Eva Ibbotson - The Great Ghost Rescue

He felt in his pocket for the piece of bread that he’d saved from his supper the night before. As he lifted it to his mouth he noticed a tiny, new, red mark on his wrist. Baby Rose must have taken breakfast by herself while he was asleep. He felt very proud of her. She was obviously going to be a very intelligent vampire indeed when she got older.

When he’d finished his bread he looked out for Humphrey’s elbow. It didn’t seem to be anywhere on the lorry. Then he saw that there was a disused barn facing away from the road on a piece of waste ground — and there they all were: the Hag fixing Humphrey’s ball and chain, Walter the Wet grumbling because Winifred wouldn’t let him paddle in her bowl, Sozzler, Gulper, Syphoner and Fred looking hungrily at a cow grazing in a distant meadow…

But it was at quite a new figure that Rick was looking. A wavering, crazy-looking old creature wearing a monk’s habit.

Not another one?

‘I tell you I can’t stand it any longer,’ he was moaning. ‘Look at me!’ He held out his quivering, thumbless hands and Aunt Hortensia, who was the expert on ectoplasm, agreed that he looked in very poor shape.

‘It’s the petrol fumes and the smell of the exhaust and those idiots whizzing by all the time,’ moaned the spectre. ‘You’ve no idea what it’s like nowadays. I was a monk you see. The Mad Monk of Abbotsfield they called me. Because I was walled up alive. So naturally I went mad. Ooh—’ he broke off nervously. ‘Who on earth is that?’

The Hag introduced Rick who shook the old wraith’s rather disgusting thumbless hand politely.

‘All this—’ the Mad Monk went on, pointing back at the motorway and the clover-leaf packed thick with cars — ‘all this used to be the grounds of an ancient Abbey, you see. I used to haunt the Old Cloisters where the monks slept. It was so lovely, so peaceful, wandering in and out, groaning and gibbering and watching the floorboards moulder where my footsteps had been. And then that wicked Henry the Eighth burnt the whole thing down.’

Aunt Hortensia’s stump snorted sympathetically. ‘Chop,’ it said, and the Head explained that it was Henry the Eighth who had done for her also.

After the Abbey had been burnt down, the Mad Monk went on, it became a ruin and then gradually just a green field. ‘I didn’t mind haunting the field either. I could make the cows jump, I can tell you,’ said the Mad Monk, wheezing with idiotic laughter. ‘But then they built the motorway and since then it’s been terrible, terrible…. You’ve no idea what it’s like to have ten-ton lorries thundering through you all night. And of course the overcrowding !’

‘There are certainly an awful lot of cars,’ said Winifred.

‘Oh, it’s not the cars. It’s the ghosts . Do you realize about a dozen people are killed on this motorway every week? Silly idiots overtaking in the fog or rushing along at a hundred miles an hour or sticking bumper to bumper and then piling up. And of course as soon as they’re killed they start thinking this is their place and they want to haunt the motorway too. And absolutely ridiculous they look. I’ve seen ghosts glide along here in Bermuda shorts, carrying a bag of golf clubs. I ask you!’

‘Poor Mad Monk,’ said Humphrey, his eye sockets misting up.

Rick only sighed. He knew exactly what was coming and he was perfectly right.

‘Please?’ said the Mad Monk. ‘Please, would you take me along? I’m very old and very mad and I so badly need a place to rest.’

‘Oh well,’ said Rick, ‘I suppose one more won’t make any difference.’

And so the Mad Monk of the Motorway came too, to see the Prime Minister of England and ask for a fair deal for the Ghosts of Britain.

Rick knew London well and he had decided that the best place for the ghosts to spend the night was in Hyde Park.

They had done the last bit of the journey in a train which turned into an Underground when it got into the centre of London. Being in a dark tunnel with slimy, blackened walls had put the ghosts in an excellent temper and everyone agreed that Rick had chosen exactly the right place.

‘Nice big trees to perch on,’ said Susie, swirling round the top of a clump of elms and frightening the rooks into fits. Sozzler, Gulper, Syphoner and Fred didn’t say anything but they nudged each other with their wings and Rick saw them looking hungrily at a couple of tramps stretched out for sleep underneath a group of bushes. ‘You won’t take too much?’ he begged them. ‘Tramps are mostly thin and tired sort of people; they can’t spare a lot of blood.’

The boys promised. Meanwhile the Hag and the Gliding Kilt were settling down in a rowing boat drawn up by the edge of the pretty lake called the Serpentine. The Hag was smelling of wet whale liver because she thought boats were romantic and she wanted to remind the Gliding Kilt of when they were courting. George and Winifred and Humphrey were sent to sleep in a little bandstand not far away and the Mad Monk settled down in a nice, dank shrubbery behind the Gentlemen’s Toilet. Walter the Wet, of course, dived straight into the Serpentine but he came up from time to time to tell them about the things he’d found, like an old armchair, a family of eels and five plastic replicas of the 1966 World Cup.

Rick was just turning to go when a small, white shape glided up to him. ‘ Please can I come with you? Please, please?’

‘No, Humphrey,’ came the Hag’s voice from the rowing boat. ‘Rick’s going to spend the night with a human . He needs a rest.’

Humphrey’s eye sockets turned into bottomless pools of despair. His jaw bones trembled.

‘Rose is going with him,’ he said.

‘I have to feed Rose,’ said Rick gently, feeling the little bundle in his pocket. ‘She’s too young for tramps. She’d never get through their skins.’

‘You get along with your brother and sister for once,’ scolded the Hag. ‘Listen, there’s poor Winifred wailing for you now.’

On the way out of the park. Rick passed Aunt Hortensia. She was hanging in a very sloppy way in a chestnut tree, her yellow feet sticking down like a bunch of old bananas.

‘You won’t forget to vanish, will you?’ he called out. And from under the tree, her head, lying sleepily between the Shuk’s paws, said: ‘Don’t worry, dear child; don’t worry about a thing.’

The friend Rick was going to spend the night with was called Daniel. He had been at Norton Castle School with Rick but the Crawlers made him so sick that he’d got his parents to take him away and let him go to day school. Daniel’s father was a painter and his mother was a writer and they were pleasant, vague sort of people with a cheerful, pink house near the river — the kind that people were always arriving at and going away from without anyone bothering. Rick reckoned he could turn up there without a lot of questions about what he was doing alone in London in the middle of the term.

Daniel was very pleased to see him and Daniel’s mother gave him some rather peculiar risotto to eat, and after that Rick phoned Barbara who was waiting as she’d promised in the deserted school office. It was nearly three days since Rick had left and she was very, very pleased to hear his voice.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Mm. We’ve got to London. But I’ve kind of collected rather a lot more than I started with.’

And he told her about Walter the Wet, and the Mad Monk, and the vampire bats.

‘Goodness! It’s like the Pied Piper of Hamelin,’ said Barbara. ‘You’ll need an absolutely enormous sanctuary.’

And then she told him what she had found out since Rick had gone.

‘Now listen. Our Member of Parliament is called Clarence Wilks. Clarence Ephraim Wilks.’