Mountwood School for Ghosts

by Toby Ibbotson

  Goneril took over. ‘Right, students, three separate groups, please, heads to your right, limbs to your left, torsos in a ring in between.’

  Nothing happened. The ghosts stayed where they were. Fredegonda looked out over the crowd. Nobody moved. Only a faint smell of sweaty socks betrayed that the Druid, in spite of his new-found mastery, had let the tension get the better of him.

  Iphigenia Peabody separated herself from the group and glided forward. ‘We wish to say something.’

  ‘By all means,’ said Fredegonda, but her voice held a warning note.

  ‘My son Perceval tells me that these two intruders are the children who saved him, and that they have come here in dire need, seeking our help.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We feel that to bale them and then send them home unheard is not fair and just—’

  ‘Fair and just? Fair and just?’ All Fredegonda’s pent-up disgust welled up in her and spilled over. ‘Is it fair and just to paint skeletons on T-shirts and write stories about soppy teenage witches who moon about like film stars? To put green plastic trolls into fast-food cartons for toddlers to play with? I will hear no more of this nonsense. Return to the business in hand.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No! No?’

  For the first time for several hundred years Fredegonda was lost for words. Goneril stood open-mouthed, showing both her teeth, and Drusilla’s eyebrow had almost disappeared into her hairline.

  ‘We refuse. We are on strike. We will not be moved.’

  Fredegonda found her voice. ‘All of you?’

  She looked around.

  The legless Anglo-Saxon warrior, pinioned by her steely gaze, looked as though he might be about to weaken. But the Phantom Welder, who was floating close by, spoke to him in a quiet but determined voice. ‘We have to stick together, comrade. Don’t be a scab, mate. They can’t break us if we hold the line.’ And he started to sing softly, ‘The worker’s flag is deepest red, stained with the blood of martyrs dead . . .’

  Iphigenia spoke again. ‘We only ask that you give them a hearing.’

  There was a faint hissing noise, like the wind blowing through ripe barley, as the other ghosts agreed.

  A long silence followed.

  ‘Fredegonda, dear,’ said Drusilla, ‘perhaps under the circumstances—’

  Fredegonda interrupted her. ‘Goneril, fetch them, please.’

  Daniel and Charlotte were led by Goneril into the great lower chamber of Mountwood, and the ghostly gathering parted to let them through. Wisps of straw clung to their clothes and stuck out of their hair. Charlotte’s face was drawn and thin, all eyes and mouth. Daniel’s square features were set, his jaw clenched and his chin up. Both of them were pale and freezing cold. There was no heating in Mountwood. The walls were damp and dripping, and the assembly hall was lit only by a few smoking torches and a handful of will-o’-the-wisps whom Drusilla had befriended in the marsh.

  ‘We have been asked to let you speak,’ said Fredegonda frostily when they came to a halt in front of her. ‘So speak.’

  Fredegonda, tall, gaunt and forbidding, was enough to make anyone unsure of herself, but the children collected their thoughts as best they could.

  Daniel began. ‘Our houses are about to be destroyed; we have tried everything. We need your help.’

  ‘Why should we help you? What concern is it of ours?’

  ‘Only fear can stop them,’ said Charlotte. ‘We thought . . . We thought that’s what this was all about.’ And she gestured around the gloomy chamber with its milling spectres.

  ‘And so it is. But we would also be helping you and your families. It would be a good deed. That is not what this is all about.’

  ‘But you would be helping those old houses too. Don’t ghosts need old houses to haunt? And they’re going to make such a mess of Markham Park. It’s been there for ages.’

  There was a desperate appeal in Charlotte’s voice. She didn’t know it, but she had hit the spot. The Great Hagges were very much against mess. Drusilla was a Lifetime President of the Society for the Preservation of the British Heritage, and had kept up contact even in retirement.

  Now she said, ‘Markham Park? I think I heard something about that. There is a Head of Planning whom the members have been complaining about for years.’

  ‘Jack Bluffit,’ said Daniel.

  ‘That’s the chap. I knew the original Markham, you know – Sir Guy of March Hamlet he was then, of course. Very respectable, and had a firm hand with the serfs.’

  ‘There is another thing,’ said Daniel. Suddenly he felt that they might be getting somewhere. ‘We thought your students might need a bit of practice. You know, like trainee teachers, or soldiers on an assault course.’

  It was this last remark that clinched it. Ever since Mrs Peabody’s little jaunt they had been discussing the need for a bit of fieldwork. ‘The litmus test,’ Fredegonda called it.

  The Great Hagges exchanged glances, and then Fredegonda nodded.

  ‘Very well. We agree to your request, assuming that there are volunteers for the task. I will not make helping human children obligatory, of that point I am quite adamant. So,’ she declared, turning to her students, ‘who wishes to be a part of this enterprise?’

  A surge of spectres, squawking and shrieking, ‘I’ll go! . . . Me, I’ll do it! . . . I’m on, count me in!’ told her that she would have no difficulty in raising her squad.

  ‘I assume you can organize billets,’ said Goneril.

  ‘Billets?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Where are they going to stay?’

  ‘But I thought—’ Daniel began.

  ‘I doubt that. You clearly did not think. Ghosts need somewhere to attach themselves. Occasionally you might meet a wanderer, like the Druid here, but for the most part ghosts don’t just haunt, they haunt places – houses, castles, ruins, graveyards . . .’

  ‘Aye, and wells,’ boomed Angus Crawe, from the depths.

  ‘Exactly. I should have thought that was obvious. So can you accommodate them?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, we can, it won’t be a problem,’ said Daniel quickly, before Charlotte could get an attack of honesty and admit that it might well be a problem.

  Once a decision had been made, Fredegonda did not hang about.

  ‘In three days from now, at midnight,’ she declared.

  Twenty-five

  Heavy Machinery

  It started the day after they returned from Mountwood. Mike came round to Daniel’s house, and when Daniel came to the door he said, ‘They’re here. Let’s go up and look.’

  They walked up to the park. Before they even got there they heard the roar of a big diesel engine, and when they came around the corner they saw that a wide gap had been torn in the low wall surrounding the park. A huge yellow bulldozer with caterpillar tracks was forcing its way through, pushing stones and rubble before it with its great blade. It headed straight across the grass. Along one of the streets that surrounded the park a line of lorries stood waiting, each one carrying a large container like a railway carriage with no wheels.

  As they stood there, a heavy truck came rumbling up the road. It had lots of big wheels with deep treads and a crane was folded on to its flatbed.

  ‘Boom truck,’ said Mike. He was a great explorer and had climbed over lots of fences; he knew most of what there was to know about heavy-duty construction machinery. ‘They’ll be rigging up the site offices first.’

  Daniel and Mike sat on the wall of the park and watched. The bulldozer crawled backwards and forwards, flattening out a large area at edge of the park. A laurel bush and a young sycamore were swept aside and dumped like litter. Then some big dumper trucks drove straight through the gap in the wall. They turned round, churning up what was left of the grass and flower beds into a quagmire, backed into the space that the bulldozer had made and started tipping huge piles of gravel and hard core.

  Next to come was a front-loader.

  ‘Hitachi,’ said Mike. ‘He
can take a few tons in that bucket.’

  The bulldozer was hard at work, spreading hard core and then gravel over a space as big as two tennis courts. Finally, with the front-loader as assistant, the bulldozer evened out the track that it had come in on, and the two machines ground to a halt. Their drivers jumped down from their cabs and stood chatting with each other.

  Now it was the boom truck’s turn. It entered the park followed by the lorries that had stood patiently waiting. There was a hiss of air brakes, and then the engine revved as the crane’s hydraulics unfolded the arm on its back. It lifted the portable site huts off the beds of the lorries and piled three of them on top of each other. The fourth was placed a bit to the side.

  Daniel saw that they had windows and doors. On the top one was a sign saying ‘Site Office’, on the middle one ‘Canteen’ and on the lowest one ‘Stores’.

  On the one that stood by itself was a sign saying ‘Toilets’.

  Now a four-wheel-drive pick-up drove in and parked in front of the huts. It disgorged four men in yellow hard hats who started unloading scaffolding from the back. In no time at all they had bolted together the huts, and a set of steps rose up the side, with gratings to stand on in front of the doors of the top two huts.

  ‘Pretty nifty work,’ said Mike admiringly.

  Just then Daniel heard a shout.

  ‘Daniel, Daniel, are there diggers?’

  Charlotte’s youngest brother, Alexander, was dragging his sister towards them, while she complained, ‘Take it easy, Alex, they’ll be there for months.’

  ‘But I want to see them now.’

  Alexander had Heavy-Machinery Disease. An excavator making a hole in the road could put him into a trance. He could stand the whole day with his thumb in his mouth just watching. It is a disease which sometimes infects small boys and there is no quick cure. Sometimes they grow out of it. Sometimes they don’t.

  ‘Hi,’ said Charlotte breathlessly. ‘I didn’t want to see this, but I didn’t have much choice.’ She looked out over the park. ‘Oh no, what an ugly mess.’

  ‘What time is it, Charlotte?’ asked Mike.

  ‘About half twelve, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ve got to go. See you.’ Mike sauntered off.

  Charlotte lifted Alexander up on to the wall, which was taller than he was, keeping a good grasp on the back of his coat. He settled down happily and stuck his thumb in his mouth.

  ‘They’d better come soon,’ said Daniel quietly.

  ‘They said the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘Do you think they’ll be all right in number twelve?’

  ‘I don’t see why they shouldn’t be. Empty houses are just the sort of places you find ghosts.’

  When they got back from Mountwood, Charlotte and Daniel had had a little conference, and Charlotte had the brilliant idea of putting up the ghosts in the Bennetts’ house. Gillian and her parents had already moved out. Mr Bennett had found a job in the south; he had been wanting to move anyway, so it had seemed best to get out as soon as possible.

  Alexander took his thumb out of his mouth and piped excitedly, ‘The big crane, look!’

  The boom truck had one more job to do that day. He had instructions from his foreman, who said they came right from the top.

  He climbed into his cab, started up and drove straight across the park, ignoring paths and waste bins and flower beds and shrubbery. He stopped at the open space in the middle of the park, next to the statue of General Markham. He climbed out of his cab, unloaded a big strap and looped it round the waist of the general, who stood proudly gazing out over the city. The driver slung the other end over the hook of the crane and got back into his cab. The great boom lifted, the strap tightened, and with a wrenching sound General Sir Markham was ripped from his pedestal. He swung in the air, shedding debris and revolving slowly.

  The crane drove carefully to the edge of the park, where a skip stood by the kerb on the other side of the wall. The crane’s long boom lowered, and General Markham disappeared head first into the skip. Only his shattered feet stuck up over the edge.

  Daniel and Charlotte watched in silence. There was nothing to say. Now everything depended on their desperate plan.

  ‘Good,’ said Jack Bluffit.

  It was he who had given the order that the very first thing to be done in Markham Park was getting rid of that statue. He hated it. He was not superstitious, but he could not stand that old general standing there as though he was guarding the place. So the sooner it went, the better. There would be a much better statue standing there by the end of the year anyway.

  Snyder had shown him some sketches that the sculptor had done, and he thought they were pretty impressive. No horse though. After that trip out to Ridget’s place he never wanted to have anything to do with horses again, not even as a statue. They should all be turned into hamburgers, in his opinion.

  ‘Good,’ he repeated.

  He was talking to the person sitting on the other side of his desk. He was called Big Robby, and the name certainly suited him. The chair he was sitting on only had room for one of his buttocks, and looked as though it would collapse at any moment. His shaved head sat like a rock on massive shoulders. There was no neck in between. Once he had been as solid as granite, but now most of him wobbled like jelly when he moved.

  His real name was Robert Mayhew, and he was a multi-millionaire and sole owner of a huge construction company that had built skyscrapers and airport terminals and motorways all over the north of England. Big Robby Mayhew had started working as a hoddy on building sites in his teens, running bricks up and down ladders; he had been tougher and worked harder than anyone else, and soon he went into business for himself. It was much easier to make money that way. You could fiddle your taxes, use cheap materials and charge for expensive ones, pay low wages and scare people who complained. He knew every trick in the book, and in no time he had made his first million – the first of many.

  ‘Yup,’ he said, ‘statue’s in a skip. When my boys get to work they don’t hang about. We’ll start digging out for foundations tomorrow, and before you can say knife we’ll be pouring concrete.’

  ‘You’re going to have to get a move on. That’s the deal.’

  Big Robby had wanted the Markham Park development job, and he had got it. But the really big payout would come if he got the job done fast. Jack Bluffit was in a hurry, with rat-face Norton sniffing at his heels and some stupid nosey parker on the council saying he had tried to pervert the course of justice by telling the police to give that old lady a going-over.

  ‘I tell you, we work fast. We’ll keep our end of the bargain,’ grunted Big Robby.

  The two men eyed each other across the desk. They didn’t like each other. Each one thought the other was stupid. But they went way back. They had been playing around with the council’s money for years, building shoddy houses and unsafe roads, and putting money in their own pockets.

  The following day the excavators moved in. Alexander was in ecstasy, and Charlotte had to bring a book with her to the park. The diggers stretched and swung their great jointed necks, taking a scoop of stones and earth the size of a small car with every bite. Charlotte had been trying for about an hour to read and hold on to Alexander at the same time when suddenly he squirmed and screeched, ‘It’s falling over!’

  One of the excavators was indeed teetering on the edge of the hole it had been digging, its caterpillars scrabbling in reverse. The driver was fast and skilful. He swung the whole body of the digger round and dropped the arm quickly, so that the toothed edge of the bucket dug into the ground. Then the powerful arm began to flex, and the digger hauled itself back from the edge. The driver hopped out of his cab as other workmen gathered round and peered down into the hole. There was a lot of shaking of heads, then one of them walked over to the site office, ran up the steps and disappeared through the door.

  Big Robby was in his office when the phone rang. It was his foreman, ringing from Markham Park.

 
; ‘It’s like we thought, Robby,’ said the foreman. ‘Straight through to an old mine shaft on the first day. The whole area is riddled with old workings; they go back hundreds of years, some of them. We shouldn’t be building here at all. I’ve said that from the start.’

  ‘You let me worry about that. Fill it in somehow.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s going to take a long time.’

  ‘We have a deadline to meet. And we’re going to meet it. Rig up some arc lamps; we’ll have to work night shifts.’

  ‘That’s going to cost you.’

  ‘Never mind, just square it with the men.’

  It would eat into his payout, but it was the only thing to do. Big Robby put down the phone and said a rude word.

  Twenty-six

  Team Spectre

  As soon as Daniel and Charlotte had left, the Great Hagges got down to business. Organizing a posse of ghosts was just the kind of thing they were good at.

  First they announced that since so many of the ghosts had applied for the mission, they would themselves make the selection, based on individual merit and value to the team. Some were bound to be disappointed, they said, but there would be other opportunities to excel.

  Then they had a staff meeting. It was a proper planning meeting, and they expected it to go on for quite a long time, so Drusilla had prepared a light lunch in the Mexican style. There was a plate of crispy blowfly fritters, with a lamb-phlegm dip sauce, and toadstool sauté. When they had eaten they pushed their plates aside and got to work. Some lively discussion followed.

  There were one or two obvious choices: the Peabodys for example.

  ‘Mrs Peabody is highly gifted, and she has drive. Her interest in this situation is hardly in question. She will give of her best,’ said Fredegonda.

  The others agreed. It was clear that the family was a unit, and that Mr Peabody could also be relied on to pull out all the stops.