The vampire's manor house was shrouded in an unwelcoming gloom on even the brightest days, a grim darkness that attracted all sorts of unnatural and unlovable beasts. Shadows were its watchword, despair its motto, darkness its manifesto. It was, in terms of architecture, an impressionable teen in the middle of their goth phase. It was therefore something of a shock to everyone in the building when a bright flash of light erupted from a rooms on the lower floor, a tsunami of light that flowed through the corridors blinding all who saw it.

  For a moment the whole world was perfectly white. Nothing could be seen.

  Plenty could still be heard, though.

  "Gods dammit, Dren!" Rotcel shouted, her words echoing after the light. "You said it would be a small wave of light! They would have seen that from the other side of the world!"

  "Do you know, I'm sorry, but I was distracted by that ghost—"

  "What? A ghost? Where?"

  "There!"

  "It's got teeth! Run!"

  Nanoc and his friends stumbled out of the room where the light had formed and into the corridor, collapsing on the ground, wheezing and groaning until, at last, the world around them became blurred colors, then shapes, then gloom of the corridor. The ghost watched all this with anticipation – it liked its victims scared. Terrified, if possible. They tasted better that way. It reached out a spectral hand towards Rotcel' Loc, and the lizardling fell out of its way. Nanoc punched the ghost, falling right through it but doing no damage.

  "That won't work!" Rotcel snapped. "It's a ghost, Nanoc! They're immune to physical damage!"

  "I know that! I hate this thing! It got me last time, too!"

  "What? Last time? Then why didn't you warn—"

  The ghost swooped down, and Dren dived out of the way. Rotcel helped the elf to his feet only to use his body as a shield when the ghost reached out for them. Nanoc punched the ghastly creature through its chest; it bit him in the neck. The trio of friends retreated, unable to hurt the specter. The ghost frowned – the trio were scared enough, yet. They needed to be terrified to be sufficiently tender. The ghost gasped and groaned, its arms and claws were growing in size, its teeth longer with every second.

  The ghost grinned. It thought its meal was nearly ready.

  It was dead wrong.

  "Ah!" Dren said, cheerfully. "Look, it's really puffing itself up there… its taking its final form! Fascinating! Even it's teeth are growing. I must take a note of this!"

  The ghost deflated a little. It had never had a victim so interested in the size and shape of its teeth before. Dren patted his pockets, looking for a pencil.

  "—asked you if there was something more to be worried about—" Rotcel was shouting at Nanoc. She was too angry to be scared.

  Nanoc was still trying to punch the ghost, even though that didn't work at all. The ghost shrank down a little, its translucent shape fading in the face of a trio who did not fear it, although they should. Then it shrugged; it could still kill them, even if they weren't particularly scared. It drew itself up. Rotcel turned and threw a knife right through its eye; the ghost blink out of an ancient habit, no damage was done. Only magic could stop a ghost.

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  "Dren!" Rotcel shouted. "Dren, do a spell or something!"

  "Do you know, I just want to complete this diagram and—""Dren!"

  The ghost swooped down, knocking the notebook from Dren's hand. The elf frowned at this rude behavior.

  "Fireball!" he shouted, holding up a hand.

  "No!" Rotcel yelped, but it was too late.

  There was a flash of bright purple fire and a wave of flame that took off Nanoc's eyebrows and the outer scales on Rotcel's head. Wild hands of fire reached through the air for the ghost, finding nothing, then settled for burning whatever they could reach. Nanoc was closest. Luckily for him, he was mostly fireproof.

  He looked around, patting his smoking hair. He could not see the ghost.

  "Did it work?" he asked.

  The ghost emerged from the charred wall, smiling. It had floated through the wall and away from danger the moment it had seen Dren casting a spell.

  "Try something else!" Rotcel demanded.

  "Yeah, something bigger!" Nanoc said enthusiastically.

  "Bigger?" Dren said, frowning. "Do you know, there is one thing I have always wanted to try—"

  "Wait!" Rotcel' Loc warned, too late.

  Dren threw a hand out behind him, fingers curled, and yelled 'Yssem's great disaster!"

  This time there could be no escape for the ghost. A glowing green hand exploded from Dren's forehead and flicked the ghost so hard that it hissed in pain. A second hand caught the ghost by the leg, a third by the hand, a fourth by its back, and then the hands pinched and pulled, the ghost squirming uncomfortably. A final hand, black and yellow, formed a massive fist behind the ghost, then extended its fingers into the specter and—

  A piece of burning hair fell into Nanoc's eyes, so he didn't see what the hand did, but the specter exploded. A wave of sticky green ectoplasm splattered across the walls, ceiling, and floor. Nanoc and his friends were not spared, either. It got into their eyes, their mouths, their noses. No part of their bodies was spared. They were a sorry sight, covered in the sticky green ectoplasm that hissed as it dripped to the floor.

  "Yuck."

  Rotcel drew a cloth and wiped the ectoplasm in annoyed silence. Dren ripped a page from one of his many textbooks and glumly used it to wipe the worst of the goo from his face. Neither of them was looking at Nanoc.

  "A ghost," Rotcel snapped. "There was a ghost, Nanoc. A ghost that exploded."

  "Dren was responsible for the explosion," Nanoc pointed out.

  This was technically true, although blaming the elf was rather unfair. The spell he'd used, Yssem's great disaster, was notoriously gross. He only used it in emergencies – although it was effective, it came with a high dry-cleaning cost. He would have prepared a better spell if he knew there was a ghost in the building.

  The skinny field scholar didn't even bother pointing this out but continued to clean himself with morose ineffectiveness.

  "Yeah, I guess I forgot to mention the ghost!" Nanoc said, ectoplasm dripping down his chest. "It slipped my mind. Anyways, I'm as sticky as either of you!"

  "Do you know, you certainly are not," Dren said, trying and failing to clean a blob from his ear. "You are not. There is simply less of you than there is of me, and subsequently, there is more area of me for the goo to attach to. This is mathematics."

  Nanoc shrugged. Being short did, sometimes, work in his favor. But he was still covered from head to toe.

  "When I asked you if there were any other dangers we needed to know about in this manor house," Rotcel said, pronouncing each word slowly. "Did you not think a ghost would be worth mentioning?"

  "I forgot about him," Nanoc admitted.

  "What? How could you possibly forget—"

  "I did die," Nanoc reminded his friends. "Which was distracting."

  This was only partly true: he had ascended to the heavens Above and met Death, sixth born of the gods, in his own domain. But even if he hadn't died, Nanoc would have forgotten to mention the ghost. At least it was a good excuse.

  "Well, all that running helped, anyway," Nanoc said. "Look!"

  They reached a set of stairs that led downwards into the darkness, down to the vaults beneath the manor house, down to where the vampire and most trusted servants stood guarding all that mattered most to him.

  Rotcel hesitated at the top of the stairs.

  "Actually," she said. "This is really embarrassing, but I think I left the stove on at the cottage. It might start a fire, and we wouldn't want that. I'm just going to—"

  Nanoc grabbed her arm and towed her downwards.