The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Lord Trembellow was in his new gravel pit, bullying his workmen, when Olive drew up in one of the Trembellow chauffeur-driven cars.

‘Daddy, I’ve bad news,’ she said. ‘I’ve got yesterday’s figures. Clawstone has beaten us by thirty-seven visitors. Thirty-seven! ’

Her sallow face was even more pinched than usual; one could feel the awful numbers eating into her brain.

The gravel pit was a new one; Lord Trembellow had bought it two weeks earlier and already the Trembellow lorries were driving up in a steady stream, loading gravel, and reversing out again on to the road.

There were great gashes in the hill sides; even after this short time hardly a blade of grass was to be seen. The noise of the diggers and the crushers and the earth movers was overwhelming; the air was full of dust and the smell of diesel fuel. It was Lord Trembellow’s fifth gravel pit and the largest and the best.

‘It’ll be that rubbish about ghosts, I suppose,’ he said now. ‘Lies and trickery. Well, we’ll get even with them. If they can get ghosts we can get ghosts. Bigger ghosts. Scarier ghosts. More of them.’

So that night he telephoned his son Neville in London and told him to buy some ghosts.

‘I don’t care what you pay,’ he told Neville. ‘Just get the best.’

But Neville said he didn’t know how to buy ghosts, and anyway he was going up to Scotland to play golf.

‘We’d better go ourselves, Daddy,’ said Olive. ‘Neville can be rather weak sometimes.’

So Lord Trembellow and his daughter decided to go to London. Lady Trembellow didn’t want to come. Ever since she’d had her tummy tuck she’d felt ill and uncomfortable. It was the most expensive tummy tuck anyone had ever had, but it still hurt.

Before they left they made a shopping list.

‘Nothing like lists to keep things tidy,’ said Lord Trembellow. He picked up the local paper in which there was a description of the ghosts which haunted Clawstone. ‘There’s a Bloodstained Bride, it says here. So we’d better have one of them.’

‘Why just one, Daddy? Why not two?’ asked Olive, and she sat down and wrote:

‘Bloodstained Brides: Two.’

‘And a skeleton,’ read out her father. ‘Well, skeletons are common enough. We could have half a dozen.’

‘Six skeletons,’ wrote Olive.

‘And there’s this man with a rat,’ read out Lord Trembellow. ‘Ranulf de Torqueville, he’s called.’

‘We don’t have to have just a rat,’ said Olive. ‘We could get something bigger. Or we could get two rats, one for the front and one for the back. And that girl who’s sawn in half. Why only in half? Why not in quarters? Or in eighths? Eight pieces of girl …’

When they got to London they checked into the largest, glitziest hotel in the city and the next day they took a taxi to the largest, glitziest department store, where they bought two long satin wedding dresses and some jars of tomato ketchup. Then they went to a shop which supplied schools and hospitals with specimens for anatomy lessons, and bought half a dozen skeletons.

‘The biggest you’ve got,’ said Lord Trembellow.

After that they looked at rats in a pet shop but they were white and not suitable, so they got the address of a man who trained animals for films and television and he agreed to bring two stunt rats up to Trembellow. Hiring actors to pretend to be the ghosts was easy enough — actors are so often out of work that they will do anything for money — and a man who supplied circuses with their acts said he would try to send them a sawn-up girl.

‘What about the Severed Feet?’ asked Olive. ‘We could ask in a hospital if they could spare any.’

But her father said they wouldn’t bother. ‘We’ve got enough here to scare the living daylights out of everyone.’

When they got back to Trembellow they got to work, but their preparations did not go smoothly. The actor who was supposed to be Ranulf de Torqueville took one look at the rats and fainted and they had to use inflatable rats instead. The two bloodstained brides hated each other on sight, and the sawn-in-half girl got tonsillitis and never turned up at all. To make up for this they ordered another dozen skeletons and got the most expensive computer firm they could find to set the skeletons dancing and leering and leaping out of cupboards.

‘It’ll be all right on the night,’ said Lord Trembellow. ‘It better be, after the money we’ve spent.’

But it wasn’t. The actor who was pretending to be Ranulf was fond of jewellery and as he tore open his shirt, his uncut garnet ring caught on the front rat’s rubber back, causing the animal to deflate with a sad squeak. As the visitors filed past the bloodstained brides, the first bride dug her elbows into her rival, who stumbled forward, causing the bottle of tomato ketchup she had hidden in her bra to fall out and spatter the white shoes of a Mrs Price from Barnsley, who was not amused.

Which left the skeletons. They began well, jumping and clacking and leering and gibbering — but the most expensive computer experts are not always the best. The skeletons danced faster and faster still — there was a high-pitched whining noise, then a whirring … and a jumble of tangled bones came crashing to the floor.

It was unfortunate that the bones were carefully labelled in blue ink for the schools who had ordered them for their studies. A skeleton labelled ‘Property of St Oswald’s College of Further Education’ is not really a very frightening sight.

‘I don’t understand it,’ said Lord Trembellow angrily when the visitors had gone off, jeering and scoffing. ‘Why do the ghosts work at Clawstone and not here?’

Lady Trembellow was lying on the sofa with a hot water bottle on her stomach.

‘Perhaps the Clawstone ghosts are real?’ she suggested timidly.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Phyllis,’ snapped her husband.

It was time he sent her off for some more repair work, he thought. Maybe an implant on her lips to give her a bit of a pout. She still didn’t look the way his wife should look.

As for Olive, she looked at her mother with contempt, because she always found it difficult to understand that she herself, who was so clever, had been born to a woman who was completely foolish. A woman who thought that ghosts could possibly exist.