Maskerade

right.
    Which meant that the Ghost was…
    …someone else.
    She’d been so certain .

    “You’ll enjoy it, mother. You really will.”
    “’Tain’t for the likes of us, Henry. I don’t see why Mr. Morecombe couldn’t give you tickets to see Nellie Stamp at the music hall. Now that’s what I call music. Proper tunes you can understand.”
    “Songs like ‘She Sits Among the Cabbages and Leeks’ are not very cultural, mother.”
    Two figures wandered through the crowds heading for the Opera House. This was their conversation.
    “’S a good laugh, though. And you don’t have to hire suits. Seems daft to me, havin’ to wear a special suit just to listen to music.”
    “It enhances the experience,” said young Henry, who had read this somewhere.
    “I mean, how does the music know?” said his mother. “Now, Nellie Stamp—”
    “Come along , mother.”
    It was going to be one of those evenings, he knew it.
    Henry Lawsy did his best. And, given the starting point, it wasn’t a bad best. He was a clerk in the firm of Morecombe, Slant & Honeyplace, a somewhat old-fashioned legal partnership. One reason for its less-than-modern approach was the fact that Messrs. Morecombe and Honeyplace were vampires and Mr. Slant was a zombie. The three partners were, therefore, technically dead, although this did not prevent them putting in a proper day’s work—normally during the night, in the case of Mr. Morecombe and Mr. Honeyplace.
    From Henry’s point of view the hours were good and the job was not onerous, but he chafed somewhat about his promotion prospects because clearly dead men’s shoes were being fully occupied by dead men. He’d decided that the only way to succeed was to better himself by Improving His Mind, which he tried to do at every opportunity. It is probably a full description of Henry Lawsy’s mind that if you had given him a book called How to Improve Your Mind in Five Minutes , he would have read it with a stopwatch. His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few people.
    Mr. Morecombe had given him two opera tickets as a reward for sorting out a particularly problematical tort. He’d invited his mother because she represented 100 percent of all the women he knew.
    People tended to shake Henry’s hand cautiously, in case it came off.
    He’d bought a book about the opera and read it carefully, because he’d heard that it was absolutely unheard-of to go to an opera without knowing what it was about, and the chance of finding out while you were actually watching it was remote. The book’s reassuring weight was in his pocket right now. All he needed to complete the evening was a less embarrassing parent.
    “Can we get some peanuts before we go in?” said his mother.
    “Mother, they don’t sell peanuts at the opera.”
    “No peanuts? What’re you supposed to do if you don’t like the songs?”

    Greebo’s suspicious eyes were two glows in the gloom.
    “Poke him with a broom handle,” suggested Granny.
    “No,” said Nanny. “With someone like Greebo you have to use a little bit of kindness.”
    Granny closed her eyes and waved a hand.
    There was a yowl from under the kitchen’s dresser and a sound of frantic scrabbling. Then, his claws scoring tracks in the floor, Greebo came out backward, fighting all the way.
    “Mind you, a lot of cruelty does the trick as well,” Nanny conceded. “You’ve never been much of a cat person, have you, Esme?”
    Greebo would have hissed at Granny, except that even his cat brain was just bright enough to realize this was not the best move he could make.
    “Give him his fish eggs,” Granny said. “He might as well have them now as later.”
    Greebo inspected the dish. Oh, this was all right, then. They wanted to give him food.
    Granny nodded at Nanny Ogg. They held out their hands, palm up.
    Greebo was halfway through the caviar when he felt It happening.
    “Wrrroowlllll—” he wailed, and then the voice went deeper as his chest expanded, and rose physically as his back legs lengthened under him.
    His ears flattened against his head, and then crept down the sides.
    “—lllllwwaaaa—”
    “The jacket’s a forty-four-inch chest,” said Nanny. Granny nodded.
    “—aaaaoooo—”
    His face flattened. His whiskers spread out. Greebo’s nose developed a life of its own.
    “—oooooss…sshit!”
    “He certainly gets the hang of it quicker these days,”