The Phamtomime

Chapter 11

All six ghosts sat in a solemn circle under the stage light bulb. When the door opened, their heads swiveled in my direction. Only one of them smiled—Barry. He'd just become the second-least-popular person in the theater, and it looked like the promotion made his afterlife worth not-living.

"Come up here, if you would, Miss Malone." Cresswell rose to his feet in one movement, like he had a string tied to the back of his neck.

"I—uh—have to get home early. See you tom—"

"Now, if you don't mind."

It would have been better if he got hysterical.

I let the door swing closed, which it did with unnecessary force, slapping my backside hard enough to shove me halfway to the stage. I swore over my shoulder at it, but doors are mostly immune to swearing.

Since I couldn't see another way, I stepped onto the stool and over the piano to get to the stage. It wasn't very polite to climb all over someone's piano like that, but the wood had water and smoke stains and lifted up in splinters at the edges. I couldn't make it any worse.

I stood up and readjusted my pants. "You're not going to go all evil entity on me are you?"

Cresswell sighed and rubbed at the lines between his eyebrows. "You really are the most tedious human." He pointed to a gap in the circle near the front of the stage. "Take a seat."

Frowning, I did as he asked. "I'm not in trouble?"

"While we would have preferred you shared this news with us earlier, I doubt it would have altered our predicament." Cresswell sat down on a wooden crate so that he towered over the rest of us.

I reached into my pocket for my stubby pencil and notebook, ready to take notes. "Maybe Archibald Holdings will reopen the theater. This could be a good thing."

"Here we go," said Barry. "This is where the plucky kid tells us to hang in there, blah blah."

I shot my filthiest glare at him, and his mouth jerked shut.

Will shook his head. "You said they pulled down other places they bought."

It sucked that a) he was right, and b) he had such a good memory. Archibald Holdings had no reason to save the theater. There were better theaters in towns nearby. By the look on the ghosts' faces, they didn't have much hope either.

"I've been researching ghosts on the Internet," I said.

"What's an Internet?" asked Will.

I stared at him. Aside from the occasional old-fashioned slang word, I could forget he hadn't been outside the theater in decades. "Um, it's—it's like a—telephone but with pictures."

They all stared at me, open-mouthed.

"Think of it as a big library everyone in the world can use at once." I opened my notebook and looked down at my list of questions.

Why do ghosts haunt a place? Answer: Because some traumatic experience keeps them there, or they have unfinished business.

Beneath that, I'd written another question that the internet couldn't answer: What is the ghosts' unfinished business?

I asked it.

They blinked like I'd shone a super bright light in their eyes.

"You must know why you're still here?" I asked.

Six heads shook slowly.

"Well, I have a theory," I said. "Your deaths were traumatic, and you had unfinished business—a double-whammy-ghosting."