Sally took Oscar to the untidy office she shared with Sir Cedric. The headquarters of the GLE was a chaos of corridors and staircases, full of busy ghosts bustling around. There were huge crystal chandeliers hanging from the ornate ceilings. The cornices were decorated with more gargoyles, whose monstrous faces overlooked tapestries: some of the images depicted famous arrests, and others were portraits of ex–police chiefs. Sally’s office was high up, near the top of the tower. The door was carved in spiky gothic letters with her and Cedric’s initials and the words Detectives, Phantasmic Breaches, and Forbidden Crafts.
Inside, the room was bathed in moonlight from a magnificent arched window that gave a view over the park and the city beyond: the sprawling jumble of living and dead cities, falling all over each other—half-sparkling, half-dark.
Around the stone-flagged office, documents and forms and folders were piled into teetering mountain ranges on every available surface. Comic books and old-fashioned serial storybooks poked out of the stacks. Oscar also noticed a giant jar of candy. Sir Cedric wasn’t there.
“That hag called me girl!” Sally was still fuming about Lady Margaret. “She doesn’t care about cases or helping the dead. All she cares about is sucking up to the chief and getting promoted. You know Lady Margaret’s only been dead for fifteen years!”
“Don’t worry…I’m sure you’ll get there one day,” Oscar said.
“If I wanted to get there, I would have done it last century,” Sally snapped. “Who’d want to be Lady Margaret? All she does is toady up to Mr. Mortis and push paper around. She’s an idiot!”
“Why does she look so…”
“Rat-bitten? Because she thinks it’s more dramatic, I suppose. We ghosts can appear pretty much how we like. Though most of us prefer to look like we used to. It just feels right, you know.”
Oscar had always wanted to have long hair, but his mum had never let him. He thought hard about his hair growing for a second, then put his hand to his neck to find…
“Gosh,” Oscar said.
“Yeah,” said Sally, cocking her head to one side. “I think that suits you better. Do you want a Gobstopper?”
“Um…yes, please.” Oscar took one of the round hard candies and popped it in his mouth. It tasted almost right—a sort of dusty lemonish flavor. His new hair felt a bit heavy when he moved his head.
Sally had pulled out a typewriter and began typing furiously. After a minute, she ripped the sheet of paper from the machine and held it up in the air.
It vanished.
“Good. Off to the visa people at Ghost Immigration. That’ll start the ball rolling on finding your dad. If he ever stuck around in the Living World and got a visa, they’ll know,” she said.
Oscar pointed at the typewriter. “How did that…” He trailed off, realizing he was asking another question, which Sally didn’t like him doing.
“Phantasma,” replied Sally. “It’s not just people who have it. It’s everywhere, and it can be harnessed like an energy source. That message was just powered through the phantasmic barrier, across the void, straight to those pen-pushing bureaucrats. Voilà! So what about you? I’m supposed to take you home now.”
“I don’t want to go home,” said Oscar quickly. “I want to find out what’s going on….And thank you for looking for my dad.”
“No problem.” Sally looked at him. It was another one of her long, penetrating stares. It felt like her gray eyes were scalpels, peeling him apart. It was doubly odd coming from a thirteen-year-old girl.
“Tell me, Oscar,” she said eventually, “why do you want to stay a ghost? Normally that’s the last thing a living person wants to be.”
Oscar had to stop and think. It was pretty bonkers when you put it like that. He wondered again if he should tell her the truth.
You see the thing is, Sally, I’m a freak. I kill things I touch.
He couldn’t bring himself to say it.
“Well…someone tried to kill me. I can’t just wait for them to attack me again.”
“Sure,” Sally said. “That makes sense, but do you really want to stay dead?”
“Yes,” Oscar said, surprised by how sure he felt. “I like it here. It’s like…here I make more sense, you know? And I can run really fast and I don’t have to use my crutch….This is basically the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me!”
Sally grinned. “That’s good. Because I would have taken you back if you wanted. But we’re not going to do that now.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Really annoy Lady Margaret.”
Sally scribbled a note to Cedric, explaining that he had to cover for her for a bit. Then they borrowed a carriage and horses and rattled north as if a full-on riot of blood-crazed knights was behind them. A hour later, they turned onto a small nondescript street. It was dark, and everyone was still asleep.
“Here we are,” Sally said, pulling at the reins. “I’m the red door.”
Her house was modest, practically indistinguishable from a thousand other London terraced houses—except that it was slipped inside another, real house—like a hand inside a glove.
The front door wasn’t locked either. Inside, he found a bigger mess than in her office. Mounds of papers. Half-read books in teetering towers. Three jam sandwiches forgotten on the sofa—and bags of sweets everywhere. They were all made by the same sweetmaker: Mr. Werther. Gas lamps gave light from where they hung on the walls, lending strange shapes to the garish Victorian textured wallpaper.
The living room was aglow in a constant shimmering fire that burned in the grate. A large bulletin board was covered in notes and strings. It looked like a spider had started a scrapbook.
Oscar tiptoed through the clutter to investigate. In the center of the board, at the heart of the maze of string, was a stiff old black-and-white photograph of a Victorian man and woman. The woman was pretty, and her familiarly high cheekbones and sharp sparkling eyes looked so much like Sally’s that Oscar knew she must be her mother. The man was in a detective uniform. Next to them, a tattered Wanted poster caught Oscar’s eye.
Hieronymus Jones
The diabolical alchemist and inventor is wanted in connection with forty-two outstanding crimes, including ghost murder, mischievous and malignant hauntings, inappropriate use of phantasma with intent to harm, and the possession of forbidden devices and contraptions in contravention of Article 15, 23, and 234 of the Ghost Convention of 1934. Jones died in 1888 but is unlikely to dress in Victorian clothes. He is a master of disguise and has been known to hide in plain sight. Do not approach unless suitably shielded. Please alert the authorities immediately if you have any information about this highly dangerous ghost.
Sally came into the room.
“Did you catch him yet?” Oscar asked, pointing at the poster.
Sally’s eyes blazed. Oscar was surprised at how furious she looked.
“No,” she said. “That’s not important. Just a cold case I’m working on.” With a grunt of effort, she grabbed the board and flipped it over.
“Sorry,” Oscar said. “I didn’t—”
“It’s time to start a new case,” Sally interrupted. “The mystery of Oscar Grimstone.”
They both got to work. Sally wrote SUSPECT. Beneath she gave a profile of the attacker: Wears hat and scarf. Trained in poltergeisting. Oscar helped her pin a piece of string to another bundle of information labeled WITNESS. There was a profile of Oscar: Oscar Grimstone, twelve years and seven months old, from Little Worthington. Able to turn into a ghost. Phantasma readings off the charts.
Once again, Oscar wondered if he should tell Sally about his Curse. That he killed things he touched. He glanced at her. She was scribbling on a note card, eyes gleaming, filled with purpose. Maybe he could trust her?
But before Oscar could decide, a piece of paper suddenly appeared in the air. Sally snatched it up and read it quickly, then handed it Oscar.
NO SIGN JULIAN GRIMSTONE
“Does that mean he’s not here?” said Oscar. His voice wobbled. He hadn’t realized how much hope had built up inside him. Tears formed in his eyes.
“No—it just means that there’s no record of him in ghost London right now.” Sally put a hand on Oscar’s shoulder. “But don’t worry, Oscar. Plenty of ghosts slip through the cracks. Just means we need to do more digging.”
Oscar took a deep breath. “Okay. Can we do that now?”
Sally stuck a card on the bulletin board, beneath the profile of Oscar: Julian Grimstone. “Sure. If we find out about your dad, we might discover what you are exactly. Maybe he’ll have the answers.”
Sally turned from the room.
“So where do we go?” Oscar said, following her out the front door.
“The place is kind of hard to describe.”
They climbed into Sally’s cart and galloped through the streets of London. This time, Sally pushed the skeleton horses so recklessly through the oncoming traffic, that Oscar closed his eyes the whole way. It was really hard to remember that the bus you were riding toward was not going to smash you and your ghost carriage into a million pieces.
He was very relieved when Sally drew up the horses outside the British Library.
The normal, living person’s building was shut up for the night, but a small, discreet wooden door shimmered a ghostly silver in the redbrick wall. A flickering green lantern above the door illuminated a sign that read Department of Records.
“This is where they keep track of everyone who has ever lived and died,” Sally explained. “And everyone on the Other Side as well. We can find your dad’s file, and yours too. But I warn you: Try to stay calm, all right? You’ll get used to it after a few breaths.”
“Stay calm? What do you mea— ARGH!”
Oscar saw what was on the other side of the door, and his mind seemed to explode.
It was the largest set of shelves he had ever seen. They went up and down and sideways forever, thousands upon thousands of shelves stretching as far as the eye could see, all neatly filled with little manila folders and scrolls. The distances were so vast and so impossible that his brain couldn’t take it all in and it felt like it was constricting in his skull. He wanted to tear his hair out and scream. He shut his eyes again to try to cope.
“Just breathe,” murmured Sally. “And don’t look down.”
But Oscar couldn’t help but look down. “Aaagh!” he shouted, clutching Sally’s sleeve.
They were standing on a small platform made out of a kind of thin wire mesh. Through the holes in this mesh, Oscar saw a very long drop. There was no bottom, only a dim, pulsing blackness.
The platform clung to the side of this giant shelf cliff like a bureaucratic bird’s nest. The platform was about ten feet square. It had room for a desk with a small brass bell on it. Behind the desk sat a very neatly dressed ghost, with a trim beard and a turban.
“Try to concentrate on my face, young ghost,” he said kindly. “Newcomers have told me they find that reassuring. I am the Archivist.”
The Archivist was the oldest-looking person Oscar had ever seen. But he had warm eyes and that helped.
“I’m just showing my new colleague the ropes,” Sally said. “This place gets newbies every time, doesn’t it?”
“It does. Were you just here to scare him?” the Archivist asked. “Or did you have a request in mind?”
“We do. We’re after two files: Oscar Grimstone—birthday January 26, 2006, and his father, Julian….”
“Hold tight, please,” the Archivist said.
“Argh!” Oscar shouted for a third time, as the small platform plunged down the giant cliff shelf, zigzagging like a drop of water running down a windowpane.
After they’d fallen for what felt like three miles, they came to a sudden stop in front of a shelf that looked exactly like all the others. Without hesitating, the Archivist walked from his desk, turned, and plucked a small brown folder from a row of a hundred that looked just like it.
The Archivist clicked his fingers. A huge leather-bound ledger appeared from thin air with a rustle of paper. “Please sign here before you look at the files,” he said.
Oscar couldn’t sign his own name without giving himself away, so he called himself Gary Stevens—the bully who lived on their street. There was only one other name in the ledger. Three weeks ago, someone called Jessie Mur had signed out Oscar’s file. After Sally signed her name neatly, she tapped the stranger’s name with the quill, catching Oscar’s eye.
She glanced at the Archivist. “Funny name. D’you remember what they looked like?”
The Archivist chuckled. “I remember everyone who visits me. Jessie Mur wore a wide-brimmed hat and a scarf wrapped around his face.”
Oscar just managed to stop himself letting out a gasp.
“I don’t know why everyone’s so interested in this file,” the Archivist said, checking that they’d signed. “A very ordinary boy, this Oscar Grimstone.”
“That’s why we’re using him for training purposes,” said Sally. “We’ve identified him as the most boring boy in Britain. He’s a marvel of the ordinary, really.”
Oscar was about to protest but remembered he was supposed to be Gary Stevens, not Oscar Grimstone, and the words choked in his throat. The Archivist gave another dry chuckle. “How funny.” He went back to his desk and began looking through a list of parchment.
Oscar and Sally eagerly paged through the bundle of forms and reports. The papers were in chronological order, with the most recent papers at the front, and documented every important event in Oscar’s life so far. They were very up to date. Already, the strange events of this evening were in the file—there were several eyewitness reports of Oscar’s antics near the bone ship, as well as Sir Cedric’s notes about investigating Oscar’s house.
As they read through Oscar’s middle school years, Sally got annoyed.
“This Gary Stevens sure likes to pick on you,” she muttered. “Why’d he call you all these names? And flush your head down the toilet? And why’d you call yourself after him in the book?”
Oscar shrugged. It was funny—Gary Stevens seemed like the least of his problems now. Because he hadn’t told Sally the full truth, he was glad that the file didn’t seem to mention anything about the Curse. Very little else was missed. Oscar’s fourth-grade clarinet exam results were noted, as were his granny’s death and an award he’d received from a local library when he was seven. It was very weird to see your life laid out like this.
Though, as they grew close to the day of his father’s death, Oscar grew very nervous. He hadn’t thought of this before, but what if he found out that he’d killed his father? What if the book showed it was all his fault? This was Oscar’s worst fear. His hand trembled as he held the book.
“Don’t worry, mate,” Sally said. “You really love your dad, don’t you?”
Oscar nodded.
“We all do,” Sally said. “Just remember that it doesn’t stop with death either. Love lasts, see?”
This made sense to Oscar. “You know how I become a ghost?” he asked.
“I’d wondered.”
“I just think about my dad—that’s all it takes.”
“Exactly—sometimes the bonds of love are so strong, they keep a connection beyond death. Maybe your dad’s love provides you with the link you need between the worlds.”
Oscar smiled at the thought and turned the page.
He froze. He could barely look at the page. It was very plain—just an excerpt from the police report, saying that his dad had died in a car crash. The fear of what really happened that night had been haunting Oscar since he’d first begun to find out about his Curse. He scanned through hurriedly.
Nothing about a Curse. Nothing about Oscar killing him.
Oscar felt relieved—and then a stab of white-hot guilt at the relief. What kind of monster was relieved that their father was killed in a car crash?
Sally carried on flicking through the file.
“You were a charming baby,” she muttered. “You won a prize! Look—hang on—what’s this?!”
At the back of the folder was a page that recorded Oscar’s birth. It looked like this:
Oscar Grimstone born January 26, 2006.
Then there was a deathday.
Oscar Grimstone died July 14, 2007 MM
The deathday was crossed out with a neat pen stroke and signed in an elegant hand MM.
“Holy Jack O’Lantern!” said Sally.
“But…how can that be?” Oscar asked. “That’s…the day of the car accident.”
He felt the world spinning around him. The fear clutched tight again. Was he supposed to be dead? Was that why he was cursed? Why he was able to turn into a ghost?
It took all his concentration to keep from turning bodily with the shock.
“And here’s me calling you the most boring boy in Britain,” said Sally. “Looks like someone helped you cheat death. Lucky for you…I suppose.” Something in her voice made Oscar glance at her face.
She looked young all of a sudden, scared.
“Who’s MM?” he asked, looking at the initials next to his deathday. “That’s who crossed it out, isn’t it?”
“MM? He’s only the biggest cheese of them all: the first Minister of the Ministry of Ghosts, Mr. Mortis himself! Your lot call him Death, or the Grim Reaper. Of course, people who’ve met him say he isn’t so grim—apparently he likes to collect mugs.”
“Are you serious?” Oscar said, heart thumping. “Death himself stopped me from dying?” He tried to picture a skeleton with a scythe, signing his life back into existence. “Why?”
“Only Mortis knows.” Sally grinned grimly. “Hey! Chin up, Oscar! We’re getting to the bottom of why you’re so peculiar. I wonder what kind of mistake was made?”
“Mistake?” Oscar couldn’t keep the hysteria out of his voice.
“Someone must have made a mistake for Mr. Mortis to intervene. He’s usually way too busy to take an interest in small matters like this. Very odd indeed. And this is odd too—look, do you see how this sheet’s been sliced in half?”
She was right. The bottom half of the death sheet had been snipped away.
“I wonder who took it. I’d wager it was the ghost in the hat, eh? Jessie Mur.”
Oscar nodded, struggling to put it all together. The stranger who tried to kill him. The Curse. The dad he couldn’t remember. The dad who’d died on the day that he was meant to. And it made it even worse to know that Mr. Mortis had saved Oscar’s life but not spared his father’s.
“I suppose that must be why you’ve got ghost powers, Oscar,” Sally said. Her voice came from very far away. “Because you’ve already died…”
Yes, Oscar wanted to add. And that’s why I kill living things when I touch them too. I should have died and now I’m cursed.
“What you thinking about, Oscar?” asked Sally. “It’s a lot to take in. Are you all right?”
Oscar didn’t tell her. What would she think of his Curse? What if she stopped helping him, or handed him in to Lady Margaret, who might send him aboard that bone ship in case he hurt anyone, or broke the rules too much. He could feel the lie getting bigger and bigger, like an anchor dragging him down.
He blinked.
“Can we see Julian Grimstone’s file now?” He looked over at the Archivist.
“Of course, young ghost,” the Archivist said. All of a sudden the platform zoomed upward, moving so fast that the shelves blurred. Oscar felt as if he was dragging his stomach eighteen stories behind him.
Once the platform screeched to a stop, the Archivist pulled another file from a shelf and handed it over.
“Julian Grimstone,” the Archivist said. “As requested.” He resumed his work, dipping his quill in a pot of ink and scrawling on a long scroll.
Oscar opened it with trembling hands. The first thing he saw was a piece of paper with a big red stamp saying OTHER SIDE.
“Oh,” said Sally, staring at it. “Oh dear.”
“What’s that?” Oscar asked.
“The Other Side?” Sally said. “Well, that’s the place where your soul goes to rest. Only it’s not really resting—you get the eternity that you deserve. A Life Maker in the Department of Afterlives takes a look at what you did during your life, and what you liked best, and then you get to do that forever. It’s not a bad deal, really. Only department that Mr. Mortis gets personally involved in.”
She was babbling. There was something she didn’t want to say.
“So can I go see him over there?” Oscar asked sharply. “I could go on that bone ship, couldn’t I?”
Sally looked him in the eye. “No, Oscar,” she said gently. “Not unless you want to stay dead. It’s a one-way ticket to the Other Side, I’m afraid.”
Somehow, this was much worse than finding out you were already dead and probably cursed. “I see,” he said in a small voice. “But it’s nice over there?”
“Take a look,” Sally said. “It’ll be here at the back.”
Sally flicked through his father’s file; Oscar, watching desperately, wished he could read it all.
“There,” Sally said. “He’s doing well.”
Looking at how Julian Grimstone spent his days, his personal afterlife sounded pretty perfect to Oscar. The Life Maker must have done a good job.
During the day, he built furniture and carved sculptures out of driftwood. He went to punk gigs in the evening. Once or twice a week, he went for a long walk along the coast or took a bike into town. Every morning was Sunday, and all the papers were delivered to his house along with a full English breakfast with extra sausages and black pudding. The newspapers always had a section about how his family was doing, Oscar in particular.
“See,” Sally said. “He’s keeping an eye on you.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“No. I’m sorry, Oscar,” Sally said. “Like I told you, it’s a one-way thing to the Other Side. But he’ll be watching you, following everything you do.”
“Right,” Oscar said.
“It could be a lot worse, trust me,” Sally said quietly. “Not everyone gets such a peaceful death.”
Oscar nodded. He couldn’t speak just then. Hot tears were running down his face—and a great bursting sob was building up inside him.
“I love you, Dad,” he whispered.
He hoped his dad could hear him.