A Gust of Ghosts (2 page)

“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…

M
rs. 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 Spotted 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?”

That evening, the Malones filled their car with their investigation equipment and headed out to the cemetery. Not only had it been prominently mentioned in
Hill Country Hauntings
(at least five different hauntings and the glowing gravestone had been reported), but it was just a short drive from their house.

After taking several wrong turns, pulling off the road to check the map, getting stuck in the mud, and losing the map out the window in a sudden gust of wind, the Malones had finally stumbled on the cemetery purely by chance. They wearily got out of the car and waded through knee-high weeds to the rusty gate and a metal sign that read, “Shady Rest Cemetery.”

The sun was just setting as they arrived, casting a mellow light over two dozen headstones, half hidden in high grass and wildflowers.

Will opened the gate. He had to push it several times. When it finally gave way, it let out a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a creak.

“Nice touch,” he commented. “Very spooky.”

Rolly tried swinging on the gate. It moved two rusty inches, then creaked to a stop. He stepped off the gate and gave it a little kick.

“I thought this was supposed to be fun,” he said accusingly.

“Fun? What nonsense,” Mr. Malone said briskly. “We are here to
work
. First things first—let's walk around, find the best spots to set up our equipment, and get a feel for our surroundings.”

“And, of course, let the spirits get a feel for us,” added Mrs. Malone. “Some of them are too shy to appear until they know what kind of reception they're going to get.”

The Malones walked through the gate, then stood still, staring in silence at the headstones. Some humble markers had sunk into the earth and almost disappeared. Even the grander monuments, including a granite tomb and a marble column, looked weathered and worn.

There were gravel paths that meandered between the graves and a stone bench in the shade of a spreading oak tree. But much of the gravel had washed away, the bench seat was covered with moss, and broken tree branches blocked several of the paths. There was even an uprooted tree lying across the path just inside the gate, its dirt-covered roots sticking up into the air.

“This place looks abandoned,” said Franny. “Like no one cares about it anymore.”

A wind seemed to rise from nowhere, sweeping through the trees and causing the grass and wildflowers to flatten to the earth. Poppy had been staring at a marble column, which had sunk into the ground and now listed to one side. She was trying to calculate the exact angle of the tilt by studying the shadow it cast in the light of the setting sun. As the branches of an oak tree tossed wildly in the air, she could have sworn that she saw the column's shadow slip along the ground in her direction....

And then the wind died down and everything was still once more. Poppy blinked, then stared hard at the shadow, but it lay dark and motionless.

She gave herself a little shake. The cemetery was rather creepy, of course—all cemeteries were—but she mustn't let her imagination run away with her. After all, she was a scientist. She had to observe everything closely and ask penetrating questions about what she saw … such as why a well-visited cemetery, famous for its hauntings, would look so run down.

“I thought lots of people came out here,” Poppy said. “I thought it was like a tourist attraction, with people driving by at midnight to see the famous glowing headstone.”

“I don't think that happens much these days,” said Mrs. Malone, panting slightly as she hauled a cooler filled with sandwiches through the gate. “At least, not since that highway bypass was put in twenty or thirty years ago. Not many people have a reason to drive down this road anymore.”

“Which is excellent news for us,” said Mr. Malone heartily. “No visitors means no interruptions, no inane questions, and no silly jokes about
Ghostbusters
. So!” He rubbed his hands together. “Let's start by finding the Glowing Angel. That's obviously the center of all the paranormal activity in the cemetery.”

Mrs. Malone pulled a piece of paper from her pocket. She had photocopied a map of the cemetery from
Hill Country Hauntings
. An arrow helpfully pointed out the location of the Glowing Angel statue.

“Hmm, let's see....” Mrs. Malone raised her head and squinted into the middle distance. “The book said the statue was on a small hill toward the east....” She walked a few feet along a path that soon disappeared into a thicket of bushes. Mrs. Malone referred to the map again, then pointed. “It should be back there, I think, just beyond all this undergrowth.”

She pushed her glasses up more firmly on her nose and stared at the bushes. “Goodness, what a tangle! I'm not sure how we'll get close enough to the angel statue to set up our equipment.”