The Pepper King: A Ghost Story

By Robin Bennett

Deep below Creake Castle there lies a secret...

A ghost story with hidden tunnels to boot. Can Fred solve the mystery of the Pepper King in time to save Creake Castle from being bulldozed?


This is an Adventure story about a remarkable boy, Fred Longshanks, who lives in Creake Castle with his parents and several unruly hedgehogs. It may contain nuts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Monster Books
• Release date: May 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9780957456549

Robin Bennett

Robin Bennett has set up and run over a dozen successful businesses from dog-sitting to tuition to translation. The list is quite exhausting. Robin is married with three young children. He spends his time between Pau in the Pyrenées and Henley-on-Thames.

Book preview

Prologue

The moon shone down, carpeting the Great Lawn in silver as it threw long shadows out across the lake and lit the surrounding countryside like a negative. An owl floated ever so lightly over the tops of the trees by the Back of Beyond and the ancient Grandfather Clock, standing at the foot of the stairs, struck twelve times.

The Witching Hour had begun...

Chapter One

Creake Castle and Fred

Fred was an unusual boy.

For starters, he lived in an old castle called Creake Castle, high on a green hill, with his parents, Sir and Lady Longshanks. It had been there for centuries, and some of the older people in the village whispered that it had originally been built by a sorcerer, which is a kind of magician; though not the sort you would like to meet at a party.

Secondly, Fred said unusual things. ‘We live in a Sumptuous Mansion,’ he once told a group of people standing at the bus stop. Nobody had anything much to say to this, except an old lady, who tutted.

Fred turned to his mother. ‘I’m a cheeky monkey,’ said Fred.

‘Yes,’ said his mother.

A ‘Sumptuous Mansion’ was not, strictly speaking, that accurate. Although Creake Castle was certainly quite large, and the grounds particularly elegant, had the grass been mown once in a while, the Longshanks family were in fact very, very poor. ‘Crumbling Pile’ was probably a better description. Nor was Fred unusual just for living somewhere that was built before plumbing was invented, or for occasionally saying irritating things to people in public places. When he was about two, Fred’s mother had wandered into the playroom to find all Fred’s toys piled on top of the cupboard. Lady Longshanks was surprised. The cupboard was at least six foot tall and Fred was barely two and a half foot. The following week, on peering into the playroom, she was pleased to see all the toys back in their rightful place, on the floor - but rather unhappy about the fact that they seemed to have swapped places with her son, who was beaming down at her from on top of the cupboard. Since then, both his parents were somewhat relieved that Fred had kept his supernatural activities to a minimum. Once in a while he made something move just by looking at it in a funny way, or saw things that should not be there, as we shall shortly find out for ourselves - but, generally speaking, he didn’t go out of his way to be eccentric. He just couldn’t help himself sometimes.

Anyway, the Longshanks had enough on their plate, which usually means quite the opposite, from a practical point of view. They no longer held grand balls or kept lots of horses. In fact they could barely afford to keep Frodo, Fred’s dog, in real dog food. He was the only vegetarian dog Fred knew. Frodo mainly lived off boiled potatoes and lots of cabbage, much like Fred, who would often go for weeks without being bought anything that was remotely bad for him. ‘Not well orf,’ his cousins would say when they came to visit. His mother assured him, however, that although they did not have much money, they were very nice. Young Fred understood this completely. His cousins had stacks of money and they were dreadful. Especially when they came to stay, which they did - all too often.

However, despite the cold cabbage and his cousins coming to stay, Fred would not have swapped his Castle for the world, and neither would his parents. This was all very well - but every year it got harder and harder for them to pay the heating bills and stop the roof caving in. Unfortunately, Fred’s father was not very good at sticking to things, apart from by accident. Usually this meant sticking to jobs. In fact, he seemed to lose jobs the same way that people lost their socks; that is to say, about once a month.

So far Fred’s dad (or Sir Longshanks, to give him his proper name) had been a travelling salesman for a heating firm (he didn’t manage to sell a single heater), the local milkman (he drove the milk van into a pond by mistake and nobody had seen it since), a bicycle repair man (Fred’s dad knew even less about bicycles than he did about milk vans, so you can just imagine how long that one lasted), and a parking inspector (he kept letting people off, which was fine if you wanted to win a popularity contest, but eventually the local town got so full of cars parked illegally, they had to call in the army to sort it all out). And that was just the list of jobs he’d managed to lose so far that year. And it was only July. He sometimes got depressed because of this, and spent a lot of time in his library, high up in one of the towers, where he would talk to no one, not even Fred’s mother, for ages and ages. This was a pity because Fred loved his dad, especially when his dad was cheerful and they were all together as a family doing normal stuff.

In point of fact, the castle was so big you could go for days without seeing anyone, which meant Fred was pretty much used to his own company. Supper was always cooked at 7 o’clock sharp by Mrs. Bee, the housekeeper, and the only other person who lived full time at Creake now. She had