The House of a Hundred Whispers

by Graham Masterton

  Katharine sat at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee while Portia made her a cheese and tomato sandwich and Rob and Vicky told her about the stained-glass window and Old Dewer’s hounds. She listened and nodded but said nothing. All of them had now come to the point where they were prepared to accept and believe almost anything, no matter how strange and frightening it was – whisperers who they couldn’t see, but who could push and kick them; Ada disappearing through a solid wall; Timmy and Martin vanishing yet their voices still being heard; the whole of Allhallows Hall shaking as violently as Herbert Russell used to, in one of his rages.

  ‘If we had a choice, we’d be out of here in five seconds flat and you wouldn’t see us for dust,’ said Rob, and then realised how ironic his words were. ‘Unlike the rest of the people who live here.’

  *

  Soon after eleven o’clock, DI Holley arrived with DC Cutland, but without any uniformed officers.

  DI Holley smelled as if he had just put out a cigarette and he had a tight, vexed expression on his face. He looked like a hawk that had managed to pick up a particularly plump mouse in his beak but had accidentally dropped it from fifty feet up in the air.

  The detectives kept their coats on, and DI Holley said, ‘We won’t keep you long, Mr Russell. A quick word in private, if we may.’

  Rob took them through to the library and closed the door, but they didn’t sit down.

  ‘No handcuffs?’ Rob asked them.

  DI Holley gave him a small, sour smile. ‘No, Mr Russell. Not today, anyway. We’ve had the final results of the DNA tests from the murder weapon this morning and – not to keep you in suspense – you’re in the clear.’

  ‘Really? I thought the DNA matched mine.’

  ‘It does. At least, it shows that you’re related on the male side to whoever wielded that hammer, although the mitochondrial DNA doesn’t tally. That’s the female DNA. The perpetrator who killed your father didn’t have the same mother as you.’

  ‘This is confusing me. I realise that Herbert Russell wasn’t my father, and that my mother must have had an affair at some time with somebody else.’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter too much, Mr Russell, because the lab carried out a carbon-14 test on the DNA, too, and that can pinpoint an individual’s birth date to within two years. In this case they calculated that the perpetrator was born between nineteen forty-nine and nineteen fifty-one, which is more than thirty-five years before you were.’

  ‘So whoever killed my stepfather… you’ve proved that it wasn’t me… but they were related to me?’

  ‘Related? There’s no question he was related. He was your father.’

  ‘My real father killed my stepfather? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘It certainly looks like it. And I think we can reasonably conjecture that some rivalry between them regarding your mother could have been all or part of his motive.’

  Rob pulled out one of the chairs and sat down. He was beginning to feel as if he were going mad.

  ‘Are you going to be able to find him?’ he asked.

  ‘Your real father? Of course we made enquiries around Sampford Spiney in case anybody noticed any suspicious vehicles in the area on the day of your father’s death. So far, though, no luck. Hardly surprising, with a population of only a hundred and seventeen and nothing in the way of what you’d call nightlife. I reckon the locals are all in bed after News at Ten. But we haven’t given up.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I can reassure you, though, that you’re completely out of the frame. We’ve also heard from Surrey police and they confirm your witness reports. You weren’t here on the evening Herbert Russell was murdered and the DNA found on the murder weapon wasn’t yours.’

  ‘And that’s conclusive, is it?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Russell. The lab technicians told us that the DNA was much better preserved than they would have expected if the hammer had been lying outside in the garden for any length of time. I think we can assume that after it was used to kill Herbert Russell it was either taken immediately out of the house to be hidden in the flower bed or, more likely, thrown out of an upstairs window.’

  DI Holley paused, and then he nodded towards Rob’s bandaged elbow. ‘Had a bit of an accident, did you?’

  Yes. I was attacked by a ravening hound that leaped at me out of a stained-glass window, what do you think?

  ‘It’s nothing. Tripped over, that’s all. Only a scratch.’

  ‘Right, then, we’ll leave you in peace. Of course, if you do think of anything that might assist us in our investigation… or if by chance your real father should make an appearance…’

  ‘Of course,’ said Rob. He showed both detectives to the front door and watched them walk away as if it were the end of a film.

  Vicky came up to him. ‘They’re not going to arrest you?’

  ‘No. They’ve seen sense. Which is more than we have.’

  *

  After about an hour, Rob considered going upstairs again to take another look at the stained-glass window, and also to check the end bedroom.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Vicky. ‘Let’s wait until Francis gets here. He did warn us to keep away from the witching room, after all.’

  ‘I only want to make sure that I’m not going insane. If my real father was psychopathic enough to murder my stepfather with a hammer, who knows what genes I might have inherited?’

  ‘Rob, I was attacked by those dogs, too, and you couldn’t meet anybody saner than my father.’

  ‘I don’t know. How sane do you have to be, to be a rewards manager?’

  ‘Very sane. If you weren’t, you’d go mad.’

  It wasn’t until the clock struck four that Francis knocked at the front door. He was carrying a black leather doctor’s bag and a walking stick with a silver knob on the top of it. He was accompanied by a balding, fiftyish man with ruddy cheeks and rimless spectacles. When this man took off his raincoat, Rob saw that he was wearing a dark grey tweed jacket, a black shirt, and a dog collar.

  ‘Rob, this is Father Salter, from Our Lady of the Assumption in Tavistock. He kindly agreed to come over and do a bit of a spiritual recce.’

  ‘Thank you, father, we appreciate it,’ Rob told him. ‘This is my wife, Victoria, and this is my sister, Grace, and her partner, Portia. And this is my brother’s wife, Katharine.’

  ‘Francis has explained to me in broad terms what seems to have been happening here in this house,’ said Father Salter. He spoke in a quiet, clipped voice, as if he were trying to explain to a particularly slow parishioner the meaning of transubstantiation.

  ‘We’ve had another incident since I spoke to you,’ said Rob, and lifted his elbow to show Francis the tea towel wrapped around it.

  Father Salter took three or four steps into the middle of the hallway and circled around. Then he stopped, and closed his eyes, one hand raised for silence.

  ‘There is an atmosphere here, no question about it.’

  ‘You can definitely feel it?’

  Father Salter crossed himself. ‘Oh, yes. An atmosphere. A highly febrile atmosphere. And its excitement seems to be rising, as if the house itself is aware that a messenger of God has entered into it.’

  ‘What happened to your elbow?’ Francis asked Rob.

  ‘It was that stained-glass window upstairs. You know, the one with Old Dewer and his dogs. We heard what we thought was Timmy crying, so despite what you’d said we went up to see if he was there.’

  Father Salter was listening to him now, and very intently. Rob hesitated, because he knew what he was going to say was totally bizarre, but then he thought that if Father Salter had been able to sense the tension in Allhallows Hall as soon as he had walked in, he would probably accept that he was telling the truth. He must have heard stories in the confessional that were equally weird.

  Haltingly, trying to sound as rational as possible, Rob described how the hounds had sprung out of the window and attacked them.

  Vicky came and
stood close to him and took hold of his hand. ‘It’s true, father. I swear it. Look – one of the dogs tore my sweater.’

  Father Salter crossed himself again. ‘I believe you, my dear. I believe you. Why would I not? The Devil has so many extraordinary ways of manifesting his presence. Less so, these days, because we live in much more sceptical times. But this house was built in a time when the Devil was known to roam freely over the moors, and in this house, as in every house, the stones of its construction are imbued with the beliefs of those who built it.’

  He paused, and frowned, and turned around to look at the bricked-up door of the cellar. Then he said, ‘This window… may I see it?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Rob. ‘Francis – will that be okay?’

  ‘Of course. I was going to take Father Salter up to see the witching room in any case.’

  ‘I think we’ll stay down here, if that’s all right with you,’ said Grace. ‘I’ll light the fire in the drawing room and put the kettle on for some tea.’

  ‘That sounds most welcome,’ said Father Salter.

  Rob led the way upstairs. When they reached the landing, Francis said, ‘Father Salter went to the Vatican last year and took its course in exorcism.’

  ‘It’s comparatively new, this course,’ said Father Salter. ‘But there has been an increasing demand for it, not only from Catholic priests but from priests of other denominations, and the Pontifical University has opened its doors to them, too.’

  ‘This “spiritual decontamination” that you were talking about, Francis…’

  ‘That was a fifteenth-century ritual that is very rarely used these days,’ Father Salter told him. ‘Mala omnia expurget, they call it in Rome. Today’s exorcisms are much more relevant to modern life, and much more specific. Most are designed to rid people of the evil influences that can enter their soul when they are feeling exhausted by their jobs, or stressed by an unhappy personal relationship, or have doubts about their gender.

  ‘The very last exorcism I carried out was to dismiss a demon that had possessed a transgender woman in her moment of greatest indecision, and was tempting her into having homicidal thoughts about her family and her friends.’

  Rob pointed along the corridor to the stained-glass window. ‘There it is. It’s completely intact now, but I swear to you that figure of Old Dewer turned right around and glared at us, and then the glass shattered and the dogs jumped out.’

  Father Salter strained his eyes to focus on it.

  ‘Rather blurry,’ he said. He tugged a handkerchief out of his breast pocket, took off his spectacles and wiped them. Then he peered at it again.

  ‘Come and take a closer look,’ said Rob, and started to walk along the corridor. ‘The way into the witching room’s down here, too.’

  Father Salter followed him, with Francis close behind, but then Father Salter abruptly stopped, so that Francis almost bumped into him.

  ‘What’s the matter, father?’ Francis asked him.

  ‘I can’t – I can’t go any further.’

  ‘Are you feeling okay?’

  ‘No, no I’m not. I can’t go any further. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Father, you’re shaking,’ said Francis, and took hold of his arm. ‘Rob – Father Salter’s having a bit of a turn – help me get him back downstairs.’

  Rob came up and held on to Father Salter’s other arm. The priest was shaking even more now, so that he could barely stand up. All the rosiness had drained out of his cheeks and his teeth were chattering like a typewriter. As Rob and Francis slowly helped him to drag his feet back to the top of the stairs, his spectacles dropped off and his knees suddenly sagged. It took all of their strength to keep him upright.

  ‘I can’t,’ he blurted out, turning to Rob as if he were appealing to an executioner to spare his life. ‘Please, get me out of here. Please!’

  ‘It’s all right, we will. Try and hold up. Francis – I think we need to call for an ambulance. It’s like he’s having a fit or a cardiac arrest or something.’

  ‘Get me out of here!’ Father Salter screamed at him. ‘Get me out of here before the Devil does for me!’

  Clutching at the banister rails to support themselves, Rob and Francis manhandled Father Salter down the stairs, his shoes clumping and bumping against every step.

  ‘Vicks!’ Rob shouted. ‘Call nine-nine-nine for an ambulance, can you! Father Salter’s having some kind of attack!’

  ‘No!’ said Father Salter. ‘I don’t need – I don’t need an ambulance – please! I need to get out of here, that’s all!’

  They reached the hallway, and Father Salter managed to stand up on his own, holding on to the newel post. He was still shaking, but not so dramatically.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s this house. Please, I don’t need an ambulance. I’ll be all right once I leave. It’s quietening down, it’s quietening down, now it knows that I’m going.’

  Vicky and Grace and Portia had all come out to see what was going on. Vicky draped Father Salter’s raincoat around his shoulders, while Rob quickly ran back upstairs to pick up his spectacles. When he reached the landing, he looked along the corridor but could see nothing that might have frightened Father Salter. The black hooded figure of Old Dewer was still standing in the middle of the stained-glass window with his back turned and his hounds around him. The window was intact, and neither Old Dewer nor his hounds showed any signs of movement.

  He went back down, handed Father Salter his spectacles and guided him to the front door. It was utterly black outside because there were no street lights around Sampford Spiney. The wind had risen and was whistling softly through the leafless trees.

  ‘Don’t you worry, father,’ said Francis. ‘I’ll run you straight home to Tavistock. Rob, I’ll come back here after I’ve dropped Father Salter off, if that’s okay. I’ll leave my bag here. I shouldn’t be longer than half an hour.’

  ‘I’m so desperately sorry,’ said Father Salter. ‘I feel so weak, and so powerless. I wanted to help you, but this force that possesses your house – it recognised me at once for what I was.’

  ‘It’s not your fault, father,’ Rob told him. ‘I’m just glad that you haven’t suffered a heart attack or something like that.’

  ‘The house – it knew what I was. It knew that I was a priest. When I saw that image of Old Dewer in that stained-glass window, I appealed to God at once to give me strength, but the house shut me off. It blocked me, in the same way that you might jam a radio signal. Usually I can feel my prayers reaching the Almighty, but not this time. For the first time ever, I could see and hear nothing in my mind but a blur of white noise.’

  ‘Come on, father,’ said Francis, laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘The sooner and the further we get you away from here, the better.’

  ‘I will pray for you all tonight,’ Father Salter told them. ‘And I will say a prayer for you now, too, before I go, for your safekeeping. Some parting words of defiance, in the face of immeasurable wickedness.’

  He turned around in the open doorway so that he was facing the hall, and made the sign of the cross, with his little finger and his fourth finger curled inward. ‘Princeps militiae caelestis,’ he recited. ‘Satanam aliosque spiritus malignos, qui ad perditionem animarum pervagantur in mundo, divina virtute in infernum detrude. Amen.’

  He turned back to Rob and Francis. ‘That’s a prayer to the archangel Saint Michael, the head of the Church Militant. Roughly translated, that means Satan and all your demons, go to hell.’

  30

  It was almost an hour before Francis returned from Tavistock. When he had taken Father Salter into the living room of his parish house, the priest had suffered another momentary fit of the shudders.

  ‘It was almost like his own house could sense where he had been – as if it could smell Allhallows Hall on him, the way your pet dog can smell another dog on you, and it was reacting against it. There was a crucifix over his fireplace and it dropped off the wall. He kept insisting that it wa
s nothing supernatural and that it had dropped off before, but I think he was in denial. I reckon that he was embarrassed because he had been so frightened, too.’

  ‘He was sure that there was something seriously bad about this house, though, wasn’t he?’ said Rob. ‘He wouldn’t have had that fit of the shakes, otherwise, and want to go shooting off so quickly.’

  They were all sitting in the drawing room. Rob had piled half a dozen ash logs onto the fire to make it seem warm and welcoming. They were drinking coffee and Jail Ale, and Grace and Portia were heating up pasties in the kitchen. Francis had stressed the importance of keeping their evening as normal as possible, and not allowing the house to frighten them.

  He opened his doctor’s bag with a click and took out a blue manila folder. ‘The force that’s here – and we know now for certain that there is one – the force that’s here is the kind of force that will do everything within its power to make you feel uneasy, and then to terrify you, and if it can it will drive you hysterical. It feeds off fear and hysteria… that’s what gives it its strength.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what it is, this force? Or where it is?’ asked Vicky. ‘Is it in the walls, or the woodwork, or the foundations? And where did it come from?’

  Francis looked serious. ‘I do have some idea, yes. At least, I’m fairly sure that I do. But I’m not going to say out loud what I think it might be. What’s that old slogan they used to use in wartime? “Even walls have ears.”’

  ‘So how much have you found out?’

  ‘From the research that we’ve done between us – John Kipling and me – we can say for certain that the Wilmington family arranged for Nicholas Owen to install a priest’s hide here. It was in or around the year 1588. John came across an entry in an old ledger for “repair work” undertaken here by a carpenter called “Little Michael”, which was one of the aliases that Nicholas Owen used to avoid detection by the authorities. “Draper” was another one.

  ‘The Jesuit priest who was hidden here by the Wilmingtons was called Father Ambrose. He had been sent over from Rome as a missionary, to restore the Catholic faith here in England. Of course, it was treason in those days not to swear the oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth as head of the Church. The Wilmingtons hid him here on and off for nearly six months before he was discovered and taken to London to be tortured and executed.’