Toby Ibbotson - Mountwood School for Ghosts

The door was open, and Daniel went into the hall and called up the stairs. ‘Hello, Mrs Wilder. Is Charlotte there?’

‘I’m up here,’ came Charlotte’s voice.

Mrs Wilder was getting pretty deaf. Daniel went up and put his head around the door of the big room on the first floor. It was the same kind of room as Aunt Joyce’s, at least in size and shape. But otherwise it was completely different. There were bookshelves packed with books, and a writing desk covered in notebooks and pens and papers, and pictures on the wall. On the old marble mantelpiece were all the usual things — photographs and invitations and a couple of candlesticks — and also some less usual things: a pack of hand-painted tarot cards, a badger’s skull, a small silver coin from Afghanistan stamped with the head of Alexander.

In the corner of the room was something that might have been just an ordinary stick, but was in fact a blowpipe from an Amazonian tribe called the Wai-wai.

‘A blowpipe is a marvellous murder weapon,’ Mrs Wilder had told Daniel once when he had asked about it. ‘Silent, deadly, accurate. And the poisons they use in South America kill in seconds.’

Mrs Wilder was a writer. She wrote detective stories and was quite famous. Now she was sitting at her desk, a small slim old lady with grey hair that kept escaping from her various pins and hairclips. You always noticed her eyes first. They were dark brown and looked at you as though they didn’t see the outside of you at all, but saw everything that was going on inside your head. Her faced was lined — she was eighty-three. There were lines for smiling with, lines for crying with and lots of lines for thinking with.

Charlotte was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, surrounded by an ocean of photographs, old and new.

‘Hello, Daniel,’ said Mrs Wilder. ‘Charlotte is going through the photo box. It’s time to get it sorted. Soon it will be too late.’

Mrs Wilder was expecting to die any day now. She had been expecting it for years, but so far, apart from the usual difficulties of being eighty-three, she was very much alive.

‘Charlotte, I have to talk to you,’ said Daniel.

Charlotte looked at him. ‘Is it what we were talking about?’

‘Yes, but there’s more to it.’

‘How do you mean?’

Mrs Wilder understood immediately that they had something secret to discuss. ‘Why don’t you two go down to the kitchen and make me some coffee?’ she said, and Daniel and Charlotte went downstairs.

‘It was a ghost, and I’ve met him,’ said Daniel, and while they made coffee and put Mrs Wilder’s favourite biscuits on a plate, he told her all about it.

‘We have to help him,’ said Daniel when he had finished. ‘I promised last night.’

‘When can I meet him?’

‘Come over tonight. I don’t think he can appear in the daytime. He wasn’t there this morning.’

After supper Charlotte went round to Daniel’s house.

‘Oh, hello, dear,’ said Daniel’s mother when she came to the door. ‘Daniel said you would be coming over. You were going to help him with something.’

‘That’s right, Mrs Salter.’ Charlotte didn’t like lying — she thought it was weak — so she was glad that Daniel’s mother didn’t ask what Daniel needed help with. They had decided that grown-ups should be kept out of the whole thing for as long as possible.

Charlotte ran up the stairs to Daniel’s room. They sat side by side on Daniel’s bed.

‘Percy, please appear now, we need to talk,’ called Daniel softly.

Nothing happened. They could hear Great-Aunt Joyce thumping around in the room below. Then she too went quiet.

‘Percy, please.’ Daniel looked at Charlotte. ‘He was here last night, I talked to him, I really did.’

‘Of course you did; don’t be stupid. There could be a thousand reasons why he doesn’t answer. He might be asleep for all we know.’

‘Do ghosts sleep?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest.’

‘Let’s turn the light out and just wait.’

They waited in the darkness for what seemed like a very long time. Charlotte began to think that she should be getting back, and wondered how she could tell Daniel in the right way, so that he wouldn’t think she didn’t believe in his ghost.

Then, just like the first time, a cold bluish bulge separated itself from the wall, and Percy appeared. He wasn’t crying any more, but he looked miserable enough, standing there thin and semi-transparent in his nightshirt.

‘How do you do?’ said Charlotte. ‘I’m Charlotte Hamilton.’

‘I’m Perceval. Are you a girl?’ Percy had lived in a time when no girl ever wore jeans and a T-shirt, so he wasn’t quite sure.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Do not fear.’

‘That’s all right, I’m not in the least frightened,’ said Charlotte, and she could have kicked herself, because Percy started to wail.

‘Oh, miserable failure that I am! No one fears me, not even girls.’

This got Charlotte very annoyed indeed, but she bit her lip this time, realizing that he had had a very old-fashioned upbringing which she would have to deal with later.

‘Perhaps it’s a good thing that we aren’t terrified,’ she said gently, ‘because we want to help you find your parents.’

Daniel and Charlotte took it in turns to ask Percy questions that might give them some kind of a clue, but they didn’t get much out of him.

He knew that it was a long journey to a special school for ghosts, and that it was in the country and had a name that sounded like the words on the removal van — ‘Forest’ and ‘Hills’.

‘Do you know what direction the school was in?’ asked Daniel. ‘North, south, east, west? I mean, it could be anywhere.’

‘North,’ said Percy. And however much they begged him to rack his brains, he had no more to add.

‘Well, north is good,’ said Charlotte. ‘We’re in the north.’

‘Are we? Are we really?’ Percy looked happy for the first time since they had met him. ‘Can we go there now? I want to go now!’

But of course they had to disappoint him. Then north of England is big, and as Daniel said, there were probably loads of places that would fit the bill, with names like Woody Knoll or Cragtrees.

‘I’m sorry, Percy, but we must do some research,’ said Charlotte. ‘Please don’t cry again,’ she added, as the little ghost’s eyes filled once more with tears. ‘We won’t give up, you know. We will bring you to your parents. It’s like a quest. Do you know what that is?’

Percy did know. ‘My name comes from a quest,’ he said, cheering up again. ‘That’s what Mother says.’

‘Exactly. This is the quest of Perceval, and your parents are the grail.’

Daniel shook his head in amazement. ‘Where do you get everything from?’

‘Oh, come on, Daniel, the Legend of the Grail? Give me a break.’

Daniel’s mother called from downstairs. ‘I think you’d better be heading home now, Charlotte.’

‘On my way, Mrs S.,’ called Charlotte. ‘Goodbye, Percy. Same time tomorrow, and we’ll see if we have news for you.’ And she went.

‘I think she might find them,’ said Percy. ‘She seems jolly clever for a girl.’

‘Yes, but don’t ever say that to her. I mean it.’

Charlotte rang the next afternoon. ‘Daniel, I’m at Mrs Wilder’s again, can you come over?’

‘You sound pleased with yourself.’

‘I think we’ve found it.’

‘We?’

‘Just come over, will you?’

Charlotte answered the door, and they went upstairs to the big room, where Mrs Wilder was sitting on her comfortable sofa, reading the newspaper.

‘Hello, Daniel,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell Charlotte off. I was curious and I got it out of her.’