Dragonbreath: No Such Thing as Ghosts

by Ursula Vernon

  Christiana joined in with another series of shrieks from the floorboards.

  “I want to get out of here!” said Jason. He was definitely farther away now. It sounded like he’d run clear off the porch.

  Danny decided it was time for him to contribute. Holding the big copper bowl in both hands, he slammed it hard against the wall.

  Danny pressed his ear to the crack in the boards again. The sounds of footsteps, and of Big Eddy yelling “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” were fading into the distance. He felt the warm glow of a job well done.

  It actually took longer to extricate Wendell from the bull-roarer than it had to scare the bully off, but nobody minded.

  Unfortunately, whatever Big Eddy had done to jam the doorknob, it was still jammed. Danny stood on the couch and twisted the knob as hard as he could, but nothing happened.

  “Well, crud.”

  “We should still try upstairs,” said Christiana.

  “What if Big Eddy’s chameleon buddy is still up there?” asked Wendell.

  Danny grinned. “Then he’s probably scared out of his mind.”

  They picked up their bags of candy and Christiana’s costume head. Danny didn’t even begrudge the fact that the rat had gone through his bag and made off with most of the Tootsie Rolls.

  The only brief scare came when Wendell bent over to get his candy and stood up into a huge cobweb.

  “It’s just a cobweb,” said Danny wearily, pulling the strands off his friend. “It’s not like it’s the ghost.”

  “And now we know it wasn’t a ghost at all,” said Christiana, “it was Big Eddy.”

  “I’m still not entirely sure of that,” said Wendell, scraping off the last of the cobwebs. “I mean, Big Eddy couldn’t have done anything about that painting.”

  “We probably just weren’t seeing it clearly because of the dark,” said Christiana. “Maybe it was one of those optical illusions that look different when you look at them from different angles. Anyway, haven’t you heard of Occam’s Razor?”

  “Can you kill ghosts with it?” asked Danny.

  “Well…I suppose metaphorically…Well, anyway, Occam’s Razor is this principle that the fewer assumptions you have to make, the more likely you are to be right.”

  Christiana rubbed her snout. “To assume that it’s ghosts, we have to assume that ghosts exist—despite centuries of failed attempts to prove their existence—that there’s one here, that it’s playing tricks on us for some unknown reason…”

  Danny and Wendell waited.

  “But if it’s Big Eddy, all we have to assume is that Big Eddy was here and he’s a jerk.”

  “I believe that’s been proven conclusively,” muttered Wendell.

  “So there.” Christiana dusted her hands. “No ghosts needed.”

  Danny rolled his eyes. “What is your problem with people believing in ghosts, anyway? I mean, wouldn’t the world be cooler with ghosts?”

  “The world would be cooler if there were no bullies and it rained candy, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna happen.”

  “Sheesh,” said Danny. “Lighten up already!”

  Christiana sighed. “Look, it’s just…sloppy thinking, okay? Like a hundred years ago, there were people called Spiritualists who claimed they could talk to ghosts, right? So they’d take money from these poor people who’d lost their kids or their husbands or whatever and claim they were talking to the ghosts of their dead kids. And the Spiritualists were all frauds, but they’d just bleed those poor people dry, and leave them with no money and their family still dead, and it was all just sad and stupid.”

  It seemed to Danny that the fact that the Spirit-whatsit people had been jerks who lied about talking to ghosts didn’t necessarily mean ghosts didn’t exist. He’d once tried to convince his father that the tracks left in the lawn by some careless handling of a bowling ball were the work of a rogue elephant, and the fact that it hadn’t been a real elephant did not mean that no elephants anywhere were real.*

  Christiana did not seem entirely reasonable on the issue however, and anyway, standing around arguing about long-dead con artists was not getting them out of the house any faster.

  “It’d be awfully hard. And sticky,” said Wendell suddenly.

  They both looked at him.

  “If it rained candy,” said Wendell. “It’d be worse than hail, because it wouldn’t melt. You’d get all those dents in your car, and then there’d be candy stuck to everything, and you couldn’t even eat it because it would have been all over the ground.”

  “And have you ever gotten hit with hail? It hurts! It’s like a little chip of glass! Imagine if you got whacked with a jawbreaker or something!”

  Christiana looked at her bag of candy as if she was thinking of whacking the iguana with a jawbreaker right now.

  “We’d get reinforced umbrellas,” said Danny. “And instead of rain gutters, we’d have candy gutters.”

  Danny was mulling over this mental image when they reached the kitchen and Christiana let out a hiss.

  Wendell kept going for a couple of seconds—something about pollution causing acid candy rain—then noticed what the other two were looking at. His voice choked off with a squeak.

  The hallway was still empty and clown-free, but the wallpaper was suddenly oozing something that looked like blood.

  Christiana stood there with her hands on her hips, glaring at it.

  Wendell didn’t really know what to say. It hadn’t been an attractive wallpaper to begin with, but the ooze didn’t help. On the other hand, it wasn’t quite as scary as it could have been. It was so over-the-top, midnight-movie-on-the-oldies-station cheesy that it seemed more like a Halloween decoration than an actual horror.

  He was careful not to touch it, though. Might be a biohazard. The house couldn’t possibly have had its shots.

  Danny, being Danny, put out a finger and poked it.

  Christiana wiggled her cilia at him.

  “Eggs or blood…I don’t really see how Big Eddy could have done that,” said Wendell.

  “Let’s just keep moving,” Christiana said, who clearly needed a minute to think of a reasonable explanation.

  Bags of candy in hand, the three of them crept toward the kitchen, but things didn’t look any better in there. An eerie green light oozed from one of the corners of the ceiling. It made a thin bright line, ran down the wall to the kitchen counter, then skittered over it and down onto the floor. The light traced the edge of a floorboard, zigzagging across the floor until it reached the stairs.

  “What…is…that?” squeaked Wendell.

  “Maybe it’s somebody with a laser pointer?” whispered Christiana.

  It didn’t look like any laser pointer Danny had ever seen. The light wasn’t at all jittery or flickery. Instead it oozed like glowing green honey up the stairs, flowing over each step, and vanished finally into the second floor.

  “That wasn’t normal,” said Danny. “Cool, but not normal.”

  “I knew there were ghosts!” hissed Wendell. “I knew it, I knew it!”

  “It wasn’t a ghost!” snarled Christiana. “It was Big Eddy! We saw him!”

  The last word wasn’t quite out of her mouth before the now-familiar voice whispered, “I’m hungry…” It seemed to be coming from behind the wallpaper. Wendell let out a yelp and tried to hide behind his pillowcase.

  “You think this is Big Eddy too?” Danny didn’t bother to hide his disbelief. Hammering on walls was one thing. Big Eddy was good at hammering on things—walls, nails, smaller kids who wouldn’t hand over their lunch money…

  Setting up eggs and sophisticated light shows was something else entirely. Danny wasn’t sure that Big Eddy knew how to use a light switch, never mind whatever that green light had been.

  She stomped toward the stairs.

  She was halfway across the kitchen, and Danny and Wendell were giving each other should-we-follow-her/what-are-you-crazy looks, when a sound came from down the hallway behind them. />
  It was a very ordinary sound. Under normal circumstances, it might even have been a funny sound.

  It was the sound of a toilet flushing.

  Christiana stopped as if she’d run into a brick wall.

  All three of them turned.

  Footsteps creaked down the hallway and halted in the entryway to the kitchen.

  Something stood in the doorway.

  Something glowing.

  Something grinning.

  It was the clown from the painting.

  The flashlight wasn’t on it, but it didn’t matter. The clown shone in the dark as if it were made of fireflies.

  Wendell grabbed Danny’s shoulder so hard it hurt. Danny didn’t blame him. His stomach felt like someone had wrapped an invisible hand around it and squeezed.

  The clown looked at each of them in turn, its painted eyes settling finally on Christiana. Its mouth yawned open. It had a great many teeth, and they were very long and sharp.

  Then it giggled.

  It was a high, humorless giggle, and it stayed in the air a lot longer than it should have, like a crow cawing.

  Christiana tried. Danny gave her credit. She really, really tried. She actually stood her ground, even through that awful giggling, even when the clown took a step forward. Danny wasn’t sure if he’d be able to stand there through that, and Wendell would have been in the next county and picking up speed.

  “Wanna see a trick?” said the clown, and giggled again.

  Christiana didn’t speak. Wendell made a noise to indicate that he very much did not want to see a trick.

  The clown reached up, popped its red nose off the end of its snout, and held it in the air. “Nothing up my sleeve…” it said.

  Then it casually popped out both of its eyeballs—Wendell yelped—and began juggling them.

  It was too much for Christiana. She let out a yell of disgust and bolted around the kitchen table—no, don’t run, Danny thought, they can’t chase you unless you run, which made no sense yet nevertheless struck him as absolutely true—and dove behind Danny and Wendell.

  The tightness in Danny’s chest made it hard to breathe, but he tried to suck in air anyway. If the clown got any closer, he was going to breathe fire. He might burn the house down, and the clown might be a ghost, and ghosts probably didn’t burn, but he had to do something.

  Meanwhile, a tiny little voice in the back of his head was going How is he doing that? If you’re juggling your own eyeballs, how can you see what you’re doing?

  He gulped air. His sinuses felt smoky, but he couldn’t seem to get a deep breath.

  The clown, still juggling, walked to the edge of the table, across from them. “No?” it said. It popped its eyes and nose back in, none the worse for wear.

  “Bet you can’t do that,” said the clown. It leaned forward.

  As fire-breathing went, it wasn’t worth much. There was a lot of smoke, and the flame was better suited to a birthday candle. The clown snickered.

  But there was a clown.

  That meant there was a ghost.

  That meant that his vision had been real.

  Danny shoved a hand into his pillowcase, found the battered edge of the stuffed animal, and yanked it out.

  You used crosses on vampires and silver on were-wolves…maybe you used stuffed animals on clowns.

  The clown recoiled. “That’s mine,” it said in a thin, childlike voice. But instead of coming toward them, it backed away, up the stairs. The firefly light coming off it cast flickering bars of shadow across the kitchen, and then it too was gone.

  Slowly, painfully, Danny’s stomach unclenched.

  He turned. Wendell was wide-eyed, but seemed okay. Maybe if you believed that there were ghosts, it came as less of a shock to find out you were right.

  “You saw it too?” asked the iguana.

  Danny couldn’t think of anything much to say to that—they hadn’t heard running water after the toilet flush, so Wendell was probably right. He looked at Christiana.

  The crested lizard was in a bad way. She was on her knees, breathing in short, panicky gasps, and she had gripped the costume head so tightly that she’d bent some of the wiggly bits in half.

  “Christiana? Christiana? It’s gone!”

  Danny grabbed her shoulder and shook it. “Christiana?”

  She wrinkled her snout at him. “What’s that smell?”

  “Danny breathed fire,” said Wendell.

  It was the best possible thing that anyone could have said. Christiana’s eyes focused on him with sudden intensity, and she said, “Nuh-uh!”

  “Uh-huh!” said Wendell. “He totally did!”

  She sat up. “Do it again,” she said.

  “It doesn’t work like that,” said Danny. “I only did it because that clown was coming at us. I can’t just do it on command.”

  “Sure,” said Christiana, in a tone that indicated she didn’t believe a word of it.

  “He did!” said Wendell.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Danny. “I’m not sure it’s murderous.”

  “That clown,” said Wendell firmly, “was up to no good.”

  “Clowns are never up to anything good,” muttered Christiana.

  Danny shrugged. “Look, I know it was scary, but it didn’t hurt us. And it definitely recognized the stuffed animal.”

  The trio considered.

  “Well…not all ghosts are bad,” said Wendell slowly. “A lot of them—from what I’ve read—just want to be acknowledged, or laid to rest, or something like that. Maybe it just wants our attention.”

  “It’s got my attention,” said Danny. “And everything we’ve seen—the footsteps, the clown, the light—they’ve all led upstairs.” He pointed upward.

  The kids stood in the dusty kitchen, flashlight trained on the stairs. Nothing moved. Very distantly, through the boarded windows, they could hear the sound of crickets.

  “Are you suggesting we go up there?” asked Wendell, gulping.

  Danny nodded.

  “Okay,” said Christiana, “okay, let’s say for the sake of argument—not that I believe it—that this is a ghost. Why would it want us upstairs?”

  “But anyway, maybe its remains are up there, and we’re supposed to lay them to rest.”

  “Do you know how to lay bones to rest?” asked Christiana skeptically.

  Wendell frowned. “I’ve read a couple of things. I could probably wing it.”

  Danny slapped the iguana on the back. “My buddy the exorcist!”

  “A skeleton is one thing,” said Christiana. “It’s bound to be less squishy than the sheep brain, anyway. But what if the…fine, all right, the ghost…is hostile, and it’s luring us into a trap?”

  Danny rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I don’t know. But I keep thinking that if it could hurt us, it probably would have already. I mean, the clown was right there, and none of us ended up murdered.”

  “Yeah, but it wasn’t nice at all,” said Wendell. “It might not be trying to hurt us, but it sure is trying to scare us.”

  “Well, what kind of ghost is it?” asked Christiana. “Hypothetically.”

  Wendell threw his hands in the air. “What am I, the expert? I don’t know!”

  “C’mon, Wendell, you read like every ghost book in the library last week. You’ve got to know all about ghosts.” Danny folded his arms and leaned against the table. “So what is it?”

  Wendell took his glasses off and cleaned them on the hem of his shirt. “Well…I can tell you what it’s not.”

  “That’s a start,” said Christiana.

  The iguana began ticking off ghosts on his fingers. “It’s probably not a poltergeist. I think they just throw things. There’s a Babylonian ghost called an enkimmu that shows up if it isn’t buried, but they live underground, and there was nothing wrong in the basement. There’s a ghost from Thailand that looks like a skull that flies around with all its guts flapping around behind it—”

  “Cool!” said
Danny.

  “—but we’re not in Thailand and anyway, the clown didn’t have its guts flapping around or anything.”

  Christiana, sensing a long list coming, dug into her bag of candy, pulled out a roll of Smarties, and began munching.

  Wendell stopped in mid-recitation and stared at her.

  “No, but the ghost might,” said Wendell slowly. “In a whole bunch of cultures, you give ghosts offerings of food. They have days where you leave out meals for them, or even candy. In fact, on All Hallow’s Eve, back in the old days, you had to leave gifts of food for the wandering dead.”

  “All Hallow’s Eve?” asked Danny.

  “What they used to call Halloween,” said Christiana, gazing thoughtfully at the candy.

  “Are you saying we have to cook the ghost dinner?”

  Wendell shrugged helplessly. “Maybe. It might be hungry. It might want to be buried. It might want to kill us all and wear our livers as little hats! I don’t know!”

  Danny exhaled. There was still a little bit of smoke on his breath, but Christiana was contemplating her candy and didn’t seem to notice.

  “Well,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of ghost it is, or what it wants, but I do know where to find it.”

  The trip up the stairs took longer than it should have, because nobody was willing to be the last one up the stairs—where any monsters waiting below could snatch them from behind—and nobody quite wanted to be first up the stairs, where they would be the first to meet the terrifying truth, which may or may not have been wearing somebody’s liver as a hat.

  Eventually, with much shoving and wiggling, they went up the stairs three abreast, although Danny noticed he was always the first one setting his foot on the next step.

  They made it to the landing and nothing spectacularly horrible happened. Well, the wallpaper started oozing again, but by that point, nobody was really that worried by it.