Tanja smiled, and it was a pretty horrible effort – more like the grimace you put on when trying to convince everyone that your broken leg isn’t that painful. Then she pointed at me. ‘The Ragged Sisters are hunting ghost hunters, so you’re in big trouble.’ She looked puzzled. ‘And me too, I guess.’

Her eyes rolled up in her head and she collapsed.

Even though she had furthest to go, Rani was there way ahead of anyone else. She caught Tanja before she hit the floor. ‘She’s out again,’ she said, and lifted her easily.

‘This way,’ Dad said and they went down the hall together.

‘She woke up. That’s got to be good, right?’ I said to Bec. ‘And she gave us a warning, that’s good thing number two.’

‘And then she collapsed like that was all she could manage.’ Bec clicked her tongue. ‘If only we knew where she’s been, that might be useful.’

‘There are always answers in the archives.’

She looked at me sidelong. ‘Just like there’s always money in the banana stand? Look at how well that turned out.’

‘Still.’

‘Okay, okay. I’ll add it to Bec’s Infinitely Expanding To-Do List. Sheesh.’

Rani came back but Dad didn’t. ‘Tanja’s out like a light,’ Rani said. ‘Breathing steadily, but unresponsive.’

‘How’s Leon? Okay?’

‘He’s bewildered, I think. Says he’ll stay by her side, though.’

‘I don’t think you’d get him away with a crowbar.’ Bec studied her nails. ‘Anyone notice how guilty he’s been looking? Almost as if he’s blaming himself for something?’

‘Her disappearing wasn’t his fault,’ I said. ‘She hadn’t taken precautions and he wasn’t to know and I can see that I’ve fallen into your clever trap, haven’t I?’

‘We all blame ourselves for stuff that’s not our fault from time to time,’ Bec said.

And that was a path I didn’t want to go down, not right now. I was coping quite well, thank you. ‘I guess we need to decide what we do now. We can’t sit around and wait for Tanja to wake up again.’

Bec gestured at her laptop. ‘I’ve got plenty of stuff to do here.’

‘And I’m happy to help,’ Rani said.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘Since you two’ll be hard at work, I can’t just goof off, right?’

‘Find something productive,’ Bec suggested.

So I went to Mum’s room and did something I’d been meaning to ever since my birthday party. I found a place for the silver photo frame Dad gave me.

Mum had used one of the spare bedrooms as a study – big house, remember? – and it was where she kept her books, did her writing and research. She did some share trading, too, and was mildly successful, something that helps to explain our money troubles since she left.

The shelves over her desk held the books she used most often, and that’s where I put her photo. I sat in her chair for a while looking up at it and thinking about all the times I saw her here, reading and writing furiously but never too busy to swivel around and give me a hug.

Most of the books were the special sort of text that circulates in ghost-hunting circles. Her family had a ghost-hunting tradition, too, which meant that she collected a bunch of material that fell outside the usual Marin family way of looking at things. Dad and she had come to some sort of agreement about this, or agreed to disagree, because these books were about how the lessons learned from ghost hunting could be applied. Magic, in other words.

She was interested in magic in a theoretical sense, I think, because I never saw her trying any conjuring or spell-casting or anything like that. She wrote articles for ghost-hunting journals, but that was about all. She was considered to be an expert, but it was a pretty small field, really. It was like being the biggest fish in a pretty tiny aquarium, one with a plastic pirate ship and a grinning skull.

All of the books were hardcover. You couldn’t claim that these ghost-hunting presses were cheapskates, whatever else you said about their commercial sense. A bestseller in ghost-hunting circles? A couple of hundred copies. JK Rowling had nothing to worry about, competition-wise.

The books, a dozen or so of them, were all together on a bookshelf over Mum’s desk. The desk was bare, but not dusty, and neither were the books, even though I never dusted in here.

I sat down, took a book almost at random, to find that it had lots of scrawling in the margins in handwriting I didn’t recognise. It wasn’t Mum’s, that’s for sure, because her sparse comments were always precise, amazingly clear. The next book had the same scrawls throughout, and I was intrigued. Who was paying such close attention to the same books Mum was? I started looking for this mystery scrawler and the writing popped up again and again. It was one note that really made me sit up and take notice, however: ‘Find out more about the RS.’

RS? Ragged Sisters? Or was I just seeing them everywhere? Who was looking into this sort of stuff? In Ghost Origins and Destinations I found a second marginalist. I knew who this one was, though, because those loopy gs and ys were unmistakeably Leon’s. His answer to a query from Writer No. 1 about Marin family history told me who No. 1 was – ‘Yes, Tanja, Great-great-aunt Meta did have the ghost sight’.

I closed the book and spent some time drumming my fingers on its scarred, leatherbound cover. So maybe Tanja was interested in these Ragged Sisters before she disappeared, and they happened to be around when she came back. So many unanswered questions here. In the end, I pushed the whole thing to the back of my mind and got on with something more practical. I interrupted Bec and Rani, who were hard at work with internet stuff, and got out some food for an evening meal.

When we finished, Rani gestured at the window. ‘It’s dark now and we still have a ghost outbreak to deal with,’ she said.

‘I’ll stay here and let you know if there’s any news,’ Bec said. ‘We’ve got a backlog of sightings you need to see to, you know. I’ve lined them up for you, so get out there and get busy.’

I got to my feet. ‘Business as usual?’

Rani stood and brushed off her sleeves. ‘With the addition of a savage cult after our blood, and a substantial upscaling in both ghost numbers and belligerence.’

‘So be careful,’ Bec said. ‘Extra careful.’

I grabbed a battered leather bomber jacket out of the wardrobe. I rarely wore it, but its semi-military background felt right for the times we were in, and it was perfect with my brand-new internet purchase, which I unwrapped and spent a few seconds admiring before stuffing it in my pack.

While Rani drove, I studied the starter list of sightings Bec had shunted to my phone, the usual intended backbone of our night’s work. She’d prioritised them according to the trustworthiness of the ghost spotter, as usual, with a weighting depending on how dangerous the ghosts were. Mopers and Weepers got scaled down. Thugs, Gnashers and Ragers were scaled up. Trouble was, this variable was now suspect thanks to our recent experiences. We had to treat all ghosts as potential berserkers.

Westgarth was our first possibility. We were crawling up High Street when I yelped. ‘Pull over!’

Rani glanced at the rear-view mirror. ‘I can’t. No spaces here, as usual, and we’re stuck in traffic anyway.’

I opened the door and was on my way, weaving through cars, and then I was down that street that runs alongside Westgarth Cinema because a ghost had latched onto some guy and draped himself over his shoulders like the worst cape ever.

As I raced towards him, the victim propped himself against the iron fence near the exit stairs of the cinema and vomited noisily onto the footpath. This, of course, made him invisible to the people strolling along High Street not far away, as they averted their eyes from the drunk. Except, he wasn’t drunk. This was the effect of the ghost that was now – ick! – rubbing his head against the back of the victim’s neck. The ghost had lank grey hair, a massive forehead, and some sort of army uniform on, minus any headgear. Could have been First World War, could have been Second, but it didn’t matter. He had latched on good and solid and was making this guy’s life a misery.

I plunged my hands into the snivelling ghost’s back. He stiffened, like I was some sort of supernatural taser, and then shattered.

Memories of marching washed over me, kilometres and kilometres of it, along roads, through sand, through bush, always bearing a crushing weight of hopelessness. I lurched backwards, hitting that metal fence hard enough for it to boom, and then the memories evaporated.

Rani was there, helping the victim stand upright. ‘It’s all right,’ she soothed. ‘You must have eaten something bad. Take some deep breaths. You’ll be fine.’

‘Haven’t eaten anything,’ he mumbled.

‘That’s the problem, then.’ I rubbed my shoulder. ‘Low blood sugar. Get some food into you.’

He groaned and shook Rani off before staggering away, still hunched over, heading away from the lights of High Street.

‘And so our night begins,’ Rani said, straightening her scarf.

‘If that’s our worst encounter tonight, I’ll be a happy guy,’ I said, rolling my shoulders and wincing.

On our way to the second job on our list we saw ghosts everywhere. They spilled out of old buildings, blundered around alleys and lanes, wandered across busy streets, and basically made nuisances of themselves. And they weren’t solo manifestations, either. Pairs, trios, mobs of them shambling around together. Packs of a dozen or more. Crowds, even, drifting around, doing their ghosty thing, enjoying – if that’s the right word – their spooky existence. It was as if someone had stuck up a sign saying ‘Worldwide Ghost Convention Here!’ and then forgot to arrange any accommodation. Good thing that politicians couldn’t see them, otherwise they’d be frothing at the mouth about roaming gangs of ghosts up to no good and using this to justify some sort of law and order crackdown.

Hey, Political Anton! Maturity Quotient boost!

Seeing the ghostly multitudes was a way to get an idea of how many ghosts, or potential ghosts, there are in a city like Melbourne. Seeing so many gave a sense of history, too, in a mashed-up way, with some spooks wearing early Victorian clothes and others right into the twenty-first century. If I was feeling charitable I could call it educational, but I wasn’t, so I called it depressing. Depressing, because there was no way we were going to get on top of this situation, even if they were cooperative.

Ghosts. Can’t live with ’em, can’t dispatch ’em in bulk by ticking a handy box marked ‘Dispatch All’.

‘Sightless Sally’s reported something serious,’ I said. ‘We need to get to the observatory.’

A moment of interesting silence followed and Rani finally said, ‘I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.’

‘I have not yet begun to joke.’

‘We’d better get going, then.’

‘Why?’

‘Every observatory I’ve ever heard of is way out in the countryside. They seem to favour mountaintops, which makes sense. Closer to the things that they’re studying.’

‘True enough, but this one’s smack-bang in the middle of the city, in the Botanic Gardens.’

‘I still get the feeling that this is the start of an elaborate joke.’

‘Get onto Hoddle Street.’ Some quick googling. ‘Way back in early Melbourne days some guys set up a scientific observatory on a hill in the gardens because you couldn’t really call yourself a hipster world city if you didn’t have an observatory.’

‘It doesn’t say that.’

‘Not in as many words, but – totally making this up now, you understand – I bet back then there was a worldwide observatory race, with plenty of bearded blokes boasting about the size of their telescope.’

‘Nothing’s changed, then.’

‘One hundred per cent correct.’

Rani gunned it, the car purring happily and me hanging on to anything I could grab.

‘A proper observatory with a telescope and all that palaver?’ she asked calmly.

‘According to Wikipedia it had the largest steerable telescope in the world for the time. And right now I have an extra truckload of pride in my city. Biggest steerable telescope, hey? Go Melbourne.’