The Great Ghost Rescue

There was a pause while the phantom beast sniffed the speck of linen. Then his head went down and his three tails went up and with a noise like an underground pumping station, he was off.

Humphrey waited anxiously as the red beam of light from the Shuk’s one eye raked the darkness. Then they heard him give a growl of satisfaction and pounce. Seconds later he had bounded back to the coach. And in his jaws, covered with black sludge but smiling happily, was Aunt Hortensia’s head.

‘That is a very intelligent and useful animal,’ said the Head. ‘I had rolled into a ditch and might never have been found.’

‘You see, Mother,’ said Humphrey, ‘You see.’

Like all the best mothers, the Hag knew when she was beaten. ‘All right,’ she said, sighing. ‘But mind you keep those disgusting feet of his off the upholstery.’

Tn of an empty castle or ruined abbey or crumbling peel tower where a tired family of ghosts could come to rest.

And then, just a couple of hours before dawn, when the sky was beginning to look dark grey instead of inky black, the Gliding Kilt turned his head and said: ‘Down there. What’s down there?’

They all scrambled to the window and looked out. Below them, set in a big park, they could just make out the outline of a huge building. It had four towers, a central courtyard, battlements....

‘A castle!’ cried Humphrey. ‘Can we live here?’

‘We’ll just go down and take a look,’ said the Gliding Kilt.

The horses were tired and glad to lose height. As they galloped round the building everyone became more cheerful. There was ivy creeping up the walls, some of the windows were barred; a fierce black crow rose squawking as they came.

‘Really this seems very possible,’ said the Hag. ‘Look, there are two stinking serpents hanging out of that window,’ she went on, sniffing happily. ‘Let’s drive in there.’

Aunt Hortensia had her faults but she certainly knew how to handle her horses. Skilfully she turned, and the coach drove past the stripy, stinking snakes hanging on the sill and in through the window.

Only they weren’t stinking snakes. They were the football socks of a boy called Maurice Crawler who had extremely smelly feet. And what the ghosts had done was to drive straight into the boys’ dormitory of Norton Castle School.

Four

Rick was usually the first person in the dormitory to wake. This morning he woke up particularly early because he had been thinking very hard the night before and the thinking had got into his sleep.

He was a serious boy with a thin face, big dark eyes and ears which stuck out because when he was a baby his mother had liked him too much to stick them down with sellotape as the doctor had told her to.

What Rick was thinking about was the world. The world, it seemed to Rick, was in a bad way. In the Antarctic, the penguins were all stuck up with oil and couldn’t even waddle. Blue whales were practically extinct, no one had seen a square-lipped rhinoceros for ages and a tribe of cannibals in the Amazon jungle which Rick had hoped to visit when he grew up had been moved to a housing estate in Rio de Janeiro. It seemed to Rick that by the time he was grown up, all the interesting animals and plants and people would have gone and there’d be nothing left but huge blocks of flats and boring shops and motorways. The whole thing annoyed him.

He looked round the dormitory. Norton Castle had been built about a hundred years ago by a rich toffee manufacturer called Albert Borringer. Mr Borringer was one of those people who couldn’t see an animal without wanting to shoot it and stuff it and stick it on the wall, and when he died and the castle became a school, the stuffed animals stayed. In the bed opposite Rick’s, under a huge wildebeeste with mild, glass eyes, Maurice Crawler was snoring. What with his dimpled knees, hot feet and piggy eyes the colour of baked beans, Maurice was not really a great joy to anyone. On the other hand if it wasn’t for Maurice there wouldn’t have been a school because his parents were the headmaster and headmistress. They had started the school for Maurice because he hadn’t settled in the school they sent him to. He hadn’t settled in five schools they’d sent him to and no wonder. Maurice was a bully and a liar and a cheat.

Rick sighed. In the bed next to him, a new boy called Peter Thorne moaned in his sleep. He was still terribly homesick. Rick was sorry for him but he would have liked an ally. Someone to help him get things done.

Suddenly he leant forward. What was that funny pink, cobwebby thing hanging on the end of his bed. He put out a hand to touch it. To his amazement, his hand went right through and hit the end of the bed. And yet he could see something there. And then:

‘No!’ said Rick under his breath. ‘I don’t believe it. I simply don’t believe it!’