Toby Ibbotson - Mountwood School for Ghosts

‘I feel,’ said Ronald Peabody, ‘That this is what we have been waiting for.’

He had been a tall well-muscled gentleman before he became a ghost, with a large handlebar moustache and side whiskers. Neither the moustache nor the whiskers were still there. They had been burned off in the fire that had turned him and his family into ghosts. Most of his skin had been burned off too, so that all his muscles could be clearly seen. He didn’t mind that, because he was very proud of his muscles, biceps, triceps and all the rest, which he had worked very hard to develop. But he still pined dreadfully for his facial hair.

‘We need to be constantly improving ourselves,’ he went on. ‘This is just the thing.’

Ronald and his wife Iphigenia were reading a notice that had suddenly appeared in glowing fiery letters on the wall of the travel agency where they lived, in between a big poster advertising Sun and Fun in Crete, and Weekend Breaks in Bratislava. A theatre had once stood on the site.

‘No doubt you are right, dearest,’ said Iphigenia.

‘I am right, Iffy dear, I am,’ said Ronald. ‘We shall have a break from town life, breathe the country air and return renewed.’

Iphigenia had been an actress, a beautiful tragic actress, and she had masses of wonderful copper-coloured hair. She had been lucky enough to die of smoke asphyxiation when the theatre went up in flames, rather than burning, and for this she thanked her lucky stars every day. If she had lost her hair, then death would not have been worth living.

The notice they had been reading said:

PUT THE GHASTLY BACK INTO GHOSTHOOD RETURN THE HORROR TO HAUNTING

The Mountwood Institute of Spectral Education offers a refresher course in essential skills to all interested members of the other side.

Then came quite a lot of information about the different courses. ‘Plashing and Moaning’, ‘The Wail for the Modern Era’, ‘Gnashing and Rattling’, ‘Basic Bloodcurdling’, ‘Exercising the Ectoplasm’ and a seminar entitled ‘Removal of body parts — the when and the where’.

Their son Perceval said nothing. He wasn’t a very good reader yet, and he didn’t quite get what they were talking about. He had passed on with his parents, which was a good thing, because he would have hated to be left an orphan. His mother had been performing a very tragic role on the night the theatre went up in flames, and he had been given a small part in the play. Dressed in a nightshirt he was lying in a crib being her starving son. He even had a line, ‘Oh, mother dear, I die, I die.’

He could still remember it. When he said it the heroine was supposed to go out into the snow to beg for help, and lots of awful things would happen. But they never did, because just before he spoke smoke started seeping up through the boards of the stage, and someone shouted, ‘Fire!’

‘Just what we need, eh? Percy and I can do lots of sports, and work on our fitness, can’t we, lad? We can go through the pain barrier.’

‘Yes, Father.’

Ronald Peabody had once been a long-distance swimmer. He still wore the charred remnants of an old-fashioned woollen swimsuit that had been scorched into his body during the fatal fire. He did his best to encourage his son to care for his body. He gave Percy pep talks about the Fight for Fitness, and the War on Weakness, and Building your Body. He wasn’t a stupid man, and he was well aware that Percy did not in fact have a body — none of them did — but it was the spirit of the thing that mattered, the manliness. And you don’t need a body in order to have willpower.

It was Ronald who had started the fire in the theatre. Long-distance swimmers have to cover their whole bodies in grease to keep out the cold, and Ron had just returned from a swim up the Thames from Tower Bridge to Putney, still in his swimsuit, and was preparing to change in Iphigenia’s dressing room and escort her home after the performance. But he came too close to a gaslight, and because he was covered in tallow he instantly ignited and blazed like a bonfire. It was a shame, but accidents happen. As Ron used to say, there is no point in crying over spilt milk. You just pick yourself, dust yourself off and start all over again.

There was something else though, something that weighed on him even now after more than a hundred years, and made him absolutely determined that his son would have a Will of Steel. For Ronald Peabody had given way to weakness once, and it had led to a terrible disappointment. Even now he couldn’t talk about it.

Percy wanted to please his father, and he always did his best. He wanted to please his mother too. But it wasn’t easy to please both of them. His mother was artistic. She felt poetry very strongly, and Percy tried to feel it too, although he didn’t always understand it.

‘There is soul in you, Perceval, I know it, but it must be nurtured,’ she would say.

Now Iphigenia read a bit more of the notice. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Mountwood is in the north, near the Scottish border. What balm to the spirit to wander among the dales and hills, to see the daffodils nodding in the breeze. To feel nature’s elemental power. Earth hath not anything to show more fair.’

‘Eh? Sorry, dear, I wasn’t attending,’ said Ronald. ‘I see they’re providing transport. Mighty efficient, those Great Hagges. Motorway service station, stroke of midnight, day after tomorrow. We’d better be there.’

‘Do you know,’ said Iphigenia, ‘I think I shall try to persuade Cousin Vera to join us. She has been looking frightfully pale and wan, and her vocal chords are simply wasting away.’ Cousin Vera was a banshee, and for a banshee voice is everything.

Iphigenia vanished through the wall to have a word with Cousin Vera in the nearby graveyard where she lived.

One day when Daniel came home from school the ‘For Sale’ sign had gone from the next-door garden.

A few days later an enormous lorry with ‘Forrest and Hills Ltd., Removals’ on the side edged carefully into the street and stopped outside the empty house. A couple of burly men jumped out of the cab, lowered the tailgate and started shifting furniture out of the back, up the short path and into the house.

Daniel watched from his window. You can learn a lot about people from their furniture, and he wished that Charlotte was there so that they could talk about it, but when he rang her there was no answer.

The furniture which the grunting removal men were lugging up the front steps of number seven did not look very promising. Quite a lot of it — an oval dining table and a set of chairs, for example — was swathed in sheets of plastic and lots of tape, which meant that it was expensive and polished. There was a huge Welsh dresser that the men almost dropped on the path, and a sideboard, both made of very dark wood with thick legs. There was a standard lamp with a chintzy lampshade. There were lots of packing cases, and Daniel could only guess what they contained. There was a glass-fronted bookcase, the kind that has books in it that nobody ever reads, if it has books at all. It might just as easily contain a collection of glass bunny rabbits, or golfing trophies. Then came two matching beds with padded headboards.

No bicycles, no skateboards, no birdcages, no playpen, no dog bed and no violins. No horse.

No children, no animals and no Romany refugees for Charlotte. I might have known it, thought Daniel.

One last object was being dragged out of the back of the lorry. It was an ugly chest of drawers with a curved front and brass handles. It was obviously meant to look like an expensive antique, and it obviously wasn’t. But as Daniel watched the men heaving the heavy piece up the front steps, something odd occurred, something that he could never really explain, even to himself.