The Beasts of Clawstone Castle (9 page)

But something had gone wrong. Sunita’s top half still floated high up among the chandeliers, her long hair seemed to blow in some unseen breeze, but she did not come down again. She circled the huge room; she looked down, bewildered. She was lost. She could not find her lower half.

‘Oh!’ Madlyn clutched her brother. This was awful. What if Sunita could never find the rest of herself ?

They stared up at the ceiling – and then, as she gazed down at them, they saw her give an unmistakable wink.

She hadn’t really lost the rest of her; she was just pretending so as to make her trick more scary.

But this last haunting had been too much for one of the visitors. There was a clatter as a stick fell to the floor; then a dreadful thump as a body hit the ground.

But it wasn’t delicate Mrs Field who had fainted. It was the man who had walked to the North Pole and

bitten off his own finger; the man who had crossed the Sahara without a single camel.

It was Major Henry Hardbottock who lay unconscious on the floor.

I
t was a terrible moment.

‘Oh, the poor man; how dreadful,’ said Aunt Emily, running out of her room. ‘What if he gets concussion?’

‘What if he sues us?’ said Sir George. ‘We’d be ruined.’

While they waited for the ambulance, and Mrs Grove let out the other visitors, every kind of dreadful thought ran through the heads of the people in the castle. If the Major was seriously hurt they would never dare to let in visitors again. It looked as though, after all their hard work, the first Open-Day-with-Ghosts had ended in disaster.

The ghosts, of course, started to blame themselves.

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have strangled him so hard,’ said Brenda, and Mr Smith was worried that he had stuck the wrong hand out of the oak chest.

‘It sometimes bothers people, seeing those slivers of muscle on the bone. Slivers can be very unsettling.’

By the time the ambulance men came with a stretcher, Major Hardbottock had come round, but they insisted on taking him to hospital for scans and a check-up.

‘You never know with head injuries,’ said the first man, looking solemn.

‘I don’t like the look of his eyes,’ said the second.

So the Major was driven away, and in the castle they settled down anxiously to wait for news.

Sir George rang the hospital in the early afternoon, and again an hour later, and then once more, but no one could tell him anything. The Major was still having tests.

‘If they’ve found something serious I shall never forgive myself,’ said Aunt Emily.

Supper was a silent and a gloomy meal. But just as they were clearing it away, Ned came running in from the village to tell them what he had seen on the seven o’clock news.

‘He was sitting up in bed – the Major – surrounded by journalists and telling them about this amazing castle he had seen absolutely chock-full of ghosts.’

And sure enough, the following morning what the Major had said was in all the newspapers, with a big picture of him and a smaller, smudgy one of Clawstone.

The day after that, the Major gave a lecture. But it was not the one he usually gave called ‘My Journey to the North Pole,’ and it was not the one called ‘My Travels in the Sahara’. It was called ‘My Adventures in the Most Haunted House in Britain.’

So, within a very few days, the number of visitors to Clawstone doubled and then trebled and then quadrupled. People came with troublesome children, hoping they would be frightened into good behaviour; groups of youths abandoned their computer games to come to Clawstone; and parties arrived from bowling clubs and cricket associations and unions of transport workers and cheesemakers and dentists.

What’s more, the first visitors, who had left screaming, came back, bringing their friends. The hikers who had been nearly throttled by Brenda brought their companions from the Ramblers’ Club; the professor came with a batch of students; the little girls persuaded their teacher to bring the whole class – and old Mrs Field brought her physiotherapist.

‘I can’t understand it,’ said poor Aunt Emily. ‘Do you think people
like
being frightened?’

They increased the number of Open Days to two a week, and then three; they could have filled the castle every day, but they didn’t because they didn’t want to exhaust the ghosts.

‘They work so hard,’ said Madlyn, ‘it wouldn’t be fair.’

The Feet had danced so energetically that they had developed ectoplasmic blisters on their big toes, and in between haunting they just crept into the Wendy house and slept and slept and slept.

‘I wish there was something we could do for them,’ said Rollo.

‘Maybe we could wash them – they’re always washing people’s feet in the Bible,’ said Madlyn.

But no one knew quite how to do this and anyway it seemed rather rude, so they left it. They had become very fond of The Feet. Having them was rather like having a dog who understood much more than people realized.

Knowing how useful they had been made the phantoms really happy. After years of wandering they felt they had come home.

Being happy is good for people’s health and this is as true of ghosts as of anyone. The rat became quieter; often it did not gnaw for hours at a time. Brenda shrieked less, and once, as they sat on the wall looking down on the park, she admitted that perhaps she had been a little unkind to Roderick, the man who had shot her.

‘He was away in the war, you see, in Burma, and my mother said I must marry someone rich, so I accepted this man who made boots for the army.’

After the first week, Cousin Howard bicycled off to Greenwood to thank Mrs Lee-Perry and the ghosts at the Thursday Gatherings for their help, and they said it had been a pleasure.

‘It’s wonderful to know that dear George’s cows will now be safe,’ said Fifi Fenwick.

Because that, of course, was the point of it all. As the money came in – more and more of it – work began at once on the park. The walls were mended, the stream was dredged, the dead wood was cleared from the copses. Sir George walked with a spring in his step, and when cattle experts came from other countries he showed them round with pride.

‘You’ll see, my boy,’ he said to Rollo, ‘we’ll have the finest herd in the world.’

‘We have the finest herd now,’ said Rollo.

Both George and Emily thanked the children most sincerely for what they had done and asked them if there was anything they wanted for themselves, but there wasn’t; at least, not anything you could buy. Madlyn wanted her parents to come back and Rollo wanted to adopt a Siberian tiger in the zoo, but there was a waiting list.

‘But I think you ought to buy yourself a new skirt,’ said Madlyn to Aunt Emily.

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, dear. I simply couldn’t,’ said Aunt Emily, looking shocked and worried. ‘I’ve settled into this skirt; I wouldn’t want to break in a new one, not at my age.’

But in the park the cattle lifted their heads proudly as if they knew that their future was secure. When Rollo went out now with the warden, Ned’s uncle, in the trailer, he could identify all the animals. The two calves, who were friends and slept with their heads resting on each other’s backs; the cow with the extra-long eyelashes, who stood for hours in the stream cooling her feet; the bullock who refused to fight but dozed the day away under his favourite willow tree …

Then one day Sir George came down from the roof with his telescope.

‘There are more cars coming here than are going to Trembellow Towers,’ he said.

He tried hard not to look pleased but he did not succeed. He looked very pleased indeed.

L
ord Trembellow was in his new gravel pit, bullying his workmen, when Olive drew up in one of the Trembellow chauffeur-driven cars.

‘Daddy, I’ve bad news,’ she said. ‘I’ve got yesterday’s figures. Clawstone has beaten us by thirty-seven visitors.
Thirty-seven!
’

Her sallow face was even more pinched than usual; one could feel the awful numbers eating into her brain.

The gravel pit was a new one; Lord Trembellow had bought it two weeks earlier and already the Trembellow lorries were driving up in a steady stream, loading gravel, and reversing out again on to the road.

There were great gashes in the hill sides; even after this short time hardly a blade of grass was to be seen. The noise of the diggers and the crushers and the earth movers was overwhelming; the air was full of dust and the smell of diesel fuel. It was Lord Trembellow’s fifth gravel pit and the largest and the best.

‘It’ll be that rubbish about ghosts, I suppose,’ he said now. ‘Lies and trickery. Well, we’ll get even with them. If they can get ghosts we can get ghosts. Bigger ghosts. Scarier ghosts. More of them.’

So that night he telephoned his son Neville in London and told him to buy some ghosts.

‘I don’t care what you pay,’ he told Neville. ‘Just get the best.’

But Neville said he didn’t know how to buy ghosts, and anyway he was going up to Scotland to play golf.

‘We’d better go ourselves, Daddy,’ said Olive. ‘Neville can be rather weak sometimes.’

So Lord Trembellow and his daughter decided to go to London. Lady Trembellow didn’t want to come. Ever since she’d had her tummy tuck she’d felt ill and uncomfortable. It was the most expensive tummy tuck anyone had ever had, but it still hurt.

Before they left they made a shopping list.

‘Nothing like lists to keep things tidy,’ said Lord Trembellow. He picked up the local paper in which there was a description of the ghosts which haunted Clawstone. ‘There’s a Bloodstained Bride, it says here. So we’d better have one of them.’

‘Why just one, Daddy? Why not two?’ asked Olive, and she sat down and wrote:

‘Bloodstained Brides: Two.’

‘And a skeleton,’ read out her father. ‘Well, skeletons are common enough. We could have half a dozen.’

‘Six skeletons,’ wrote Olive.

‘And there’s this man with a rat,’ read out Lord Trembellow. ‘Ranulf de Torqueville, he’s called.’

‘We don’t have to have just a
rat
,’ said Olive. ‘We could get something bigger. Or we could get
two
rats, one for the front and one for the back. And that girl who’s sawn in half. Why only in half? Why not in quarters? Or in eighths? Eight pieces of girl …’

When they got to London they checked into the largest, glitziest hotel in the city and the next day they took a taxi to the largest, glitziest department store, where they bought two long satin wedding dresses and some jars of tomato ketchup. Then they went to a shop which supplied schools and hospitals with specimens for anatomy lessons, and bought half a dozen skeletons.

‘The biggest you’ve got,’ said Lord Trembellow.

After that they looked at rats in a pet shop but they were white and not suitable, so they got the address of a man who trained animals for films and television and he agreed to bring two stunt rats up to Trembellow. Hiring actors to pretend to be the ghosts was easy enough – actors are so often out of work that they will do anything for money – and a man who supplied circuses with their acts said he would try to send them a sawn-up girl.

‘What about the Severed Feet?’ asked Olive. ‘We could ask in a hospital if they could spare any.’

But her father said they wouldn’t bother. ‘We’ve got enough here to scare the living daylights out of everyone.’

When they got back to Trembellow they got to work, but their preparations did not go smoothly. The actor who was supposed to be Ranulf de Torqueville took one look at the rats and fainted and they had to use inflatable rats instead. The two bloodstained brides hated each other on sight, and the sawn-in-half girl got tonsillitis and never turned up at all. To make up for this they ordered another dozen skeletons and got the most expensive computer firm they could find to set the skeletons dancing and leering and leaping out of cupboards.

‘It’ll be all right on the night,’ said Lord Trembellow. ‘It better be, after the money we’ve spent.’

But it wasn’t. The actor who was pretending to be Ranulf was fond of jewellery and as he tore open his shirt, his uncut garnet ring caught on the front rat’s rubber back, causing the animal to deflate with a sad squeak. As the visitors filed past the bloodstained brides, the first bride dug her elbows into her rival, who stumbled forward, causing the bottle of tomato ketchup she had hidden in her bra to fall out and spatter the white shoes of a Mrs Price from Barnsley, who was not amused.

Which left the skeletons. They began well, jumping and clacking and leering and gibbering – but the most expensive computer experts are not always the best. The skeletons danced faster and faster still – there was a high-pitched whining noise, then a whirring … and a jumble of tangled bones came crashing to the floor.

It was unfortunate that the bones were carefully labelled in blue ink for the schools who had ordered them for their studies. A skeleton labelled ‘Property of St Oswald’s College of Further Education’ is not really a very frightening sight.