Eva Ibbotson - The Great Ghost Rescue

‘Disgusting!’ said Aunt Hortensia, looking at the gleaming white baths and marble washbasins and gold-plated showers in the showrooms. ‘All that washing humans do. No wonder they aren’t fit for anything.’

They drove on for another hour and then they had to come down again because the horses were tired.

‘Look at those funny black mountains!’ said Humphrey.

They had landed on a large, sludgy piece of waste ground between an enormous, parked excavator and a mechanical shovel.

‘They’re not exactly mountains,’ said the Gliding Kilt. ‘They’re big heaps of coal. We’ve come down on an open-cast mine.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said the Hag, who would have liked somewhere more romantic. ‘Never mind, it’ll do to stretch our legs.’

‘I don’t want coal dust all over my stump,’ grumbled Aunt Hortensia. But she got down too and wandered off, holding her nightdress out of the dirt and splashing through the puddles with her enormous, yellow feet.

Humphrey was still feeling sick after the journey and the ball and chain which the Hag always made him wear on long journeys to strengthen his ankle had made him stiff and sore. So to cheer himself up he glided into the cab of the mechanical shovel and started making what he thought were mechanical shovel-driving noises.

After a bit he realized that the shovel-driving noises had turned into something different. Into a strange, low whining noise. A kind of animal noise.

When he’d made quite sure it wasn’t him making the noise, Humphrey glided out of the driving seat and began to search carefully between the heaps of coal, now getting closer to the sound, now losing it again. And then suddenly, coming round a pile of scaffolding, he saw something that made him gasp.

It was a Shuk. A real, proper Black Shuk with a single, red saucer eye, huge, backward-pointing feet and three tails.

Humphrey was enchanted. Shuks are phantom dogs and quite rare now. He’d heard of them often but never seen one.

‘Oh, come here, you nice Shuk. Come along. Good dog. Good dog,’ said Humphrey, clicking his finger bones.

At first the Shuk didn’t move. His one eye burned warily and he made a low, rumbling noise in his throat, like stones falling over a cliff.

‘Don’t be frightened. I’m Humphrey. Humphrey the Horrible . Come on Shuksie.’

The rumbles died away. The Shuk came closer.

‘Oh, you poor thing! Why you aren’t well at all .’

Humphrey was right. The Shuk was in a dreadful state. His tails were as limp as over-cooked spaghetti, his saucer eye was on the blink and his coat was matted and caked with grime.

As though he knew, now, that Humphrey the Horrible would help him, the Shuk came forward, making a weird, plashing noise as he walked. Two of his tails were wagging but the third was still a little shy.

‘What have you got there, Humphrey,’ shouted the Hag. flying over and peering with her squinty eyes between the heaps of coal.

‘Oh, Mother, it’s a Shuk. A proper padfoot — you know. And he’s miserable here you can see. I expect this used to be a lovely wild bit of country and he’d haunt it and people who saw him would go mad with terror. And now he has to haunt this silly coal mine and have coal dust in his lungs and fumes from all those bulldozers and excavators and things. Please , can’t we take him with us?’

‘Yes, please , Mother,’ said George and Winifred, gliding up to join them.

‘Don’t be silly, dears. We haven’t got a home ourselves. How can we be taking in stray dogs?’

‘I’m sure he’ll be useful,’ said Humphrey imploringly.

‘Useful!’ yelled the Hag, letting a burst of rotten pig’s kidneys out into the night air. ‘What can he possibly do? Now don’t be silly, Humphrey. Come on children, back into the coach.’

Humphrey could hardly bear it. As he looked at the Shuk, gazing trustingly up at him, he felt as if his ectoplasm had turned to lead. They were all climbing sadly in when a wail from Aunt Hortensia’s stump stopped them.

‘Head,’ wailed the stump. ‘Gone! Gone!’

Everybody sighed and climbed out again, and the Gliding Kilt murmured something rude and Scottish. It was not the sort of night in which you wanted to go searching for someone’s old and smelly head.

It was then that Humphrey had an idea. ‘Shuk?’ he said. ‘Here. Shuksie.’

The black beast bounded up and looked hopefully at Humphrey. ‘Have you got a handkerchief, Aunt Hortensia?’ Humphrey went on.

She nodded her stump and fished under her nightdress in the pocket of her long woollen drawers. ‘Here.’

Humphrey took it and held it to the dog’s nose. ‘Find, Shuksie. Go on. Find .’

There was a pause while the phantom beast sniffed the speck of linen. Then his head went down and his three tails went up and with a noise like an underground pumping station, he was off.

Humphrey waited anxiously as the red beam of light from the Shuk’s one eye raked the darkness. Then they heard him give a growl of satisfaction and pounce. Seconds later he had bounded back to the coach. And in his jaws, covered with black sludge but smiling happily, was Aunt Hortensia’s head.

‘That is a very intelligent and useful animal,’ said the Head. ‘I had rolled into a ditch and might never have been found.’

‘You see, Mother,’ said Humphrey, ‘You see .’

Like all the best mothers, the Hag knew when she was beaten. ‘All right,’ she said, sighing. ‘But mind you keep those disgusting feet of his off the upholstery.’

Tn of an empty castle or ruined abbey or crumbling peel tower where a tired family of ghosts could come to rest.

And then, just a couple of hours before dawn, when the sky was beginning to look dark grey instead of inky black, the Gliding Kilt turned his head and said: ‘Down there. What’s down there?’

They all scrambled to the window and looked out. Below them, set in a big park, they could just make out the outline of a huge building. It had four towers, a central courtyard, battlements….

‘A castle!’ cried Humphrey. ‘Can we live here?’

‘We’ll just go down and take a look,’ said the Gliding Kilt.

The horses were tired and glad to lose height. As they galloped round the building everyone became more cheerful. There was ivy creeping up the walls, some of the windows were barred; a fierce black crow rose squawking as they came.

‘Really this seems very possible,’ said the Hag. ‘Look, there are two stinking serpents hanging out of that window,’ she went on, sniffing happily. ‘Let’s drive in there.’

Aunt Hortensia had her faults but she certainly knew how to handle her horses. Skilfully she turned, and the coach drove past the stripy, stinking snakes hanging on the sill and in through the window.

Only they weren’t stinking snakes. They were the football socks of a boy called Maurice Crawler who had extremely smelly feet. And what the ghosts had done was to drive straight into the boys’ dormitory of Norton Castle School.

Rick was usually the first person in the dormitory to wake. This morning he woke up particularly early because he had been thinking very hard the night before and the thinking had got into his sleep.

He was a serious boy with a thin face, big dark eyes and ears which stuck out because when he was a baby his mother had liked him too much to stick them down with sellotape as the doctor had told her to.

What Rick was thinking about was the world. The world, it seemed to Rick, was in a bad way. In the Antarctic, the penguins were all stuck up with oil and couldn’t even waddle. Blue whales were practically extinct, no one had seen a square-lipped rhinoceros for ages and a tribe of cannibals in the Amazon jungle which Rick had hoped to visit when he grew up had been moved to a housing estate in Rio de Janeiro. It seemed to Rick that by the time he was grown up, all the interesting animals and plants and people would have gone and there’d be nothing left but huge blocks of flats and boring shops and motorways. The whole thing annoyed him.