The Girl, the Ghost and the Lost Name by Reece Carter

Author:Reece Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Usborne Publishing Ltd

Half an hour later, we’re still trudging through the forest. We’ve made our way around the back of Elston-Fright, and the ground is beginning to slope upwards. From somewhere overhead, I hear the hooting of a frogmouth – a night-time bird which, even though I can’t see it, I know has mottled and tawny feathers. Yellow eyes. A serious face.

Hoot-hoot. Hoot-hoot.

I’m not sure whether Girl and I have stopped fighting or not. I guess the fact that she was banished changes things a bit. And she did send Old Man with the warning about my heart, I suppose. But I still feel funny about it all.

Click-click-click.

“Is that right?” Girl coos, in the sugary voice she used to reserve for whenever she was wandering around the rock-that-doesn’t-exist’s boundary, talking to the water.

She would daydream and dance there.

She would make friends with the critters who lived on the reef.

“Two-hundred?” she says now. “That’s a lot of brothers and sisters, Simon. Your parents must have had their hands full. Wait…do spiders have hands?”

And then she giggles.

I make a huffing sound, except nobody hears me. Simon has been sitting on the shoulder of Girl’s oilskin for almost the entire time we’ve been walking, ever since I made the mistake of introducing them. I don’t know why it bothers me – but it definitely does.

“Traitor,” I mutter quietly.

(Hoot-hoot-hoot, goes the frogmouth.)

“Oh,” Girl says to Simon, sadly now. “I’m so sorry.”

She turns back to me. “Is it true?”

“Is what true?” I ask.

(As if I haven’t been listening in the whole time.)

“Simon says that his whole family, that…well, he says that Scraggleknee ate them. All of them. And he says that he would have been eaten, too, if you hadn’t saved him. He says that after it all happened, you invited him to live in the roof with you.”

I don’t reply.

“So…is it true?” Girl says.

“Yeah,” I say. “So what?”

Girl looks at me strangely. Not in a bad way, exactly. Just in a way that makes me wish she would look somewhere else. “That’s a different Corpse to the one I remember.”

“And what does that mean?”

“The Corpse I know wasn’t exactly big on animals. I don’t even remember you talking to them, to be honest. Let alone saving them from being eaten.”

“I talked to animals all the time.”

Girl raises her eyebrows. “Okay, Corpse. If you say so. But you do know that talking to animals is different to Po—”

I hold a hand up to stop her. “Don’t say it.”

And then I stare at my feet, feeling something like embarrassed.

“Maybe I’ve changed,” I say. “Did you ever think about that?”

“Honestly? No. But I’m glad to hear it.”

Girl’s answer annoys me.

Hoot-hoot.

“Where are we going, anyway?” I ask, changing the topic.

Girl has been leading the way. I tried telling her we need to head back the way we came, to the lighthouse, but she said there was no time. She said that we have to hurry. Still…it would be nice if Girl would tell me where it is that she’s taking me.

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