The Great Ghost Rescue Read online

  ‘We must be patient, dear,’ said her husband, taking the sword out of his chest and putting it neatly on the pillow. ‘After all she’s had a bad time. Have you noticed how lumpy her neck stump is looking? And anyway, Mabel, you know that chicken wasn’t running away from Humphrey. It was running towards its mother.’

  The Hag blushed and sent a whiff of squashed dung beetle across the room.

  ‘Oh well.’ She got into bed beside her husband and laid her hideous head lovingly against his gaping wound. ‘Maybe we could spray him with something to make him smell bad,’ she murmured sleepily. ‘Pus from an open boil might work... mixed with sour milk... or smouldering Wellington boots...’

  But when morning came, everybody had more important things to think about than how to make Humphrey smell as awful as his mother. Because that was the morning the men came.

  There were a lot of men: four ordinary-looking ones in caps and raincoats who arrived in a blue van and ran about with tape measures and plumb lines and long, striped poles, and two more important-looking ones with fat, red necks who came in a big, grey car and had thick overcoats and notebooks which flapped in the wind.

  They stayed all morning, pacing the grounds, jabbing at the woodwork with their penknives, shouting to each other, and when they went away more men came the next day and the day after that.

  It was a great strain for the ghosts. They didn’t know what was happening and of course with all those people around they had to stay invisible. Ghosts can stay invisible for days on end but they don’t like it. It makes them feel unwanted.

  Then the men stopped coming for a few weeks and everything was quiet again. But the poor ghosts didn’t have long to enjoy the peace of Craggyford because what came next was the bulldozers.

  ‘Mother, they’re digging up the West Meadow,’ said Humphrey worriedly. ‘What will happen to those nice moles?’

  But the men didn’t care about the moles and they didn’t care about the young trees in the Hazel Copse or about the blackbirds and thrushes that roosted in the hedgerows. They just bulldozed through everything and when it was all flat, dead rubble they began to build. And what they built was little wooden bungalows, lots and lots of them in straight rows, running towards the castle.

  ‘Perhaps the army is coming?’ suggested the Gliding Kilt, cheering up a little because he had been a fine and mighty soldier.

  But it wasn’t the army. What the men were building was a holiday camp, and the little houses were for the holidaymakers to sleep in. But for their meals and their entertainment, the holiday visitors were to go to the castle. And that meant that the castle had to be modernized.

  ‘Oh that this should happen to me all over again!’ wailed Aunt Hortensia, as the lorries full of workmen came thundering across the drawbridge. ‘Twice in a lifetime! It’s too much. My ectoplasm! What will happen to my ectoplasm!’

  ‘It’s the children’s ectoplasm I’m thinking of,’ snapped the Hag. Hortensia was getting on her nerves more and more, and those phantom horses of hers in the stable, eating their heads off – even if their heads were off already...

  The next few months were desperately anxious ones for the ghosts. For they soon realized that it wasn’t just central heating and strip lighting and bathrooms that were being put into Craggyford. No, the whole castle was being completely rebuilt. The nice, mouldering armoury full of owl pellets and cobwebs was turned into a restaurant with mirrored walls and a plastic floor. The Banqueting Hall, which had been the ghosts’ dining room, became a discotheque with terrible strobe lights which brought the Hag out in spots even in the few minutes the workmen were testing them. The lovely, dark, damp dungeons were tiled and turned into a gleaming, white kitchen so that hundreds of innocent woodlice and friendly spiders and harmless mice were walled up alive or turned out into the cold.

  But it wasn’t till George came screaming down the corridor to tell his parents what was going to happen to the East Wing of the castle that the ghosts realised how serious things were.

  ‘A cinema,’ cried the Hag. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh, I shall like a cinema,’ said Humphrey, waving his arms about. ‘Cowboys and Indians. Wicked gangsters. Bang bang!’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said the Hag, clouting him with her wing. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Films aren’t like that any more.’

  ‘What are they like, Mother?’ asked Winifred.

  ‘Rude,’ said the Hag simply. ‘Rude and shocking.’

  ‘And that’s quite apart from the litter,’ said Aunt Hortensia’s head. ‘Iced lolly sticks in Winifred’s bowl, toffee papers stuck to my stump, chewing gum jammed in our ear holes – that’s what a cinema will mean.’

  The Hag turned to her husband. ‘Hamish,’ she said, and her squinty eyes were desperate, ‘what is to be done?’

  There was a moment of silence while the Gliding Kilt stood twirling the sword in his chest, always a sign that he was thinking deeply. Then:

  ‘Mabel,’ he said. ‘Everybody. You must be brave. There’s nothing else for it. We must leave Craggy-ford and find another place to live.’

  ‘Leave Craggyford,’ faltered the Hag. ‘Leave our ancestral home?’

  The Gliding Kilt put a soothing hand on her crooked back.

  ‘Think of the children,’ he said.

  That did it, of course. ‘You’re right, dear,’ she said. ‘Right as always. We’ll leave at once.’

  Three

  They set off late that night. It was very painful saying goodbye to Craggyford where they’d spent nearly five hundred years but everybody tried to be brave. Loopy Fred came out of his hollow oak to wave to them and the Grey Lady cried. They offered to take her along but she said she was almost certain her teeth would turn up quite soon now and she didn’t think anyone would dare to dig up the churchyard so she stayed.

  Humphrey had hoped to be allowed to sit behind his father on one of the headless horses but his father took George, and Humphrey had to travel inside the coach with his mother and Winifred. Aunt Hortensia drove, of course – after all it was her coach – but she left her head inside because of the wind. Humphrey was never a very good traveller and this old, white-haired head rolling back and forward on the seat every time they turned a corner made him feel queasy very quickly.

  ‘You’ll have to use Winifred’s bowl, dear,’ said the Hag. ‘We really can’t keep stopping in mid-air.’ But of course Winifred’s bowl was for washing and she didn’t want to use it for Humphrey to be sick in. It was not a very happy journey.

  Although there was a moon, there was a lot of cloud with it and it was very difficult to see exactly what they were flying over. Once the coach swooped down on what looked like a hopeful building but it turned out to be a steam laundry working a night shift. Once George screamed: ‘Look, Dad, there’s a nice castle!’ but when they came down they found it was a huge factory manufacturing bathroom fittings.

  ‘Disgusting!’ said Aunt Hortensia, looking at the gleaming white baths and marble washbasins and gold-plated showers in the showrooms. ‘All that washing humans do. No wonder they aren’t fit for anything.’

  They drove on for another hour and then they had to come down again because the horses were tired.

  ‘Look at those funny black mountains!’ said Humphrey.

  They had landed on a large, sludgy piece of waste ground between an enormous, parked excavator and a mechanical shovel.

  ‘They’re not exactly mountains,’ said the Gliding Kilt. ‘They’re big heaps of coal. We’ve come down on an open-cast mine.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said the Hag, who would have liked somewhere more romantic. ‘Never mind, it’ll do to stretch our legs.’

  ‘I don’t want coal dust all over my stump,’ grumbled Aunt Hortensia. But she got down too and wandered off, holding her nightdress out of the dirt and splashing through the puddles with her enormous, yellow feet.

  Humphrey was still feeling sick after the journey and the ball and chain which the Hag
always made him wear on long journeys to strengthen his ankle had made him stiff and sore. So to cheer himself up he glided into the cab of the mechanical shovel and started making what he thought were mechanical shovel-driving noises.

  After a bit he realized that the shovel-driving noises had turned into something different. Into a strange, low whining noise. A kind of animal noise.

  When he’d made quite sure it wasn’t him making the noise, Humphrey glided out of the driving seat and began to search carefully between the heaps of coal, now getting closer to the sound, now losing it again. And then suddenly, coming round a pile of scaffolding, he saw something that made him gasp.

  It was a Shuk. A real, proper Black Shuk with a single, red saucer eye, huge, backward-pointing feet and three tails.

  Humphrey was enchanted. Shuks are phantom dogs and quite rare now. He’d heard of them often but never seen one.

  ‘Oh, come here, you nice Shuk. Come along. Good dog. Good dog,’ said Humphrey, clicking his finger bones.

  At first the Shuk didn’t move. His one eye burned warily and he made a low, rumbling noise in his throat, like stones falling over a cliff.

  ‘Don’t be frightened. I’m Humphrey. Humphrey the Horrible. Come on Shuksie.’

  The rumbles died away. The Shuk came closer.

  ‘Oh, you poor thing! Why you aren’t well at all.’

  Humphrey was right. The Shuk was in a dreadful state. His tails were as limp as over-cooked spaghetti, his saucer eye was on the blink and his coat was matted and caked with grime.

  As though he knew, now, that Humphrey the Horrible would help him, the Shuk came forward, making a weird, plashing noise as he walked. Two of his tails were wagging but the third was still a little shy.

  ‘What have you got there, Humphrey,’ shouted the Hag. flying over and peering with her squinty eyes between the heaps of coal.

  ‘Oh, Mother, it’s a Shuk. A proper padfoot – you know. And he’s miserable here you can see. I expect this used to be a lovely wild bit of country and he’d haunt it and people who saw him would go mad with terror. And now he has to haunt this silly coal mine and have coal dust in his lungs and fumes from all those bulldozers and excavators and things. Please, can’t we take him with us?’

  ‘Yes, please, Mother,’ said George and Winifred, gliding up to join them.

  ‘Don’t be silly, dears. We haven’t got a home ourselves. How can we be taking in stray dogs?’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be useful,’ said Humphrey imploringly.

  ‘Useful!’ yelled the Hag, letting a burst of rotten pig’s kidneys out into the night air. ‘What can he possibly do? Now don’t be silly, Humphrey. Come on children, back into the coach.’

  Humphrey could hardly bear it. As he looked at the Shuk, gazing trustingly up at him, he felt as if his ectoplasm had turned to lead. They were all climbing sadly in when a wail from Aunt Hortensia’s stump stopped them.

  ‘Head,’ wailed the stump. ‘Gone! Gone!’

  Everybody sighed and climbed out again, and the Gliding Kilt murmured something rude and Scottish. It was not the sort of night in which you wanted to go searching for someone’s old and smelly head.

  It was then that Humphrey had an idea. ‘Shuk?’ he said. ‘Here. Shuksie.’

  The black beast bounded up and looked hopefully at Humphrey. ‘Have you got a handkerchief, Aunt Hortensia?’ Humphrey went on.

  She nodded her stump and fished under her nightdress in the pocket of her long woollen drawers. ‘Here.’

  Humphrey took it and held it to the dog’s nose. ‘Find, Shuksie. Go on. Find.’

  There was a pause while the phantom beast sniffed the speck of linen. Then his head went down and his three tails went up and with a noise like an underground pumping station, he was off.

  Humphrey waited anxiously as the red beam of light from the Shuk’s one eye raked the darkness. Then they heard him give a growl of satisfaction and pounce. Seconds later he had bounded back to the coach. And in his jaws, covered with black sludge but smiling happily, was Aunt Hortensia’s head.

  ‘That is a very intelligent and useful animal,’ said the Head. ‘I had rolled into a ditch and might never have been found.’

  ‘You see, Mother,’ said Humphrey, ‘You see.’

  Like all the best mothers, the Hag knew when she was beaten. ‘All right,’ she said, sighing. ‘But mind you keep those disgusting feet of his off the upholstery.’

  Tn of an empty castle or ruined abbey or crumbling peel tower where a tired family of ghosts could come to rest.

  And then, just a couple of hours before dawn, when the sky was beginning to look dark grey instead of inky black, the Gliding Kilt turned his head and said: ‘Down there. What’s down there?’

  They all scrambled to the window and looked out. Below them, set in a big park, they could just make out the outline of a huge building. It had four towers, a central courtyard, battlements....

  ‘A castle!’ cried Humphrey. ‘Can we live here?’

  ‘We’ll just go down and take a look,’ said the Gliding Kilt.

  The horses were tired and glad to lose height. As they galloped round the building everyone became more cheerful. There was ivy creeping up the walls, some of the windows were barred; a fierce black crow rose squawking as they came.

  ‘Really this seems very possible,’ said the Hag. ‘Look, there are two stinking serpents hanging out of that window,’ she went on, sniffing happily. ‘Let’s drive in there.’

  Aunt Hortensia had her faults but she certainly knew how to handle her horses. Skilfully she turned, and the coach drove past the stripy, stinking snakes hanging on the sill and in through the window.

  Only they weren’t stinking snakes. They were the football socks of a boy called Maurice Crawler who had extremely smelly feet. And what the ghosts had done was to drive straight into the boys’ dormitory of Norton Castle School.

  Four

  Rick was usually the first person in the dormitory to wake. This morning he woke up particularly early because he had been thinking very hard the night before and the thinking had got into his sleep.

  He was a serious boy with a thin face, big dark eyes and ears which stuck out because when he was a baby his mother had liked him too much to stick them down with sellotape as the doctor had told her to.

  What Rick was thinking about was the world. The world, it seemed to Rick, was in a bad way. In the Antarctic, the penguins were all stuck up with oil and couldn’t even waddle. Blue whales were practically extinct, no one had seen a square-lipped rhinoceros for ages and a tribe of cannibals in the Amazon jungle which Rick had hoped to visit when he grew up had been moved to a housing estate in Rio de Janeiro. It seemed to Rick that by the time he was grown up, all the interesting animals and plants and people would have gone and there’d be nothing left but huge blocks of flats and boring shops and motorways. The whole thing annoyed him.

  He looked round the dormitory. Norton Castle had been built about a hundred years ago by a rich toffee manufacturer called Albert Borringer. Mr Borringer was one of those people who couldn’t see an animal without wanting to shoot it and stuff it and stick it on the wall, and when he died and the castle became a school, the stuffed animals stayed. In the bed opposite Rick’s, under a huge wildebeeste with mild, glass eyes, Maurice Crawler was snoring. What with his dimpled knees, hot feet and piggy eyes the colour of baked beans, Maurice was not really a great joy to anyone. On the other hand if it wasn’t for Maurice there wouldn’t have been a school because his parents were the headmaster and headmistress. They had started the school for Maurice because he hadn’t settled in the school they sent him to. He hadn’t settled in five schools they’d sent him to and no wonder. Maurice was a bully and a liar and a cheat.

  Rick sighed. In the bed next to him, a new boy called Peter Thorne moaned in his sleep. He was still terribly homesick. Rick was sorry for him but he would have liked an ally. Someone to help him get things done.

  Suddenly he leant fo
rward. What was that funny pink, cobwebby thing hanging on the end of his bed. He put out a hand to touch it. To his amazement, his hand went right through and hit the end of the bed. And yet he could see something there. And then:

  ‘No!’ said Rick under his breath. ‘I don’t believe it. I simply don’t believe it!’

  Before putting him to bed, the Hag had ordered Humphrey most particularly not to become visible until she told him to. But of course if someone tickles your elbow when you are fast asleep you don’t always think what you are doing, and the next second, rubbing his eyes and yawning, Humphrey had become as visible as daylight.

  ‘What don’t you believe?’ said Humphrey sleepily.

  ‘But you can’t be. It’s impossible. You can’t be a ghost.’

  Humphrey was not a touchy person but this annoyed him. ‘What do you mean I can’t be a ghost? I am a ghost. I’m Humphrey. The Horrible.’

  Rick just couldn’t believe his eyes. Yet there it was, sitting on the bed, transparent as air, with a ball and chain on its left ankle, rubbing its eye sockets with skeletal fingers.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked Humphrey. ‘I suppose you’re a human. A boy?’

  ‘Sure. I’m Rick.’

  ‘Just Rick? Not Rick the Revolting or Rick the Repulsive or anything like that?’

  ‘No. Just Rick Henderson. Rick’s short for Richard. Come to that you’re not so very horrible, are you? I don’t mean to be personal.’

  ‘I will be later,’ said Humphrey confidently. ‘I’m growing into it. My mother and father are horrible,’ he went on proudly. ‘So are my brother and sister. And my Aunt Hortensia is really disgusting.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Rick. He still hadn’t got over the fact that a real live – well, a real dead ghost – was sitting on his bed. ‘Are they here too?’

  ‘Oh yes, they’re all here. We came last night.’

  And he began to tell Rick the story of their adventures, beginning with the man who’d put central heating into Night Abbey, going on to the people who’d turned Craggyford into a holiday camp and ending with the poor Shuk who’d been found trying to haunt a coal mine. And as Rick listened he got angrier and angrier. Not just penguins and whales and cannibals were being driven out and made homeless or extinct but ghosts as well.