The Whispering House Read online

  That was all. Nothing happened. There was nothing especially frightening about the dream, and she would have forgotten all about it, except that the following night she had it again. And again the night after that. Each time it was the same.

  Then, for no apparent reason, the dreams stopped. The weather cleared, the nights lost their damp clamminess, and she slept soundly. Gradually the memory began to fade.

  Until just then, in Tanners’ Lane, she had seen something that, for a brief moment, had brought it back. It was an ash tree, in full summer leaf. There should have been no reason why the pattern of leaves against the pale sky filled her with sudden apprehension.

  Except that the sky in her dream had been pale, just like that. And the bright-green leaves, she now knew, had been ash leaves.

  She shook herself impatiently and went on walking, trying to fill her mind with cheerful thoughts. If she got up reasonably early on Saturday and did some studying before eleven, she could enjoy Sam’s visit with a clear conscience. When she’d offered to give him a guided tour of the new house, it had been a joke, of course—there was nothing of interest to see at Cowleigh Lodge—but it might be fun to have someone else to share it with, and if anyone could clear the dusty cobwebs of memory from her brain, it was Sam Fallon.

  Her determined optimism took a slight knock when she got home and saw the anxious look on her mother’s face.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Your father’s got to go away for a month.”

  “Where to?”

  “America.”

  “America? That’s cool! Are we going too?”

  “While you’re still in school? No chance, I’m afraid. Anyway, he’s been offered a lecture tour, so he’ll be traveling around a lot. He’s standing in for someone who had to cancel suddenly.”

  “When does he leave?”

  “The day after tomorrow. His flight to Washington is at eight a.m.”

  “Oh!” Hannah perched on a kitchen stool, feeling suddenly deflated. She frowned. “Don’t you need visas and stuff to go to the U.S.A.?”

  “They fixed him up with an emergency interview. He’s known about this for a week, apparently, but didn’t want to worry me with it until he knew it was all sorted and he was going for certain.” Her mother looked bewildered. “If only he’d told me sooner, I could have helped him get ready, made a list of things for him to bring back. We could have arranged for my aunt to visit him—you know, Aunt Ruth who lives in Philadelphia? But she doesn’t do email and I don’t have her phone number, so it would have meant a letter, but I know she’d have loved to see him if only I’d had a bit of time to organize things.”

  Hannah turned away to hide a smile. She was fairly certain she knew why her father had made quite sure Mom didn’t have too much time to organize anything. Still, it was tough on her. “You’re going to miss him. We both are.”

  “Well, yes, and I wish he didn’t have to go away just now. What if something were to go wrong? Something the real estate agent hasn’t told us about?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Hannah soothingly. “It’s only a month. And anyway, nothing’s going to go wrong.”

  Chapter Three

  The Book

  THE NEXT DAY BEGAN clear and bright, but by midmorning the sky had clouded over, and although the temperature remained high, the air had turned humid again. Lessons passed sluggishly; with exams so close, no new work was being given now, and the constant reviewing of topics studied over the past year lent its own staleness to the atmosphere in the classroom.

  Standing in the queue for lunch, Hannah noticed a tall, thickset boy sitting at a table on his own. His jutting forehead, flattish nose, and square, prominent chin gave him an aggressive look.

  “Who is that?” she asked Sam.

  “Dunno,” he replied, squinting at the boy. “Never seen him before.”

  “Do you know who it is, Susie?”

  Their friend Susie was standing a couple of places farther up the queue and stood on tiptoe to see where Hannah was pointing. “Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “Looks scary, though.”

  “Well, someone must know who he is. And why’s he sitting on his own?”

  “His name is Bruce Myers, and he’s new,” said Emily, who had joined the queue late because she’d stayed behind after class to ask the teacher a question, and as usual seemed to know everything.

  “Which class is he in?” Hannah looked puzzled. “He looks about our age, but I didn’t see him this morning.”

  “That’s because he’s in class seven. He’s just big for his age. From what I can gather, there was some kind of problem at his last school.”

  “What kind of problem are we talking about?” Sam narrowed his eyes. “Arson? First-degree murder? The guy looks capable of anything to me.”

  “Maybe we should go and sit with him,” suggested Hannah. But nobody seemed very keen on this idea, and in any case, by the time they had collected their lunch from the counter, the boy had left his table and the four of them took it over. Within five minutes, they had forgotten all about Bruce Myers.

  Before going to bed that night, Hannah said good-bye to her father, who would be leaving before she was up the next morning.

  “Don’t forget to email me,” he said, hugging her. “I’ll need some news from home to keep me going while I’m out there.”

  “I won’t,” she promised.

  Earlier in the evening it had begun to rain lightly, and her bedroom felt slightly damp. She undressed quickly and was hanging up her school skirt when she noticed something unusual about the closet. This was a door fitted in front of a recess beside what had once been a fireplace but was now boarded up. The back and sides of the recess had been papered over—several times by the look of it—and the layers had hardened with age and dried mildew to a brittle, boardlike mass that had come away from the original plaster at one side, leaving a gap of about four inches between it and the wall at the top of the recess.

  It would be easy to drop something down there, thought Hannah, frowning, but not so easy to get it back again, maybe. Pressing her head against the wall, she peered into the dark little space and saw that somebody had clearly done just that. A rectangular object was wedged about three feet down. She reached her arm into the space and found she could just feel whatever it was, but without being able to get a hold on it. Straightening up, she took a wire coat hanger from the rail and bent it into a roughly square shape, which she lowered into the space until the bottom part of the hanger felt as if it was underneath the obstruction. Then she carefully raised it far enough to be able to grab the object with her hand and bring it into the open.

  Coughing, she took her find to the window and brushed away the thick layer of dust and cobwebs to reveal a book. The faded gold lettering showed it to be a volume of illustrated children’s fairy tales with stiff covers that had once been red but now were dingy and blotched by the same damp that had attacked its resting place. The pages were hard to separate, and when she pried open the cover, a piece of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor. She bent down to pick it up and laid it on the bed while she examined the book. On the flyleaf was an inscription in ink, faded now to the color of boiled spinach water:

  To Maisie.

  From your loving papa.

  Christmas 1876

  On the opposite page, a childish hand had written in pencil:

  Maisie Holt. This is her book.

  She looked curiously at the looped, slightly uneven letters. Had Maisie slept in this room? And if so, what would she have thought, waking up on that long-ago Christmas morning to find, not this faded, stained old volume, but an exciting new book with pages white and crisp as new linen and shiny scarlet covers with gleaming gold lettering?

  But then, she told herself, the book might simply have come from a secondhand shop and been dropped there quite recently. It didn’t take long for things to gather dust in an empty house. She put it down on the bedside table and was about to get into be
d when she noticed the sheet of paper still lying there. At first she thought it was a page of illustration, come loose from the book, but then she saw that the paper had a different quality altogether and had simply been folded in half to fit inside. Unfolding it revealed a single page torn from a calendar showing the month of June and the year, 1877. Like the book, it was stained and brown spotted, but the days and dates were still perfectly legible. In fact—she glanced at her watch in mild surprise—the page had an odd appropriateness, for today was Friday, the first of the month. And it just so happened that in 1877, June the first had also fallen on a Friday.

  For some reason, the page bothered her. Why had somebody decided to tear out this particular month? A calendar wasn’t a thing you kept, like a diary. It was simply a useful reminder of things to come, not a record of what had already happened. And in any case, there was nothing written here. That was the trouble.

  On an impulse, she reached into her schoolbag for a pencil and her exam timetable and carefully copied the times of all her exams onto the stained, slightly brittle paper. Then she drew a neat line through today’s date, tucked the page into the edge of the mirror on the chest of drawers where she would be able to see it each morning, and got into bed. Somehow it felt right that those blank days should be filled in now. At the end of the month, she would throw the page away. After nearly 140 years, it would at last have served its original purpose.

  She lay down and went to sleep.

  When she woke, it was still dark. The rain was pattering against the windowpane, but the room felt hot and airless and there was a strange smell—vaguely chemical. She sat up, groped for the switch on the bedside lamp, found it, and as the room flooded with light, sank back against the pillows, sweating. It had been the same dream. The wood with the vivid green leaves against the flat, overcast sky, the birds singing, the fire quietly crackling nearby, and the odd, smiling face had all been just as before.

  It was only now, on waking, that she obscurely knew it hadn’t been a pleasant dream.

  Chapter Four

  The Attic

  THE NEXT THING SHE was conscious of was what sounded like the persistent wailing of a young child just below her window. Getting out of bed, she peered out the window to see a grayish, murky daylight with a fine drizzle falling and Toby having a standoff with a rangy-looking ginger tomcat. She glanced at her watch. Eight thirty. So she must have fallen asleep again, eventually.

  Hannah showered and dressed, wondering why the house was so quiet, until she remembered that her mother had taken Dad to the airport and wouldn’t be back until the afternoon. As she crossed the upstairs landing, her eye fell on the door of the locked bedroom. What was behind that door? Probably four damp walls and a lot of flaking plaster, she told herself firmly.

  The dull paintwork had a depressing feel in this light, and she wandered disconsolately downstairs to the pale, tidy kitchen that now smelled faintly of bleach and poured herself a bowl of cereal.

  Afterward, she went into the living room to do some studying. Searching in her schoolbag for a textbook, she noticed, with a mixture of amusement and irritation, one of Sam’s paper airplanes at the bottom. There was no point throwing it away just now—she’d do a real clear out later, if she had time.

  After working steadily for an hour on some geography notes, she felt more cheerful and rewarded herself with a mug of hot chocolate and a couple of cookies, pleased that her mother wasn’t there to comment on the probable effect on her waistline.

  Now for some biology. She opened the textbook and began to read.

  Photosynthesis is the way a plant makes food for itself. Chlorophyll in the green part of the leaves captures energy from the sunlight, which powers the building of food from carbon dioxide and water.

  Green leaves. Sunlight. Why that sudden prickle of unease? She stood up and walked to the window. The drizzle was still falling. Sitting down again, she tried to concentrate on work, but the edginess refused to go, making her get up from time to time to wander restlessly around the room.

  When the doorbell rang, she almost jumped out of her skin. She froze for a moment, then walked nervously across the hallway and opened the door a couple of inches.

  Sam stood on the step.

  Hannah opened the door wide, and he walked in, carrying a cellophane-wrapped bunch of purple tulips. “From my mom,” he said, holding the flowers at arm’s length as if he wanted to get rid of them as soon as possible. “Housewarming present.”

  “Thanks.” Hannah grinned and took the flowers from him.

  He glanced speculatively at the mug on the table. “Hot chocolate?”

  “Sure. And I’ll have some more to keep you company.” She resolutely dismissed the image of her mother’s outraged stare and led him into the kitchen, where she got the milk out of the refrigerator and put it in a saucepan on the stove, arranging the flowers in a vase while it heated up.

  Five minutes later they were back in the living room, the tin of cookies on the table between them, and Hannah wondered why she’d ever been spooked by a biology textbook.

  “Nice place.” He glanced around him, sipping noisily.

  “It’s okay. A bit small.” Then she felt guilty, remembering the apartment, half the size of this, where Sam lived with his parents and younger brother and sister, who were twins. “We’ve got too much furniture. And there’s no garage or shed. That’s why it feels small.”

  He finished his drink and stood up. “Come on, then. Give me that guided tour.”

  “Okay. We may as well start with the garden. There’s not much to see, but never mind.” She opened the French doors at the end of the room and led him down some stone steps onto a small terrace, beyond which was an overgrown lawn surrounded by borders that clearly hadn’t been weeded for a long time. Just beyond the terrace, facing the house, was a slatted wooden bench with ornate wrought-iron armrests. Until that moment, Hannah hadn’t noticed that it was odd that the bench was facing the house when it would surely have been more natural that it should look out onto the garden. But then, she thought, just now the garden was hardly worth looking at. In any case, Sam showed little interest, so she took him back into the house.

  The other room on the ground floor had the same cream-painted walls and beige carpet as the one they’d been sitting in, and both rooms had high mantel-pieces above what must once have been handsome fireplaces but were now, like the one in Hannah’s bedroom, boarded up. In the first room, a modern electric heater stood in the hearth. Here, someone had tried unsuccessfully to liven up the blank board with a vase of dusty dried flowers. In both cases the effect was depressing. Hannah and Sam didn’t stay long.

  The predictably beige-colored staircase led to a landing with four doors leading off it. Hannah showed him the bathroom, the large room at the front that her parents slept in, and the smaller one at the back, which was hers.

  When they came to the fourth door, Sam tried it and frowned. “Why’s this one locked?”

  “We’re not allowed to use it. The real estate agent has the key.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “I’ve no idea. Like I said, we don’t have the key.”

  He looked at her as if she’d said that she was sitting in the dark because she couldn’t figure out how to use the light switch. “Do you own a screwdriver?”

  “I guess so. Dad was using one to fix a hinge on a cupboard last night.” She went back down to the kitchen and returned with a toolbox.

  Sam ran a professional eye over the assembled contents and selected a small screwdriver.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Unscrew the lock, of course.”

  “But the agent said not to use that room.”

  “Well, we’re not going to use it, are we? We’re just going to take a look inside.”

  “Maybe they have a reason for not wanting us to go in,” she said lamely, but she knew when she was beaten, and in any case, Sam had already loosened all four screws and was careful
ly removing the lock. He laid it on the floor, tipped the screws inside, and pushed open the door.

  A first glance told them there was nothing sinister in that room, unless you counted bare floorboards and discolored walls as sinister. In shape it was very like its opposite number on the other side of the landing, the one taken by her parents, except that it was slightly larger and had two windows, not one, which gave it a lighter, more welcoming feel. The smell of mildew was unpleasant, though, and the room felt cold.

  “Let’s go,” Hannah said, shivering. “There’s nothing to see in here. The real estate agent was right—it’s just storm damaged. I guess the roof has leaked sometime.”

  “Mmm.” Sam ran his hand over a gray-mottled wall. “This paper looks likes it’s as old as the house. You can feel the plaster underneath.”

  She noticed that the walls had been stripped down, leaving a faint pattern of very pale pink stripes on what would once have been a creamy background, maybe. It was hard to tell in some places, but in others the damage wasn’t so bad, and the wall opposite the front window was in fair condition. You could even see the darker squares and rectangles where somebody had once hung pictures. There was something faintly indecent about those marks. It was as though the house, elsewhere so clean and primly covered up, here was revealed in its grubby underwear. She shivered again. “Come on. It’s freezing in here.”

  “Do you want me to put the lock back?” he asked when they were outside.

  “Wait till Mom gets home. She might think it’s okay to store stuff in there. I don’t see that the house people can object to that, if we’re prepared to take the risk. We’re really short of space here.”

  “Isn’t there an attic?”

  “I don’t think so. No one ever said anything about an attic.”

  “There may be a trapdoor,” he said, thoughtfully scanning the landing ceiling, but it was smooth and bare and innocent of trapdoors. He walked slowly along the hall, then stopped outside the door to Hannah’s bedroom.