“OVER HERE, MOLLY! IT’S IMPORTANT.”
Down at ground level, it was hard for Molly to see. A thick milky mist had rolled through the trees into Howlfair New Cemetery. She stepped over the fence, pulled out her torch, and guided the beam across the higgledy graves, which protruded from the sea of mist like the bows of wrecked ships.
The torch beam caught the side of Lowry’s face, illuminating one of her eyes, which glowed unnaturally blue. Then Lowry disappeared behind a tall grave.
“Lowry, what are you doing here?” she warbled. “What’s going on?”
Molly knew that something was very wrong. But she felt compelled to venture deeper into the cemetery. She couldn’t stop herself.
She drew closer to the gravestone.
“Molly, you need to see this!” came her best friend’s voice.
Unable to resist, her feet moving almost of their own accord, Molly wobbled her way through the mist to the tall, mossy tombstone, her torch beam bobbing.
“Here – look!” came Lowry’s voice from the other side of the stone. Molly poked her head around the gravestone, gripping its cold shoulder, and she gasped.
There was nobody there.
She moved around the gravestone, the torchlight making spectral shadows spring and sprawl. She circled to the other side of the gravestone – nothing. Then she heard a giggle.
She looked up.
Lowry was floating above her.
She was wearing a tattered white dress. No, a shroud. Jewellery hung from her, and her skeleton-hands were reaching down towards Molly. Although the dangling wisps of bobbed golden hair were Lowry’s, the desiccated white face with the dislocated jaw and the row of brown fangs and the bulbous blue eye glowing in the dark – these were not. And neither was the parch-throated laughter that spilled from the black gullet.
Molly fell to the ground and sprawled in the whorling fog, lock-jawed with terror, her arms flailing to bat away the floating thing that was now descending on her. She struggled to breathe, her heart careening like a dodgem car in her chest. Then she heard the screeching wildcat mewl of Gabriel as he sprinted over, skittling around the side of the Excelsior – somehow he’d found a way out – and bounding through the fog.
A window opened on the side of the towering guesthouse, and the voice of Mr Banderfrith bellowed into the windy night.
“Will someone shut that cat up!”
Lights went on across the black-beamed building. The creature that had impersonated Lowry flew away. As Gabriel found Molly and leapt protectively upon her, Molly squinted up at the gravestone in front of her and saw, scrawled in what appeared to be blood, these words:
She lay there staring, panting. Her face was wet. Those few minutes of fear had forced out all the tears Molly hadn’t known she’d contained, and now she felt wrung out. Graveyard soil had made stripes of mud on her face. Her chest rose and fell. Her cat stepped onto her stomach and sniffed her hair meaningfully.
“I was right,” Molly said. “They’re real. Monsters are real.”
Thank goodness she was still wearing her day clothes, and so had a key to the guesthouse in her pocket. Molly took Gabriel back into the Excelsior, and in her bedroom she lay curled on her Dracula duvet, trembling with rage and shock, gripping her cat like a talisman, wondering what to do.
She had felt for so long that there was a mystery to be solved in her life and in her town. She’d felt that there was a secret behind the old legends, a truth too terrible for the town to face. And she had been right.
“This changes everything,” Molly said to Gabriel. She wiped her eyes, sat up and lifted him so that they were face-to-face. “Gabriel, I know I’m not exactly strong or brave. But I’m the best investigator in this town. I’m Molly Thompson, and I can find anything out. I’ll find out what happened to Mrs Fullsway, and I’ll find out how to deal with ghouls, and I’ll make sure that Benton Furlock will never, ever be the mayor of this town.”
Gabriel sneezed approvingly.
Molly waited for the dawn. She’d made a decision. There was something she’d wanted to do for a long time, and when morning came, she was going to do it.