The Last of the Spirits Read Online Free PDF Page A

fall.’
    ‘You won’t fall, Liz. All you have to do is –’ Sam’s face became suddenly very still and serious.
    ‘Lizzie,’ he said slowly. ‘Don’t turn round.’
    Naturally, Lizzie turned round.
    Sam clamped his hand over Lizzie’s mouth again, but some of her scream still managed to squeeze through his filthy fingers to mingle with the unholy din of the ghostly choir around them. Floating just a few feet away, level with them but hovering above the alleyway they had walked through, was the ghost of a woman, her pale and terrible face contorted by sadness, her hands reaching out towards Lizzie.
    The ghost’s white throat showed a blue lesion, the mark of a rope clearly visible round her neck. Was she hanged, Sam wondered, or had she been driven by misfortune to take her own life? Her face was a portrait of hopelessness, framed in black despair.
    Lizzie almost shoved Sam from the wall in her urgency to access the drainpipe, and no rat could have scaled it quicker. She was over the sill and in through the window before Sam could blink an eye, and he needed no further persuasion to join her as the ghost threw back her head and let out a terrible, despairing moan.
    Sam slammed the window shut behind him. Lizzie was sitting on the rug nearby, sobbing to herself.
    ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You’re inside now.’
    ‘Those ghosts . . .’
    ‘They ain’t going to bother you in here.’
    Lizzie wiped her nose with her sleeve.
    ‘It ain’t that,’ she said with another sob. ‘They looked so sad, Sam.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ he asked. Although he knew exactly what she meant.
    ‘Their faces,’ she replied, tears dripping down her cheeks. ‘It was horrible, Sam. Horrible.’
    Sam shook his head and sighed.
    ‘Only you could feel sorry for a load of bleeding ghosts, Liz,’ he said. ‘What’s it to you if they’re sad? Maybe they deserve to be sad, eh? Maybe they was horrible people when they was alive.’
    She sniffed and rubbed her eyes.
    ‘But I think that’s why they’re sad. I think they want to help people now and they can’t. Like the ghost what was looking at the woman on the doorstep across the road. I think he wanted to help her but he couldn’t. And that’s why they’re sad. Cos they could have helped when they was alive. And now they can’t.’
    This was the longest speech Sam thought he had ever heard Lizzie give in the entirety of her short life. Why did she care? Why did she still care? It was a mystery to him as inscrutable as the heavens or the fathomless deeps of the sea.
    ‘Look, there’s a fire,’ he said after a while. ‘It ain’t much but it’s something. Go and warm yourself.’
    Lizzie settled herself down, holding her hands over the meagre embers. The pathetic fire seemed to throb, its red glow fluttering and faintly pulsating like a weak heart. Lizzie felt in need of comfort and asked a question she had asked many times before.
    ‘Tell me about the house by the river, Sam.’
    ‘No.’
    This was a response she had heard almost as many times.
    ‘Please . . .’
    ‘No,’ said Sam, more fiercely.
    Lizzie scowled into the hearth. The chimney made a low whimpering noise.
    ‘Just get warm, Liz.’
    ‘What about you? What are you going to do?’
    ‘Me?’ Sam said, pulling the bedding from Scrooge’s bed and lifting the mattress. ‘I’m going on a treasure hunt.’

Sam set off on a search of every grimy inch of Scrooge’s bedroom, even prising up a loose floorboard and standing on a chest to look at the filthy canopy above the old man’s bed, but he found nothing at all save for dust and cockroaches.
    He sat back, muttering a low, angry incantation of curses. It infuriated him all the more that this man was rich and chose to live in squalor. It was another kind of selfishness. What was the point of having all that money if he wasn’t going to spend it? It was a waste. He didn’t deserve to have it.
    But more to the point, where was it? Where was all the