‘Hey,’ Tanja said as soon as she stepped into the Secret Room, the control centre and archive hidden in the Marin family bookshop. ‘You’ve put in a bar fridge!’

‘And there’s more,’ Bec said proudly. ‘New shelves!’

Bec had persuaded Dad to update our shelving because we had so much material it was hard to find anything. Her solution was to invest in some of those sliding, compacting techno-shelves that you see out the back of libraries. Dad saw the complicated installation instructions and agreed straight away because complicated installation instructions are his idea of fun.

Bec showed Tanja around, while Rani checked the network server. Dad stood just inside the door and watched them.

‘You don’t know how happy I am to say I’ve never seen that tartan waistcoat before,’ I said, pointing.

Dad looked down, as if surprised to see what he was wearing. ‘It’s from when your mother and I spent a month in Glasgow. Before you were born.’

‘That’d explain it.’

He pointed an eyebrow in the direction of his sister. ‘And how do you think she is?’

For a second I thought he’d asked who did I think she was, and it took me a while to sort out my answer. ‘She’s been through a lot,’ I said eventually. ‘And I don’t think she’s telling us everything.’

‘To spare us, or for some other reason?’

‘Answer uncertain. Ask again later.’

‘When bad things happen, it changes people. Don’t forget that.’

Despite the dark circles under her eyes and her general look of ill-health, Tanja set herself up at the big table in the middle of the room. The first thing she did was tell the others about the presence in Elsewhere.

‘Make no mistake,’ she finished. ‘This entity is behind the ghost eruption here. It’s harvesting ghosts in Elsewhere before they can go on and sending them back to disrupt life here.’

‘That’s abominable,’ Dad said. ‘Unnatural.’

‘It wants to remove humanity entirely.’ Tanja smiled, then, and it wasn’t a smile full of good humour. ‘So with the presence and the Ragged Sisters, it looks like we have a lot on our hands.’

That led to a barrage of questions. Dad wanted to know more about Elsewhere, while Bec and Rani were heavily into Tanja’s knowledge of Trespassers. When it came up that a mysterious Trespasser organisation was responsible for the deaths of Rani’s parents, Tanja started throwing up all sorts of possibilities. I was intrigued; she’d never mentioned anything about them when she was training me. Maybe she’d been keeping it for when I was a little older, because some of the stories she told were pretty much from hell. I mean, I could have done without knowing that the Committee of Forty thought suffocating baby animals would be useful in their ghost magic. Still, it did give us an idea of what we could run into.

‘You never told us anything like this, Leon,’ I said to Dad after a while.

He screwed up his face. ‘It’s not my area.’

‘You loved listening to my stories,’ his sister shot back.

‘So I’m imperfect,’ Dad said. ‘I won’t argue with anyone on that score.’

‘If that’s not fishing for a compliment, I don’t know what is,’ I said. ‘I’ll repeat what I’ve said before – you did a great job in difficult circumstances, Leon.’

‘I hope so, but it’s always good to hear it.’

Aunt Tanja watched this exchange carefully, frowning a little. The five years she was away were crucial in my development. Hey, in anyone’s development, that thirteen-to-eighteen-years bit is important. Puberty, adolescence, wild-arse teenagerhood, call it whatever you like, but I think we can all admit that stuff happens.

So I bet she was wondering how Dad had coped. ‘The finely tuned, highly efficient ghost-hunting maestro you see in front of you,’ I explained to her, ‘is largely due to your brother. Of course, he had excellent source material to work with, but his fumbling efforts were useful.’

She snorted, and I think Bec did too. Stereo snorts. ‘I’m sure they were.’

The laptop pinged. Bec leaned forward and her brow knotted. ‘Sigurd says that branches of the Ragged Sisters are springing up across the world right now. There’s something afoot all right. Those bastards haven’t crawled out of the woodwork for no reason at all.’ She flicked a finger at the screen. ‘The best that she’s been able to put together is that they’re trying to open a way to Elsewhere to help this presence in its mission.’

Boom. Ragged Sisters getting together with a Big Bad from Elsewhere? Nasty and Nastier.

Tanja grimaced and hissed through her teeth. ‘Yeah? They might be smarter than I thought.’

‘But that’s daft,’ Rani said. ‘If this presence is determined to exterminate humanity, then the Ragged Sisters will suffer as well.’

‘You wouldn’t go into something like this without a deal organised,’ I said, while part of me was wondering how this Sigurd felt after getting an email from someone she hadn’t heard from in five years. Maybe these ghost theoreticians worked on a different sort of schedule, one where a gap like that wasn’t unusual. ‘Promises have been made, I bet.’

‘Power, riches, and maybe passage to somewhere else,’ Bec said. ‘That’d probably do it.’

‘So how does this work with the encounter the other night, when you reappeared?’ Dad asked Tanja. ‘Was that their ritual, opening a way to Elsewhere and instead of this presence, you happened to be there?’

She spread her hands. ‘Something like that.’

‘I fear that the dark days ahead could be darker than we suspect,’ Dad observed.

‘Don’t be so miserable, Leon,’ Rani said. ‘The Marins are well organised and well resourced. Not only will we survive, we will thrive.’

I groaned. ‘It’s like an outlook choice between gloomy and nihilistic Rick Sanchez and improbably optimistic Joy.’

‘Joy from Inside Out!’ Dad said, leaping to his feet. ‘I understood that reference!’

‘Which is a reference in itself and we’re getting so meta here that we could all disappear,’ Bec said.

Tanja scratched at the back of her hand. ‘The zombie ghosts you described. How do they fit into all this?’

‘What if they’re building a zombie ghost army to help this presence from Elsewhere?’ Rani suggested.

‘Maybe.’ Tanja tugged hard on that earlobe. ‘I need to check, dammit, but I seem to remember that zombie ghosts are not only blindly obedient, but they’re extra hard to dispatch.’

‘They don’t want to go on?’ I asked. ‘We’ve dealt with ghosts like that.’

‘You’re not so special. Every ghost hunter in the history of ghost hunting has had the same issue sometime,’ Tanja said, cutting me down nicely. ‘These guys, if I remember correctly, don’t yield to standard dispatching. They can only be eased if their creators are taken out of the picture.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Unconscious, out of range, dead, but that’s not going to be easy because anyone who’s shaping these horrors is likely to be a nasty piece of work.’ She smiled. ‘Well, if we can’t fight this presence from Elsewhere directly, maybe we can stop the Ragged Sisters from letting it in.’

‘A small point,’ Dad said, ‘but to stop the Ragged Sisters, you need to find them.’

‘Way to bring the mood down, Leon,’ I said.

‘Well, they don’t appear to be advertising their whereabouts with careless photos on the social media, do they?’

‘No, but that’s not a bad idea.’ I pulled out my phone. ‘Aw, look, a puppy on the beach!’

‘Why don’t we look for them where they set up last time they were here?’ Tanja suggested.

It had been a time so full of startling revelations and admissions that I thought my astonishment gland had been totally drained of its surprise enzyme, but I was wrong. I jumped to my feet, sending my chair skating backwards across the polished floorboards. ‘The Ragged Sisters have been in Melbourne BEFORE?’ I patted the air. ‘Take it easy, everyone, I reacted big enough for all of you.’

‘I thought everyone knew that,’ Tanja said.

‘Where?’ Rani asked. ‘And when?’

Tanja went all cross-armed again. ‘That, I can’t remember.’ She swept an arm around the Secret Room. ‘But I read it somewhere in the archives.’

Bec wiggled her fingers. ‘Did someone say “archives”? Let me loose!’ She stopped halfway out of her chair. ‘Oh, we must message all our ghost spotters re-emphasising that they need to be on the lookout for the Ragged Sisters.’ She gazed at all of us. ‘It’s one thing making sure you’re okay, but we have others to look after too.’

‘Correct, Rebecca,’ Dad said. ‘I should have thought of that.’

I stood. ‘So, if you’re all comfy here digging up some answers, I guess Rani and I need to get some rest before going out there and working through the sightings list.’

‘Are they always like this?’ Tanja asked Dad.

‘Highly competent, fearsomely efficient and extraordinarily capable? Most certainly.’