Tap a bold word to see what it means. Underlined words are from earlier chapters.
Previously: Mrs Nair kept cleaning the ghost's red stain. When the ghost tried to scare the family at night, Mr Nair offered him oil for his chains, and the twins threw pillows at him.
For a week, the ghost stayed in his room under the roof. Once he had been the most frightening ghost in Perak. Now two ten-year-old boys had hit him with pillows.
He wanted . They had hurt him, so he would hurt them back. He would , and it would be terrible.
He planned a show, with costumes and a great entrance, like an actor on a stage. He would come as the Headless Merchant, the most of all his characters.
But the twins were . They loved tricks and small trouble, and they had heard him practising.
At midnight, the ghost came round the corner of the stairs and stopped. In front of him stood another ghost: a white bedsheet on a broom, with a watermelon for a head and a sign that said THE REAL GHOST.
He gave a scream and ran. Later he understood it was a trick. A ghost, afraid of a watermelon! He felt completely , so silly that people would laugh at him for years.
Then, at his door, a bucket of cold water fell on his head.
"Boo!" shouted the twins.
The next morning, Mrs Nair was . She had told the boys again and again. "Leave the poor ghost alone!"
The ghost went to in his room, silent and angry, refusing to talk to anyone.
Then, on Sunday, Priya heard a new sound from the top of the house. Not chains. Someone was crying.
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
In plain English: People can be very silly.
Story inspired by Oscar Wilde's "The Canterville Ghost" (1887). Word levels: CEFR-J Wordlist v1.6 (Yukio Tono, TUFS) · Octanove Vocabulary Profile C1/C2 (CC BY-SA 4.0).