Death by Soup

by David MacPhail

  I huffed and puffed the whole way up the mountainside. Sweat was lashing off me, but not one bead of perspiration appeared on Granny’s wrinkled brow. She would shoot off ahead of us, then turn and yell in her deep, croaky voice, “Come OAN, ya puddens!” Plonking herself down on a rock to wait for us, she would yawn, pull out her karate magazine and idly leaf through it.

  A strange sight indeed. And that wasn’t including the actual ghost that was trailing along behind us. Grandad thought the whole thing was hilarious. “Look at the state of you half-wits!”

  It was alright for him. He could just float, which required no effort whatsoever.

  Finally, at about four o’clock that afternoon, Mum had ticked off all of her ‘must-see’ stop-offs and we drove into Brightburgh village, where the hotel was situated. The village green was a pleasant, bustling place, fringed by cottages, shops and an inn, sloping gently down to the banks of Loch Lomond. The loch’s waters were still and glassy, studded with wee wooded islands, and the banks on the other side rose up to the mountains.

  Driving through the village, we came to another sign, one of those brown touristy ones.

  “Here we are, dearies.” Mum turned the campervan off the road, through an old stone gateway and then along a tidy gravel drive edged with trees.

  Bhangra music was playing loudly on the van’s radio, and Grandad was nodding and singing along with it at the top of his voice. He was waving his hands around and conducting an imaginary orchestra as he sang.

  Mum was singing along too, shaking her head in time with the long stringy beads hanging down from the rearview mirror. Except she had no idea she was doing a duet.

  The music stopped. Grandad smiled. “Ah, the old ones are always the best, eh, boy?”

  Ahead, the trees opened out to wide, green fields and grazing cows. The grounds seemed to go on for miles.

  “This is some back garden,” I said.

  “Up until a few years ago we would never have been allowed to see it,” replied Mum. “This used to be a private estate. It was owned by an actual lord – Lord Brightburgh. He never allowed visitors. I checked it out on the internet.”

  At the head of the drive, about 250 metres away, stood a grand three-storey Victorian manor built of reddish sandstone and covered here and there with ivy. I kept thinking about this competition we’d won. A competition we’d never entered. And then I thought about my Dad and his disappearance. And the building we were headed to, which was really old. It was bound to be full of old bookcases, stairways and secret passageways. A building full of secrets to uncover. My detective nose was already twitching.

  “So this lord, he used to own it. You mean he doesn’t own it any more? What happened?”

  “No, he went bankrupt a few years ago. He had to sell the whole estate. Then it opened as a hotel. He still lives here. They let him keep a wee cottage round the back.”

  Mum brought Petal crunching to a halt just outside the main entrance. A man stood at the top of the steps: thin, bald, with a droopy moustache and sunken shoulders, wearing a suit and tie. He looked miserable enough, but his face dropped even further when he clocked the van. I didn’t blame him. I doubted vehicles like ours showed up very often in places like Brightburgh Manor.

  “Er, hello,” he said in a crisp English voice. “Can I help you?”

  “Hullo,” said Mum cheerily, as she raised one of her boots and kicked the car door shut. “The name’s Patel. We’re booked in.”

  “Oh, er, are you?” The man looked disappointed. Again, I didn’t blame him. An eccentrically dressed woman, a scruffy eleven-year-old boy and a pensioner who looked like she’d just wandered off the set of a Japanese horror movie; we probably weren’t the kind of clientele they were used to. And he didn’t even know about the ghost. “Er, well, you’d better come in then. My name is Timothy Shand. I’m the hotel manager.”

  Chapter 3

  The Awful Arrival

  Shand led us into a big hall lined with antiques, high windows and dark panelled wood walls decorated with glassy-eyed mounted stags’ heads. Velvet-covered sofas and chairs were clustered around, and there was a smell of burning logs from a great fireplace. A wide staircase led up to the first floor. Grandad suddenly drew up close to me. He was eyeing a suit of armour standing stiffly at the other side of the hall.

  “Hey, I do not like that guy there,” he said in a nervous voice.

  “It’s only a suit of armour.”

  “There is still a dead guy in it. Look…” Grandad blinked his eyes, which was always a bad sign. It meant that I could now see everything he could see. Not very nice things. Specifically, all the ghosts!

  A face was staring out at me from the helmet visor. I say a face, it was more like a gruesome, rotting skull with eyes. And when I say eyes I mean eye, because only one of them was remotely where it should be, in a socket. The other was dangling out.

  “You! YOU!” the spectre growled. “You arrant knave, cometh here whilst I smite you!” The ghost’s dangly eyeball swung precariously as he spoke.

  “Huh!” said Grandad. “Fat chance of you smiting anyone in your condition.”

  “Grandad, please!” I said, not wanting to witness any more of their ‘argy-bargy’ as Mum would call it.

  Grandad blinked again, and the gruesome face was gone.

  Since Grandad came back I’ve learnt that there are ghosts everywhere; they’re on the streets, they’re in shops, in houses and schools. They walk among us. It’s just that most of us can’t see them (so be careful where you sit).

  A hotel porter wearing a smart black jacket appeared. He picked up a leather case belonging to an old lady with a walking stick who seemed to have just checked in. The initials ‘VH’ were stitched into the side of her expensive-looking luggage.

  “Follow me, Mrs Hackenbottom,” said the porter in a Polish accent, before bounding up the stairs two at a time. He turned to wait for the old lady, a sheen of sweat glistening on his forehead.

  “I shall be right with you,” warbled the woman, unhitching her cane from the crook of her elbow. “Hacken? Bottom? Did you hear that?” Grandad burst out laughing, making a hacking motion with his hand against his ghostly bum. “Hackenbottom!”

  The lady hobbled painfully slowly towards the first step.

  Grandad cupped his hand next to his mouth, calling out to the porter. “You are going to be waiting a while there, mate!”

  The porter waited patiently at the top of the stairs for the elderly guest, but her expensive suitcase must have weighed a ton – the handles slipped in the porter’s sweaty hands and hit the floor with a thump.

  “My case!” the old woman cried. Then, to our surprise, she bounded up the steps.

  “Huh! She is sprightlier than I thought,” said Grandad.

  “She’d make a nice girlfriend for you,” I smirked.

  Grandad held up his finger at me. “Hey, your granny, the love of my life – and after-life – is right here!”

  And so she was, doing fist pump exercises into a full-length mirror a short distance away, making fierce snarling noises with every tenth punch. So fierce it sounded a bit like someone throwing up.

  There was a couple in front of us at the reception desk, a man and a woman. The man wore chinos, tan loafers and a jumper wrapped round his shoulders. He laughed smugly and swept his hand through his mane of wavy hair. “Oh, darling, really!” I heard him say.

  The woman did a lot of smug laughing too, tossing her curly black hair back and forward. “Yes, DAAAH-LING!” she brayed, then they turned and clocked me, standing there in my jeans, and Mum in her flowy dress and muddy Dr. Martens. They looked us up and down and attempted to smother another laugh.

  The couple moved off, and Mum, who hadn’t even noticed, stepped forward and dangled the letter in Shand’s face, making him jerk. “We’re the Yummy Cola competition winners!” she declared.

  He reluctantly took the sheet of paper from her, inspected it, then nodded. “Ah.”

&nb
sp; Shand reached behind the reception desk, pulled out a card and pushed it towards Mum. “Can you fill out this registration card, please, madam?”

  “Why, of course I can, my good man,” she replied in her finest fake posh voice. Then she put on a weird high-pitched fake laugh, which was quite embarrassing.

  Mum picked up the pen and started filling in the card, humming some tune that was in her head. At that point a lady appeared from the office door marked ‘PRIVATE’ on the other side of reception. Her hair looked like a giant white blancmange perched on top of her head. She had a tiny scrunched up mouth and she was plastered in garish makeup. The woman looked Mum over like she was inspecting a mouse she’d caught in a mousetrap. Then she took in Granny, who’d finished her fist pumps and was now standing with her arms folded up in her kimono sleeves, looking like some kind of mystical troll. Finally, she turned her eyes on me and that seemed to tip her over the edge. She wrinkled her nose in disgust and screwed her mouth up, as if she was sucking on a particularly sour lemon.

  I tried to smile back at her, but it only made her face drop and her mouth scrunch up even more, until she looked like something from a horror movie.

  Grandad whistled through his teeth. “I would not like to meet her on a dark night.”

  Shand glanced at the woman and caught the expression. “These are guests,” he explained, before turning back to us with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “This is my wife, Mrs Shand.”

  She glared at him, as if insulted, and spoke in a screechy, snobby voice. “Guests?! May I speak with you, Timothy?”

  “Certainly, dear,” said Shand with a gulp.

  They stepped into an office behind the reception desk. The man’s shoulders drooped further, and his moustache even further still. Mrs Shand slammed the door shut. I heard them arguing under their voices. About us.

  “I told you,” she squeaked. “We need a better class of person at this hotel. No riff-raff.”

  “I know that, dear,” he murmured. “But I’m afraid we need every penny we can get!”

  A slight movement behind the desk caught my eye. I’d been so distracted by Shand and his wife’s (now quite loud) argument that I hadn’t spotted a woman of about nineteen sitting at the computer. Her hair was dyed black, and she was wearing black eyeliner, black lipstick and black clothes. All of this was in sharp contrast to her chalk-white face, on which sat a long and slightly aquiline nose. Her lips were curled up in a kind of snarl, and there was a fierce and icy look in her blue eyes. Her name badge said ‘Lucy’.

  “Phew! There’s another one I would not like to bump into on a dark night,” commented Grandad.

  The girl turned her head to listen to Mr and Mrs Shand’s argument. Then she tutted, sighed angrily and shook her head. She glanced at me out of the side of her eye as she turned back to the screen, but her look went straight through me. I got that a lot. No one thinks you’re worth noticing when you’re only eleven. Quite often, it’s their biggest mistake. And my biggest advantage.

  Shand emerged from the office, his face flushed, as Mum finished filling in the card and handed it to him. She hadn’t heard any of the conversation, but then Mum was on another planet for most of the time. She once walked past me in the street without noticing. “There you go,” she beamed. “I drew you a wee flower on it as well.”

  Shand looked at the card, together with the doodle Mum had scrawled on it, with more than an ounce of disdain.

  “I see. Thank you, madam. Would you like our porter, Arek to get your bags?” He gestured towards the man in the black uniform who’d just made it back down the stairs after showing the old lady to her room. Young and thin with a nest of brown hair and a mole on his upper lip, he seemed a little out of breath. And still very sweaty.

  “No, do not do that!” said Grandad, waving his arms. “You will have to tip the guy. They expect dosh, these hotel porters.”

  “No thanks,” replied Mum, grinning at me. “Why get a porter to humph my bags around when I have a perfectly good son?”

  “No, really, it’s fine, I will get it,” said the porter, which was probably the nicest thing anyone had said to me all day. As he leant forward to pick up Granny’s bag, her wrist flicked up, barring the way. He stared at her clenched fist, her knuckles white and bony, then at her narrowed, twitching eyes.

  “Ah’ll get it!” she croaked, like a demonically possessed doll.

  He looked somewhat terrified. And I didn’t blame him. I was somewhat terrified as well, and she was my granny.

  The porter backed away, hands up, like someone retreating from a chance encounter with a bear in the woods. All of which left Granny to lug her own case, and me to grapple with Mum’s.

  “Very well,” said Shand. “Er, this way.”

  He led us towards the stairs, where there was a display cabinet set into the wall. It was full of trophies and china vases, but a large silver bell took pride of place. It struck me as a bit strange why anyone would want to put a bell on display, so I stopped to give it a closer look.

  “Bells,” said Grandad. “Pff. Yawn-amundo.”

  Grandad always comes out with stuff like that. I think it‘s old-fashioned slang from when he was alive. Basically you just stick ‘-amundo’ on the end of words. It’s pretty lame (-amundo).

  Shand stopped, noticing my interest in the display.

  “That, young man, is the famous Brightburgh silver bell.”

  Grandad’s face screwed up. “Famous? Why have I not heard of it?”

  “It dates back to 1134 AD, when it was gifted to Lord Brightburgh’s family by King David I. Like all of Lord Brightburgh’s possessions, it is now owned by the hotel.”

  “So it’s yours?” I asked.

  He see-sawed his head slightly from side to side. “Sort of, but it has protected status, so we can’t sell it.”

  “Must be worth a few bob, though?” I added.

  “Indeed. It is priceless,” said Shand.

  Grandad’s ears always pricked up when money got mentioned.

  “How much? Ask him how much,” he said. ‘Antiques Roadshow’ was his favourite programme, although compared with most things he was the antique.

  “‘Priceless’, he said. There is no price,” I replied to Grandad through gritted teeth.

  Grandad tried to fold his arms, disappointed, but they just went through each other. I turned back to Shand, who was staring at me oddly.

  “So, are you not scared it’ll get nicked then?” I asked him.

  Shand smiled smugly. “Impossible. It’s alarmed.”

  In my experience there was no such thing as impossible. I should know, my own grandad had come back from the dead to haunt me.

  Chapter 4

  The Ghostly Jacuzzi

  Shand led us up the winding staircase. The red-carpeted hallway on the first floor was lined with oil paintings and stone busts of long-dead posh people on plinths. He eventually stopped outside a carved oak door. He turned the handle and raised an eyebrow at Mum.

  “Madam, this one is yours.”

  He pushed the door open to reveal a vast room with large windows and a four-poster bed.

  “Wow! Oh, WOW!” Mum sprinted inside, dived into the air and then belly-flopped on the mattress. “YIPPEE!” she yelped, bouncing up and down on the bed.

  DOIING! DOIING! DOIING!

  “And your room is just through the connecting door there.” Shand pointed me towards a door at the other end of Mum’s room. Then he glanced questioningly at Granny. “It’s a room for one.”

  Granny stared him down, her eye twitching furiously, and then growled. Shand shrunk away. “Er, I’ll leave you to make your own arrangements.”

  That meant the single room that was supposed to be for me, and me alone, was also going to be Granny’s room. Oh, and Grandad’s too. I was stuck with the two of them.

  Shand left us, closing the door behind him. I wandered into my room to find it was just as posh as Mum’s. Granny gazed around, unimpressed. Her ka
rate instructor preached simplicity as the path to enlightenment, so at home she’d dispensed with her proper bed and now slept on a bamboo mat on the floor. She’d brought the mat with her, and pulled it out of her bag, whipping it in the air with the same kind of flourish as a bullfighter flicking his cape, before laying it in the corner.

  Granny nodded, satisfied, then turned and left.

  Mum hovered at the connecting door, looking around and nodding at my room. “Hmm, nice.” She grasped the door knob. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. I’m going to meditate.” Mum gave a smile, then yanked the door shut behind her.

  I wasted no time. I felt round the bedroom walls, tapping them firmly with my fingers.

  “What are you doing?” asked Grandad.

  “Seeing if the walls are hollow.” My detective instincts were tingling. I wanted to find out if there were any secret passageways leading to my room. I knew for a fact that we hadn’t entered the competition, which meant there was a good chance we’d been brought here for a reason – but why? I intended to find out.

  I soon came to a spot where the wall sounded different. Hollow.

  “Do me a favour, Grandad,” I said. “Stick your head through there.”

  “What? No!”

  “Just to see,” I wheedled. “Come on, you’re a ghost. It can’t hurt you.”

  He waved his hands about. “No, no, no, nothing doing. I hate going through walls.”