Toby Ibbotson - Mountwood School for Ghosts

‘You see,’ said Charlotte, ‘it’s like a crossword clue: “ Forest and Hills, school in the north ”. And so of course I thought of coming here.’

Mrs Wilder did a lot of crosswords, even very difficult ones.

‘I tried to lie about it, but it didn’t come off.’

‘You’d better leave the lying to me in future,’ said Daniel. ‘You’re absolutely pathetic at it.’

‘You won’t tell, will you?’ he asked Mrs Wilder. ‘I think my parents have enough to deal with at the moment.’

‘My dear Daniel,’ said Mrs Wilder in a very dignified voice, ‘I am perfectly aware that this is confidential information.’

‘And you believe us, don’t you?’

‘Heavens above! One more ghost is neither here nor there to me,’ she replied, and her gaze drifted off for a moment, back down the long years.

‘Well,’ said Charlotte, ‘a school for ghosts has to be a big place, doesn’t it? And you can’t have it in the middle of a town. So that means somewhere out in the country. But there are an awful lot of big estates in the borders; I had no idea. Most of them are occupied though, or have been turned into hotels and conferences centres and so on. Then Mrs Wilder was absolutely brilliant; it must be because of writing detective stories.’

‘Fairly brilliant, I think it’s fair to say,’ said Mrs Wilder, looking up from her paper.

‘No, really brilliant,’ said Charlotte. She went on. ‘Mrs Wilder said that if the school had only just been started, then maybe some place had been rented out or bought quite recently, just a month or two ago. So we started calling all the estate agents in the north of England, but there was nothing even remotely like “Forest and Hills”. I was ready to give up, and then Mrs Wilder was brilliant again.’

‘Twice in one morning,’ muttered Mrs Wilder. ‘Not bad for an ancient person.’

‘She said that the agent might be across the border,’ said Charlotte, ‘so we started on Scotland. Then we got lucky. Someone gave us the number of a big firm in Edinburgh that handles the sale of large properties. It was odd really. When I rang and asked if there had been a recent sale in the borders, perhaps to some retired ladies — you remember Percy called them Great Hagges, but I couldn’t say that — then the man I was talking to started babbling and saying that everything was in order, and if it wasn’t he would see to it immediately and please don’t let them come back. I got the name out of him though: Mountwood.’ She looked triumphantly at Daniel.

‘And look at this,’ she went on. ‘Mrs Wilder said she had an old book somewhere about big houses of the borders, and she dug it out.’

She pointed at the book that lay open on Mrs Wilder’s desk, and Daniel saw an old photograph of a rather forbidding fortified manor house, surrounded by dark crags and fir trees. The caption read ‘Mountwood, ancestral home of one of the fiercest clan chiefs of the borders.’

Daniel almost shouted. ‘You’ve found it! It has to be the place! That’s amazing!’

Charlotte and Mrs Wilder looked very pleased with themselves.

Then Daniel said more soberly, ‘Now all we have to do is get Percy there.’

The Stinking Druid of Llwnannog occupied a single room at Mountwood. He was a tall thin ghost, and everything about him was a dirty greyish white — his shoulder-length straggly hair, his trailing robes, his bushy eyebrows and his long horse-like face.

When Goneril was making her list of who would stay where, she hadn’t found anyone who wanted to be his room-mate. All the other ghosts had made some kind of excuse. It wasn’t because of his disgusting stench; ghosts don’t have human noses; their senses are of a different sort. It was because he knew all the ancient lays of the Celtic mysteries off by heart, some of which had thousands of verses, and he never recited just a part, but always a whole one.

The Druid didn’t mind being on his own, not really. He was used to it, and even when he was alive in Wales more than two thousand years ago, he hadn’t had any special friends. Now he watched dreamily from the little mullioned window of his room as a huge pale moon freed itself from a tangle of dark branches to sail the night sky. He thought of many things, but mostly he thought of the lovely maiden who was the only person who ever truly understood him, and how he had loved her, and how she had caused him to sin. He had saved her from being burned in a wicker basket at the Great Festival of Beltane, on Mayday eve.

As a Druid, a member of the ancient Celtic priesthood, he was all in favour of human sacrifices in principle. But he had been so very attached to the girl. It was a terrible thing to do, to secretly exchange her, the Chosen One, for one of his aunts whom he particularly disliked. He almost got away with it, but the Chosen One had been discovered, alive and well, in the hollow oak where he had hidden her, and it all came out. The Chief Druid had been absolutely livid and had cursed him horribly so that he was doomed to wander for eternity, with the smell as a special punishment. He had disliked his aunt because she had made him cut her toenails when he was a boy, and she had very smelly feet.

‘Smelly she was, and smelly shalt thou be,’ the Chief Druid had intoned.

The Stinking Druid sighed. If he hadn’t sinned, he would have been one of the famous Nine Standing Men of Llwnannog, those great stones standing peacefully and odour-free on the hill above the village, visited by bus-loads of American and Japanese tourists every summer. That would really be something. Every year hundreds of tourists asked why there were only eight stones, when they were called the Nine. Nobody knew, but he knew.

The Druid’s thoughts turned to Mountwood, and his secret hope. If he did really well, then perhaps the curse would be lifted. He wasn’t up to much, he was aware of that. He had signed up for extra lessons in Gnashing of Teeth, but he was having a hard time of it. It isn’t easy to gnash when you only have one tooth. But he was determined to work really hard, and he would do his exercises, and perhaps, one day, he would be forgiven.

From the courtyard below came a mournful howl. ‘Oh dear, I’m late,’ said the Druid. ‘They’ve started the voice class without me.’

Just as he was about to leave his place at the window and float downstairs, he saw two small figures approaching the house, walking down the track from the main road. There was enough moonlight for him to see that they were children, living ones. The boy had a rucksack, and they walked slowly, as though they were tired.

Daniel and Charlotte were tired. In fact they were exhausted. Mountwood was not easy to get at — they had soon found that out when they started looking at timetables and making plans.

It wasn’t too difficult to get to Carlisle, which had a train service. But then they had to get a bus, then another bus, and finally, in the late afternoon, they got off at a small village and still had quite a way to go. They had decided to use the rest of their money to take a taxi the last bit, even though it meant no supper and nothing to eat on the return journey. They rang the number that was posted on the bus shelter, and the man who answered sounded cheerful enough and said he would be there in five minutes, after he had drunk his tea.

‘Where are you going then?’ he asked.

‘To Mountwood.’

There was silence at the other end. Then, ‘Look, sorry, I’ve got another job. Forgot all about it. I can’t help you.’

‘But we don’t mind waiting.’

‘It’s a long job. Won’t be back till after midnight.’

‘Is there anyone else who could take us?’