Eva Ibbotson - The Ogre of Oglefort

The Smoking Girl was a very young ghost hung all over with gaudy scarves and floating shawls, and she would have been pretty except that her fingers and the corners of her mouth were stained yellow with nicotine. She had smoked a hundred cigarettes a day, coughing and blowing smoke at the other passengers on purpose. There was nothing she liked better than breathing her poisonous fumes into other people’s lungs.

There was even a Headless Ghost, the Chewer — whose head was so stuck up with chewing gum that he had left it on the train.

But there was one more ghost to come! He came slowly, and at first he was only a gray wavery shape — a space, a nothingness. But what a nothingness! A cold and hopeless emptiness; a pit of such pointlessness and despair and fear that those who came near felt that life had no sense or meaning.

“The Inspector!” whispered the other ghosts, and stood back to let him pass.

The wavery shape became more distinct. It was the figure of a man in a uniform with shiny buttons whose merciless dazzle pierced the eyes — and in his hand a ticket puncher with which he had punched the tickets of the passengers who were on the train.

But no face. Only two eyes, narrowed to slits, and a mouth set in a slimy calculating leer. The Inspector had had power over the specters when they were alive, kicking off passengers whose tickets were not in order, pushing them out onto the platform, separating mothers from children, making sure that trains stuck in tunnels for hours — and always talking about “the regulations” to justify his cruelest deeds. His creepily soft call of “Tickets, please” had sent shivers down their backs, and even now they were afraid of him.

The Inspector seldom spoke. He did not need to. His ticket puncher, which once had pierced paper, could now pierce ectoplasm.

The Norns looked at the ghosts and were pleased with what they saw. The ghosts were deeply disgusting. Ectoplasmic spit is probably the nastiest substance there is, and the Honker had just produced a gobbet of it, which landed in the lap of one of the nurses. The Bag Lady’s phantom knickers had risen from one of her shopping bags and were drifting around the cave, looking for a victim. All the garments in her bags could wrap themselves around people’s faces so that they couldn’t see.

But that wasn’t what pleased the Norns. An ogre might not be scared of ghosts that were just disgusting. He himself was probably disgusting, too. No, what was terrifying about these ghosts was the sheer evil and selfishness that seemed to hang over them like a black mist. There is nothing more frightening than specters who have lived with cruelty and viciousness day after day, and even the Norns, used as they were to strangeness, found themselves shivering. One murderous deed may be forgiven but these ghosts had practiced evil morning noon and night.

“Ogre must be killed,” began the First Norn.

“Ogre of Oglefort,” said the Second Norn.

“Killed absolutely. Finished,” said the Third.

“Frightened to death,” said the First Norn.

“Terrorized,” said the Second.

“Pulverized,” said the Third.

“And the rescuers must be punished,” said the First Norn.

“Horribly.”

“Cruelly.”

“Shouldn’t be difficult,” said the Aunt Pusher, smiling his horrible smile. “Ogres are afraid of ghosts, ev-eryone knows that.”

“What about our reward?” asked the Ghost with the Umbrella. “What do we get if we do the job?”

The Norns blinked at each other. They were not used to rewarding people — but the ghosts just stared with their relentless eyes.

Then, “Train will be rerouted,” said the First Norn.

“Not just around and around,” said the Second.

“Different stations,” said the Third.

“Junctions,” said the First Norn.

“Branch lines,” said the Second.

“Tunnels,” said the Third.

The ghosts were satisfied, nodding their horrible heads.

“How do we get to Oglefort?” asked the Bag Lady.

“Orders will be given,” said the First Norn.

“Instructions,” said the Second Norn.

“Information,” said the Third.

The Norns were now exhausted. The nurses came forward with syringes to give them an injection but nothing could stop the Old Ones from falling asleep. One by one their heads fell forward on to their chests, they slid down under the bedclothes… they began to snore. And the ghosts glided back onto the platform and into the train and sat staring out of the window at the dark tunnel — and waited.

The children and Charlie had followed the stream which led from the lake. They had taken off their shoes and socks and were treading carefully over the bright sharp pebbles. Charlie was not content with paddling. He plunged into the water, swam across to the other bank and back again, shook himself all over them, and plunged again. He waited with his head on one side while they threw sticks for him, and more sticks and more sticks still, and after that he began a ferocious tug-of-war with a tree root, growling like a werewolf, but whatever he was doing he came back to them, sneezing with pleasure and sharing his happiness. He was a great believer in sharing.

“I thought I’d never love a dog after Squinter, but I was wrong,” said Mirella.

“He makes everything seems as though it’s just been invented, doesn’t he?” said Ivo. “I mean, look at him with that stick — you’d think there’d never been a stick like it in the whole world.”

The little dog still slept on Ivo’s bed, but as soon as he woke in the morning he trotted off to see Mirella, who now had a bedroom along the corridor, and when the children were apart he simply went backward and forward between them.

“He’d never let us quarrel,” said Mirella.

But the children had no wish to quarrel. They agreed exactly about what they wanted to do: make the castle gardens grow, stock the larder, tend the land. And perhaps — though they did not put this into words — turn the place into somewhere where people would not want to be changed but would be content to be themselves.

“If only we had more help,” said Ivo as they made their way back to the castle. “The kitchen garden needs digging all over and the rose garden needs mulching and Ulf says we ought to be pruning the trees in the orchard. And the Hag gets so tired.”

“Yes, I know. Maybe the animals could help. People used to use animals on farms.”

“But not hippos or gnus or aye-ayes.”

“No… but why not? The gnu could pull a cart; it takes ages to wheelbarrow the stuff to the compost. And the hippo could help us to find out what’s going on in the lake. Catching fish would be a big help.”

“We could ask the ogre a bit more about who the animals were — the gnu and the rest. He might remember.”

But the ogre said he couldn’t remember anything like that, and anyway he was far too busy with the arrangements for the funeral.

“I’ve changed my will again,” he told them. “I’m going to leave the castle to the Aunt-with-the-Ears. I’ve thought about it and I think she’ll do better than the Aunt-with-the-Eyes. She dances, you know. She goes around and around when you play a waltz and her teeth flash, and I think it will be jolly when I’m under the mound to have a dancing aunt about the place, don’t you agree? And what about the hearse, how is that getting on?”

He had also changed pajamas again. Not the ones he was wearing, which were turning a rather messy gray color, but the ones he was going to be buried in.