Tap a bold word to see what it means. Underlined words are from earlier chapters.
Previously: The ghost planned a big scare, but the twins tricked him with a fake ghost and a bucket of water. He hid in his room under the roof, and then Priya heard someone crying.
Priya opened the door slowly. The ghost was sitting by the window. Without his chains and his face, he looked like a small, tired old man in an old-fashioned suit. He seemed , lonely and sad, like a child who has lost his way.
There was a deep in his eyes, a sadness much older than Priya.
"I'm sorry about my brothers," she said. "They're only ten."
"A hundred years," he said quietly, "and nobody has ever said sorry to me. Nobody has spoken to me at all." He had lived in for a century, alone with only the walls.
Priya did not think he looked now. "Why do you stay here? Why can't you rest?"
Slowly, he told her. In 1925 he was rich from the tin mines, and greedy. He argued with his younger brother, Kok Wai, about money, and sent him away with nothing. Kok Wai went to Penang and died there, poor, two years later.
"I wrote him a letter to say sorry. I never sent it. I was too proud." His voice was full of , the pain of someone who knows he did wrong.
Priya felt real for him. She could almost feel his sadness herself. Now she understood his : he was trapped in a situation he could not escape.
"How can I help?"
He gave a smile, sad but hopeful. "Perhaps you can. But you must be brave. You must come with me through the wall."
“I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night.”
In plain English: A ghost explains that he must walk at night and cannot rest yet.
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).