Toby Ibbotson - Mountwood School for Ghosts

The Druid closed his eyes, and repeated again and again, ‘I am one with my smell; I embrace it.’

This went on for quite some time. Then Drusilla, who couldn’t exactly see smells but always knew exactly what they were up to, noticed that the stench that had hung in a drifting cloud around the Druid was beginning to concentrate itself in the region of his stomach; his deathly pale face took on a sickly greenish tinge, and suddenly the stench was gone.

‘Oh! You have mastered it. Congratulations.’

‘I have!’ cried the Druid joyfully. ‘It is within me. My smell is within!’

‘It is. Now, this might be asking too much, but if you could release it again…’

The Druid closed his eyes. Like an invisible snake striking with its deadly poisonous fangs, a viciously nauseating stink shot out of his stomach, and a cockroach that was going about its business on the wall opposite coughed once, scrabbled a little with its back legs and fell lifeless to the floor.

‘A cockroach — well done indeed!’ exclaimed Drusilla. ‘Cockroaches can stand almost anything, you know.’

The Druid smiled a proud smile, and apparently without effort withdrew his odour back into himself.

Drusilla came back to the present. The sun’s lower rim was already nudging the distant fells. To the east a bank of clouds was building.

‘I should be getting back,’ she said to herself.

She straightened up and started to wade back to where she had left her shoes and socks on a convenient rock. She had one muddy foot on the bank and one still in the water when she suddenly stopped dead. Her nose had twinged.

‘Hmmm,’ she said.

She left the pool and climbed the side of the little dell to catch the light airs off the moor that signalled the beginning of the evening breeze. She pointed her nose straight into the air, and sniffed.

‘Well, well,’ she murmured.

At breakfast, as Fredegonda and Goneril were spooning up the last of their tapioca pudding, Drusilla said, ‘We will have visitors tonight.’

‘Yes,’ said Fredegonda, looking down at her thumb, which had swollen up slightly and started to blacken at the tip.

Her thumb was very good at keeping her informed about what was going on. Sometimes she thought it was almost too excitable, too keen to tell her things that she could perfectly well have found out for herself. But on the whole they got on very well together, and she was conscientious about attending to its needs. Like a faithful pet that one has cared for over the years, it had found its way to her heart, and if anything had happened to it she would have been very upset.

‘Those children,’ said Drusilla. ‘I caught a distinct whiff of the boy, and a hint of the girl too.’

‘When do you expect them to be here?’

‘Around midnight, I should think.’

‘What a bother.’

‘Just when things were beginning to settle down nicely. Shall I deal with it?’ said Goneril hopefully. She felt the need to be up and about. She had always been the most sporty of the three.

‘It is tempting, I agree,’ replied Fredegonda, ‘but children aren’t as easy to get rid of as they used to be. The place will be crawling with police cars and do-gooders in no time. We’ll just have to keep our heads down. Batten down the hatches.’

So when the students gathered as usual for evening assembly in the great lower chamber of Mountwood, they got a surprise.

‘Tonight it will be necessary to take some evasive action,’ announced Fredegonda. ‘Mountwood is threatened by intruders. So absolute disappearance by eleven o’clock, please. No groans, no rattling or gnashing. And no stray ears,’ she declared, fixing the Legless Anglo-Saxon Warrior with a piercing look. His ear went red.

The Shortener raised a shy hand. ‘If I may say so, wouldn’t it be better to frighten them off? We would all like to show what we can do.’

‘It is nice to see you so keen,’ replied Fredegonda. ‘You show a fine spirit, all of you. However, in this particular case…’ she paused, remembering how the two children who had brought Percy home sat calmly by the wall while a crowd of phantoms howled and screeched in the courtyard, ‘… it might prove quite a hard nut to crack.’

Mrs Salter stopped the car at the head of the track.

‘Are you sure you want to do this? It’s terribly dark.’

‘Mum, we’ll be fine. I’ve got a torch and it’s not cold. See you tomorrow.’

Daniel and Charlotte had decided to arrive at Mountwood at around midnight, to have the best chance of meeting everybody and explaining everything. They picked their way down the rutted track by the light of Daniel’s torch. During the evening the sky had become overcast, and now not a single star was to be seen. The night was as black as soot, the darkness so solid that you could almost reach out and touch it, but treading gingerly they came at last to the courtyard of Mountwood.

Daniel let the beam of his torch play over the castle’s louring front. It picked out the iron-studded door and, to the side, the bell pull. Charlotte walked forward, reached up and pulled with all her strength. The clanging of the bell sounded shockingly loud. It echoed through the castle for ages. Nothing happened. The silence was total, so complete that it hissed in their ears.

‘Can they have gone? Is it deserted?’ whispered Charlotte. It was difficult not to whisper in that soundless nothingness.

‘No, they were going to be here for a year at least. Try again.’

Charlotte pulled the bell again. Again the frightful clamour, followed by utter silence.

‘What shall we do?’

‘We can’t give up. Let’s get some sleep in the byre and then see if the Great Hagges come out in the morning.’

Daniel and Charlotte had never been sure that the ghosts would help them. But that they would simply have disappeared — really disappeared — had never occurred to them. They found their way to the byre and forced open the warped, half-rotten door. The pile of old straw was still there. They made a sort of nest for themselves, unrolled their sleeping bags and crept into them. They lay there in the darkness, trying not to think of what the future held if their mission should fail.

Charlotte was finally drifting off into a worried sleep when she quite distinctly felt something walk across her legs.

‘Oh no, a rat!’ she exclaimed, sitting up.

She had nothing against rats and mice in principle, but having one walk over you — and this had felt like a big one — in the middle of the night is hard to take for anyone. Then she heard a sound that was quite unmistakable: a quiet, contented purring.

‘Daniel, where’s the torch?’

Daniel fumbled around, found it and turned it on. They saw a tortoiseshell kitten, curled up and resting peacefully in the space between their sleeping bags.

When the clang of the doorbell echoed through Mountwood all the ghosts ignored it, as they had been told to do. They remained completely invisible, absorbing themselves into walls, floors and cupboards. Not a single rattle or gnash was to be heard.

Hours passed, very difficult ones for Percy. He desperately wanted to go out and see Samson but he just didn’t dare. His mother and father had told him very firmly to be absolutely quiet, and he thought he could manage that bit, even if he did sometimes let out a little hiccup by mistake.

But what about those intruders? The Great Hagges hadn’t said who they were. They might be the kind that are dangerous for ghosts. There might be a whole clutch of clergymen out there in the darkness with garlic and little black books. The druid had told some horrible story just the other night about how badly ghosts were treated in the old days. Then Percy had a terrible thought. What if the intruders were dangerous not to ghosts, but to cats? He simply had to go out and see that Samson was all right.