The House of a Hundred Whispers Read online

  ‘I’m afraid to tell you that we have another missing person,’ said Rob. ‘My brother, Martin. He came home from Tavistock last night a little the worse for wear, but we haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘We’re not panicking yet,’ put in Katharine, her voice sharp and steady like a schoolmistress. ‘He’s pulled this kind of trick before. But your people might keep an eye open for a rather bedraggled middle-aged man. They’ll be able to recognise him because he’ll be wearing a navy-blue blazer with gold buttons and he’ll look as if he’s suffering from a crashing hangover. If they do come across him, they might be so good as to suggest that he returns here to Allhallows Hall as soon as he finds it convenient.’

  John looked at Rob as if to say, Gosh, she’s angry with him, isn’t she? If and when he eventually turns up, I’ll bet he’s in for the roasting of a lifetime.

  As he turned to go, he snapped his fingers and said, ‘Nearly forgot to tell you. Ada called me first thing this morning. She’s dropping over to Monkscross to see Frank Coade around ten, so she reckons she’ll be here around half past eleven. She would have called you but she forgot to make a note of your number.’

  ‘Okay, fine.’

  ‘And – Rob – please don’t give up hope of us finding your Timmy. Children don’t just vanish off the face of the Earth. The rector and his partner are going to be joining us today so maybe we’ll have some divine assistance.’

  Rob was about to say that he didn’t believe in God, but then he remembered that he did, at least for the time being. But if Timmy were never to be found, he knew that he would instantly go back to being a committed atheist. No God of any denomination would allow a dear little boy like Timmy to be lost to his parents forever.

  *

  Ada arrived at noon. It was lashing down with rain, but strangely the sun had come out from behind the clouds so that the courtyard and the garden were dazzling. She was wearing a black boat-neck sweater today and very tight black jeans, and she was accompanied by an elderly man in a hooded khaki raincoat. When he stepped into the porch and took his raincoat off, and shook it, Rob saw that he looked almost saintly, like medieval paintings of Joseph the stepfather of Jesus. His white beard was neatly trimmed, and although his crown was bald and mottled, he had two wings of long white hair. His eyes were bright, but the irises were so pale they were almost colourless, giving him the appearance of being blind, although he clearly wasn’t, and didn’t even need to wear glasses.

  He was wearing a three-piece suit in purplish herringbone tweed, with padded shoulders and wide lapels, which suggested it must be at least twenty-five years old.

  ‘Rob – Vicky – this is Francis Coade I was telling you about – the gleaner. I hope you don’t mind but after I described your priest’s hole to him he was itching to come and see it for himself.’

  Francis Coade held out his hand and said, ‘How do you do,’ in a thin, raspy voice, with an accent that sounded more Cornish than Devon. ‘I gather your priest’s hide is really quite something.’

  ‘Well, it’s pretty big, as priest’s holes go,’ Rob told him. ‘When you consider how long we’ve lived in this house, I really don’t know how we failed to realise it was there. But it’s disguised really cleverly. The windows on the inside are identical to the windows on the outside, so that you wouldn’t immediately guess there was another room in between them.’

  He led the way upstairs. As he followed close behind him, Francis said, ‘I’ve seen many a priest’s hide around this part of the world, a dozen at least, because of course St Mary’s church was Catholic when it was built – around 1250, long before the Reformation. Most if not all of those hides were constructed by Nicholas Owen.’

  ‘John Kipling thinks he built this one, too. It’s so well hidden that we only found it by accident.’

  ‘It’s interesting that it’s so large. Nicholas Owen’s closets tended to be tiny. Stifling, some of them, so that the priests who were hiding inside them would sometimes suffocate. He made two at Stoke Climsland House and they were concealed inside the pillars in the entrance hall. There was only enough room inside each pillar for a priest to stand up straight, with his arms by his sides, and he may have had to stay shut up inside it for hours – if not days. Nothing to eat, nothing to drink, and nowhere to relieve himself.’

  Rob unlocked the end bedroom and opened the door. Before he went in, Francis stared at the stained-glass window and said, ‘My God. Who has a window with the Devil in it? And his pack of Whist Hounds, too.’

  ‘Whist Hounds?’ Vicky asked him.

  ‘“Whist” means weird, or eerie,’ said Ada. ‘Anything that gives you the willies.’

  ‘It was the Whist Hounds that gave Conan Doyle his inspiration for that Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles,’ added Francis. ‘Old Dewer’s pack, though – they were supposed to be fifty times more ferocious than that. So the legend goes, they used to rush around the villages all about Dartmoor, sniffing out unbaptised babies, dragging them out of their cribs and tearing their lungs out so that they could never breathe a word of devotion to God.’

  ‘Timmy’s been christened,’ said Vicky. She realised as soon as she said it how fatuous that sounded, because the Whist Hounds weren’t real, but Rob put his arm around her shoulders and gave her a comforting hug. He understood that Timmy being baptised had given her one less threat to worry about, even if that threat was supernatural dogs.

  They went into the bedroom. Francis looked around it, breathing deeply, his blind-looking eyes flicking from the ceiling to the floor to the wine table with all its cobwebby candlesticks.

  ‘I can distinctly smell something. Something tangy.’

  ‘We could, too. We reckon it smells like that aftershave, Old Spice.’

  ‘I can feel something, too. Some kind of atmospheric disturbance. It’s hard to put my finger on it. It’s not like the usual resonance you can feel in a house that’s supposed to be haunted.’

  ‘When I was in there, I was sure I could feel someone brushing past me.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Francis. He looked around some more, and then he said, ‘The hide’s behind that panelling, I presume?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rob, and lifted the window seat. ‘And this is how it opens.’

  Francis leaned over so that he could watch Rob lifting up the crucifix. The dado creaked back, revealing the hidden room behind it. Because the sun was shining so brightly through the stained-glass windows, the horsehair floor was dappled with red and green and yellow diamond patterns.

  ‘That’s an ingenious bit of engineering, that,’ said Francis. ‘But I doubt if it was made by Nicholas Owen.’

  ‘Really? Why’s that?’

  ‘Nicholas Owen may well have built a priest’s hide here, but like I say, his hides tended to be tiny, and very cramped.’

  He bent down under the dado rail and stuck his head into the hidden room.

  ‘It’s an amazing piece of trompe l’oeil, I have to admit. But apart from its size, there’s this crucifix. Nicholas Owen would never have risked installing a lever in the shape of a crucifix. Those priest hunters weren’t only searching for priests. They were searching for any kind of paraphernalia to prove that people were holding the Roman Catholic Mass illegally – such as statues of the Virgin Mary, or rosaries, or crucifixes like this one.

  ‘They were relentless. That’s because they were awarded a generous bounty for every priest they winkled out and every Catholic worshipper they discovered. Even a share of their property.’

  He crouched down under the dado rail and entered the hidden room. Ada and Vicky and Rob followed him, although Katharine held back.

  ‘This is too scary for me. I’m going back downstairs. I don’t know. Perhaps Martin will come back in a minute.’

  Once inside the hidden room, Francis looked around intently – up at the ceiling, down at the floor, out of the windows. He ran his fingertips all the way along the walls and then he lowered himself down on one knee and rubbe
d the horsehair matting between his fingers.

  ‘What do you think, Frankie?’ said Ada. ‘There’s some presence here, isn’t there? Or even presences, plural. I’m sure I can sense them even now. And I don’t feel as if they’re at all friendly. It’s almost like this room itself resents us being here.’

  Francis stood up straight again, letting the stray horsehairs drift from between his fingertips.

  ‘Do any of you have a match on you?’

  ‘A match? No,’ said Vicky. ‘But there’s a box in the kitchen. I’ll fetch them for you.’

  While they waited, Ada lifted up her shoulder bag and said, ‘This is my conjure-bag. I’ve brought two tests with me. A mirror test, and a powder test.’

  ‘Why don’t you try them now?’ Francis suggested. ‘I have my suspicions about this room, but at least your tests might be able to give us some idea of what these atmospheric disturbances actually are.’

  Ada took an oval hand mirror out of her bag. Its brass handle was cast in the shape of a fairy and its frame was formed by her wings curling up behind her. She didn’t look like a good fairy, though. She had narrow, catlike eyes and a gleefully malevolent grin.

  The mirror itself was polished and highly reflective, but it wasn’t glass. Instead, it was totally black.

  ‘This is a scrying mirror,’ said Ada. ‘It’s made of obsidian, from Mexico. Obsidian allows you to see through it into the Otherland. I often use it to find out if there’s a spirit still wandering around somebody’s house.’

  ‘I remember you showed me that before, over at the Channings’ place,’ said Francis. ‘We didn’t see anything in it, though, did we?’

  ‘That’s because Mary Channing wasn’t being haunted. She was suffering from early-onset dementia, and you can’t see that in a scrying mirror. But I think there’s much more chance of seeing something in here.’

  She held up the mirror and started to walk slowly around the room, angling it repeatedly from side to side.

  ‘Nothing so far,’ she said, as she passed the outside windows.

  Rob was tempted to say, If they’re invisible, these presences, they’re going to be just as invisible in a mirror as they are in real life. But even if they couldn’t be seen, both he and Vicky had experienced how violent they could be, and how solid they felt, and if there was the slightest chance of discovering what they were, he was prepared to go along with it.

  Once Ada had completed a circuit of the room she stopped still, lowering the mirror and closing her eyes. She started to murmur something under her breath, although Rob couldn’t clearly make out what it was. He thought he caught words that sounded like Evokare lemures de mortuis, but that was all.

  She was silent for a few more seconds. Then, abruptly, she lifted up the mirror so that she could look over her shoulder.

  ‘I see them!’ she screamed. ‘I see them!’

  At that instant, with a sharp crack, the obsidian in the mirror exploded, and splinters of glittering black were scattered onto the horsehair floor. Ada flung away the broken mirror as if it were red-hot and turned to Francis, her eyes wide. She pointed towards the far corner of the room, so terrified that she opened and closed her mouth several times before she could speak.

  ‘They’re there, Frankie! I saw three or four of them at least! Jesus Christ, they’re actually there!’

  Francis gripped her arm and said, ‘Come on, steady. What do they look like?’

  ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! I only caught a glimpse of them before the mirror broke! They were all shadowy – but they looked like men – men, three or four men!’

  ‘Maybe we should get out of here,’ said Rob.

  ‘No, no—’ said Francis. ‘We need to find out who they are. They haven’t done anything to harm us, have they?’

  ‘Oh, not much. They’ve only pushed me and Vicky over and kicked me in the leg. Who knows what else they’re capable of? The one who kicked me told me that I needed to mind my own business, if I knew what was good for me.’

  ‘Rob – I have a strong suspicion about what’s going on here. If I’m right, this could be the answer to where your son has disappeared to.’

  ‘So what is it, this strong suspicion?’ Rob asked him. He couldn’t take his eyes off the corner of the room where Ada had said that she had seen three or four men. He couldn’t make out anybody there at all, not even the faintest wavering in the air. He couldn’t even see the impressions of any feet in the horsehair matting.

  ‘Let me test it out first,’ said Francis. ‘Ah, look – here’s your good wife now, with the matches.’

  Vicky came into the room and immediately realised that something had happened.

  ‘What’s wrong? You haven’t felt any more of those presences, have you?’

  ‘Ada’s seen them,’ said Rob. ‘She had this special mirror that lets you see spirits and she saw some standing in the corner over there.’

  ‘Oh my God, you’re joking. They’re not still there, are they?’

  ‘That is what we are going to try to find out,’ said Francis. He held out his hand and she passed him the box of matches. ‘I don’t know whether this will prove my suspicion, but if it does, it will go a long way to explaining what has been going on here at Allhallows Hall. If I’m mistaken – well, we’ll have to try some more tests, such as Ada’s powder test, although I am not at all sure that will tell us anything we don’t already know.’

  He took out one of the matches and struck it. It was a long kitchen match, which Herbert Russell had used to light the range. When it was burning, he wedged the end of it into a narrow split in the oak of the nearest windowsill, so that it stood upright.

  ‘Right, now let’s all get out of here,’ he said.

  ‘That’s a bit dangerous, isn’t it, leaving that there?’ asked Rob, nodding towards the match.

  ‘Not if I’m right about this room. Come along, let’s get out as quick as we can – chop-chop!’

  They all crouched down under the dado rail and went back into the bedroom, closing the panelling to seal the room behind them. Francis took a pocket watch out of his waistcoat and held it up.

  ‘Let’s give it five minutes,’ he said. ‘That should prove it beyond any question.’

  ‘Either that or the house will start to burn down.’

  ‘Trust me.’

  Rob said nothing, but thought, How am I going to explain this to the insurance company if the house does burn down? ‘Oh – I allowed a wizard to stick a lighted match in a wooden windowsill in a room carpeted with dry horsehair.’ ‘And why did you do that, Mr Russell?’ ‘What do you think? We were trying to find out if there were any ghosts in there, of course.’

  Vicky said, ‘These presences, Ada. Did they look human?’

  ‘As far as I could tell. I only saw them for a split second before my scrying mirror broke. They looked like ordinary men, though. No horns or wings or anything like that.’

  ‘Three minutes,’ said Francis.

  ‘Are you going to tell us what we’re waiting for?’ Rob asked him.

  ‘If I’m wrong about this room, it won’t matter.’

  ‘But if you’re right?’

  ‘Then I’m not at all sure what we’re going to do. I’ve heard about these rooms but I’ve never actually come across one before. Not in the flesh, so to speak.’

  ‘But what? Are they evil, these rooms? Are they dangerous? Are we going to need an exorcist?’

  Francis gave a shake of his head that was almost imperceptible, and the faintest of smiles. ‘You only need exorcists when a person or a house is possessed by Satan or one of the seventy-two demons listed in the Lesser Key of Solomon.’

  ‘But you don’t think that’s what we have here?’

  ‘No, because Satan doesn’t exist and neither do any of his demons. The only evil in this world is in the minds of men. And women, of course. I don’t want you accusing me of sexism.’

  He lifted up his pocket watch again. ‘There… five minutes. That
should do it. Let’s all go back in.’

  Francis ducked under the dado rail first and the rest of them followed. The sun had gone behind the clouds now, and the room had become colourless and gloomy. When they stood up straight, though, they saw that the match stuck into the windowsill was still alight, and that it hadn’t burned down even a fraction since Francis had wedged it there.

  Rob went over to examine it closely. It continued to burn, but it still stayed the same length.

  ‘This is a conjuring trick, right? You rubbed some grease on it, or something like that, so that it burns like a candle.’

  ‘I did nothing to it. And it isn’t a trick. What you’re seeing is a natural phenomenon.’

  ‘Matches that last forever? I never heard of those before.’

  Francis looked around the room again. His expression was different now, more wary than it had been before. He leaned forward slightly and stared with his eyes narrowed at the corner where Ada said she had seen the presences.

  ‘Ada, do you want to try your powder test?’

  ‘They’re there, aren’t they?’ Ada asked him.

  ‘I don’t know. They may have left when they saw me lighting the match. I have no idea if they’re restricted to this room only, or if they’re free to roam around other rooms, too. Judging by what happened to Rob and Vicky here, they can wander about the whole house.’

  ‘All right. But let’s hope it doesn’t annoy them, this powder test, and they decide to attack us.’

  Ada reached into her conjure-bag and took out a hexagonal green glass bottle with a silver cap.

  ‘This is battlefield dust,’ she explained. ‘It was originally used by bereaved relatives who had lost a soldier in battle but the body had never been found. They would go to the battlefield long after it was all over and collect any bones they could dig up from where their loved one was thought to have fallen – or as near as they could tell from what their surviving comrades had told them. Then they would take these bones home and grind them into powder, rather like they do in crematoriums.’