As I walked back I heard a creaking above the hiss of the rain and the rush of the wind harrying the wood. It changed into a sharp splintering and ahead of me an old beech crashed across the drive. Sick at the thought of what would have happened if I had been a few steps ahead, I inspected the tangled branches and realized immediately that it would be impossible to drive the Peugeot out.
I was marooned with Ashley.
*
Next morning I awoke knowing that I had been dreaming ill-omened dreams. The details had dissolved, but the lingering sense of menace was strong. Then I remembered my guest and, putting on my dressing-gown, hurried to her room, half afraid that she might have lapsed into a coma. Her face was still unnaturally pale, and rather than turn her head she swivelled her eyes towards me.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Still got a crook headache, but I slept, thanks to your kindness,’ she answered. ‘You married?’
‘Yes. Separated by the Atlantic Ocean, though.’ I heard myself add, ‘And not only that.’
‘I thought you might be on your own. There’s not a single feminine touch in this room. Sorry. I only asked because I didn’t want to …’
‘I understand. But believe me, you’re no trouble. The guest is god and all that.’
‘I’ll get out of your hair as soon as I can.’
I smiled at her, not wanting her to go yet. The coincidence of her arrival and the fictional meeting of Falco and Lorna was too remarkable to ignore. And so far I knew nothing about her. She had no accent to indicate her origin, though one word she had used did give a suggestion. However, my curiosity could wait. Now I was worried in case she had concussion, remembering alarming stories of people suddenly collapsing after unattended damage to their skulls. I gave her a couple of paracetamols for her headache and told her that I was going out for a few minutes. Putting on a waterproof jacket, I set out along Church Walk in the direction of the vicarage. The rain had cased to a bleak drizzle, the only sound being that of heavier drops, which had coalesced on the leafage above, striking the waterlogged loam. With the warmth of the morning coils of vapour drifted among the mossy trunks and exposed roots like the aerosol mist favoured by pop groups and directors of horror films.
When I left the shelter of the trees I saw that the sky, normally such a delight to me, was a sickly white, and there was something in the clammy atmosphere which brought back the feeling I had awakened with. I was glad to reach the vicarage, where I recognized the grotesque door-knocker as an old sanctuary knocker: once you had grasped its ring on the church door you were safe from the posse. And when I entered the cosy house with its well-worn furniture I felt I had indeed gained sanctuary from the opaque alien world outside.
‘Heard you on the radio last night,’ Henry Gotobed greeted me. ‘Must have been fun to be on the same show as a king. And what did you make of McAndrew? He’s got quite a reputation in ecclesiastical circles.’
I responded briefly and then explained about last night’s incident. ‘I think a doctor should have a look at the girl before she gets up,’ I finished. ‘But not having a phone, or knowing a doctor down here …’
Henry nodded. ‘I’ll ring Dr Valentine for you,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he’ll come when I explain. He’s one of our churchwardens.’
I thanked him. While I drank a cup of tea prepared by Mrs Turvey, who came in each day to ‘do’ for the vicar, he telephoned the doctor and gave me a thumbs-up sign.
‘He’ll be over as soon as he can,’ he said a moment later. ‘Now, shall I ring the garage to collect the young lady’s car?’
As I was preparing to leave, Henry asked, diffidently, ‘By the way, have you had time to read the BM material I gave you?’
‘I haven’t had a chance, what with having to go up to London, but I hope to start on it as soon as I get Miss Matheson sorted out.’
‘It might just give you an idea or two.’ He sounded almost apologetic. ‘I was quite excited when I came across it. I started off by looking to see what the BM had under Lychett and it was quite surprising what I unearthed.’
‘Thanks again,’ I said, anxious to get back to Whispering Corner to make sure that Ashley was still all right. As I walked back through the weeping woodland I wondered if my anxiety over her was heightened because I found her presence so intriguing. We had exchanged no more than a few dozen words and I had no idea what she was like under normal circumstances. And yet, and yet …
I went through the white wicket gate and was struck by the sombre appearance of the house I had fallen in love with. Now its gables were no longer picturesque; against the sky bled of colour there was a harsh defiance about them like the turrets of a medieval castle constantly under siege by the erosion of time. A remark of Pamela’s returned to the effect that Whispering Corner must have two personalities: a romantic one to reflect the summer and something like a backdrop for Macbeth in winter.
Inside I hurried up to the spare bedroom, where I found the duvet in a tangle on the bed. Ashley had disappeared.
6
For a moment I stood staring stupidly at the rumpled bed. Then the obvious explanation came to me — she had gone to the bathroom.
‘Ashley, you OK?’ I called.
There was no reply and I felt a ripple of panic. Throwing propriety to the winds I pushed open the bathroom door, half afraid of seeing her lying on the blue floor in a faint. But the room was empty and a minute later I had ascertained that the rest of the house was too.
I ran into the drizzle, again half expecting to see a sprawled shape on the wet lawn. Instead I saw a figure in my red and white striped nightshirt standing beneath the hornbeam at the far corner of the garden.
‘Ashley!’ I shouted as I ran towards her. ‘What the hell are you doing? You’ll get your death of cold!’
She slowly turned her head towards me. ‘I was afraid. I had to get out,’ she said between chattering teeth.
‘There’s nothing to be scared of. You must come in now.’
She turned her bandaged head from side to side with the solemnity of a disobedient child. I came to the conclusion that it must be pressure on her brain that was causing her to act irrationally, and I cursed myself for not having taken her in search of a hospital last night before the tree fell.
I took her clammy hand. ‘You can’t stay out here in the wet,’ I said gently. ‘Everything will be all right now. I’ll see that you’re safe.’
‘It was the voices …
‘Voices?’
‘Yes. Several voices running through my head.’
‘That’s called hypnagogsis,’ I said. ‘People get it just as they’re going to sleep. I’ve had it since I’ve been down here.’
The last sentence made me pause. A question hovered in my mind, but I shelved it. The essential thing was to coax Ashley back into the warmth.
‘It seemed as though they — the voices — were yelling at me, telling me to go.’
‘Hypnagogic voices never make sense,’ I said lightly. ‘You just listen to my voice telling you to come inside.’
The remote expression left her face. She smiled wanly and I led her by the hand back to the house.
‘Get yourself dry and back into bed until Dr Valentine comes,’ I said. ‘I’ll make a cup of tea to warm you up.’
Having given her a fresh bath towel I went down to the kitchen, but as I took a couple of teabags out of their green glass jar my fingers were trembling. What had I expected to find in the garden? A dead body? I was dramatizing. Yet when I looked back on the feeling I had when I found the house empty it was like a premonition of disaster.
I carried two cups of tea upstairs and found Ashley asleep in bed, her cheek on her arm. I sat in a chair by the bed and drank from one of the cups. The girl’s breathing was shallow and when I laid my fingers on her forehead her skin felt unnaturally dry and hot. I’d be relieved when the doctor arrived.
Ashley opened her eyes half an hour later.
‘I drifted off —
no voices this time. You should have woken me. The tea must be cold.’
‘I’ll make some more.’
Through the kitchen window I saw Valentine arrive, a broad ruddy-faced old man with tight curls of silver hair.
‘I hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding the place,’ I said as he shrugged off his dripping trench coat.
‘None at all,’ he replied in a pleasant Dorset accent. ‘I used to visit Miss Constance, God rest her. Let’s have a look at the patient. According to the vicar she had a road accident last night and you played the Good Samaritan. What do you think is wrong with her?’
As I led him upstairs I explained my worry about concussion. I left him sitting on the edge of the bed, his red sausage fingers lifting Ashley’s eyelid with surprising deftness.
When he came downstairs he said that to be on the safe side he would have her X-rayed.
‘Will she need an ambulance?’
‘No. I’ll take her to the cottage hospital myself. I’m due there anyway.’
He brushed away my thanks and explained the location of the cottage hospital so that I could visit Ashley. A few minutes later I held an umbrella over her as she walked unsteadily up the drive and past the fallen tree to where the doctor’s Volvo estate car was parked.
‘I’ll visit you this afternoon and bring the traditional grapes,’ I told her as I helped her inside.
‘Please bring one of your books,’ she replied. ‘I’d like to read Shadows and Mirrors again. Now that I’ve met you it’ll be fun to try and pick out the autobiographical bits.’
Dr Valentine backed carefully out into the lane and I was left alone.
After the events of the last twelve hours I did not feel like starting to type immediately. To appease my conscience I took up the folder which Henry had given me. Inside were a number of pages in neat handwriting and photostats of several octavo pages of old-fashioned text in two columns; a running head proclaimed The Gentleman’s Companion. I sprawled on the sofa and read the printed heading on the first page: Notes on the Experiences of the Lawson Family in the House of Colonel Elphick in the Wood on the Edge of Lychett Village.
Beneath this he had written:
‘According to The Gentleman’s Companion the house in question was built around 1750 by Sir Richard Elphick who subsequently lived there with his wife Arabella and his sister-in-law Evelyn. In 1758 Arabella died and her sister remained to run the household for Sir Richard. What was described as an “attachment” developed between them, which set the district seething with gossip. In those days marriage between a widower and his sister-in-law were forbidden and if they had an intimate relationship they would have been technically guilty of incest. Sir Richard and Evelyn ignored the gossip, if indeed they were then aware of it, and continued as leading members of the Dorset social set, frequently giving lavish entertainments at the secluded house. When these entertainments ceased in 1762 and Sir Richard and Evelyn no longer followed the local hunt, rumours circulated that Evelyn was pregnant. As time passed and no evidence of a birth was forthcoming there were malicious whispers that Sir Richard, who placed great value on his outward respectability, had had the newborn child secretly done away with.
‘It seems that this gossip was taken seriously, because when Sir Richard wished to start entertaining again hardly any of his old acquaintances accepted his invitations. Indeed, the couple appear to have been ostracised by the leading county families. Sir Richard’s response was to drop any further attempts at reviving social intercourse with his neighbours and, having sacked most of their domestic staff, he and Evelyn lived in melancholy seclusion. She died in 1770 and he followed her by taking his own life a few months later.
‘The house passed on to his nephew Colonel Wardley Elphick and, as the colonel was on duty overseas, it remained empty for some time. In 1775 Enoch Lawson, a well-to-do merchant with business connections in the West Indies, leased the house and settled his wife and young family there before setting out on a long business visit to Kingston. After he departed Mary Lawson began to experience the phenomena which were to drive her and her children out of the house within a year. A highly educated and intelligent woman, she was more intrigued than frightened at first, and she kept a diary of events which she later turned into her “Narration”. This remained a curiosity in the Lawson family until 1872 when it was published in the September issue of The Gentleman’s Companion, causing considerable interest as psychic matters were in vogue at that time.
‘To give you a flavour of the “Narration”, I have included several photostated pages of the magazine. Having briefly described the house and her situation there, Mary Lawson wrote that soon after moving in a young nursemaid came to her complaining of hearing disembodied voices during the night. At first Mrs Lawson, who had a no-nonsense attitude towards servants’ fancies, dismissed the story as the imaginings of a girl who was probably emotionally upset “having had to forsake the weekly tryst with her beau in Kensington for the solitude of a house in a remote rural setting’. It was only when the girl threatened to give up her position that her mistress began to take the matter seriously, doubtless encouraged by the fact that her two oldest daughters, aged five and seven, told her that they were frightened by a voice they heard during the night. Mrs Lawson did not consider that there was any supernatural cause behind their distress — she believed that they had probably overheard the servants discussing the nursemaid’s fears. Having questioned the girl again and been impressed by her sincerity, Mrs Lawson decided that she had been deluded by some natural cause such as the sound of wind-tossed branches close to her top floor bedroom. Born and bred a Londoner, the girl was “unacquainted with the diverse sounds and rustlings of nature”.
‘Mrs Lawson therefore placed the nursemaid in a downstairs room insulated from the “diverse sounds” and allowed her two daughters to sleep in her bedroom. The change had no effect and Mrs Lawson wrote that she was becoming exasperated with their “wilful fancies” — until she heard the whispering herself.’
This was followed by a photostat of part of Mary Lawson’s ‘Narration’ as it appeared in The Gentleman's Companion, which read:
‘I betook myself to bed close to midnight, having composed a long epistle to my absent husband giving him a full account of our quiet domestic life in this charming part of the country and having ensured that all was secure in the house. I recall that I was fatigued and as soon as my head rested upon the pillow I began to doze. In that vague borderland between wakefulness and slumber, I became aware of a sibilant whispering. Although I could not distinguish the words, I comprehended that it was an exchange between two people: one, a female voice, seemed to be protesting against something that was said vehemently by a deeper male voice.
‘This experience, which I first took to be a random dream generated in my semi-conscious state, had the effect of banishing my drowsiness, but instead of the acrimonious dialogue fading with it, to my puzzlement and, it must be admitted, apprehension, the incomprehensible argument continued. Meanwhile Louisa and Annie awoke, crying out that there were people quarrelling in the room. I hastily took them down to the parlour. Despite the rare comfort of hot chocolate, however, they continued to weep and my efforts to calm them met with no success until the sounds subsided.’
Mary Lawson now accepted that there was something strange happening in the house. However, she was a very determined lady, and she refused to be put out by the experience even though a couple of servants — one was the nursemaid — packed their bags.
‘I decided that as we were all God-fearing, church-going people who could count on the benevolent protection of Him who orders our lives, we would outbrave the disembodied voices. I recalled that many houses have traditions of unaccountable manifestations and that their owners have come to no harm but accept them as household curiosities. With these thoughts in mind I endeavoured to quell the fears of my girls, trying to explain in simple terms that what we heard were probably echoes from a bygone time which for
some reason, not yet explained by Science, has not entirely died away, and I concluded that no harm could befall them provided they remembered their prayers.’
For a while there were no more unaccountable sounds and Mary Lawson congratulated herself that in some way her practical attitude to the phenomenon had put an end to it. But this was not to last. The ‘Narration’ continued:
‘At the beginning of the year 1776, when the vocal manifestation had been replaced in our minds by seasonal festivities, I became conscious of a hollow murmuring which seemed to fill the whole house. It was like no other sound that I have heard and could not have been caused by the wind as it occurred on the calmest nights.
‘At times it was interspersed with the return of the original voices, although now the female voice was no longer protesting so strongly but more sorrowfully at something the male voice was urging upon her. As before, it was impossible to distinguish the actual words.’
From the ‘Narration’ it was possible to see how the scale of the phenomenon steadily increased and new forms of haunting began.
‘Some time after the voices returned I, then sleeping in the bedroom over the kitchen, frequently heard the noise of someone walking in the room within. Although we often made instant search, we never could discover any appearance of human or brute being. I once or twice heard sounds of music and one night in particular three distinct and violent knocks as though someone was beating with a club or other heavy weapon against the door downstairs. These were followed by a stifled cry, as though of a woman in anguish, after which there was a silence almost as alarming as the unaccountable noises. There seemed to be no regular pattern to these occurrences. Sometimes we would go for a week without hearing anything unusual; sometimes the peace of the house would be disturbed for several nights on end.’
The ‘Narration’ continued for several more pages, giving a graphic description of the mounting tension in the household. The voices would now end abruptly with a scream that slowly died away.
Whispering Corner Page 8