The Great Ghost Rescue

Cautiously, Rick put out an arm. As he’d half expected, it went right through the old creature and hit the railings of the bridge.

‘You’re a ghost too, then?’ he said.

The old man nodded. ‘River spirit. Very old family, Walter’s the name. Walter the Wet.’ He pulled a dead fish out of his beard, made a face, and threw it on the ground. ‘Stinking thing,’ he grumbled.

‘Are you looking for anyone?’ said Rick cautiously.

‘Heard some people were passing. Something about a ghost sanctuary.’ He looked sharply at Rick from under his shaggy eyebrows. ‘A Hag or two maybe; a Gliding Kilt... that kind of thing.’

‘Well, they are here,’ admitted Rick.

But by now the ghosts could stand it no longer. One by one they appeared and clustered round Walter the Wet who was sneezing a water beetle out of his nose.

‘See that,’ he said picking it up. ‘Dead. Poisoned. Like the fish. Look at my ectoplasm.’

He stretched out a bare arm and flexed his muscles which looked pale and runny like semolina made with too much milk.

‘Bad,’ said Aunt Hortensia. Not to be outdone, she craned forward to show him her stump and he agreed that that was bad too.

‘Three thousand years I’ve lived in that river,’ said Walter the Wet. ‘I remember the Romans going up to build Hadrian’s Wall. Hundreds of them I’ve lured to death in that river like a proper river spirit should. I’ve drowned Picts and Scots. I’ve sent Border Raiders mad with terror, rearin’ out of the water on a dark night with my wild hair flying. Loathsome I’ve been, an’ pulpy; there wasn’t nothing pulpier than me north of the Thames. But now I tell you, this river’s finished.’

‘What exactly’s wrong with it, Mr Wet Walter?’ asked Humphrey.

‘What’s wrong with it? You name it and that’s what’s wrong with it. Everything. Sewage. Waste muck from the cement factory. Oil from the ships. Chemicals from the fertilizer plant. Here, look at my tonsils.’

He opened his mouth, letting out a stream of dirty brown water and they all took turns peering into his throat

‘Badly swollen,’ said the Hag, shaking her head.

‘I think there’s a bit of glass sticking to the left one,’ said Winifred, looking worried.

‘Glass. Rusty nails. Boots. I tell you, the bottom of that river is like a rubbish dump. And dead fish – why I’ve gone to sleep of an evening on the river bed and woken up with a good ton of dead fish on top of me in the morning, that’s as fast as they come down. Disgusting it is. Do you know what I do now when a sailor falls overboard from one of them tankers there?’

Rick and the ghosts shook their heads.

‘I just go back to sleep. No need to lure ’im to his death, I say to myself. One gulp of that river, water and ’e’ll die of poisoning. That’s if his throat isn’t cut by an old tin can. And sure enough, by morning there he is with the fish, lying among the old bedsteads and as dead as a dodo.’

Rick was very worried by all this. In a way it was the whales and the penguins all over again. ‘The poor fish,’ he said.

‘What about me?’ said Walter the Wet. ‘It’s me I’m thinking about. I tell you, I can’t go on in that river another minute. They’re starting to build a tunnel under it now, to take a road through. Blinking drills rattling in your ear hole the whole night. No, it’s no good, you’ve got to take me along to this sanctuary place.’

Everybody looked at everybody else. ‘Won’t you dry out on the journey?’ asked Rick.

‘I’ll take a dip when I can,’ said Walter. He gave a crafty look at Winifred’s bowl and Winifred stepped back a pace. She was the kindest of girls but her bowl – if she ever caught up with it – was for washing out her blood stains.

Rick was frowning. If Walter the Wet was to come it meant finding the ghosts a place with a river or a lake. It looked as though this sanctuary was going to have to be rather big. He hoped the Prime Minister was a nice and understanding man. On the other hand, it wasn’t much of a sanctuary if it was going to leave people out.

‘I’m afraid there won’t be room in the coach.’ said Aunt Hortensia. ‘Even if my stump could stand the damp. Which I very much doubt.’

Walter shook a puddle from his back and said: ‘Going south, aren’t you, to London? River flows south. So get on a boat. A coal barge, maybe.’

‘A boat!’ cried Humphrey the Horrible. ‘Oh, I’d like a boat.’

‘You mean drive the coach on to the boat?’ enquired Aunt Hortensia.

‘Could be. There’s a barge goes through here about twelve o’clock carrying coal down to Porchester. The men moor by that landing stage and go for a beer to that pub on the hill. The boy can get aboard then and hide and of course there’s no trouble about us.’

Walter the Wet was right. Just after twelve a long, flat coal barge came chugging up the river and stopped on the quay below the bridge. Two men were working her; a little, thin whiskery man and a big broad-shouldered man who got George very excited because he had a picture of a skull and crossbones tattooed on his forearm.

‘It’s me,’ George kept on screaming. ‘It’s me; it’s a picture of me!’