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“Sorry—guys, please, slow down! One at a time!” Alison said, but it was no use. She’d just gotten home from a girl’s weekend; before she could even take off her coat or put down her bag she’d been met with an ambush. The ghosts, as they were wont to do, were all talking at once.
The Captain was smacking his stick against his palm, saying, “A very bad situation—requires a tactical response—yes, all hands on deck, a coordinated effort—”
Thomas, wet-eyed, holding his clasped hands up: “Alison, I beseech you, to forgive me for this abdication of my responsibility, this abhorrent and dismal unraveling of trust—”
“It’s not your fault,” said Pat sympathetically.
“It might have been!” Thomas snapped at him. “Alison, just let me hear you say I forgive you, Thomas, with all of my heart—”
“We searched every inch of this house, and I do mean every inch, not a spot missed, and I’d know, nobody knows this house better than me!” Fanny was proclaiming, while Mary wrung her hands, saying, “The poor dear, the poor dear, carried off by the goblins, perhaps, not unusual this time of year, ‘specially being that no one ever sets their cheeses out anymore…”
“Guys, I just need you to explain—” Alison tried again, but she was interrupted by Robin letting loose a great keening howl, throwing his head back and beating his chest, in an elaborate and primitive display of grief that Alison felt was a bit too private to be witnessing.
“Heya! Welcome back—what’s going on?” Mike had walked in, carrying a half-dozen rolls of wallpaper under his arm—presumably destined to go up on the wall, which was currently half-covered. It was a nice pattern, which Alison had picked out ages ago; turning away from the complement of ghosts, who continued yammering behind her, she noticed that he’d put it all on upside-down.
“It’s Kitty,” she sighed. “Apparently, she’s gone missing.”
“Kitty? That’s the—the Georgian girl, yeah?” Mike mimed voluminous skirts with his free hand. Alison nodded, her lips pursed. “Hold on, how can a ghost go missing? They can’t leave this house. We know that, don’t we?”
“Yeah,” said Alison. “That’s what’s weird, it’s why they’re freaking out. Here, can you take this?” She tugged her coat off and handed it to Mike, and slung her bag around him as well, before turning back to the ghosts.
“Listen,” she said, “I know it’s tough to think about—but might Kitty have, you know. Moved on?”
“She did not get sucked off,” said Mary, confidently. “We sees that happen many a time in this house here. We know how it feels, and it didn’t feel.”
“Mary is correct,” said Fanny. “It is a… singular sensation, shared by all ghosts present.” She made a curious expression as she recalled it.
Robin grunted in assent. “No suck off,” he said. “Kitty gone.”
“She’s fine,” insisted Julian, as Thomas continued swooning, one hand on his heart, the other on his forehead. “You are all getting worked up over absolutely nothing. She’s just run off to hide somewhere, like she does, why’s it suddenly our job to keep track of her moods?”
Everyone glared at him. The Captain gave a harrumph. “How can you say that, Julian? She’s one of us, and deserves to be treated with respect.”
“Yes, she sure was ‘one of us’ when you had her listen to your storytime from behind the sofa because her ‘face’ was ‘putting you off’,” Julian said with a leer.
“Right, when was the last time any of you saw her?” asked Alison, as the Captain made a variety of mildly chagrined noises.
“I—I, well, could ask you the same question!” Fanny said, wagging a finger in Alison’s face.
“I’ve been away!” Alison reminded her. “I saw her probably the morning I left, so, Friday. 8 AM, let’s say. And you all…?”
The ghosts gave a communal “Er….” and looked at each other guiltily.
“Today is Monday,” said the Captain, who kept close track of the calendar, “and last I saw her must’ve been… yes, Friday, thirteen hundred hours, upstairs. She was reading her book.”
“Anyone remember seeing her after that?”
The answer to that seemed to be no.
“And you’ve checked the entire house? And the garden, and the woods?”
“The Captain had us out looking for her all morning today,” said Thomas, “as soon as we figured out she was missing. Stomping through the weeds like groundskeepers.”
“It was good exercise,” said the Captain. “even if an unsuccessful outing, objective-wise. You need to keep fit, you know. You’re becoming less shapely with every passing decade.”
“I’m not!” exclaimed Thomas, whirling on the Captain. “You take that back—!”
Alison left them to their bickering. She took her coat back from Mike and dug in her bag for the car keys.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “You just got back.”
“Where do you think? To look for Kitty.”
“I could come with,” he offered.
“No, no, it’s fine. Just keep going with your wallpaper.” As she pointed to his efforts, a great floral sheet of it slid right off the wall and crumpled sadly to the floor.
“Any luck?” Mike asked, when Alison returned an hour later, wearing a tired and glum look.
“No,” she groaned, flopping down in the nearest armchair. “No sign of her anywhere around the estate, or down in the village. I just don’t know what to do.”
“Well,” said Mike, with a satisfied smile, “I took the liberty of doing some research for you. It turns out, there’s a whole category of supernatural services on Yelp. Some of these guys have great reviews.” He hopped down from the ladder, took out his phone, and handed it over to Alison.
Her brow furrowed as she scrolled through the list he’d made. “Psychics? Ghost hunters? Mike, you know we can’t let those people in here. They’d try to profit off the ghosts! They’d turn it into—into a ghost zoo!”
“Yeah, but these ones are holistic. That means they’re like, chill. They might be able to, I dunno, track Kitty through—soul GPS, or something.”
“You are not allowing spiritual exterminators onto this property!” shrieked Fanny, reading the adverts over Alison’s shoulder. “Nor will you be letting a single modern medium in to my sitting room!”
“No, Fanny, of course I won’t. Look, Mike, I appreciate you finding all this for me, I really do, but if we’re going to get Kitty back, it’s going to be on our own.” She handed the phone back.
“That’s the spirit!” the Captain shouted. “We’ll all help you make a plan, Alison, and put it into action with speed and efficiency. Search and rescue, the true test of any regiment.”
“You know,” mused Pat, “when I lost something, my keys, I was always losing my keys, or my cufflinks, Carol would tell me to go round in circles, getting bigger and bigger, till I found it.”
“Did that really work?” Julian asked.
“No,” said Pat with a frown, and then brightened: “But it should’ve! It’s a great concept!”
“Then that’s what I’ll do, then,” Alison said. “I’ll just have to go a bit further afield each time.”
Leaving Mike to his wallpapering once more, she got back in the car, and this time instead of turning right towards the village she turned left, heading east.
About fifteen minutes later, she saw a ghost, walking along the side of the road. Alison knew she was a ghost because she was wearing a beautiful white lace gown with matching elaborate hat, and the front of her gown was stained a deep red from a fatal wound in her chest.
Alison reduced speed and rolled down the window. “Scuse me,” she called to the ghost, “but you didn’t happen to see a girl come by recently—a ghost, actually? Big hair, bigger dress, very frilly? Might’ve been giggling?”
The ghost didn’t seem surprised at all that Alison could see her. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, polite as anything. “I saw her a few days back, walking that way.”
Alison looked towards where the ghost pointed, and her eyes fell immediately upon a sign that read: LONDON - 45 KM.
“Oh, Kitty,” she sighed to herself. “Well, thank you,” she said to the ghost, “and have a... nice walk.”
“It’s never nice,” said the ghost with a frown. “Did you know, I was the first person in Surrey to get killed by a motorcar?”
“Er. Congrats,” said Alison, and drove off.
All along the road into the city, she kept her eyes peeled for that telltale flash of pink and purple fabric; but it never came. By now the sun was already beginning to set; after she'd been sitting in traffic for an hour, she turned around and headed home.
Back at Button House, the ghosts had grown more and more distressed. “She did annoy the hell out of me sometimes,” Julian remarked. “I’d probably give her the title. Top Annoyer.” He gestured as if putting up a marquee. “But now that she’s gone… well. I seem to feel the loss more keenly than expected.”
“You will find her, won’t you, Alison?” asked Pat nervously.
“Course I will,” said Alison, trying to sound more confident than she felt.
“I should have done better teaching,” said Robin. “I know how go by star and moon-ah. From anywhere, everywhere in world, get right back here to cave. Super duper easy. If I made sure she learn, she would come right back here. Right back.”
Privately Alison had her doubts that Kitty could’ve mastered the art of celestial navigation no matter how expert or passionate her teacher, but she nodded along with Robin all the same.
The next morning, she headed back up the road into the city to start her search anew. She tried all the landmarks, all the places she thought Kitty might have headed right for: Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, the Tower of London. There were plenty of ghosts—some even wearing dresses like Kitty’s, staring right back at Alison over top their jeweled fans—but none of the ones that were willing to speak had seen her.
On the third day, Alison trooped up and down Oxford High Street and through Soho, checking all the fanciest stores for a glimpse of Kitty flitting amongst the mannequins and jewelry cases.
On the fourth day, when she returned to her car to find a big fat parking ticket on the windshield, a bunch of dead Puritans in big hats and buckled shoes pointed and laughed at her.
Finally, on the fifth day of her search—one week since anyone had seen Kitty, and Alison was so close to giving up, except when she thought about a Button House without Kitty popping through the walls to shriek good morning and good night, she knew she couldn’t—she headed to St. Paul’s. If Kitty wasn’t there, it would at least be nice to see, and maybe she could do a bit of praying, not that she was the praying type, but Kitty was, she was pretty sure, so why not?
She couldn’t find parking close to the cathedral, so she drove slowly through back streets, eventually managing to squeeze between a Tesla and a Bentley.
Standing on the street corner was the ghost of a grizzled old sea captain, brass buttons gleaming on his wool uniform, puffing on a whalebone pipe. He looked weathered and wise; and so before heading for the cathedral, Alison went up to him, and asked the same question she’d been asking every ghost in the city for the past week: have you seen Kitty?
“Aye, I did see the lady you describe,” he said, his silver hair blowing in an ocean breeze that Alison couldn’t feel. “Seen her these last few days, and hasn’t she been a sight for sore eyes. She’s got a gift, you know.”
“Oh, thank God. Please, can you tell me where?” said Alison, desperate.
The captain pointed with the stem of his pipe, up the street in the opposite direction from the cathedral. “You’ll see. Hard to miss.”
When she rounded the corner, at first she thought it was a concert, or some kind of block party: but then she felt the telltale shiver up her neck that meant a ghost was near, except multiplied exponentially, and she realized what she was looking at.
Children. Dozens of children, maybe a hundred; all of them dead, and all of them laughing and playing: hoops and sticks, kick-the-can, football, running about and tagging each other on the shoulder. There were ghostly chessboards, marbles, jacks, conkers; translucent paper planes darted through the air; on the pavement, underneath ghostly feet, lay hopscotch squares.
And in the center of it all: Kitty.
Alison stood there, unable to even call out; and then Kitty seemed to sense someone looking, and her head spun around, and an enormous grin spread across her face.
“Alison!” She picked up her skirts and pushed her way through the crowd, “Oh, I’m so glad you found us! Look, look!” she said. “These are my new friends. I’ve been playing games with them! So many wonderful games.”
Some of the kids were wearing raggedy, homespun garments like the ones the plague ghosts in the basement wore. Some wore torn-up knickerbocker suits; some were unbreeched, white lace trailing on the cobblestones; and there were the ones who looked as if they might have been any kid Alison saw on the street, before her accident: t-shirts, basketball shorts, trainers and windbreakers. It was the most ghosts Alison had ever seen in one place before. But she wasn't scared, and she wasn't too sad, because they all looked so wonderfully happy.
“That’s—that’s really wonderful, Kitty,” said Alison. “I’m so glad you’ve been having fun. We were really worried about you, I’ve come to take you home...” It occurred to her, only as she spoke, that Kitty might not want to come home—that this might be a better place for her than Button House, with none of the sad memories that lay within its walls.
But thankfully, that didn’t seem to be the case. “Oh, that would be lovely,” Kitty said. “I missed you so much! … And everyone else.”
Alison beamed. Filled with a flood of cheerful confidence, she felt like she could run a marathon—but she decided instead to focus on finishing the task at hand. “Let’s get you back right away, then, if that’s alright—say your goodbyes, now.”
“Goodbye Margaret! Goodbe Anthony! Goodbye Eadwulf! Goodbye Solinus! Goodbye Thou-shalt-not-fornicate!” Kitty cried, blowing kisses, walking backwards in Alison’s wake. “Sanjay, you must share your Gameboy! And Eliza, remember, knight goes two up, and then one over! Two, then one!”
“Goodbye Kitty!” called the children. “Goodbye, come back soon!”
“I will! Oh, I certainly will!”
When they reached the car, Alison realized she’d not considered the difficulty that getting to a ghost into it might prove: but as it turned out, sitting in the passenger seat of Alison’s car was as easy for Kitty as sitting in a chair at Button House. Alison tried not to think too much about it.
The whole ride home, Kitty chattered away about her new friends, and about how she’d finally gotten to throw a delightful party, with such wonderful guests, who were such wonderful company—she only wished she could have gone earlier, because those children had been without parties for so long!
Finally, they pulled up to the house. Alison unlocked the front door, and Kitty flung herself into the front room, calling, “I’m baaaaack!”
The front room was instantly filled with the sound of cheering ghosts.
“Blessed be, oh lovely day,” Mary said, tears running down her sooty face. “The goblins gave you up to us!”
“See?” said Julian, from where he reclined on the sofa in front of the television. “I told you all she was fine. And here she is! Totally fine! Dead as ever, not a frill out of place!”
“No thanks to you,” sniffed Fanny. “Kitty, I hope you know you were—you were dearly missed, in your absence.”
“But how did you do it?” asked Pat. “How were you able to leave the house?”
“Well, it all started when Julian said something that made me really sad,” said Kitty.
Alison sent a glare at Julian, one that she hoped effectively communicated, we’ll be discussing that later.
“Then, I ran through the wall out into the front garden, where I usually hide in the fountain, but Robin was already in there sleeping, so I just kept going, and before I knew it, I’d gone through the gate… And then I just kept going! And going and going and going! And then I was at the road, and I saw the sign to London, and I never got to go to London, but I knew all about it, because my sister would tell me of the balls and parades and feasts she attended. And I thought, it’s Kitty’s turn to go to Town.”
“So that’s your special power,” said Thomas, slightly awed.
Kitty nodded proudly. “And I’ll be going back. Whenever I feel like it, right?”
“Right,” Alison confirmed.
“And nobody can stop me, from having all the fun I want!”
“Right.”
“How was it?” Julian asked eagerly. “The city—God, I miss it—that horrible smell—did you see Whitehall?”
“It was wonderful,” Kitty said. “I saw so many exciting things. I would’ve seen more, but I mainly spent time with all the new friends I made.”
“Really?!”
Everyone gathered around Kitty as she began recounting her big city adventures; Alison, who’d heard it all on the way here, wandered over to the ladder, where Mike was struggling with his paste roller.
“Do you need help with that?”
“Just a bit, yeah,” said Mike. “I’m shit at wallpaper, apparently. It all turn out okay with the ghosts, then? Everything back in its right place?”
“More than okay,” said Alison. “Everything turned out great.”