Mountwood School for Ghosts

by Toby Ibbotson

  There are a lot of great-aunts in the world who are very nice, sending interesting presents at Christmas, and telling stories about what it was like to travel on steam trains and ocean liners and have porters to carry your luggage. Great-Aunt Joyce was not one of those. She was nasty, thoroughly one-hundred-percent horrid. Daniel was grown-up enough to know that nobody is perfect. Some people are a bit greedy, or a bit snobbish, or a bit grumpy. Great-Aunt Joyce was totally greedy and snobbish and grumpy and mean and a lot of other things.

  She had come to live with them years ago, when Daniel was very small, because she was in some kind of trouble and had nowhere else to go. Now she was just there, like an incurable disease. She told Daniel off all the time, she complained about everything, she left her used knickers outside her bedroom door for Daniel’s mother to wash and she suffered from varicose veins. That wasn’t her fault. But when she sat in the best chair in the front room she rolled down her stockings, put her feet up on the coffee table and massaged her legs, which was her fault. She made life miserable for Daniel. The most miserable thing was that she was allergic to everything. Not only to dust and pollen, but to everything; this meant that Daniel could never have a pet. Not a dog, not a cat, not a hamster, not a budgerigar. Anything with hair or feathers made her face swell up and her eyes water and brought her out in a rash. That’s what she said, anyway, but Daniel suspected she was just making it up; his mother remembered visiting her as a child, and then she had a cat that used to sit on the sofa and shed hair all over the place.

  ‘I suppose all her troubles brought it on. That can happen, you know,’ said Mrs Salter.

  Daniel had a friend called Mike who lived at number eleven. Mike was often in trouble because he was interested in things. If he saw something interesting on the other side of someone’s fence, he would climb over to take a look, and if it was very interesting he would take it home to look at more closely. Daniel hated to be in trouble, but for Mike it was just something that happened, like rain or grazing your knee. People on the street muttered that his father treated him badly, but he just shrugged his shoulders. Daniel felt a bit sorry for him sometimes, but more often he was jealous. Mike had an aquarium in his bedroom and two or three cages with small animals in them. He had even had a pet jackdaw for a while, which he had found as a fledgling and fed on worms and mince.

  ‘But Great-Aunt Joyce can’t be allergic to grass snakes,’ Daniel said to his mother one day, after another visit to the pet shop with Mike, who was getting food for his gerbil. ‘Or goldfish. They have aquariums in doctors’ waiting rooms.’

  ‘Oh, Daniel, you know she has a phobia about snakes. And goldfish food does things to her lungs,’ said his mother. ‘Please don’t make a fuss.’

  Daniel tried not to make a fuss, because he knew that his mother suffered almost as much from Great-Aunt Joyce as he did. But he spent a lot of time out of the house, and so did his father, who had an allotment by the railway line at the bottom of the hill where the vegetables were very well looked after indeed, and there was a little shed that had lots of stuff in it that weren’t anything to do with gardening, like books and CDs.

  Markham Street was a street of terraced houses, big old houses which had once been homes for quite rich people, so there were lots of rooms on top of each other, and lots of stairs. At the top of the houses were attic rooms that had once been for the servants, and lower down were the big rooms for the doctors and lawyers and businessmen who had owned the houses, and the kitchens were right at the bottom at the back, because making the food wasn’t something well-off people did so people used to have cooks. Food just arrived on the table.

  But now things were different, and the big old kitchen was the place where Daniel’s family cooked, and ate, and talked.

  ‘Broccoli,’ said Great-Aunt Joyce, as Daniel’s mother brought the food to the table. ‘You know I have difficulty with cabbage. Broccoli is no better.’

  ‘But it’s fresh from the allotment, Aunt Joyce. John brought it in this afternoon.’

  ‘I’m afraid that makes no difference. I shall probably suffer pangs tonight. You could fill a hot-water bottle for me this evening, and bring me some hot milk. That might ease the pain.’

  Daniel ate in silence, as fast as he could.

  ‘Don’t wolf down your food, Daniel,’ said Great-Aunt Joyce. ‘You are quite spoiling the little appetite I have left.’

  Joyce’s appetite was not entirely spoiled. There was rice pudding for afters, and first she said that she could possibly try just a tiny bit, and then she felt she could manage just a tiny bit more. In the end she had three full helpings, and Daniel, who loved rice pudding, hardly got any.

  ‘Can I leave the table now?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Well you can,’ said Great-Aunt Joyce. ‘The question is whether you may.’ She prided herself on being a bit of a stickler for correct grammar.

  ‘Off you go, Daniel,’ said his father.

  Daniel went up to his room and shut the door. He had an attic room right at the top of the house, with a window that looked out over the street. It was the only place in the whole house which was not a Great-Aunt Joyce danger zone.

  Daniel sat on the low windowsill and looked out over the roof slates to the street below. It was getting dark, and soon the street lamps would be lit. To his right he could see down into Mrs Cranford’s well-kept garden, where the delphiniums glowed bright blue in the evening light. On the other side the garden was overgrown, and what had once been a well-tended patch of lawn was full of dandelions and daisies.

  This house had stood empty for several months, with a ‘For Sale’ sign on a post by the hedge. He and Charlotte had talked quite a lot about what kind of people would move in. Daniel was hoping for an old couple who needed someone to walk their dog, or at least a family with some children of his age. Charlotte wanted someone a bit different, from a foreign country.

  ‘They might be Romany who are fleeing oppression in Eastern Europe,’ Charlotte had said hopefully. She had been reading about them. ‘And their children will dance and play the violin and be good with horses.’

  ‘Where will they keep a horse?’ said Daniel. ‘In the living room, I suppose.’

  Charlotte had frowned. Sometimes Daniel could be a bit of a sourpuss. But she knew all about Great-Aunt Joyce of course, and she realized that his life was not an easy one.

  Daniel went to bed that night feeling sorry for himself. It seemed that the really interesting and exciting things that happened to other people were never going to happen to him. He was wrong.

  Three

  Lawless Lands

  The Great Hagges were having tea.

  ‘Well,’ said Fredegonda, ‘this is turning out to be rather a bother.’

  ‘It certainly is,’ Goneril agreed. ‘We can hardly offer an advanced course in howling and moaning next door to a cinema showing a film called Screams of the Damned.

  They had just visited an empty warehouse on the outskirts of a large city. But the smarmy estate agent who had taken them there hadn’t mentioned the huge multiplex cinema nearby. They had spent many days touring the length and breadth of the country, trying to find a suitable place for their school of ghosthood, but it was proving difficult.

  Britain had changed quite a lot since they last went motoring. The Ordnance Survey map that was in the glove compartment of the Rolls was very little use. Towns and cities had got much bigger, there were huge roads where there should be open countryside, and there were even completely new towns, such as Milton Keynes and Welwyn Garden City, which weren’t marked on their map at all. And although there were plenty of places for sale or rent, most of them were far too modern and filled with things that ghosts, ghouls and spectres really have no use for at all, such as en-suite bathrooms with flushing toilets and central heating. Even when they had decided only to look at old castles, disused factories and abandoned hotels, the buildings were always too close to a town or a golf course or a railway station.

 
; Luckily Great Hagges don’t need a lot of sleep, and none at all when they have important work to do. But they do need tea. So now they were sitting in a small cafe in a pleasant tree-lined street. They had had some very unpleasant experiences looking for a decent place to stop, and they shuddered when they thought of the way they had seen young people behave, and adults too for that matter. Once they had even been served by a girl with a ring in her nose like a prize porker and another one in her lip and yet another in her eyebrow. Times had certainly changed, and not entirely for the better. But the little tea shop which they had found now was bearable, just a few tables with proper tablecloths and doilies on the saucers and some older customers chatting quietly to each other. They had ordered a pot of tea for three and a plate of scones, and been served by a pleasant middle-aged woman who didn’t have metal in her face.

  ‘Perhaps we should just accept that it’s hopeless,’ said Drusilla. Of the three of them, she was the one who most missed the comforts of home, especially her kitchen.

  ‘Don’t be a weed, Drusilla. We must soldier on.’

  But even Fredegonda, who was the eldest and most determined, was beginning to have her doubts.

  It was late afternoon when they left the cafe, and as they drove, darkness fell. They pressed on through the night, Goneril driving and Fredegonda reading the map. Drusilla was dozing in the back.

  Goneril was a good driver, and the Rolls had a fine turn of speed. Suddenly in the headlights they saw a car with flashing blue lights on the roof parked at the side of the road. Beside it a figure in uniform was holding up his hand.

  ‘I think there’s been an accident. We’d better see what’s going on.’ Goneril braked and stopped.

  The uniformed figure walked over to the Rolls.

  ‘Are you in trouble, officer?’ asked Goneril, sticking her head out of the driver’s window.

  ‘It’s you who are in trouble,’ came the reply. ‘You were doing seventy-five.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s anything to worry about. In fact she’s going nicely, considering her age.’

  ‘Very funny. Show me your licence, please.’

  ‘My licence? What are you talking about? You are being rather impertinent, young man.’

  Goneril had bought her car long before people had to take driving tests.

  ‘Either you produce a licence, or I shall arrest you for illegal driving. Step out of the car.’

  Policemen have very thorough training before they are let out to start policing. They are taught how to deal with violent drunks, armed bank robbers and belligerent teenagers. But nothing in their training tells them what to do when confronted with three Great Hagges in a speeding Rolls-Royce.

  If he had been properly trained, this particular policeman would probably not have tried to arrest Goneril, and he would definitely never, ever have told her to get out of the car. He would have asked her politely, and added that vital word ‘please’. A Great Hagge can be both generous and forgiving, but simply will not be told.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Goneril, and a small child would have heard something in her voice that promised no good to come. But policemen are not small children, they are grown-up men in uniforms, and hearing that sort of thing is not their strong point.

  ‘You heard me. Get out,’ said the policeman.

  So what followed was simply unavoidable. It started down at his feet. Suddenly his shoes seemed very tight. And then he felt that his trousers were several sizes too small, and his shirt. His collar started to strangle him, and he went very red in the face and began to splutter and gasp for air. By now his whole head, which had been on the small side, was the size of a football, then a party balloon. He was swelling up, just as though somebody had attached him to an air hose. Then the splitting started, which was lucky for him, or he would have choked to death. Sounds of ripping and tearing could be heard, and as he got bigger and bigger his uniform fell off him in shreds. In less than a minute a huge round pale naked policeman was standing in the road, looking very much like a hot-air balloon about to fly away. His police hat, strangely, remained balanced like a little blue fly right on top of his vast head.

  It was Drusilla’s voice from the back of the car that saved his life.

  ‘Oh, Goneril, please don’t burst him, dear; there will be such a terrible mess.’

  With an effort Goneril calmed herself, and the white of her left eye, which always turned green when she was spellbinding, returned to normal. She snorted, put the car into gear and drove off.

  Fredegonda had been silent all this time, but now she spoke. ‘Well, that settles it. We’ll have to go home now. We can’t stay here. Really, Goneril, a bit more self-control is to be expected from someone of your experience.’

  ‘You’re making too much of it,’ said Goneril. ‘He will start deflating in an hour or two.’

  ‘It won’t make much difference what size he is. You cannot leave a naked policeman in the middle of the road without questions being asked. They will be out looking for us in no time, and the car is not exactly inconspicuous.’

  Goneril said nothing. Her eyes were fixed firmly on the road ahead. She was still upset. But she was also a bit ashamed of herself. She had always respected the authorities, and if they had been stopped by a policewoman, and not a policeman, then things might have turned out very differently. One of the very few things that had pleased the Hagges about the modern world was the advancement of women. The first time they saw a lady police officer they had been very excited.

  ‘That I should live to see the day!’ Drusilla had exclaimed. At one time she had fought hard for the rights of women.

  But now there was nothing for it. They left the main road at the next turning and started to make their way by the shortest possible route back to the Scottish border. In the pale light of dawn they saw drystone walls marching over sweeping moorland pastures, and heard the cry of the curlew. Stone byres and cottages huddled in the valleys out of the wind. They were in the borderlands.

  They came to yet another fork in the narrow winding road.

  ‘Left or right?’ asked Goneril, bringing the car to a halt.

  Fredegonda, sitting with the map on her knees in the front passenger seat, was silent. She was lost. She hated to admit it. She had always prided herself on her map-reading skills, but the ancient map and the maze of country lanes had defeated her. To make things worse, the morning mist still lay on the hills and it was impossible to get her bearings.

  Drusilla sat up in the back seat and sniffed. ‘Let’s go left. I like the smell of it.’

  Soon they were driving through the Debatable Lands, a part of the country that for hundreds of years was neither England or Scotland, but a lawless tract where outlaws and bandits and fierce clan leaders held sway, stealing sheep, feuding and pillaging, both to the north and to the south, and then retreating by secret pathways over the moors to their fortified peel towers.

  Drusilla had taken over the navigation, and now they followed her nose, which she stuck out of the window. Something in the air was drawing her on, something that whispered to her of damp leaf mould, rotting flesh, mouse droppings, decomposition and decay. It was irresistible to Drusilla, reminding her of happy afternoons in the kitchen trying out new recipes.

  Suddenly she cried, ‘Here, turn right here!’ and Goneril swung the car into a narrow lane that dived steeply downhill through a dense stand of fir trees.

  They were descending into a narrow valley. On both sides dark crags were outlined against the sky, cutting out the light. The further in they drove, the gloomier it became. Just as Goneril was beginning to think that the track was turning into a path, and was starting to worry about her shock-absorbers, the valley opened out slightly, and before them, crouched darkly under an overhanging face of blackened rock, was a castle.

  It wasn’t a big castle, more a large rambling house, but it had battlements and slit windows. The ancient sandstone walls, gnawed by wind and rain, were adorned with waterlogged mos
s and slimy lichens.

  The Great Hagges got out of the car and stood for a moment drawing the damp and foetid air deep into their lungs.

  ‘Oh, how delightful,’ said Fredegonda. ‘Just imagine if . . .’ She didn’t have to finish her sentence. They were all thinking the same thing, and as one they approached the castle.

  The ground around the building was squelchy – any drainpipes and gutters that had ever existed were long gone – and all three Hagges just longed to remove their sensible shoes and woollen stockings and feel ooze between their toes. But they didn’t. Business must come before pleasure.

  The front entrance had a big door of solid, iron-studded oak. It had been made to resist the attacks of bloodthirsty marauders from both sides of the border and was still in good shape. Beside it hung a bell pull on an iron chain. Goneril gave it a tug, and it came off in her hand.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said.

  ‘The place looks deserted,’ said Drusilla. ‘Shall we just have a peep inside?’

  Goneril put the flat of her hand against the door and gave a little push. With a wrenching sound the two iron bars on the inside bent like rubber and sprang loose, and the door creaked inwards on its hinges.