The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER NINE

‘She’s had her calf!’ said Rollo, rushing upstairs to find Madlyn. ‘The cow who eats stinging nettles… It tried to stand up at once and then it fell down and stood up again and started to drink but the mother kept licking it so hard that it fell over again. I saw it all from the top of the wall.’ Rollo had found a flat place on the top of the wall round the park which he could reach from the overhanging branch of an elm tree. ‘The herd’s the biggest now it’s been for ten years.’

Yes, but for how long? thought Madlyn. How long will there be a herd? And for the first time since she had come, she was wishing it was time to go back home to London. Because nothing as far as she could see could now save Clawstone. At the last Open Day there had been five visitors and one of them was an old man who lived in the village and was sorry for the Percivals.

And Cousin Howard had been useless. The few times they had seen him since they’d asked for his help he had hurried away without speaking.

But the next morning, just as the children were making their way downstairs, they met him again and this time he didn’t glide away; he actually stopped and beckoned to them.

‘There are a few… people… you might like to see,’ he said in his quiet, shy voice. ‘This afternoon, perhaps?’

So they went to tell Ned and as soon as lunch was over they made their way to Cousin Howard’s library.

As they sat down, facing the big wall of books at one end of the room, they didn’t really know what they were expecting, but in fact they had been invited to hold an audition.

‘I don’t want you to choose anyone… er… unsuitable,’ said Cousin Howard. ‘If… somebody… doesn’t fit your requirements they can be sent back. But the… ones that will appear are willing to come and… do what you ask.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I shall call them one by one if that is convenient.’

The children nodded and Madlyn moved her chair a little closer to Rollo’s. She didn’t think he would be nervous; he was not a nervous boy, but she wanted to be near him just in case.

Cousin Howard clapped his hands. There was a pause. Then slowly… very slowly… there appeared a long, white floating veil… a wreath of wilted orange blossom… and then: a face.

The bride who stood before them was very beautiful, but she was quite shockingly bloodied. There was blood on her veil, blood on her dress, blood on her train and her silver shoes.

And there was a good reason for this. There was a bullet hole in her left cheek, another in her chest, a third in her arm.

Cousin Howard introduced her. ‘This is Brenda Peabody. She had some… er… trouble on her wedding day. A man she had jilted shot her on the steps of the church.’

‘Trouble?’ spat the ghost. ‘Oh yes, I had some trouble! Men… Vile beasts! Look at that!’ She dug her fingers into the holes, and fresh streams of blood poured over her bridal clothes. ‘And it won’t come out… I wash and I scrub and it makes no difference, the gore just goes on coming. Drip, drip… ooze, ooze.’

‘I don’t know if you have heard of banshees?’ said Cousin Howard quietly. ‘They’re famous for weeping and wailing and washing out the linen of the dead. Brenda’s not a banshee, of course, she’s a proper ghost and she’s busy with her own washing, but one thing you can be sure of with Bloodstained Brides is a constant stream of liquid. She won’t dry up, you can be certain of that.’

‘She’s good,’ said Madlyn. ‘She’s very good.’

Brenda disappeared behind the books and when Uncle Howard clapped his hands again a dark shape in an enormous duffel coat appeared.

‘This is Mr Smith.’

The children looked at each other. So far Mr Smith didn’t seem very remarkable — just a very fat man in a heavy coat.

Then Mr Smith said, ‘Pleased to meet you,’ and at the same time he threw his overcoat wide open and lowered his hood.

He was a skeleton. A few pieces of flesh still clung to him here and there, a small slab of muscle below one kneee, and a sinew or two on his elbow… and in one eye socket there still hung a single eye — but overall Mr Smith was as skeletal a skeleton as you could find.

All three children nodded their heads. If there is one thing people expect from a haunted house it is a skeleton, and a skeleton in which one eye still flickers is particularly good.

Mr Smith, whose first name was Douglas, had been a very fat taxi driver — so fat that people had nagged him and teased him, and he was so hurt that he stopped eating. Only he overdid it, and one day he woke up dead. When you have been very fat it is difficult to accept that you are now very thin or even not there at all, which was why Doug liked to wear his overcoat.

After the bride and the skeleton came a very old woman from whose matted, grimy hair there dropped a stream of lice.

Real lice are nasty and ghostly lice are nastier still, but all the same the old woman did not look very interesting. Nasty, yes, but not interestingly nasty, and the children were very relieved when she said she’d decided that Clawstone wouldn’t suit her and she was going back to live with her cronies in the bus shelter behind the slaughterhouse in town.

The next candidate surprised the children very much.

She was a truly beautiful girl, with masses of jet-black hair and lustrous dark eyes ringed with kohl and she was wearing a short embroidered bodice, loose trousers of shimmering silk and brocade slippers.

‘This is Sunita,’ said Cousin Howard. ‘Her parents came from India but she has lived here all her life. And worked here too.’

The three children stared at her and Sunita smiled, a lovely friendly smile, and put her hands together in greeting. Everybody liked her at once; you couldn’t not like her. But Rollo spoke for all of them when he said, ‘Would she frighten people? She seems so nice.’

‘Watch,’ said Cousin Howard.

He nodded at the girl, and she took a step forward, so that they could see the jewel in her tummy button and her golden-brown midriff. Then, as they stared, a sudden jagged line appeared round her middle — an irregular streak, like lightning, which turned darker and more sinister as they watched. And slowly… very slowly… the top half of Sunita floated upwards to the ceiling, leaving the bottom half still firmly on the ground.

‘She was sawn in half,’ whispered Cousin Howard. ‘The man she worked for did it. It was a trick in a circus — you know… sawing a girl in half. It’s often done, but this time it went wrong and he really halved her. Poor man, he was dreadfully upset, but it was too late.’

Everyone, of course, wanted Sunita; she passed the audition straight away. After her came a very boring ghost, a hoity-toity lady in a hooped petticoat who didn’t seem able to do much and whom they had to send away. But after that came Ranulf de Torqueville.

Ranulf was dressed in old-fashioned clothes: velvet breeches and a loose white shirt. His hair was long and he looked romantic, like the people one sees in swashbuckling films having sword fights and leaping from high walls.

‘What does he do?’ asked Rollo.

They were soon to know. With an agonized grimace, Ranulf opened his shirt. And there, hanging on to his chest, its front legs scrabbling at the bare skin, its scabrous tail thrashing, was a huge black rat, gnawing at his heart.

‘He was cursed,’ explained Cousin Howard. ‘His evil brother said, “May rats gnaw at your heart till you die,” and threw him in a dungeon. Only in this particular case the rat died too. It is not usual for a rat to hang on like that, but you can’t separate them; it never lets go.’

‘It’s a proper plague rat,’ said Rollo. ‘Rattus rattus. The kind that first came over in ships and caused the Black Death. The brown rats came later.’

But even Rollo, fond of animals as he was, could hardly bear to look at the twitching, yellow-toothed creature tearing and scrunching and clawing at the young man’s heart.

‘I think we’ve got enough now,’ said Ned when they had agreed that Ranulf would do splendidly. ‘Four ghosts seems about right,’ and the others agreed. But just as they were getting up to go, a pair of feet suddenly appeared from behind the wall. They were large feet: hairy, bare and not very clean. And nothing at all was attached to them. No ankles, no knees, no thighs, and certainly no body. They were simply feet.

‘Oh dear, I told them they wouldn’t do. I told both feet.’ Cousin Howard was looking worried. ‘I didn’t see what could be done simply with feet.’

But the feet were obstinate. They were determined. Every time they were told to go away they returned.

‘I suppose we could make room for them,’ said Madlyn. ‘I mean, just feet don’t take up a lot of space.’

‘Maybe they feel they’ve been chosen,’ said Rollo. ‘It’s a thing that happens.’

So the final list contained the Bride called Brenda, Mr Smith the Skeleton, Sawn-in-half Sunita, Ranulf with his rat — and The Feet.

There was nothing left now except to thank Cousin Howard for finding the ghosts, and this they did again and again.

‘You must have taken so much trouble,’ said Madlyn.

And Cousin Howard said, no, no, not really, he had been only too glad to help.

Aunt Emily and Uncle George had of course noticed the change in Cousin Howard. No one now would have called him Pointless Percival — or Pointless anything at all. He spent more and more time out of his room; he glided round the castle looking busy and purposeful. The Hoggart was forgotten.

‘When did you realize that Cousin Howard was… not quite like us?’ Aunt Emily asked the children.

‘Oh, quite soon,’ said Madlyn. ‘After a few days — only we didn’t like to say anything.’

But now seemed to be a good time to mention their plans for the next Open Day and to ask their great-aunt and great-uncle whether they minded if a few of Cousin Howard’s acquaintances came to help bring in more visitors.

‘What do you think, dear?’ Aunt Emily asked her brother.

Sir George was worrying about some loose stones he had found in the wall of the park and not really listening very hard.

‘I suppose it can’t do any harm. As long as they’re proper ghosts. No cheating.’

‘Oh, they’re proper ghosts all right, Uncle George,’ said Rollo. ‘You can’t get more proper ghosts than these!’