The Beasts of Clawstone Castle by Eva Ibbotson

great-uncle whether they minded if a few of Cousin Howard’s acquaintances came to help bring in more visitors.
    ‘What do you think, dear?’ Aunt Emily asked her brother.
    Sir George was worrying about some loose stones he had found in the wall of the park and not really listening very hard.
    ‘I suppose it can’t do any harm. As long as they’re proper ghosts. No cheating.’
    ‘Oh, they’re proper ghosts all right, Uncle George,’ said Rollo. ‘You can’t get more proper ghosts than these!’

C HAPTER T EN
     
    W ith only three days to go till Open Day the children started rehearsals for the haunting straight away – and it was very hard work.
    Brenda made it clear that she didn’t just want to drip blood on to people – she wanted to strangle them and put her icy hands round their throats and tighten them till they choked.
    ‘Round men’s throats,’ she said firmly.
    Mr Smith was still in a muddle about his size.
    ‘I can’t fit in there,’ he said, when Madlyn suggested that he might like to lie in the oak chest in the Great Hall because it was the nearest thing they had to a coffin.
    ‘But, Mr Smith, you’re a skeleton ,’ said Madlyn. ‘You can’t be thinner than that.’
    ‘Oh yes, I forgot.’
    When you have been as fat as Mr Smith had been, it is difficult to realize how much you have changed.
    Most skeletons are not interesting to talk to because they can’t use proper words; they just rattle their bones and grind their teeth. But Mr Smith, like all the ghosts that Cousin Howard had found, was special, and had kept the deep and matey voice he had had when he was a taxi driver.
    Ranulf spent a lot of time buttoning and unbuttoning his shirt.
    ‘I could open it suddenly, with a flourish,’ he said, ‘so that the rat, so to speak, exploded in people’s faces.’
    But when they said yes, that would be good, he thought that maybe unbuttoning it slowly might be better. ‘So that that the tail appeared first,’ he said, ‘and then the legs’ . . .
    Because she had worked in a circus, Sunita had a real feeling for special effects. What the children loved particularly was the little sigh she gave just before she separated herself into two halves; it made the whole thing very moving and beautiful.
    Which left The Feet. No one knew quite what to do with them and they were standing about rather wearily when the kitchen door opened and a blast of sound from Mrs Grove’s radio came out towards them.
    It was a Scottish reel. A special one. The reel of the 51st Highlanders played on the bagpipes.
    For a moment nothing happened. Then the left toes began to tap, followed by the toes on the right . . . and The Feet began to dance. The toes rose and fell, they curled and uncurled. The heels thumped on the floor, the ankle stumps crossed and uncrossed . . . and all in perfect time to the music.
    All Highland reels need to be practised if one is to do them well, but the reel of the 51st Highlanders is the most difficult of all. And here were these ancient hairy feet, with their corns and their calluses, dancing as if to the manner born.
    Clearly these were Scottish feet – feet from over the border. Having feet like these at Clawstone could only be an honour, and they decided to bring up Ned’s CD player and let The Feet do what they felt like on the day.
    Rehearsing a show too much can be as bad as rehearsing one too little.
    The ghosts which Cousin Howard had found had one thing in common: all of them were homeless.
    Ranulf’s dungeon had been blown up and a shoe factory built on the site. Brenda, who had liked to haunt the graveyard behind the church where she’d been shot, left it when a motorway was driven through it. Mr Smith’s flat near the taxi rank was bought by a couple who started doing what they called ‘improvements’, which meant knocking down perfectly good walls, putting up partitions and painting the woodwork in colours which made his skull ache. And Sunita’s family had