Mountwood School for Ghosts Read online

  Daniel and Charlotte stood before the great door of Mountwood and listened to the fading echoes of the bell. They were cold, tired, and more than a little uneasy. The castle seemed to be completely deserted.

  ‘If we are wrong, and the place is empty, then we are in for a rough night,’ said Daniel.

  ‘And even if it isn’t empty . . .’ Charlotte replied.

  ‘It isn’t,’ said Daniel, and Charlotte too heard the sound of heavy footsteps approaching.

  The door creaked slowly open and three extremely large ladies stood looking down at them.

  ‘Children!’ exclaimed the middle one.

  ‘What are you doing here? At this time of night?’ asked the one on the left.

  ‘Are you lost?’ asked the third.

  ‘Er . . . er . . .’ said Daniel.

  ‘Speak up, boy. Has the cat got your tongue?’ thundered Fredegonda.

  Charlotte found her voice. ‘Sorry to bother you, but we are looking for the Great Hagges of Mountwood.’

  ‘The what? Pure gibberish,’ rasped Goneril. ‘We are simply three pensioners who have no wish to be disturbed by little brats. We were just on our way to bed.’

  ‘But . . .’ stuttered Daniel.

  Before he could say more a small clear voice rang out. ‘Mother, Father, I’m here, I’m back. I was in a removal van but now I’m here. I’ve been on a bus, and on a train.’

  The next half-hour or so was one that Daniel and Charlotte would never forget. A spectral light filled the courtyard and ghosts of all shapes and sizes started to appear around them, screeching, wailing, waving ghostly limbs about and then putting them back on again. Severed heads bobbed about, bleeding happily and smiling like idiots.

  In the midst of the crowd, as though in a private place of their own, Iphigenia stood hugging Percy to her breast, while Ronald stood and patted him on the head and said in a voice filled with fatherly pride and love, ‘Well done, lad, what a boy you are, you made it, a chip off the old block.’

  Daniel and Charlotte were forgotten. They sat down a bit out of the way, with their backs to the wall of the castle, partly because it is a bit odd having ghosts passing through you all the time, and partly because the Stinking Druid had joined the happy throng and neither of them wanted to vomit in front of the Great Hagges.

  At last Fredegonda, in a voice like the foghorn of an ocean liner, brought the joyful crowd to their senses.

  ‘Enough!’ she roared. The ghosts started to quieten down. Fredegonda stepped up to Percy, who looked up at her shyly.

  ‘Well, you seem to have been found. I presume our Missing Ghost alert got through to someone.’

  ‘No, Miss Hagge,’ said Percy. ‘I don’t know about that. It was them. It was Daniel and Charlotte who helped me,’ and he pointed at the two children sitting quietly by the wall.

  ‘They’re the best friends ever.’

  ‘Humans?’ Fredegonda’s voice was terrible. ‘You were helped by humans? You are FRIENDS with HUMAN BEINGS?’

  ‘Bleeding ’eck,’ whispered the Phantom Welder to himself. ‘That’s torn it.’

  Fredegonda marched towards the children, who scrambled to their feet. Daniel found himself smoothing down his hair. Charlotte tried to brush a bit of the dirt off the front of her jeans.

  The Great Hagge towered above them, arms akimbo and a fierce glitter in her eye.

  ‘You are mere chits, sprogs. You are humans. You are no doubt terrified by what you have seen this night.’

  ‘Well, a bit . . . frightened,’ said Charlotte. She didn’t want to say that by far the scariest thing in that courtyard was the Great Hagge Fredegonda.

  Fredegonda snorted. She turned and in a mighty voice addressed the assembled phantoms.

  ‘Now, perhaps, you understand. These children, these weak and tiny things, are a bit frightened. They are not petrified, or horror-struck. They have not been driven mad with fear, or died of sheer terror. Their hair has not turned white, they do not even tremble. It is not good enough; it will not do. You have brought shame upon the name of true haunting. You must apply yourselves to your work unceasingly and put this failure behind you. And until then it is absolutely against school rules to have any communication, friendly or otherwise, with members of the human race. Now please disappear. There will be no more lessons tonight.’

  Within seconds the courtyard was empty.

  Now Fredegonda turned back to Daniel and Charlotte. ‘As for you two, Goneril will run you into the village in the morning.’ She turned away. ‘Come, girls, I am calling an emergency staff meeting.’

  The three Great Hagges stumped back into Mountwood, slamming the door behind them.

  Daniel and Charlotte stood outside. It was cold, dark and damp.

  ‘Rotten cow,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘Our French teacher is a bit like her,’ said Daniel.

  Then a voice whispered gently on the night air. ‘I daren’t appear, but I just had to thank you.’

  It was Iphigenia. ‘Percy has told me everything and, oh you darlings, I am so, so, grateful. I shall be in your debt until the end of time. If we can ever be of help . . . I shouldn’t say that, should I . . . ? But I mean it, I do.’

  There was a moment of silence, and then, very faintly, they heard, ‘There is straw in the byre.’ And Iphigenia was gone.

  Daniel and Charlotte found the byre, an old stone building close by with a half-collapsed roof. Inside it was pitch dark, but they felt their way forward and burrowed into the heap of old straw that lay there. They crept close together for warmth, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

  Afterwards Daniel thought that the most surprising part of their whole trip came the next morning, when they rode to the bus stop in the village in the back seat of a 1912 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost driven by a Great Hagge called Goneril.

  PART TWO

  Nine

  Jack Bluffit

  Jack Bluffit, head of the city Department of Planning, stood gazing out of his office window. His office was right at the top of the council building, with one wall almost entirely made of glass, so the whole city was spread out below him. His city – that was how he thought of it. He had been born in it, grown up in it and seen it change. Lots of the changes were his work, planned by him, and he was proud of it. People moaned about old buildings and narrow streets being torn down to make way for shiny new tower blocks and big roads and flyovers; they whined about the city losing its ‘character’, or its ‘charm’. Jack despised them. He knew better. He remembered well enough the slum where he was born. He remembered the miners with their sunken chests and the horrid coughs that would kill them. That was charm all right. He remembered his mother going out to scrub, and coming home exhausted with chapped hands, to put a meal of bread and dripping on the table. He remembered the earth closet at the back of the house which always stank. He remembered the kids with rickets and heads that had been shaved by the nit lady at school. That was character, was it?

  Jack himself had no children; he had never wanted any. ‘The city is my baby. I’ve given it the best years of my life,’ he used to say, whenever some office worker started boring him to death about how their Sheila had got top marks in history or played ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ on the recorder. Children were just a waste of time and money, in Jack’s view. Snot and nappies and expensive rubbishy toys that got broken the next day. He had more important things to do. He had been determined from the age of seven to make things change, and he had done it. It had been a long hard fight to the top. But now he was there. He was the strong man of the city. The politicians on the council came and went. Here one year, gone the next. Talking and voting. But Jack Bluffit was always there, making plans.

  That’s what he was doing now, as he gazed down on his city. From his window he could see the long sweep of the street that led down to the railway station, and halfway along was a great big monument, with a statue of Lord Lilford on it. Carved on the pediment was an inscription that Jack had read a thousand
times on his way to the station. ‘Lord Lilford, Benefactor of this City.’ Now Jack saw in his mind’s eye a bronze statue; a statue of a man seated on a powerful rearing horse, the great curve of its neck and the noble head reined effortlessly in by one firm hand. In the other hand, held aloft for all to see, was a roll of paper (bronze paper, of course): the plans for the regeneration of the city. And the proud determined face of the rider was the face of Jack Bluffit. He would have something better than children to remember him when he was gone, he would make sure of that. The city would remember him.

  Jack went over to his desk and sat down. He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. The chair creaked and complained. Jack was no lightweight. He had thick hairy arms, a thick neck and a solid square head. He had a big round stomach which strained his shirt buttons, and big round thighs. He looked like the kind of person you might meet working on an offshore oil rig or a construction site. Sometimes people made the mistake of thinking that a thick body went with a thick head. But they usually regretted it. Jack could never have got where he was if he had been stupid. He was wily. Nothing got built or pulled down in the city without Jack Bluffit’s say-so. He always got what he wanted, and he did not much care how. As far as Jack Bluffit was concerned, rules and regulations were only there to keep the little people in their place, and if they were stupid enough to let that happen, well, hard luck for them. When he narrowed his sharp little eyes and pursed his thick lips and started to work out ways of getting what he wanted, there were not many council workers or politicians who could stand in his way, and now there was something that Jack wanted very badly.

  There were some unopened letters on his desk, and Jack started to look through them. Most of them were official business, but one was a card with stylish writing on it. ‘Lord Ridget has the pleasure of inviting you to join the hunt at Ridget Hall on Sunday the 23rd . . .’

  Jack Bluffit snorted. That snob Ridget would never have had him within fifty miles of Ridget Hall if he could help it. But Jack knew what he was after. Jack had plans that made Lord Ridget tremble in his posh shoes. If Ridget thought that he could twist his arm by impressing him with his snooty county friends, he had another think coming. But then something struck Jack. He would have to pose for the statue, and he had to look natural. He didn’t want people snickering when it was unveiled and saying that he had never sat on a horse in his life. A bit of practice would come in handy. And it couldn’t be that difficult. If that gangling chinless wonder Ridget could ride, then anybody could. He took a sheet of paper out of the desk drawer and wrote a reply.

  There was a little knock at the door and it opened slowly. Bluffit’s personal assistant slid into the room. He was thin and sharp-faced, very neatly dressed with short hair that seemed to be stuck to his head, and had a way of looking about him all the time as though he thought someone was spying on him.

  ‘What?’ barked Bluffit.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, Mr Bluffit, but you said I should let you know as soon as the decision came through.’ He held out a folder with the city crest embossed on the front.

  ‘Right, give it here then, and get out.’

  His assistant slid out again, closing the door carefully behind him. Bluffit didn’t like slammed doors, unless he was the one doing the slamming.

  As soon as he had gone Bluffit opened the folder and leafed quickly through to the last page, which began, ‘The motion to approve for development . . .’ Then there was a long sentence which he skimmed through, looking for the words he wanted to see. There they were: ‘. . . has been passed.’

  A satisfied smile spread over his features, but it didn’t stay there very long. There was work to be done. He got up, opened the office door and yelled, ‘Get in here!’

  His assistant’s name was Frederick Snyder, but Bluffit was a rude man. He called it being ‘no-nonsense’ and ‘to the point’, as rude people often do.

  ‘Right,’ he said, when Frederick was back in the room and standing in front of the desk. ‘We’re ready to go. The approval has come through.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Frederick knew already. He made it his business to know everything before anybody else.

  ‘Get the announcement ready . . .’

  ‘I’ve already done that, sir.’ Frederick smirked. ‘It will be in the papers this evening. If you approve, of course.’ His eyes swivelled to the office door and back again to Bluffit. ‘And the letters . . . ?’ he said.

  ‘Send them out right now, if not sooner. All the residents, the usual thing.’

  ‘Of course, sir. Though I was just about to take my lunch break, sir.’ But the look on Jack Bluffit’s face made him decide not to take his lunch break after all.

  When Frederick had removed himself Jack crossed to one of the filing cabinets that lined the opposite wall. He took out a rolled-up blueprint and flattened it out on his desk. He pored over it intently for a while, grunting with satisfaction. Yes, it looked good; the new bypass, the slip roads, the shopping centre – retail park, they called it – all laid out in detail. It would be a proper bit of modernization. Plenty of demolition to do first though. They would have to make a clean sweep of all those old houses. Tomorrow Bluffit would start making calls and lining up contractors. He owed a favour or two. Jack reached for a felt-tip pen. His hand hovered over the blueprint and then descended decisively to place a red cross right in the middle, where the main entrance to the retail park would be.

  ‘That’s the spot,’ said Jack.

  Ten

  Bad News

  Sometimes after something really interesting has happened, life can seem a bit flat. Finding Mountwood and meeting the ghosts and the Hagges had been very interesting. Now life in Markham Street went on as usual, and there was nothing wrong with that, but there wasn’t much for Daniel and Charlotte to get excited about, if you didn’t count the end of term coming closer, and the summer holidays to look forward to. Tompkins disappeared, and everybody went looking for him, until he turned up in a suitcase on top of Mrs Cranford’s wardrobe. And one of Charlotte’s small brothers swallowed a goldfish, and had to be taken to the doctor’s, not because of the goldfish, which as Charlotte pointed out was only a fish and people eat fish all the time, but because it had been dead and floating in the park lake, and could have had any number of germs.

  Charlotte was pretty busy, either helping out at home or doing homework. She was absolutely determined to get top marks in everything. So on the days when only Great-Aunt Joyce would be at home, Daniel took to popping in after school to talk to Mr Jaros who lived at number four.

  He was certainly interesting. He had a lot of white hair and a beaky nose with deep furrows on either side of it. He always wore a waistcoat and trousers that had once been part of a whole suit. But his old Labrador, Jessie, had lain down on the jacket one day when he had thrown it into a corner and, since she obviously liked it better than he did, he had let her keep it. Now he wore a pullover instead. He was a bow-maker, and he had his workshop on the ground floor. He didn’t make bows for archery; he made bows for musical instruments, and as he often explained to Daniel it was a very highly skilled craft, and one which very few people understood.

  In fact, he told Daniel, he was the best bow-maker in England, probably the best in Europe.

  ‘Though I say it myself; I cannot hide myself from the truth. Compared to me, that man in Geneva is a pimple.’

  He talked very precise English, far too well to really be English, which he wasn’t. He had been born in Czechoslovakia, and had had some fairly nasty experiences there that he preferred not to talk about. ‘What’s done is done. What’s past is past concern,’ he used to say. He quite often sounded as though he was quoting something that he had read, which he often was.

  Mr Jaros’s workshop would have been a nice place to spend time even if Mr Jaros hadn’t been there. There was a long workbench, and wood shavings on the floor, and on the wall hung the tools of his trade: chisels, knives, awls, dividers, clamps,
pliers, tongs and files. There was a smell of resin, turpentine and pipe tobacco. There was a dusty CD player on a shelf, and something was almost always playing, mostly music by Smetana and Dvořák and Janáček, composers who, Mr Jaros maintained, were the greatest of them all. Bows of every description hung everywhere, small ones for children’s first violins and great big ones for double basses, finished ones, half-finished ones and some that were only just started.

  Mr Jaros had cleared a corner of the workbench and Daniel was making a birthday present for Charlotte, a box with a proper hinged lid where she could keep things. Mr Jaros had said that he would help Daniel put in a working lock with a key, so that whatever Charlotte decided to keep in there couldn’t be eaten by her small brothers. And on the lid Daniel was going to carve her initials. He was using walnut wood, so it wasn’t easy, with the hardness and the shortness of the fibres, and he had to use razor-sharp tools. Mr Jaros was strict, and Daniel had had to spend one whole afternoon learning to hone his chisels properly.

  ‘A dull workman uses dull tools. If you take my edges off, you must put them back on.’ Daniel was determined to do it right, with dovetail joints at the corners. So far he hadn’t cut himself very badly, and Mr Jaros’s sticking-plaster supplies had only been needed three or four times.

  But the best thing about Mr Jaros’s workshop was old Jessie, who lay and snored on her jacket in the corner for most of the day. She always opened one eye when Daniel came in and said hello to her, and she thumped her tail a couple of times. Daniel took her out for a walk sometimes, though she wasn’t much of a walker these days.

  ‘She runs in her sleep, and plays,’ said Mr Jaros. ‘Time can’t take that away from her.’

  But he knew that time would take her away from him soon enough, and he didn’t like to think about that.

  One day a few weeks after the trip to Mountwood, Daniel was at the workbench smoothing down the bevelled edge of his box and Mr Jaros was looking through a delivery of horsehair and complaining.