Ghostcatcher Read online

  Lil flattened herself against the tent’s silk-thin walls. ‘Abe?’ she whispered.

  No answer.

  ‘Abe?’ she tried again, more loudly this time

  She stuck her head quickly through the tent flap. In the soft white sheen of the floodlights diffused by the tent material she saw immediately that Abe wasn’t there, but EGON was.

  It was the size of a garden shed. A rectangle of brushed steel with rounded corners. Its surface was almost completely smooth except for at the centre where there was a dull black screen and beneath it a keyboard. A panel of dials and a single metal switch were on one side of the screen.

  An empty operator chair on wheels was in front of the control panel. To the left was a card table, three folding chairs and a camp bed.

  Nedly crept in behind her and they both stood staring.

  ‘Abe isn’t here.’ Nedly bit his lip.

  ‘He’s probably got lost, that’s all. I bet he’ll be here any minute,’ Lil lied, trying to keep her own panic in check. ‘So let’s get on with it, all right?’ She rolled up her sleeves. ‘What do we have to do?’

  Nedly shrugged. ‘Starkey said that I could put a reverse surge of electromagnetic energy through EGON and melt its circuits.’

  ‘Right,’ said Lil, nodding. ‘Where do you think they are?’

  ‘Somewhere inside?’ Nedly eyed the large metal box apprehensively.

  Lil gave it the Squint. ‘Only one way to find out.’

  ‘No way am I getting in there. What if EGON traps me?’ He shook his head. ‘What if I get in there but I can’t get out again?’

  ‘Good point,’ Lil agreed. ‘Stay out here, put your hands on the shell and melt them from the outside in.’

  Nedly wriggled his shoulders and shook out his arms and at the end of his sweatshirt his hands started glowing. His fingertips turned orange, like he was shining a torch behind them, then they grew brighter, until they looked white hot. He rubbed them together briskly in a ready-for-business kind of way and then he flattened his palms and laid them squarely on EGON.

  His body began trembling, his face fixed with concentration, his hair swaying in the spectral wind he was generating.

  Lil watched him, fingers crossed, whispering ‘Come on!’ under her breath.

  A few minutes later Nedly gasped, ‘Is it working?’

  ‘I can’t tell,’ she confessed. ‘It’s just blank.’

  Nedly redoubled his efforts.

  Lil paced back and forth a few times, blowing out her cheeks, and then, after Nedly glared at her, perched restlessly on one of the fold-up chairs. There was a book on the card table, a thick hardback with a bookmark stuck halfway in. There was something familiar about the book; it was lying face down but there was a photograph on the back cover of a man in a white lab coat, a man with deep-set eyes. Lil stared at it for a moment. ‘Can you feel its insides melting now?’ she asked distractedly.

  Nedly grimaced and tried to shake the question out of his head. ‘One, I don’t want to think about melted insides. And two, I keep telling you: I can’t feel anything. Nothing is happening.’

  He closed his eyes and bared his teeth with the prolonged effort. Lil crooked her elbow over her eyes to keep the spectral wind out of her face. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘You can do it; I know you can.’

  After a few more minutes Nedly disengaged and slumped, exhausted, onto his knees, drooping forward until his forehead touched the floor. ‘I can’t do it,’ he moaned.

  There was a single switch on the panel, a small metal one. Lil flicked it on and off, on and off. Nothing happened. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, flicking buttons and turning dials. ‘It’s like EGON is already dead.’

  Nedly collapsed onto his side and laid there recovering, with his eyes closed. ‘Maybe Abe did get to him first. Maybe we passed each other without noticing?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Lil. ‘But how would Abe have taken EGON out without leaving a mark on it?’ She frisked EGON’s surface, looking for hidden buttons, switches or weaknesses, and found a thin circle cut into the metal on its side. ‘Wait, Nedly, I’ve got something!’

  Lil scrabbled frantically at the impossibly narrow gap round the circle, trying to get a grip with her fingertips. She gave up and stuck a pencil in and broke the nib off. ‘Arrrggh!’ She kicked EGONs shell. ‘If only Abe was here, he could jemmy this with his Swiss Army hand – wait!’ she gasped. ‘I have a Swiss Army knife too.’ She started rummaging in her bag, unloading everything onto the floor. ‘Where is it?’

  Nedly opened his eyes. From his position on the floor things looked different. There, just a few feet away from where he lay was the thing they had missed. ‘Lil!’ he called out. ‘I think I’ve worked out what the problem is.’

  ‘What?’ Lil looked up from her pile of stuff.

  Nedly got back to his feet and Lil joined him. ‘The red pipeline. It’s the power source.’ He pointed at the cable, lying slack on the floor. ‘That’s why we couldn’t switch him on. It’s not plugged in, see? We just have to –’

  They heard a sound, the snap of someone standing on a twig. Lil turned to see a shadow moving along the side of the tent. It wasn’t Abe. The shadow had wavy hair and was carrying something in front of it. Lil froze, then whispered, ‘Hide!’

  ‘No need.’ Lazlo Yossarian entered the tent behind the tray he was carrying, which was heavy with a cosied teapot and some cups. He was wearing a collarless shirt with an orange-silk cravat, baggy trousers, espadrilles and a large woollen cardigan. Instead of a belt a paisley sash was wrapped tightly round his waist.

  He grinned broadly. ‘You don’t need to be afraid of me.’

  Lil got to her feet, forced her eyes not to look at Nedly and said nothing.

  ‘Have you come from the orphanage?’

  He hadn’t recognised her. Cautiously Lil reached for the suggestion. ‘That’s right,’ she said slowly. ‘I came from the orphanage and I got lost, then I saw the lights so I came here.’

  Yossarian smiled. ‘You must have come through the perimeter fence. Someone deactivated the security system, I think – it’s not working anyway.

  ‘I bet you’ve been wondering what we’re up to out here. It’s OK, I understand; kids are curious, always sneaking around. I was the same when I was small, always asking questions. That’s why I became a scientist.’

  Lil noticed there were three cups on the tray.

  Yossarian saw her looking and smiled. ‘Oh, don’t worry it’s just me here – the others have been called out.’ He paused. ‘On a mission. But I knew I had company, so I made some tea. Enough for all three of us.’

  Chapter 20

  Tea for Three

  Lil’s eyes shot around the tent before she could stop them. Abe was here too. She looked back at the tent flap but no one else stepped through it.

  ‘Don’t be alarmed.’ Yossarian gave her a shy smile. ‘Welcome, both of you!’

  ‘Who are you talking about? There’s just you and me here.’ Lil held out her arms to emphasise the emptiness of the space around her.

  Yossarian smiled warmly. ‘We both know that’s not true.’

  Lil grabbed hold of her rucksack and started shoving her scattered belongings back inside it.

  ‘Please don’t go, not yet,’ Yossarian said. ‘I just want to talk to you, for a few minutes and then if you still want to leave, I’ll help you. Agreed?’

  ‘All right.’ Lil turned to place her bag back on the floor, taking the opportunity to flick her gaze over to Nedly once and then at the flap in a way that meant, I’ll distract him, you split and then she said: ‘What do you want to talk about?’

  ‘I want to tell you a story, something I’ve pieced together from notebooks and public records, newspaper articles and the word off the street.’ Yossarian grinned. ‘I think you’ll find it interesting and at the end of it I’d like you to tell me if my story is true.’

  Lil shrugged and kept her gaze low, while Nedly began to slink carefully through t
he tent material.

  Yossarian shivered. ‘It’s another cold night.’ He pointed at the fold-up chair. Why don’t you have a seat over there away from the draught?’

  ‘I’m all right standing.’

  ‘It’s a long story; you might feel more comfortable if you take the weight off.’

  Nedly hesitated half in and half out of the tent.

  Lil circled round to the table, glaring at him as she passed with a look that said, Why are you still here? She turned a chair so that she had a view of the door for when Abe came through it and then sat down and gave Yossarian the Cryptic Eyebrow.

  ‘OK,’ he began. ‘During the “investigation” –’ he crooked two fingers round the word investigation and grinned – ‘into the second fire here at Rorschach, Gordian’s Police Department turned up a whole archive of notebooks stashed away in the cellar, charting the genesis of Cornelius Gallows’ later work on disembodiment. His notes were written in teeny-tiny handwriting on narrow lines, pages and pages of it, a decade of research all swollen with damp.

  ‘I was the first person they called to decipher it. Many years ago I had studied Gallows’ book.’ He pointed to the hardback that lay on the stool. ‘I wrote a paper on it, so I knew the theory, just not how to apply it.’

  Yossarian poured out the tea. It smelt spicy and sweet. Lil tried to subtly nod Nedly out of the tent while he grimaced back at her insisting, ‘I can’t just leave you here.’ When Yossarian looked up she tried to turn the nod into a thoughtful-looking agreement with whatever it was he had been saying.

  ‘We all have our favourite books.’ He smiled brightly and nodded at Lil’s copy of McNair and the Free Press, which was still lying on the floor where she had dropped it. ‘Books that change how we see the world, and remind us of its possibilities.’

  Lil quickly bent down, scooped her book off the floor and shoved it into her mac pocket and then crossed her arms and slumped back in her chair, giving him an eye-roll for good luck.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking: Gallows was a fright – a total monster.’ He shrugged and moved closer to EGON. ‘But the science was good. It was revolutionary. He proved it was possible to die and yet still live. Just like your friend here.’

  Nedly froze. The bottom dropped out of Lil’s stomach, plunging her insides to ice. ‘What?’

  ‘Your friend. Here.’ He met Lil’s eye with a smile in his, held her gaze and then dropped his hand to the ground, grabbed the red cable and shoved it into its port.

  ‘No!’ yelled Lil.

  ‘Lil?’ shouted Nedly. ‘What should I do?’ EGON whirred into life, the buttons beside the black screen glowing dimly at first but then growing brighter.

  ‘It’s all right.’ Yossarian held out a hand to quiet her. ‘This is just so that we can keep an eye on my colleagues in the city, that’s all.’

  There was a pause and then the hum of a fan and the buttons glowed and brightened. A map of Peligan City appeared on the black screen: thousands of tiny square buildings in blocks, black roads like rivulets of oil, and the Kowpye a grey snake winding through it.

  Yossarian took his place in the wheelie chair and pressed a combination of buttons on the panel, then flipped the switch and a luminous green wand appeared on the map, like clock hands at midnight. He turned a dial and the wand began wiping through the city in a circle. They all watched it trailing a pale green tail as it pulsed round and round.

  A blip appeared on the map. ‘There’s Ghostcatcher.’ Yossarian pointed to a dot in Old Town, on the edge of the Saints. They’re just kicking their heels, though; there’s only one ghost in Peligan City now and he’s right here.’

  Lil glanced at Nedly with a question. Where’s Starkey? She dug her fingernails into the sweaty palms of her hands. Then it appeared, the second blip.

  Yossarian frowned. He typed in a few more numbers. And then turned the dial with his head cocked, as though he was tuning a radio.

  ‘Some kind of decoy?’ He raised his eyebrows. Lil kept quiet. ‘Oh well, whatever it is out there I expect it will keep them busy for a while at least.

  ‘Now, where was I? Yes, so I read the research that was in the bunker and from that we were able to create our Projected Entrapment Matrix and the EMF readers. Once we had seen how Gallows’ original experiment worked, it wasn’t rocket science to reverse it.

  ‘We were able to capture our first ghost at that haunting in Old Town.’ Yossarian handed Lil a mug of tea with a smile. ‘That’s when we first met. Do you remember? I picked up a reading from you, a residual.

  ‘Later, when we ran the analysis on the combined feeds from all our equipment we realised that there had been a second spirit there that night. We thought it was an echo but it was, in fact, the first recorded haunting of the Final Ghost.’

  He set a second mug on the table, explaining, ‘This one is for our friend. I know he probably can’t drink it yet, but it would have been rude not to offer him one.’

  Nedly shuffled closer to the table and cautiously lowered himself into the seat opposite Lil. He wrapped his hands round the mug as though he was warming them. Lil didn’t look at him. She looked everywhere else but there.

  The tea smelt of warm milk, cinnamon and ginger. Lil took a small sip. ‘This doesn’t taste like normal tea.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. It’s a kind of spiced chai that I picked up on my travels. I put lots of honey in it.

  ‘So …’ He dragged the wheelie chair over, sat down again and slapped his hands on his thighs. ‘By then, events had taken another turn; it was discovered that although Cornelius Gallows himself had been alive and working in Fellgate Prison, weaponising the ghosts of the prisoners there, he was now quite genuinely dead and no longer in need of his later research, personal diaries or experimental equipment, and, via Acting Mayor Gordian again, we got our hands on enough material for phase two. EGON.’

  Yossarian slid back over to the controls. He flicked the switch by the keyboard and the picture changed to a green pulse that zigzagged its way across the screen like the reading on a heart monitor.

  ‘After that point Marek and Virgil spent all their time working on EGON here, and I was left to my own devices to continue my research into the identity of the Final Ghost.

  ‘We knew where Gallows was getting his material – I mean, victims.’ He winced. ‘They were all inmates in the Secure Wing for the Criminally Insane, but before that … it was me who discovered that Gallows’ first weaponised ghost, Mr Glimmer, was created from his young apprentice, Leonard Owl –’

  Lil interrupted. ‘Gallows murdered Owl.’

  There was a pile of playing cards on the table, next to the book. While Yossarian’s back was turned Lil tried to flick one at Nedly to get his attention but he was too absorbed in the story and it fluttered straight through him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Yossarian soberly. ‘That’s right.’ He turned back to face them. ‘Coincidentally that same night an eleven-year-old went missing from the Hawks Memorial Orphanage across the road from the asylum.’ Lil’s tea went down the wrong way. Yossarian waited for her to stop coughing before adding, ‘He was never seen alive again.’

  Nedly was staring at Yossarian. He looked like he was holding his breath.

  ‘Now, according to Gallows’ notes, during the experimental procedure a boy burst in and attempted to free Owl before the lightning struck. Both were killed, though Gallows makes no reference to the mysterious boy after that, or to weaponising a second ghost.’

  Yossarian typed something in to EGON’s keyboard. Nedly craned closer and Yossarian shuddered suddenly but a small smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. He adjusted the dial again and then stared at the screen as though he saw something in the green pulse that interested him so greatly that he had to pull his eyes from it to continue the story.

  ‘Following an anonymous tip one year later, Peligan City P.D. located a makeshift grave here in the grounds at Rorschach. A second body had been laid to rest alongside Leonard Owl. That bo
dy was identified as that of Ned Stubbs.’ He spun his chair to face her. ‘And that, Lil Potkin, is the ghost that haunts you.’

  Lil tried to keep her face completely still. They sat there for a moment staring at each other and not blinking until Lil looked away.

  ‘It’s an honour to meet you, Ned Stubbs, at long last. I’ve read so much about you.’

  Lil wouldn’t let her eyes betray her; she bored them into a muddy footprint on the canvas.

  Yossarian smiled. ‘It’s all right; I can see him myself now.’ He pointed to the thin green line that was zigzagging across the screen. ‘That’s him – right there. It’s the electromagnetic field he’s generating.’ Then he looked at the chair opposite Lil and waved.

  Lil glanced up at Nedly, and she could see that his eyes were gleaming.

  ‘He can see me! He’s practically looking right at me!’ Nedly’s heart looked like it was about to burst.

  ‘And there,’ Yossarian continued, referring back to the screen and pointing to a faint echo of Nedly’s line that tracked beneath it, ‘is you.’

  ‘Which line is you?’ Lil asked.

  Yossarian laughed. He wheeled himself to the card table and poured Lil a second cup of tea.

  ‘So,’ he continued, ‘I’ve been working on this idea of objects that the ghosts are bound to. We know that’s how Gallows controlled them. We found pictures of the poppets in his notes, and traces of tiny metal bells in the furnace in the basement of the doll hospital. So my theory is that someone else destroyed the bound objects and therefore the spooks before we got there. It’s the only explanation I can find.

  ‘The objects are their weakness, you see. Their Achilles heel. And so I began my own project, to search for the object that the Final Ghost was bound to.’

  ‘So you could destroy him.’

  ‘No, I have never wanted that. Never.’ He spun to face Lil and met her gaze with unflinching sincerity. ‘I don’t believe that the Final Ghost is bad. He’s nothing like the others, are you, Ned?’