Toby Ibbotson - Mountwood School for Ghosts

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.

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.

‘Ah, there is no true quality to be had any more. If you could only have seen the pure-white perfect tails of the stallions of the Puszta.’