Dial a Ghost (16 page)

He moved on to Sir Pelham. If anyone could survive an attack it would be him – but when he turned the hairy, pock-marked face towards him, the head lolled back and the sightless eyes were like black pits of nothingness.

‘It’s to do with that smell, I’m sure,’ said Trevor. ‘If we could get them outside into the air . . . ’

But Oliver had found Adopta. She lay between Aunt Maud and Lady de Bone, and both spectres had stretched out their twisted limbs towards her as though even in their final agony they’d fought for her. No, he’d got that wrong. Their arms were sheltering her, not grasping. They had made an arch round Addie’s head; they had had time to make their peace.

Oliver knelt down beside his friend. The sponge bag had dropped from her fingers; her tumbled hair was spread out in a halo behind her head. She was so frail that he could make out the pattern of the carpet beneath her shoulders.

‘Addie, you can’t go away, you
can’t
. I need you so much. Remember all the things we were going to do? Please, Addie,
please
.’

As he tried to call her back, to prop her up, his tears fell on her upturned face. But nothing woke her, and to Oliver suddenly it was as though the end of the world had come. Everything bad that had happened to him: his parents dying, the year he had been shunted between people who didn’t want him . . . everything got him by the throat.

‘It’s my fault,’ he sobbed. ‘It’s because I went away and left them.’ And then: ‘I don’t want to live.’

Trevor had been trying to comfort him. Now he got up and tiptoed to the door. ‘Listen,’ he whispered. ‘Someone’s just come in. Two people. I can hear them talking.’

Fulton and Frieda stood in the hall at Helton and gloated.

‘We’ve done it! We’ve got rid of the spooks and Oliver is dead! Helton is ours, Frieda! It’s ours. It’s ours!’

But Frieda had stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Are you sure it’s safe? They’re all done for, the creepy-crawlies?’

‘Of course it’s safe. You heard what Dr Fetlock said when I handed over the money. “Wait till morning to make sure their ectoplasm’s properly eaten and then you’ll be fine,” he said. And anyway the Ectoplasm Eating Bacterium doesn’t hurt living people. I’ve told you.’

‘No. But I don’t want to bump into half-chewed legs and fingers and things. Even if we can’t see them we might feel them. And there’s a funny smell.’

‘Now, Frieda, you’re always whining. The spooks are done for and Oliver is dead! There’s nothing to stop us now. Nothing.’

‘Yes, Oliver is dead—’ began Frieda. Then she stopped and pointed with a trembling hand towards the top of the stairs. ‘It’s his ghost,’ she said with chattering teeth. ‘It’s Oliver’s ghost!’

It was something anyone might have thought. Oliver was as white as a spectre and he held something that real boys do not often hold: a great throwing spear with a black wooden handle and a point as sharp and lethal as only the Indians of the Amazon could make it. An assegai which he had plucked from the wall and carried as if it weighed no more than Grandma’s umbrella.

And he had gone mad. Trevor saw that at once. This slight, shy boy stared down at Fulton with such hatred that the Snodde-Brittles stood hypnotized like baboons in front of a leopard.

‘I am not dead as you see,’ said Oliver. ‘But you will be in a minute because of what you have done to my ghosts.’

He lifted the spear and began to walk down the steps – and Fulton took a step backwards and fell over Frieda so that both of them rolled down on to the marble floor.

‘I too am a Snodde-Brittle,’ said Oliver, still in that level voice. ‘And I Am Going To Set My Foot On
My
Enemies.
Now
.’

He took another step and lifted the spear, and as Fulton and Frieda tried to disentangle themselves, he brought the point down to touch Fulton’s throat.

‘No!’ screamed Fulton. ‘Stop! I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry! Don’t kill me, don’t!’

‘But I’m going to,’ said Oliver. ‘I’m just looking for the best place.’

Trevor had come round behind him. ‘Here, steady, Oliver. They’ll put you away if you kill him, and you don’t want that.’

Oliver didn’t even hear him. He brushed the tip of the spear against Fulton’s throat and the scratch filled up with blood. No, not Fulton’s Adam’s apple – his heart . . .

Frieda was trying to scramble to her feet and Trevor moved towards her and kicked her hard in the shins. If he couldn’t stop Oliver, at least he could see that the woman didn’t run away and squeal.

Fulton was grasping his throat, screaming with terror as his hand came away dipped in crimson.

Then from somewhere above them there came a . . . fluttering . . . the sound, faint as breath, of wing beats. And then a noise so unbelievable, so absolutely amazing, that Oliver couldn’t believe his ears.

He turned his head only for a moment – but in that moment, Fulton and Frieda took to their heels and ran.

The van was back in the garage. The letters
Rid A Spook
had been painted out; it was just a plain red lorry now.

And the laboratories had been dismantled. The cages where the phantom mice had had their tails removed by the dreaded EEB had been sent back to the pet shop from which they came; the rest-rooms in which the tramp and the bag lady had been destroyed were once again ordinary cloakrooms.

‘That should see it through,’ said Dr Fetlock – who wasn’t a doctor at all but plain Bob Fetlock, a man who’d failed every exam he’d ever taken but had a flair for tricking people.

‘Six months in the sun!’ said Professor Mankovitch, throwing her white wig on to the table and combing out her frizzy red hair. Her name was Maisie; she was Fetlock’s girlfriend and they were off to Spain.

‘What a sucker that bloke was,’ said Charlie. His scar was real enough but he certainly hadn’t got it when a head on a platter came out of his mother’s larder in Peckham. He’d got it by roller-skating into a milk float when he should have been at school.

They’d worked on all sorts of scams, Fetlock and Maisie and Charlie, who was Maisie’s nephew, but they’d enjoyed this one particularly.

‘That was good, the bit about the villis luring my boyfriend away in the forest – I really went for that,’ said Maisie, lighting a fag. ‘Can you see me just sitting there while these white ghoulies pull off a bloke I fancied. I’d have kicked them in the teeth.’

‘It’s a pleasure to deceive such a nasty piece of work,’ said Fetlock, who hadn’t cared for Fulton Snodde-Brittle. ‘Swallowing all that stuff. Ectoplasm Eating Bacteria! What a twerp!’

Fetlock had got the idea out of a horror comic and set the whole thing up. There hadn’t been any phantom mice or rabbits or ghostly tramps, of course. The labs that Fulton had been shown round were completely empty and the great thumping vat that ‘Professor Mankovitch’ had been working on was left behind from a steam laundry. As for the stuff they’d squirted from their nozzles, it was a job lot of laughing gas they’d nicked from the back of the dental hospital. No one used it now for pulling teeth – it put people to sleep all right, but it made them so sick and silly and giggly afterwards that dentists had stopped using it.

‘Well, that’s it, then,’ said Fetlock. ‘Thirty thousand in cash should keep us out there for a bit. Got the tickets, Maisie?’

Maisie nodded and shut her suitcase. ‘What’ll happen to the spooks, do you reckon?’ She was a person who could see ghosts, but she didn’t care what became of them – she’d have done anything for money.

Fetlock shrugged. ‘Same as happens to people, I suppose. Only with them being sort of looser and woozier than us, the gas’ll get further into their brains. All the same we’d best be well clear of Fulton before they come round.’

And ten minutes later the premises of
Rid A Spook
were deserted – and as silent as the grave.

‘Do I look all right?’ asked Lady de Bone.

‘Yes, Mother, you look fine,’ said Adopta. She rearranged a piece of liver in the spectre’s tangled hair and pulled her bloodstained skirt straight.

‘What about me?’ asked Sir Pelham. ‘Does my hoofmark show up properly?’

Addie stood on tiptoe to examine the place where the horse had bashed in her father’s head and said they both looked fine and everyone would be terrified and now it was time to start.

The de Bones were always a little nervous before the doors of Helton opened to the public and the long queues shuffled in to see the Most Haunted House in Britain. The visitors liked seeing Mr Hofmann’s withered head coming out of the dining-room sideboard and they enjoyed Grandma whooping up and down the window curtains, but it was the Shriekers who made them go ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’ and hold on to each other in terror and feel that they had got their money’s worth.

It had been Oliver’s idea to open Helton to the public so as to get money for the work he wanted to do, and it was a great success. Trevor was in charge of the car park and Oliver showed people round and Helton had already beaten all other stately homes for attracting visitors.

Three months had passed since Oliver had turned his head and seen the budgie giggling and laughing and falling about, and he and Addie were close now to fulfilling their dreams. Colonel Mersham had come to live at Helton and Matron had sent her sister down to keep house, and you couldn’t have found two nicer people anywhere. As for Fulton and Frieda, no one had seen them since they scuttled away in terror from the hall.

The awful moment when the ghosts saw the nozzle of the EEB people come round the door and believed they were finished, had changed them all. In that ghastly moment, Lady de Bone and Aunt Maud had stopped fighting over Addie and sheltered her, and when they came round again the de Bones realized how wicked they had been and glided off to Larchfield Abbey to ask the nuns for forgiveness.

When they came back, a sensible arrangement was made about Addie. She spent the weekend with the de Bones, learning to say upper-class things and keeping her shoulders straight, and the week with the Wilkinsons, so that she stopped being a tug-of-war ghost and became a ghost with two sets of parents, which is a very different thing. And if she was always glad when Monday morning came round and she could be a Wilkinson again, she kept these thoughts to herself.

With the money they got from the visitors, Colonel Mersham and Oliver turned the stables into a Laboratory for the Study of Ghostliness. The Colonel was in charge of the work, with Uncle Henry to help him, and they made a splendid team. Already Helton was becoming the place to go if one wanted to know about ectoplasm and how it worked.

But the rest of the buildings and the gardens and the grounds filled up with Addie’s pets. Every phantom animal who did not understand what had happened to them was welcome and not one was turned away: not the ghost of the meanest water-flea or the skinniest tapeworm or the most beaten-up rabbit or pigeon with gunshot wounds in its side. The duck-bill in the zoo passed on at last and Addie brought it down to live in the shrubbery, and though she never found a phantom sheep she became quite fond of the python, who had been ill for a long time after the gas made him throw up the budgie, and needed careful nursing. And there was one animal so special and so famous that scientists came from all over the world to see it sitting by the fountain: the shining, pop-eyed and beautiful ghost of the golden toad which Colonel Mersham had brought back from the cloud forests of Costa Rica.

If Addie never turned away an animal in need, Oliver opened his home to every human spook without a place to lay his head. He had told the ladies of the adoption agency to send him any ghosts they couldn’t place themselves, and soon the Hall filled up with bloodstained widows and actresses who had fallen through trapdoors and foolish people who had thrown themselves under trains for love.

There was one ghost, though, who did not appear.

However much they called her, poor Trixie never came to them. But one night as they were gathered round the sundial for the Evening Calling, a spectre did appear. A blowzy, raddled old spook with a puffy face and an out-of-date hairstyle who landed with a bump on the sundial.

‘Coo-ee!’ she called, waving a fat arm. ‘It’s me. Don’t you remember me, Eric? It’s Cynthia Harbottle!’

It was the most incredible shock. Eric couldn’t believe it. He’d remembered her the way she was, of course: a thin girl in a gym-slip with marvellous teeth.

‘I told you,’ said Aunt Maud under her breath. ‘I told you she’d be old.’

Eric was speechless. He knew that if you love people you have to do it for always and perhaps he would have tried, but then Cynthia did the most awful thing. She snatched Trixie’s banana, peeled it
– and threw the skin on to the neatly swept gravel path.

That finished it. No Boy Scout could ever bring himself to love a person who leaves litter lying about, and in that moment Eric’s passion for Cynthia Harbottle shrivelled and died.

Fortunately she was only passing, and after she went Eric was a new man. He whistled as he worked, he went for long tramps in the woods, and when Oliver’s friends came down from the Home for the holidays, he showed them all the clever things he had learnt to do when he was a Scout: how to make a noise like a corncrake, how to splice ropes, and which kinds of sticks are suitable for skewering sausages and which are not.