‘Looks like it’s half asleep.’
‘Thought this was meant to be the highlight of the show?’
‘Oh, hi,’ I said casually.
The whispers started up again. ‘Didn’t realise it would talk to us.’
‘Bit arrogant, if you ask me.’
‘What are we meant to do, answer back?’
‘Absolutely not,’ I said. ‘You just sit back, and let us take over.’
This time, bringing my anger out felt completely different. It wasn’t like following a script. It was like digging a hooked claw into my heart and hauling it out through my skin. Pain and grief burnt in every single part of me, and I nearly blacked out from it. I gritted my teeth, threw my head back and screamed. For an awful, still moment, nothing happened.
And then the storm finally fell.
Fury ran up and down my body like flames licking wood. I unscrewed the rivets in the beams above. They swung pleasingly from the centre of the room for a second, before falling with a clatter to the floor, missing the people in the ghost train by millimetres.
With difficulty, they all clapped.
‘Oh, wonderful,’ I heard someone gasp.
‘Real sense of peril,’ said someone else, grey and shaking.
‘Great build-up of tension,’ panted a third. ‘Masterful.’
‘Thank you,’ I said politely, picking up my heavy single bed and throwing it, panting, at the window.
As it smashed, and the glass fell into a neat little pile at my feet, and the window frame groaned and collapsed, the people in the ghost train made admiring noises, although a few gazed in confusion at each other.
‘Did any of you feel that?’
The roar of the thunder overhead was too loud for us to hear much else, but we could easily sense the shift within the building – a feeling of things being loosened, of coming undone.
‘Oh my,’ said someone. ‘The floor is shaking. I felt a tremor.’
‘It felt like the building was shaking too,’ added his companion. ‘From side to side.’
‘That is possible,’ I said reasonably. ‘After all, the others are wrecking their rooms too.’
They looked at each other.
‘I thought there was only one poltergeist?’ said a woman slowly, forcing her words out with difficulty.
‘Not any more,’ I said. ‘We’re all at it now. We had a chat last night. Turns out, there’s a lot for us to be angry about. They’re all furious downstairs. You should see them – it’s quite beautiful, really.’
Underneath the sound of the thunder you could just about make out a crashing, banging noise coming from elsewhere in the building, and peals of wild, jubilant laughter.
‘We’re so angry,’ I said, taking a hammer to the wooden floor and banging at it until I could see the room beneath. ‘I’m angry at what they suffered. We’re angry at Crawler, and what he did to us. And to his son. But we’re also angry with you. You should be ashamed of yourselves.’
The floor beneath our feet began to groan and splinter. I saw someone swallow nervously.
‘If too many beams and planks and joists get damaged,’ I explained carefully to the aghast audience in the train, happily remembering everything I learnt during the Sea View restoration, ‘then the integrity of the entire property will be compromised.’
‘What does that mean?’ spluttered a purple-faced man from the ghost train.
‘It means run.’ I grinned. ‘Honestly, you lot have more money than sense, don’t you?’
Forty grown-ups got up with a gasp and began pushing and shoving each other in their rush to get out of my room.
Crawler burst in.
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing? Setting yourself free? You’ll hate it out there, Poltergeist. They all will. They’ll have nothing if they don’t have this place.’
Even though I knew he couldn’t hear me, I answered him anyway, just for the joy of saying the truth.
‘Maybe, but that’s a risk we’re prepared to take. Oh, and by the way? You’ve been wrong all along, Crawler. It’s so much better when you get angry with feeling. So much more powerful. You’ve been missing a trick all this time.’
And for a second, I could have sworn his eyes looked at me, properly, in surprise and frustration.
‘Crawler?’ I said slowly. ‘Did you hear me just now?’
Something about the way his pupils contracted at the question seemed very suspicious. He’d gone completely still.
‘Crawler, can you see me? Have you only pretended you couldn’t see ghosts all along? So that your son had to do all the dirty work for you?’
So he didn’t have to get tangled up in their emotions, and their lives. That’s what Scanlon was for. Crawler had used his child as a sponge, to soak up all the guilt he should have been burdened with instead.
‘Crawler? I know you can hear me.’ Once I’d spotted it, it was so obvious.
His jaw went very tight then. And, as if he was relieved that he didn’t have to keep up the pretence any more, he looked straight at me. It was like being given an electric shock.
‘Fine,’ he said, gesturing to the wrecked room. ‘Pull it down if you want to. I’ll rebuild. We can rebuild together. Something bigger. Something better.’
The sound of crashing and splintering seemed, for a moment, to fade under the ferocious persuasion in his face. I gulped. His smile was almost gentle, nearly loving.
‘Come off it, Poltergeist,’ he said softly. ‘Stop pretending. You love it here. And listen, I’m impressed that you’ve orchestrated this, er, little uprising, really I am. You’ve gone up in my estimation. I’ll give you anything, anything at all. What do you want, a bigger room? A whole Haunted House to yourself? Or – better yet – how about a poltergeist theme park, completely dedicated to you? Consider it done. We can be business partners if you like. You and me, frightening the world. How about it?’
My body went limp with longing. An entire theme park? I could see it all. ‘Poltergeist’ in lights. The adulation. The total licence to misbehave, my temper swelling like a nightmare, growing bigger every day. I could stay. And together, it would be a total