The House of a Hundred Whispers

by Graham Masterton

  ‘The Wilmingtons denied that they knew him, though, didn’t they?’ said Grace.

  ‘Yes, they did, and that saved them from being arrested as traitors, although it’s possible that in the years to come they hid other priests here, too.’

  Rob lifted his hand and said, ‘Hold on. Is that somebody out there?’

  He was sure he had heard a creaking sound, the sound that they made whenever they started to climb the staircase. He crossed the drawing room and opened the door wider, but when he looked out into the hallway there was nobody there. Nobody that he could see, anyway.

  He went to the foot of the staircase and looked up. For a fleeting moment, he thought he saw a curl of smoke or a gauzy fragment of fabric floating across the diamond-patterned window, but then it had vanished. All the same, he stayed there for a few seconds, watching and listening. He had the distinct feeling that somebody had been eavesdropping on them, but had now crept off upstairs.

  When he returned to the drawing room, Francis said, ‘Anything?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something and nothing. Like you said, we mustn’t let this house get to us.’

  ‘Do you want me to take a look?’

  ‘No, you’re all right. Like I said, it was something and nothing. Just a squeak.’

  ‘It was John who found the clincher,’ Francis went on. ‘He has a friend who volunteers at the Tavistock Museum, so they allow him access to some of the archives that the public generally don’t get to see. He found an antique order book that had been kept by a local apothecary back in the late seventeenth century, and it included an entry that refers to Allhallows Hall. Here – he scanned it for me.’

  Francis opened the manila folder and took out two sheets of paper. One had the image of an old handwritten page on it. The writing on this page was slanting and crowded, and almost illegible, but John had deciphered it and sent Francis a typewritten version.

  ‘“June 16th, 1687, To the order of Jeremy Wilmington Esq. at Allhalloes Hall, Sampford Spiney, the following in the quantities of three and one half pounds each: Quicksilver, Salt of Hartshorn, Plumbago, Stibnite, Spiritus Fumans, Philosopher’s Wool and Fulminating Gold.”

  ‘Those are old names for chemicals like mercury and antimony and zinc oxide. But this list wouldn’t mean much if you didn’t know that they’re the main ingredients for mixing with plaster and creating a witching room.’

  ‘These chemicals,’ asked Rob. ‘Would they be all that you need?’

  ‘As far as I can make out, they’re just the basics. I could find hardly any information at all about witching rooms, even on Google, but from the little that I have been able to discover, these chemicals were used to make the room receptive to whatever force you decide to summon up. Once that force has permeated the walls, though, and if it’s triggered with the right incantation, you can hold anybody who enters the witching room in suspended animation. Or “time-durance”, as one of the seventeenth-century wizards calls it.’

  ‘When you say “force”—’ asked Vicky, ‘what exactly are you talking about?’

  ‘I can’t be sure yet, not specifically, and like I said, I think it would be safer for all of us if I didn’t say its name just yet. It might not be the right name, but I wouldn’t want to take the risk, especially since it seems to be growing increasingly active – like setting those hounds on you.’

  ‘I know it sounds loony, but are you talking about a demon of some sort?’

  ‘You know I don’t believe in Satan and all the traditional demons. But I do believe in invisible forces that can affect our lives – forces that we don’t yet have the science to be able to identify. Think about it – it wasn’t until 1931 that we were able to see viruses for the first time, even though we’d suspected their existence for at least forty years.’

  ‘So how are we going to get rid of this force?’

  ‘Well, I was hoping that Father Salter was going to help me by trying to exorcise it. I didn’t think that exorcism would really do the job, but it might have helped us to narrow down exactly what we’re dealing with. If we said its name out loud, for instance, and it lashed out against us, then we’d know that we had struck a nerve, and we’d have a much clearer idea what to do when it came to spiritual decontamination.’

  ‘But now we don’t have Father Salter. What are you going to do – see if you can find another exorcist?’

  ‘That won’t be easy… especially if it gets around that Father Salter got cold feet about doing it. The Catholic Church still believe that exorcism works, which is why they’ve opened up their exorcism classes. But they don’t want to be seen to be defeated by some evil spirit, especially if it gets out on social media. You can imagine some of the trolls they’d get.’

  ‘Francis, I don’t give a toss about the Pope’s public image. I want our son back, and Katharine here wants her husband back, and I’m sure you’re just as desperate to rescue Ada. Right now, that’s all that matters.’

  ‘I know, Rob, I know. Which is why I’m prepared to give it a go myself.’

  ‘You know how to carry out an exorcism?’

  ‘I know how to carry out a spiritual decontamination. I have the full text, which was first written down by a Jesuit priest called Raphael Hix. He was a real oddball and apart from being a priest he was a gleaner, like me – or a wizard, if you want to call me that. In the early eighteenth century he was paid by Baron Robert Petre to decontaminate Old Thorndon Hall, the Petre family seat in Essex.’

  ‘The Petres? Who were they?’

  ‘They were hereditary peers, the Petres of Writtle, in Essex. They’d always been staunch Roman Catholics. Twelve of the family were Jesuits and two of them were bishops. It was Bishop Francis Petre who decided to call in Raphael Hix, because he had tried to exorcise Old Thorndon Hall himself, but he had failed, and he didn’t want the Pope to find out that he had failed. As it was, the Pope did eventually find out, and because of that he refused to make him a cardinal.’

  ‘So what was it in this Old Thorndon Hall that needed to be exorcised?’ asked Rob.

  ‘It was a spirit that had plagued the Essex salt marshes for decades, known as the Lamper. It was rather like the Jack O’Lantern that was supposed to haunt the Suffolk marshes. If you were out walking or gathering oysters on the marshes, a dense sea fog could roll in quite unexpectedly and it was easy to find yourself lost. But after you’d been wandering about a bit you’d see this lamp waving in the distance, or what looked like a lamp, and you’d walk towards it, thinking that somebody was guiding you. The next morning your dead body would be found in a creek, naked and lacerated all over as if you had been whipped with barbed wire, with your eyes missing.’

  ‘Urghhh!’ said Portia, with a shudder. ‘Remind me not to go looking for oysters on the Essex marshes, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh, the Lamper doesn’t haunt the marshes any more, because Raphael took care of him – or her, or it, or whatever sex it was. Mind you, more than half the marshes have gone, too, because the sea’s washed them away.’

  ‘How did the Lamper get into Old Thorndon Hall?’ asked Vicky. ‘I mean, what was he doing there?’

  ‘Pretty much the same as the force that’s here in this house. Robert Petre and members of his family had been attacked time and time again by Protestants – physically as well as verbally. His wife had horse dung flung over her when she was stepping down from her carriage in Westminster, and gangs used to creep into the estate at night and smash all the downstairs windows.

  ‘Robert Petre had no doubt at all who was behind these attacks – the suffragan bishop of Bradwell, the Anglican diocese that borders the Catholic diocese of Brentwood. His name was Leonard Montague and according to several historical records he had an almost incandescent hatred of Catholics. Nobody quite knows why, but he made no secret of it. He called them the “Lice of Rome”.’

  ‘Charming,’ said Vicky.

  ‘Well, that’s exactly what Robert Petre did. He brought in a charmer like Ada, a wit
ch whose name unfortunately we shall never know, and she created a witching room for him. She did that by luring the Lamper to the Thorndon estate with the promise of a safe dark hiding place in the wine cellar. From there he could come out at night, or whenever it was foggy, and roam around the local area, snatching any passers-by whose eyes he took a fancy to. He would also be free to drink as much of Baron Petre’s wine as he wanted.’

  ‘Now that my hangover’s gone, I think even I would be tempted by that,’ said Katharine. ‘The wine, not the eyes.’

  Francis opened his folder again and showed them a seventeenth-century plan of Old Thorndon Hall. ‘The witching room was installed on the first floor here, right at the back, overlooking the three-hundred-acre park. Once it was ready, Robert Petre invited Bishop Montague to visit him, so that they could discuss some kind of a truce between them. He also hinted that he might donate a considerable amount of money to the Bradwell diocese, as a gesture of reconciliation.’

  ‘But he trapped him?’ asked Rob.

  ‘Exactly. He showed Bishop Montague around the house, ending up in the witching room, where the charmer was waiting for him. She recited the incantation that catalysed the Lamper’s force in the walls, and bam! there your bishop was, stuck for all eternity in that moment that he’d walked in there. Even if there was a God, not even He could have rescued him.’

  ‘But if Robert Petre’s problem with Bishop Montague had been sorted out, why did he want to have the place decontaminated?’

  ‘That wasn’t until three or four years later. The Lamper was growing restless. Local people avoided the estate like the plague because too many of them had been found dead with their eyes missing, so there were fewer victims for the Lamper to go after, and it had drunk most of Robert Petre’s wine. Its force started to appear around the house, with flickering lights and strange noises, and Bishop Montague could be heard all night whispering prayers. Several of the servants left because they were too frightened to stay there, and Baroness Petre went up to their house in Scotland and refused to return to Old Thorndon Hall until the Lamper was exorcised.’

  ‘So that was why they called in this Raphael Hix?’

  ‘That’s right. Because Raphael Hix was the only priest they knew who had actually practised this spiritual decontamination. It was known about by the Catholic Church and it was known to be highly effective when it came to curing people who were thought to be possessed by demons and cleansing houses that had been taken over by dark forces. But it was officially disapproved of, because it was a combination of Christian exorcism and Druidic chants, with some rituals thrown in that you could only describe as witchcraft. Sticking scores of cloves into slugs, for instance, until they resembled hedgehogs, and having them crawl up the walls. In Druidic culture, cloves are supposed to be spiritually cleansing.’

  ‘You’re not going to do that, are you?’

  ‘I’m going to have to, and a few other gruesome things besides.’

  ‘You haven’t brought the slugs in your bag, have you?’ Grace asked him, leaning over to look inside it and wrinkling up her nose.

  ‘No, no. I won’t be carrying out the decontamination until tomorrow. It’ll be a good time to do it, because Raphael Hix recommends carrying out the ritual during the three days when the moon’s energy is at its strongest. “Full moon magick” he calls it, with a “k”.

  ‘If it’s all right with you, though, I’d like to look around the house one more time and carry out one or two preparatory tests – things I was hoping to do with Father Salter.’

  He stood and picked up the walking stick he had brought with him. They could see now that the silver knob on the top was in the shape of an old woman’s head, with her eyes closed.

  ‘This is a wand, rather than a walking stick,’ he told them. ‘The woman is Cailleach Bheur, the Druidic goddess of air and darkness. Her name means “the veiled one with the shrill voice”. She detested sunlight and warm weather. In the summer she would turn into a grey rock, and lie there waiting for the darkness and the cold days to come. She used a wand like this to strike against walls to find out if anybody was hiding inside them, and if there was, she would strike the wall again and turn them into ice.’

  He smacked the wand in the palm of his hand. ‘I don’t think I’m capable of doing that, but it might help me to locate where the force in this house is hiding.’

  ‘I’ll come with you, if you like,’ said Rob. ‘You never know what might jump out at you.’

  31

  They went upstairs first, and along the corridor to the stained-glass window of Old Dewer. Francis tapped the glass gently with the silver head on the top of his wand and then held the wand up straight.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There’s some energy there. Here – hold it. You can feel the force for yourself.’

  Rob took hold of the wand just below Francis’s hand. It was faintly humming, like a tuning fork. The vibration lasted only a few seconds before it died away, but he had distinctly felt it.

  ‘Maybe we should smash this window,’ said Rob. ‘That would get rid of some of its power, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘No, no – we don’t want to do that. This window has been put here for a reason, and I don’t think it’s the reason that you’ve always believed.’

  ‘We were told that it was to keep Old Dewer from coming into the house and stealing our souls. If he saw that we respected him, he’d stay away.’

  ‘Nice story, but not very likely. I’d say it was put here so that he could continue to keep an eye on the outside world, even though his real force is hidden somewhere else. At the moment he’s looking outward, isn’t he, so that he can see the garden and the moor beyond it. But you said that you saw him turn around, so he’s obviously capable of keeping watch on what goes on in the house, too.

  ‘His force possesses this house, Rob. It completely possesses it. It’s his energy that gives the witching room its capability of trapping people in time, and it’s his energy that allows them to walk around at night, whispering. The same as the Lamper in Old Thorndon Hall.’

  ‘You said that we shouldn’t say his name out loud, but we have, and nothing’s happened.’

  ‘I know. And do you know what that tells me? This isn’t Old Dewer at all. It might be the same presence that Dartmoor folks came to call Old Dewer, but they were wrong. This isn’t the Devil we’re dealing with here. This is something totally different.’

  ‘So you really think you know what it is?’

  ‘As I said, I have a good idea. But I won’t want to speak its name until I’ve found it. I’ve dabbled in some strange and dangerous things since I’ve been a gleaner, but I’m not suicidal.’

  *

  They went into the end bedroom, and Francis knocked three times on the dado with his wand. When he had done that, he handed the wand to Rob, and Rob could feel a prickle running down it, as if it had become charged with electricity.

  ‘The force in these walls is really strong, as I would have expected, but let’s see what it’s like in the other bedrooms.’

  They went into one bedroom after another, with Francis tapping at the walls. He tapped at the walls as he walked along the corridors, too, and ended up in the bathroom.

  ‘It’s much weaker in all of these other rooms. Feel it now, Rob… there’s hardly any buzz at all. Let’s try downstairs.’

  As he followed Francis down the stairs, Rob noticed that several strands of his long white hair had fallen out and had been caught on the shoulders of his purple herringbone jacket. At first he was reluctant to say anything, but when they reached the hallway where the light was brighter he could see that even more were falling out.

  ‘Francis… you’re losing your hair.’

  Francis looked down at his jacket. ‘Bloody hell. So I am.’ He brushed the strands off his shoulders and then he propped his wand against the panelling and ran both hands through the wings of hair on either side of his head. When he took his hands away, he was holding clumps of white hai
r in both of them, and there were bald patches around his ears.

  ‘A-barth an Jowl!’ he exclaimed in his thin, rasping voice. In desperation, he started to pull at his hair and more and more of it came out, until the left side of his head was almost completely bald.

  ‘It’s him that’s doing this! Him – or it! He knows that I’m a gleaner and that I’m looking for him and he’s trying to stop me!’

  ‘Then maybe you should stop,’ said Rob. ‘He might do something worse to you than make your hair fall out.’

  ‘No! I’m going to find him! I’m going to find him and I’m going to decontaminate him! He might be able to scare off a Catholic priest but he’s not going to frighten me away! I’m a Cornishman and Cornishmen are frightened of nothing, especially devils!’

  He picked up his wand again and walked stiff-legged around the hallway, knocking loudly at the panelling. ‘Where are you, you bylen? Where are you hiding yourself? Show me where you are, you coward, and I’ll show you what I’m made of!’

  Vicky and Grace and Portia came out into the hallway to see what the shouting and the banging was all about. Rob waved his hand to indicate that they should just let Francis continue to circle around, knocking at the walls, and not interrupt him. Vicky pointed to her own head to show him that she could see how much of Francis’s hair had fallen out, and mouthed the words What’s happened to him? But all Rob could do was shrug.

  Francis stopped knocking the panelling at last, and stood in the centre of the hallway, breathing hard. He tugged in anger and frustration at the remaining hair on the right side of his head, and most of that came out too. There were tufts of white hair all over the hallway floor, as if two furious albino cats had been fighting each other.

  Rob went up to him. He didn’t know what to say.