Dan and the Teacher Ghost by Churchill David

Author:Churchill, David [Churchill, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Juvenile Fiction
Publisher: David Churchill
Published: 2011-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Eleven

It’s Monday morning and I’m hunched under the duvet. For once, I don’t want to go to school. I had a horrid dream last night about Dan being trapped in a coal mine and when I tried to pull the lumps of coal aside to let him out they all turned into sticky blobs of glue and he was choking in it. Then I tried to shout for help and my mouth filled up with white cobwebbs.

For a moment when I woke up, with a nasty dry throat, I hoped that the whole thing had been a dream anyway and that we never had gone underground. But I knew it was real enough in a way and I still can’t make any sense of it. Dan liked it – he likes everything except being shouted at – and he just accepted it. He wanted to go out into the open, get stuck in and help the woman in the weird clothes. The problem is, I’m thinking, it couldn’t have been in the open.

As often as I go over it I always come back to the point that we definitely were underground. Well underground. And there isn’t any sunshine underground. What’s more, I realize with a shock, it was summer down there. Flowers. Leaves on the trees. I stop and check if I’m being stupid, but no, it’s definitely February here, not long since Christmas when Dan got his watch. That’s weirder than ever. And something truly scary did happen in the classroom when we got back there. Something I’m not going to think about in case I feel it all again. Which I’m doing anyway.

Even when we were kicking the ball around with the other kids Dan kept on about helping the woman. It had made a big impression on him but I was still scared. I told him to shut up in the end. He was really upset and went home by himself without speaking to me. I was sorry about that, but I hope he’ll have forgotten about it by today.

Mum stops me from going over it all yet again when she comes in and pulls off the duvet and grumbles me out of bed. I eat a weetabix and drink some orange then I trudge off down the road to pick up Dan.

He’s outside his house, just standing there. When he sees me he gives me that grin.

“Yo Tony,” he says. “I kept the secret. Are we going to help that lady today?”

Was I hoping he would have forgotten?

“What lady?” I ask.

He looks perplexed now.

“That…that…lady, you know Tony.”

“Where?” I ask.

“That lady…under our desk – ”

I stop him dead there, by pretending to fall about laughing.

“Under our desk?” I splutter. What an actor I am. “There’s a lady under our desk? Don’t go telling people that or they’ll think you’ve gone crackers!” and although I feel as mean as hell when I see how confused he looks, I do the big laughing act again.

“But…” he starts, “that lady…” and he tails off, really troubled now.

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