ONLY NOW DID MOLLY REALLY NOTICE THE wreckage in the room. The Persian rug: sundered. The grandfather clock like a felled tree. The shattered glass-top table.
“Molly!” Mum screeched. “Snakes alive, what have you done to my attic?”
Molly cowered. She looked around. “The attic?” she coughed, small-voiced. “Oh, I thought I was in the…”
“Don’t treat me like a fool, Molly Thompson! I forbade you from coming in here! I forbade you!”
Mum waded into the attic, a gangly creature with hip-length rose-gold hair who looked like someone else’s mother entirely. Her moonlit face was all horror. She stepped on a stray shard of glass and cried out as though a zombie had bitten her.
“Sorry, Mum!” said Molly while Mum hopped around clutching her stockinged foot. “I just – I heard Gabriel in here, and I, um, wanted to play fishing with him, and…”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a vampire bat you heard?” Mum snapped, whirling round to confront her.
“A vampire?” Molly coughed. “How do you…?”
Mum held up the notepad that Molly had affixed to the listening-pipe. It was open at a page showing a picture of a vampire bat dripping blood. Underneath the doodle was written, in big red letters: Is Aunt Carol a bat in our attic??
“Uh-oh,” said Molly under her breath.
“I can’t believe my own daughter thinks such things about her family!” Mum pulled flabbergasted faces as she flipped through the notepad’s pages. “Why would you think my sister is a vampire bat who lives in our attic?”
“Because she’s always really pale, Mum! And she’s never at home during the day, and I keep seeing a bat flying over the garden, and I keep hearing scratching in the attic, and…”
“Enough!” cried Mum. “Molly, there’s only one mystery in this house – the mystery of why you’re so convinced that this house is full of mysteries! Why is it, Molly? Why are you so sure that I’m trying to keep secrets from you?”
Molly coughed. She glanced over at the cupboard on the other side of the attic, the one with chains wrapped around it and a padlock in the shape of a skull. Then she looked at the small door – no more than elf height – on the far wall of the attic, with the sign saying KEEP OUT. She eyed the cryptic fandangles on the shelves: odd ivory figurines, locked jewellery boxes, a key attached to a necklace hung with dozens of tiny sharp fangs. She squinted at Gabriel, who was curling like fog around Mum’s ankles and who knew a secret way to get into the attic, even when the door was shut.
“Um, just a hunch…”
“Well, I have a hunch that you’ll be doing your ridiculous investigating somewhere else. This guesthouse is our livelihood, Molly. It’s all we have, and I can’t let you demolish it.”
“But I’ve investigated everything in Howlfair!”
“You’ve investigated a million local ghost stories that nobody believes in – and you’ve never found a single ghost. All you ever find is the skeletons in people’s cupboards.”
“Not just ghost stories, Mum. I’ve investigated the history of the town and all the families too. I found out that Reginald Pinkside murdered his wife and his two daughters in 1937. I found out that Mrs Henderson was really Mr Farley’s daughter …”
“Yes, that caused quite a stir,” tutted Mum.
“… and I learned about the plague pit under the new housing development! And I finally translated the motto on the Howlfair flag! And I also learned what Mayor de Ville was doing visiting that woman who grows those prize-winning carrots, and… Mum, why are you looking at me like that?”
Mum stood shaking her head.
“What is it, Mum?”
Mum hesitated. “I wasn’t going to tell you.”
Molly frowned. “Tell me what?”
“There’s been a local petition.”
“A petition?”
“Some people came to me with a list of signatures. They want me to put a stop to your investigations.”
“Who?” Molly staggered as though punched in the gut. “How many people? Why?”
“Molly, pretty much every grown-up in Howlfair lives in fear of your next scandal. Almost half the town signed the petition.”
“But I’m not causing scandals, Mum – I’m just trying to find out the truth!” Molly fought the urge to cry. “What did you tell them?”
“I told them to stop being silly.” Mum knelt down and, with a wince, picked up a broken ornament. “Since then business has gone downhill. We hardly have any new bookings for after the end of the month. People are finding ways to sabotage us.” She looked up, eyes narrow. “I stuck up for you, Molly. And now I’ve found out that you’ve been disobeying me.”
Molly hung her head.
“No more investigations,” said Mum coldly. “I want your library books returned tomorrow. And I’ll be confiscating your library card until further notice.”
Molly gasped. “What for?”
“So you can’t spend every waking hour leafing through old almanacs and prying into the history of every family in Howlfair!” Mum gave an awful sigh. “Just get to bed, Molly. I bet you’ve woken up every guest in the house.”
“Doubt it,” muttered Molly, staring at her feet. “They’re all about a hundred years old.”
“What did you say?”
Molly looked up. “Can I sleep in a normal room tonight?”
“We’ve been through this,” Mum said. “Mrs Fullsway is an important guest, and when she stays, she likes to sleep in your bedroom; and the only other free rooms are the themed rooms, with lots of very valuable antiques, and I can’t trust you not to break anything while you’re pacing around solving mysteries in your head. So I need you to sleep in … the spare room.”
“Why does she like my room so much? She’s got a huge house of her own down the road!”
“Because it overlooks the graveyard where her husband is buried.”
“But, Mum, that’s so weird! Why would anyone want to look at someone’s grave?”
“Not everyone thinks like you,” snapped Mum. “Now please, Molly – go to bed and leave me to clear up your devastation in peace.”
Molly muttered apologies as she headed past Mum, out of the attic, Gabriel following. She tiptoed down the stairs while Mum knelt despondently amidst the debris, and paused for a second by the stair window. She glanced out at hill-hemmed Howlfair – a town with more scary legends than any other town on earth, a town that tourists, for some reason, hardly ever came to, no matter how hard the tourist board worked to attract them. A town positively crammed with creepy old mysteries that the townsfolk thought were very amusing and very quaint, but which almost nobody other than Molly seemed the slightest bit interested in actually solving.
She didn’t spot the stark skeletal face glaring out from a hedge on the other side of her street. And Molly turned away too soon to see the skull-faced creature crawl out of the hedge and begin creeping through the shadows towards the Excelsior Guesthouse.