Eva Ibbotson - Dial a Ghost

‘Oh yes, yes indeed,’ said Fulton. He had wasted no time in coming to see the doctor. ‘I’d rather not have my part in this talked about either. In fact I’d like it if your men could come and spray Helton under cover of darkness.’

‘There shouldn’t be any problem about that. Now you will want to know what you are getting for your money, so let me show you round.’ Dr Fetlock leant forward and stared hard at Fulton with his black pop-eyes. His long hair straggled down his back, he wore thick glasses and looked as though he hadn’t been in the open air for years. ‘But first of all I have to ask you something: can you personally see ghosts? Are you a spook seer?’

Fulton stroked his moustache. A piece of kipper had caught in it from his breakfast, but he didn’t know this and thought he looked good. ‘Well, actually, no. I can’t.’

Dr Fetlock nodded. ‘Perhaps it’s as well. But it means I’ll have to explain the experiments to you. I will have to describe what we have done to the ghost animals we keep here, so that you will see how amazing our product is. Now if you will just put on this white coat, we will go into the laboratory.’

He opened the door for Fulton and led him down a long dark corridor. ‘You will find that everyone here is really keen on their work. All the staff of EEB Incorporated — that’s what we call ourselves — have suffered from disgusting spooks. The lab boy who is looking after the animals has a gash down the side of his cheek, as you will see. He got it when a head on a platter came out of the larder of his mother’s house in Peckham. Just a severed head and nothing else — well, you know how these creepy-crawlies carry on. He fell over backwards and gashed his cheek on the fender and he’s got the scar to this day.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ said Fulton.

Dr Fetlock opened the door of the animal house. What Fulton saw were rows and rows of cages with straw in the bottom and numbers nailed to the top. Beside the numbers were charts showing how much liquid the animals had been given and at what dose. A strange smell of decay hung about the room, and a murky fog clouded the windows.

‘That’s the dissolving ectoplasm,’ said Dr Fetlock. ‘We’ll get the fan going on it in a minute. Now this top row is the rabbits. Of course we had to drill a small hole in their brains and squirt it with EEB — that’s the name of our product — so as to destroy their will power. Otherwise they’d just have glided through the bars — keeping ghosts caged up is the devil, as you know. The first three cages are the ones where we’ve destroyed the rabbits’ left ears, and in the next row they’ve lost their right ears — it’s a pity you can’t see because it’s a very neat experiment. Then below them we’ve got the mice. We’ve got rid of all the tails in the first batch and the second batch have got neither tails nor forepaws.’ He turned round and shouted: ‘Charlie!’, and a youth in a spattered overall with a scar down the side of his face came out with a clipboard. ‘Show Mr Snodde-Brittle the figures, Charlie.’

Fulton took them and ran his eyes down the pages. They seemed to be graphs of different strengths of the EEB mixture set against the loss of limbs and ears and eyes.

‘Very interesting,’ he said.

Dr Fetlock had moved to another group of cages. ‘Now these are the hamsters,’ he said. ‘You see we’ve managed to destroy their pouches completely. That’s only the beginning of course… we’re going to make the spray stronger and liquidate their front ends altogether so—’

‘Yes, yes.’ Fulton was feeling a little queasy. ‘But how do I know it’s going to work on humans? The ghosts I want to exterminate are people — well, they were.’

Dr Fetlock seemed to be thinking. ‘I think we’d best take Mr Snodde-Brittle to the rest-rooms, Charlie.’

The rest-rooms were just cubicles, rather like police cells, each with a camp bed, a grey blanket and a water jug.

‘Perhaps you’d like to look in here?’ said Dr Fetlock. ‘If you’re sure it won’t upset you.’

‘Nothing upsets me,’ blustered Fulton. He stared at the empty bed and the folded blanket — and saw nothing else.

‘He was only a tramp,’ said Dr Fetlock. ‘We thought it was quite right to use him for science. He was sleeping rough under Waterloo Bridge when he became a ghost. So we lured him in here — we said he could rest in peace and he is resting in peace!’ He began to titter. ‘What’s left of him!’

‘Er… what is left?’

‘A shoe with a broken sole… half a sock… look there, hanging over the bed. We came at him while he was asleep — three squirts from one of the big aerosols and well, you’ll see. We’ve got two more in the next rooms. The old bag lady is completely gone, but there’s a drunk we found on the Embankment — his arms and legs have disappeared but his torso’s left, if you’d like to have a look.’

‘No, that’s all right, thank you. I think I’ve seen enough,’ said Fulton. ‘But are you absolutely sure there’s no effect on living people? I mean, I shall want to move back into the house when it’s cleared.’

Dr Fetlock turned to Charlie. ‘Go and get Number Five — it’s just been filled.’

Charlie went away and returned with a large metal canister rather like a fire extinguisher, with a hose and nozzle. The letters EEB were written on it in red paint. Dr Felton put out his arm. ‘Right. You can give me a full dose.’

Charlie pressed the nozzle. There was a hiss, and an evil-smelling liquid shot on to the doctor’s sleeve. Apart from the smell and a damp stain nothing happened at all.

‘Satisfied?’ asked Dr Fetlock.

Fulton nodded. ‘Yes, indeed. It’s all exactly as I hoped. But… could one ask… what is EEB? What do the letters stand for?’

Charlie and Dr Fetlock looked at each other. ‘Well, Mr Snodde-Brittle, we don’t trust everyone with this, but… all right… we’ll take you along to the preparation room. It isn’t I who discovered the EEB, you see — it’s Professor Mankovitch. But I warn you, the Professor is completely dumb. She’s probably the most brilliant scientist in the world — a Hungarian; they’re very clever in Eastern Europe — even the little children play chess — but she can’t say a word. She lost her voice as the result of a frightful shock.’

‘What was that?’

‘She was picnicking with her boyfriend in a forest. They have a lot of forests over there. And suddenly a whole lot of white, shimmering creepies came out of the trees — wibbly, wobbly slithering ghoulies — they call them villis or tree spirits or some such thing. And they stretched out their awful arms and grasped her boyfriend and went off with him into the woods and he never came back. So she swore she would spend the rest of her life finding out how to destroy things that shouldn’t be there. Come along; I’ll show you.’

Fulton followed him. As they came closer to the lab he could hear a kind of bumping and gurgling, and the temperature rose. Then the door was thrown open and he saw an enormous vat which reached from the floor to the ceiling. A great piston went thump, thump, thump, stirring whatever was inside; tubes came from the vat and curled round the walls. Beside the vat, a woman with a blank face and white hair was twiddling a dial.

‘This is it, Mr Snodde-Brittle. This is the fruit of twenty years’ work on the part of Professor Mankovitch. She has scarcely stopped to eat or sleep in all that time, but the result is success. Complete and total success. This vat is full to the brim of the most amazing discovery of the century. It is full, Mr Snodde-Brittle, of EEB.’

‘Yes, but what is EEB? What’s inside it?’