The Great Ghost Rescue

‘Well, you must stay with us, of course,’ said the Hag.

‘It isn’t just me,’ said Aunt Hortensia gloomily. ‘It’s the same everywhere. Old buildings being pulled down, nice murky pools being drained, respectable ruins being turned into hotels or Bingo Halls. I hear poor Leofric the Mangled is haunting a sausage factory!’

‘Well, nothing will happen to us at Craggyford,’ said the Hag soothingly, piling rats’ tails on to a plate for her headless aunt.

But there she was wrong.

Two

Aunt Hortensia meant well but she was not an easy person to have in the house. For one thing, she was terribly forgetful. She didn’t just leave her head up in the bedroom when she went down to breakfast, she left it in the boot cupboard when she went out into the garden to pick Sneezewort or Deadly Nightshade and once, feeling playful, she threw it so suddenly at Humphrey that he dropped it and it said, ‘Butterfingers!’ to him in a very nasty way.

She would also get everybody very muddled up about what she was trying to tell them. Aunt Hortensia’s neck stump had learnt to say simple things like, ‘More please’, ‘No’, or ‘Pshaw!’ but if she wanted to say something complicated with quite a lot of words in it she had to have her head. Being so forgetful she would sometimes say one thing with her neck stump and something quite different with her head. For example, if the Hag asked her: ‘Would you like another toadskin sandwich, Aunt Hortensia?’ the stump might say ‘Yes,’ while the head, on the other side of the room, was saying, ‘You know, Mabel, that toadskin always gives me wind.’ This kind of thing, if you have to live with it, can make you very tired.

But what bothered them most was that she was crabby about Humphrey. While they all knew that Humphrey was not as horrible as he should have been, they really didn’t want anyone else to point it out. Making personal remarks about children when you are staying in their house is not a nice thing to do but Aunt Hortensia did it.

‘Really, Mabel,’ she would say, disturbing the Hag as she sat in the kitchen copying curses into a recipe book or trimming the corpse candles, ‘that boy of yours smells of new-mown hay.’

This made the Hag very cross.

‘He doesn’t. Not really. I admit that Humphrey has not inherited my best smells, but—’

‘You’re sure he is a ghost?’ said Aunt Hortensia, interrupting her. ‘He isn’t really a Faery or a Brownie or something? I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find him creeping out at night and doing good to people.’

This time the Hag was so angry that she went through the roof. ‘You have no right to say such things, Aunt Hortensia,’ she said when she came down again. ‘Why, only yesterday, when I was in the garden, I saw a chicken run in terror from Humphrey.’

‘A chicken!’ snorted Aunt Hortensia.

When something upset the Hag she always talked it over with her husband.

‘She’s got her knife into Humphrey,’ she said that night to the Gliding Kilt as they were preparing to go to bed. ‘Just because he dropped her beastly head.’

‘We must be patient, dear,’ said her husband, taking the sword out of his chest and putting it neatly on the pillow. ‘After all she’s had a bad time. Have you noticed how lumpy her neck stump is looking? And anyway, Mabel, you know that chicken wasn’t running away from Humphrey. It was running towards its mother.’

The Hag blushed and sent a whiff of squashed dung beetle across the room.

‘Oh well.’ She got into bed beside her husband and laid her hideous head lovingly against his gaping wound. ‘Maybe we could spray him with something to make him smell bad,’ she murmured sleepily. ‘Pus from an open boil might work... mixed with sour milk... or smouldering Wellington boots...’

But when morning came, everybody had more important things to think about than how to make Humphrey smell as awful as his mother. Because that was the morning the men came.

There were a lot of men: four ordinary-looking ones in caps and raincoats who arrived in a blue van and ran about with tape measures and plumb lines and long, striped poles, and two more important-looking ones with fat, red necks who came in a big, grey car and had thick overcoats and notebooks which flapped in the wind.

They stayed all morning, pacing the grounds, jabbing at the woodwork with their penknives, shouting to each other, and when they went away more men came the next day and the day after that.

It was a great strain for the ghosts. They didn’t know what was happening and of course with all those people around they had to stay invisible. Ghosts can stay invisible for days on end but they don’t like it. It makes them feel unwanted.

Then the men stopped coming for a few weeks and everything was quiet again. But the poor ghosts didn’t have long to enjoy the peace of Craggyford because what came next was the bulldozers.

‘Mother, they’re digging up the West Meadow,’ said Humphrey worriedly. ‘What will happen to those nice moles?’