The Great Ghost Rescue

Everywhere in the sanctuary terrible things were happening; things which no one could explain or understand. The Mad Monk had come out in big boils – frightful red lumps, with pus oozing out of his ectoplasm and running down inside his tunic. Walter the Wet was thrown up on the sea shore, bone dry. The Shuk’s lantern eye turned white and then closed up altogether so that he dropped Aunt Hortensia’s iron-hard head with a clatter and ran howling to hide under a tree.

Ughtred and Grimbald had fallen on a clump of heather and lay groaning and holding their stomachs, the Ladies slowly lost their colour: all the blue faded from the Blue Lady, the Green Lady lost her greenness; the Grey Lady became totally colourless.

‘Oh, the Devil and the Dark Shades help us!’ cried the Hag. ‘What can it be? And where’s my little boy? Where’s Humphrey?’

‘It’s a plague,’ cried Sucking Susie flying in brokenly, trailing a damaged wing. ‘My boys can’t fly any more, they’re too weak to leave the cave. And look at my baby! Oh, look at my little Rose!’

She opened her pouch and they looked at the frail grey pathetic thing inside it in terror. Rose’s little eyes were filmed over, her fangs were loose and bleeding and every so often she gave heart-rending squeals of pain.

‘I don’t want to alarm you,’ said the Gliding Kilt, speaking with difficulty, ‘but look at my right arm.’

One and all, caught by something in his voice, they turned. Below the elbow, his strong, Scottish, ectoplasmic arm was slowly disappearing into nothingness.

‘It isn’t me doing it,’ said the Gliding Kilt in a strangled voice. ‘It’s being done to me. I can’t stop it. I’m being dissolved, exterminated, killed.’

The Gliding Kilt’s terrible words pierced the ghosts like an arrow through their hearts. The Hag wailed ‘Hamish!’ and threw herself against her husband’s doomed body. Winifred moaned, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ A weak scream came from the melting George.

It was Humphrey who brought an explanation of the terrible things that were happening to them – a Humphrey no one would have recognized. His ectoplasm looked like an old dishcloth left in a slimy washing-up bowl for weeks on end, his eye sockets were like smudged bits of coal, and his ball and chain, as he dragged himself into the castle through the slits for pouring boiling oil, seemed too heavy for him to lift.

‘Mummy, Daddy... everyone... There are some dreadful men... surrounding the sanctuary. Men in black coats and white collars. And they’re saying awful things... and waving rowan branches... and—’

Aunt Hortensia’s head gave a shriek so terrible that everyone stood as if turned to stone.

‘EXORCISM! That’s what it is. EXORCISM!’

‘What’s... exorcism... Auntie?’ said Winifred, still weakly pawing the air for her vanished bowl.

‘It’s a way of laying ghosts. Killing them. Sending them back to where they came from. Spells, prayers, rowan berries, a thing called a pentacle... They use them all. Oh, my darlings,’ said Aunt Hortensia, getting sentimental as people do when they think death is near, ‘we’re done for. We’re finished!’

‘But who... would want to... exorcise... us?’ said Walter the Wet, who had dragged himself in, crackling with dryness, and now hardly had the strength to speak.

‘I saw three clergymen,’ whispered Humphrey. ‘And a man with a pale face and black hair, egging them on. I think it was the man we saw with the Prime Minister. The man who said we could come here.’

‘Lord Bullhaven!’ cried the Gliding Kilt.

And in despairing horror the ghosts looked at each other as they realized what had happened.

‘A trap!’ said the Hag, holding her dissolving husband in her arms. ‘We simply walked straight into a trap!’

Thirteen

It was true. The ghosts had walked into a trap – a terrible and dangerous trap. Because Lord Bullhaven was not at all what he had pretended to be. He was not a kind, rich man willing to offer the poor ill-treated ghosts of Britain a place where they could live in peace. No, he was really a very bad person and he had decided to lure as many ghosts as he could to one place and then exterminate them.