The Secret of Platform 13 Read Online Free PDF

he’s a Trottle and he thinks Mrs Trottle is his mother and—’
    ‘But she isn’t! She isn’t! She’s a wicked woman and a thief.’
    ‘Yes, that’s true,’ said Odge. ‘But if he’s a royal prince it will be difficult for him to hate his mother and—’ She broke off, not wanting to say more.
    ‘It could be a dangerous journey,’ said the Queen.
    Odge drew herself up to her full height which was not very great. Her green eye glinted and her brown eye glared. ‘I am a hag,’ she said huffily . ‘ I am Odge-with-the-Tooth.’ She stepped forward and opened her mouth very wide, and the Queen could indeed see a glimmer of blue right at the back. ‘Darkness and Danger is meat and drink to hags.’
    The King and Queen knew this to be true – but it was absurd to send such a little girl. It was out of the question.
    ‘Sometimes I cough frogs,’ said Odge – and blushed because it wasn’t true. Once she had coughed something that she thought might be a tadpole, but it hadn’t been.
    ‘Why do you want to go?’ asked the King.
    ‘I just want to,’ said Odge. ‘I want to so much that I feel it must be meant .’
    There was a long pause. Then the Queen said: ‘Odge, if you were allowed to go, what would you say to the Prince when you first saw him?’
    ‘I wouldn’t say anything,’ said Odge. ‘I’d bring him a present.’
    ‘What kind of a present?’ asked the King.
    Odge told him.

Four
    ‘Well, this is it!’ said Ernie Hobbs, floating past the boarded-up Left Luggage Office and coming to rest on an old mailbag. ‘This is the day!’
    He was a thin ghost with a drooping moustache, still dressed in the railway porter’s uniform he’d worn when he worked in the station. Ernie hated the new-fangled luggage trolleys, taking the bread out of the mouths of honest men who used to carry people’s suitcases. He also had a sorrow because after he died his wife had married again, and when he went to haunt his old house, Ernie could see a man called Albert Fisher sitting in Ernie’s old chair with a napkin tied round his nasty neck, eating the bangers and mash that Ernie’s wife had cooked for him.
    All the same, Ernie was a hero. It was he who had seen Mrs Trottle snatch the baby Prince outside the fish shop and tried to glide after the Rolls Royce and stop her – and when that hadn’t worked he’d bravely floated through the gump (although wind tunnels do awful things to the stuff that ghosts are made of) and brought the dreadful news to the sailors waiting in the Cove.
    Since then, for nine long years, Ernie and the other station ghosts had kept watch on the Trottles’ house and now they waited to welcome the rescuers and show them the way.
    ‘Are you going to say anything?’ asked Mrs Partridge. ‘About . . . you know . . . Raymond?’
    She was an older ghost than Ernie and remembered the war and how friendly everyone had been, with the soldiers crowding the station and always ready for a chat. Being a spectre suited her: her legs had been dreadful when she was alive – all swollen and sore from scrubbing floors all day and she never got over feeling as free and light as air.
    Ernie shook his head. ‘Don’t think so,’ he said. ‘No point in upsetting them. They’ll find out soon enough.’
    Mrs Partridge nodded. She never believed in making trouble – and a very pale, frail ghost called Miriam Hughes-Hughes agreed. She’d been an apologizing lady – one of those people whose voices come over the loudspeaker all day saying ‘sorry’ to travellers because their trains are late. No one can do that for long and stay healthy and she had died quite young of sadness and pneumonia.
    They were a close band, the spectres who haunted platform thirteen. The Ghosts of the Gump, they called themselves, and they didn’t have much truck with outsiders. There was the ghost of a train spotter called Brian who’d got between the buffers and the 9.15 from Peterborough, and the ghost of the old