There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around

CHAPTER 1

We Don't Move into a New House

MOST GHOST STORIES start with a new house. Well, actually, it's usually an old house, a little bit run-down but with more rooms than your average Howard Johnson—most of them with dark corners and cobwebs. But it's new to the people about to get haunted: The family moves out to the country or to an island dominated by an abandoned lighthouse; or the kids are sent to visit Great-Aunt Agatha, who lives by the windswept moors and talks to herself; or the car gets a flat tire or the horse breaks its leg, and the travelers are miles from anything except the gloomy mansion on top of the hill. The house is generally situated someplace that has frequent thunderstorms, preferably between a swamp and a cemetery.

Our house is old, but we've been living here peacefully forever. At least, my family has been here forever. The house was built by my grandfather's uncle's father—I think I've got that right. Anyway, I know it was built by the ancestor I was named after—Theodore Beatson (except everyone calls me Ted)—and he built it before the Civil War. I've been living here just about twelve years, because that's how old I am, just about twelve. Not that the house looks 150 years old. Granddad says he signed the house over to my dad and moved to the condominium in Florida because Grandma had run out of walls to knock down and floors to refinish. So it's not like the house looks spooky or anything.

And we're not out in the middle of nowhere, either. We're in Rochester, New York, which is pretty big even if nobody outside of New York State has ever heard of it. We're close enough to hear Mr. and Mrs. Lidestri arguing in the house on one side of us, and to smell the chlorine from the Wienckis' pool on the other side. Behind our house is a big ditch that was part of the old Erie Canal before the canal was rerouted about a mile south. But the ditch isn't as interesting as it sounds: There's a housing development right on the other side, close enough that in winter, without leaves on the trees, we can see their lights. We can also hear their dogs barking—summer and winter—but then again, they can probably hear my brother Zach's stereo, which only tunes in heavy-metal stations at about a thousand decibels, proving, I guess, there is justice in the world.

So, no swamps, cemeteries, or windswept moors. (Just to be sure, I asked Zach what a moor is and he said it's a black person. I told him that sounded stupid, but his tenth-grade class is reading Othello and he showed me where it says Othello the Moor; and there's Othello on the cover, definitely black. I'm not sure what's so spooky about a windswept black person, but anyway, the closest black people are the Baileys, five houses down.)

Not counting Zach, there's nothing weird about my family: no undertakers or mad scientists or people who only come out at night. My dad works for the telephone company and Mom is a waitress at the little coffee shop in the mall. Besides me and Zach, there's our little sister, Vicki, who's in kindergarten.

So that's me, my family, and our house.

No long-lost relatives have come to visit.

Nobody died.

Halloween was five months past.

But suddenly we had a ghost.

CHAPTER 2

A Ghost Moves In

THE HAUNTING STARTED so slow and easy we didn't know enough to be afraid.

Mom, who usually works only during school hours, was working in the evenings because one of the other waitresses had just quit.

Dad also would normally have been home in the evenings because he's a manager at the phone company—an indoor nine-to-five job. But the repair people had gone on strike the week before, so the management people were trying to cover for them, even though they didn't know what they were doing. All of a sudden Dad was working from seven in the morning to seven at night—sometimes later if he got in the middle of something—and when he was home, generally he'd be asleep or at the kitchen table, trying to make sense of the technical manuals. I can't remember which it was that particular night.

Vicki was supposedly asleep upstairs, and Zach and I were trying to watch TV together.

Except that Zach had the remote control.

It's impossible to watch TV when Zach has the remote control. Every time there's a commercial, he starts to wonder what he's missing on the other channels. Nine times out of $ten$ it's more commercials, but that doesn't stop him. He'll hold his finger down on the button that advances the channels. Flip-flip-flip. Just about a second slower than it takes for the image to register on the eye. Very annoying. A black-and-white movie. Gilligan's Island in Spanish. Painting lessons. An opera about a woman who is dying, who'll still be dying fifteen minutes from now, the next time Zach flips through. By the time we get back to whatever we were watching, our commercial's ended and the show has gone on without us: I've missed the crucial revelation somewhere between Madonna on MTV and Senate hearings on C-SPAN.

When Dad is in the room, he takes the remote control away from Zach; but Zach's sixteen, and if I try to use force with him, he sits on me.

So I have a tendency not to get too involved with TV when it's just the two of us.

That's why I noticed Vicki in the upstairs hall. She was sitting on the floor, wearing a robe and her ratty gray bunny slippers, watching the TV through the slats of the stair rail.

I called up to her, You better—

Jeez—Zach smacked me on the side of the head with the remote control—not in my ear, you jerk.

You bigger jerk, I said, but I moved before I said it. My head must have made contact with the mute button—it felt like all the buttons were imbedded in my scalp—but anyway, Zach ignored me while he tried to figure out what had happened to the sound. I told Vicki, If Mom comes home and catches you out of bed, I don't want to be around to see what happens.

Keep it down, Zach grumbled.

Vicki said, Marella wanted to see what TV's like. She's never seen TV before.

Who's Marella? I asked.

Vicki pointed to the empty spot next to her. My new friend.

Well, I thought, kids pick up the strangest things when they go to kindergarten. I'm told Zach acquired a pet giraffe in kindergarten, though I only got chicken pox. Anyway, I figured one of the other kids had an imaginary friend and Vicki had decided she should have one, too.

Well, you tell Marella— I started.

Zach threw one of the decorative pillows at me. You tell Marella to go to bed, Zach finished for me.

Vicki got to her feet. Disdainfully she said, Marella didn't like TV, anyway, and she stomped off back to her room.

I should have been suspicious. From a girl who names her stuffed animals things like Pink Bear and Big Rabbit—I should have been suspicious.

But that was how it started.

THE NEXT MORNING at breakfast, just as Zach was about to sit down, Vicki screamed.

Zach nearly swallowed the pen he was carrying in his mouth, and Mom poured out about two cups of milk, none of which landed in her coffee mug. I'd been looking at Vicki, however, and I figured I knew what it was all about.

What? Mom asked in her frantic mother's voice. What's wrong?

Zach almost sat on Marella, Vicki said.

Who? Mom asked.

Her new friend, I explained. I wiggled my eyebrows at Mom to indicate the nature of that friendship. When Mom continued to look at me as though I were speaking Martian, I added, "Her new—invisible— friend."

Zach, who'd frozen midsit, said, Obviously someone dropped both of you on your heads when you were babies, and he let himself fall the rest of the way into his seat, so hard the chair skittered backward on the floor. How's that feel, Marella? he demanded.

In that self-satisfied tone all girls master by the age of two, Vicki said, She already moved to Daddy's chair.

Zach, whose brain is not up to competition with a five-year-old, mimicked, 'She already moved to Daddy's chair.' He started poking at the air above the empty seat.

Stop it! Vicki screamed. Stop it! She doesn't like that.

If she doesn't like it, Zach said, she should tell me to stop.

She can't talk, Vicki said. Stop it now!

If she can't talk, then how do you know her name's Marella? Zach asked with uncharacteristic clarity of thought.

Vicki was trying to grab hold of his jabbing finger, but she wasn't fast enough. "She can talk if she has to, but it's hard. Mommy! Make him stop."

Vicki! Mom said, having finally caught her breath again. Stop that awful squealing. Zach, leave your sister alone. Ted, elbows off the table.

That's Mom. She never wants to show favoritism, so she figures if she yells at one of us, she'd better yell at all of us.

As