Eva Ibbotson - Dial a Ghost

Even thinking that Fulton might have made a mistake and not looked properly made Oliver feel guilty, because his cousin was trying so hard to be kind. Every evening, for example, Fulton would take him into the drawing room and turn out the overhead light and tell him ghost stories.

‘You like ghost stories, I’m sure,’ Fulton would say, making Oliver sit beside him on the sofa. ‘All the boys in my school love a good creepy story and I bet you do too.’

Then he would start. There was the story of the eyeless phantom that tapped each night on the window pane asking to be let in, and when the window was opened, he seized the person and sank his teeth into their flesh. There was the story of the wailing nun who plucked off people’s bedclothes and strangled them as they slept, and the story of the skeleton who came to look for his own skull.

‘And do you know where he found it?’ Fulton would say, bringing his face close up to Oliver’s. ‘In an old coffin chest exactly like the one in your room!’

Then he would pat Oliver on the head and Frieda would come and say, ‘Bedtime, Oliver!’ — and the little boy would go alone through the Long Gallery with its faceless marble statues, along the corridor lined with grinning masks, up the cold stone staircase, past the bared teeth of shot animals — and reach, at last, his room.

Oliver did not cry; he did not run back and beg to be allowed to stay downstairs. But as he lay in the cave he had made for himself under the bedclothes, he thought he wouldn’t mind too much if it was soon over; if they came quickly, the ghosts that were going to get him. If he was frightened to death he could go and lie quietly under the ground in the churchyard. He had seen the graves and the tombstones covered with moss and it had looked peaceful there.

And for a child to think like that is not a good idea at all.

In the knicker shop, the Wilkinsons were having a party. It was the day before they were due to leave for their new home in the country and they had invited their friends to say goodbye. Mr Hofmann had come from the bunion shop, sniffing a little because he was going to lose Grandma, and a lovely Swedish phantom called Pernilla, with luminous hair and gentle eyes, had drifted in from the music store. There was a jogger who had jogged once too often, and various children Addie had picked up: the son of a rat-catcher who came with a dozen of his father’s phantom rats, and a pickpocket called Jake who knew everything there was to know about living off the land.

It was a good party. Though the ghosts were sad to see such a nice family leave the district, they tried hard not to begrudge the Wilkinsons their good luck.

‘Aaah… imagine… to breathe again the fresh clear air,’ sighed Pernilla, who was dreadfully homesick for the pine forests of her native land.

‘And living with nuns,’ said the jogger, who had been a curate before he dropped dead of a heart attack on the A12. ‘Such good people!’

Aunt Maud was everywhere, filling glasses with her nightshade cordial, making people feel comfortable.

‘If only you could all come with us,’ she sighed.

‘Maybe you can,’ said Adopta. ‘If the nuns are so kind, maybe they’ll make room for you all!’

She had filled Grandma’s gas mask case with the ghosts of beetles and woodlice which she meant to re-settle in the country and was so excited that she found it impossible to keep still.

Everyone had been very well behaved up to then, but perhaps Aunt Maud’s drinks were stronger than she realized because Eric, who was usually so quiet, suddenly said, ‘No more knickers!’ and sent a box of mini-briefs tumbling to the floor.

‘No more Tootsies and Footsies and Bootsies,’ shouted Grandma, who had been particularly annoyed at the silly names that people nowadays gave to socks, thwacking at the display stand with her umbrella.

‘And down with tummy buttons,’ yelled Adopta, and a pile of polka-dot bikinis tumbled from their shelves.

At first Aunt Maud and Uncle Henry tried to stop them, but it was no use. The relief of getting away from all that underwear was just too great, and soon even Mr Hofmann, who could hardly glide, was thumping a see-through nightdress with his crutch, while Pernilla zoomed to the ceiling with a box of body stockings which she draped like streamers round the lamp.

But when the clock struck eleven, they quietened down. Mr Hofmann was led away by Grandma, the jogger jogged back to the A12, the rat-catcher’s son called to his rats — and the host and hostess, as is the way with parties, were left to clean up the mess.

There was only one more thing to do. Sober and solemn now, the Wilkinsons filed out into the street and called to Trixie.

‘We love you, Trixie,’ they said, bowing to the north.

‘We need you, Trixie,’ they said, bowing to the east and the west and the south.

‘And we shall never forget you,’ they promised.

Of course if Trixie had come just then it would have been a miracle, but she didn’t. So they went back to pack and cover the budgie’s cage, while Uncle Henry made his way to the Dial A Ghost agency and the office of Miss Pringle.

The folder with all their instructions and the maps was exactly where she had said it would be, on the window sill beside the potted geranium. Uncle Henry took it and passed it backwards and forwards across his chest so as to cover it with ectoplasm and make it invisible.

And an hour later, the Wilkinsons were on their way.

The Shriekers did not have a farewell party. To have a party you need friends and the Shriekers didn’t have any. All the same, in their dark and nasty way they were excited.

‘A place that’s fit for us at last,’ said Sabrina. ‘Statues… suits of armour… a tower!’

Mrs Mannering had come herself to tell the Shriekers about Helton Hall, which was noble of her because the frozen meat store had not been a nice place even before the de Bones came, and now it was unspeakable. Sides of beef lay sprawled on the floor where they had tried to drink blood from them; sheep’s kidneys and gobbets of fat squelched underfoot.

‘Perhaps there’ll be some children we can scare to death,’ said Sir Pelham, and the hatred in his eyes was terrible to see.

‘A little girl I can scratch with my fingernails,’ gloated Sabrina. ‘Long, deep scratches right to the bone.’

‘A little boy I can squeeze and squeeze till he turns blue and chokes.’

But now it was time to thaw out the ghoul and get ready to leave. They had tipped him out of his container the night before but he was still rigid, and while Sir Pelham beat him with his riding crop, Sabrina jerked the rope round his neck and screamed her orders. ‘You’re to get up, you pullulating blob. You’re to get up and cook something and clean something and pack something and hurry!’

While the poor ghoul tottered about muttering, ‘Fry! Sizzle! Sweep!’ Sabrina made herself beautiful for the journey. She squeezed the juice from a pig’s gall bladder and dabbed it behind her ears; she smeared her dress with lard to give a shine to the bloodstains, and she unknotted the python from her neck and fed him a dead mouse.

Meanwhile Sir Pelham glided to the Dial A Ghost agency and through the window of Mrs Mannering’s office. The folder with the maps in it was just where Mrs Mannering had promised. It even had ‘de Bone’ on it in Ted’s rather wiggly handwriting.

And as midnight struck, the de Bones too, dragging their wretched servant by his rope, set off for their new life.

Oliver had woken with the feeling that he just couldn’t go on. He would have run back to the Home, but the letter he wrote to Matron begging her to let him return had gone unanswered like all his other letters.