98. The Pit – Ann Cheetham

Oliver is living in a very old house in London where his mother takes in elderly boarders and his basement is super scary and there’s construction next door that’s digging up the past and it wants to talk to Oliver via his dank basement and a guy who is probably a ghost and just taught me that mice and rats like white sheets. Frightening.

Something that happens during the construction scares Oliver’s builder friend dude very heartily and then Oliver finds a crack in the basement wall, gets hit in the shoulder by falling plaster when a huge truck goes by shaking the whole building, and winds up dreamwalking in the past during the Black Plague in his very own neighborhood. It smells. Surprise. Also there are bad jokes from the dark humorists that are calling out for bodies like in Monty Python (much worse jokage).

There’s also a sideline where Oliver gets a pet rat and thinks he can hide it in the basement, which was stupid considering rats that are bored spend all their time trying to escape and Oliver is an ineffective pet caretaker. So the possible ghost dude isn’t full of it when he says he got bitten by a rat in the house, he did, it was Rufus (Oliver thinks Rufus is more dignified than Roland for a rat name, I do not agree).

When he’s dreamwalking he sees his own home and the people who lived there, a nice saddling family, and some of the more brutal elements of the time of plague like the doctors, the sentries, the closing off of houses where someone is ill that leads to more deaths, and the thievery from the dead, plus so much coughing and straining and rats and mold and such. Fun. Anyway, once the family is mostly dead in his dreamwalk, he realizes the reason the construction next door is causing problems and stopped for a second in the present when they “found something” is a plague burial pit that contains most of this family. They seem to find those enough that I guessed that way early, but at least it provided a way to reunite the ghost dude with his family of ghosts and also Oliver to have hallucinations in the London Dungeon (I miss that place).

Thaddeus will solve the Plague era ghosts’ issues once he finishes his nap.

Here’s Ace hoping no one calls to tell her about anything scary like attracting rats with white sheets or plague ghosts.
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