Gargoyle Hall

  For

  Isabella Blount,

  with love

  CONTENTS

  1

  Bat Trouble

  2

  Scuppered Supper

  3

  Stake-Out

  4

  Set-Up

  5

  Stowaway

  6

  Beastly in the Cellar

  7

  Help!

  8

  Number-One-Witness

  9

  Pink Rabbit

  10

  Go, Edmund!

  11

  The Beast of Gargoyle Hall

  12

  Chief Detective Spook

  13

  The Bonkers Baron

  By the Same Author

  When I grow up, I want to be a detective and solve Mysteries. To get into training I have set up Spook’s Detective Agency. I am Chief Detective and my friend, Wanda Wizzard, is my sidekick. This means Wanda helps out in the detective agency and sometimes goes on Mystery-solving expeditions with me. Well, that is the idea, anyway.

  Running a detective agency is not easy, because first you need a Mystery to solve. In films and books, people go to a detective agency and ask them to solve a Mystery. But no one has come to Spook’s Detective Agency and asked it to solve anything yet. I don’t know why. So I have to find my own Mysteries to solve. Weeks can go by without any kind of Mystery and then, just like buses, a whole load of Mysteries arrive at once. This is what happened recently. The first to arrive was The Mystery of Uncle Drac’s Travelling Sleeping Bag.

  It all began after my uncle Drac came back from his holiday to see the giant bats of Transylvania. Suddenly he started acting strangely. Of course, most people would think that Uncle Drac acted strangely before he went on holiday. That is probably because Uncle Drac has a turret full of bats, where he sleeps in a flowery sleeping bag, which hangs from the rafters at the very top of the turret. I don’t think that many uncles do that. Well, not in a flowery sleeping bag anyway.

  Before he went on holiday, Uncle Drac used to spend all day happily sleeping in the bat turret surrounded by his bats. But when he came back from holiday that changed. He began to hang around the house—and when I say hang around, I mean it literally. One day I found him in his sleeping bag hanging behind the door of the ghost-in-the-bath-bathroom, the next day he was hanging from the balustrades on the top landing, and the day after that, I tripped over him because his sleeping bag had fallen off the coat hooks by the front door. It was very unsettling. I never knew where Uncle Drac would turn up next.

  When I told my sidekick about The Mystery of Uncle Drac’s Travelling Sleeping Bag, she did not look impressed. She said, “But, Araminta, why don’t we just ask Uncle Drac why he isn’t sleeping in the bat turret any more?”

  I sighed. “Look, Wanda,” I said. “A detective can’t go around asking people why they are doing mysterious things.”

  “Why not?” Wanda asked.

  “Because people would tell them the answers and then there wouldn’t be any Mysteries to solve, would there? So then there wouldn’t be any detectives.”

  But later on, when I found Uncle Drac in his sleeping bag in the boiler room, I decided to take my sidekick’s advice and ask him why he was not sleeping in the bat turret any more.

  Uncle Drac groaned when I prodded him awake, and he poked his head up over the top of the sleeping bag. “Wherrrsit, Minty?” he mumbled. Uncle Drac always calls me “Minty”, which I really like.

  “Uncle Drac, why aren’t you sleeping in the bat turret any more?” I asked.

  Uncle Drac groaned and said, “Don’t ask, Minty. Just don’t.”

  “But I just did ask, Uncle Drac,” I said.

  “I know you did,” said Uncle Drac. “And I would rather not say, if you don’t mind.” Then he slid back down into the sleeping bag. As I was walking out of the boiler room, Uncle Drac popped his head up again. “Minty …” he said.

  Aha, I thought. This is what always happens. As the detective walks away, the suspect has second thoughts and calls her back to confess all. Not that Uncle Drac was a suspect—well, not at that point, anyway.

  “Yes, Uncle Drac?” I said nonchalantly. Being nonchalant is what you have to do a lot of when you are a detective. It means behaving as if you are not really bothered about something, even if you are. It is a very good way of getting people to tell you things. However, it didn’t work this time.

  “Do not go into the bat turret,” Uncle Drac said.

  “Oh. Why not, Uncle Drac?” I asked, looking up at the ceiling at some spiders’ webs so that it seemed like I was still being nonchalant.

  “Because I say so,” said Uncle Drac sounding rather grumpy. “And that goes for Wanda too.”

  “All right, Uncle Drac,” I said, and I ran off to find my sidekick. I wanted to tell her that we now had another Mystery to solve—The Mystery of the Forbidden Bat Turret.

  But even that Mystery did not interest my sidekick. All she said was, “But, Araminta, you know we are not allowed in the bat turret. It is dangerous in there.”

  Wanda does not like the bat turret. This is because Uncle Drac has taken all the floors out to give his bats lots of space to fly around. This means that when you climb in through the little red door at the top of the turret you look straight down to the very bottom, which is covered with bat poo. Wanda is afraid of falling all the way down, even though I think it would be quite a soft landing really as the bat poo is very thick. But Wanda does not like bat poo.

  Even though Wanda can be very boring about bats and turrets and bat poo, she is my best friend (most of the time). Wanda lives in Spook House with me and we share our bedrooms. We have a bedroom for every day of the week, which is fun.

  There are other people in Spook House too: Wanda’s mum and dad, Brenda and Barry Wizzard, and also Pusskins, Brenda’s smelly old cat (who is not a person, even though Brenda seems to think she is). There is my uncle Drac, who you have already met. Then there is my aunt Tabby, and you are lucky not to have met her yet; but you will, because no one escapes Aunt Tabby for very long.

  The best thing about Spook House is the ghosts. We have three. We have a ghost in armour called Sir Horace, his faithful hound called Fang and his weedy page called Edmund.

  As I said, once you have one Mystery, lots more start coming along. The next one arrived that evening—it was The Mystery of the Terrified Bats. It all began when I was downstairs in the hall playing with Fang, Sir Horace’s ghostly hound. In Spook House there is a very big entrance hall. It has a wide flight of stairs with a bannister that is really fun to slide down, it has lots of doors that go off into other rooms, a huge clock, some funny old chairs all around the walls and a lot of weird stuffed animals in cases that Wanda’s mum, Brenda, has started collecting. Most of the animals are cats wearing clothes. They are actually quite creepy, but I always look in the cases because I hope that one day I will see Pusskins in there too. I don’t think Aunt Tabby likes the stuffed cats either, because she does not even go near them with her duster, which means there are a lot of lovely spiders’ webs all over them.

  Fang was running to catch a ball—which he never can because he is a ghost—when the doorbell rang and kept on ringing, because our doorbell gets stuck. Aunt Tabby came scooting out of one of the doors to answer it. She pulled open the front door, banged the doorbell hard to make it stop and then said, “Oh!” She did not sound pleased. But I soon knew why, because the next thing she said was, “Come in, Emilene. What a surprise.”

  “Bother,” I thought. It was Great-aunt Emilene, Uncle Drac’s mother. Great-aunt Emilene is scary—even Aunt Tabby is a little bit scared of her. She always wears a long black coat and has a double-ended ferret around her
neck. A double-ended ferret is actually two ferrets stitched together to make a kind of creepy ferret-scarf. It means that when you look at Aunt Emilene, two dead little ferret faces with glassy eyes stare back at you.

  “Are you staying long?” Aunt Tabby asked Great-aunt Emilene.

  Great-aunt Emilene sniffed, rather like Wanda does. And then she said, “For as long as it takes, Tabitha.”

  As long as what takes? I wanted to ask, and I think Aunt Tabby did too. But neither of us said anything.

  Great-aunt Emilene strode in and stopped beside me and Fang—who she can’t see because she does not believe in ghosts. So all she saw was me rolling the ball and then running to pick it up by myself. “It is very sad,” Great-aunt Emilene said to Aunt Tabby.

  “What is very sad?” Aunt Tabby asked suspiciously.

  “That an excitable child like Araminta should be always playing on her own like this. It will lead to all kinds of trouble, mark my words.” And then she swept off towards the big smart room that Aunt Tabby keeps (fairly) clean for guests to go into.

  Aunt Tabby did not look pleased. “But she has Wanda to play with,” I heard her say as she hurried after my great-aunt.

  “Wanda. Huh!” I heard Great-aunt Emilene say with another sniff as the door closed behind them.

  I listened at the door a bit but could not hear anything except for Great-aunt Emilene droning on and Aunt Tabby occasionally saying, “No.” It got boring after a while, so I decided to build a spider pyramid. One of my hobbies—when I am not busy running the detective agency—is making houses for spiders. Recently I have expanded that to include acrobatics for spiders, because it is good for spiders to do some kind of sport. I found five really good spiders dangling from the stuffed-cat cases and took them upstairs to the landing to make a spider pyramid. Fang came too. He was watching me with his tongue hanging out and every now and then he tried to snap at one. I don’t think Fang understands that he is a ghost and ghosts cannot eat anything, not even spiders.

  As I expect you know, it is not easy to make a spider pyramid, because spiders have so many legs and they get tangled up. Also, they keep running away. It seems to me that they do not like making pyramids. I don’t know why. If I were a spider I would think that spider pyramids were really fun. Anyway, after trying for ages all my spiders seemed to have got used to the idea of being in a pyramid. But just as I was about to put the last spider on the top, Fang threw back his head and began to howl. Fang has a really great spine-chilling howl but it does not make balancing the top spider on the pyramid very easy.

  “Arrooooo!” Fang howled. “Arroooooooooo!”

  “Shush, Fang,” I said. “Just wait a minute until I have finished.”

  But Fang would not wait. He just kept on howling. He was so loud that I am surprised I heard Wanda scream at all. But I did. From somewhere high up in Spook House, I heard a distinctive Wanda-scream.

  “Aaaiiiieeeeee! Help! Gerrrrroffmeeeee!”

  Wanda used to scream a lot when she first moved into Spook House, but now that she is used to all the ghosts and spiders—and to Aunt Tabby—she hardly screams at all. But this scream was just like one of Wanda’s early ones. It was very loud and piercing and it made my ears ring. I wondered what she was screaming about and thought that maybe another Mystery was about to happen. So, because a Chief Detective is never off duty, I went to find out. Fang came lolloping after me.

  We followed Wanda’s screams all the way to the top of the house and the little red door that leads into Uncle Drac’s bat turret. It was wide open and a long stream of bats was flying out like a black cloud. Fang sat down and howled again and then I remembered—Fang always howls at bats.

  The screams were coming from a bat-covered Wanda shape lying on the floor with her hands over her head. “Aaeeiiiiii!” she was yelling. “Get them off meeeee! They are stuck in my hair!”

  It was true—some of the bats were stuck in Wanda’s hair. Poor bats. Bats have sweet little claws on the end of their wings and their delicate claws had got all tangled in Wanda’s hair. The bats were flapping their wings like crazy, trying to get away from her. Who can blame them? She was making a horrible noise. Bats don’t like loud noises, they have very sensitive hearing, and the ones that were stuck in her hair were panicking because they were really close to where the noise was coming from. It was not, as I pointed out to Wanda, very nice for the bats at all.

  “It is not very nice for me either, Araminta!” yelled Wanda. “Get them off!”

  As I am Wanda’s best friend, I decided to do what she asked. There is only one thing to do when someone is covered in bats and that is what I did—I really don’t know why everyone made such a fuss about it afterwards. I rushed along to the drowned-nun-in-the-bath-bathroom and was back a few seconds later with a bucket of cold water. I threw the water over Wanda and the bats.

  This is something I learned from Uncle Drac—the best way to calm down a panicking bat is to throw cold water at it. Once a bat is covered in cold water it stops making a fuss. Being covered in cold water is not very nice for the bat, but sometimes in an emergency, you have to do it. And I thought this was definitely an emergency.

  The cold water worked perfectly. Even though Wanda was still squealing like a little pig, all the bats stuck in her hair went very still and stopped struggling. They sat and dripped and looked really fed up, because bats do not like cold water. The trouble was, neither did Wanda—which was something she had in common with bats (although when I told her that, she did not look impressed). While the bats were still shocked I carefully untangled their delicate little claws from Wanda’s hair, and then I put them up on a nearby chest so that they would be out of the way of Aunt Tabby’s big feet while they dried out.

  Unfortunately, Aunt Tabby’s big feet did not stay out of the way of me. Suddenly I heard a voice yelling, “Araminta! Araminta, what are you doing now?” and Aunt Tabby whizzed around the corner. She skidded to a halt and her eyes went all wide and round like they were going to pop out of her head. Aunt Tabby stared at the empty bucket and the soggy bats and then she stared at Wanda, who had stood up and was dripping like an old tap. Wanda was making a real mess of the rug, which had a big squelchy puddle in it. I could see that Aunt Tabby was not happy about something. I guessed it was the rug but I was wrong.

  “Araminta Spook!” she said. Then she stopped as though she had run out of words. I sighed. I knew it was bad. Aunt Tabby only says my last name when she is extra-specially cross.

  “Yes, Aunt Tabby?” I asked in my best angelic way. I am perfecting being angelic as I think it will come in useful when I am trying to lull suspects into what is called a false sense of security.

  “You can take that dying duck expression off your face right now,” Aunt Tabby told me.

  I frowned. I do not think you should make jokes about dying ducks.

  “And it is no good looking sulky either,” Aunt Tabby said snappily.

  Wanda sniffed noisily and rubbed her nose on the end of her sleeve. It is a disgusting habit of hers, but Aunt Tabby did not even notice. She was too busy asking me stupid questions. Like, “Did you throw this bucket of water over poor Wanda?”

  The bucket was actually empty, but I knew it was not the time to be what Uncle Drac calls pedantic. So I went for the angelic expression again and said, “Yes, Aunt Tabby, I did.”

  “But why?” Aunt Tabby wailed.

  I sighed and began to explain. “It was a bat emergency. Wasn’t it, Wanda?” I thought it was about time Wanda backed me up. After all, she had been yelling for help and I had been really nice and helped her. But Wanda did not back me up. All she did was drip more on the rug and then go, “Atchoo … atchoo … atchoo-atchoo-atchoo!” Wanda always overdoes sneezing. It has to be at least five times.

  The sneezes brought Brenda thumping up the stairs. Brenda may not recognise a yell for help but she knows a Wanda sneeze from ten miles away. It is like the call of a baby monster to its mummy. Brenda took one look at Wanda a
nd screamed. Then she scooped her up, saying, “Oh, Wandy-Woo-Woo,” (which is the icky name Brenda calls Wanda if she can’t find Pusskins to fuss over). “My poor baby. Come and get dry before you catch your death.” And all the time she was saying that, Brenda was staring at me as though I had tried to drown Wanda instead of saving her.

  After Wanda had been led away by the mummy monster—and had not even said, Thank you, Araminta, for rescuing me—Aunt Tabby looked at me in the same way that Brenda had. “I am disappointed in you, Araminta,” she said. “I had hoped you were growing out of your bad habits but it seems you still enjoy these childish practical jokes. They are not funny, Araminta. Much as I do not like to admit it, I think your great-aunt Emilene has a point. Boarding school would do you good.”

  With that, Aunt Tabby swivelled on her heel like a clockwork soldier and marched off. I stared at her pointy, cross shoulders as they disappeared through the mouldy curtains at the end of the corridor and heard her boots clumping down the stairs. Now I knew what Wanda felt like. I felt as though Aunt Tabby had thrown a bucket of cold water over me.

  It took Wanda ages to escape from Brenda’s clutches. I was sitting in our Thursday bedroom listening to a brilliant thunderstorm and reading the bat book, Beastly Bats, which I had borrowed from the Spooky Library-on-Wheels that stops outside Spook House every Monday. I love the Library-on-Wheels—they have the best books ever. I was reading about werebats when Wanda, escorted by Brenda, came in with her hair plaited and covered in ribbons, just like one of the plastic ponies that she keeps beside her bed.

  “Neigh,” I snorted.

  “Oh, ha ha, very funny,” said Wanda.

  “Araminta,” said Brenda in a very stern voice. “Wanda’s hair is now bat-proof so perhaps that will put a stop to your bat jokes.”

  “But I don’t know any bat jokes,” I said. “Well, apart from that one that goes, ‘What do you call a ten-foot tall bat carrying a machine gun?’”

  “What do you call a ten-foot tall bat carrying a machine gun?” asked Wanda.