The Great Ghost Rescue

Sixteen

‘Oh, Hag,’ cried Rick, and it was all he could do not to burst into tears then and there. She was only just there still; her whiskery nose had gone and her crooked back, and her scaly black wings were as weak and worn through as winter leaves. But what frightened Rick most of all was that she was giving off absolutely no smell.

‘Rick!’ whispered the Hag, looking pitifully up at him.

‘It’s all right, we’ve got the men who were exorcising you. It’s over!’ cried Rick, bending over her.

The Hag tried to shake her head. ‘Too late,’ she murmured brokenly. ‘Look!’

She put out a faint claw and pointed to a piece of tartan cloth spread on the floor beside her. It was absolutely all that was left of the Gliding Kilt. On the other side of the wretched Hag was a little pile of yellowish bubbles — George’s softened and melted skull. Winifred, wrapped in her shroud, had fainted.

‘And my Little One… lost for ever. My Humphrey. He’s been laid!’

‘No, Mother! No, I haven’t. Look at me!’ said Humphrey. As soon as the exorcism stopped he’d felt his strength return and left the aeroplane. Now as he glided up to hug his mother, he looked almost his old self.

‘I went and fetched Rick and he got the people who were trying to lay us. He went bang wallop, wallop bang,’ said Humphrey, waving his arms excitedly. ‘And Peter and Barbara. I knew Rick would rescue us.’

‘Humphrey,’ said the Hag. She couldn’t believe that it was really him and kept passing her claws through and through his ectoplasm to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.

Suddenly she made faint, flapping movements with her wings, like a stranded chicken, and they realized she was trying to sit up.

‘We must… help the others,’ said the Hag. ‘If the exorcism’s over perhaps there is still hope for them. We must get organized.’

‘A hospital?’ Barbara suggested.

The Hag nodded. ‘Bring… everyone… in here.’

So Rick and Barbara and Peter went out to look for the other ghosts. They fetched in the poor Mad Monk and laid him on the refectory table and then they went to the burial mound to find Aunt Hortensia. Because ectoplasm is made of nothingness and you can’t get rid of nothing, exorcism often makes ghosts go solid before destroying them. Aunt Hortensia, who always seemed to do things more than other people, hadn’t just gone solid, she’d gone like granite. Her neck stump was like one of those poles that firemen slide down to get to fires quickly, and as they dragged her along the castle corridors her bunions gave off a clanging, metallic sound.

Peter and Barbara found the Colourless Ladies lying in a heap near the moat and Rick, stumbling across what seemed to be a gigantic, grey, dried-out dish cloth, found that he had stepped on Walter the Wet.

One of their worst sights was the Shuk, lying on his back with his legs in the air and blood coming out of his mouth from trying to carry Aunt Hortensia’s stone-hard head. All his tails had gone, his eye was closed and when Rick lifted him he whined with pain. As for the Head itself, Barbara couldn’t lift it; she had to dribble it into the castle like a football.

The children had never worked so hard as they did that night. They found an old tin bath which someone had left on the rocket site and put Walter in to soak. Barbara dressed the Mad Monk’s boils and Peter screamed and screamed at the buttery mess which had been George to see if he could get him to scream back. They massaged Aunt Hortensia’s stump till their fingers ached, rubbed the Ladies with different coloured moulds and lichens to see if they could get their colours back and made poultices for Ughtred and Grimbald who were doubled up with stomach cramps.

Though she was still so weak, the Hag was wonderful. ‘Say Latin curses over him backwards,’ she advised Barbara as the Mad Monk groaned in pain. Or; ‘There’s some dried wormwood in the larder; try that on the Shuk’s tail.’

But though they never stopped for a minute, though Humphrey did everything to make himself useful, it seemed for a while as if most of the ghosts were too ill to recover. And then:

‘Oh, children!’ screamed the Hag, the tears absolutely rushing down her nose. ‘Oh look! Oh, Hamish. My husband! My Gliding Kilt!’

Rushing over, they saw a rusty sword begin to form itself very slowly and waveringly in the air. For a while, the sword just hung there patiently, waiting. Then slowly a wound appeared, gaping and bloody, and round it a torn shirt and some skin — and then with a relieved ‘whoosh’ the sword dropped down into the chest. The Gliding Kilt’s face came next, then his arms, and lastly his knee stumps peering out below the kilt like young asparagus tips pushing through the earth.

‘Hamish! Oh, Hamish,’ said the Hag, and as she took him in her arms the room filled suddenly and gloriously with the smell of mouldering pig’s intestine.

It must have been a sort of magic time limit when the effect of the exorcism began to wear off because Peter jumped up as the skull he was holding began to scream softly. One tail reappeared on the Shuk’s back, then two, then three….

‘Oh look!’ said Humphrey. ‘Winifred’s bowl’s back! Winnie! Winnie, your bowl!’

A Colourless Lady turned blue, another showed patches of green. The Grey Lady got up and began at once to totter about looking for her teeth.

‘Head?’ said Aunt Hortensia’s stump, and when they brought her head to her they saw that it was almost back to its old, disgusting, white-haired nothingness.

This happy scene was suddenly and terribly interrupted by a shriek of anguish as Sucking Susie, followed by the four vampire boys, came flapping into the room.

‘My Baby, my Rose,’ howled Susie, quite beside herself. ‘She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s DEAD!’

A complete and frightful silence fell in the Castle Hall.

‘No,’ gasped the Hag weakly.

Rick had gone deathly white. ‘No,’ he said also. ‘No!’

But as he stepped forward and took the tiny, grey body from Susie’s claws it seemed there could be no doubt. Rose had shrunk almost to nothingness — she hardly stretched across the palm of his hand. Her body was quite cold and completely still. There was no heartbeat.

‘No,’ said Rick again. He was trembling all over but with a tremendous effort he managed to steady himself. Then he bent over and very gently pulled Rose’s thread of a mouth open with his hand.

‘The kiss of life?’ whispered Barbara.

Rick didn’t answer. He lifted Rose up in his cupped hands and began to breathe into her mouth. In — out; in — out; in — out….

Nothing. No movement. No one stirred in the Castle Hall. Only a small, stifled sob from Humphrey the Horrible broke the silence.

Still Rick breathed softly, steadily, never stopping, holding Rose’s jaw open with his fingertips.

‘It’s no good,’ wailed Sucking Susie, beating her wings hysterically. ‘She’s dead, I tell you, she’s dead, she’s dead.’

Rick didn’t even look up. He just went on quietly, steadily breathing. In and out, in and out….

And then suddenly the limp, cold thing in his hand gave a tiny jerk, so faint that he thought he had imagined it. Then another; a little twitch, a judder and… yes, it was her heart. It was beating. She was alive.

‘Oh heck,’ said Rick the Rescuer, completely disgusted. Because from his own eyes it must have been, there’d dropped on to the little body a fat, wet, and quite unmistakable tear.