The Whispering House

by Rebecca Wade

  “What happened?”

  “The pitcher fell off the shelf,” returned Mom curtly. “Don’t ask me how! I wasn’t anywhere near it at the time.” She finished brushing the pieces into a dustpan and dropped them in the trash.

  “It was here, wasn’t it?” Hannah examined a shelf near the door, which wobbled slightly. “Oh, I see. The screw’s come loose. I’ll fix it.” She opened the cupboard under the sink, which was where she’d put her father’s toolbox, found the screwdriver that Sam had used on the upstairs landing, and tightened the screw. “That should do it.”

  “Thanks. I’m sorry, sweetheart, I didn’t mean to snap just when you get home, but I can’t tell you what a frustrating day this has been! Whatever I’ve tried to do, something’s gone wrong. First the vacuum cleaner quit on me. Just stopped working, halfway down the stairs. So I left it and went to fetch a cloth to clean the windows. I started upstairs, and I’d just finished the ones in your bedroom when the vacuum started up again. All on its own!”

  “It probably overheated before and you forgot to switch it off,” suggested Hannah.

  “After half a staircase? Anyway, I finished the vacuuming and set up the board to do some ironing. So I switched on the iron and was just about to go upstairs and fetch the clothes when there was this terrific bang from behind me!”

  “The iron? It’s broken then?”

  “Dead as a doornail. I’ll have to buy a new one tomorrow.”

  “Sounds like the house needs rewiring. It was probably done years ago and no one’s checked it recently.”

  “Maybe. This place has been pretty carefully done up otherwise, though.” Mom suddenly put her hand to her mouth. “I forgot! How were the exams?”

  “Could have been worse.”

  “That’s good. Come on then, let’s eat some of this chicken.”

  Fortunately, the oven didn’t seem to be suffering from any peculiar electrical disorder, and dinner put Mom in a better mood. Afterward, she sat down to listen to a radio program while Hannah loaded the dishwasher. Just before leaving the kitchen, she glanced at the door of the refrigerator, noticing that now the letters were innocently bunched together in one corner where Mom had moved them when she’d been cleaning. Yesterday’s random selection had obviously been just that—random.

  Hannah went back into the living room and settled in an armchair to look over her science notes for tomorrow. Again, the hearth rug was empty.

  “Mom,” she said, puzzled. “What’s wrong with Toby? I haven’t seen him for a couple of days now.”

  “Don’t ask me! I’ve hardly seen him either. If he didn’t come in to eat, I’d suspect someone else was feeding him, but he just comes in for long enough to wolf down his food, then goes straight out again.”

  Frowning, Hannah considered this. Then she shook her head and went back to her notes. Cats were funny creatures—there was no point trying to figure out what went on in those furry little heads.

  At ten o’clock she packed away her books, kissed her mother good night, and went upstairs. As she got undressed, she noticed that the decoration in her room was showing a few signs of wear: The layers of paint and paper curled up very slightly where they met the mantelpiece, and there was another small patch where they had come unstuck near the window. Probably, she thought, the house had been repainted quickly, without too much care about surface preparation. Dad was always saying that was the key to good decorating. Yawning, she crossed off another day on the calendar and got into bed.

  She had almost dropped off when the sound of distant laughter seemed to come from somewhere. Upstairs, maybe, but of course it couldn’t be upstairs, she thought drowsily. It must be the radio. She should go and ask Mom to turn it down, but she really couldn’t be bothered. Not now.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Disturbances

  TUESDAY’S WEATHER WAS HOTTER. At school, a light breeze blew through the open classroom window, gently ruffling exam papers and making the big hanging map of the world skitter against the wall. Hannah’s class was being tested on science both morning and afternoon, and after a day battling with questions on fractional distillation and parallel circuits, she got back to Cowleigh Lodge feeling she’d earned a rest.

  But as soon as she’d let herself in, one look at her mother’s face told her that all was not well.

  “Come and look at this.” Mom’s voice sounded tight, ominously controlled. She led Hannah upstairs to the bedroom at the front of the house, which she and Dad had taken over. Pushing open the door, she pointed to the top of the wall. All along the side nearest the window, the layers of paint and paper had come loose from the plaster and curled outward stiffly for a distance of about half an inch.

  “Now look at the curtains,” said Mom, before Hannah could comment on the wallpaper.

  The window was open and the curtains were blowing lightly, with one hanging noticeably lower than the other.

  “What happened to this?”

  “The screw holding the rail’s come out of the wall.”

  “Oh. That’s a nuisance. But we can put it back, can’t we?”

  “And now take a look at the radiator.”

  Hannah cast an anxious glance at her mother’s face before going over to the other side of the room, where it was plain what the problem was this time. The radiator was one of the old-fashioned kind that was designed to be screwed into the wall, but now one of the brackets that were meant to secure it at the top had sheared off, so although it was still joined to the pipe at the bottom, it wobbled freely at one end.

  “We . . . we’re not using the central heating at the moment, are we?” she said, still hoping to put an optimistic slant on things.

  “No, we’re not,” replied her mother with a brittle smile. “I was, however, still hoping to use this.” She walked over to the side of the bed and switched on the reading lamp. Nothing happened.

  “Bulb gone?”

  “I’ve changed it.”

  “Fuse?”

  “I’ve changed that too.”

  “Maybe we’re having a power outage,” suggested Hannah, but not very hopefully.

  “Then why is the television working? The refrigerator?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. Perhaps they’re on a different circuit or something. Does the main light work?” She moved to the door and pressed the switch. The light came on. “There you are. At least you don’t have to go to bed in the dark.” She gave an encouraging smile.

  But her mother refused to be consoled. “That’s not all.” She walked over to the window and pointed to the floor. “Look. Over here the carpet’s come untacked underneath the window. And have you seen the tiles in the bathroom? The paper in your bedroom? Steph brought Billie around for coffee this morning, and she was horrified!”

  “Steph has the kind of house that gets photographed for glossy magazines. She practically faints at the sight of dust,” Hannah reminded her patiently. Mom’s closest friend, mother of six-year-old Billie, was famously proud of her housekeeping. “Why wasn’t Billie in school, anyway?”

  “Some bug or other. He seemed lively enough to me.” Her mother shrugged. Then she shook her head, frowning. “I just don’t get it! How can a house deteriorate so fast?”

  Hannah sat down on the bed and looked thoughtfully at her mother. “We’ve had all the windows open a lot recently, haven’t we?”

  “Of course. It’s been hot outside.”

  “But before we moved in, they would have been closed. According to the woman in the shop, this house has been hard to rent, so they could have been closed for a long time—don’t forget, you said yourself that it felt damp at first. Supposing all this fresh air we’re letting in suddenly is drying the house out. Mightn’t that make the wallpaper come unstuck, loosen the screws?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. There’s probably a perfectly good explanation, but for some reason I can’t even persuade Toby to come into the house the
se days. I’ve had to start leaving his dinner outside the back door.”

  “Perhaps he still feels unsettled here. He knows it’s not his real home.”

  “Then why was he fine when we first moved in? I don’t understand it. Ever since last weekend, he’s avoided the house like it had a dog in it!”

  Hannah sighed. She felt she’d had enough of trying to solve baffling problems for one day. “Don’t worry, Mom, he’ll come back when he’s ready. But right now, can we have something to eat?”

  “Of course. I’m sorry.” Mom smiled, and they went downstairs.

  Dinner was cold chicken and salad, which they ate at the kitchen table. Afterward, Hannah took her schoolbag up to her bedroom and tipped the books onto the bed. She noticed that more soot had escaped from underneath the boarded-up fireplace, and that the paper above the mantelpiece seemed to have come a little farther away from the wall, but the explanation she had given Mom now felt like the most probable one, and she settled down to concentrate on learning French verbs.

  She had been at it for about an hour when a sudden crash from the floor below made her jump. She got up and stuck her head through the doorway. “Mom? Are you okay?”

  There was no reply. Quickly she ran downstairs and, having glanced in and seen that her mother wasn’t in the living room, discovered her standing in the kitchen, staring down at the smashed remains of a jar of peanut butter.

  “Bad luck,” said Hannah sympathetically. “Did you drop it?”

  “I didn’t touch it. It fell out of that cupboard over there.” Mom looked shaken. “I suppose I can’t have put it back properly after I fixed Billie a snack this morning.”

  “Look, you go and sit down. I’ll take care of this.” Hannah shooed her mother out of the kitchen and set to work with the dustpan and brush. After dropping the broken glass in the bin and wiping the floor with a cloth, she straightened up and looked at the cupboard. It was easy to see what had happened this time. Here the shelves weren’t screwed in but rested on wooden supports, two of which had shifted slightly, causing the shelf to tip forward. Having pushed the jars and bottles firmly to the back of the shelf, she went to the refrigerator to get a glass of milk. But as she was about to open the door, her attention was held by something on the front of it. For a moment, she froze, her heart thudding. Then she turned round and walked quickly into the living room.

  “Mom, when you and Steph were having coffee this morning, where did you sit?”

  Her mother looked up, surprised. “In here. Why?”

  “Where was Billie?”

  “In here too, most of the time.”

  “Could he have gone into the kitchen on his own?”

  “Probably. We were talking. I didn’t really notice. He couldn’t have reached that peanut butter jar, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “No. It doesn’t matter.”

  She returned to the kitchen and leaned heavily against the wall. It had been Billie, of course, bored with listening to grown-up talk, looking for something to do. Six-year-old Billie, who was just learning to write.

  Who else would have moved the magnetic letters so that they spelled

  HELP ME

  After a few moments she stepped forward, roughly shuffled the letters into the rest of the collection, and left the kitchen, closing the door firmly behind her. Then she went back upstairs. At nine thirty, she packed her schoolbag and took it down to the hall, leaving it by the front door ready for the morning.

  It was when she was in the bathroom brushing her teeth that she noticed the tiles above the bath. They were now so loose that one of them had almost come away from the wall altogether, revealing the yellowish, hardened glue behind. But in one spot there was no glue, and when Hannah peered closer, she could just make out a very faint trace of something else. A pale blue stripe.

  She remembered Mrs. Wilson’s words. “Don’t forget you’ve got a bathroom now. That would have been a bedroom in those days.”

  There was no reason why the memory of those words should have made her shiver suddenly, any more than the sight of that tiny patch of wallpaper, no bigger than a small coin. Except that for a moment, she felt as though she had been caught guiltily spying through a keyhole. A keyhole into another world.

  Quickly she finished brushing her teeth and went to bed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Message Received

  WEDNESDAY BEGAN ORDINARILY ENOUGH. The weather was still hot and dry and, according to the forecast, set to remain so until the weekend. Hannah had slept well. Walking to school, she felt well prepared for the day’s exam.

  The French exam was straightforward, and by the time she put down her pen at twelve thirty, she knew she’d done okay and could enjoy lunch with a clear conscience. There was no exam set for the afternoon—instead the class was expected to do some private study in the library, and at one thirty she and Sam sat down side by side to get ready for the following day. Hannah had made some notes in her English notebook the night before and now opened it.

  For one puzzling moment she thought she’d made a mistake and picked up someone else’s book. But there was her name on the front, and a brief glance over the notes showed her own work of the night before. There was no mistake.

  Only, some way below her own writing, in a looped, spidery script, three words were penciled.

  Let me go

  Trying to control a rising sense of panic, she sought an explanation. Somebody at school had taken the notebook and played a trick on her. Or maybe someone had picked up her notebook by accident and written in it before realizing their mistake. But even as she tried to convince herself, she knew it wasn’t possible. The book had been in her schoolbag ever since she’d put it there last night. And her schoolbag hadn’t left her side all morning.

  Hannah stared at the words as they swam before her eyes. Her heart was pounding. Roughly she pushed the notebook away from her, put her elbows on the table, and covered her face with her hands.

  Sam dug her in the ribs. “What’s the matter?” he whispered. “You okay?”

  Instead of replying, Hannah raised her face and thrust the notebook toward him. She saw his eyes flicker over her own work, then open wider when he came to what was underneath.

  “What is this?”

  She opened her mouth but didn’t trust herself to speak.

  “Hey! What’s the matter? Why are you upset?” he mouthed. “It’s only . . .” He stopped. He peered closer at the old-fashioned lettering, then back to her stricken face, then, for longer this time, at the page. She heard him catch his breath. “Hannah?” he said softly. “Who wrote this?”

  Sam hardly ever used her name when talking to her. The fact that he did so now was a sign that he knew something was wrong. Very wrong. Suddenly the image of those magnetic letters sprang before her eyes, and a horrible connection began to form in her brain. She stared at him in panic.

  “Come on,” he muttered, getting up and grabbing her elbow with one hand and the notebook with the other. “Let’s get out of here.”

  He shepherded her out of the library, along the corridor, and into an empty classroom. Then he drew up two chairs, and they sat down facing each other.

  “It was her, Sam. Maisie wrote it!” Hannah blurted, her voice overloud now that whispering was no longer necessary.

  For once he didn’t contradict her, but held the book in his lap and stared soberly at the page. “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know, but there was something a bit like it last night, only I tried to tell myself it had nothing to do with Maisie.” She told him about the magnetic letters.

  “Help me. Let me go,” he muttered. “Is that all?”

  She nodded. Then she caught her breath. “No! I’ve just remembered! On Sunday night, when I went out to the kitchen, four of the letters were grouped together. H-A-N-A. Like someone had been trying to write my name but couldn’t spell properly.”

  “Mmm . . . guess that one could have been just coinciden
ce?”

  “That’s what I thought then. But there’s something else I haven’t told you about. Like with those magnetic letters, I’ve been trying to explain it rationally, but I . . . I think, now, it’s all connected.” Then she told him about the smashed pitcher and the jar, the odd electrical outages, and the rapidly deteriorating state of the upstairs part of the house.

  “Are you saying it’s Maisie doing all this? Pulling radiators off walls? Damaging tiles and wallpaper?”

  “I don’t know,” Hannah muttered. Put like that, it sounded ridiculous.

  “Have the dreams stopped now?”

  “They seem to have.”

  “And these messages? When was the first one?”

  “Sunday night.”

  He frowned. “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Why then? You’ve been living in that house over a month. Then suddenly you get three weird messages in the space of four days. There must be a reason.”

  She stared at him. He seemed to be trying to apply logic to something that was essentially illogical.

  “Think back,” he said sharply. “I left you on Saturday afternoon. What happened between then and Sunday evening?”

  “Nothing. At least, nothing important. On Sunday morning I did some work, and then we went out for lunch. In the afternoon I did some more work. It was after that, when I went out to the kitchen to make tea, that I saw the letters on the refrigerator.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “Yes, I think so. No . . . wait. There is something else. On Saturday evening, after you’d left, I did some drawing.”

  “What did you draw?”

  She looked at him curiously. “It wasn’t a real drawing. I was just copying that photo of Maisie. Trying to see if I could catch her expression.”

  “You drew her?”

  “Well, yes.” She suddenly felt alarmed. Why was Sam looking at her like that? “It wasn’t anything special. Just a pencil sketch.”

  “I seem to remember it was just a pencil sketch that caused all the trouble last time.” His voice was quiet, but he was looking at her intently, and she knew he was referring back to two Christmases ago, when she’d drawn the statues in the cathedral.