Smithy’s head immediately appeared over Denzel’s shoulder. He smiled charmingly down at the speaker. “I’m listening…”
“What do you mean?” Denzel asked. He briefly shut his eyes as the bike launched itself back into traffic, then opened them to find the headlights of a truck blaring towards them.
Instinctively, he leaned left, trying to steer the bike that way. It went right instead, narrowly squeaked past the truck, then swung sharply in the opposite direction, cutting in front of a taxi and forcing the driver to slam on the brakes.
“I mean I can remotely connect to your bike and have you come find me,” Tabatha said. “I’ve got the ghost in sight. We can take it down.”
Denzel liked the sound of that. Taking a ghost down might not be his favourite way to spend an evening, but he was pretty sure it would mean stopping the bike and getting off – something he was very much in favour of.
“OK. Do that then,” he squeaked.
Some Japanese text lit up on the display. “It says you should press there to accept the connection,” Smithy explained. He narrowed his eyes and squinted. “Or it might say something about kiwi fruit – it’s hard to tell when we’re bumping around.”
Denzel decided to risk it and touched the screen. The text changed colour then vanished. No kiwi fruits appeared, or at least not to the best of his knowledge.
He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, really. He’d thought the bike might change direction. He’d hoped it would slow down, but he hadn’t been counting on it.
Instead, to his amazement, it sped up.
The neon storefronts, which had been a series of bright blurry shapes, became a single smear of colour. The sounds of the city fell silent, replaced by the howling of the wind and the whining of the engine between Denzel and Smithy’s legs.
There was some more screaming, although everything was going too fast for them to figure out which of them it was coming from.
A sudden right turn whipped Smithy’s legs straight through the bike. Denzel gasped as Smithy’s arms tightened around his stomach, squeezing the air out of him.
“Hold on!” Denzel cried, but the bike was moving so quickly that the words were whipped out of his mouth and sent tumbling along the street behind them.
The bike swerved left. Smithy was jerked back towards the bike, and managed to turn his lower half solid again when he landed in the seat.
“That was unpleasant,” he said, then they both launched into another round of screaming when the bike pulled a series of ultra-fast swerves and dodges. Turning sharply, the bike powered down an alleyway so narrow it almost touched the handlebars on both sides, roared out into another street, drawing horn blasts and angry shouts, then slowed suddenly when it pulled up alongside another identical bike.
“Everything all right?” asked Tabatha, looking them up and down. “You both look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
She looked ahead to where Denzel and Smithy could just make out another bike dodging through the traffic. “Speaking of which…”
Tabatha’s bike weaved on to the pavement and Denzel’s motorcycle fell into line behind it.
“Is she steering us?” asked Smithy.
“I think so,” said Denzel.
“That’s good. At least you don’t have to do it,” Smithy reasoned.
“It’s good if she doesn’t crash,” Denzel pointed out. “If she does crash, then it’s bad.”
“Suppose,” said Smithy. “Still, on the bright side, I’ll be fine.”
“How will you be—” Denzel began, before realising what Smithy meant. “Oh, yeah. Ghost.”
“Exactamundo.”
Another horn blared. It was a deep, booming sort of horn that made Denzel picture a big truck with an angry driver bearing down on him. This, coincidentally, was exactly what was happening, but a sudden burst of acceleration from Tabatha dragged the trailing bike clear. Denzel felt the whoosh of the truck’s wind as it powered past, and the heat of the driver’s furious glare on the back of his head.
Tabatha’s voice came from the console speaker. “It’s getting away.”
Denzel narrowed his eyes against the oncoming wind and peered past the bike in front. The target motorcycle was almost at the other end of the street, the high speeds making the sheet-like ghost flap violently.
“Be ready with the scanner,” Tabatha instructed. “If it reaches the end of the street and turns, there’s no way we’ll be able to keep track of it without the scanner.”
A cold, clammy feeling of dread descended over Denzel.
The scanner. What had he done with the scanner?
He checked his belt, where it had been clipped for a while.
Nope.
He patted his pockets, taking one hand off the handlebars at a time.
Nothing.
“Do you have the scanner?” he whispered, looking back over his shoulder.
Smithy shook his head. “You had it.”
“I know I had it,” Denzel said. “But I don’t have it now.”
Tabatha’s voice was an urgent bark. “You don’t have the scanner?”
Denzel winced. She wasn’t supposed to have heard that yet.
“I mean, it might be here somewhere,” he said, checking all the same pockets he’d already checked a moment ago.
“OK, Plan B,” said Tabatha. “Smithy, how long can you phase you, Denzel and the bike for?”
Smithy puffed out his chest. “Oh, ages.”
“I need more detail than that,” Tabatha told him.
Smithy calculated for a moment. “About… All at once, yeah?”
“Yes! All at once!”
“About four seconds.”
Denzel spluttered. “How is that ages?”
“It’s ages longer than you could do it,” Smithy pointed out.
Denzel couldn’t really argue with that. Even if he wanted to, there wasn’t time, as Tabatha’s bike immediately turned and sped towards a towering building, dragging Denzel and Smithy along behind.
“Wall,” Denzel mumbled, nodding ahead of them. “Wall. There’s a wall. Big wall.”
“Smithy, get ready,” Tabatha said.
“Wall!” Denzel yelped, on the off-chance that no one else had noticed the huge building looming dead ahead. “Watch out for the—”
Tabatha and her bike phased through the wall. Denzel heard Smithy give a little grunt of effort and felt the arms around him pull tighter.
As the wall rushed up to meet them, Denzel instinctively closed his eyes and screamed a number of rude words.
And then, with a whoosh, they were through the wall, solid again, and powering across the plush foyer of an expensive-looking hotel, tyres chewing up the carpet.
A lot of people shouted a lot of things at them in Japanese. Denzel guessed that these were probably rude words too.
Tabatha’s bike smashed through some high-backed leather armchairs, shattered a couple of glass coffee tables and then zoomed past the reception desk.
Denzel held on to his handlebars, his cheeks burning, his eyes staring straight ahead as he tried to ignore the chaos around them.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, before Smithy tightened his grip again and they passed through another wall like a ghost. Or, more accurately, like a ghost, his best friend, and the motorbike they were both riding on.
Car horns blasted. More people shouted. In the distance, a police siren wailed.
And then there was another wall ahead of them, and Tabatha showed no sign of slowing down.
Denzel tried not to close his eyes this time, but his brain became increasingly insistent as they sped towards the building. A few seconds before they reached it, his instincts won out, and when he next opened his eyes he saw Tabatha’s bike carving a trench through a fastfood restaurant, scattering tables and knocking aside chairs.
There was a lot of screaming, some more shouting, a chorus of bangs, breaks and smashes, and then they were through another wall and into the building next doo
r.
This one was another restaurant, although it looked more high-class than the previous one. At least, it looked more high-class when they arrived. By the time two motorbikes had torn through it, it wasn’t quite as impressive.
They passed through three more restaurants, two karaoke bars and a small comedy club where everyone whooped and cheered them as they thundered across the stage, mistaking them for part of the act.
“Wow, this is tiring,” Smithy groaned.
“Almost there! Hang on!” Tabatha replied via the intercom.
And then, with a sudden burst of speed, both bikes plunged through a final wall and out into another busy street lit by garish neon signs.
“Brace yourself!” Tabatha warned.
For a split second, Denzel and Smithy caught a glimpse of something white and flappy dead ahead of Tabatha’s bike.
There was a bang. There was a crash.
And then Tabatha’s motorcycle and the bike they had been chasing became a tangle of metal bouncing and rolling across the road.
Cars swerved to avoid the bikes and found each other instead. Brakes screeched and tyres spun as multiple vehicles tried to avoid smashing into those ahead, but failed.
Denzel and Smithy’s own bike came to a sudden stop, and they both sat there wincing as vehicles collided all around them.
Smithy leaned forwards in the seat so his face was next to Denzel’s. “You do have insurance, right?” he asked.
Denzel slowly shook his head.
“Oh. That’s unfortunate,” Smithy said, leaning back.
The restraints that had been holding Denzel’s legs in place unclipped themselves. He jumped off in case they tried to trap him again.
Across the street, Tabatha sprang out of the wreckage, spun round and pointed with her cane to where a figure in a white sheet was making a run for it.
“What are you just standing there for?” she barked. “It’s getting away!”
Denzel had never been a big fan of running. It required a lot of effort, hurt his knees and was generally an unpleasant experience that he did his best to avoid.
Recently he’d found himself running quite a lot. Usually he was running away from things. This was much easier than normal running, because no matter how unpleasant running was, it was better than being torn apart by ghosts and monsters.
Now, though, he was chasing something that might be a ghost or monster, and he was finding this type of running even harder than usual. He was still wearing the ugly necklace Mrs Gourlay had given him, and the weight of it pulled the chain tight against the back of his neck with every step.
The problem, he thought, wasn’t just that his legs were hurting and his breath was short. It was more the fact that he wasn’t sure he wanted to actually catch the thing they were chasing.
What if it tried to eat him?
Or worse, what if it did eat him?
He was about to offer a compelling argument for why they shouldn’t be chasing a ghost through the streets of Tokyo when the ghost in question phased through the ornate stone frontage of what looked like an old theatre building and vanished inside. A couple of nearby pedestrians gave little gasps of surprise, but most people just walked on with their heads down, eyes fixed on the pavement ahead.
Tabatha, who had been leading the chase, caught Denzel by the left wrist and Smithy grabbed on to Denzel’s right, the three of them forming a ghost-human-ghost chain as they raced towards the theatre.
As ever, Denzel took a deep breath right before they plunged through the wall, afraid that he might accidentally inhale a brick on the way through.
They stumbled into the grand but faded foyer of an old Japanese theatre that had seen better days. The theatre looked to be closed, although a couple of lights had been left on, presumably for security purposes.
The general impression Denzel got of the place involved a lot of red curtains and gargoyle-like faces carved out of solid gold. On closer inspection, though, he saw that the gold was just paint, and that much of it was peeling away in flakes.
A series of grimacing white-painted faces leered out at them from posters on the wall. For a moment, one of the faces seemed to be moving, then Denzel realised he was watching the flowing white ghost pass through the poster.
“There!” he said, against his better judgement.
He braced himself again as Tabatha dragged him and Smithy into a lumbering run. The poster they were racing towards showed a close-up of a man wearing white and red make-up. His mouth was wide open, either shouting or singing, and Denzel couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being swallowed whole when Tabatha pulled him through the poster and the wall behind it.
They emerged into some sort of backstage area, filled with painted trees, some garishly coloured costumes on hangers, and several tables that held nothing but ornate paper fans.
Tabatha’s shout was short and sharp. “Freeze, or I’ll shoot!”
The figure in white didn’t freeze. Instead, it ducked behind a fake tree, which immediately lost several cardboard branches when Tabatha shot it with a blast from her cane.
“Tiiimbeeeer!” Smithy shouted.
Denzel caught a glimpse of the ghost hiding behind the smoking remains of the scenery, then it dropped through the floor as if a trapdoor had opened directly below it.
He began to sink the moment Tabatha grabbed his hand. They fell through the floorboards and into a dark, dingy basement below. It had the same low-level security lighting as everywhere else in the theatre, so Denzel got a half-decent view of the concrete floor several metres below him, right before he smashed into it.
“Ow! Bit of warning next time would be nice!” he hissed, quickly patting himself down to make sure nothing was broken.
Tabatha had already sprung to her feet, and now stood with her cane pointed at the ghost they had been chasing.
“Make one more move and you’re ectoplasm!” she warned.
The ghost had its back to them, but stood perfectly still. Then, very slowly, it raised its hands.
“Wait, were we chasing someone?” asked Smithy.
Denzel side-eyed him as he got to his feet. “Yes. Of course. Why do you think we were racing about like that?”
Smithy shrugged. “I thought it was just, you know, for a laugh.”
“For a laugh? But… But…” Denzel shook his head and sighed. “Doesn’t matter.”
Up close, Denzel could see that the ghost wasn’t covered by a sheet at all. Instead, it wore something that looked like a hoodie crossed with a cape. The material was fluffy and warm-looking, with two long rabbit-like ears stitched on to the top of the hood.
“Did we just capture Bugs Bunny?” Smithy whispered.
“Turn round,” Tabatha ordered.
Smithy turned round.
“Not you,” said Denzel.
Smithy turned back.
To begin with, the ghost didn’t move, but then it clearly thought better of ignoring the only person in the room wielding a weapon, and slowly shuffled around on the spot.
As the ghost turned, it pushed down its hood, revealing a crop of bright-pink hair and two of the largest eyes Denzel had ever seen. Considering he’d once been very close to the front end of a giant shark, this was really saying something.
Her irises were the same pink colour as her hair, which should have been horrifying but actually looked pretty nice.
Both eyes shimmered, reflecting at least three different light sources that Denzel was pretty sure didn’t exist in this room. One of the light sources appeared to be heart-shaped.
Under her hoodie-cape, she wore a skirt that was the precise same pink as her eyes and hair, and a white T-shirt with a picture of an overweight unicorn on it, and too many rainbows to count.
She reminded Denzel less of a real person and more like someone from a Japanese video game or anime cartoon. When she spoke, he expected it to be in Japanese, and was pleasantly surprised when her words came out in slightly broken English.
“Please, no shoot! No shoot!”
“Don’t give me a reason to,” Tabatha replied, but she kept her cane raised, the little hand on the end making a gun-like motion with one finger and thumb. “Who are you? Why did you run? What were you doing in that underground complex?”
“What happened to the Spectre Collectors?” Denzel asked, adding to the growing list of questions.
“Where did you get that cape?” demanded Smithy. “I like the ears.”
“Saku. Saku,” babbled the ghost girl, prodding herself right on the cartoon unicorn. “I am Saku.”
She frowned in concentration, as if struggling to find the right words. “I … woke up in that place. I do not remember how I was there. But, when I woke, there was … much noise.”
She cupped her hands near her ears and shook them. “Very scary.”
“What kind of noise?” asked Denzel.
“Big noise. Bad noise,” Saku whispered. “Very scary.”
Her huge eyes darted left and right, as if checking to see if the coast was clear. “And crazy as this will sound, there were ghosts.”
Denzel and Smithy exchanged glances. “What do you mean?” Denzel asked.
“Ghosts,” Saku repeated. She held her hands in front of her and made a wailing sound. “Wooooo! Ghosts. Yes? You have heard of ghosts?”
“Once or twice,” said Smithy.
“Very scary,” Saku said again. She shivered, as if cold. “Very scary ghosts. I no like that. No like ghosts.”
Denzel’s face was a picture of confusion. He opened his mouth and raised a finger as if to speak, thought about it some more, then finally voiced the words the others were almost certainly thinking.
Well, maybe not Smithy.
“But … you are a ghost.”
Saku’s big eyes somehow grew larger. Her mouth, which was half the size of one eye at most, dropped open.
“Pardon?”
“Well, I mean, you’re a ghost, aren’t you?” said Denzel. “You ran through walls. You phased through the floor. You’re a ghost.”
Saku stared blankly back at him.
“She is, isn’t she?” Denzel asked Tabatha, just in case it was him who had got the wrong end of the stick. “She is a ghost?”
Rise of the Ghostfather Page 11
