The Beasts of Clawstone Castle by Eva Ibbotson Read Free Book Online Page A

was not a nervous boy, but she wanted to be near him just in case.
    Cousin Howard clapped his hands. There was a pause. Then slowly . . . very slowly . . . there appeared a long, white floating veil . . . a wreath of wilted orange blossom . . . and then: a face.
    The bride who stood before them was very beautiful, but she was quite shockingly bloodied. There was blood on her veil, blood on her dress, blood on her train and her silver shoes.
    And there was a good reason for this. There was a bullet hole in her left cheek, another in her chest, a third in her arm.
    Cousin Howard introduced her. ‘This is Brenda Peabody. She had some . . . er . . . trouble on her wedding day. A man she had jilted shot her on the steps of the church.’
    ‘Trouble?’ spat the ghost. ‘Oh yes, I had some trouble! Men . . . Vile beasts! Look at that!’ She dug her fingers into the holes, and fresh streams of blood poured over her bridal clothes. ‘And it won’t come out . . . I wash and I scrub and it makes no difference, the gore just goes on coming. Drip, drip . . . ooze, ooze.’
    ‘I don’t know if you have heard of banshees?’ said Cousin Howard quietly. ‘They’re famous for weeping and wailing and washing out the linen of the dead. Brenda’s not a banshee, of course, she’s a proper ghost and she’s busy with her own washing, but one thing you can be sure of with Bloodstained Brides is a constant stream of liquid. She won’t dry up, you can be certain of that.’
    ‘She’s good,’ said Madlyn. ‘She’s very good.’
    Brenda disappeared behind the books and when Uncle Howard clapped his hands again a dark shape in an enormous duffel coat appeared.
    ‘This is Mr Smith.’
    The children looked at each other. So far Mr Smith didn’t seem very remarkable – just a very fat man in a heavy coat.
    Then Mr Smith said, ‘Pleased to meet you,’ and at the same time he threw his overcoat wide open and lowered his hood.
    He was a skeleton. A few pieces of flesh still clung to him here and there, a small slab of muscle below one kneee, and a sinew or two on his elbow... and in one eye socket there still hung a single eye – but overall Mr Smith was as skeletal a skeleton as you could find.
    All three children nodded their heads. If there is one thing people expect from a haunted house it is a skeleton, and a skeleton in which one eye still flickers is particularly good.
    Mr Smith, whose first name was Douglas, had been a very fat taxi driver – so fat that people had nagged him and teased him, and he was so hurt that he stopped eating. Only he overdid it, and one day he woke up dead. When you have been very fat it is difficult to accept that you are now very thin or even not there at all, which was why Doug liked to wear his overcoat.
    After the bride and the skeleton came a very old woman from whose matted, grimy hair there dropped a stream of lice.
    Real lice are nasty and ghostly lice are nastier still, but all the same the old woman did not look very interesting. Nasty, yes, but not interestingly nasty, and the children were very relieved when she said she’d decided that Clawstone wouldn’t suit her and she was going back to live with her cronies in the bus shelter behind the slaughterhouse in town.
    The next candidate surprised the children very much.
    She was a truly beautiful girl, with masses of jet-black hair and lustrous dark eyes ringed with kohl and she was wearing a short embroidered bodice, loose trousers of shimmering silk and brocade slippers.
    ‘This is Sunita,’ said Cousin Howard. ‘Her parents came from India but she has lived here all her life. And worked here too.’
    The three children stared at her and Sunita smiled, a lovely friendly smile, and put her hands together in greeting. Everybody liked her at once; you couldn’t not like her. But Rollo spoke for all of them when he said, ‘Would she frighten people? She seems so nice.’
    ‘Watch,’ said Cousin Howard.
    He nodded at the girl, and she