by Eva Ibbotson
It was an awful moment – like holding a crumb to a sick fledgling and wondering if it was strong enough to feed. Would she? Would she not?
For a moment Rose stayed still, hunched and trembling. Then her head turned, her mouth groped along his arm and Rick shut his eyes as she made a sudden jab at his wrist.
And, after all, it was nothing. Susie was right. Less than a pinprick, and then he sat happily watching the tiny thing suck and feeling her warm life in his hand.
The next day they set off across the moors. No one bothered any longer to tell the vampire bats that they couldn’t come. When Susie woke and found Rick had fed Rose she burst into a storm of tears. ‘Oh the relief!’ she cried, flying round and round Rick’s head. ‘Oh, you wonderful boy. I’m sorry I said all those silly things to you. Oh, my baby – look how pink her cheeks are! What excellent blood you have, you dear, dear boy!’
Rick had been afraid that Susie would also want him to feed Sozzler, Gulper, Syphoner and Fred and this he thought would be going too far, but she didn’t. Though they were skinny the boys seemed strong enough, circling round and round the phantom coach and doing somersaults.
It was a long walk along the side of the new reservoir which looked cold and bare, not a bit like a natural lake. Walter the Wet jumped in, of course, and they could see a little whirlpool made by the top of his head moving along beside them. No one said anything but there was a sort of hope in the air that Walter might like to stay there. They were fond of him but all that wetness was trying. But when he came out he said he hadn’t liked it at all. ‘Clean, I grant you that. But all that concrete. Gives me the willies. No, a nice natural bit of water, that’s what I like.’
As he walked along Rick tried not to worry but he couldn’t help feeling that things were getting a bit out of hand. A river spirit meant that the sanctuary would have to have water in it; now the vampire bats needed a place to keep cows or some other warm-blooded animals to feed on. ‘And anyway,’ he said to Humphrey the Horrible who as usual was gliding along beside him, ‘are vampires really ghosts?’
Humphrey frowned. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think they’re made of ectoplasm. I mean, you can’t see through them like you can see through us, can you?’
‘Still,’ said Rick, ‘a sanctuary’s a sanctuary as I’ve said before. It’s for keeping people safe, not for leaving anybody out. All the same . . .’
They walked all day through that gloomy valley, and as they walked the vampire bats told them of the sad things that were happening to the ghosts and werewolves and spirits all over Britain. Apparently the Hag of the Dribble, a very famous Welsh Hag who was a sort of second cousin to Humphrey’s mother, had had her Dribble drained and was in a very bad way indeed.
‘You don’t say! Her Dribble drained,’ said the Hag. ‘How dreadful!’
‘What’s a Dribble, Mother?’ said Humphrey.
‘A Dribble? Well, it’s a... well it’s a Dribble. A sort of marsh, maybe. Or perhaps a bog. All I know is that a Dribble must Never Be Drained.’
There were lots more sad stories: werewolves dying of food poisoning, forest spirits having their trees cut down, ancient and famous ghosts having to haunt fish and chip shops, or discos, or Bingo Halls.
‘And you’ll have heard of poor Wolfram? Wolfram the Withered I mean, not that dreary uncle of his.’
‘Haunting a swimming bath, I understand,’ said Aunt Hortensia, who was half hanging out of the phantom coach so as to listen better.
The vampire nodded. ‘He was a town ghost and when they pulled down his house they built a Public Swimming Bath instead. He says it’s quite unbearable: all those dreadful pink thighs and shoulders and bottoms splashing through him all day. And of course the chlorine in the water is just murdering his ectoplasm.’
‘Poor Wolfram. We’ll have to invite him to the sanctuary as soon as we’re settled,’ said the Gliding Kilt, shaking his head.
Rick didn’t say anything. He didn’t like to point out that there wasn’t a sanctuary yet and might never be one. One had to go on hoping. It was the only thing to do.
Eight
It was evening before they had crossed Saughbeck Moors and reached the place where the small road they had been walking along joined the main road to London.
At the crossroads there was a big lay-by with a garage and a restaurant from which there came one of the most satisfying smells in the world: the smell of frying chips.
‘You’d better go and eat something,’ said the Hag to Rick. ‘You must be starving. We’ll wait for you outside.’
So Rick opened the door of the restaurant and went in, blinking a bit at the bright lights and the people. It was a ‘help yourself’ place where you took a tray and slid it along past lots of glass cases till you got to your tea or coffee at the end. He still hadn’t spent any of the money he’d brought from school and the food looked marvellous. The first thing he took was a huge plate of sausage, peas and baked beans. The sausages looked simply beautiful – sizzling hot and grilled to a turn. But then he remembered what Sucking Susie had said about cutting up pigs so he sighed and put it back and had egg and chips instead. It wasn’t quite the same but by the time he’d added a bowl of tomato soup, two doughnuts and a helping of apple tart and custard, he thought that he would manage not to collapse with hunger.
And when he’d eaten and found the ghosts again, Rick climbed into the back of a parked lorry which said Alfred Barchester. London Road. Bigglesford and hid under a pile of sacks. There was no reason at all for doing this since the driver, who was a nice fat man called Albert with a wife and four children, would have given him a lift anyway, but Rick was too tired by then to think straight. Then Aunt Hortensia drove her coach over the top and all the other ghosts piled in just as Albert, looking rather tired, with a growth of stubble on his chin, came back to the lorry and climbed into the cab.
And they had hardly turned south, on the main road to London, before Rick – completely worn out by the day’s adventures – fell fast asleep.
When he woke it was morning. Albert had parked the lorry in a lay-by and had gone to stretch his legs. They must be quite near London, Rick reckoned, because they were on a huge, six-lane motorway with a big clover-leaf flyover a few hundred yards on. Even at this early hour the traffic streamed along continuously: blue cars, beige cars, green cars, red cars; lorries and caravettes, trailers and delivery vans; huge Rolls Royces and tiny Fiats, on and on and on.
He felt in his pocket for the piece of bread that he’d saved from his supper the night before. As he lifted it to his mouth he noticed a tiny, new, red mark on his wrist. Baby Rose must have taken breakfast by herself while he was asleep. He felt very proud of her. She was obviously going to be a very intelligent vampire indeed when she got older.
When he’d finished his bread he looked out for Humphrey’s elbow. It didn’t seem to be anywhere on the lorry. Then he saw that there was a disused barn facing away from the road on a piece of waste ground – and there they all were: the Hag fixing Humphrey’s ball and chain, Walter the Wet grumbling because Winifred wouldn’t let him paddle in her bowl, Sozzler, Gulper, Syphoner and Fred looking hungrily at a cow grazing in a distant meadow...
But it was at quite a new figure that Rick was looking. A wavering, crazy-looking old creature wearing a monk’s habit.
Not another one?
‘I tell you I can’t stand it any longer,’ he was moaning. ‘Look at me!’ He held out his quivering, thumbless hands and Aunt Hortensia, who was the expert on ectoplasm, agreed that he looked in very poor shape.
‘It’s the petrol fumes and the smell of the exhaust and those idiots whizzing by all the time,’ moaned the spectre. ‘You’ve no idea what it’s like nowadays. I was a monk you see. The Mad Monk of Abbotsfield they called me. Because I was walled up alive. So naturally I went mad. Ooh—’ he broke off nervously. ‘Who on earth is that?’
The Hag introduced Rick who shook the old wraith’s rather disgusting thumbless hand polite
ly.
‘All this—’ the Mad Monk went on, pointing back at the motorway and the clover-leaf packed thick with cars – ‘all this used to be the grounds of an ancient Abbey, you see. I used to haunt the Old Cloisters where the monks slept. It was so lovely, so peaceful, wandering in and out, groaning and gibbering and watching the floorboards moulder where my footsteps had been. And then that wicked Henry the Eighth burnt the whole thing down.’
Aunt Hortensia’s stump snorted sympathetically. ‘Chop,’ it said, and the Head explained that it was Henry the Eighth who had done for her also.
After the Abbey had been burnt down, the Mad Monk went on, it became a ruin and then gradually just a green field. ‘I didn’t mind haunting the field either. I could make the cows jump, I can tell you,’ said the Mad Monk, wheezing with idiotic laughter. ‘But then they built the motorway and since then it’s been terrible, terrible.... You’ve no idea what it’s like to have ten-ton lorries thundering through you all night. And of course the overcrowding!’
‘There are certainly an awful lot of cars,’ said Winifred.
‘Oh, it’s not the cars. It’s the ghosts. Do you realize about a dozen people are killed on this motorway every week? Silly idiots overtaking in the fog or rushing along at a hundred miles an hour or sticking bumper to bumper and then piling up. And of course as soon as they’re killed they start thinking this is their place and they want to haunt the motorway too. And absolutely ridiculous they look. I’ve seen ghosts glide along here in Bermuda shorts, carrying a bag of golf clubs. I ask you!’
‘Poor Mad Monk,’ said Humphrey, his eye sockets misting up.
Rick only sighed. He knew exactly what was coming and he was perfectly right.
‘Please?’ said the Mad Monk. ‘Please, would you take me along? I’m very old and very mad and I so badly need a place to rest.’
‘Oh well,’ said Rick, ‘I suppose one more won’t make any difference.’
And so the Mad Monk of the Motorway came too, to see the Prime Minister of England and ask for a fair deal for the Ghosts of Britain.
Rick knew London well and he had decided that the best place for the ghosts to spend the night was in Hyde Park.
They had done the last bit of the journey in a train which turned into an Underground when it got into the centre of London. Being in a dark tunnel with slimy, blackened walls had put the ghosts in an excellent temper and everyone agreed that Rick had chosen exactly the right place.
‘Nice big trees to perch on,’ said Susie, swirling round the top of a clump of elms and frightening the rooks into fits. Sozzler, Gulper, Syphoner and Fred didn’t say anything but they nudged each other with their wings and Rick saw them looking hungrily at a couple of tramps stretched out for sleep underneath a group of bushes. ‘You won’t take too much?’ he begged them. ‘Tramps are mostly thin and tired sort of people; they can’t spare a lot of blood.’
The boys promised. Meanwhile the Hag and the Gliding Kilt were settling down in a rowing boat drawn up by the edge of the pretty lake called the Serpentine. The Hag was smelling of wet whale liver because she thought boats were romantic and she wanted to remind the Gliding Kilt of when they were courting. George and Winifred and Humphrey were sent to sleep in a little bandstand not far away and the Mad Monk settled down in a nice, dank shrubbery behind the Gentlemen’s Toilet. Walter the Wet, of course, dived straight into the Serpentine but he came up from time to time to tell them about the things he’d found, like an old armchair, a family of eels and five plastic replicas of the 1966 World Cup.
Rick was just turning to go when a small, white shape glided up to him. ‘Please can I come with you? Please, please?’
‘No, Humphrey,’ came the Hag’s voice from the rowing boat. ‘Rick’s going to spend the night with a human. He needs a rest.’
Humphrey’s eye sockets turned into bottomless pools of despair. His jaw bones trembled.
‘Rose is going with him,’ he said.
‘I have to feed Rose,’ said Rick gently, feeling the little bundle in his pocket. ‘She’s too young for tramps. She’d never get through their skins.’
‘You get along with your brother and sister for once,’ scolded the Hag. ‘Listen, there’s poor Winifred wailing for you now.’
On the way out of the park. Rick passed Aunt Hortensia. She was hanging in a very sloppy way in a chestnut tree, her yellow feet sticking down like a bunch of old bananas.
‘You won’t forget to vanish, will you?’ he called out. And from under the tree, her head, lying sleepily between the Shuk’s paws, said: ‘Don’t worry, dear child; don’t worry about a thing.’
The friend Rick was going to spend the night with was called Daniel. He had been at Norton Castle School with Rick but the Crawlers made him so sick that he’d got his parents to take him away and let him go to day school. Daniel’s father was a painter and his mother was a writer and they were pleasant, vague sort of people with a cheerful, pink house near the river – the kind that people were always arriving at and going away from without anyone bothering. Rick reckoned he could turn up there without a lot of questions about what he was doing alone in London in the middle of the term.
Daniel was very pleased to see him and Daniel’s mother gave him some rather peculiar risotto to eat, and after that Rick phoned Barbara who was waiting as she’d promised in the deserted school office. It was nearly three days since Rick had left and she was very, very pleased to hear his voice.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘Mm. We’ve got to London. But I’ve kind of collected rather a lot more than I started with.’
And he told her about Walter the Wet, and the Mad Monk, and the vampire bats.
‘Goodness! It’s like the Pied Piper of Hamelin,’ said Barbara. ‘You’ll need an absolutely enormous sanctuary.’
And then she told him what she had found out since Rick had gone.
‘Now listen. Our Member of Parliament is called Clarence Wilks. Clarence Ephraim Wilks.’
‘Wow!’ said Rick.
‘So you’d better go to the Houses of Parliament and ask if you can speak to him.’
‘But nobody will ever let me in.’
‘Rick you’ve got to be firm. Everyone’s allowed to see their M.P.; I told you. That’s the point of a democracy. And if he isn’t at Westminster you must go and see him in his house. He lives at 397 Cadbury Avenue, Golder’s Vale. It’s in the North of London somewhere.’
‘All right,’ said Rick. ‘And then I explain to Mr Wilks about the ghosts and ask him to take me to the Prime Minister.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’ve never heard of a boy who just got taken to the Prime Minister,’ said Rick. Now that he was actually in London it all seemed much more difficult than it had done at Norton.
‘There’s always a first time,’ said Barbara briskly.
Rick sighed. ‘O.K. How are things at school?’
‘All right. The Crawlers are quite happy about you being gone because your rich godmother is going to buy a smashing present for the school.’
‘My rich what?’
‘Never mind. I’ll explain when you get back. Nothing’s happened really. Maurice’s feet are worse than ever and Masterson got detention for hoisting Matron’s knickers on the flagpole. The usual stuff.’
‘Well, I’d better be off.’ said Rick. ‘I’ve got to feed this vampire bat.’
‘Lucky you,’ said Barbara, who was a very motherly girl. ‘A waste, really. I’d be better at it. More blood.’
And hung up.
Nine
The following afternoon, feeling as if a whole lot of very large butterflies were banging about in his stomach, Rick took a bus to the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. They looked very beautiful and very impressive in the sunshine, with the Clock Tower and Big Ben standing out against a clear, blue sky, pigeons roosting on the carved stonework, and glimpses behind the buildings of pleasure boats going up the Thames. It seemed perfectly ridiculou
s that a boy no one had ever heard of could just march into a place like that.
But of course Barbara was perfectly right. She always was. The first policeman he spoke to directed Rick to St Stephen’s Gate and the policeman there showed him the entrance that visitors used, and there he was in a huge, echoing place called the Central Lobby which felt like a cross between a railway station and a church, filling in a green card which yet another policeman had given him. And when he’d filled it up and put in his own name, and the name of the person he wanted to see, a very grand man in a tail coat, wearing a golden chain took it and went off to find Mr Wilks.
While he was waiting, Rick looked round and what he saw encouraged him. There were a lot of people queuing up to see their Member of Parliament: a party of school children come to see how the government worked, two students, and a whole bus-load of grey-haired ladies – probably a Women’s Institute or something like that. And as one by one their Member of Parliament came to take them inside, Rick noticed that the M.P.s all had very kind and intelligent faces. He even overheard one of them say something cheering about going to have tea.
But when Mr Clarence Wilks came, Rick’s heart sank. Not that you could tell just by looking at someone but it did seem as though Norton Castle School and District had elected the only dud in the Houses of Parliament. Mr Wilks had one of those dark red, sweaty faces that looks as though it’s about to explode from trying to cram too much fat in under the skin; pale glassy eyes and that superior look that people have who think that everyone who is not grown up is half-witted.
‘What can I do for you, young fellow?’
Rick looked round the crowded hall. ‘Could I speak to you more privately, do you think?’
‘No one will hear us here,’ said Mr Wilks, leading him to a slightly less packed bit of the floor. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have long, so make it as brief as you can. You didn’t say what you wanted on your card.’