Books by Sibéal Pounder
tinsel sprouts
beyond platform 13
wonka
charlie and the christmas factory
Witch Wars
witch wars
witch switch
witch watch
witch glitch
witch snitch
witch tricks
Bad Mermaids
bad mermaids
bad mermaids: on the rocks
bad mermaids: on thin ice
bad mermaids: meet the sushi sisters
bad mermaids: meet the witches
Neon’s Secret Universe
neon’s secret universe
neon and the unicorn hunters
neon and the goonicorns
Fright Club
let ’ s boo this !
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First published 2025
Text copyright © Sibéal Pounder, 2025 Illustrations copyright © George Ermos, 2025
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For Bumps and Ermie
HAL MEET THE TEAM
ROSE
JOE
DEBBIE
BEFORE YOU GO ANY FURTHER, A WARNING:
OVER THE FOLLOWING PAGES, AT TIMES YOU WILL BE ASKED TO DECIDE WHOSE STORY YOU WISH TO FOLLOW. CHOOSE WISELY . . . NOT EVERYONE IS WHO THEY SEEM. YOU MAY FIND YOURSELF AT A DEAD END.
Follow Joe Bones – turn to page 1
The Cloaked Figure
My name is Joe Bones, and this is the story of how I found the Graveworlds and lived to tell the tale.
Or did I? Because if the Graveworlds have taught me anything, it’s that a lot of dead things still talk . . .
It all started here in Grim, the kind of town they write about in horror stories.
I’ve lived here my whole life, and rumour has it it’s the birthplace of the Grim Reaper himself. Well, at least that’s what they tell the tourists who visit our town, to make it famously spooky.
And it is spooky! See, here’s a map to prove it:
JOE BONES
11/11/1511
BITTEN COURT
That’s right. Grim is designed entirely around the graveyard – a skull-shaped plot of land with mounds stabbed through with gravestones. There are several huge tombs that sit next to the regular graves and two dead trees, their branches twisted like dancing spirits rising up into the night. The houses in the town are on the north side of the graveyard while the high street sits to the south, so the only way to reach one from the other is through the graveyard.
People from here are totally used to stalking through the graveyard every day, and the spooky stories they tell pile up like bodies in a catacomb. I’ve heard of skeleton hands rising from the mud, flashes of blood-soaked stone, ghostly figures and strange-looking bats. Every kid in Grim knows the graveyard paths off by heart. We run past gravestones, hide in the ivy and climb the epic tombs – Here lies Walter Scald, Harriet Redmarrow, Karen Grubble, Rosanne Burney, Adam Grit – without a thought.
Sometimes it feels like there are more dead people in Grim than living ones . . .
Every house in town, every shop, has a graveyard view, even the schools. You can look out of your bedroom window at night and see where the dead lie. People say if you look for long enough, you’ll see things that make you wonder if the dead are really dead at all . . .
To be honest, you never get used to the eerie feeling
that follows you around in Grim. The adults who live here try to pretend the weird and spooky happenings are just stories people tell to scare each other or bring in tourists, but I know there’s more to it than that. Even so, I’ve always felt safe because I come from generations of Grimovians (that’s the name for people who live here). In fact, my gran lived here for over one hundred years and she knew everything there is to know about Grim. Nothing scared her. She always told me that she’d protect me from what was out there.
And she was someone, it turns out, who knew exactly what was out there.
I began to unravel the truth about who she really was the day that she died.
I need to take you back to that day – the day we found her body – because that’s where this story really begins.
There were four of us walking back from the park that chilly autumn day. Three old friends and one new one. Hal Skelly and Debbie Grimes have been my best friends for as long as I can remember. Rose Underwood, however, was new. She had arrived a few weeks earlier with her nose stuck in a book and a shyness that Hal immediately identified as fear before insisting we befriend her. Hal is like that: he’s always nice to everyone.
I’ll tell you more about them all soon. But, first, back to the scene of the crime.
Gran’s house is on the route back from the park and we often stop in for a bite to eat and a chat – usually about horror films, her favourite thing. But this time, as we approached her house, we saw a strange figure heading inside. Tall, cloaked and moving in jolts and darts, as if it were floating.
It made me shiver. I could tell by the shock on my friends’ faces that they had seen the figure too.
We stared at each other for a second then, without a word, all raced inside.
Gran’s house was dark, too dark, but the sitting room glowed brightly at the end of the hall. I heard the distant hum of the old TV, the shadows on the walls morphing and flickering with the changing screen.
We inched towards the door, so close together that I felt Hal’s breath on my neck. None of us spoke. We somehow knew not to make a sound.
I lifted a hand to open the door, but it groaned open all by itself. Bright light flooded the hall, blinding us for a second. We stepped inside to where the TV was blaring in the corner, illuminating the back of Gran’s chair. I could see her hand clutching the armrest. I looked around the room. There was no one else to be seen, no guests . . . not invited
ones anyway. Whoever had slipped into her house had to be hiding.
I shivered again.
The Goosebumps film was playing and the creepy doll was laughing manically.
‘Gran,’ I said as I made my way over to her. ‘We thought we saw –’ I froze.
Her shoulders were sagging; her face was pale. I wanted her eyes to snap open as they often did when I surprised her with a visit. ‘Joe!’ she’d cry with delight and hug me tightly. She loved it when we visited, and she loved my friends. But I knew she wouldn’t wake. I could tell she was dead.
‘Joe . . .’ Hal whispered.
‘I think she’s dead,’ I said in a choked voice.
‘Cloakman!’ Debbie cried, kicking the TV’s off button. She held a hand to her ear and listened eagerly – as if she were a Scout on a fun camping trip. She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘Can’t hear anything, but then I think we all saw that Cloakman floats.’
‘Cloakman?’ Rose squeaked.
‘I just made that up now,’ Debbie said. ‘I don’t know his real name . . . yet.’ She began sniffing. ‘But I’ll ask when I find him.’
Debbie’s reaction to scary things was unusual to say
the least. I’d never witnessed her being scared. Now that I think of it, she’s usually the opposite – she comes alive in scary situations. It’s impossible to imagine her living somewhere other than Grim. Anywhere peaceful would make her wilt.
‘You . . . don’t think the strange figure . . .’ I trailed off, the panic rising in me. They were almost certainly still in the house.
‘We should go,’ Rose said nervously. She had already stepped out into the hallway.
‘Definitely,’ I said, going to join her. But as I did, behind her in the darkness, something moved.
I froze. My arms were too heavy to raise in alarm; my mouth was too dry to speak.
The figure reared up behind Rose. I could see that the cloak moved like a ghost, wafting in a wind that wasn’t there. It was facing me, but where a face should be there was just a dark void.
‘Are you all coming?’ Rose whispered, oblivious to what was behind her.
I looked to Hal; he was staring into the hallway too, his face grey and terrified.
Debbie turned, spotted it, and instantly screamed, ‘CLOAKMAN!’ at an ear-splitting volume that sent the thing flying backwards.
‘What?!’ Rose yelped, turning just in time to see it flee.
A clatter sounded from the hallway.
I tore past her. The hall table was sideways, the lamp that once sat on it smashed and flickering. The front door was wide open, and I just caught a glimpse of the cloaked figure disappearing into the night. From the cloak, something dropped, landing on the doorstep.
‘Excuse me! You’ve dropped your –’ Hal began, but stopped himself when he realized now probably wasn’t the moment to be nice and point out to the potentially murderous figure fleeing the house that it had dropped something.
I raced over and scooped it up. It was a smallish box, no bigger than a jewellery box and made of gnarled, blistered wood.
Burned into the lid were two letters: f.c.
‘What’s that?’ Hal said, his words wobbling and knocking together like shaking knees.
‘A clue,’ Debbie said. ‘Whatever is inside might tell us who Cloakman really is.’
I shook my head, a memory hazy but growing stronger. I knew the box – I’d seen it before.
Oh, Joe, Gran’s voice echoed in my memory, my tiny hands clutching the box tightly. I must’ve been only about four, one of my earliest memories. We don’t play with that yet. One day you can, when you’re old enough.
‘It’s not his box,’ I said. ‘He was stealing it!’
‘Your gran owned it?’ Hal said, his eyebrow raised as he eyed the gnarly, haunted-looking box.
‘It’s still evidence,’ Debbie said. ‘Maybe what’s inside is a motive for murder.’ Her eyes were wide and wild. ‘What’s in it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, turning it over in my hand. There wasn’t an obvious clasp to open it. ‘Gran didn’t let me see inside.’
‘I say we crack it open!’ Debbie said. ‘Rose agrees.’
‘I do?’ Rose squeaked.
‘We are absolutely not doing that!’ Hal said. ‘Sorry to ruin your fun, Debbie, but there is a body in there of a beloved Bones family member and we are duty-bound to tell Joe’s parents immediately about this sad news.’
At that moment I swore I heard my gran chuckle. Hal’s turn of phrase always tickled her. But when I turned around her body was still lifeless.
Debbie bowed her head. ‘I’m sorry about your gran, Joe. I’m going to catch Cloakman for you.’
Hal nodded approvingly at Debbie’s sympathetic and supportive tone.
‘Also,’ she said, making Hal sigh, ‘since your mum’s a forensic pathologist, she could help us investigate this as a proper crime scene!’
I tucked the box under my arm. Debbie was right. We needed to investigate. Whoever the cloaked figure was, we couldn’t let them get away with this.
When we told my parents about the shadowy figure in Gran’s house they didn’t believe us, of course. That’s the problem with living in Grim – there are so many weird stories, no one pays attention to them. Especially if it’s a kid telling the story.
Gran always listened to me, and now she was gone.
‘You’re in shock, Joe,’ Dad said, pulling me into a hug. ‘I can imagine finding my mum dead to the soundtrack of the Goosebumps doll giggling was traumatic to say the least. Although, you know your gran would’ve loved to die to a soundtrack like that.’
It was true. Gran loved horror. The scarier the better. Scary didn’t scare her like it did everyone else. I’d go as far as to say she was comforted by it . . . like horror was an old friend.
‘Mum,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to investigate.’ I broke free of Dad’s grip and ran to her study. ‘I’ll go and get a magnifying glass or something and we can begin our investigations!’
But Mum grabbed my arm as I passed and pulled me to a stop.
‘Firstly, you’re eleven, so you’re not going to be investigating anything, especially not a death. And, secondly, your gran was very, very old.’
‘Not that old,’ I protested.
‘Three digits is pretty old, Joe,’ Dad said. ‘Not many people live past one hundred.’
‘Explain the strange figure, then!’ I said.
Mum shrugged. ‘Maybe the nurse leaving? That’s the most likely explanation.’
I rolled my eyes. ‘Do nurses sneak about in weird cloaks and not talk to anyone?’
‘No,’ Mum said. ‘They don’t.’
She often answered rhetorical questions. It was a very annoying habit.
I closed my eyes in frustration.
‘I promise I will check it’s not a suspicious death,’ Mum said, patting my head gently. ‘If it will help you feel better.’
‘A full autopsy?’ I asked hopefully. ‘With a proper investigation? Police involvement to track down whoever was in her house?’
‘Well, no,’ Mum said. ‘That would be excessive. But I will check for obvious signs of a struggle.’
‘The figure looked . . . supernatural!’ I spluttered. ‘Maybe they had a way of killing gran subtly.’
Mum smiled sadly. ‘Oh, Joe, it’s hard to accept when
someone dies, but you have to remember, Grim is not the place people say it is. You should know that by now. The stories are just that – made up, designed to give the town character and attract the tourists.’
‘Gran always said that’s what they want you to think.’
‘Joe,’ Dad said firmly. ‘Enough now. Your gran had a wild imagination, like most people in this town. When I was a young boy, I believed all the stories too, and so did your mum. But as you get older, you realize Grim is actually really boring. Your mum’s never had a murder case, for example.’
‘I know,’ Mum said, pouting sadly.
‘But we all saw it. Rose, Hal and Debbie,’ I protested.
‘Not just me.’
‘Collective madness,’ Mum said.
Why are adults so naive?
What’s Inside the Box?
The next day, my friends came over and we gathered in my room.
‘I tried to open it last night, but I couldn’t,’ I said, pulling the box out from where I’d stashed it under my bed. Debbie began rifling around in her tattered backpack. Everything she owned and wore looked like it had been on a dangerous adventure – there was no skirt, no jumper and certainly no backpack she owned that wasn’t frayed or holey or speckled with mud. And she rarely brushed her wild red hair. Once, she told me she liked the knots – they added texture.
‘Ah ha!’ she said, producing an unnecessarily large meat mallet and placing it on the floor. ‘I came prepared.’
‘We can’t smash it!’ Hal said. ‘Not without knowing the contents. We could obliterate something precious inside. Or worse – damage something cursed, unleashing awfulness on to us all!’
JOE BONES
Debbie’s eyes lit up.
‘That wouldn’t be a good thing,’ Hal said quickly.
‘Maybe it would be a good curse, something we’d love,’ Debbie argued.
‘Debbie,’ Hal said flatly. ‘By their very nature, curses are not good.’
She smiled. ‘Says the guy who’s clearly never been cursed.’
Debbie was right – Hal was too well put together to have ever been subjected to a curse – his hair was always slicked back, not a strand out of place, his skin dewy with a healthy glow. His clothes were ironed to perfection, and he always wore a tie, or at the very least a neckerchief, even when playing football. If anyone looked like they had battled a curse, it was Debbie.
‘Maybe there’s a secret way of opening the box,’ Rose said quietly. I’d almost forgotten she was there. It had always been me, Debbie and Hal – and Rose was so reserved, it was taking a bit of getting used to. Though she stood out in other ways – her outfits were a lot cooler than most Grimovians’.
She wore a long black cardigan with some ripped black jeans and a purple high-neck shirt. Her earrings were long, dangly skeletons that looked like they were dancing on her high collar. I noticed she’d kicked off her shoes and was sitting cross-legged on my bed, her nose in one of my old childhood pop-up books.
Ghosts Don’t Just Say Boo – it was a book my gran used to read to me all the time when I was little. Pop goes the ghost! she would read, before adding, Of course, Joe, a ghost won’t pop up and surprise you – because ghosts are entirely invisible at all times, even when they’re standing beside you. If you listen, you might hear one though.
Rose bent the spine of my book, watching the paper ghosts in the middle pop up and down. ‘Maybe the box opens in a way we wouldn’t expect.’ She placed the book carefully on the bed and joined us.
She took the box and shook it. Something rattled inside.
Debbie grabbed the meat mallet and Hal shot her a warning look.
‘In case Rose’s idea doesn’t work,’ she said. We huddled around it on our knees, sitting in silence as Rose tapped it.
‘What was that?’ Hal whispered.
‘What was what?’ I said. ‘Rose tapping the box?’
‘No,’ Hal said. ‘That.’
Debbie’s eyes grew wide.
‘That!’ Hal said again.
Then I heard it too.
A scraping.
It was coming from inside the box!
‘Something’s alive in there!’ Debbie said, chucking the
meat mallet behind us in her excitement. It smashed into my bookcase, making the whole thing collapse noisily in a heap. ‘Whoops,’ she said. ‘I’ll fix that for you, Joe. I apologize on behalf of my meat mallet.’
Rose abandoned the box and shuffled closer to me.
‘Is it always this creepy in this little town?’ she whispered.
I didn’t know what to tell her. Grim was weird, and this was all very Grim.
The scraping grew louder.
‘What do you think it is?’ she asked.
Hal backed off until he was pressed against the door. ‘Something is definitely . . . alive in there.’
‘Hal scares easily,’ Debbie said to Rose, before turning to Hal and saying, ‘Don’t worry, it might not be alive, it might be a dead thing – a moving dead thin . . . ’ She trailed off when she realized that was scaring him even more.
‘Well, we can’t open it anyway,’ I said. ‘Maybe that’s for the best.’
Rose cleared her throat. ‘Actually, it’s a secret latch –you slide this bit here and it should –’
Before she could stop it, the lid popped open, hanging back on its hinges like a slack jaw.
The scraping stopped.
Hal grabbed the door handle.
I leaned over the box, and suddenly something flew at me! Green and putrid-smelling, a flash of silver.
My hand reached up instinctively, grabbing the object before it hit my forehead.
‘It’s undead!’ Debbie said, as if she were announcing a winning answer in a gameshow.
‘Joe,’ Hal wheezed. ‘What is it?’
My hand was shaking violently, partly from fear, partly from the thing trying to escape from my grasp. Slowly, I opened my palm. There, writhing about like a furious fish, was a green severed finger! Its nail was sharpened to a point and decorated with silver polish, old and chipped.
‘ARGH!’ I cried, flinging it in Hal’s direction.
It pinged off his cheek and he immediately fainted. The finger somersaulted through the air, grabbed on to Debbie’s hair and swung itself like Tarzan on to the book lying open on the bed. Then it stood bolt upright, balancing on the sharp tip of its nail, piercing the paper ghost beneath it.
Rose ran over and snapped the book shut on it.
‘Rose!’ my mum yelled from downstairs, making us all jump. ‘Your nanny is here to collect you!’
Rose didn’t live with her parents; they were travelling the world and had put a nanny in charge of her. The nanny never let her stay out late. Now I’d seen a sentient severed finger, I could understand why.
‘Rose!’ came her nanny’s sweet, sing-song voice. ‘Your carriage awaits!’
Rose rolled her eyes. ‘I’d better go,’ she said.
She didn’t seem to like her nanny, despite the fact the lady seemed lovely. A bit over-protective, perhaps – Rose had strict curfews, and her nanny followed her almost everywhere, except to the library (which I’m sure was why when Rose wasn’t with us she spent most of her spare time there). But her nanny wasn’t horrendous. I wondered if Rose resented her because she wished her parents hadn’t left her alone in Grim. Something she probably wished even more now that she’d seen a severed finger with a mind of its own.
Rose carefully handed me the book and made for the door, kneeling down on her way out to shake Hal awake.
‘I am loath to say it, but we should’ve used the meat mallet,’ he said wearily, before fainting again.
‘I wonder whose finger it is,’ Debbie said excitedly. She stuck her chin in the air and began mouthing, One, two, three. ‘No . . . your gran had all ten . . .’
‘Let’s put it back and never open that box again,’ I said. ‘Maybe that cloaked figure –’
‘Cloakman,’ Debbie corrected me.
‘Maybe Cloakman put it in there as a trap, and dropped it on purpose,’ I said. ‘Surely that makes the most sense. Gran wouldn’t have a severed finger. He could’ve swapped it out for whatever she usually kept in the box. This is a dead end.’
‘Quite literally,’ Hal said, coming to again.
Debbie got to her feet and began pacing. ‘OK, hear me out – what if we make it our pet for now? I have a hamster ball at home that we could keep it in?’
I placed the book on the floor – it was juddering, so I used my knee to pin it down.
As quickly as I could, I flipped open the book and the finger slipped into the box. Without taking a breath, I slammed the lid shut.
‘We’ll bury it,’ I said.
‘Aww,’ Debbie said.
‘Where?’ Hal fretted. ‘What if we can’t dig a hole big enough?’
I thought for a moment. ‘We’ll put it in Gran’s coffin,’ I said. ‘At the wake. She wouldn’t mind; she wasn’t scared of anything. Gran always looked after me – she can do it one last time. We just have to keep it until the funeral.’
The box rattled. The muffled scraping noise sounded angrier than before.
‘How long until the funeral?’ Hal squeaked.
CELEBRATING THE LIFE OF GRETAL BONES
1923–2025
Please join her family to celebrate her life, at her home. The wake will be followed by a service at Grim Cemetery. All welcome. No flowers at request of Gretal; please instead donate to the Grim Horror Film Club (donations will be used to provide easy-access screenings for the elderly).
ATTENDING:
Mr Peter Grimes (Debbie’s dad – graveyard caretaker, remember to pay him)
Mrs Paula Grimes (Debbie’s mum – undertaker, remember to thank her again)
Debbie Grimes
Bobby Grimes (Debbie’s big brother)
Eddie Grimes (Debbie’s little brother, not to be confused with Bobby – apparently they hate that)
Patsy Grimes (Debbie’s little sister)
Rose Underwood
Hal Skelly
Harriet Skelly (Hal’s mum – is providing catering from the family restaurant, Marrows)
Henry Skelly (Hal’s dad, thank him for the boiled eggs, which were off-menu)
Lucifer Peach (headteacher at Grim High)
Rachel Howlhedge (headteacher at Bloodwood School)
Mr Good (Gretal Bones’s childhood friend)
Paula Gråv (Gretal Bones’s neighbour)
Fred Burry (Gretal Bones’s neighbour)
Carl Runton (new chief detective of Grim Police)
The librarian
Grim Horror Film Club (sixteen members, all over eighty years old – make sure we have enough seats)