Page 75 of The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

‘Can you come down to the office a minute?’

‘Steepleton? Do you know what time it is?’

‘It’s quarter-past two in the morning,’ he said, still watching the icing sugar. The ghost was still there, just. He could feel his pulse squeezing right inside his skull, but the instinct to get out was fading more the longer the ghost did nothing sudden. ‘There’s something here you should see.’ He had to swallow, because he could taste the icing sugar, sweet but dry. ‘Right now.’

Vaulker came down still fully dressed. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Hold on, let me – find it again,’ Thaniel said unevenly, because he had just seen a flicker in the sugar. He tipped the rest of the bowl into the air. It furled at once around a shape. Arinori was still looking through the papers. They were government memoranda. The icing sugar clung more to the white of the paper than to the black ink, so the letters were outlined strangely. ‘Can you see that?’

Vaulker stepped around to see it better. ‘That’s … what in God’s name is that?’ He glanced at Thaniel. ‘Can it see us?’

Thaniel shook his head.

Vaulker clenched his hands, but he went up closer to it. ‘Hello?’

The ghost didn’t say anything, or show any sign it knew they were there. Thaniel and Vaulker glanced at each other, both of them waiting for it to turn and scream at them.

Thaniel blew softly and watched the sugar particles spin. The patterns were natural until they reached the ghost, when the motes veered across the outlined surface like they had been magnetised. He drew his fingertips through the shape and looked away to see if he could feel it. There was a tiny, tiny crackle. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been concentrating. They both jumped when the ghost moved, but not towards them, or not as if it knew they were there, only to the desk.

‘I should fetch my camera,’ Vaulker said unevenly. He didn’t move.

Thaniel drew his hand through the ghost again. The sugar parted and then moved straight back again into shape. It was hypnotic. ‘No wonder they were seeing things in the kitchen. Flour everywhere.’

‘But this can’t have been happening for months. We would have noticed,’ Vaulker murmured.

‘Would we? How often do you throw powder into the air?’ Thaniel had never felt so stupid. At Mori’s house, the little gardener, Hotaru, had seen ghosts in the particles of quicklime. The salt burners saw them in the smoke. ‘Jesus, and the fires. It’s the smoke. The servants lay the fires, of course they’re the ones who see what’s in the smoke.’

Vaulker drew his teeth over his lower lip. ‘What the hell do we do? Go to the mission church?’

‘I don’t … think it’s that kind of ghost.’ He brushed it again, and this time it gave him a static shock that made him clench his hand.

‘What was that?’ Vaulker asked tightly.

‘Electricity.’ Mori had said Yoruji was haunted in bad weather. Christ. ‘How long has the weather been stormy? Since November?’

‘Yes. Maybe the middle of November.’

‘Which is when the staff began to complain.’

Vaulker lifted his eyebrows. They both glanced at the window where the fire on Mount Fuji was still clear.

‘Iron in the ground all around Fuji, isn’t there?’ Vaulker said. ‘Was it you who said that was why this weather is so electrical? Something to do with electromagnetic something-or-others when the volcano’s active?’

‘The Met Office says that. I don’t know if iron in the ground could really cause all this, though, no matter how stormy the weather is. It would have happened somewhere before, wouldn’t it?’

‘Perhaps it has, perhaps that’s why some places are haunted and others aren’t.’

Thaniel dug his fingertips into his own shoulders again. Black handprints. One of them had touched him – shocked him awake with that static snap. His skin, all of it, as one organ, prickled.

‘Dad,’ Six said from the door.

He paced forward, into the ghost, to displace the last of the sugar. He would have shown it to her in daylight, but however clockwork-minded she was, it wasn’t sensible at two in the morning. ‘Nightmares, petal?’

‘No. There’s a fire outside.’

‘It’s on Fuji, it’s miles away.’

‘No.’ She pointed towards the canal. It was hard to tell quite how far away the fire was, but she was right. Vaulker’s reflection came up behind them too.