‘It’s something Tim said,’ I explain. ‘And, though he didn’t realise it at the time, something Venn said too.’
‘Something that will bring the poltergeist down here?’ Si looks doubtful.
‘Or at least provoke a reaction,’ I say. ‘You know what ghosts are like, Si – they all want something. Even you have something keeping you here, some purpose, even if you want to keep it secret from me.’
‘Yes, well,’ Si says. ‘You’re right about that, at least.’
‘Yeah. And with most ghosts it’s something they’ve left unsaid or undone, something I can help them with. And they can get pretty angry if I can’t help, or of they’ve been waiting too long. Well, this is probably the angriest ghost we’ve ever come across. But even if I can’t help her, there must still be a reason for that anger. That’s why I asked Tim if he’d said anything to provoke the pencil attack in the gift shop.’
‘Ah, so you did!’ Si screws up his face to try and recall my conversation with Tim. The ectoplasm puffs from his head with the effort. ‘He said something about his supervisor, he called her a… a “right nasty old…”’
‘Exactly!’ I say quickly, to stop Si from finishing it. ‘And that’s when the window cracked, remember? Then, what did Venn shout above the wind, just before the glass shattered completely and we were driven out of the viewing level?’
Si screws up his face again, but I know he has a good memory, despite dying from a musket ball in the brain. His face lights up.
‘Oh!’ he cries.
‘Exactly,’ I say again. ‘It’s not the same word really, but it sounds the same. And Venn shouted it out at least twice.’
Si looks at me, and I look back at him. Well, there’s nothing to do but try it, is there?
I notice that the gym’s exercise bikes are firmly bolted to the floor. I climb onto one and grab the handles tightly, bracing myself for whatever happens next. Then I shout the word as loudly as I can.
‘Witch!’
Nothing happens.
But wait! Isn’t there a slight change in the atmosphere? And are the hairs on the back of my neck starting to stand up?
‘Witch!’ I shout again, though slightly more timidly. ‘Nasty old, er… witch?’
The atmosphere fizzes.
There’s a flash of light as a vivid arc of electricity leaps from a power point on a nearby wall and connects with the exercise bike I’m sitting on. I find myself flying backwards through the air, my whole body singing with pain. I crash to the ground somewhere or other and lie there trying to work out which way is up and what my name is.
Someone is shouting, ‘Daniel? Daniel?’ I look up and see that it’s Si. Either my eyesight has been ruined, or even the emergency lights are out now. I can only see the ghostly glow of Simon in the pitch dark.
And another glow from something else.
I manage to move my arms enough to sit up, and turn my groggy head towards the new light. I see a figure standing across the other side of the gym, crackling and popping with electrical energy that pours out from the light fittings and plugs, and gathers in the form of a person.
The ‘pretty lady’.
Actually, she’s barely a lady at all, she’s a teenage girl with cropped hair and a simple white dress.
But she is pretty. Mind you, being lit up like a Christmas tree probably helps with that.
‘Grgnn…!’ I manage to say through teeth that feel welded shut from the electric shock. What I want to say is ‘hold your fire, I’m here to help’, but ‘grgnn’ will have to do for the moment.
Si is hopping from one foot to the other, chewing his spectral finger nails, so there’ll be no chance of a translation from him.
‘Brbrgh…’ I add, getting up onto my shaking legs and somehow managing to stand. My tongue is starting to move again too. ‘Brbyuyu… hwelp… hwelp you. I can… help you.’
The electrical girl flashes with a pulse of angry power and her eyes narrow.
‘Help me?’ she cries with a fizzing voice. ‘I have waited over four hundred years for help. None came. Now I will help myself.’
She gestures towards me with one of her hands. I just have time to drop to the floor as a bolt of lightning connects the girl’s finger tips with the wall behind me in an explosion of heat and light. I see Simon caught in the attack. I have no idea what the relationship between ghosts and electricity is, but it can’t be anything good because Simon explodes in a puff of ectoplasm and is gone. Burning wood and chunks of shattered marble rain down all around me, and the air smells like a demon’s armpit.
‘Four hundred years?’ I say, peering over the seat of a rowing machine. My hair feels funny. I reach up and find it’s standing straight up from my head. ‘That is a long time to wait. So, er, something happened to you in sixteen hundred and, er, something, then?’
Okay, as conversation openers go this is pretty rubbish, I know, but I’ve got to keep her talking. This might be my only chance to find out what this whole business is about. The girl is crossing the room towards me now, riding through the air on wings of lightning.
‘1603,’ the girl says in a voice like a shattering iceberg. ‘They cried “witch” then too.’ And she adds, in a sing-song tone, ‘Witch, witch, burn the witch!’
The girl comes to a stop in the air above me. I look up and try my emergency grin, the one I reserve for moments of utter hopelessness. No, I don’t think it’ll make any difference either.
‘But I wasn’t a witch!’ the girl says, showering me with sparks. ‘Not a witch at all, but they burned me anyway, those men. Burned me to ashes. I wasn’t a witch, but oh, the irony. Look what I have become now!’
And she begins to glow brighter and brighter, with a sound like a generator being turned up to max.
I get ready for some sort of final bone-melting zap. Well, there’s not much else I can do, is there? But then, as suddenly they appeared, the arcs of power joining the girl to the national grid wink out. In a moment, the electricity shuts down entirely.
The girl stares at her hands in fury, an ordinary ghost of faintly glowing ectoplasm and unearthly regret once again.
‘No!’ she cries. ‘Why does the power never last?’
I don’t know if she’s expecting me to answer that or not, but before I can say anything, I’m being pelted with cushions, books, Christmas decorations, a coffee percolator – anything moveable that the poltergeist can get her spectral hands on. In a moment I’m completely covered.
When I finally dig myself out from the burnt tinsel and ruin, she’s gone.
And I’m all alone in the dark.