Mountwood School for Ghosts Read online

  ‘William Markham, my lord.’

  ‘Markham? One of the Markhams of Futtering Burnside?’

  ‘That’s correct. The family seat is at Burnside, and their land marches with yours, I believe.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course it does. But . . . that must be Lugsy Markham. Good grief! He fagged for me at school. Huge ears, stuck out like soup plates . . . Well, well, dear me, that’s a different kettle of fish. Tradition . . . Heritage . . . Oh dear . . .’

  And the inquiry was over.

  Sixteen

  Pathetic Percy

  In the early morning after Kylie’s boils exercise, Ron and Iphigenia had a row. They were on the whole a very happy couple, perhaps because they were so different, but even the happiest couples sometimes get themselves into a tangle.

  As they were preparing to snuggle down and disappear for the day, Ron said casually, ‘Fine head of hair on that sprite, I must say.’

  Iphigenia was silent for a while. She might not have been a young enchantress with a dimple in her cheek, but at least she wasn’t completely empty; and as far as hair was concerned, well, a very famous painter called Mr Rossetti had seen her perform at the theatre once, and afterwards he had come round to her dressing room and said that he wanted to paint her wonderful copper-coloured hair. She had almost agreed, until she realized that he wanted to paint the rest of her too, in a bath with no clothes on.

  ‘I have heard that gentlemen prefer blondes, Ronald,’ said Iphigenia. This told Ron all he needed to know – he had put his foot in it, and then some. She had called him Ronald, and her voice reminded him of the mummified pharaoh whom they had chatted with once on a trip to the British Museum.

  ‘Oh no, m’dear, that’s absurd, I didn’t mean . . . I was only . . .’

  But of course it was too late.

  ‘You don’t have to defend yourself, Ronald. You have a perfect right to express an opinion.’

  Then Ron, as husbands always do, began to feel hurt and misunderstood.

  ‘Now, Iffy, you know very well what I meant. Nothing at all.’

  ‘Nothing? I saw you staring at her. I suppose you thought she gave a wonderful performance.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say that. But it was pretty good, er, wasn’t it . . . ?’ he finished lamely.

  ‘It was childish and the work of a rank amateur. We aren’t supposed to be playing charades here.’

  ‘But . . .’

  Iphigenia turned away. ‘Percy, my darling,’ she called, ‘Come here, sweetest. There is a lovely sonnet about daffodils that I want you to hear before bed.’

  But now Ron, glaring at Iphigenia from his skinless face, shouted, ‘Percy, me lad, let’s try that handspring again; you nearly got it last time.’

  Percy appeared between his two parents. He looked up at his mother, then at his father.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ he said, and faded from view.

  Percy had been having rather a boring time at Mountwood. He sat in on most of the classes, but nobody paid him much attention, and everybody thought he was too young to do any serious haunting. Young ghosts – murdered children and suchlike – can be very frightening if the atmosphere is right, but there is not much one can do to develop skills. They are just dead children. But then Percy had found Samson, and that cheered him up a bit.

  Samson had been abandoned by his mother, and when Percy first met him he was standing uncertainly in front of a cornered rat in the byre. His back was arched, his tortoiseshell tail was stiff as a bottle-brush, but although he was very hungry he couldn’t quite summon up the courage for the final spring. The rat was bigger than he was, and was standing up baring its yellow teeth at him and chattering unpleasantly. When Percy appeared, the rat saw its chance and scuttled off. After that Percy and Samson got to know each other. It was nice having a cat because, cats being what they are, it didn’t matter whether Percy was visible or not, and that was peaceful. Cats have a sixth sense as well as nine lives.

  So it was to the byre that Percy fled from his rowing parents.

  ‘It’s all my fault. I’m just Pathetic Percy,’ he said to Samson, when he had found him curled up in the straw. ‘I’ll never make them pleased with me, I’ll never have proper friends and I’ll never be frightful.’

  Percy knew that he would be a young child forever. He would never grow up. Ghosts don’t do that; they are what they are. But couldn’t he change inside himself? Become different? What kind of different though?

  His father wanted him to be manly, and he did try to do press-ups, but it wasn’t easy in a nightdress and although Ron didn’t say that he was disappointed, and was always very cheerful, Percy could feel it.

  His mother wanted him to love poetry and remember long and difficult things. At this very moment he should have been practising something that started ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind . . .’ He could do the beginning bit, and the end, which went ‘. . . As friend remembered not.’ But the middle just would not stick in his mind.

  Percy missed Daniel and Charlotte. They weren’t remembered not, they were remembered. For more than a century he hadn’t had any other children to talk to, dead or alive, so meeting the two of them had been very special. He almost wished he hadn’t been so weak and sorry for himself when he missed the bus. If he hadn’t made such a fuss, then they wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to find Mountwood and take him home. Could he have been braver? He just didn’t know, and Samson didn’t care one way or the other, because he was a cat, and cats aren’t in the least bit interested in becoming better or braver or cleverer. They are interested in mice and birds and keeping clean and watching out for dogs.

  So as the sun climbed higher in the sky, and Iphigenia and Ronald vanished into separate corners of the mouldy boot room that they occupied in the castle, Percy curled up beside Samson in the straw of the byre and sadly dematerialized.

  In the city the morning traffic clogged the main thoroughfares. The honking of horns and the wailing of a siren floated up to the top floor of the Department of Planning, where Jack Bluffit was waiting impatiently for his visitor. At last there was a timid tapping on the door and Snyder oozed into the room.

  ‘Lord Ridget has arrived.’

  ‘Well, get him in here.’

  Snyder disappeared, to be replaced by the gangling figure of Lord Ridget. His eyes stuck out even more than usual and worried lines furrowed his brow.

  ‘Right,’ said Jack. ‘Time’s up. I need a result.’

  ‘It’s most frightfully difficult, I’ve been thinking about it all weekend, lost some sleep over it. Tossing and turning.’

  ‘Poor you.’

  ‘I really don’t see how I can let this go through, you know. Lugsy’s letter shook me up. I mean, he’s right, isn’t he? Everything is just getting bulldozed away, all the old houses and the way things used to be. There was a burn not far from Markham Park that I fished when I was a little chap. Just tiddlers, of course, roach mostly; you know, a float and a little bit of bacon rind, but they said there were bream, although I never saw one . . .’

  ‘What’s this got to do with anything?’ growled Bluffit impatiently. Surely this dolt wasn’t about to mess things up for him?

  ‘Well, I mean, it’s gone, vanished. You can’t find the burn anywhere. It runs underneath the city bypass. It’s part of the sewage system! Imagine the poor fish trying to swim in sewage!’

  At that moment Jack Bluffit was imagining Lord Ridget swimming in sewage, but he gritted his teeth and said, ‘Right then, if you are going to stop the Markham Park development, I’ll just give the contractor a ring. He’s waiting for the go-ahead from me to move in and start making a right old mess of your precious riverbank.’ He reached out to the telephone and picked up the receiver.

  ‘No, stop, hang on! Wait!’ yelped Lord Ridget.

  Bluffit put the receiver down again. ‘Well?’

  Lord Ridget collapsed into a chair like a puppet whose strings had been cut. His face was a picture o
f melancholy and despair. He put his head in his hands and groaned. In a few months he would look out of his bedroom window and see, not the ancient willows lining his peaceful river, but houses and motorbikes and people. In his mind’s eye he saw them throwing plastic bottles and cigarette ends into the river, dumping rusty bicycles. There might even be children who paddled. It was no good; he simply could not bear it.

  He sighed deeply, took a gold fountain pen from his inside pocket and signed the document that Jack Bluffit thrust under his well-bred nose.

  When he had gone, shaking his head and mumbling to himself, Jack sat down at his desk. Things were working out. They always did.

  He started happily looking over the plans for the new development. He would have to make sure that no buildings or traffic signs spoilt the view of the statue from the main road. A few years ago some idiots on a council had spent a huge amount of money on a great big sculpture and plonked it down on a hill a mile or two outside their city. It was supposed to be some kind of angel; it looked more like a rusty aeroplane to him. But it had to be admitted, after a year or two it had become a landmark for the whole area. Everybody knew about it; every tired motorist coming back from the south saw it and thought, There it is, I’m home. The trick was visibility. Lines of sight.

  Jack was making a few notes in pencil on the blueprints when Snyder appeared in the room carrying a tray.

  ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to knock.’

  ‘I did, Mr Bluffit.’

  ‘Are you calling me a liar?’

  ‘Absolutely not, Mr Bluffit. You, sir? Such a pillar of honesty, such an ornament to the city, a liar – never.’

  Jack looked at him sharply. Was Snyder making fun of him? He’d better not be.

  Frederick caught Jack’s look, and his eyes darted about the room. He wondered if he had gone too far this time. His hands trembled, and the coffee cup on the tray jiggled and tinkled in its saucer.

  ‘It’s eleven o’clock, sir.’

  Coffee time. Jack reached out for his cup.

  ‘Where’s the paper? What’s got into you today?’

  ‘Ah, the paper. I may have mislaid it, sir.’

  ‘Mislaid it? You’ve never mislaid anything in your life. What’s going on?’

  Snyder didn’t speak.

  ‘Shove off and get it.’

  Snyder left the room and returned quite soon with the morning paper, folded carefully, held out in front of him at arm’s length. He dropped it on the desk, and before a surprised Jack Bluffit could say anything, he turned on his heel and almost ran out of the room.

  Jack heard his rapid footsteps pattering away down the corridor. Then he took a sip of his coffee, leaned back in his chair and unfolded the paper. A huge banner headline covered almost the entire front page.

  BLUFFIT BLUFFS IT

  Underneath, in smaller print, it said ‘Markham Street pensioner gives Bluffit a going-over. See pages 2–4.’

  As he read the article, Jack’s face darkened. His eyes narrowed, and the grinding of his teeth could be heard in the next room, where a secretary thought something had gone wrong with the copying machine and rang down to the service department to get it fixed. Sam Norton, the author of the article, had had great fun. He made a big thing of the frail old woman who had taken the lid off Bluffit’s schemes (he called it ‘opening a can of worms’) and mocked Lord Ridget mercilessly, suggesting that Bluffit had hauled him in to lead the inquiry only because a sack of potatoes couldn’t be dressed in a suit. He had ended the article with a question: ‘How much longer can Jack Bluffit be allowed to treat our city as his personal property?’

  With his meaty hands Jack scrunched the newspaper into a ball and hurled it across the room, missing the waste-paper basket by at least a yard. He got up from his desk and paced up and down for a while, imagining all the things he would do to Sam Norton if he ever met him in a dark alley. But after a while he calmed down a bit. Why should he care about being trashed by some little rat of a reporter. Norton was nobody, a cockroach. And nothing could stop him now. Ridget had done his bit. Markham Street was going into the dustbin of history, and that old cow who had tried to nobble him was going the same way.

  He returned to his desk and dialled the number of the local television station, to make sure that the result of the Ridget Inquiry made it on to the evening news.

  Seventeen

  Iffy Breaks the Rules

  The Great Hagges had decided to give their students a night off. Drusilla had received a letter in the post from one of her nieces, who wrote that the Grim Ghoul of Grisley Deep was very unwell. He had always had problems with his stomach, which was sensitive, and now he was a mere shadow of his former self. The old mine workings at Grisley were not very far away and the Great Hagges felt it was their duty to help if they could. So Drusilla packed her special bag of tonics and remedies, Fredegonda oiled her thumb and Goneril backed the car out of the old stables and gave it a rub-down. Before they left, Fredegonda gathered the ghosts in the courtyard, and addressed them.

  ‘We will be away for the night. As responsible phantoms, I am sure you do not need to be told to respect the regulations of this establishment. However, I would like to remind you that if Mountwood is to continue its important work unmolested, we must not create any disturbance in the local community. Vicar Flitch down the road at St Agnes has on several occasions in the past thought about coming here to exorcize Mr Crawe. Imagine how excited he would be if he found out about all of you. So a quiet period mulling over your work and rejuvenating tired ectoplasm is the order of the night.’

  With that she climbed into the front seat beside Goneril and the Rolls disappeared up the track to the main road, its headlamps cutting a fine swathe through the shadowy fir trees.

  For a while after the Hagges had left the ghosts flitted quietly about, feeling relaxed and sort of holidayish.

  The Phantom Welder appeared here and there and said, ‘Boo! How was that for scary?’ until a legless Anglo-Saxon warrior from the Isle of Thanet told him to stop mucking about and leave him alone. Cousin Vera the Banshee drifted into the main hall and sat down on the edge of the well, dangling her spindly legs over the side. She had as usual a touch of the sniffles, and drops formed on the end of her nose and dripped steadily into the dark waters below. They didn’t bother Angus Crawe, nor did her woeful monotonous voice.

  Vera liked talking to Angus Crawe, mainly about how she would be bottom of the class at Mountwood, which she had known from the beginning because she had been bottom of the class all her life.

  ‘I am a failure, you see, a banshee must wail, and I wail not. Or not very well, anyway.’ Angus Crawe did her a lot of good. He never interrupted, he had no opinions, yet she was sure he understood. Sometimes, not very often, she paused to say, ‘You see?’ or ‘Don’t you agree?’ and she always got a reply, if not a very clear one.

  ‘Divn’na’ or, ‘Why aye, man,’ or, ‘Getaway wi’yus,’ echoed from the depths. But it was enough for her to feel that someone cared.

  The night wore on, and soon Vera was no longer alone with Angus. One by one the ghosts glided into the hall, floating around rather aimlessly among the rafters or coasting along the walls. The truth was that they were bored. They had become so used to the strict timetable followed by the Great Hagges that when they suddenly had a lot of free time they didn’t know what to do with themselves.

  Vera spotted her cousin Iphigenia standing alone in a corner, and left the well-mouth to go over to her. ‘Hello, dear. Where are Ron and Percy?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say.’

  Vera was not much of a wailer, but she knew about worry and sadness, and she could tell straight away that things were not right. Soon Iphigenia had told her about her row with Ron over that foolish sprite.

  ‘And now Ron is on the roof and won’t come down, and Percy spends all his time in the byre, playing with the cat.’

  At that moment they both saw Kylie starting to emerge throug
h the wall beside them.

  ‘Oh no!’ whispered Iphigenia, and began to thin herself out, but it was too late.

  ‘Excuse me, Mrs Peabody,’ said Kylie. ‘Could I have a word?

  Iphigenia merely nodded.

  ‘It’s just . . .’ stammered Kylie. ‘It’s just that I wondered if I had done something to annoy you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Oh good, because I did so want to ask you about my boils the other night. Were they all right, do you think?’ And she smiled the little modest smile that means, ‘Wasn’t I brilliant?’ Then she added, ‘Though I’m sure you would have been much better.’

  Iphigenia looked at her. That was exactly what she thought, but she wasn’t going to say it. ‘You made an impression on Miss Goneril, did you not?’ she said instead. ‘And all your fellow students. I suppose that was the idea.’

  ‘I wanted to do my best.’

  ‘And that was your best?’

  ‘Well, I made as many boils as I could, you know. Like Miss Fredegonda said – more is better.’

  ‘There is a difference between more and too much.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Frankly, darling, you were a bit over the top. Rather a vacuous performance.’

  This was not a nice thing to say to someone who was hollow and couldn’t do anything about it. Fortunately Kylie wasn’t sure what ‘vacuous’ meant. However, she knew perfectly well that Iphigenia was not being kind, and she came from a long line of Scandinavian spirits who had lured bear hunters and woodcutters to their deaths for generations, so spirit she had.

  ‘You are annoyed, aren’t you? I wonder why. Perhaps you can’t stand that I did rather well,’ she hissed.

  By this time quite an audience had gathered round the two phantoms, who were staring at each other with undisguised fury.

  ‘What’s going on?’ said the Phantom Welder.