Eva Ibbotson - Dial a Ghost

‘No, no, of course not. You are so right !’ cried Mrs Mannering. ‘If only more people thought like you!’

‘Now, I’m the manager of this big house in the north of England. It’s been empty for a long time and now the owners want to open it to the public. They want to charge money for letting people go round the place.’

‘Yes, I see. It’s sad the way these stately home owners have fallen on hard times.’

‘Only of course there’s a lot of competition in this business. At Lingley they’ve got lions and at Abbey-ford they’ve got a funfair and at Tavenham they’ve got a boating lake. Well, there’s nothing like that at the place I’m talking about. So I thought if we got some proper ghosts we could advertise it as The Most Haunted House In Britain or Spook Abbey or some such thing. That should pull in the crowds.’

‘It should indeed,’ agreed Mrs Mannering. ‘Only I have to ask… what would you offer the ghosts — and what would you expect from them?’

‘What would we offer them? My dear Mrs Mannering, we’d offer them accommodation like no ghosts in Britain could boast of. Thirteen bedrooms with wall hangings. Corridors with howling draughts and hidden doors. Suits of armour to swoop out of… and a master bedroom with a coffin chest which they could have entirely to themselves. As for what we’d expect — well, some really high-class haunting. Something that would make people faint and scream and come back for more.’

Mrs Mannering was getting more and more excited. ‘My dear Mr Boyd, I have exactly the ghosts for you! Sir Pelham and Lady Sabrina de Bone. They come of a very good family as you can gather and would be absolutely at home in such a setting.’

‘They’re the real thing, are they? You know… icy hands, strangling people, rappings, smotherings?’

‘Yes indeed. All that and more. Pythons, bloodstains, nose stumps… I promise you won’t be disappointed. There’s a servant too who I believe is very fiendish, but he’s in cold storage at the moment so I haven’t seen him. There’s only one thing — the de Bones really hate children. Especially children asleep in their beds. Of course if the house is empty at night that wouldn’t be a problem. But I would be worried about any children going round the house with their parents.’

‘We would certainly have to be careful about that,’ said Fulton smarmily. ‘I tell you what, we could put up a notice saying ‘‘This guided tour is not suitable for children under twelve’’. Like in the cinema. We might even build a playground so that the children are kept out of the way.’

‘That sounds fine,’ said Mrs Mannering. ‘Quite excellent. Now tell me, how soon would you like them to come?’

Fulton was silent, thinking. Oliver was already going under, but he needed a bit longer to get properly softened up. ‘How about Friday the 13th,’ he said. His lips parted over his yellow teeth and Mrs Mannering realized he was smiling. ‘But I have to make it quite clear that I won’t take anything nambypamby. You know, spooks wringing their hands and feeling guilty because they stole tuppence from the Poor Box or were nasty to their mummy. I need ghosts with gumption; I need evil and darkness and sin.’

‘You will get them, Mr Boyd, I promise you,’ said Mrs Mannering.

As soon as her visitor had gone, Mrs Mannering hurried across the corridor and hugged her friend. ‘You were right, Nellie, our luck has turned! I’ve found a place for the Shriekers!’

‘Oh my dear, what wonderful news! When are they leaving?’

‘Friday the 13th — the same day as the Wilkinsons!’

The following morning they each wrote out the adoption papers, and made careful maps for both sets of ghosts and instructions about what to do when they got there. They put the Wilkinsons’ maps into a green folder and the Shriekers’ maps into a red folder and placed them in the filing cabinet, ready for the day when the ghosts should leave.

‘Now be sure and look after these very carefully,’ they told Ted the office boy.

And Ted said he would. He was a nice boy and a hard worker, but he had not told the ladies that he was colour-blind.

This didn’t mean that he couldn’t see any colours. He could see yellow and blue and violet perfectly well. But for a person who is colour-blind there is absolutely no difference between green and red.

Oliver had been ten days at Helton and no one would have recognized him as the cheerful, busy child he had been in the Home. He was pale, his dark eyes had rings under them; he jumped at sudden noises.

He knew he had to be grateful to Cousin Fulton and Cousin Frieda who had come to stay with him even though the boys at their school needed them so much, and he knew that people couldn’t help how they looked.

But he couldn’t feel comfortable with them and there was no one else to talk to. The servants were so old and deaf that it was a wonder they didn’t drop down dead every time they picked up a duster, and the people who worked outside weren’t friendly at all. The gardener hurried away whenever he saw Oliver, and the people from the village scarcely spoke to him.

Oliver did not know that Fulton had told them to do this.

‘The boy’s delicate,’ he told everyone. ‘He’s got to be kept absolutely quiet.’

So Oliver spent most of the day alone, which was exactly what Fulton had planned. He wandered down the long corridors being sneered at by the Snodde-Brittle ancestors in their heavy frames. He sat in the library turning over the pages of dusty books with no pictures in them, or tried to pick out tunes on the piano in the dark drawing room with its shrouded windows and enormous chairs.

If the inside of Helton was gloomy and dank, the outside was hardly any better. The weather was windy and grey, and the garden seemed to grow mostly stones: stone statues, stone benches covered in rook droppings, stone fountains with cracked rims. The lake was a black, silent hole and something bad had happened there.

‘A stupid farmer drowned himself,’ said Frieda.

‘Oh!’ Oliver looked down into the water, wondering what it was like to lie there in all that blackness. ‘Is he still there?’

‘I expect so,’ said Frieda. ‘It was his own fault. He had the cheek to fall in love with a Snodde-Brittle.’

‘Didn’t she want him?’ Oliver asked.

‘ Want him? A Snodde-Brittle want a common farmer! Don’t be stupid, boy.’

Something bad had happened on the hill behind the house as well. Two hikers had been caught in a blizzard and frozen to death.

‘They were townies,’ said Fulton. ‘Not properly dressed.’

‘I’m a townie too,’ said Oliver. ‘I come from a town.’

But he could see that it was the fault of the hikers, like it was the fault of the farmer for falling in love.

What made everything so much worse for Oliver was knowing that all his friends in the Home had forgotten him.

‘We’ll write to you at once ,’ Nonie had promised. ‘Even before you get there we’ll start.’

Everybody had said they would write straight away, and Matron too.

But they hadn’t. Every day he waited for a letter and every day there was nothing at all. Oliver had written the very first morning, trying not to sound miserable and drawing them a picture of the hall. Since then he’d written three more letters and he hadn’t had a single one back, not even a postcard.

‘Are you sure , Cousin Fulton?’ Oliver said each day as Fulton returned from the post office, shaking his head.

‘Quite sure,’ Fulton would say. ‘There was nothing for you. Nothing at all.’

And Oliver said no more. How could a boy brought up to trust people as he had been, look into the black heart of a man like Fulton? How could he guess that the letters he wrote to his friends were torn up before they ever reached the post office, and that the letters that came for him — lots of letters and postcards and a little packet from Matron — were destroyed by Fulton on the way back to the Hall.