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122 pages

English

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Whatever you know about ghosts - forget it. They don't haunt, go headless or vanish in white floaty sheets. But they do have a tendency to reek like foul, rotting flesh - something that Sethaliss, a soul-stealing Grey Ghost masquerading as the village undertaker, is somewhat proud of. With extendable cracking bones and a retractable extra finger, he's a master of deception and disguise, as well as the ruthless enemy of Creeven, where the good ghosts live. Coullian Cuill is a twelve-year-old who's lost his father, been abandoned by his mother and is living with his grandmother in a rear-end-of-nowhere village. When a strange letter arrives inviting him to compete for the role of Ghost Guardian Apprentice, Creeven's sworn protectors on earth, he has little hesitation in applying. With bruiser best friend Rawsy as his Assistant, Coullian is trained in everything ghost, from the tell-tale signs to spot a living ghost to the 3Gs (Gadgets for Grey Ghosts). When Sethaliss learns that Coullian is to be the next Apprentice, their relationship rapidly deteriorates - culminating in endeavours to chop off Coullian's head, attempts at poison, and getting his trusted Assassin to murder him. When all this fails, he then tries his bony hand at kidnapping... On All Souls' Night, when souls rise from graves to become good ghosts or Greys, Sethaliss is desperate to discover the secret entrance into Creeven. With time running out, Sethaliss gives Coullian an impossible choice: his life for Rawsy's, a soul for a soul. Coullian must prove what he's willing to do to save others - even after all he's lost - to show that he's got what it takes to become the next Ghost Guardian Apprentice. Coullian Cuill: Apprentice Ghost Guardian is a coffin-cracking adventure that will appeal to all lovers of scary, sharp comedy aged 10+

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Children's

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 mai 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781788032278
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

COULLIAN CUILL
APPRENTICE
GHOST GUARDIAN

RITI BRIDIE
Copyright © 2017 Riti Bridie

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Illustrations and cover copyright © 2017 Alan Graham, Section D

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Matador
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Tel: 0116 279 2299
Email: books@troubador.co.uk
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 978 1788032 278

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

For Helen, who’s always made me feel I can do anything

And Tom and Bridie, who now can
Acknowledgements
Section D – Phil, Alan and Sam – your creative genius is immense and your patience endless. Who knew we could create such wonder? Okay, you did!

That Lot – David Beresford and David Schneider – your incredible, infectious enthusiasm had even Sethaliss believing (me too, in grave-digging spades).

The family – dead and alive – my thanks to all, and that’s a lot of all! But especially, Adrian, Deirdre, Finola, Bernard, Helen, Martin, Tony and Fr Bernard.

Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue

PART 1
Devious Distraction
Life Stirs
Spade
Ashes and Dust
Fair Play
Off With Your Head
Fallen Angel
Open Invitation
Killane
All Things Ghost
Gadgets for Greys
Proof of Blood
Position Filled
Ghostdustrial Fortnight

PART 2
Wind of Warning
A Taste to Die For
Shadows Creep
Up in Smoke
Fatal News
Pain and Gain
Roof-Diving Party
Batsyard
Dead Already
Time to Go

PART 3
Dumpy-Lump
Shim Ghosts’ Reek
Corpses Rising
Graves and Grievances
Kick-Ash Granny
Murderer Anonymous
A Soul for a Soul
Last Breath
Light of Day
Awkward Enemies
Going it Alone
Soul Ache
Prologue
All Souls’ Night
Sethaliss swallowed the tongue.
Still warm, saliva still drooling, it slid down his throat. He savoured the moment. A trophy snack like that cried out to be indulged – or it might have, if it hadn’t been cut off.
Sethaliss could still taste the victim’s blood as he slurped it down. And that always got his Grey Ghost gases going. He opened the kitchen window, proudly wafting his black cassock to share his bowels-of-hell stench.
The scent of death carried on the cool November breeze. It always did on the Night of All Souls, when souls rose from graves to become ghosts and Sethaliss finally, brutally had the Apprentice murdered. Run right through by his best Assassin, slaughterer supreme, Aukram.
A sinister sneer teased Sethaliss’s newly veneered teeth. A Ghost Guardian Apprentice sworn to protect good living ghosts dies on the night ghosts rise to live – how horrifically, hilariously tragic.
He stared in the mirror – he did every hour. Unnerving green eyes and ridge-hard, sharp cheeks glared back. He was like the drawn last breath of a tortured life: long, deadly and painfully thin. He stretched out his bloodstained tongue, dabbing his finger to paint crimson streaks across his cheeks. It felt fiendishly furtive marking his kill like that – so he dabbed his face again.
PART 1
DEATH WALKS
1
Devious Distraction
One Year Later – Seven Weeks to All Souls’ Night
Sethaliss rapped his nails on the distressed pine table – wasn’t it great that even tables suffered distress – and wracked his decayed-to-mush brain for something to do.
He leant back in the wicker kitchen chair, which creaked like cracking bones. Breakfast wasn’t the same without his trophy snack. Devouring that tiny morsel of flesh from those he’d killed; so warm, so supple and way more filling than nibbling on a cold side of corpse.
Which was exactly how all his victims ended up: souls lying in graves, waiting to be converted to an afterlife of sin. All polished off by the master of killing himself. A ruthless, living Grey Ghost (if he did say so himself), masquerading as the village undertaker.
He summoned his chief undertaker, who, after finishing with formaldehyde for the day, switched to being his caretaker at night. Both jobs offered little distinction: each respectfully tended the dead.
“Fetch out my coat and hang it on the line, will you?” Sethaliss smiled at the honed accent he’d practised for years. A hint of Eastern European denoting suffering and survival, laced with a gentlemanly, elegant crispness.
“Grey one or black?” asked the caretaker, like it was a matter of grave importance, when he clearly doubted it was. His talent at blending into the background while relatives poured out their grief was the main reason he got the job – that, and his ability to talk in the hushed tones of a sermon-whispering parson.
“Grey one, I think,” said Sethaliss, sticking with his preference for all things grey. It was a tough decision given the warm forecast, but either way his coat had to be aired, otherwise they’d smell his rancid odour quicker than a second coming. And a respectable funeral director never went anywhere without his long, dark coat.
“Very well.” The caretaker clicked his heels, a habit Sethaliss found disturbing, which was probably why he did it. Sethaliss called him Henrick. It wasn’t his name, but it fitted him well, and Sethaliss’s assumed identity even better.
Sethaliss rose from the table, glancing – for the hundredth time that morning – into the mirror. A lifeless finger traced the central parting of his black splayed hair, a good style for his line of work. Wolf-wild eyebrows twitched over pale green eyes. Splendidly sinister, his best feature, when in normal body mode (extendable cracking bones and a retractable extra finger weren’t exactly suited to daytime living).
A defiant thread hung from the frayed hem of his black cotton robe. Around the house – shaded by partially drawn curtains and some sombre respect – he wore floor-length cassocks over his white shirt and black trousers that had been left to him by a priest. Not in his will. In the boot of the car Sethaliss had run off the road.
He picked at the hem and then broke off the thread. If only it were a new Ghost Guardian Apprentice’s neck. He rubbed his teeth until they sparkled. It was always easier to kill an Apprentice before they’d completed their let’s-guard-a-good-soul training. For Sethaliss, anyway, as fully-fledged Ghost Guardians got right up his dirt-caked nose, with all their stopping him from stealing souls and insufferable goodness. Sethaliss pulled a saint-like face and the top of the mirror cracked. He’d yet to meet one who didn’t make his centuries-rotten intestines squirm. Except there was no morbid chance of that now, seeing as he’d already murdered the last in the adult line.
But if he ignored that tiresome complication (and he was a glass half-full kind of slaughterer), let his dark imagination run wild, pretend a new Apprentice was out there somewhere, wouldn’t that make his grey squalid life complete? Nothing sent gaseous propulsions up and down his spine like murdering an Apprentice.
Sethaliss sighed, mournfully (he was good at that). There must be something he could do to darken these sickeningly sunny days of September, and in one of the quietest of villages, too. Sidling into its underbelly ten years ago had been such a genius thing to do. ‘Seth & Son’s Funeral Parlour’ was the perfect profession for a soul-stealing Grey Ghost (he didn’t actually have a son, but a family business went a long way in a rural community).
His eye caught the Grey Ghost Informers’ Calendar, which was impaled on the blood-red kitchen wall. “Now, there’s a thought,” he said to himself, tapping a gnarled talon across each day of the week. “What are all you hideously good ghosts getting up to right now?” His finger landed on today’s date, the second Saturday in September. Only weddings happened on Saturdays, never funerals, so he was as free as a soul-leaving-splattered-body bird.
The Greyhole Gruesome Fair, how could he forget?
“Grey my hole,” he scoffed to himself. He supposed they thought it funny to change the Hall’s name from Greyfell to Grey hole to make a mockery of him. So what if he stank to bum’s blazes, there was no need to get personal.
Of course, he wasn’t invited, but why let a trivial detail like that put him off? After all, he was a master of deception and disguise. He’d been living a lie since the day he’d left Creeven – that do-good world of ghosts. What other funeral director went around smiling?
He followed the caretaker into the hall, halting in front of the mirror. Even in the sallow light, he could see that his skin needed attention: a grey, sickly face only ever made people think of death, which was the last thing he wanted them to do until they met their end.
Sethaliss opened the wooden box on the hall side table. Three recently deceased animals lay on their backs, pinned to a black velvet cushion: a mouse, a toad and a vole. Each wore the same startled expression.
Which one today? thought Sethaliss.
He always liked to go to