Eva Ibbotson - Dial a Ghost

He tried to cry out and warn Addie, but there was no hope of making a single sound. This is it, then, thought Oliver. This is the end.

But Addie was awake. Without bothering to become visible she went into the attack.

‘How dare you?’ she screamed. ‘How dare you harm Oliver, you disgusting old spooks.’ Kicking out at Pelham with one foot, she swooped down and picked up the inhaler. ‘Breathe!’ she ordered Oliver, putting it into his hand. ‘Go on. Do it.’

‘Who are you? What’s going on here?’ spluttered Pelham, who could see nothing.

‘What’s going on here is that I’m going to do you in,’ yelled Adopta. ‘I don’t know where you come from, but I’m not scared of you, you silly old banshees.’ She aimed a kick at the ghoul, lying on the floor, then swooped up to bite Sabrina in the neck. ‘If you’ve hurt Oliver, I’ll kill you. I’ll turn your ectoplasm into semolina; I’ll grow maggots in your earhole.’

As she walloped and thumped and kicked, Addie was slowly becoming visible. Her night-dress was beginning to show up now, and her long hair.

‘Well, go on,’ roared Pelham to his wife. ‘Do her in. Finish the little spitfire off. The boy’s done for anyway.’

But Lady de Bone was standing quite still. Her loathsome mouth hung open and she was staring and staring.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ yelled Pelham to his wife. ‘What are you gawping at?’

‘I feel… strange,’ said Sabrina.

Addie was moving in for the kill. She rose into the air, ready to punch the female phantom’s nose stump into a pulp — and as she did so, she rolled up the sleeve of her nightdress.

And Lady de Bone screamed once… screamed twice… and fell in a dead faint on to the floor.

Toby Benson, the little boy whom Fulton had beaten so cruelly, sat on his suitcase in the hall at Sunnydell Preparatory School and smiled. His parents were coming to take him away for ever and he was so happy he thought he would burst.

The inspectors had been to the Snodde-Brittles’ school and said it had to be closed at once. The teaching was a disgrace, they said, and Fulton not fit to be a headmaster.

But if the boys had left, and the cook and the cleaning ladies and the sports master, there were other people who had come. The greengrocer who supplied the school with vegetables had come, waving his bill, and the butcher had put a ladder against the house and stuck his head in at the bathroom window and told Fulton he’d turn him into a plate of tripe if he didn’t pay what was owing. Even now, a van from the electricity company had drawn up and two men got out, ready to cut off supplies.

‘We’re going to end up in prison for debt if this goes on,’ said Frieda, looking down at the street.

‘No we aren’t. We’re going to end up in Helton Hall. We’re going to own the farm and the grounds and the forest and have proper servants to wait on us.’

‘Well, I hope you’re right. That horrible little boy seems to be spook-proof as far as I can see.’

‘He won’t be spook-proof with this new lot. I tell you, Frieda—’ He broke off. ‘Good Lord, look who’s here! It’s Mr Tusker getting out of a taxi.’

Getting out of a taxi was not an easy thing for Mr Tusker to do. He was too bent and his legs were too wobbly. But he managed it at last and then they saw that Miss Match was in the taxi too.

‘This is it, Frieda. I just feel this is it.’

It looked as though he was right. When the housekeeper and the butler reached Fulton’s study they were grey with shock and they had come to give notice. Mr Tusker was on the way to his sister in York and Miss Match was going to stay with a niece in Scotland and neither of them was ever going to spend another minute in Helton Hall.

‘We tried to tell Mr Norman,’ said the butler. ‘But he’s away and his secretary’s a twitty little thing. So we came to let you know and to give back the keys.’ He laid a great bunch of labelled keys on the table. ‘We want you to sign that we’ve given them to you, and a month’s wages is owing to us.’

‘Yes, yes. Mr Norman will pay them when he returns. But why? Why are you going in such a hurry? What’s happened at Helton?’

Mr Tusker started to wheeze and Miss Match hit him on the back. ‘Everything. It’s haunted. It’s full of evil. Things fall.’

‘Things burn.’

‘There’s a creeping mist in all the rooms.’

‘There’s screams to make your hair stand on end.’

‘Oh dear, how terrible,’ said Fulton. ‘And the boy?’

‘Gone!’ said Mr Tusker.

‘Dead, it’s my opinion,’ said Miss Match. ‘Drowned.’

‘Drowned! But how terrible! How ghastly!’ Fulton’s voice rose to a shriek. ‘Tell us more! Tell us more!’

‘We found his clothes by the lake. Shoes. And a shirt floating on the water. And the lake looks… funny.’

‘But how appalling! The poor little boy. Have you told the police?’

‘It’s not our job to tell the police, Mr Snodde-Brittle. We’ve given back the keys and you’ve got our notice. And a month’s wages is owing—’

‘Yes, yes. You shall have them of course. I’ll tell Mr Norman. Just leave your address.’

‘It’s happened!’ shouted Fulton when the butler and the housekeeper had left. ‘I told you! The woman in the agency said they were spooks to end all spooks. They’ve obviously frightened the boy into fits and he’s run into the lake. I told you he wasn’t stable.’

‘Yes, but even if he’s dead what are we going to do about the spooks? I’m not staying in the place with those nasties hanging round.’

‘Now, Frieda, why don’t you trust me? I wouldn’t have set all this up if I hadn’t had a card up my sleeve.’

‘You mean exorcism and all that? Salt and rowan twigs and that sort of stuff? Because—’

‘No. Nothing as feeble as that. It might work on those soppy Wilkinsons in their night-gowns, but it wouldn’t work on the Shriekers. No, this is something different,’ said Fulton gloatingly. ‘This is science .’

He opened a drawer and handed her a newspaper cutting which she read carefully, and then read once again.

‘I see,’ she said, licking her lips. ‘Yes. You don’t think it will come expensive?’

‘What does that matter? Once we have Helton we’ll have all the money in the world. We can cut down the forests and sell the wood. We can bulldoze the farm for building land — we’ll be rolling.’

‘Yes.’ Frieda put down the newspaper and looked down at the street. Toby Benson was just running out to meet his parents. They were going to take him out to Africa with them rather than send him to another boarding school. ‘You don’t think he’ll… Oliver… he’ll come up from the lake and haunt us?’

‘For Pete’s sake, Frieda, what’s got into you?’ He pushed the newspaper under her nose. ‘You can read, can’t you? There isn’t a spook on the planet we can’t destroy with what they’ve got there.’

‘Yes.’ Fulton was right. It was silly to think of Oliver lying at the bottom of the deep dark pit that was the Helton lake. No one got anywhere who let themselves get soft.

The letters above the grimy redbrick building said The Safeguard Sewing Machine Company , but it wasn’t sewing machines that they made in that sinister place. It was something quite different.

It was a liquid — as Dr Fetlock now explained — that you could spray on to ghosts so as to destroy them completely and for ever.

‘We have to keep our work secret,’ he told Fulton Snodde-Brittle. ‘That story in the paper did us a lot of harm. You see there are feeble and soppy people about who might make a fuss. They might think that ghosts have a right to be around and then there would be questions asked and laws passed. So I have to tell you that everything you see and hear in this building is top secret. Will you promise me that?’