The Haunting of Hiram

by Eva Ibbotson

  And they loved the vampire film!

  It came on twice every night and they became terribly fond of the vampire. From the moment the curtains swished back and the graveyard came on the screen, with the sinister fog swirling round the tombstones, the ghosts were riveted. It turned out that the poor vampire had been cursed, just like Krok, so that it had to suck blood, which made them very angry with the way the silly girls screamed and fussed whenever it bent over their beds. It also made Krok wonder if he should try and kill someone here in the cinema, so as to get up to Valhalla to eat hog meat.

  ‘I could swoop down with my battleaxe and utter a horrible war cry,’ he said one night to Miss Spinks when the other ghosts had gone to sleep. ‘Somewhere near the back of the stalls, perhaps? It’s quite likely someone would die of fright, don’t you think?’

  Miss Spinks looked up at him through her wet eyelashes, trying not to show how sad she would be if he left to go to Valhalla. ‘Of course, when you swoop and whoop you are absolutely terrifying,’ she agreed. ‘The trouble is, you might kill a lot of people. Women with weak hearts and so on. Would that be quite right?’

  Krok thought about this. ‘Vikings did kill women, of course. They killed everybody, and who knows what their hearts were like? But it’s true that I would rather slay a warrior. Perhaps after all I had better wait.’

  ‘I was wondering about Uncle Louse,’ said Miss Spinks, lowering her voice, for the old man was sleeping in his wheelchair above their head. ‘He’s been so unsettled, seeing the film and remembering the old days. And I’ve heard that American dentists are very good. Do you think they might make him a set of teeth? Pointed ones? A little fang-like?’

  This seemed to Krok to be a kind thought and for a moment he wondered if he should call the governess ‘Lettice’. But then he decided this was going too far, so he said: ‘It is possible. But would they become part of him now that he has been dead so long? Are false teeth truly ghostly?’

  It was a difficult question. ‘Alex would have known,’ said Miss Spinks, and both spectres sighed. Missing Alex was an ache that never left them.

  When The Curse of the Vampire had been on for five days, a dreadful thing happened. The film changed!

  The ghosts were all hanging comfortably in their favourite place in front of the projection box when the curtains swished back and instead of the lovely, creepy churchyard with the fog and the open grave, there was an orchard full of pink apple trees. Then the title appeared, and it was Blossom Time!

  Next, a girl in a peasant dress came on. She started to milk a cow and sing a sickening song full of ‘Tra la las’. Then a man in leather shorts popped out from behind a tree and said he was going to Vienna to be a great composer, and then he sang too.

  As the awful film went on, the ghosts simply couldn’t believe their eyes. There wasn’t one scream, not one decent fight, not a single drop of blood! Although there was a perfectly good river in Vienna, not one person drowned in it, no one fell off the church steeples or got stabbed in an alleyway. All they did was to sing, and when they didn’t sing, they kissed.

  ‘I don’t think this is at all suitable for Flossie,’ said Miss Spinks anxiously.

  But she needn’t have worried. Flossie had taken one look at the girl with the cow and fallen asleep in mid-air, her thighbone in her mouth.

  The ghosts, of course, had gone each day to see how the building of Carra was getting on. Usually they went after dark so that they didn’t have to be invisible, but Blossom Time made them feel so gloomy that they glided off the following morning.

  It was an exciting sight that met their eyes! There were lorries backing and bulldozers shovelling and men banging at scaffolding or digging deep down in the foundations where the dungeons were to be. They had even started to excavate a place for the well!

  ‘Oh, how beautiful it will look – oh, dear, dear Carra!’ cried the governess, getting all emotional.

  But that night, as Flossie was lying drowsily between Row L and Row M which was where she liked to sleep, she said, ‘Flossie saw the lady with the coming-off bosoms.’

  Miss Spinks was very upset. She exchanged a glance with Krok, who had come to tell the poltergeist her bedtime story. It was so important for little children not to grow up rude and interested in things of that sort.

  ‘Flossie, I don’t want to hear any more words like that from you. And you must learn to say ‘‘ I’’ instead of ‘‘ Flossie’’.’

  ‘I-Flossie did see that lady. She had the coming-off bosoms and she had a wheelbarrow and she had hairy legs like Uncle Krok’s.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear. That lady was on the boat.’

  ‘No, she wasn’t. She was here and—’

  ‘Be silent, child!’ thundered Krok. Viking children never mentioned bosoms and he was as upset as Miss Spinks.

  But Flossie had turned purple with temper. She threw her bone across the seats and got up and began to stamp her feet as hard as she could. ‘Flossie did, she did, she did,’ screamed the poltergeist. And as she stamped and she screamed, she let off the full force of her racketing spirit.

  Flossie had been good since they left Carra. She’d thrown a few antlers around at Dunloon and sent a few hats tumbling overboard in the Queen Anne. But now she really let rip! The ice-cream trays piled up in the corner rose and crashed down on to the aisle. The curtains across the screen billowed as if in a high wind and drew apart. A chandelier crashed to the ground – and everywhere in the cinema the doors flew open.

  Flossie was good with doors. There was no door, however solidly built or locked or bolted, that she couldn’t make fly open – it was one of her best tricks. The barred exits to the corridors flew open; so did the door to the projection room and to the foyer and the cloakrooms. And a very ancient iron door at the back of the stage … a door that no one had used, or even thought of, for years and years and years.

  Flossie’s temper tantrum blew itself out. She fell asleep, and presently the other ghosts slept also.

  But in the dead, small hours, something appeared through the ancient, rusty door. A hand …

  The Hand was by itself. It was severed – cut off at the wrist from its owner, who had been foully murdered a hundred years before. Since then, the Hand had lived alone in a maze of tunnels and caves deep below the Rex Cinema. It was a strong hand, and manly, but it was shy. Now, though, it groped its way between the rows of seats, sometimes walking on tiptoe on its fingers, sometimes looping along like a caterpillar, and as it walked or looped, it glowed with a soft blue light which shone through its bloodied fingernails and lit up the shattered bone and muscle of its wrist.

  The Hand had never been in the cinema. It had never been through the door that Flossie had blown open, but it felt that somewhere nearby there were beings like itself, beings that might understand it and know how difficult it was to be severed, and alone, and underground. And it felt that it would be nice to leave them a message.

  The Hand could not speak too well because it had no mouth, but it could write. There was no difficulty about what to write on – the large white screen was perfect. But what to write with? The Hand had come up from below without a pencil or a pen. For a while it wandered between the seats, moving its thumb back and forward in a puzzled way. Then suddenly it pounced. It had found a golden tube about the length of its own little finger. (Just as it had learnt to glow through years of living in darkness, and to think with the nerves that were left to it, so the Hand had learnt to make out simple shapes even without eyes.)

  What the Hand had found was a lipstick – a deep crimson one, the colour of blood. Very pleased, it unscrewed the top and clambered up the side of the screen.

  Then it paused because it wanted to get the message right: simple and friendly, but sincere.

  After a while it wrote,

  WELCOME FROM THE HAND

  Then it walked on fingertips all over the message to feel how it had come out, and after another pause it added ‘SEVERED’ after ‘HAND�
�, because it wanted to make it clear that it wasn’t just any old hand.

  Now the message said,

  WELCOME FROM THE HAND (SEVERED)

  After this the Hand suddenly felt very tired and it clambered down and looped back through the iron door behind the screen, through an old and dusty storeroom, down a flight of dank stone steps, through a cobwebby corridor and on, down and down, into the dark.

  For the Rex Cinema, though few people knew it, was a much more complicated building than it seemed.

  Thirteen

  The friendship between Alex and Helen grew steadily. Helen had buried nearly three hundred pills in the potted geranium, and though the plant was beginning to look droopy, Helen was not. She now went riding with Alex, and swimming with him, and at night they planned their expedition to Patagonia. That wild country at the tip of South America was becoming very real to them: the lakes on which flamingoes swam, the grassy valleys studded with flowers and the mountains with their ice-blue peaks. Neither of them doubted that they would find the giant sloth, but they argued about what to do when they had found it. Alex wanted to bring it back and show it to the world in a really good zoo. Helen wanted to photograph it and leave it where it was.

  Mr Hopgood, like Helen, was getting very fond of Alex, but Nurse Boniface hated the Scottish boy. She felt that he was taking her patient away from her and that she’d soon be out of a job, and she was right. For once someone young has really decided to get well, they usually do, and Helen could hardly remember how frightened and hopeless she had felt before Alex came.

  Meanwhile Carra was growing and growing. The four towers were halfway to their full height, the gateway was nearly finished and work on the drawbridge had begun.

  ‘Is everything as it should be?’ Mr Hopgood asked Alex as the foreman took them round the building.

  ‘Yes, it is. It’s all absolutely correct,’ said Alex – but Mr Hopgood caught a slight doubt in his voice.

  ‘What is it, boy? Remember, I want the place just the way it was so don’t be afraid to speak.’

  ‘Well, it’s just that everything looks so clean,’ said Alex. ‘You see, from being so old, Carra was full of… oh, slime and bird droppings and owl pellets. And there were cobwebs and bats and… just dust, I suppose. Of course, I see that you can’t have that here.’

  ‘What do you mean, I can’t have it here?’ said Mr Hopgood, nettled. ‘I work hard enough – if I want dust and slime and bird droppings, then dust and slime and bird droppings I will have.’

  So that night they drew up a shopping list and the following morning the three of them drove to Searly and Rowlock, the most famous department store in Texas.

  It was an amazing place. If Alex hadn’t known they were in a shop, he’d have thought they were in a maharajah’s palace. The carpets were ankledeep, perfume wafted through the air; there were real fountains and flowering camelia trees in tubs.

  And the things that were for sale!

  There were fur coats made of Russian sable and dresses of wild silk sewn with pearls and satin night shirts trimmed with silver braid. In the food hall, live swordfish and exotic eels swam in a great aquarium and if you pointed to one of them, an assistant came and caught it and hit it on the head and filleted it for you then and there. There were dustbins covered in real mink and ovens that played ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ when the food was cooked – and a tray of little gold discs with HIS and HERS written on them in diamonds, which had Alex completely flummoxed.

  ‘What on earth are those?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re for people to wear in their tummy buttons as they lie beside their swimming pools,’ explained Helen.

  Alex was shocked. Mr Hopgood worked so hard and looked so worried that it hadn’t seemed particularly wrong that he should be so rich. But people labelling their tummy buttons to show which of them was which, or keeping the rubbish warm with mink when in other countries children were starving, just couldn’t be right.

  ‘It’s a bit like Dunloon,’ he said to Helen. ‘That’s the place I told you about where my mother’s cousin lives, Lady Trottle. It’s full of stuff that’s valuable, but absolutely useless, like snuff boxes and the bedsocks of dead kings.’

  Just then there was a sudden scuffle at the next counter and a lady with red hair reared up and dislodged a rhinoceros-hide waste-paper basket which fell over her head, snuffing her out like a candle.

  But before anyone could go to help her, a hand with bitten-looking fingers came up and lifted the basket off, and the lady, whose hair now looked very lopsided, scuttled towards the exit.

  Adolfa (because that’s who it was, of course) had heard something most useful and important. She’d been snooping round Green Meadows for days and following the children, trying to work out how to get herself asked into the house, and now she knew how to do it.

  For Adolfa had been to Dunloon! A long time ago, it was true, when she was still in the band with her sisters. The Beautiful Batters had been asked down to Dunloon to play at the Servants’ Ball. Maisie Batters had got a bit sloshed and dropped her trombone in the goldfish tank and when she came to play her solo, a little tiddler had shot out and landed on the butler’s feet. Lady Trottle had thought this very funny, and Adolfa remembered her well.

  All she had to do was to pretend that she had a message for Alex from his mother’s cousin. Then they’d have to invite her to Green Meadows and once she was inside, she’d certainly find some way of getting herself asked to the Opening Ball at the castle.

  And Adolfa’s eyes, as she scuttled from the store, glittered with triumph.

  Meanwhile Mr Hopgood and the children had reached the pet department. They could see an armadillo in a cage and two baboons with interesting-looking behinds, but there didn’t seem to be any of the things on their list.

  ‘Three hundred spiders,’ read the young assistant. He looked up, frowning. ‘You mean Black Widow Spiders, perhaps, sir? The kind whose bite means instant death? Or tarantulas, who send men mad?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Mr Hopgood. ‘I mean ordinary household spiders. And I mean ordinary cockroaches, too, and ordinary jackdaws, just like it says.’

  The assistant sighed. ‘Ordinariness is not something we go in for at Searly and Rowlock. Now if you wanted a Bactrian Camel we could deliver it to your door within the week. Or the other kind without the extra hump. No problem at all, that would be.’

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ said Mr Hopgood shortly. ‘I want exactly what it says on the list and I want it by the first week in December.’

  ‘I shall have to consult the manager,’ said the young man.

  Mr Hopgood now got angry and made a fuss, as only a millionaire can do, and the manager came and swore that every single thing on the list would be delivered to Granite Falls by the seventh of December. ‘All of it, sir – the bats, the slime, the raven for the roof. Even if we make a loss on the deal, even if we have to scour the length and breadth of our great land,’ he promised, pumping Mr Hopgood’s hand.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ said Mr Hopgood as they came out of the store. ‘I reckon by the time we’re through, Carra will look just the way it did back in Scotland.’

  ‘I tell you what we didn’t order, though,’ said Helen, as they made their way towards the car park.

  ‘What’s that, honey?’ asked Mr Hopgood.

  She smiled. ‘A ghost!’

  Alex looked up quickly, his face full of hope. Could he, after all, let the Hopgoods into Carra’s secret? But Mr Hopgood’s face wore its anxious look again.

  ‘Now, Helen, don’t be foolish. As if I’d ever let a ghost near my little girl to frighten her! Even if there were such things.’

  And Alex sighed and said no more.

  ‘Would you like another sandwich?’ Helen Hopgood asked politely, and turned her head away because Miss Batters eating the thin, rolled-up asparagus sandwiches which Maria had prepared was not a pleasant sight. Miss Batters had arrived in gloves, but she had removed them, of cou
rse, for tea and her forefinger was so badly bitten that the torn skin caught on the bread in a most unpleasant way.

  Altogether, both the children found it impossible to like Miss Batters. Though she looked so respectable, with her grey, cropped hair and her steel-rimmed spectacles, there was something about her that bothered them. Perhaps it was the way she fiddled with her locket, as though it held something she wanted to stroke and touch; perhaps it was the way her old-fashioned lace-up shoes bulged at the sides, as though she had put her bunions in a straitjacket. But, of course, when she had telephoned to say that Lady Trottle had asked her to look up Alex, there’d been nothing to do except ask her to tea.

  ‘It’s such a beautiful, beautiful place, dear Dunloon,’ said Adolfa, while her sludge-coloured eyes darted round the room, noticing everything. She’d been right to postpone the snatch till they moved to the castle. It had taken her ten minutes to get from the front gate in here.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ said Alex. He hardly remembered Dunloon, but there was no point in disagreeing with Miss Batters.

  But what Adolfa really wanted to know was the plan for moving into the castle and she now brought the conversation round to the Opening Ball. If Mr Hopgood had been there, he might have smelled a rat, but Alex and Helen answered her freely enough. Adolfa seemed such an awful-looking woman, her bitten forefinger was so nasty and her imprisoned bunions looked so depressing, that Helen said, ‘Would you like me to ask my father if you could come? Then you could tell Lady Trottle about it afterwards.’

  Adolfa put down her cup and her thin lips twisted into a smile of satisfaction.

  ‘Thank you, my dear. That would be very, very kind. I’m only a lonely visitor to this country without friends and relations, and that would really be something to look forward to.’

  Just then, Nurse Boniface came to fetch Helen because the physiotherapist had arrived and, for a moment, Alex and Miss Batters were alone.