‘Our incarceration here is not of our doing,’ the priest whispered. ‘We cannot be blamed for our predicament. But we have the right to save ourselves from oblivion. Oblivion, you see, is our only alternative.’
‘Who are you?’ Ada asked him. ‘What are you?’
The priest pressed his fingertip against his scabby lips. ‘Shh, my dear, some of us are still in the land of nod.’ He pointed down to the heap of dirty blankets at the end of the room. Out from under the blankets a man’s hand was protruding, like a dead crab.
‘I’ll talk as loud as I like, thank you! In fact, I’m going to shout out for help.’
‘It will be futile, I’m afraid. The pilgrims won’t hear you.’
‘Pilgrims? What are you talking about? What pilgrims? All I want to know is who you are and how you managed to get me in here. And why.’
‘The pilgrims are those outside this chamber – those who are free to continue their journey through one year after another until they finally reach the end of their days. Unlike us.’
He gave her a small, regretful smile.
‘My name is Thomas. I have been here the longest. I was alone for so long that I believed I would remain alone for all eternity. But eventually my companions appeared. Bartram first. Then – after many more tiresome years had rolled past us – all of these others. And here we are. Exactly where we were, going nowhere.’
The other six men had now crossed the room and were gathered in a semicircle with their arms folded, staring down at her. Apart from the bearded man in his knee breeches, Ada had rarely seen such hard-looking characters since her brother had taken her down to visit his body-building gym. Their necks were thickly corded and their biceps bulged, so they had obviously been taking steroids and regularly working out. The man with the shark’s-fin hair had a snake tattoo on his neck that curled up to his left ear.
‘Blimey, you’re a gift from God and no fucking mistake,’ he said, grinning at her. ‘What’s your name, love? Mine’s Ron but you can call me Jaws. Everybody else does.’
Ada said nothing, but drew up her knees and squeezed her thighs defensively together, making herself as small as she could.
‘So what was you and them two geezers and that other bint all doing in here? You was trying to catch a sneaky butcher’s at us in that mirror thing, wasn’t you? Don’t say you wasn’t. And then chucking all that fucking dust all over us. What was that all about?’
Ada still said nothing, but Thomas leaned close to her again. ‘I quite understand your reticence, my dear, but I think you fail to understand the transformation that you have undergone. Most of all, its permanence.’
‘What are you talking about? What transformation? All I know is that one second you were all dragging me down the room and the next I hit the wall and then I woke up here. What time is it?’
‘Time is no longer of any consequence. Not for any of us here in this chamber, and that includes you.’
Jaws hunkered down close beside her, so that she could strongly smell his Old Spice aftershave. He was handsome in a dark, untrustworthy way, with a permanent look of self-satisfaction, as if he knew something that nobody else could guess at, but was never going to say what it was.
He cupped one hand over Ada’s left knee and said, ‘Let’s put it this way, darlin.’ There’s no point in you asking what the time is, because it’s the same time as when we pulled you through the wall and always will be. You want to know what the time is? Look at your watch.’
‘Take your hand off me,’ Ada told him.
He grinned again, and said, ‘Make me.’
‘The police are coming back here soon. I can have you arrested for indecent assault. Not to mention threatening behaviour.’
‘No you can’t, love. Look at your watch. You’re still stuck in that second when we fetched you in here but those coppers are hours ahead of you already. Tomorrow they’ll be a day ahead of you and next week they’ll be a week ahead of you. Then they’ll retire and then they’ll die and you’ll still be here. There’s no way they can come back in time to find you and there’s no way you can go forward in time to whinge that I’ve been touching you up. Which I’m not, am I? Only being friendly.’
Ada looked at Thomas for support and for some kind of rational explanation, but all Thomas could do was give her a beatific smile.
‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. She lifted up her right hand and squeezed her wrist between the fingers of her left. ‘There – look! I’m solid. I can feel myself. I’m not stuck in time. I’m real. Now, whoever you are, if you’ll just take your hand off me and get back out of my way, I’m leaving.’
‘Look at your fucking watch,’ said Jaws.
‘I don’t have to look at my watch. Maybe my watch has stopped. I’m getting out of here and that’s all there is to it.’
Jaws lifted his hand from her knee and stood up, still giving her that knowing, secretive look.
‘Go ahead, love. Try. I’ve done a whole lot of things in my life that I’m less than proud of, but if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a pork pie merchant.’
The seven men all stood back and watched Ada as she climbed to her feet. She went over to the panel in the dado that had opened to let her in, along with Francis and Rob and Vicky. It was closed now, and there seemed to be no lever on this side to open it. No crucifix, nor any other kind of switch.
She ran her hands under the dado rail to see if she could feel a gap where she could get a grip on it and pull it open, but it was seamless.
‘See?’ said Jaws, making no attempt to hide his satisfaction. ‘You’re trapped, love, same as we are. Rats in a trap, all of us – you included.’
Ada slapped on the wall hard, first with her right hand and then with both hands.
‘Frankie!’ she shouted, at the top of her voice. ‘Frankie, I’m stuck in the priest’s hide! I can’t open the panel! Can you hear me, Frankie? Frankie – get me out of here!’
She stopped, and listened, to hear if she had any response. Jaws watched her, still smiling.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘They can’t hear you. I told you to look at your watch, didn’t I? That’s when you were here. They can’t hear something that’s happened in the past.’
‘You’re not making any sense,’ Ada snapped at him. ‘I’m banging the wall, aren’t I, and I’m doing that now. And if you hadn’t been here at the same time that I was here, how did you manage to pull me out of here, and knock my friends over?’
She clenched her fists and started thumping the wall again and again, as hard as she could.
‘Frankie!’ she screamed. ‘Frankie, I’m stuck in the priest’s hide! Get me out of here! Frankie! Rob! Get me out of here!’
She waited almost half a minute, but there was still no answer from the other side. Ada started to knock on the wall again and call out miserably, ‘Frankie – Frankie, please!’ but then she stopped and started to cry.
Thomas came up to her, put his arm around her shoulders and gently pulled her away from the wall.
‘It’s of no avail, my dear,’ he whispered. ‘You will have to accept your destiny. All any of us can do is make the best of our lives in this room, and in this house.’
‘You shouldn’t have come looking for us, love,’ said Jaws. ‘That was your mistake. You and your mirror and your magic dust. You should have left well enough alone, do you know what I mean?’
The russet-bearded man in the long brown jacket came up to Ada, too. She smeared the tears out of her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater and looked up at him. Close up, she could see that he had a deep diagonal scar across his forehead and his left cheek, as if he had been cut by a sword, and that his left eye was milky white and blind.
‘Our lives as pilgrims have been stolen from us,’ he whispered. ‘But we have to safeguard the lives that we still have left to us, if only to outlast the rest of humankind.’
He had a strong, slurred accent that sounded more French than West Country, and every word ende
d in a strange airy whistle, so that Ada could barely understand what he was saying.
‘When all the other men and women who have walked on this Earth are rotting in their graves – when the sun dims and winks out for the final time – when total darkness and icy cold swallow everything – we shall still be here, we few, to greet that darkness and that cold, and beyond. We shall be here for eternity, so that we can see what God has planned for the universe after the disastrous failure of humanity.’
Ada took a deep breath to steady herself, and then she said, ‘I’m not interested in eternity, whoever you are. I just want to get out of here. Now, tell me how I can do that.’
‘You can’t,’ Jaws whispered. ‘Don’t you understand what we’ve been telling you, me and Father Thomas here? He’s stuck back in sixteen-something or other. Bartram here, he’s stuck back in seventeen thirty-five.’
‘May the ninth, seventeen thirty-five, at one minute past nine in the evening, to be precise,’ Bartram put in. ‘The clock had just finished chiming.’
‘Me… five to five on Sunday, June the tenth, nineteen- seventy-nine,’ Jaws went on. ‘The day after Derby Day. Back then I didn’t have a fucking clue what that was all about, but it didn’t take me too long to work it out, did it, not after Billy here got pulled in, too. Fucking Russell had lost a packet betting on the wrong horse. What a muggins I was. And there was me thinking I was the sharpest chisel in the box.’
Ada said, ‘I can’t stay here forever. I can’t.’
‘As I told you, my dear, none of us has a choice,’ said Thomas. ‘We cannot take our own lives. We cannot cut our wrists because our circulation stopped at the moment of our entry and we would not bleed. We cannot starve ourselves because we never need to eat, or to drink for that matter. We can breathe, yes, and we can talk, but every breath we take is the last breath we took when we were trapped, breathed over and over again, ad infinitum.’
‘Recycling, you might call it,’ grinned Jaws.
‘Wait a minute,’ Ada protested. ‘You keep saying you’re trapped in this room, but you’re not, are you? That family who’ve been staying here… they’ve heard you walking about the house. They haven’t been able to see you, but they’ve felt you… You pushed that woman when she came looking for you, and you pushed that man over, too – and kicked him.’
‘That didn’t happen.’
‘Yes, it did. I’ve even seen their bruises.’
‘No, love, that didn’t happen. That was all a dream.’
23
Rob and Vicky had been planning to go out in their car that afternoon and drive around the Tamar Valley, or even to the south as far as Plymouth – way beyond the area that was being covered by the search and rescue teams. They were hoping that by some chance Timmy had been picked up by a stranger and then abandoned miles away.
They knew that it was a remote chance, millions to one, but it would have been better than sitting in Allhallows Hall listening to the rain clattering outside in the courtyard and watching the logs lurching in the drawing-room grate.
Now that Rob had been ordered by DI Holley to stay in the house, they had to give up on that plan. Grace and Portia made some sandwiches with Sharpham Rustic cheese and they all sat around the fire, drinking Herbert Russell’s Jail Ale out of the bottles and saying very little.
Katharine was still feeling hungover and tired, so she took herself upstairs to bed. There had still been no word from Martin, and they agreed that if they hadn’t heard from him by the time it started to grow dark, they would report him missing.
Rob sat on Herbert’s throne, prodding at his phone to see if he had any messages and to catch up on the latest news on the Devon Live website. A teenage girl had been found naked and dead in the River Tavy, under Harford Bridge. It was not yet known if she had been sexually assaulted, but a pentagram had been carved into her back with a knife.
Vicky was sitting on the floor next to him. She poked at the fire and then she looked up at him and said, ‘Perhaps we should take another look in the witching room. I still can’t believe how Ada disappeared into the wall like that.’
‘You think she might have come back? If she has, she would have shouted out to us, wouldn’t she?’
‘I don’t know. If she went through the wall one way, maybe it’s possible that she’s been able to come back through it the other way. But maybe after doing that she’s too weak to shout out.’
‘Ten out of ten for imagination, darling.’
‘Are you joking? After those ghostly men we saw, pulling Ada through the wall, and all that whispering, and both of us being pushed and kicked by people we couldn’t even see? For God’s sake, Rob, who needs to have an imagination?’
‘All right. You win. Let’s go and look. But I don’t think we’re going to find that it’s any different.’
Grace said, ‘I’ll come with you. Portia?’
Portia was sitting on the sofa with her feet up, playing a game on her phone.
‘No, thanks. You go. I’m trying to de-spook myself.’
They climbed the stairs and walked along the corridor to the end bedroom. Grace said, ‘This witching room… there’s no danger that we could be pulled into the wall, is there?’
‘We’re only going to take a quick look, just to make sure that Ada hasn’t managed to come back,’ Rob told her. ‘Those men we saw when she threw that dust all over them… I think they grabbed her because she upset them. They were only whispering, but they sounded furious, didn’t they?’
He lifted the lid of the window seat, reached down inside and pulled up the crucifix. For some reason it was stiffer than it had been before, and the dado opened more slowly, with an anguished creak that sounded like a grieving grandmother, and a dry clanking of cogs.
They bent down and went inside. The room appeared to be empty. There was no sign of Ada, nor anybody else who was visible.
Grace inhaled and said, ‘Yes… you’re right… it’s Old Spice, isn’t it? That’s so creepy! I can really smell it. Ooh. Can we go now?’
‘Wait a second,’ said Vicky. ‘What’s happened to those blankets? They were all piled up before, weren’t they? Now they’re all folded back.’
‘Yes, but Ada was kicking them about like mad when she was trying to stop herself from being pulled through the wall.’
‘I know. But after she disappeared they were still lying in a heap. It was almost like there was somebody hiding underneath them.’
‘John looked. There wasn’t.’
‘Can we go now?’ Grace repeated. ‘I’m sure I felt somebody breathing against the back of my neck.’
‘Hold on,’ said Rob. ‘I’ll take another look.’ He went down to the end of the room, picked up the blankets one after the other and shook them. They were heavy and damp and dirty and woven out of coarse unwashed wool. Gingerly, he lifted up the corner of one of the blankets and held it under his nose. It had the lard-like reek of sheep’s grease but also the musky odour of stale human sweat.
Grace, by now, had already crouched down so that she could back out into the bedroom.
‘Go on, Gracey,’ said Rob. ‘But I’m taking one of these blankets with me. It smells like somebody’s been sleeping in them. I’ll ask Sergeant Billings if he can get one of his police dogs to sniff it.’
‘What good will that do?’
‘I’m not sure. But maybe they can identify whose scent it is, and where in the house we can find them, even if they are invisible.’
*
Katharine had drawn the curtains so that the master bedroom was dark, taken off her skirt and climbed under the heavy embroidered quilt. She thought she could still faintly smell cheesy vomit on the pillows, but she had changed the sheets and the pillowcases and she guessed that it was just her guilty imagination.
She had tried to appear nonchalant about Martin’s disappearance in front of the others, even cynical. There were many times during the course of their marriage when it had taken only the slightest of provocations
for him to lose his temper and storm off for hours or even days. But she had learned that he had inherited these bursts of rage from his father, both genetically and from the way that Herbert had brought him up. He may have appeared to be domineering and full of himself, but she had come to realise that his anger was set off by frustration and a lack of belief in his own self-worth, and an irrational feeling that everybody was demeaning him behind his back.
She knew that he loved her, and even more than that, how much he depended on her. He would never have been such a success in the City without her business and social contacts, and because she had pushed him to go for some highly risky investments. He was terrified of bankruptcy, because he had seen how much his father’s life had been blighted by debt, even if he had never guessed the scale of it.
She loved him, too, although sometimes she never fully understood why. She used to see him staring out of the window and wonder what was going on inside his mind, and if she would ever be able to find out. She had given up asking him what he was thinking about, because he always said, ‘Oh. Nothing much.’
She closed her eyes. She felt hungry but her tongue felt as if it were coated with fine sand and she didn’t think she would be able to swallow anything.
She was starting to slide into darkness when she felt fingers gently touching her hair, and a voice whispered, ‘Kathy?’
For a second she thought she was dreaming, but then the voice whispered, ‘Kathy? Are you asleep?’ and she jerked her head up off the pillow. It had sounded like Martin, but there was nobody there.
She sat up, her eyes flicking from one side of the master bedroom to the other. It was still raining and the water that was gurgling in the gutter outside the window sounded like a child choking.
‘Kathy, it’s me. I know you can’t see me, but I’m here.’
‘Martin? Am I dreaming this? Where are you?’
‘You’re not dreaming it, Kathy. I’m still here in the house.’
‘Where? I don’t understand. We looked everywhere for you.’
The House of a Hundred Whispers Page 15