Gargoyle Hall

by Angie Sage

  “Sir,” I told her.

  Wanda looked at me, puzzled. “Why?” she asked.

  Brenda heaved a big sigh and Wanda said, “It’s all right, Mum, you don’t have to stay. I will be OK, I promise.” Wanda waited until Brenda had stomped off, then she tugged out her plaits and shook her head like a real pony. “I’m sorry, Araminta,” she said. “I was only doing a bit of detective work to help you out. I thought I would have a look in the bat turret. So I opened the door, only a tiny little bit, and all the bats just burst out.”

  “Well, it would have been nice if you had told Brenda that,” I said. “And Aunt Tabby.”

  “I did. Honestly I did,” Wanda said. “I told Mum while she was doing my hair, but she didn’t believe me. And then I told Aunt Tabby when she came to see if I was all right. And she didn’t believe me either.”

  “Huh,” I said. And I carried on reading.

  Wanda sat for a while staring at me like she does when she is thinking. I am used to it now, so I didn’t take any notice. Suddenly Wanda said, “You look sad, Araminta.”

  “No I don’t,” I said.

  “Yes, you do. Aunt Tabby has said something horrible to you, hasn’t she?”

  Now, Uncle Drac once said something about Wanda. He said she was empathetic. I was cross with her at the time, so I agreed. I said I thought she was totally pathetic. But Uncle Drac said that wasn’t what he meant. What he had meant was that Wanda always seems to understand how you are feeling. I suppose he was right. So I told Wanda what Aunt Tabby had said about the boarding school. Wanda stared at me and looked puzzled. I sighed. I wasn’t getting the sympathy I had hoped for. I decided that Wanda wasn’t empy-thingy at all.

  Then Wanda said, “Araminta, what is boarding school?”

  “It’s a school where you go to live,” I told her.

  Wanda’s eyes looked like they were about to pop out. Just like my old goldfish used to when I forgot to top up the tank with water. “You have to live at school?”

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “What—for ever?”

  “Yes. Although I think they sometimes let you out for the holidays if you have been good.”

  “Oh, Araminta, that’s awful,” Wanda said. “Because you would never be good, and so they would never let you out.”

  I reckoned that Wanda was probably right. Which was bad, because then The Mystery of the Forbidden Bat Turret and The Mystery of the Terrified Bats would never be solved, as Wanda is no use at Mysteries at all.

  Wanda’s eyes went all fuzzy like they do when she is going to cry. “So I would never see you again,” she said. “Well, not until we left school and then we wouldn’t even recognise each other because we would both be so old. Oh, Araminta,” she wailed.

  I felt a bit like wailing myself by now, so it was a good thing that we got interrupted by the sound of Aunt Tabby banging the gong far below in the hall to tell us to come down for supper.

  Boowoom-boowoom! Boowoom-boowoom!

  Wanda squeezed my hand. Wanda’s hands are always a little bit sticky; I think it is all the gummi bears she eats. She looked at me very seriously, like I was dangerously ill or something. “You will have to be really polite at supper, Araminta,” she said. “I know it will be difficult, but don’t worry, I will help you.” And then she squeezed my hand again and I had to go and wash it in the drowned-nun-in-the-bath-bathroom.

  On the way downstairs we met Sir Horace and Fang. Sir Horace is a lovely ghost; he lives inside a suit of armour and has a very spooky, booming voice. I was pleased to see him because recently he has been spending more time at his old castle down the road. But Sir Horace does not like thunderstorms and he especially does not like lightning, which I suppose is something to do with living inside a metal suit. So when there is a thunderstorm you can always find him at Spook House.

  “Ah, Good Evening, Miss Spook. Good Evening, Miss Wizzard,” he boomed.

  Wanda is still a bit shy with ghosts so she just smiled, but I said, “Good evening, Sir Horace,” very politely. This was not because I was practising for being polite at supper but because you must always be polite to ghosts. And anyway, Sir Horace is always polite to me, so it is only fair.

  Fang wagged his ghostly tail while Sir Horace, who is almost as polite as I am, began to bow. There was a horrible teeth-on-edge creaking noise and Wanda looked at me in a panic. The problem with Sir Horace bowing is that his head falls off. And when his head falls off at the top of the stairs it bounces all the way down. And Aunt Tabby always blames me.

  “No, Sir Horace!” I said. “Please don’t b—” but it was too late.

  Boiiing! Sir Horace’s head fell off. But Wanda was ready; she dived and caught it just before it hit the top step.

  “Oh, well caught, Miss Wizzard,” said Sir Horace. He plonked his head back on and gave it a sharp twist. He chuckled, “A knight in distress saved by a fair damsel. Ho ho.” I think it was some kind of ghost joke. Wanda giggled like she understood it, but I reckon she was just showing off.

  “And what, pray, can I do for you fair damsels in return?” he asked us.

  I was just about to ask him to get rid of Great-aunt Emilene for us—I hoped he might be able to throw her out of a window or something—when Wanda suddenly stopped being shy and got in first. “Can you help Araminta to be polite at supper, please?” she asked.

  Sir Horace chuckled again. “Oh, I had hoped for an easy task, Miss Wizzard, ha ha. But fear not, I am at your command. Lead on.”

  In honour of Great-aunt Emilene’s visit, Aunt Tabby had arranged for us to have supper in the ballroom. The ballroom is huge. It is where my guinea pig Gertrude lives, although I haven’t seen her for ages.

  Wanda and I arrived in style—Sir Horace clanked in with Wanda on one arm and me on the other, and Fang trotted in front like a guard of honour. Edmund had turned up too, so he followed us, floating a few feet above the floor. It was very dramatic and everyone looked at us—even Great-aunt Emilene. My great-aunt can’t see ghosts at all, but even she could not miss a walking suit of armour.

  “Goodness!” she tutted. “No wonder the child is over-excited all the time.”

  We smiled graciously and took in the scene. It looked amazing, like something from one of those vampire films that Aunt Tabby likes to watch. (Actually, Wanda and I like to watch them too, from behind Aunt Tabby’s sofa but she doesn’t know that, so you mustn’t tell her.) The long table that lives beside the wall was in the middle of the room with some old embroidered curtains over it as a cloth. The chairs around it looked like chair ghosts because they had long white sheets over them, and in the middle of the table was a huge candelabrum—which is a kind of metal tree thingy that you put candles in—and all the candles were alight.

  I could see the thin, spiky shape of Aunt Tabby at one end of the table and the fatter shape of Great-aunt Emilene at the other. Brenda and Barry were sitting at Aunt Tabby’s end, and Uncle Drac was lurking in the shadows, which is something he does really well. I wondered why Aunt Tabby was allowing him to lurk at supper because usually she tells him to, “Stop hanging around, Drac, and make yourself useful for a change,” but then I realised that he was doing something useful. He was pulling up the little lift that is called the dumb waiter. You use it to bring food up from the kitchen, and whatever was on its way smelled delicious.

  So, as Fang, Sir Horace and Edmund escorted us to the table and everyone (except Great-aunt Emilene) smiled at us, I actually thought that supper was going to be good.

  How wrong can you be?

  Great-aunt Emilene smells of mothballs and the double-ended ferret makes me feel sick, so I was not exactly thrilled when Aunt Tabby told me to sit next to her. “Me?” I said.

  “Yes, Araminta, you,” Aunt Tabby replied.

  I was going to tell Aunt Tabby about the double-ended ferret and how I would not be able to eat any supper if I sat next to Great-aunt Emilene when I caught sight of Wanda—who was sitting at the other end of the table with
Brenda and Barry—making her please-try-to-be-good-Araminta face. So I sat in the chair next to the double-ended ferret. Uncle Drac came to my rescue by sitting opposite me, and I felt a bit better until I remembered that Uncle Drac still calls Great-aunt Emilene, “Mummy”, which always makes me laugh, however hard I try not to.

  Brenda had cooked supper and Brenda’s cooking is delicious. It was my favourite too: rat-in-a-blanket. This is not a real rat (although that might taste nice)—it is a big roll of meatloaf wrapped in cheesy pastry. Brenda had also done some rat gravy along with a big dish of rat-poo peas, which are peas with butter and mint and nothing at all to do with rat poo, but I like calling them that because it annoys Aunt Tabby.

  I was busy squashing the rat-poo peas into the gravy when Great-aunt Emilene leaned over and barked in my ear, “Manners!”

  It was a real shock. I jumped, my fork went up in the air like a catapult and a shower of rat-poo peas went all over Great-aunt Emilene’s dead ferrets.

  “Bertie!” she screeched. “Basil!” Which I suppose was what the ferrets were called before they got sewn together. She jumped up from her seat, pulled Bertie and Basil off her neck and shook the peas out. A shower of dead ferret fur fell on to my rat-in-a-blanket. Yuck!

  Wanda’s please-try-to-be-good-Araminta expression was going full blast now. I knew Wanda thought I was going to say something really rude to Great-aunt Emilene about the ferret-fur sprinkles on my rat-in-a-blanket but—as Uncle Drac likes to say, because for some reason he thinks it is funny—Wanda mis-underestimated me. I can be very good when I want to be and right then I really did want to be good. There was no way I wanted to end up at boarding school.

  So, in an extremely gracious and polite way, I turned to Great-aunt Emilene. “Oh, Aunt Emilene,” I said. “I am so very sorry about the rat poo, I—”

  “The what?” said Great-aunt Emilene, still shaking out her horrible dead ferrets.

  “Rat poo!” I said much louder because she was clearly deaf.

  Great-aunt Emilene looked shocked. “Araminta Jane, when I was a little girl I would have been sent straight to bed if I had used a word like that.”

  Now I hate it when someone calls me Araminta Jane. Even Aunt Tabby in her very worst mood has never called me by my middle name. But even so—despite Wanda’s amazing please-try-to-be-good-Araminta face, which was going into overdrive now and made me want to laugh—I not only stayed remarkably polite, I also tried to educate my great-aunt. “Great-aunt Emilene, there is nothing wrong with the word ‘rat’,” I told her, as loud as I could so that she could hear me. “And there is nothing wrong with the word ‘poo’ either. Or with the words ‘rat’ and ‘poo’ together. Rats do go poo, even though it isn’t green like rat-poo peas—well, only if a rat has eaten something really yucky—and actually the poo is not usually round either, it’s more oblong, but I was using what Uncle Drac calls artistic licence to—”

  “Aaaargh! Araminta, stop!” A sudden yell came from the Aunt Tabby end of the table, but it wasn’t from Aunt Tabby. It was from Wanda.

  “Stop what?” I asked Wanda.

  But Wanda did not reply. She just shoved her elbows on the table (which is not at all polite) and rested her head in her hands like she had a really bad headache. I think she was even moaning a bit, so maybe she did have a headache from sitting next to Aunt Tabby.

  I noticed that everyone else had gone very quiet. Even Great-aunt Emilene wasn’t saying anything—she was staring at me with her mouth open. This is also very bad table manners because it is not nice seeing people’s food inside their mouth and my great-aunt had a mouth full of half-chewed rat-poo peas.

  I decided that the only polite thing to do was to ignore Great-aunt Emilene’s lapse of manners and carry on eating the bits of my rat-in-a-blanket that did not have dead ferret fur on. I was so busy fishing out the little bits of fur that I did not see that Sir Horace had decided to come and give me some advice. So when his ghostly voice boomed out of his armour like a foghorn in my ear, saying, “When in a hole, Miss Spook, stop digging,” it is not surprising that I got another shock.

  I am not sure exactly what happened next, but I think I must have turned around really fast because my elbow hit Sir Horace and he began to topple. I jumped up from the table because I knew that when Sir Horace falls over he ends up in hundreds of pieces and it takes ages to get him back together.

  “Manners!” Great-aunt Emilene screeched again. I thought she was yelling at Sir Horace, because it is definitely not polite to creep up on people when they are eating and boom in their ear. Then she did something very rude indeed. She got up, grabbed hold of me and tried to push me back in my seat.

  Well. I was not pleased. There was Sir Horace lying in pieces on the floor, groaning and needing help, while this horrible woman with her dead ferrets swinging in my face had grabbed hold of the back of my dress. I was stunned. How would she feel if I had done that to her when she was trying to help an old friend who had fallen to bits on the rug?

  Everyone else—even Uncle Drac—just stared with their mouths open. It was Fang who tried to come to my rescue. I suppose dead double-ended ferrets are an exciting thing for a dead dog. Anyway, Bertie and Basil were dancing around in the air and Fang leapt up and bit them. Of course, being a ghost dog, his teeth went right through them, but because I am a nice, considerate person, I thought that Great-aunt Emilene would not like even a ghost dog biting her dead ferrets, which she was clearly very fond of. So I pushed Fang out of the way. Fang is a very realistic ghost and in the excitement of the moment I had forgotten that he was a ghost. So my push landed on Great-aunt Emilene. She staggered back, tripped over Sir Horace’s left foot (it is always his left foot that causes trouble) and went sprawling on to the floor.

  “Araminta!” Aunt Tabby yelled and jumped up from the table—along with everyone else.

  After we had picked Great-aunt Emilene up from the middle of Sir Horace and dusted down her ferrets, the rest of supper was very quiet indeed. All you could hear was the scraping of knives and forks on plates. Even Brenda’s tasty apple crumble and custard did not make anyone smile. So when at last Aunt Tabby said, “Araminta and Wanda, it’s time for bed,” I was really pleased.

  As soon as Wanda got outside the ballroom she burst into tears. “Oh, Araminta,” she said. “Now you’re definitely going to boarding school.”

  “Don’t be silly, Wanda,” I told her. “Of course I’m not.”

  But as we climbed all the way up to our Thursday bedroom, I wasn’t as sure as I sounded.

  I didn’t sleep very well that night. It wasn’t because of the boarding school stuff; it was because of a lot of very strange noises going on in the house. There were thumps and bumps, amazingly loud bat-flapping noises and I am sure I heard some rude words from Aunt Tabby. I tried to wake up my sidekick but she just said, “Go ’way, ’Minta.” But when there is a Mystery to solve, a good detective does not ignore an important lead—so it was down to Chief Detective Spook to investigate on her own.

  I got out of bed, tiptoed to the door and peered out. I heard Aunt Tabby yell, “Here, Drac, here!” and then I saw Uncle Drac rush past holding out the most enormous batcatching net. Unfortunately he saw me and skidded to a halt. He seemed very flustered.

  “Minty!” he said. “What are you doing awake? Go back to bed. Lock the door and don’t come out until morning.” And he wouldn’t go until he heard me bolt the door.

  So Chief Detective Spook went back to bed with another Mystery to think about—The Mystery of the Bat Net in the Night.

  In the morning, when I woke and peered out to see what was happening, I found Sir Horace sitting outside. I guessed Aunt Tabby must have put him back together, which she is quite good at. I asked Sir Horace what he was doing and he said, “I am protecting damsels in distress, Miss Spook.” He wouldn’t tell me any more than that, no matter how much I asked. So that was another Mystery—The Mystery of the Barricaded Bedroom. They were coming in fast.

&nbs
p; Wanda wouldn’t say much that morning either. I could see that she was still thinking about boarding school, but I had more important things to think about—I had Mysteries to solve.

  Chief Detective Spook now had two suspects. Number-One-Suspect was Uncle Drac because I had actually seen him acting very suspiciously, and Number-Two-Suspect was Aunt Tabby, because I had heard her acting very suspiciously. I was really excited, because I had what detectives call “a lead”. This means that you have found something or someone that might lead you to solving the Mystery.

  The first thing you have to do with suspects is interview them. I tracked down my Number-One-Suspect to the furry bathroom at the end of the little corridor that leads to the fire escape. He was in his flowery sleeping bag, which he had hung up inside the linen cupboard and then closed the door. It seemed to me that Uncle Drac did not want to be interviewed, but there is no hiding from Chief Detective Spook. You may wonder how I managed to find my Number-One-Suspect. I don’t usually give away detecting secrets but because some of you who are reading this may one day want to be a detective—in fact, I might even employ you in Spook’s Detective Agency—I will let you into a detecting secret: if you are looking for someone who is asleep and you hear snoring, follow the snores and you will find them.

  Uncle Drac snores really loudly, so I easily found him. However, I would not recommend interviewing a suspect while he is hanging up in a sleeping bag inside a linen cupboard. The suspect will tell you to go away and then disappear down into the sleeping bag. Even when you prod him with the toilet brush he will not tell you anything that makes sense. He will just say stuff like, “Eurgh … go away, Minty,” and, “For goodness’ sake, Minty, give it a rest, will you?”

  But a good detective is not put off. I left my Number-One-Suspect to think things over and as I walked back along the little corridor that leads into the main part of the house, I realised that I hadn’t seen any bats hanging around. So I deduced that Uncle Drac had managed to catch them all last night and put them back in the bat turret. Deducing is when you use clues to guess something and it is a skill that all detectives need.