The Great Ghost Rescue

Two

Aunt Hortensia meant well but she was not an easy person to have in the house. For one thing, she was terribly forgetful. She didn’t just leave her head up in the bedroom when she went down to breakfast, she left it in the boot cupboard when she went out into the garden to pick Sneezewort or Deadly Nightshade and once, feeling playful, she threw it so suddenly at Humphrey that he dropped it and it said, ‘Butterfingers!’ to him in a very nasty way.

She would also get everybody very muddled up about what she was trying to tell them. Aunt Hortensia’s neck stump had learnt to say simple things like, ‘More please’, ‘No’, or ‘Pshaw!’ but if she wanted to say something complicated with quite a lot of words in it she had to have her head. Being so forgetful she would sometimes say one thing with her neck stump and something quite different with her head. For example, if the Hag asked her: ‘Would you like another toadskin sandwich, Aunt Hortensia?’ the stump might say ‘Yes,’ while the head, on the other side of the room, was saying, ‘You know, Mabel, that toadskin always gives me wind.’ This kind of thing, if you have to live with it, can make you very tired.

But what bothered them most was that she was crabby about Humphrey. While they all knew that Humphrey was not as horrible as he should have been, they really didn’t want anyone else to point it out. Making personal remarks about children when you are staying in their house is not a nice thing to do but Aunt Hortensia did it.

‘Really, Mabel,’ she would say, disturbing the Hag as she sat in the kitchen copying curses into a recipe book or trimming the corpse candles, ‘that boy of yours smells of new-mown hay.’

This made the Hag very cross.

‘He doesn’t. Not really. I admit that Humphrey has not inherited my best smells, but—’

‘You’re sure he is a ghost?’ said Aunt Hortensia, interrupting her. ‘He isn’t really a Faery or a Brownie or something? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find him creeping out at night and doing good to people.’

This time the Hag was so angry that she went through the roof. ‘You have no right to say such things, Aunt Hortensia,’ she said when she came down again. ‘Why, only yesterday, when I was in the garden, I saw a chicken run in terror from Humphrey.’

‘A chicken!’ snorted Aunt Hortensia.

When something upset the Hag she always talked it over with her husband.

‘She’s got her knife into Humphrey,’ she said that night to the Gliding Kilt as they were preparing to go to bed. ‘Just because he dropped her beastly head.’

‘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.’