A Gust of Ghosts Read online

  SUZANNE HARPER

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  DEDICATION

  For Cameron Belgrave

  Chapter ONE

  “Will, get up off that grave this instant!” Mrs. Malone hissed.

  “I would if I could,” Will said, each word as slow and measured as if he were in a trance. “But … I … just … can’t.” To demonstrate, he lifted one limp hand, then let it drop heavily to the ground.

  Poppy gave her twin brother a jaded look from the spot, two headstones over, where she was positioning a camera tripod. He was lying neatly on his back with a gravestone looming behind his head like a granite headboard. His eyes were closed, his arms folded across his chest, and his toes pointed to the sky.

  “The vibrations are too powerful,” he went on dreamily. “The atmosphere too fraught, the night too filled with a mysterious ether—”

  “And you feel like taking a nap while the rest of us work,” Poppy said, wiping off her face with her sleeve. Even though it was almost midnight, it was still warm in the cemetery. Since moving to Austin a month ago, the Malones had learned that summer days in Texas never cooled off, even after the sun went down. But Poppy was sure she wouldn’t feel quite so hot and sweaty if she were stretched out on a grave plot. Instead, she was climbing trees to place camera traps in the branches and crawling around on the ground, setting up motion sensors next to tombs. “Which means pretty soon you’ll start snoring, and any audio evidence we get will be ruined.”

  Will smiled but didn’t open his eyes. “I can feel the spirits around me,” he murmured. “They are approaching.... Now they are close to us … very close....”

  “Oh, give me a break,” muttered Franny. Their older sister was slouched on a bench under a nearby cypress tree. Cypresses are gloomy trees in general, and this one, with its drooping branches and green-black needles, was gloomier than most. That, Poppy knew, was why Franny had decided to sit under it; she had chosen a tree to match her mood in the same way that she would choose a piece of clothing.

  “The only scary things out here in this graveyard in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night,” Franny went on, “are the bugs.” She slapped her arm irritably.

  Mrs. Malone held up a magnetometer and peered at the dial, moonlight glinting off her glasses. “Dear, you know you shouldn’t develop a theory before you have all the facts,” she said. “After all, dozens of eyewitnesses have reported unearthly phenomena at this cemetery over the years. We, on the other hand, have only just arrived. The whole night lies before us! Who knows when or how we might contact the World Beyond? If we’re very lucky, we may even establish communication with a spirit tonight!”

  From the shadows came the sound of a heavy sigh and another slap. “Who cares about spirits?” Franny muttered. “I’ll be lucky to have any blood left after tonight, thanks to these mosquitoes.”

  “Maybe you could pretend they’re vampires,” suggested Poppy with a hint of mischief. (Franny dreamed of someday meeting a vampire, which she seemed to think would look like the cutest member of her favorite boy band. Nothing that the rest of the family said could put this notion out of her mind.) “Or put on some repellent.”

  “And smell like bug spray?” Franny slapped at her leg. “No, thank you.”

  “Lucille, do you have the extra flash drive?” Mr. Malone called out. He was crouched beside a granite tomb, surrounded by a tangle of equipment. “I know I put one in the equipment case, but I can’t find it.”

  He continued rooting through a battered black case. Mr. and Mrs. Malone had carried the case with them for years as they traveled the world searching for evidence of the supernatural. It had a long scratch on one side that Mr. Malone insisted had been made by a werewolf. The handle had been ripped and torn (the result, Mrs. Malone always claimed, of a vicious attack by a windigo) and was now held together with duct tape. There was a deep dent in one side, a souvenir, both Mr. and Mrs. Malone declared, of the time they were caught in a shower of strangely glowing meteorites and held the case over their heads to protect themselves.

  “Maybe we left it in the car,” said Mrs. Malone.

  “Impossible,” replied Mr. Malone. “I always put it in this little pocket on the right—”

  He was interrupted by a handful of dirt hitting the back of his head.

  “What the—” Mr. Malone turned to see five-year-old Rolly industriously digging a hole. Rolly approached this activity the way he approached his life, with single-minded intensity and manic focus that did not include any consideration for others, even if they were standing in the path of incoming dirt.

  “Rolly!” Mr. Malone shouted. “What do you think you’re—?”

  More dirt hit him square in the face.

  “—doing?” he spluttered.

  “Digging,” Rolly said without glancing up.

  “You are a master of stating the obvious,” Mr. Malone said, spitting out a small pebble. “Let me rephrase my question. Why are you digging?”

  Rolly’s head swiveled around. He leveled his most baleful stare at Mr. Malone. “I’m pretending,” he said, his voice dark with meaning. “I’m pretending to be a dog.”

  Poppy rolled her eyes. Will groaned. A theatrical sigh wafted from under the cypress tree.

  “Now, Rolly, please be reasonable,” began Mrs. Malone, casting a worried look at Mr. Malone, who was scowling down at his younger son as he wiped off his face with a handkerchief.

  “For. The. Last. Time.” Mr. Malone clipped off each word as if he were doing his best not to start shouting. “We are not getting a dog that will chew our furniture, pee on our rugs, and eat us out of house and home.”

  Rolly growled.

  “Stop that snarling,” said Mr. Malone. “The discussion is closed.”

  The growling grew louder.

  “Rolly, dear, perhaps you’d like another pet,” said Mrs. Malone, rather desperately. “Now, goldfish are quite nice. It’s so soothing to watch them swim around their bowl, don’t you think?”

  Rolly gave a small but expressive bark that indicated, quite clearly, what he thought of goldfish.

  “And don’t imagine that this canine impersonation of yours will make me change my mind,” Mr. Malone said. “I have said No Dog and that’s final.”

  Rolly snapped his teeth a few times, cast one last black look at Mr. Malone, then went back to his digging. As he threw another scoop of dirt over his shoulder (which Mr. Malone deftly sidestepped), there was a flash of moonlight on silver.

  Mrs. Malone gasped. “Rolly! My great-aunt Maude gave me that!”

  Rolly ignored this and kept digging.

  “Emerson!” Mrs. Malone turned to Mr. Malone. “He’s excavating with my gravy ladle!”

  But Mr. Malone had found the flash drive hidden under a copy of Arcane Mysteries Magazine and was feeling more cheerful.

  “Oh, let him use it,” he said with a careless wave of his hand. “We never do.” />
  “But it was a wedding present,” Mrs. Malone said.

  “Yes, and a completely idiotic one,” said Mr. Malone. “Of course, everyone in your family has always been impractical.”

  Mrs. Malone stopped in her tracks and turned to face him. “I don’t know why you say that,” she said. “I think they’re quite sensible, actually.”

  “As I recall, we told everyone that we were going to spend our honeymoon tracking Mokele-mbembe through the Congo,” said Mr. Malone. “How did your great-aunt imagine gravy would fit into that plan?”

  Mrs. Malone gave him a cool look. “I’ll admit it wasn’t the most useful gift for starting out my married life—”

  “The only thing more ridiculous would have been a set of embroidered tea towels,” said Mr. Malone, “which, as I recall, is what your sister gave us.”

  Mrs. Malone took a deep breath, her usual remedy when she felt she was about to lose her temper. “She thought they would make our base camp feel homier. And the embroidery was charming.”

  “Tea towels!” Mr. Malone said, chuckling and shaking his head. “A gravy ladle! It’s hard to believe that you grew up in that family, Lucille—”

  “Now, listen here,” Mrs. Malone began dangerously.

  “Considering how sensible, intelligent, and levelheaded you turned out to be,” he finished.

  “Well, really, Emerson …” Mrs. Malone’s expression shifted from pleasure to annoyance and back again. “That’s very nice … but I wish you wouldn’t talk about my family like that … although I must admit they can be trying … but still, it’s not kind to actually say so....”

  She stopped, flustered, then took another deep breath and went back to the issue at hand. “At any rate,” she said. “I don’t think Rolly should use my gravy ladle as a shovel. In addition to the sentimental value, it happens to be solid sterling—”

  “And it’s being used to dig up a grave,” said Poppy. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

  “It is?” Will sat up at last, blinking as he peered over the top of the gravestone. “Has Rolly hit anything interesting yet?”

  “Will, don’t encourage him.” Mrs. Malone went back to her deep breathing. (She was, Poppy noted with interest, beginning to sound like a small steam engine.) “Rolly, please stop. You don’t know what you might unearth. It could be, well … unsanitary.”

  Will jumped to his feet. “It could be a zombie,” he said gleefully. “A zombie with rotted arm stumps and an eyeball falling out of its socket and two horrible holes where its ears used to be—”

  “Eww.” Franny sprang up from the bench and began backing toward the cemetery gate. “Mom! Make Rolly stop! I hate zombies!”

  “But they love you, Franny.” Will stretched out his arms and began following her with a lurching, stiff-legged walk. “Well, if you can call it love. It’s really more of a terrible, insatiable hunger for your human flesh—”

  “Be quiet, all of you!” Mr. Malone snapped. “You know very well that there hasn’t been a zombie sighting in Texas since 1968. And we’ll never contact any spirits if you insist on making so much noise.”

  Poppy sighed. How, she wondered, had she ended up sitting in a lonely cemetery at midnight, with one brother excavating a grave, another pretending to be a zombie, and parents who were intent upon summoning ghosts from the World Beyond?

  Of course, she knew the answer perfectly well. It had started where all such trouble usually began. At the library…

  Chapter TWO

  Mrs. Malone had been looking for a cookbook with recipes that were tasty enough to please a picky family and easy enough to make while leafing through a file of reported werewolf sightings.

  It was not, she said defensively, too much to ask for.

  Instead, she had stumbled upon a book of local history that had proved a thousand times more valuable.

  “It was the Library Angel,” she had exulted that night as she looked through a handful of takeout menus. (The goal of making a nutritious home-cooked meal had been abandoned in the excitement of what she had found.) “He—or she—always comes through just when I am most in need of help!”

  Mrs. Malone believed in the Library Angel with all her heart. On more than one occasion, this mystical being had been responsible for delivering to her hand exactly the book she wanted—or, more important, the book she needed—exactly when it was required.

  There was the time she had been researching the lost island of Atlantis and, mired in despair at ever finding any good information since Plato, she had glanced over and spotted Ignatius Donelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882). There was the time she had put a book about ESP back on a shelf and thus seen a small monograph written by Dr. J. B. Rhine, which was far more helpful. And there was the time that she had been drifting through a crowded university library as an undergraduate, hoping simply to find a spot to sit and work.

  “A simply enormous book fell on my head,” she would say. “It was a three-volume compilation on astral projection, of all things, which I wasn’t particularly interested in at the time. But then your father came over to see if I was all right and, well, it was love at first sight.” She always ended this story with a moony look that made Will groan and Mr. Malone blush.

  And now, she said triumphantly, the Library Angel had delivered a true treasure. It was a book titled Hill Country Hauntings: Ghost Sightings Deep in the Heart of Texas.

  “And just think, it fell off the shelf and landed right at my feet!” she exclaimed.

  “Shouldn’t the Library Angel have thrown a cookbook on the floor?” asked Poppy. “Since that’s what you were looking for?”

  Mrs. Malone waved this away. “Nonsense, one can always open a can of soup or order Chinese. But this”—reverently, she held up the book, which had a faded green cover, dog-eared pages, and a title printed faintly in gold—“this is a treasure beyond counting! And just when we were beginning to be the teensiest bit worried about our next report to the institute.”

  The book, of course, was just the beginning. Poppy, Will, and Franny had felt their hearts sink as their mother began leafing through the pages, muttering comments as paragraphs caught her eye.

  “Hmm, a headless apparition … a mysterious silhouette that appears on a tomb and can’t be washed off … a child’s swing that moves of its own accord … the sound of a woman weeping …” She looked up, her face lit with excitement. “There are dozens of leads here for us to follow up on!”

  So Poppy, Will, and Franny were drafted into spending hours in the library’s historical archives, squinting at microfilm and leafing through thick books with yellowing pages, trying to track down old newspaper articles about supernatural sightings.

  “These stories are simply fascinating!” Mrs. Malone said a week later, reading through a sheaf of photocopies and handwritten notes. “Here’s one about a young woman wearing a prom dress who has been seen standing on a lonely road, trying to wave down a car and get a lift home—”

  “And drivers who pick her up find that she has mysteriously vanished by the time they reach the address she gave them,” said Poppy. She pushed her bangs off her forehead, the better to give her mother a severe look. “Mom, that book was shelved in the folklore section. Folklore is just another way of saying ‘stuff people made up before TV existed because they didn’t have anything better to do.’”

  “Stories that are passed down from one generation to the next clearly have their roots in something real,” said Mr. Malone. “That’s why people keep telling them over and over again, isn’t that right, Lucille?”

  “Oh yes, dear, absolutely,” murmured Mrs. Malone, whose attention had returned to her folder of papers. “There are so many stories to investigate, it will be hard to choose just one—ah!”

  Her face brightened as she pulled out a paper and brandished it in the air. “Now this sounds like a possibility!”

  Poppy just had time to see that it was a newspaper article with a headline that read, “Spirits S
potted at Shady Rest Cemetery?” before Mrs. Malone turned the paper toward her and began reading aloud.

  “It says here that the cemetery has been in existence for almost a hundred and seventy-five years.” Mrs. Malone looked over the top of her glasses at the rest of the family, her eyes sparkling. “Plenty of time for a nice selection of ghosts to gather. And there’s a glowing grave marker! Those are always such fun!”

  This was met with silence. It was the kind of silence that vibrated with Contradictory Remarks That Were Not Being Said and Vigorous Arguments That Were Not Being Made.

  Perhaps there was such a thing as ESP, however, for Mr. Malone squinted suspiciously at his children, as if he knew what they were thinking. Then he said, “I know what you’re all thinking. But every experience, no matter how bad it seems at the time, can be helpful as long as you learn from it. And what we learned in Massachusetts was to check that pranksters have not painted the gravestone with glow-in-the-dark paint—”

  “And to watch your feet,” Franny added with a meaningful glance at Will, “so that you don’t trip and fall on top of the gravestone—”

  “And to wash your hands immediately if you do happen to fall on a gravestone covered with fresh paint,” Poppy added. “And not to run around putting your hands in other people’s hair because you think it’s funny.”

  Will did his best to look abashed. “It wasn’t that bad....”

  “I had to cut off all my hair before I could go to the movies with my friends!” Franny said bitterly. “The theater manager said that my glowing head was too distracting for the audience!”

  “I couldn’t finish my research into the nocturnal habits of tree frogs,” said Poppy. “When they saw my glowing head, they were shocked into early hibernation.”

  The corner of Will’s mouth twitched.

  “It’s not funny!” Poppy and Franny shouted.

  “It was kind of funny,” said Will, but he was careful to say it under his breath.

  “Now, now, that’s all water under the bridge,” said Mrs. Malone. “Your hair grew out, the tree frogs recovered, all’s well in the world. So, what does everyone think—chow mein or pizza?”