Ghostly gears went crunch. The car juddered.

‘Drat the thing. Ah . . . Be seeing you . . .’

It rose gently, turned towards the east, and sped away and up . . .

And then there was one.

‘Well, I think I might as well be off,’ said Mr Vicenti. He produced a top hat and an old-fashioned walking cane out of thin air.

‘Why are you all leaving?’ said Johnny.

‘Oh, yes. It’s Judgement Day,’ said Mr Vicenti. ‘We decided.’

‘I thought that was chariots and things.’

‘I think you’ll have to use your own judgement on that one. No point in waiting for what you’ve already got. It’s different for everybody, you see. Enjoy looking after the cemetery. They’re places for the living, after all.’

Mr Vicenti pulled on a pair of white gloves and pressed an invisible lift button. He began to rise. White feathers cascaded out of his sleeves.

‘Dear me,’ he said, and opened his jacket. ‘Go on, away with you! All of you! Shoo!’

Half a dozen ghostly pigeons untangled themselves and rocketed off into the dawn.

‘There. That proves it. You can escape from anything, eventually,’ he called down. Johnny just managed to hear him add, ‘. . . although I will admit that three sets of manacles, twenty feet of chain and a canvas sack can present a considerable amount of difficulty in certain circumstances . . .’

The light glinted off his hat.

And then there was . . . one.

Johnny turned around.

Mr Grimm was standing neatly in the middle of the path, with his neat hands neatly folded. Darkness surrounded him like a fog. He was watching the sky. Johnny had never seen such an expression . . .

He remembered the time, many years ago, when Bigmac had a party and hadn’t invited him. He’d said afterwards, ‘Well, of course not. I knew you’d come, you didn’t have to be asked, you didn’t need to be asked, you could just have turned up.’ But everyone else was going to go, and was talking about going, and he’d felt like a pit had opened up in his life. That sort of thing was pretty awful when you were seven.

It looked much, much worse when you were dead.

Mr Grimm saw Johnny staring at him.

‘Huh,’ he said, pulling himself together. ‘They’ll be sorry.’

‘I’m going to find out about you, Mr Grimm,’ said Johnny.

‘Nothing to find out,’ snapped the ghost.

Johnny walked through him. There was a chilly moment, and then Mr Grimm was gone.

And then there were none.

Real night flowed back in. The sounds of the town, the distant hum of the traffic, filled the space taken up by the silence.

Johnny walked back along the gravel path.

‘Wobbler?’ he whispered. ‘Wobbler?’

He found him crouched behind a gravestone with his eyes shut.

‘Come on,’ said Johnny.

‘Look, I—’

‘Everything’s OK.’

‘It was fireworks, right?’ said Wobbler. His Count Dracula make-up was streaked and smudged, and he’d lost his fangs. ‘Someone was letting some fireworks off, yes?’