by Eva Ibbotson
‘Pray over them, you mean?’ asked Madlyn. ‘Like a funeral service?’
‘Well, yes … but not only like that.’ She hesitated. ‘In India cows are sacred because they provide milk and give their hides. But they’re sacred too because ...’ She looked down, suddenly embarrassed. ‘Because they carry the souls of the dead to heaven. They’re sort of connected with heaven. In the old days people’s bodies were sometimes taken for burial on the back of a bull or a cow to help them on their journey. I can’t put it into words, but they’re … special. And I don’t think they should just be buried and forgotten without a ceremony.’
‘A sort of leave-taking,’ said Ned.
‘Yes. And I think we wouldn’t feel so wretched ourselves if this were done. Saying goodbye is important.’ She paused and looked at the children. ‘What do you think?’
Rollo was the first to speak. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said firmly. ‘We were silly not to do it before. We must go as soon as we can.’
Lord Trembellow had made no secret of the fact that the cattle were buried in his gravel pit: he was proud of helping the vets get rid of the infected beasts. But the pit was fifteen kilometres away, on the other side of the hill to Trembellow Towers.
‘It’s too far to walk there and back,’ said Ned. ‘But there’s a bus one way at least. If the ghosts don’t mind being invisible there shouldn’t be any trouble.’
They decided to go on their own without saying anything to the grown-ups, and their chance came two days later when the Percivals were asked out to dinner with the Lord Lieutenant of the county, who lived in a mansion which was an hour’s drive away from Clawstone. Both George and Emily hated going out to dinner, which meant changing out of their usual clothes and eating things which disagreed with them and staying up late.
But they went, and as soon as Uncle George’s Bentley was out of sight, the children and the ghosts hurried down to the bus stop by the church.
The sun had gone down by the time they reached the road leading to pit Number Five. There were traffic cones in rows across the path, and a notice saying ‘Out of Bounds’ and another one saying ‘No Admittance’.
When they got to the entrance to the pit itself, they found it roped off. The windows of the workmen’s hut were boarded up. The hillside with its gashes looked threatening and sinister; flood water from the recent rains had collected into large puddles; old tin cans floated on the oil-stained water.
Rollo shivered and Madlyn looked at him anxiously. Had it been a mistake to come?
Certainly it made everything seem worse, seeing where those warm-blooded, lovely creatures had ended up.
The ghosts had glided on ahead. Sunita was looking very purposeful as she searched for the burial site. The Feet followed her, keeping close to her heels.
The rough track, with its churned mud and heavy wheel marks, veered round to the left and led into a wider piece of waste ground.
‘There,’ said Ranulf. ‘That will be where they’re buried.’
They had come to a large patch of flat ground, covered with recently turned-over earth. Diggers and crushers stood nearby, like great dinosaurs.
Sunita nodded. ‘Yes. This must be the place.’
She began to move backwards and forwards over the burial site. Her arms were stretched out, her head was bent intently over the earth.
‘It’s strange,’ she said after a few moments, ‘I can’t seem to—’
She broke off suddenly and clutched Brenda. The children drew closer to each other; the other ghosts took a step backwards.
‘Oh heavens, what is it?’ said Madlyn.
The pit had suddenly filled with the most appalling sounds … sounds like none they had heard before: horrible, troubling, somehow not decent.
First, a ghastly gurgling sort of grunt … Then a rasping, squawk-like screech … and lastly a kind of honking hoot which changed halfway into a croaking squeal.
‘Who’s there?’ shouted Ned.
The noise stopped abruptly. The silence was absolute.
‘Maybe it was an animal?’ suggested Rollo.
But what kind of animal? And there had been more than one.
‘I’m not going to let it stop me,’ said Sunita. ‘If it’s werewolves, we can deal with them. They can’t hurt ghosts.’
She began once more to glide round the patch of freshly dug earth, trying to make contact with the spirits of the creatures who lay below. Madlyn had brought a bunch of flowers; she held them in her hand, waiting till Sunita should give the signal and the ceremony begin.
But Sunita kept gliding steadily round the edge of the burial ground, then across it, and they could see that she was becoming troubled and uncertain.
‘I don’t understand it,’ she murmured.
Five minutes passed, and then ten. It grew darker and colder, and Sunita became more and more bewildered and unsure.
Then the noise came again. It was louder than before, and even more horrible, and it died away in a hopeless kind of gurgling splutter.
And from behind a large digger there emerged … three grandmothers.
At least, they looked like grandmothers – the old-fashioned kind: plump, with grey hair and black clothes, and they carried not one handkerchief each but a whole bunch of them.
‘Of course!’ said Brenda. ‘I know who you are. You’re banshees.’
‘Yes, of course we’re banshees. And you’re ghosts. But I can tell you this: whatever you’re doing you’re wasting your time,’ said the eldest of the women.
‘It’s a disgrace,’ said the middle one. ‘We’re going to complain when we get back – the Banshee Bulletin used to be a reliable newspaper but it seems it’ll print any sort of rubbish nowadays. They don’t check their facts. And poor Greta’s in a dreadful state.’
‘Yes, I am,’ said the youngest. ‘My insides are all knotted up and my throat’s as curdled as custard.’
‘People make a fuss about constipation, but it’s nothing to what happens when a howl gets stuck inside you,’ said the eldest banshee.
‘We came three hundred miles to have a good wail and – well, you heard us,’ said the middle one. ‘If the Banshee Choral Society had been there, we’d have been struck off the register, making a noise like that.’
‘But why? Why can’t you wail?’ asked Brenda, who felt herself close to these women.
‘We can’t wail because there’s nothing to wail about.’
‘There’s nothing to wail for.’
‘Wailing doesn’t happen for nothing, you know. There has to be a reason.’
Sunita now glided closer to the women. She looked relieved, as though a weight had fallen off her shoulders.
‘Yes, I see, I see,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t understand it. I thought I’d lost my power to connect. But they aren’t here, are they?’
‘You can say that again,’ said the eldest banshee. ‘There’s nothing under that earth except more earth and more earth still.’
Rollo had stepped forward; he was trembling with excitement. ‘You mean they aren’t dead?’
The banshees shrugged. ‘As to that, we couldn’t say. But they aren’t here and that’s for sure.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
They had forced open the door of the workmen’s hut and the banshees were making tea.
It was a crush with all of them inside – unlike the ghosts, the banshees were solid – but the fug was cosy. They had missed the last bus back to Clawstone, but the banshees had offered to drop them off on their way home.
‘I don’t understand it,’ said Ranulf yet again. ‘Why say the cattle are buried here when they aren’t? What is Lord Trembellow up to?’
‘If it was Lord Trembellow,’ said Mr Smith. ‘He may have been had.’
But why?
No one could understand it. The Feet had climbed on to the eldest banshee’s knee and refused to get down.
‘I feel I’ve seen them somewhere before,’ she said, patting the hairy toes.
‘Yes, I feel th
e same,’ said the middle sister. ‘Somewhere where we went to do a job. A funeral, I suppose, but I can’t think where.’
And the youngest sister nodded and said that she too felt that The Feet were familiar.
But Rollo could think of one thing only. The fate of the cattle.
‘Where can they be?’ he said again and again, and Madlyn sighed because it seemed to her cruel that Rollo should once again be given hope. If the animals weren’t buried here they would be buried somewhere else.
‘All the same, it’s really strange,’ said Ned. ‘Why pretend to bury them?’
They had searched the site, using their torches, but found nothing. After the torrential rain, any hoof marks or tracks there might have been would have been washed away.
The banshees sipped their tea. The fug in the hut increased.
‘We need some more water for the kettle,’ said the middle banshee.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Rollo.
He took the kettle and went out to the tap at the back of the hut. Wedged behind the standpipe was a long thin metal object. He pulled it out and shone his torch on it. It seemed to be the nozzle of a spray-gun. Well, that didn’t help much. The workmen had probably used it to spray paint on to the lorries.
Rollo sighed. If only he could find some real evidence – something to prove that the cattle had been here – but there was nothing.
He picked up the kettle and went back into the hut.
Sir George had been in bed for an hour when he heard a knock, and Rollo, in his pyjamas, put his head round the door.
‘I have to speak to you,’ he said.
‘Good heavens, boy, it’s the middle of the night!’
‘Yes, I know. But it’s terribly important.’
Sir George put on his bedside lamp. He had indigestion after his dinner party, and a headache from the wine.
‘Well, come on then. What is it?’
Rollo came and stood by the bed. ‘We went to say goodbye to the cows,’ he said, ‘and they aren’t there.’
Sir George roused himself. ‘You did what?’
So Rollo told him about the visit to the gravel pit.
‘But Sunita couldn’t get in touch with the spirits of the cows, and the banshees couldn’t wail and that means that the cows aren’t buried in the pit.’
Sir George looked at Rollo. The boy’s face was lit up and excited, and he hated throwing cold water on his hopes.
‘Look, Rollo, I have every respect for the ghosts. Ghosts are important and venerable. But they’re ghosts. And banshees are banshees. They don’t belong to the real world. The world where animals are infected and have to be buried safely and put away.’
‘Sunita knows about the cattle. She knows. We have to find out what happened to them and where they are.’
Sir George sighed.
‘Rollo, when we want something very much we will believe all sorts of things. You want to believe that the cattle are still alive and so do I, but—’
‘They are alive. I know they are. They’ve been stolen and taken somewhere. I know. You should see my zoo magazine … animals are always being stolen.’
Sir George shook his head. ‘What would be the point of stealing them? No one could get money for them – they’re the only herd of white cattle in the country. They’d be recognized at once.’
But after he had sent Rollo back to bed he lay awake, turning over what the boy had said. It was nonsense – of course it was nonsense. It was wishful thinking. Propped up on his pillows, Sir George remembered the D-Day landing. His best friend had been shot and fell beside him. Later, when there was a lull in the fighting, he went to the field station to see him and the doctor told him there was no hope, but George couldn’t believe it.
‘He’s going to get better,’ he kept saying. ‘He’s got a good colour.’
But the doctor was right. His comrade had died that night.
All the same, thought Sir George now, perhaps he would get in touch with the ministry and ask them to confirm the identity of the vets. And it might be a good idea to have a word with Lord Trembellow.
Rollo had gone to bed at last; all the children slept; the castle was silent.
But the ghosts were not asleep. As the clock struck midnight they glided one by one out of the nursery windows and set off along the road which led through the village.
No one saw them – they moved invisibly, and fast. At the first crossroads they separated. Ranulf and his rat went west, towards the hills and farms of the Lake District. Brenda took the road to the east, which led to the villages and resorts of the coast. Sunita and Mr Smith glided on till the road divided once again. Then Sunita and The Feet made their way southwards, heading for the big towns. Mr Smith went north.
They had said nothing to the children. A Ghost Search is best carried out silently and without witnesses – for the people that must be sought out and questioned are often shy of the undead; they will only help or speak to others of their own kind. And it was from phantoms like themselves that the ghosts of Clawstone hoped to discover what had happened to the cattle.
Ranulf’s ancestors had come from the Lake District; the de Torquevilles had owned big tracts of land there; the wicked brother who had imprisoned Ranulf had been Sheriff of Westmorland. The roads that carried the traffic now were built on the tracks and lanes that Ranulf had known as a boy, and many of them were still steep and narrow. If a truck big enough to take a load of cattle wanted to get through, it would have to take the big motorway to Keswick.
‘Oh, do be quiet,’ said Ranulf to the rat.
But the rodent sensed that they were returning to his home ground. He had been a lakeside rat, one of six who had moved to the ancestral home of the de Torquevilles, and he swooped up and down Ranulf’s chest as if he was on a skating rink.
Just before the road widened for the motorway there was a lay-by with picnic tables and litter bins. It was on this spot that Ranulf’s old friend Marmaduke Franshaw had passed on and become a ghost. He had been practising with his longbow when there was a sudden thunderstorm, and Marmaduke, who should have known better, took shelter under a tree and was struck by lightning.
Ranulf and Marmaduke had shared a tutor, they had ridden together and courted the same girls. Marmaduke had been a keen sportsman, able to follow the spoor of any animal he was hunting. If anyone had noticed a large lorry carrying animals it would be him.
Ranulf sat down on a milestone and prepared to wait.
Sunita’s first stop was in the town where the old ghost with head lice was living – the one who had been at the audition but decided to return to her friends. It had stuck in Sunita’s mind that the old woman had said she lived in a bus shelter near the slaughterhouse.
The word ‘slaughterhouse’ made Sunita feel sick, but if there was any trafficking in stolen animals for slaughter she would have to look into it.
‘No, can’t say I’ve noticed anything,’ said the old woman when Sunita had tracked her down. She bent over a brazier to stir something in a pot, and Sunita saw the lice, silver in the moonlight, drop one by one into the stew. ‘It’s not used now, the slaughterhouse; it’s all locked up. I’d have noticed if anything had come in. They make an awful din, these great lorries – like trains they are, with iron cages and all. Nasty things.’
Beside Sunita, The Feet stirred restlessly. They did not think being opposite a slaughterhouse with an old lady who dripped lice was bad for Sunita; they did not think anything at all – but they felt it through the skin of their toes and the soles of their feet and they moved closer to Sunita.
‘Fond of you, aren’t they?’ said the old lady, looking down at them.
She beckoned to some of the other ghosts who lived rough, but no one had seen anything, and Sunita and The Feet went on wearily gliding south. It was going to be a long night.
The first ghost whom Brenda met as she glided east to the seaside was Fifi Fenwick, exercising her bull terriers. Phantom dogs are usually black, but Fifi’s
bull terriers had stayed the same colour they were when they were alive – white with an occasional brown ear – so Brenda saw them at once.
Fifi was immensely interested, of course, to hear that the cattle were not buried where they were supposed to be, and very anxious to help, but she had seen nothing.
‘I mostly stay on the beach,’ she said. ‘It’s easier for the dogs. But I’ll tell everyone at the Thursday Gatherings, of course – they may have heard something. Those lorries make a devilish noise – even when they drive at night they shake the windows.’
She asked after Brenda’s mother and was sorry to hear that she had not become a ghost but stayed where she was, underground.
‘You’ll miss her,’ she said, and Brenda agreed that she missed her badly.
‘Though of course if she hadn’t made me marry the boot manufacturer, Roderick wouldn’t have shot me, and Mummy and I would have been together longer.’
‘There’s a big garage on the way to Seahouses,’ said Fifi. ‘It’s open all night and they’re doing a road survey there. Something about widening the road. They might be able to help you.’
And she called her dogs to heel and strode off up the beach.
Mr Smith, like all men who have made their living by driving taxis, had a very good sense of direction. He could see the roads between England and Scotland in his head as clearly as he had seen the veins on his hand when he still had proper hands. And of the three main roads that led north over the border, the most likely one for a heavy vehicle to take was the road on the flat plain between the coast and the Lammermuir hills.
And as luck would have it, it was there that an old friend of his, who had given up taxis and become a lorry driver, had met with a fatal accident.
Hal Striver had gone head-on into an outsize transporter which had skidded on black ice – one of those juggernauts that should not have been on the road at all – and since then Hal had haunted the garage and the transport cafe near the site of the accident.
He was quite a well-known ghost, not particularly shy, and drivers eating their egg and chips often saw him wandering between the tables. But what Hal mostly did was watch the traffic – he’d been on the roads all his life and to him cars and lorries had personalities, like people. And when he saw a juggernaut, the kind that killed him, he would clench his fists and call rude words after the retreating lorry.