Free Out of the Depths by Cathy MacPhail Page B

didn’t want to but I had no choice.

20
    â€˜Mum’s picking me up at ten o’clock,’ I told Jazz when I arrived.
    â€˜Plenty of time for us to contact the dead,’ Jazz whispered.
    I had wondered all the way to her house if I was doing the right thing coming here. Maybe I would only be making things worse. But when Jazz said that, I laughed. The idea of summoning the spirits before ten o’clock was so ridiculous it chased all my fear away.
    While the boys got stuck into the cheesecake, Jazz and I cleared and polished her dining-room table.
    â€˜It has to be really slidy so the tumbler can move quickly,’ she said, very matter of factly, as if contacting the dead was something she did everyday of the week. Then she produced a whisky glass filled with squares of paper. She’d obviously been busy since she’d got in fromschool. Each square had a letter of the alphabet printed on it, and two other squares had the words YES and NO written on them. She put the tumbler in the middle of the table and placed the squares alphabetically in a circle around it with the YES and NO opposite each other.
    Jazz dimmed the lights and lit candles and placed them all round the room. Their light flickered and reflected on the glass tumbler and cast moving shadows on the walls.
    Adam’s face appeared round the kitchen door, he had a tea towel wrapped round his head like a turban. ‘I am the spirit of the tumbler … ask me anything. I am your servant.’
    I giggled, because he sounded more like a dalek than a spirit.
    He didn’t get the chance to say another word. Jazz was taking all this much too seriously to allow that. She whipped the towel from his head and ordered him to sit down.
    â€˜This is no way to treat the spirits,’ she said. ‘We don’t want to annoy them before we start.’
    Adam made a face at me and I giggled again. Couldn’t help it. This was going to be fun, nothing scary about it at all. Adam and Mac wouldn’t let that happen.
    I knew from the way they sneaked a glance at each other that they intended to have a laugh about the whole thing.
    At the start, it was hard to take it seriously.
    The bits of paper would blow off the table every time a door opened, and the candles kept going out.
    But, by the time we all took our places, and the house was silent, and candlelight illuminated our faces, it didn’t seem so funny then. I’d never done anything like this before. Maybe we were tempting fate even trying it. My feelings must have shown on my face. Adam leaned towards me. He whispered, ‘Don’t look so worried, Tyler. You don’t really think we’re going to contact the dead through this?’
    Mac just stared at me. I knew what he was thinking. That I would take over the whole thing, try to get all the attention he thought I craved.
    â€˜OK, fingers on the glass,’ Jazz said, and we all laid our index fingers lightly on top of the tumbler.
    â€˜Spirit of the tumbler … are you there?’
    The glass shot to the square that said YES.
    Jazz immediately took her fingers off the glass and yelled at Adam, ‘You pushed that!’
    He grinned. ‘No? It must have been the spirits.
    Honest!’ Then he laughed and half the squares blew off the table again. It took ages to pick them all up and place them back where they’d been.
    â€˜For goodness’ sake,’ Jazz said. ‘We’ve only got till ten o’clock!’
    Adam laughed again. ‘Spirits got to be back in their graves for then, eh?’ He laughed so much the rest of the paper fluttered off the table.
    â€˜Och, this is a waste of time,’ Mac said. ‘Let’s have more cheesecake.’
    But Jazz insisted. ‘It’ll work. You wait and see. You can laugh all you want, but it’s going to work.’
    So again, once everything was back in order, and Jazz had threatened the boys with no more cheesecake if