The House of a Hundred Whispers

by Graham Masterton

  DI Holley gave DC Cutland a look that clearly meant: Independent young women, nothing but trouble. Then he said, ‘Very well. I’ll report both of them as mispers even though neither of them have yet been gone for twenty-four hours and they’re both responsible adults. You’ll let us know immediately, won’t you, if either or both of them turn up?’

  Rob showed the detectives to the door. While he was buttoning up his raincoat, DI Holley looked around the hallway and said, ‘There’s definitely something iffy going on here. I can feel it in my water.’

  As he said that, a fork of lightning flickered over Pew Tor, only half a mile away, and it was followed almost immediately by a colossal rumble of thunder, like a hundred barrels rolling down a flight of stairs. Somewhere in the darkness, a black kite screamed in panic.

  27

  Ada opened her eyes. She had the most extraordinary sensation that she was weightless, and that she was sliding up the wall behind her. She found that she was standing up, and even though the witching room was dark, she could vaguely see the wavering outlines of at least eight or nine men, like the reflected ripples at the bottom of a well.

  ‘She’s up,’ whispered one of them, and the rest of them whispered in what sounded like excitement. At first Ada couldn’t make out what they were saying, but then she heard a voice say, quite clearly, ‘There… I told you she wouldn’t be able to hold off the weary much longer. None of us did, the first time we were chanted.’

  There was more whispering, and then she heard a swishing sound as somebody approached her. Chilly fingers took hold of her hand, and she tried to wrench herself away, but the fingers clutched her even tighter.

  ‘Don’t be frightened. It’s me, Thomas. I’ll take care of you.’ He was so close that she could smell the stale incense on his cassock, and his musty breath.

  ‘What’s happening to me? I feel… I feel like a ghost.’

  ‘You’re having a weary. Your physical body is resting, to recover from the shock of your chanting. But your essence is still awake, as it always will be.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘This is you. Your essence. This is who you are. This is what people mistakenly believe is your soul.’

  ‘You’re a priest. Don’t you believe that people have souls?’

  Ada could almost feel him smiling in the dark. ‘I used to, before I was incarcerated here. Now I know what I really am, and what everybody really is. Our souls are not supernatural. They are not granted to us by God. Our souls, if you want to call them that, are manifestations of the same energy that makes the stars shine and the wind blow and the clouds stream over our heads. That is why you can leave your weary physical presence for a while, as you are doing now.’

  ‘I want to wake up.’

  ‘You will, when your brain and your body have recovered.’

  ‘Thomas – I want to wake up. I want to get out of this room. I want my life back.’

  ‘What is your name?’

  ‘What difference does that make? Ada, if you must know.’

  ‘Ada! That is a beautiful name, Ada. It is one of the first women’s names mentioned in the Book of Genesis. It means “bright”, or an “adornment”, and you are certainly both.’

  ‘I don’t care if it means “miserable bitch”. I just want to get back to the way I was, before you pulled me through that wall.’

  Thomas was silent for a long time, although he didn’t release his chilly grip on her hand. Eventually he said, ‘I’m afraid you underestimate the force that commands this room, and the whole of this house.’

  ‘What are you talking about? What force?’

  ‘I cannot speak its name, Ada, and neither can any of the men confined here.’

  ‘Just tell me what it is. If you think I’m going to stay stuck here for ever and ever amen you have another think coming.’

  She felt somebody else approach, and it was only because she could smell Old Spice that she recognised who it was.

  ‘Father Thomas ain’t giving you no grief, is he, love?’

  ‘No. But he won’t tell me what it is that’s keeping us all here, or how I can get out.’

  ‘That’s because you can’t, darling, I’ve told you that. The best you can do is survive. Come on – come with us, we’ll show you how you can make the best of both worlds.’

  ‘I don’t want to. All I want to do is get back to the way I was.’

  ‘Ada,’ Thomas coaxed her. ‘One day we may be able to find a way, and if we do, we can all find our freedom. I can’t tell you how desperately we all long to open the door and walk out of this house, into the daylight. But for now, we have to accept that we are where we are, both in time and in space, and thank the Lord that we are still conscious, and able to talk, and that for all of our suffering, death has not yet been able to claim us.’

  ‘You’ve been stuck here in this house for four hundred years,’ Ada retorted. ‘Four hundred years! Haven’t you had enough? Don’t you want to die?’

  Again, Thomas was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘Death will be much the same as this. One dark day after another. So what’s the difference?’

  ‘Come on,’ said Jaws. He put his arm around Ada’s shoulders and gently pushed her towards the wall.

  *

  The sensation of passing through the wall was like walking naked through a shower of ice-cold sparkling water. It lasted only a split second, but Ada felt as if her entire personality had been disassembled into atoms so that they could flow between the atoms of the wall, only to be reassembled on the other side. Here she was, standing in the end bedroom, next to the stack of chairs and the table crowded with cobwebby candlesticks.

  Enough light filtered along the corridor from the hallway downstairs for Ada to see that Jaws was already here beside her, next to the stack of chairs, although he was semi-transparent, so that she could see the outline of the window frame behind him. There was a soft shushing sound, and then Thomas appeared right through the wall behind her.

  ‘All right, darling?’ Jaws whispered. ‘You’ll get used to it. Just keep in mind that this is the actual you, but your body’s still sitting in the room back there.’

  ‘Why do we have to whisper?’ Ada asked him. ‘Why can’t we talk in our normal voices, or shout? What difference would it make? The people who are staying here, the Russells, they’ve already heard you whispering. Why do you think we came looking for you?’

  ‘It’s not them we’re worried about.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘Never mind that. Let’s show you what we do while we’re having a weary.’

  ‘Don’t give me “never mind that”!’ Ada hissed at him. ‘If you’re whispering for some reason, I want to know why! You don’t want to wake somebody up, is that it?’

  Thomas laid his hand on Ada’s shoulder. ‘Please, Ada. We can’t answer you, not without jeopardising our lives. We don’t want to live like this, but we don’t want to die.’

  Ada could have let out a hysterical laugh. ‘We don’t want to live like this, but we don’t want to die’ was a line from a song by the rock band Vampire Weekend. The same bleak words, she thought – the same hopeless sentiment – spoken by a man from four hundred years ago.

  Jaws laid his hand on her shoulder and gently propelled her out of the end bedroom, past the stained-glass window of Old Dewer and along the corridor to the landing. She could see other presences climbing up and down the stairs, whispering to each other, even though they were no more substantial than the images in a black-and-white photographic negative – just like Jaws and Thomas and herself.

  When she turned the corner, she saw even more of them. Three or four were gathered outside the master bedroom, their heads close together as if they were furtively discussing what they were going to do next.

  Jaws stopped outside the door of the first bedroom, where Grace and Portia were sleeping.

  He leaned close to Ada’s right ear and whispered, ‘What we need more than anything else, lov
e, is breath. Even when it’s second-hand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You wait till you’ve been breathing your last breath a thousand times over, day in and day out. You’ll start to feel like somebody’s trying to smother you with a stinky old pillow and won’t take it away. You ain’t got to that stage yet, but give it a month or two and you’ll be gasping, I promise you.’

  ‘Why can’t we just go outside, and breathe some fresh air there?’

  ‘Because we can’t, love. We can walk through all these indoor walls when we’re having a weary, but the outside walls – no. They’re as solid to us as they are to them what hasn’t been chanted. Believe me, I’ve tried enough times.’

  ‘So what are we going to do now?’ Ada whispered.

  ‘Here, I’ll show you. Thomas, mate – are you joining us?’

  Thomas shook his head and pointed down the corridor towards the master bedroom. ‘She is the one whose breath I wish to savour.’

  ‘Her?’ said Ada. ‘That’s the wife of Rob Russell’s older brother.’

  ‘I don’t care whose brother he is. I want to go back and tell him how much I relished the taste of her.’ With that, his tongue darted out and licked his scabby lips.

  ‘Why? What’s he ever done to you?’

  ‘He told me when he first set eyes on me that I was a disgrace in the eyes of God. A walking blasphemy, that’s what he called me. Why do you think I chanted him?’

  ‘You chanted him, too?’ asked Ada. ‘You’ve trapped him, the same as me?’

  ‘He deserved it. Nobody should take the name of the Lord our God in vain. Nobody should denigrate somebody who gave his own mother solace. And above all, nobody should question the integrity of a man whose devotion to the Almighty has kept him imprisoned in the moment of his sacrifice for century after wearisome century, and for countless wearisome centuries to come.’

  Thomas was whispering as he spoke, but intensely, almost hatefully, and he pronounced ‘quessstion’ with an extra snake-like hiss.

  ‘Martin, that’s his name, isn’t it?’ asked Ada. ‘I don’t know what he looks like, but none of the men I saw in the priest’s hole looked as if they could have been him.’

  ‘He was having himself a weary, I expect,’ said Jaws.

  ‘Martin?’ whispered Thomas. ‘I never asked his name. One never speaks the names of demons or those possessed by demons – not when one is chanting them. He is among us now, yes, and thanks to me the world at large is purged of his presence for all eternity. For that, I think I deserve to be lauded, don’t you?’

  Ada didn’t know what to say. When Thomas had first approached her, she had thought that he was sympathetic and friendly, and that he might be able to help her to find a way to escape from this nightmare. Now she began to see that his four-century confinement in Allhallows Hall had unhinged him, and made him vengeful – even if he hadn’t already been deranged on the day when he was first trapped here.

  Without saying another word, Thomas grinned and turned and went off along the corridor to join the other whispering men outside the master bedroom.

  Jaws gave a dismissive grunt. ‘Don’t let the holy father get to you, darling. He’s a dirty beast, so what do you expect? All dirty beasts are funny in the head. They have to be. All that walking on water and feeding the five thousand and raising the dead. You’ve got to have a fucking screw loose to believe in all that cobblers.’

  He pressed his hand between her shoulders again and said, ‘Come on. Let’s snag ourselves some of that breath.’

  Ada still couldn’t believe that she would be able to pass through the bedroom wall as if it had no substance at all, and when Jaws pushed her towards it, she turned her face to one side and tried to shy away. But with that same sharp, effervescent tingle, she found herself standing in the gloom of Grace and Portia’s bedroom. It was lit only by the red numbers on the digital clock that Portia had borrowed from the kitchen, although both she and Jaws seemed to have a faint luminosity of their own.

  It was 3:11, and then 3:12. Both Grace and Portia were deeply asleep, back to back, with the quilt drawn up under their arms. Portia’s mouth was open and she was softly snoring.

  ‘Here, love,’ whispered Jaws, ‘this is what you do.’

  He made his way around the end of the bed and carefully laid himself down next to Portia. He made no impression on the covers at all, as if he weighed nothing, but he was able to fold back the corner of the quilt to give himself unobstructed access to Portia’s face. He stared at her for a moment, so close that the tips of their noses were almost touching, and then he opened his mouth and pressed his lips against hers.

  She murmured and jerked her head, but Jaws kept their lips stuck together. Every time she breathed out, he breathed in. They passed the same breath between them over and over, until his eyelids began to droop with the sensation that she was giving him, and gradually they starved the oxygen out of the air that they were sharing.

  At last he sat up. She found it hard to read the expression on his face. The last time she had seen a man looking like that was after her boyfriend, Will, had made love to her but had gasped out another girl’s name when he climaxed. Ferna! She had never found out who Ferna was, but that had been the beginning of the end of her relationship with Will.

  Portia was snoring again. Her hand lay on the pillow with her fingers twitching slightly.

  ‘She hasn’t woken up,’ Ada whispered.

  ‘No. She won’t. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to see us. Now it’s your turn.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Jaws nodded towards Grace. ‘Go on. Don’t tell me you’re not feeling a little breathless.’

  He was right. Ada’s lungs did feel constricted. Ever since she was little she had suffered from asthma, and although this tightness didn’t feel exactly the same as an asthma attack, she still felt as if she needed an inhaler. Or Grace.

  ‘I can’t,’ she whispered, but all the same she sat down on the side of the bed, next to Grace. ‘Suppose she wakes up?’

  ‘She won’t, I promise you. But even if she did, I don’t think she’d mind, do you? Tutti-frutti like you.’

  Ada lay down beside Grace and looked at her closely, and even though the radiance that she was giving off was only dim, it was enough to illuminate Grace’s face. Her eyelashes were almost transparent and she had a spatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her pink lips were bow-shaped and slightly parted and now that she was this close, Ada could hear her quietly breathing in and out.

  ‘Kiss her,’ Jaws urged her. ‘But keep your mouth open. Take her breath in, and then give it back. In and out, in and out, until you start to go dizzy.’

  Ada kissed Grace, lightly at first, but when she breathed out, she kissed her harder, so that their lips would be sealed tightly together and none of her precious exhaled air could escape. Once she had taken it into her lungs, she breathed it out again, back into Grace’s mouth. Grace made a muffled sound, and tried to twist her face to one side, but Ada took hold of her head in both hands, burying her fingers in her gingery hair, and held her fast.

  She couldn’t believe that she was so greedy for this exhaled breath, even though it was so depleted in oxygen. It made her feel light-headed and it aroused an excitement in her – not so much erotic as the kind of helpless thrill she had felt on a roller-coaster. She sucked again and again at Grace’s lips, drawing out the last remaining gasp of breath from her lungs, until at last she sat up, panting, and now she knew why Jaws had looked so post-coital. It was nothing like anything she had experienced in the whole of her life – the fear of suffocation but exhilaration, too, and the sensation that she was sharing so much more than another woman’s breath; she was sharing her mortality.

  ‘What now?’ she whispered.

  ‘That’s it. We can take a tour of the house if you like. But you’ll have plenty of time to do that in the future. You’ll have years and years and years, until you know every floorboard and eve
ry windowpane and every knothole and every curtain hook by heart, same as I do.’

  Ada looked down and saw to her surprise that Grace’s green eyes were open, and were staring up at her. For a moment, she forgot that Grace was unable to see her, and she promptly stood up, and raised both hands, as if to apologise for having kissed her and stolen her breath.

  Grace raised her head off the pillow, still staring, but through her, rather than at her.

  ‘Is there somebody there?’ she said quietly, obviously not wanting to wake Portia.

  Ada looked across the bed at Jaws, who shook his head, warning her not to answer. But she was desperate for Grace to know that she was still alive, and still in the house.

  She leaned forward and whispered, ‘Yes, Grace, there is somebody here! It’s me, Ada! Ada Grey! Please, Grace! I’m in the priest’s room! Please find a way to get me out of it. Please!’

  Jaws came storming around the bed and seized her arm.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded, his whisper blasting directly into her right ear.

  ‘Get off me!’ she snapped back. ‘Do you really believe I’m prepared to stay like this? If you think I have any intention of living with you and all those other leches for the next thousand years you must be out of your brain, if you even have one! I’d rather kill myself!’

  ‘Keep your fucking voice down!’ Jaws whispered at her.

  Grace sat up in bed now and waved her arms around, trying to feel Ada, even if she couldn’t see her. ‘Ada? Ada! And who else is here? Ada!’

  Now Portia sat up, too, rubbing her eyes. ‘Grace! What’s going on?’

  ‘Ada’s in here! Ada’s in here! And some – some man!’

  Jaws twisted Ada’s thick glossy hair twice around the knuckles of his left hand and hooked his right arm around her waist. He was almost invisible, but he was twice as powerful as she was, and he was able to force her towards the door. She kicked and struggled as furiously as she had kicked and struggled when she had first been pulled through the wall in the witching room, but he was far too strong for her.