Eva Ibbotson - The Great Ghost Rescue

There was also the Grey Lady who haunted the churchyard where Humphrey slept. Ghost Ladies, whatever their colour, are usually looking for something: buried treasure, or somebody they have murdered and feel worried about — that kind of thing. What the Grey Lady was looking for was her teeth. She had had a full set when she was buried — at least she said she had — and then someone had robbed her grave and this annoyed her very much. When you could get her mind off her teeth, which was not often, the Grey Lady was good at thinking of games, like Spillikins played with old toe bones, or snakes and ladders, using live vipers.

When you are leading a happy and peaceful life with your family, there seems no reason why it should ever end. Certainly Humphrey thought they would go on living at Craggyford Castle for another five hundred years, or a thousand, or three thousand. But the world outside was changing. Life was getting difficult and dangerous for ghosts. Just how difficult and dangerous they didn’t realize until one dark and stormy night just after Halloween…

They were sitting at supper. It was a simple meal but very pleasant: chopped rats’ tails lightly fried in dripping, washed down with cold toad’s blood. (People who think ghosts don’t eat or drink or go to the bathroom are wrong. They don’t have to but they like to. It passes the time.)

George had been naughty and screamed too loudly, and the Hag, who had a headache, had popped the tea cosy over him to keep him quiet. Often when you can’t see you can hear better, which is probably why George was the first to stop chewing and say: ‘What’s that noise?’

After a moment they all heard it. The sound of horses’ hooves pounding the air outside.

It came closer. A lot of hooves, and the jingle of harness, the creak of leather…. And then with a swoosh, and a gust of wind which sent the rats’ tails skidding across the plates, an enormous phantom coach, drawn by four black horses, came racing through the window and came to rest in the air above their heads.

‘It can’t be!’ cried the Gliding Kilt.

‘But it is! It’s Aunt Hortensia !’ said the Hag, flapping her wings excitedly.

The door of the coach opened. Dressed in a huge white flannel nightdress embroidered with hollyhocks, a lady stepped out on to the dining room table. Above her rather grubby collar, her neck stump, a little jagged from where the axe had been, gleamed pinkly in the evening light.

‘What is it, Auntie? What’s happened?’ asked Winifred.

There was a pause while Hortensia’s neck swivelled round the room. It seemed to be looking for something. Then she dived back into the coach and took something out. It was her head.

‘I have been turned out of my home,’ said Headless Aunt Hortensia’s head. It looked cross and sad, and its tangled, grey hair was all over the place.

‘Oh no!’

‘Yes.’ The head nodded and a tear fell out of its left eye.

‘Such goings on,’ it continued. ‘You know how comfortable I was at Night Abbey?’

Everybody nodded. When she was alive. Aunt Hortensia had been housekeeper to King Henry the Eighth at Hampton Court Palace. However, Aunt Hortensia was very bad at arithmetic and one day when she was doing the accounts she said that five plump capons, a flagon of mead and two tallow candles came to eleven pence three farthings whereas they came to eleven pence halfpenny, and Henry, who hadn’t chopped anyone for a whole week, had her arrested just as she was getting into her bed in her nightdress and long woollen underpants, and cut off her head.

For a while, Aunt Hortensia haunted the Palace but it was so overcrowded with ghosts (three of Henry’s wives were already weeping and wailing in the corridors) and she felt so out of things in her nightdress and long woollen drawers among the grandly dressed Court Ladies, that one night in 1543 she borrowed a phantom coach from the royal stables and drove away to find a place of her own.

And she found Night Abbey — a ruined and creaking house on the East Coast, with doors leaning on their hinges, bats hanging in disgusting clumps from the rafters and miles of desolate salt marshes for her headless horses to run around in.

‘Four hundred and thirty-two happy years I’ve spent in that house,’ Aunt Hortensia’s head went on. ‘And then three months ago…’

Three months ago, it seemed, a man called Mr Hurst had bought Night Abbey and decided to modernize it.

‘What exactly does that mean?’ asked Humphrey.

‘You may well ask,’ wailed Aunt Hortensia’s head. ‘It means washing machines in the scullery where my frogs used to live; it means fluorescent lighting messing up your vibrations. It means central heating !’

‘Ugh!’ The Hag and the Gliding Kilt shivered sympathetically.

‘You may well say ‘‘Ugh’’,’ said Aunt Hortensia. She stuck out an ample arm and they could see, where the nightdress had fallen back, her ectoplasm looking all dry and curdled, with a most unhealthy, yellowish tinge to it. ‘I tell you, the place has become impossible,’ she went on.

‘Well, you must stay with us, of course,’ said the Hag.

‘It isn’t just me,’ said Aunt Hortensia gloomily. ‘It’s the same everywhere. Old buildings being pulled down, nice murky pools being drained, respectable ruins being turned into hotels or Bingo Halls. I hear poor Leofric the Mangled is haunting a sausage factory !’

‘Well, nothing will happen to us at Craggyford,’ said the Hag soothingly, piling rats’ tails on to a plate for her headless aunt.

But there she was wrong.

Aunt Hortensia meant well but she was not an easy person to have in the house. For one thing, she was terribly forgetful. She didn’t just leave her head up in the bedroom when she went down to breakfast, she left it in the boot cupboard when she went out into the garden to pick Sneezewort or Deadly Nightshade and once, feeling playful, she threw it so suddenly at Humphrey that he dropped it and it said, ‘Butterfingers!’ to him in a very nasty way.

She would also get everybody very muddled up about what she was trying to tell them. Aunt Hortensia’s neck stump had learnt to say simple things like, ‘More please’, ‘No’, or ‘Pshaw!’ but if she wanted to say something complicated with quite a lot of words in it she had to have her head. Being so forgetful she would sometimes say one thing with her neck stump and something quite different with her head. For example, if the Hag asked her: ‘Would you like another toadskin sandwich, Aunt Hortensia?’ the stump might say ‘Yes,’ while the head, on the other side of the room, was saying, ‘You know , Mabel, that toadskin always gives me wind.’ This kind of thing, if you have to live with it, can make you very tired.

But what bothered them most was that she was crabby about Humphrey. While they all knew that Humphrey was not as horrible as he should have been, they really didn’t want anyone else to point it out. Making personal remarks about children when you are staying in their house is not a nice thing to do but Aunt Hortensia did it.

‘Really, Mabel,’ she would say, disturbing the Hag as she sat in the kitchen copying curses into a recipe book or trimming the corpse candles, ‘that boy of yours smells of new-mown hay.’

This made the Hag very cross.

‘He doesn’t. Not really. I admit that Humphrey has not inherited my best smells, but—’

‘You’re sure he is a ghost?’ said Aunt Hortensia, interrupting her. ‘He isn’t really a Faery or a Brownie or something? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find him creeping out at night and doing good to people.’