Mountwood School for Ghosts

by Toby Ibbotson

  Mrs Wilder was expecting to die any day now. She had been expecting it for years, but so far, apart from the usual difficulties of being eighty-three, she was very much alive.

  ‘Charlotte, I have to talk to you,’ said Daniel.

  Charlotte looked at him. ‘Is it what we were talking about?’

  ‘Yes, but there’s more to it.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  Mrs Wilder understood immediately that they had something secret to discuss. ‘Why don’t you two go down to the kitchen and make me some coffee?’ she said, and Daniel and Charlotte went downstairs.

  ‘It was a ghost, and I’ve met him,’ said Daniel, and while they made coffee and put Mrs Wilder’s favourite biscuits on a plate, he told her all about it.

  ‘We have to help him,’ said Daniel when he had finished. ‘I promised last night.’

  ‘When can I meet him?’

  ‘Come over tonight. I don’t think he can appear in the daytime. He wasn’t there this morning.’

  After supper Charlotte went round to Daniel’s house.

  ‘Oh, hello, dear,’ said Daniel’s mother when she came to the door. ‘Daniel said you would be coming over. You were going to help him with something.’

  ‘That’s right, Mrs Salter.’ Charlotte didn’t like lying – she thought it was weak – so she was glad that Daniel’s mother didn’t ask what Daniel needed help with. They had decided that grown-ups should be kept out of the whole thing for as long as possible.

  Charlotte ran up the stairs to Daniel’s room. They sat side by side on Daniel’s bed.

  ‘Percy, please appear now, we need to talk,’ called Daniel softly.

  Nothing happened. They could hear Great-Aunt Joyce thumping around in the room below. Then she too went quiet.

  ‘Percy, please.’ Daniel looked at Charlotte. ‘He was here last night, I talked to him, I really did.’

  ‘Of course you did; don’t be stupid. There could be a thousand reasons why he doesn’t answer. He might be asleep for all we know.’

  ‘Do ghosts sleep?’

  ‘Haven’t the foggiest.’

  ‘Let’s turn the light out and just wait.’

  They waited in the darkness for what seemed like a very long time. Charlotte began to think that she should be getting back, and wondered how she could tell Daniel in the right way, so that he wouldn’t think she didn’t believe in his ghost.

  Then, just like the first time, a cold bluish bulge separated itself from the wall, and Percy appeared. He wasn’t crying any more, but he looked miserable enough, standing there thin and semi-transparent in his nightshirt.

  ‘How do you do?’ said Charlotte. ‘I’m Charlotte Hamilton.’

  ‘I’m Perceval. Are you a girl?’ Percy had lived in a time when no girl ever wore jeans and a T-shirt, so he wasn’t quite sure.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Do not fear.’

  ‘That’s all right, I’m not in the least frightened,’ said Charlotte, and she could have kicked herself, because Percy started to wail.

  ‘Oh, miserable failure that I am! No one fears me, not even girls.’

  This got Charlotte very annoyed indeed, but she bit her lip this time, realizing that he had had a very old-fashioned upbringing which she would have to deal with later.

  ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing that we aren’t terrified,’ she said gently, ‘because we want to help you find your parents.’

  Daniel and Charlotte took it in turns to ask Percy questions that might give them some kind of a clue, but they didn’t get much out of him.

  He knew that it was a long journey to a special school for ghosts, and that it was in the country and had a name that sounded like the words on the removal van – ‘Forest’ and ‘Hills’.

  ‘Do you know what direction the school was in?’ asked Daniel. ‘North, south, east, west? I mean, it could be anywhere.’

  ‘North,’ said Percy. And however much they begged him to rack his brains, he had no more to add.

  ‘Well, north is good,’ said Charlotte. ‘We’re in the north.’

  ‘Are we? Are we really?’ Percy looked happy for the first time since they had met him. ‘Can we go there now? I want to go now!’

  But of course they had to disappoint him. Then north of England is big, and as Daniel said, there were probably loads of places that would fit the bill, with names like Woody Knoll or Cragtrees.

  ‘I’m sorry, Percy, but we must do some research,’ said Charlotte. ‘Please don’t cry again,’ she added, as the little ghost’s eyes filled once more with tears. ‘We won’t give up, you know. We will bring you to your parents. It’s like a quest. Do you know what that is?’

  Percy did know. ‘My name comes from a quest,’ he said, cheering up again. ‘That’s what Mother says.’

  ‘Exactly. This is the quest of Perceval, and your parents are the grail.’

  Daniel shook his head in amazement. ‘Where do you get everything from?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Daniel, the Legend of the Grail? Give me a break.’

  Daniel’s mother called from downstairs. ‘I think you’d better be heading home now, Charlotte.’

  ‘On my way, Mrs S.,’ called Charlotte. ‘Goodbye, Percy. Same time tomorrow, and we’ll see if we have news for you.’ And she went.

  ‘I think she might find them,’ said Percy. ‘She seems jolly clever for a girl.’

  ‘Yes, but don’t ever say that to her. I mean it.’

  Charlotte rang the next afternoon. ‘Daniel, I’m at Mrs Wilder’s again, can you come over?’

  ‘You sound pleased with yourself.’

  ‘I think we’ve found it.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Just come over, will you?’

  Charlotte answered the door, and they went upstairs to the big room, where Mrs Wilder was sitting on her comfortable sofa, reading the newspaper.

  ‘Hello, Daniel,’ she said. ‘Don’t tell Charlotte off. I was curious and I got it out of her.’

  ‘You see,’ said Charlotte, ‘it’s like a crossword clue: “Forest and Hills, school in the north”. And so of course I thought of coming here.’

  Mrs Wilder did a lot of crosswords, even very difficult ones.

  ‘I tried to lie about it, but it didn’t come off.’

  ‘You’d better leave the lying to me in future,’ said Daniel. ‘You’re absolutely pathetic at it.’

  ‘You won’t tell, will you?’ he asked Mrs Wilder. ‘I think my parents have enough to deal with at the moment.’

  ‘My dear Daniel,’ said Mrs Wilder in a very dignified voice, ‘I am perfectly aware that this is confidential information.’

  ‘And you believe us, don’t you?’

  ‘Heavens above! One more ghost is neither here nor there to me,’ she replied, and her gaze drifted off for a moment, back down the long years.

  ‘Well,’ said Charlotte, ‘a school for ghosts has to be a big place, doesn’t it? And you can’t have it in the middle of a town. So that means somewhere out in the country. But there are an awful lot of big estates in the borders; I had no idea. Most of them are occupied though, or have been turned into hotels and conferences centres and so on. Then Mrs Wilder was absolutely brilliant; it must be because of writing detective stories.’

  ‘Fairly brilliant, I think it’s fair to say,’ said Mrs Wilder, looking up from her paper.

  ‘No, really brilliant,’ said Charlotte. She went on. ‘Mrs Wilder said that if the school had only just been started, then maybe some place had been rented out or bought quite recently, just a month or two ago. So we started calling all the estate agents in the north of England, but there was nothing even remotely like “Forest and Hills”. I was ready to give up, and then Mrs Wilder was brilliant again.’

  ‘Twice in one morning,’ muttered Mrs Wilder. ‘Not bad for an ancient person.’

  ‘She said that the agent might be across the border,’ said Charlotte, ‘so we started on Scotland. Then we got lucky. Someone gave us th
e number of a big firm in Edinburgh that handles the sale of large properties. It was odd really. When I rang and asked if there had been a recent sale in the borders, perhaps to some retired ladies – you remember Percy called them Great Hagges, but I couldn’t say that – then the man I was talking to started babbling and saying that everything was in order, and if it wasn’t he would see to it immediately and please don’t let them come back. I got the name out of him though: Mountwood.’ She looked triumphantly at Daniel.

  ‘And look at this,’ she went on. ‘Mrs Wilder said she had an old book somewhere about big houses of the borders, and she dug it out.’

  She pointed at the book that lay open on Mrs Wilder’s desk, and Daniel saw an old photograph of a rather forbidding fortified manor house, surrounded by dark crags and fir trees. The caption read ‘Mountwood, ancestral home of one of the fiercest clan chiefs of the borders.’

  Daniel almost shouted. ‘You’ve found it! It has to be the place! That’s amazing!’

  Charlotte and Mrs Wilder looked very pleased with themselves.

  Then Daniel said more soberly, ‘Now all we have to do is get Percy there.’

  Eight

  Journey by Moonlight

  The Stinking Druid of Llwnannog occupied a single room at Mountwood. He was a tall thin ghost, and everything about him was a dirty greyish white – his shoulder-length straggly hair, his trailing robes, his bushy eyebrows and his long horse-like face.

  When Goneril was making her list of who would stay where, she hadn’t found anyone who wanted to be his room-mate. All the other ghosts had made some kind of excuse. It wasn’t because of his disgusting stench; ghosts don’t have human noses; their senses are of a different sort. It was because he knew all the ancient lays of the Celtic mysteries off by heart, some of which had thousands of verses, and he never recited just a part, but always a whole one.

  The Druid didn’t mind being on his own, not really. He was used to it, and even when he was alive in Wales more than two thousand years ago, he hadn’t had any special friends. Now he watched dreamily from the little mullioned window of his room as a huge pale moon freed itself from a tangle of dark branches to sail the night sky. He thought of many things, but mostly he thought of the lovely maiden who was the only person who ever truly understood him, and how he had loved her, and how she had caused him to sin. He had saved her from being burned in a wicker basket at the Great Festival of Beltane, on Mayday eve.

  As a Druid, a member of the ancient Celtic priesthood, he was all in favour of human sacrifices in principle. But he had been so very attached to the girl. It was a terrible thing to do, to secretly exchange her, the Chosen One, for one of his aunts whom he particularly disliked. He almost got away with it, but the Chosen One had been discovered, alive and well, in the hollow oak where he had hidden her, and it all came out. The Chief Druid had been absolutely livid and had cursed him horribly so that he was doomed to wander for eternity, with the smell as a special punishment. He had disliked his aunt because she had made him cut her toenails when he was a boy, and she had very smelly feet.

  ‘Smelly she was, and smelly shalt thou be,’ the Chief Druid had intoned.

  The Stinking Druid sighed. If he hadn’t sinned, he would have been one of the famous Nine Standing Men of Llwnannog, those great stones standing peacefully and odour-free on the hill above the village, visited by bus-loads of American and Japanese tourists every summer. That would really be something. Every year hundreds of tourists asked why there were only eight stones, when they were called the Nine. Nobody knew, but he knew.

  The Druid’s thoughts turned to Mountwood, and his secret hope. If he did really well, then perhaps the curse would be lifted. He wasn’t up to much, he was aware of that. He had signed up for extra lessons in Gnashing of Teeth, but he was having a hard time of it. It isn’t easy to gnash when you only have one tooth. But he was determined to work really hard, and he would do his exercises, and perhaps, one day, he would be forgiven.

  From the courtyard below came a mournful howl. ‘Oh dear, I’m late,’ said the Druid. ‘They’ve started the voice class without me.’

  Just as he was about to leave his place at the window and float downstairs, he saw two small figures approaching the house, walking down the track from the main road. There was enough moonlight for him to see that they were children, living ones. The boy had a rucksack, and they walked slowly, as though they were tired.

  Daniel and Charlotte were tired. In fact they were exhausted. Mountwood was not easy to get at – they had soon found that out when they started looking at timetables and making plans.

  It wasn’t too difficult to get to Carlisle, which had a train service. But then they had to get a bus, then another bus, and finally, in the late afternoon, they got off at a small village and still had quite a way to go. They had decided to use the rest of their money to take a taxi the last bit, even though it meant no supper and nothing to eat on the return journey. They rang the number that was posted on the bus shelter, and the man who answered sounded cheerful enough and said he would be there in five minutes, after he had drunk his tea.

  ‘Where are you going then?’ he asked.

  ‘To Mountwood.’

  There was silence at the other end. Then, ‘Look, sorry, I’ve got another job. Forgot all about it. I can’t help you.’

  ‘But we don’t mind waiting.’

  ‘It’s a long job. Won’t be back till after midnight.’

  ‘Is there anyone else who could take us?’

  ‘Not in this village. What do you want to go there for anyway?’

  ‘It’s part of a school project.’

  ‘Do your project somewhere else, if you’ve got any sense.’ And he hung up.

  There was nothing for it but to walk.

  The first mile went well enough. As the light faded and the shadows lengthened Percy appeared faintly beside them, chattering away about the buses and the train they had travelled on. He was already feeling much more grown-up and couldn’t understand how he had mistaken a removal van for a bus.

  ‘Oh, what a lot I shall have to tell Mother and Father!’ he said excitedly.

  The further they walked, and the later it got, the more cheerful Percy became. Of course for a ghost the night is the time to be up and about, whereas Charlotte and Daniel were almost asleep on their feet.

  ‘Can we go faster? I want to get there soon,’ said Percy.

  ‘No, we can’t. In fact I need a rest,’ said Charlotte. She sat down at the side of the road with her back against a drystone wall. It had been particularly hard for her, making up a story to tell her mother. She would have her hands full the whole weekend with the children, and no one to help her. They had told some silly story about a school project on castles and spending the night with a friend who had moved to Carlisle. Charlotte had hated having to do that. Now the sun was setting, they had miles to go and she was dog-tired.

  ‘I suppose we’d better wait a bit then,’ said Percy. ‘You’re probably not very strong, you’re only a g—’

  ‘Percy!’ Daniel almost shouted. ‘Now you shut your mouth, and keep it shut.’

  Percy vanished.

  ‘You’ve hurt his feelings, Daniel,’ said Charlotte. ‘He’s only a little kid.’

  ‘Stuff him,’ said Daniel. ‘He’s a pain in the neck. The sooner we get shot of him the better. A ghost who’s too scared to scare people, I mean, honestly.’

  They went on. A big fat moon rose over the moor.

  At last they found the turning and trudged down the eerily moonlit track towards the dark building that loomed at the end of the valley.

  ‘This should be the place,’ said Charlotte. ‘It’s certainly creepy enough.’

  It was a bit unnerving walking into that dark valley, where the fir trees cast inky-black moon shadows and strange rustles and squeaks could be heard from the grasses and bracken that lined the track. Percy did not reappear, although Daniel called out and apologized for shouting at him. Th
e little ghost seemed to be still in a sulk, and Daniel and Charlotte began to wish he was around to give them an introduction when they arrived. They were not the kind of children who got all hysterical about just any ghost, but they knew that there were things in the invisible world that were a lot nastier than Percy, and if he wasn’t with them, they might not be very welcome.

  Goneril was in charge of the evening session. It was not going well. The students had been at Mountwood for almost a week, and they seemed to be making no progress at all. They made heavy weather of even the simplest exercises, basic stuff like materialization and sudden scary noises. Class discipline was lax to say the least. The Phantom Welder had decided to be the clown of the group and cracked stupid jokes that made the sprites titter. The Stinking Druid was so unhappy and unsure of himself that he just stood at the back and sighed, and this evening he hadn’t even turned up. But worst of all were the couple who had mislaid their son; they were so droopy and half-hearted that they were driving Goneril mad. She had had great hopes for them. She was an experienced judge of these things, and could tell that Iphigenia was a skilful professional at heart, and Ronald a real worker. It is very upsetting for any teacher when pupils simply cannot or will not make the best of themselves.

  ‘Please, Mrs Peabody, could you try to put a bit more energy into the moaning. We are looking for the hair-raising effect,’ said Goneril.

  But it was no good. Iphigenia came to the front of the class and produced a weary whimper which would not have raised a single hair on the head of a nervous five-year-old.

  Then a foul stench filled the air, and the Stinking Druid appeared. But instead of sneaking in at the back of the class as he usually did, he glided forward and spoke.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss Goneril, but I think we have visitors.’

  At that moment the front doorbell rang, a loud clanging that echoed through the castle. All the ghosts instantly vanished.

  ‘What on earth . . . ?’ said Goneril, and strode to the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Fredegonda, Drusilla,’ she called, ‘there’s someone at the door. I think we should deal with it.’