Her own room felt like a safe haven. She peeled off her soggy clothes, shrugged on sweats, and looked unhopefully at the alarm clock.
Three a.m. That meant she’d actually had eight hours of sleep, but if she got up now she’d be tired well before a reasonable English bedtime. She lay down. Turned over. Frowned. She felt thoroughly, uncompromisingly awake. She also felt tired, but that didn’t always help, as she knew by experience.
“If only I could sleep,” she said aloud.
As she said it John Dowland’s song swam back into her mind. She’d sung it last year to great effect, and managed to keep her voice true as it spiraled to the dizzy heights of the first line.
“Come heavy sleep, the image of true death...”
But she’d never started it that high, she wasn’t a soprano, she couldn’t have hit the note she was hearing now. And she was hearing it. She was wide awake. The soft clear voice was singing somewhere above her, in the... no, not in the sky, in the attic. The voice was swooping low now, soft and sweet and somehow profoundly disquieting.
“And close up these my weary weeping eyes,
Whose spring of tears doth stop my vital breath...”
On the words Ida felt her own throat tightening again. She leaped out of bed, hurried down the stairs, turned the CD player up loud enough to drown out the sounds from the attic, and tried to soothe herself with Bach and oatmeal. It worked about as well as she’d expected; that is to say, it didn’t work at all.
Chapter Four I Am Not in my Perfect Mind
After breakfast, Ida told herself she ought to go back up and deal with the wet mess in the big bedroom. She didn’t want to. She decided, instead, to check the downstairs windows. They weren’t open. Several of them weren’t locked either, and the latches were so firmly rusted into their open position that she couldn’t set them to lock.
Well, no wonder things were a little dilapidated; Cousin Anthea had spent her last ten years in the rest home, and even before that Ida thought she hadn’t lived in Hillcrest House, and apparently she hadn’t rented it out either, which Ida would have found odd if she’d thought of the house as anything but an escape from her own problems. She was beginning to find it odd now.
She tried the unlocked windows. One of them was so tightly stuck shut that it didn’t need a lock. Another opened with deceptive ease, but when Ida let go of it and went to reach out and check for shutter latches it came crashing back down with startling force. Ida was glad she hadn’t thrust her head out. She’d have to do something about the windows.
That wouldn’t be too hard; she’d dealt with old houses before... Thinking of that, she got a out a flashlight (a torch, on this side of the pond, she told herself) and a meter stick and began to ferret in, and swipe under, cabinets. There were no mouse nests in the kitchen, which Mrs. Tretheway seemed to have tidied very thoroughly.
There was one in the drawing room, way back under the couch. The study contained some fine-looking chairs and a heavy old desk—a valuable antique, for all Ida knew, but she didn’t like the look of it—which was empty of everything but mouse nests and mouse droppings. By the time Ida had finished vacuuming and scrubbing her stomach and her mind had unclenched, and watery sunlight was straggling in through the windows.
Outside Ida found a toolshed whose contents included a can of lubricating oil that would do nicely for the window latches, a slightly rusty but quite usable hammer and saw, a pail of untarnished long nails, and enough odds and ends of board so that she could readily cut out twist-latches to hold the errant shutter.
She also found a quite serviceable ladder, and spent the rest of the morning up on it fixing latches, testing the shutter hinges (surprisingly good), and noticing other small repairs that would be needed soon. An old man with a cane walked by when she was working on the street side, but as she had a mouthful of nails she could hardly be expected to do more than wave at him.
Turning back from waving, she noticed something caught on the nail head which protruded beyond the twist-latch. A hank of hair. Not Ida’s hair, which was dark and rough and wavy. Not Mrs. Tretheway’s, which had been reddish-purple with grey roots and anyway had come down only to her shoulders. This was silver-blonde, fine, straight, and very long. Ida frowned, tugged it free and let the wind take it away.
By eleven Ida had worked up an appetite, and also some courage. She told herself firmly that she would go deal with the mess in the bedroom and then she would have a good hot lunch.
She yanked the oddly heavy and lumpy mattress off the bed, hauled it down the stairs behind her, and deposited it in an oozy pile on the stone floor of the kitchen, in front of the fire, which she’d built up again. She was actually whistling as she tramped back upstairs to get the curtains down.
The echo was there again, slightly out of time and far too high-pitched. She realized that before realizing that she had been whistling “Come Heavy Sleep.” She bit her lip, stopped.
The echo didn’t stop. It changed. Somewhere above her a sweet high voice was singing the end of the song.
“O come, sweet sleep, come or I die for ever;
Come ere my last, come ere my last sleep comes
Or come, or come never.”
“Shut up!” Ida bellowed at the ceiling. The voice changed again. It was gasping, it was choking. Ida was choking too.
She didn’t notice that she was running full-tilt until she reached the head of the stairs. She realized that too late to stop herself. She did manage to grab the smooth-polished banister with one hand; this didn’t stop her banging down every single confounded stair, but it did keep her up in a sitting position, so she landed at the bottom with nothing worse than a sore rear end, banged knees and a burning sense of shame.
Back in the States she’d worried, she’d been self-conscious, she’d been stupid and scared. She had not been delusional. This...this... there was no good explanation for this.
“Keep me in temper,” Ida whispered. “I would not be mad.”
There was no musical echo, but Ida could have sworn she heard a hiss of nasty laughter diminishing and dying in the stairwell. She picked herself up, wincing as she straightened her right knee out, and glared up the stairs in the direction from which the laugh seemed to have come.
She needed help that was plain. The rooms she’d seen so far were oddly bookless, but there had been a telephone directory laid on the corner of the kitchen table. No doubt they’d have mental health clinics listed. Perhaps, after all, it would be less embarrassing to check into a mental hospital here than at home... The insurance would be beastly to figure out, no doubt, but if she was crazy she couldn’t be expected to sort it out, somebody else would take care of it...
She opened the yellow pages and riffled through to the M’s.
The page she wanted was marked with several strands of pale blonde hair.
Chapter Five Screw Your Courage to the Sticking Place
Ida opened her mouth to scream, shut it again, and clenched her fists to stop her hands shaking. Don’t panic, she told herself firmly. Think. The music comes and goes. That could be a hallucination. But this hair...
She picked it up gingerly, held it up toward the fluorescent light. Yes, it was clearly hair, not thread or floss or something. There wasn’t blood matted into it or anything creepy like that. Just four strands of hair, nearly but not quite the same length.
It seemed a rather specific and unsensational thing to have hallucinated. In any case, if the hair wasn’t really there, probably the phone book wasn’t there either, nor the phone itself. If the hair wasn’t there, everything was a hallucination and there was no good her trying to do anything about it. That was neither a useful assumption nor an encouraging one.
All right, then. The hair was there, or at least that was the only useful working assumption she could make. In that case there had to be a logical explanation for it, one that didn’t involve Ida going mad. What could that be?
Once she’d framed the question, the answer wasn
’t so hard to find. The hair in the window, the hair in the phone book, the open window, the noises in the attic.... Someone was messing with Ida’s head. Someone had snuck around in the night, opened the window, unlatched the shutters and left them to bang. Someone who had earlier stuck their hair into the phone book, knowing she’d think she was going mad, knowing she’d find it.
Why would they do that? Such long hair should be pretty easy to trace back to its owner. Unless all the girls in England now were wearing their hair down to their hips... Maybe the prankster had left someone else’s hair. Someone they didn’t like. Or else someone who would be very embarrassed, or who would embarrass Ida, if Ida confronted them.
Why, again? Who in England had a vendetta against Ida?
It needn’t be a vendetta. It might just be bored kids amusing themselves. Or patriots who didn’t like Yanks. Or someone who thought they had a better claim on the house. Anything was possible.
Her nightmare? The curtain-cord around her throat?
Nerves. Jet lag. Coincidence.
But the music...
A speaker hidden in the attic, obviously, either set on a timer somehow or remote-controlled. It wouldn’t be hard to do. It shouldn’t be hard to find. And once Ida had found it she would know the truth. At least, enough of the truth to take to the police, Or maybe just too nice Mrs. Tretheway. Unless, of course, Mrs. Tretheway was in on the plot or the joke or whatever exactly it was...
And if Ida didn’t find a speaker...
Ida wasn’t going to think about that.
Even with this thoroughly logical explanation firmly held in her mind, Ida felt very reluctant to switch the CD player off and climb the stairs. She lingered in the kitchen, checking and rechecking that the stove was off, that the fire was burning steadily. She scraped her hair back tightly, frowning at her reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“Where got’st thou that goose look?” she muttered to herself. She turned away from the mirror and skipped back a few acts. “But screw your courage to the sticking-place, and we’ll not fail,” she said firmly.
Back into the kitchen. CD player off. Up the stairs. There was the music again, coming faintly and blurrily from above. That’s good, Ida told herself. It’ll be easier to find the speaker when it’s actually playing. Down the hall to the little windowless storage-room—was that the thing they called a box-room in English novels? Time to think about that later.
The speaker seemed to have a wider repertoire than she had initially believed. “He that hath but a tiny little wit,” it sang, high and thin and mocking. “With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain...”
There was a little ladder in the box-room, if box-room it was, tall enough, when stood upright, to reach through the trap door. She undid the latches. “Must be content with his fortunes fit...” the fey voice piped upstairs.
“For the rain it raineth every day,” Ida finished defiantly and one octave down, shoving the trapdoor up and back with the end of the ladder.
The trap slid back, clunked. The music stopped.
Ida shone her torch up into the attic and saw cobwebs, beams, and something tall and squared-off under a filthy-looking dustsheet. “Once more unto the breach,” Ida said under her breath. She gripped the ladder firmly and climbed up.
At first she could see nothing but the cloud of dust she had disturbed. As that settled and her eyes adjusted the shapes of things began to come clear.
Dust-sheeted furniture. Dust-covered boxes and trunks. Plenty of places to hide a speaker. She looked around hopefully for a dust-free surface indicating recent tampering. She didn’t find one.
“Look at everything in order,” she said out loud in tones she’d have used to a shy child or a nervous horse. “First—you!” She whipped the dustsheet off the nearest hulking shape.
That proved to be an upright piano. A pretty piece in some warm-colored wood—rosewood, maybe—with an elaborately wrought stand to hold the music. No music, though. Would the speaker be actually hidden inside the works of the piano? If so she’d have to find it later. She pressed a key experimentally.
The note was very sour, Well, of course it was sour, it probably hadn’t been tuned in dog’s years. Still, it lingered in the air longer than Ida liked, and she turned hastily away.
A straight-backed spindle rocking chair, a decrepit plaster statue of a nymph with a harp, a folding easel. No speaker, and no place to hide one. Nothing obvious hanging from the ceiling, other than cobwebs—and so many cobwebs, so thick and so begrimed, that Ida couldn’t believe anyone had hung anything there recently. Searching the floor was an unpleasant prospect, thick as it was with choking dust. Ida decided to start with the trunks.
The first one was full of blankets, some moth-eaten, none concealing a speaker. But down in the bottom right corner was a little box. Ida opened it, looked in.
There was a locket in the box. Ida opened it with slightly shaky hands and looked inside.
The frame on the left was empty. There was a ragged bit of paper in the edge, as though the picture had been torn away. The man in the frame on the right was fair-complexioned, his hair corn-gold, his eyes a burning blue...
His eyes...
Surely this was the man from Ida’s nightmare. She shook her head and sang loudly enough to drown out the nasty little voices in her head: “Then sigh not so, but let them go, and be you blithe and...”
The words choked in Ida’s throat as she heard the trapdoor slam shut behind her.
Chapter Six Sad Stories of the Death
For a moment Ida stood rooted to the spot. If I don’t move, if I don’t turn around, if I don’t have to see who’s there, she told herself, none of this will be real.
Then I’m back to being crazy, she answered herself. And where does that get me?
“Who is it?” she asked aloud. Nobody answered. A cold wind stroked the back of her neck...
A cold wind. And there were no windows...
She wheeled, arms out to defend herself against... she didn’t know what. She saw the dustsheets flapping in the wind, and, beyond the dustsheets, another open window.
“Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air hand fated o’er men’s faults light on...this...window!” Ida growled feelingly, stomping across the attic to slam it shut.
Small wonder she hadn’t seen the window from the outside, or noticed it at first from inside. A festoon of ivy, with the sere leaves still clinging to the stem, blocked the light from it, though not the wind. Ida tugged experimentally to see if it would tear loose and let some light in. It didn’t. She shoved the loose flap aside and leaned out.
“Fine progress you’re making with the cleaning,” Mrs. Tretheway called from the sidewalk below.
“Mrs. Tretheway!” The thought of another real live person to talk to was suddenly very appealing. “Do you have a minute?”
“I’ve an hour, if you want it,” Mrs. Tretheway said mildly. “Or two, but I doubt you’ve that much to spare. Don’t hurry, love, I’ll wait for you to come down.”
Ida, backing into the attic and wrestling with the window latch, felt she could gladly spare the rest of the day. She wondered, too, how long Mrs. Tretheway had taken tidying the place. Well, of course, Mrs. Finch might have paid her for that...but then again she might not... was there a tactful way to ask?
She was still a bit out of breath when she opened the door to Mrs. Tretheway.
“I meant to thank you,” she said, “for fixing things up. And to bake you something to take with you...but I got distracted with the cleaning...”
“Have you had anything to eat yourself?”
“Not since three in the morning,” Ida said ruefully.
“Maybe you’d like to step round to the cafe, then, and have some lunch with me?”
That sounded good to Ida, and Mrs. Tretheway agreed to let Ida treat her. Half an hour later Ida, in clean clothes and with the dust brushed out of her hair, was sitting over soup and sandwiches with her neighbor, who insisted on being
called Annie.
“This is a lovely place,” Ida said. “And by the time I need to cook supper maybe the mattress will be dry and I can haul it back out of the kitchen...” Annie’s eyebrows formed a question, though she kept her mouth shut. Ida felt herself blushing; she’d made it sound as though she was a bed wetter. She explained about her abrupt awakening, leaving out the fear and the curtain-cord around her neck.
“Yes, that was a wild night,” Annie said. “And, of course, that’s always been an interesting house.”
“Interesting?” Ida asked. “Yes, Mrs. Finch said something about ghosts.”
“Right then, you know all about that. Well, aren’t you the plucky one?”
“No, I don’t know anything about it. Not really. But you do?”
“Are you sure you want to know? It’s an old story now, but not a pretty one.”
“Yes, I’d rather know,” Ida said, more loudly than she’d intended. If there was a joke, and Annie was in on it, surely that should become clear. And if there was something real... Anything was better than wondering whether or not she was mad.
“It was more than a hundred and fifty years ago,” Annie said, leaning forward a little. “The Corbetts had had the house I don’t know how long before that; they were a Fine Old Family and they knew it, so the stories say. The good Lord only knows what the rest of the family said when their Geoffrey took up with a singing girl from the shantytown”
Her voice lowered.
“A mill hand, you know, a nobody, but a good enough singer to get herself noticed in society. Seems her husband didn’t like the notice. He told the coroner she’d hanged herself. That he’d gone into her bedroom in the morning and found her like that.”
“One of the manservants backed his story, but the maid swore up and down that the master had been raging at her mistress, and that he went into her room in the evening right after she did and came out corpse-pale and shaking, and when the maid went to help the lady with her hair the lady’s door was locked from the outside. “
Haunting and Scares Collection Page 39