Dan and the Shard of Ice

by Thomas Taylor

  Stacey’s mum stops hammering on the dead panel of the lift and turns a look of desperate hope on to Venn Specter.

  ‘Bring her to me! Please, just… bring her back safe.’ Then she bursts into sobs and buries her face in Venn’s bottle-green polo neck sweater. Venn holds her close and turns to the camera like a hero.

  ‘I promise you,’ he declares. ‘I will bring Stacey home.’

  Televisual gold.

  I want to be sick.

  Tim leads Stacey’s mum – who is blowing trumpet sounds into a fistful of paper towels – to the downward lift. For a moment it looks like he’s going to try and make us join them, but in the end he just shakes his head and looks relieved when the doors close. The lift descends to safety.

  I’m just straightening the lapels of my coat, when I notice that Venn is eyeing me up. He turns to Ned and makes a throat-cutting ‘time out’ gesture. Ned lowers the camera, the red light winking out.

  ‘You seem remarkably calm, kid, given what just happened up there,’ Venn says to me, his huge forehead furrowing.

  I shrug. Well, I’ve been through worse, I guess.

  ‘But I wonder what did happen,’ he goes on. ‘Some kind of freak wind or something. There’s always a rational explanation. Not that I tell my viewers that, of course.’

  I raise my eyebrows. He’s being very chummy all of a sudden.

  ‘You don’t actually believe in ghosts, do you?’ I say.

  Venn chuckles. ‘Oh, right, and you do, I suppose? Of course there’s no such thing as ghosts. Only an idiot would believe in that old clap-trap.’

  Clap-trap?

  ‘What if I could prove to you that ghosts exists?’ I say, glancing at Si. ‘What if I showed you a ghost? What would you say then?’

  Venn laughs. Darkly. The chumminess vanishes completely as he steps closer.

  ‘Say? I wouldn’t say anything, boy. I’d be too busy filming it and sticking it up on YouTube with my name in big letters. Why should I waste my time saying anything to a nobody like you? You just don’t get it, do you, kid? Whether ghosts exist or not, I’ll still come out the winner. And do you know why?’

  ‘Er…’

  Venn leans down over me. He’s eaten garlic recently.

  ‘Because I’m famous.’

  Oh.

  ‘Whereas you…’ He wrinkles his nose in mock disgust. ‘You’re just… ordinary.’

  ‘If I’m so ordinary,’ I say, annoyed that this has all got so personal all of a sudden, ‘how did I know about the hamster?’

  Venn shrugs.

  ‘Yes, that. Well, maybe you really did just get lucky. Frankly, kid, I’m disappointed. You know, for a moment down there I thought maybe you had seen something. But it turns out you’re no more interesting than any of the other dumb schmucks who watch my show. And now I’ve got you away from the crowd, you can just slink back to Nowheresville where you came from, and keep your mouth shut.’

  ‘But…’ I hold up my finger.

  ‘Leave it, kid,’ he says, turning his back on me. ‘You’ve had your fifteen minutes of fame. Now it’s time for the professionals to get busy. You can take the lift back down.’

  And with this, Ned raises the camera again, and Venn goes on with the show.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, as you have seen, exciting and terrible events have taken place at the Shard. We have captured on film proof that a ghostly presence has taken control of the building. Not only that, it has seized an innocent little girl! But I am Venn Specter, and I am not so easily deterred. I will continue alone from here, armed with my jade ring and my long years of experience. I will uncover the secret at the heart of this affair, and save poor little Stacey from her terrible fate. So follow me, dear viewers, as I, Venn Specter, investigate further.’

  And with a flourish, he turns on his heel and vanishes around a corner, Ned jogging along behind him.

  ‘A most unpleasant individual.’ Si snorts. ‘Would you like me to materialise in a cloud of dust motes and terrify him to the foundations of his soul?’

  ‘Nah,’ I say. ‘At least, not yet. But I’m not letting him get away from me that easily.’

  I stroll off after Venn. But when I turn the corner, I stop when I see what’s there.

  Which is precisely nothing.

  Venn and Ned have gone. It’s like they’ve vanished into thin air.

  ‘What trickery is this?’ demands Si, at my side.

  We turn around, staring at the blank walls and carpet of the corridor. Ahead there is nothing but the open door of the empty out-of-order lift.

  ‘There must be another door here?’ I say, tapping at various wall panels at random.

  ‘But Daniel, how does Venn Specter know of secret doors?’

  ‘He’s got a whole film crew behind him, remember? He’s probably studied plans of the building, and knows where all the emergency exits are. But if he thinks he can escape me, he’s mistaken. I’ve got something he hasn’t.’

  ‘Oh, and what, pray, is that?’

  ‘You, Si, you great numpty!’ I roll my eyes. ‘Now stop fiddling with your pony tail and get ghosting through these walls. We’ve got to find that hidden door.’

  He does so, pushing his spectral head through the wall panels one by one, until he emerges with a puff of ectoplasm and a triumphant cry.

  ‘There are stairs behind this panel,’ he declares. ‘You were right. There is a secret door.’

  I run my fingers around the panel, and tap on it. Nothing much happens, and there’s no sign that it can open at all, not even any visible hinges.

  ‘You know, Si, despite everything, I think things have just turned out pretty good for us.’

  ‘I admire your optimism.’ Si scowls at me. ‘But we have been attacked by something we cannot identify, you have almost died falling down the lift shaft, and that poor Stacey child is in the clutches of a power unlike any we have encountered before. I hardly see…’

  Si trails off when he sees me lean on the panel. When my hand presses it in just the right place, there’s a click and the panel swings open.

  In the flickering neon beyond we see the stairs.

  ‘I know all that, Si,’ I say. ‘But at the same time, we’ve just got exactly what we wanted all along.’

  He looks confused.

  ‘We’re in the Shard, aren’t we? All alone. With no security guards, and no more cameras. And that’s just how I like it.’

  ‘Indeed we are.’ Si smiles his ghastliest smile and bows his frilliest bow. He flourishes his hand towards the open door. ‘Then after you, Master Dyer.’

  I set my purple specs, and adjust my lapels. It’s time to do what I do best. It’s time to get down to business.

  I stroll through the door.

  8

  A QUICK WORKOUT

  ‘Is there a plan, at all?’ says Si, floating at my side as I climb the stairs. It’s even darker here than the corridor below, and the lights keep cutting out altogether. ‘I only ask because I’m usually the last to find out.’

  ‘Don’t think we know enough yet for a plan,’ I gasp between steps. ‘We’re still in the, er, fact-finding phase of the operation.’

  I’ve run up several flights of stairs by now, jogged up a few more, staggered up the rest, and now I’m almost on my hands and knees. Looking up, the stairs go on and on, spiralling into the darkness above.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Si sounds unimpressed. ‘Well, don’t forget to tell me when we’ve found a fact, Daniel. I’m beginning to forget what one of those looks like.’

  I sit down on the floor of a landing, puffed out. But not too puffed put to put Si in his place.

  ‘Oh, come off it, Si. We’ve found out one fact at least.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘That the poltergeist is the ghost of a woman,’ I say. ‘Unless the meaning of the phrase “pretty lady” has changed since I last looked in a dictionary.’

  On the landing where I sit, a double door marked ‘Fire Escape’ in g
lowing red letters is half open. There is nothing but darkness beyond. I decide not to bother with it. Well, I’ve got a lot of stairs still to go, haven’t I? I drag myself to my feet and put a foot on the step of the next flight of stairs going up.

  A great, ringing, clamouring sound reaches me from above. I look up. It’s dark, but something flashes in the emergency lighting far above. Then, as I stare, an office photocopier flies into view, brushes my shoulder and then hits the concrete floor right beside me, exploding into a hail of plastic bits and glass.

  ‘’Zooks!’ Si roars, raising his hands to shine their ghostlight up the stairwell. ‘Run, Daniel! Get out of the way!’

  Looking up again, I just have time to see a tumbling mass of furniture, TV screens, and kitchen equipment, rushing down at me.

  I dive through the fire door with a cry of ‘Crapsticks!’ A sound like a meteorite strike fills the air, as the falling things hit the landing where I was just standing.

  I roll to a stop and look back at the doorway. The landing and stairwell are jammed solid with twisted metal and ruined stuff. It’d take hours to shift it.

  And now there’s another sound, too – a high, almost tinkling human sound.

  Laughter.

  I look at Si.

  ‘For somebody described as a pretty lady,’ he says, ‘our poltergeist has a very un-ladylike approach to keeping visitors at bay.’

  I nod. I wonder for a moment if Venn and Ned were caught on the stairs above, but something tells me they weren’t.

  ‘I bet Venn came this way too,’ I say, getting unsteadily to my feet and brushing myself down. ‘That must be why the door was open. Come on, Si – we’ve got to find another way up.’

  We’re in a large, open-plan space reaching all the way to the glass sides of the building. There are strange shapes all around me, barely visible in the emergency ceiling lights and the glow from the city outside. For a moment, in my rattled frame of mind, I think the shapes are creatures, poised to spring at me, but then the main lights come on unexpectedly. I raise my hands to my eyes against the sudden, blinding light, though just as my eyes get used to it, it cuts out again. But not before I’ve seen what those strange shapes are.

  ‘Exercise machines,’ I say. ‘Si, we’re in a gym! This must be the hotel that’s in the middle of the Shard. There’s even supposed to be a swimming pool up here somewhere.’

  As I speak the lights come on again, but faintly this time, flickering. The gym is panelled with gleaming wood and there is a marble floor, but it’s hard to focus with the dodgy lights.

  ‘What is wrong with the electrics?’

  ‘Electricity is a little after my time, Daniel,’ says Si with a sniff. ‘As you know, ghostly manifestations can interfere with your modern lighting. However, I’ve never known it affect a whole building like this.’

  I cross the gym, surprised that it’s so completely empty. Then I remember that apart from Tim and a few members of staff, I haven’t seen anyone else in the Shard at all. I see the orange splat of a dropped smoothie congealing on the marble, beside a towel and a squeezy bottle of moisturiser. A running machine is running all on its own. A strange hairy object floating in a footspa turns out, on cautious inspection, to be a man’s wig.

  ‘Si, I think the people here left in a hurry. It’s like they couldn’t get out of here fast enough.’

  ‘Given what’s just happened on the stairs,’ says Si, ‘that hardly seems surprising.’

  ‘But it does mean things are much worse here than people outside realise,’ I say. ‘No wonder I couldn’t get in before. Whoever owns the Shard must be pretty desperate if they think Venn Specter and his rubbish TV show can help.’

  On the wall near a receptionist’s desk, beside an overly tasteful Christmas tree, is a plan of the Shard – a spike-like schematic of the entire building. It’s taller than I am.

  ‘Where do you think we are now?’ I say, my finger hovering at the midpoint of the map of the building.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, Daniel.’ Si puffs ectoplasm at me. ‘Caught somewhere between Impossible Odds and Unspeakable Peril, I expect. We’re certainly a long way south of Happily Ever After.’

  ‘It looks to me like the hotel begins at Level 34,’ I say, ignoring him. ‘I wish I’d counted how many floors we climbed from the lift, but my guess is we’re at the top of the hotel now, around here – level 52.’

  I stare in dismay at the rest of the building towering up to the top of the map. I’m still puffed out from climbing over twenty levels just to get here, but I’ve got at least that much again to get back to the viewing level. And that’s only if I can find another way onto the stairs and avoid being crushed to death by more falling furniture. In the meantime, what’s happening to Stacey?

  ‘You know what, Si? It seems to me that if we can’t get up to see this “pretty lady”, we’re just going to have to get her to come down to see us somehow. I think it’s about time to we came to face-to-face with her ladyship, don’t you?’

  ‘But, Daniel…’ Si starts to splutter. ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’

  ‘Well, I suppose you could always fly up there on your own, Si. You know, take a look around, see what we’re up against.’

  Si goes whiter than an advert for washing powder.

  ‘I think it would be better if we didn’t split up,’ he squeaks, his ectoplasm going small with fright. ‘In fact, I’m beginning to think we should make a tactical retreat, Daniel. Maybe it was a mistake getting involved in this, after all.’

  ‘Mistake or not, we can’t wuss out now, Si. Do you really want to leave Stacey up there, with Death knows what, and only Venn and his stupid jade ring to save her?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Si splutters, a little ashamed of himself. ‘But the risk, Daniel! It’s my job to keep you safe. If anything happens to you, it would all have been for nothing!’

  I turn to him. Once again I am reminded that there are things he’s keeping from me, things he wouldn’t let Mrs Binns say. I feel something in my deep coat pockets and realise that I still have that old copy of the Radio Times rolled up in there.

  ‘All what would have been for nothing, Si? What is the big secret?’

  Si slams his skeletal jaw shut and looks cross with himself.

  ‘And anyway,’ he says eventually, ‘how on earth can you get the poltergeist to come down here? I don’t see how it’s even possible, so…’

  ‘Well, it’s funny you should ask that,’ I say, adjusting my specs. ‘Remember that plan you asked about earlier?’

  ‘You said there wasn’t one.’

  I shrug.

  ‘There is now.’

  9

  HOW TO SUMMON A GHOST

  ‘It’s something Tim said,’ I explain. ‘And, though he didn’t realise it at the time, something Venn said too.’

  ‘Something that will bring the poltergeist down here?’ Si looks doubtful.

  ‘Or at least provoke a reaction,’ I say. ‘You know what ghosts are like, Si – they all want something. Even you have something keeping you here, some purpose, even if you want to keep it secret from me.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Si says. ‘You’re right about that, at least.’

  ‘Yeah. And with most ghosts it’s something they’ve left unsaid or undone, something I can help them with. And they can get pretty angry if I can’t help, or of they’ve been waiting too long. Well, this is probably the angriest ghost we’ve ever come across. But even if I can’t help her, there must still be a reason for that anger. That’s why I asked Tim if he’d said anything to provoke the pencil attack in the gift shop.’

  ‘Ah, so you did!’ Si screws up his face to try and recall my conversation with Tim. The ectoplasm puffs from his head with the effort. ‘He said something about his supervisor, he called her a… a “right nasty old…”’

  ‘Exactly!’ I say quickly, to stop Si from finishing it. ‘And that’s when the window cracked, remember? Then, what did Venn shout above the wind, just before th
e glass shattered completely and we were driven out of the viewing level?’

  Si screws up his face again, but I know he has a good memory, despite dying from a musket ball in the brain. His face lights up.

  ‘Oh!’ he cries.

  ‘Exactly,’ I say again. ‘It’s not the same word really, but it sounds the same. And Venn shouted it out at least twice.’

  Si looks at me, and I look back at him. Well, there’s nothing to do but try it, is there?

  I notice that the gym’s exercise bikes are firmly bolted to the floor. I climb onto one and grab the handles tightly, bracing myself for whatever happens next. Then I shout the word as loudly as I can.

  ‘Witch!’

  Nothing happens.

  But wait! Isn’t there a slight change in the atmosphere? And are the hairs on the back of my neck starting to stand up?

  ‘Witch!’ I shout again, though slightly more timidly. ‘Nasty old, er… witch?’

  The atmosphere fizzes.

  There’s a flash of light as a vivid arc of electricity leaps from a power point on a nearby wall and connects with the exercise bike I’m sitting on. I find myself flying backwards through the air, my whole body singing with pain. I crash to the ground somewhere or other and lie there trying to work out which way is up and what my name is.

  Someone is shouting, ‘Daniel? Daniel?’ I look up and see that it’s Si. Either my eyesight has been ruined, or even the emergency lights are out now. I can only see the ghostly glow of Simon in the pitch dark.

  And another glow from something else.

  I manage to move my arms enough to sit up, and turn my groggy head towards the new light. I see a figure standing across the other side of the gym, crackling and popping with electrical energy that pours out from the light fittings and plugs, and gathers in the form of a person.

  The ‘pretty lady’.

  Actually, she’s barely a lady at all, she’s a teenage girl with cropped hair and a simple white dress.

  But she is pretty. Mind you, being lit up like a Christmas tree probably helps with that.