The Great Ghost Rescue

by Eva Ibbotson

  It is not easy to surround what is practically an island, and quite a big one, with only four men, but Lord Bullhaven had done his best.

  He’d put Mr Heap, the clergyman who looked like a pig, on a rocky outcrop just below the castle, and Mr Wallace, the nice one with nine children, on a shingle beach near the causeway which led to the mainland. Dotty Mr Hoare-Croakington was up on the hill by the rocket site and Professor Brassnose was down by the ruined chapel and the well. All of them had folding chairs to sit on and packets of sandwiches to eat and thermos flasks of hot coffee to drink, so that they could go on and on exorcising and of course all of them had books of ghost-laying spells and rowan twigs, and Professor Brassnose also had bottles of vinegar and iron filings and cymbals to bang and a hold-all of strange ointments and powders from his laboratory.

  Lord Bullhaven himself was too mad to sit quietly on a chair exorcising. He just rampaged round the island yelling things like, ‘Vile, disgusting creepie-crawlies!’, ‘Filthy, foul scum!’, ‘Britain for the British’, and making lopsided pentacles out of anything he could lay his hands on. And if any of the clergymen stopped even for a second, just to stretch his legs, Lord Bullhaven came charging up and said: ‘Back, blast you! Back to your post.’

  Mr Heap didn’t take much notice of the aeroplane that passed overhead and landed a mile or two to the north. He was sitting with his back to the sea and his big, bristly face turned up to the castle. Cigarette packets and sandwich papers flapped round his ankles because he was a litter lout as well as a crook and he was gabbling ghost-laying spell No. 976 with such venom that bits of spittle came out of his mouth and dropped disgustingly on to the pages of the book.

  Spider, Scorpion, Ugly Toad

  Follow on your Hellbound Road,

  Bile and Blisters, Blasts and Plague

  Every Sore and III and Ague!

  Out with Hag and Vampire Bairn

  Let the Earth Be Clean Again,

  gabbled Mr Heap.

  And then quite suddenly he wasn’t sitting on his chair. He was sitting on a patch of wet and slippery rock and a small, fair boy who seemed to have come out of the sea was standing over him.

  ‘I’d like you to stop now, please,’ said Peter Thorne politely.

  ‘Why... you...you....’ Mr Heap struggled to his feet and put out a huge hairy hand to seize Peter by the throat.

  Only it wasn’t any longer Peter’s throat. It was just thin air and Peter himself had somehow become a ball of lead charging straight at Mr Heap’s fat and unprotected stomach.

  ‘Yaaow!’ yelled Mr Heap and crashed down on to the rocks again. By the time he was up once more, Peter was running up the steps of the castle, the book of ghost-laying spells under his arm.

  ‘Give me back that book, you little swine,’ yelled Mr Heap.

  Peter turned at the top of the steps. ‘If you want it, come and get it,’ he shouted.

  He ran on up the steep cliff track to the drawbridge which crossed the pit of slime and mud that was the castle moat. Then he stopped quietly and waited for Mr Heap – steaming with sweat and gibbering with fury – to catch up with him.

  ‘Here’s your book,’ said Peter sweetly.

  Mr Heap lunged forward to grab it. Peter narrowed his eyes, concentrating very hard. The Uki-Otoshi hold was a bit tricky; one had to get it exactly right. Then he dropped on one knee, stiffened his other leg – and as the flabby, panting man collapsed against him, pushed with all his might.

  And Mr Heap sailed quietly into the air and fell – all sixteen quivering stone of him – with a splash that sent up a flock of startled seagulls – into the green and putrid waters of the moat.

  Meanwhile poor Mr Hoare-Croakington, up on the bleak and windy hill by the rocket site, was getting more and more confused. He had been so absolutely certain that he had been asked to Insleyfarne to shoot grouse. Mr Hoare-Croakington had never before shot grouse – he had never before shot anything – and he wanted to very much.

  But no one had handed him a nice shotgun and some pretty, pink cartridges. Instead they had put him on a canvas chair on a very cold hill and told him to say poetry out of a book. Mr Hoare-Croakington was not fond of poetry and he found the whole thing very disappointing and sad.

  After a while however he cheered up and the reason was this: at the hotel where they had spent the night, Lord Bullhaven had ordered everyone’s thermos flask to be filled with coffee so as to keep them awake. But the hotel kitchen-maid, who was very overworked, had made a mistake and mixed up Mr Hoare-Croakkigton’s flask with the flask of someone called General Arkwheeler who always ordered his thermos to be filled with neat whisky.

  So every time Mr Hoare-Croakington took a little sip, things got more and more cheerful and more and more muddled up.

  Curse (hic) and Plague (hic) and Bell and Book

  Drive away (hic, hic) this ghostly Spook,

  sang Mr Hoare-Croakington. And then: ‘Bang, bang,’ he said. And again: ‘BANG!’

  ‘No,’ said Barbara, appearing quite suddenly out of the waist-high bracken.

  ‘No?’ said Mr Hoare-Croakington, very surprised to see her. ‘No bang-bang?’

  Barbara shook her head. ‘Well, there’s nothing to bang bang, is there?’ she pointed out, gently easing the ghost-laying book off the old man’s knees.

  ‘Grouse?’ said Mr Hoare-Croakington hopefully.

  ‘No grouse here,’ said Barbara firmly, scuffing Mr Hoare-Croakington’s rather grotty pentacle aside with her shoe. ‘But I know where there are some lovely, lovely grouse. If you come with me. Big, FAT grouse with huge plump chests....’

  Mr Hoare-Croakington liked the sound of that.

  ‘Huge, plump chests....’ he murmured happily.

  And very quietly and meekly he let Barbara lead him away by the ends of his woollen muffler towards Lord Bullhaven’s big, black car which was parked on the far side of the causeway.

  Rick wasn’t normally much of a boy for fighting. He preferred to think things out. But on his way to tackle Professor Brassnose, he passed the ruined chapel. And when he’d seen what was inside – the Mad Monk writhing in agony on a sea of pus made from his own boils – Rick wasn’t interested any longer in thought.

  Professor Brassnose was sitting on his chair beside the well, clashing his brass cymbals together and gabbling a spell from the book on his knees. A bottle of iron filings and vinegar was propped against his chair and the rest of his ghost-laying paraphernalia spilled out of a big carpetbag nearby.

  At least that was how it was one minute. The next minute the contents of the hold-all were scattered to the winds, the ghost-laying book had been snatched from his hands and the pages ripped to shreds, and the bottle of vinegar and iron filings lay smashed to pieces against a stone.

  ‘Stop it,’ squeaked Professor Brassnose, waving his arms. ‘Stop it at—’

  ‘Don’t you dare to speak to me, you filthy, murdering swine,’ said Rick managing to kick the Professor’s chair, his shins and his stone pentacle all at once.

  ‘Help!’ screamed the Professor, who was definitely not a fighting man. ‘Lord Bullhaven! Help! Help! There’s a bad moy down here. I mean a mad boy. Help! Help!’

  Lord Bullhaven was in an evil mood. He had just come across a green, slime-covered cursing THING which turned out to be Mr Heap, stumbling towards the car and refusing absolutely to return to his post. Then he had gone up to the rocket site and found Mr Hoare-Croakington’s chair empty. And now that idiot, Brassnose....

  ‘Coming,’ shouted Lord Bullhaven and started lumbering downhill towards the chapel, slashing about with his rowan switch as he came. When he saw Rick his sludge coloured eyes widened like dustbin lids. ‘You!’ he thundered.

  Rick stood still and faced him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Me. The boy to whom you promised sanctuary for his ghosts.’

  Lord Bullhaven’s face had turned purple. ‘Get off my land,’ he screamed. ‘Get off it and stay off it.’

  For answer, Rick pulled ove
r Professor Brassnose’s chair, tipping the squealing Professor out on to the grass and hurled the cymbals into the well.

  Lord Bullhaven now seemed to lose the last scrap of his reason. He ran at Rick and started hitting him viciously with his rowan stick. ‘It’s your fault, you young devil, you’ve spoilt my plans. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to—’

  ‘No,’ said a quiet voice, ‘I think not.’ It was Mr Wallace, the nice clergyman with the nine children, who had heard the shouting and come to see what was up. ‘You’re hurting the boy,’ Mr Wallace went on, still in a quiet, level voice. ‘Let him go.’

  Lord Bullhaven gave Rick a last blow across the shoulders and turned on Mr Wallace. ‘You’re on their side,’ he screamed. ‘You’re in with the spooks. You’re a paid agent, you’re a witch lover. I’ll have you flogged if you don’t go back, I’ll have you hanged—’

  He put down his head, ready to charge at Mr Wallace. Mr Wallace, who had been Boxing Champion at his Theological College, just had time to ask God, very quickly, to forgive him. Then he bunched up his fists – and that was that.

  They were dragging the unconscious Lord Bullhaven towards the car, when the most dreadful, desolate and shuddering scream came from the castle.

  Rick turned white and began to shiver. ‘It’s the Hag,’ he said, ‘I recognize her voice.’

  ‘You go and see to them,’ said kind Mr Wallace, to whom Rick had told the whole story. ‘I’ll drive this lot back to the hotel.’

  Rick nodded his thanks. Then with Barbara and Peter at his heels, he turned and ran towards the castle.

  Sixteen

  ‘Oh, Hag,’ cried Rick, and it was all he could do not to burst into tears then and there. She was only just there still; her whiskery nose had gone and her crooked back, and her scaly black wings were as weak and worn through as winter leaves. But what frightened Rick most of all was that she was giving off absolutely no smell.

  ‘Rick!’ whispered the Hag, looking pitifully up at him.

  ‘It’s all right, we’ve got the men who were exorcising you. It’s over!’ cried Rick, bending over her.

  The Hag tried to shake her head. ‘Too late,’ she murmured brokenly. ‘Look!’

  She put out a faint claw and pointed to a piece of tartan cloth spread on the floor beside her. It was absolutely all that was left of the Gliding Kilt. On the other side of the wretched Hag was a little pile of yellowish bubbles – George’s softened and melted skull. Winifred, wrapped in her shroud, had fainted.

  ‘And my Little One... lost for ever. My Humphrey. He’s been laid!’

  ‘No, Mother! No, I haven’t. Look at me!’ said Humphrey. As soon as the exorcism stopped he’d felt his strength return and left the aeroplane. Now as he glided up to hug his mother, he looked almost his old self.

  ‘I went and fetched Rick and he got the people who were trying to lay us. He went bang wallop, wallop bang,’ said Humphrey, waving his arms excitedly. ‘And Peter and Barbara. I knew Rick would rescue us.’

  ‘Humphrey,’ said the Hag. She couldn’t believe that it was really him and kept passing her claws through and through his ectoplasm to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.

  Suddenly she made faint, flapping movements with her wings, like a stranded chicken, and they realized she was trying to sit up.

  ‘We must... help the others,’ said the Hag. ‘If the exorcism’s over perhaps there is still hope for them. We must get organized.’

  ‘A hospital?’ Barbara suggested.

  The Hag nodded. ‘Bring... everyone... in here.’

  So Rick and Barbara and Peter went out to look for the other ghosts. They fetched in the poor Mad Monk and laid him on the refectory table and then they went to the burial mound to find Aunt Hortensia. Because ectoplasm is made of nothingness and you can’t get rid of nothing, exorcism often makes ghosts go solid before destroying them. Aunt Hortensia, who always seemed to do things more than other people, hadn’t just gone solid, she’d gone like granite. Her neck stump was like one of those poles that firemen slide down to get to fires quickly, and as they dragged her along the castle corridors her bunions gave off a clanging, metallic sound.

  Peter and Barbara found the Colourless Ladies lying in a heap near the moat and Rick, stumbling across what seemed to be a gigantic, grey, dried-out dish cloth, found that he had stepped on Walter the Wet.

  One of their worst sights was the Shuk, lying on his back with his legs in the air and blood coming out of his mouth from trying to carry Aunt Hortensia’s stone-hard head. All his tails had gone, his eye was closed and when Rick lifted him he whined with pain. As for the Head itself, Barbara couldn’t lift it; she had to dribble it into the castle like a football.

  The children had never worked so hard as they did that night. They found an old tin bath which someone had left on the rocket site and put Walter in to soak. Barbara dressed the Mad Monk’s boils and Peter screamed and screamed at the buttery mess which had been George to see if he could get him to scream back. They massaged Aunt Hortensia’s stump till their fingers ached, rubbed the Ladies with different coloured moulds and lichens to see if they could get their colours back and made poultices for Ughtred and Grimbald who were doubled up with stomach cramps.

  Though she was still so weak, the Hag was wonderful. ‘Say Latin curses over him backwards,’ she advised Barbara as the Mad Monk groaned in pain. Or; ‘There’s some dried wormwood in the larder; try that on the Shuk’s tail.’

  But though they never stopped for a minute, though Humphrey did everything to make himself useful, it seemed for a while as if most of the ghosts were too ill to recover. And then:

  ‘Oh, children!’ screamed the Hag, the tears absolutely rushing down her nose. ‘Oh look! Oh, Hamish. My husband! My Gliding Kilt!’

  Rushing over, they saw a rusty sword begin to form itself very slowly and waveringly in the air. For a while, the sword just hung there patiently, waiting. Then slowly a wound appeared, gaping and bloody, and round it a torn shirt and some skin – and then with a relieved ‘whoosh’ the sword dropped down into the chest. The Gliding Kilt’s face came next, then his arms, and lastly his knee stumps peering out below the kilt like young asparagus tips pushing through the earth.

  ‘Hamish! Oh, Hamish,’ said the Hag, and as she took him in her arms the room filled suddenly and gloriously with the smell of mouldering pig’s intestine.

  It must have been a sort of magic time limit when the effect of the exorcism began to wear off because Peter jumped up as the skull he was holding began to scream softly. One tail reappeared on the Shuk’s back, then two, then three....

  ‘Oh look!’ said Humphrey. ‘Winifred’s bowl’s back! Winnie! Winnie, your bowl!’

  A Colourless Lady turned blue, another showed patches of green. The Grey Lady got up and began at once to totter about looking for her teeth.

  ‘Head?’ said Aunt Hortensia’s stump, and when they brought her head to her they saw that it was almost back to its old, disgusting, white-haired nothingness.

  This happy scene was suddenly and terribly interrupted by a shriek of anguish as Sucking Susie, followed by the four vampire boys, came flapping into the room.

  ‘My Baby, my Rose,’ howled Susie, quite beside herself. ‘She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s DEAD!’

  A complete and frightful silence fell in the Castle Hall.

  ‘No,’ gasped the Hag weakly.

  Rick had gone deathly white. ‘No,’ he said also. ‘No!’

  But as he stepped forward and took the tiny, grey body from Susie’s claws it seemed there could be no doubt. Rose had shrunk almost to nothingness – she hardly stretched across the palm of his hand. Her body was quite cold and completely still. There was no heartbeat.

  ‘No,’ said Rick again. He was trembling all over but with a tremendous effort he managed to steady himself. Then he bent over and very gently pulled Rose’s thread of a mouth open with his hand.

  ‘The kiss of life?’ whispered Barbara.

  Ric
k didn’t answer. He lifted Rose up in his cupped hands and began to breathe into her mouth. In–out; in–out; in–out....

  Nothing. No movement. No one stirred in the Castle Hall. Only a small, stifled sob from Humphrey the Horrible broke the silence.

  Still Rick breathed softly, steadily, never stopping, holding Rose’s jaw open with his fingertips.

  ‘It’s no good,’ wailed Sucking Susie, beating her wings hysterically. ‘She’s dead, I tell you, she’s dead, she’s dead.’

  Rick didn’t even look up. He just went on quietly, steadily breathing. In and out, in and out....

  And then suddenly the limp, cold thing in his hand gave a tiny jerk, so faint that he thought he had imagined it. Then another; a little twitch, a judder and... yes, it was her heart. It was beating. She was alive.

  ‘Oh heck,’ said Rick the Rescuer, completely disgusted. Because from his own eyes it must have been, there’d dropped on to the little body a fat, wet, and quite unmistakable tear.

  Seventeen

  After that, of course, there was only one thing to do. ‘A party!’ said the Hag. She was still full of aches and pains, the Gliding Kilt’s left thumb was still missing but the Hag loved parties and couldn’t resist giving them.

  Rick went out to see if Peregrine wanted to come but he had fallen asleep in the cockpit of the Cherokee, so they just covered him with a blanket and left him there.

  There is nothing like release from danger to make you feel ecstatically and wonderfully gay. Outside, the owls hooted and a baleful moon glared through the scudding clouds. Inside, the ghosts ate toadskin rissoles, stewed spookfish and minced gall bladder, and showed each other their exorcism scars.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to make you any maggot sandwiches?’ the Hag kept asking the children. ‘It would be no trouble at all.’

  But Rick and Barbara and Peter said they were perfectly happy with the chocolate and apples they’d brought from the plane.