The Whispering: A Haunted House Mystery

by Sarah Rayne

  I should make it clear that my contempt for the meagre travelling expenses was not born from mere hedonism; I am perfectly prepared to sacrifice comfort if the cause is sufficient. What I am not prepared to do is travel in third-class railway carriages, where the only seating is wooden benches, where the washing facilities are non-existent, and where the only food is the greasy bread and fat bacon brought by other wayfarers for their private sustenance. It would have been undignified to ask for more money though, so before leaving I made a few judicious sorties into a number of rich homes. The careful selling of the items I removed provided funds for more acceptable travelling conditions, and I left Moscow in a first-class compartment, ate my meals in a well-appointed dining-car, and slept in the best hotels until I reached my destination.

  My destination. That exercised me a good deal. Simply, I could not decide where I should go. The kaleidoscope of power-balance and of friendship and enmity between countries had been shifting with bewildering rapidity throughout that summer – so much so that I changed my mind half a dozen times.

  But it was becoming clear that Germany wanted France. And to get France, the German armies had to take the neutral countries that lay between. Above all, they had to take Belgium – small, peaceable Belgium with its gentle defences but its key position. That meant my articles could only be written from one place. The place I strongly suspected was about to become the epicentre of the fight.

  And so it was to Belgium that I went.

  Michael had translated with reasonable ease to this point, but from a cursory glance at the next couple of pages it looked as if ‘Alexei Iskander’ had merely been making background notes about the opening moves of the war. The page was spattered with the names of Prussia and Austria, together with mention of the German Chancellor Bismarck and also the German Army Chief of Staff, along with a few references to the Habsburg Archdukes and Duchesses. It seemed safe to assume that most of these references were detrimental.

  He was just thinking he would try to translate at least another couple of paragraphs in the hope of getting to Iskander’s arrival in Belgium and his meeting with Leonora, when he was pulled out of Iskander’s insouciant world by the realization that footsteps were coming up the steps from the underground room.

  He went cautiously to the door and peered out. Luisa was emerging from the underground room, her eyes still with the same unfocused look, and her movements still disconcertingly puppet-like. She closed the door in the panelling, locked it, and returned the key to the drawer in the small bureau. Michael watched her ascend the stairs and waited until he heard her walk across the landing and open and close her bedroom door. It was just on two a.m. He closed Iskander’s journal, switched off the laptop, and went determinedly up to his own room, undressed and got into bed.

  Surprisingly, he slept extremely well. He had expected the images conjured up by Iskander, as well as the trip to the underground room, to keep him awake, but the old bed was comfortable, and he did not wake until the soft bleeping of his travel alarm at half-past seven. It was a good feeling to realize the night had passed and he would not need to spend another one inside Fosse House.

  Seen by day, the house was no longer the brooding mansion of fiction, and the storm had blown itself out. Thin sunshine slanted in through the old windows and painted a pale gold haze across wood and glass and silk. The silk was frayed, the wood dull and the glass grubby, but seen like this the house had a dim charm of its own, and Michael could sympathize with Stephen Gilmore’s longing to come home and to see the lamps glowing in the windows as he walked along the drive.

  Last night, when Luisa had murmured about breakfast, Michael had at once said he would forage for himself, then make an early start in the library. Accordingly, he went along to the kitchen, where he made toast and ate a bowl of cereal. After this, he took himself and a second cup of coffee along to the library.

  When he opened the curtains a faint mist lay over the gardens. The library windows looked across to an old walled garden, with a wrought-iron gate. Michael wondered if he could go out there to take a look later on. There was something intriguing about walled gardens – they were the kind of green and darkling places where secrets might linger, and where the enquirer was warned not to trespass, not to speak or even whisper, in case, in the words of the de la Mare poem, ‘perchance upon its darkening air, the unseen ghosts of children fare’. Seen at this hour, Fosse House’s walled garden looked as if ghosts of any age might congregate there.

  Somewhere in the house a clock chimed eight o’clock, and, as if answering, from beyond the house came a deeper chime of some distant church tower. A bird flew out of a tree and twitteringly dive-bombed the lawn for its own breakfast, and the spell of the old garden splintered. The chimes died away, and Michael forgot about ghosts and sat down at the big leather-topped table, to step into the past.

  Six

  Nell was having a good morning.

  Before opening the shop at ten, she had arranged for a longer loan of the books borrowed for Owen Bracegirdle which Owen, the previous evening, had thought might be very helpful, and would almost certainly buy. The bookseller in Quire Court, learning who the potential customer was, expressed himself as perfectly happy to grant an extension. He observed that since Dr Bracegirdle, whom he knew slightly, was accustomed to the jealously-guarded treasures of the Bodleian and on page-flipping terms with assorted incunabula, it was unlikely in the extreme that he would tear the dust jackets or spill gin on the pages. Appealed to for help, he thought he did have one or two volumes about WWI POW camps and vanished artefacts from that war, and proceeded to scurry along his shelves like an energetic grasshopper.

  ‘Did you say Holzminden? Where exactly is it?’

  ‘Lower Saxony.’ Nell, feeling it incumbent on her to help with the search, followed him along the shelves, navigating around the piles of books on the floor which the bookseller had not got around to cataloguing. ‘I looked it up. It’s one of those places dating back to the eighth or ninth century. Princes of the Wolfenbuttel line dodging in and out of its ownership, and various monastic settlements, and a royal charter in eleven-or-twelve hundred.’

  ‘I haven’t heard of the place,’ said the bookseller, ‘but I’m sure I’ve got— Ha! Here it is.’ He extracted a large tome from the end of a shelf, blew dust off its leaves, and presented it beamingly. ‘There are several chapters in this about internment camps in that war. He’s something of an authority, the author. There might be a reference to Holzminden. Oh, and this one as well.’ He darted at another section of shelf and seized an even heavier book. ‘You’re more than welcome to borrow both of them for the afternoon.’

  ‘Thank you, Godfrey. I won’t tear the dust jackets or spill gin on them, either,’ said Nell.

  She carried the books back to her own shop. Beth was in Scotland for the entire week and Quire Court was never particularly busy on Wednesday afternoons, so after she had finished applying Danish oil to a beautiful but neglected Regency escritoire destined for a customer in Hertfordshire, she had a snack lunch then curled up in the little office behind the shop.

  The more promising of the books was called Fragments of Great War Treasures and had several index references to Holzminden and to the sketches themselves. It was slightly annoying, however, to discover that the author wrote about the sketches with an air of faint contempt, as if feeling a pitying amusement for anyone sufficiently credulous to actually think they might exist. He or she wrote:

  They are almost certainly apocryphal. Indeed, it would not be making too strong a statement to place them with such ephemeral objects as the Holy Grail, the Lost City of Atlantis and/or Avalon, and the missing jade zodiac heads of China.

  In my opinion, the fabulous Holzminden sketches fall squarely into these categories – and I use the word ‘fabulous’ in the sense of fabled or mythical. They even have a sinister legend attached to them, one that might have come out of an M.R. James ghost story or even, (God help us), a Sixties horror
film. No real credence can be given to the legend, of course, but I am including it as a curio.

  Nell, who liked and admired M.R. James’s stories and found some horror films quite entertaining, turned to the title page to see who the author of these rather sneering put-downs might be, and was unreasonably annoyed to discover that it was a certain B.D. Bodkin, whose works she had sometimes consulted, and with whom she had in fact exchanged correspondence last year while trying to provenance some Victorian watercolours. But she wanted to know more about these sketches, so she read on. He wrote, didactically:

  Reports vary as to how many sketches there are. But most sources agree that there were probably two. The belief is that the sketches were done while the artist was under sentence of death, and that he had been driven mad by his approaching execution. One source, (uncorroborated), suggests that the taint of madness clings to the sketches. That macabre legend has clung to the sketches down the years and has no doubt added to their notoriety.

  Well, B.D. Bodkin, thought Nell, I’d very much like to hear what you’d have to say if you knew there’s a framed sketch hanging in a dark old house in the depths of East Anglia, with the legend ‘Holzminden 1917’ inscribed on it. I suppose you’d say it was a fake. I suppose it might be a fake. Or perhaps a copy of an original – yes, I’d better keep that possibility in mind.

  But one of the sentences from the book had stuck in her mind. The taint of madness clings to the sketches.

  Nell certainly did not believe that statement, any more than B.D. Bodkin did, but she was aware of a prickle of unease at the knowledge that if one of those sketches really was inside Fosse House, Michael was shut in with it – until tomorrow at the very least. It did not matter, of course. And yet …

  And yet with no knowledge of the legend, he had already talked about hearing whisperings in the house. A whispering voice, he had said; a voice that had murmured about needing to keep a hold on sanity … I do wish he hadn’t said that, thought Nell.

  She was no longer as vehemently sceptical about the supernatural as she used to be – she had had one or two strange and inexplicable experiences over the last couple of years, and her scepticism had taken a few dents. She had come to the rather unwilling acknowledgement that it might be possible for strong emotions or events – particularly tragic or violent events – to leave a lingering impression within a house. Under certain circumstances, it was just about credible that people with a particular sensitivity might pick up on those fragments. Michael had certainly done so at least twice. But she refused to believe there was anything malevolent inside Fosse House, and by way of emphasizing this, she carried on reading what else B.D. Bodkin had to say.

  He did not say anything more about the sketches, but he had devoted a whole section to extracts from letters written by a German officer who had been an attendant at Holzminden camp. They had been taken from a privately-printed volume of memoirs originally published in the mid-1950s, and were signed simply ‘Hugbert’ and addressed to ‘My dearest Freide’. The translation from German to English seemed quite good, although some of the phrasing was a little stilted.

  The letters seemed to have earned their place in the book because Hugbert had had some brief contact with Siegfried Sassoon. There were several missives referring to Sassoon, whom Hugbert had seen while guarding the Hindenberg Line in Verdun, remarking that even from a distance he looked peculiar, but then everyone knew the English were a peculiar race. Nell made a note of the pages in case this might be of use in the Director’s book, then turned to the later letters, which probably had been included to give a little more background to Hugbert and to Holzminden.

  The first one was dated September 1917.

  My dearest Freide,

  All goes well here, but Holzminden camp is bleak – an old cavalry barracks they have adapted for British officers, and a grim place. But anything is better than those weeks in France.

  Today we were told that our Camp Kommandant, Colonel Habrecht, is to be replaced. We shall miss the Colonel, who is elderly but has a kindness for his men (you remember how concerned he was when I suffered from bunions last month?), and he views the prisoners with much humanity. So I was very sorry when there came an announcement that his second-in-command is appointed in his place. This is Hauptmann Karl Niemeyer, and the appointment is of much regret to several of us, for he is a very harsh man and already imposing a strict regime. I take a great risk in writing that, but I know, my dearest Freide, that you will not allow anyone to read it, and I do not think letters to our loved ones are being opened, and anyway I am a trusted staff member and it is known that you are I are affianced. Last evening I showed your photograph to Hauptfeldwebel Barth while we were having supper together, and he thinks you are very fine and I am very lucky. I, too, think so.

  Today we had two new prisoners – a young Englishman and a Russian. The Englishman is quiet and withdrawn, but agreeable to the bed and locker he was allotted, but the Russian glared at everything and appeared to consider it all beneath him. I said to the Hauptfeldwebel that perhaps he was an aristocrat – he has that air of thinking himself better than his fellow men – but the Hauptfeldwebel said no, he had been a newspaper reporter – a war correspondent, scavenging the countries of Europe to write about what was happening, and I was gullible and too easily-impressed.

  ‘He is a man of the people, just as we are ourselves,’ said the Hauptfeldwebel, which is the kind of comment he often makes, his father having been a butcher in Braunschweig and Hauptfeldwebel Barth being sensitive about it. Not that there is anything wrong in being a butcher, and I believe his Bockwurst was the finest a man could eat.

  ‘But he will be planning to write about us and about the camp,’ said the Hauptfeldwebel, ‘so we should make sure to treat him with care. We do not want people thinking we give out cruel treatment, for that would reflect badly on the German Empire. Also, it would mean I should not be considered for promotion, and nor would you.’

  ‘And there is the Hague Convention regarding the treatment of prisoners of war,’ I said.

  ‘This is perfectly true.’

  The Russian’s name is Alexei Iskander, and I think the Hauptfeldwebel was right about him recording all that happens here, for within an hour of arriving at the camp Iskander was demanding writing materials.

  I found a notepad and pencils, and he sat on his bunk, writing away as if his life depended on it. The Hauptfeldwebel tells me he will not be permitted to send his scribblings out, but does not rule out the possibility of Iskander finding a way to smuggle them out. At worst, he will squirrel them away and arrange for publication after Germany wins the war, so we must not baulk at reading what he writes, and if necessary destroy it.

  This is important, so after supper, while the prisoners were all in the bathhouse, I searched Iskander’s locker, which I disliked doing very much, for I am not a Prying Paul.

  [Editor’s note: It seems likely that the translator mistook the exact wording here and that Hugbert meant Peeping Tom.]

  But everything Iskander had written was in Russian so I have no idea what it says, although I do not think it will be very complimentary. As you know, I am liking to improve my knowledge of all languages, for it is never known when that might be useful to a man. My English is a little improved since talking to some of the prisoners, but I could not make any sense of Iskander’s Russian journal.

  He is going to be difficult, that is already clear. He has already denounced the evening meal as disgusting pigswill and demanded better provisions. The Hauptfeldwebel said, in his sarcastic way, that perhaps Russian caviar and vodka would be acceptable in place of the sausage and cabbage dish, to which Iskander, cool as a cat, said certainly it would, but he would specify the caviar was ikra, which was superior to most kinds, and that with it came kummel, since he did not care overmuch for vodka.

  I wish only to be with you again, and I am,

  Ever your devoted Hugbert.

  P.S. My bunions are much improved. You will
be glad to know this.

  The second letter had been written a couple of weeks later, and it appeared that Hugbert had got to know the English prisoner who had arrived with Iskander a little better.

  He is a strange young man. There are times when he sits in complete silence, not moving, staring ahead of him, as if he can see things other people can not. This morning, he suddenly reached for my hand and said, ‘I am not mad, not any more. You must not let them think I am mad now.’

  Iskander, who happened to be in the room at the time, told me afterwards that he believed the Englishman had been ill after the battle of the Somme.

  ‘Mentally ill,’ he said. ‘They told me he would sit in a corner of the room and stare in the same way.’

  ‘At what?’

  Iskander gave one of the shrugs I always find a little theatrical. ‘Who can say?’ he said. ‘He will have seen many horrors inflicted on my countrymen and his.’ A pause. ‘Inflicted by your countrymen.’ He is never one to miss an opportunity for insolence, although somehow he manages to stop short of crossing the line and risking punishment. Before I could think how to answer him, he said, ‘I have heard it called the Hundred Mile Stare— Ah, I see you know of it.’

  ‘I know it as the Ten Mile Stare.’

  ‘It means the same, no matter the distance. They stare towards a distant horizon so they will not have to look at the nightmares that lie in their immediate path. Ten miles, a hundred, a thousand, even. The greater the nightmares, the further away they try to look.’

  I said (I could not help it), ‘But you have seen nightmares yourself?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, and for a moment his eyes took on an odd expression and I thought he was going to tell me more of what he had experienced before coming here. But he only said, ‘Yes, I also have the nightmares and the demons – I think you have them, also,’ he said, with a sudden disconcerting look.