Dial a Ghost

Chapter Six

‘Is this really mine? All of it?’ asked Oliver.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Fulton grimly. ‘I hope you’re impressed.’

But Oliver was not impressed; he was appalled. They had driven through a spiked iron gate along a gravel drive and now stood at the bottom of a flight of steps on either side of which were statues. To the left of Oliver was a lion being stepped on by a man who was beating him on the head with a club. On the right was an even bulgier man wearing a sort of nappy and strangling a snake. The windows of the tall grey building stared like a row of dead eyes; pointless towers and battlements sprouted from the roof, and the front door was studded with nails.

Almost worse than the gloomy building and the statues of animals being bullied by bulging men was the icy wind sighing and soughing in from the sea. Tall trees bent their branches; rooks flew upwards shrieking. Everything at Helton looked grey and miserable and cold.

Oliver shivered and wondered again if there was some way he could give the place away. Perhaps he should ask his guardian? Colonel Mersham sounded sensible, trying to save the lemurs in the rain forest and looking for golden toads; but he wasn’t going to be back for months.

The door now opened from the inside and Oliver found himself in a stone hall which was full of things for killing people. Crossed pikes, a blunderbuss, a row of rusty swords fastened to the wall…A stuffed leopard snarled from a glass case and beside it stood the butler and the housekeeper waiting to greet him.

Oliver thought he had never seen two people who looked so old. The housekeeper, Miss Match, had a grey bun of hair and a pink hearing aid stuck lopsidedly to one ear. The butler, Mr Tusker, was bent almost double with rheumatism. As he shook their dry leathery hands Oliver was shocked that they should be working as servants; they should have had servants working for them.

‘Dinner is ready in the dining room, sir,’ said Miss Match to Fulton. She had been told to take her orders from him and she was too ancient and tired to be curious about the little boy who now owned Helton Hall.

Oliver followed them down a long corridor hung with portraits of the Snodde-Brittles in heavy golden frames. They passed through a shuttered billiard room… a library with rows of leather-bound books locked up behind an iron grille… and reached the dining room where Oliver’s first meal at Helton Hall was waiting.

It was a meal he never forgot. Cousin Fulton and Cousin Frieda made him sit at the head of the table and his feet, hanging down from the high carved chair, didn’t even touch the ground. The table was the size of a skating rink, the room was freezing cold — and beside his plate were more knives and forks than Oliver had ever seen in his life.

‘Start from the outside in,’ Matron had told them when they went for a treat to the Holiday Inn and had a proper banquet. So he picked up the round spoon and ate the soup, and then Mr Tusker shuffled away and came back with a very red-looking bird and some potatoes and cabbage. Oliver ate the vegetables and took two mouthfuls of the bird, which was full of round dark pellets and tasted of blood. Then he put down his knife and fork.

‘Have you finished, sir?’ asked the butler.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Oliver.

‘What’s the matter, boy?’ said Fulton. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the meat, is there?’

‘No, I expect it’s fine, but I don’t eat meat. I’m a vegetarian.’

‘A vegetarian?’ said Fulton, his eyes bulging.

‘A vegetarian?’ echoed Frieda.

‘A lot of us were in the Home. About half. It was after we saw a film about a slaughterhouse.’

No one said anything after that. It was as though Oliver had said he was a wife-beater or had the plague.

But if the meal was bad, going to bed was much, much worse.

‘You’re to sleep in the master bedroom,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s up in the tower, quite on its own. Nobody will bother you there.’

‘I don’t mind being bothered,’ said Oliver in a small voice. ‘Couldn’t I sleep a bit closer to other people?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Fulton, for it was part of his plan to keep Oliver as lonely and as far away from help as possible. ‘The owner of Helton has always slept in the tower.’

So Oliver followed Cousin Frieda up a wooden staircase, through the Long Gallery with its faceless statues and rusty suits of armour, along a corridor lined with grinning African masks… up another flight of steps — a curving stone one this time, lit only by narrow slits in the walls — down a second corridor hung with snarling heads of shot animals… and reached at last a heavy oaken door.

The room in which he found himself was huge; the single light in its heavy shade scarcely reached the corners. Three full-length tapestries hung on the wall. One showed a man stuck full of arrows; one was of a deer having its throat cut, and the third was a battle scene in which rearing horses brought their hoofs down on screaming men. An oak chest shaped like a coffin stood by the window, and the bed was a four-poster hung with dusty velvet curtains and the words ‘I Set My Foot Upon My Enemies’ carved into the wood.

‘The bathroom’s through there,’ said Frieda, opening a door beside the wardrobe. ‘I’ll leave you to unpack and put yourself to bed.’

Oliver listened to her steps dying away and followed her in his mind along the corridor with the stuffed heads, down the curving stone stairs, across the Long Gallery… He had never in his life felt so alone.

The bathroom was a room for giants. All the cupboards were too high for him, and the only way he could reach the lavatory chain was to stand on the seat. In the bathtub, scrubbing himself with a long-handled brush which hurt his skin, Oliver tried hard not to think about the Home. Bath-time had been one of the best times of the day; they’d blown bubbles and told silly jokes and afterwards there was cocoa and a story from Matron. They were reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The only way to get into bed was to run fast across the blood-red carpet and leap in under the covers. But it didn’t help much. He could still hear the stealthy tap-tap of the tassel of the blind against the window — and surely there was something in that big brown wardrobe… the way it creaked even when there was no one near.

The sound of footsteps returned. At the thought that someone had come back to say goodnight to him, Oliver brightened and sat up in bed. Perhaps they did care at Helton; perhaps he wasn’t quite alone.

Cousin Frieda entered the room.

‘Well, you’re all settled, I see.’ She moved to the bed and looked down at the inhaler which Oliver had put on the night table beside him. ‘You won’t want that,’ she said briskly. ‘I’ll put it in the bathroom cabinet.’

‘Oh no, please.’ Oliver was frightened now. ‘I always have it by my bed. Sometimes I need it in the night.’

‘Well, it won’t be far away,’ said Frieda. She took it off to the bathroom and put it in the high medicine cupboard, far out of Oliver’s reach. ‘Now I know you’re not one of those silly children who ask for night lights,’ she said, and her bony fingers moved towards the switch.

She was halfway out of the door when Oliver’s choked voice came out of the darkness. ‘Cousin Frieda,’ he said. ‘There aren’t… are there any ghosts here? Does Helton have ghosts?’

Frieda smiled. Standing there in the shadows in her black dress, she might have been a phantom herself.

‘Really, Oliver,’ she said. ‘What a silly question! Of course there are ghosts in a house as old as this.’

Then she shut the door and left him alone in the dark.

Fulton was in the drawing room, smoking a cigar.

‘It’ll work, Fulton, you’re right,’ said Frieda. ‘He’s scared already — in a week or two he’ll be ready.’

Fulton nodded. ‘I’ve had another look at the leaflet and there shouldn’t be any trouble about getting what we want. ‘‘Spooks of every kind,’’ it says. I’ll ring up in the morning to make an appointment. I’ll go down in a few days and book some that’ll do the trick. Then when the boy’s properly softened up, we’ll move them in.’

‘You hadn’t thought of us being in the house when… you know. Not that I’m frightened in the least, but…’

‘No, no. When the time’s right we’ll go away and leave him quite alone. I tell you, Frieda, our troubles are over. Helton is as good as ours!’