Dial a Ghost (6 page)

‘It should indeed,’ agreed Mrs Mannering. ‘Only I have to ask... what would you offer the ghosts – and what would you expect from them?’

‘What would we
offe
r
them? My dear Mrs Mannering, we’d offer them accommodation like no ghosts in Britain could boast of. Thirteen bedrooms with wall hangings. Corridors with howling draughts and hidden doors. Suits of armour to swoop out of... and a master bedroom with a coffin chest which they could have entirely to themselves. As for what we’d expect – well, some really high-class haunting. Something that would make people faint and scream and come back for more.’

Mrs Mannering was getting more and more excited. ‘My dear Mr Boyd, I have exactly the ghosts for you! Sir Pelham and Lady Sabrina de Bone. They come of a very good family as you can gather and would be absolutely at home in such a setting.’

‘They’re the real thing, are they? You know... icy hands, strangling people, rappings, smotherings?’

‘Yes indeed. All that and more. Pythons, bloodstains, nose stumps . . . I promise you won’t be disappointed. There’s a servant too who I believe is very fiendish, but he’s in cold storage at the moment so I haven’t seen him. There’s only one thing – the de Bones really hate children. Especially children asleep in their beds. Of course if the house is empty at night that wouldn’t be a problem. But I would be worried about any children going round the house with their parents.’

‘We would certainly have to be careful about that,’ said Fulton smarmily. ‘I tell you what, we could put up a notice saying ‘‘This guided tour is not suitable for children under twelve’’. Like in the cinema. We might even build a playground so that the children are kept out of the way.’

‘That sounds fine,’ said Mrs Mannering. ‘Quite excellent. Now tell me, how soon would you like them to come?’

Fulton was silent, thinking. Oliver was already going under, but he needed a bit longer to get properly softened up. ‘How about Friday the 13th,’ he said. His lips parted over his yellow teeth and Mrs Mannering realized he was smiling. ‘But I have to make it quite clear that I won’t take anything nambypamby. You know, spooks wringing their hands and feeling guilty because they stole tuppence from the Poor Box or were nasty to their mummy. I need ghosts with gumption; I need evil and darkness and sin.’

‘You will get them, Mr Boyd, I promise you,’ said Mrs Mannering.

As soon as her visitor had gone, Mrs Mannering hurried across the corridor and hugged her friend. ‘You were right, Nellie, our luck has turned! I’ve found a place for the Shriekers!’

‘Oh my dear, what wonderful news! When are they leaving?’

‘Friday the 13th – the same day as the Wilkinsons!’

The following morning they each wrote out the adoption papers, and made careful maps for both sets of ghosts and instructions about what to do when they got there. They put the Wilkinsons’ maps into a green folder and the Shriekers’ maps into a red folder and placed them in the filing cabinet, ready for the day when the ghosts should leave.

‘Now be sure and look after these very carefully,’ they told Ted the office boy.

And Ted said he would. He was a nice boy and a hard worker, but he had not told the ladies that he was colour-blind.

This didn’t mean that he couldn’t see
an
y
colours. He could see yellow and blue and violet perfectly well. But for a person who is colour-blind there is absolutely no difference between green and red.

Oliver had been ten days at Helton and no one would have recognized him as the cheerful, busy child he had been in the Home. He was pale, his dark eyes had rings under them; he jumped at sudden noises.

He knew he had to be grateful to Cousin Fulton and Cousin Frieda who had come to stay with him even though the boys at their school needed them so much, and he knew that people couldn’t help how they looked.

But he couldn’t feel comfortable with them and there was no one else to talk to. The servants were so old and deaf that it was a wonder they didn’t drop down dead every time they picked up a duster, and the people who worked outside weren’t friendly at all. The gardener hurried away whenever he saw Oliver, and the people from the village scarcely spoke to him.

Oliver did not know that Fulton had told them to do this.

‘The boy’s delicate,’ he told everyone. ‘He’s got to be kept absolutely quiet.’

So Oliver spent most of the day alone, which was exactly what Fulton had planned. He wandered down the long corridors being sneered at by the Snodde-Brittle ancestors in their heavy frames. He sat in the library turning over the pages of dusty books with no pictures in them, or tried to pick out tunes on the piano in the dark drawing room with its shrouded windows and enormous chairs.

If the inside of Helton was gloomy and dank, the outside was hardly any better. The weather was windy and grey, and the garden seemed to grow mostly stones: stone statues, stone benches covered in rook droppings, stone fountains with cracked rims. The lake was a black, silent hole and something bad had happened there.

‘A stupid farmer drowned himself,’ said Frieda.

‘Oh!’ Oliver looked down into the water, wondering what it was like to lie there in all that blackness. ‘Is he still there?’

‘I expect so,’ said Frieda. ‘It was his own fault. He had the cheek to fall in love with a Snodde-Brittle.’

‘Didn’t she want him?’ Oliver asked.

‘
Wan
t
him? A Snodde-Brittle
wan
t
a common farmer! Don’t be stupid, boy.’

Something bad had happened on the hill behind the house as well. Two hikers had been caught in a blizzard and frozen to death.

‘They were townies,’ said Fulton. ‘Not properly dressed.’

‘I’m a townie too,’ said Oliver. ‘I come from a town.’

But he could see that it was the fault of the hikers, like it was the fault of the farmer for falling in love.

What made everything so much worse for Oliver was knowing that all his friends in the Home had forgotten him.

‘We’ll write to you at
once
,’ Nonie had promised. ‘Even before you get there we’ll start.’

Everybody had said they would write straight away, and Matron too.

But they hadn’t. Every day he waited for a letter and every day there was nothing at all. Oliver had written the very first morning, trying not to sound miserable and drawing them a picture of the hall. Since then he’d written three more letters and he hadn’t had a single one back, not even a postcard.

‘Are you
sure
, Cousin Fulton?’ Oliver said each day as Fulton returned from the post office, shaking his head.

‘Quite sure,’ Fulton would say. ‘There was nothing for you. Nothing at all.’

And Oliver said no more. How could a boy brought up to trust people as he had been, look into the black heart of a man like Fulton? How could he guess that the letters he wrote to his friends were torn up before they ever reached the post office, and that the letters that came for him – lots of letters and postcards and a little packet from Matron – were destroyed by Fulton on the way back to the Hall.

Even thinking that Fulton might have made a mistake and not looked properly made Oliver feel guilty, because his cousin was trying so hard to be kind. Every evening, for example, Fulton would take him into the drawing room and turn out the overhead light and tell him ghost stories.

‘You like ghost stories, I’m sure,’ Fulton would say, making Oliver sit beside him on the sofa. ‘All the boys in my school love a good creepy story and I bet you do too.’

Then he would start. There was the story of the eyeless phantom that tapped each night on the window pane asking to be let in, and when the window was opened, he seized the person and sank his teeth into their flesh. There was the story of the wailing nun who plucked off people’s bedclothes and strangled them as they slept, and the story of the skeleton who came to look for his own skull.

‘And do you know where he found it?’ Fulton would say, bringing his face close up to Oliver’s. ‘In an old coffin chest exactly like the one in your room!’

Then he would pat Oliver on the head and Frieda would come and say, ‘Bedtime, Oliver!’ – and the little boy would go alone through the Long Gallery with its faceless marble statues, along the corridor lined with grinning masks, up the cold stone staircase, past the bared teeth of shot animals – and reach, at last, his room.

Oliver did not cry; he did not run back and beg to be allowed to stay downstairs. But as he lay in the cave he had made for himself under the bedclothes, he thought he wouldn’t mind too much if it was soon over; if they came quickly, the ghosts that were going to get him. If he was frightened to death he could go and lie quietly under the ground in the churchyard. He had seen the graves and the tombstones covered with moss and it had looked peaceful there.

And for a child to think like that is not a good idea at all.

In the knicker shop, the Wilkinsons were having a party. It was the day before they were due to leave for their new home in the country and they had invited their friends to say goodbye. Mr Hofmann had come from the bunion shop, sniffing a little because he was going to lose Grandma, and a lovely Swedish phantom called Pernilla, with luminous hair and gentle eyes, had drifted in from the music store. There was a jogger who had jogged once too often, and various children Addie had picked up: the son of a rat-catcher who came with a dozen of his father’s phantom rats, and a pickpocket called Jake who knew everything there was to know about living off the land.

It was a good party. Though the ghosts were sad to see such a nice family leave the district, they tried hard not to begrudge the Wilkinsons their good luck.

‘Aaah... imagine... to breathe again the fresh clear air,’ sighed Pernilla, who was dreadfully homesick for the pine forests of her native land.

‘And living with nuns,’ said the jogger, who had been a curate before he dropped dead of a heart attack on the A12. ‘Such good people!’

Aunt Maud was everywhere, filling glasses with her nightshade cordial, making people feel comfortable.

‘If only you could all come with us,’ she sighed.

‘Maybe you can,’ said Adopta. ‘If the nuns are so kind, maybe they’ll make room for you all!’

She had filled Grandma’s gas mask case with the ghosts of beetles and woodlice which she meant to re-settle in the country and was so excited that she found it impossible to keep still.

Everyone had been very well behaved up to then, but perhaps Aunt Maud’s drinks were stronger than she realized because Eric, who was usually so quiet, suddenly said, ‘No more knickers!’ and sent a box of mini-briefs tumbling to the floor.

‘No more Tootsies and Footsies and Bootsies,’ shouted Grandma, who had been particularly annoyed at the silly names that people nowadays gave to socks, thwacking at the display stand with her umbrella.

‘And down with tummy buttons,’ yelled Adopta, and a pile of polka-dot bikinis tumbled from their shelves.

At first Aunt Maud and Uncle Henry tried to stop them, but it was no use. The relief of getting away from all that underwear was just too great, and soon even Mr Hofmann, who could hardly glide, was thumping a see-through nightdress with his crutch, while Pernilla zoomed to the ceiling with a box of body stockings which she draped like streamers round the lamp.

But when the clock struck eleven, they quietened down. Mr Hofmann was led away by Grandma, the jogger jogged back to the A12, the rat-catcher’s son called to his rats – and the host and hostess, as is the way with parties, were left to clean up the mess.

There was only one more thing to do. Sober and solemn now, the Wilkinsons filed out into the street and called to Trixie.

‘We love you, Trixie,’ they said, bowing to the north.

‘We need you, Trixie,’ they said, bowing to the east and the west and the south.

‘And we shall never forget you,’ they promised.

Of course if Trixie had come just then it would have been a miracle, but she didn’t. So they went back to pack and cover the budgie’s cage, while Uncle Henry made his way to the
Dia
l
A
Ghos
t
agency and the office of Miss Pringle.

The folder with all their instructions and the maps was exactly where she had said it would be, on the window sill beside the potted geranium. Uncle Henry took it and passed it backwards and forwards across his chest so as to cover it with ectoplasm and make it invisible.

And an hour later, the Wilkinsons were on their way.

The Shriekers did not have a farewell party. To have a party you need friends and the Shriekers didn’t have any. All the same, in their dark and nasty way they were excited.

‘A place that’s fit for us at last,’ said Sabrina. ‘Statues... suits of armour . . . a tower!’

Mrs Mannering had come herself to tell the Shriekers about Helton Hall, which was noble of her because the frozen meat store had not been a nice place even before the de Bones came, and now it was unspeakable. Sides of beef lay sprawled on the floor where they had tried to drink blood from them; sheep’s kidneys and gobbets of fat squelched underfoot.