The Haunting of Hiram Read online

  ‘What on earth are you doing, you ridiculous spook,’ screeched the Red Lady, swooping in to interfere as usual.

  ‘I’m trying to drown myself,’ said Miss Spinks miserably. ‘I always try to drown myself.’

  ‘She has the Water Madness,’ explained Krok, helping her out of the bath.

  ‘Because of my crime,’ said Miss Spinks, dripping helplessly on to the floor.

  But the Ladies didn’t want to know about the Water Madness or the guilt Miss Spinks felt about having sent Rory MacBuff to his death. They didn’t want to hear about the moment when Uncle Louse’s teeth had crunched sickeningly beneath the wheels of his chair. They didn’t even want to hear about the curse that had been laid on Krok Fullbelly – though it was an interesting curse and important.

  ‘You will want to know about my curse,’ Krok had said the first night at dinner – and he had gone on to explain that Viking heroes when they die go to a special heaven called Valhalla, where they eat hog meat and drink barley wine and tell each other stories. But when he, Krok, had been thrown off Carra Rock because he wouldn’t go on pillaging and burning and dragging women about by the hair, the priests had cursed him for being a coward, and said he was doomed to go on roaming the earth as an unquiet spirit till he had caused someone’s death.

  ‘It’s to do with honour,’ Krok had explained to the Ladies. ‘I have to spill blood and then I can stop being a ghost and become a hero. Though I shall still be dead, of course…’

  Alex had liked nothing better than to hear about Krok’s curse, and they had often discussed how Krok might kill someone and so get up to Valhalla and eat hogs. But the ghosts of Dunloon just yawned and said, ‘Oh, yes?’ They were lousy listeners though they droned on often enough about what had happened to them. The Red Lady had smothered her husband with a pillow because he snored; the Green Lady had got shut in a closet when deciding which of her ninety-seven dresses to wear and been suffocated, and Hal had fallen into a ditch when drunk – as though anybody cared.

  But worst of all was the way the Dunloon ghosts treated Cyril.

  ‘Is he house-trained?’ was the first thing the Ladies had asked when the poor dog, half dead with exhaustion, had touched down on their roof. Hal, whenever the hellhound passed him, would wrinkle up his nose and start brushing imaginary hairs off his velvet pants. Cyril knew, of course, and he became, as dogs do when they are not loved, rather puppy-like. Before he could get too downhearted, however, someone left the top off a glass case in the Gold Salon and Cyril found the bedsock which had belonged to Charles the First.

  Cyril became very fond of this bedsock. Probably it still smelled a little of the sad king’s feet. He took it everywhere. But of course when people came, Cyril vanished and the bedsock didn’t – and the maids, seeing a free-floating sock about a foot above the ground, screamed even more.

  ‘Do you realize this is a royal bedsock!’ said the Red Lady furiously. ‘And look at it now!’

  So Cyril’s treasure was taken from him, and as the days passed he became sadder and sadder. His stomach sagged ever more until a bald patch developed in its middle from rubbing so hard against the ground.

  ‘We must be brave,’ said Krok. ‘We must put up with it for Alex.’

  Miss Spinks nodded her wet head. ‘It can’t be easy for him, either.’

  Miss Spinks was right. It was not easy for Alex. He had taken his Aunt Geraldine to Torquay and settled her into the Queen’s Hotel, which she liked very much. There was a Palm Court Orchestra which played waltzes at tea time; delicious cream cakes arrived on trolleys, and the lounges were full of friendly ladies knitting and playing cards. Her room faced the sea; she had her own bathroom with a rose pink bath and a matching wash basin, and the television set was the kind you could turn on and off from the bed.

  All the same, when it came to saying goodbye to Alex, Aunt Geraldine who, after all, had lived with him since he was six months old, became rather weepy and Alex, instead of going back north, decided to stay with her for a while. There were several weeks to go before the autumn term, and to tell the truth he was glad to be away from Carra. He knew he’d done the right thing selling it to Mr Hopgood, and he hoped that he and Helen would be very happy there, but it is not easy to think of strangers living in your home.

  Torquay was very pretty, but the things that pleased Aunt Geraldine were not very much use to Alex, who didn’t really like cream cakes or Viennese waltzes or rose pink bathroom suites. Everyone in the hotel seemed to be old and Alex missed the clean, cold air of the North and his room in the West Tower.

  But most of all, Alex missed his ghosts. He had known it would be difficult to live without them, but it was far worse than he had imagined.

  When you are thinking of people, you seem to see them everywhere. Alex would pass an aged person being wheeled along in a Bath chair and turn round with a thudding heart, only to find himself staring into the baleful eyes of some old man with a perfectly good set of teeth. A little girl queuing for an ice cream would make him duck as he waited for her to send the whole pile of cornets flying across the beach, but the insipid child just stood there. Again and again, he found himself saying: ‘I’ll ask Krok about that,’ –and then remember that the Viking was hundreds of miles away. As for the ‘phantom drainpipe’, Alex could scarcely bring himself to pat the ordinary, solid dogs that romped on the sands, he missed him so much.

  Still, he was determined to make the best of things. He made friends with the son of the head waiter and together they went to the bowling alley and the skating rink and fished off the pier. Then, a week before he was due back at school, a letter came, forwarded by the headmaster from Errenrig. It was from Mr Hopgood and when Alex read it his jaw quite literally dropped open. He read it once more, and then a third time, to see if it really said what he thought it said, and then he went to find Aunt Geraldine.

  The following day he was on the train, bound once more for Scotland.

  Four

  Time dragged for the ghosts at Dunloon. Every day there was a new snub, a new piece of unpleasantness. Sometimes it was a complaint about the duckweed Miss Spinks brought in; once there was a row because Flossie had got annoyed with a footman and bitten him in the leg – as though any little girl, let alone a poltergeist, could stand the sight of a grown man in satin pants handing round veal chops in a pair of gloves!

  It seemed as though the visitors could do nothing right. After the trouble over Sir Ian Trottle’s bath, Miss Spinks took to drowning herself in the fountain on the terrace, but the water was so shallow that she could only do it by standing on her head. And here too there was a fuss because Dunloon was open to the public and a lady from Huddersfield in a Crimplene trouser suit, seeing these webbed feet sticking in the air, and a pair of upside-down ghostly grey knickers, fainted clean away.

  ‘It’s being unwanted everywhere,’ said Uncle Louse. ‘That is what hurts. Unwanted here, unwanted at home.’

  They were quite ill with homesickness, the poor Carra ghosts, and after dinner when the Ladies and Hal had gone off to tweak at their hair and dab ointments into their ectoplasm, they played the ‘Do you remember?’ game.

  ‘Do you remember those picnics down in the dungeons?’ Krok would ask. ‘That intelligent rat that shared with us … What a natural life we led. How healthy!’

  ‘And the sea!’ said Miss Spinks whose Water Madness was getting worse and worse. ‘I do so miss the sea.’

  But they had promised Alex to stay at Dunloon and so they would have done. What changed their lives was something rather odd: a dead ferret.

  The ferret had died of old age and lay in an open drain beside the kitchen garden. There Cyril found it.

  Cyril had not sulked when they took away his bedsock, but he had suffered. The ferret, however, cheered him up at once. He really liked it; he thought it might be his younger brother or perhaps his puppy and he picked it up in his mouth and carried it everywhere. Sometimes he shook it a little and sometimes, when it got a
bit limp and squashed-looking, he put it down and licked it into shape, but always and in every way the ferret was his friend.

  One day, however, he carried it into the drawing room and put it to bed on the sofa and Sir Ian Trottle came and sat on it in his best trousers just before he was going out to dinner with the Duke of Mortimer, a man so important that he often had the Queen to stay.

  This time the Ladies were quite beside themselves with fury.

  ‘Do you realize, it might have been the Duke himself who sat on a dead ferret?’ screeched the Green Lady.

  The ghosts of Carra didn’t see that it made any difference who sat on a ferret; a duke or a plumber or a dustman; they were not snobbish in the least. But the Red Lady now pointed to Cyril with a shaking hand and said: ‘Out! Out of this house, you filthy animal, and don’t ever set foot in it again! From now on you’ll sleep in the cowshed. Even a kennel’s too good for you.’

  ‘Yes, out to the cowshed!’ screamed the Green Lady, and Hal kicked out at Cyril with his buckled shoe.

  It is possible that Cyril had never been more hurt than he was at that moment. Even being cast out of hell had not upset him more. Had he been angry, he might have savaged Hal and the Ladies and burnt them with his fiery tongue, but what he felt was deeper than anger. And that night the dog that had helped Cerberus to guard the gates of Hell and raced through the star-spangled sky with the Wild Hunt lay in the straw among cows.

  Cows are, of course, very useful animals. But to Cyril these large, dozy beasts, standing in rows while bags of milk hung from their underneaths, were a horrid sight. The way they let people pull at their udders, their silly eyes, and all that mooing….

  For one hour, and two, and three, Cyril lay with his head between his paws, enduring his shame. Then he got up, shook himself and padded slowly out into the yard. The night was clear, the moon rising. Carefully, Cyril sniffed the wind. Then he threw back his head and howled – a sound so mournful that it sent the night creatures scuttling away in alarm.

  There was only one thing left to do – and Cyril did it.

  It was Flossie who found out that the hellhound was missing and she woke Krok by sitting on his chest and pounding him with her fists.

  ‘Cyril’s gone,’ said the poltergeist. ‘And Flossie wants him. She wants him now.’

  Krok yawned and scratched his beard. ‘He’s in the cowshed. In banishment.’

  ‘No, he’s not.’ Flossie’s lip began to tremble. ‘He isn’t not anywhere.’

  So Krok woke the others and they all went to look, Flossie was right; there was no sign of the hellhound, but on the soft mud of the farmyard there were unmistakable tracks which pointed to the north, then stopped abruptly where the dog had become airborne.

  They all understood then. Cyril had fled to the place where he had been happy. He had gone home.

  ‘Oh, what shall we do?’ cried Miss Spinks. ‘Alex will never forgive us if anything happens to the poor dear creature.’

  ‘And yet we promised to stay away from Carra; we gave our word.’ The Viking was very troubled, for nothing is more binding than a Viking oath.

  ‘There’s a chance we might overtake him,’ said Uncle Louse. ‘The tracks look fairly fresh. If we can bring him back there’s no harm done.’

  Ten minutes later, having stopped only to collect a few of their things, the ghosts were in the sky, calling and searching, searching and calling.

  It was no use. No drainpipe-shaped creature was hidden among the flocks of travelling geese; no barks came from behind the fleecy clouds … and by evening they had reached the estuary that ran inland from Carra Point.

  Perhaps it was wrong, but the ghosts now forgot their promise to Alex; they forgot that Helen Hopgood might see them and be frightened – they forgot everything except that at any moment they would once more see beloved Carra with its slime-covered towers, its crazy battlements, the flagpole like a black pencil against the sky!

  ‘Let’s close our eyes,’ said Miss Spinks, beating her webbed feet together girlishly. ‘Then when I say ‘‘ Now’’ we can open them, and then there it will be!’

  ‘I will say ‘‘ Now’’,’ said Krok Fullbelly, taking charge.

  So they closed their eyes and glided the last few miles across the estuary.

  ‘Now!’ commanded Krok.

  The ghosts opened their eyes. Then a great, full bellied cry of horror came from the Viking; Flossie tumbled from Uncle Louse’s lap – and all of them stopped dead in mid-air.

  The castle had gone. Quite simply vanished. The wave-lashed towers were gone. The barbican and the drawbridge and the gatehouse were gone.

  Where Carra had stood, proud against the northern sky, there was now only gaping emptiness.

  The ghosts never knew how long they hung there, rooted to the sky. Miss Spink’s ectoplasm turned a sickening green and if Krok hadn’t caught hold of her hair she would have drifted downwards in a faint.

  ‘Oh, ruin! Oh, darkness and betrayal! Oh, disaster and despair!’ Uncle Louse’s ear-trumpet trembled in his hand and little Flossie whimpered and reached for her bone.

  ‘Is it a curse?’ wondered Krok. ‘Have Thor and Odin come to smite our home?’

  ‘Or a storm?’ suggested the vampire.

  Still supporting the swaying governess, they floated slowly to the ground. No storm could have done what had been done to Carra and if it was a curse it was a very strange one. Every stick and stone of what had once been Carra had vanished, but the bare ground was clear of rubble and the foundations stood out plainly: the underground passages, the place where the well had been.

  ‘The nasty man’s stolen the castle,’ said Flossie. ‘Flossie’s going to bite him in the stomach; Flossie’s going to kick him in—’

  ‘Hush,’ said Krok. ‘It’s his castle now. There can be no talk of stealing.’

  But if it was Mr Hopgood’s doing, why had he done it? Why had he destroyed something for which he had paid so much?

  It was then that they heard high, excited barking coming from the landward side of the castle. Cyril, at least, was found! The ghosts glided quickly across the moat – and saw a most extraordinary sight!

  Parked on the narrow roadway that led to Errenrig was a fleet of lorries – close on twenty of them – standing nose to tail facing away from Carra. The lorries were open and each one was piled high with stones of all kinds: round ones, square ones, carved ones – and on each stone was a squiggly mark in yellow paint.

  ‘It’s the castle! It’s the castle on the lorries!’ squeaked the poltergeist excitedly.

  ‘The child speaks truly,’ said Krok. ‘Look, there are the pillars from the banqueting hall; I know them well.’

  ‘And that slab with the poor dear snail in it,’ said Miss Spinks, pointing with a shaking finger. ‘That’s from the armoury.’

  Another volley of barks led them to the first of the lorries where the hellhound was crouched, digging with his little forefeet as though his life depended on it. Though he was overjoyed to see them, Cyril only had time to clout them a few times with his wagging tail before he turned back to his explorations. And no wonder! For this lorry didn’t just contain stones. It was full of things they knew well; the old chest, the suit of armour, the rusty thumbscrews…. It was their own East Tower that was piled up here.

  ‘Oh, what can it all mean?’ wailed Miss Spinks. ‘It’s all so strange!’ And suddenly her knees gave way and she collapsed on a carved door, her webbed feet pointing at the sky.

  ‘We must rest,’ said Krok Fullbelly firmly. ‘What it means will be shown in the devil’s own time, but now we can do no more.’

  Even he, who could lift an ox when he was alive, was tired, and Uncle Louse was quite blue with shock and strain. So they made themselves as comfortable as they could on the lorry. Flossie curled up beside Cyril, and one by one they closed their eyes.

  Ghosts who have suffered sleep like the dead. So slept the ghosts of Carra now, becoming invisible as spirits do in slumber
– nor did they wake when the men came in the morning and drove the lorries across the country to Liverpool where the world’s biggest ship, the Queen Anne, lay waiting at anchor, ready for her journey across the sea.

  Five

  Mr Hopgood was not mad, nor was he a thief. He was just a man who liked Scottish castles, but did not like the Scottish winter. Also, he couldn’t spend a lot of time in Scotland because he needed to look after his oil wells and his factories and his department stores.

  So he decided to buy a Scottish castle, have it pulled down very carefully, and rebuild it in America where he lived.

  He had not told his daughter Helen what he was going to do because he wanted it to be a surprise. And he didn’t tell Alex beforehand because he thought it might be rather a shock for the boy. But when the workmen had finished at Carra, he wrote Alex a letter and this is what it said:

  ‘Dear Alex,

  As you may have heard by now, I have finished pulling down Carra Castle and am arranging to have it shipped back to the States in the Queen Anne, sailing from Liverpool on September third.

  It’s been on my mind to ask if you’d like to come and watch over the rebuilding of the castle in my home town of Granite Falls in Texas?

  I’ve found a really nice spot for it not too far from my present home and I reckon you could be most useful in making sure that everything is put back exactly as it was. I plan to have the job finished in a couple of months and then I’m going to give a Scottish Ball to celebrate. If you could stay over for that it would be an honour: to have a proper MacBuff present at such an occasion would give the best possible send-off to the place.

  Of course, I’d expect you to be my guest during the rebuilding and I’ll pay your fare across the Atlantic because I know you’ve put the money I paid you in trust for when you’re grown-up. There’s a direct plane from Heathrow to Houston and you’d be collected there and driven to my place.