At that they began filing out of the shrine, leaving their tracers behind. Only the man with the crown remained.
“You, too, Buckingham!” Richard commanded.
“Oh, er, I thought I …”
Richard pointed at the door, and Buckingham scurried out with the others.
Jonah wasn’t sure what he expected Richard to do next. But as soon as everyone else was gone, he threw himself against the stone altar, completely apart from all the ghostly tracers.
“Dear Father,” he moaned. “Thou knowest—”
“God knoweth everything you’ve ever done!” Chip interrupted.
“Please! I am a godly man!” Richard begged.
“Do godly men kill children?” Chip sneered.
Richard slowly raised his head, his brown hair splaying out on his shoulders.
“I didn’t … it was not I who …” He was almost weeping now, deep in anguish. “What wouldst Thou have me do?”
“Renounce the throne!” Chip commanded.
Richard froze. When he spoke again, he sounded like he was trying very hard to control his voice.
“Renounce it in whose favor?” he asked. “Who else could protect England so well as I? All I have done, I have done for the good of my country.”
“That’s what traitors always tell themselves,” Chip said scornfully.
Jonah was amazed that Chip could sound so strong and authoritative. Anytime Jonah tried to sound like that, his voice cracked. In a weird way Chip was even starting to seem less see-through.
It makes sense, Jonah thought. If someone sounds strong, your brain and your eyes start thinking that they look strong too. A nearly transparent kid just couldn’t look that powerful.
“But that is the truth!” Richard protested.
“Your version of truth,” Chip scoffed. “God will judge you based on, uh, the true truth.”
Jonah hoped that Richard wouldn’t notice that Chip had faltered. “True truth” didn’t sound authoritative. It just sounded stupid.
But Richard was staring up, right at the place where Chip was standing. A look of horror was spreading over his face.
“I see you,” he whispered.
EIGHTEEN
It was hard to tell who looked more stunned now, Richard or Chip.
“I … I …,” Chip stammered, looking helplessly down at his hands.
Katherine started to bolt toward Chip, almost knocking over one of the stone statues in her haste. Jonah reached out his arm to stop her.
It’s just an illusion, he wanted to assure her. A trick of the eye. I thought I was seeing things too, just because Chip is doing such a great job. … Richard can’t see Chip. Chip’s invisible to everyone in the fifteenth century. Remember? So are we.
But Richard’s eyes followed Katherine’s motion, and Jonah’s.
“There are more of you?” he murmured. “Children? And in such strange garb …”
Now it was Jonah’s turn to look down at himself. He wasn’t see-through anymore. He wasn’t translucent. His hands were flesh colored again, not crystal. He could even see that the H of the HARRIS MIDDLE SCHOOL on his sweatshirt was starting to peel off. A thread stuck out from a worn place on the knees of his blue jeans. The glow-in-the-dark green stripes on his tennis shoes gleamed.
Jonah felt paralyzed.
How could we not be invisible anymore? he wondered in agony. We shouldn’t be standing here in twenty-first-century clothes in the middle of the fifteenth century. It’s too dangerous to time. And … to us.
Richard half turned, like he was about to call for his guards.
But Katherine stepped forward, calmly now.
“This is what people wear in heaven,” she said. “Don’t you … I mean, do you not recognize your own nephews?” She pointed first at Chip, then Alex, who was standing among the statues as still as if he, too, were made of stone. “They were changed by, uh, what they went through. Dying so tragically … they were transformed. That’s how it works.” She lowered her voice and glared at Richard. “Not that you’ll ever get to see heaven, after what you did.”
Richard looked from Chip to Alex.
“My nephews?” he murmured, his voice cracking. “Haunting me?”
“And we plan to do a lot of it!” Chip threatened.
Footsteps sounded at the back of the shrine.
“Richard?” a voice called softly. “Everyone’s waiting.”
“Buckingham,” Richard murmured. Determination gleamed in his eyes—maybe it was a determination not to believe in ghosts. “My lord,” he called back to his friend. “Wouldst thou …”
Jonah didn’t want to stick around to see exactly what he was going to say.
“Run!” Jonah cried.
“This way!” Alex agreed.
He led the others behind the statues to a small door in the wall at the back of the shrine. He yanked on it, hard, and it swung open—Maybe they don’t have door locks yet, Jonah thought disjointedly. And then he couldn’t think anything else because he was concentrating so hard on scrambling down dark, winding stairs. And he was listening so hard for footsteps behind him—footsteps of people who weren’t wearing tennis shoes. He could hear only Chip’s Nikes pounding on the stone steps, Katherine’s panicked panting. …
The stairway opened into a long, dark hallway lit solely by intermittent torches propped on the wall.
“Is anyone following us?” Alex stopped to ask.
“I can’t hear anything but Katherine breathing,” Jonah complained, breathing hard himself. “Hold your breath!”
She gasped and puffed out her cheeks, silently. Jonah did the same. Now he could hear only his own pulse pounding in his ears. He gave up.
“We’ve got to get out of here!” he said, looking around frantically.
“Not looking like this, we can’t,” Katherine countered.
“Calm down,” Chip said. “Richard isn’t going to send his guards after ghosts.”
“Do you think he really believed we were ghosts?” Jonah asked.
“Well, once he saw us, he wasn’t going to believe it was just his conscience speaking to him,” Chip said disgustedly.