There was a long silence, and then it sounded as if Martin had crossed the room and was standing next to the door. ‘I have to be careful. I don’t want the others to hear me. I don’t know how many of them are sleeping.’
‘What others? What are you talking about? How can I hear you but not see you?’
‘Kathy, you have to find a way to get me out of here. That witch-woman that Rob was talking about. Maybe she knows how.’
‘Martin, if it’s really you, you’re doing my head in. How can I find a way to get you out of here if you’re not here?’
‘I am here. I’m shut up in that priest’s hole, along with the rest of them. You have to get me out, Kathy, or else I’ll never get out. And I mean never. I’m begging you.’
‘Martin, this is scaring me to death.’
‘Shhh!’
Katharine was about to ask Martin how he had become trapped when she heard whispering outside in the corridor. Sharp, persistent whispering, between at least three or four people. She sat up in bed and drew back the quilt as quietly as she could. The whispering went on and on, and it sounded like an argument.
‘So where is he?’
‘How should I know? I’m not his keeper.’
‘You could have fucking waited. Both of you.’
‘Stop fretting, will you? It’s the first of the fulness tomorrow. If we don’t find him tonight we’ll find him then.’
The whispering continued, although the whisperers must have been walking away along the corridor because Katharine could no longer distinguish what they were saying. Eventually their voices faded altogether, and apart from the rain and the sibilant whistling of the wind down the chimneys, Allhallows Hall was quiet again.
‘Martin?’ said Katharine. She began to wonder if she was asleep and having a nightmare, although she could feel the bobbly stitching on the quilt and the lumpy mattress that she was sitting on, and she could make out the looming mahogany wardrobe and the outline of the door. She hesitated to reach over and switch on the bedside lamp in case she saw that Martin really wasn’t there, or in case he suddenly appeared. She didn’t know which would frighten her more.
‘Martin? Say something.’
There was no answer. She waited a little longer and then she clicked on the lamp. Even if Martin had been nothing more than a watery outline, she couldn’t see him.
She said, ‘Martin? Are you still there?’ but he didn’t reply. Suddenly she felt deeply cold, all the way down her spine, and she started to shiver. She tried to say ‘Martin’ again, but her teeth were chattering and she couldn’t even pronounce his name.
After a minute she stood up, went to the window and drew the curtains. Outside, over the moor, the sky was beginning to clear. She went back to the bed and sat down again, still shivering. She had never felt so helpless in her life.
24
Rob called Sergeant Billings at Crownhill police station, but was told that he wouldn’t be back for at least an hour because he was attending a serious car accident on the A388 at Polborder. He had only just put down his phone, though, when there was a brisk knock at the door. Vicky went to answer it and found John Kipling standing outside, brushing the rain off his crimson anorak.
‘John, come in,’ said Rob. ‘Has Francis been in touch?’
John entered the hallway and prised off his wellingtons. It had stopped raining now, and three DSR volunteers were standing outside in the courtyard having a smoke. A black-and-white border collie in a waterproof dog parka was sitting patiently beside them, its tongue lolling out, next to the headless cherub.
‘Yes…’ said John. ‘I was halfway up the side of Cox Tor when he called me. I don’t know what to think. I gather there’s been no sign of her?’
‘No. We’ve searched the house all over again, every nook and cranny, believe me, but she’s totally vanished. And I’m supposing that there’s no trace of Timmy, either.’
‘Sorry, no. We’ve had three drones circling all around for most of the morning, but nothing. Only a few stray sheep.’
He paused, and then he said, ‘Francis told me all about that hammer that was used to kill your dad – how the police found your DNA on it and everything. I mean, how weird is that?’
He paused again. ‘Have you told them about Ada yet? I think I’m still in shock about that.’
‘Not yet, but we’ll have to. And about my brother, Martin, too, if he doesn’t show up. Listen – you know those blankets that were lying on the floor in the “witching room” or whatever you want to call it. It looked as if somebody had disturbed them, so I’ve brought one down. I was going to ask Sergeant Billings to send a police dog up here to see if it could pick up a scent from it, but since you’ve got one of your search dogs here already – maybe he could have a sniff.’
‘Well, yes. Sure. Why not?’
John was about to call to his companions in the courtyard when Katharine appeared halfway down the stairs. Her blonde hair was sticking up as if it had been lifted by static electricity and her face was as pale as oatmeal.
‘Katharine! What’s wrong?’ asked Vicky, going over to the foot of the stairs. ‘You haven’t been sick again, have you?’
Katharine came slowly down the last remaining stairs. ‘It’s Martin. He came into the bedroom and he whispered to me, but he wasn’t there.’
‘What? Come and sit down. I’m sorry, but you look terrible.’
They went into the drawing room. Grace and Portia stood up so that Katharine could sit down on the sofa. She was shaking uncontrollably and Vicky sat beside her and took hold of her hands.
‘My God, Katharine, you’re freezing! Rob – would you fetch her coat for her?’
Katharine looked at her in desperation. ‘I was nearly asleep and then I felt him touch me. He said that he was trapped in that priest’s hole and he didn’t know how to get out. He pleaded with me to help him. I don’t understand how he could have been trapped in that priest’s hole but yet he was whispering to me in the bedroom at the same time. I thought for a moment that I must be having a bad dream or going mad. But Vicky, I felt him, and I heard him, I swear it. I heard him as clear as anything! And then I heard more of them whispering outside the door, and it sounded as if they were looking for him.’
Rob came back in with Katharine’s overcoat and draped it around her shoulders. She clutched it tightly around her, still shaking as if she had Parkinson’s.
Vicky looked up to Rob. ‘Martin’s still here in the house, Rob. I know it’s crazy, but he must be. And if he’s still here, what are the chances that Timmy’s still here, too, and Ada?’
John said, ‘After what Francis was telling me, I believe now that there’s a very good chance of that. And I’m not saying that because I believe in half the stories that folks around here tell about hobgoblins and piskies and ghosts and Old Dewer. I’m saying that because the DSR have never conducted a search as thorough and as wide-ranging as the one we’ve been carrying out for your Timmy and never found not the slightest trace at all. We always find something – a footprint, or a fragment of wool that’s got snagged on a brimmel. But this time, nothing at all. Even supposing somebody drove right past the front of the house here and collected him, the dogs didn’t pick up even the faintest scent going out from here to the road.’
‘But – Jesus – we couldn’t have gone through the house more thoroughly if we’d demolished it stone by stone,’ said Rob. ‘What I can’t work out is how these people can be here and yet not here. Francis said they might be nothing but energy. All right, supposing they are, how do we find them and how do we get them back to reality? That’s if it’s even possible to get them back.’
John raised both eyebrows. ‘Right now, your guess is as good as mine. And Francis didn’t seem to have too much of a clue either. But there are so many stories about Nicholas Owen and the priest’s holes he built. There are still at least a dozen of them that have been written about in the histories of the various houses where he fitted them, but which n
obody has ever been able to find.
‘What I’m asking myself now is: why can nobody find them? Is it because his carpentry was so clever, or did he discover some way of installing them in what you might call a different dimension? You know, like a sort of a parallel universe. That’s what Francis was trying to explain to me, more or less, although he was pretty sure that the priest’s hole in this house might have been changed into a witching room later on, by somebody else.’
‘Yes, he told us that Nicholas Owen would never have used a crucifix,’ said Rob. ‘He reckoned that whoever did it mixed some kind of strange chemicals into the plaster, so that if somebody went into the room and they said this special incantation, that person would get stuck in time for ever. It sounds bonkers, doesn’t it? I mean, it sounds utterly and completely bonkers. If Timmy and Ada and Martin weren’t missing and if Vicky and me hadn’t felt and heard those whispering people for ourselves, I think we’d turn ourselves in to the local mental hospital and beg to be sectioned. Katharine, too, after what she’s just been through.’
‘Let’s make a start, anyway,’ said John. ‘I’ll have Bazza bring his dog in, and he can have a good snuffle at that blanket.’
He went back to the front door and Rob followed him. The volunteers out in the courtyard were flicking their cigarette ends away and they looked as if they were getting ready to leave.
John called out, ‘Bazza? Do you want fetch Pluto into the house here for a moment?’
‘Okay – but I warn you, John, his paws are proper gacky!’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ said Rob. ‘This is a lot more important than a few muddy footprints.’
‘So long as you’re not bothered.’
Bazza looped Pluto’s lead twice more around his fist and started to walk the collie towards the house. He had only gone three or four steps, though, before Pluto stopped, and went completely rigid, his legs as stiff as pokers.
‘Come on, Ploots, what’s got into you, ya mackerel?’
Bazza tugged at Pluto’s lead again and again, and whistled, and clucked, and snapped, ‘Come on, will ya?’ but the collie refused to budge. When Bazza began to drag him across the courtyard, he started to bark, not just angrily, but hysterically, almost as if he were screaming, and wouldn’t stop.
‘What the devil’s got into him, Bazza?’ called John.
‘I don’t have a notion. He’s never behaved this way before. Normally, like, he’s not scared off by nothing! You could drive a tractor straight at him and he wouldn’t flinch an inch!’
‘Look, there must be something about this house that gives dogs the willies,’ said Rob. ‘There was a police dog here the other day and he wouldn’t come near it either. Perhaps it has a smell to it that puts them off, even though humans can’t smell it. I’ll bring the blanket out and he can have a sniff of it outside.’
He went back inside and returned with the blanket over his arm, which he carried over to Bazza and Pluto. The other two volunteers were watching, half in interest and half in amusement.
‘You’ve lost control of him there, Baz! Just like your missus!’
‘You shut your cakehole!’ Bazza retorted, although Pluto was barking so furiously now and straining on his lead so hard that he was having trouble keeping his balance. ‘For Christ’s sake, Ploots, you gurt gawk! Hold still, will you?’
Rob patiently waited, but it was obvious that Pluto wasn’t going to calm down.
‘It’s no use,’ John told him. ‘Whatever’s got into Pluto there, it’s spookified him good and proper. Bazza – why don’t you take the poor fellow away before he barks his head off?’
Bazza took Pluto off down the shingle driveway, although it was Pluto who was doing all the pulling, as if he couldn’t put enough distance between himself and Allhallows Hall. When he reached the road he stopped barking, but he turned his head around to look back at the house and Rob could see that his eyes were bulging as if he had been seriously frightened.
Rob and John went back inside. Rob dropped the blanket down behind the elephant’s-foot umbrella stand and sniffed his fingers. ‘I don’t know about this blanket. I can smell grease and dried sweat, but nothing else. Obviously poor old Pluto picked up some smell that really scared him.’
He looked around the hallway and said, ‘This house only smells musty to me, but for some reason dogs hate it.’
‘Yes, but a dog’s sense of smell is forty times keener than ours, isn’t it?’ said John. ‘And they’ve done some recent tests that show that when dogs pick up a scent, they can actually create a mental picture of it. Like a ball, or a toy, or even a lost child. Whatever it is that scares them about this house, they can actually see it.’
‘It’s a pity they can’t talk. Then they could tell us what it is.’
Vicky was waiting for Rob by the fire. Katharine was still hunched up on the sofa, bundled up in her coat, and Grace had made her a mug of tea to warm her up. Portia was standing in front of the painting of the pagan mass, with its gathering of hooded figures. She was studying it with such concentration that Rob could have imagined she was trying to pick out the face of somebody she knew.
‘What happened?’ asked Vicky. ‘I heard barking.’
‘Barking!’ said Rob. ‘I think that just about sums up the whole of these past few days.’
He clamped his hand over his mouth for a moment, and squeezed his eyes tight shut to hold back the tears. When he took his hand away, he said miserably, ‘All I want is Timmy back, safe and sound. That’s all I want. And I want to know that Martin’s safe too. But how do people bear it when they lose their children? How do they bear it? How can you keep on going into the future when you’ve left your child in the past?’
Vicky came up to him and put her arms around him, and Grace came up and embraced him, too. John could only stand there, looking grave, while they hugged each and wept.
Portia turned round from the painting and said, ‘Just look at this picture. It’s like everything that’s been happening in this house. If you ask me, it’s all the Devil’s work.’
25
Ada felt overwhelmingly tired, and she would have done anything to lie on her side on the horsehair matting and close her eyes for an hour or two. But she stayed sitting upright. She was all too aware of the men gathered at the far end of the room, and how they were glancing in her direction from time to time as if they were checking that she was still awake.
She had read dozens of books by mediums who had made believable claims that they had encountered spirits and departed souls. Even more convincingly, she had seen and felt for herself the resonance of more than thirty people who had left this world and gone to the Otherland. She had never agreed with Francis that their resonance was nothing more than an emotional echo of the life they had recently left, and that it would eventually fade altogether, in the same way that an echo eventually dies.
She had seen the spirits of at least three people who had been deceased for more than five years. The most memorable had been a widow standing on the beach at Heybrook Bay, waiting for a drowned husband who would never return to her. This widow had been visible only intermittently, nothing more than a darker shadow that flickered in the persistent sea breeze, her scarf flapping behind her, but Ada had been able to see her twice. Once, she was sure she had heard her calling out her husband’s name.
Because of this and all her other experiences as a ‘charmer’, Ada was convinced that the men who were gathered in this witching room were not spirits, or ghosts, or phantoms, or however dead souls were usually labelled – they were all still alive. Spellbound, but alive.
In spite of that, their movements appeared to Ada to be narrowly constrained by the spell they were under. ‘Spell’ sounded like something out of a fairy story, but it was the best description of it that she could think of, since it meant both a state of enchantment and an indeterminate period of time.
She guessed that the men were visible at certain times – visible to her, at least, like the
y were now, and each other – even if nobody else who came into the witching room could see them. While they were visible, it seemed as if they had no choice but to stay penned up in here. At other times, though, they seemed to be able to roam invisibly around the house in some form or another, whispering, angry, frustrated, and even capable of hitting and pushing the people who were staying there.
She wondered if they were angry and frustrated not only because they were trapped in time, but because they were trapped in Allhallows Hall, too. They might be able to wander around the house, but if they couldn’t take their physical bodies with them they wouldn’t be able to leave it.
She tilted her head tiredly back against the wall. She had been friends with Francis for at least five years, and she knew how knowledgeable he was when it came to spells and necromancy, as well as physics. She prayed that he was doing everything he could to devise a way to release her from this temporal suspension, and out of this stuffy, airless, horsehair-smelling room.
Behind the stained-glass windows, the light was beginning to fade. The thought of the night approaching filled her with dread. What was it going to be like in total darkness, with all of these men? To begin with, she had counted only seven or eight, but now she could see that there were more, at least eleven, and more seemed to be appearing all the time. They seemed to rise up off the floor, as if from nowhere, and their whispered conversation grew louder and more insistent.
‘You must – we must – there must be a way—’
‘Now that he’s gone – I wish that I could go out and spit on his grave—’
‘No, they’ll cremate him – ashes to ashes – mistrust to dust—’
*
Ada closed her eyes for a few moments. When she opened them again she found Jaws crouching down close beside her, his face half in shadow now, but enough for her to see that he was smiling with that enigmatic, self-satisfied smile.
‘You trying to doze off there, love? You’ll be lucky. It’s not bedtime yet and it never will be.’
The House of a Hundred Whispers Page 16
