The House of a Hundred Whispers

by Graham Masterton

  ‘No. Just thinking, that’s all. What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. Just felt like being friendly, that’s all.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m not in the mood. Why don’t you crocky down somewhere else and be friendly?’

  ‘Hah! You’re a right local girl, aren’t you? Talk like fucking pirates, you lot. Oooh this and aaarrh that. But there’s no point in you being all shirty. You’re going to need a mate, I’ll tell you that for nothing. It’s going to be dark before you know it and some of these blokes have been shut up here since the fucking millennium.’

  ‘I told you to go away. I’m not interested in you being my “mate”, thank you very much, and I can take care of myself.’

  ‘Oh, you think so? Couldn’t stop us from chanting you, could you? Even with your friends there.’

  ‘What do you mean, “chanting”?’

  Jaws pressed his fingertips to his forehead as if he were trying to remember something that had slipped his mind, but then she realised that he must be visualising the moment when he himself had been trapped in this room. For him, that must have happened only a split second ago, and yet it was years ago, too. The day after Derby Day, nineteen seventy-nine.

  ‘The chanting is the words that freeze you. Don’t ask me who made them up or what half of them mean. We all know them now because we’ve heard them so often we could Wallace and Gromit. In any case, I went down to old Russarse’s library one fulness and took a shufti through his book of mumbo-jumbo for myself.’

  He didn’t explain himself any further but continued to stare at Ada as if he could see right through her eyes and into her head. It made her feel so uncomfortable, almost as if he were sliding his hand into her jeans, and so she turned away and looked towards the other end of the room, where the opening dado was – the door to reality that she was powerless to open.

  ‘You’re cream-crackered, aren’t you, love?’ Jaws asked her, after a while.

  She kept her head turned away. ‘Leave me alone, will you? Whatever you’ve got to say to me, I’m not interested and I don’t want to hear it.’

  Instead of standing up and leaving her, Jaws shuffled himself even closer. Every breath she took in was pungent with his Old Spice aftershave.

  ‘What you can’t work out is, how can you be cream-crackered when it’s still exactly the same time as it was when you first come in here? I saw you looking at your watch. What about Father Thomas, how can he be tired when as far as he’s concerned he’s still back in sixteen- hundred-and-whenever-it-was? Father Thomas hasn’t aged a second, let alone three and a half fucking centuries.’

  ‘I’m not listening to you so you might as well shut your teeth.’

  Jaws ignored her, and again he cupped his hand over her knee to get her attention.

  ‘We never need no sleep, not us, not in the way we used to sleep before we was banged up in here. We just don’t need it. But our heads get worn out from thinking, do you know what I mean? Your brain can’t go on like a fucking washing machine, turning over the same thing again and again and again. You’d go mum and dad if it did. So now and then we have to have a bit of a lie-down and we call that having a “weary”.’

  Ada turned back to look at him. She couldn’t decide from his expression if he was being genuinely helpful or lascivious. He slowly raised his hand off her knee, but he didn’t take his eyes off her and he didn’t blink.

  ‘How long for?’ she asked him.

  ‘How long do we have a weary for? It all depends, love. It depends on how long we’ve been in here and what kind of a state we’re in – you know, up here.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘Some of these blokes, they’re right nutters. Others, it’s hard to tell. They keep themselves to themselves and you can never work out what’s going on inside of their heads. See that bloke next to the wall there – the one with the glasses and that long grey shirt untucked? Professor Corkscrew they call him, and believe me you don’t want to know why. But I don’t think I’ve heard him say more than ten words the whole time he’s been here, and two of them was “eff off”.’

  ‘How many men are here altogether? Do you know?’

  ‘Seventeen, love. I’ve been here long enough to know them all, even though you never see them all at once, simultaneous-like, on account of them all having a weary at different times. But give yourself a year or two, and you’ll get to know them all, too. That bloke with the droopy moustache, that’s Wellie. You want to stay well away from Wellie, he’s a fucking headcase. It’s a good thing there’s no kettles in here. That was Wellie’s favourite trick,in the nick if you crossed him. Boil a kettle of water, mix it up with sugar, and pour it all over your bonce. But – you know – even the nuttiest of nutters have hearts.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘What do you think? It means they have wives and girlfriends – or boyfriends, some of them. They have mums and dads and kids of their own. But they ain’t going to see none of them again, never. Once old Russell was brown bread, at least we was able to go up into the attic and go through our suitcases. All of us had family photos in our luggage, and personal letters, and now we’ve got them back. Mind you, I’m not sure if it doesn’t stick the knife in even harder, having all those photos of somebody you ain’t never going to be able to put your arms round again and reading the letters they’ve sent you over and over until you know every fucking word of them off by heart.’

  ‘Aren’t there any women here?’

  ‘No, love. Only you. That’s why I said you should have left well enough alone.’

  It had grown so dark now that Ada could barely see him – only the glitter of his eyes. The only light was a faint red-and-green glow behind the stained-glass window at the end of the second bedroom. The door must have been left open, and the landing light was shining along the corridor.

  Jaws stood up. ‘You want my advice, love? Take each day as it comes, because you’ve got more days coming to you than you can ever count. You’ll never get any older, so you might as well try to get wiser. I never pretended to be the nicest bloke in the world, and who knows, I might be tempted to take advantage of you, too, because you’re a looker, no mistake about that. But I’m here if you need me.’

  Ada sat there in the darkness, breathing her last breath over and over again.

  ‘So why do they call you Jaws?’ she asked him, and she realised that she was whispering, too.

  ‘Lots of reasons. One of them is, I don’t never bite off more than what I can chew.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Another one is, my bite is a whole lot worse than my bark.’

  He went back to join the rest of the men, who were whispering together in the far corner. She strained her ears to hear if they were whispering about her, but their voices were too sibilant and soft. They sounded like a troop of sad children traipsing their way slowly through heaps of autumn leaves. Whisper, whisper, whisper.

  The red-and-green light in the stained-glass bedroom window was suddenly extinguished, so somebody must have closed the door – somebody in that other world from which she had now been cut off. Now she understood how people must feel in that very last moment of brain-consciousness, when they die.

  She started to recite some of the Dartmoor poems she knew. If she kept her thoughts varied, and interesting, maybe she wouldn’t succumb to this so-called weary. If there was one thing that Jaws had said to her that had given her a cold crawling feeling of dread, it was ‘I might be tempted to take advantage of you, too’.

  26

  Katharine was still so shaken that Vicky gave her two of her Unisom and helped her back up to bed. Rob had suggested that both of them should call for a taxi and go to spend the night at the Tavistock House Hotel, but Katharine didn’t want to leave Allhallows Hall in case Martin made some kind of reappearance, and Vicky wanted to stay because she was convinced now that Timmy was still somewhere in the house.

  ‘She’s fasters,’ said Vicky, when she came back downstairs. Rob and Grac
e and Portia were sitting around the fire. They had left the television on, but mute. Seeing a Sky newsreader’s face helped them to feel less isolated, and that there was still an ordinary world out there, with ordinary people in it.

  ‘We still haven’t heard from Francis,’ said Rob. ‘I was hoping he might be able to find out what in the name of hell is going on here.’

  Vicky sat down next to him. ‘I couldn’t help thinking while I was upstairs… what if we never see Timmy again, ever? How are we going to go on living? How are we going to forgive ourselves for bringing him here? And what if we never see Martin again, either?’

  ‘I’m not allowing myself to think like that yet. If Katharine heard Martin whispering to her, then he must still be here. And if Martin’s still here, there’s every chance that Timmy’s still here. And Ada. I’m beginning to believe that John was right about a parallel dimension, if that’s what you want to call it. And if you can go into a parallel dimension, surely you can come back out of it.’

  ‘I was reading about that the other day,’ put in Portia. ‘Quite a lot of scientists think that there’s an infinite number of parallel dimensions, and that they’re all just like this one, except they all have very subtle differences. Like, we’ll all be in them, all of us, but dressed a little differently, and talking a little differently, and maybe the colour of our eyes will be different. And when we go outside, the grass will be a different shade of green, if it’s green at all, and there’ll be different birds and trees.’

  ‘It sounds like Alice In Wonderland,’ said Vicky.

  ‘Well, perhaps that’s where Lewis Carroll got the idea from. He used to visit Alice in her family’s big house in Oxford, didn’t he? Perhaps that house had presences, too, just like this one.’

  ‘I feel as if I’m dreaming this,’ said Grace. ‘I hope and pray I don’t hear any of that whispering tonight. I’m not sure I can take any more of it. I don’t care who it is.’

  Portia reached across the sofa and held Grace’s hand. At the same moment, there was a knock at the front door. They all looked at each other. It was dark outside now. Was it good news or bad news, or no news at all? Was it better to keep on hoping, or to be told that the volunteers had found a body?

  Rob went to open the door and found DI Holley standing outside, with DC Cutland.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, and held out both of his hands as if he were expecting to be handcuffed. ‘Come to arrest me, have you?’

  ‘Not this evening, Mr Russell, no,’ said DI Holley. ‘We won’t receive the final DNA analysis until tomorrow at the earliest. But we’ve made some interesting progress with all that luggage you found in the attic here. May we come in?’

  ‘Of course, yes. Come through to the library.’

  The two detectives took off their raincoats and then they followed Rob into the library and sat down. DI Holley was carrying a black plastic file, which he placed on the table in front of him and opened up. Rob could see that the first sheet of paper in it bore the letterhead of Dartmoor Prison.

  ‘We paid a visit to the prison this afternoon and I must say the governor was most cooperative. She gave us access to all the inmate records going back more than forty years. Who was locked up there, who was released and who was transferred.’

  ‘And did you find out who all these suitcases belonged to, and why they were stored in the attic?’

  ‘We found out who they belonged to, yes. Every one of them belonged to an inmate who was serving a sentence during the time that your father, Herbert Russell, was governor. There were thirteen of them altogether, and every one of them had been convicted of corruption or fraud. As you know, Dartmoor is only a C-category prison, so that’s where they send white-collar criminals, although “white-collar” is stretching it a bit with some of them.’

  DC Cutland leaned over and read a name from the list in DI Holley’s file.

  ‘Here’s one. Jeremy Porter, more commonly known as Jez the Jeweller. He made a fortune out of faking diamond certificates and selling inferior gemstones in Hatton Garden for a huge mark-up. Anybody who complained or threatened to squeal on him would have their fingers crushed in a taxi door, and be told in no uncertain terms why it had happened. Except nobody could prove that Jez was behind it, which was why he was only category C.’

  ‘The list goes on,’ said DI Holley. ‘And during the nineteen years that your father was governor, every one of these inmates was transferred from Dartmoor to HMP Ford, which is an open prison in Sussex. The records show that he’d assessed every one of them as suitable candidates for a special rehabilitation programme called Social Conscience, and that this programme could see them being granted a much earlier release. Some of them might have as much as four or five years knocked off their sentences.

  ‘Every one of their transfers to Ford was signed off by your father and the head of the Offender Management Unit.’

  ‘But if they were being transferred to this open prison, what the hell were their suitcases doing in his attic?’

  ‘That, I’m afraid, we don’t yet know. We’ve tried contacting HMP Ford but the governor is away at a conference until Monday and the staff who deal with inmate records won’t be available until tomorrow.’

  ‘All right. I suppose you’ll be able to tell me tomorrow when you come here to arrest me. I don’t know why you bothered to come here tonight, to be honest with you. I already knew that those suitcases all belonged to prisoners, from the labels.’

  ‘I wanted to see your reaction, Mr Russell.’

  ‘And what has that told you?’

  ‘It’s told me that your father’s death is a lot more complicated than a straightforward quarrel over the ownership of this property. There’s something iffy going on here, in my estimation, something extremely iffy, and it goes deeper than you’ve been letting on.’

  ‘You still don’t seriously believe I killed my father? Have you contacted any of my witnesses yet?’

  ‘Surrey police are doing that for us. We should have heard by tomorrow. Once they’ve been in touch I’ll be wanting to have a word with your missus, too.’

  ‘“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”,’ Rob quoted. ‘And now you might as well know, my brother, Martin, went missing last night and still hasn’t turned up yet, and so has a young woman called Ada Grey who came to visit us.’

  DI Holley stared at him as if he couldn’t believe what he had just heard. DC Cutland looked at DI Holley as if to say, Is this a wind-up?

  ‘I think you need to tell us a bit more, don’t you, Mr Russell?’ said DI Holley. ‘When you say “went missing”, what exactly do you mean?’

  Rob’s head slumped down. He felt infinitely tired.

  ‘I wish I knew. I wish I knew but I don’t. “Missing” as in “not here any more”, that’s all I can tell you.’

  DI Holley was thoughtfully tapping his middle finger on the table.

  ‘“Missing as in not here any more”?’ he repeated. ‘That’s not very helpful, now is it? That’s not very helpful at all.’

  *

  Before they left, DI Holley and DC Cutland went into the drawing room to speak to Vicky and Grace and Portia.

  ‘When exactly was the last time you ladies saw these two missing persons?’ asked DI Holley.

  ‘The last time we saw Martin was early yesterday evening,’ Vicky told him. ‘He and his wife, Katharine, went into Tavistock for something to eat. We heard them come back but it was late and we didn’t see them. We heard Katharine go up to bed but we didn’t hear Martin.’ She didn’t add that they had both sounded drunk, and how fiercely they had been arguing.

  Rob said, ‘In the morning his coat was on the sofa but he was gone, and we haven’t heard from him since.’

  ‘Where’s his missus now?’

  ‘Asleep at the moment,’ said Vicky. ‘She’s extremely upset.’

  ‘You’ll be able to talk to her when you come back tomorrow,’ said Rob. None of them mentioned that Katharine thought she had heard
Martin whispering to her in her bedroom.

  ‘And this Ada Grey? When and how did she go missing?’

  ‘She came here early this afternoon because she was interested in seeing this house.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘Well, it’s supposed to be haunted, and she’s a medium.’

  ‘Oh, talks to your dead granny, all that kind of malarkey? Crystal balls and Ouija boards?’

  ‘That’s about it, yes.’

  ‘So when did she disappear?’

  ‘We’re not sure. About half past one. One minute she was looking around the house and then she wasn’t. We looked everywhere for her, but we couldn’t find her.’

  ‘Does she live locally?’

  ‘Yes, Rundlestone.’

  ‘You’re sure she didn’t just get fed up or bored and leave the house without telling you?’

  ‘Or shit-scared, if it really is haunted,’ put in DC Cutland, without even the hint of a smile.

  Rob didn’t answer that. He was tempted to tell these two detectives everything about the whispering and the witching room and the way that Ada had been dragged into the wall, but he was desperately worried that if the police came barging into the house, knocking holes in walls and lifting up floorboards, the reaction from the whisperers would be even more hostile than it was already. If there was the slightest chance that they could bring Timmy and Martin and Ada back from whatever parallel existence they had been taken to, he didn’t want to jeopardise it.

  ‘Is there any reason you can think of why either of them would have gone missing? Any disagreements? Any personal problems? Depression? Mental illness?’

  Rob shook his head.

  ‘You’ve tried to contact them, I imagine.’

  ‘Martin left his phone here, so we haven’t been able to – and no, we haven’t yet tried to get in touch with Ada.’

  ‘Any reason for that?’

  Yes – she disappeared into a solid wall. How the hell do you think we were going to get in touch with her?

  ‘No – well, we were waiting for her to get in touch with us. She’s what you might call a free spirit. A very independent young woman.’