'I'll ... try to remember it.'

'Good man. Well, we'd better be going ...'

Ghostly gears went crunch. The car juddered.

'Drat the thing. Ah ... Be seeing you ...'

It rose gently, turned towards the east, and sped away and up ...

And then there was one.

'Well, I think I might as well be off;' said Mr Vicenti. He produced a top hat and an old-fashioned walking cane out of thin air.

'Why are you all leaving?' said Johnny.

'Oh, yes. It's Judgement Day,' said Mr Vicenti. 'We decided.'

'I thought that was chariots and things.'

'I think you'll have to use your own judgement on that one. No point in waiting for what you've already got. It's different for everybody, you see. Enjoy looking after the cemetery. They're places for the living, after all.'

Mr Vicenti pulled on a pair of white gloves and pressed an invisible lift button. He began to rise. White feathers cascaded out of his sleeves.

'Dear me,' he said, and opened his jacket. 'Go on, away with you! All of you! Shoo!'

Half a dozen ghostly pigeons untangled them- selves and rocketed off into the dawn.

'There. That proves it. You can escape from anything, eventually,' he called down. Johnny just managed to hear him add, ' ... although I will admit that three sets of manacles, twenty feet of chain and a canvas sack can present a considerable amount of difficulty in certain circumstances ...'

The light glinted off his hat.

And then there was ... one.

Johnny turned around.

Mr Grimm was standing neatly in the middle of the path, with his neat hands neatly folded. Darkness surrounded him like a fog. He was watching the sky. Johnny had never seen such an expression ...

He remembered the time, many years ago, when Bigmac had a party and hadn't invited him. He'd said afterwards, 'Well, of course not. I knew you'd come, you didn't have to be asked, you didn't need to be asked, you could just have turned up.' But everyone else was going to go, and was talking about going, and he'd felt like a pit had opened up in his life! That sort of thing was pretty awful when you were seven.

It looked much, much worse when you were dead.

Mr Grimm saw Johnny staring at him.

'Huh,' he said, pulling himself together. 'They'll be sorry.'

'I'm going to find out about you, Mr Grimm,' said Johnny.

'Nothing to find out,' snapped the ghost.

Johnny walked through him. There was a chilly moment, and then Mr Grimm was gone.

And then there were none.

Real night flowed back in. The sounds of the town, the distant hum of the traffic, filled the space taken up by the silence.

Johnny walked back along the gravel path.

'Wobbler?' he whispered. 'Wobbler?'

He found him crouched behind a gravestone with his eyes shut.

'Come on,' said Johnny.

'Look, I—'

'Everything's OK.'

' It was fireworks, right?' said Wobbler. His Count Dracula make-up was streaked and smudged, and he'd lost his fangs. 'Someone was letting some fireworks off, yes?'

'That's right.'

'Of course, I wasn't scared.'

'No.'

'But those things can be dangerous ...'

'Oh, that's right.'

They turned as a rattling sound started up behind them. Mrs Tachyon

appeared, pushing her shop- ping trolley; the wheels bounced and skidded on the gravel.

She ignored both of them. They stepped aside hurriedly as the trolley, one wheel squeaking, van- ished into the gloom.

Then they walked home, through the morning mists.

As Tommy Atkins had once said, things aren't necessarily over just because they've stopped.

There was Bigmac, for a start. Yo-less had gone home with him, and Bigmac's brother had been waiting up and had started on at him and Bigmac had looked at him strangely for a few seconds and then hit him so hard that he knocked him out. Yo-less said, with awe in his voice, that it'd been so hard that the word 'TAH' was printed in Biro on the brother's chin. And then he'd growled at Glint and the dog had hid under the sofa. So Yo-less had to get his mother out of bed to bring her car round to carry Bigmac's suitcase, three tropical fish tanks and two hundred copies of Guns and Ammo back to her spare room.

And there was the generous donation to the Blackbury Volunteers by United Amalgamated Consolidated Holdings. As Mr Atterbury said, it's amazing what you can do with a kind word, pro- vided you've also got a big stick.

The cemetery was already looking more lived- in. There were endless arguments between the Volunteers who wanted it to be habitat and the ones who wanted it to be ecology and a middle group who just wanted it to be clean and tidy, but at least it was wanted, which seemed to Johnny to be the most important thing.

It took Johnny a week to find what he wanted, and when he found it he took it along to the cemetery after school, when no-one was about. There was frost on the ground.

'Mr Grimm?'

He found him by the canal, sitting staring at the water.

'Mr Grimm?'

'Go away. You're dangerous.'

'I thought you'd be a bit... lonely. So I bought you this.'

He opened the bag.

'Mr Atterbury helped,' he said. 'He phoned around some of his friends who've got electrical shops. It's been repaired. It'll work until the batteries die, and then I thought maybe it'd work on ghost batteries.'

'What is it?'

'A very small television,' said Johnny. 'I thought I could put it right in a bush or somewhere and no-one'11 know it's there except you.'

'What are you doing this for?' said Mr Grimm, suspiciously.

'Because I looked you up in the newspaper. May the twenty-first, nineteen twenty-seven. There wasn't very much. Just the bit about them finding ... you in the canal, and the coroner's inquest.'

'Oh? Poking around, eh? And what do you think you know about anything?'

'Nothing.'

'I don't have to explain.'

'Is that why you couldn't leave with the others?'

'What? I can leave whenever I like,' said the ghost of Mr Grimm, very quickly. 'If I'm stay- ing here, it's because I want to be here. I know my place. I know how to do the right thing. I could leave whenever I want. But

I've got more pride than that. People like you don't understand that. You don't take life seriously.'

It hadn't been a long report in the paper. Mr Vicenti was right. In those days, some things didn't get a lot of reporting. Mr Grimm had been a respectable citizen, keeping his head down, a man at the back of the crowd, and then his business had failed and there'd been some other trouble involving money, and then there'd been the canal. Mr Grimm had taken life very seriously, starting with his own.

People didn't talk much about that sort of thing in those days. Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living.

Mr Grimm sat with his hands clasped around his knees.

Johnny realized that he could think of nothing to say, so he said nothing.

Instead, he wedged the little pocket television deep in a bush, where no-one, not even the keenest birdwatcher, would find it.

'Can you turn it on with your mind?' he said.

'Who says I shall want to?'

The picture came on, and there was the faint tinkly sound of the familiar signature tune.

'Let's see,' said Johnny. 'You've missed a week ... Mrs Swede has just found out Janine didn't go to the party ... Mr Hatt has sacked Jason from the shop because he thinks he took the money... and ...'

'I see.'

'So ... I'll be off, then, shall I?'

'Right.'