Dial-A-Ghost
‘If only we could get your Shriekers placed as happily,’ said Miss Pringle.
Mrs Mannering sighed. ‘I don’t know what’s going to become of them, Nellie. They’re wrecking the meat store, and that servant of theirs has climbed into one of the containers and passed out cold. I keep wondering what would happen if someone came for a tray of hamburgers and found a completely frozen ghoul.’
Miss Pringle made sympathetic tutting noises. ‘We must just go on hoping, dear,’ she said. ‘Perhaps getting the Wilkinsons fixed up will turn our luck.’
Chapter Six
‘Is this really mine? All of it?’ asked Oliver.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Fulton grimly. ‘I hope you’re impressed.’
But Oliver was not impressed; he was appalled. They had driven through a spiked iron gate along a gravel drive and now stood at the bottom of a flight of steps on either side of which were statues. To the left of Oliver was a lion being stepped on by a man who was beating him on the head with a club. On the right was an even bulgier man wearing a sort of nappy and strangling a snake. The windows of the tall grey building stared like a row of dead eyes; pointless towers and battlements sprouted from the roof, and the front door was studded with nails.
Almost worse than the gloomy building and the statues of animals being bullied by bulging men was the icy wind sighing and soughing in from the sea. Tall trees bent their branches; rooks flew upwards shrieking. Everything at Helton looked grey and miserable and cold.
Oliver shivered and wondered again if there was some way he could give the place away. Perhaps he should ask his guardian? Colonel Mersham sounded sensible, trying to save the lemurs in the rain forest and looking for golden toads; but he wasn’t going to be back for months.
The door now opened from the inside and Oliver found himself in a stone hall which was full of things for killing people. Crossed pikes, a blunderbuss, a row of rusty swords fastened to the wall...A stuffed leopard snarled from a glass case and beside it stood the butler and the housekeeper waiting to greet him.
Oliver thought he had never seen two people who looked so old. The housekeeper, Miss Match, had a grey bun of hair and a pink hearing aid stuck lopsidedly to one ear. The butler, Mr Tusker, was bent almost double with rheumatism. As he shook their dry leathery hands Oliver was shocked that they should be working as servants; they should have had servants working for them.
‘Dinner is ready in the dining room, sir,’ said Miss Match to Fulton. She had been told to take her orders from him and she was too ancient and tired to be curious about the little boy who now owned Helton Hall.
Oliver followed them down a long corridor hung with portraits of the Snodde-Brittles in heavy golden frames. They passed through a shuttered billiard room . . . a library with rows of leather-bound books locked up behind an iron grille... and reached the dining room where Oliver’s first meal at Helton Hall was waiting.
It was a meal he never forgot. Cousin Fulton and Cousin Frieda made him sit at the head of the table and his feet, hanging down from the high carved chair, didn’t even touch the ground. The table was the size of a skating rink, the room was freezing cold – and beside his plate were more knives and forks than Oliver had ever seen in his life.
‘Start from the outside in,’ Matron had told them when they went for a treat to the Holiday Inn and had a proper banquet. So he picked up the round spoon and ate the soup, and then Mr Tusker shuffled away and came back with a very red-looking bird and some potatoes and cabbage. Oliver ate the vegetables and took two mouthfuls of the bird, which was full of round dark pellets and tasted of blood. Then he put down his knife and fork.
‘Have you finished, sir?’ asked the butler.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Oliver.
‘What’s the matter, boy?’ said Fulton. ‘There’s nothing wrong with the meat, is there?’
‘No, I expect it’s fine, but I don’t eat meat. I’m a vegetarian.’
‘A vegetarian?’ said Fulton, his eyes bulging.
‘A vegetarian?’ echoed Frieda.
‘A lot of us were in the Home. About half. It was after we saw a film about a slaughterhouse.’
No one said anything after that. It was as though Oliver had said he was a wife-beater or had the plague.
But if the meal was bad, going to bed was much, much worse.
‘You’re to sleep in the master bedroom,’ said Frieda. ‘It’s up in the tower, quite on its own. Nobody will bother you there.’
‘I don’t mind being bothered,’ said Oliver in a small voice. ‘Couldn’t I sleep a bit closer to other people?’
‘Certainly not,’ said Fulton, for it was part of his plan to keep Oliver as lonely and as far away from help as possible. ‘The owner of Helton has always slept in the tower.’
So Oliver followed Cousin Frieda up a wooden staircase, through the Long Gallery with its faceless statues and rusty suits of armour, along a corridor lined with grinning African masks... up another flight of steps – a curving stone one this time, lit only by narrow slits in the walls – down a second corridor hung with snarling heads of shot animals... and reached at last a heavy oaken door.
The room in which he found himself was huge; the single light in its heavy shade scarcely reached the corners. Three full-length tapestries hung on the wall. One showed a man stuck full of arrows; one was of a deer having its throat cut, and the third was a battle scene in which rearing horses brought their hoofs down on screaming men. An oak chest shaped like a coffin stood by the window, and the bed was a four-poster hung with dusty velvet curtains and the words ‘I Set My Foot Upon My Enemies’ carved into the wood.
‘The bathroom’s through there,’ said Frieda, opening a door beside the wardrobe. ‘I’ll leave you to unpack and put yourself to bed.’
Oliver listened to her steps dying away and followed her in his mind along the corridor with the stuffed heads, down the curving stone stairs, across the Long Gallery... He had never in his life felt so alone.
The bathroom was a room for giants. All the cupboards were too high for him, and the only way he could reach the lavatory chain was to stand on the seat. In the bathtub, scrubbing himself with a long-handled brush which hurt his skin, Oliver tried hard not to think about the Home. Bath-time had been one of the best times of the day; they’d blown bubbles and told silly jokes and afterwards there was cocoa and a story from Matron. They were reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The only way to get into bed was to run fast across the blood-red carpet and leap in under the covers. But it didn’t help much. He could still hear the stealthy tap-tap of the tassel of the blind against the window – and surely there was something in that big brown wardrobe... the way it creaked even when there was no one near.
The sound of footsteps returned. At the thought that someone had come back to say goodnight to him, Oliver brightened and sat up in bed. Perhaps they did care at Helton; perhaps he wasn’t quite alone.
Cousin Frieda entered the room.
‘Well, you’re all settled, I see.’ She moved to the bed and looked down at the inhaler which Oliver had put on the night table beside him. ‘You won’t want that,’ she said briskly. ‘I’ll put it in the bathroom cabinet.’
‘Oh no, please.’ Oliver was frightened now. ‘I always have it by my bed. Sometimes I need it in the night.’
‘Well, it won’t be far away,’ said Frieda. She took it off to the bathroom and put it in the high medicine cupboard, far out of Oliver’s reach. ‘Now I know you’re not one of those silly children who ask for night lights,’ she said, and her bony fingers moved towards the switch.
She was halfway out of the door when Oliver’s choked voice came out of the darkness. ‘Cousin Frieda,’ he said. ‘There aren’t... are there any ghosts here? Does Helton have ghosts?’
Frieda smiled. Standing there in the shadows in her black dress, she might have been a phantom herself.
‘Really, Oliver,’ she said. ‘What a silly question! Of course t
here are ghosts in a house as old as this.’
Then she shut the door and left him alone in the dark.
Fulton was in the drawing room, smoking a cigar.
‘It’ll work, Fulton, you’re right,’ said Frieda. ‘He’s scared already – in a week or two he’ll be ready.’
Fulton nodded. ‘I’ve had another look at the leaflet and there shouldn’t be any trouble about getting what we want. ‘‘Spooks of every kind,’’ it says. I’ll ring up in the morning to make an appointment. I’ll go down in a few days and book some that’ll do the trick. Then when the boy’s properly softened up, we’ll move them in.’
‘You hadn’t thought of us being in the house when... you know. Not that I’m frightened in the least, but...’
‘No, no. When the time’s right we’ll go away and leave him quite alone. I tell you, Frieda, our troubles are over. Helton is as good as ours!’
Chapter Seven
Three days later Fulton walked into the Dial A Ghost agency. He had put on a blond wig and gave his name as Mr Boyd because he didn’t want anyone to know what he was doing to Oliver.
Mrs Mannering smiled at him. ‘What can I do for you, Mr Boyd?’ she asked.
‘Actually, it’s more what I can do for you,’ he said. ‘Which is to offer a home to some ghosts. But not any ghosts. I want fearful ghosts; frightful and dangerous ghosts. Ghosts that can turn people’s limbs to jelly.’
Mrs Mannering leant forward eagerly. Was it possible that she could get rid of the Shriekers at last?
‘You see, I think that people nowadays want a bit of danger,’ Fulton said. ‘They want a thrill. They don’t want things to be boring and tame.’
‘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 happene
d 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.
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.