House of Whispers: Supernatural Suspense with Scary & Horrifying Monsters (Mortlake Series Book 2)

by David Longhorn

  “Kitchen,” Mortlake said. “I’ll find it. No, you stay here! I’ll go and bring it back.”

  Why, he thought as he walked on, why didn’t I insist they leave? Because I was too pleased with myself, how cleverly I’d worked it all out. I wanted an audience, to show them the expert in action. Stupid egotistical bastard!

  He resumed his walk toward the house. The doorway looked like the great open maw of a beast, waiting for its prey to walk right in. A poem, silly but also sinister, started to run ’round his mind.

  Won’t you come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly?

  Cassandra. Her face, her body, the touch of her long cool fingers, came back to him, unbidden. She had spoken that line, playful as ever, when he’d invited her back to his rooms. He saw her face now, raising a pencil-thin eyebrow and giving a little pout.

  “Earl Grey and a slice of Madeira cake, Professor? You really know how to spoil a girl.”

  The memory hit hard, and he stifled a sob. He’d been thrown off-balance by Cassandra’s ghost or whatever had been haunting him in Cambridge. That problem had festered in his mind and made him all too eager to get away, come rushing up north and start meddling and showing off.

  You arrogant, old bastard!

  “What are we planning, boss?” Tara asked. “If you still want me on the team, I have a contingency plan to stop me going rogue again.”

  Startled, he glanced down at her. He’d been so preoccupied he hadn’t noticed her running up to him. He saw that she was still badly rattled.

  “Plan?” he said. “Erm, may I ask…?”

  “Simple,” she said. “Sammy trained me to incapacitate somebody with one quick blow. So, he taught you, too, right? Call it a life hack. Or a knockout blow, either’s good.”

  Mortlake remembered how he had tried to use that particular move on Sammy and failed every time. The Iraq veteran had been too quick for him. And Sammy had also warned him that the blow in question might well kill if dealt clumsily. The man’s precise words came back to Mortlake.

  “Use this as a last resort, Prof—but only if you don’t mind doing time for manslaughter.”

  When he started to explain this, Tara cut him off.

  “Better you just kill me outright than let that demonic asshole burn you up—or Sonia, or Tim, or Ellie,” she said in a fast monotone. “It’s a risk I’ll take if you will. If you need me. Otherwise, I’ll go and sit in the corner and wait and see what happens. Which is torture for me, the whole doing nothing bit. For you, too, I guess?”

  Mortlake looked down into her eyes. She was brave and more sensible than he’d been at her age. He nodded his assent, unable to find the right words to thank her. Then he explained, as best he could, what he hoped to achieve. Tara asked a few intelligent questions. She was thinking clearly as before, he noted. Perhaps they did have a chance.

  “I can’t be sure,” he said, resuming the walk to the house. “But salt features in a lot of traditional magic. It was rare, a valuable commodity you didn’t just throw around for no good reason. The Celts certainly valued its power, it features in a lot of magical rituals today… And, yes, to be honest, I’m putting a lot of faith in sodium chloride. It just makes sense to protect the child if we can’t get her away.”

  He looked back at the Garlands. Tim was gazing after them, his expression inscrutable at this distance. Sonia was taking something from around her neck, looping it over her little girl’s head. He had forgotten the crucifix and had no idea if it would be effective. But, he reflected, his ideas were just as tentative and problematic.

  ***

  “I think the demon—to call it that for want of a better word—needs to recharge its batteries between attacks,” Mortlake explained as they searched the kitchen. “I also think that human sacrifice gives it energy. Carl’s death wasn’t just to keep us in its sphere of influence, it was a kind of—feeding.”

  Tara frowned as she rummaged through kitchen drawers. They were searching for a large container of salt. There was only a half-empty salt cellar in sight. She had not recovered from the trauma of seeing Carl die. She knew she never really could. But this frantic activity was helping. And she had devised a contingency plan to avert any future use of her powers by the dark god. She could only hope one, or both, of them didn’t end up dead as a result of what was a very sketchy idea.

  “You mean, if we’d all made a run for it after Carl died, it couldn’t have hurt us?” she said.

  Mortlake paused in his searching, smiled grimly.

  “That’s my theory. Would you stake your own life on it, let alone that of someone else’s child?”

  “Okay, so it uses human spiritual energy to harvest more of that same energy?” she asked. “Like an animal that hunts prey for food? So, it’s a trade-off, and it could be exhausted if it tries and fails? I guess having some tribe do the killing for it was a sweet setup for the evil bastard. And using me was a neat twist. It is a quick learner, you were right.”

  Mortlake nodded but admitted that this was only his best guess.

  “I suspect it might be many years since it actually tried to kill anyone,” he said, pulling drawers out onto the kitchen floor and scattering cutlery. “But it’s got a long memory and it’s fully awake now, I fear.”

  Tara reached for what might have been a salt container but it was bleach. She flung it aside, cursing, and rummaged at the back of the cupboard under the sink.

  “But,” Mortlake added, “the fact that Helen York and the Romans are still around, in a sense, means that the thing can never entirely destroy its victims’ souls, their essence. That makes it worse, in a way. They’re eternal sacrifices.”

  “Information can’t be created or destroyed in this universe, only transformed,” Tara observed distractedly. “It’s the same problem if you fall into a black hole, or so Stephen Hawking said. Human souls might be a special form of information… Hey, I found some!”

  She held up a cardboard box of table salt that was almost full. Mortlake explained that he wanted her to go and get his ghost-hunting kit. Clearly, there was no need for any proof of a haunting now. But she grasped that he wanted to gather as much data on the enemy as possible.

  “Okay,” she said as they separated in the hallway. “You go do the circle thing.”

  As she made her way upstairs, Tara had tried to recover her composure, but the death of Carl was like an open wound in her mind. She tried to banish the memories of the burning corpse, the crackle of flames. Above all, the stench of burned flesh.

  Rationality, she told herself. Cool head. You can’t be a wuss, and you can’t change the past. Focus on the enemy, see it as a problem to be solved.

  Tara tried to stop thinking of the entity they faced as some kind of super-spook. But for all her scientific rationalism, she had to accept that they were in the domain of a demon that had once been worshipped as a god. And it was desperate for the tribute it had once received.

  Mortlake’s luggage was dumped on his bed. She spotted the ghost-hunting kit at once. She had seen it several times before, and he had shown her how to use it. As she opened the large plastic case, she wondered if he’d ever sleep in this room. Normal things like sleep seemed very far-off. And yet, they were in a nightmare that seemed to have already lasted for a very long time.

  Having checked the kit, she closed the case and hefted it off the bed. She wheeled around and glanced at the dressing table mirror. It bore straggling words, again scrawled in one of Anita’s lipsticks.

  HELP US TARA

  She had experienced so many shocks that it barely registered. She was already at the top of the stairs when the difference to earlier messages struck her.

  “Us?”

  ***

  Mortlake ran, wheezing slightly, down the drive to where the Garlands stood by their immobilized SUV. The vehicle, he noticed, blocked their view of Carl’s body. It suddenly occurred to him that someone driving past might see the charred corpse, stop, and come inside. Even worse, they
might call the police straight away. That would provide the entity under Haslam House with more victims. Perhaps even a steady stream.

  One thing at a time, he told himself. Can’t do anything about that yet.

  “Is this going to work?” Tim asked dubiously.

  Mortlake came to a lumbering halt and tried to catch his breath.

  “I… think… so,” he replied. “Best… sit down… grass—you’ll be there… a while.”

  In fact, Mortlake reflected, he had no idea how long they’d be there. This brought him up short, and he reconsidered his plan. If he was right about Tara, she was far enough away…

  Don’t take stupid risks, he told himself.

  But he was just a few yards from the gate. And he should get Carl’s body out of sight anyway.

  “Here,” he said to Tim, handing him the box of salt. “Just get comfortable as you can and pour it around you in a circle. Not too big, you want it to make a thick line. No gaps. That’s vital.”

  Tim stood, holding the box, watching as Mortlake set off around the car.

  “What—what are you going to do?”

  “Just make the circle, Tim, please,” Mortlake replied.

  The body had stopped smoking but that meant the face was visible. Or rather, what was left of the face. There was no hint that, a few minutes earlier, this distorted, blackened form had been a funny, intelligent, honest human being. Mortlake felt guilt and self-disgust rising like bile and forced it down. He stepped between the gates and onto the country road, paused for a second, half expecting a searing bolt of heat to shoot through him to the core.

  But there was nothing. He stooped, grabbed the body by the blackened workman’s boots, and pulled Carl inside and around behind the wall. He made sure the body was still out of sight of the Garlands. Then he tried to rub the soot off his hands, succeeding only in smearing his light linen trousers with black streaks. He hoped that, when Ellie saw them, she could not work out what they were.

  “Done?” he said, rounding the SUV again.

  “For what it’s worth,” Tim said, his voice carefully neutral.

  The grass around the family was marked with a white circle about five feet across. Mortlake knew it should ideally be on a hard surface, but this would have to do if Tara was to help in the house. However, there was a chance that the demon was unable to strike at them now.

  If only I could be sure of anything about its powers, he thought, other than that they must have limits.

  “Tim,” he said. “Listen carefully. I just stepped outside and wasn’t harmed. Do you want to risk it? If so, the sooner the better.”

  Tim looked baffled then sprang to his feet. Sonia reached up for him, and for a moment, Mortlake wondered if she would hold him in the circle. Then she looked from one man to another and down at her little girl. Ellie was crying quietly again. The Garlands touched hands briefly, then Tim set off running. A few seconds later, he shouted to Sonia, who gathered up Ellie and walked briskly past the professor.

  “Good luck,” she said, with a thin smile. “I know you did not mean any harm.”

  That remark, and the sight of Ellie’s face looking back at him over her mother’s shoulder, opened the wound in his ego a little wider.

  ***

  “They’ve gone?”

  Mortlake nodded.

  “I think they’re safe. I put the body… I put Carl out of sight of the road.”

  It took her a second to realize why.

  “I didn’t think of that,” she said. “Good call. But will this stuff really help?”

  She gestured at the case of equipment on the living room table. Mortlake opened it and handed her an EMF meter, laid a second out by the case. Then he took out something else. A taser.

  “Illegal, in England,” he said. “But it occurred to me that it might be better than…”

  “Accidentally killing me with your bare hands when you try to knock me out as you burst into flames?” she interrupted. “Yeah, there’s that I guess.”

  She straightened up, looked at the EMF detector, then at him.

  “I should go. It doesn’t matter where, I should just go,” she said, hearing her voice almost break. “That’s the real takeout from this—this total screwup! I was little Miss Cleverclogs and thought I could solve a mystery. Instead, I let you think it was going to be easy…”

  Mortlake reached out, and for a second, she thought he was going to grasp both her arms. She shied away, irritated. It was such a clichéd thing to do, cheap movie stuff.

  “This is serious!” she exclaimed. “This is not the bit where the smart hero lectures the dumb chick! Though God knows I’ve been dumb.”

  He let his arms fall helplessly to his side.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I wasn’t—I’m not a hugger, as you’ll have noticed. I just wanted to say that I would rather have you with me here than anyone else. But you’re right. You should go. I’ve faced evil before, I’ve done it alone. I can do it again.”

  She put the gadget down and tried to smile.

  “Guess we’ll have some talking to do when this is over,” she said, not looking him in the eye. “In the meantime, I have to get away right now.”

  She walked out of the room without looking back. It struck her that the hallway was weirdly normal, as if this was a house where normal people could live in reasonable happiness. She wondered if she would ever have a house like that. It seemed a wild fantasy, knowing what she knew now. She had to live with a so-called wild talent, which was at least as bad as any curse in the darkest of fairy tales.

  I’m a loaded weapon. I could be used to kill someone, anywhere, anytime, she thought. And how will I know when it’s about to happen? How can I stop it, suppress this god-awful “gift” or preferably get rid of it?

  She had no answers. She couldn’t even think about finding answers, not yet, not on this day of horrors and revelations.

  Tara stepped outside and walked down the steps to the drive. Suddenly, she was running, pounding down the gravel in the sunlight. Birds sang and a few insects buzzed by her. A light breeze ruffled her hair. She saw a black roughly oblong thing lying by the gate and rounded the SUV on the other side. And then she was out in the English countryside and turning away from the village.

  She headed into an unknown country, not knowing what she might encounter around the next bend. She told herself it was not just to avoid the Garlands. It was to avoid every human being, at least for a little while.

  Chapter 12

  The EMF device confirmed what Mortlake had already suspected. There were several active spots around the house, but when he took a few steps down into the cellar, the device went crazy. He flicked on the light, revealing a nondescript space, cluttered with old junk. The gadget clicked wildly as he took another few steps then fell silent. At first, he thought it had overloaded but then realized that it had probably failed like their phones.

  “Cruder than a phone,” Mortlake murmured to himself. “But still electronic. As opposed to purely electrical.”

  He was not sure if the distinction was relevant, but he had to find out. He left the cellar light on and went up to the doorway to retrieve another device. This one, he turned on and simply waved through the doorway. It kept working. He went halfway down the cellar steps. The small Dictaphone was still working. Through a small window, he could see the reels of old-school magnetic tape still turning.

  “Okay,” he said. “Nothing ventured.”

  He descended to the concrete floor, pointed the device around the cellar again. It had worked well in the past. The theory went that digital devices were somehow incapable of picking up impulses generated by a haunting. Tape certainly did pick up voices that seemed to link with historical incidents and long-dead characters. But Mortlake had never tried the Dictaphone in this kind of situation.

  He returned up the stairs to the ground floor and replayed the tape.

  At first, he just heard the familiar hiss of tape passing over the pickup. Then
came the sounds of a crowd, a mélange of confusing shouts and jeers, some words he could not make out. And then the crackling of flames and the screams. There were a few words being shouted too. He could make out one very clearly, the voice of a man who had died nineteen centuries ago. The Latin was heavily accented, not the language of the learned but that of the common soldier.

  The word was clear enough. Mortlake stopped the tape, took a breath, rewound it. And listened again to a burning man crying out for his mother. Again, despair threatened to overwhelm him. How could he stop this? It was not an echo of a past atrocity. It was a kind of eternal damnation.

  Then he heard another voice. It was calling his name in English. Shocked, Mortlake spoke without thinking.

  “Carl?”

  He rewound, played it again at full volume, holding the small speaker to his ear. Then he headed back to the hallway and the psychomanteum.

  ***

  Tara slowed to a jog then a walk. A tractor appeared around the bend ahead of her. It was pulling a trailer full of bright blue plastic sacks. She flattened herself against the hedgerow to give it room. The man driving was stout, middle-aged with a weather-beaten face. He nodded cheerfully and shouted over the roar of the diesel.

  “Afternoon!”

  Tara gave a little wave, forced a smile.

  “Hi!”

  She watched as he drove up the narrow road and turned into a farm gate. He had already forgotten her, like as not. His day would proceed in its normal pattern. If she’d told him what was lurking maybe a quarter mile further along this road, he’d think she was joking. Or crazy. The world was not going to change to accommodate her problems. She could try to carry on running but, sooner or later, she would run out of road.

  You always run out of road, she thought. You’ve gotta turn off, stop somewhere. Or turn around and go back.