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forth between them, as if he were watching a game. Ryu just lay flat on the ground with his ears over his paws.
    “Oh!” Laurel said, driven to speechlessness with anger. “Oh!”
    “Anyway, you just stay here in the barn and tell Elyn what you think of me,” Rod said ungallantly. “I’ll be outside with Arville and Ryu and the Companions laying a trap. Because it’s not ghosts, it’s people, and I am going to catch them!”
    “Wait, what?” Arville replied, looking panicked.
    “If you don’t need me,” Alma said carefully. “I do have something I need to check in here.”
    :Mayar?: Elyn thought.
    :He asked us, and it’s a good plan. Certainly better than Laurel’s idea of holding a séance to find out what the spirits want. If it’s people, we will catch them. If it is demons, well, you will find us stampeding into the barn fast enough. And if it is spirits, we can try Laurel’s idea.: Mayar seemed quite satisfied with whatever it was that Rod had decided.
    Well, she was supposed to be getting them to think and plan for themselves, wasn’t she? And they had certainly plunged into this, not only with enthusiasm, but with some forethought.
    “Go ahead and set your trap, Rod,” she said firmly, cutting short any protests. “Alma, Laurel, we three will try to make enough sounds in here to make it seem as if all of us are in here.” She glanced out the open door. “If you’re going to get things set up, Rod, you’d better do so now, and then you’ll be in hiding well before sunset. I want all of you that are going to be setting up the trap to go in and out several times so that if anyone is watching us, they’ll likely lose count. Get water or wood, anything you think is a good excuse. Laurel, you and I will take care of the camp chores and make a lot of noise about it while Alma does her investigation.”
    Laurel looked ready to burst with indignation, but she didn’t protest. Alma dove into the storage compartments and assembled a mortar and pestle, a couple of buckets of water, some dishes, and some other apparatus, and set to breaking up something in the mortar and pestle that made enough noise to cover just about anything.
    Looking very unhappy, Arville and Ryu made several trips in and out of the doors carrying water and small amounts of wood, some odds and ends, before finally going out and not coming back again. The Companions made a more convincing job of it, bringing in quite a good deal of firewood before vanishing one by one. Elyn shut the door after them, lit all the lanterns, and, with Laurel’s sulky help, began making noisy supper preparations. At this point, Alma was doing something inscrutable with the dishes and the water; whatever it was, it was making some sound too, so Elyn left her to it.
    She stretched out the preparations as long as she could; it wasn’t easy to tell in here whether the sun had set or not. Since it was a threshing building, it was as sealed against vermin as could be managed. The food was ready in what seemed to her to be far too short a time, but there was no point in wasting it. She and Laurel ate; Alma came and fetched herself a bowl of the thick soup Elyn had made, then went back to her buckets. Halfway through the meal, she had stopped messing about with the buckets and was pounding again, this time using the pestle as a hammer against a stone, pounding something she had wrapped in a bit of cloth.
    She unfolded the cloth, peered at what was in there, and then did something with it. “Aha!” Elyn heard her say.
    And that was when everything exploded outside.
    The long, moaning howl began. Elyn heard Ryu yelp, Arville burst out with a terrified exclamation of “G-ghosts!” and Rod shout, “Got you!”
    And that was the signal for what sounded like a battle royal.
    She ran for the doors, but they were both bolted again. She and Alma and Laurel pounded on them fruitlessly for a while, while outside she could hear not only Rod shouting, but the sounds