Ghosts on Board

by Fleur Hitchcock

  But he doesn’t manage to speak again.

  ‘Good,’ I say. I can’t think of anything else to say. A breath of wind falls on my cheek and a cold finger brushes over my palm.

  Footsteps sound at the top of the passage to the courtyard, accompanied by the uncomfortable screech of a heavy, metal gas tank being dragged over flagstones.

  A minute or two later and Victor appears, struggling and cursing. ‘Cretinous invention, impossibly unintelligent way to get through anything. Strewth but it’s so heavy!’ The cylinder breaks free and rolls down the passage, clanging into the bars of the cell, and bowling Victor over like a skittle.

  ‘Ow! Blasted thing.’ He scrambles to his feet, dragging the rest of the torch over the cobbles and then stopping outside the cell. ‘Oh yes,’ he says, gazing at the piles and pots of dust inside. ‘Oh yes – wonderful new world of shining sparkling things, you are so nearly mine.’

  He stands, holding the tube and torch in one hand and the top of the gas bottle with the other.

  ‘So how do you two make friends then?’ he asks. ‘Do you go in there? Or do you go in there?’

  I realise that as a Victorian he might never have seen an oxyacetylene torch and that there’s a distant chance he might not be able to make the two things go together, but no such luck, as it only takes him a couple of minutes to not only get it linked but also to get it fired up.

  ‘Oh la!’ he says as the huge flame leaps from the torch and then focuses into something tiny and bright. ‘Now, you tiny little self-important bits of metal – feel my rage.’

  The bars fall away from the flame like sticks of butter and within a minute he has cut a doorway and is standing inside the cell, pots and pots of dust arranged around him.

  I panic.

  Supposing Flora Rose and Billy dropped the key on their way back to Eric and Jacob? Supposing they haven’t changed the dust for chocolate powder – supposing I’ve just failed to prevent him from being the most powerful evil genius in the world?

  He empties a pot of dust over his head and begins to laugh. The dust flies up into the air around him, glittering and spinning in the draught. ‘I have it! I have it! This is it! I am invincible, unstoppable! Fire and water, come to me, make me strong!’

  He dances, he whirls, he laughs, he shouts, and I’m more and more worried. He appears to be becoming more solid, less grey, but it’s difficult to tell in the dull red glow of the bulb. It could just be that he’s getting coated in chocolate, or it could be that there’s still some magic dust left in there. ‘Yes, yes, yes! At last. Bow down, World, before me. I am the most powerful being of all time, the greatest man alive, or dead. Everything shall be mine – all mine,’ and he giggles madly, tasting the dust on his tongue, rubbing it into his hair, his hands, his clothes. He pauses and licks his hand. ‘Mmmm, chocolate! Oh wonderful dust, you taste of chocolate. How appropriate! AWE-SOME! I am a god, a demigod, an all-things god, a superpower. I am that rare thing, a superhero with a brain – they will worship me!’

  He’s reached the stage of lying on the floor on his back like a dog, chucking handfuls of dust into the air, when quite suddenly the ground gives way beneath him.

  It’s my cue and I race out and up the passage, out of the castle courtyard and around the outside of the walls, tumbling and tripping over the tussocks and earthworks until I see Eric and Jacob standing staring at the bottom of the ancient medieval toilet chute.

  Finding an extra burst of energy in my legs I race over the grass to join them.

  ‘Wow!’ says Eric.

  ‘Awesome!’ says Jacob.

  An explosion of chocolate powder bursts from the wall – followed by a heavy thump.

  There on the ground in front of us is Victor, pale and chocolatey in uneven patches. He gazes at his hand. Beneath the cocoa powder it’s definitely faded to grey. ‘Oh no,’ he says. ‘I’m turning back into a ghost. This is terri—’ But before he’s finished speaking, Eric turns on the sprinklers at the end of his fingers and drenches him with freezing cold water, washing off all the castle’s magic dust and all the chocolate powder.

  ‘Chaps!’ he manages to stutter. I form my thumb and forefinger into an O, step back so that Victor is right in the middle and …

  Click.

  Chapter 20

  ‘Chaps - this is not fair!’ Victor squeaks. ‘Not fair at all.’

  ‘Now what?’ asks Jacob, crouching down to look at the curious little grey figure squirming in the puddle. ‘Did I look like this when you shrank me?’

  ‘Yes, kind of, but redder and … rounder,’ I say, taking a small, yellow, plastic capsule out of my pocket. ‘Let’s put him in here for now.’

  ‘He’ll suffocate in there,’ says Eric.

  ‘He’s only half human,’ I say.

  ‘Exactly,’ says Flora Rose from nowhere. ‘The minute he gets more ghostly he’ll be out of there. You can’t imprison ghosts. And you won’t be able to see him.’

  We stumble down the long grass slope until we reach the path that winds up the hill towards the model village.

  ‘Couldn’t we keep him underwater?’ asks Jacob, panting along at the back.

  ‘What about a metal box? A lead box?’ says Eric. ‘Even radiation can’t get through that.’

  ‘No, it won’t work – we can go through anything. We can fly, float. We’re indestructible,’ says Flora Rose from above.

  Jacob screws up his face in thought. ‘How do you get to be a ghost?’ he asks.

  Sometimes the depths of Jacob’s lack of intelligence astonish me.

  ‘So what do we do with him?’ asks Eric. ‘We can’t let him go – he’s dangerous.’

  He holds open the gate at the bottom of the model village and we pass through. I look at the capsule in my hand. I hope Victor’s still in there – I wouldn’t want him to fall out here and haunt the model village. That would go down really badly with Grandma.

  ‘Yes,’ says Flora Rose. ‘Billy, you’re right.’

  ‘What did Billy say?’ I ask.

  ‘He says you’re going to have to offer Victor something he really wants. You’ve got to make it worth his while to stay away. In fact, you’re going to have to bribe him. There’s no point in appealing to his better nature – he hasn’t got one.’

  We wander up to the house and I push open the front door. There’s no sign of Grandma so we pile into the kitchen and settle on both sides of the table. Actually, there’s only me and Eric and Jacob – the other two are completely invisible. You could almost imagine they didn’t exist.

  I take a jam jar from the window sill and open the yellow pod. Victor’s still visible, slumped on the bottom, his head resting on his hands.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he says dismally and goes on staring at the plastic walls.

  Gently, although I’d love to be more enthusiastic, I pour Victor from one container to the other.

  ‘He needs some food in there.’ Jacob snaps off a piece of exploding chocolate volcano and drops it into the jar. It immediately pops, chasing Victor round and round the bottom of the jar in a random series of tiny explosions.

  ‘Oops,’ says Jacob, reaching back inside the jar to get it out.

  Victor cowers at the bottom, his hands over his head. ‘Leave me alone,’ he wails. ‘I never did anyone any harm. I’m an innocent creature – honestly, believe me.’

  ‘Don’t,’ says Flora Rose. ‘Don’t believe him. He’s lying.’

  Eric balances a copy of 1,000 Quite Difficult Recipes for Tea Shops on top of the jar and we stare through the glass.

  Victor’s almost invisible.

  ‘Flora Rose is right. Given another twelve hours we won’t be able to keep him,’ says Eric, ‘unless we expose him to dust, and if we expose him to dust who knows what powers he’ll develop.’ He heaves a long sigh and I think back to what Billy said.

  ‘You need, says Billy, to improve the island,’ says Flora Rose. ‘So that it’s a home rather than a prison.’

  ‘R
eally?’ says Jacob. ‘Like a makeover?’

  Eric nods wisely.

  ‘So if we improve the island, what do you all want?’ I ask wearily, my hand poised over a sheet of paper with a stump of Grandma’s shopping-list pencil. ‘I mean, bearing in mind we’re only human.’

  ‘Billy wants friends,’ says Flora Rose. ‘He wants people to come. Children to play with. He’s only little, and I must say, it gets pretty dull talking to skeletons all the time. I’d like some nice people, day trippers who go away at night. I’d like street lights, someone to remove all the rotting houses where the ghouls hang out. I’d like cheerful gardens, a vegetable patch, an orchard, and tea shops like you have here, with pretty wallpaper, and a house of my own with soft beds and nice clean sheets. I’d like … ’

  ‘You can’t even lie in a bed, you stupid creature. You’re a ghost!’ squeaks Victor from his jam-jar prison.

  Something brushes against my leg. ‘Yow! What was that?’

  ‘Shipwreck James,’ says Flora Rose. ‘OOOOWWWW, you lovely creature, come to Mummy, oh yes, cuddles, and boojiboojiboojums, yes, yes … ’

  I find myself shuddering, not sure whether it’s the overload of cat love or the idea of a ghost girl and a ghost cat having a mutual love-in which we can hear but can’t see.

  ‘Oh do shut up, Flora Rose,’ moans Victor.

  ‘OH!!!! Was that Victor talking? Tom! You shrank him, how perfect. He’s so cuuuuuute!’ says Tilly, wandering into the kitchen. ‘Can I have him? Keep him with the Woodland Friends? Please Tom, please?’

  ‘No!’ I echo with Victor.

  ‘You’re no fun,’ says Tilly. ‘You’ve finally shrunk someone worth having and you won’t let me have him.’

  ‘He’s a dangerous lunatic,’ says Flora Rose. ‘Believe me, you don’t want him. You’d lose all your little furry creatures within days. He’d do something horrible to them.’

  ‘Like, dismember them? Cool,’ says Tilly. ‘Please, Tom.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘And that’s final.’

  ‘He’ll grow back anyway,’ says Eric. ‘You’d only have him small for a few days.’

  Tilly leaves the kitchen, slamming the door behind her. She stamps her way up the stairs and into her bedroom, making absolutely everything vibrate so that a swathe of cobwebs that have so far clung to the ceiling over the stove float gently to the floor, releasing a cloud of dead flies.

  ‘And what do you want, Victor?’ asks Eric, staring hard at a shadow caught in the cobwebs that might possibly be Flora Rose, or Billy.

  ‘Power, I just want power,’ Victor says. ‘But it’s all been ruinnnned.’ He sinks to the bottom of the jam jar and hides his head in his hands.

  ‘Like electricity?’ says Jacob.

  ‘Well, apart from power, what would you like? What would keep you on the island?’ I ask.

  ‘I want a castle,’ Victor mutters. ‘And I do want electricity, and light, and comfort, and one of those screen things with a shooty thing and controls.’

  ‘He means a games console,’ says Jacob. ‘He’s got his priorities right.’

  ‘But there is no electricity on the island,’ says Eric. ‘It’s four miles off shore – no one’s ever put so much as a single lighthouse on it.’

  ‘Well, you’re going to have to solve it, or I won’t go away. I will stay here forever and ever and make everyone do what I want one way or another. I will make your lives a misery.’

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  ‘That’s too much. Ridiculous. You’d need to spend thousands,’ says Eric. ‘Maybe millions. We can’t possibly do that. We can’t possibly do any of it. It’s all utterly unrealistic. It’s as mad as trying to move the bird sanctuary – it just can’t be done. And while we’re thinking of you, Victor, can we have our meteorite back, please?’

  ‘Oh honestly,’ squeaks Victor, and I hear the ping of the meteorite clattering down the wall of the jam jar. Outside the kitchen window Grandma’s in full swing painting her placards that are arranged around the garden: Turn back for the Little Tern. Roller coasters are not fun for everyone. And other snappy slogans.

  ‘So you would actually like Mystery Smoke Island developed.’

  ‘Yes,’ say Flora Rose and Victor.

  ‘Who on earth would want to do that?’ says Eric, flicking a stray piece of volcano chocolate back up into the air and down into the jam jar.

  Victor hides his head in his hands as the popping candy explodes.

  I stare into the jar, imagining something mad – something totally crazy and brilliant.

  ‘I’ve an idea – but I need to talk to Grandma.’

  ‘What?’ says Eric.

  ‘I’m still working it out,’ I say. ‘But when I’ve solved it, you’ll be the absolute first to know, I promise.’

  ‘Tom,’ says Grandma, placing her rubber-gloved hands on either side of my head and jerking me forwards so that the inevitable kiss lands somewhere between my hair and my nose, ‘I’m so proud – what a fantastic solution. But I’m not going to come with you. You’ll have to work it out on your own.’

  ‘Oh, Grandma!’

  ‘It’ll be so much better coming from you. I’m just an old battleaxe on a bandwagon. They’re sick to the back teeth of me – and the Worthies. They want someone different, and your idea’s brilliant.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, go on. The mayor’s all right really, even if he is a money-grasping so and so.’

  I turn to run and then remember something. ‘Grandma, you know when you told me about ghosts being unpredictable. How did you know? Has this happened before?’

  ‘Oh – well, only sort of. Years ago one Halloween, a couple of drunken ghosts blew over to the mainland. They caused the most awful chaos – salt in the milk, holes in boats, fish in the water tanks, that sort of thing. There was an old woman who could see them. She took them back to the island. I imagine when they sobered up they had no idea what had happened.’

  ‘So who was she?’

  ‘Your great-grandmother, Tom. Now get on with it, before the bulldozers move in.’

  Chapter 21

  Grandma keeps everything. Cardboard, tinfoil, chocolate boxes, plastic things in the exact shape of a banana – and she keeps them all in the shed in the garden.

  ‘Take anything, build it here,’ she says, sweeping a city of paint pots to one side.

  I gaze at the huge pile of recycling and try really hard to believe that we can build something fantastic.

  ‘So – we need a roller coaster for a start.’ Jacob picks up a shoebox and cuts it in half. It looks like a shoebox cut in half.

  ‘And a ghost train,’ he says, plonking a tinfoil takeaway box on a piece of cardboard. ‘And a tower of fear, a plunge of terror, and a pit of doom, and we can have those arcade games where you shoot things, like jelly eyes, and –’

  ‘No.’ Eric’s face crumples as if he’s in pain. ‘Surely no one will want to go to something like that?’

  ‘Everyone will want to go to something like that,’ says Jacob.

  They both look at me. I’m tempted to say nothing, but in the end I open my mouth and mumble, ‘I suspect Jacob’s right. People like being scared, a little, when they think things are under control.’ Eric sags. ‘And remember – this is about saving the bird reserve. Although we might have to keep an eye on the ghost train.’

  ‘Billy and I will keep an eye on the ghost train,’ says Flora Rose.

  ‘Would you stop doing that!’ I say, jumping and tipping an entire bucket of milk-bottle tops over the floor.

  ‘Sorry, I thought you knew I was here,’ she says. ‘Anyway, I was always rather good at making things when I was alive. I’ll help you. Well, I’ll tell you what’ll work and what won’t. Now, is there any glue?’

  There are hundreds of people in the town hall, all milling about, all chatting, and nearly all adults. Our model is standing on one side of the stage, and Whizzo’s model is under a perfectly placed sheet on the other. Ours, even with F
lora Rose’s help, looks like a table heaped with household recycling and glue. Theirs looks as if it’s going to be spectacular. It’s bigger than it was in the library.

  Everyone sits down and stares at us, expectantly.

  The suit couple from the library step forward from behind the Whizzo table. ‘Shall we go first, before the children?’ Mrs Suit looks towards the mayor.

  The mayor waves his hand airily, and goes back to checking messages on his phone.

  ‘So,’ says Mr Suit, smiling. ‘We’d like to present Whizzo’s updated plans for the upgrading of the current bird reserve.’

  A photograph of the bird reserve appears on the screen behind. It’s been carefully taken so that an empty drink can looms large at the front, along with globs of tar and half a plastic bottle. You wouldn’t know it was a bird reserve – you’d think it was a recycling centre.

  ‘An eyesore, I think you’ll agree,’ says Mrs Suit.

  ‘Which is why we’re pretty sure you’re going to like this … ’

  As they speak, Eric goes pale and sinks back onto a chair. At first I think he’s eaten something bad, and then I realise he’s watching the woman peeling back the sheet over the model.

  The entire audience gasps.

  ‘Awesome, isn’t it?’ says the woman.

  It’s pin-drop silent in the hall as we all stare at the thing on the table.

  It is awesome, but not in the way she means. There are the perfectly made white cardboard models you’d expect, like little buildings, and a roller coaster and trees, but then there are all these plastic birds. The kind of things that they sell in the toy shop: puffins and seagulls and robins and owls, all different scales and sizes.

  Next to me Eric groans.

  ‘So, welcome to Birdy World,’ says Mrs Suit briskly. ‘Yes, you’re not going mad. We have changed the plan. Bunny World has become Birdy World! We thought, as you were so keen on your seabirds here, we’d transfer the theme to something more in keeping. Seagulls and – those sorts of things. So here,’ she points at a white blob with wings, ‘we have the Sandwich Tern serving sandwiches, and here the Puffin Play Club, and over here the Curlew Club for older … ’