The Time of the Ghost (20 page)

“Thickhead,” said Cart. “If the ghost can talk, it can tell us how to help it.”

“Don't be so stupid,” Fenella said severely to Howard. “People are full of blood. Cut yourself. Then go and see if they've got any in the biology lab.”

“You silly fool!” Imogen said to Jenkins. “I never go past any of the little boys without seeing at least two of them with nosebleeds. Go and get them, and make them bleed here.”

“Yes,” said Cart. She fetched the enamel bowl from the sink and dumped it with a
boom
on the table. “Get everyone to bleed in this. Tell them all contributions welcome. I'm going to raid Mrs. Gill for some. Hurry. Break will be over before we've got any at this rate.”

Howard and Jenkins caught the idea at last. “General call for blood!” Howard said excitedly. “Come on, Jenk!”

Everybody scattered, except Fenella. Fenella climbed on the table and knelt there, leaning over the bowl, where she commenced hitting herself rhythmically on the steep bridge of her nose. The ghost went with Cart, through a whirl of banging doors, once more to raid Mrs. Gill. She was rather nervous of what Cart intended to do to Mrs. Gill.

Cart stood with her back to the silvery metal of the school kitchen door. She had a blurred polite smile on her face, as if she did not mean Mrs. Gill too much harm. “Oh, good,” she said.

On the table there was now a silvery tray, out of which stood the rounded, glistening hulks of two ox hearts. The tray was swimming nearly brim-full with weak blood from them. The sight cheered the ghost as much as it seemed to cheer Cart. No one would have to bleed Mrs. Gill now. Cart went over to a white cupboard and helped herself to a thick white jug. It looked as if her method with Mrs. Gill was halfway between Imogen's and Fenella's. Mrs. Gill, who was slicing brassy yellow lumps of margarine into a mixer bowl, turned her face and her cigarette to watch Cart, but she did not say anything. Cart did not say anything either. She gave Mrs. Gill another smile and held the tray so that blood poured out from one corner into the thick jug.

Naturally, the two slippery ox hearts began to lumber down the sloping tray, bringing a wave of blood with them. “Bother!” said Cart. She put the jug down on a chair, pulled the chair over to hold up one corner of the tray, and used her free hand to hold the slippery brown hearts in place.

“And just what are you two doing now?” said Mrs. Gill.

“Only getting some blood,” Cart said airily.

“And dirtying lunch.” Mrs. Gill threw down her lump of margarine and advanced, wiping her hands. Having done that, she took the cigarette out of her mouth, showing she meant business. “Out,” she said. “This minute.”

Cart was keeping a wary eye on her. “In just a moment,” she said. “Which two of us do you think this is?”

“You know who you are as well as I do,” retorted Mrs. Gill. “Did I say ‘Out,' or did I not?”

She was now near enough to grab the tin, and she reached out to do it. Cart let go and backed off hastily with the nearly full jug.

“And see you bring that jug back!” Mrs. Gill said.

“Are you accusing
me
of dishonesty?” said Cart, and backed out between the thumping doors again. The ghost did not like the last glimpse she had of Mrs. Gill's face.

Back in their own kitchen, Fenella was kneeling by the bowl, wiping her upper lip with toilet paper. One of her knots of hair was red and sticky. “I managed a bit of a nosebleed,” she said. “But it's not one of my best.”

“Every little helps,” Cart said cheerfully. There were now a few bright red splashes in the wide bottom of the bowl. Cart emptied her jugful in it. It made a watery mixture.

“It looks a bit weak,” Fenella said doubtfully.

“We'll thicken it,” said Cart. She took a steak knife from the untidy rack on the sink and held her left wrist out over the bowl. She began prodding at it with the steak knife. “Oh, I forgot,” she said as she prodded. “What he did in whatever book it was, was to keep other ghosts off with his sword, so that only the one he wanted got to drink.”

“I'll do that,” said Fenella. She climbed down and fetched a mighty triangular carving knife out of the table drawer. She stood waving this back and forth across the bowl while Cart prodded. “Unwanted ghosts keep away!” she intoned. “We only want
our
ghost here.”

“Ow!” said Cart. “It isn't only that it hurts—I can't seem to get any blood out at all. Yet I
know
the ancient Romans were doing it all the time. They used to commit suicide like this regularly in their baths. Do you think there's something different about modern veins?” She stabbed at her wrist and was rewarded with a swelling red blob. “Ah! Ooooh-ow!”

“Squeeze it.” Fenella suggested critically, waving the knife. “Before it sets.”

Cart had just succeeded in detaching several red blobs from her wrist into the bowl when Imogen crashed in through the back door. She had two small boys each by a shoulder. One was holding a red-smeared handkerchief to his nose. The other had his head bent carefully over a paper cup. “I promised them tenpence each,” Imogen said. “Go on. The bowl's there. Bleed in it.”

The boy with the handkerchief obediently shuffled across and bent over the bowl. The one with the paper cup looked round and selected Cart as the one in authority. “There's a lot in here,” he said, holding out the cup. “It's worth at least a pound.”

“Nonsense,” said Cart, giving the contents a brief glance. “I've just given more than that for nothing.”

“Blood donors always give it free,” said Imogen. “I told you.”

“They get a cup of tea,” the boy argued, clutching the cup defensively. “One pound, twenty. It's
my
blood, after all.”

“But that little drip's not worth one-twenty,” Cart said. “Proper blood donors give at least a pint.”

The boy glowered at her, still obstinately hanging on to his cup.

“If you really want to give a pint,” Fenella said, flourishing the triangular knife, “I'll help you. Just hold out your jugular, and I'll make you a cup of tea afterward.”

The boy stared at her, the knife, and the bloodstained knot in her hair. Then he put the cup down and fled. The other boy was given tenpence, which proved to be all the money anyone had.

“I hope the rest don't ask for money,” Imogen said as with jerky, clumsy, distasteful movements, she, too, punctured her wrist and, with surprising efficiency, let quite a trickle of blood run into the basin.

Unfortunately everyone asked for money. The two small boys proved to be the first of a rush of donors. Jenkins and Howard both came back with two more small boys each. Howard, in addition, had hopefully brought the corpse of a rabbit from the biology lab. It proved to be pickled. They laid it on the table, stinking of formaldehyde, raw and drowned-looking, and supervised the nosebleeds of their four donors. All four of these demanded at least a pound. Cart sighed and wrote them out IOUs for the money.

“The rabbit will do to stand for a sacrifice,” Howard said, needling at his finger with his tiepin. “We ought to have one if we're going to be properly pagan.”

By this time word had got round the school. Boys—mostly smaller ones—began to arrive in numbers, cautiously tiptoeing through the orchard or sliding furtively round the green door, carrying paper cups and tinfoil tart dishes each containing a precious drop of blood. It soon emerged that the market rate for a donation of blood was one pound, twenty pence. No one would take less. Some demanded more. These were usually the ones who arrived without a trace of blood and expressed themselves willing to be punched on the nose for money. The price for this was one pound, forty pence. Ned Jenkins did the punching. He was good at it. But if no blood resulted—and not everybody bleeds easily—the boy was given a steak knife and asked to produce his own. The price then went down again to one-twenty. Cart wrote out IOUs—a good sixty pounds' worth, it seemed to the ghost. But not everyone wanted only money. Most of the donors had heard there was a ghost. About a quarter of them gave blood at a reduced rate of one pound on condition that they were allowed to stay and watch what happened when the ghost drank the blood.

“Wait out in the orchard, then,” Cart told each of these. “It ought to be outside, anyway,” she explained to the others. “It was outside in the book. I think they dug a trench for the blood.”

The orchard began to become rather crowded. The level of cloudy red liquid in the bowl rose encouragingly. Fenella waved her carving knife above it with increasing glee.

“Lots of lovely gore!” she chanted. “No foreign ghosts wanted.”

The ghost hovered above, looking down at Fenella's disheveled head and waving knife and, below that, the grubby bowl of ropy red blood.
I can't be you, Fenella
, she said.
I'm not enjoying this at all. It's quite disgusting. I must be Imogen.

But Imogen did not seem particularly disgusted. “It's a funny thing,” she was saying, from the middle of the crowded kitchen. “Apart from the rabbit, I have a feeling of rightness about the whole thing. I know it's going to work.”

“Well, I think it's quite disgusting, frankly,” said Howard. “Don't you, Ned?”

“Yes,” said Jenkins. “But Imogen's right.”

A number of people seemed to agree with Howard. A group of bigger boys—Nutty Filbert was among them—was now standing in the orchard among the waiting donors, expressing their opinion. Mostly they did it with jeers and boos, but every so often they broke out into a chant. “We think you are dis
gus
ting! We think you are dis
gus
ting!”

“Take no notice,” advised Imogen. “They don't know a serious emergency when they see one.”

The chanters were in full cry when the back door opened and Julian Addiman put his head into the kitchen. “What
is
going on?” he asked, laughing. His eyes gleamed, and his wet red lips shone. “I hear you're calling for blood.”

“Of course. It's a way to make ghosts speak,” Cart answered briskly.

Julian Addiman looked at Fenella waving the knife over the bowl and the rabbit lying beside it, at Howard and Jenkins, and at the latest pair of donors. He seemed full of sly amusement. At that moment the bell shrilled for the end of Break. “Ooops!” said Julian Addiman. “Let me know if it says anything.” And he slid away laughing.

“Hey!” called Fenella. “Give us some blood first.”

But Julian Addiman, to the ghost's relief, was gone. The donors in the kitchen sped after him. The chanting group in the orchard was going away, too, and so were most of the waiting donors, slowly and disappointedly. But quite a number seemed determined to hear the ghost and lingered on hopefully under the trees. And a further party of fresh donors was just arriving—eight or ten of them—advancing across the orchard from the hedge, carefully carrying paper cups.

“Doesn't it matter to them that Break's over?” Imogen wondered, watching them advance through the window.

“Most people can think of an excuse if they really want to,” said Howard. “Oughtn't we to be going, Jenk?”

“I want to know what the ghost says,” Jenkins answered. His pale chin was bunched mulishly.

That was the moment when Mrs. Gill pushed open the green door, saying, “You come and take a look, Mr. Melford. They've got enough blood in here to float a battleship.”

Himself was in the kitchen doorway. Howard, who was nearest to the living room, made a running rugby dive through its door and vanished in a faint crunch of cornflakes. Jenkins, who had been with Imogen by the window, had no choice but to bend down and cram himself under the sink. Imogen stood in front of him. Cart hastily joined her, and the ghost joined the pair of them, with the idea of getting as far away from Himself as possible. Fenella, out of pure bravado, looked Mrs. Gill unlovingly in the eye and went on waving the carving knife.

“Weaving spiders, come not near,” Fenella intoned. “Spotted snakes with double tongue—one of which is in this room now—must get out of here or get down on the floor and wriggle.”

Himself took in her, and the bowl of blood, and the rabbit as he advanced into the room. He looked ready to do murder. Outside in the orchard his silhouette was recognized and caused consternation. Those waiting to hear the ghost dived for cover. The party of donors advancing with paper cups first backed away, then ran in panic for the hedge, throwing down the paper cups as they ran.

“Oh, well. We'd got about enough blood,” Cart murmured.

“You see, Mr. Melford?” Mrs. Gill asked triumphantly.

“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Gill,” Himself said cordially, and he went back to hold the green door open for her to go away.

Mrs. Gill, however, ghoul as she was, pretended to misunderstand him. She moved over to the table and folded her arms, where she stood eyeing the bowl of gore with strong expectation.

Himself was forced to come back into the kitchen. This caused an uncertain pause. Everyone well knew that Himself wanted to let rip in one of his screaming rages. He wanted to roar and shout and hit people and call his daughters bitches, but he did not want to do it with Mrs. Gill looking on. So he stood there mantling and glaring, an eagle ready to rend, and nobody else knew whether to be scared, relieved, or embarrassed.