Dial a Ghost (13 page)

As she walloped and thumped and kicked, Addie was slowly becoming visible. Her night-dress was beginning to show up now, and her long hair.

‘Well, go on,’ roared Pelham to his wife. ‘Do her in. Finish the little spitfire off. The boy’s done for anyway.’

But Lady de Bone was standing quite still. Her loathsome mouth hung open and she was staring and staring.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ yelled Pelham to his wife. ‘What are you gawping at?’

‘I feel... strange,’ said Sabrina.

Addie was moving in for the kill. She rose into the air, ready to punch the female phantom’s nose stump into a pulp – and as she did so, she rolled up the sleeve of her nightdress.

And Lady de Bone screamed once... screamed twice... and fell in a dead faint on to the floor.

Toby Benson, the little boy whom Fulton had beaten so cruelly, sat on his suitcase in the hall at Sunnydell Preparatory School and smiled. His parents were coming to take him away for ever and he was so happy he thought he would burst.

The inspectors had been to the Snodde-Brittles’ school and said it had to be closed at once. The teaching was a disgrace, they said, and Fulton not fit to be a headmaster.

But if the boys had left, and the cook and the cleaning ladies and the sports master, there were other people who had come. The greengrocer who supplied the school with vegetables had come, waving his bill, and the butcher had put a ladder against the house and stuck his head in at the bathroom window and told Fulton he’d turn him into a plate of tripe if he didn’t pay what was owing. Even now, a van from the electricity company had drawn up and two men got out, ready to cut off supplies.

‘We’re going to end up in prison for debt if this goes on,’ said Frieda, looking down at the street.

‘No we aren’t. We’re going to end up in Helton Hall. We’re going to own the farm and the grounds and the forest and have proper servants to wait on us.’

‘Well, I hope you’re right. That horrible little boy seems to be spook-proof as far as I can see.’

‘He won’t be spook-proof with this new lot. I tell you, Frieda—’ He broke off. ‘Good Lord, look who’s here! It’s Mr Tusker getting out of a taxi.’

Getting out of a taxi was not an easy thing for Mr Tusker to do. He was too bent and his legs were too wobbly. But he managed it at last and then they saw that Miss Match was in the taxi too.

‘This is it, Frieda. I just feel this is it.’

It looked as though he was right. When the housekeeper and the butler reached Fulton’s study they were grey with shock and they had come to give notice. Mr Tusker was on the way to his sister in York and Miss Match was going to stay with a niece in Scotland and neither of them was ever going to spend another minute in Helton Hall.

‘We tried to tell Mr Norman,’ said the butler. ‘But he’s away and his secretary’s a twitty little thing. So we came to let you know and to give back the keys.’ He laid a great bunch of labelled keys on the table. ‘We want you to sign that we’ve given them to you, and a month’s wages is owing to us.’

‘Yes, yes. Mr Norman will pay them when he returns. But why? Why are you going in such a hurry? What’s happened at Helton?’

Mr Tusker started to wheeze and Miss Match hit him on the back. ‘Everything. It’s haunted. It’s full of evil. Things fall.’

‘Things burn.’

‘There’s a creeping mist in all the rooms.’

‘There’s screams to make your hair stand on end.’

‘Oh dear, how terrible,’ said Fulton. ‘And the boy?’

‘Gone!’ said Mr Tusker.

‘Dead, it’s my opinion,’ said Miss Match. ‘Drowned.’

‘Drowned! But how terrible! How ghastly!’ Fulton’s voice rose to a shriek. ‘Tell us more! Tell us more!’

‘We found his clothes by the lake. Shoes. And a shirt floating on the water. And the lake looks... funny.’

‘But how appalling! The poor little boy. Have you told the police?’

‘It’s not our job to tell the police, Mr Snodde-Brittle. We’ve given back the keys and you’ve got our notice. And a month’s wages is owing—’

‘Yes, yes. You shall have them of course. I’ll tell Mr Norman. Just leave your address.’

‘It’s happened!’ shouted Fulton when the butler and the housekeeper had left. ‘I told you! The woman in the agency said they were spooks to end all spooks. They’ve obviously frightened the boy into fits and he’s run into the lake. I told you he wasn’t stable.’

‘Yes, but even if he’s dead what are we going to do about the spooks? I’m not staying in the place with those nasties hanging round.’

‘Now, Frieda, why don’t you trust me? I wouldn’t have set all this up if I hadn’t had a card up my sleeve.’

‘You mean exorcism and all that? Salt and rowan twigs and that sort of stuff? Because—’

‘No. Nothing as feeble as that. It might work on those soppy Wilkinsons in their night-gowns, but it wouldn’t work on the Shriekers. No, this is something different,’ said Fulton gloatingly. ‘This is
science
.’

He opened a drawer and handed her a newspaper cutting which she read carefully, and then read once again.

‘I see,’ she said, licking her lips. ‘Yes. You don’t think it will come expensive?’

‘What does that matter? Once we have Helton we’ll have all the money in the world. We can cut down the forests and sell the wood. We can bulldoze the farm for building land – we’ll be rolling.’

‘Yes.’ Frieda put down the newspaper and looked down at the street. Toby Benson was just running out to meet his parents. They were going to take him out to Africa with them rather than send him to another boarding school. ‘You don’t think he’ll... Oliver... he’ll come up from the lake and haunt us?’

‘For Pete’s sake, Frieda, what’s got into you?’ He pushed the newspaper under her nose. ‘You can read, can’t you? There isn’t a spook on the planet we can’t destroy with what they’ve got there.’

‘Yes.’ Fulton was right. It was silly to think of Oliver lying at the bottom of the deep dark pit that was the Helton lake. No one got anywhere who let themselves get soft.

The letters above the grimy redbrick building said
The Safeguard Sewing Machine Company
, but it wasn’t sewing machines that they made in that sinister place. It was something quite different.

It was a liquid – as Dr Fetlock now explained – that you could spray on to ghosts so as to destroy them completely and for ever.

‘We have to keep our work secret,’ he told Fulton Snodde-Brittle. ‘That story in the paper did us a lot of harm. You see there are feeble and soppy people about who might make a fuss. They might think that ghosts have a right to be around and then there would be questions asked and laws passed. So I have to tell you that everything you see and hear in this building is top secret. Will you promise me that?’

‘Oh yes, yes indeed,’ said Fulton. He had wasted no time in coming to see the doctor. ‘I’d rather not have my part in this talked about either. In fact I’d like it if your men could come and spray Helton under cover of darkness.’

‘There shouldn’t be any problem about that. Now you will want to know what you are getting for your money, so let me show you round.’ Dr Fetlock leant forward and stared hard at Fulton with his black pop-eyes. His long hair straggled down his back, he wore thick glasses and looked as though he hadn’t been in the open air for years. ‘But first of all I have to ask you something: can you personally see ghosts? Are you a spook seer?’

Fulton stroked his moustache. A piece of kipper had caught in it from his breakfast, but he didn’t know this and thought he looked good. ‘Well, actually, no. I can’t.’

Dr Fetlock nodded. ‘Perhaps it’s as well. But it means I’ll have to explain the experiments to you. I will have to describe what we have done to the ghost animals we keep here, so that you will see how amazing our product is. Now if you will just put on this white coat, we will go into the laboratory.’

He opened the door for Fulton and led him down a long dark corridor. ‘You will find that everyone here is really keen on their work. All the staff of EEB Incorporated – that’s what we call ourselves – have suffered from disgusting spooks. The lab boy who is looking after the animals has a gash down the side of his cheek, as you will see. He got it when a head on a platter came out of the larder of his mother’s house in Peckham. Just a severed head and nothing else – well, you know how these creepy-crawlies carry on. He fell over backwards and gashed his cheek on the fender and he’s got the scar to this day.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ said Fulton.

Dr Fetlock opened the door of the animal house. What Fulton saw were rows and rows of cages with straw in the bottom and numbers nailed to the top. Beside the numbers were charts showing how much liquid the animals had been given and at what dose. A strange smell of decay hung about the room, and a murky fog clouded the windows.

‘That’s the dissolving ectoplasm,’ said Dr Fetlock. ‘We’ll get the fan going on it in a minute. Now this top row is the rabbits. Of course we had to drill a small hole in their brains and squirt it with EEB – that’s the name of our product – so as to destroy their will power. Otherwise they’d just have glided through the bars – keeping ghosts caged up is the devil, as you know. The first three cages are the ones where we’ve destroyed the rabbits’ left ears, and in the next row they’ve lost their right ears – it’s a pity you can’t see because it’s a very neat experiment. Then below them we’ve got the mice. We’ve got rid of all the tails in the first batch and the second batch have got neither tails nor forepaws.’ He turned round and shouted: ‘Charlie!’, and a youth in a spattered overall with a scar down the side of his face came out with a clipboard. ‘Show Mr Snodde-Brittle the figures, Charlie.’

Fulton took them and ran his eyes down the pages. They seemed to be graphs of different strengths of the EEB mixture set against the loss of limbs and ears and eyes.

‘Very interesting,’ he said.

Dr Fetlock had moved to another group of cages. ‘Now these are the hamsters,’ he said. ‘You see we’ve managed to destroy their pouches completely. That’s only the beginning of course... we’re going to make the spray stronger and liquidate their front ends altogether so—’

‘Yes, yes.’ Fulton was feeling a little queasy. ‘But how do I know it’s going to work on humans? The ghosts I want to exterminate are people – well, they were.’

Dr Fetlock seemed to be thinking. ‘I think we’d best take Mr Snodde-Brittle to the rest-rooms, Charlie.’

The rest-rooms were just cubicles, rather like police cells, each with a camp bed, a grey blanket and a water jug.

‘Perhaps you’d like to look in here?’ said Dr Fetlock. ‘If you’re sure it won’t upset you.’

‘Nothing upsets me,’ blustered Fulton. He stared at the empty bed and the folded blanket – and saw nothing else.

‘He was only a tramp,’ said Dr Fetlock. ‘We thought it was quite right to use him for science. He was sleeping rough under Waterloo Bridge when he became a ghost. So we lured him in here – we said he could rest in peace and he
i
s
resting in peace!’ He began to titter. ‘What’s left of him!’

‘Er... what is left?’

‘A shoe with a broken sole... half a sock... look there, hanging over the bed. We came at him while he was asleep – three squirts from one of the big aerosols and well, you’ll see. We’ve got two more in the next rooms. The old bag lady is completely gone, but there’s a drunk we found on the Embankment – his arms and legs have disappeared but his torso’s left, if you’d like to have a look.’

‘No, that’s all right, thank you. I think I’ve seen enough,’ said Fulton. ‘But are you absolutely sure there’s no effect on living people? I mean, I shall want to move back into the house when it’s cleared.’

Dr Fetlock turned to Charlie. ‘Go and get Number Five – it’s just been filled.’

Charlie went away and returned with a large metal canister rather like a fire extinguisher, with a hose and nozzle. The letters EEB were written on it in red paint. Dr Felton put out his arm. ‘Right. You can give me a full dose.’

Charlie pressed the nozzle. There was a hiss, and an evil-smelling liquid shot on to the doctor’s sleeve. Apart from the smell and a damp stain nothing happened at all.

‘Satisfied?’ asked Dr Fetlock.

Fulton nodded. ‘Yes, indeed. It’s all exactly as I hoped. But... could one ask... what
i
s
EEB? What do the letters stand for?’

Charlie and Dr Fetlock looked at each other. ‘Well, Mr Snodde-Brittle, we don’t trust everyone with this, but... all right... we’ll take you along to the preparation room. It isn’t I who discovered the EEB, you see – it’s Professor Mankovitch. But I warn you, the Professor is completely dumb. She’s probably the most brilliant scientist in the world – a Hungarian; they’re very clever in Eastern Europe – even the little children play chess – but she can’t say a word. She lost her voice as the result of a frightful shock.’

‘What was that?’

‘She was picnicking with her boyfriend in a forest. They have a lot of forests over there. And suddenly a whole lot of white, shimmering creepies came out of the trees – wibbly, wobbly slithering ghoulies – they call them villis or tree spirits or some such thing. And they stretched out their awful arms and grasped her boyfriend and went off with him into the woods and he never came back. So she swore she would spend the rest of her life finding out how to destroy
thing
s
that shouldn’t be there. Come along; I’ll show you.’