Mountwood School for Ghosts

by Toby Ibbotson

  Drusilla giggled. ‘It seems to be open.’

  The lower floor was a single stone-flagged vault, where livestock and women had been herded together for protection in troubled times. Cobwebs curtained the tiny windows set high in the walls, and a large rat scuttled along by the wall.

  ‘This is very promising,’ said Fredegonda, ‘but we must not get our hopes up yet.’

  On the floor was a big flat block of sandstone, with a ringbolt set into it. A chain had once been attached to the ringbolt, and two strong men, with the help of a wheel and ratchet, could lift the stone and expose the mouth of a well, which was the only source of water during a siege. Now Goneril walked forward and pushed the stone aside with the outside of her foot. She leaned over the dark well-mouth.

  ‘Cooee, is there anyone at home?’

  At first there was no answer. The only sound was a slow drip, drip, dripping. Then a pale bluish mist began to gather slowly on the black surface of the water at the bottom of the well. It swirled gently for a while, and finally became a face, hollowed-eyed, with straggly hair and a half-open gap-toothed mouth.

  It was the ghost of Angus Crawe, who had a great many dark deeds on his conscience, or would have had if he had a conscience. One evening he had got into a fight with his nephew over a young woman whom they had captured in a raid on Alnwick. He managed to slaughter his nephew, but slipped on the blood that splattered the floor and fell headlong into the well. His nephew’s mates had quite simply put the cover-stone back and gone out to a party.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ said Goneril. ‘We are looking for the laird. Can you help us?’

  The pale mouth moved, trying to form words, but Angus Crawe had not spoken for centuries, and his broad Northumbrian accent had not been easy to understand even when he was alive.

  ‘Could you speak up, please? And try to articulate.’

  ‘Eee . . . Eees . . . Eeble.’ said Angus.

  ‘What on earth are you saying, man?’ Goneril was getting irritated. ‘Eels? Eagles? Evil?’

  Finally Angus produced a proper word. ‘Peebles,’ he said.

  Goneril was very determined, and after a long question-and-answer session they worked out what they needed to know. The last laird of the castle came from a long line of uncouth border reivers and was no better than his wild ancestors. He had married a girl from the local town, who had soon discovered what a terrible mistake she had made, and being a resourceful lass she had doctored the brakes of his Land Rover. The very next day he tried to slow down as usual to take a bend at the bottom of a steep hill, but the Land Rover just flew straight on and landed in the riverbed far below. The vehicle was totally demolished, and so was the laird. His wife inherited all his wealth, which was considerable, and left the hated home of her husband to rot. She was now enjoying a very expensive holiday at the Peebles Hydro, a holiday that had already lasted for several years.

  The Hagges had found what they were looking for. Within a few days they had contacted the Peebles Hydro and been told in no uncertain terms that they were welcome to the dratted place and much good may it do them. The price was very reasonable. At first there were some delays caused by lawyers in Edinburgh who didn’t seem to understand that there was no time to waste. But the Hagges paid them a visit, and after that everything went very quickly indeed. They moved in and were soon hard at work planning a curriculum and drafting important documents. The name of the castle was Mountwood, and within a surprisingly short period of time they were ready to open the doors and welcome the first students.

  Four

  The Peabodys Make Plans

  ‘I feel,’ said Ronald Peabody, ‘That this is what we have been waiting for.’

  He had been a tall well-muscled gentleman before he became a ghost, with a large handlebar moustache and side whiskers. Neither the moustache nor the whiskers were still there. They had been burned off in the fire that had turned him and his family into ghosts. Most of his skin had been burned off too, so that all his muscles could be clearly seen. He didn’t mind that, because he was very proud of his muscles, biceps, triceps and all the rest, which he had worked very hard to develop. But he still pined dreadfully for his facial hair.

  ‘We need to be constantly improving ourselves,’ he went on. ‘This is just the thing.’

  Ronald and his wife Iphigenia were reading a notice that had suddenly appeared in glowing fiery letters on the wall of the travel agency where they lived, in between a big poster advertising Sun and Fun in Crete, and Weekend Breaks in Bratislava. A theatre had once stood on the site.

  ‘No doubt you are right, dearest,’ said Iphigenia.

  ‘I am right, Iffy dear, I am,’ said Ronald. ‘We shall have a break from town life, breathe the country air and return renewed.’

  Iphigenia had been an actress, a beautiful tragic actress, and she had masses of wonderful copper-coloured hair. She had been lucky enough to die of smoke asphyxiation when the theatre went up in flames, rather than burning, and for this she thanked her lucky stars every day. If she had lost her hair, then death would not have been worth living.

  The notice they had been reading said:

  PUT THE GHASTLY BACK INTO GHOSTHOOD RETURN THE HORROR TO HAUNTING

  The Mountwood Institute of Spectral Education offers a refresher course in essential skills to all interested members of the other side.

  Then came quite a lot of information about the different courses. ‘Plashing and Moaning’, ‘The Wail for the Modern Era’, ‘Gnashing and Rattling’, ‘Basic Bloodcurdling’, ‘Exercising the Ectoplasm’ and a seminar entitled ‘Removal of body parts – the when and the where’.

  Their son Perceval said nothing. He wasn’t a very good reader yet, and he didn’t quite get what they were talking about. He had passed on with his parents, which was a good thing, because he would have hated to be left an orphan. His mother had been performing a very tragic role on the night the theatre went up in flames, and he had been given a small part in the play. Dressed in a nightshirt he was lying in a crib being her starving son. He even had a line, ‘Oh, mother dear, I die, I die.’

  He could still remember it. When he said it the heroine was supposed to go out into the snow to beg for help, and lots of awful things would happen. But they never did, because just before he spoke smoke started seeping up through the boards of the stage, and someone shouted, ‘Fire!’

  ‘Just what we need, eh? Percy and I can do lots of sports, and work on our fitness, can’t we, lad? We can go through the pain barrier.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  Ronald Peabody had once been a long-distance swimmer. He still wore the charred remnants of an old-fashioned woollen swimsuit that had been scorched into his body during the fatal fire. He did his best to encourage his son to care for his body. He gave Percy pep talks about the Fight for Fitness, and the War on Weakness, and Building your Body. He wasn’t a stupid man, and he was well aware that Percy did not in fact have a body – none of them did – but it was the spirit of the thing that mattered, the manliness. And you don’t need a body in order to have willpower.

  It was Ronald who had started the fire in the theatre. Long-distance swimmers have to cover their whole bodies in grease to keep out the cold, and Ron had just returned from a swim up the Thames from Tower Bridge to Putney, still in his swimsuit, and was preparing to change in Iphigenia’s dressing room and escort her home after the performance. But he came too close to a gaslight, and because he was covered in tallow he instantly ignited and blazed like a bonfire. It was a shame, but accidents happen. As Ron used to say, there is no point in crying over spilt milk. You just pick yourself, dust yourself off and start all over again.

  There was something else though, something that weighed on him even now after more than a hundred years, and made him absolutely determined that his son would have a Will of Steel. For Ronald Peabody had given way to weakness once, and it had led to a terrible disappointment. Even now he couldn’t talk about it.

  Percy wanted
to please his father, and he always did his best. He wanted to please his mother too. But it wasn’t easy to please both of them. His mother was artistic. She felt poetry very strongly, and Percy tried to feel it too, although he didn’t always understand it.

  ‘There is soul in you, Perceval, I know it, but it must be nurtured,’ she would say.

  Now Iphigenia read a bit more of the notice. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Mountwood is in the north, near the Scottish border. What balm to the spirit to wander among the dales and hills, to see the daffodils nodding in the breeze. To feel nature’s elemental power. Earth hath not anything to show more fair.’

  ‘Eh? Sorry, dear, I wasn’t attending,’ said Ronald. ‘I see they’re providing transport. Mighty efficient, those Great Hagges. Motorway service station, stroke of midnight, day after tomorrow. We’d better be there.’

  ‘Do you know,’ said Iphigenia, ‘I think I shall try to persuade Cousin Vera to join us. She has been looking frightfully pale and wan, and her vocal chords are simply wasting away.’ Cousin Vera was a banshee, and for a banshee voice is everything.

  Iphigenia vanished through the wall to have a word with Cousin Vera in the nearby graveyard where she lived.

  One day when Daniel came home from school the ‘For Sale’ sign had gone from the next-door garden.

  A few days later an enormous lorry with ‘Forrest and Hills Ltd., Removals’ on the side edged carefully into the street and stopped outside the empty house. A couple of burly men jumped out of the cab, lowered the tailgate and started shifting furniture out of the back, up the short path and into the house.

  Daniel watched from his window. You can learn a lot about people from their furniture, and he wished that Charlotte was there so that they could talk about it, but when he rang her there was no answer.

  The furniture which the grunting removal men were lugging up the front steps of number seven did not look very promising. Quite a lot of it – an oval dining table and a set of chairs, for example – was swathed in sheets of plastic and lots of tape, which meant that it was expensive and polished. There was a huge Welsh dresser that the men almost dropped on the path, and a sideboard, both made of very dark wood with thick legs. There was a standard lamp with a chintzy lampshade. There were lots of packing cases, and Daniel could only guess what they contained. There was a glass-fronted bookcase, the kind that has books in it that nobody ever reads, if it has books at all. It might just as easily contain a collection of glass bunny rabbits, or golfing trophies. Then came two matching beds with padded headboards.

  No bicycles, no skateboards, no birdcages, no playpen, no dog bed and no violins. No horse.

  No children, no animals and no Romany refugees for Charlotte. I might have known it, thought Daniel.

  One last object was being dragged out of the back of the lorry. It was an ugly chest of drawers with a curved front and brass handles. It was obviously meant to look like an expensive antique, and it obviously wasn’t. But as Daniel watched the men heaving the heavy piece up the front steps, something odd occurred, something that he could never really explain, even to himself.

  The chest of drawers that he was looking at went wavery and blurry. Then the wavery blur gathered itself into a sort of misty cloud, and the misty cloud swooshed in through the front door and disappeared.

  Daniel rubbed his eyes. The whole thing had taken just a few seconds. But Daniel knew he had seen something very unusual. When people see something very unusual they know it. Afterwards, when they think about it, they often dismiss it. ‘I was dizzy, I didn’t have enough breakfast, I’m coming down with something, I was imagining things, I had strained my eyes,’ they tell themselves. They forget that when they actually saw it, they knew. Daniel sat down on his bed, and his heart thumped. He knew.

  At supper that evening Great-Aunt Joyce talked about their new neighbours. She occupied the biggest room in the house, naturally, with three big windows looking out over the street, and while Daniel had stood in his room looking at the furniture being unloaded next door, she had done the same thing on the floor below, sitting in her special comfy chair and peering out of the window. She spent much of the day there, disapproving of everything and hoping that a dog would lift its leg against the fence, or a child kick a ball into the garden, so that she could tell Daniel’s father to complain.

  ‘Well, I think they seem to be the right sort of people,’ said Great-Aunt Joyce. ‘They can’t be foreigners, if their furniture is anything to go by. I must say that’s a relief. I shall look in at some point and welcome them to our street. If I’m up to it, that is. If not, you must invite them over for coffee, Sarah. It is the proper thing to do.’

  ‘Of course we will want to get to know them, Aunt Joyce,’ said Daniel’s mother. She hadn’t seen the furniture, but she had heard about the new neighbours from Mrs Hughes at number nine, and she wasn’t very hopeful. A dog to cheer Daniel up would have been better.

  ‘Great-Aunt Joyce,’ said Daniel, ‘did you see anything a bit funny about the chest of drawers that they took in at the end?’

  ‘Funny?’ Aunt Joyce’s fork, which had just speared a large piece of sausage, stopped on its way to her mouth. She leaned forward and pointed it at Daniel. ‘What do you mean, boy?’ Her eyes narrowed.

  Although Daniel couldn’t stand Aunt Joyce, he wasn’t scared of her. But now, for a brief second, he was afraid. ‘Nothing, I didn’t mean anything. I just thought that it was a . . . a funny-looking piece of furniture.’

  The moment passed. Aunt Joyce went on eating. ‘It was a very nice piece,’ she said. ‘And no doubt very valuable. Chippendale, I think. Not that I would dream of prying into other people’s personal property.’

  Daniel said nothing. If Great-Aunt Joyce had seen something too, then she wasn’t going to tell him about it.

  After breakfast the next day, Daniel went to talk to Charlotte. He knew where she would be, because it was Sunday, and every Sunday Charlotte took her small brothers to the park so that her mother could have a lie-in.

  The park was another good thing about Markham Street. If you went through the posts at the top of the street and walked up a cobbled lane full of wheelie bins, past the back entrances of another row of houses, you came to the park. It was very big, with wide-open green spaces and lovely old trees and council flower beds where the park keepers planted pansies in special shapes, so that they formed pictures of the city’s coat of arms, or the emblem of the football team.

  The park was on the top of a hill, and there were views right across the city to the great cranes and gantries that still lined the river, even though nobody had built ships or loaded coal and steel there for years and years. You could see the spires of churches, and the high-rises on the other side of town. There was a shallow pond – an artificial lake, really. The water wasn’t very clean, but some ducks lived there, and they seemed to get on all right. There were dense clumps of rhododendron. You could see a squirrel sometimes, but you were more likely to see a rat, and quite a lot of litter. It was the kind of park that visitors might think was a fairly grotty place. But for the children of Markham Street it was a playground, and breathing space, and freedom. For the parents of the children it was a blessing.

  Right in the middle of the park, at the highest point, was a statue. It was a statue of General Sir George Markham, who had gone to the local grammar school and risen to fame in the army, finally being gloriously hacked to pieces at a famous last stand somewhere in Africa.

  Charlotte Hamilton was sitting on the stone pedestal at the foot of the statue. She was a thinnish girl, just the right side of skinny, and she was a bit taller than Daniel, with long thick hair the colour of wheat. (‘Old straw is more like it,’ she used to say.)

  She was reading, or trying to read. The wind kept blowing her hair into her face and ruffling the book’s pages in an annoying way, and her youngest brother kept wandering off in the direction of the lake. The water was very shallow, but she still had to keep an eye on him. So sh
e was quite happy to close her book and talk to Daniel instead when he flopped down beside her.

  They talked about Daniel’s new neighbours.

  ‘Well, they might be interesting even though they have no children,’ said Charlotte. ‘And people with lots of children aren’t exactly perfect neighbours. If it was us moving in, and they started unloading cots and high chairs and baby baths and tricycles, then I bet some people would be pretty upset. Where’s Alexander?’

  They found him under a rhododendron bush and walked down to the lake to get the worst of the dirt off him.

  ‘They might be doctors who work in disaster areas and operate on people in tents, or helicopter pilots, or musicians or actors or mountaineers,’ Charlotte went on.

  ‘I bet you anything they aren’t. Not with a leather armchair and a dining-table that two grown men can hardly lift. Great-Aunt Joyce says they are the “right sort of people”.’

  ‘Oh.’

  There was nothing to say to that.

  They collected Charlotte’s other brothers, who were in a tree being Spider-Man, and started back to Markham Street. On the way Daniel mentioned what he had really wanted to talk about all the time.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, trying to sound off-hand, ‘I saw something weird when they were taking out the last thing.’

  Charlotte knew Daniel very well and off-hand didn’t work on her.

  She stopped at once and turned to face him. ‘What? Tell me.’

  So he told her. When he had finished she didn’t do any of the ‘how can you be sure?’ stuff he had been dreading. She just said, ‘If it’s a . . . you know . . . that would certainly be as good as anything – Romany, dogs, anything.’

  Five

  Percy

  The next day when Daniel came home from school, their new neighbours had arrived. They were called Mr and Mrs Bosse-Lynch, and Great-Aunt Joyce, who had been spying from her window all day, was very satisfied. They had the right sort of car, and the right sort of clothes, and Mr Bosse-Lynch had started trimming the hedge immediately. Then two ladies from the town had arrived to clean the house, and Great-Aunt Joyce had heard Mrs Bosse-Lynch telling them what to do before they had even got through the door.