Boy Meets Ghoul Read online

  The girl in the skintight dress made a choking noise. ‘So you’re calling me ugly now?’

  ‘Are you being offensive to Shannon?’ Another girl with a high ponytail swishing at the back of her head entered the fray, marching right up to me. ‘That’s rich, coming from you in your stupid dress.’

  ‘It’s not a dress –’ I started, trying to look for a way out, or to catch Kayla’s eye and get her to help me somehow. She was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘It’s not a suit and tie, is it?’ Shannon sneered.

  I could practically feel the boy beside me radiating smugness.

  The third girl smacked the bottom of my takeaway tub. Twelve pieces of chicken in bright red hot sauce leaped up and hit me in the chest.

  ‘Right, I’ve told you kids, I’m not having messing about in my shop.’ The owner swung up the counter and stormed through. He must have been about six foot, and as broad-chested as he was tall. He looked like a brick wall in an apron. ‘Who started this?’

  ‘He was staring at me.’

  ‘He said I was ugly!’

  ‘He dissed my nan.’

  ‘It’s not even a proper dress.’

  The chorus of complaints went off at once, and the owner fixed his eyes on me. I tried to run for it, dodging round Shannon and getting ready to hurdle over the top of suit-and-tie, when two massive hands gripped the back of my sheet – and the shirt under it – lifting me off the floor.

  As I skidded to a stop, face first on the pavement outside with chick’n pieces scattered around me like sticky-coated shrapnel, Kayla bounded over and took a final photo.

  ‘That was brilliant, Dylan!’ She beamed. ‘I knew you’d make a great ghost, but I didn’t expect you to find a way to fly!’

  THIRTEEN

  By the time Kayla had finished using the ghostly sheet to wipe hot sauce out of my hair, and we’d caught another bus, we were an hour late getting back to the hotel. I wasn’t sure if my stomach was churning with worry over how livid my parents were going to be, or because of the leftover chick’n pieces I’d eaten on the way.

  I needn’t have worried, though. Mum and Dad got back later than we did. The door to the suite flew open just as I was tapping out a Where are you? text.

  They had Jude with them, leading the way. I’d expected him to look a bit tired after his day with Whizzy Wheels, but he looked white as paper. This was in contrast to Mum, behind him, who was flushed with delight.

  ‘What kept you?’ I asked, letting my tone imply we’d been waiting ages without actually having to lie.

  ‘Spooky Doings!’ Mum replied, clasping her hands together.

  ‘Isn’t that a TV show?’ Kayla interjected. ‘You could have watched it up here.’

  It was Mum’s favourite TV show. A sort of documentary where nothing ever happened. Every week, the team would show up in a new location – usually an ancient Tudor manor or a derelict church, and spend a few nights sitting in the dark being scared of nothing in particular. I was nearly sure they’d never caught a ghost on camera, but there were always enough mysterious tapping noises and chairs that might have moved a tiny bit to keep Mum hooked.

  In my opinion, Spooky Doings spent more time proving ghosts didn’t exist than they did, but that didn’t seem to matter to Mum. She was beaming.

  ‘Not the TV Show – real spooky doings! Can you believe it? The hotel is haunted!’

  ‘Your mother’s been reading to us from their pamphlets,’ Dad put in, sounding like this was some form of torture. ‘Apparently, there’s a famous ghost.’

  ‘Here? Really?’ I frowned. ‘Don’t ghosts usually go in for places with oak beams and ancient graveyards, rather than en suite showers and a breakfast buffet?’

  ‘Apparently this hotel was built on the foundations of somewhere much older,’ Mum said, dropping her voice. ‘A Tudor lodge that burned down in mysterious circumstances. They say that even now guests often complain of smelling smoke near the kitchens, or spot Mary the maid in a dress lit up by flames . . .’

  ‘The restaurant has a barbecue menu, doesn’t it?’ Kayla asked.

  ‘It might,’ Mum said, slightly sharply. ‘Though I don’t see what that has to do with anything. Anyway, don’t you think it’s exciting? I might go ghost hunting tomorrow night!’

  ‘Speaking of barbecue –’ I cut in, because I’d definitely rather talk about that than how quickly Mum could get us thrown out of the hotel by stalking spectres through the halls – ‘weren’t we supposed to be going out to eat about now?’

  At the word eat, Jude let out a soft whimper. I looked at him for a moment, then carried on cautiously.

  ‘Only . . . I said I’d speak to Leo at eight, and I don’t want to miss him.’

  ‘Right, yeah. About dinner . . .’ Dad said.

  Jude whimpered again, louder this time.

  ‘About . . . that,’ Dad tried, looking worried. ‘We’ve decided the plans we had weren’t exactly ideal.’

  ‘What? Why?’ I’d been looking forward to eating downstairs, or at least to eating something nice enough to take the terrible chick’ny taste out of my mouth. ‘Are there bad reviews for the restaurant or something?’

  I barely finished my sentence. At the word restaurant, Jude wailed loudly and swooned to one side, pressing his pale face against the side of his chair.

  Mum crouched down and smoothed her hands through his hair: a tried-and-tested comfort technique she’d used since he was a baby. ‘Well, exciting as the hotel having its own personal haunting is, it’s made Jude a little anxious about the restaurant.’

  That explained things. Jude was pretty easily freaked out. He believed there was a monster under his bed for so long that we gave it a name and made up a boring day job for it as an accountant. Eventually we told him it decided to move away for a shorter commute, and it hadn’t bothered him since.

  ‘What would a ghoul be doing in a kitchen, anyway?’ I asked, as Mum and Dad shot me please don’t make this worse looks. ‘Making spookghetti?’

  Jude glanced up from his woeful slump.

  Kayla glared at me. I could tell she was just jealous I’d outdone her poultrygeist pun.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. ‘It must be stealing all the boo-berry pies.’

  I had to admit that was well played, even if it was seriously annoying. How did she just come up with these? I’d nearly done a victory dance when I’d thought of spookghetti.

  The most important thing, though, was that Jude had almost forgotten his fears and cracked a smile.

  ‘Even so, we thought we’d stay in with room service tonight,’ Dad said, unaware that he was making another of my dream holiday wishes come true. Room service! And all it had taken was making a five-year-old too scared to leave the suite.

  ‘We’ll try the restaurant again in the morning,’ he said. ‘For some bacon and . . . egg-toplasm.’

  Jude, Kayla and I wrinkled our noses at the exact same time.

  ‘Doesn’t really work, Dad,’ I said.

  Kayla nodded. ‘Just sounds a bit gross.’

  And we went to grab the room-service menu, leaving Dad to google ‘best dad jokes of all time’ so he’d be prepared for the next pun-off.

  Once we’d ordered, I shut the door to my room and texted Leo to see if he’d be around earlier than we’d agreed.

  Hey, are you there?

  I waited a couple of minutes. He was probably still stuck in rehearsals. The last few nights, they’d been running really late, and I’d been trying to feel sorry for him about that. Poor Leo, having no fun. Being forced to dance all day with no holiday at all.

  It could be a little bit difficult to work up much sympathy when he kept telling me how much he loved doing it, and what a ‘cool group’ the people he was working with were, but I was sure that was just him making it sound better than it was, so as not to worry me. Leo didn’t even like cool people, anyway. He liked me.

  (I really hoped he still liked me.)

  Finally, my ph
one screen lit up with one new message.

  Yeah. But I’d rather be there.

  It was just unfair the way even Leo’s pixels could make me smile like an idiot.

  I snapped a picture of the view across my room and out of the window and sent it to him.

  Well, when you’re famous, we can stay in places like this all the time. I’ve decided I’m going to be your POD.

  My what?

  Tell you later. Speaking of which, can I call you earlier than we planned? This hotel is literally celebrity central – I need a pep talk in acting cool.

  You’re already cool, Dyl. But about the call.

  What about it?

  Something’s come up.

  I stared at my phone. Those same three words again – the ones Leo had used to say he couldn’t see me this half-term. I knew what they meant by now. They meant nothing. Nothing for me and Leo.

  Not even a stupid phone call.

  I typed something angry into my phone and made myself delete it and typed instead:

  Oh. Never mind, then.

  The message vanished into the empty space between us with a whooshing sound, just as a blood-curdling scream came from outside in the hall.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘A RAT – I SAW A RAT!’

  Outside our room, a little bit further along the hallway, one of the room-service porters had climbed on to the top of his silver trolley and was holding a fork and a domed serving platter out in front of him like a sword and shield.

  Mum, Dad, Kayla and Jude had beaten me to investigating the noise. All along the corridor, other people were peering out of their rooms.

  ‘It’s not a rat – it’s a hamster,’ Jude muttered.

  ‘IT WAS A RAT!’ the porter screeched, though I didn’t think he could have heard. ‘HUGE AND ORANGE WITH SAUCER EYES AND SHARP, EVIL TEETH.’

  ‘Orange?’ Kayla whispered to me.

  ‘I know,’ I hissed back, scanning the floor in case Fluffy had escaped the food trolley and was making a beeline for the feet of any of the probably-rich-and-posh people who’d actually paid for their rooms on our floor.

  In the doorway opposite ours, a young woman was clutching her baby and looking concerned. The baby wasn’t fussed; just busy fiddling with a dummy that it eventually dropped on the floor.

  The porter pointed to the rolling piece of plastic and shrieked. ‘THERE, SEE? HELP! RAT!’

  ‘He’s clearly imagining things,’ Mum said under her breath.

  Jude looked round at me woefully. ‘It’s not a rat – it’s a hamster.’

  I put a finger to my lips to shush him – we didn’t need anyone to know we’d given the hotel a second pest-control problem, and who knew what might happen to Fluffy if the hotel management found out he was real?

  At the same time, Kayla stepped forward. She’d told me before that one of the key skills of a good lawyer is the ability to stay calm under pressure. She was clearly going to be an amazing one: she could make her voice as soothing as a lullaby.

  ‘Hello. I’m Kayla. It’s nice to meet you –’ she stood on tiptoe to read the name on the porter’s badge – ‘Alfie. Has it been a long shift?’

  Alfie, distracted from his hyperventilating hamster-based panic, nodded slowly. ‘Ten hours.’

  ‘That is long,’ Kayla crooned sympathetically. ‘I’m sure the hot kitchens and all the fragrance and music they pump through the halls must have left you practically dizzy by now. Are you feeling OK?’

  Alfie paused. ‘I am perhaps feeling . . . a little . . . woozy?’

  ‘And it must be easy to see a shadow and mistake it for something else?’ Kayla said it as if it were an answer, not a question.

  As Alfie nodded slowly, people around us started sighing and going back into their rooms. Mum and Dad moved in to help – Dad held his hands up for Alfie to take.

  ‘If you’re dizzy, you don’t want to be standing up there, mate. Come on, before you have a fall.’

  Alfie reached nervously to accept Dad’s help at the same time as a door down the hall slammed open.

  ‘Are those the chilli dogs? Perfect timing,’ a chirpy Australian voice called.

  The colour drained out of Kayla from her scalp to her fingertips. She stood still enough to be mistaken for an ice sculpture as Antoni Deathsplash, probably the best bass guitarist in the world, strolled up to slide a large silver-domed platter from between Alfie’s legs.

  ‘Cheers, man – keep the change.’

  Without pausing for a second to consider what might be unusual about a porter standing on top of the dinner cart, instead of on the floor with a tray in his hand, Antoni leaned over and tucked his tip into Alfie’s sock. Then he strolled back to his room, whistling.

  When he reached the door, he called, ‘Hey, Jenna – dinner’s here!’

  ‘Big stars eat special macrobiotic diets, don’t you know,’ I whispered in Kayla’s ear. It was the fastest way to crack through the icy veneer and turn her skin coloured again.

  ‘Maybe they’re vegan dogs,’ she huffed.

  ‘Blue crunchy ones?’

  And then she clutched my arm. ‘Dylan, look.’

  Further up the corridor, a tiny flash of orange zipped across the carpet and into the Deathsplash suite, just as the door slammed shut again.

  Jude had missed it. Even more fortunately, Mum and Dad had missed it too, as Alfie picked exactly that moment to swoon delicately off the trolley and right into Mum’s arms. Fortunately, as a paramedic, she was used to dragging people heavier than she was around.

  She got Alfie laid out on the plush carpet while Dad knelt down to check his vitals. Then she straightened up and brushed off her hands, smartly.

  ‘Right then. Kayla, go and call reception – let them know one of their porters is down for the count. Jude, Dylan . . .’ She stopped, and lifted up a couple of the covers on the still-trollied meals. ‘Well, I have no idea whether these are ours, but they’ll do. Go and lay the table, will you?’

  It was funny the way things you’d daydreamed about all your life never turned out quite the same way in reality. For example, when I’d imagined staying in a luxury suite and having room service delivered to my door, I’d never expected to have to carry it in myself, after loading up my little brother with a selection of knives, forks and small bowls containing salt, pepper and teeny tiny spoons (because apparently when you’re posh, you’re too rich to shake things on your own food).

  I hadn’t expected that my dream, deluxe scenario would end in my family arguing over which plate of food we didn’t actually order was whose, or that by the time we’d decided on a plate and eaten, our real dinner would show up at the door, and I’d have to watch Dad make a valiant attempt at eating not only seconds, but thirds, fourths and fifths.

  Just like when I’d dreamed about having a boyfriend, I hadn’t got to the part of the dream where I never saw him, and where he even cancelled phone dates because everything in the whole world seemed like it was more important than me. I was trying really hard to be understanding. Whatever Leo was doing was probably really important. It was probably his big chance to show the world how brilliant he was. Just because I already knew he was brilliant, didn’t mean I got to keep that secret to myself.

  Maybe whatever he was doing was the thing that would shoot him to fame and make me the world’s first glamorous POD.

  Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would turn out I wasn’t even a P, after all.

  After dinner (or six dinners, in Dad’s case) I sloped back to my room and tossed the phone on the bed. It lit up for a moment.

  There were new messages on the screen. With the whole rat crisis in the hallway, I hadn’t checked to see whether Leo had replied to my never mind.

  He had. The whole screen was taken up with a flood of green text boxes. I scrolled through.

  Hey, I mind.

  This week’s been messed up enough for us already, but something really has come up.

  Can’t wait until I can tell you abou
t it properly, in person.

  Because, more than anything, I can’t wait to see you.

  Dyl?

  Gotta go. I hope everything’s OK. Hope you are.

  Xxx

  Reading down the screen, the heavy lead coating around my heart slowly started to warm up and melt away.

  But there was one message, at the bottom of the list, that wasn’t from Leo. There was just a phone number at the top – one I didn’t have listed in my contacts.

  Got your number off the team listing. Just wanted to say you were on great form today, so don’t let Dutton grind you down. Looking forward to tomorrow. Fred.

  Fred. I turned the letters round in my head just in case someone might have made a typo. Maybe Fred was what Fauntleroy Genghis Charlemagne Hughes autocorrected to. But no, there was only one Fred in the team – only one person even close.

  Freddie Alton was looking forward to seeing me tomorrow.

  FIFTEEN

  Although I’d walked in with my nerves tied in more knots than my shoelaces, the second day at Feet of the Future wasn’t too bad. We’d started playing some five-a-side matches, splitting up into three groups of ten, and I’d managed to avoid being on Freddie’s team every time.

  I didn’t manage to avoid Jez Dutton’s bad books, though. At lunchtime, he overheard me pointing out that Lacey Laine was reading the same copy of MOXY Magazine as yesterday, except this time, she was holding it upside down.

  That meant twenty more laps, but more importantly it meant I didn’t have to try to figure out how to use my voice box while Freddie was less than ten feet away for the whole of lunch either.

  We spent the afternoon practising penalties, which are my speciality. When I played on the school team, I was always a striker – usually playing centre forward. I could be quick down the pitch and a sharpshooter by the goal. I was really good at confusing the goalie. This time, both Laurie and me tied equally for managing to get every penalty home. There were no words of praise from Jez, though. He went straight into a lecture on how there could only be eleven people on the field, and anyone he didn’t think was up to scratch by the end of the week would be left on the bench for the students-versus-pro-players match on our last day.