Here it is. The end. The only one that matters. I don’t have anything to wait for any more. It’s all done now. All the tangles have been untangled and most of the visions make sense.
You’ve seen the end and the beginning, and hopefully you have more of an idea than me of which is which. But we have time for one more beginning, I think. Just a little one.
A few months from now, Rima will babysit me. She spends a lot of time talking to me these days. I think she’s worked out that I’m listening to everything. She includes me in conversations even though I can’t reply.
She talks about Oscar sometimes. About how much she wishes there was a way she could have saved him when he died. How, if she’d given him a bit of her energy, he might not have disintegrated. Felix could have had his brother back.
I don’t think she’s so disappointed for his sake alone.
I think there’s something I can do to help. I look back into the past, to the moment that Oscar died. I pull his ghost through into the future, just before Harriet can consume him totally.
It won’t change anything in the past – in the confusion of the fight with Harriet, they’ll all think that he disappeared because he disintegrated. It was all so quick and strange, that maybe this is what happened all along. Harriet could never have consumed all his energy, not when she was already filled to the brim with stolen powers.
When I tug Oscar’s ghost through into the present day, he re-forms into a dim and weak Shell. Rima is surprised at first, but she quickly jumps into action. She has to give him half her energy before he stops being a Shell.
Rima tries to calm him down, explaining that he’s dead, a ghost, and his brother is here waiting for him.
Once the shock leaves him, Oscar looks at Rima, frowning. “Are you Rima? Rima from uni?”
She blushes bright red, and stutters out, “Yes.”
Oscar grins and shakes her hand. “Good to see you, after all these years. You look … great.”
The years have made Oscar distinguished. Maybe even handsome. Rima clearly thinks so. She says, “You too!” in a too-high voice.
He tries to pull his hand away, but it takes her a moment to let go. “Sorry!” she says. “It’s just so nice to see you, after all these years. Let me show you around?”
He grins. “Lead the way, Rima Hamid.”
Rima sneaks glances at him all the way to Felix’s bedroom, trying to hide a smile.
That’s a small beginning. And another, bigger, one: a week after that, while Rima and Leah are trying to make Cody play with a badger spirit that Felix found on the ground floor, a car pulls up outside Mulcture Hall. None of them notice the caretaker who staples a poster to the fence, whistling to himself.
Not Felix, who is busy providing Rima and Leah with helpful comments – despite his insistence that he has no interest in the badger at all, and has never wanted a pet. Or Kasper, who is busy wrapping Felix as tightly in his arms as he can.
The caretaker drives off, leaving behind a sign. It says that the building is scheduled to be demolished in one week, due to a recent spate of fatal incidents on the site.
But, like I said – none of them notice any of this. Not even me. Not yet.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to my editors, Annalie Grainger and Frances Taffinder, and my agent, Claire Wilson, for guiding this messy book through the many, many rounds of edits it took to turn it into something readable. It was a long process, but worth it in the end!
The team behind the scenes – thank you to Miriam Tobin at Rogers, Coleridge & White Literary Agency, and Kirsten Cozens, Rosi Crawley, John Moore, Georgie Hookings, Jenny Bish, Anna Robinette and Chloé Tartinville at Walker Books.
And my writer pals! Thank you to the irreplaceable Alice Oseman, Lucy Powrie, Non Pratt, Emma Mills, Beth Reeks, Laura Wood, Sarah Barnard *and* Sara Barnard, Kat Harris and Beth Worrall and Clare Samson (who has always been a big support of #ghosthouse!). You all guided me through the aches and pains of creating such a long and complicated narrative.
Mum, Dad, Chris, Charlie – thanks for being so supportive, always. And Cody the dog, for donating her name to Rima’s fox.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Lauren James was born in 1992, and has a Masters degree from the University of Nottingham, UK, where she studied Chemistry and Physics. Lauren is a passionate advocate of STEM further education, and many of her books feature female scientists in prominent roles.
She started writing during secondary school English classes, because she couldn’t stop thinking about a couple who kept falling in love throughout history. She sold the rights to the novel when she was twenty-one, while she was still at university.
Lauren lives in the West Midlands and is an Arts Council grant recipient. She has written articles for The Guardian, Buzzfeed, Den of Geek, The Toast and the Children’s Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. She teaches Creative Writing for Coventry University, Writing West Midlands and WriteMentor.
Her books have been twice-nominated for the Carnegie Medal, and include The Loneliest Girl in the Universe, The Quiet at the End of the World and The Next Together series, as well as the dyslexia-friendly novella The Starlight Watchmaker and serialized online novel An Unauthorised Fan Treatise.
You can find her on Twitter at @Lauren_E_James, Tumblr at @laurenjames or her website, laurenejames.co.uk, where you can subscribe to her newsletter to be kept up to date with her new releases and receive bonus content.
“A HUGELY REWARDING READ.”
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