Eva Ibbotson - The Great Ghost Rescue

Cold with terror, Rick peered into the darkness. Were those fangs? Wings? Unspeakable folds of skin…?

And then suddenly he had it. Vampire bats. They were completely surrounded by blood-sucking vampire bats!

It was a frightful moment. Everything he’d ever read about vampires flashed through his mind: how they sucked blood from people’s throats while they slept; how they robbed graves; how they lived in dark and ghastly places; how they terrorized everyone who saw them. He must have screamed without realizing it because the mad red eyes came closer. Gloating. Waiting.

And now, beside him, Humphrey stirred and sat up, rubbing the ball and chain on his ankle. Then, before Rick could stop him, he had darted forward — right at the largest of the terrible, staring eyes.

‘Cousin Susie!’ he shouted. ‘It’s me! Humphrey! Humphrey the Horrible!’

The red eyes closed, opened again, and the largest of the vampire bats came forward into the light of the dying fire. ‘Good heavens! If it isn’t Mabel’s boy,’ said Sucking Susie. She peered forward, slicing through his ectoplasm with her ghastly fangs. ‘Well, you’re not getting any horribler are you, my poor child.’

‘I will later,’ said Humphrey, sighing. He couldn’t help wishing that everybody didn’t make the same remark. ‘This is Rick, Cousin Susie. He’s a human and he’s going to find us all a place to live.’

‘A human, eh?’ said Sucking Susie. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

She edged closer. ‘ Very pleased to meet you.’

Rick tried to look pleased too, but he couldn’t make it. Haunting was one thing, blood-sucking was another, and as Susie came towards him it was all he could do not to move away.

‘Actually, this Sanctuary’s what I’ve come about,’ Susie went on. ‘I heard something from a little bat that came through yesterday.’

‘Susie!’ There was a shriek from the mossy hollow and the Hag swooped over, giving off stale sheep’s brains, rotten eggs and dead earthworm all at once in her excitement, while she and the vampire bat started hugging each other in a tangle of black wings, noses, warts and claws.

‘Well, fancy,’ said the Hag again and again. ‘What a pleasure, what a pleasure. How are the boys?’

The Vampire turned. ‘Sozzler! Gulper! Syphoner! Fred! — Come here,’ she called, and four pairs of eyes flickered and came forward into the firelight.

‘Fine boys,’ said the Hag. ‘But thin.’

‘ Thin , Mabel? Not just thin. Skinny. Starving.’ She prodded the one nearest to her in the stomach. ‘ “Gulper,” I christened him,’ she said bitterly. ‘That child hasn’t had a decent gulp of fresh, warm blood since the day he was born.’

‘I’ve heard things were bad for you,’ said the Gliding Kilt, coming over to join them. He could never go on sleeping when the Hag had left his side.

‘Bad! They’re terrible. Unbelievable. You know our valley — a nice bit of farmland it used to be. Lots of plump farmer’s wives, healthy young cow-hands, clean-living shepherds. Villages with butchers and bakers who slept with open windows — oh, there was lots to eat! A nip or two every other night and we vampires were as happy as you could wish.’

‘You mean you used to fly in and suck people’s blood at night? You really did ?’ said Rick, backing away.

‘Certainly we did,’ said Susie, looking crossly at Rick. ‘What do you expect blood-sucking vampires to do except suck blood? The people never knew. A vampire that knows its job doesn’t leave a hole bigger than a mosquito.’

‘Well I think it’s disgusting all the same.’

‘Oh you do, do you? And what’s that you’re wearing on your feet, pray?’ said Susie, her red eyes glinting.

‘Shoes,’ said Rick surprised.

‘Exactly. Made of leather, no doubt. From a cow , I dare say. And I suppose you went up to the cow first and said: “Excuse me, Madam, but would you mind being murdered so that I can have a pair of shoes?”’

Rick flushed. He hadn’t thought of it like that.

‘And what did you have for breakfast before you set out. Bacon, I suppose. From a pig.’

Rick nodded.

‘Precisely,’ said Susie. ‘What’s more you didn’t have the good manners just to go up to that pig and take only a little bite out of him so that he could go on living? Oh no. You had to kill the whole animal and slice it up. Really, human beings make me tired .’

‘Rick’s my friend ,’ said Humphrey the Horrible, laying his skeletal fingers lovingly on Rick’s arm.

Rick took no notice. What Susie had said had shaken him. But could you not wear shoes, or not eat meat? Some people were vegetarians, he knew, and maybe one could just wear gym shoes. But no roast chicken, no hot dogs, or pork chops…

‘Well, what happened in the valley? Why did things go wrong?’ asked the Hag.

‘Well, first people began to drift away; they wanted jobs in the towns. Better pay. Bingo. The cinema. More to do , they said. Every day you’d see some family pack up and leave. Lovely, plump dinners just piling into their cars and leaving.’ She sighed. ‘But that isn’t all. Do you know what they’ve done now?’

They all shook their heads.

‘Flooded the whole place. Built a huge concrete dam at each end. Made a reservoir. To provide water, they say, for the factories down south.’

‘Dear me,’ said the Hag. ‘Dear me, dear me, dear me.’

‘You can say that again,’ said Susie. ‘There isn’t a warm-blooded human left in the place. Just water and a few wretched fish.’

‘You couldn’t feed on the fish, I suppose?’

‘We tried, Mabel, we tried,’ said the vampire sadly. ‘But of course fish are cold -blooded. We got the most ghastly chills on our stomachs. My poor old Uncle Slurper — do you remember him? — died after sucking the blood of some fiendishly cold trout last January. Gave him pneumonia. I tell you, Mabel, we can’t go on .’

‘But what would you live on, Susie, if you came with us? There won’t be any people in this sanctuary.’

‘Cows would do. Surely you could keep a cow or two?’

‘You can’t go sucking the blood of—’ began Rick.

‘Oh we can’t, can’t we?’ said Susie, turning on him. ‘And if you were a cow, which would you rather? A nip or two at night while you were asleep or people pounding and squeezing your udders and taking all the milk you wanted for your calf?’

Rick sighed. It seemed to be very difficult to argue with Sucking Susie.

‘It isn’t just me,’ she said and her voice changed and became soft and motherly. ‘The boys and I — we’d get along somehow. It’s… well, look.’

She fumbled in the loose skin on her stomach and from what seemed to be a black pouch of skin she took something out and held it up to them.

‘Oh!’ said the Hag, and the whiskers on her long nose quivered with emotion.

It was a tiny baby vampire bat. Its little face was hardly bigger than Rick’s thumbnail, its wings were so frail and thin you could see the firelight through them and as it felt the cold night air the little creature opened its pathetic mouth and made a pitiful, mewing sound.

‘It’s my Little One,’ said Susie. ‘My Baby Rose. And I don’t think,’ she went on, bursting into tears, ‘that she’s going to live.’

An hour later, the little wood was silent once again. The ghosts had gone back to sleep. Sozzler, Gulper, Syphoner and Fred were roosting in the branches of a great beech; their mother, snoring slightly, lay among its roots.

Only Rick found sleep impossible. He sat with his arms round his knees looking into the embers and thinking about the things that Sucking Susie had said.