The Great Ghost Rescue

by Eva Ibbotson

  Twelve

  The following morning the Hag woke with a headache. Like most mothers, the Hag often had a headache. George’s screaming, for a start, frequently had her flat on her back by teatime with a damp frogskin on her forehead. But this was a much worse headache than usual. It pounded and jabbed and thumped inside her skull till she felt she just couldn’t move another step. Then the backache started, creeping up her hump on one side and down the other as though someone was running a meat chopper along her spine.

  ‘I think I’ll just lie down a little,’ she said to her husband.

  The Gliding Kilt, usually so sympathetic, just stared at her. ‘I think I’ll just lie down, dear,’ she repeated – and stopped because her husband had a very frightened look on his face.

  ‘I can’t hear what you’re saying, Mabel,’ he said. ‘There’s an awful buzzing in my ears and I’m so giddy.’ His kilt was swaying as if caught in a gale and the sword in his chest had a tarnished, rusty look. But the Hag had no time to see to her husband before the most agonized screaming from the East Tower pierced her ears. It was George, of course, but this wasn’t George’s loud and lusty roar. This was a hoarse, pitiful scream; the scream of somebody in pain.

  ‘Oh what is happening to us all?’ wailed the Hag, gliding up to the tower and cradling George in her arms. His skull had gone terrifyingly fuzzy and the bones felt soft and buttery in her hand.

  ‘What is it, darling, what is it?’

  ‘I hurt,’ screamed George. ‘I hurt, I hurt, I hurt!’

  Holding him lovingly in her claws and ignoring the terrible pain in her back, the Hag flew down looking for the rest of her children. She found Winifred lying on the steps leading from the dungeons. She looked completely stunned. ‘My bowl’s smashed, Mummy. My bowl’s smashed. My bowl ...’

  ‘Something terrible is happening,’ said the Hag desperately. ‘We must stay together. Where’s Humphrey?’

  But before she could look for Humphrey, Aunt Hortensia came flying in. Her knobbly knees stuck out like ramrods; her neck stump was as stiff as a board.

  ‘I’ve gone rigid, Mabel,’ she said, circling the room like a great iron cross. ‘Can’t bend a thing. And my head’s like rock.’

  Everywhere in the sanctuary terrible things were happening; things which no one could explain or understand. The Mad Monk had come out in big boils – frightful red lumps, with pus oozing out of his ectoplasm and running down inside his tunic. Walter the Wet was thrown up on the sea shore, bone dry. The Shuk’s lantern eye turned white and then closed up altogether so that he dropped Aunt Hortensia’s iron-hard head with a clatter and ran howling to hide under a tree.

  Ughtred and Grimbald had fallen on a clump of heather and lay groaning and holding their stomachs, the Ladies slowly lost their colour: all the blue faded from the Blue Lady, the Green Lady lost her greenness; the Grey Lady became totally colourless.

  ‘Oh, the Devil and the Dark Shades help us!’ cried the Hag. ‘What can it be? And where’s my little boy? Where’s Humphrey?’

  ‘It’s a plague,’ cried Sucking Susie flying in brokenly, trailing a damaged wing. ‘My boys can’t fly any more, they’re too weak to leave the cave. And look at my baby! Oh, look at my little Rose!’

  She opened her pouch and they looked at the frail grey pathetic thing inside it in terror. Rose’s little eyes were filmed over, her fangs were loose and bleeding and every so often she gave heart-rending squeals of pain.

  ‘I don’t want to alarm you,’ said the Gliding Kilt, speaking with difficulty, ‘but look at my right arm.’

  One and all, caught by something in his voice, they turned. Below the elbow, his strong, Scottish, ectoplasmic arm was slowly disappearing into nothingness.

  ‘It isn’t me doing it,’ said the Gliding Kilt in a strangled voice. ‘It’s being done to me. I can’t stop it. I’m being dissolved, exterminated, killed.’

  The Gliding Kilt’s terrible words pierced the ghosts like an arrow through their hearts. The Hag wailed ‘Hamish!’ and threw herself against her husband’s doomed body. Winifred moaned, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ A weak scream came from the melting George.

  It was Humphrey who brought an explanation of the terrible things that were happening to them – a Humphrey no one would have recognized. His ectoplasm looked like an old dishcloth left in a slimy washing-up bowl for weeks on end, his eye sockets were like smudged bits of coal, and his ball and chain, as he dragged himself into the castle through the slits for pouring boiling oil, seemed too heavy for him to lift.

  ‘Mummy, Daddy... everyone... There are some dreadful men... surrounding the sanctuary. Men in black coats and white collars. And they’re saying awful things... and waving rowan branches... and—’

  Aunt Hortensia’s head gave a shriek so terrible that everyone stood as if turned to stone.

  ‘EXORCISM! That’s what it is. EXORCISM!’

  ‘What’s... exorcism... Auntie?’ said Winifred, still weakly pawing the air for her vanished bowl.

  ‘It’s a way of laying ghosts. Killing them. Sending them back to where they came from. Spells, prayers, rowan berries, a thing called a pentacle... They use them all. Oh, my darlings,’ said Aunt Hortensia, getting sentimental as people do when they think death is near, ‘we’re done for. We’re finished!’

  ‘But who... would want to... exorcise... us?’ said Walter the Wet, who had dragged himself in, crackling with dryness, and now hardly had the strength to speak.

  ‘I saw three clergymen,’ whispered Humphrey. ‘And a man with a pale face and black hair, egging them on. I think it was the man we saw with the Prime Minister. The man who said we could come here.’

  ‘Lord Bullhaven!’ cried the Gliding Kilt.

  And in despairing horror the ghosts looked at each other as they realized what had happened.

  ‘A trap!’ said the Hag, holding her dissolving husband in her arms. ‘We simply walked straight into a trap!’

  Thirteen

  It was true. The ghosts had walked into a trap – a terrible and dangerous trap. Because Lord Bullhaven was not at all what he had pretended to be. He was not a kind, rich man willing to offer the poor ill-treated ghosts of Britain a place where they could live in peace. No, he was really a very bad person and he had decided to lure as many ghosts as he could to one place and then exterminate them.

  This may seem not only a cruel thing to do but also a very silly one. Even if you are not particularly fond of ghosts you have to admit that they don’t do anybody the slightest harm. But Lord Bullhaven was the sort of person who couldn’t bear anything to be even the least bit unusual or out of the ordinary. He lived in a big house in the country, called Bullhaven Hall. It was a very neat, boring house with a lot of absolutely square rooms and straight corridors. The garden was square and straight too and if a wild flower – even the prettiest wild flower like a bright blue speedwell or a golden-eyed marguerite or a scarlet poppy – dared to seed itself on one of his gravel paths, Lord Bullhaven would scream for a gardener to come at once and kill it with weed killer. His garden pond looked like the kind of rectangle you draw for a maths lesson and he dosed it with chlorine so that no interesting water plants should mess it up. His yew hedges all had crew cuts and even the statues were scrubbed with carbolic soap in case any moss or creeper should dare to grow on them.

  Inside his house, Lord Bullhaven carried on in just the same way. He had a wife, poor Lady Bullhaven, who had married him to get away from her mama and then discovered too late that Lord Bullhaven was far, far worse, and he had two children called Wystan and Emily. Lady Bullhaven wasn’t allowed to wear anything that wasn’t exactly the same as what everybody else was wearing and if she tried to cook him anything like pizza or risotto or apple strudel he would spit it out and say he wasn’t having any foreign muck in his house. Wystan and Emily weren’t allowed to read fairy stories because they were full of weird carryings-on and they weren’t sent to the village school in case they mixed with dirty, common children. Lord
Bullhaven didn’t like the Irish or the Welsh or the Jews or the Catholics and he loathed the Chinese, the Africans and the Greeks. He believed in flogging and hanging and his favourite saying was: Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child. Oh, he really was a charming man.

  The reason that Lord Bullhaven had been with the Prime Minister the day that Rick came with his ghosts was because just then a country with a very nasty ruler had decided to throw out a lot of people who were living there just because they were of a different race. The Prime Minister had said they would give these people a home in England because they had absolutely nowhere else to go. This annoyed Lord Bullhaven so much that he nearly burst a blood vessel and so he went up to London to complain. The reason he didn’t want these people in England was because they were different.

  But when he saw Rick’s ghosts he quite forgot what he had come for. Because however different the Chinese or the Irish or the Welsh or the Jews were, they were nothing to how different the Gliding Kilt was, or the Hag or Wailing Winifred or even Humphrey. Here were nasty, creepy, unusual things: things you couldn’t spray with weed killer or torture in gin traps or just shoot. So Lord Bullhaven made this plan. He decided to offer them Insleyfarne and then when he had got a whole lot of ghosts together he would go up there and exorcise them.

  Exorcising ghosts and spirits is something that has gone on for years and years. It’s a way of getting rid of ghosts in a haunted house or an evil spirit that has got into somebody, and it’s really a sort of magic so that it’s a very stupid thing to fool about with unless you know exactly what you’re doing. Ghosts that have been exorcised never appear again. They just aren’t ghosts any more – they aren’t anything any more. So really they’ve been killed.

  To exorcise a ghost you can use all sorts of things but the best people to do it are some clergymen, sitting in a circle and saying special ghost-laying spells over and over again. Rowan berries are used too because they are bad for ghosts, and arranging sticks or stones in a five-sided shape called a pentacle helps. Some people swear by iron filings and vinegar; others believe in salt. But the clergymen are the most important and they have to be willing to go on for days on end because exorcising ghosts can be a long job.

  So as soon as Lord Bullhaven had lured the ghosts into his trap he began to look for clergymen who would travel to the north of Scotland with him and help him destroy the ghosts. But here Lord Bullhaven ran into a great deal of trouble. Not as much trouble as he should have done, but trouble all the same.

  Because clergymen are mostly very good, nice people who are far too busy looking after the old and sick in their parish and having choir practices and carol services and preaching sermons to want to travel all the way to the north of Scotland and sit on a cold, windy island gabbling spells over and over again and exorcising ghosts.

  The first clergyman Lord Bullhaven went to see was his own vicar and he said ‘No’ straight away because he knew enough about Lord Bullhaven to know that he didn’t want to go anywhere with him, let alone to the north coast of Scotland, and anyway he had the children’s Sunday School outing to organize. The second vicar, who lived in a big, rambling house in the next town, said he rather liked ghosts and would prefer not to help get rid of them.

  ‘But these are disgusting, unclean spooks!’ screamed Lord Bullhaven.

  But the Vicar of Netherton just smiled and said he was sorry but he wouldn’t come.

  It went on like this for days. Lord Bullhaven drove all over the south of England in his big, black car trying to find vicars who were willing to come with him but all of them were too busy or too sensible or too kind, and some of them thought it was shocking to go and exorcise anybody in a place of sanctuary.

  Then in the end he found a very poor vicar who had nine children. The roof of his vicarage leaked, his church was falling down and his wife was so tired from managing on next to nothing that she used to sit down every evening after the children were in bed and cry.

  ‘If you come with me,’ said Lord Bullhaven craftily (because he was very rich as well as very bad), ‘I will give you one hundred pounds.’

  So Mr Wallace, which was the vicar’s name, thinking of all the shoes for his children and nourishing food for his wife which he could buy, agreed to come. After that Lord Bullhaven found a very old, very deaf vicar called Mr Hoare-Croakington. Unfortunately Mr Hoare-Croakington (who wasn’t just old and deaf but quite, quite ga-ga) thought he was being invited to Scotland to shoot grouse and this made rather a muddle later on.

  The last man Lord Bullhaven got hold of was a very unpleasant character indeed. His name was Mr Heap and he had been a clergyman once but got chucked out of the church for stealing the money out of the offertory box and using it to buy whisky. But he still wore his clerical collar and called himself the Reverend Bertram Heap so Lord Bullhaven was quite taken in and thought he had got a proper vicar. Mr Heap was one of those people who look as though they were meant to be an animal – an ox or a bullock or a pig. He had huge shoulders, a red neck and a large bloated face with bristles.

  After that Lord Bullhaven simply could not get any more clergymen so the last person he took with him was a rather peculiar Professor from the University of London called Professor Brassnose who wrote books about ghost-hunting and who wanted to try out a lot of stuff like brass cymbals to bang and baking powder to sprinkle and sulphur crystals to burn, all of which he thought might work against ghosts but one couldn’t be sure.

  And on a bright day in late October, Lord Bullhaven filled the boot of his huge, black Rolls Royce with books of ghost-laying spells and folding chairs to sit on and thermos flasks to drink from while sitting on the folding chairs – and then the clergymen and Professor Brassnose got inside, and they all set off on the long drive to Insleyfarne to go and murder Rick’s ghosts.

  Fourteen

  ‘I... don’t think... it will be... much longer now,’ said the Hag.

  She was lying on a bed of mouldering leaves in the roofless Banqueting Hall of the castle. In her arms she held what was left of her beloved husband, the Gliding Kilt. It wasn’t very much. His leg stumps had gone; his chest and arms were so faint that they seemed to be just a shimmering in the air; only the brave tartan of the kilt remained – that and his wise and comforting words.

  ‘We’ve been... so happy together. Don’t be sad.’

  But the Hag was sad. She was unbearably sad. Tears rolled down her whiskery cheeks and a whole mix-up of smells: mashed mice stomachs, pig’s trotters, Camembert cheese, rolled from her sick body as she remembered the wonderful times they had had together. ‘And my Little Ones,’ she moaned.

  ‘It is best... that we should all go... together,’ said the Gliding Kilt, whose face was beginning to break up on one side.

  With her weak and aching arms, the Hag reached out to George who lay at her feet. His skull had almost melted and his screams sounded like the muffled squeaking of a mouse.

  ‘Winifred?’ whispered the Hag brokenly. A hopeless sobbing answered her. Without her bowl,

  Winifred was nothing.

  ‘Humphrey?’

  No answer.

  ‘Humphrey!’ screamed the Hag again.

  Still no answer. Yet just now he had been lying close beside her. Humphrey was dead then. Exorcised. Sent back for ever to where ghosts come from, never to return. Quite, quite desperate, the Hag closed her eyes and prepared for death.

  Humphrey, however, was not dead. He was terribly, terribly weak and for a while, as he lay between George and Winifred feeling the stabbing pain in his poor ectoplasm, watching the pink colour drain from his tortured limbs, he just wanted the end to come quickly.

  And then something happened. A little wriggling, thinking worm sat up in his brain and said: ‘No. You’re not just going to lie down and die. You’re too young to die, Humphrey the Horrible,’ said this little worm. ‘You’re going to do something. You’re going to get help.’

  And when the little wriggling worm in Humphrey’s brain got to the
word ‘help’ it got much bigger and reared up and said the one word: ‘RICK.’

  ‘But I can’t,’ said Humphrey weakly to the little worm. ‘How can I get to Rick? I can’t even move.’

  ‘Can’t you?’ said the wriggling worm. ‘Are you sure you can’t? Try. Move one leg. Go on – try. There. Now the other.’

  ‘It hurts,’ said Humphrey to the little worm.

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Now up. Glide. Go on. Go on.’

  And then Humphrey really was up in the air and gliding, weakly and slowly but gliding... past Aunt Hortensia lying like an iron girder on her tomb, past the poor Shuk whimpering in agony with only one tail left of his three, past the moaning, fast-dissolving Ladies...

  As he came over the causeway which separated Insleyfarne from the mainland, he felt a stab of pain so agonizing that he nearly fell to the ground. He was flying right into the beam of Mr Wallace’s exorcism. Mr Wallace was the youngest and the strongest of the clergymen. He was also the nicest, and though he hated the job he was doing he thought it only fair to do it well. So he was sitting on Lord Bullhaven’s folding chair waving a rowan wand in one hand and gabbling Spell 293 out of the ghost-laying book as hard as he could.

  Creeping Nasty Crawling Creatures

  Ghosts With Hideous Monster Features

  Go We Tell You, Leave This Spot

  Go Into The Grave And Rot...

  There was a lot more of this spell and if Mr Wallace had been able to get to the end of it, Humphrey would probably have been done for. But poor Mr Wallace only had a very thin and threadbare coat and it was bitterly cold sitting on the shingle with the wind howling in from the sea and quite suddenly he was attacked by a terrible fit of sneezing.

  It lasted only a few moments, this gap in the exorcism, but it was enough. Humphrey was able to glide on over Mr Wallace’s head and to set off on his long and exhausting journey to find Rick the Rescuer.