Anita had to laugh at that. She was not wholly lacking in self-awareness but always argued that, as a romantic, she had to follow her heart. They had talked about this a lot. Anita was convinced she would eventually find true love with her ideal Mister Darcy or similar. Tara, feeling a little naughty, pointed out that Jane Austen would not approve of Anita’s methods.
“She was a classic victim of patriarchal culture,” Anita responded. “If Miss Jane Prissy-Pants was around today, she’d be hurling herself at everything in trousers to make up for lost time. Mark my words!”
Tara couldn’t quite figure out the rationale behind that idea, so she let it go. Instead, she discussed ghost hunting with her friend. Anita was predictably enthusiastic and wanted to start questioning Ellie at once.
“Kids are famous for seeing ghosts and stuff,” she insisted. “Like that daft dog—they’re sensitive too. And it won’t come indoors; how spooky is that? What if Ellie’s a hotline to the undead? Save us a lot of trouble if she could just ask them what’s going on. Maybe she could tell them to bugger off and let Tim get the job done!”
Tara suggested that discussing the paranormal with a six-year-old should be handled quite gently. Anita was having none of it though. She argued that children were far more open-minded than adults because every day of their lives brought new facts, new experiences, a lot of them quite disturbing.
“And,” Anita added, “it’s nearly tea time. That means Ellie will be in bed within a couple of hours, and we’ll have to wait until tomorrow to question her.”
She headed outside in search of the girl.
“Okay,” sighed Tara, following. “But if she’s even a little upset, we’ll lay off right away.”
Ellie was playing with Trixie under the watchful eye of Sonia, who looked out from the kitchen window. Tara and Anita joined in with an improvised game of soccer, and soon, all four were yelling and running around. At one point, Trixie was rebuked for ball-hogging, but otherwise, it was good clean fun. It was a warm day, and, after nearly an hour, Tara suggested cool drinks indoors.
“I’d like to see more of your drawings,” Tara said as Sonia produced homemade lemonade. “I’m sure Anita would, too.”
Ellie was happy to show off her art. Tara made a point of being casual, not asking too many questions, just pointing to something now and again. She pointed to the mysterious lady and asked if she was around at the moment. Ellie shook her head. Tara followed up with a few innocuous questions about dinosaurs. Anita, impatient, asked if the mysterious lady was a ghost.
“The lady is scared of ghosts,” Ellie replied, surprising them all. “I don’t think she likes being one. I don’t think the other ghosts are nice to her.”
Tim came in to talk to Sonia and was sidetracked by the discussion around the kitchen table.
“Have you told them about the Romans?” asked Ellie’s father.
The girl looked up at him blankly for a moment then shook her head.
“Are the Romans the other ghosts?” Tara asked.
Ellie shrugged.
“Sometimes, but there are other ones.”
Anita looked at Tara.
“I think we’ve got our work cut out here.”
Carl arrived with a few queries for Tim, who decided to get some more work done before dinner. The men went upstairs, and Sonia set about making what she referred to as “builder’s tea.” Tara, puzzled, looked to Anita.
“Extra strong tea, and very sweet, packed with energy,” Anita said. “Now, Ellie, about these Romans…”
Ellie wanted to talk about other things, such as BlunderBears, and how they might fare in a world of dinosaurs. And possibly robots. Anita, who was not famous for her patience, soon took a back seat as Tara worked around to Ellie’s drawings and her experiences. It emerged that the little girl was visited at night by the lady, but she wasn’t scared. She knew the lady could not hurt her.
“How?” asked Tara.
“I just know,” came the reply.
“Did the lady—live here?” Tara said.
She had almost asked if the woman had died there. But she was unsure how far down that road Ellie’s parents had taken her. So instead, she asked if the lady was around now. This time, Ellie nodded. Tara asked where she was. Ellie pointed to a corner of the kitchen.
“Has she just—arrived?” Anita asked.
The child nodded again.
“Is she talking to you now?” Tara asked.
Another nod.
“What’s she saying?”
Ellie looked bored by the questioning but was obviously on her best behavior for the guest so she answered.
“She says Auntie Anita is a painted trollop. I don’t know what that means but I don’t think it’s very nice.”
Anita had turned an interesting shade of puce and was staring into the corner. Tara almost laughed before she grasped the implications then felt a slight chill. It was possible that old-fashioned sexist insults might have gotten into Ellie’s head via her daddy’s iPad but it seemed very unlikely.
“Does she say anything about me?” Tara asked with some trepidation.
Ellie nodded once more.
“She says you’re different. Different to her, different to ordinary people. She thinks you can help her. But there’s not much time.”
More questions failed to get any answers, and a look from Sonia told Tara to ease off. As Ellie’s mother carried two steaming mugs of tea upstairs, Tara asked to look at more of Ellie’s drawings. Most were simple and expressive, but a few seemed odd. One showed some people in black clothes around a table with a square object in the middle. Tara pointed and asked what it was.
“A special thing,” Ellie said and looked up at the corner. Then she lowered her voice and leaned closer to Tara. “She doesn’t want people to know about it. But she’s gone so I can tell you. It’s the trick slate. She hid it away with her other things somewhere.”
Trick slate. The term meant nothing to Tara, but it was just the kind of obscure reference that would appeal to Mortlake. She took out her phone and started to tap out a text message.
***
Tim had decided to get a simple job done quickly, laying new floorboards on one of the bedrooms. The room had been sadly neglected and had suffered badly from dry rot in places. Before Buster’s accident, the team had ripped up half of the old floor to find the beams mercifully intact. Tim and Carl donned dust masks and gloves and commenced cutting planks to the right lengths and nailing them down.
It was a fairly simple job they’d done a hundred times before.
But Tim still felt uneasy.
The room was well lit by the afternoon sun, but the shadows in the corners seemed profoundly black. They worked to the blare of the radio set to a local FM pop station and made plenty of noise themselves. But occasionally, the quiet came flooding back, the not-quite-silence that whispered to Tim in words he couldn’t quite understand.
He tried to focus on the job. Carl, a more precise craftsman, was cutting the floorboards to length. Tim was nailing them down with a special gun, one that he had bought secondhand after being stung once too often over rentals. The “gun” in fact looked nothing like a weapon—it was designed for floorboards, which made it far safer than regular nail guns. He was an expert in handling it safely.
Yet Tim still jumped when the gadget fired a nail through a board and into a beam. He was nervous, antsy over the sharp sound and the shock of impact that shot through him. He was relieved to be able to stop when Sonia arrived with their mugs of tea. She warned them that they had just an hour until dinner and frowned knowledgeably at the job so far.
“I got the tax returns done,” she added. “Bloody tax man, he is like a vampire. Only he bleeds you through stupid government website.”
Sonia glanced at Carl and frowned again. The workman was normally more talkative, but he was currently staring down at the portable workbench as if fascinated by engineered hardwood. His mug of tea remained untouched, perched o
n the end of the bench. The circular saw, which had been idle, whined into life, and its earsplitting noise made Tim flinch.
Sonia was standing in the doorway beside Carl. Tim was a few yards away and, down on his knees, couldn’t see too clearly what happened. He saw Sonia’s mouth working but couldn’t hear what she was shouting. She lunged forward, grabbed Carl’s hand, and jerked it upright, away from the circular saw. The two fell against the wall. The whine of the saw subsided. Carl was rubbing his head in confusion.
“You could have cut your fingers off!” Sonia said. “Oh God, Carl! You careless bugger!”
Tim stood up, alarmed as much by his wife’s demeanor as what had happened. Sonia never lost her composure, she was always his rock, but she was genuinely alarmed now. He demanded to know what had happened, how a workman as experienced and careful as Carl could have neglected safety.
“I was daydreaming, I guess,” Carl said. “Sorry, it felt like I wasn’t in control of my body…”
Tim felt anger, stifled it, started to tell Carl to be more careful in the future, maybe knock off for the day now. It was getting late. Sonia screamed again and pointed. Tim looked down. The nail gun was—impossibly—no longer on the floor. It took him a moment to grasp the fact that the tool was now hovering above his right foot. He started to pull back when the gun fired with its familiar thunk. Then pain shot through his foot. He saw the small metal shaft protruding from his work boot, just behind the steel toe cap. And he saw blood oozing out of the hole.
“Oh God!”
Sonia and Carl were by him now, hands reaching out, propping him up, supporting him under his arms. The room seemed to darken, the voices of his helpers fading. Other voices rose, a susurrus from many mouths speaking words he could not understand. But then, among them, was another voice.
It spoke a name.
***
Mortlake’s phone vibrated in the pocket of his tweed jacket. He had been dozing lightly in his living room, Opal purring on his lap. He had recovered from the shock of seeing the unaltered square by the Senate House, but yesterday’s early start was catching up with him. He fumbled at the jacket, which was draped over the back of his chair. Opal stretched luxuriously, yawned, curled up again.
“Hello?”
Tara was clearly agitated, but she still spoke coherently and gave him the facts. He admired that but was also a little worried. It seemed that, if three witnesses were to be believed, some kind of poltergeist event had injured a man. It transpired that the damage was minor.
“The nail didn’t go in deep,” Tara explained. “Missed major blood vessels, too. But it’s scary as hell on top of everything else.”
More discussion followed as Tara described the haunting at Haslam House. Mortlake accepted her argument that the Garlands could not simply leave. Instead, he suggested caution and further research. The Roman angle was interesting, as was the mysterious lady.
“Helen York,” Tara said. “That was a name Tim heard. Does it mean anything to you?”
Mortlake mulled it over for a moment. It did ring a bell, but neither name was uncommon.
“I’ll look it up in my files,” he said. “And you might just ask around locally. You never know. Parish records are always useful—befriend the vicar. Or send Anita to befriend him, if she’s half the girl you say she is.”
That got a laugh from Tara, and he felt pleased to have eased the tension a little. Far from being a standard English haunting—sounds heard and things sensed or glimpsed—it seemed Haslam House had unusually powerful phenomena. But there was an obvious question about the way they had become evident.
“This more—spectacular trouble,” he said. “Has it just started recently? How long have the family been living in the place?”
“They arrived just over a month ago,” Tara said. “But you’re right. Until today, they all agree it was just standard ghostly stuff…”
There was a pause. Mortlake wondered if she would reach the conclusion he had, if he was honest, simply jumped to.
“You don’t think,” Tara went on, “that my turning up caused the poltergeist thing? Because I wasn’t even in the room, I was downstairs talking to Ellie when we heard the noise.”
“But the little girl, Ellie,” Mortlake said. “She has some kind of link to the mysterious lady and these Romans, yes?”
Tara offered him a couple of seconds of eloquent silence. Mortlake changed tack.
“Do you want me to come up?” he asked. “It’s the long summer vacation, I can put off any other business…”
This time, the response was firm.
“No, thanks, Prof, but I want to deal with this myself if I can. If it gets worse, don’t worry, I’ll scream for help. But I know you have your college work to do, and it’ll piss off that Provost guy if you drop everything.”
Mortlake started to protest, but she cut him off. They came close to bickering as he proposed coming up for just a long weekend. Then he was distracted as Opal suddenly woke up and stared intently at the front door, small tail twitching. Mortlake asked a few more questions, gently urged Tara to think about accepting more help, and made her promise to call back with regular updates.
“At least once a day,” he insisted. “At least do that for me.”
Opal leaped down off his lap and stalked over to the door, tail still waving. The effect was almost comical—tiny kitten becomes mighty huntress. But it was also odd. Opal usually reacted to people passing by with a mere twitch of the ears, perhaps a lifting of her head. Now she was crouched at the door, apparently fascinated by something on the other side.
“All right,” he said. “If there’s nothing else…”
Tara rang off. Mortlake decided to check outside. There might be another cat lurking in the building. Perhaps Opal’s dad, Bigglesworth, was on the prowl. He was about to open the door when he froze. He had a sudden overwhelming conviction that there was somebody outside, listening as intently as he was.
Opal mewed up at him, pink mouth bright against black fur, green-gold eyes enormous.
“Shh!” he said, absurdly.
He opened the inner door of his rooms. He had closed the outer door when he got back, as he didn’t want to be disturbed while napping. Now he wished he’d left it open. Opal switched from mewing to hissing and growling. Again, it did not seem cute, just worrying. Mortlake had amassed quite a few enemies. Not all of them were human, or fully human.
“Who’s there?” he said loudly.
The response was unexpected. It was a giggle, feminine, low, and familiar. It took him several pounding heartbeats to reach for the door and wrench it open. There was nobody there, but Opal bounded out into the corridor and crouched, facing right, still emitting tiny growls.
He stepped out and looked along the corridor. Someone—moving fast, almost a blur—was disappearing around the corner. He started to run, reached the nearest corner just as the stranger was vanishing around the farther one. He had a sudden vision of himself chasing someone around forever. The medieval building enclosed the quadrangle. But the main staircase was behind him, so to get down…
Mortlake stopped. Then he heard a clank, the dull sound of an electric motor. He had forgotten the elevator. He turned and ran for the staircase then remembered Opal. He could hardly leave her unattended. He slowed, walked back to his apartment, panting and vowing to take more exercise. The kitten had leaped onto a windowsill that looked down onto the quad. He scooped her up, was about to go inside then decided to linger.
Someone emerged from the main entrance below. He had expected the mane of black hair and the familiar walk. But he had not expected her to pause and look up at the window. Now he saw her face, pale as in his dream, lips shockingly red, dark eyes blinking in the sun as she raised a slender hand to shade her face.
She smiled, and he felt as if razor-sharp claws were tearing at his heart.
“Cassandra!”
She turned her face away from him and walked swiftly out of sight, heading for the mai
n gate. He rushed inside, dropped a protesting Opal onto the sofa, and grabbed his phone. He fumbled over the menu, cursing, and managed to get it the third time. The porter’s lodge number rang twice, three times. He ran outside, still clutching the phone, and got to a window where the gate was visible. A small knot of international students whom he recognized was clustered around the stone archway.
Cassandra walked by the youngsters. A young man turned, checked out the dark-haired woman. A young woman punched him on the arm.
She was real. And she vanished into the lodge gate.
He leaned against the wall. The porter’s lodge picked up, and a small voice answered.
“Stop that woman!” he shouted, hearing himself sounding crazy.
“Who is this?”
“Professor Mortlake! The woman just leaving, stop her!”
“Sir…”
He realized how ridiculous he was being. He couldn’t order college staff to detain anyone—all they could do was call the cops, but he had no evidence of any crime. Of course, there were security cameras, tapes, proper procedures. Which, if he followed them, would raise eyebrows and antagonize the Provost, again.
“Professor?”
“I’m sorry, forget it—sorry to bother you.”
He walked slowly back to his rooms where Opal had already gone back to sleep. Mortlake shut the inner door, leaving the outer one open. He would welcome some everyday disturbance. He sat down at his desk and tried to focus on work, resolving to deal with some dull admin matters. But his attention kept straying to the shelves above the sofa where Opal lay like a puddle of blackest shadow.
Finally, he got up and went over to his old box files and ran a finger along the handwritten labels. He stopped at CROWE, NATHANIEL.
Underneath the name, Mortlake’s younger self had added, in slightly smaller letters, three more words:
CULT—MASS SUICIDE
He took a deep breath, grasped the file. It was heavy, packed with material, much of it from newspapers in the wake of the tragedy. He took it back to his desk and, for the first time in months, opened the spring-loaded lid.
House of Whispers: Supernatural Suspense with Scary & Horrifying Monsters (Mortlake Series Book 2) Page 6