Dial a Ghost

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.

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.

‘And do you know where he found it?’ Fulton would say, bringing his face close up to Oliver’s. ‘In an old coffin chest exactly like the one in your room!’