Dot and Mr Holmes are on the attic floor of Dendringham Hall to see if they can find what’s behind the ghostly howlings and the ghostly rider that have been spooking everyone at the Hall for weeks… and it looks like Mr Mouse has led them straight to the spot!!
For a moment Dot thought Mr Holmes was going to fall straight forward through the hidden doorway he’d opened up!
But he got his balance back, pulled out his funny old fashioned lantern and shone it round the edges of the door into the room that had been revealed – a room completely invisible behind the panel with the picture on it.
“Excellent!” said Mr Holmes. “A first class piece of joinery!”
And it was – the skill of the wood-working “joiner” had been superb, where he’d very cleverly placed the wooden panel. There wasn’t a crack anywhere round it to suggest where the secret door was, and as Dot looked at the hinges she could see they were gleaming with oil, so it would swing open silently.
Nowhere for anyone to get through – but whoever had made the secret room, hadn’t thought of a talking mouse, who could get through a crack no thicker than a pencil, and then report back on what he’d found!
Who was now very pleased with himself, of course!
“See!” he said from his little snuggle-away under the shoulder of Dot’s dress. “Told ya!”
“Cool!” Dot said, before she could stop herself… but luckily Mr Holmes was too busy looking at what they’d found to notice she’d used a 21st century expression again.
At first it was quite hard to see exactly what it was they’d found. The room had bare floorboards, and seemed to have no window. Dimly, in the distance, in the part of it that was to the front of the Hall, they could see big, lumpy shapes underneath some heavy old material – looked like the curtains Dot could remember from her Gran’s house when she was very little.
“Better and better!” said Mr Holmes, striding towards the funny shapes, so that the floorboards creaked under his feet and little puffs of dust rose up into the beam of his torch.
He walked right up to the shapes, and, without hesitating, pulled at the corner of the heavy material – Dot could see it was a red and black flower pattern now – and pulled.
“Great Scott!” said Mr Holmes.
And Dot knew her guess was right. Well nearly right!
Standing before them was what looked just like a very old fashioned cinema projector. Except in front of where the light comes out was a huge, shiny disc, with what looked like patterned holes all round its edge.
The machine was made out of a knobbly black material, and had shiny brass handles and knobs all over it. It stood as high as Mr Holmes. As the detective played his lantern over it, they could see a thick black cable snaking away from the base of the machine to a fat brown plug in the wall – much bigger than the ones we have now!
Mr Mouse yawned. “Gotcha whatcha wanted!” he said. “Wake me up when the main feature starts!” Dot felt him snuggling down to go back to sleep.
The front of the machine, with its projector like a gun barrel and the shiny disc, was pushed up close to the inside of the sloping roof of the attic floor – and in front of the disc was a kind of panel in the roof, made up of the slate tiles just like the rest of it, but fitted inside a wooden frame and held in place between two iron runners, which also gleamed with oil.
It reminded Dot a bit of the windows in Giles Langton’s hidden cottage, and the way they slid open to let the light and air into the hidden cottage underneath the bank of ferns in the Dendringham Woods.
But that wasn’t all.
Next to it was what Dot’s Nan used to call a “gramophone player” – a heavy wooden box in a beautifully marked wood, with brass fastenings at each corner and another disc, this time in a shiny black material, lying down. It smelt all funny and musty.
It was like a big, old-fashioned version of the little record player Mum had got out from the loft once to play Dot some old vinyl discs of the songs that were hits ages ago. Dot could remember one called ‘Shang-A-Lang’ by a band called the Bay City Rollers that she’d been humming for weeks afterwards!
Resting on the middle of the disc was a spindly kind of metal arm with a needle at the end of it. But it was the other end that caught Dot’s attention.
It was huge horn thing, like a very big trumpet, at least three feet round.
“I think we have found our ghostly rider!” said Mr Holmes with a chuckle. “What an extraordinary apparatus! I wonder how it works?”
They were about to find out! No sooner had the words left Mr Holmes’ lips, than with a low humming sound, the room was lit up with a dim yellowy light from a fat old light bulb hanging just above them.
The two machines in front of them started to make a whirring noise.
And then –
“AROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
