Aliens In The Family by Margaret Mahy Page B

everyone thinks I can ride. David's parting words to her when he had last seen her over a year ago had been about horses.
    "Sweetheart, you'll love it out in the country. Your granny is a dear, even if she does blame me for everything, and there'll be Pet's horses for you to ride. You'll be better off with the horses than with me—at least until I get my life reorganized." And now David was settled and Jake was saddled with a lot of imaginary horses. She felt them trotting invisibly alongside her, sneering with their yellow teeth, angry at being called into half-life and never truly ridden. At least if they stand on my foot it doesn't hurt, she thought, recalling how agonizing it was when Cooney stood on her foot back at the stables before the ride. In the shadows of the bush she smiled a little at her thoughts.
    Surrounded by the shaggy bark of manuka trees, their tiny leaves speckling the air above, the riders continued in single file. Shortly however they came out onto a hunched shoulder of rock and grass that protruded from the bush making enough room for them all to gather in a group, to look across the tree tops falling away with the slope below them, and to see not only a vast sky, but also the open valley beyond.
    "We'll be able to canter when we get down there," said Philippa, pointing to Webster's Valley. The bird sang again. It was surprising that anything so clear and simple could also be eerie, but it was partly the great clarity that made it ghostly in a world where everything else was softened and blurred with shadows.
    "Is it really haunted?" asked Jake.
    "Not here," replied Philippa, "but where we're heading—Webster's Valley—that's supposed to be haunted. Not that I've ever seen a ghost there myself, but I know all about it. A man called Sebastian Webster saw ghosts sometime during the 1830s. He wrote about it. You'll find it in the New Zealand Room at the Library—it's called 'An Account of Strange Appearances in the New Zealand Forest, by Sebastian Webster, Sailor and Whaler and Pakeha Maori'."
    "What a title!" commented David. "But what was Sebastian Webster, Sailor and Whaler, doing here during the 1830s?"
    "He came out to New Zealand to work on the whaling boats and ended up living with the Maoris," Philippa said, turning her head so that her voice would carry to the children behind her. "He had a Maori wife and family—there are still Websters living over the hill. Anyhow, he was coming home through this valley one day with two of his Maori friends—they'd been visiting the whaling station further round the coast and had stopped off to help the Martins at Martins Bay do a bit of pit-sawing—and they actually saw... well, Sebastian Webster said they saw ghosts."
    "There's no such thing," said Jake scornfully. "Must have been shadows they saw."
    "Well, I don't think it was quite as simple as that," Philippa answered. "He says they were walking home from Martins Bay when there was an earthquake—okay, nothing very strange so far. But he maintained that after the earthquake they could no longer find their way through the bush. Everything had altered and they got lost. Then there was another earthquake and after that, pitch-black night! They blundered about, very frightened by what was happening, and eventually came across a lighted glade full of mannikins and imps. Some had wings and one was blue, there was one in the shape of a horse, and all of them were outlined in silver fire."
    "I'd die if I saw a ghost," said Dora sombrely. "I believe in ghosts. I'm inhibited."
    "You mean 'intuitive'," Philippa corrected her. "Sebastian says the mannikins argued amongst themselves—at least their lips moved although he couldn't hear any sound. However he says his earring protected him—I think it was his earring—some charm the Maoris had given him, anyway. The ghosts took fright and vanished in a fountain of fire. Now, you have to admit that's more than shadows, Jake!"
    "Sebastian Webster was a sort of