Eglantine

by Catherine Jinks

  ‘I think it only happens at night,’ Mum remarked. ‘Which is what you’d expect, really, isn’t it? With a ghost.’ She gave an unconvincing little laugh.

  Sylvia didn’t reply. She took out of her pocket a funny thing the size of a calculator, and began to pace the room with it.

  Bethan asked her what it was.

  ‘An electromagnetic field detector,’ she replied.

  Everyone – except Sylvia – exchanged glances.

  ‘And what does it do?’ Ray wanted to know.

  ‘It identifies anomalies in electromagnetic readings.’ Sylvia stopped, her gaze fixed firmly on her gadget. ‘High volumes of electromagnetic activity are usually associated with poltergeist reports and so forth. Hmm.’

  ‘What?’ said Mum.

  ‘Well . . . you do have a very high reading in here. Anything over point nine is a problem, and this room is registering point twelve.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Mum.

  Trish nudged her. ‘You see?’ Trish whispered. ‘What did I tell you? Intersecting ley lines.’

  ‘So there is a ghost in here?’ Bethan inquired, but Sylvia wouldn’t commit herself.

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Then what’s happening?’ Mum demanded. ‘Who’s doing this?’

  Sylvia raised her eyes from her gadget. She surveyed us all in a way that made me feel uncomfortable.

  ‘At the moment,’ she said at last, slowly, ‘we can’t rule out a human agent.’

  ‘What?’ Mum cried, and Ray said, ‘Who?’

  ‘That is what we’ll have to determine.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t me,’ I announced. ‘I don’t want Bethan in my room.’

  ‘And it isn’t me, either!’ Bethan cried. ‘I don’t want to sleep with Alethea. I want my own room back!’

  Sylvia looked at me long and hard. Then she looked at Bethan. Then she said, with a hint of apology, ‘We have to rule out the possibility of human intervention before we can accept that any strange activity has a paranormal cause. It’s standard procedure.’

  ‘And then what?’ asked Mum. ‘If you rule out human intervention, what happens after that? How can you get rid of this thing?’

  Sylvia blinked.

  ‘Get rid of it?’ she echoed.

  ‘Yes. That’s what you do, isn’t it? You’re a kind of ghost-buster, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well . . . no,’ said Sylvia. ‘Actually, I’m not.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘My job is to identify what the problem is – if it’s paranormal or not. If it is, and you want it stopped, well . . . we can make some suggestions -’

  ‘Like what?’ Mum sounded quite cross, and Ray put a hand on her shoulder.

  Sylvia watched them both cautiously. ‘It depends on what you have here,’ she said at last. ‘And what your religious beliefs might be. You may want to talk to Laurie, in fact – he’s our president. He may be able to help you. But really, nothing can be done until we establish exactly what it is we’re dealing with.’

  She went on to explain that, if the mystery was to be solved, she and some of the other investigators would have to spend at least one night in Bethan’s bedroom, with their equipment. Would Mum object to that? Mum said no, she supposed not, since Bethan wouldn’t be sleeping in there anyway. When was Sylvia planning to return?

  ‘Oh, I’ll have to get back to you,’ Sylvia replied. ‘As soon as possible. This is a very interesting case. I’m grateful that you brought it to our attention.’

  And that was that. After peering at the ghostly handwriting one last time, Sylvia moved out of the bedroom briskly, her heels clicking on the floor.

  I have to admit, it was a bit of a let-down. We had all been expecting her visit to be more dramatic.

  ‘So I take it that my son shouldn’t be sleeping in his room?’ Mum inquired, as Sylvia said goodbye on the doorstep. ‘I mean, with all that electromagnetic activity?’

  ‘It’s entirely up to you,’ Sylvia responded. ‘A microwave oven registers sixty-five when it’s switched off.’

  ‘I won’t have one of those things in the house,’ said Mum, and Trish asked, ‘What about wind-chimes? Would they moderate the negative energy?’

  Sylvia raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said cautiously. ‘But anything’s worth a try.’ Turning back to Mum, she added, ‘If I were you, Judy, I would scatter some talcum powder on the floor of that room. It’s a way of ruling out human intervention. We often use it ourselves.’

  Then, after promising to call Mum as soon as possible, she disappeared into the shadows.

  CHAPTER # four

  Mum scattered talcum powder over the floor of Bethan’s room before she went to bed that night. The next morning, the powder lay undisturbed, but the walls were covered in so many new lines of script that it took me an hour to copy them all down.

  The copying took place after school, naturally. I didn’t have time to do it in the morning. Besides, Mum didn’t want me trudging around Bethan’s room before she’d vacuumed up the talcum powder. So it wasn’t until Monday evening that I made my interesting discovery about the text on the walls . . .

  Before that happened, however, I spoke to the school librarian. I’d been thinking about our family’s problem all morning, off and on. (I usually finish my work long before everyone else does, and have to sit around waiting as a result. That’s why I have so much time to think.) It seemed to me that we weren’t going to get much help from PRISM – not until Sylvia was convinced that we actually had a ghost in the house. Weeks might pass, I thought, before anyone tried to stop the ghost from writing on our walls. And I didn’t want to wait that long for sole custody of my bedroom.

  I decided to do a bit of research. Instead of joining my friend Michelle in the playground, at lunchtime, I went to the school library, collected a stack of books about ghosts, and sat down to work out why ghosts haunt houses. After a lot of reading, I came to the following conclusion. Ghosts – if they exist – are tricky, unreliable things that don’t respond well to being told what to do. Nevertheless, some of them need help. Some of them are only drifting about because their killers have gone unpunished, or because their earthly remains haven’t been given a decent burial.

  I wondered what could possibly have been troubling Eglantine Higgins. She couldn’t have been buried under the house, because the house had been built in 1886, and Eglantine had been alive twenty years later. Had she died in the house, perhaps? Had someone killed her in it? That was a nasty thought, but it had to be faced.

  I asked Mrs Procter, the librarian, how you could find out who had been living in your house a hundred years ago.

  ‘Well,’ she said, after some hesitation, ‘that might be a bit difficult. Is this your new house, Alethea?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  I had no intention of telling her the truth. I was already having a hard enough time convincing people that I wasn’t a weirdo – the last thing I needed was a reputation for seeing ghosts.

  ‘Just some things we found,’ I replied vaguely. ‘A book and . . . other stuff.’

  ‘I see.’ She thought for a moment. I like Mrs Procter, because she always takes me seriously. She’s very intelligent, too, and knows a lot about books. (I’m a favourite of hers, because I actually read them.) ‘You might ask your neighbours,’ she finally suggested. ‘Sometimes people have been living in one place for a long while, and know things about the neighbourhood.’

  I grunted. Our new neighbours weren’t very friendly. On one side lived a big sloppy lady who spent all her time in front of the television, when she wasn’t on the phone complaining to Mum about the noise of our renovations. On the other side lived a well-dressed young couple with an expensive car, who were hardly ever home. The big sloppy lady wouldn’t talk to us any more. The young couple were never available.

  ‘I don’t think our neighbours would be much help,’ I said.

  ‘Of course, if you
wanted to find out who owned the house a hundred years ago, you could check the title deeds,’ Mrs Procter remarked. ‘When your mother bought the house, her lawyer would have done a historical search, and had a copy made of the old title deeds. Title deeds show the names of all the past owners, and tell you when they bought the house. That might be useful – although just because a person owned a house, it doesn’t mean that they lived there.’

  Or died there, I thought. Then something else occurred to me.

  ‘How do you find out where and when somebody died?’ I asked. ‘If it happened about a hundred years ago, say?’

  Mrs Procter fixed me with a curious look.

  ‘There’s a name in the book we found under the stairs,’ I added hastily. ‘I want to find out if the person who owned the book lived in the house. And whether she’s still alive.’

  ‘I see,’ said Mrs Procter. ‘Well, you can check with the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. There’s one in every state. They keep records of death certificates.’

  ‘Where’s the New South Wales one?’ I inquired, wondering doubtfully how I might persuade Mum to take me there. But Mrs Procter assured me that, like most other government bodies, the Registry would have its own internet site. I would simply have to log on.

  ‘They do have rules about privacy,’ she continued, ‘but I don’t think rules like that would apply to people who died a long time ago, or no one would ever be able to trace their family trees. Anyway, you should give it a try. Can’t do any harm, can it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. But then the bell rang, and I had to put off looking at the Births, Deaths and Marriages site until the next day.

  We don’t have the internet at home, you see. Mum doesn’t really trust it, for some reason – she says it’s too expensive. She doesn’t even like computers very much, despite the fact that she works in a bank. So I have to use a school computer, or one at the local library. It’s very annoying. The school computers are nearly always hidden behind a crowd of boys who ignore you when you say that you’ve booked a session for an hour, and would they please move? As for the library computers, they’re usually broken.

  But that’s neither here nor there. I was telling you about Monday. On Monday afternoon, I came home from school to find Mum vacuuming up the talcum powder in Bethan’s room, and I told her what Mrs Procter had said about title deeds, and asked her where ours were.

  ‘I don’t have all those papers,’ she replied without much enthusiasm.’The solicitor has them.’

  ‘Could you call the solictor?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘If we don’t do something,’ I declared, ‘we’ll never get rid of this stupid writing.’

  ‘I’ll call the solicitor when I finish the vacuuming,’ Mum promised. And she did, too. And he said that he would send over a copy of the old title deeds as soon as he could.

  So that was my first job done. My second job was to record and underline all the new lines of text on Bethan’s bedroom wall, which, as I said earlier, took me an hour because there were so many. But as I copied them into my journal, I noticed something. To begin with, I noticed a name: Emilie. For the first time, a name had been used. “Emilie is a good child was written on the back of the door, and it was a sentence that caught my attention, not only because of the name, but because of the opening quotation marks. Quotation marks mean that somebody’s speaking. What’s more, you can’t have one set of quotation marks at the beginning of a line of speech without another set closing the same passage. So I looked around for more quotation marks, and found them – three sets of them, widely scattered, all brand new – and thought, I wonder if these quotation marks match up, somehow? I wonder who’s speaking?

  That’s when I settled down with my journal, and began to piece all the lines of text together. It was just like doing a jigsaw puzzle. With a jigsaw puzzle, you always look for the corner pieces first, and attach other pieces to them. With this funny collection of stray sentences and phrases, I used the quotation marks as my corner pieces. I also used the name Emilie, which I tried to match up with all the female references that were starting to appear. (My great crown would crush her smooth brow, for example.) It wasn’t easy. But I made it easier by cutting out every separate line of text – again, just like a jigsaw puzzle. (I love solving puzzles.) Then I arranged the pieces and rearranged the pieces, and by dinner time I was pretty much convinced of one thing.

  Though the lines had been written all over the place, they did fit together. They fitted together into a story. It was even possible that they had been written on the wall in order, and we hadn’t noticed because we had spotted later lines before earlier ones.

  Amazing? I thought so. Of course, I didn’t have everything worked out by dinner time. There were more than sixty strips of paper to join up, and I had homework to do. But when I sat down at the kitchen table, I was able to inform everyone that the ghost upstairs was trying to tell us something, and that she wasn’t finished yet.

  Three heads turned.

  ‘What do you mean, tell us something?’ said Mum. ‘What gives you that idea?’

  ‘I’ve been putting all the sentences together,’ was my response. ‘They do make sense, when they’re not scattered all over the walls. I think the ghost has been writing them out in the proper order, too, because the first few nights she was talking about a king and his kingdom, but last night the king started talking about a daughter. Emilie.’

  ‘Wait – wait a second.’ Ray lifted his hand. ‘You’re saying that the writing upstairs can actually be joined together? Into a composition of some kind?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said patiently. ‘That’s what I’ve been doing. Cutting out the lines and sticking them together with sticky tape. Like a puzzle.’

  ‘What does it say?’ Mum demanded. ‘Is it some kind of message?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I thought about the little strips of paper spread over my bedroom floor. ‘Maybe. It’s about a white-bearded king, with mines, and sea ports, and a good navy, and a daughter but no son. The daughter’s name is Emilie.’

  ‘It sounds like a fairytale,’ Bethan offered.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘It does. That’s just the way it sounds. That’s just the way it’s written.’

  ‘But it might be a piece of history,’ Ray mused. ‘What king had a daughter called Emilie? Can anyone remember?’

  Mum, however, wasn’t interested in history. ‘You said something about its not being finished,’ she interrupted, fixing me with an anxious gaze. ‘How can you possibly tell?’

  ‘Well – I don’t know. It doesn’t feel finished.’ I tried to work out why. ‘Nothing’s happened yet. I think the king wants an heir.’

  ‘We should have a look at what you’ve done,’ Ray said, ‘and see what we think about it.’

  ‘Do you reckon the writing’ll stop when the story is finished?’ asked Bethan, whereupon we all looked at each other.

  I had to admit, it was a smart thing to say.

  After a pause, Ray remarked, ‘I wonder. That would solve the problem, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘As long as it’s not a three-thousand-page novel,’ Mum said. ‘We’ll be waiting years, if that’s the case.’

  ‘If that is the case, then we’ll have to move out,’ Ray declared. ‘We can’t live in a house that has a ghost permanently installed in one of the upstairs bedrooms.’

  ‘Oh, but Ray,’ Mum protested, ‘think of the expense! Agents’ fees and stamp duty -’ ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘And all the work I’ve put into this house!’ Mum wailed. ‘I couldn’t go through it all again.’

  ‘I know,’ said Ray, placing a hand on Mum’s. ‘It’s all right. I’m sure we’ll sort it out.’

  Then Bethan asked, in a worried voice, whether the story on his bedroom wall contained any blood and guts. Anyone choking? Anyone suffocating? I knew just what he was getting at, and so did Mum. She said, ‘The daughter’s name in the story is Emilie, not Eglantine.’


  ‘But they both start with E,’ I pointed out. ‘Maybe Emilie was Eglantine’s second name. Or maybe Emilie stands for Eglantine. Maybe she is telling us what happened to her.’ I started to get excited. ‘Maybe she’s disguising it as a fairytale, but it’s really true! Maybe someone killed her, and she’s trying to tell us how! Maybe that’s why she’s haunting us -’

  ‘Maybe we ought to wait until PRISM has established if we are being haunted,’ Ray broke in, firmly. At which point the phone rang, and Mum went to answer it.

  It was Sylvia, calling to inquire about the type of paint used on Bethan’s bedroom wall. She mentioned that she was consulting a chemical engineer about the possibility of substances reacting to other substances. There was a chance that the old writing was soaking through the paint, she said. Whatever she found out, she would call us again.

  When she rang off, I grumbled, ‘You see? She doesn’t believe us.’

  ‘She has to rule out every logical explanation,’ said Ray.

  ‘And meanwhile, Bethan’s been kicked out of his own bedroom.’ I was very cross. ‘We should hire an exorcist, or something.’

  But no one listened to me.

  CHAPTER # five

  I’d better explain about exorcists. Exorcists are people who perform exorcisms, and exorcisms are one way of driving out evil spirits. I’d learned about exorcisms when I was doing my research in the school library. I’d also learned that Catholic priests sometimes perform exorcisms, and I was wondering if Mum should call the local Catholic church when my friend Michelle discouraged me from suggesting it. But that was on Wednesday, and I haven’t told you what happened on Tuesday, yet.

  On Tuesday morning, I went straight into Bethan’s bedroom as soon as I woke up. There, I found the walls and ceiling covered with so many new lines of text that very few blank spaces remained. One new line had even been written across an old one. It was obvious that very soon the room would be returned to its former state, almost black with unreadable scribblings. Bethan, when he saw this, was hugely depressed.