Ghouls, Ghouls, Ghouls Read Online Free PDF Page B

tall.”
    I squinted into the gray morning light. “At least.”
    “How do we get up to the top again?”
    I pointed to a crude set of stairs carved into the side of the rock face. “We hoof it.”
    Heath shifted his backpack. “We need to keep track of how long it’ll take us to climb those stairs. We’ll have to figure that into the time it’ll take us to get down and get back across the causeway. The last thing I want to do is get stuck here until tonight when the tide rolls back out again.”
    “I’m with ya.”
    “M. J.?” Gilley asked from behind me.
    I glanced over my shoulder. “Yeah?”
    “What’s that?”
    I saw that Gil was pointing up and over to my left. I turned to look and noticed movement along the top of the cliff. It was still a bit too dim to see clearly, but I swore I saw a tall dark shape moving along the outer edge. “I have no idea. But whatever it is, I think it could be trouble.”
    There was a squeak behind me and the sound of a zipper. I looked again over my shoulder and saw Gil rummaging through his backpack until he located his magic sweatshirt.
    Several months earlier—before Gil and I had begun working on the TV show—I’d realized that Gilley was one of those rather unlucky people who is super attractive to spooks. For whatever reason, they love to haunt him and invariably, as he’s actually terrified of spooks, they end up torturing him. To keep him safe, I’d glued about a dozen refrigerator magnets to the inside of one of his old sweatshirts, and as long as he wore it, he would be far less appealing to mischievous or malevolent spirits.
    That first sweatshirt had had a few different versions since then, and the one he was currently shrugging into had triple the number of magnets, thus tripling its power and range of protection. Gilley, by nature, was never too careful when protecting what he treasured most in this world ... himself.
    “Need some help?” I asked him when I saw how he was struggling to take off his jacket, hold his backpack, and put on the sweatshirt all at the same time.
    “I got it,” he insisted, just as he dropped his backpack. Something crunched when it struck the cobblestones, and all three of us stopped to stare at the pack.
    “Uh-oh,” Heath said.
    “What was in there?” I asked as Gilley stared at his backpack in horror.
    “The meters,” he said weakly.
    I reached down and picked up the pack carefully. Glass tinkled inside. After unzipping it and moving aside a few items, I said, “Aww, Gil! You broke all three of them!”
    “It was an accident!”
    “Well, of course it was an accident,” I snapped. “But did you have to put the meters at the bottom of the pack where they were the most vulnerable?”
    Our electrostatic meters, which we use to isolate ghostly hot spots at all our haunted locales, were pretty fragile gadgets and we often lost one or two due to wear and tear on our investigations, but we hadn’t even made it to the island yet and a major piece of our ghost-hunting equipment wasn’t just gone; it was likely irreplaceable for the rest of the hunt.
    “I can get us some new ones,” Gil vowed.
    I scowled at him. “From where? The local hardware store?”
    “I can buy one or two online and have it shipped to us.”
    I sighed and handed him the pack, thoroughly irritated that he’d been so careless and stubborn when all he’d had to do was accept my offer to help. Still, as I looked into his guilty face, I softened. “Okay, buddy. We’ll work without them for now.”
    We got moving again and I was really relieved when the thin drizzle stopped and the clouds began to clear. At least we’d soon be dry. Not long after that, we were standing at the base of the cliff on the rocky shore of the island. I tilted my chin up while Heath, Gilley, and I waited for the rest of the crew to catch up to us. Heath shrugged uncomfortably. “You sensing that?”
    I nodded. “Feels thick as molasses.”
    “What feels thick as