The Great Ghost Rescue

Eleven

Rick had been back at school for nearly three weeks. At first the Crawlers had fawned all over him and he could do nothing wrong. But as the days passed and no present arrived from Rick’s rich godmother (who naturally could not send a present because she did not exist) the Crawlers went back to being their own nasty selves.

Nothing seemed to have changed while he was away. The boys still played silly tricks on Matron like putting the school hamster inside her knitting bag or pouring bubble-bath mixture in her tea and everyone went on making the same old jokes about Maurice Crawler’s feet. They should have smelled the Hag’s feet, Rick thought — then they’d have something to talk about.

At night, when the new boy called Peter Thorne who slept beside him, sobbed into his pillow, Rick was much nicer to him than he used to be. He really knew now what it was like to miss people so much that you just ached with wanting to see them. Peter might be homesick but Rick, he realized himself, was ghost sick.

‘You really do miss those ghosts of yours awfully, don’t you?’ said Barbara when she found him sitting gloomily under a beech tree with his arms round his knees, just staring into space.

‘Well, they were so interesting. I mean, compared to this lot.’ He waved his hands at a group of boys dribbling a football and bickering about whether Smith Minor was, or was not, offside. ‘And I can’t help worrying a bit. Supposing seals are too tough for Baby Rose whatever Sucking Susie says. And I don’t honestly think Humphrey is getting any Horribler. What if the new ghosts that come to the sanctuary start teasing him?’

‘Oh, Rick, it’ll be all right. You’ve done a smashing job on them.’

‘I suppose so. I hate things to be over. You know, you have an adventure and then it’s all flat.’

‘How do you know it is over?’ said Barbara. ‘I’ve a feeling it may just be beginning.’

Rick just looked at her and shook his head. He had forgotten that Barbara was an extremely clever girl.

Meanwhile the ghosts settled down very happily at Insleyfarne. The Hag soon had the castle really nice and homelike. Jars of bottled rats’ blood, and addled owl eggs, and maggot jam stood neatly on the larder shelves. She trained ivy over the gaping windows so that it made a sinister noise with its loose, tapping branches and she brought up the old torture instruments from the dungeons and hung them very prettily against the slime-green walls.

While the Hag was making the castle lovely, the Gliding Kilt planted a splendid kitchen garden. There was Henbane and Deadly Nightshade, Skullcap and Stinking Hellebore and a fine crop of turnips to make frightful lanterns out of on Halloween.

Mind you, now that they were peacefully settled in their own place, the ghosts did have time for those little, niggling worries that disappear so completely in times of danger. For example there was, as Rick had foreseen, the business of Humphrey’s Horribleness. Although he was very good and went on repeating ‘Every day I’m getting Horribler and Horribler,’ each morning when he woke up at the bottom of his well, even a newborn baby could see that Humphrey wasn’t, in fact, getting Horribler at all. His eye sockets continued to twinkle, his ectoplasm still looked like fleecy summer clouds, his ball and chain went on sparkling like a Christmas cracker.

Of course the new ghosts which kept arriving at the sanctuary didn’t make things any better. They didn’t mean to be rude but they’d say things like, ‘Well, well!’ or ‘You can never tell how children will turn out these days,’ — and as everybody knows, words like that can wound.

But on the whole, those first days at the sanctuary were wonderfully busy and happy. Baby Rose had taken marvellously to seal’s blood and as she grew bigger she started following Humphrey about which helped him to feel less lonely without Rick. No one saw much of Walter the Wet who spent his time under a pile of treacherous rocks trying to lure sailors to a Salty Death Beneath the Waves which was difficult because absolutely no ships passed that way, but he came up in the evenings sometimes, splashing into the castle and telling them tall stories of what he had done. The Mad Monk felt so much better that he got quite giggly, saying Latin prayers backwards and hiccuping as he floated up and down his chapel, and Aunt Hortensia took up Art and made a collage out of driftwood and seaweed which she said was two werewolves eating each other up.

And of course there were the new ghosts to be settled in. Almost every day some poor, weary ghost arrived and asked for sanctuary. There were two soldiers called Ugh-tred and Grimbald who had fought with King Alfred, the one who was supposed to have burnt the cakes. They used to haunt an old, crumbling cow-byre under the Malvern hills until it was rebuilt and turned into a Factory Farm, and they had to glide up and down uttering hoarse war cries between three hundred squawking battery chickens laying eggs. They were rough, uncouth fellows, but everybody liked them. Soldiers are often very gentle and good-hearted when you get to know them.

Then there were the Ladies. Ladies kept arriving all the time. There was a Green Lady who was looking for the key to her treasure chest, and a Blue Lady who was looking for her dead husband. (She had smothered him with a pillow and forgotten where she put him.) And when they’d been at the sanctuary for about a fortnight, their old friend the Grey Lady arrived, the one that used to haunt the churchyard at Craggyford and she, of course, was still looking for her teeth.

Soon word of the sanctuary spread so far afield that ghosts came from other countries. Most of them fitted in very well but there was a musical ghost from Finland who was rather a trial to them. It wasn’t just that she liked to play the harp on the cliff top by the light of the moon, it was that she got very offended if everybody didn’t come and listen.

‘Not ghostly, I call it, but ghastly,’ said Aunt Hortensia crossly. She was not musical and sitting on a cliff by moonlight made her bunions shoot.

Still, on the whole the ghosts were very, very happy. Best of all they liked the evenings when they all sat in the Hag’s kitchen and talked about their adventures, and about Rick.

‘What was he like, this great Rick the Rescuer?’ one of the new ghosts would ask.

‘Oh, he had sort of big eyes and a thin face and sticking-out ears,’ Humphrey would begin, and the Hag would clout him with her wings and say: ‘Humphrey, what are you saying. Rick’s ears were absolutely straight.’

Because Rick, you see, was becoming a hero in their minds and heroes don’t have sticking-out ears. And they would tell and re-tell how Rick had fed the vampire bats from his own wrist and led them to the Prime Minister of Britain, and even Poldi, a rather mischievous poltergeist who had come up from Putney, would stop chucking things about and listen.

‘And now here we are, thanks to him, safe and sound for ever,’ the Hag would end, her whiskers twitching with emotion.

But she was wrong.