The Sly Phantom

By Monique Golay

"The Sly Phantom", second of a series following "The Funny Necromancer" – Synopsis

Lite Yeer is an orphan who lives with her horrible aunts, Gretchen and Bridget Slug, for whom she must do chores and sleep in the dog house. When she reaches eleven, Màrs, a DNA-free sorcerer, comes out of her watch and tells her that she can time travel and that in going to the past, she will escape from her aunts. Then she goes to the seventeenth century whose peoples she brings back to life. In so doing, she acts as a necromancer – a funny one, because she doesn’t use common magic, but astromagic which is the art of governing planets, stars, and moons for the purpose of time travelling.
In reaching September 1 of year 1666, she enters the ghost world where she meets her ancestor, the knight Roger. At the service of the Queen of Denmark, with Lite’s help Roger puts London ablaze and creates the 1666 Fire. By that way, Lite damages Moyo’s Time Wheel. Moyo, who is a five billion years old elf, has enough of his life. But he can disappear only if he time travels to the Big Bang, which will destroy the Universe, himself included. Luckily, in visiting different eras, Lite keeps ruining his Time Wheel, which prevents him from performing his apocalypse.
In the ghost world, Lite is reluctant to deal with a poltergeist, death angels, and a giant ant whose victims it eats and excretes in the form of stinking ghosts. But she surprises even herself by her resourcefulness as an illusion-maker. In the end, she succeeds in taking revenge over her aunts by producing false evidence which incriminates them for a baby swap, which convinces a judge to send them to jail and which is the only way for justice to prevail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monique Golay
• Release date: Feb 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310822193

Monique Golay

On Monique Golay: Born from a mad scientist for a father, the physicist Marcel J. E. Golay, and quite a nice Dutch mother, I am always surrounded by scientists, wherever I go, so I better know something about Mechanics. An anecdote on my teaching sciences to young people: I have been tutoring Descriptive Geometry to a 16-year old student. Sweating on a geometrical demonstration, I asked help from one of my physicist-friends and he said: “Do they do such things in their two first years of College? It’s very complicated and I’ve never had to do such a thing. My solution would be to convert everything into coordinates and resolve the problem with linear algebra (and with a computer). That’s modern sciences (and mathematics).” But I assure my readers of “Lite the Sorcyair” that all they need to know is about the great many planets, moons, and suns in the Universe to which I’ve added wizards, fairies, and devils. And alien ants.

Book preview

Book II

The Sly Phantom,

sequel to The Funny Necromancer.

ISBN: 9781310822193

Written by Monique Golay,

© Monique Golay 2016

«The Intellectual Property Code prohibits copies or reproductions intended for collective use. Any representation or reproduction in whole or in part by any means whatsoever without the consent of his author or his successor in title or assignees is unlawful and constitutes an infringement, under the intellectual law article L.335. »

The Live Skeleton

It was a lucky fact that many poplars interspersed the plain from the forest edge to the Tower of London. By that way, the tall ghost tree was not going to render the English police suspicious. Lite and the knights walked behind him in single file, Opacus spitting fog around them to camouflage them as best as he could. Lite wasn’t haunted by the swallowing of Lieutenant Augustin. On the contrary, she regretted that the witch-ant had gone back underground, because it was a perfect monster to bring back home to scare the Slugs with. If she had been able to command it by telepathy, it should be easy to have it eat her aunts and cousin who'd then turn into a splendid trio of dung-ghosts. Lite was deep in those thoughts when the knights approached the Tower of London at whose foundations ran the River Thames. The air was filled with the flowing sound of water, lapping and rushing. The shores sank, and the grass ended into sand. There was frantic talk of the trade that sailed up and down on the waterways, of the constant traffic on the Thames, and of the great risk of being seen. So talking, an enemy boat loomed up.

‘To escape from the witch-ant,’ said Corporal Eustache, ‘and then be spotted by the English Navy... we won’t have gained anything.’

‘I hope that Opacus’s fog won’t lift with the river breeze,’ said Roger. ‘Without his camouflage, we’re dead.’

‘There!’ cried Lite. ‘Through a gap in the fog I see a hole in the tower foundations on the other side of the river.’

‘Well seen,’ piped Lord Guillarmod. ‘Quick, let’s go there.’

All the while directing the ghost sequoia and Opacus, Lite led the knights as fast as her legs could take her to where they were level with the dungeon window on the other side of the river. Through the gap, they watched the boat grow bigger and darker as it drew nearer.

‘Tsoog,’ said Lite, ‘now is the time and place for you to lie down as a drawbridge.’

‘It’s never going to work,’ said Corporal Eustache. ‘The sequoia’s not tall enough. The Thames is wider than his height. You’ll only succeed in having our enemy spot us.’

‘Don’t forget that his roots render him twice as tall as he looks,’ said Lite. ‘Go on, Tsoog, lay quickly across the river before that boat comes.’

‘Stop!’ yelled the corporal. ‘Roger, tell Lite to stop that tree from falling! We’re going to get caught!’

‘Go down now!’ yelled Lite.

‘Stay up!’ yelled Corporal Eustache.

‘No, no!’ Lite yelled back. ‘The sequoia’s got to lay down.’

‘But why?’ chorused the knights. ‘We can swim across the Thames.’

‘We don’t have time for swimming,’ said Lite.

‘If that tree is crazy enough to lay across the river,’ said Sergeant Cornelius, ‘we’ll be seen and hanged.’

‘Being seen and hanged,’ said Lite, ‘has always been a chance you’ve had to take.’

‘If I’ve called Lite my admiral,’ put in Roger, ‘you must obey her.’

‘Now or never, Tsoog!’ said Lite.

With that, slowly - soundlessly - the ghost tree tore his roots out of the earth, lifted and fell pouf! across the Thames. Lite and the knights leaped onto his bark, their feet sinking into it as into deep powder snow. The boat was about to cut through the sequoia when the last of the knights jumped onto the other bank, giving Tsoog one second to rise and get out of the way. Just narrowly avoiding detection, they watched their enemy sail away, recovering their breath, sighing with relief.

‘Tsoog and the Cloods, thank you so much,’ hollered Roger from one side of the river bank to the other. ‘You camouflaged us to perfection.’

‘I’m grateful to you, Lord Guillarmod and Lite,’ said the ghost tree, ‘for this revenge over the citizens. You won’t need me anymore, so I’ll return to my forest. Dear Clood, come with me so that your moistness may not smother the fire.’

‘Goodbye Opacus,’ shouted Lite. ‘May your hair, beard, and snow never again be polluted by the city smog.’

After the Clood left, the mist lifted and the flaming torches on the Tower of London wall blinded Lite. The sounds, too, became more piercing. She looked up when she heard the sound of a guard pacing to and fro. It echoed ominously against the stone of the rampart, covering the rushing noise of the river. A trumpet blared from the tower top, and deeper within came an answering call. Lite shivered. The night guards were watching the surroundings with keen eyes.

‘Let’s go inside the tower foundations through this dungeon window,’ said Roger as he snatched a flaming torch out of its bracket and squeezed through the aperture.

Lite and the knights followed the general and found themselves in a labyrinth: there were two passageways to the right, three to the left, and they didn’t know which one to choose.

‘We’re trapped,’ whined Corporal Eustache.

‘Let’s try the first passageway to the right,’ suggested Lord Guillarmod.

They went into what looked like a tunnel whose gloom swallowed much of the torchlight. There were many other passageways leading off, first to the left, then to the right. On and on they went, going up and down again. They had lost all hope when Lite saw a bright hole in the distance.

‘There!’ she piped. ‘Straight ahead.’

The hole grew bigger and brighter as they approached it. Although it was dusk, the outside light flowed inside through the opening and lit up their passageway like a spot lamp. Lite and the knights were sure they’d found the way out when they realized it was only the dungeon window through which they had at first entered.

‘We’ve ended up at the same place where we started,’ groaned Major Albert.

‘Abracadabra,’ grumbled Corporal Eustache. ‘Admiral Lite and her wonderful magic tricks. We’re never going to find the way out of this labyrinth. Say your prayers—all hope’s gone. Fine strategy to count on Tsoog and the Clood. Now we’re stuck. And cooked. We’re going to rot in this dungeon.’ In his rage he seized a bone sticking out of the ground and threw it against the wall.

‘Oo, a tibia!’ said Lite who knew her anatomy. She sprayed the bone with a pinch of elf powder and chanted Ossum, confident that that was a good Latin word for a spell. She, however, had to admit that she was only experimenting and that she didn’t know what was really going to happen. The tibia bounced on the floor and assembled itself with a skull and a spine, forming a skeleton. With a clip-clop sound of bone against bone, it straightened out and stretched. The knights gasped but Lite laughed, proud to have worked out a new clever bit of magic.

‘Hello, Mr Bones,’ she piped.

‘Have all of you been the queen’s lovers?’ asked the skeleton with a slight clatter of his teeth. ‘Did the king condemn you to stay in this dungeon?’

Amused, Lite presented herself and told the story of her time travel. When she spoke of her motive to render Roger as famous as Julius Caesar, the skeleton grinned with an eerie smile typical of the dead and declared: ‘I know you: You’re in a song:

We rise above our tombs cold,

And out of deep dungeons old,

We sing before the break of day,

And jest at the fall of Moyo the Old.

Opacus the old Clood,

In his jolly good mood,

Told us about Moyo’s failure,

A story to relish like food.

Opacus the great, misty cloud lord,

Without even a knife, blade, or sword,

Helped Lite to escape the elves

Who’d have throttled her with a cord.

Daggers lie on their dusty shelves

To kill Lite, where no human delves

In the North Pole they scheme,

To slay Lite: so terrible are the elves.

Opacus shone silver beneath the Moon,

Lite’s time travel turned midnight to noon,

The Clood saved her in her fall to Roger’s hall,

Where she ate dragon soup with a spoon.’

‘It sounds like a lot of nonsense, Mr Bones,’ said Lite, ‘but the rhymes are so good that you could put those lines on a greeting card. Speaking of greeting, if you know who I am, I don’t know who you are.’

‘Mr Bones is a lovely title,’ said the skeleton, brightly. ‘Bones are what orthopaedists claim to be the cleanest part of a human body. Osteo is my name, though in my first human life people called me Sir Thomas Wyatt. I worked as an ambassador at the Court of Henry VIII and wrote poetry. As I was the lover of Queen Ann Boleyn, the king condemned me to stay here in this oubliette. That’s why when I saw you, kind sirs, I thought you were the queen’s lovers.’

‘I’m the lover of the Queen of Denmark,’ Lord Guillarmod confessed.

‘Dear Osteo, can you please do something for us?’ Lite asked politely.

‘With pleasure,’ said the skeleton, bowing; then his skull dropped off but the deft Mr Bones just narrowly caught it before it crashed to the ground to fix it anew atop his spine. ‘I’m grateful that you cast the Ossum Spell on me, because it has revived my bones. It’s interesting enough to be a skeleton but I’m looking forwards to turn back into a human, because I miss eating. How can I help you?’

‘To tell you the truth, we’re lost and in need of a guide. We’d like to know the way out of here to the centre of London. We plan to set the City afire.’

‘I know this labyrinth by heart. Follow me! I’ll show you the shortest way.’

The skeleton went ahead, his bones clomping as he walked. Hoping to have found a reliable guide, Lite and the knights scurried behind him in a single file. They came to places where side-tunnels opened, this way and that. These Osteo counted knowingly. On and on he ran, clip-clopping ahead, whistling through his toothy skull: ‘One right, two left, four right.’

A passageway climbed steeply and put him out of breath—Lite could hear a queer breeze howl through his ribs as he tried to get more air inside him. With a sound of vertebra on vertebra, his spine clicked funnier as he walked quicker. They went one left, one right, three right, four left. At last, the slope stopped. There, filtering around the next corner, Lite saw a glow. Not a pale open-air sort of glow, but a red light, as of a fire or of a torch. The glow grew as they went forward, and it got hotter in the labyrinth. Wisps of steam drifted by, and they began to sweat.

‘Magma!’ cried Corporal Eustache. ‘We’re going straight into an active volcano.’

‘That magma,’ put in Major Albert, ‘is exactly the same bright red as the fire spat by the Great Hungarian Worm, a dragon species more carnivorous than polar bears. We’re jumping into the lion’s den.’

‘Roger, do you think it – safe – to trust a skeleton as a guide?’ asked Corporal Eustache. ‘Skeletons mean death, and to death is where that nasty skeleton is leading us to.’

‘I trust the skeleton because Lite trusts him,’ said Roger. ‘Who else but Osteo will help us find our way out of this labyrinth?’

‘Osteo’s taking us straight to that magma,’ squealed the corporal. ‘We’re going to carbonize.’

‘You shall have to step across the magma,’ said Mr Bones, ‘if you want to go out of this labyrinth.’

‘It's impossible to step across magma,’ whined Major Albert, ‘without turning into ashes.’

‘Be quiet,’ said Lite. ‘Osteo knows exactly what he’s doing.’

‘We must go right into that glow,’ announced Mr Bones. ‘We must be able to stand a temperature of four thousand two hundred and thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Major Albert. ‘Couldn’t Lite have chose a guide with more sense? Roger, you make him stop! I want to turn back! I’m melting.’

The walls of the labyrinth were melting,