by Eva Ibbotson
Brenda disappeared behind the books and when Uncle Howard clapped his hands again a dark shape in an enormous duffel coat appeared.
‘This is Mr Smith.’
The children looked at each other. So far Mr Smith didn’t seem very remarkable – just a very fat man in a heavy coat.
Then Mr Smith said, ‘Pleased to meet you,’ and at the same time he threw his overcoat wide open and lowered his hood.
He was a skeleton. A few pieces of flesh still clung to him here and there, a small slab of muscle below one kneee, and a sinew or two on his elbow... and in one eye socket there still hung a single eye – but overall Mr Smith was as skeletal a skeleton as you could find.
All three children nodded their heads. If there is one thing people expect from a haunted house it is a skeleton, and a skeleton in which one eye still flickers is particularly good.
Mr Smith, whose first name was Douglas, had been a very fat taxi driver – so fat that people had nagged him and teased him, and he was so hurt that he stopped eating. Only he overdid it, and one day he woke up dead. When you have been very fat it is difficult to accept that you are now very thin or even not there at all, which was why Doug liked to wear his overcoat.
After the bride and the skeleton came a very old woman from whose matted, grimy hair there dropped a stream of lice.
Real lice are nasty and ghostly lice are nastier still, but all the same the old woman did not look very interesting. Nasty, yes, but not interestingly nasty, and the children were very relieved when she said she’d decided that Clawstone wouldn’t suit her and she was going back to live with her cronies in the bus shelter behind the slaughterhouse in town.
The next candidate surprised the children very much.
She was a truly beautiful girl, with masses of jet-black hair and lustrous dark eyes ringed with kohl and she was wearing a short embroidered bodice, loose trousers of shimmering silk and brocade slippers.
‘This is Sunita,’ said Cousin Howard. ‘Her parents came from India but she has lived here all her life. And worked here too.’
The three children stared at her and Sunita smiled, a lovely friendly smile, and put her hands together in greeting. Everybody liked her at once; you couldn’t not like her. But Rollo spoke for all of them when he said, ‘Would she frighten people? She seems so nice.’
‘Watch,’ said Cousin Howard.
He nodded at the girl, and she took a step forward, so that they could see the jewel in her tummy button and her golden-brown midriff. Then, as they stared, a sudden jagged line appeared round her middle – an irregular streak, like lightning, which turned darker and more sinister as they watched. And slowly . . . very slowly . . . the top half of Sunita floated upwards to the ceiling, leaving the bottom half still firmly on the ground.
‘She was sawn in half,’ whispered Cousin Howard. ‘The man she worked for did it. It was a trick in a circus – you know . . . sawing a girl in half. It’s often done, but this time it went wrong and he really halved her. Poor man, he was dreadfully upset, but it was too late.’
Everyone, of course, wanted Sunita; she passed the audition straight away. After her came a very boring ghost, a hoity-toity lady in a hooped petticoat who didn’t seem able to do much and whom they had to send away. But after that came Ranulf de Torqueville.
Ranulf was dressed in old-fashioned clothes: velvet breeches and a loose white shirt. His hair was long and he looked romantic, like the people one sees in swashbuckling films having sword fights and leaping from high walls.
‘What does he do?’ asked Rollo.
They were soon to know. With an agonized grimace, Ranulf opened his shirt. And there, hanging on to his chest, its front legs scrabbling at the bare skin, its scabrous tail thrashing, was a huge black rat, gnawing at his heart.
‘He was cursed,’ explained Cousin Howard. ‘His evil brother said, “May rats gnaw at your heart till you die,” and threw him in a dungeon. Only in this particular case the rat died too. It is not usual for a rat to hang on like that, but you can’t separate them; it never lets go.’
‘It’s a proper plague rat,’ said Rollo. ‘Rattus rattus. The kind that first came over in ships and caused the Black Death. The brown rats came later.’
But even Rollo, fond of animals as he was, could hardly bear to look at the twitching, yellow-toothed creature tearing and scrunching and clawing at the young man’s heart.
‘I think we’ve got enough now,’ said Ned when they had agreed that Ranulf would do splendidly. ‘Four ghosts seems about right,’ and the others agreed. But just as they were getting up to go, a pair of feet suddenly appeared from behind the wall. They were large feet: hairy, bare and not very clean. And nothing at all was attached to them. No ankles, no knees, no thighs, and certainly no body. They were simply feet.
‘Oh dear, I told them they wouldn’t do. I told both feet.’ Cousin Howard was looking worried. ‘I didn’t see what could be done simply with feet.’
But the feet were obstinate. They were determined. Every time they were told to go away they returned.
‘I suppose we could make room for them,’ said Madlyn. ‘I mean, just feet don’t take up a lot of space.’
‘Maybe they feel they’ve been chosen,’ said Rollo. ‘It’s a thing that happens.’
So the final list contained the Bride called Brenda, Mr Smith the Skeleton, Sawn-in-half Sunita, Ranulf with his rat – and The Feet.
There was nothing left now except to thank Cousin Howard for finding the ghosts, and this they did again and again.
‘You must have taken so much trouble,’ said Madlyn.
And Cousin Howard said, no, no, not really, he had been only too glad to help.
Aunt Emily and Uncle George had of course noticed the change in Cousin Howard. No one now would have called him Pointless Percival – or Pointless anything at all. He spent more and more time out of his room; he glided round the castle looking busy and purposeful. The Hoggart was forgotten.
‘When did you realize that Cousin Howard was . . . not quite like us?’ Aunt Emily asked the children.
‘Oh, quite soon,’ said Madlyn. ‘After a few days – only we didn’t like to say anything.’
But now seemed to be a good time to mention their plans for the next Open Day and to ask their great-aunt and great-uncle whether they minded if a few of Cousin Howard’s acquaintances came to help bring in more visitors.
‘What do you think, dear?’ Aunt Emily asked her brother.
Sir George was worrying about some loose stones he had found in the wall of the park and not really listening very hard.
‘I suppose it can’t do any harm. As long as they’re proper ghosts. No cheating.’
‘Oh, they’re proper ghosts all right, Uncle George,’ said Rollo. ‘You can’t get more proper ghosts than these!’
CHAPTER TEN
With only three days to go till Open Day the children started rehearsals for the haunting straight away – and it was very hard work.
Brenda made it clear that she didn’t just want to drip blood on to people – she wanted to strangle them and put her icy hands round their throats and tighten them till they choked.
‘Round men’s throats,’ she said firmly.
Mr Smith was still in a muddle about his size.
‘I can’t fit in there,’ he said, when Madlyn suggested that he might like to lie in the oak chest in the Great Hall because it was the nearest thing they had to a coffin.
‘But, Mr Smith, you’re a skeleton,’ said Madlyn. ‘You can’t be thinner than that.’
‘Oh yes, I forgot.’
When you have been as fat as Mr Smith had been, it is difficult to realize how much you have changed.
Most skeletons are not interesting to talk to because they can’t use proper words; they just rattle their bones and grind their teeth. But Mr Smith, like all the ghosts that Cousin Howard had found, was special, and had kept the deep and matey voice he had had when he was a taxi driver.
Ranulf spent a lot of time buttoning and unbuttoning his shirt.
‘I could open it suddenly, with a flourish,’ he said, ‘so that the rat, so to speak, exploded in people’s faces.’
But when they said yes, that would be good, he thought that maybe unbuttoning it slowly might be better. ‘So that that the tail appeared first,’ he said, ‘and then the legs’ . . .
Because she had worked in a circus, Sunita had a real feeling for special effects. What the children loved particularly was the little sigh she gave just before she separated herself into two halves; it made the whole thing very moving and beautiful.
Which left The Feet. No one knew quite what to do with them and they were standing about rather wearily when the kitchen door opened and a blast of sound from Mrs Grove’s radio came out towards them.
It was a Scottish reel. A special one. The reel of the 51st Highlanders played on the bagpipes.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the left toes began to tap, followed by the toes on the right . . . and The Feet began to dance. The toes rose and fell, they curled and uncurled. The heels thumped on the floor, the ankle stumps crossed and uncrossed . . . and all in perfect time to the music.
All Highland reels need to be practised if one is to do them well, but the reel of the 51st Highlanders is the most difficult of all. And here were these ancient hairy feet, with their corns and their calluses, dancing as if to the manner born.
Clearly these were Scottish feet – feet from over the border. Having feet like these at Clawstone could only be an honour, and they decided to bring up Ned’s CD player and let The Feet do what they felt like on the day.
Rehearsing a show too much can be as bad as rehearsing one too little.
The ghosts which Cousin Howard had found had one thing in common: all of them were homeless.
Ranulf’s dungeon had been blown up and a shoe factory built on the site. Brenda, who had liked to haunt the graveyard behind the church where she’d been shot, left it when a motorway was driven through it. Mr Smith’s flat near the taxi rank was bought by a couple who started doing what they called ‘improvements’, which meant knocking down perfectly good walls, putting up partitions and painting the woodwork in colours which made his skull ache. And Sunita’s family had washed their hands of her when she went to work in a circus.
So the first thing the children did was to try and make the ghosts feel comfortable in the castle and give them a place they could call their own.
They offered them the dungeon and the armoury and the banqueting hall – but the ghosts chose the old nursery at the very top of the house. There was a day nursery with a Wendy house and a dappled rocking horse and a tinny piano, and a night nursery with three small beds and a sagging sofa and a row of china chamber pots. There was also a pantry and a scullery where the children’s nannies had prepared their food and washed their nappies.
‘Are you sure this is what you want?’ Madlyn asked, because the rooms, though dusty and full of cobwebs, were light and cheerful. ‘You wouldn’t rather have somewhere damp and dark?’
But the ghosts liked the white-painted rooms, which had belonged to the Percival children long ago. It reminded them of the times before they had grown up, and suffered, and become phantoms. Ranulf spent much of the time on the dappled horse – he said that the rocking movement quietened the rat – and Brenda was pleased with the big sink where she could soak her veil and dab at the spots on her dress. She had told them that she had been a war bride and married at a time when clothes were rationed and one had to save up for them not only with money but with coupons.
‘Thirty-three coupons, this dress cost me,’ she said – and of course that made it understandable that she should be so cross about the blood.
As the big day approached everything seemed to be going really well. The ghosts kept thinking of new and interesting ways of frightening people. Ned had printed leaflets warning people to beware as some terrifying spectres had been found in Clawstone and anyone with heart problems should take care. There was even a small piece in the paper.
And then on the last evening disaster struck.
The children had gone up to the nursery to wish everybody luck – and found that the rooms were empty.
‘Are you there?’ they called.
But already they were alarmed. Ghosts do not usually become invisible when they are staying with friends.
At first nothing happened. Then, very slowly, the ghosts appeared. They were huddled together on the sagging sofa and they looked terrible.
‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ asked Madlyn.
Brenda cleared her throat. ‘We don’t think we can do it,’ she said ‘It’s too difficult. It’s not what we’ve been used to.’
‘We’ll never get it right,’ said Mr Smith.
‘Do what? What can’t you do?’
‘Haunt like you want us to,’ said Ranulf. ‘Give a proper performance. Scare people.’
The children looked at each other in dismay. They knew what they were dealing with and that it was serious.
Stage fright. The terror that can come out of the blue and attack actors and musicians before a show. Sometimes it passes, but it can be so bad that nothing on earth can make the person go on and perform. The careers of brilliant artists have been completely blighted by stage fright – and no doctor has yet found a cure.
‘We don’t feel we can stay,’ said Ranulf, ‘not if we cannot do what you ask of us.’
‘It wouldn’t be fair to stay if we can’t do our work,’ said Sunita.
Strangely, it was Rollo, who was usually so dreamy, who now took charge.
‘If you come with me I’ll show you why you have to help us,’ he said, ‘why you have to stay.’
The phantoms looked at him listlessly. The Feet stayed where they were, half buried in the sofa cushions, but the others followed him out of the nursery, down three flights of stairs and out of the castle.
He led them across the gardens, past the gate to the park and to the place where the elm tree leaned over the high stone wall. Rollo climbed up to his watching place; Madlyn and Ned followed – and the ghosts glided up and settled down beside them.
They were staring down on the soft green fields of the park; the hazel and birch trees of the copse; the silver ribbon of the stream. A thrush was singing. Wild roses glowed in the hedgerows.
‘There,’ said Rollo. ‘That’s the king in front.’
The ruler of the herd came slowly out of the trees: huge and vigorous and as white as milk. Close behind him came the oldest of the cows, with her scars and her crumpled horn, followed by the others with their skittering calves. The young bull, skinny and bad-tempered, who had challenged the king so often and so unsuccessfully, came last.
‘They’ve been safe here for a thousand years,’ said Rollo, ‘but if we can’t get more visitors to come to the castle they’ll have to be sent away – or even slaughtered. That’s why you have to stay and help us.’
Sitting beside her brother, her legs dangling over the ivy-clad wall, Madlyn held her breath. Could the phantoms be expected to see what Rollo saw: beasts so special that they had to be cared for whatever the cost?
No one spoke. The park was silent; even the thrush no longer sang.
It wasn’t going to work, thought Madlyn. Whatever Rollo hoped for wasn’t going to happen.
But now one of the ghosts had stirred. Sunita. She rose to her feet and tossed her hair back and for a moment she stood balanced on the wall. And then she floated down, down into the field. Not the top half of her and not the bottom. All of her.
No one knows whether animals can see ghosts but they can certainly sense them. The king bull pawed the ground once with his powerful hooves. The cows lifted their heads and stared. The smallest of the calves gave a sudden cry.
Sunita stood still and the cattle came forward to form a circle round her. Not crowding her, just gazing with their dark and gentle eyes. The calves stopped butting and playing and came to
rest by their mothers’ side. The king’s great hooves were still. Every one of the beasts had its head turned to the place where she stood. Even the young and angry bull was still.
When she saw that all the animals were calm, Sunita walked up to the oldest cow, with her scars and her crumpled horn. She put her hands together and bowed down so that her hair touched the grass.
‘I salute you in the name of Surabhi, the Heavenly Cow who gave birth to the sky and was the mother and muse of all created things,’ she said.
Then she moved on to stand before the king bull, and on the wall the children held their breath for they knew how fierce he could be, and Sunita, down in the field, did not look like a ghost: she looked like a vulnerable girl.
‘And I salute you in the name of Nandi, the bull-mount who carried the Lord God Shiva safely through the universe.’
She bowed low again and it seemed as though the bull returned her salute, bending his head so that the muscles bunched and tightened on his neck.
But Sunita had not finished. She went round the herd and to each and every beast, even the smallest of the calves, she made the same bow and spoke a greeting.
Up on the wall, the children had remembered.
‘Of course,’ said Ned. ‘Cows are sacred in India. They wander all over the streets, and no one’s allowed to harm them.’
‘And when they’re old they don’t get slaughtered, they get sent to a place where they can live in peace. Sort of like an old people’s home for cows,’ said Madlyn. ‘Rani told me, at school.’
Sunita, when she had returned to her place on the wall, told them more about what these beasts meant to her people.
‘I was born in January,’ she said. ‘There’s a feast then called Pongal to celebrate the harvest and the end of the rains. It goes on for days and on the third day is the Festival of Cattle. The bulls get silver caps on their horns and the cows get bead necklaces and bells and sheaves of corn. And garlands of flowers – wonderful flowers: marigolds and pinks and hibiscus blossom.’
For a moment, as they looked down on the park, the children imagined the cattle of Clawstone decorated and garlanded, with jewellery on their horns. What would Sir George say if that was to happen? Something rude, that was certain!