The House of a Hundred Whispers

by Graham Masterton

  Jaws appeared behind her out of the wall, and then the other men, one at a time, until the room was crowded.

  ‘Right,’ said Jaws. ‘I’ll nip along and lock all them bedroom doors so your mates can’t come out and give us bother. You, my love – you go first and stand in front of the window. Do like I said and stare right into the moonlight. Try not to blink too much, and think hard about what you was like before you was chanted. Once you’re done, all these other geezers will do it, too, me included, and then we’ll all be unlocked.’

  He went off along the corridor and Ada found herself standing in front of the stained-glass window with the other five men gathered in a semicircle around her.

  ‘Get your skates on, darling,’ said a middle-aged man who bore a striking resemblance to Charles Bronson – weathered, baggy-eyed, with a tangled fringe and sideburns. ‘The quicker you get yourself sorted, the longer we got.’

  The men were standing so close behind her that Ada could smell them. Stale cigarettes and body odour, and another smell, too, strangely metallic, like chicken that was past its sell-by date. She took a step closer to the window and there right in front of her was the hooded black figure with his black slavering hounds all around him.

  Ada could see the full moon shining through a squarish panel in the window that was stained dark blue to represent the night sky. She looked quickly behind her to make sure that the men hadn’t shuffled any closer, and then she concentrated all of her attention on it. Occasionally a cloud passed across it, and its light dimmed and brightened again, but even when it was obscured she could feel the penetrating chill of its negative energy, gradually numbing the spell that was keeping her trapped in time. It was like standing close to the open door of a freezer, giving her goosebumps and making her shiver.

  She tried to think back to what she had felt like before she had been chanted. What it had been like to laugh, and eat, and breathe, and walk freely over the moors wherever she wanted. She thought about going out into the garden at the back of her cottage, on a morning when all her herbs and vegetables were still wet and sparkling from the previous night’s rain, and picking bitter nightshade for a potion that would help to heal a broken heart.

  Staring at the moon gave her the revelation that none of us want time to pass, and to grow older, and that time will eventually take away from us everything that we hold dear. Yet without time we would never have the chance to find love, or happiness, or excitement. Whatever fulfilment we find in life, time brings it to us, even if the day will inevitably come when it drains it all away again, like an ebbing tide sliding away across the sand.

  Ada understood then that living for ever, suspended for all eternity in the same second, was a far worse punishment than death.

  At that instant, she felt as if warm syrup had been poured all over her, from her head right down to her feet. With a distinctive thump, she felt her heart start to beat, and when she took in a breath she could smell not only the sweaty men around her, but the musty oak smell of Allhallows Hall. The moon had brought her forward out of the day before yesterday into the present time.

  She turned around, holding up both her hands so the men could see that she was unlocked. Just then, Jaws came briskly along the corridor, smiling and rubbing his hands together.

  ‘Right, that’s them all banged up! Stand back, lads, and let the lovely young lady come through. Ray – your turn next. Then you, Phil.’

  One by one, the men stood in front of the stained-glass window and let the moonlight shine on them. One by one, they stepped away from it, unlocked, and Ada was struck by the difference in their appearance. Even after she had been chanted, and she had been able to see the whisperers who had been roaming invisibly around the house in the form of energy, they had still appeared to be translucent. Now they were solid, and real, and she could tell that they even had weight, because the floorboards creaked as they walked along the corridor and gathered on the landing.

  Jaws was the last to stand shining in the moonlight. When he came walking towards them along the corridor Ada noticed that he had a slight limp, and that his left foot turned inwards.

  ‘Okay, lads,’ he whispered. ‘We’ve got about four hours max before the moon goes down. Let’s hope there’s still plenty of booze left downstairs. Before that, though, we’ve got to celebrate the good Lord smiling on us, and sending us this angel.’

  He gave Ada a mischievous grin, and for the first time the other men smiled at her, too, and two of them gave her the thumbs up.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded.

  ‘Shh! You don’t want to wake them friends of yours up. They’ll be knocking on their bedroom doors and putting us off our stroke!’

  ‘Yeah – the only ones doing any knocking should be us!’ whispered the man who looked like Charles Bronson, and he gave a lewd chuckle.

  Jaws took hold of Ada’s arm, but she immediately twisted herself away. ‘If you think what I think you’re thinking, then you can all go to hell!’

  ‘We’ve all been in hell for years, love, don’t you worry about that. That don’t bother us.’

  ‘Just stay away from me. I had a bad feeling about this, and I was right, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Depends what you mean by a bad feeling, darling,’ said the young man called Phil. ‘I can give you the best feeling you’ve ever had in your life, I can promise you that. Phil the Firework, that’s what my girl used to call me, ’cause I always made her go off with a bang, every time.’

  ‘I want to go back to the priest’s hide, right now,’ said Ada. ‘How do I get back?’

  ‘You’re not going to be a spoilsport, are you?’ asked Jaws. ‘After all, I think you owe us one, don’t you, or maybe even two or three? Waltzing in there with your friends and chucking that dust all over us, trying to flush us out. That’s what you was up to, wasn’t it? Trying to flush us out? Now Old Semtex is gone, they’ll be wanting the house to themselves, won’t they? Won’t give a shit what happens to us.’

  ‘Old Semtex? Who’s Old Semtex?’

  ‘Governor Russell. Ex-governor of Dartmoor nick. They called him Old Semtex because he was always liable to blow up without any warning.’

  ‘I’m going back,’ said Ada. It occurred to her that since she was real, and here in present time, she could lift up the window seat and open the dado to get back into the priest’s hide.

  She tried to push her way past Jaws, but two of the men grabbed her arms from behind and held her tight. She ducked and struggled and kicked at their legs, but they were far too strong for her.

  ‘Let go of me, you pigs!’

  ‘You don’t mean them two? Stevey and Mandeep? That’s an insult to pigs, that is!’

  ‘I’m a witch! How do you think I managed to throw that dust on you and show you up? You lay one finger on me and I swear that I’ll make your life a misery once we’re back in that hide!’

  ‘You’re a witch? What? Do me a favour! Witches are butters, ain’t they, with long noses and black cats and ride around on broomsticks! They ain’t peng like you, with whopping big bristols. Besides, even if you was a witch, there’s no way that you can make our lives any more of a misery than they are already!’

  The young man in the white T-shirt opened the door of the bedroom right behind him, and switched on the light, even though the heavy brocade curtains were open and the moonlight was shining in. Inside, there was a large tester bed, with dusty embroidered drapes and a damp-looking green satin quilt with brown stains scattered across it. It looked as if nobody had slept in it in years.

  Stevey and Mandeep forced Ada down onto the quilt, face down, and then rolled her over. The other men crowded into the bedroom as Stevey held her pinned to the bed while Mandeep crammed all her necklaces and talismans down into the neck of her black sweater and then started to pull it off.

  ‘Get off me!’ she screamed at them, but as soon as Mandeep had dragged her sweater over her head, Stevey clamped his hand over her mouth. She kicked and bu
cked up and down as Mandeep unfastened her jeans and wrenched them off, too, inch by inch. Once he had wrestled them over her ankles, he pulled down her black lace knickers, spun them around his finger, and tossed them across the bedroom. All the men let out a soft, hissing cheer.

  ‘How about that, she’s shaved it in a heart shape!’ whispered Ray. ‘Must be to show us how much she loves us!’

  Between them, Stevey and Mandeep lifted Ada into a sitting position, so that Mandeep could unfasten her bra. Stevey’s hand slipped from her mouth and she threw her head from side to side and was able to scream out, ‘Get off me! Let go of me!’ before he muffled her again.

  ‘I never could get the hang of these things!’ whispered Mandeep, still struggling with the catch of her bra. Eventually, though, he managed to open it, take off her bra and throw it across the bedroom after her knickers.

  ‘Now that’s what I call a great pair of melons,’ growled Charles Bronson, under his breath.

  ‘I’m first in the queue,’ whispered Jaws. ‘The rest of you can fight it out between you.’

  Ada could only stare at him as he lifted his grey T-shirt over his head. His snake tattoo wound its way up from underneath his waistband, sliding through the dark hair on his narrow white chest until it licked with its forked tongue at his neck. When he reached down to loosen the cord of his baggy grey sweatpants, she could see that he was already aroused.

  He dropped his pants to the floor and climbed up naked onto the end of the bed, his purple-headed penis so stiff that it was parallel to his stomach, and almost touching his navel. Ada closed her eyes tight so that she wouldn’t have to look at him, and she bounced even more furiously on top of the quilt.

  Jaws whispered, ‘Come on, lads, give us a bit of a hand here, will you, and hold down this fucking bucking bronco for me!’

  While Stevey and Mandeep kept Ada’s arms spread wide as if she were being crucified, two more men took hold of her ankles and parted her legs. Ada opened her eyes again and saw Jaws leaning over her, holding his penis in one hand as he guided it between the lips of her vulva. He looked down and saw that her eyes were open and that she was staring up at him, and he gave her that warm, mocking smile.

  ‘You’re going to love this, darling,’ he told her. ‘It’s getting on for forty years since I last had a shag, so believe me, this is going to blow your brains out. Phil the Firework? This is Ron the fucking Apollo Rocket.’

  Ada jerked her head up and bit Stevey’s fingers, so that he whipped his hand away from her mouth, flapping it and saying, ‘Shit!’

  ‘I hate you,’ she spat at Jaws. ‘I’m going to put a spell on you that makes your ridiculous little dick drop off! And that goes for the rest of you – mmfff!’

  Stevey had pressed his hand even harder over her mouth, digging his thumb and his fingernails into her cheekbones.

  Jaws pushed himself into her, but almost as soon as he did he was whipped right out again. He jumped backwards off the end of the bed like a skydiver jumping backwards out of a plane, and he hit the wooden floor so hard that Ada heard his head banging against it. She lifted her head and saw a man standing over him, and then stamping on him.

  Jaws shouted out, ‘Jesus!’ and then, ‘Jesus!’ as the man stamped on him a second time.

  Ada could see that the man was tall, and well built, and it appeared that he was wearing a blazer and a loosely knotted tie. Unlike Jaws and the rest of the men in the bedroom, though, he didn’t appear to be solid. He had that fluid, wavering, semi-translucent appearance that all of the whisperers shared, herself included, when they were wandering around Allhallows Hall as nothing but energy, with their physical bodies left behind.

  Jaws snatched at the end of the quilt and tried to pull himself up, but the man smacked him full in the face with the back of his hand, and he tumbled back onto the floor.

  The man turned around to Stevey and Mandeep, and to Phil and Ray, who were holding Ada’s ankles.

  ‘You’ll be letting her go now, won’t you?’ he told them. The tone of his voice made it clear that it wasn’t a question, it was an order. They hesitated for a second, and then they released their grip on her and backed away from the bed.

  ‘Now bugger off, the lot of you. Do you hear me? And don’t let me catch you trying to attack this young woman again, or it’ll be the worse for you.’

  Even though he was at least six inches shorter, Charles Bronson went up close to the man, his chest inflated, his fists clenched and his jaw jutting out.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ he whispered defiantly. ‘And how do you think you’re going to do that, exactly?’

  The man looked down at him with a tired, indulgent expression. ‘I overheard you chaps talking, back in the priest’s hole. As I understand it, you’re solid so long as the full moon’s up, as solid as you were before you were trapped. That’s all well and good, I would have thought, but what happens if you’re seriously injured while you’re solid? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I imagine you’d be stuck with that injury for ever and ever amen.’

  The man jabbed Charles Bronson in the chest with his finger. ‘Maybe I’m not solid at the moment, my friend, but I’m still perfectly capable of breaking your nose, or poking your eyes out, and logic tells me that you’ll have to stay that way for all eternity. So… do you want risk it?’

  Jaws climbed to his feet, holding his sweatpants. His penis was flaccid now, as if it were hanging its purple head in shame and disappointment.

  ‘You’ll fucking regret this, I warn you. One day, mate, when you’re having a weary…’

  ‘I’ll worry about that when the time comes,’ the man replied. ‘Meanwhile, off you all go.’

  34

  There was a moment of extreme tension. From the fierce looks on their faces, Ada thought that the men were going to jump on her saviour, beat him up, and then go back to raping her. But Jaws pulled up his baggy sweatpants, tugged on his T-shirt and said, ‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers. Let’s go down and see how much of Old Semtex’s booze there is still knocking around. She’s not just a witch, anyway. She’s a slag, and we don’t want to be catching the knob rot off of her, do we?’

  The men shuffled out of the bedroom, and after the last one had left, Ada climbed off the bed and picked up her jeans and her sweater. The man stood by the door with his back to her while she quickly pulled them on. She found her bra and her knickers lying in the corner and stuffed them into her pockets.

  Further along the corridor, she could hear Rob rattling the handle of his bedroom door and calling out, ‘What’s going on out there? Who’s locked this door?’

  She went up to the man and stood close behind him.

  ‘I can’t thank you enough. They were going to take it in turns to rape me. All of them.’

  He turned around, looking serious. ‘You must be Ada Grey, the witch that Rob was talking about.’

  ‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘Well… a charmer is what I call myself, rather than a witch.’

  ‘I’ve overheard those men talking about you, too, but I’m afraid I haven’t been too compos mentis since they trapped me. Being chanted, that’s the word they use for it, isn’t it? I managed to leave that priest’s hole last night and talk to my wife briefly, but that’s about all. The rest of the time… it’s all been a bit of a blur, to tell you the truth. Rather like being totally sozzled.’

  ‘Who are you? Are you one of the family?’

  ‘That’s right. You wouldn’t think it, because we don’t look at all alike, but I’m Rob’s brother. His older brother, Martin.’

  They heard Rob knocking at his bedroom door again, and furiously rattling the handle.

  ‘Who the hell has locked this door? Come and open it! Grace? Grace! Is your door locked as well? Katharine?’

  ‘That fellow you pulled off me,’ said Ada. ‘The one who calls himself Jaws. Before he became solid, he locked all your family into their bedrooms.’

  ‘Perhaps we ought to see if we can find a way to let them out.’
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  ‘No… best not. Not yet, anyway. Not till the moon’s gone down. If your brother goes downstairs and finds them, who knows what they might do to him. They’re not what you might call happy at the moment, are they? I’m right amazed they didn’t attack you.’

  ‘I think I guessed right and they were afraid I might do them an injury, whereas there was nothing they could do to me. I’m not solid at the moment, am I? I’m only my energy, or my spirit, or the ghost of me, or whatever. I have the power to hurt them, but I have no physical substance, have I, so they can’t hurt me in return. It’s rather like being a gale-force wind. A gale-force wind can blow you over, can’t it, but there’s nothing that you can do to retaliate. You can punch the wind like Tyson Fury, but of course it won’t feel it.’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘What are you going to do now? I don’t know how long you have left before the moon sets.’

  ‘There’s something I want to try, now that I’m solid. I want to see if I can get out of here. There’s an incantation I know, if I can remember all of it. I need to go down to the front door, if you don’t mind coming with me. You know – just in case they try to attack me again.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Rob was pummelling on his bedroom door even harder, and now it sounded as if he were using both fists.

  ‘I feel really bad just leaving them there,’ said Martin.

  Ada looked back along the corridor. Rob had switched on the lamp inside his bedroom and the light was shining under the door. She could see then that the key was lying on the floor right outside. On the other side of the corridor, the key to the master bedroom was also lying on the floor. Jaws must have entered the bedrooms by walking through their doors, even though they were closed. After he had locked them, he would have had to kick the keys through the gap underneath, because that would have been the only way for him to get them out. Since he himself had been only a collection of energised atoms, he had been able to pass through the inch-thick oak panelling as if it were no more substantial than smoke, but the keys couldn’t.