The Haunting of Hiram Read online

  ‘We will stay till the night of the Opening Ball,’ decided Krok. ‘Then at the stroke of midnight we will glide away westwards across the prairie and perhaps the Shades of Doom and Darkness will

  grant us peace and a new home.’

  But what was to be done about the Hand?

  They had asked him to the meeting and he had listened most carefully, climbing up and down to lip-read and not complaining though so much exercise made him tired.

  Now Uncle Louse said: ‘What about it, friend? Why don’t you come with us? There’s plenty of room in my chair for both you and Flossie.’

  The others all joined in, begging the Hand to leave the dark and lonely mine and come with them. You could see how tempted he was: sweat broke out on his palm just thinking about it. But then he picked up the pencil they had taken from the office, and the paper, and now as he wrote the letters were not smooth and perfectly rounded, but quavery and untidy because he was telling them his most deep and personal thoughts.

  ‘I have already told you how happy I was joined to Arthur Brett, who was a scholar and a gentleman and never spoke a cross word to me in the thirty eight years we were together. You also know that I feel I must avenge his murder by the vile Erik Erikson, though I must say I do not see how to do this just at present. But there is something I have not told you.’ Here the Hand paused and the ghosts were afraid that after all he did not wish to share his secret. But he picked up the pencil again and wrote, ‘And it is this… There are certain kinds of hand which are not only severed and ghastly but also magical. When such a hand spreads its fingers, every single living thing is frozen into immobility – which means it stops dead still and cannot move or breathe or speak until the Hand allows it. A hand like this is called a Hand of Glory and to become glorious in this way is what I want more than anything in the world. Every day in the quiet and darkness of the mine I practise and practise, but the exercises are difficult and I do not think they could be done in the open prairie among Native American ghosts who lead such different lives.’

  After this, the ghosts did not try to persuade him any more. When someone has work to do he must be allowed to get on and do it. All the same, they felt very sad. Considering how little there was of him, it was extraordinary how important the Hand had become to them.

  On 10 December the flagpole was hammered into place on the gatehouse tower and the castle was complete.

  It looked magnificent. Mr Hopgood had asked Alex if he might fly the MacBuff standard with a golden eagle on a background of red and black, and Alex had said of course. All the furniture which had come over on the Queen Anne had been polished and mended, and Mr Hopgood had bought other antiques, like pictures of stags fighting each other and wall hangings of St Sebastian being stuck full of arrows, which he thought would fit in well.

  Searly and Rowlock had kept their promise. Delivery vans had arrived with crates full of spiders and cockroaches and bats, and men had put up ladders and painted the walls with bird-droppings and slime.

  ‘Doesn’t it look fantastic!’ said Helen, quite overcome, as she and Alex followed Mr Hopgood through the rooms. ‘If only you could stay and live here too!’

  But Alex couldn’t and she understood this really. He was staying for the ball and he was going to spend their first Christmas with them in the castle, but after that he had to go home. Aunt Geraldine was alone in Torquay and he had promised to go and see the New Year in with her. And, of course, there was school. But what really drew him back was his homesickness for the ghosts. Not getting a reply from Dunloon had shaken Alex badly.

  Two days before the ball, the caterers came, and the ladies to arrange the flowers, and the security people to guard the treasures and make sure that no one got in without an invitation.

  And lastly, marching down Main Street in a swirl of kilts, came the Errenrig Pipe Band, which Mr Hopgood had flown out specially from Scotland.

  It was going to be the most splendid, the most exciting ball there had ever been.

  Seventeen

  Down in the darkness of the mine, the Hand was trying to become glorious.

  He had done his exercises, making his blue glow stronger and then weaker so as to give a sinister flickering effect, and spreading his fingers as if to say ‘STOP’. But he was feeling unwell. Something wasn’t right. There were clanking noises where for years there had been silence, broken only by the drip, drip of the water running down the rock face, or the plop of a loose pebble falling two hundred metres into the murky black pool which had been formed by flood water at the bottom of one of the shafts.

  ‘Every day and in every way I am getting gloriouser and gloriouser,’ wrote the Hand with an old piece of stick on the loose gravel. He wrote this ten times a day in the hope that soon he really would become a Hand of Glory, but today his fingers trembled so much that there was no point in going on.

  It’s because the ghosts are going away, I expect, thought the Hand. That’s why I’m so upset.

  Clank! There it was again! He spread himself flat on the ground so as to let the noise pass through his bones and skin.

  There was no doubt about it. The sound came from the ancient, rusty trolleys. Someone had set them going again. Perhaps even now the actual trolley that had killed Arthur Brett was rolling towards him!

  I mustn’t be like this, thought the Hand as it shivered and shook. I must pull myself together or I’ll never be a Hand of Glory.

  Should he go and investigate? It meant going through the wide place where the three tunnels met: his own, the one from the field where they’d built the castle, and the dreadful tunnel that led down to the bottomless pool. He was never happy in that part of the mine – if he lost his way and fell into the water there was no hope for him.

  The Hand’s blue glow got fainter and fainter as he decided what to do. He could feel footsteps, too

  –slow, heavy ones. Whoever was thumping about must be a huge hulk of a man.

  I could go and tell the ghosts in the cinema, he thought. A trouble shared is a trouble halved, Arthur always said. But they were leaving the next day, it seemed wrong to go and upset them now. And the ghosts looked up to me, thought the poor Hand. What would they say if they could see me shaking like a leaf?

  But now, suddenly, the Hand felt a new shock, a shock so dreadful that he tottered backwards and all but fell. Every blood vessel in every finger throbbed and pounded with fear; even his chilblain tingled with terror.

  Something new and different had entered the mine. A second set of footsteps – and with them a presence so evil and appalling that the Hand did not think he could survive it.

  What can it be? thought the Hand, feeling himself choked by vileness. The wickedness seemed to stretch back into the past … to a time when he had not been severed, but led a carefree life playing the piano and scratching Arthur Brett behind the ear. Yes, what he felt now belonged to that unspeakable moment when the trolley had passed over Arthur’s wrist and Erik Erikson had done the foulest, the most evil deed known to man – murder – and gone unpunished.

  Erikson … that was what it was! The smell, the feel, the awfulness of Erik Erikson was everywhere. He could reach out and touch it.

  Erikson, or his ghost, must be here down below … quite close to him and coming closer! Erikson returned to visit the scene of his crime!

  The Hand seized a piece of stick to scrawl a message of despair, but it clattered from his fingers. Then his knuckles gave way and he fell to the ground.

  Overcome by the horror of it all, the Hand had fainted.

  The great day had arrived and the people of Granite Falls were getting ready for the ball.

  Mrs Franklyn, the mayor’s wife, fastened a dozen tartan ribbons into the curls of her conceited little daughter, Lilianne, who smirked and prinked in front of the mirror.

  ‘I’ll be the prettiest girl there, won’t I, Ma?’ said Lilianne, smiling to show her dimples.

  ‘Of course, honey. But you must remember to be nice to poor
Helen. Not everyone is as fortunate as you.’

  Mr O’Leary, who ran the bowling alley, lowered his foot into his evening shoe and yowled with pain because his wife had smashed his big toe when she was teaching him to dance an Eightsome Reel.

  And everywhere there appeared – knees! Knees that hadn’t been seen for years; knobbly ones and fat ones, warty ones and dimpled ones, as the citizens of Granite Falls put on their kilts.

  Adolfa Batters, too, was getting ready for the ball. She had sprayed a scent called Purple Heather into her unpleasant armpits and now put on a ruffled tartan dress which made her look like a Highland Ham in a butcher’s shop. Then she fished the locket with the swastika on it out from under her vest and arranged it on her scraggy chest because she didn’t want Hitler’s curl to miss what was going on.

  ‘I look like my great-great-grandfather in the painting,’ she said, gazing at herself smugly. Mr Erik Erikson had led an interesting life with a lot of foreign travel before he settled in London. No one knew why he had changed his name to Batters, but Adolfa had always admired his picture in the dining room and thought he was just the sort of person to have done well in CREEP.

  When she had finished dressing, she picked up an electric torch and went to the window.

  A few minutes later, Oscar the Hulk appeared in the doorway. He wore a black hair piece to cover his scar, and a black moustache, and looked even nastier than usual. There was an armband saying Security round his arm, and a badge in his lapel, and he wore a holster.

  Adolfa nodded. It had been worth paying the Bulgoni Brothers to get him false papers and set him up as a security guard. The Hulk had been taken on to watch over Mr Hopgood’s treasures; he’d be able to get in and out of the castle with no questions asked.

  ‘And the car?’ she asked sharply.

  Oscar nodded in the direction of the car park where a red Ferrari waited. It had a special number plate and the words Securicars Inc. were painted on the sides. The Bulgonis were expensive, but they did their stuff.

  ‘Now go through your instructions,’ ordered Adolfa.

  ‘I’m to wait till you’ve pushed the kid through the tunnel and Ratt’s grabbed her. Then I’m to take the bits of clothes of hers you give me and drop them in the copse behind the Three Star Ranch for the police to find. Exactly at nine a.m. I’m to go to the phone box on the crossroads and phone the ransom demand. Then—’

  ‘All right; that’ll do. And Ratty?’

  Oscar grinned. ‘He’s waiting to go down through the cinema, but he’s feeling sore. Says he’ll get chilblains. He’s put on a pair of woollen underpants and got himself some cough drops.’

  It was true. Ratty was feeling very sorry for himself. Oscar had all the fun, dressing up as a detective and laying false trails in flashy cars while he had to stay down in the cold and the dark. But one day he’d show them, thought the little crook as he shuffled forward in the queue for Raiders of the Glen. The way his body-building exercises were going, he’d soon be as strong as any of them – and then they’d best watch out!

  ‘Do I look all right?’ asked Helen, turning from the mirror in her room in Green Meadows.

  ‘You look fine,’ said Alex. ‘Don’t fuss.’

  Helen wore a simple white dress such as girls used to wear to Highland Balls, and matching satin slippers, and her dark hair was loose and held back by a wreath of white rosebuds. Though Nurse Boniface and the servants had nagged at her, she had refused to wear a tartan sash or anything tartan at all. ‘I’m not Scottish,’ Helen had said, ‘and it wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘You look absolutely splendid,’ she said now to Alex, who turned away and told her not to be daft.

  But Helen was quite right. Alex didn’t care for dressing up, but you can’t be a MacBuff of Carra and not know how it is done. The black velvet jacket and the dress kilt had belonged to his father when he was a boy, and the eagle’s head brooch which fastened his plaid was of beaten silver and was five hundred years old.

  ‘Our last night at Green Meadows,’ said Helen. They were coming back to sleep because the security arrangements were not quite complete at the castle and then, tomorrow, they would move in properly. And a week after that, Alex is leaving, thought Helen, her stomach crunching up in a most disagreeable way.

  But it was silly to think of that, and ungrateful, when there was so much to be thankful for. Silly, too, to wish she could dance like other girls. She knew all the dances: The Gay Gordons, The Dashing White Sergeant, but what was the use of that?

  For a moment, Helen’s old sadness came flooding back. It was going to be hard standing by the wall and watching Lilianne, with her dimples and her ringlets, swirling round the room to all those rousing tunes. Very hard.

  ‘Time to go!’ said Mr Hopgood, coming into the room. And then: ‘My word, what a handsome couple!’

  Then he put Helen’s wrap round her shoulder and they left for the ball.

  Eighteen

  It was the ghosts’ last night in the cinema. They had meant to glide away at midnight, but when they discovered that there was to be an all-night showing of Scottish films they decided to stay till morning. Raiders of the Glen began at eleven o’clock, but before that they were going to say goodbye to Carra.

  Just before they were due to leave, Flossie gave a little shriek and pounced on something that had been hidden under one of the seats. Then she picked up her treasure and snapped it open and snapped it shut. Next she threw it up in the air, making it loop the loop the way poltergeists do. Her green eyes shone and she giggled happily. But Uncle Louse, leaning forward in his wheel chair, had turned deathly pale and his head shook on his withered neck.

  ‘Teeth!’ he murmured hungrily. ‘Teeth!’

  It was true. What Flossie had found was a perfectly good set of false teeth. How anyone could leave them in a cinema was hard to understand, but people did sometimes take their snappers out when they wanted to be comfortable.

  ‘Flossie, bring them here,’ ordered Miss Spinks.

  But Flossie was too pleased with her new toy to part with it at once. She sent the teeth flying up to the balcony, she made them clack up and down in mid-air and do somersaults. But at last she came over to Uncle Louse and laid them in his lap.

  The next moments were among the most exciting that the ghosts could remember. Uncle Louse picked up the teeth with a shaking hand, and slowly – very slowly – put them in his mouth.

  They fitted. Not perfectly, but not badly either. There is always some looseness with new teeth.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t have believed it,’ he murmured, and there were tears in his eyes. ‘It’s a miracle, that’s what it is.’ He snapped the dentures shut, ground them together, made chomping noises. ‘I’m myself again now; you’ll see!’

  The old vampire was so happy that Krok decided not to worry about whether the teeth would learn to vanish when Uncle Louse did. After all, out on the prairie these things probably didn’t matter as much as all that.

  None of them guessed how soon Uncle Louse’s new-found teeth would be brought into use – and in a most unexpected and rather dreadful way!

  Inside the castle, Alex stood beside Mr Hopgood and Helen, welcoming the guests, and as they passed him, the people of Granite Falls pressed Alex’s hand and said how proud they were to meet a real Scottish Laird and what an honour he was doing to their city.

  But it was Helen who surprised the guests. Most of them hadn’t seen her since she’d had polio and they’d heard how delicate she was, that she could hardly walk, that it wasn’t even certain that she was going to live till she was grown-up. And what they saw was a bright-faced girl, flushed and pretty, a source of pride to any father.

  After they had been welcomed, the guests were given delicious things to eat and drink. Then, punctually at ten o’clock, the band marched into the hall; the first rousing notes of The Gay Gordons rang out…

  And everybody looked at Alex!

  A Highland Ball has to be started by the Laird, who cho
oses one girl to go forward on to the floor, and then all the other couples join in and the dancing begins.

  Who would Alex choose to open this most important ball? The mayor’s wife? Or the lady senator who had flown in specially from Washington and was already slipping off her shawl?

  Helen didn’t wonder; she knew. He would ask Lilianne who was cute and had won prizes for ballet and tap. Lilianne had come to tea sometimes and said things like: ‘Oh, you poor thing, it must be awful being lame!’

  She bit her lip and stared down at the floor so as not to see Lillianne smirk and toss her curls with their dozens of tartan ribbons when Alex led her out.

  ‘Come on!’

  Alex had never thought about anything so obvious as who he would open the ball with. Now he stood in front of Helen and feeling that perhaps he’d been a bit rude, he grinned and said: ‘I mean, will you do me the honour of this dance?’

  Helen flushed and shook her head. Then she whispered: ‘I can’t, Alex; you know I can’t.’

  ‘Look, the steps are easy. Just watch me, I’ll push you round.’

  ‘It isn’t that. I know the steps. It’s my—’

  ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake, not that stuff again.’ Taking no notice of the people watching, he pulled Helen out on to the floor. ‘If you can ride and swim, you can dance. Or do you suppose I’m going to ask that poisonous-looking kid over there all done up in tartan ribbons like a box of shortbread?’

  Then Helen smiled. She forgot her long years of being ill and different from other children. She forgot her fears and her father, half rising from his chair to try and stop her.