With a freshly scrubbed face she started again. Foundation to cover her numerous freckles. Blush to cover up the foundation and match the complexion of the rest of her face. Maybe no mascara at all. The effect seemed a lot better than her last try. Zelda was determined to grab Groovy's attention this time. No slobbering dog was going to come between her and her man. At least that was the theory. A deep part of her mind wondered if going after Groovy was setting the bar too low. She could do better, couldn't she? She shook off her doubts and checked her hair. She's spent an hour straightening the kinky mess of her hair. It looked almost decent.
Zelda didn't have much choice in the matter of clothes. She'd packed four sweaters in brown, yellow, orange and grey, four pleated skirts in tan, ocher, gray and black and four pairs of knee socks, white, red, green and blue. It didn't matter how she mixed and matched, she'd still look pretty much like she always did. However a little work with safety pins had turned her yellow sweater into one two sizes smaller. With it on she almost looked like she had boobs. She'd considered attacking the collar of her sweater with a pair of scissors, give herself a bit of cleavage but the idea of chopping up one of her sweaters was a step too far.
Zelda took away the towel she'd wrapped around her neck to protect her clothes, stepped back, and appraised the final results. Alas, a life of reading mysteries instead of Teen Beat left her unsure. Well, it would have to do. With a deep breath she reached for the bathroom door. It was showtime.
Groovy was sitting on one of the beds in the boy's room. He had rented a game console from the hotel and was playing a game - something involving zombies and surfers. The Rottweiler was sprawled on the floor, between the beds, next to him. Zelda hitched herself up on the bed next to Groovy. She let her skirt rise up a little bit more than normal. Boys liked to look at girl's legs, right?
"How's it going?" she asked.
"Fine, fine." Groovy answered without taking his eyes off the game.
"Is the game any good?" she asked. All the advice columns said to show an interest in your boyfriend's hobbies.
"It's OK," Groovy said. So much for that idea.
"Where'd Curtis and Phyl go?" God, thought Zelda, this is lame. She'd never get Groovy's attention at this rate.
Groovy shrugged his shoulders.
"So it's just you and me..." she said huskily.
"Hunh," Groovy grunted. Alphonse sat up for a moment to glare at Zelda. It didn't growl but the dig bared its teeth for a moment before siting back down again.
Zelda humped closer to Groovy just to spite the dog. She slipped an arm through his and leaned against his shoulder. You want to do something. Just the you of us?
I dunno. "How bout we go for a walk, see a bit of the city before it gets too dark?" she asked. "There's a full moon out. I bet the park looks very romantic now..." Did she just say that? Talk about laying it on with a trowel! Then again, Groovy didn't seem to be responding one way or another.
"What do you say?" she prompted after a moment.
"Huh?"
"About going for a walk."
He looked at her confused as ever. She tried batting her eyes, since that's what girls seem to do in these situations. Instead of being taken by her earth-shattering beauty he asked, "You got something in your eyes?" Scratch the eye-battering, Zelda concluded. "No," she denied.
"Something about you looks different" he said, finally pausing his game and looking her in the face. Zelda's heart leaped. Success! Or at least the start towards success.
"Like what?" she hinted. "My hair? I tried straightening it out. I hate it's frizziness."
"Could be." He continued to look at her intently, with a puzzled frown on his face.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"I don't know. I guess I've seen you so long with frizzy hair that I'm not used to it being straight. I'm not sure I like it or not."
"Oh." Zelda's hopes were falling again.
"Where's your freckles?" Groovy suddenly asked. "What did you do with them?"
"I covered them up with some make-up. I wanted to see what it was like to not look like a freak all the time."
"You re not a freak. I like your freckles. They gave your face character."
"Really?" He liked her freckles? That sounded good to her.
"You know, Phyl's a great kid and she's really pretty but I never understood why she always put so much make-up her face. I like 'em natural."
"Really?" Zelda was confused. All her research had indicated that boys liked girls who wear make-up. Was her research wrong, or was Groovy different?
"Oh, yeah, I like em natural." Groovy leaned back against the front of the bed, then wrinkled his nose. "What's that smell?"
"Maybe it's my perfume," Zelda said. "I found a complimentary bottle in our room and thought I'd try it. Do you like it?"
"Eww, no. It smells like something crawled up inside a bus exhaust and died."
With great casualness Zelda scratched her nose, really a ploy to sniff the dot of perfume she's put on her wrist. She wasn't sure how much perfume one puts on at a time. Was it a splash or a dotting here and there. The fumes coming off her wrist were pretty strong. Maybe she over did after all. Damn! Another failure in her plan to seduce Groovy.
But as she moved her arm back to her side she caught the whiff of something that smelled like vulcanized eggs.
"Zeld', is that you, did you cut one?" Groovy accused.
"No!" she protested.
"Well, it wasn't me!" He edged away from her.
"Groovy..." Zelda caught a glimpse of the dog sitting on the floor next to Groovy. The dog was going "he...he...he..." like it was trying to cough up a hairball. Was it laughing at her.
She was going to say something more when the door popped open and Curtis stuck his golden-haired head in. "One of our alarms went off!" he shouted. "Come on. Maybe we've caught the monster already!" He dashed away. Groovy, Zelda and the dog raced after him.
Danny Phantom wove a large square around Amity Park's Memorial Park looking for a hint of spectral movement that would be the Kraken. But the monster was keeping out of sight. With a sigh he landed in the parking lot outside the abandoned Aquarium. He spotted Sam and Tucker sitting on a near-by picnic table, changed to Danny Fenton and joined them.
"Nothing, huh," said Sam as she tossed him an apple from her backpack.
Danny shook his head, polishing the apple on his sleeve. "Either's its too early in the night or last night frightened him into hiding out for a while." He took a bite out of the apple then reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. He flattened it on the picnic table. It was a copy of a street map with several numbered Xs marked on it. The Xs looked scattered at random on the paper but Danny had penciled in a vague spiral which seemed to center on the Aquarium. "I'm guessing he'll attack here," Danny said, pointing to a point beyond the spiral, "only that's the financial district and there's never anyone around after Five."
"You sure he's only trying to scare people away," Sam asked.
"He shows up, throws things around, shouts and stomps around until everyone's run off, then disappears." Danny said. "He doesn't seem to be actively trying to hurt anyone but doesn't care if people do get hurt. And he doesn't seem to be stalking anyone."
"So why is he trying to scare people away?"
Danny shrugged. "I doubt that we ll know until we capture him."
"Well, if he comes out to frighten people, I've got it covered," Tucker announced.
"Uh?" Danny grunted, his mouth full of apple. Sam raised her eyebrows. She had been practicing the trick of only raising one, like Spock, but so far hadn't mastered it.
"I've hooked my computer at home to a police scanner. The audio is being feed into a voice-to-text program and the text is analyzed for key words. Anything pops up I'll get an email alert in my cell phone."
"Cool. But I thought you said voice-to-text programs are really ineffective?" Danny wondered.
"They're getting better, but I don't need exact word-for-word fidelity, just key words like riot or attack or ghost. The analysis program ought to catch anything important."
"So we can just sit around here until something happens?" Sam asked.
"Yeah."
"That sounds boring. Let's go look at that tree the Kraken dropped on Danny last night."
The sun had yet to sink below the hills to the west of Amity Park. It shed mellow rays over the wooded glade as they walk around the Aquarium and the hundred yards beyond to where the tree had fallen. The Parks Dept. had been at work on it already. Most of the smaller limbs had been trimmed off and carted away. Danny supposed they'd have to bring in heavy equipment to cut up and haul away the truck and main branches.
The tree was a good yard across at its base and what remained of the truck was easily forty feet long. It's fall had opened up a good sized hole in the leafy canopy overhead.
"Man," Tucker summed up the feelings of all three. "That tree is huge! And the Kraken just dropped it on you?"
"Well, he sort of pushed it over." This was obvious from the amount of roots still in the ground. Those that had been torn out when the tree fell were thick and ropy. They stuck up in the air like knobby fingers.
"Could you do that?" Tucker asked.
"Oh sure," Danny lied confidently. "Look at all the surface roots. That tree would have fallen over in any good breeze."
That it hadn't fallen over anytime in the last hundred years ought to have negated Danny's assertion.
They walked back towards the Aquarium. Sam remembering that Danny had said there was a door open into the building, wanted to explore. Tucker, who generally tried not to stick his head into rattlesnake pits, was less enthusiastic. Sam left to get some flashlights when Tucker sighed in relief as his phone chirped with an incoming message.
"Police are scrambling to a disturbance at 15th and Miller," he said. "It's a Code G."
"Meaning what?"
"Ghost, of course."
"Miller's not that far away, well within the range of his other attacks. I'll fly there. You and Sam follow on your mopeds for back-up." There was a flash of light as Danny transformed into his ghost self and rocketed into the sky.
Sam arrived just as he was leaving. "Dang!" she swore. "I really wanted to see what the inside of that place looked like." She followed Tucker back to their mopeds.
Miller and 15th was less than a quarter mile away. It was an area on the edge of what Amity Park called their Cultural Center, meaning where the Main Library, the Opera House, several dance clubs and the community college were located. Miller hosted a sting of bars and cafes for people to wet their whistles after a stretch in High Society. Danny followed the screams of fleeing people to the Kraken. It had seized a trash can and was swinging it around like a baton. Danny exploded it with a burst of ectoplasm. He landed and reached for his Fenton Thermos. Flipping the lid open he called out to the monster.
"It's time for you to go back to the Ghost Zone. Terrorizing the mortals may be fun but I can t allow it. Are you going to go peacefully or what?"
For an answer the Kraken seized a pipe railing from an outside cafe, ripped it from the ground and hurled it at Danny. It happened so fast Danny had to duck and roll out of the way. "Why is it that nobody ever want to do things peacefully?" he muttered as he jumped to his feet and threw a blazing loop of ectoplasm over the kraken's head. He pulled the noose tight and tried to haul the creature in. The Kraken stagged a couple feet towards Danny, then found its footing and braked its slide to a halt. For a moment there was a tug-of-war between the two. Then the ectoplasm rope snapped and disappeared in a flare of light.
The Kraken threw a newspaper box at Danny before chasing after some fleeing customers. Danny blocked the box with an ectoplasm shield and scrambled to his feet. He launched himself into the air and rained a stream of fireballs on the monster s back. These seemed to bounce off with little effect.
"Dang!" Danny cursed. It s scaly body was more or less fire-proof.
The Kraken, he realized, tended to stay materialized, unlike a lot of other ghosts who slipped easily between substance and shadow. Maybe, Danny reasoned, he needed to take a more material approach to stopping the ghost.
He circled back to where the pipe railing lay on the ground. He picked it up, marveling on how much heavier and more awkward it was than it had looked when the Kraken had thrown it at him. Danny held it like a bat, choking up until he got a nice balance and took off after the monster. While it was busy shaking a patio table at people, Danny came up behind and swung the railing like a bat, swinging for the bleachers.
The pipe bent around the Kraken, barely knocking it off its clawed feet. The monster turned to face Danny and charged. Danny levitated into the air, over the Kraken's head. He was beginning to think he was in over his head, but if he could face down Vlad Plasmeus or Skulker, Dark Pariah and others, he wasn't going to let some man-gator ghost get the best of him.
The crocodile-headed monster suddenly soared into the air, chasing after Danny. This, Danny thought, was progress, since he could now lead the ghost away from this populated area to some place safer to fight in. He lead a zigzag course towards Memorial Park, keeping just far enough ahead of the creature to be safe but not so far ahead that it lost interest in pursuing him. When they got over the trees Danny turned and laced into the Kraken with a series of rapid-fire, concentrated ectoplasm blasts. The fireballs struck in a tight pattern over its belly. The Kraken roared in pain and charged after Danny with greater speed. Danny dodged and fired again. This time he struck the creature s back, which, clearly was more fire-resistant than his underside.
Danny looped to get under the Kraken and sent another wave of ectoplasm winging its way. The Kraken tried to dodge but couldn't avoid all the blasts. It roared in pain again, then took off to the west, Danny in close pursuit. He continued to send ectoplasm bolts with one hand while holding the Fenton Thermo at ready with the other.
The Kraken dropped under the tops of the trees and tried to lose Danny by whipping around and between the thickly grown trees. The Kraken, seeming unaware it could turn intangible, tried to avoid hitting any trees. Danny followed suit. Suddenly, while taking a turn to cut off the Kraken's course, Danny felt himself run into something like cobwebs. He was going too fast to stop and thought nothing of it. Until a weighted net fell out of the sky, closed in around him and yanked him out of the sky. He fell to the ground with an painful thud, sparks from multiple Ghost Deflectors woven into the net kept him paralyzed.
"W. T. F.!" he groaned before slumping back to the ground, panting.
The gang clattered down a flight of stairs and out the hotel's doors, across traffic and into the park on the other side of the street, then down a long block to the old low Aquarium building.
Overhead someone was playing with fireworks. Streaks of fire, some red, some green shot from one side of the sky to the other. Occasionally a streak would impinge on something invisible and burst into a shower of sparklers. The source of the streaks of fire seemed to move about the sky in erratic sweeping motion. Slowly it dawned on the four that they were watching some sort of firefight in the air between two invisible forces. At least invisible in the twilight gloom. Suddenly one of the fighter unleased a blistering series of blasts while swooping low over the abandoned building. They could hear a low rush of air and feel a breeze as something flew past them.
"Like, what was that?" asked Groovy.
A thud in the distance answered him. Curtis pulled out his cell phone and consulted it. The sprung trap had sent him an email when it was triggered. He pointed out a direction through the grove of trees surrounding the old building. Dimly in a street light could be seen a struggling mass on the ground.
"We did it," Phyllidia called. "We captured the Amity Park monster, and on our first night!"
"Not bad for an improvised trap," Curtis grinned.
"Groovy" said Groovy.
"Get this stuff off me!" an angry voice demanded.
Someone buried under the mess of netting struggled to his feet. Sparks flashed as he wrestled with the netting. Each flash bringing a yelp from the person struggling with the net.
"Let's see who we're got here," Curtis said, pulling a flashlight out of a pocket and shining beam on the net. There was a gasp from the foursome.
Staring at them from within the net was a medium sized boy with white hair and a black jumpsuit. There was a large "D" on his chest. But his eyes visible glowed in the dark a baleful green, and the light from Curtis's flash shone faintly through his transparent body.
"Rowst!" howled Alphonse, who had been sniffing around the edges of the netting and leaped for safety behind Groovy's back.
"Did that dog just talk?" the ghost in the netting asked.
The four kids stared at the ghost boy for a moment while he continued to struggle with the net. Finally he found an edge and quickly pulled it off him. "Whose bright idea was this? I almost had the Kraken but for you meddling - kids!"
The four kids had closed in together but otherwise hadn't moved a muscle. The flashlight shining in his eyes shook nervously.
"What with you guys? You act like you've never seen a ghost before?"
After a moment the shorter girl squeaked, "we haven't?"
"Well, welcome to Amity Park, home of ghosts, ghosts and more ghosts. I'm Danny Phantom."
"You're not the Amity Park Ghost?" the tall blond haired kid asked.
"I am "an" Amity Park ghost. I'm the one trying to put the Kraken back in the Ghost Zone and I almost had him until I ran into your trap."
"Phyl, your idea of tying those ghost deflectors into the net worked! What a great idea." the blond hair kid whispered, seemingly oblivious to Danny as he talked to the taller, smartly dressed girl beside him.
"Who the heck are you, and what are you doing in my town?" Danny called out, demandingly.
"We're the Clew Crew," the blond said. "We go around the tri-state area solving mysteries and uncovering fraudulent supernatural schemes. I m Curtis, This is Phyl, Groovy and Zelda."
"And news of the Kraken brought you here?" Danny asked.
"That and the hidden treasure," the other boy, Groovy, added.
"Treasure?" Danny echoed.
"The treasure that Phineas George stole. The shorter girl filled in.
Phineas George?
The bank robber? the shorter girl said, ending her statement with a rising inflection, as if she was asking a question. He stole $20,000 in gold coin from a local bank, was chased into the Aquarium and was captured when he tried to leave. He didn t have the money on him when he was arrested.
Really. Doesn t ring a bell. When did this happen?
1923.
Ah, that would be before my time. Well, good luck with that treasure thing. I m after the Kraken and if you don t mind, stay the heck out of my way. I m what you might call a professional. he added.
Danny turned and walked away from them. He was furious at them, less for making him lose the Kraken then for embarrassing himself by getting caught in their lame trap. He stopped and looked at the abandoned building speculatively. The open door in the rear was temptingly avalable for ingress. The Kraken was in there. Why it had set up a lair there was a mystery. Somewhere in there was a secret the Kraken was protecting. But what? He wanted to explore it at length but he didn't want these amateurs getting in his way.
"So you're really a ghost?" a voice said beside him.
If he had had a skin, Danny would nearly have jumped out of it. He spun around and found the shorter girl from the Clew Crew standing next to him.
What was she doing here? Danny pointed to his feet. Only he didn t have any at the moment. His body below the waist fainted away into a wisp of smoke.
The girl gasped but failed to run away.
"Shouldn't' you be helping them or something?" he asked, motioning back to where the blond kid - Curtis? - was shinnying up a tree.
"They won't notice I'm gone," she said with a note of finality that made Danny glance at the girl. They never do. He could see a lot better in the dark as a ghost so he could see the sour look on her face.
What s it like being a ghost, she asked.
Danny shrugged. It was a hard question to answer, since he wasn t a full-time ghost nor had he died or gone through any of the usual things that turn the spirits of the dead into ghosts. To avoid further unanswerable questions he answered with a question of his own:
"So you guys hunt ghosts?"
"No, we solve mysteries. The girl said. It's a hobby of ours. I mean we've investigated a lot of ghost sightings but it always turns out to be someone in a costume trying to scare people away so they can commit some criminal act. This is the first time we've actually run into a real ghost."
Danny shook his head. Since he didn't want to just stand there talking to this girl he didn't want to talk to, he started towards the door.
She trotted after him, puppy-dog fashion.
When he looked to his side and found that the girl was still there. Still looking at him with a bright-eyed expression and a smile that seemed almost a rictus. Was she sucking in her guts? Danny noticed. "I ran into the Kraken in there last night. There's a chance he's there again tonight. I'm going in to find him. It could get pretty dangerous in there. You should wait outside."
Danny raised his hand and filled it with a glowing ball of ectoplasm. he was through the door before noticing that the girl was still beside him.
"You can create fire?" she wondered.
"It's ectoplasm. Ghost are made up of ectoplam. It glows when exuded from our bodies. It s not flame."
"Wouldn't this work better?" she said, turning on her flashlight.
Danny was about to explain that he could see better in the dark than a mortal, then decided what was the point.
They went through the small door into the central area of the old building. He checked his breath for frostiness. Nothing. Nothing was setting off his ghost sense. Where ever the Kraken had gotten to, he wasn't here. Still he preferred doing his exploring alone. Since Danny was raised not to tell people to get lost he took the other course and asked "Where you guys from?" Not that he cared, but was just making polite conversation.
"Charity Harbor," she said. "It's in Massachusetts, near Salem. It should be called Despair Mudflats because that's what the harbor looks like most of the time. We do a strong business in Slime Worms and other stuff that grow in the mud but it kind of hurts the tourism business."
"Tourism?"
"Yeah. When the factories closed Charity Harbor took to tourism. Salem got all the attention for their Witch Trials but everyone knows that Charity Harbor had more witches and supernatural events than Salem ever had. We're in the Information Please almanacs as the most haunted place in America."
"And people come to see the ghosts?" Danny was moving slowly down the hall, pausing to read the placards on the many empty or near empty tanks.
"Yes."
"And you never found a ghost there?"
"Nope."
"Must be rough on the tourism."
"Exactly."
He paused at the crossing at the center of the building. "That's where I meet the Kraken last night," he said, pointing to one of the large tanks on the corner of the intersecting halls.
Zelda pushed up her glasses and looked into the corner. "That's where the Kraken attacked me last night," she said in surprise.
"Really?"
"Really! I've got the bruises and everything to prove it. Look!" She pulled up the side of her sweater to show Danny her darkening bruise.
Danny was more embarrassed to see part of her bra than the extent of her bruising. He turned away to inspect the tank the Kraken seemed to be haunting.
It was larger than most of the others and with windows on two sides since it was on the corner of two aisles. There was about six inches of water left in the tank and about a foot of mud. Limestone flags had been piled in the center to form a sort of hill. "Alligator Gar," he read off the placard. "Wonder what kind of fish that was?"
"The Gar is a family of relative primitive fish notably for their bony scales. The Alligator Gar has a long, flat snout filled with lots of tiny sharp teeth, making it look a lot like an alligator. Except it has fins instead of feet."
Danny looked at the girl in surprise.
"I can't help it, she said, clearly embarrassed by spouting off, I like to read."
His mother, Maddie Fenton, was easily the smartest person Danny knew. And his sister could probably teach Freud a thing or two about psychology, so Danny was used to intelligent women, but not women who didn't want people to know they were smart. "So it could be hanging out here because of the family resemblance?" Danny joked, hoping to make the girl feel better.
"Or it could be protecting a nest? Animals get really aggressive protecting their children."
"Ghosts don't have children," Danny said.
"How sad."
"Well, post-life, there's not much need for children." Danny said. "You know, it may not be this tank that it's protecting. It could be that the Kraken doesn't want us to go down either of these two corridors. Why don't we go down this one and see what's there."
Zelda swung her flashlight down the side corridor. It looked like the hall they had already come down: Arched, echoing brick walls, rows of tanks set into the wall, a knee-high center wall running down the center. A couple trash receptacles. That was all.
They walked in silence for a minute.
"So you and your friends go around Charity Harbor exposing all these frauds while the city has been trying to build up the city's reputation as 'the must haunted city in America'?" Danny asked. The girl nodded.
"I bet you're well liked there?
The girl answered with a non-descript grunt.
...And now you're on a road trip to bother someone else."
"You make it sound like they were trying to get rid of us."
Well, weren t they? I mean you look like high schools. Doesn t that make you a little young to be driving across the country on your own? What kind of parents would let their kids do that? Danny was about to add that his parents never would but remembered in time that he was in his ghost form now and as a ghost he had no parents.
I think our parents trust us to do the right thing when we re alone.
That s not what I meant, Danny said. You re going off to look into trouble. Last night you got beat up by the Kraken, but the Kraken doesn t appear to being trying to hurt people, only scare them off. He could have broken bones, maybe even killed you if it had been really vicious. I can t believe any parent would let their kids poke their nose into that kind of trouble. Parents are their to protect their kids. I don t know. It just seems weird that they let you go around doing this stuff.
The girl stopped to look into one of the empty fish tanks. Danny couldn t see anything of interest in it, then noticed that she was blinking rapidly. Trying to stave off tears? He shouldn t have been so rough on her, he decided guiltily. Obviously she enjoyed going off doing this stuff. It wasn t right for him to success that her parents didn t care about her. And it wasn t like Danny hadn t gone behind his parents back at times to go ghost-hunting. He certainly knew the feeling to doing things on his own. Of being his own person. But how to apologize to her?
What makes you think that stolen bank money is here? he asked instead.
The girl cast a swift glance at Danny then took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Well, she began, turning around from the fish tank, "According to all the newspaper accounts at the time Phineas George went in here with his bank loot but when he was caught coming out he didn't have any of it on him. He had the empty bank satchel on him but it was empty."
"Surely they looked for it."
"Numerous times."
"And found nothing."
"Not a thing," the girl said.
"What makes you think you'll have better luck than they did?"
"We're pretty good at finding clues that no one else ever noticed."
Danny thought that was pretty egotistical but looking at the girl he couldn't see anything vain or egotistical in her expression.
"So what's it like being a ghost?" the girl asked unexpectedly. You never did answer me before.
Danny had hoped she had forgotten that question. He decided to answer her question with a question. "What's it like being alive?"
"You know... Do you eat, sleep? I don't know, play, have fun, have friends? Do you have a girlfriend?" The last sort of blurted out.
"Are you flirting with me?" Danny asked.
"No! No... I couldn't... I don't know the first thing about flirting," she protested, stepping back from him. Danny suspected her face was beat-red at the moment.
They were at the end of the corridor, about to turn back the way they came. There was a fire exit door on the end wall. A sign there warned that an alarm would sound in the door was opened.
As they paused before making the return journey Danny realized that he liked this girl. She was short and dumpy, wore horribly ugly black rimmed glasses but she was smart, like Sam, Independent, like Sam, she had a subtle sense of humor, like Sam. He didn t recognize her was wounded emotionally or that in that she was also a lot like Sam. She had been flirting with him, even though he was in his ghost form. Who wouldn t like a girl who was flirting with them?
Let me show you something I can do that you can't," Danny suggested, embarrassed that he had embarrassed the girl. "Take my hand."
He held out his hand and she tentatively came closer and touched it. Danny closed his fingers around hers and exerted intangibility along his arm and through her body. He floated off the ground a little and as she gasped to find herself in the air, floated through the closed door and out into the moonlit night. There were some cement steps leading down from the building. Danny settled down there, returned to materiality and sat down, pulling her down with the hand he still held.
"You walked through that wall!" she gasped.
"And we flew. If only just a few feet. As long as we touch I can make you invisible, intangible, and weightless."
"Oh! my! god!"
"Neat trick, eh?"
"Oh, you have got to fly me to the moon!"
"I can't fly that high. But I could take you up a couple miles. It gets kind of cold up there, though."
She was going to say more when she heard someone calling her name. "I'd better get back," she said reluctantly. "My friends are calling. Usually when they notice I'm not around it's because I've been kidnapped. i don't want them to worry."
"Sure," Danny agreed and stood up. As he did so he noticed that his breath had suddenly turned to fog. His ghost sense! He looked u just in time to see a black featureless figure push against a statue built into the roof of the building. "Look out!" he shouted as it began to fall directly on them. He give the girl a hard shove while he rolled out of the way in the other direction. Instincts die hard and in the panic of the moment Danny forgot that he could have turned intangible.
The masonry hit the ground with a hard smack, shattering on the steps they had been sitting on moments before. Zelda screamed as she tumbled down the steps.
Danny zoomed up to the roof but whoever had pushed the statue was already gone. That was fast, he thought. He wondered if it had been the Kraken?
He flew back to the ground. By that time the other members of the Clew Crew and run up. "Zelda," the surfer kid was shouting. "Like, where are you?"
"Here!" a muffled voice came from somewhere in the darkness.
"Zelda?" the blond called out, shining his flashlight in the direction her voice had just come.
"Curtis?" The voice seemed to be coming from the tangle of rosebushes in the corner of the building.
"Zelda?" he repeated.
Oh God, it s horrible! Zelda exclaimed from within the rose bushes. How did I get in here? Can you get me out?
Uh Curtis looked at the overgrown mass of thorny bushes. There didn t appear to be any way through except by tearing through the tangle.
"I'll get her," Danny said, went intangible and walked into the mass of thorny bushes. He found Zelda a moment later - at the bottom of what must have once been a reflecting pool. There were cement walls keeping the roses from encroaching and a three foot drop into a foot of water and an unknown depth of mud. Zelda looked like a drowned rat and was a mad as a cat getting a bath.
"Why did you push me in here!" she shouted.
"I pushed you out of the way of a falling statue. I didn't mean to push you in here. In fact I don t think I pushed you hard enough to fall in here. Come on, take my hand and I'll get you out of here."
She looked at him resentfully before putting her hand in his. Danny went intangible and floated them out of the muddy reflecting pool and through the torn bushes to where her friends were anxiously waiting. Phyllidia whispered an oh my god, as she saw Zelda float through the rose bushes, inches above the ground.
"What happen? Curtis wanted to know, so Danny explained about the falling statue.
"Was it the Kraken?" Phyllidia wanted to know. Danny had to admit that he wasn't sure.
Just then Alphonse wandered in. Danny was surprised to realize that the dog hadn't been with the others before now. The dog race up to Zelda and sniffed her reeking, mud soaked skirt before trotting back to Groovy, turning around and looking her way again, the dog barked, ruff-ruff-ruff, almost like it as laughing.
They went over to look at the fallen statue. It had left a spiderweb of cracks on the steps where it had landed. Had the Kraken pushed the statue over to fall on him, even knowing he was a ghost? The Kraken tended to favor physical attacks. Or had it pushed the statue onto the girl, Zelda? Had it tried to kill her or just scare her? Looking at the path she took falling into the rose bushes had Danny wondering, too. It was just too far for her to have stumbling from his push. He hadn't pushed that hard, even though, as a ghost, his strength was greater than normal.
Danny went to find Zelda. She was dabbing at her face with a hand wipe and a bottle of water that Phyllidia had fished out of her purse. She tried to brush as much of the muck from the pond off her clothes and had left a sizeable pile of it in a circle around her. As she wiped her face Danny noticed freckles coming out on his skin, like some sort of magic anti-eraser. It took him a moment to realize that they had been hidden under make-up.
"After I push you out of the way, did you feel any other ghostly presence?" he asked.
"God, I must look like a mess."
"At least you re not bleeding," Phyllidia offered. "Oh wait, you've got blood all over your arms..."
Zelda looked like she was on the edge of tears. Danny didn't have any ideas what to do about that so he pressed on with his question. She gave her arms a disgusted shake, dislodging yet more gunk. "How should I know, she snapped. I was too busy trying not to land on my face!
Did you feel a second push or something?
Zelda put down the filthy wipe and turned an angry face at Danny. After an long moment she answered. Maybe. I don;t know. I was getting my balance when I did seemed to trip over something, but maybe I was pushed instead and that's what carried my over to the bushes."
"Did you see anything?"
"it all happened so fast." she complained. "Wait, it seemed like for an instant while I was being pushed something blotted out the stars."
"What did it look like?"
"Nothing. It was just a dark blot."
"No scales, no crocodile's teeth or any of that stuff?" Danny wondered.
"I'm sure I would have remembered that if whoever pushed me had had them."
Zelda wiped what mud she could off her glasses and put them back on. She looked around at where the statue had fallen, saw the size of the statue laying there a few feet away from the stairs. It was nearly as big as she was. It took a moment for it to sink in then suddenly her knees trembled, she wobbled a bit then flung herself on Danny, mud and all, clinging with her arms around his neck. With a sob she whispered, You saved me!
Danny caught her around the waist to hold her up. As he pulled her up she tightened her grip around his neck. Just as he was thinking things were getting out of hand he heard a singular question, in stereo.
Who s that girl! two people asked at the same time. Danny looked to Curtis who was the louder, closer voice. He was pointing to the parking lot where Sam, perched on her moped, was staring at Danny. She looked shocked and outraged.
This can t get any worse, Danny thought. Then Zelda kissed him.