Charlotte turned her head from the window and said bitterly, ‘You wouldn’t have believed me anyway. You don’t believe me now.’
John Salter spoke. ‘Lottie, this is all very well, but a tale of ghosts and Great Hagges and haunting school, I mean, surely you don’t think . . .’ He was suddenly uncertain.
‘I shall tell you what I think,’ said Mrs Wilder, ‘and then of course as these children’s parents you must make up your minds whether to let them go on their . . . quest.’
‘In the first place,’ she went on, leaning back in her chair, ‘have you considered what an odd thing it is to make all this up. As one who is interested in mysteries, I wonder how Daniel and Charlotte, quite out of the blue, got the idea that there must be a place, not too far from here, whose name bears a resemblance to the words “forest” and “hills”, and then in fact went on to find such a place. Now that would be insane. Unless they had prior information. As to the question of whether they received that information from a small frightened ghost in a nightdress . . . well, now we come to my second point.’
She was quiet for a moment. Then in a different voice, more dreamily, she said, ‘It’s all forgotten now, beyond our ken. Human beings no longer believe in the Perilous Realm, and that, I might add, is perilous indeed. But some day, some quiet evening perhaps, when you are walking off your supper, or having a breath of fresh air on your balcony, or taking a short cut down some backstreet to your favourite cafe, there will be a lull in the traffic, a moment quiet enough to hear a few starlings settling down for the night, or a mouse skittering along the guttering; and in that little lull, you will see something out of the corner of your eye: a movement, a shape, a shadow. And you will sense a small door opening in your mind.’
Mrs Wilder sighed. ‘And then you will have to decide whether to shut it, or keep it open. It’s your choice, and yours alone.’
For quite a long time nobody said anything. John Salter was remembering one late evening down on his allotment, when he had been tying up his broad beans, and had been so sure that someone was watching him over the fence that he actually called out to him. But when he looked again, there was nobody there. He was the first to speak.
‘You’d better go, I think. Any port in a storm. What do you say, Margaret?’
‘Yes, yes. Charlotte’s always known her own mind.’
Charlotte jumped out of her chair, gave Daniel an I-told-you-it-would-be-all-right grin and ran over to Mrs Wilder, gave her a huge hug and planted a kiss right on the top of her grey head.
‘Silly girl,’ said Mrs Wilder.
Mr Salter had a talk with his wife when he and Daniel got back from Mrs Wilder’s. At first she didn’t want to let Daniel go, but she saw that her husband had made up his mind. He was quite determined. He might not quite believe in ghosts, but he believed in Daniel, and that was enough. And once he got into that state, as Sarah very well knew, then there was nothing to be done. Daniel was exactly the same. But she absolutely insisted on driving them all the way there.
‘But you can’t come to the actual castle, Mum. They don’t know you.’
Mrs Salter was about to say something, but she saw her husband shake his head.
‘That will be fine, Sarah. I’ll book a room for you in the village and you can wait for them there.’ For Sarah Salter the thought of a peaceful night all on her own in a quiet inn was such bliss that she gave in at once.
‘In that case they must have proper sandwiches and sleeping bags,’ she said, trying unsuccessfully to sound as if she was in charge.
Twenty-three
Noses and Thumbs
Drusilla was splashing about happily in a mossy pool about half a mile from Mountwood. It lay in a marshy dell where one of the peat-brown burns that came off the moors had a chance to slow down and spread itself out a bit before tumbling on down to the valley floor. She was collecting frogspawn to make her very own variety of tapioca pudding for the Hagges’ breakfast.
They usually breakfasted at around six in the evening, before the ghosts were astir, so that they could discuss the night ahead and get themselves organized. But Drusilla was an early riser, and there was nothing she liked better than to take a little walk on the hills in the slanting evening light and see what she could collect. She had taken off her shoes and socks and waded out into the pool. It was quite delicious to feel the marsh mud oozing up between her toes as she scooped spawn into her little bucket.
Work was going on apace at Mountwood. The Hagges had not told the students that they were secretly rather pleased about Iphigenia’s little escapade. However, they had let them off with a stern warning, and the ghosts were so relieved that they worked even harder than before.
Only last night Drusilla had had a wonderful success. The Druid had finally achieved smell control. After weeks of effort, trying and failing and trying again, the breakthrough had come. He had turned up as usual for his special-needs class, accompanied by a swirling stench of dead fish and untreated sewage.
Drusilla had said, ‘I think you are trying too hard. You must relax; don’t fight it; it is your greatest asset. Your stink is also you – you must greet it as your friend. Say quietly to yourself, “I am one with my smell; I embrace it.”’
The Druid closed his eyes, and repeated again and again, ‘I am one with my smell; I embrace it.’
This went on for quite some time. Then Drusilla, who couldn’t exactly see smells but always knew exactly what they were up to, noticed that the stench that had hung in a drifting cloud around the Druid was beginning to concentrate itself in the region of his stomach; his deathly pale face took on a sickly greenish tinge, and suddenly the stench was gone.
‘Oh! You have mastered it. Congratulations.’
‘I have!’ cried the Druid joyfully. ‘It is within me. My smell is within!’
‘It is. Now, this might be asking too much, but if you could release it again . . .’
The Druid closed his eyes. Like an invisible snake striking with its deadly poisonous fangs, a viciously nauseating stink shot out of his stomach, and a cockroach that was going about its business on the wall opposite coughed once, scrabbled a little with its back legs and fell lifeless to the floor.
‘A cockroach – well done indeed!’ exclaimed Drusilla. ‘Cockroaches can stand almost anything, you know.’
The Druid smiled a proud smile, and apparently without effort withdrew his odour back into himself.
Drusilla came back to the present. The sun’s lower rim was already nudging the distant fells. To the east a bank of clouds was building.
‘I should be getting back,’ she said to herself.
She straightened up and started to wade back to where she had left her shoes and socks on a convenient rock. She had one muddy foot on the bank and one still in the water when she suddenly stopped dead. Her nose had twinged.
‘Hmmm,’ she said.
She left the pool and climbed the side of the little dell to catch the light airs off the moor that signalled the beginning of the evening breeze. She pointed her nose straight into the air, and sniffed.
‘Well, well,’ she murmured.
At breakfast, as Fredegonda and Goneril were spooning up the last of their tapioca pudding, Drusilla said, ‘We will have visitors tonight.’
‘Yes,’ said Fredegonda, looking down at her thumb, which had swollen up slightly and started to blacken at the tip.
Her thumb was very good at keeping her informed about what was going on. Sometimes she thought it was almost too excitable, too keen to tell her things that she could perfectly well have found out for herself. But on the whole they got on very well together, and she was conscientious about attending to its needs. Like a faithful pet that one has cared for over the years, it had found its way to her heart, and if anything had happened to it she would have been very upset.
‘Those children,’ said Drusilla. ‘I caught a distinct whiff of the boy, and a hint of the girl too.’
‘When do you expect them
to be here?’
‘Around midnight, I should think.’
‘What a bother.’
‘Just when things were beginning to settle down nicely. Shall I deal with it?’ said Goneril hopefully. She felt the need to be up and about. She had always been the most sporty of the three.
‘It is tempting, I agree,’ replied Fredegonda, ‘but children aren’t as easy to get rid of as they used to be. The place will be crawling with police cars and do-gooders in no time. We’ll just have to keep our heads down. Batten down the hatches.’
So when the students gathered as usual for evening assembly in the great lower chamber of Mountwood, they got a surprise.
‘Tonight it will be necessary to take some evasive action,’ announced Fredegonda. ‘Mountwood is threatened by intruders. So absolute disappearance by eleven o’clock, please. No groans, no rattling or gnashing. And no stray ears,’ she declared, fixing the Legless Anglo-Saxon Warrior with a piercing look. His ear went red.
The Shortener raised a shy hand. ‘If I may say so, wouldn’t it be better to frighten them off? We would all like to show what we can do.’
‘It is nice to see you so keen,’ replied Fredegonda. ‘You show a fine spirit, all of you. However, in this particular case . . .’ she paused, remembering how the two children who had brought Percy home sat calmly by the wall while a crowd of phantoms howled and screeched in the courtyard, ‘. . . it might prove quite a hard nut to crack.’
Mrs Salter stopped the car at the head of the track.
‘Are you sure you want to do this? It’s terribly dark.’
‘Mum, we’ll be fine. I’ve got a torch and it’s not cold. See you tomorrow.’
Daniel and Charlotte had decided to arrive at Mountwood at around midnight, to have the best chance of meeting everybody and explaining everything. They picked their way down the rutted track by the light of Daniel’s torch. During the evening the sky had become overcast, and now not a single star was to be seen. The night was as black as soot, the darkness so solid that you could almost reach out and touch it, but treading gingerly they came at last to the courtyard of Mountwood.
Daniel let the beam of his torch play over the castle’s louring front. It picked out the iron-studded door and, to the side, the bell pull. Charlotte walked forward, reached up and pulled with all her strength. The clanging of the bell sounded shockingly loud. It echoed through the castle for ages. Nothing happened. The silence was total, so complete that it hissed in their ears.
‘Can they have gone? Is it deserted?’ whispered Charlotte. It was difficult not to whisper in that soundless nothingness.
‘No, they were going to be here for a year at least. Try again.’
Charlotte pulled the bell again. Again the frightful clamour, followed by utter silence.
‘What shall we do?’
‘We can’t give up. Let’s get some sleep in the byre and then see if the Great Hagges come out in the morning.’
Daniel and Charlotte had never been sure that the ghosts would help them. But that they would simply have disappeared – really disappeared – had never occurred to them. They found their way to the byre and forced open the warped, half-rotten door. The pile of old straw was still there. They made a sort of nest for themselves, unrolled their sleeping bags and crept into them. They lay there in the darkness, trying not to think of what the future held if their mission should fail.
Charlotte was finally drifting off into a worried sleep when she quite distinctly felt something walk across her legs.
‘Oh no, a rat!’ she exclaimed, sitting up.
She had nothing against rats and mice in principle, but having one walk over you – and this had felt like a big one – in the middle of the night is hard to take for anyone. Then she heard a sound that was quite unmistakable: a quiet, contented purring.
‘Daniel, where’s the torch?’
Daniel fumbled around, found it and turned it on. They saw a tortoiseshell kitten, curled up and resting peacefully in the space between their sleeping bags.
Twenty-four
The Terrifying Worms
When the clang of the doorbell echoed through Mountwood all the ghosts ignored it, as they had been told to do. They remained completely invisible, absorbing themselves into walls, floors and cupboards. Not a single rattle or gnash was to be heard.
Hours passed, very difficult ones for Percy. He desperately wanted to go out and see Samson but he just didn’t dare. His mother and father had told him very firmly to be absolutely quiet, and he thought he could manage that bit, even if he did sometimes let out a little hiccup by mistake.
But what about those intruders? The Great Hagges hadn’t said who they were. They might be the kind that are dangerous for ghosts. There might be a whole clutch of clergymen out there in the darkness with garlic and little black books. The druid had told some horrible story just the other night about how badly ghosts were treated in the old days. Then Percy had a terrible thought. What if the intruders were dangerous not to ghosts, but to cats? He simply had to go out and see that Samson was all right.
Trembling in every phantom limb, Percy eased his way through the wall of the castle into the courtyard and sneaked over to the byre. He was totally invisible and the night was black as pitch, but he sneaked anyway, just to be on the safe side.
He glided into the barn, and immediately saw Samson sleeping quietly on the straw. But to his utter horror he saw something else. Two great worms were lying on either side of him! Percy knew about great worms. He knew about the Lambton Worm that had lived in the well at Lambton Castle and got bigger and bigger until it had eaten all the sheep and cattle. There was a song about it that Angus Crawe’s mates had sung when they were visiting him only the other week. Geordie Lambton had killed it in the end, not far from here, but could it have had children? These ones weren’t as big as the Lambton Worm, but there were two of them.
Percy was shaking with fear, but he simply had to be brave. Samson’s life was in danger. He had to frighten them off. He began to materialize, wishing he had listened more closely to the scary-noise lessons.
‘Ooh-wooh,’ he said.
The worms twisted and turned. Percy almost vanished in fright, but he took hold of himself and tried again.
‘Ooh. Ooh-wooh.’
Now the two worms lifted their heads, and to Percy’s utter horror and astonishment he saw not the evil worm heads with red eyes and venomous teeth that he had been expecting, but the heads of Daniel and Charlotte.
Percy panicked. ‘Oh no, they’re eating my friends! Stop! Help, help!’ he screeched.
‘Percy, is that you?’ said Daniel.
‘Yes, yes, I want to save you, but I don’t know how!’ The tears poured down his cheeks.
‘You don’t have to save us. We’re fine,’ said Charlotte, sitting up, ‘and we’re very pleased to see you. We thought you had all left.’
Charlotte and Daniel crept out of their sleeping bags. Percy saw at once that he had been a bit foolish, but it didn’t matter. He was so very pleased to see them.
He introduced them to Samson, and asked them if they had come on a bus, and then he cried, ‘Oh, I forgot. How could I? I should be invisible, and so should you. There are intruders.’
‘I think we are the intruders, Percy,’ said Charlotte. ‘We know that the Great Hagges don’t want you to talk to humans, but we just had to come. We are in trouble. We need help.’ And she told him what was happening to Markham Street.
‘My mama will want to help you, I know she will,’ said Percy when she had finished, ‘but I’m not so sure about—’
At that moment there was a mighty crash and the door of the barn flew open. Three dark figures stood silhouetted in the wide doorway. Behind them a dark red flush in the sky hinted at the coming of dawn.
The Great Hagges advanced on Daniel and Charlotte. Drusilla uncovered a lantern, which cast its flickering light around the byre, chasing shadows into corners and illuminating the faces of the two chi
ldren. Daniel and Charlotte moved closer together, but they stood their ground. Daniel opened his mouth to speak, but there was no time.
‘We do not usually bother with children,’ said Fredegonda, ‘but since you are clearly determined to bother us, it seems we will have to make an exception. Goneril, if you would be so kind.’
Goneril stepped forward. Her long eyebrow had formed itself into a V-shape above her nose, and her left eyeball had turned green. Daniel’s feet suddenly felt icy cold. He tried to move, but he was rooted to the spot. He turned his head to look at Charlotte. She looked at him, and he saw real fear in her eyes.
‘Daniel,’ she whispered, ‘I can’t move.’
Then the heap of straw in which they were standing began to heave and writhe and rustle. Charlotte though of rats and worse, but there were no rats. The straw itself was alive; it roiled and twisted and great ropes of straw began to encircle Charlotte’s and Daniel’s legs, and waists, and arms. In no time at all two straw dolls were standing there. Their noses stuck out a bit, but nothing else.
When Goneril was finished, Fredegonda said, ‘Well, that will do for now, but we are not out of the woods yet.’
‘No,’ said Drusilla. ‘Someone will be expecting them back. But perhaps I can think of something. Memory loss is a bit unreliable. A sudden shock can jolt it. I would go for some kind of permanent brain damage.’
‘What’s wrong with a good old-fashioned fire?’ said Goneril, who liked a bit of a blaze. ‘Accidents do happen.’
Discussing possible solutions to their little problem, the Great Hagges returned to the castle. There was only an hour or two before dawn, so no time to waste. Percy had vanished in terror when the Hagges arrived and hung about in the rafters of the byre not daring to move. As soon as they left, he fled to find his father and mother.
‘You will be pleased to hear,’ announced Fredegonda, when the wraiths and phantoms of Mountwood had drifted in, in answer to their summons, ‘that the intruders have been temporarily discouraged. They will be dealt with later. Meanwhile we have missed a night’s work, but there is still time for a workout before sunrise. Goneril will lead a session of ectoplasmic callisthenics.’
Mountwood School for Ghosts Page 14