Tabatha nodded. “Sure is.”
“Right. Right,” said Denzel, glad he’d had this confirmed.
Saku shook her head. “No. No, not ghost!”
“It’s OK, it’s OK,” said Smithy, raising his hands in a soothing gesture. “I’m a ghost too. And so’s she.”
He and Tabatha both smiled broadly at Saku. She stared at them both in turn for a while, head tick-tocking between them.
And then she screamed.
It was quite a shrill, high-pitched scream, and only ended when Tabatha slapped her across the face with the little golden hand on the end of her cane.
“Pull yourself together,” Tabatha told her. “You’re a ghost, we’re both ghosts, deal with it. Tell us what you know. What happened to the others back at the complex? Where is everyone?”
Saku’s eyes shimmered like she was about to burst into tears, but then she sniffed, whispered something to herself in Japanese and straightened. “Men were there. Men in robes. There was much fighting. Battles. Explosions. Boom! They wanted ‘Chosen One’. That’s what they say. ‘Give us Chosen One! Where is Chosen One?’”
Denzel shifted uncomfortably on his feet but said nothing.
“They say Chosen One key to lock. Chosen One open everything. Chosen One important to them.” Her voice dropped into another whisper. “To one they call ‘Ghostfather’.”
“And did they find this Chosen One?” asked Tabatha, deliberately not so much as glancing in Denzel’s direction.
“Oh, yes!” said Saku, nodding enthusiastically. “Yes!”
“They did?” asked Denzel. “Are you sure?”
“Yes! Lured the Chosen One out, they did. Drew him away.”
It was Smithy’s turn to frown. “Hold on, hold on,” he said, turning in Denzel’s direction. “I thought you were—”
“Shh,” said Tabatha, shooting him a warning glare over her shoulder. It was, Smithy thought, the most beautiful warning glare he’d ever had shot at him, and he sighed happily as he did what he was told and stopped talking.
When Tabatha turned back, there was something different about Saku. She had pulled up her hood, half-covering her pink hair.
Saku continued speaking, but while her accent was unchanged, she had suddenly become much more fluent in the English language. The words flowed out without thought or hesitation.
“It was easy enough. Show up on a scanner, make a run for it, always staying just far enough ahead for you to keep up, but not close enough that you smell a rat. I couldn’t make it too easy for you, or you’d see right through it.”
As she spoke, the ears on her hood twitched excitedly. “Of course, now that I meet you face to face, I can see you’re not bright enough to see through anything.”
“Oh look, the ears move! How cool is that?” said Smithy, completely failing to pick up on the change of atmosphere in the room. “I’m totally getting a hoodie like that before we go home.”
“You had us chase you deliberately,” said Tabatha. “You wanted us to follow you. Why?”
Saku shrugged. “Nothing personal, honest,” she said, smiling sweetly. “It was just business.”
From the shadowy corners of the basement came the shinkt of swords being drawn. Six Samurai-ghosts stepped into view, blades raised and ready to start swinging. Behind them, several figures in long robes shuffled out of the darkness, Ghostfather symbols emblazoned on their chests.
“I’d drop the cane,” Saku told Tabatha. “These guys are crazy fast.”
Tabatha looked around at the other occupants of the room, spent a few seconds calculating her chances, then let her cane fall to the floor.
“Very sensible,” Saku told her.
A cloth bag landed on the floor at Saku’s feet. It chinked in a way that made Denzel think of gold coins and pirate chests.
“You have done well, Saku,” intoned one of the hooded figures. “We shall call on your services again someday.”
“Any time, boss,” said Saku, taking the bag and hooking it on to her belt.
She gave a little giggle and smiled at Denzel and the others. Then she raised two fingers in a peace sign, winked at no one in particular and went streaking upwards through the ceiling above.
“Well,” said Smithy after a moment’s pause. “She seemed nice.”
Denzel didn’t remember being knocked out. He guessed he must’ve been at some point, though, because the next thing he knew, he was waking up.
It was not, he quickly concluded, the nicest way he’d ever woken up.
He was strapped to some sort of rack at the top of a flight of wide stone steps, his arms and legs spread in an X-shape and secured across the wrists and ankles with lengths of gold-coloured rope not unlike the belts the Oberon Spectre Collectors wore.
He was dressed in a bright-yellow robe, the hood of which had been pulled up and secured with another piece of rope across his forehead.
Worrying as all this was, it was actually quite far down the list of the things that were currently concerning him. Highlights of this list included:
The hundreds of robed figures all gathered around holding candles. They were definitely on the list.
The dozens of Samurai-ghosts standing guard around him, one hand on the hilt of their sheathed swords. They made the list too.
The fact they were all assembled in what looked like some sort of underground tomb, with arcane symbols adorning the walls, floor and ceiling.
The sacrificial altar that stood in the middle of the floor, dark-red stains marking the stone. That was pretty high up, although not quite at the top of the list.
Currently sitting in the number-one spot on Denzel’s list of concerns was the enormous curved guillotine blade that hung above him, positioned so that if it fell it would slice him neatly into two halves – specifically, a front half and a back half.
Denzel really didn’t want to be chopped in half. And, if he was going to be, those were probably the last two halves he’d choose. Top and bottom would’ve been better. Left side and right side, at a push. But front and back? That felt like someone was trying extra hard to be mean.
There was some chanting going on, Denzel realised. It was coming from the hooded figures, but he couldn’t understand it and it didn’t sound very friendly, so he decided it was probably best not to dwell on it too much. It wasn’t like he didn’t already have a literal list of worrying things to dwell on, after all.
A figure in a purple robe stood by the altar, waving his arms around as if conducting the chants. Denzel wasn’t sure this was the same person they’d met back in Scotland, but the robe and height matched pretty closely, so he assumed it was.
Not that it really mattered. If he was going to be chopped in half and sacrificed, he wasn’t all that fussed about being on first-name terms with the person who did it.
Denzel couldn’t see Smithy or Tabatha anywhere. With a bit of luck, they’d escaped and were planning a dramatic last-minute rescue, but luck had never really been Denzel’s strong point.
Despite everything that was going on, and his growing list of concerns, Denzel felt oddly calm about it all. Sure, he was terrified, but he wasn’t panicking for some reason. Maybe he was just getting braver. Maybe he was finally becoming a real Spectre Collector.
Or maybe it was something to do with the soothing smell that rose like smoke from all those candles, and the way the chanting was numbing his brain.
Probably those last ones, he decided.
He realised that he hadn’t yet shouted or screamed, and felt he should probably address this as a matter of urgency. He’d used up his lifetime’s screaming quota on the back of the motorbike, he reckoned, so he decided he’d shout something.
Denzel spent a few seconds trying to come up with something dramatic and cool to shout, but couldn’t think of anything. Instead, he yelled, “Hey!” in quite a half-hearted way, and everyone completely ignored him.
He decided to try getting free of the ropes that bound him to the frame. Th
e ropes didn’t look too thick, and he reckoned if he really went for it he could work at least one hand free. After that, getting the rest of himself out would be child’s play, and he could leg it as fast as he could towards the stone staircase at the far end of the tomb.
Denzel really went for it.
Four seconds later, he stopped really going for it and accepted that there was absolutely no hope of him breaking free.
During those four seconds, the chanting stopped. Denzel didn’t notice this until after he’d stopped really going for it with the ropes, and by the time he’d stopped his brief-but-frantic thrashing, the last traces of the final “Ommm” were echoing into silence.
As one, every hood in the room angled upwards in his direction. The Samurai-ghosts continued to face front, hands on their sword hilts. It would be nice to think that they were there for his protection, Denzel thought, but he knew they would really be there to stop anyone trying to rescue him.
The silence felt heavy and oppressive. Denzel felt an overwhelming urge to fill it.
“Hello,” he said.
He wasn’t sure why he said “Hello”. Of all the things he could have said, given his current circumstances, “Hello” didn’t feel particularly appropriate.
He tried again.
“You’d better let me go,” he warned. “I am a Spectre Collector in the Seventh Army of the Enlightened, a … a…” His mouth went dry. “A Messenger of the Allwhere. A soldier in the Seventh Army of… Wait, no, I’ve done that one.”
“Silence,” said the figure in purple.
Denzel was almost grateful for the opportunity to stop talking. It hadn’t been going very well for him.
A very low-level chanting resumed as the cult leader pushed back his hood to reveal a head so old and withered-looking Denzel’s first thought was that the man was a zombie.
Technically, his first thought was “Ew!” but the zombie thing was a close second.
His wrinkled skin was tattooed with dozens of symbols, all connected by a series of twisting lines. He looked like someone had printed a map of the London Underground on a walnut, then brought it to life.
“Welcome, Chosen One,” the cult leader said. “I am the Shakarath.”
“We meet at last,” said Denzel. Again, he felt that this was quite an odd thing to say, given the situation, but it just slipped out on its own. He blamed the candle fumes.
The Shakarath hesitated. “Yes. Well, we’ve already met, but … OK.”
“Or have we?” asked Denzel.
“Yes. Yes, we have. In Scotland,” said the Shakarath. He gestured to his robe. “I was wearing this.”
“Or were you?” asked Denzel.
The Shakarath’s ravaged features frowned for a moment, then he turned and gestured to the other hooded figures. On cue, they all blew out their candles.
The smell faded quickly and Denzel felt his veins filling with icy-cold terror. It didn’t help that, now that the candles were out, the tomb was substantially darker than it had been a few moments before.
A few torches hung from brackets on the ancient walls, their flickering flames sending shadows scurrying and scrabbling across the masonry. The shadows deepened the crags in the Shakarath’s face, somehow making him look even worse.
“Do you know why you are here?” the old man asked.
The last of the candle fumes were still working their way through Denzel’s brain, which was probably why he said what he said.
“Are you throwing me a surprise party?” he asked. “Is it my birthday?”
The Shakarath smiled grimly. “You know, in a way, it is,” he said. The menacing way in which he said it cleared Denzel’s head of the final traces of the fumes.
Now thinking clearly again, Denzel felt the panic really start to set in. He swallowed hard, trying to keep his terror from exploding out of him in a scream.
He wanted to cry. Well, he didn’t want to cry – crying was the last thing he wanted to do – but he could feel a good cry bubbling up inside him. He bit firmly on his tongue and held the tears back through sheer force of will. There was no way he was going to cry in front of this lot.
Wetting himself was a real possibility, but crying? Never.
“You are here because we brought you here,” said the Shakarath. Even in his growing panic, Denzel felt this was a pretty obvious statement, but he decided not to mention it. “We have been leading you here for quite some time now, Chosen One. We have been planning this moment since long before you were born.”
He gestured around with a hand that was almost as withered as his head. “This. All this was built for you. Centuries ago. Built for this day. For this moment. For this great thing we are about to do.”
He raised his voice and Denzel got the impression the cult leader was no longer talking to him.
“For the return of the Ghostfather!”
Denzel remembered the feeling of standing on the hillside in that vision he’d had back in Mrs Gourlay’s house. He remembered the oceans boiling and the land burning. He remembered the screams, the pain, the destruction.
He remembered the end of the world.
“My friends will stop you,” he said. “They’ll come for me.”
The Shakarath raised a crooked finger, as if he’d just remembered something. “Oh. Wait.”
He rummaged inside the baggy sleeves of his robe and then produced two large red gemstones like the ones the Spectre Collectors used to trap ghosts. They were both wrapped in thin lengths of willow branches, binding the spirits inside.
“You mean these friends?”
He raised both gems so they were closer to his mouth. “Are you coming to rescue him? Hmm? Are you? Are you?” he asked, in the sort of voice usually reserved for talking to babies or excited dogs.
Turning his head, he listened to the gems, then shrugged.
“Doesn’t sound like it,” he said, then he shook both gems violently before tossing them on to the sacrificial altar. “Pathetic,” he sneered. “Traitors to their own kind. The Ghostfather himself shall choose their punishments. History tells us He can be most … creative.”
The Shakarath clasped his hands in front of himself and emerged from behind the altar. He appeared to glide across the floor until he reached the bottom of the steps that led up to Denzel, but came no further.
“You do not realise how special you are, Chosen One,” he said. “When the signs told us of your birth, we acted quickly to take you from your natural parents and hide you, so that none may interfere with our plans.”
Denzel felt his stomach twist into one giant knot. The tears threatened to come again, and he had to work hard to force them back.
“Wait, what are you saying? My adoptive parents knew about this? My dads worked for you?”
The Shakarath made a dismissive gesture. “Those idiots? Of course not. They had no idea. We chose them at random. They were desperate to adopt a child, and we knew they would keep you safe until you were ready.”
A single tear made it past Denzel’s defences. Despite the awfulness of his situation, it was a tear of happiness and relief. His dads weren’t in on any of it. They weren’t actors playing a role. They weren’t undercover agents for an ancient cult. They were just his dads.
If he was going to die, he’d at least die knowing that.
“And now, finally, you are ready,” the cult leader said.
“Ready for what?” Denzel demanded, his voice rising into a shout. “I still don’t know what you need me for.”
Something malicious twinkled in the Shakarath’s eyes. “Then perhaps it is time for you to find out,” he said. He raised a hand above his head, fist clenched. “Prepare the Key!”
Four of the hooded figures broke ranks and walked forward, each drawing a long, curved piece of pointy metal from their sleeves.
Denzel didn’t know what they were going to do with those bits of metal, exactly, but he was pretty sure it was nothing he was going to enjoy. He struggled against his ropes, ki
cking and thrashing as he tried desperately to break free.
“Let me go! Let me go! You’re making a mistake! I’m not the key!” he cried. “I’m not the key!”
The Shakarath snorted out something that was not unlike a laugh. “The Key? Of course you’re not the Key!”
He gestured to the sacrificial altar, where the four hooded figures were slotting the bits of metal together.
“This is the Key, Chosen One.”
Denzel blinked in surprise. “Uh. Right,” he said. “What? I thought…?”
“You are not the Key, boy. You never were,” said the Shakarath. His puckered mouth twisted into a grin, showing a set of brown teeth. “You are the prison. You are the lock.”
His voice became a scratchy hiss as, all around the tomb, the chanting resumed.
“The Ghostfather resides in you. And tonight, we’re breaking Him out.”
Denzel had questions. He had a lot of questions. He had so many questions, in fact, that he couldn’t decide which one to ask first.
He eventually settled on, “Huh?”
“It is detailed in the historical records. In the Book of Lum,” said the Shakarath. The way he said it reminded Denzel of one of his old teachers telling him off for not doing his homework. “Lum tells us that a thousand thousand lifetimes from the banishing of the Ghostfather, He shall be reborn anew through the vessel of a child.”
“But – but how do you know it’s me?” asked Denzel.
“We guessed,” said the Shakarath.
“You guessed?”
“No, we used magic, you fool. Our greatest scholars and mages have been searching for you for generations. The very moment that you were born, the entire world’s Spectral Energy levels went up by four bings.”
Denzel didn’t know if four bings was a lot of bings or not. The way the cult leader said it suggested it probably was.
“When we found you, one of our mages attempted to link with your then infant mind,” the Shakarath continued. “He exploded. We knew then that we had found the Chosen One, and our plans were quickly put in place.”
“You stole me from my parents,” Denzel said. He’d been aware of this since the Shakarath had first told him, of course, but he’d had a lot on his mind, and it was only really sinking in now. He steeled himself for the answer to his next question. “What did you do with them?”
Rise of the Ghostfather Page 12
