Dial a Ghost

But when they had been married for about ten years, the de Bones had a Great Sorrow and this had driven them mad. No one knew what their sorrow was; they never spoke about it, and the grief and guilt of it had turned inwards and made them wilder and crazier with every year that passed. Even before they became ghosts people had been terrified of the de Bones, and now the sight of them sent the strongest man running for cover. Sir Pelham still wore the jodphurs and hunting jacket he had worn when he broke his neck, but they were covered with filth and gore and he carried a long-thonged whip with which he slashed at everything that crossed his path. His forehead had been bashed in by a horse’s hoof so that it was just a mass of splintered bone; his left ear hung by a thread, and through the rent in his trousers you could see his scarred and vicious knees.

His wife was even worse. Sabrina’s dress was so bloodstained that you couldn’t see the fabric underneath, and hatred had worn away two of her toes and her nose, which was nothing but a nibbled stump. She had picked up a phantom python on her travels and wore it slung round her neck so that the evil-smelling eggs it laid broke and dribbled down inside her vest. Worst of all were her long fingernails, from which bits of skin and hair stuck out because of the tearing and scratching she did all day.

Not only were the Shriekers hateful to look at, but they were the most foul-mouthed couple you could imagine. You could hear them shouting abuse at each other from the moment they woke up to the moment they went to bed.

‘Do you call that blood!’ Sabrina would shriek when her husband dripped some gore on to the ground. ‘Why that isn’t even tomato ketchup! I could put that on my fish fingers and not even notice it, you slime-grub!’

‘Don’t you dare call me names, you maggot-ridden cow-pat,’ Sir Pelham would yell back. ‘What have you done today, I’d like to know? You were going to strangle the butcher’s boy before lunch and there isn’t a mark on him. And your python looks perfectly ridiculous. You’ve tied it in a granny knot. Pythons should be tied in a reef knot, everyone knows that.’

The only time the Shriekers were cheerful was when they were working out something awful to do to children. When they had thought of some new way of harming a child, Sabrina would open one of the containers and take out a pig’s trotter to put in her hair, and string a row of pork chops together to make a belt for her husband, and they would do a stately dance in the dark, cold hall so that one could see how proud and grand they had once been.

But it never lasted long. Soon they’d tear everything off again and bombard each other with pieces of liver and start screaming for more horror and more blood.

The Shriekers had a servant, a miserable, grey, jelly-like creature; a ghoul whom they had found asleep in a graveyard with a rope round his neck. He slept behind a waste bin and every so often they would kick him awake and tell him to cook something and he would totter about muttering, ‘Sizzle’ or ‘Roast’ or ‘Burn’ and swipe vaguely at the sausages with a frying pan. But the cold had almost done for him – ghouls are not suitable for freezing – and the thought of doing their own housework made the Shriekers absolutely furious with the kind ladies of the adoption agency.

‘Those human blisters,’ yelled Sir Pelham, ‘those suppurating boils!’

‘I bet they’re lying in their beds snoring while we rot in this hell-hole,’ shouted Sabrina.

But the Shriekers were wrong. At that very moment, though it was late at night, Miss Pringle and Mrs Mannering were putting one hundred leaflets into brown envelopes and sticking on one hundred stamps. The leaflets were addressed to the owners of grand houses and stately homes all over Britain, and offered ghosts of every kind suitable for adoption straight away.

And two days later, one of those leaflets dropped on to the dusty, marble floor of Helton Hall.

Chapter Four

Helton Hall was a large, grand and rather gloomy house in the north of England. It was built of grey stone and had a grey slate roof, and grey stone statues of gods and goddesses with chipped and snooty-looking faces lined the terrace. Helton had thirteen bedrooms, and stables, and outhouses, and a lake in which a farmer had once drowned himself. At the end of the long grey gravel drive was a large iron gate with spikes on it, the kind you could have stuck people’s heads on in the olden days, and on top of the pillars sat two carved griffons with evil-looking eyes and vicious beaks.