I ran all the way to Zelda’s house. I didn’t care whether I was expelled from school for playing truant a second time. I didn’t care about anything. Where was Ella?
As I stumbled into the living room, Zelda was sitting on her sofa, surrounded by toads, a letter in her hand. She had taken off her glasses, and her eyes were red from crying.
“What is it?” My mind pictured Ella run over by a truck or drowned in the millpond.
Zelda held the letter toward me. The handwriting looked strange and clumsy, as if someone who usually writes with the right hand had used the left.
At first I didn’t understand a word of what I was reading, but when the meaning slowly dawned on me, I had to sit down right where I was, on Zelda’s carpet. My knees just gave in (and I nearly squashed two toads).
Zelda Littlejohn: Bring the Hartgill boy to the Kilmington cemetery at nightfall or your granddaughter will be in hell by sunrise.
Underneath the words was a sketch of a coat of arms. It was smudged, as if a clumsy finger had touched the wet ink, but I still recognized it. I had last seen it on a dead horse’s blanket.
“But that’s… impossible!” I stammered. “He’s dead. I mean, for real this time. We saw it. Longspee killed him.”
Zelda noisily blew her nose.
“Sir William Longspee? Jon, why didn’t the two of you tell me about this? That’s Lord Stourton’s crest, but ghosts can’t write letters.”
Zelda looked at me accusingly, and she had every right.
So I told her everything. How Ella had gone into the cathedral with me on Friday night, how we’d called Longspee, and how he’d rescued us from Stourton and his servants. I left out only the parts about the dead chorister and the stolen heart. I just couldn’t get myself to call Longspee a murderer.
Zelda listened. She was dumbfounded. When I got to the end of my story, she looked as if she’d like to kill me just as much as Stourton did.
“How could you not tell me about this, Jon?” she hollered. “And what was Stonehenge about, then? We didn’t go there for Viking treasure, did we?”
I dropped my head. I couldn’t look her in the eye.
“That’s a different story,” I mumbled. “Really. It’s got nothing to do with Stourton.” I got back to my feet. “How could he kidnap Ella and write a letter, Zelda? He’s a ghost. He can’t even hold a pen.”
“Holy stinkwort, how would I know?” Zelda said. “The ghosts I know don’t hunt children or have demon hounds. They utter a few hollow groans and are gone as soon as you shout at them. What kind of mess did you get Ella into, Jon?”
She started sobbing into her soggy handkerchief again. I just stood there and stared at the letter still clutched in my hand.
Suddenly there was a knock at the door. I spun around as if Stourton had just poked his bony finger into my back. Zelda, however, dropped her handkerchief with a sigh of relief.
“Oh, good. That’s my son,” she snuffled. “I called him as soon as I got the letter. Come in, Matthew!” she called, rubbing the back of her hand over her teary eyes.
“I really hope this is urgent, Zelda!” I heard a voice behind me. “I was in the middle of performing a root canal when you called. So, what’s happened to Ella?”
I turned around, and there he was.
The Beard.
I’m pretty positive I’ve never looked so stupid in my whole life, and I hope I never will again. At least The Beard didn’t look particularly sharp either when he saw me standing in his mother’s living room.
“Oh, Matthew, you still have that horrid beard!” Zelda said, struggling up from her sofa. “How often do I have to tell you that you look like an idiot with that on your face?”
“You know why I have it, Mother,” The Beard said, trying to force a halfway-sensible expression onto his face. “Or do you think the scar just disappeared meanwhile?”
“What scar?” I muttered.
“Bah, just a little accident from when he was still helping me with my ghost tours.” Zelda squeezed a hasty kiss onto The Beard’s cheek. “Jon, you tell Matthew the whole horrible story. I need some coffee. I can’t think straight anymore. I cried myself out of my last bit of sense.”
She blew into her handkerchief once more and hobbled off, leaving me alone with The Beard.
For the longest while The Beard and I just looked at each other in uncomfortable silence. I couldn’t believe he was Zelda’s son. He didn’t even seem to mind the toads, which I thought was particularly strange for a dentist.
“Well, if this isn’t a surprise!” he finally managed to say. “So, Jon, what happened to my niece? Did you get her into some kind of mischief, as you like to do with your sisters?”
Ah! No more camouflage. Open war. I could handle that.
“Nothing would’ve happened to her if you hadn’t made sure Mum sent me here!” I shouted at him. “Really smart, sending me into a city where there’s a dead murderer waiting for me. Without Ella I would now be dead myself. But how could I know he’d come back to get her and not me?”
Of course, The Beard had no clue what I was talking about, but at least he was now looking gratifyingly worried.
“What are you saying? Who got Ella?”
I gave him the letter and told the whole story all over again. While I was talking, he caught some toads—maybe it calmed him—and I tried to get used to the idea that The Beard was Ella Littlejohn’s uncle. I would’ve loved to ask her whether she hated him as much as I did. But Ella was gone, and I was as sick with worry as if I’d eaten three whole bowls of that hideous mushroom soup the school serves on Wednesdays.
Where had Stourton taken her?
Was she still alive, or had he already turned her into a ghost?
Could he do that?
Zelda came back with the coffee. I was just telling The Beard how Longspee had driven his sword through Stourton’s chest. I admit, The Beard didn’t ask one stupid question. In fact, he listened as quietly as if I were explaining which of my teeth hurt when I ate ice cream. When I finally stopped, he just gave me a nod, as if he listened to stories about murderous ghosts and dead knights every day.
“Sadly, it all makes perfect sense,” he said, dropping into the threadbare armchair that was usually reserved for the toads. “Stourton grabbed Ella instead of Jon because she’s not a boarder and therefore he could get to her more easily.”
“But how could he kidnap a child and write a letter?” Zelda cried. “He’s nothing but a shadow!” She tried to pour her coffee, but her hands were shaking so badly that The Beard took the pot from her.
“I’ve always told you, Mother, you have a far too positive notion of ghosts,” he observed, also pouring a cup for himself. “How could he write the letter? First possibility: Our murderous ghost lord has scared a living man into capturing Ella and writing the letter. Second possibility…” He hesitated and shot me a quick glance.
“What?” I asked testily. “You think I’m not old enough for your ‘second possibility’? I bet you’ve never been chased by a five-hundred-year-old killer or fought with his demon hounds.”
This came out of my mouth in such an aggressive tone that Zelda looked at me in surprise. She still believed I’d just met her son for the first time.
“The second possibility,” The Beard continued, unfazed, “is that Stourton literally scared a man to death and has given one of his servants use of the body.”
“Use of the body? Ghosts can use dead bodies?” My voice was now no more than a terrified croak.
Zelda put down her cup and sat bolt upright on the sofa.
“No, they cannot!” she said very clearly. “Stop telling the boy such stories, Matthew. You know I think this is utter nonsense. These are fantasies. Superstitions. Nothing else. Stourton has probably frightened some poor farmer by riding out of his barn at night, and he scared the unfortunate fellow into writing the letter and catching Ella as she came out of school.”
The Beard reached for his coffee (which he drank without sugar, of course!) and took a long sip.
“But… but I still don’t understand why he… why Stourton’s still here!” I stammered. “Longspee sent him to hell. I was there!”
The Beard’s mouth stretched into a grim smile. “But you said Stourton left his skin behind?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Well, he’s a peeler.”
Zelda rolled her eyes, but The Beard was clearly on to a favorite subject. Only once before had I heard him speak with a similar passion—when he’d explained to my mother the effect lemonade has on children’s teeth.
“In the Middle Ages,” he continued, “there was a superstition that a man who was hanged could save himself from eternal damnation if he soaked the skin of an onion in his own blood and kept it under his tongue while he was hanged. It was believed that this would give the ghost a protective skin, which would keep him out of hell and could grow back seven times. Hangmen were generally told to look under the tongues of condemned men, but Stourton was, of course, rich enough to bribe his executioner.”
“Seven times?” I asked.
“Yes.” The Beard nodded as if I’d asked him the number of his fillings. “We can only hope the skin you saw was already the seventh. How many servants did he have with him?”
“Four,” I muttered.
“Did they also shed skins?”
I shook my head.
“Hmm.” He tugged at his beard, as he always did when he was thinking. “If we’re lucky, he only managed to bring back one of them. Supposedly you can call back a ghost if you offer him the body of a dead man. To bring back all four of his servants, Stourton would have had to kill four men. That wouldn’t have gone unnoticed in a small village like Kilmington. On the other hand, if they immediately slipped into those bodies…”
“Oh, stop it, Matthew!” Zelda put her hand over his mouth. “You always went for these dark stories, even when you were barely Jon’s age.”
“But how does he know all these things about ghosts?” I asked her. “Since when do dentists know this stuff? Or did he lie to my mother, and he’s really some kind of secret ghost hunter?”
“Your mother?” Zelda gave The Beard a baffled look. “What have you got to do with Jon’s mother?”
“She’s the woman I’m living with, Mother. Margaret Whitcroft. I introduced you to her. One of your toads jumped into her lap.”
Zelda looked at me with wide eyes. “Then Jon here is the spoiled little…?”
The Beard didn’t let her finish. “Never mind that.” He turned to me. “Of course I’m a dentist!” he asserted in an offended voice (though my doubts had been meant more as a compliment). “But what do you expect, with a mother like Zelda? When I was your age, she took me on dozens of ghost tours. I even had to dress up and play a ghost! So I read everything I could find about ghosts, but, disappointingly, still haven’t met one.”
“Well, at least that’s about to change tonight,” Zelda observed drily.
The Beard didn’t really seem to be looking forward to it, which didn’t surprise me. I’d always taken him to be someone who was much more comfortable with books and teeth than he was with real life. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine how he was going to help us against Stourton. But Zelda had probably been unable to think of anything else.
A dentist, an old woman, and a kid. Poor Ella!
The Beard had let the letter drop to the carpet, and a toad had settled on it. I nudged it away and read the letter once more.
“Why are we still sitting here? We should go to Kilmington right away!” I said. “Maybe we’ll find Ella before it gets dark.”
But Zelda shook her head. “I’m sure Stourton will only bring her to the cemetery at nightfall.”
“But where is he keeping her?” My voice was trembling, which was pretty embarrassing in front of The Beard. But there was nothing I could do about it. I pictured Ella in some dark dungeon, guarded by one of those huge black hounds, and I wished once more that Longspee could have taught me how to handle his sword. I would have cut Stourton out of all his skins and sent him to hell for good.
“I still think he frightened some farmer into becoming his accomplice,” Zelda said. “That means Ella is probably in his house. That’s how Stourton did it with your ancestors, Jon. First he held them prisoner on a farm, and then…” She didn’t finish the sentence.
“Then why don’t we look for that house?” I exclaimed.
“How?” Zelda retorted. “By ringing every doorbell in Kilmington and asking, ‘Excuse me, did you kidnap an eleven-year-old girl because you were frightened by a ghost?’ ”
“ ‘Or murdered by one?’ ” The Beard added, which immediately earned him another stern look.
So we all sat in silence. It was terrible. I felt that I was abandoning Ella after getting her sucked in to this whole mess in the first place. And our fight was just making it all worse.
It was Zelda who finally broke the silence.
“Fine, Matthew,” she said. “Jon is right. What are we still doing here? Let’s go to Kilmington. I want my granddaughter back.”
The Beard swallowed hard, but then he nodded and got to his feet.
“You’d better go back to school, Jon,” he said. “They probably called your mother, and she’ll be wondering where you are.”
“Didn’t you read the letter?” I barked at him. “They’ll hand over Ella only if Zelda brings me to them. I’m coming with you.”
Zelda gave her son a puzzled look.
“I’m coming,” I repeated. “End of discussion.”
Zelda looked at me and wiped a tear from her cheek.
“Thanks, Jon!” she muttered. “Now my glasses will get all fogged up again.”
“But you can’t take him with you!” The Beard protested. “His mother’s going to kill me. It’s too dangerous.”
“Matthew!” Zelda snapped. “If Jon doesn’t come with us, then whoever wrote that letter is going to kill our Ella.”
The Beard had run out of arguments—even dumb ones.
“Maybe we should inform the police,” he said feebly.
“The police don’t believe in ghosts, Matthew,” Zelda said. She hobbled to the cupboard in which she kept her car keys. “And the letter says we have to come alone.”
“And what about his knight?” The Beard put on his jacket.
“Of course!” Zelda spun around and looked at me, her hope restored. “Jon! Why haven’t you called Longspee yet?”
I didn’t know where to look. “Because… because he may be a murderer as well.” I’d finally managed to get it out. “And we’ll have more than enough of those to deal with tonight already, don’t you think?”