The House of a Hundred Whispers Page 13

  ‘So what would they do with this powder? Bury it? Scatter it?’

  ‘No, no. They would blow it up into the air in the rooms that their loved one used to frequent, usually their bedrooms. They hoped that if he was still haunting the house where he used to live, the powder would settle on his ghost. In that way they would at least be able to see his outline.’

  ‘But we’re not related to these presences, are we?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Battlefield dust works for all spirits, not only relatives. I’ve used it myself twice now and seen the outline of two people who were long dead. One was a grandmother in Cadover Bridge. I distinctly saw her sitting in front of her fire in her parlour, and as far as I could make out she was knitting. The other was a young farmer in Bellever, who had been run over by his father’s tractor. I saw him in his bedroom sitting on his bed, and even though I couldn’t hear him, his shoulders were shaking like he was crying.’

  She unscrewed the cap of the green glass bottle and held it up. ‘This particular dust is supposed to have come from the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. I bought it three years ago when I went to a spiritualists’ fair in Germany. It’s supposed to have enormous spiritual potency, because over ninety thousand soldiers died in that battle, and hundreds of their bodies were never recovered. There were so many skeletons left on the battlefield that more than fifteen years after it was over, tons of bones were collected up and shipped to Scotland for fertiliser. However—’

  She stopped, and glanced uneasily over to the far corner of the room.

  ‘I don’t know. Even if these presences are still there, Frankie, I’m not at all sure now that I really want to see them.’

  ‘Ada, we have to. Most of all we need to know if they have anything at all to do with Rob and Vicky’s little boy disappearing. And even if they don’t, we can’t just leave them trapped in this house forever. They need to be laid to rest, and when you’ve carried out this test I’ll tell you why.’

  ‘All right, then. But don’t give me a hard time if I scream. Talking to spirits in the Otherland, that’s one thing. They’re never threatening. Almost every one of them is sad to have died, and some of them are not even aware that they have.’

  She padded her way cautiously down to the far end of the room until she was facing the corner where she had seen the figures in her scrying mirror. She stood there for over half a minute, her back turned, not moving, not speaking. Eventually she looked over her shoulder for reassurance from Francis.

  ‘Go on, love, you can do it,’ he urged her. ‘We’re here. We’ll protect you.’

  ‘I don’t know. I was much more confident about this before I actually saw them. I mean, I’ve seen spirits before – but these didn’t look the same as spirits.’

  ‘It’s up to you, Ada. But Rob and Vicky here, they’re counting on you. People like us who have the gift of communicating with the spirit world – we have a duty to share that gift, don’t you think so, no matter how much of a risk it might be? You wouldn’t refuse to help a blind man across the road, now would you, just because you were scared you might get run over by a truck?’

  From the look on Ada’s face, it was plain that she wasn’t entirely sure what Francis was talking about, but all the same she turned back and faced the corner again. She held out her left hand and carefully tipped the green glass bottle until her palm was heaped up with pale grey powder.

  In a high, piercing voice, she sang out, ‘Poudre, poudre, envole-toi, montre-moi les visages que je cherche aujourd’hui!’

  She sang that three times, and then she bent her head forward and carefully puffed on the powder in her hand until it flew up and filled the air above her in a fine cloud.

  Nothing happened at first. But as the powder slowly began to sink down from the ceiling, it appeared to be settling on something the shape of a man’s head – and after that another, and another, and yet another. Then it settled on their shoulders, and their backs, and on their arms, and they could gradually discern that there were four men standing in the corner, even though they were nothing more than shadowy outlines formed of dust.

  ‘Christ almighty,’ said Francis, under his breath. ‘I’ve seen some weird things, I can tell you, but this—’

  ‘Ada – do they know that we can see them?’ Rob called out.

  ‘I can’t tell. Their faces aren’t clear enough.’

  ‘Do you think they might be able to hear us? Can you ask them questions?’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Can you ask them if they know where Timmy is?’

  Vicky was clinging on to the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Rob – they won’t know his name, will they? Just ask them if they’ve seen a small boy. Oh God, I’ve never been so frightened in my life. Supposing they do know where he is? What then?’

  The four men were still only dimly visible, despite all the fine grey powder that had drifted down onto their heads and their shoulders. All the same, Rob could see that at least two of them looked broad-shouldered and bulky. One of them had his hair brushed up in a point, while another had curls. The other two looked as if they were bald or at least shaven-headed.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ Ada called out to them. ‘Turn around and look at me if you can hear me.’

  Three of the four men slowly turned to face her. Rob could make out their foreheads and their cheekbones and the tips of their noses, where the dust had fallen, but that was all. Their eyes were empty. He could see the wall behind them through their eye sockets.

  ‘We haven’t come to disturb you,’ said Ada, her voice rising up a pitch. ‘We’re looking for a lost boy, that’s all. Five years old. We think he may be somewhere hidden in this house, but we can’t think where.’

  The men looked at each other, although with every move they made more of the powder fell off them onto the horsehair matting, and it was increasingly difficult to see them distinctly. They started to whisper – the same conspiratorial whispering that Rob and Vicky had heard in the corridor outside their bedroom. It sounded almost like a chant.

  ‘What are they saying, Ada? Do they have any idea where Timmy is?’

  ‘I can’t hear, Rob. I’m just hoping they’ll – aah! Let go! I said, let go of me!’

  ‘Ada? What are they doing?’

  ‘They’re pulling my arms! I said, stop it! Let go of me! Let go!’

  Both Rob and Francis immediately hurried towards her. Even though the four men had all but vanished, Ada was jerking and kicking and thrashing her arms, and it was clear that they were dragging her further down the room towards the end wall. They were kicking up the horsehair matting all around her, and Rob could hear them grunting and swearing to each other in tense, hissing whispers.

  He reached Ada and seized her shoulders. He couldn’t believe how violently she was flinging herself around, as if she were dancing to some frantic disco music. He tried to wrench her towards him, but then he was punched, hard, on the side of his head, an inch above his left ear. He had never been hit so hard in his life, and he pitched backwards, stunned, his brain singing, and collapsed onto his back on the floor.

  He managed to sit up, even though he was so disorientated and his vision was blurry. Almost at once, with a loud thud, Francis dropped onto his hands and knees close beside him, shaking his head like a dog that had been swimming in a lake.

  Ada screamed, and her scream was so high-pitched that it was almost beyond the range of human hearing. Rob blinked and tried to focus on her. He could see that she was kicking and frantically flailing her arms, but she wasn’t strong enough to resist the four men who were pulling her away. By now they had shaken off all the battlefield powder, and so they were invisible again, but he could still hear them sharply whispering to each other.

  Pull her – pull her, for Christ’s sake! Pull the bitch harder!

  Rob managed to heave himself up on one knee, gripping the nearest windowsill to give himself support, but it was then that he saw Ada rammed up against the end wall, still furiously st
ruggling to get herself free.

  Yet she wasn’t just rammed up against the wall. She began to disappear into it – swallowed up by the plaster as if she were being dragged behind a thick white curtain. It happened in seconds. Rob saw her right arm waving in a last desperate appeal to be saved, and then she was gone.

  There was nothing he could do but stand and stare at the wall in disbelief. Francis stood up, too, and said, ‘My God. I was right. But I never thought – oh, my God. I never realised that could happen.’

  Without a word, Rob went back and ducked under the dado rail. He crossed the end bedroom, knocking over two or three candlesticks with a brassy clatter, and then he ran along the corridor to the landing, so that he could look at the other side of the wall through which Ada had disappeared.

  There was nobody there. The house was silent. He listened, but he couldn’t even hear any whispering. He walked back and rejoined Vicky and Francis. Vicky was pale with shock, and she caught hold of his arm.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘How could she go through the wall like that? You don’t think she’s dead, do you? You don’t think they’ve killed her?’

  ‘No,’ said Francis. ‘I don’t think they’ve killed her. I think they’ve done something worse than that.’

  20

  ‘Do you think we should call the police?’ asked Vicky.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Francis. ‘I really don’t know. What are we going to say to them, if we do? From what Ada told me, the police are already beginning to wonder if you’re all a bit doolally. And even if they do believe us, what can they do about it? What’s happened to Ada isn’t criminal, it’s metaphysical.’

  ‘But where has she gone?’

  ‘It’s this room,’ said Francis.

  He went up to the end wall and pressed his hand flat against it.

  ‘It’s solid, see? Perfectly solid. But only in this time.’

  ‘What do you mean, “in this time”?’ Vicky asked him.

  ‘I don’t have conclusive proof, but I don’t think that this is a priest’s hide at all. Well, it might have been, to start with. In fact, it’s quite likely that it was. These duplicate stained-glass windows – they could well have been fitted by Nicholas Owen. They’re just the kind of optical illusion that he excelled at.’

  He looked around the room, thoughtfully rubbing his bruised right elbow.

  ‘Like I said before, though, Nicholas Owen would never have used a crucifix as a switch to open the dado. Far too risky. That would have been fixed in much later – I’d guess even centuries later – and probably the whole pulley mechanism was installed then, too. Before that, who knows? To get into this room originally, the priest might have had to lift the floorboards in the bedroom and slide underneath the floor. That was a typical Nicholas Owen trick.’

  ‘So if this room isn’t a priest’s hole or hide or whatever you want to call it, what is it?’

  ‘To my mind, this match proves it. Look, it’s still burning. I believe that this is what in the sixteenth century they used to call a “witching room”. I’ve read quite a bit about them. There are all kinds of different names for them in different cultures. The Scandinavians used to call them “frozen rooms”. In Slovenian, I think they’re called something like “ageless chambers”. In Greece, “chronovóres táfoi”, which roughly means “tombs that eat time”.

  ‘From what I’ve read, an alchemist will have mixed various elements into the plaster so that after the plaster dried the room was kept suspended in time. If you entered the room and somebody recited a particular incantation, that incantation would trigger a metaphysical reaction from the walls, and you would become trapped in the moment that it was spoken to you, forever. You would never age from that moment. Your physical body would remain in that exact second, like an insect in amber, while the rest of the world carries on. The room itself is timeless. That’s why that match will burn and burn but will never go out, ever. We could come back here in twenty years’ time and it will still be there, burning.’

  ‘So those men who took Ada – those presences – what are they? If they’re stuck in the moment when they first came into this room – how can they walk about the house? How can they walk through walls, and pull Ada through a wall?’

  ‘It’s not them you saw, Rob. It’s their energy. They’re still here, in this room. Or somewhere in this house, anyway.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Where?’

  ‘Let me put it simply. Supposing on Monday you’re standing on a street corner by a letterbox. If I go to that same street corner on Tuesday you won’t appear to be there, will you? But supposing you’re still stuck in Monday. Time will have moved on but your physical existence won’t have moved on with it. You’ll still be there.’

  ‘But those presences? Those men we saw?’

  ‘They’re what people mistakenly call our souls, or our spirits. We all have an incredible amount of electrical energy that makes up our physical being and our personality. That energy can leave our bodies, usually when we’re asleep, and roam around. That’s why we dream. Occasionally somebody’s energy can become visible, or partially visible, and that’s what we call ghosts, although ghosts are never the energy of dead people. When you die, your energy dies with you.

  ‘Those men we saw just now when Ada threw that powder over them… yes, I suppose you could call them ghosts, but they’re not dead yet. They’re still here, in this house, in what you might call suspended animation. In the same way as I described you still standing by the letterbox, the only reason we can’t see them or feel them is that they’re not here now, not in today. They’re all still back in the very hour – the very minute – the very second when they were first trapped here. For all we know, some of them could have been here for a hundred years, maybe even more.’

  ‘But Ada says she sees the spirits of dead people, doesn’t she?’ said Vicky.

  ‘What Ada sees is the resonance that people sometimes leave behind after their death, especially in the walls of the houses in which they used to live. She calls it the Otherland, although I like to think of it as more of a spiritual echo. It fades, eventually, this resonance, like all echoes fade. There is no afterlife. No heaven, no hell – even though all the atoms that once made us what we were will go on milling around the universe for all eternity. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed.’

  ‘Do you think that these presences could have taken Timmy, too?’ asked Rob. ‘I mean – is it possible that Timmy could be stuck right here in this room, except we can’t see him because he’s still back in Wednesday afternoon, when he disappeared?’

  ‘I don’t know, Rob. I simply don’t know. This is the first witching room I’ve ever found myself in. As I say, I’ve read a fair amount about them. It was when I was studying to be a gleaner and I found a translation of an essay written by Nicolaus Copernicus after he studied medicine under Girolamo Fracastoro in Padua. Its title in Latin is Stat Adhuc Tempus, or Time Stands Still. Just as Copernicus theorised that the Earth goes round the Sun instead of the other way around, he suggested that certain combinations of chemicals could stop people growing old so quickly or even stop time in its tracks.

  ‘But, honestly, I need to find out so much more. I have no idea how these witching rooms were made, or who made them, or exactly what for. I have no idea what chemicals were mixed into the plaster or what incantation has to be spoken to suspend a person for ever in the moment when they first entered. Without being flippant, I suppose it’s a bit like those incantations to raise a specific demon, such as Asmodeus or Barbatos, or like saying “Alexa” and immediately hearing the tune you want.’

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ said Vicky. ‘This is completely doing my head in. But I saw those men and I heard them whispering and I saw Ada go right through that wall. We have to do something, don’t we? That’s Timmy gone and Martin gone and now Ada gone. Who’s going to be next?’

  ‘We’ll have to tell the police,’ said Rob. ‘After a while
somebody’s going to come looking for Ada, aren’t they? Does she have family around here? Or a boyfriend?’

  ‘She did have a boyfriend. Bill or Will, I think his name was. But I think they split up two or three months ago and he went back to wherever he came from. Australia, as far as I remember. And I think she has a brother in Plymouth.’

  ‘Well, let’s look around the house first. If she disappeared into one wall, maybe she’s reappeared out of another. Or maybe there’s some trace of where those men have taken her.’

  They looked around the room one more time. Rob went across to the window and blew on the match, which was still burning. He blew again, harder, but it didn’t even flicker. Francis picked it up and took it out of the room with them, and once they were back in the bedroom he nipped it out between finger and thumb.

  ‘Stat adhuc tempus,’ he said, ‘but nihil durat in aeternum. Time may stand still, but nothing lasts forever.’

  *

  They found Katharine in the kitchen. She was sitting at the table staring into space. She had a mug of tea cupped between her hands, which she had obviously forgotten about because the teabag was still floating in it and it had steeped to the colour of mahogany.

  She looked up when Rob and Vicky and Francis came in.

  ‘Has something happened? I thought I heard that Ada shouting.’ She paused, and blinked, and then she said, ‘Is Ada not with you? Has she gone?’

  Vicky pulled out a chair and sat down beside her. ‘Ada’s been – well, there’s only one way of putting it. There were men in that room. It looked as if there were four of them. But they were like ghosts.’

  ‘Ghosts? Are you serious?’

  ‘Ada threw some of this special powder in the air and it fell on them and we could see them. But then they grabbed hold of her and they—’ Vicky stopped. She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

  ‘They what? They what?’

  ‘They pulled her into the wall and she vanished,’ said Francis, in his throaty voice.