WHISPERS IN THE DARK
Jonathan Aycliffe
HarperPaperbacks
A Division of HarperColllinsPublishers
Copyright © 1993 by Denis MacEoin/Daniel Easterman
Cover illustration by Edwin Herder
First printing: May 1993
All Charlotte Metcalf knows of the Ayrtons is that they are relatives of her father, nothing more. But that is enough for the desperate orphan, who turns up on their doorstep after running away from a life of hardship and hunger. To her surprise, they welcome her with open arms and offer not only to take her in, but also to help locate her long-lost beloved brother Arthur.
But life at the stately Barras Hall estate quickly takes a sinister turn. At night, Charlotte hears weeping coming from a locked room, and she catches glimpses of an ominous dark figure no one else admits to seeing. Soon she fears for her life. Something hateful exists in the house. . . a thing of unspeakable horror and unbearable pain. . . and it is coming for Charlotte.
For Beth Who Has Always Haunted Me And Always Will
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to everyone who assisted with this second chiller: my editors, Patricia Parkin in London, and Karen Solem and Katie Tso in New York, whose gentle criticisms brought the text to life; my indefatigable agent, Jeffrey Simmons; my wife, Beth, whose sensitivity in these matters is unsurpassed; and Barbara Heathcote, the librarian in charge of local studies at Newcastle Central Library, for giving me direct access to her special collections and making numerous suggestions.
They shall inherit it. . . forever.
Exodus 6:8
St. Botolph’s College
Elvet Place
University of Durham
Durham City
4 September 1991
Rev. Norman Savage
The Vicarage
Kirkharle
near Kirkwhelpington
Northumberland
Dear Norman,
Well, here they are: the papers I promised, the ones you wanted so badly. I wish I’d never said a word to you about them. You can make of them what you like, but don’t blame me if they give you bad dreams. It’s only right that I should put them into your hands, I suppose: they’re bound to have a special interest for you as vicar of your parish. And perhaps . . . Perhaps there are things you vicars do in cases like this. I’d like to think so. I’d like to be sure she is at peace. You’ll understand. When you’ve read her journal to the end, you’ll understand. If you can read it to the end.
You wanted me to tell you all I know about the journal, how it came into my possession, and so on. Well, there’s not a lot to tell, really. Let me be perfectly frank, Norman. By the time you get to the end of this thing—if you get that far—you’ll be wondering if it isn’t all some sort of elaborate hoax. Of course, you know me better than that, you know I’d never perpetrate such a thing. Apart from anything else, it’s hardly in my interest to play fast and loose with things like this. It’s enough of an embarrassment that I found them in the first place.
But you may start thinking, poor Simpkins, he’s been taken in hook, line, and sinker. He needs to get out in the world more, take a few deep breaths of real air. Maybe I do, but I can assure you this thing is no hoax. Or if it is, it’s so damned elaborate, so clever in every verifiable detail, that the hoaxer is a genius. His greatest genius, of course, having been to hide the journal so well that it was only ever discovered by the wildest chance in the first place.
Look, let me tell you straight: I think it is important these matters be believed, that they be treated with respect, with gravity. The pages themselves breathe conviction. You haven’t read them yet, you don’t know what I’m talking about, but you will, if you have an ounce of feeling in you. Or awe.
I know I did. Believed them, that is. I’d only read a few pages, I’d scarcely begun, but I knew, I knew for a certainty that she was writing from her heart. Yes, that’s what I mean, the heart: she felt every word she wrote, she wasn’t performing some literary exercise. How could it have been otherwise, under the circumstances? After what she had seen. And heard.
I’ve had them checked out, Norman, as much as I was able: the names, the dates, the addresses, the workhouse entries, electoral rolls, burial records. Everything fit, Norman. She had a good memory, our Charlotte, and an eye for detail. The point is, all the facts check out. It’s a genuine document, and I for one believe she saw and heard everything she says she did.
I found the narrative a month ago among my father’s things. Do you remember, just after the funeral, I told you there was a lifetime’s junk to clear out? My mother, God bless her, never kept things very tidy, and he, if anything, was worse.
Most of it consisted of papers directly relating to his practice, patient records and that sort of thing, the accumulations of a busy city GP. I’ve passed it all on to the man who’s taking over the practice, a young chap by the name of Calvert. No doubt he’ll have thrown out half of it himself by now.
The present document was in a file he kept in his safe, along with his bonds and insurance documents. She’d been his patient, of course: I was able to check that right away from his flies. She came to him in October 1968 suffering from recurrent depression. He gave her the usual nostrums, but they did her little good. Father was the old-fashioned sort of family doctor. Instead of packing her full of more little pills or shunting her on to a so-called specialist, he talked with her. Judging by the entries on her notes, he spent a lot of time with her just talking.
And then, in 1970, he suggested she write down a proper record of what was troubling her. I think it troubled him. He had his breakdown the following year.
Well, Norman, it’s in your hands now. You needn’t say anything about it if you don’t want to. But, knowing you, you will.
Best wishes,
John
CHAPTER 1
June 1970
When I was a little girl, they told me that God was good, that God was love. They whispered to me in the winter nights, saying God loved little children. There was a hymn they made us sing. We sang it in the workhouse. Every morning when I was a little girl, and twice on Sundays:
Little beams of rosy light,
Who has made you shine so bright?
Little blossom sweet and rare,
Who has made you bloom so fair?
Tis our Father, God above,
He has made us. He is Love.
That was sixty-eight years ago. A lifetime. I know better now, I have known better since I was fourteen. God is not good. God is not even wicked. God is just indifferent. I remember praying to Him all that winter, that particular winter, with its endless wind and ice, but He never answered me. Nor has He answered me since. I have not lost my belief in Him. I know He exists. It is just that I know I cannot depend on Him, not in the things that really matter.
Dr. Simpkins says I should put my story down on paper. He says it will do me good to get it out of my system. What does he know, what does anybody know? But I’ll do it to humor him. And it will give me something to do of an evening, now the nights are drawing in again. The long nights, when I lie awake for hours listening. Breathing and listening. The way I did all those years ago. That lifetime ago.
What do I listen for? Well, that will have to wait until I have told some of my story. Not even Dr. Simpkins knows, do you, Doctor? But he will soon, I will put it all down on paper as he recommends. The beginning of it all. The end of it all.
I came into this world in December 1887. It was the year of the Royal Jubilee Exhibition in Newcastle, at which my father had a stand. A year of snowstorms and gales and a protracted miners’ strike in Northumberland. My brother Arthur was born eighteen months later. H
e was a sickly child at first and nearly died. My mother came near her own death having him, and the doctor said she was to have no more children. Well, that was not usual for those days, people had large families (and quite a few in the churchyard, as often as not). When I was little, I used to wonder why it was that Arthur and I were the only ones. Nowadays that’s quite a normal thing, but then they would look at you strangely If you said there were only two of you. They would pity you, though Arthur and I never felt any need for pity. At least not at first, not when we were very small.
My father, Douglas Metcalf, was a wealthy man, a clever man who had made his money in the Tyneside chemical industry. Those were the days of the big alkali companies around Haverton Hill, and my father set up his own saltworks between Tennant’s and Allhusen’s. That was four years before I was born. He used the new Solvay process, and in a few years had made enough money to build the house I was born in, Kenton Lodge. We lived in Gosforth, in what was then more or less open country to the north of Newcastle, not so very far from where I live now.
We would go to Bridlington every year for two weeks’ holiday. I remember the softness of those nights. An orchestra played in the glass pavilion, popular songs of the day. The music drifted to my window every night, and there was a sound of waves in the distance as the sea fell against the shore. The music and the falling waves lulled me to sleep. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night, when the orchestra and its audience had long gone to their beds, and the waves continued to fall in the stillness, and I knew that the sea went on for ever, out into the night. And every year when we came back to the city, the sounds and smells of the seaside would remain with me. They are with me now; very faint, but unmistakable.
I remember a calico nightdress with crocheted work on its neck and sleeves. And the gas lamp burning above my bed, the flame like a golden halo. But ours was one of the first houses to have electricity installed. Not many people now remember that the world’s first elec-trie light was lit here in Newcastle. That was exactly nine years before I was born, to the very day. Joseph Swan demonstrated the prototype of his famous lamp before a gathering of the Newcastle Chemical Society. My father was in the audience, was indeed a member of the committee that year.
And I remember the fire in the night nursery, turning to ashes as the winter night went on. And an apple tree that grew right outside the day nursery, where Arthur and I were put to play when we were small, with Hannah, our nurse. When I was older, Hannah would take me for a walk each afternoon, with Arthur in his pram, and then both together, one on either side of her. Sometimes we were allowed to buy sweets in a shop on the High Street run by Mrs. Clutch: Cupid’s Whispers and Tom Thumb Drops, Spanish ribbon, everlasting sticks, Red Sugar Cakes, and a stretchy toffee called Wigga Wagga.
The memories never leave me, never so much as fade. Why should that be, when so much else has gone, so much of the past, the precious things, the things I once thought I would never forget and now have? He comes to my thoughts every day without fail. Arthur. Arthur and the others, they are abiding presences even now. I have become an old woman almost without realizing it. This year I shall be eighty-three: my mind is clear enough, but my body has grown to be an encumbrance. For sixty-nine years I have been afraid, I have known daily, blatant, unreasonable fear. And yet what is there truly to be afraid of? Memories? Faces that are always there? Voices that come to me in the early morning, whispering as they used to whisper all those years ago?
It is trite to remark how much has changed since then, how the whole world is different, but nonetheless it is true. The world changes, but we go on, with our memories intact, and our fears, thinking nothing has really changed, that we are the same people we ever were. Sometimes I wake in the mornings, silly old woman that I am, and expect to see my mother standing over my bed, watching as she used to watch, perhaps smiling at me. Or Hannah, dead these sixty years or more.
Or else Arthur. Arthur as I first remember him, a small boy coming to my light-filled room to tell me his dreams. Such dreams. I remember none of them now, but I can still see his face, the expression of fear on it, the uncertainty the night had left there, like a faint scar.
He was such a sweet child. Nowadays that’s almost an insult. My daughters find it hard to understand why my grandchildren are such a worry to me. But they dash about so fiercely and watch such violent programs on television. Oh, I know it isn’t fashionable to say such things, but when I see them shouting and yelling, even swearing, I cannot believe they are quite children. Arthur was gentle. He took care of things. And people.
And he was such a pretty child. I don’t mean that he was a pampered, ringleted thing, a little boy off a chocolate box, in a velvet suit, carrying a hoop. There was nothing simpering about Arthur, my father would never have stood for that. He was not mollycoddled or spoiled in anyway, neither of us was. But the gentleness I spoke of, the awareness of others and their feelings, that was something innate in Arthur, something no nurse or teacher inculcated, and it made everyone love him. There were times, when I was small, when I felt quite jealous of Arthur, of the way both men and women doted on him in that rather prim way they had then. But I did not stay jealous long, for I loved Arthur like the rest of them and wanted only the best for him.
He’s dead now, of course, he’s been dead for a very long time. But sometimes I tell myself secretly that that isn’t true, that Arthur is still alive, that he’s here now, in the house, watching me. Watching me quite quietly, the way he used to watch me in bed before I woke. Sometimes I think I could speak to him, just turn my head and say, “Hello, Arthur,” and he would reply the way he used to, all those years ago: “Hello, Charlotte. It’s been a long time.”
I live in a different part of Newcastle now, in Jesmond, among strangers, men and women who pass me in the street and nod, but never say good day. When I was young, a man would doff his hat and nod when he passed a woman of his acquaintance; well, a gentleman would do it for a lady if they passed one another. But not now. That’s another of the things that have changed. Still, I mustn’t grumble. The young man in the post office on Clayton Road is always very friendly.
Jesmond used to be a better place, what some called a “posh” part of town. It was where the well-off lived, Jews and businessmen, solicitors, bankers, that sort of person, the better sort. Many of my parents’ friends lived there. I remember there were plenty of big houses, grand houses three and four stories high, with fine gardens in front set off with railings. Though none was as grand as Kenton Lodge. Most of the railings came down during the last war, of course, and have never been replaced.
It’s all changed now. When people started having small families, they didn't want houses that size any longer. Most were sold off and divided into flats and bed-sitters, but a few remain. I still live in this house facing the park. John and I bought it after we were married. He died here, in this room.
I live here in a little peace and a little pain. I live from day to day, hoping for nothing. John left me well provided for, I have money of my own, quite a lot of money, I do not fear poverty. What is there to hope for at my age? I live now only to remember. And that is the hardest thing of all. Not the remembering, I don’t mean that, remembering is easy; but the enduring of memory, of the sensations memory brings with it.
I was widowed twenty-five years ago. For so much of my life I have been alone. It is not loneliness that frightens me, however; not loneliness, not hopelessness, not weariness. Death will take care of all that soon enough. No, what frightens me is the smell of memories, the sound and taste and feel of them, knowing there is no one else with whom I can share them. Old Simpkins suspects as much. I have hinted at certain things in his presence. That is why he has suggested this therapy. Maybe it will do some good.
I go to St. George’s church on Osborne Road, on Sundays, when I have the stamina for God. There are quite a few of us, old ladies and a few old men, refugees from our oversized houses or our little, tidy flats: a silent, gray tr
ibe full of memories. But none of them share my memories. Only I know what lurks in here. The others would not believe me.
CHAPTER 2
It all began with a sprained ankle. Or so I at one time, looking for ultimate causes, used to think. When my mother was seventeen, she slipped on some broken paving on the Elizabethan walls of Berwick-upon-Tweed, twisting her ankle. She had gone there with her entire family—her mother, father, two sisters, an aunt and uncle, and three cousins—for their annual holiday by the sea. It was not a severe injury, but bad enough to keep her off her feet for well over a week. There was talk of going home, but they had barely arrived, the weather was glorious, and she insisted they stay. She would remain in her room at the Crown Hotel, well cosseted and supplied with romantic novels, and visited from time to time by her relations, as they came and went from their holiday pursuits.
Those pursuits included a long-planned boat trip to Lindisfame, or Holy Island, if you prefer, not far off the coast, a few miles to the south of Berwick. It was, I think, the third day of my mother’s invalid existence, and already she had grown tired of the four walls of her room and taken up residence on an antique chaise longue in one of the sitting rooms downstairs. She was by now fretting a good deal at her confinement and growing bored of smoldering glances and base betrayals. I believe she came close to insisting that they take her with them after all, but it was out of the question. The trip would involve much climbing up and down steep steps in order to get in and out of the boat, not to mention some very brisk walking once they got to their destination. Reluctantly she agreed to stay behind.
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