Rules for Ghosting (9 page)

He didn't have time to take them off though, because Wiley was on the move and it was all Oliver could do to keep up. “Hmmm, odd, very odd indeed,” the ghosterminator was saying. “Those readings skyrocketed and then, poof! Just disappeared. Almost as though …” He stood upright and snapped his fingers together. “Of course! The ghoul is on the move.” Wiley spun in a full circle before apparently picking something up on his Spectrometer. He pushed through into the mudroom, the Aspirator knocking against the door in his haste.

Oliver followed close behind, ignoring Wiley's ongoing stream of babble, but studying how the goggles warped the air around him. There was nothing ghostly in sight—not that he'd expected there to be—but through these twisted lenses he could almost imagine there was.

“AHA!” Wiley bellowed, snapping Oliver out of his thoughts. They were standing in the sunroom, and the Spectrometer was lit up like a Christmas tree. “What do you have to say now, eh? We've hit the jackpot!”

Oliver shifted his gaze from the Spectrometer to the place Wiley was indicating. “It's just … a wall,” he muttered.

“But is it
really
?” Wiley reached over his shoulder and pressed a button on the side of his backpack. A low motor started up on the Aspirator.

Oliver squinted at the wall.
What
was Wiley going on about? There wasn't anything there. He glanced back toward the
door. Would Mom and Dad hear the noise and come investigate? Or could they really imagine this was all part of Wiley's house-fixing plan?

And then Oliver froze. What was
that
?

In front of the door—for the briefest of seconds—through the smudged and warped glass of the goggles, he'd seen the shape of a girl. A foot-stomping, furious, old-fashioned-dress-wearing, completely
see-through
girl.

Oliver had just seen a ghost.

“My cubby!” Dahlia shrieked. They'd had a narrow escape earlier, when the ghosterminator had whipped out his Spectrometer and started yammering on about
ghosts in this very room!
Mrs. Tibbs had whisked her away so fast that she'd actually left a body part or two fully behind her. By the time she'd pulled herself back together enough to check up on Wiley with her Clearsight, the bloodhound was back on the trail.

And now he'd found his jackpot.

“We have to stop him!” Dahlia wailed. “All my stuff is in there. You heard him describe that Aspirating business. He'll suck it all up! I'll never see it again.”

“We should not be hanging around him to begin with,” fumed Mrs. Tibbs. “Remember our plan to
lie low
?”

But Dahlia couldn't leave now. She wrung her hands despairingly and hovered at the edges of the sunroom.

Rank Wiley stood in front of the entrance to her cubby. He
had that weird orange-and-black machine strapped to his back. In his twitching hand, the Spectrometer gave a series of sharp pings. Oliver's mouth gaped open, and he turned his head wildly around the room, like he was looking for something he couldn't quite find. Dahlia couldn't spare a minute for this living boy. Her
cubby
! How many years had she worked to put it all together? She could feel tears starting in the corners of her eyes.

“You see,” Wiley yelled over the noise, “
that
is the precise direction of the disturbance, right there.” He waved an arm. “There might appear to be nothing in that spot, but my fine apparatus indicates otherwise. Now stand back and watch the Aspirator at work!” He depressed a button on his shoulder strap and the nozzle began to vibrate. He yanked it from its holster, holding it out like a fire hose.

A faint glowing outline appeared over one side of Dahlia's cubby. Oliver gasped. “That's the pilot light,” Wiley barked. “You see the infected area now, don't you?”

Behind her, Dahlia felt Mrs. Tibbs's hands close around her shoulders. “My dear, I
really
don't think we should be in this room right now.”

Dahlia shrugged her off. “We have to do something!” But what? Maybe she could rescue some of her things! She shot forward and in a second she was inside the cubby, looking wildly around. She only had a few seconds at the most. What could she save?

Wiley centered his aim squarely at the middle of the cubby.
He pressed another button. A cloud of pale green foamy gunk flowed from the end. It ballooned into the air and rushed directly toward her.

“I insist!” said Mrs. Tibbs, shooting up beside her. “We must leave
now
.” She seized Dahlia and pulled her back toward the sunroom. In the same instant, the phoam connected with the cubby.

The greenish goo slopped all over her tiny room, turning its crisp, sharp edges dull and washed out. Dahlia squeezed her hands into tight fists. She knew what it meant when something looked halfway erased to her: it meant that it was clearly visible in the world of the living.

There were gasps outside. Both Oliver and Wiley seemed momentarily stunned by what they were seeing.

Mrs. Tibbs was still pulling Dahlia along. They were almost through the last wall. But the phoam oozed toward them.

They were not quick enough.

Dahlia screeched as something cold and slimy connected with her foot. “I'm hit!”

“Pull away,” said Mrs. Tibbs, tugging on her arm.

But Dahlia's foot would not pass through the last wall. “The phoam!” she gasped. “It's keeping me from ghosting through. What can I do?”

By now, the entire cubby was encased in phoam. Mrs. Tibbs stood inside the sunroom and so did Dahlia, both off to the side and out of Wiley's range, now that the phoam had settled—all except Dahlia's left foot, which was glommed
onto the side of her room, stuck like a gopher halfway into its burrow. Again the dark cube flashed in Dahlia's mind. She pictured herself trapped in the tiny space, unable to get out ever again. What could she
do
?

“The shoe!” exclaimed Mrs. Tibbs suddenly. “It's just on your shoe!”

In the terror of the moment Dahlia was having a hard time thinking straight, but she looked down and saw that Mrs. Tibbs was right. She kicked out hard. The shoe came off and tumbled back into her cubby. Her bare foot slipped through the rest of the wall.

With a rush that was as much relief as speed, the two ghosts shot up through the sunroom ceiling and hovered in the room above, watching the proceedings below in trembling horror.

Rank Wiley crowed in triumph. “You see?” he yelled to Oliver over the roar of the Aspirator. “Now you understand my profession, young Oliver, so vital and yet so misunderstood. Since the very moment you set foot in this house—yes sirree, without even realizing it—you have been living with
ghosts among you
! What do you think of that?”

“We
must
go deeper into the house,” said Mrs. Tibbs. The flowers on her hat quivered and even her carpetbag looked poised for flight. “That was a very close call. And we haven't seen the end of it.”

“No,” whispered Dahlia. “I have to stay and see what happens!” Her fingernails still dug into the palms of her hands,
but this was her room—these were her treasures. She couldn't just abandon them.

Slipping back down through the floor, Dahlia circled the far side of the sunroom. She kept to a cautious distance—she had not forgotten her near-Aspiration—but close enough to keep tabs on what was going on.

Rank Wiley fiddled with the knobs on his machine. The loud blowing sound stopped, gurgled, and a harsh sucking noise took its place. Dahlia's stomach flipped over, but she would not leave. Not yet. It couldn't be true—this man couldn't
really …
could he?

The nozzle was up again, and Wiley stepped toward the sunroom wall. He took aim. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Dahlia smiled in sudden relief and turned to Mrs. Tibbs. “See? Nothing to worry—” She stopped.

The wall of the cubby was stretching. Like a piece of chewed bubblegum, the nearest wall was getting longer and gooier, slipping steadily toward the nozzle of the Aspirator.

“Nooooo!” Dahlia wailed. Eyes wide, she watched the wall bend and warp until with a loud
thwunck
, it came off in one giant piece. It popped like a bubble and shimmied down into the spout of the nozzle.

The rest of the walls went like a row of dominoes. Then the Aspirator attacked the inside of the room.

Thwunk!
One squashy armchair.

Thwunk! Thwunk! Thwunk!
One frilly party dress, one well-worn paperback, and a collector's edition of
Curious George
.

Thu-thwunk!
A leather left shoe, recently on Dahlia's foot. All vanished into the belly of the Aspirator.

The last bit of ghostly wallpaper disappeared. The Aspirator belched loudly, and Wiley slammed the OFF button.

Outside the sunroom, the wall of Silverton Manor was as bare as a peeled potato. Dahlia's eyes burned with tears, which were suddenly tumbling down her cheeks. Everything she had ever owned, every little bit of the life she had managed to cobble together over her years as a ghost—it was all gone.

It was too much to bear. Dahlia turned and shot through the nearest wall, not knowing where she was going, not caring, not thinking about anything except getting as far as she could from the ruin of her carefully built-up world.

High in the oak tree the minutes stretched like taffy as she hung motionless, not thinking, not feeling, just letting her molecules settle. Had she ever cried before this? She didn't think so. She'd been stuck here in this house for years and years, but it hadn't been so bad. It had been boring sometimes, but there was always
something
she could look at, explore, or do. Her mother had watched a lot of TV—the Discovery Channel mostly, programs about space and stars and planets, which Dahlia loved. Never mind if Dahlia couldn't pass through that stupid Boundary. But the years kept passing, and Mrs. Silverton got older and older, and their halfway-almost conversations—which consisted of her mother talking to the TV, and Dahlia answering, even though she was the only one who could hear herself—had gotten fewer and farther
between. And then her mother had left for the nursing home, and that was that.

The house had settled onto itself, growing quieter and more lonely by the day, and Dahlia had started to wonder what else was out there, beyond the Boundary in the greater world. But through all this, at least she'd had her little cubby, her own private nook, somewhere she could be fully
ghost
without having to worry about falling into stuff. Where she could just
be
.

She considered all of the things she had been keeping busy with since Mrs. Tibbs's arrival—avoiding Wiley and learning the Rules of Contact and everything else. Suddenly, Dahlia knew the real reason why she hadn't insisted they start searching for her Anchor: deep down, she hadn't really wanted to find it. Oh, she wanted to leave the manor all right. But maybe she was also a little bit afraid. And all that stuff about her past that she couldn't remember … what if some things were better forgotten?

But now everything had changed. Losing her cubby was like a big splash of cold water in her face. The more Dahlia sat on her tree, sinking slowly down into the trunk, looking back at the house with glazed eyes, the more she knew she was ready to start. Right now. She wasn't going to wait another second.

She looked down at her feet, dangling in the air forty feet above the ground. The patent-leather shoe on her right foot was big and chunky alongside the dainty bare toes of her left foot. Enough with letting things drag her down. Dahlia kicked
hard, wiggled and shook until her shoe tumbled right off. It hung in the air for a second, an expired object loosed from its owner, almost like it couldn't believe its luck at being so unexpectedly freed. With a little quiver, the shoe flipped over in a gust of wind and started to drift up.
Always rising
, Dahlia thought as she watched the shoe pick up speed, surfing the gusts of wind, passing through the Boundary without even a moment's pause. A smile pulled at her lips.

The shoe was gone. And soon, Dahlia would be too.

Across the yard, Mrs. Tibbs shimmered through the front wall of the house. She wore a concerned frown, but Dahlia waved to show her that all was well and she had regained her gumption.

“Rank Wiley,” she muttered to herself. “You've messed with the wrong ghost.” She raised her voice and called, “Mrs. Tibbs—let's get to work! I want to find my Anchor and I want to find it fast. Today, if we can. Then that pawky man will get up tomorrow and find his Spectrometer sitting on a big fat zero.”

Back in the sunroom, Oliver was still reeling over what he had seen. What
had
he seen? A ghost … and a ghost-
room
… and then … then suddenly it was gone, all gone. Rank Wiley had been true to his word, Aspirating that amazing structure right down to the last molecule, where it lay twitching and bulging inside his now puffed-out backpack.

This was clearly the high moment of Wiley's whole life. He preened and strutted around the room, twisting his head from side to side as if facing a chorus of cheers and applause. “No need for thanks—no need for thanks,” he said. “I'm Rank T. Wiley of Ghostermintors, Inc. It's what I do. All in a day's work, all in a day's work.”

Oliver shuddered. The man was actually
proud
of what he'd done. And … a wave of shame washed over Oliver. He had actually
helped
the ghosterminator do it!

Wiley rubbed his hands together, then reached back and
patted his Aspirator as if it were an affectionate dog. “My machine is quite full up now, wouldn't you know. I'll just zip back to my room and transfer the …
matter
to its storage chamber, free up some more space, hmmm? Then I'll be back on the job as quick as a blink. No rest for the hardworking ghosterminator, you can be sure of that! Not until I see every last specter safely stowed in the belly of my Aspirator.”