“What is going on?” Oscar muttered. “Mum!” he cried.

The door swung open, and his mum burst into the room just like he’d summoned her.

She had a candlestick in her hand. Howling, she swung it at Oscar’s head.

Oscar just managed to duck out of the way. His mum stumbled, carried forward by her wild swipe, but she quickly turned to face him. Her expression was full of fear.

“Don’t you dare steal anything. I’ve called the police!”

“Mum, it’s me! Oscar!”

“Don’t call me that! I don’t have a son, you villain! You thief!”

She swiped again with the candlestick. Oscar backed away. He wanted to run over and hug her. More than that, he wanted his mum to hug him, to tell him everything was okay. That it all would look better after a cup of tea.

But when he looked in her eyes, he saw only fear, like his mum had never seen him before in her life.

“Get out!” she screamed. “Get out of my house!”

Oscar turned, moving as fast as his crutch would let him. As he bumped down the corridor, he realized that it wasn’t just his room that had changed. All the familiar photos were gone, and the furniture had been moved about.

Nothing was the same.

“Get out!” his mum screamed again from the top of the stairs. Oscar heard the triumph ringing in her voice. She’d scared away the monster.

He crashed through the front door and hobbled in a daze toward the road, without any idea where he was going. Maybe he had actually fallen asleep. Maybe this was a nightmare.

Far off in the distance, he heard a siren. Much closer, he saw a tallish figure in a wide-brimmed hat. The figure was standing in Oscar’s front yard. The figure’s face was muffled by a red scarf, as if that person really didn’t want to be recognized.

Oscar jolted. He was so distressed and confused that he knew this was important but he had no idea why. Then a familiar itchy tingle wriggled down Oscar’s back. Phantasma. The shock was enough to jerk him out of his dream.

As the figure in the hat raised its hand, mist appeared around the person’s ankles and curled across the lawn. The pair of shears that Mr. Kenright had left in a wheelbarrow outside of number 32 lifted into the air and flew straight at Oscar’s head.

Oscar had no time to move, so he didn’t.

He turned ghostly. The shears passed right through him like a guided missile and buried themselves in his front door.

As soon as Oscar looked back at the ghost, all his exhaustion and pain lifted from his body. It felt as if a giant hand that had been gripping him tight had suddenly let go.

Before Oscar knew what he was doing, he bounded forward, raising his crutch like a club.

The figure didn’t try to throw anything else at Oscar’s head. It didn’t try to run either. Instead, from its pocket it pulled out a round object and let it drop from the end of a short length of wire or piece of string. It looked like a watch on a chain—or maybe a yo-yo.

Oscar continued to charge, screaming in rage, fear, and frustration.

But the figure didn’t flinch. Instead, it lifted up the object and began to move it very slowly. Oscar could see it wasn’t a yo-yo at all. It was a withered eyeball. It was yellowing, crusty with a glowing, bright red pupil moving about. It was alive and it was looking—and as soon as the horrible thing saw him, Oscar stopped.

The scream died in his throat.

He felt a horrible sucking sensation tugging at his soul. He saw bits of his body and his clothes whirling away from him, swirling toward the glowing red eye.

When Oscar looked at his body, he saw the sparkling shimmering light was fading, becoming more see-through, and parts of his fingers were disappearing completely.

The eye was sucking him up! Swirls of ghostly mist were transferring from Oscar’s body into the wide pupil of the eye. The eye began to glow.

Oscar panicked and tried turning back to human again to escape. He had the knack now, and it should have been easy, but he couldn’t do it right. The ghastly eye gripped him somehow. The front half of his body stayed ghostly and was being vacuumed away. Only the back half of his body turned human. But with the front half of him still ghostly, Oscar could see into the back half, which was still in living form. He could clearly see his human heart beating and his kidneys pulsing and his bloody raw muscles twitching as he tried to run.

Oscar heard a scream behind him. His mum had followed him out into the street—but she wasn’t ready for the bloody butchery that she found. Even though she’d been an undertaker all her life, she couldn’t handle the sight of half a boy, organs exposed, flailing about on her front lawn.

To be fair, very few people could.

Her scream hummed with terror. It was nearly as good a scream as Oscar’s had been, and it was shockingly loud; so loud, in fact, that the eye was distracted for just a second.

It turned to the noise—and the figure turned too.

Suddenly the awful grip on Oscar lifted.

Oscar took his chance. He turned fully human.

Without thinking, he dived forward, trying to tackle the ghost before it could hurt his mum—but his arm and his crutch met empty air. He went straight through the figure without stopping and landed in a lavender bush.

The figure was turning toward him, trying to get the eye to look at Oscar again. His mum was still screaming.

Oscar knew that he was about to die. Later, if you’d asked him why he did what he did right then, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you.

In that moment, pure animal instinct took charge of him. He did three awesome things very fast. He turned back into a ghost. He did a backflip out of the lavender bush, landing neatly on his feet. With his ghost strength and whip-quick reactions, he brought his crutch round in a mighty sweep. The crutch connected sweetly with the behatted ghost’s stomach. It drove the ghost up through the air, spinning it round like a ragdoll. Then the ghost thumped onto the ground with a satisfying bounce and dropped the eyeball. It burst, collapsing into dust.

Oscar found himself a little startled, staring down at the crumpled figure of his opponent on the ground, with no clear idea how it had gotten there. Oscar’s body was twisted round with the force of his blow, his crutch high over his shoulder like a golfer after a mighty drive.

It was his surprise at finding himself in this extraordinary position that allowed the ghost to escape. The ghost reached into his pocket and drew out a lilac-colored doorknob.

Oscar watched in stunned amazement as the ghost turned the doorknob and opened a door in midair. In a flash, the ghost jumped through it, and the door vanished.

His mum was still screaming as the police drove up with sirens blaring. Neighbors were appearing in doorways, woken by Oscar’s mom’s screaming, and they rushed to help. Oscar’s mum was taken inside and given a cup of tea.

But no one noticed Oscar. As a ghost, he was invisible. He followed his mum and his neighbors inside and watched them huddle around the kitchen table. Gary Stevens appeared in the kitchen five minutes later. Whatever satisfaction Oscar had felt at whomping the man in the hat vanished as he listened to Gary talking to his mother about the break-in.

“The thief said he was my son,” his mum said. “But I don’t have a son—though I’ve always thought of you that way, Gary. Thank you for coming and checking up on me.”

“It’s no bother, Mrs. Grimstone,” Gary said. “You know, I think I saw the thief outside your house earlier. I tried to fight him, but he ran off.”

“Oh, you’re so brave!” his mum said. “Thanks for watching out for me!”

Oscar wanted to reappear and punch Gary Stevens in the face. But it wouldn’t have done any good.

None of his neighbors remembered him. No one told his mum that they’d known Oscar since he was a baby. Worse, the police didn’t tell her she’d gone mad. That she had a son, named Oscar, who went to Little Worthington Middle School.

Oscar had been wiped off the map. Obliterated. Erased.

Without a shadow of a doubt, this was worse than any nightmare. It was worse than being actually dead.

Oscar couldn’t take it anymore and walked out of his house, with no idea where he should go. He didn’t have any other family. He didn’t have any friends. And even if he did, they wouldn’t have recognized him anyway.

Oscar Grimstone didn’t exist.