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“Ooooh,” Tom intoned, drawing the words out in a barely passable spooky voice, “she’s going to get you.”
“Not if she gets you first,” Max said. He flicked the torch on and held it under his chin so he was lit from below like a scare actor at some cheap haunted house attraction. “The Marble Lady is coming! If she finds you here, she’ll never let you leave!”
Rowland mimed being strangled by an invisible hand, staggering about and almost dropping his torch in the process. Ralph rolled his eyes at his friends and then laughed at their overdramatics.
The Marble Lady was the ghost of some long-dead noblewoman rumored to haunt the ruins of Hardford Hall. It was said she neither laughed nor screamed nor smiled nor frowned, only floated silently and stoically through the house like she was carved from a block of solid marble. She had lived—and died—about two hundred years ago in the eventually-abandoned manor house that sat high up on the cliffs overlooking town, and some servants had claimed to see her walking around about a dozen years later. More and more people had reported sightings after that, and around the time that they invented the camera, some nutty ghost hunters were even convinced they had got some photos of her wandering the halls.
A few suspicious accidents and even deaths on the property over the years had only added fuel to the rumor-fire, though if you asked Ralph, it was less a haunted house situation and more people letting their imaginations run away with them. If you really stopped to think about it, the incidents were only noteworthy because of the ghost legend in the first place. If they had happened anywhere else, no one would bat an eye. And Ralph was pretty sure that the last bloke, back in the nineties, had only broken his leg because he decided to climb a tree and lost his balance—drunk or on drugs, probably, seeing as it had been past four in the morning—and not because a ghost had popped up out of nowhere and scared him half to death.
But whether or not it was true didn’t really matter to most people, because the rumors were spooky and scary and mysterious enough to match the abandoned ruins of Hardford Hall. The Marble Lady had been the subject of local folklore and the reason parents warned their children away from exploring the moldering old ruins for generations now, and that wasn’t going to change any time soon.
So of course the four of them—Ralph, Max, Tom, and Rowland—had decided to sneak in for some early Halloween fun. Well, they had decided together, but it had been Ralph’s idea to begin with and he was quite proud of it. What better place to spend a Friday night in October than the creepy old manor up on the hill? It was way better than maths homework and or rugby practice at any rate, even if ghosts weren’t actually real.
“Come off it, mates,” Ralph said, still laughing, snatching the torch from Max and pretending to hit him over the head with it. “Ghosts aren’t actually real, you know. There’s nothing scary about this place.”
“Hey, watch it with that thing! You trying to kill me or what?”
“I think he is,” Rowland deadpanned from somewhere behind them. “If we die tonight, it’ll all be his fault.”
“Unappreciative, that’s what you are,” Ralph said as Max grabbed his torch back. “Who planned this whole thing anyway? Whose idea was it that we told your mum we were going to Tom’s and Tom’s mum we were going to Max’s and Max’s mum we were going to mine and my mum we were going to yours?”
“I still think we should’ve just said we were going to see a film,” Tom said. “It would’ve been easier all around.”
“Less interesting, though,” Ralph said. “Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?”
Rowland nodded. “He’s got a point, Tom. What’s the point of doing something if you can’t have a bit of fun with it?”
“Fair enough.” Tom shrugged and then grinned wickedly. “All right, then, Ralph, what’s the plan?”
Max and Rowland turned expectantly to him as well. Switching his own torch on, Ralph considered their options.
They were standing in the entrance hall of the old manor, a cavernous room with a gritty layer of dust and cobwebs that coated nearly every available surface. A cold draft seeped under the front door and whispered through the broken windows that lined the walls, stirring some dust up into the air as well. It was well past nightfall, and with only the faintest moonlight coming in through the windows, the oppressive darkness made everything that much creepier.
They could go left or right, down into the east or west wings that spread out wide in either direction. Or they could go forward, up the massive main staircase to explore the upper floors of the manor.
“Let’s go that way,” Ralph said, shining his torch up the stairs. The beam of light only made it up a few steps before it was swallowed by the shadows. Despite all his flippant claims that he wasn’t scared and didn’t believe in ghosts, he felt himself swallowing hard anyway.
His friends crowded around him, peering into the foreboding darkness over his shoulders. One by one their torches flicked on and joined his, strengthening the beam until the staircase was lit halfway up.
“Okay, sure,” Tom said.
“Sounds good to me,” Max said.
“You first,” Rowland said.
Ralph couldn’t help letting out a nervous laugh as he began to climb. The stairs were just as filthy as the rest of the place, and the boards creaked underfoot as they made their way up. The entrance hall disappeared from view as they spiraled upwards, passing creepy old paintings and sconces draped with cobwebs on the walls.
Halfway up the staircase, they came to a wide landing. There was a little table in the corner with some cool old stuff on it, and Ralph stopped for a moment to look around, forcing his friends to come to a halt behind him as well.
There was a grimy marble bust on an equally grimy pedestal and an ornate clock that had frozen at two twenty-six somewhere along the years and some little figurines that looked like they might be made of solid silver and gold. Above the table hung a massive portrait that practically took up half the wall. It showed a youngish woman in an old-fashioned dress: high-waisted and short-sleeved with a long, flowing skirt that went all the way to the floor. Dark blonde hair was pulled back into a tight bun with a few curls framing her face, and her eyes were pale but piercing even through centuries of dust. Somehow she looked serious and miserable at the same time, and Ralph shuddered slightly as they stared at each other, a gulf of hundreds of years between them.
And it seemed almost as though her eyes followed the four of them as they resumed their climb, her gaze hard on their backs as the portrait faded into the darkness behind them once more.
After what felt like an eternity, they reached the next floor. The hallway was just as high-ceilinged and cavernous as the entrance hall downstairs, and likewise the rows of doors that lined it stretched out in either direction as far as the eye could see.
Max reached out to rattle the doorknob closest to them. It was locked up tight, and when he pulled his hand away, streaks of thick grey dust came with it. He wiped his fingers on his jeans in disgust and broke the silent spell that had descended over them as they climbed the stairs by saying, “Ew, gross.”
“Are they all locked?” Rowland tried another one. “Lame.”
“No, look at that one.” Ralph pointed his torch at a door halfway down the hall. It was as dirty and decrepit-looking as the others, but it was hanging slightly off its hinges, practically inviting them into the room.
“Can you imagine if there really was a ghost in there?” Max joked as they approached the door.
“Ha ha,” Tom said sarcastically, wiggling his torch about. “I’m absolutely terrified.”
They stepped over the threshold and were immediately confronted by a figure looming out of the darkness. It had been bending over next to the sofa, seemingly inspecting something on the side table, but as they came in, it raised its head and took a half-step towards them.
Ralph screamed, but it was a very masculine scream so it didn’t really count as embarrassing. Dropping the torch didn’t count either. Tom, Max, and Rowland shouted too, and the small bit of Ralph’s brain that wasn't actively panicking started to skitter towards the door before an annoyingly familiar voice cut through the noise.
“What are you lot doing here?”
“Graham? Is that you?”
Ralph picked up his torch and shone it towards the source of the voice. Unless ghosts wore hooded jumpers and scuffed-up trainers, it was definitely Graham Muirhead, standing next to a dusty sofa and having the audacity to look cross with them.
“Shit, mate,” Max said, “don’t jump out at people like that.”
“I didn’t jump,” Graham retorted, “you’re the ones who came out of nowhere.”
“Gray?”
Ralph turned. Chloe, Graham’s older sister, was running down the hallway. She was holding a notebook in one hand and a torch in the other, and she looked worried until she saw the four of them and slowed down to a walk.
“Oh, all right then. I heard shouting, but I suppose that was you lot, wasn’t it?”
“Forget about my lot,” Ralph said, embarrassed that she had heard him scream and irritated that he was embarrassed in the first place. His hands suddenly felt too large for his body, and his mouth had gone dry. “What are you doing here?”
Graham looked at him as though he rather thought it was obvious. “It’s October, isn’t it? We’re writing a piece about local ghost legends for the school paper.”
Of course they were. Wasn’t that just like the Muirheads, to put classwork over having a laugh on a Friday night? Ralph had been going to school with Graham for years, but he still wasn’t sure if they were friends or not. Sometimes he was all right, funny even, but other times he was bloody annoying and the most sanctimonious son-of-a-bitch there ever was. Right now it seemed to be the latter rather than the former, and Ralph tried and failed to suppress a surge of annoyance.
“We did the great black dog in the churchyard and the old man in the lane,” Chloe said, tapping her notebook for emphasis, “but we need a bit about the Marble Lady. It’s all for legitimate research purposes.”
“And you’re just here to mess around, I expect,” Graham chimed in.
“Well, yeah,” Max said. “We’re not boring.”
“You’re not doing very well in maths either,” Graham shot back, which Ralph thought was rather unfair.
“Bold coming from a guy who’s afraid of rugby,” he scoffed.
Graham colored instantly. “I’m not afraid of rugby, I simply don’t believe that high-contact sports have any place in a secondary school due to the potential risk—”
“Prat!”
“Tosser!”
“Knobhead!”
“Wanker!”
“All of you shut it!” Chloe shouted, shining her torch directly in Ralph’s face and ignoring his cry of protest. “You lot are insufferable! If we’ve got to be here together, we’re bloody well going to ignore each other. You stay in the east wing of the house, and we’ll stay in the west. Come on, Graham.”
She stuck her nose in the air and flounced off. Graham followed, frowning at them over his shoulder. Tom and Max flipped him the bird as Rowland wiggled his torch in a purposefully irritating way.
Ralph was too busy watching Chloe walk away to join in his friends’ taunting. Ah, Chloe Muirhead. She was better looking than half the girls in school, and she was one year above him, which only made her hotter. Ralph had fancied her since year ten, when he’d gone over Graham’s house to work on a science report and she’d helped them because she’d taken the same course with the same teacher the previous year and knew just how he wanted things. She’d leaned over his chair as she explained the difference between the results and discussion sections, her braid falling over one shoulder, and Ralph hadn’t understood a single blessed thing she’d said. The only thing he’d taken away from the experience had been two years’ worth of increasingly embarrassing dreams featuring soft skin and vibrant red hair.
“Writing newspaper articles on a Friday night,” Max said, rolling his eyes. “Leave it to Graham.”
Rowland smirked. “But I bet you’d like to poke around this old place with Chloe, huh, Ralph? I’m sure there’s an empty room around here somewhere….”
“Shut it!”
Ralph wanted to smack his friends on the heads with his torch again. He was glad it was dark in here so they couldn’t see how red his face was, but he was also a little bit glad they’d run into Chloe and Graham. Now all his nerves from before seemed silly again. He had just let the darkness and the silence and that big creepy portrait get to him. There was nothing scary about the manor at all. It was just empty, big and dusty and completely abandoned apart from him and his mates and the Muirheads.
And it seemed like his friends had got the same feeling. Max leaned against the arm of the dusty sofa, waving his torch aimlessly around the room, and Rowland stepped away to poke at the ornate frame of a painting on the wall. His fingers came off covered in cobwebs, and he made a disgusted little sound as he rubbed them against each other to get the grossness off.
“Hey, want to see if we can find one of those big clocks somewhere around here?” Tom suggested. “You know, they’re really tall and they’ve got that long swinging thingy and they make that bong noise when they chime on the hour?”
Max looked askance at him. “You mean a grandfather clock?”
“Yeah! They have them in old-timey films and stuff, and it can’t get more old-timey than this.”
“Come on, we can do better than that!” Ralph gestured to the massive old house around them as he spoke. “They’ve got all kinds of fancy stuff in here. There’s probably a suit of armor or something under all this dust.”
“That’s from, like, medieval times,” Max pointed out. “I don’t think this place is that old.”
“Ugh, whatever.” Ralph rolled his eyes. “But we can totally find something better than some big clock. How about a contest? The one who finds the coolest thing wins?”
“You’re on, mate,” Rowland said. “Split up and meet back downstairs in ten?”
“Sure, so long as Ralph doesn’t ditch us for Chloe,” Tom said. “She doesn’t count as a cool thing, mate, and you can’t find her when she’s already found us first.”
“Idiots, the lot of you. Why do I put up with you anyhow?”
His friends just laughed at him. Eventually Ralph ran out of insults to throw their way, so they split up with the agreement to meet back up in the entrance hall in ten minutes to compare their finds. Tom went left, Max went right, Rowland went back downstairs, and Ralph went up. There were more hallways up there, more rooms full of dust and old stuff and more opportunities to win their contest. Most of the doors were unlocked on the upper floors, and he was able to do a bit more exploring.
He found a few more portraits of old-timey people: a man with a ridiculous powdered wig on, a lady in a gigantic dress that looked like it could barely fit through the doorway, two little boys in suits with their pet dog. They weren’t cool enough, though, just kind of weird looking. But at least their eyes didn’t seem to follow him around the room like the portrait of the lady in the staircase.
There was an honest-to-goodness golden egg sitting on a sideboard in some dusty old room. It was bigger than both of Ralph’s fists combined and had a huge red jewel on top, which was frankly overkill in his opinion. If you had an egg made out of solid gold, it was obvious that you were some fancy rich bloke. The ruby just seemed like bragging at that point.
He wandered a little bit more. Maybe there really would be a suit of armor lying around somewhere up here. Would that be cool enough to win, or would he have to find something better? It was definitely more interesting than a big clock, that was for sure. Tom needed to get a little more imaginative if that was the most exciting thing he could think of.
Just as he was contemplating forcing a door open to see if there was anything cool behind it, his torch flickered. Off for a second and then right back on, like the batteries were dying. Frowning, he thumped it against his palm, trying to see if a wire was loose somewhere, but it didn’t do it again.
Huh, weird.
Then Ralph saw something move out of the corner of his eye. Thoughts of ghosts and haunted mansions immediately jumped back into his head, but when he turned his torch quickly in that direction, he saw that it was just a Muirhead again. Chloe this time instead of Graham, and his stomach did a funny little flip that had nothing to do with that fact whatsoever.
“All right, then?” he said in what he hoped was a cool and confident and not scared of imaginary ghosts way.
Chloe crossed her arms and looked warily at him. “What are you doing over here? We agreed to split up.”
“No, we didn’t,” he reminded her. “You just said we should. And anyway this is the middle bit, not the east or west wing, so it’s fair game.”
For a minute she seemed like she was going to argue semantics with him, but she just shrugged and turned back to a portrait on the wall. This one was a married couple from a couple hundred years ago, the woman in a short-sleeved, high-waisted dress and the man in a brilliant red military dress uniform. The man had a sword in his belt and a big black hat on his head, and he looked really rather impressive. The woman was sort of familiar. She had dark blonde hair and light eyes, just like the lady in the big portrait hanging in the stairs.
“This is her,” Chloe said, staring up at the painting. “The Marble Lady.”
Ralph stared up at it too. The Marble Lady looked younger here than she had in the stairs, and she didn’t seem to be made of marble at all. True, she wasn’t smiling, but people never smiled in old paintings so that didn't really mean much. She seemed calm in this portrait. Peaceful, even. And she wasn’t staring uncomfortably out at them through all the dust and centuries either. She was looking at her husband, and he was looking at her.
“So, do you actually believe in ghosts?” As soon as he spoke, he cringed slightly at the shoddy line, but Chloe didn’t seem to mind.
“Not really, no.” She shook her head. “But this house has a great history, and local legends are interesting. The Marble Lady especially. Did you know she died during the Napoleonic Wars?”
Ralph chanced a step closer. Her hair was falling over one shoulder, all loose and curly and soft. He tried to concentrate on the painting. “She fought in a war?”
“Not exactly. She was a woman, after all, and they didn’t let girls fight back then. She lived in the officers’ camp in Portugal with the other wives, I think. Before we write our article I have to do some more research about that part. But I know her husband died in the wars, and then she came home and died of a broken heart a few years later.” Her voice went all soft as she said that last bit, and her torch wandered over the walls, illuminating centuries-old family portraits draped in cobwebs and dust. “I think it’s more sad than anything else. She can’t be a malevolent spirit, not really. Why would she want to hurt anybody?”
Ralph wanted to say something else—hopefully something else witty or clever, if his brain could think of something fast enough—but he didn’t get the chance.
His torch flickered and died. Chloe’s went out at the same moment, and he heard her make a noise of confusion as she thumped it against her palm.
“What gives?” he said, shaking his torch again. But instead of turning back on again like it had done before, it remained stubbornly dark, even though he’d put fresh batteries in just a few hours ago for the express purpose of being able to see while he was sneaking around an creepy old manor with his friends.
“Yours too, again?” Chloe said. “Mine went out before, just down the hall, but it came on right away. There must be electrical issues in the building or something.”
“How can there be electrical issues if they don’t have any electricity?" Ralph didn’t know much about history, but he was pretty sure that a manor abandoned nearly a century ago didn’t have any wiring. And he wasn’t sure how electrical issues would affect their torches when they weren’t plugged in anywhere, but then again, he wasn’t sure why both their torches would go out at once either. “Maybe it’s the weather. It’s a bit chilly tonight, isn’t it? I think the cold drains batteries. Maybe that’s why it’s—”
“Ralph,” Chloe said suddenly, grabbing his arm. His brain short-circuited for a moment—had his friends been right before? was this really about to happen right here and now? he’d have to stop buying batteries altogether if this was where it got him—before reality caught up to him and he figured that no, she probably wasn’t about to kiss him, and in fact she looked rather frightened, so he should probably see what that was about.
“What is it?” he asked.
But she didn’t answer him. Her eyes were so wide he could see the whites shining in the faint moonlight coming in through the windows, and she was staring at something over his shoulder.
“Ralph,” she whispered again, lips barely moving, eyes still locked on whatever was behind him.
He turned around.
The ghost that didn’t exist was slowly melting out of the shadows in front of them, her dress trailing behind her as she silently floated down the hall. She was somehow translucent and solid at the same time and pale as, well, death. She looked just as she did in the portrait of the sad, severe woman hanging in the staircase, and as his heart dropped down to the soles of trainers, Ralph knew that he was looking at the Marble Lady, the ghost of Hardford Hall.
“Hide,” Chloe hissed, squeezing his arm with rather unnecessary force, all that not-a-malevolent-spirit talk apparently flying right out the window as the ghost floated towards them. “Hide!”
“Where?”
“There!”
She pulled him into the closest room and behind a decrepit sofa that smelled like mold and death. She smelled like vanilla and roses, which was a weird thing for his brain to focus on when they were probably about five seconds away from being murdered by a ghost.
The Marble Lady floated past the door, just a few feet away from where they cowered on the floor. Ralph didn’t dare breathe. He didn’t dare think. His legs were cramping up, but he didn’t dare shift them. Chloe was pressed into his side, a hand clapped over her mouth and her eyes shining wide and terrified above it. Her hair was falling over her shoulder again, and he could smell her flowery shampoo. Her elbow brushed against his. God, she was so hot. Even though they were moments away from death, Ralph could feel his face going embarrassingly red, and his palms were sweaty for entirely un-ghost-related reasons.
Stop it, he thought. Death. Dying. A ghost is going to kill you. They’re going to find your mangled corpse in the morning and never know what happened and she smells so good and her arm is touching your arm and you are literally about to die.
The ghost was gone by now, and she didn’t reappear. After what seemed like an eternity, Ralph felt he was finally able to move again. He tested it out, flexing first one leg and then the other. They had gone all dull and tingly like they did when they were falling asleep, but it was better to be asleep than dead.
“Let’s get out of here,” Ralph said as loudly as he dared.
Chloe’s eyes darted around as they got cautiously to their feet. After a moment of hesitation, during which no ghosts leapt through the door to grab them and drag them down to hell or whatever it was that ghosts did when they got ahold of you, Ralph fiddled with his torch. But it was shot, the batteries gone totally dead, and so was hers.
It was dark in the old house, darker than it had been just moments before in a way that the faint moonlight couldn’t entirely fix. Chloe jumped as the sound of a door creaking slowly echoed down the hall, and Ralph felt the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up as the air stirred coldly around them.
“Ah, sorry!”
“Sorry!”
Their fingers brushed together as they started into each other, and somehow they ended up holding hands. Ralph could feel a hot flush creeping up over his neck, but he was too freaked out to really be embarrassed. Or to fully appreciate that he was holding hands with Chloe Muirhead, a fact which the tiny part of his brain that wasn’t screaming you’re going to die! would surely berate him for later. But right now, it just was nice to know that there was someone else there in the dark with him, someone who was a real flesh-and-blood person and not a centuries-old ghost.
They hurried back down the hallway, back down the stairs. Ralph tried not to look at the portrait of Marble Lady on the landing, but his skin prickled nevertheless as they passed it by. It still seemed like she was watching them, her disapproving gaze following them as they practically ran past her.
He had never been so happy in his life as the moment they made it back down to the ground floor, which seemed like it might be a problem if the sight of cobwebs and broken windows and dust was that appealing to him. But he didn’t have a chance to properly appreciate the relative safety of the entrance hall before a torch was abruptly shined in his face for the gazillionth time tonight and a shout followed close behind.
Blinking spots out of his eyes and trying to bring his heart rate back down to a brisk jog rather than a flat-out sprint, Ralph saw that it was just Tom and Max and Rowland. They were accompanied by a harried-looking Graham, who seemed openly relieved to see his sister or at least openly relieved that he didn’t have to follow Ralph’s friends around anymore.
“Ralph! Where’ve you been?” Max demanded. “We said ten minutes, but you never showed. And then Graham showed up and said he couldn’t find Chloe. We’ve been looking all over for the pair of you.”
“Me? Where were you lot, anyway? We almost died and you were off messing around.”
“Died?” Graham echoed, his eyebrows shooting up practically past his hair. “What’re you on about? Chloe?”
“It was the ghost,” Ralph said, and Chloe nodded emphatically beside him. “We saw her.”
“Come off it, Ralph. You seriously expect us to believe the Marble Lady almost got you?” Tom asked, smirking like their near-death experience was one big joke as Max and Rowland exchanged amused glances behind him.
“She almost did,” Chloe insisted, running a hand over her arm and shivering slightly. “She was right in front of us. All white and pale, just like they say.”
“She came out of nothing,” Ralph added. “The hallway was empty, and then she was there.”
Now Graham looked positively alarmed. Ralph couldn’t tell if he was afraid of the ghost or if he thought the pair of them had gone stark raving mad, but either way he moved forward and gave his sister a careful once-over.
“I think we should get out of here,” he said, frowning at her. “Come on, Chloe, we have enough for our article, and it’s getting late.”
“I’m fine, Gray.” But she allowed him to take her arm and pull her towards the door.
As she moved away, Ralph was forced to drop her hand and belatedly realized he had been holding it all the while. He stood there stupidly for a moment, unsure of what to do with his now-empty hand. Hand. Hands. Holding hands. Chloe. He rubbed his palms on his trousers for lack of anything better to do. Had they been this sweaty the whole time or was it just now? Did she think he was weird or cowardly or—
Just as he was coming to this series of earth-shattering revelations, Chloe stopped and turned back to him and his friends.
“Stay safe, you lot,” she said by way of goodbye, then added, “See you at school, Ralph.”
It was hard to tell in the dark, but he could’ve sworn she was blushing.
“Um,” he said intelligently, “yeah. Bye.”
The Muirheads left, and the massive doors slowly creaked shut behind them. There was a beat of silence before the distant sound of a car starting up, then the faint crunching of gravel beneath tires that faded back into silence as they drove away.
“You ditched us,” Tom said. He heaved a long-suffering sigh as he shook his head sadly. “I knew you would.”
Max elbowed him in the ribs, laughing. “And we were messing around, yeah? Sounds like you were the one messing around with her.”
“Shut it!” Ralph bonked him on the head with the torch again. “I told you, the Marble Lady almost got us. Nothing happened!”
“You were holding hands,” Rowland said. “With her. And she said ‘see you at school.’”
As he said that last bit, he put on a fake girly voice, making it seem like an invitation to snog in a bathroom stall or meet up in the back stairwell during classes instead of a perfectly normal sentence. Which it was—despite Ralph’s years-long crush and his friends’ repeated teasing—because Chloe Muirhead would never be into him and she would certainly never make the first move even if she was.
Would she?
“She was scared,” Ralph protested. Rather ineffectually, it seemed, because his friends kept laughing at him and making stupid knowing faces at each other. “And of course she’ll see me at school. We’ll all be there on Monday.”
Max smirked. “But she’s not going to see me at school.”
“Because she’s a year above us taking her A-level in maths and you’re in the catch-up class,” Ralph pointed out, but even so he knew there was no talking his way out of this one. He grasped for a good way to change the topic of conversation. “Let’s just get out of here before we end up as ghosts ourselves. How about seeing that film, Tom?”
Tom shrugged, still smirking at him. “Sure, if popcorn’s your treat.”
“Popcorn’s your treat because I’m driving,” Ralph said. “Now you better get a move on or I’m leaving without you lot.”
Fishing the car keys out of his pocket, he threw open the door and walked away without looking to see if his friends were following. He was serious about making them pay for popcorn, but he was only half-serious in his threat. He wouldn’t abandon them to the Marble Lady—he still wasn’t sure if she truly was a harmless spirit or not, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let them find out the hard way—but he was ready to get out of there already.
“Aw, come on, mate!” Footfalls sounded on the gravel behind him, and then Rowland was grabbing his arm. “We’re only joking around. Don’t be like that.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” Ralph said, waving him away. “Just get in the car. I’m not joking about driving away without you.”
“You’re really serious about this ghost thing, aren’t you?” Max asked. They were at the car now, and he hopped in the passenger seat before one of the others could claim it. “You actually think you saw her?”
“I already told you I did. She was five feet from me. Now, what film do you want to see?”
“But there’s no way—” came Tom’s voice from the back seat, but he was silenced as Rowland jumped in with a quick, “Dunno, but I think there’s a new Jurassic World out now.”
“They’re still making those?” Tom asked, thankfully allowing himself to be distracted. “What is that, number four?”
“No, there’s way more than four,” Rowland said. “They’ve been making them since the nineties.”
“You’re thinking of Jurassic Park,” Max said, craning his neck over the headrest to look at the two of them in the back seat. “Jurassic World is a completely different thing.”
“But they’re all about dinosaurs, what’s the difference anyway?”
“What’s the difference? You’re asking me, what’s the difference? Are you out of your—”
As his friends argued about dinosaur movies, Ralph watched the manor house disappear behind them in his rearview mirror. For a moment, he thought he saw a figure standing in the upstairs window, watching them go, but then he blinked and it was gone.
He shuddered slightly. Max cast a look at him from the passenger seat, but he didn’t say anything more about it. Not right now, at least. Ralph knew his friends were never going to let him live this down come school on Monday, and he was equally sure that he was never going to go to Hardford Hall again.