Dragonbreath: No Such Thing as Ghosts

by Ursula Vernon

  Danny had managed to wrestle the flashlight back from Wendell, but had given him the stuffed animal instead. He had a feeling that it was going to be important.

  The second flight of stairs was much shorter. The hallway at the top was moonlit, with dark doorways leading onto it.

  At the very end of the hallway was a closed door.

  Danny opened his mouth to say something—“Well, here we go,” or “Look out, ghosts!” or maybe just “I hope this works!”—when the strange green light from before slid down the wall, wrapped once around the banister, and slipped down the hallway to the closed door. A thin light of green fire outlined the doorway, and then it faded.

  “I guess that’s where we’re supposed to go,” he said.

  Wendell gulped again. Christiana looked grim.

  Danny set his foot on the first step and began to climb.

  He was only a single step from the top, with Wendell and Christiana behind him, when the closed door opened, slowly swinging with that thin creak of hinges found in horror movies the world over.

  Wendell stopped. Danny took another step, and so did Christiana, which left Wendell standing on the lower step alone. He squeaked and crowded so close against Danny’s back that the dragon nearly dropped the flashlight.

  There was a brief moment of jostling on the stairs, and then Danny gritted his teeth and stepped up into the hallway.

  A shivering wind seemed to swirl around him, and then every door except the one at the end of the hall slammed shut, one after the other—WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! Wendell let out a shriek.

  With the echoes of the slamming doors ringing in his ears, it took a moment for Danny to recognize that Christiana had come up beside him. A second later, Wendell was on his other side. The iguana looked terrified, and he was holding his bag of candy up like a shield, but he was there.

  The hallway was about twenty-five feet long. The door at the end was cracked open just enough to see darkness through it.

  It should have taken under five seconds to walk down the hallway and push the door open the rest of the way.

  Danny couldn’t swear to it, but he was pretty sure it took more like five years.

  The first few steps weren’t so bad. They made it as far as the first set of closed doors before the noises began.

  “Hungry…hungry…hungry…” chanted the voice.

  Something was scrabbling at the bottom of the door on their left, pawing at it the way a cat paws when it wants to get out. Danny didn’t look at it. He kept his eyes locked forward and kept walking.

  Wendell, being Wendell, did look. “It’s got red claws…” he moaned.

  “Keep walking,” said Danny. “Don’t look at it.”

  There was a soft snick as the door on their right opened behind them.

  Danny didn’t look at it. He did glance over at Christiana, and saw her leaning forward like a lizard in a strong wind. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she hissed under her breath. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  This did not strike Danny as a terribly productive statement, but if it got her down the hallway, he wasn’t going to argue.

  The wallpaper was now oozing so furiously that they should have been ankle-deep in egg yolk, but somehow they weren’t.

  They were nearly at the second pair of doors when one popped open, and the clown stuck its head out.

  The clown grinned. It was inches away. It could reach out and grab him right now if it wanted to.

  Just behind his left shoulder, he could hear Christiana saying, “It won’t get me twice. It isn’t real, it isn’t real…”

  He took another step forward. For some reason, all he could think of was Wendell saying: “It didn’t wash its hands!”

  “Come…closer…” the clown whispered. And then it disappeared back through the door.

  Danny looked at Christiana. Christiana looked at Danny. Together they reached out and pushed open the door.

  The ghost sat on the bed inside.

  It was a very small ghost. It looked younger than any of them. It was hard to tell what species it had been—some kind of lizard, but it was mostly transparent and had only the hint of scales. An unboarded window behind it shone with moonlight, which fell through the ghost and across the dusty bed without casting a shadow on the floor.

  “Trick or treat!” it cried, bouncing on the bed. “Did I scare you? Did I?”

  Wendell wiped a hand over his face and made a noise that was either relief or disbelief or something in between.

  “Uh…yeah,” said Danny. “Definitely.” He glanced at the other two. Christiana looked murderous. He elbowed Wendell instead.

  “I haunt here,” said the ghost, sounding somewhat snooty (almost exactly like Danny’s seven-year-old cousin, now that he thought about it). “This is where I died.”

  “Um,” said Danny. What did you say to something like that? Stinks to be you? “Uh…sorry for your loss?”

  “I missed Halloween,” said the ghost. “I was sick and I wanted to go out trick-or-treating, and Mom said I could go next year. But instead I got sicker and I died and didn’t get to go at all.”

  Just like my vision! Danny thought.

  The ghost sounded peeved. It occurred to Danny that while trick-or-treating would be something he’d miss if he was dead, there were a lot of other things he’d miss more. His mom, say. His dad. Hanging around with Wendell. Comic books. Bacon. You know, the really important stuff.

  On the other hand, he’d never been dead, so maybe things changed when you were a ghost. Still, Danny was getting a feeling that he wouldn’t have liked the ghost very much when it was alive. (Then again, he didn’t like his cousin much either.)

  “So I come back here for Halloween every year,” said the ghost. “Sometimes people come in, and I get to scare them, but usually they just run away.” It bounced on the bed.

  The threesome looked at one another.

  “I think this is yours,” said Danny, taking the stuffed animal from Wendell. “I found it in the basement, and—”

  “Stuffy!” shrieked the ghost, and pounced.

  It felt like cobwebs, maybe, or a puff of cool air when it touched him. Then the ghost had the stuffed animal, which had assumed the same odd transparency, and Danny was holding empty air.

  “Stuffy?” asked Wendell, of no one in particular.

  The ghost hugged the mangy stuffed animal tightly. “Stuffy! I missed you!”

  Danny exhaled. “So…” he said. “You’ve got your stuffed animal back, so I suppose you can rest now, and we can get going…”

  The ghost looked up from Stuffy, eyes narrowing. “No. Not yet. I said trick or treat!”

  There was an awkward pause. The wallpaper split open and oozed a whole barnyard worth of egg yolk down over the baseboards.

  “Why eggs, anyway?” asked Wendell.

  “I hate eggs,” said the ghost. “And mashed potatoes.”

  “We didn’t see any mashed potatoes…”

  “You didn’t go in the closet.”

  Danny was getting frustrated. He’d been sure that the stuffed animal was the key, and if they gave it back, the ghost would be at rest, or at least let them go. Now he wasn’t sure what to do.

  “’Scuse us a minute,” said Wendell brightly, and pulled Danny backward into a brief huddle. “I think I’ve got it. Remember what I said about food offerings?” asked the iguana. “And that voice—it kept saying it was hungry, right?”

  “We need to cook it a meatloaf?” asked Danny.

  “No, dummy! It wants to go trick-or-treating,” said Wendell. “Well, what’s the point of trick-or-treating?”

  “Candy,” said Danny immediately—and then bit his lip. “Oh, no! You mean it’s hungry for our candy?”

  Wendell nodded grimly.

  Danny winced. Ghosts were ghosts…but candy was candy!

  “I think…between the stuffed animal and the offering…we might be able to buy it off.” Wendell shoved his glasses up his nose. “I’
m not sure if that’ll lay it to rest, but maybe it’ll at least let us go.”

  Danny grimaced. Figuring out the secret of a haunted house had been cool—a little spooky, sure, but a good Halloween kind of spooky. But giving up your Halloween candy…that wasn’t cool at all.

  Christiana, who had been silent through this whole exchange, stepped forward. “I’ve got a couple of questions…” she said.

  The ghost frowned at her, but she plunged ahead anyway. “So you’re a ghost. What happened, exactly, after you died?”

  “I was dead,” said the ghost. “Duh.”

  “Right, right. But your existence postulates the existence of some form of afterlife, so what does that entail? Clearly you can manifest visually and to a limited extent physically, but is your range constrained? Do you have a sense of the passage of time? Are there other ghosts with which you can communicate?”

  Wendell was nodding, so he apparently understood this display of vocabulary, but Danny had started to flounder somewhere around “postulates the existence.”

  He wasn’t the only one.

  The ghost narrowed its eyes. A door slammed somewhere in the hallway.

  Danny leaned over to Christiana and hissed, “Maybe this isn’t the best idea…”

  “But if it’s really a ghost—the loss to science—!”

  Another door slammed. Somewhere, the clown giggled.

  Danny decided that he really, really wouldn’t have liked the ghost when it was alive. It was probably one of those snotty little kids that threw tantrums on the floor of the grocery store because their mom wouldn’t buy them a gumball.

  He figured the clown was probably some kind of illusion, like a puppet the ghost was controlling. Maybe the ghost couldn’t hurt them…but maybe it could.

  “If we give it the candy, maybe it’ll unlock the door!” hissed Wendell.

  Danny had to think about this for a minute. It wasn’t like they’d tried to break the windows…sure, they’d probably slice their arms off on the way out, but they’d have lots of candy for the hospital…

  Christiana sighed. Her shoulders slumped. She opened up her pillowcase and dumped about half of it out on the floor.

  “Offerings of food, huh?” she said to Wendell.

  It was a lot of candy. Christiana gazed at it with longing and no skepticism whatsoever.

  “You can keep the Milk Duds,” said the ghost. “I hate Milk Duds.”

  “Everybody hates Milk Duds,” said Christiana gloomily, but she swept a half-dozen little yellow boxes back into her bag anyway. Her pillowcase seemed pitifully light. It was the sort of haul you got when you were a little tiny kid going around with your mom to ring the doorbell for you.

  “So that’s plenty, right?” said Danny. “That’s a lot of candy.” He tried to hide his bag behind his back to make it look smaller.

  The ghost glared at him. “I’m really hungry,” it said. The clown giggled again, sounding as if it was right behind the door.

  Christiana punched him in the arm.

  Faced with this example, Danny really couldn’t refuse. Christiana had extremely pointy knuckles. He upended half his pillowcase, feeling a wrench. So much sugar, lost. So much hard-earned chocolate. There were a couple full-sized candy bars in there too, the really good ones.

  “Oh well,” he said, “I guess it’s better than Big Eddy getting it.”

  Wendell looked at the resulting mound of candy. He looked at his pillowcase, then up at the expectant ghost.

  “This is the only really good candy I get all year,” he said sadly. “My mom buys sugar-free stuff the rest of the time. And carob. I don’t care what she says, it doesn’t taste like chocolate at all.”

  Danny and Christiana both put their hands on his shoulders.

  “Good-bye, chocolate,” said the iguana, drawing a candy bar slowly from the bag. “Good-bye, licorice. Good-bye, lollipops. Good-bye, thing that tastes sort of vaguely like chocolate but with that weird waxy shell—”

  The ghost squinted at Wendell’s pie plate. “What are you supposed to be, anyway?”

  “A hydrogen…you know, never mind. A pie salesman.”

  “That’s a stupid costume,” said the ghost.

  “Yes,” said the iguana, “yes, it is.” He gazed into his pillowcase. “I guess it’s only pity candy.” He poured a generous quantity onto the mound.

  “Hey,” said Danny as the ghost burrowed into the candy, “can you open the door and let us out of here now?”

  “Huh? Oh, sure…” It waved a hand. There was a distant creaking noise from downstairs.

  Wendell did not exactly bolt, but he was out the door and headed down the hall calling “Thanks-nicetomeetyougottagobye!” with a speed better suited to a whip snake than an iguana. Christiana wasn’t far behind him.

  Danny paused in the doorway and turned back to say something to the ghost—he hadn’t liked it, but he felt a little bad that it had died and not gotten a chance to go trick-or-treating—

  The moonlight from the unboarded window fell through the place that it had been sitting, and neither ghost nor candy was anywhere to be seen.

  “Well,” said Danny as they walked down the driveway. The world seemed very bright in the glow of the streetlights. “That was an adventure.”

  “I’m never going anywhere near that house again,” said Wendell, sadly examining the remains of his candy.

  “Wuss,” muttered Christiana.

  “Heck, yeah!” Christiana turned around and walked backward, gazing at the house. “I’m gonna get my dad’s video camera and come back. If that really is a ghost, it needs to be documented! We need proof of what we saw!”

  “It might not be there,” said Danny. “We gave it candy AND its stuffed animal. Wouldn’t that lay it to rest?”

  Wendell shrugged. “It depends on the ghost. In some cultures, they come back for food offerings every year. There’s a big festival in Mexico every year called the Day of the Dead just to feed the wandering ghosts.”

  Danny frowned. “If it’ll be back next year, maybe we should warn people.”

  “Or feed Big Eddy to it.”

  They all snickered.

  They were halfway to the sidewalk when Wendell tripped over something and fell down with an “OOF!”

  “You okay?” Danny helped him up.

  Surprisingly, Wendell was grinning. “I’m great! Look what I found!”

  “Big Eddy must have dropped his candy when he was running off,” said Christiana. “Awesome!”

  They quickly split the loot three ways. It didn’t quite make up for the candy lost to the ghost, but it certainly helped.

  Wendell’s mood improved dramatically. “So…Christiana…if you believe that’s a ghost, I guess that means you believe Danny’s a dragon too?”

  Danny sighed.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Christiana. “Just because ghosts might be real, it doesn’t mean everything is real. Ghosts have nothing to do with UFOs or those weirdos who think the Mayans made spaceships…or fire-breathing dragons. Sorry, Danny.”

  Danny, who hadn’t expected anything else and kind of wished Wendell would drop the subject completely, stared at the sidewalk. There weren’t any other kids out trick-or-treating. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been in the house, but he figured it was at least an hour.

  His dad was gonna kill him. Then ground him. Then kill him again.

  As if in answer to his fears, the family car pulled up to the curb with a screech of brakes. His father leaped out of the car, looking relieved, terrified, and furious in equal measure.

  “Thank god you’re all right! Young man, you are in so much trouble…”

  Danny hung his head and waited. Ghosts were one thing, but his dad on a rampage was scary.

  Christiana looked at him, looked at his father, made a faintly exasperated noise under her breath, and stepped in front of Danny and Wendell.

  Danny blinked.

  “We were following these other kids,” said C
hristiana, managing just the faintest trace of a sob, “and we thought you were back with their parents, but then they went inside and it turned out it wasn’t you after all, and by then we were a whole bunch of streets away and we didn’t know how to get back—”

  Wendell gazed at her in awe.

  Danny tried to look quietly heroic. Wendell had that expression that meant he was fighting a snicker.

  “Where were you?” asked Mr. Dragonbreath plaintively. “I drove up and down for half an hour looking…”

  “Uh—” Christiana glanced at the others.

  “There were a lot of cul-de-sacs,” volunteered Wendell. “We kept thinking we’d found the street, and then it would end in another cul-de-sac. We probably weren’t that far away, but it feels like we’ve been walking for hours.”

  “Well…” said Danny’s father. He exhaled. “I suppose…no harm done. If you’re more careful next time, we don’t need to say anything more about it.”

  “So, kids…” Mr. Dragonbreath put an arm across the back of the seat. “I’ve been hearing radio reports of an escaped mental patient, with hooks for hands—”

  “Oh, come ON, Dad!” Danny rolled his eyes. “We tell that one at summer camp!”

  “Oh.” His father considered. “So there was this ghostly hitchhiker—”

  “Daaaaad!”

  * Well, quiet except for Danny. The regular parade of ambulances, fire trucks, and emergency plumbers livened up the street substantially, and Danny could never figure out why the neighbors weren’t more grateful.

  * Actually, this was not entirely true. There was a place way out in the country that put on a haunted house and hayride that had guys in ski masks carrying chain saws, and even though you knew they were actors, the sound of the chain saw starting up in the dark was pretty terrifying. Danny had made his parents go through it three times.