Dan and the Teacher Ghost
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Nine
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Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Dan and the Teacher Ghost
By David Churchill
Dan has Down's Syndrome and Tony, his mate, looks out for him, but they go exploring under the classroom floor and out comes a ghost who gives Tony a very hard time during lessons. It would be funny if it wasn’t frightening, but although she’s a ghost she’s desperate for help. Tony knows it’s all too dangerous and it’s his fault and they mustn’t get any more involved but Dan is determined to help, even if it means going into the dark all by himself. So when Dan goes missing, what can Tony do but follow him into double danger!
Copyright © David Churchill 2011
All rights reserved. David Churchill has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Communications regarding this work may be addressed to the author at
[email protected] subject line “teacherghost”
for other works by the author see
www.fishing-forever.co.uk
One
It’s a bit sad, the school building that our classroom’s in. High-up windows you can’t see anything out of, except the grey sky and the rain. Huge radiators that clank and clunk and don’t get warm, especially on winter days like this when the cold wind blows off the moors. Cracks up the walls and over the ceiling. Loos that smell of all the kids who have peed in them in the last hundred years, or however long the little brick prison has been here, under the shadow of the grassy slag-heaps. And Mr Piggott - the doziest teacher in the universe - left to keep us company to the end.
It’s called Grimp’s Building. Whoever he was, his name is carved on a slab by the door. There’s only one classroom anyway. My Mum says it was all they had, years ago when this was just a little mining village. They are shutting it down at the end of term, when the extension’s finished on the main school.
Look. See what I mean about the Pig. He’s dozing now. Pretends to be reading, head on hand - and he’s dribbling. Gross! He’ll snort in a minute, look up and then go back to sleep again. He’s like it every afternoon.
Paper, in little wet pellets, is flying through the air, spat from biro tubes. It’s the usual stuff – Jason and Phil and Titchy Trevor, the kids from up the hill who think they’re posh, getting at me and Pete and Susan, and specially Dan, who live down the bottom. Actually I’m half way but they include me because of Dan. My Dad says it goes back years to when the poor miners lived in the little houses in the valley and the bosses lived up the hill in the big houses.
The girls whisper and watch, and scribble notes to each other. No-one’s copying the stuff about the Romans that the Pig has filled the blackboard with. On the shelf above the blackboard the stuffed owl in its glass cabinet stares, unblinking, over our heads. Beside it the Globe of the World is just as still. Phil, up front, turns and launches a paper dart in my direction. It loops the loop then dips and skids under my desk.
I bend down sideways to pick it up and shoot it back at him. But Dan shoves my bum so that I rock off my chair and crash to the floor. While I’m down I reach under the desk and thump his toe through his trainer. He kicks out and bangs his shin on the metal bar of the old desk. While I snigger he leans right over and pulls an upside down face at me, like a gorilla in a cage.
Just then there’s a mega snort and grunt from Sir. It’s such an explosion that I can hear it, even under the desk. Dan’s round, red face disappears upwards. Everyone in the room freezes for a moment. Silence. I’m still down, with my face just above the scuffed old floorboards that kids’ feet have been scraping over for years and years.
The plank just under my nose is broken. A bit of it must have fallen in leaving a jagged black gap looking straight down into whatever’s underneath.
There’s a strange, dark smell and a cold breath of air against my face. For a moment I even think I can hear something …like the sound you get when you press a seashell to your ear, a hollow sound, going on and on…then I lose it as the class starts to buzz again. The Pig’s gone back to sleep. At least he didn’t wake up enough to make us start chanting old fashioned tables like he does sometimes.
But I’m still looking at the floor. The gap in the boards fascinates me. I slip my fingers between the rough edges of the planks and grip underneath one of them. When I pull upwards the rusty nails just slip out and it lifts easily. I slide it sideways and peer in. It looks like a big space down there in the darkness. I can’t resist trying the next plank. It feels like it wouldn’t be too hard to pull that one up as well but I’d better not. I bend forwards to look right in.
Dan keeps poking his foot at me but I grab it and hold it still while I study what I can see in the hole. There’s depth…darkness…something lumpy in the light coming down from the classroom.
I feel a bit giddy, straining my eyes down into the dark space, like I did once on the edge of a cliff, looking right down to the tiny people on the beach below and gripping a rock because I didn’t know if I was floating or falling, but now I can’t really see anything properly.
The noise of the class seems miles away, a distant murmur, and I wish I had a torch. It’s like I’m all by myself in a cave, or in another world, the classroom’s gone away and left me here alone – except that I’m still hanging on to Dan’s smelly trainer.
Two
On the day of the disaster they were sitting on the two benches, each side of the scrubbed wooden table. Thomas, twelve. Annie, ten and a half. Mary and Frederick - twins with jet black hair as spiky as hedgehogs- nine. John, Hannah and Peter, all eight. Little Solomon, only four, on a tall stool of his own. Inside the oversized boots he was wearing his toes itched with chilblains and he rubbed them against the legs of the stool. He was born just after the flu epidemic that had carried away half the village children. There was flu about this year too, and the three others who made up the cottage school were away sick.
Their slate pencils squeaked on the grey slates as they carefully copied the words from a board propped up at the end of the table. They were trying to make perfect letters, just like Miss Peddie’s.
Thomas stirred and stretched his long legs under the table. The bench was hard, he’d been sitting on it all day, and outside the deep set window, fringed by the thatched roof, he could see blue sky, white clouds and warm sun. The window was partly open and the scent of may blossom and fresh cut grass drifted in. He wished he was fishing down in the stream below the mill. One day he was going to catch the biggest pike that anyone had ever seen. He knew it was there, where the willows reached out over the water, just before the bend. He had seen its huge shadow pass over a sunlit patch of riverbed and it had made his hair stand on end. He was planning to go home that way when school finished and try to get a glimpse of it.
A sparrow perched on the sill for a moment, then flew off as Thomas heard the thudding, clinking sound that he knew came from the boots of the men, tramping past on their way home from the pit. He looked up at the big clock on the wall, with its swinging pendulum and knocking tick. It said quarter to four, nearly hometime. Why had the men left the pit so early in the afternoon? There must be trouble of some sort, he thought, perhaps another roof fall.
His Dad would be there, black face and hands, and clothes clotted with coal dust. He’d be going home to try to wash, and that wasn’t easy since Mr Grimp, the mine owne
r, didn’t pay the men enough even to keep a fire going all day. And they dig the coal to make him rich, Thomas thought. His Dad kept saying the mine was dangerous because of the way Grimp made them dig it, and he wouldn’t provide enough pit props to keep the roof safe or have it all properly surveyed.
He longed for the end of term, when he could leave the school, but it would mean starting down the pit. He didn’t want to do that and spend all his days in the dark. There wasn’t much choice, though. The family needed money - such money as the greedy mine owner paid the people who slaved for him - and there wasn’t any other work.
Miss Peddie saw that he was disturbed by the sounds of the men and she had a good idea what he was thinking. He was a good natured lad and she’d miss him next term. She looked around at the other children, labouring over their writing, and she sighed. Would such education as she could give them really make any difference to their lives? She uncorked the little glass vial on her desk and tipped a few drops of lavender water on to a lace handkerchief and dabbed her forehead with it. The scent lifted her spirits so that she could feel again that what she was doing was worth it. She clapped her hands. “You may put down your pencils,” she said.
Obediently eight slate pencils were placed neatly at the top edges of the eight slates.
Miss Peddie walked behind the benches, her long skirt swishing as she passed each obedient, motionless child, praising some, criticising others. Her red-brown hair was swept up in a tight round knot on the top of her head, with a big amber comb gleaming across it. Her white blouse with its high collar billowed out in lace ruffles. Her clear green eyes looked intently through shining reading glasses.
“That’s good, Thomas,” she said when she finally reached the end of the bench. “You have a very good hand.”
Thomas blushed at the praise and felt better. Praise was not easily come by from Miss Peddie. She set the highest standards and though her voice was never loud it wasn’t to be ignored.
His Mum had known her when she was a girl, before the scandal. Before she ran away from home all by herself and went to the big town. All the village had said she was wicked and she’d come to a bad end, but then she’d turned up again one day, a proper lady. She’d only gone to live with her aunt and get an education and now she had come back and wanted to start a school for the village children. She had always been different - nice, but always the leader. She had a will of iron, his Mum said. She had chosen to come back to the village to open a cottage school and had even, incredibly, persuaded Mr Grimp to give a little money - very little, of course - to make it possible to set up the Dame School. Every one agreed that he was mean, hard, greedy, a slave-driver, but she had confronted him and even he had felt the strength of her and given way when she turned those eyes on him.
“That shows how strong she is - she can achieve the impossible!” Thomas’s Mum said at the time.
Thomas felt bad again when she went on speaking. “I have marked your tests and I am very disappointed with your knowledge of the tables. Before you go home you will recite all of the tables from one times two is two, to twelve times twelve. Education is the most important thing in your lives. Begin.”
They began. Miss Peddie’s will was much stronger than any urge Thomas might have to rebel. And little Solomon straightened up on his stool, rubbed his tired eyes with his grubby knuckles and the chant began…
“One times two is two
Two times two are four
Three times two are six…”
On and on and on, trying to get it right this time, with no mistakes, no reason for being made to start again, while the sunshine called from the window, and mothers waited at home with whatever they had managed to scrape together to feed and comfort them.
Ms Peddie sat, as upright as ever, her agreeable but quite stern face willing them to remember, to prepare themselves for life in the hard world outside the cottage walls.
Solomon didn’t mind chanting the tables all together because if you went a bit slowly you could hear what the others were saying and pretend you knew it as well, and the ten times table was really easy, once you got there. So they chanted their way through until “twelve times twelve are one hundred and forty four!” came out almost with a shout of relief at having finished at last. Ten minutes to hometime.
But then she began to fire questions.
“Annie, four times six?” She knew that one
“Thomas, eight times nine?” He was hardly listening, thinking of the pit…going down in the cage…the darkness…He stuttered and was lost, got it wrong. Felt stupid and embarrassed. He was hot and tired and nearly groaned out loud.
They were all hot and tired. Even Miss Peddie, who usually looked so cool and crisp, was hot and tired, but she had a job to do and she was not one, ever, to give up. She tried again, and all she got was wrong answer after wrong answer. The children were confused and fidgety. Her face was becoming bright red. She felt that she had failed, let down the parents, let down the children. She dabbed her forehead again with the blessed lavender and kept trying but all she got were wrong answers. The black hand on the clock pointed to four - hometime. “At last,” Thomas sighed to himself, pining for the cool green shade of the river bank.
But no. She must not weaken.
“You will stay in,” she announced. “The tables must be known! Begin again. Once more, to make sure it stays all night.” Although somewhere inside she knew that she was pressing them too hard, especially poor little Solomon, she started them off, strong and certain. “One times two is two…”
So the dreary, dreary chant began once more, but just when they had reached the easy five times table her attention was suddenly drawn to the window. She saw that a dark cloud had drifted across and a sudden flurry of rain spattered against the glass.
“Oh, my washing!” she exclaimed. “Carry on, children. Don’t stop,” and with a swish of her skirt she moved swiftly to the door.
The door opened into a porch with white roses over it, and straight on to the brick garden path. There were flowers beside the path - lupins and hollyhocks and marigolds - all growing cheerfully together in a marvellous tangle, even though she had planted them so neatly, she thought.
Her sheets were drying on the lavender hedge at the end of the path but as she hurried towards it she realised that the rain was already passing. Indeed, she looked up and saw a splendid rainbow arching right across the sky beyond the cottage. She could even see one end of it in the cornfield down by the mill. There was another slightly paler arc beneath.
“A double rainbow! I must let the children out to see it,” she thought. “The poor mites, how long they have been shut in.” Indeed, the sad chant from their thin, tired voices could clearly be heard in the garden, through the window and the open door, and it made her feel mean.
The horror began as she took the first step back down the path, leaving the white sheets to air in the still warm sunlight.
It was so sudden. The first thing she saw was the hollyhocks against the cottage wall waving violently. A purple lupin lurched across her path making her stumble to avoid treading on it. Then the path itself buckled, bricks rising under her feet and making her totter sideways on to the garden. Struggling to stay upright she clutched her mouth and gasped in fear and astonishment as the earth began to shift and break up all around her. She stepped forwards and it was like treading on bread. And then she saw something truly terrifying - the most dreadful thing that she could possibly have imagined. For the first time in her life, she screamed. While her scream was still echoing into the sky, she was staggering and stumbling up the erupting path, towards the cottage, back to the children.
Three
I’m in a world of my own under the desk, breathing in the old air that’s seeping up around me. I press closer, closer to the gap, my eyes straining down into the dark, until my lips are against the wood itself. It’s black and it’s cold down there, icy cold against my face so that my eyes are running, but it’s got an atmosphe
re. I feel drawn by it. I’ve got to see more
I’m so lost in a kind of a dream that when there’s a crash from the room above I jump violently and really bash my head under the desk. That will have been the Pig, suddenly wide awake and banging the board rubber down on his table, pretending he was with us all the time.
In a moment I’m back in my chair, rubbing my head, copying the notes, digging my elbow into Dan to stop his sniggering. But the grin on his face always makes me grin too, it’s one of the reasons he’s my mate and why I always deal with it if anyone looks like upsetting him. Even bighead Jason knows that by now, so it doesn’t often happen.
At the same time I’m prodding at the floor with my toe, easing the plank back in place and pushing it down. And I’m still feeling the weirdness that I felt when I was under the desk. There’s a big space under where we’re sitting. Something strange to look into. Something to explore, and soon.
Four
Miss Peddie saw the earth crack open. A jagged black fissure, as wide as the path, was cutting across the garden towards the cottage. Another was zigzagging to meet it and her flowers were tilting and falling inwards all along the crumbling edges. The cottage chimney shook and she saw pieces of straw from the thatched roof breaking away from the eaves. Trees beyond the building were waving against the sky in a way that no wind could cause. Black rooks flew up, squawking in alarm.
Filled with horror, she had no doubt what was happening. It was a possibility she had wondered about but had never believed would actually occur, despite what the men said about how recklessly the old mines had been driven right under the village.
Gasping, she reached the porch. The trellis arch over the door was leaning away and a strand of the climbing rose scored across her face, snatching at her glasses to crash them on the path at her feet.
And at that moment the door slammed shut. She gripped the round iron handle and turned it. But when she went to yank the door open it tilted from a broken hinge and then jammed. The door frame was out of shape, the flagstone under her feet had lifted. Everything had moved.
Dan and the Teacher Ghost Page 1