Toby Ibbotson - Mountwood School for Ghosts

The chest of drawers that he was looking at went wavery and blurry. Then the wavery blur gathered itself into a sort of misty cloud, and the misty cloud swooshed in through the front door and disappeared.

Daniel rubbed his eyes. The whole thing had taken just a few seconds. But Daniel knew he had seen something very unusual. When people see something very unusual they know it. Afterwards, when they think about it, they often dismiss it. ‘I was dizzy, I didn’t have enough breakfast, I’m coming down with something, I was imagining things, I had strained my eyes,’ they tell themselves. They forget that when they actually saw it, they knew. Daniel sat down on his bed, and his heart thumped. He knew.

At supper that evening Great-Aunt Joyce talked about their new neighbours. She occupied the biggest room in the house, naturally, with three big windows looking out over the street, and while Daniel had stood in his room looking at the furniture being unloaded next door, she had done the same thing on the floor below, sitting in her special comfy chair and peering out of the window. She spent much of the day there, disapproving of everything and hoping that a dog would lift its leg against the fence, or a child kick a ball into the garden, so that she could tell Daniel’s father to complain.

‘Well, I think they seem to be the right sort of people,’ said Great-Aunt Joyce. ‘They can’t be foreigners, if their furniture is anything to go by. I must say that’s a relief. I shall look in at some point and welcome them to our street. If I’m up to it, that is. If not, you must invite them over for coffee, Sarah. It is the proper thing to do.’

‘Of course we will want to get to know them, Aunt Joyce,’ said Daniel’s mother. She hadn’t seen the furniture, but she had heard about the new neighbours from Mrs Hughes at number nine, and she wasn’t very hopeful. A dog to cheer Daniel up would have been better.

‘Great-Aunt Joyce,’ said Daniel, ‘did you see anything a bit funny about the chest of drawers that they took in at the end?’

‘Funny?’ Aunt Joyce’s fork, which had just speared a large piece of sausage, stopped on its way to her mouth. She leaned forward and pointed it at Daniel. ‘What do you mean, boy?’ Her eyes narrowed.

Although Daniel couldn’t stand Aunt Joyce, he wasn’t scared of her. But now, for a brief second, he was afraid. ‘Nothing, I didn’t mean anything. I just thought that it was a… a funny-looking piece of furniture.’

The moment passed. Aunt Joyce went on eating. ‘It was a very nice piece,’ she said. ‘And no doubt very valuable. Chippendale, I think. Not that I would dream of prying into other people’s personal property.’

Daniel said nothing. If Great-Aunt Joyce had seen something too, then she wasn’t going to tell him about it.

After breakfast the next day, Daniel went to talk to Charlotte. He knew where she would be, because it was Sunday, and every Sunday Charlotte took her small brothers to the park so that her mother could have a lie-in.

The park was another good thing about Markham Street. If you went through the posts at the top of the street and walked up a cobbled lane full of wheelie bins, past the back entrances of another row of houses, you came to the park. It was very big, with wide-open green spaces and lovely old trees and council flower beds where the park keepers planted pansies in special shapes, so that they formed pictures of the city’s coat of arms, or the emblem of the football team.

The park was on the top of a hill, and there were views right across the city to the great cranes and gantries that still lined the river, even though nobody had built ships or loaded coal and steel there for years and years. You could see the spires of churches, and the high-rises on the other side of town. There was a shallow pond — an artificial lake, really. The water wasn’t very clean, but some ducks lived there, and they seemed to get on all right. There were dense clumps of rhododendron. You could see a squirrel sometimes, but you were more likely to see a rat, and quite a lot of litter. It was the kind of park that visitors might think was a fairly grotty place. But for the children of Markham Street it was a playground, and breathing space, and freedom. For the parents of the children it was a blessing.

Right in the middle of the park, at the highest point, was a statue. It was a statue of General Sir George Markham, who had gone to the local grammar school and risen to fame in the army, finally being gloriously hacked to pieces at a famous last stand somewhere in Africa.

Charlotte Hamilton was sitting on the stone pedestal at the foot of the statue. She was a thinnish girl, just the right side of skinny, and she was a bit taller than Daniel, with long thick hair the colour of wheat. (‘Old straw is more like it,’ she used to say.)

She was reading, or trying to read. The wind kept blowing her hair into her face and ruffling the book’s pages in an annoying way, and her youngest brother kept wandering off in the direction of the lake. The water was very shallow, but she still had to keep an eye on him. So she was quite happy to close her book and talk to Daniel instead when he flopped down beside her.

They talked about Daniel’s new neighbours.

‘Well, they might be interesting even though they have no children,’ said Charlotte. ‘And people with lots of children aren’t exactly perfect neighbours. If it was us moving in, and they started unloading cots and high chairs and baby baths and tricycles, then I bet some people would be pretty upset. Where’s Alexander?’

They found him under a rhododendron bush and walked down to the lake to get the worst of the dirt off him.

‘They might be doctors who work in disaster areas and operate on people in tents, or helicopter pilots, or musicians or actors or mountaineers,’ Charlotte went on.

‘I bet you anything they aren’t. Not with a leather armchair and a dining-table that two grown men can hardly lift. Great-Aunt Joyce says they are the “right sort of people”.’

‘Oh.’

There was nothing to say to that.

They collected Charlotte’s other brothers, who were in a tree being Spider-Man, and started back to Markham Street. On the way Daniel mentioned what he had really wanted to talk about all the time.

‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, trying to sound off-hand, ‘I saw something weird when they were taking out the last thing.’

Charlotte knew Daniel very well and off-hand didn’t work on her.

She stopped at once and turned to face him. ‘What? Tell me.’

So he told her. When he had finished she didn’t do any of the ‘how can you be sure?’ stuff he had been dreading. She just said, ‘If it’s a… you know… that would certainly be as good as anything — Romany, dogs, anything.’

The next day when Daniel came home from school, their new neighbours had arrived. They were called Mr and Mrs Bosse-Lynch, and Great-Aunt Joyce, who had been spying from her window all day, was very satisfied. They had the right sort of car, and the right sort of clothes, and Mr Bosse-Lynch had started trimming the hedge immediately. Then two ladies from the town had arrived to clean the house, and Great-Aunt Joyce had heard Mrs Bosse-Lynch telling them what to do before they had even got through the door.

That night, when Daniel had put his light out and lay in the darkness waiting for sleep, he heard something. At first he thought that it must be a pigeon under the slates. But it wasn’t the right cooing and scratching noise that pigeons made. It seemed to be coming from the wall beside his bed. On the other side of the wall, he knew, was an attic room just like his in the house next door. The noise was more a snuffling or gulping kind of noise. He sat up and put his ear to the wall. Now he could hear quite clearly. He heard stifled sobs, and sniffs. Someone was crying.