Penny banged again on the window, trying to get Harper’s attention. As she’d approached the window, she’d seen him standing there in the corner, frozen in place. Wearing an expression of blank shock, as if witnessing a car wreck.
He hadn’t even budged when she’d banged the first time.
Penny’s toe hit something solid, a chunk of stone or rubble from the house. She felt it with her foot and found it large enough to stand on. She hoisted herself up with one foot to the drawing-room window and saw what had paralyzed her brother.
The ghost, cracking her knuckles. That hollow-eyed hungry look on her face as she slowly approached him.
Penny raised a fist and banged hard on the glass, shouting.
“Harper! Harper! It’s me!”
He turned his head then and looked at her in a daze.
“You’ve got to get out!” Penny yelled.
She waved him back from the glass.
“Stand back!”
She got down on her knees in the wet dirt and grubbed around, closing her hand around a good-sized piece of stone.
Penny stepped back up to the window as Harper watched, entranced, his lips slightly parted.
“Stand back!” she yelled. She heaved the stone through the window glass.
Harper then jumped into action. He picked a candlestick off a table and quickly swiped it around the window frame, breaking out more glass and widening the hole. He dove headfirst out on top of Penny, who stumbled backwards with her brother on top of her.
“Oh my God,” Harper was saying. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
“Get off me,” Penny grunted and rolled out from under him.
Harper stood. “Penny, d-did you see her? The ghost?”
“Of course I saw her. Did you think I was just in the mood to break a window?”
“She was coming for me.”
“I know.” Penny sighed. It was bad when a ghost was old news.
“She made this awful cracking sound.”
“I know.”
“And Dad’s gone mad, Pen. He’s not Dad any more.”
“What happened?”
“I think the ghost got inside him. He threw me in that room and locked me in. It hurt.” Harper began to sob. “Dad hurt me, Pen.”
“Ssh.” She hugged him. “It’ll be okay. We’ll sort it. Have you seen Mum?”
“No,” Harper wailed. “But I think he’s got her.”
“Where?”
“Upstairs somewhere. What are we doing to do?”
“We’ve got to find her.”
“Dad’ll kill us.”
“No, he won’t.”
Penny was as afraid as Harper, but she couldn’t let him see it. She had to keep a grip on herself or she’d have an asthma attack, and her inhaler was who knows where. Her chest already ached, and her breath scratched going in and out. She repeated to herself a favourite saying of Em’s: One trick at a time. One trick at a time.
She hugged Harper. Poor kid. Penny knew perfectly well that he’d been sneaking out of his room at night hoping to see a ghost, and now he’d gotten his wish. She more than anyone knew what that felt like. It totally sucked.
“It can’t really hurt you,” she whispered, hoping it was true.
Harper snuffled into her. “But what are we gonna do?”
Penny thought. “The front door’s locked. And he might see us there anyway. So we need to go around the back.”
She took his hand, and they crept around to the back of the house, where the kitchen door stood open. Light spilled in a big square out onto the cracked back steps and into the dirt and weeds.
Penny motioned for Harper to stay in place while she went up the steps and stuck her head inside. Nothing. She motioned for him to come after her.
They quietly entered the kitchen and moved through towards the hallway. Suddenly Harper stopped and started gathering oranges off the kitchen table. He pointed towards his feet. Ah, he meant to use them as an obstacle. Penny nodded in approval and motioned for him to stay behind her.
She slowly peered around the kitchen doorframe, but the corridor was empty. Just the pile of rubble where their mum had torn through the wall into the root cellar.
Penny motioned for Harper to follow, and they entered the corridor, their trainers crunching on plaster and chunks of brick.
Then they heard him. Heavy footfalls coming quickly down from the grand staircase just ahead.
Penny grabbed Harper’s wrist and heard him suppress a yelp as she dragged him through the hole in the wall.
They lay on their bellies in the dirt and rubble of the cellar, holding their breaths.
They saw the large, dark form of their father pass from left to right in front of the hole, and then go back the other way.
Then he stopped, and came back again.
Penny tried not to breathe. Her heart was pounding so loudly it drummed in her ears. She squeezed Harper’s hand.
Their dad stopped right in front of the hole, bent down, and peered in. He stood like that for what seemed like minutes, breathing coarsely, then withdrew and went back down the corridor towards the staircase.
They heard his feet going up the stairs.
Penny put a hand on Harper’s arm.
“I don’t think he could see us,” Harper whispered, blowing out his breath.
Penny nodded. “Too dark in here,” she said.
“What do we do now?”
Penny had absolutely no idea. But she knew one thing for sure. She could tell from the morbid, radioactive density of the air around her dad when he’d stopped and looked into their hole.
Harper was right. The ghost had got into him. He definitely was not their dad any more, and where their dad had gone to, she hated to even think.
This whole situation was what Emily would describe as a Giant Ball of Chicken Foo. Penny hoped that someday she would get to hear her friend use those words again.