The Griffins of Castle Cary

by Heather Shumaker

  Suddenly, from the hallway came a splintering noise of shattered glass. Aunt Effie yelled. Ariel’s legs twitched, but she did not wake. Meg sprang to her feet, but Uncle Ben was up before her. He pounded down the hall with Meg and Will after him. There, at the back of the house, stood Aunt Effie just outside her office door. She was staring in disbelief at the small bathroom across the hall, the one she called the loo.

  “Are you all right?” asked Meg.

  “Did something break?” asked Will. “What’s all this glass?”

  “What happened?” they both cried together.

  The three of them stared into the little room. Jagged shards of glass clung to the window frame, and glass littered the floor. Aunt Effie pulled Uncle Ben back so he wouldn’t cut his paws. A hole the size of Uncle Ben’s head gaped in the center of the window.

  “Like a bomb,” said Will. “Holy mackerel!”

  “Do you think it was a bird, Aunt Effie?” asked Meg.

  “No bird that big around here,” said Aunt Effie, shaking her head ruefully. “You would need an emu or an ostrich. Whatever it was had tremendous force. Better take a look outside. You lot stay here.”

  But when Aunt Effie returned, she was shaking her head.

  “Nothing to be seen,” she said. “That’s more money out the window, quite literally. It will cost a pretty penny to replace that pane. Odd sizes always are, and this house is nothing if not odd.” She grabbed a broom and began sweeping up.

  Meg and Will helped Aunt Effie clean up the mess and tack heavy-duty plastic across the open window hole. All this time, Ariel continued to sleep. Uncle Ben prowled the hallway and poked his nose at the loo, then paced back to resume his position beside Ariel, ears alert and poised on his haunches as if ready to spring down the hall at any minute.

  It was evening when Ariel finally stirred. She sat hunched in a rumple of blankets, yawning and looking dazed. “Well, at least we know you didn’t do it, sleepyhead,” said Aunt Effie. “Sleep is the perfect alibi.”

  “I’m warm now,” said Ariel.

  “Well, you had about a hundred blankets,” said Will.

  “Is Kay Kay gone?”

  “I don’t see her,” said Aunt Effie, smiling. “Do you, Meg?” Meg politely shook her head.

  Ariel hugged the doll fiercely. “When I hold her I feel like Mama’s here,” she said.

  “We can do better than that,” said Aunt Effie, giving her a hug. “Let’s give your mother a quick call. Then it’s supper and bed for you, missy. It’s plain you’re worn out.” Aunt Effie ushered Ariel off the sofa and steered her into the kitchen. At the threshold, she turned to Will, who’d perked up at the mention of supper. “The three of us will eat later.”

  Ariel did not protest. She rubbed her eyes and followed Aunt Effie to the telephone, but clammed up after saying hello. “Too tired to talk,” said Aunt Effie, taking the receiver. “Here, Meg, you have a chat.” So Meg told her mother about the lambs and the manor and Glastonbury Tor. It was funny to talk about the manor without mentioning the ghost, but her mother was a practical sort, and ghosts didn’t fit into the conversation. While Meg was talking, Ariel picked at her private supper. Then Aunt Effie bustled her upstairs and into her nightie.

  “I’m cold, Aun’ Effie,” she whispered.

  “There, now.” Aunt Effie tucked a hot water bottle between the covers and added two wool blankets. “Now you’ll be cozy as a campfire.” Aunt Effie patted the blankets and tiptoed out of the room. Uncle Ben watched the proceedings. As soon as Aunt Effie was gone, he slipped into Ariel’s room and settled down next to her bed.

  An hour later, Will came into the kitchen hiccupping.

  “Oh, Will. Go drink some water,” said Meg.

  “Tried that, hic,” said Will, sliding onto the bench next to Aunt Effie. “Sorry.” His eyes lit up as they always did at suppertime. His earlier fears that day about the bells, broken window, and curious gravestones seemed far away when he was surrounded by the comforting smells of fresh bread and roasted chicken.

  “You were the strangest baby, Will,” said Aunt Effie unexpectedly. “Born hiccupping.”

  “I was?”

  “How do you know?” asked Meg.

  “Oh, I was there,” said Aunt Effie. “Helping to look after you, Meg. Things were hectic for your mum, what with Will coming along less than a year after you were born. You were just a tiny thing, Meg, always wanting to be held and hard to comfort.” She paused. “I thought you’d never be born, Will. Do you know the story about your birth?”

  “Mama’s told us,” said Meg. “Go on, though.”

  Will grinned and nodded. He always liked to hear the story about how he’d been born on Halloween night. He leaned on his elbows, trying to stifle his hiccups and ignore the whooshing sound in his ears. He pulled on his earlobe, but the sound wouldn’t go away.

  “We thought you might be a November baby,” Aunt Effie continued. “Your mum went into labor early on October thirty-first, but you took your time coming out. She wanted a home birth, so there she was in one room, and Meg and I were in the rocking chair in the next. Wasn’t until a moment before midnight that you were finally born. All blue-faced you were, with little fists balled up tightly. For a time there, we thought we were going to lose you. You were just pale and limp, in and out of this world and the next. Didn’t take a breath until November first. Then suddenly you came around, and we knew everything would be all right. Hiccups, Will. Started hiccupping like the dickens.”

  Will took a bite of chicken between hiccups. Meg giggled.

  “Remember that time you got the hiccups at the Tower of London?” Meg asked.

  “Hic,” said Will, which meant “yes.”

  “That beefeater was so mad at us. He was being all serious, and you kept letting out these great, huge hiccups.”

  Will nodded so he wouldn’t let a new hiccup escape. He remembered that day clearly. It had been during the Griffin family’s first trip to England, when Will was only five and Meg was six. Ariel hadn’t been born yet. His hiccups had started by the portcullis water gate, and they kept getting worse—great belchy ones—until finally their guide, a bushy-browed beefeater, strongly suggested they leave. “Never mind, Wills,” his dad had said. “Enough history for one day. Let’s go get ice creams.” He’d picked chocolate marshmallow. How nice it had been, sitting on a bench near the Thames River, licking his ice-cream cone, just the four of them.

  “You looked so funny!” Meg said, dissolving into a fit of giggles. “We thought you might be thrown into the dungeon!”

  Will grinned and exploded with another hiccup. It was cheerful in the Griffinage with the bright lights blazing. He loved storytelling evenings. There was something ever so satisfying about stories that were all about you. Maybe Aunt Effie would tell the one about how he’d fallen in the Cannon River when he was three. He was just about to ask when Aunt Effie turned her head and flicked her eyes to the window. Something was tapping.

  “Wind’s picking up,” announced Aunt Effie. “That cherry tree always attacks the windows like that when the wind mounts. Makes a racket, doesn’t it?” She stacked her dishes and stood up. “I better set a bucket under the upstairs thatch, and check that tarp over the back window, too,” she said. “Sounds like a storm’s brewing.”

  Will was back in the Tower of London. He could see the beefeaters with their red suits and flat-topped hats, and high on the Tower’s outer wall, a squadron of black ravens perched in a line. He was standing among the tour crowd, the guide’s voice droning on, when a tremendous wind swept in. The force of it knocked Will over and pinned him to the ground. Around him, the other tourists stood unaffected, their coats merely flapping in a slight breeze, but the wind rushed on, targeting Will and spinning into a tempest. This wasn’t right. He wanted his dad to call out for ice cream and get the wind to stop. But all he could hear was the wind’s rage and the ravens calling.

  Will woke up, hiccupping with relief to see he was in hi
s bedroom at the Griffinage. Had he been hiccupping in his sleep? His father always said hiccups came in bunches: If you get them in the morning, you’ll get more throughout the day. He never said throughout the night.

  Outside, he could hear the wind rattling the branches. A faint smell of sulphur pervaded the room, like a match that just blew out. Light flashed, a green color. Did lightning ever burn green? He fumbled for his bedside light and clicked it on. Will hiccupped again, and the sound echoed in the shadowy room.

  Now a great whooshing sound seemed to be worming deep into his ears. Loud and wild like wind. Like his dream. He didn’t want to be alone. Will threw back the covers and ran the short distance to the girls’ room.

  “Meg!” said Will. He launched himself at Meg’s bed, then paused and shook her arm.

  “Meg, it’s me. Wake up.”

  He waited impatiently as Meg blinked, sat up, and peered at him in the dim light.

  “You okay?” Meg asked.

  “Shift over,” said Will. He climbed in next to Meg and pulled the blankets over both of them. Will rubbed his ears. The persistent whirring was gone, but his ears still tingled with the prickly feeling you get when your foot goes to sleep. Except ears don’t go to sleep, he told himself.

  “It’s about my hiccups.”

  “You woke me up to talk about hiccups? Will, it’s the middle of the night!”

  “Shh!”

  Will stiffened. He heard a sound in the hall. Then he sank back in the bed. It was only the soft jangle of dog tags as Uncle Ben reentered the room. He snuffed at Will, as if to say, What, you here too? then took up his post by Ariel in the alcove.

  “No, it’s important. Listen.”

  “Okay, but, ‘shh’ yourself. Ariel’s sleeping right there.” Will nodded. He could see the dark hump of Uncle Ben’s body partially sticking out from the alcove. He lowered his voice.

  “Look, I had the hiccups twice yesterday, plus just now, and before then too, remember, at Mendip Manor? And sometimes I hear this strange whooshing sound like the wind. Well, the same thing happened at the Tower of London. I just remembered.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Meg. She was fully awake now. She sat up next to Will, her back propped against the wall, her arms clutched around her bent knees, pressing them to her chest.

  “When I got the hiccups at the Tower, I heard this sound,” Will went on. “And then it got really loud by the execution block.”

  “You mean where they beheaded all those people? Where the guard got mad?”

  “That’s where we were standing, remember?”

  Meg nodded.

  “Right,” said Will. “My hiccups started when we were looking down at Traitor’s Gate.”

  “Oh!” said Meg. “You mean where young Princess Elizabeth came in.”

  “Yeah, it was by the water gate.”

  “Oh yes, I remember. It was Queen Elizabeth I; she came in by boat and they threw her in prison when she was just a girl.”

  “Forget which queen it was, you’re getting me off track,” snapped Will. “Anyway, my hiccups got worse inside the White Tower, and then out in the courtyard they really got loud.”

  “Where the guide was telling us about Lady Jane Grey.” Meg shuddered. “Poor Lady Jane! Only queen for nine days and then they beheaded her.”

  “Are you listening? The point is they beheaded her right there in that very spot. And I had the hiccups and the noise came that day. And it happened today, too. You know, I’ve been thinking, I don’t get hiccups often, but when I do it’s really bad and it’s mixed up with this whooshing noise in my head and my ears get all tingly and stuff. I think it means something.”

  “You mean you think your body’s trying to tell you something?” asked Meg, forgetting to whisper.

  “Don’t you see?” said Will. “Think about all the people they killed there. There are probably tons of ghosts in the Tower of London.”

  “Ghosts?

  “At the Griffinage. And that’s not all. I saw a green light, too.”

  “You mean—”

  “I think she’s here,” said Will.

  Dawn was just cracking the sky with a slit of red when two figures left the Griffinage.

  “It’s a mite early to be out visiting, isn’t it?” Shep said. He was standing barefoot with an old overcoat wrapped around him. Meg and Will stood on his doorstep, heads close, hair touching. “Better come in,” he said kindly.

  Neither Meg nor Will had been able to sleep again. Of course, they’d been hoping to meet a ghost, but a middle-of-the-night ghost was much different than a daytime one, when you could sit down for a friendly chat. Meg drilled Will with questions. Why was he sure it was the manor ghost? Weren’t there other ghosts around? Did it have the brooch? Will tried to answer, but the more they talked, the more things went in circles and they both grew agitated. “Look, there’s never been a ghost in this house before,” said Will. “Of course it’s her! She’s the one who’s active.”

  After talking in Meg’s room, they’d gone downstairs and huddled in the kitchen nibbling cold biscuits, while they waited for what Meg considered an appropriate time to bang on Shep’s door. Now she realized it was still too early—the clock on Shep’s wall said six thirty a.m.

  “Something troubling you?” asked Shep.

  Meg and Will both nodded.

  “Right then, tea first. Won’t be a minute.” Shep plugged in the electric kettle and fished out mugs from the dish drainer. While the water heated, he shuffled down the hall and returned in less than two minutes dressed in his work pants and a plaid flannel shirt. “Time I was up anyway,” he said. He set three steaming mugs of tea on the kitchen table, and they all sat down, cupping the warm mugs in their hands. “Now then, tell me what’s on your minds.”

  “We were wondering . . . ,” said Meg.

  “We think she’s here,” Will blurted out.

  “Eh?”

  “Well, not here,” Will said, “but at the Griffinage.”

  “The manor ghost,” explained Meg. “Or some ghost.” It still didn’t make sense to her that the manor ghost would leave her tower.

  “I got hiccups,” said Will, “and when I was sleeping, I heard this wind—at least, I think I did. I was dreaming, but I heard it, though it might have been the storm, of course, and then I woke up and had hiccups.” Meg listened as he stumbled through it. Explaining everything in daytime to a grown-up suddenly made the story sound flimsy. At night, in the darkness of their bedrooms, the ghost explanation seemed so clear.

  “Well, that’s what we thought, anyway,” Meg said.

  Shep set down his own mug. “Why don’t you start over and tell me everything carefully,” he said.

  So they did. Will did most of the talking, and Meg chimed in when he forgot parts, like Lady Jane Grey. When he was done, Will gave his tea a fierce stir. When he looked up again, Shep was staring at him intently.

  “Just you, Will?”

  “What?”

  “Meg didn’t feel anything?”

  Meg shook her head. Inside, she felt a hard knot in her stomach. Maybe it was all true about ghosts. Maybe she was too old for real ghost-finding. Shep nodded and turned back to Will.

  “When’s your birthday?” Shep asked abruptly.

  “My birthday?” echoed Will. “I’m ten.”

  “No, the date, I mean.”

  “October thirty-first.” This time it was Meg who answered. If she couldn’t see ghosts, at least she could supply information. “At midnight.”

  “I see. A Samhain baby.” But it didn’t sound like that. He pronounced it “sow-in.”

  “A what?”

  “Old holiday around here,” said Shep. Meg was about to ask more when Will interrupted.

  “What about my hiccups?” said Will.

  “Looks to me as if that might be your sign,” said Shep. “Your sign for detecting a ghost, that is. Some people feel them and some people don’t. And with a birthday like that . . .” Shep s
hook his head. “As I said, it happens most with children. When a ghost is nearby, there’re people who feel a tingle down their backs or their hair sticks up. In Will’s case, it might be hiccups.”

  Meg’s mind raced. She glanced at Will, whose mouth was drooping open. If he hiccupped now, it would be one of those great belchy ones. For a moment, she almost giggled, but that thought was chased away by a more unnerving one: When Will had bad attacks of the hiccups, she’d usually been right next to him feeling nothing.

  “Do you think Will’s right?” she blurted out. “Do you think his body really senses a ghost in the Griffinage?”

  “People who don’t sense ghosts are the ones who usually ask that, Meg,” said Shep gently. “I don’t hear Will asking.”

  Meg sank in her chair a little. She was too old. Will seemed to be the special one, not her. She felt tears welling up at the unfairness. With an effort, she pushed them down again. So what if she couldn’t see ghosts. Will wasn’t seeing one either, just hiccupping at one.

  “Notice anything else, Will?”

  “The lightning was strange. It was green, and everything smelled funny. Like matches.”

  “Sulphur,” said Shep. “That would be her.”

  “The manor ghost?” asked Will. Shep nodded.

  “But why would she suddenly be here?” asked Meg, exasperated. “She’s supposed to haunt the manor, not the Griffinage.”

  “Can ghosts move?” Will asked. “I mean, to a new place, if they’ve haunted one place for years and years?”

  “Take up a new residence?” said Shep. “I’ve heard it’s possible. Have to follow something, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember what I told you,” Shep answered. “Ghosts don’t follow time and space the way we do. They follow longings. Usually, the longing is much greater in one place, so the ghost sticks around and we say the place is haunted.”