The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

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.

CHAPTER TWELVE

It 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.