“The yellow-haired one is never quiet,” the voice says suddenly, suspiciously. Its owner has reached the top of the stairs, just on the other side of the door. He knows we’re here.

And then Germ, for some reason, startles and looks over my shoulder, not toward the basement door but over the top of the fort, and slowly she stands.

“Um, Rosie?” she says, not whispering anymore. “What does a ghost look like, exactly?” She sounds sick, panicked.

“Like, um, dead and see-through-ish,” I whisper back, eyes glued to the basement door, thinking, Everyone knows what a ghost looks like.

“Um. Rosie?”

“Yeah.”

“I think there’s more than one.”

I notice now, what she’s talking about, and I feel sick with fright. The glow isn’t only coming from in front of us, but all around us.

I swivel, slowly.

A woman stands in the parlor staring at us, a ball of yarn in her hands. A man is just behind her wearing a yellow rain slicker, sopping wet and pale, starfishes stuck to his arms. There is another woman by the couch, very old, all in white. And closest—just inches from us—is a boy with floppy brown hair and a dour expression, like he’s just tasted something rotten. He’s a dreadful sight: maybe thirteen or fourteen, wide brown eyes, a furrowed forehead, pale, his dark hair plastered wetly down around his ears, bluish skin. He glows with a bluish light that casts a dim glow onto the wall behind him.

We’re surrounded.

CHAPTER 5

The boy raises one finger and points at me, frowning. My heart pounds in my fingers, my feet, my ears.

“You,” he says, “can see us?” His voice is as clear as a bell, like a real living boy talking to us, but there’s nothing living about him—he’s pale and limp, a shadow of a person who looks half-drowned.

I swallow, and nod.

He stares at me for a long moment, and then he seems to crumple into himself, hanging his head and shaking it. “No,” he says. “No, no, no.”

Germ and I gape at him, exchanging a look of confusion and fear. I don’t know what to say, or if I should say anything, or if we should run. I eye the silver spoons we’ve dangled all over the room. Whatever they are supposed to do, they are not doing it.

The boy looks Germ up and down, uncertainly. Her face is pale white, her freckles drained. “You see me too?”

She hesitates for a moment, then nods furiously.

The boy lets out a long, slow sigh, his eyes full of sadness. “Well, I guess you’ve really done it now,” he finally says. Germ and I exchange another confused look.

Then a voice behind us makes us leap. “Done it now!”