... . ☁ . ☁ . ☁ . ...

"Which ghost is it?" Haley asks Olive as they pull their boots on. "Which one are you still looking for, I mean?"

Olive scrunches her face as she figures out how to describe it. "It's big, kind of blobby. Almost human-shaped, like... like if you drew a human with your eyes closed. Kinda transparent-looking, I dunno."

"You're describing most of them," Haley points out.

Bree laughs, standing just outside on the patio. "If you find anything that looks like that, we'll probably want to bring it back to the inn."

"It was the first one that got out," Olive remembers. "It was already standing by the door."

She's not how she's sure, but she is. Even though the ghosts mostly look the same – big blobs, some more human-shaped than others – they all feel unique. Some residue of personality in their blank-eyed faces, in their postures and movements. Some holdover from when they were individual living people with friends and memories and dreams.

"It's the one that was staring at the 'DO NOT PROP THE DOOR' sign," Olive says.

"Ahhhh, already planning an escape route, I see," Haley says, dragging her vowels. Olive recognizes it as her sister's detective voice.

Haley and Olive follow Bree outside. They walk across the patio and onto the grass, past the garden, where clumps of vegetable shoots slump over, heavy with droplets from this morning's rainstorm. Olive has an urge to gently pat the droplets off each of them.

Poor things, she thinks. They look a little pathetic, leaves drooping like sleepy little arms. They're strangely cute.

They walk past the garden and along a thicket of blackberries that Haley's long afternoons of lopping have barely made a dent in. Haley notices from here that the roof looks easily climbable. She makes a mental note to scope it out later. Nothing better than a good roof for reading and avoiding people.

They pass the shed where Devon is putting all of his weight against a badly-rusted handle. He and Haley pause to shoot each other nasty looks.

They continue past the tool shed, past the coop of gently clucking chickens, and the girls discover that the Butler's property goes much farther than they had realized. They walk along the forest's edge until they reach a slender, winding trail that creeps beyond the thicket of blackberries and into the trees.

Haley and Olive expect the trail to lead them straight on into the forest, but after a few minutes of crashing clumsily through the underbrush, they emerge into an unexpected clearing in the woods, large and unkempt, blocked from sight of the house by the ever-growing wall of blackberries and ivy.

The clearing looks like something out of a faerie tale: a large, perfect circle of dirt like the floor of a circus tent. The dirt of the clearing, once trodden smooth by foot traffic, is being reclaimed by ferns and wild grasses, except for a crumbling pile of ashy wood in the center. Old, wrought iron lanterns stand guard against the forest, cobwebbed and covered in moss.

Surrounding the clearing are three concentric circles of sculpted rock, rising from the ground like shark teeth. It's only when Olive accidentally kicks one of the stones that she realizes – bent over and holding her stubbed toe – that it's a gravestone.

"Why does it look like we're in an abandoned carnival?" Haley asks, turning in a slow circle.

"Not a carnival, a graveyard." Bree says, amused. "Sometimes I bring my friends over here for bonfires. Don't tell Lila, though."

"There's a graveyard right on the other side of the inn?" Haley asks.

"Seems like a bad place to put an inn..." Olive mumbles.

"Is this where all of the ghosts come from?" Haley asks excitedly.

"Kind of. Some of them, at least. I mean, if you were a ghost, where would you think you were supposed to hang out?" Bree pauses to brush leaves from the surface of one of the headstones. "But I think this is where the idea for the inn came from. Of having a place for ghosts to hang out and... process."

They walk slowly past the clearing. Olive looks for any sort of engraving on the headstones, but they are clean; either the crawling vegetation and heavy rains have eroded the stones, or they were never engraved to begin with.

"Before this place was an inn, it was just a graveyard," Bree says. "But then it became a little too haunted for the stewards. So they shut themselves inside the house and never went outside. Died in there, I heard. The next people who took it over turned it into a zoo."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"A zoo?"

"Like a ghost zoo, yeah. Super spread out, ghosts corralled into little fenced-off areas. Ghosts wandering around all over the place. When Lila took it over, she decided what the ghosts needed was company. As far as I can tell, they don't really talk to each other. But maybe it does make them feel better to just, like, be nearby."

"What was it like before?"

"I wasn't around to see it," Bree says. "I only started working here a few years ago. We're talking, like, a century ago." She pauses thoughtfully. "I said it was like a zoo. That's not quite right. A better word is 'prison.'"

Old lanterns hang from the branches above their heads. Haley imagines ghosts floating around, flickering in and out of the trees.

As they keep walking, it becomes increasingly obvious that this place is older than Haley and Olive realized. The property continues beyond the clearing, laid out haphazardly as if it were constructed by a hundred different hands, each with a hundred different ideas of what the land should look like.

They pass unused sheds and lean-tos grown over with ivy. Some of the sheds are rotted from the inside-out, smothered to death by moss and mushrooms. Some of the sheds have little dirt paths leading up to their doors; some seem to grow right out of the woods. There's a little forge that a previous owner must've used to repair tools; the basin of the forge is a marshy puddle.

Haley can't believe she missed all of this when she was first exploring; she thought there was nothing beyond the fence. Eventually, it becomes clear that they've finally reached the end of the Butler's property – the stamped-down vegetation and ramshackle outbuildings give way to fallen-down trees and a thin, steep trail through the woods.

It feels good to move around. Haley and Olive never got a lot of opportunities to hike, being from the city. Sometimes, Mom and Dad would take them out to a state park to rent kayaks or stomp around on a straight path dusty with a hundred-thousand footprints. Here, Haley's amazed that she can just walk out her backyard and straight up into a mountain, where the paths are wild and the vegetation encroaches on all sides.

They see nothing out of the ordinary. No signs of a missing ghost – not even so much as a squirrel. The woods are eerily quiet, though they're far from still. Sunlight flickers through gaps in swaying leaves, painting a mosaic across the ground. Branches clatter and leaves shimmer, moss snakes in the air like kelp in a current.

Haley and Olive are surprised when the trail takes a turn and they emerge onto the same dirt road they'd driven up with Mr. Westbrook when they first arrived at Echo Valley.

"Bust," Bree says. She doesn't sound surprised. Olive is suspicious that Bree just took them away from the house to avoid another Haley-Devon fight. "Maybe Neil found it somewhere in town."

Olive imagines Neil putting up Lost Ghost, Please Call posters on stop signs and shop windows.

"Do people in town know about the ghosts?" Haley asks, huffing between words. The road's getting steeper with each stride

"Duh," Bree says, looking like she's hardly exerting herself. "They're kind of our biggest tourist attraction. People come from all over to say one last thing to a family member, or an old flame... we get a surprising amount of people coming to try to talk to deceased celebrities... a few people come to try to prove that someone's not actually dead. We have a few people in town who handle the tourists who become a problem. Mostly it's just sweet people who want to lay flowers."

"Oh," Haley says. "The first time we came here, it was so our parents could show us that ghosts aren't dangerous. We don't have a lot of ghosts where we're from... almost none, actually."

"Not a very magical, spiritual place, the city," Bree agrees.

"But they are dangerous, aren't they?" Olive asks. Seeing the way Bree looks at her afterward makes her feel crazy for asking. "We're all-hands-on-deck looking for one ghost that got out of our sights, like we're magicians that lost a tiger."

Bree doesn't answer for a moment. "Lila wouldn't like it if I told you what I think," she says. "Probably best to let you ask her that question."

She says it matter-of-factly, without any resentment. And then she doesn't say anything else. They walk in silence until they get to the house, circle around to the porch to take their boots off, and issue a collective gasp upon seeing the garden.

Neil greets them with an exasperated wave, hands on his hips, and gestures toward the ruined crops.

The garden is devastated. There's paper strewn all over, looking like it was ripped straight out of a book. Olive picks up a page and reads it: Tomatoes soak up sunshine like water. Make sure to plant in your sunniest location in the garden.

"A gardening book?" She asks. Sure enough, all of the pages describe different fruits and vegetables, some with little watercolor pictures.

The pages are ripped up into little shreds. Bits of paper flutter in the breeze, stuck into the ground, caught in the grass, pinned under rocks, everywhere. The gutted hardcover of the book, disemboweled, lays open in the center of the garden.

All of the plants have been dug up. The tomato sprouts are collected in a clump atop a soggy page from the gardening book. The snap pea vines have been pulled out one by one, disentangled from their trellises, and laid out in the sun like clothes left to dry. Beneath each of their dirt-crusted root balls squirms a piece of paper, flapping to get airborne. The baby roots of just-forming carrots are wrapped up in pages like tiny swaddled babies.

Neil is looking at the mess like he doesn't know where to start.

"I'm guessing you didn't have any luck?" Bree asks. Neil shakes his head and sits down, sighs inaudibly. Bree slumps to the ground as well, putting a hand to her head. "Devon's going to be so frustrated. He planted most of this."

Neil points up at the sky. The clouds are gathering above the woods, moving like a tide. Rain is brewing on the horizon.

"I'll keep looking," Bree says. Neil nods, and they share another quiet, secret glance before Bree heads back into the woods. Olive's been noticing their secret looks all week; it's been hard not to feel left out.

Olive says to Haley, "Maybe you should go back inside before Lila poofs and finds out you left."

She turns to her sister, who is staring at the plants with a heartbroken expression.

"Haley?"

"Yeah, I'm going," Haley says glumly. Olive briefly catches her eyes, but her sister looks away quickly and goes inside to be reprimanded.

➵ . ➵ . ➵