Free Dial a Ghost by Eva Ibbotson Page B

hill to look at the place where the two hikers had frozen to death.
    ‘I can’t feel them,’ said Adopta. ‘I’m afraid they may just not have become ghosts. Perhaps it’s as well if they had bad frostbite. But I think you ought to ask your factor to put up a proper cross or a little monument. It seems rude not to have anything.’
    ‘I don’t know if I’ve got a factor. What is it exactly?’
    ‘It’s a person who runs an estate and tells the shepherds and farmers what to do.’
    ‘How do you know about factors? I mean you wouldn’t have had them in the knicker shop or at Resthaven.’
    Adopta shrugged. ‘Sometimes I know things that I don’t know how I know them, but please don’t start on again about how I’m really someone else because I’m a Wilkinson and I’m me.’ She glanced round at the wide view, the heather-covered hills, the river. ‘Pernilla would love this. She feels so trapped in the shopping arcade.’
    ‘Who’s Pernilla?’
    ‘She’s a Swedish ghost – she came to look after some children and learn English, and some idiot in a Jaguar drove her home from a party and crashed.’
    ‘Why don’t you ask her to stay? And Mr Hofmann too. Anyone you want, there’s lots of room here.’
    ‘Could we? Oh Oliver, that would be great. Only we’d better do it properly through the agency or—’ She broke off and pointed excitedly at a field below them. ‘Look! Sheep! Hundreds of them. Come on!’
    But when they reached the field every single sheep in it looked fleecy and cheerful and well.
    ‘I could kill one for you, I suppose,’ said Oliver. ‘But I don’t eat mutton and—’
    ‘No, that would be silly. It might not become a ghost and then it would be a complete waste of time. You can never tell, you see. You can get half a dozen animals that just lie there dead as dodos and absolutely nothing happens, and then one suddenly rises up, and you’re away!’
    The day ended with a great honour for Oliver. He was invited to the Evening Calling for Trixie. They did it near the sundial and everybody linked hands and bowed to the north and the south and the east and the west and told Trixie that they wanted her and needed her and would she please, please come.
    When it was over, Oliver asked if there was anything that Trixie had particularly liked.
    ‘Something that we could put out for her, perhaps?’ he said.
    Grandma and Aunt Maud looked at each other. ‘Bananas,’ said Grandma. ‘She’d have sold her soul for a banana. All of us would in the war.’
    So Oliver ran back into the house and fetched a banana – a long and very yellow one – which they put on the sundial where it could be seen easily from above, and Aunt Maud was so happy that she rose into the air and did the dance that she and Trixie had done when they were Sugar Puffs – a thing she hadn’t done for years.
    Oliver fairly skipped along the corridor that night on his way to bed – and when he got to his room he had a surprise. While he was out with Adopta the others had done out his room. The man stuck full of arrows was gone, and so was the deer having its throat cut, and the rearing horses. Instead Aunt Maud had brought in some dried grasses and put them in a vase, and they’d hung up a cheerful picture of a garden they’d found in one of the other rooms.
    And Oliver’s inhaler was once again beside his bed.
    ‘You won’t need it,’ said Uncle Henry. ‘The air here is excellent and anyway asthma’s something you grow out of. But it might as well be there.’
    Although ghosts usually haunt by night and sleep by day, they had decided to keep the same hours as Oliver, but when everyone had settled down, Oliver still sat up in bed with his arms round his knees.
    ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Adopta sleepily.
    ‘I was thinking about how much there is to find out. About ghosts and ectoplasm and why some people become them and others not, and why some people see them and others don’t . . . I mean,