Eva Ibbotson - The Great Ghost Rescue

‘What is it that you want of us?’

For answer, Rick clicked his fingers and poor Humphrey, shivering with exhaustion, appeared before the witches. For a moment they looked in silence at his lumpy, curdled ectoplasm, his swollen ankles, the rash round his battered face….

‘Exorcism!’ thundered Nocticula. ‘A disgusting habit.’

‘The poor little fellow,’ said Fredegonda.

‘That’s the iron-filings spell, I think,’ said Melusina, who was really Miss Ponsonby from the post office, lifting Humphrey’s left hand. ‘A very cruel and uncivilized spell, I always think. Look at the softening of the joints.’

‘Who was responsible for this?’ said Nocticula her eyes glinting. Witches and ghosts have always been fond of each other and the sight of Humphrey made her very angry.

So Rick told them the whole story: of the ghost sanctuary and the trap it had proved to be; of the dreadful plight of the ghosts on Insleyfarne; of their desperate need to get up there at once .

‘On a broomstick maybe?’ said Peter who was rather young.

‘A broomstick!’ snarled Nocticula.

‘Or whatever you use nowadays? A vacuum cleaner?’ said Peter.

‘You may be young,’ said Nocticula, ‘but there is no reason to be silly. I doubt if witches ever flew on broomsticks. They certainly don’t do so now.’

‘But isn’t there any way you can get us there?’

‘Witchcraft isn’t a lot of stupid tricks,’ said Nocticula. ‘Witchcraft is about power. Willpower. Making things happen . White witches make good things happen. Black witches make bad things happen. Flying about on broomsticks, turning people into toads — that’s all cheap trickery and rubbish.’

‘So you can’t help us?’ said Rick sadly.

‘I don’t remember saying that,’ said Nocticula irritably. ‘In fact I didn’t say it.’ She turned to the other witches. ‘Come on, girls, quickly now.’

Rick and Peter and Barbara followed the witches over to the trestle tables lined against the wall. Now that they were close up to them they could see that some of the exhibits were rather odd. In the Cookery section there were jars of wormwood jam, bottles of powdered gall and a lot of small jars labelled CORIANDER SPELL OR PERIWINKLE SPELL OR LOVE PHILTRE: Dilute as needed .

On the table labelled Needlework there were little sachets filled with Moonwort and Cinquefoil and Smallage and in the Pottery part were cauldrons and double-handled cups with strange signs painted round the sides.

But the table where Nocticula now stopped was the most interesting of all. It was covered in handmade puppets — beautiful life-like puppets in modern clothes.

‘Oh look, there’s Mrs Crawler,’ said Rick suddenly, pointing at a fat puppet in a blue dress which had won second prize.

‘And there’s the Vicar!’ said Peter.

‘And Ted — the groundsman.’

As they looked carefully the children realized that every one of the puppets looked exactly like somebody who lived in, or around the village.

‘This one, I think,’ said Nocticula. She picked up a puppet in a dark blue flying suit and earphones.

Rick recognized it at once. It was a young man called Peregrine Rowbotham who lived in Rowbotham Hall about three miles north of the village. His father was very rich so all Peregrine did was to go to lots and lots of parties and fly about in his private Piper Cherokee aeroplane.

‘Right,’ said Nocticula. She hitched up her skirt, fished a piece of chalk out of the pocket of her green, Chilprufe knickers and drew a triangle on the floor. Meanwhile Fredegonda threw some incense on to the bowl of glowing charcoal and Melusina went over to the Cookery table and began pounding up various powders on a wooden board. It was rather like watching nurses get ready for an operation.

‘We’re out of Graveyard Dust,’ said Melusina.

‘Not important,’ said Nocticula impatiently. ‘Use Dragon’s Blood.’

When the preparations were over, they put the puppet down in the middle of the triangle and stood round it. You could see that they were all concentrating very hard.

‘In the name of Cernunnos the Horned One, we wake thee from sleep, O Peregrine Rowbotham,’ said Nocticula.

‘May the travel thirst roam through your limbs and make you rise from your bed,’ chanted a second witch.

‘May your soul seek greedily the distant soil of Insleyfarne,’ said a third.

‘Wake, O Peregrine! Wake, wake, wake and come!’ cried all the witches.

Then Nocticula took a hatpin out of her hat and stuck it gently into the puppet’s foot. The witches raised their arms and a blue flame shot upwards from the crucible.

cried all the witches.

Then: ‘Unlock the door,’ ordered Nocticula.

Two minutes passed, five, ten…. And then they heard the sound of a car screeching to a halt outside. There was a knock on the door. It creaked open and on the threshold, blinking and looking totally bewildered, stood Peregrine Rowbotham.

‘I say, would anyone like a jolly old spin in my crate up to Insleyfarne?’ he said. ‘I suddenly had a fancy to see the place.’

And with their mouths hanging open, Rick and Barbara and Peter went slowly up to him and said, ‘Yes, we would. Please.’

Poor Peregrine Rowbotham had been lying in his four-poster bed in Rowbotham Hall, wearing his best blue silk pyjamas and snoring gently. It was the middle of the afternoon and an odd time to be asleep but Peregrine had been to a party which had gone on all night and hadn’t got to bed till eight in the morning.

At first Peregrine’s dreams were the sort he usually had: about beautiful girls and fast cars, and the horses he had backed winning their race. And then gradually his dreams changed. He saw purple heather and brown, tumbling streams and bracken; and then a promontory of land stretching out into the wild, Atlantic sea. It was a bleak and windblown place, with stunted trees and a dark, ruined castle but Peregrine, in his dream, wanted to go there more than anything in the world.

‘Insleyfarne,’ said Peregrine, talking in his sleep, ‘I want to go to Insleyfarne!’

A sudden, jabbing attack of cramp in his right leg jerked him awake. Without quite knowing what he was doing, he began to pull on his clothes….

‘Insleyfarne,’ he went on saying, standing there in his underpants. ‘Insleyfarne.’

But when he was dressed and had climbed into his gleaming E-type Jag, he found he didn’t want to drive straight to the field where he kept his aeroplane. Something was making him turn left instead of right, towards the village.

‘Lonely,’ said Peregrine, still in that dazed voice. ‘Poor Peregrine needs friends to go to Insleyfarne.’ And he had driven straight to the village hall.

And now he was flying steadily north with three unknown children in the plane beside him and an odd, cobwebby scrap of grey that kept catching his eye when he turned round.

‘It was hypnotism, really, wasn’t it?’ said Barbara.

Rick shrugged. ‘Hypnotism. Willpower. Witchcraft — it’s all the same I guess. Just as long as we’re not too late .’

They flew over dark lochs and rocky islands, over spruce forests and rolling moors. The country grew wilder, bleaker. And then at last:

‘Insleyfarne!’ cried Rick. ‘Look! There!’ And Peregrine banked, circled and came neatly in to land on a long, empty beach of hard, packed sand to the north of the promontory.

It is not easy to surround what is practically an island, and quite a big one, with only four men, but Lord Bullhaven had done his best.