Obsidian Pebble Read Online Free Page B

couldn’t see anything and all he could hear was Ellie’s steady breathing behind him. Finally, after what seemed like an age, he put his finger on the torch’s switch and was about to flick it on when it happened. Inches away, they heard the footsteps again.
    â€œSecond door,” whispered Oz urgently, and reached out his hand to feel for the handle. “Ready? On three—one, two…”
    â€œGo,” Ellie and Ruff said in high-pitched unison.
    Pulse accelerating madly, Oz flicked on the torch and thrust the door open. He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. An apparition? Something spectral and ghostly? At the very least a creeping thief in a balaclava… But what he wasn’t expecting was what was revealed to the three of them as they stepped across the threshold. In the stark light of the torch beam, the room, in which seconds before they had all distinctly heard footsteps, was completely and utterly empty. Oz frowned. Behind him, he heard Ruff let out a sigh that was a mixture of relief and disappointment.
    They scoured the walls, floor and ceiling in the torchlight but found no sign of any footsteps in the dust that lay thick and undisturbed on the floor. Ellie took half a dozen pictures, but all they showed was more yards of dark paneling with huge cobwebs dangling from the dusty corners like net curtains. There was no other door in or out, nor any sign of occupation. And somehow, that made it worse.
    â€œWhat time is it?” asked Ellie as they stood near the window that looked out onto the garden. She shivered, but Oz wasn’t sure it was entirely from the cold.
    â€œFive past midnight,” Oz said, squinting at his watch.
    â€œLooks like we’ve frightened it off.” Ruff shone his torch into the four corners of the room one last time. There was no denying the relief in his voice.
    â€œIt? Aren’t ghosts supposed to be the spirits of people?” Ellie said.
    â€œYeah,” Ruff said as if he was talking to a three-year-old, “but it hasn’t left a name and address, has it?”
    Oz breathed on a window pane and drew a ghostly shape in the misty circle. “Well, if it really was a ghost, then the answer as to who it was must be here at Penwurt somewhere.”
    â€œOkay. So where do we start?” Ruff asked.
    Oz looked at Ellie and they said in unison, “The library.”
    They hurried out and Oz sensed that the others, like him, were glad to be away from that room. They made their way back to the main house without speaking and went straight to the spiral staircase that led upstairs. But when they got to the second floor landing, Oz put up his hand and peered upwards.
    â€œThere’s a light on in Caleb’s room,” he whispered.
    â€œAnd I can hear voices,” Ellie added.
    There were voices. They were low and barely audible, but the rise and fall of the intonation suggested that a discussion was taking place. Oz crept forward and called out, “Ummm, hello? Anybody there?”
    The voices stopped. There was the scraping of a chair on block flooring and a voice said, “Oz, is that you?”
    â€œCaleb?”
    Caleb Jones’ rooms were on the same floor of Penwurt as Oz’s, but on the other side of the spiral stairwell that separated the two wings. Caleb had been renting those rooms for almost as long as the Chambers had owned the house. It was pure luck that he’d been looking for somewhere at exactly the time that Oz’s mum and dad had started looking for tenants. And as a colleague of Dr. Michael Chambers in the history department of the university, he’d also been the first to hear that they were renting. But he was not alone in his sitting room that night. At the table with him, and looking her usual misery-guts self, was one of the other tenants, Lucy Bishop.
    â€œWhat are you three doing wandering around at this hour?” she said frostily. She was a small, thin girl