The Haunting of Hiram Read online

  I’m off back home next week so let my secretary in London know what you prefer. I’m sure that you and Helen will get along splendidly.

  With best wishes,

  Yours sincerely,

  Hiram C. Hopgood’

  This was the letter Alex had been reading in Torquay. Now he stood in the headmaster’s study at Errenrig, waiting to hear if Mr Donaldson would let him miss the autumn term at school.

  It was a difficult decision for a head teacher to make. School is school and lessons are important. The Head had read Mr Hopgood’s letter and now stood looking out of the window and thinking hard.

  ‘It’s a chance, Alex – a real chance,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve never been to America myself, let alone Texas. The Lone Star State, they call it…. Of course you’d have to work like a demon when you got back, but you’re well ahead in most of your studies. Yes, if the trustees in Edinburgh agree, you can go.’

  The trustees did agree. They had heard of Mr Hopgood and knew that Alex would be safe with him. So Alex wrote at once to Mr Hopgood’s secretary, and she booked him on to a plane from Edinburgh to London and on to a jumbo jet from London to Houston. She also rang the airport staff and asked them to look out for a twelve-year-old boy who was travelling alone and see that he was all right.

  There was only one more thing for Alex to decide: should he go to Dunloon before he left and say goodbye to his ghosts?

  He thought about this a lot, but in the end he decided against it. The headmaster had often told him how unsettled children became when they first went to boarding school and their parents visited too soon. He would go straight away when he got back from America; perhaps they could all spend Christmas together. But the truth was, he himself couldn’t face another parting.

  And three days after the Queen Anne steamed out of harbour, Alex flew out from London, bound for Mr Hopgood’s house in Granite Falls.

  Six

  ‘Come along, dear; you haven’t taken your pills,’ said the nurse to Helen Hopgood.

  She wore a white overall, her voice was brisk and jolly, and she held out a bottle of red pills.

  ‘I’ve had my pills,’ said Helen. ‘I had the green ones after lunch. And I had the blue ones after breakfast.’

  ‘But not the red ones!’ said Nurse, still jolly, but in a steely way. ‘You know your father likes you to have all of them. And then it’s time for your rest.’

  ‘I’m not tired,’ said Helen. ‘Please don’t make me rest again.’

  But there was no getting round Nurse Boniface, who had been engaged to look after Helen since her illness, and who spent her days making Helen take medicine and disinfecting her room and rubbing her legs with an ointment which was supposed to make them strong again, but which smelled absolutely vile.

  Nurse Boniface was a good nurse, and the doctor who came every week to prod and poke Helen’s joints was a good doctor, and the physiotherapist who came to massage her was the very best. Mr Hopgood worried so much about Helen that he had surrounded her with people who were supposed to make her completely well.

  Only Helen wasn’t getting completely well. If you spend all day eating pills and having people take your temperature and telling you to rest you just get iller. Helen was small for her age and pale, and though her limp wasn’t a bad one, it was still there.

  The house that Helen lived in with her father was called Green Meadows. It was long and low like a ranch house and had nine bathrooms, a swimming pool and a small cinema where Helen could watch films. There were buttons everywhere to press and make the air conditioning come on, or beautiful music play – and at night the terrace was lit up by hundreds of different coloured lights.

  But round the garden of Green Meadows there was a high, chain-link fence and the top of the fence was electrified. A guard with two fierce dogs

  –Dobermann pinschers who bit first and asked questions afterwards – patrolled the grounds. The gates were electronically operated and opened only after you had identified yourself to the man who lived in the lodge.

  All this was necessary because Mr Hopgood was a millionaire and had to stop burglars getting in to steal his pictures or kidnappers getting in to snatch his daughter. But Helen did feel very much like the Sleeping Beauty must have felt when the hedge of thorns grew over her house. ‘Except that I’m not beautiful,’ Helen said sadly to herself.

  This was true. Helen was too thin; there were often dark circles under her eyes and her long brown hair seemed too heavy for her head. When Helen smiled, she lit up like a candle and no one cared whether she was beautiful or not, but she did not smile very often. For Helen had come to believe that she would never get well, or be like other children and go to school. And sometimes, lying awake in the dark, she thought that quite soon she was going to die.

  But today her rest passed quickly and she did whatever Nurse Boniface asked her to do, for her father was expected back from Great Britain. He had already phoned and told her that he had the most exciting news!

  Mr Hopgood had flown all night across the Atlantic, but as soon as he arrived in Houston he had himself driven straight to the Hopgood Building in the centre of town.

  The building had eighty-seven storeys and all of them belonged to him. On the first twenty-three were the offices of the people who looked after his oil wells. The next thirty-nine floors housed the people who looked after his department stores and the rest of the building was for the people who managed his factories.

  Mr Hopgood himself had a suite of rooms on the top floor with a rubber plant and a tank of tropical fish and some black sofas. But he had no time to look at the rubber plants or feed the fish or sit on the sofas because as soon as he arrived absolutely everyone wanted to tell him what they had bought and done and sold while he was away.

  All day Mr Hopgood worked at his desk. His secretaries went out to lunch, but Mr Hopgood stayed and had lunch brought in on a tray. It was not a very nice lunch: a bowl of semolina and a glass of milk. The worries of being a millionaire had made his stomach squirt out so much acid that a sore place had developed – an ulcer – and when he ate anything at all rough or interesting he got a pain.

  But at last the day was over and he left the Hopgood Building and was driven to his home in Granite Falls. Mr Hopgood had looked dreadfully tired when he left his office, but now he began to relax, and even to smile – for he was driving towards the person he loved most in the world: his daughter, Helen.

  It was very late when Mr Hopgood got in, but Helen was wide awake, sitting up in her nightdress and waiting.

  ‘Now then,’ said Mr Hopgood when they’d finished hugging each other. ‘Let’s see how good you are at guessing. What do you think I bought over in Britain?’

  Helen guessed and guessed, but she didn’t come anywhere near the truth.

  ‘A castle!’ said Mr Hopgood, beaming. ‘A real, genuine Scottish castle!’

  Helen stared at him and her eyes grew wide. ‘Are we going to live in Scotland, then?’ she asked eagerly, for she had read all about the Battle of Glencoe and Robert the Bruce with his spider and of course Bonnie Prince Charlie hiding in caves.

  Mr Hopgood shook his head. ‘There’s no way I could go and live over there, poppet; my work keeps me here. But I’m having the castle shipped home and we’re going to put it up right here in Granite Falls. Then when it’s all finished, you and I’ll move in and be as happy as sandboys.’

  ‘Perhaps there’ll be a ghost?’ suggested Helen. ‘Ghosts can travel with an old building even if the stones are separate. I’ve read it somewhere.’

  Mr Hopgood had read it too. That was why he had been so firm with Alex.

  ‘No, honey,’ he said. ‘Absolutely no ghosts – I made sure of that. There’ll be nothing to scare my little girl, I promise.’

  Then he told Helen all about finding Carra and how he had bought it from the owner who was an orphan and only twelve years old and Helen listened with wonder and amazement.

  What excited her even more
than hearing about the castle was the news that Alex was coming to stay, and long after her father had said goodnight she lay in bed, wondering what he would be like. Very tall, she thought, with coal black hair and piercing eyes. She saw him in his kilt and sporran, with sunburnt knees, and perhaps the claw of some animal pinned to his beret. He would be riding a horse, of course, and playing the bagpipes, though not at the same time. It was probably difficult to play the bagpipes on a horse.

  How were they going to find a haggis for him to eat? she wondered. She knew what a haggis was: the stomach of a sheep filled with old bits of scrunched-up meat, but however loathsome it sounded they would have to get one. One had to be polite.

  After a while she got out of bed and switched on the light and looked at herself in the mirror. Pale and undersized, a girl with a limp who couldn’t do anything … How dreadfully a boy like that would despise her! Well, there was nothing to be done. Helen went back to bed, but it was a long, long time before she slept.

  Seven

  The Queen Anne left Liverpool on a sunny day in September, bound for New York. She was not only the largest ship in the world, but by far the grandest. There were four huge staterooms with raised platforms on which orchestras could play at night and two dining-rooms as big as railway stations and shops and a library and a gym. The passengers were served with five-course meals by smiling waiters in red coats and there was a whole army of stewards and stewardesses to make people comfortable in their cabins.

  But better than all the grand rooms below was the open deck. It was a clear white world up there: the scrubbed boards, the gleaming paint, the trim lifeboats in their davits. Gentlemen in blazers strode up and down breathing in the wonderful air: tired ladies lay in rows in steamer chairs with rugs over their knees, tilting their faces to the sun.

  At the end of the second day, however, all this changed because the ship ran into a storm.

  It was a bad one – a Force Ten gale which made the ship heave and judder and slap herself down sickeningly on the waves. First the deck emptied of people and then the staterooms down below emptied. Greedy men who had sat peering at the menu turned green and groped their way to their cabins; drinks were left untouched at the bar and a lady who was having her hair done tottered away to her bunk, her rollers still on her head. Soon there wasn’t a passenger to be seen – only the crew, keeping the storm-bucketed ship on course.

  But down in the hold, the ghosts of Carra woke.

  Krok woke first and clutched his belly, which did not feel full of food, but of uproar and pain. He had no idea where he was or what had happened, but he felt iller than he had ever felt in his life. Then the front wheels of Uncle Louse’s chair appeared, followed by the old man himself, clutching his head and groaning.

  ‘It is the Heaving Sickness, the dreaded Plague! We are as good as dead,’ cried Krok, forgetting that he was dead already.

  A swirling ball of force beside them turned into Flossie, her curls bedraggled, the corners of her mouth turned down. ‘Flossie wants a bucket!’ wailed the poltergeist.

  ‘I must go and drown myself!’ Miss Spinks rose from behind a pillar. Her lank hair lay across her face; her teeth chattered. ‘I must drown myself at once!’

  They all wanted to drown themselves. There is nothing like seasickness for making you want to end your life. It was a thousand years since Krok had sailed in his longboat and the juddering and thumping of the great engines were like nothing he had ever known. The worst hit was poor Cyril, whose stomach was so long that when anything went wrong with it he felt it acutely. He now lay moaning on his side with his eyes closed and his long eyelashes tangled and matted on his cheeks.

  Not only did they feel dreadfully ill, but they had no idea where they were. They seemed to be in a kind of vault or tomb, but how had they got there?

  ‘It is Hades! It is the Underworld! I am here because of my curse. It’s because I haven’t killed anyone!’ said Krok.

  This annoyed Uncle Louse. ‘Rubbish! The curse is your curse and we’re all here. What we need is air!’

  So they all floated up out of the black tomb (which was actually a large metal container in the hold of the ship) and up … up … until they reached the deck.

  The wind met them then: screaming, tearing, buffeting. They could scarcely stand, but they knew now where they were: on a ship in the middle of the ocean! But how had they got there? And where were they going?

  ‘Wait … I remember….’ The shock of the storm had begun to clear Krok’s head. ‘We fell asleep on a lorry … on the stones of the castle…. So we must have been loaded on to the ship with them. Only why…?’

  The ghosts, knowing nothing of Mr Hopgood’s plans, could make no sense of this.

  But Miss Spinks wasted no time in remembering. Her eyes glittered with the Madness and before the others could stop her, she had gathered up her skirts and leapt on to the rails.

  ‘I am coming!’ cried Miss Spinks to the Atlantic Ocean – and with an eerie scream, she gave herself to the sea.

  It was a bad moment. When Miss Spinks gave herself to the duckpond or the well they knew she would return – but this heaving, pounding mass of grey went on and on, and when Flossie waved her little hand and said, ‘Bye-bye, Spinkie,’ she spoke for them all.

  None of them would have believed that they could mind so much. The governess had often annoyed them – her wetness, her sadness – but she had belonged. Uncle Louse turned his wheelchair away because he didn’t want Krok to see how upset he was, and the Viking stood clinging to the rails and shaking his great head to and fro. Even their sea sickness seemed unimportant compared with their new sorrow.

  In spite of the storm, the ship was moving at a good fifteen knots so that what happened next was quite extraordinary.

  A long whitish arm … a tentacle … reared out of the water … and another … and another. Arms studded with suckers, and so long that the ghosts did not believe what they were seeing. Then two more of the pale, snake-like arms groped upwards in an exploring way, reaching almost as high as the rails of the ship.

  And still another arm – but this one held something in its coils: a limp and bedraggled object like a large and squidgy dishmop.

  For an instant the creature itself appeared above the waves and they saw its round, jelly-like body and bulging blue-tinged eyes. Then it vanished, but the arm which held the dishmop now reared up again and, with incredible strength, threw its burden on to the deck.

  Then it, too, vanished and there was only the restless, heaving sea.

  The ghosts huddled together, trembling. ‘It was the Blob!’ said Uncle Louse wonderingly. ‘The Big Blob itself! That I should live to see the day!’

  Krok nodded. There was no doubt about it – they had seen the largest sea creature in the world: the giant octopus which men have sought for hundreds of years.

  ‘Why didn’t the Blob come and see Flossie?’ asked the poltergeist angrily, stamping her feet. It was only people that annoyed her and she’d liked the octopus very much.

  But Cyril, who had been sniffing at the thing that the Blob had hurled on to the deck, had begun to bark excitedly, and they glided over to investigate.

  It was not a dishmop. Grey and bedraggled, the governess lay splattered on the deck.

  The Viking, who knew about First Aid, began at once to chafe her wrists. ‘Miss Spinks?’ he said. ‘Speak to us, Miss Spinks.’

  The battered spectre moaned. Her eyes fluttered open. ‘Lettice,’ she said faintly.

  ‘Lettuce?’ Krok had been very upset when she went overboard, but now he was cross again. What did she want a lettuce for? Ghosts can eat, but they don’t have to – and anyway he hated salad: slithery green stuff with nothing you could get your teeth into.

  ‘It … is … my Christian name,’ murmured Miss Spinks, looking deeply into Krok’s eyes.

  The Viking flushed. He had not realized that Miss Spinks was fond of him. But he was made of sterner stuff than Rory MacBuff. He wasn’t goin
g to throw himself out of the window and he certainly wasn’t going to call her by a daft name like Lettice.

  The ghosts spent the rest of the night in one of the lifeboats slung above the deck. When they woke it was to an entirely different day.

  The wind had dropped; the sea was calm; the sun shone. Even as they yawned and stretched, about twenty passengers, many of them fat ladies in very short shorts came through a door and lined up in rows. Then a young man in a track suit came and shouted things at them and all the people bent down and touched their toes and raised their arms, or lay on the ground bicycling in the air with their pink, plump legs.

  It was a Keep Fit class and Uncle Louse absolutely loved it.

  ‘Oh, if only I had my teeth,’ he mumbled, for the vampire in him was not entirely dead, and it was years since he had seen such inviting flesh.

  Meanwhile the sailors had uncovered the swimming pool and a lot more people came running out in rude little bathing costumes that scarcely covered them and leapt into the water, laughing and splashing and throwing coloured balls about. Miss Spinks was dreadfully shocked.

  ‘Why do they behave as though drowning oneself was a joke?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Well you see they aren’t wicked like us,’ explained Krok. ‘They haven’t committed a crime. They didn’t make Rory MacBuff jump out of the window.’

  There was no doubt about it, the passengers on the Queen Anne really enjoyed themselves. The ghosts, gliding about unseen and watching, were quite amazed by shipboard life.

  The way people ate in the dining-room for instance. Valhalla – where Krok would have gone to eat hog meat if he hadn’t been cursed – was nothing to the dining-room of the Queen Anne where the waiters served prawn cocktails followed by grilled sole followed by roast beef and Yorkshire pudding followed by Peach Melba followed by cheese.

  ‘Why don’t the people go ‘‘ pop’’?’ Flossie wanted to know.