Diana Wynne Jones - The Time of the Ghost

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The Time of the Ghost
Diana Wynne Jones
A 3S digital back-up edition 1.0
click for scan notes and proofing history
Contents
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GREENWILLOW BOOKS, NEW YORK
Copyright © 1981 by Diana Wynne Jones
First published in Great Britain in 1981 by Macmillan
Children’s Books.
First published in the United States in 1996 by
Greenwillow Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the
Publisher,
Greenwillow Books, a division of William Morrow &.
Company, Inc.,
1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019.
Printed in the United States of America
First American Edition
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Diana Wynne.
The time of the ghost / by Diana Wynne Jones.—
1st American ed.
p. cm.
“First published in Great Britain in 1981 by
Macmillan Children’s Books“—T.p. verso.
Summary: A ghost, uncertain of her identity, watches
the four Melford sisters hatch a plan to get their parents’
attention and slowly becomes aware of the danger from a
supernatural power unleashed by the girls and their
friends from the boys’ boarding school run by the
Melfords.
ISBN 0-688-14598-1
[1. Ghosts—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Fiction. 3.
Supernatural—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.J684Ti 1996
[Fic]—dc20 95-36155 CIP AC
To MY SISTER ISOBEL
And To HAT
One
^ »
There’s been an accident! she thought. Something’s wrong!
She could not quite work out what was the matter. It was broad
daylight—probably the middle of the afternoon—and she was
coming down the road from the wood on her way home. It was
summer, just as it should be. All round her was the sleepy, heavy
humming of a countryside drowsing after lunch. She could hear the
distant flap and caw of the rooks in the dead elms and a tractor
grinding away somewhere. If she raised herself to look over the
hedge, there lay the fields, just as she expected, sleepy gray-green,
because the wheat was not ripe by a long way yet. The trees were
almost black in the heat haze, and dense, except for the bare ring of
elms, a long way off where the rooks were noisy specks. I’ve always
wanted to be tall enough to look over the hedge, she thought. I must
have grown.
She wondered if it was the heavy, steamy weather that was
making her feel so odd. She had a queer, light, vague feeling. She
could not think clearly—or not when she thought about thinking.
And perhaps the weather accounted for the way she felt so troubled
and anxious. It felt like a thunderstorm coming. But it was not
quite that. Why did she think there had been an accident?
She could not remember an accident. Nor could she think why
she was suddenly on her way home, but since she was going there,
she thought she might as well go on. It made her uncomfortable to
be reared up above the hedges, so she subsided to her usual height
and went on down the road, thinking vague, anxious thoughts.
What’s happened to me! she thought. I must stop feeling so silly.
I’m the sensible one. Perhaps if I ask myself questions, my memory
will come back. What did I have for lunch!
That was no good. She could not remember lunch in any way.
She realized, near to panic, that she could not remember anything
about the rest of today at all.
That’s silly! she told herself. I must know! But she didn’t. Panic
began to grow in her. It was as if someone was pumping up a very
large balloon somewhere in the middle of her chest. She fought to
squash it down as it unfolded. All right! she told herself
hysterically. All right! I’ll ask something easy. What am I wearing!
This ought to have been easy. She only had to look down. But
first she seemed to have forgotten how to do that. Then when she
did—
Panic spread, roaring, to its fullest size. She was swept away
with it, as if it were truly a huge balloon, tumbling, rolling,
bobbing, mindless.
There’s been an accident! was all she could think. Something’s
awfully wrong!
When she noticed things again, she was a long way on down the
road. There was a small house she somehow knew was a shop
nestling in the hedge just ahead. She made herself stand still. She
was so frightened that everything she could see was
shaking—quivering like poor reception on the telly. She had a
notion that if it went on shaking this way, it would shake itself
away from her, and she would be left with utter nothing. So she
made herself stand there.
After a while she managed to make herself look down again.
There was still nothing there.
I’ve turned into nothing! she thought. Panic swelled again.
There’s been an accident! STOP IT! she told herself. Stop and think.
She made herself do that. It took awhile, because thinking seemed
so difficult, and panic kept swelling through her thoughts and
threatening to whirl her away again, but she eventually thought
something like: I’m all right. I’m here. I’m me. If I wasn’t, I
wouldn’t even be frightened. I wouldn’t know. But something has
happened to me. I can’t see myself at all, not even a smear of shadow
on the road. There’s been an accident! STOP THAT! I keep thinking
about an accident, so there must have been one, but it does no good
to say so, because every time I do, things just get vaguer. So I must
stop thinking that and start thinking what’s the matter with me. I
may be just invisible.
On that not altogether comforting thought, she took herself over
to the hedge and—well—sort of leaned into it. She had, as she
leaned, strong memories of the way a stout prickly hedge bears you
up like a mattress and sticks spines into you as it bears you.
Not this time. She found herself in the field on the other side of
the hedge without feeling a thing. She could not even feel anything
from the clump of nettles she seemed to be standing in. Seemed is
the right word, she thought unhappily. Let’s face it. I’m not just
invisible. I haven’t got a body at all.
She had to spend another while squashing down bulging panic
after this. It does no good! she shouted at herself. In fact, she was
beginning to see that the panic did positive harm. Each time it
happened she felt odder and vaguer. Now she could hardly
remember coming down the road or why she had been coming this
way in the first place.
It probably comes of not having a proper head to keep my thoughts
in, she decided. I shall have to be very careful. She half put a
nonexistent hand to what she thought was probably her head but
took it away again. If I put my hand right through, I might knock
all the thoughts out, she said, forgetting she had already been
through a hedge. Where am I?
The field had a path winding through it, and there was a stile in
the hedge opposite, leading to somewhere with trees. As she looked
at that stile, she had a very strong feeling that beyond it, she would
be able to get help. She went that way. Now she knew herself to be
bodiless, she was almost interested by the way she moved, dangling
and drifting, with her head about the height she was used to. She
could rise higher if she wanted, or sink lower, but both ways made
her uncomfortable. When she reached the stile, she started to climb
it, out of habit. And stopped, feeling foolish. For a moment she was
glad no one was there to see her. Of course she could just go
straight through. She did. Then she was in an orchard, a rather
messy place that she seemed to be used to. The nettles and the
chickens pecking about were rather familiar, and as she passed a
hut made of old doors and chairs and draped with soggy-looking old
carpet, she had almost a twinge of recognition. She knew there
would be a mildewy rag doll inside that hut. The doll’s name was
Monigan.
How do I know that! she wondered. Where am I?
The fact that she did not know confused her. She dangled
sideways across the orchard, avoiding trees out of what seemed to
be habit, and found herself faced with a hedge again—a tall, hefty
hedge, which looked as impenetrable as a wood.
Well, let’s see, she said, and went through.
Here she was more confused still. For one thing, she had a very
strong sense of guilt. She was now somewhere she ought not to be.
For another thing, it was all much less familiar here. It was a very
sparse, open garden, much trampled, so that the grass was mostly
bare earth. Beyond that, behind a line of lime trees, was a large
redbrick building.
She drifted under the lime trees and inspected the red building.
Bees buzzed among the flat, wet heart shapes of the lime leaves,
and little drops of lime liquid pattered down around (and through)
her. Oddly enough, the bees avoided her. One flew straight at her
face and swerved off at the last minute. This comforted her
considerably. There must be something of me for it to dodge, she
told herself, staring at a churchlike window in the red house. From
behind the window came a buzz, quieter than the bees, but quite as
perpetual. There was also a smell, distinct from the smell of lime
trees, which she found she knew.
This is School, she said.
Maybe this was why she felt so guilty here. Perhaps she should
be at school. Perhaps at this moment a teacher was looking up from
a register and asking where she was.
This was alarming. It caused her to speed along the front of the
red house to a small door she somehow knew would be there and
dart through it, to a dark space full of blazers and bags hung on
pegs. No one was there. They were all in lessons evidently. She
sped on, through tiled corridors, wishing she could remember which
was her classroom. She knew there was a rule about not running in
the corridors, but she was not sure it applied to people without
bodies. Besides, she was not running. It was more like whizzing.
She could not find her classroom. It was like a bad dream. And
here she had an idea which made her much, much happier. It was a
dream, of course. It was a bad dream, but a dream definitely. In
dreams one could run without really running and often could not
feel one’s body, and above all, in dreams one was always urgently
looking for something one could not find. She was so relieved that
she slowed right down. And there, beside her, was a door labeled
“IV A.”
That was her class, IV A. She was more relieved than ever, even
though she did not remember the door looking like this. It was
pointed, like the school windows, with thick ribs and long iron
hinges on it. But behind the door she could hear a teacher’s voice
droning on, and the voice was definitely one she knew. She put out
her hand to turn the ringlike handle of the door.
Of course the handle went right through the part that seemed to
be her hand. She stood back. A strong pricking where her eyes
ought to have been suggested that she might be going to cry
disembodied tears. She knew she could go through the door by
leaning into it, but she did not dare. Half the class would laugh, and
the rest would scream. The teacher would say—
Dreamlike, she had entirely forgotten she could not even see
herself. I will do it! I will, I will! she said.
She put her nonhand to the handle again. This time, by exerting
enormous effort, she managed to make it flip and rattle gently.
The handle turned fiercely under her not-fingers. The door was
wrenched open inward from her. A voice roared, “When I ask you to
decline mens, Howard, I do not mean mensa! Come!” the voice
added, and a man’s bristly head looked round the door.
Uncertainly she slipped through the opening into the sudden light
of a classroom. It was more dreamlike than ever. They were all
boys here, rows of boys, some leaning forward writing busily, some
leaning back on two legs of their chairs looking anything but busy.
There was not a girl in the room.
“Nobody there,” said the teacher, and clapped the door shut
again.
She looked at him wonderingly. For some reason she knew him
enormously well. Every line of his bristly head, his birdlike face,
and his thin, angry body were known to her exactly. She felt drawn
to him. But she was afraid of him, too. She knew he was always
impatient and nearly always angry. A name for him came to her.
They called him Himself.
Himself rounded on the class, glowering. “May I remind you,
Howard, that mens means the mind and mensa means a table? But
I expect in your case the two things are the same. No, no. Don’t
scratch your head, boy. You’ll get splinters.”
The boy Howard seemed untroubled by the glower and the roar of
Himself. “Not to worry, sir,” he said comfortingly. “I don’t think
splinters are catching.”
“Fifteen all,” murmured someone at the back of the room. This
caused a good deal of not quite hidden laughter.
She found she knew Howard, too. He had a round, bright-eyed
face like an otter’s. In fact, most of the boys at the desks were
people she had seen before. She knew names: Shepperson, Greer II,
Jenkins, Matchworth-Keyes, Filbert, Wrenn, and Stinker-Tinker,
to name just the front row. But she was beginning to think this was
not her class after all. There should have been girls. And this was
probably a Latin lesson. She had never learned Latin.
I think I’d better go, she said apologetically to Himself.
“A test tomorrow on the third declension,” said Himself. “Make a
note in your rough books.”
He had not heard her. To judge from the way everyone was
behaving, no one could see her or hear her. She might just as well
not have been there. Maybe that was not such a bad thing. Very
much ashamed of her embarrassing mistake, she leaned into the
door and was in the corridor again, hearing Himself still, dimly,
from behind the door.
Puzzling about how she knew everyone in that strange class so
well, she wandered on. And because she was not trying to
remember where to go, she found herself going very certainly in a
definite direction— downstairs, past a room with rows of tables,
past a shiny door which gusted out smells of cooked cabbage and
washing-up liquid, into a dark wooden hall with a green-covered
door at the end of it. The green was the felty kind of cloth you find
on billiard tables. She knew that door well. She suddenly wanted
badly to be on the other side of it.
Before she got there, a lady came quickly through the shiny door,
which bumped loudly and let out a gust of old gravy smell to join
the smell of cooked cabbage. The lady hurried to a side table and
picked up a pile of papers there, frowning. She was a majestic lady
with a clear strong face. Her frown was a tired one. A bright blue
eye between the frown and the straight nose stared at the papers.
Fair hair was looped into a low, heavy bun on her head.
“Ugh!” she said at the papers. She looked like an avenging angel
who had already had a long fight with the devil. All the same, the
papers should have withered and turned black. The bodiless person
in the corridor felt yearning admiration for this angel lady. She
knew they called her Phyllis.
Under the frown Phyllis said wearily, “Your father’s told you, I’ve
told you. How many times have you been told to stay behind the
green door, Sally?”
Warmth and comfort and pleasure swelled, as huge and swift as
the balloon of panic had swelled earlier. Mother had seen her.
Mother knew her. Mother knew who she was. She was Sally. Of
course she was Sally. Everything was all right, even though she
had gone and done an awful thing and interrupted Father while he
was teaching. It was true she should have been on the other side of
the green door. Coming into School was quite forbidden. Sally—yes,
she was sure she was Sally—stood guiltily by the green door,
wondering how to explain, as Phyllis turned her blue eyes and tired
frown toward her.
The blue eyes narrowed her way, and widened, as if Phyllis had
suddenly focused on a distant hill. The frown vanished and came
back, deeper, making two little ditches at the top of Phyllis’s
straight nose.
“Funny,” said Phyllis. “I could have sworn—” Her creamy face
became reddish in the darkness. The words turned to mere moving
of the lips. Phyllis twitched her shoulders and turned away
uncomfortably.
Sally—she must be Sally if Phyllis had said so— was astonished
to find that other people besides herself could get embarrassed
when they thought they were all alone.
That embarrassed her. It was even worse to realize that Phyllis
could not see her after all. Sally—she knew she was Sally
now—turned and plunged desperately through the green door. She
went so fiercely that the door actually lifted inward an inch or so
and bumped back into place. Sally thought that Phyllis turned and
stared at it as she went.
Beyond the door was the right place. First, a stone flagged
passage, which was chilly now and freezing in winter, where four
coat hooks held a mound of many coats. The open door at the end
led to the room called the kitchen, also stone-flagged but warmed
by the sun that rippled in through the apple trees outside. It was in
its usual mess, Sally saw wearily. Books, newspapers, and bread
and jam were cast in heaps on the table. Someone had spilled milk
on the floor. Sally longed to lift the front page of one of the
newspapers out of the butter, but she was not sure she would be
able to. She wondered whose turn it had been to do the washing-up.
She could see a mountain of white school china sticking up out of
the sink.
Well, this time I can’t do it, she was saying when she saw what
she took for a hideous dwarf on the draining board.
The dwarf had a tangle of dark hair and was wearing what
seemed to be a bright green sack. The sack stuck out so far in front
that Sally thought the dwarf was hugely fat at first, until she saw
its long, skinny arms propped on the edge of the sink. The dwarf
was leaning forward, propped on its arms, so that a sharp white
nose smeared with freckles stuck out from among the tangled hair,
and so did two large front teeth. From between those teeth came a
jet of water, squirting onto the white crockery in the sink. The
dwarf appeared to have tied two knots in the front of its tangled
hair to make way for the jet of water.
The dwarf squirted solemnly until the mouthful of water was
used up. Then it relieved Sally’s funny vague mind considerably by
standing up on the draining board. Two skinny legs with immense
knobs for knees unfolded from under the green sack, making the
dwarf about the right height for a small ten-year-old. Some of the
bulge in front of the sack had been those knees, but quite a large
bulge still remained. Fenella—she knew its name was Fenella
now—took another mouthful of water from a mug in her hand and
tried the effect of squirting the crockery from higher up. The jet of
water hit a cup and sprayed off onto the floor.
That’s no way to do the washing-up, Fenella! Sally cried out. And
what have you tied your hair in two knots for!
There was no sound, no sound at all, except the gentle hissing of
Fenella’s spray on the cup and the floor and the mild buzzing of
flies round the table. No one can hear me! Sally thought. What shall
I do?
But Fenella said, “Look at this, Sally.” The white face, the
freckles, and two large shrewd eyes under the knots of hair turned
Sally’s way. “Oh, I forgot,” said Fenella. “She’s not here.” At that
摘要：

TheTimeoftheGhostDianaWynneJonesA3Sdigitalback-upedition1.0clickforscannotesandproofinghistoryContents|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|GREENWILLOWBOOKS,NEWYORKCopyright©1981byDianaWynneJonesFirstpublishedinGreatBritainin1981byMacmillanChildren’sBooks.FirstpublishedintheUnitedStatesin1996byGreenwill...

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