The House of a Hundred Whispers

by Graham Masterton

  Father Salter raised both hands and said loudly, ‘All of you souls in this accursed room, I implore you to listen to me. We cannot see you, because you have each been imprisoned in a moment that has now long passed, some of you for very many years. We know, however, that you can see us, and hear us. And we wish you with all of our hearts to understand that we are doing everything we can, my friends here and I, to release you at last from your imprisonment.’

  As he spoke, the witching room began to be filled with a soft, barely audible whispering. It sounded like, what, what, what, who is this and what does he want?

  ‘My name is Father Maurice Salter, from the Catholic church of Our Lady of the Assumption in Tavistock. I am newly trained by the Vatican in the dismissal of malevolent presences, and I am aware that it is the power of a malevolent presence that first trapped you here and which continues to keep you trapped.

  ‘I have come here today with the intention of exorcising it. I have no illusions that it will be an easy exorcism, because this presence, too, has been incarcerated in this house against its will, and it will undeniably be simmering with as much rage and resentment as you.’

  The whispering grew louder, and more excitable, although Rob thought that he could hear protesting voices too. What, what, what, who does he think he is, he’s a fraud, he’s a fake, he’s only going to make things worse for us. Trouble, he’s going to cause trouble.

  Rob and Vicky and Grace and Katharine moved closer together, because they could all feel the whisperers jostling around them, even though they couldn’t see them. It was like standing in a chilly, blustery breeze.

  Father Salter lifted up his hands again, and declared loudly, ‘Whoever you are – whatever the reason for your having been trapped here – whether you welcome my intervention or whether you resent it – I am first going to pray for you. I am going to petition the Lord for your freedom and for your survival outside this unhallowed room.

  ‘In return, I ask you to direct all of your energy, all of your goodwill, every atom of your humanity towards supporting my ritual here today. I am not going to pretend to you that dismissing this presence is not the most challenging exorcism that I have ever faced, or by far the most frightening, or that I am at all certain of success. But every ounce of passion that you can muster against the malevolent presence that has been holding you captive for so long will weaken it just a little more, and strengthen my hand.

  ‘Oro Deum ut eriperet de tenebris vos aquam desperandum. I pray to God to rescue you from the dark waters of your despair. Amen.’

  The whispering grew louder and more flustered, until it sounded as if the witching room were filled up with the flapping wings of a whole flock of panicking birds. Then, suddenly, it fell silent. Rob felt as if somebody had brushed close past him, as he had before, but that was the only indication that there was anybody there.

  Vicky looked up at him and said, ‘Do we have to go? Do we have to leave Timmy here?’

  ‘I don’t know, darling. Father? Can we stay?’

  ‘I’m afraid that would be very unwise,’ said Father Salter. ‘Not until I have completed my dismissal, anyway. As I understand it, these walls are imbued with an occult power beyond anything that we can imagine, and the Lord alone knows what may happen when we start to leach it out. There’s even a risk that the whole house might collapse. But if my exorcism turns out to be successful, we can come back up here and open the door again, and release all those souls who are able to leave. Including, I pray, your Timmy, and your brother Martin, and Ada.’

  ‘Right, then,’ said Rob. ‘I suppose we’d better get on with it.’

  *

  They closed the panel in the dado and silently went back downstairs. Father Salter went around the hallway picking up the three-headed cat and the candles and Vicky found him a dustpan and brush in the scullery so that he could sweep up the white ghost slugs. Rob brought back the shield that had rolled into the drawing room.

  Father Salter wrapped everything up in the sheepskin, bundled it back into Francis’s suitcase, and locked it.

  ‘I can fully understand why Francis thought that these Druidic artefacts might give him more power to dismiss a pre-Christian malevolence. But it’s possible, even likely, I would say, that this demon predates even the Druids. Dartmoor is two hundred and eighty million years old, after all, and it used to be forested and well populated in the Bronze Age, when the climate was warmer.

  ‘This cat and these slugs and the sheepskin and the shield, they may have had the reverse effect, and aroused the demon’s ire even more. After all, if somebody came at me with that atomic whirl that atheists display as their symbol of disbelief, shouting that God didn’t exist and that I should quit my church and never come back, I think I should find it difficult not to lose my temper, too.’

  ‘Do you need our support?’ asked Rob. ‘I mean, do you want us to stay here with you?’

  ‘Definitely not, no. Thank you for your offer, but this is going to be a one-to-one contest between the presence and me. I will need total concentration – total – and I don’t want to be worrying about you and your welfare. It’s quite possible that the presence could threaten your lives in order to divert my attention away from completing my ritual. He may well realise that it is my sworn commitment to protect those in danger, and take advantage of it.’

  ‘Well – if we retreat to the drawing room… is that far enough?’

  ‘I should hope so. But don’t be surprised or upset if I suddenly tell you to leave the house altogether. It may become necessary, depending on how violently the presence reacts. We’re not talking about some petty little troublemaker like Pazuzu here.’

  Rob said, ‘Okay… but if it all starts getting out of hand… just yell.’

  Father Salter raised his hand in acknowledgement, but from the way he was standing alone in the middle of the hallway, with his shoulders hunched and the red blotches of his cheeks looking more pronounced than ever, as if he had been made up for a part in a pantomime, Rob thought that he looked as if he were waving goodbye.

  He left him and went to join the others in the drawing room, but he lifted one of the Jacobean chairs nearer the door, so that he could sit there and watch him. Father Salter would never have come here to carry out this exorcism, after all, if he hadn’t persuaded him, and if anything happened to him – if he was dragged into the wall in the same way as Francis – Rob knew he would never be able to forgive himself.

  Father Salter stood in front of the cellar doorway and made the sign of the cross. After the Latin benediction, he began to speak clearly and slowly, at a pitch slightly higher and more expressive than his normal voice. Usually, he sounded as if he were patiently explaining something to somebody who was having difficulty in grasping it. Now he sounded as if he had stepped onto a stage in front of an audience.

  ‘Hear me, Esus! I have come here today in the name of the Lord to release you from your captivity. I come in the spirit of reconciliation, and of forgiveness, and in the understanding that all beings are equal, substantial or insubstantial, whether they recognise the supremacy of the Holy Trinity or not.’

  He repeated the sign of the cross, three times, and then he said, ‘Esus! I free you from whatever spell or ritual is holding you here in this house, no matter how complex, no matter how ancient. It is the Lord who created every fibre of this world, and the Lord can untangle any knot of mischievous magic made by men.

  ‘Surge Esugenus et vade in via! Vacat vobis, liberum! Rise up, rise up, Esus and be on your way! You are free!’

  The house remained silent except for the soft crackling of the drawing-room fire and the rain-beggars still tapping at the windows.

  Father Salter went up to the cellar doorway, his chest rising and falling with stress. He waited for nearly a quarter of a minute, and then he called out, ‘Esus! You cannot ignore me, because I speak with the voice of God! Rise up, Esus and return to the moors! Rise up!’

  Rob felt that deep vibration sta
rting up again. The floor began to tremble, and the paintings on the walls began to rattle against the panelling. This time, the vibration was even more violent, and they could hear the ladles and colanders and saucepans that were hanging in the kitchen jangling like some frantic fire alarm. A kitchen chair tipped over onto the tiled floor with a loud clatter.

  ‘Esus! It is the Lord God who releases you! Acknowledge his supremacy, acknowledge that He alone has the power and the divine authority to free you! Accept that He is the master of the world, and the custodian of the moors over which you used to pursue your quarry! He will allow you to return there, and to ride with your hounds at night! All you have to say is, Lord, I accept your pre-eminence! Lord, let me go!’

  The vibration was deafening now. It felt as if everything in the house was juddering and groaning and squeaking. From the library came the thumping of books as they tumbled off the shelves, one after the other, and from halfway up the staircase they heard one of the leaded windows crack from side to side.

  Vicky came up and stood beside Rob’s chair. Her voice was watery with fear, and he could scarcely hear her. ‘It doesn’t sound as if it wants to acknowledge God, does it? Oh, please! Why doesn’t it just give in and go free?’

  Father Salter stepped back into the centre of the hallway. He grasped both ends of his stole and said, ‘Esus, o evil one, I order you now to rise up and leave this house. In the name of God, and in the name of the one who commands you, Arawn, king of the underworld, lord of darkness, who also has to kneel to the Lord.’

  There was a bang so loud that Vicky screamed. Out in the hallway, Father Salter stood up straight and rigid, quivering, his arms pressed down by his sides. Then the top of his head exploded like a watermelon and his skull flew up into the air, still attached to his spine. Next his shoulders burst apart, followed by his chest. His shoulder blades and his ribcage followed his skull up into the air, and all the rest of his bones came rattling up after them, some connected but some disconnected, flying up in a high arc over the hallway and into the cellar doorway, where they hit the bloodied silhouette that Francis had left behind, and vanished.

  All that was left of Father Salter after his skeleton had been wrenched out of him was a pile of clothes, sodden with blood. His jacket and his trousers and his underwear were all torn into shreds, and among the tatters lay lumps of flesh held together with translucent stretches of skin, as well as his liver, which lay on top of his glistening pink intestines like a basking brown seal.

  His white fringed stole had been spread out on top of his remains and his blood-spattered dog collar perched on top of that, as if they had been carefully laid there by a respectful mourner.

  Gradually, the vibrations died away. There was a high ringing noise from the kitchen as one metal spatula dropped off its hook, but then there was silence again. Rob stood up. He took a step towards the doorway but Vicky snatched at his sleeve and said, ‘No, Rob. Wait.’

  ‘I’ve killed him, Vicks. I should never have persuaded him to come here. He didn’t want to come but I made him. I might just as well have murdered him myself.’

  ‘It’s too late. Stay here. Wait.’

  Rob stayed where he was, staring at the small ragged heap that was all that was left of Father Salter. He was trembling with anger and guilt, but he accepted Vicky’s intuition. She had sensed several times before when something bad was about to happen to them, or that somebody they had met was not to be trusted.

  Portia and Katharine were sitting on the sofa together, wide-eyed, silent and shocked. Grace said, ‘What are we going to do now, Rob? It looks like nothing is going to get rid of it. I mean – if even God can’t get rid of it—’

  It was then that they saw Father Salter’s remains stirring as if they still had life in them – his shredded clothes and his ripped-up lumps of flesh and his piles of intestines. They began to slide across the polished oak floorboards, heading towards the cellar doorway. To begin with they left behind them a shining slug-like trail of blood and mucus, but as they neared the wall this trail rapidly dried up, leaving no trace.

  When his remains reached the wall, they slid straight into the plaster, and disappeared, exactly in the same way that Francis had been absorbed. Apart from his open briefcase, there was nothing in the hallway now to show that Father Salter had ever been there.

  ‘This is a nightmare,’ said Grace. ‘We’ll have to call the police now, won’t we?’

  ‘What’s the point?’ said Rob. ‘If two exorcists can’t get rid of this demon, what can the police possibly do? Arrest it?’

  ‘But that’s two people dead, Rob.’

  ‘Yes, and if this demon didn’t have our Timmy trapped I would call the police. Then I’d walk out of this house and I’d never come back. But we’re almost one hundred per cent certain that Timmy’s here, and we’re equally sure that Martin’s here, too, and Ada.’

  ‘So what are we going to do?’

  ‘Somebody has to clear him out of this house, somehow, and it looks like the only person left to do that is me.’

  38

  Rob poured himself a glass of his father’s Jameson’s whiskey and phoned John Kipling.

  He stood by the library window with books scattered on the floor all around him, looking out over the kitchen garden. It was still raining, but in curtains of fine drizzle.

  Vicky sat at the table listening to him. She had tied up her hair and in her ankle-length coffee-coloured dress she looked more like the Lady of Shalott than ever.

  ‘John? It’s Rob. Rob Russell. I’ve got some really bad news, I’m afraid.’

  Haltingly, Rob told John how Father Salter had attempted to dismiss the force that they believed to be secreted in the cellar, and how it had ripped him into a fountain of bones.

  John said, ‘Oh, Jesus. That’s terrible. That’s just terrible. What are you going to do now?’

  ‘I don’t see that I have any choice, John. I’ll have to try and get rid of the damned thing myself. What other chance do I have of getting our little Timmy back? And our Martin? And Ada?’

  ‘Rob – do you have any idea what you’re up against? He may be walled up in your cellar but he’s still on his home ground, and that makes him more powerful around here than any other presence you could think of, and that includes Old Dewer.’

  ‘John, Vicky and I have been hit and kicked and bitten by dogs that jumped out of a stained-glass window. Of course I know what I’m up against, and that’s the whole reason I’m calling you. Father Salter told me that he’d talked to you about this presence, whatever you call it. I’m wondering if you know anything at all about it that could help me. Anything.’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure, but I might. Yesterday I was searching through some old parish records from Sampford Spiney, going right back to the late sixteenth century. They’re all stored online these days, which makes it a whole lot easier. It seems that in June 1695 the parish priest of St Mary’s was visited by one Matthew Carver from London, who said that he was – here, I’ve noted this down – “a remover by royal appointment of sundrie supernatural abominations”.’

  ‘What’s that? A jobbing exorcist?’

  ‘It sounds like it, doesn’t it? Apparently he had been paid by the Crown to purge some of the navy’s ships in Plymouth harbour of evil spirits. Their crews had been going down “with all manners of the foulest pox” and suffering any number of fatal accidents, like falling out of the rigging or getting themselves impaled by anchors. The suspicion was that they had been infected with these evil spirits by the French, sometime during the Nine Years’ War.’

  ‘So what was he doing in Sampford Spiney, this “remover of abominations”?’

  ‘The parish priest recorded that Matthew Carver was a guest of the Wilmingtons at Allhallows Hall. He said that they had hired him to track down and remove the malevolent spirit called Old Dewer by some locals, but known also by other names, such as the Flute Player or the Fluter. He said that the Wilmingtons wanted this spirit exo
rcised because he had been randomly slaughtering their sheep and blighting their crops.’

  Rob said, ‘Wait a minute – Matthew Carver – that name rings a bell. There’s a gravestone with that name on it in St Mary’s churchyard. There’s a Latin inscription on it, too, something about time standing still.’

  ‘Listen, Rob, I don’t want to jump to any erroneous conclusions,’ John told him. ‘What you’re proposing to do – it’s mind-blowingly dangerous, I mean it, and you could get yourself killed, like poor old Francis and Father Salter. But my first thought when I read about Matthew Carver was that the Wilmingtons didn’t call him in to chase the Fluter away. Instead they’d asked him to catch him, or it, so that they could use its power to turn Nicholas Owen’s priest’s hide into a witching room – although God alone knows why they wanted to do that.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about God, John. He’s not exactly my favourite person at the moment – not that He ever was. But you reckon Matthew Carver could have been the one who caught this presence and bricked him up in the cellar?’

  ‘Everything points to it, doesn’t it? Although I may be wildly off beam.’

  ‘But if this presence is so powerful – even more powerful than Satan – how did Matthew Carver catch him? That’s what I need to know. Father Salter said something about every demon having an Achilles heel.’

  ‘He mentioned that to me, too. He said that some demons couldn’t stand the sound of bells, and some other demons you could chase off with smoke from particular herbs, or incense. There’s one demon who’s terrified of two-pronged forks, because he believes you’re going to stick them into his eyes.’