The Great Ghost Rescue

One

Humphrey the Horrible was a ghost. Actually his name was simply Humphrey but he had added ‘The Horrible’ because he thought it would help him to become horrible, which at present he was not.

Nobody knew what had gone wrong with Humphrey. Perhaps it was his ectoplasm. Ectoplasm is the stuff that ghosts are made of and usually it is a ghastly, pale, slithery nothingness — a bit like the slime trails left by slugs in damp grass or the mist that rises out of disgusting moorland bogs. But Humphrey’s ectoplasm was a peachy pink colour and reminded one of lamb’s wool or summer clouds. And then his eye sockets didn’t leer or glare, they twinkled, and the sounds of his finger bones jangling together made a tinkling noise, like little bells.

His parents, who naturally wanted him to be frightful and ghastly and loathsome like all the best ghosts, worried about him quite a lot.

‘I can’t think why he has turned out like this,’ his mother would say.

Humphrey’s mother was a Hag. Hags have hooked noses and crooked backs and scaly black wings and when they move they give off the most dreadful smells. It was nothing for Humphrey’s mother to smell of mouldy tripe, unwashed armpits and minced maggots in a single afternoon.

Humphrey’s father would try to comfort her. ‘Don’t worry so much, Mabel,’ he would say. ‘The boy’s probably a late developer.’

Humphrey’s father was a Scottish ghost. He had been killed fighting in the Battle of Otterburn in 1388. This was a very bloody battle in which the English and the Scots killed each other in all sorts of unpleasant ways. Both of Humphrey’s father’s legs had been cut off by a cruel English baron right at the beginning of the battle but he had gone on fighting on his stumps until another wicked Englishman put a sword through his chest. Now he was called The Gliding Kilt because when you looked at him all you could see was the bottom of his kilt and then a space where his legs weren’t. He was a very impressive ghost and a good father.

But the Hag, like most mothers, was a great worrier and she wouldn’t be comforted. ‘He’s not a bit like George or Winifred,’ she moaned.

George was Humphrey’s older brother and he was a Screaming Skull. Screaming Skulls are just a skull with no body attached to it. If you try to bury a Screaming Skull it just screams and screams until you dig it up. They scream if you try to move them, too, or if anyone is coming that they don’t like the sound of. In fact they scream most of the time and the noise they make sounds like seven or eight people having their insides pulled out so that someone who has heard a Screaming Skull scream is never quite the same again. Naturally this made them rather proud of George.

As for Wailing Winifred, Humphrey’s sister, she used to glide about in a long, grey shroud trying to catch a little bowl of water which floated in front of her. The water in the bowl was for her to wash out her bloodstains. No one could remember how Winifred had got so bloodstained; she must have done something really bad before she died because she was certainly covered in the stuff. But however fast Winifred went, the bowl always went faster. Naturally this upset her so that she used to wail a lot, and that was why she was called Wailing Winifred.

They were a very happy family. There was probably not a more devoted couple anywhere in the world than the Hag and the Gliding Kilt. She kept all her best smells for him. He found her squinty eyes and long, black whiskers beautiful. Both of them loved George and Winifred. And they loved Humphrey too, very much — even though he wasn’t horrible. In fact Humphrey, being the youngest, was perhaps just a little bit spoilt.

Not only were they a very happy family but they were a very lucky one because they lived in just the sort of place that ghosts like best. It was a castle in the north of England, with a damp, dark dungeon crawling with large grey rats, a moat filled with green, slimy water and a drawbridge which still had the hair of a murdered robber stuck to the rusted iron with dried blood.

The castle was called Craggyford Castle, so that Humphrey and his family were known as the Craggyford ghosts.

They lived very simply. Humphrey slept in a little coffin under a yew tree in a corner of the churchyard and every night the Hag came to tell him bedtime curses and when she bent over him to say goodnight the smell of very old feet or extremely mouldy mutton would drift into his nose holes and send him happily off to sleep.

By day, of course, the children did their lessons. They had to learn how to leer, how to rattle their chains and how to pluck off people’s bedclothes with icy and skeletal fingers. (George, who was only a skull and didn’t have any fingers, had extra screaming practice instead.) Most of all, of course, they had to learn how to vanish.

Humphrey was particularly bad at this. He was the most patchy, messy, mucky vanisher you could imagine. Sometimes he’d forget a foot, sometimes a shoulder and once everything vanished except his stomach which was left hanging in the room like a round, Dutch cheese. Worst of all was his elbow. Humphrey’s left elbow just would not disappear.

‘You’re not trying, Humphrey,’ the poor Hag would scream.

‘I am, Mother, honestly,’ Humphrey’s voice would come. ‘It’s just sort of… stuck.’

Winifred, who was a very gentle, kind girl in spite of wailing such a lot, would try to make things better.

‘It doesn’t really show up much, Mother. It just looks like a… cobweb or a bit of dust.’

‘Rubbish, Winifred. It doesn’t look in the least like a cobweb or a bit of dust. It looks like an elbow. Now again, Humphrey. Harder.’

But however difficult the lessons were, there was always lots of time afterwards for them to do what they liked. There was a wood full of yellow-eyed owls where they played hide-and-seek, or they ran gliding races round the battlements. And of course they had lots of friends. There was Loopy Fred, who was a tree spirit and lived inside a hollow oak on Hangman’s Hill, moaning and gibbering and waiting for people to come past so that he could turn their hair white overnight. Then there was the Phantom Sow who lived on Craggyford Moor. Pigs don’t become ghosts all that often but this one had been hunted down and killed by no less a person than the second cousin of Robin Hood. Not that she was conceited about this: she was a very peaceable sow who liked Humphrey to scratch her back and enjoyed snuffling among the beech nuts just as if she were an ordinary farmyard animal.

There was also the Grey Lady who haunted the churchyard where Humphrey slept. Ghost Ladies, whatever their colour, are usually looking for something: buried treasure, or somebody they have murdered and feel worried about — that kind of thing. What the Grey Lady was looking for was her teeth. She had had a full set when she was buried — at least she said she had — and then someone had robbed her grave and this annoyed her very much. When you could get her mind off her teeth, which was not often, the Grey Lady was good at thinking of games, like Spillikins played with old toe bones, or snakes and ladders, using live vipers.

When you are leading a happy and peaceful life with your family, there seems no reason why it should ever end. Certainly Humphrey thought they would go on living at Craggyford Castle for another five hundred years, or a thousand, or three thousand. But the world outside was changing. Life was getting difficult and dangerous for ghosts. Just how difficult and dangerous they didn’t realize until one dark and stormy night just after Halloween…

They were sitting at supper. It was a simple meal but very pleasant: chopped rats’ tails lightly fried in dripping, washed down with cold toad’s blood. (People who think ghosts don’t eat or drink or go to the bathroom are wrong. They don’t have to but they like to. It passes the time.)

George had been naughty and screamed too loudly, and the Hag, who had a headache, had popped the tea cosy over him to keep him quiet. Often when you can’t see you can hear better, which is probably why George was the first to stop chewing and say: ‘What’s that noise?’

After a moment they all heard it. The sound of horses’ hooves pounding the air outside.

It came closer. A lot of hooves, and the jingle of harness, the creak of leather…. And then with a swoosh, and a gust of wind which sent the rats’ tails skidding across the plates, an enormous phantom coach, drawn by four black horses, came racing through the window and came to rest in the air above their heads.

‘It can’t be!’ cried the Gliding Kilt.

‘But it is! It’s Aunt Hortensia!’ said the Hag, flapping her wings excitedly.

The door of the coach opened. Dressed in a huge white flannel nightdress embroidered with hollyhocks, a lady stepped out on to the dining room table. Above her rather grubby collar, her neck stump, a little jagged from where the axe had been, gleamed pinkly in the evening light.

‘What is it, Auntie? What’s happened?’ asked Winifred.

There was a pause while Hortensia’s neck swivelled round the room. It seemed to be looking for something. Then she dived back into the coach and took something out. It was her head.

‘I have been turned out of my home,’ said Headless Aunt Hortensia’s head. It looked cross and sad, and its tangled, grey hair was all over the place.

‘Oh no!’

‘Yes.’ The head nodded and a tear fell out of its left eye.

‘Such goings on,’ it continued. ‘You know how comfortable I was at Night Abbey?’

Everybody nodded. When she was alive. Aunt Hortensia had been housekeeper to King Henry the Eighth at Hampton Court Palace. However, Aunt Hortensia was very bad at arithmetic and one day when she was doing the accounts she said that five plump capons, a flagon of mead and two tallow candles came to eleven pence three farthings whereas they came to eleven pence halfpenny, and Henry, who hadn’t chopped anyone for a whole week, had her arrested just as she was getting into her bed in her nightdress and long woollen underpants, and cut off her head.

For a while, Aunt Hortensia haunted the Palace but it was so overcrowded with ghosts (three of Henry’s wives were already weeping and wailing in the corridors) and she felt so out of things in her nightdress and long woollen drawers among the grandly dressed Court Ladies, that one night in 1543 she borrowed a phantom coach from the royal stables and drove away to find a place of her own.

And she found Night Abbey — a ruined and creaking house on the East Coast, with doors leaning on their hinges, bats hanging in disgusting clumps from the rafters and miles of desolate salt marshes for her headless horses to run around in.

‘Four hundred and thirty-two happy years I’ve spent in that house,’ Aunt Hortensia’s head went on. ‘And then three months ago…’

Three months ago, it seemed, a man called Mr Hurst had bought Night Abbey and decided to modernize it.

‘What exactly does that mean?’ asked Humphrey.

‘You may well ask,’ wailed Aunt Hortensia’s head. ‘It means washing machines in the scullery where my frogs used to live; it means fluorescent lighting messing up your vibrations. It means central heating!’

‘Ugh!’ The Hag and the Gliding Kilt shivered sympathetically.

‘You may well say ‘‘Ugh’’,’ said Aunt Hortensia. She stuck out an ample arm and they could see, where the nightdress had fallen back, her ectoplasm looking all dry and curdled, with a most unhealthy, yellowish tinge to it. ‘I tell you, the place has become impossible,’ she went on.

‘Well, you must stay with us, of course,’ said the Hag.

‘It isn’t just me,’ said Aunt Hortensia gloomily. ‘It’s the same everywhere. Old buildings being pulled down, nice murky pools being drained, respectable ruins being turned into hotels or Bingo Halls. I hear poor Leofric the Mangled is haunting a sausage factory!’

‘Well, nothing will happen to us at Craggyford,’ said the Hag soothingly, piling rats’ tails on to a plate for her headless aunt.

But there she was wrong.