Whispering Corner

by Marc Alexander

  It is a trite thing to say that one is paralysed by fear — too often I had used that expression in my novels! — but that is what happened to me. I stood motionless and speechless at the door, and yet I was still capable of taking everything in. My recording mechanism was still functioning.

  Inside the room a log blazed in a large fireplace and by its dancing light, coupled with that of several oil lamps, I saw a four-poster bed with hangings of rose brocade. Lying beneath a patchwork counterpane, her head propped against several lace-edged pillows, was a woman whose white, wasted face still held a hint of its former beauty. Beneath the cover her chest rose and fell rapidly as she fought to speak, and there was a familiarity of timbre which evoked my hypnagogic experiences.

  It was not illness but outrage which caused her speech difficulty, outrage directed at the man standing close to the fire. His broad, bulging back was turned towards me and he appeared to be dressed as a gentleman of the eighteenth century. Neither of the occupants of the room were aware of me standing in the doorway.

  When exhaustion halted the invalid’s words and she lay panting, the man addressed her in a cold and deliberate voice. Although I was unable to distinguish his actual words any more than I had been able to distinguish hers, the tones of both echoed their enmity.

  The woman on the bed gulped back her breath, made an extraordinary effort to half raise herself upon the pillows, and then answered the man with such vehemence that her parchment features twisted into anguish like a mask in a Greek tragedy.

  The man stepped up to the bed. He laid his hand on her chest and pushed her down, then tugged a pillow free and pressed it over her face. He leaned over her, both arms rigid as he used all his weight and strength to smother her.

  On each side of the pillow stick-like arms flailed, and the counterpane writhed as she kept drawing up her knees and kicking with a strength unimaginable from the poor emaciated frame.

  The only sounds were the soft grunting — the sound that accompanies great physical exertion — of the man and the cheerful crackle of the log in the grate. Now he was kneeling on the bed to apply more weight to the pillow, and once he glanced over his shoulder as though in fear of being discovered. I had a glimpse of a broad florid face which in middle age still retained something of the handsome arrogance that must have turned many a girl’s head and heart when he was a youth.

  If I had been in the real world, of course, I would have dashed forward to save the woman, but this was not my world and I remained as paralysed as Lot’s wife.

  The threshing of the bedclothes diminished. The waving arms with their opening and closing hands fell back, and the man slowly raised the pillow and held it ready to ram it back into position.

  The woman’s mouth gaped, the eyes were wide open and already glassy in death.

  Roughly he seized her jaw, shaking her head from side to side as though to satisfy himself that no ember of life remained, then he replaced the pillow with its dainty lace beneath her head, straightened her fair-grey hair over it and rearranged the bedclothes. After glancing round the room as though to satisfy himself that nothing would proclaim his guilt, he walked past me at the doorway so close that I noticed the dandruff on his velvet collar.

  An elderly servant woman scurried from the direction of the kitchen in answer to his call. She threw up her apron to cover her distress when she saw the still form. She was followed by a young woman in a wrap of blue Chinese silk whose face was similar enough to that of the dead woman to indicate they were sisters. Pressing her hand across her mouth she threw herself on to her knees by the bed and seized the hand of the corpse.

  The murderer followed them into the room slowly, mopping his face with a handkerchief to remove sweat rather than tears.

  And then nothing.

  Nothing!

  *

  I stood looking into my darkened dining-room. There was no fire, no four-poster, no figures.

  The paralysis which had held me during that brief, horrifying drama released me and I walked across the hall and sank down on the stairs, once again covered by carpet bought at John Lewis’s. I was shuddering and deathly cold, and crying like a child whose sobs rack its whole body. After a while the hysteria passed and in snuffling shame I wiped my wet face on the sleeve of my pyjamas.

  I climbed awkwardly to my feet, my movements slow and my fingers and lips trembling like someone in shock. What I needed more than anything was brandy. I made it to the drinks cabinet and took a mouthful straight from the bottle. My throat was scorched but the sudden influx of alcohol did halt the jumping of my nerves. Now all I wanted was to go upstairs and literally and figuratively pull the covers over my head.

  It occurred to me then that perhaps the scene in which Sir Richard Elphick had murdered his ailing wife Arabella was the climax of some cyclic replay and from now on there would be no more phenomena. I recalled that many people who claimed to have seen ghosts — especially landlords of haunted pubs — declared that the manifestations happened on their arrival in new premises and that once the point had been made, as it were, there was peace.

  This theory was dashed when I was halfway up the stairs. A babel of voices seemed to explode in my head. Not the low bickering of the old hypnagogic voices but mad, angry, screaming voices. It was like a gust of sound from an air shaft of hell, and its impact on me was so great that I had to clutch the banister.

  Perhaps they were like the voices which echo through the minds of the criminally insane. While the actual words were impossible to distinguish, there was no doubt as to their terrible meaning.

  ‘Ashley!’ I heard myself cry and I forced myself to run up the stairs to her bedroom.

  At the door I saw a white figure kneeling on her bed in horrific repetition of what I had witnessed below; a white figure bending over Ashley who, with a slight smile on her face, lay unaware of the arms, those lint-white arms, reaching for her.

  12

  With fear only for Ashley, I lunged across the room and flung myself on to the attacker. He — it, whatever the thing was — simply collapsed under the impact and I was left grasping a tangle of white bedding. Only that; a hideous linen origami which had been animated by the same spirit of evil whose action replay I had just witnessed downstairs.

  Under my weight — I was lying half across her — Ashley’s eyes snapped open.

  ‘What … ?’ she began. ‘Jon, what’s wrong with you?’

  My expression alarmed her as much as the abruptness of her awakening. She sat up, drawing as far away from me as she could without actually falling out of bed.

  ‘What the hell have you been doing with the bedclothes?’ she continued. ‘Ugh! You’ve wet the bed. You’re smashed — you stink of brandy …’

  She ran out of words and gazed at me in the dim light from the window with an expression of fright on her usually calm features. There is nothing worse than feeling suddenly threatened by someone familiar, but for a moment I could say nothing to reassure her. My lungs were pumping too painfully for me to be able to speak coherently.

  Ashley switched on the bedside lamp.

  ‘What a mess,’ she murmured. I did not know whether she was referring to my appearance or the tangle of bedclothes. Then she added wearily, ‘Stay here. I’ll get some coffee. Maybe that’ll sober you up a bit.’

  I shook my head. ‘Don’t go down,’ I managed to say. ‘Not drunk.’

  ‘You could have fooled me,’ she said.

  ‘Listen, Ash,’ I said between gasps. ‘This is going to sound crazy, but please believe me …’

  ‘There’s certainly something crazy round here. You landed on me like an All Black making a tackle.’

  ‘All right. I know how it must seem to you, but please just listen.’

  I moved off the bed — Ashley was right, the tumbled candlewick counterpane was damp — and sat in the white rocking chair in the corner of the room. Shattered by my experience in the dining room and now faced with Ashley’s hostility, I had never felt a gr
eater need for a drink.

  ‘Just let me tell it from the beginning,’ I said, ‘but remember I can only say what happened — I can’t say why.’

  Ashley nodded. ‘OK, but make it good.’

  Her words triggered something off in me. The events of the past few minutes had stretched a thread within me almost to breaking point, and her implied judgement before I had a chance to make my defence snapped it.

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ I said in the cold, reasonable voice which comes only on those very rare occasions when I am filled with anger, ‘but — until the bank chucks me out — this is my house. In my own house I should be allowed to have hallucinations, get blind drunk if I wish and even — as you accuse me — piss on the bed. Because it’s my house, my booze, my bed — and my bloody ghosts.’

  ‘So sorry I mistook your hospitality,’ she replied. ‘I didn’t realize there was a price tag on it …’

  ‘Price tag?’

  ‘Yes, the price of my accommodation is to accept whatever the Great Author may say as Holy Writ and obey the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not criticize no matter what the provocation.”’

  ‘One thing I do know for sure — and it’s interesting that such a cheap jibe should come into your mind — is that I’ve never played the Great Author. And another thing I know for sure is that there was never ever a price tag on your staying here.’

  ‘Not even my bed?’

  Her anger forced words out before she could bite them back. Their effect was devastating; all the magic that had been generated between us was turning to dross.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said finally in a voice so low and dull that it was difficult to hear. ‘I know I’ve blown it. I just don’t know what’s got into us tonight …’

  ‘I do,’ I said in sudden sick comprehension. ‘It’s what they want.’

  ‘They? Who are they? I just don’t understand you. I don’t understand anything this bloody night. I’ll go in the morning.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish. Just listen to me for five minutes. A few minutes ago I saw a murder take place. And — no! — it was not the DTs but something that happened a couple of centuries ago …’ And I went on to describe in detail the scene I had witnessed, and then how on reaching the bedroom I had seen a figure created out of bedclothes bending over her in the same way that Sir Richard Elphick had bent over his wife Arabella.

  ‘The sheets were animated by a psychic force,’ I said. ‘It needed something by which to manifest itself.’

  ‘I can’t believe that you’re telling me this,’ said Ashley in a hushed voice. ‘You’ve always been such a cynic over supernatural matters.’

  ‘That’s true, but there can be no other explanation for the drama I saw. I went down those stairs into another world. I could even smell the smoke from the fire …’

  ‘But did it seem real? I mean, did the figures look as real as I do sitting here?’

  ‘Real, all right,’ I answered, remembering the dandruff on Sir Richard’s collar when he went past me to announce his wife’s death. ‘And yet there was something about them — the phantoms, for want of a better word — that’s hard to define. Although they were real enough to cast shadows there was a lack of substance. Have you seen a hologram?’

  Ashley nodded.

  ‘Like that. A hologram image looks perfectly real, yet you can pass your hand through it.’

  ‘And all this really happened? I mean, you weren’t sleep-walking and it wasn’t a nightmare?’

  ‘It would be a comforting explanation, but no — it was real.’

  ‘Jon, I’ve wondered about ghosts in the past. I mean, people seeing phantoms and so on. Does something actually appear or is an image projected in the mind of the beholder? Were there ghosts actually moving about down there or did something lingering from the past create the images in your brain?’

  ‘I only know that what I saw there was a re-enactment. A re-run of your tape of time, if you like. What concerns me is that thing — the bedclothes man — I saw bending over you. That was something different. Up here a power was at work — perhaps a blind elemental power — using the bedclothes to take on a shape and mimic the old murder.’

  ‘But even seeing that might have been in your mind,’ said Ashley reasonably. The hostility had gone from her voice but she was still mistrustful. I could not blame her for that. If our roles had been reversed and she had been telling me about the haunting I would have put it down to the concussion she had recently suffered.

  ‘It wasn’t a hallucination,’ I told her wearily. ‘Those sheets didn’t get twisted up by themselves. Besides, they’re wet. According to a book on the occult in my study pools of water are frequently found where poltergeists have been active. That dampness is not a figment of my imagination, and I certainly wasn’t responsible for it. No, Ash, there is something malign here, and I think its power is growing. It began with those hypnagogic voices I was hearing, the sense of fear that made you run into the garden after your accident, the feeling of terror I experienced in the cellar, and now full-blown manifestations. I am convinced that it was its influence that made us bitter with each other just now. We were being forced to act like Sir Richard and Arabella …’

  ‘Jon, I don’t actually disbelieve you, but I can’t believe it either.’

  ‘You’d believe it if you’d just watched a woman being smothered.’

  ‘I’m sure I would, but I didn’t see it.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said wearily. ‘How can I expect you to believe it, when I’ve been such a materialist myself? It’s funny — it only takes one experience like that to prove to me that there is something beyond the bricks and mortar of our world.’

  Suddenly I felt close to tears again, and perhaps something in my voice warned Ashley of this.

  ‘All right, darling, what shall we do?’

  ‘I think we should get out of the house for tonight, at least, and then we’ll think of something. Please bear with me. We’ll take the car and drive to the coast and watch the sun come up.’

  ‘Of course, darling.’

  I did not care that her tone was placating so long as she agreed to come with me. I was shaking again and suddenly I began to appreciate the truth in the old saying about ‘going to pieces’. I had an absurd feeling that I was physically about to break up and parts of me would fly off in different directions. I afterwards discovered that this is one of the classic portents of a nervous collapse.

  I went to my room for slacks and a sweater while Ashley put on a black tracksuit emblazoned with the New Zealand emblem of a silver fern. My ears strained for the slightest noise and as I returned to Ashley’s room my eyes sought any movement in the shadows, but the house was still.

  ‘Ready?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Have you seen Mrs Foch?’

  ‘We’ll let her out as we leave.’

  I led the way down the stairs. Together we went into the living room — still thank goodness as I had furnished it — and while I tried to coax Mrs Foch from under a chair Ashley went to the French windows.

  ‘Shit!’ she cried, that word of despair which is usually the sudden and final exclamation of a pilot on the flight recorder of a crashed aircraft.

  I hurried over to Ashley, whose face was blanched by more than the moonlight.

  ‘Ash … ?’

  Then I looked out of the window at an altered landscape.

  The trees which normally crowded the garden of Whispering Corner were now much further from the house and held at bay by tall dense hedges, and down each side of the lawn stood a row of statues, doubtless plundered from Greece.

  Even the moon was in a different quarter.

  *

  It was sunlight streaming through the bedroom window that awakened me. As my eyes focused I found myself looking into Ashley’s calm face, sleep having erased the tension of the night. My arm was round her protectively and as I moved to ease the cramp she opened her eyes.

  For a minute she lay in silenc
e as memory returned. ‘Was it true, Jon, what happened?’ she asked finally. ‘Had everything changed outside the house?’

  ‘It seemed to us that it had,’ I said cautiously. ‘It was interesting that we both experienced the phenomenon.’ ‘Interesting? It was bloody horrendous!’

  ‘At least it proved something to you — that what I had told you was not just a product of the DTs.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘But what was I to think? You did smell of booze and you seemed to be on the edge of hysteria. But that’s understandable,’ she added quickly. ‘I wasn’t exactly calm when I saw how the garden had altered.’

  For a while I lay without speaking, turning over in my mind the events of the night, events which twelve hours earlier I would have thought incredible. Perhaps, in the light of morning, I might have been tempted to explain away my experience in the dining room and the figure on Ashley’s bed as hallucinatory symptoms of an approaching breakdown, but Ashley had seen the transformed garden — so transformed that we dared not venture into it.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked at length.

  ‘Get up, shower away the terrors of the night and have a good breakfast. Then we’ll decide,’ I said in a positive voice.

  ‘Everything seems so normal again in the daylight,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to imagine now that we’re in a haunted house. It’s odd. I always felt the atmosphere here was friendly.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure there’s nothing sinister about Whispering Corner itself,’ I said with conviction. ‘After all, your great-aunt lived here all her life without any ill effect. It’s just that for some reason we don’t understand something tragic and evil has been reactivated from the past. The house can’t be blamed for that.’

  ‘For as long as I live I shall never forget looking out and seeing everything altered,’ said Ashley. ‘It was like being in another country …’

  ‘Didn’t someone say the past is another country?’ I said.

  ‘What do you think would have happened if we had gone out into it?’

  ‘I really don’t know. I suppose it would have been rather like things in the dining room; everything appearing real but somehow superimposed upon us. The trouble is that there seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. The garden was as it must have been a couple of centuries ago, yet inside the house everything was normal by then. And nothing more happened when we came up here.’