The Great Ghost Rescue

Thirteen

It was true. The ghosts had walked into a trap — a terrible and dangerous trap. Because Lord Bullhaven was not at all what he had pretended to be. He was not a kind, rich man willing to offer the poor ill-treated ghosts of Britain a place where they could live in peace. No, he was really a very bad person and he had decided to lure as many ghosts as he could to one place and then exterminate them.

This may seem not only a cruel thing to do but also a very silly one. Even if you are not particularly fond of ghosts you have to admit that they don’t do anybody the slightest harm. But Lord Bullhaven was the sort of person who couldn’t bear anything to be even the least bit unusual or out of the ordinary. He lived in a big house in the country, called Bullhaven Hall. It was a very neat, boring house with a lot of absolutely square rooms and straight corridors. The garden was square and straight too and if a wild flower — even the prettiest wild flower like a bright blue speedwell or a golden-eyed marguerite or a scarlet poppy — dared to seed itself on one of his gravel paths, Lord Bullhaven would scream for a gardener to come at once and kill it with weed killer. His garden pond looked like the kind of rectangle you draw for a maths lesson and he dosed it with chlorine so that no interesting water plants should mess it up. His yew hedges all had crew cuts and even the statues were scrubbed with carbolic soap in case any moss or creeper should dare to grow on them.

Inside his house, Lord Bullhaven carried on in just the same way. He had a wife, poor Lady Bullhaven, who had married him to get away from her mama and then discovered too late that Lord Bullhaven was far, far worse, and he had two children called Wystan and Emily. Lady Bullhaven wasn’t allowed to wear anything that wasn’t exactly the same as what everybody else was wearing and if she tried to cook him anything like pizza or risotto or apple strudel he would spit it out and say he wasn’t having any foreign muck in his house. Wystan and Emily weren’t allowed to read fairy stories because they were full of weird carryings-on and they weren’t sent to the village school in case they mixed with dirty, common children. Lord Bullhaven didn’t like the Irish or the Welsh or the Jews or the Catholics and he loathed the Chinese, the Africans and the Greeks. He believed in flogging and hanging and his favourite saying was: Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child. Oh, he really was a charming man.

The reason that Lord Bullhaven had been with the Prime Minister the day that Rick came with his ghosts was because just then a country with a very nasty ruler had decided to throw out a lot of people who were living there just because they were of a different race. The Prime Minister had said they would give these people a home in England because they had absolutely nowhere else to go. This annoyed Lord Bullhaven so much that he nearly burst a blood vessel and so he went up to London to complain. The reason he didn’t want these people in England was because they were different.

But when he saw Rick’s ghosts he quite forgot what he had come for. Because however different the Chinese or the Irish or the Welsh or the Jews were, they were nothing to how different the Gliding Kilt was, or the Hag or Wailing Winifred or even Humphrey. Here were nasty, creepy, unusual things: things you couldn’t spray with weed killer or torture in gin traps or just shoot. So Lord Bullhaven made this plan. He decided to offer them Insleyfarne and then when he had got a whole lot of ghosts together he would go up there and exorcise them.

Exorcising ghosts and spirits is something that has gone on for years and years. It’s a way of getting rid of ghosts in a haunted house or an evil spirit that has got into somebody, and it’s really a sort of magic so that it’s a very stupid thing to fool about with unless you know exactly what you’re doing. Ghosts that have been exorcised never appear again. They just aren’t ghosts any more — they aren’t anything any more. So really they’ve been killed.

To exorcise a ghost you can use all sorts of things but the best people to do it are some clergymen, sitting in a circle and saying special ghost-laying spells over and over again. Rowan berries are used too because they are bad for ghosts, and arranging sticks or stones in a five-sided shape called a pentacle helps. Some people swear by iron filings and vinegar; others believe in salt. But the clergymen are the most important and they have to be willing to go on for days on end because exorcising ghosts can be a long job.

So as soon as Lord Bullhaven had lured the ghosts into his trap he began to look for clergymen who would travel to the north of Scotland with him and help him destroy the ghosts. But here Lord Bullhaven ran into a great deal of trouble. Not as much trouble as he should have done, but trouble all the same.

Because clergymen are mostly very good, nice people who are far too busy looking after the old and sick in their parish and having choir practices and carol services and preaching sermons to want to travel all the way to the north of Scotland and sit on a cold, windy island gabbling spells over and over again and exorcising ghosts.

The first clergyman Lord Bullhaven went to see was his own vicar and he said ‘No’ straight away because he knew enough about Lord Bullhaven to know that he didn’t want to go anywhere with him, let alone to the north coast of Scotland, and anyway he had the children’s Sunday School outing to organize. The second vicar, who lived in a big, rambling house in the next town, said he rather liked ghosts and would prefer not to help get rid of them.

‘But these are disgusting, unclean spooks!’ screamed Lord Bullhaven.

But the Vicar of Netherton just smiled and said he was sorry but he wouldn’t come.

It went on like this for days. Lord Bullhaven drove all over the south of England in his big, black car trying to find vicars who were willing to come with him but all of them were too busy or too sensible or too kind, and some of them thought it was shocking to go and exorcise anybody in a place of sanctuary.

Then in the end he found a very poor vicar who had nine children. The roof of his vicarage leaked, his church was falling down and his wife was so tired from managing on next to nothing that she used to sit down every evening after the children were in bed and cry.

‘If you come with me,’ said Lord Bullhaven craftily (because he was very rich as well as very bad), ‘I will give you one hundred pounds.’

So Mr Wallace, which was the vicar’s name, thinking of all the shoes for his children and nourishing food for his wife which he could buy, agreed to come. After that Lord Bullhaven found a very old, very deaf vicar called Mr Hoare-Croakington. Unfortunately Mr Hoare-Croakington (who wasn’t just old and deaf but quite, quite ga-ga) thought he was being invited to Scotland to shoot grouse and this made rather a muddle later on.

The last man Lord Bullhaven got hold of was a very unpleasant character indeed. His name was Mr Heap and he had been a clergyman once but got chucked out of the church for stealing the money out of the offertory box and using it to buy whisky. But he still wore his clerical collar and called himself the Reverend Bertram Heap so Lord Bullhaven was quite taken in and thought he had got a proper vicar. Mr Heap was one of those people who look as though they were meant to be an animal — an ox or a bullock or a pig. He had huge shoulders, a red neck and a large bloated face with bristles.

After that Lord Bullhaven simply could not get any more clergymen so the last person he took with him was a rather peculiar Professor from the University of London called Professor Brassnose who wrote books about ghost-hunting and who wanted to try out a lot of stuff like brass cymbals to bang and baking powder to sprinkle and sulphur crystals to burn, all of which he thought might work against ghosts but one couldn’t be sure.

And on a bright day in late October, Lord Bullhaven filled the boot of his huge, black Rolls Royce with books of ghost-laying spells and folding chairs to sit on and thermos flasks to drink from while sitting on the folding chairs — and then the clergymen and Professor Brassnose got inside, and they all set off on the long drive to Insleyfarne to go and murder Rick’s ghosts.