The Whispering House Read online

  Eventually Hannah closed the book and lay down. But it wasn’t until the early-summer dawn had begun to filter through the curtains that she at last fell asleep.

  Chapter Seven

  Nightmare

  MONDAY MORNING, SCHOOL DRAGGED interminably, and Hannah found it difficult to concentrate. When the bell rang for morning break, she breathed a sigh of relief and went outside to get some fresh air. Sam was waiting for her.

  “Are you wearing makeup?” he asked suspiciously.

  “No. Why?”

  “Your eyes look all black.”

  “I didn’t sleep well. Listen. You know I said that doll we found belonged to a girl called Maisie Holt?”

  He nodded, but without much interest.

  “She died. I found her grave in the churchyard.”

  “Well, obviously she died, right? If she hadn’t, she’d have been around a hundred and fifty by now, wouldn’t she?”

  “She died when she was eleven.”

  He raised his eyebrows, then shrugged. “Kids were always dying young in those days. They died of things like measles and appendicitis.”

  “And there’s something else. The doll’s got these brown marks all over it, and each one’s got a tiny hole in the center, like there’d been a pin in there.”

  “Acupuncture?”

  “Don’t be stupid! The Victorians didn’t do acupuncture!”

  “Okay, okay, only kidding. Wait a minute! What’s happening over there?” He ran off suddenly, heading for the opposite side of the playground, where some kind of disturbance seemed to be going on. Hannah didn’t follow but watched him approach a little knot of what looked like younger children, all making a lot of noise and waving their arms. A minute or so later he was back, looking baffled.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m not sure.” He frowned. “One of the year-seven kids had fallen over. That little guy with the fair hair and the glasses. Henry something or other.”

  “Henry Knight?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Seems to be.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that the other kids think he didn’t just fall. He was pushed.”

  “Who by?”

  “Guess.”

  “Not that new boy? Bruce Myers?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “But Henry just says he fell over?”

  “Yes . . . but the others in his class think he might have been saying that because he was scared of what Bruce might do to him later if he told the truth.”

  “Oh.” Hannah frowned. “So what did you do?”

  “Nothing. If Henry’s not going to make any accusations, there’s no point.”

  She sighed and started to walk back into the school. It was bad enough having exams in this hot term, without all these other problems as well.

  As soon as she got home that afternoon, Hannah collapsed in a chair and closed her eyes. The effect of two very short nights made it feel like the end of the week, but it was only Monday.

  “Are you all right?” asked Mom anxiously. “You’re not sick, are you?”

  “I’m all right.” Hannah opened her eyes. “Just tired. Are you okay, Mom? You don’t look so good yourself.”

  “I wish your father were here, that’s all.”

  Hannah nodded. She missed Dad too. When he’d been there, the house had seemed too small. Now it seemed too large for just herself and her mother. She’d emailed him a couple of times but hadn’t mentioned Maisie or the dreams. There was no point in worrying him, and in any case, what could he do from four thousand miles away?

  After dinner she couldn’t face doing any work and switched on the TV, flicking aimlessly through the channels. But her mind was too occupied to concentrate on anything, and after fifteen minutes she gave up and went to bed.

  It had begun to rain again. She closed the window, opened the curtains, got into bed, and lay on her back listening to the sound of the wind in the trees and the raindrops pattering against the pane. The noise soothed her, and she closed her eyes.

  It wasn’t raining in the wood. The sun was shining, the birds singing, the fire gently crackling—and surrounding her on all sides were the leaves. Ash leaves. She could see clearly how the delicate, pointed spindles grew on either side of the long stems, each with a single, crowning leaflet curving gently toward its neighbor. The sky between them was light but overcast, which was strange, because surely only bright sunlight could make the green so intense, so vivid. Turning her head, she saw again that smiling face. She lay quite still, watching the face, but it didn’t move. It simply stared back through odd, sightless eyes.

  But it wasn’t the face that, just then, gave her a sudden prickle of unease. It was something else. A faint stirring among the trees. A dark shadow moved there. Was it the wind, shifting the branches? But the leaves were motionless. There was no wind. An animal, then? She strained her eyes to make it out, and as she did so, the shadow became a shape. A shape that broke free from the trees and slowly moved toward her until she saw that it was no animal but a human figure. A woman wearing a long dress and carrying a cup.

  She wanted to run away, to escape from that cup, because it was meant for her, she knew that, and she also knew that she must not drink from it!

  But she couldn’t move—her limbs were leaden, claylike. She could only lie there and wait, helplessly, while the woman drew closer and closer until at last the cup was thrust toward her. She grasped it with both hands and hurled it violently into the depths of the wood.

  The sunlight faded, the fire ceased its crackling, the leaves vanished, and she was awake, back in her room at Cowleigh Lodge. She sat up against the pillows, sweating and trembling. The strange chemical smell was there again, and the room felt unbearably stuffy, drying her mouth and giving it an unpleasant, bitter taste. She turned toward the little polished bedside cabinet. On the white cloth stood a china basin painted with pink rosebuds, and inside it was a pitcher full of water. Next to them was a glass. She reached eagerly for the pitcher, and as she did so there was a crash. She groped for the white cloth, expecting it to be drenched. But the surface her hand met was quite dry.

  And it wasn’t polished. In fact, it wasn’t a cabinet at all. It was her own painted bedside table. There was no cloth. No pitcher. No basin. Only her alarm clock, and the reading lamp, overturned. With a trembling hand, she set it the right way up and switched it on.

  She sat there until at last the shaking subsided enough for her to get out of bed and open the window, leaning out onto the sill and letting the rain wet her face and the sleeves of her pajama top.

  At last she got back into bed. It had been the finding of that doll that had transformed this dream into a nightmare, she tried to tell herself. Somehow, her sleeping brain had connected it with those earlier dreams, turning its face into the one she had seen before. And the woman with the cup was fairy-tale stuff, obviously, probably brought on by reading that old book.

  But the pitcher, the cloth, the basin? She had really seen those, she was certain. Her eyes had been wide open. Perhaps she had still been in some kind of half-sleeping, half-waking trance?

  Yet underneath was another fear. Cold and lurking. For somehow she had expected that those things would be beside her. Even before she turned her head, she had known they would be there.

  Chapter Eight

  Green Leaves

  “I NEED TO TALK to you,” she muttered urgently to Sam when he arrived in class that morning.

  “Go on then.”

  “Not now, later. Can we have lunch together?”

  “Sure.” He looked puzzled. “Is something wrong?”

  “Only in my head.” Her voice was grim, and he looked at her curiously but said no more.

  When lunchtime came, they took their trays to the back of the cafeteria, where there was a table that most people avoided because it had wobbly legs and was in a draft from a side door,
but where they had the advantage of being able to talk undisturbed.

  “Well?” asked Sam after sitting down and winding spaghetti around his fork. “What’s the problem?”

  Hannah looked down at her own plate and pushed it away. “It’s Maisie Holt,” she said quietly. “I think I’m having her dreams.”

  Sam’s fork drooped, allowing the spaghetti to slowly unwind and slither back to his plate. “What are you talking about?”

  She sighed and took a deep breath. This wasn’t going to be easy. “The dreams started about a week after we moved in. Then suddenly they stopped. That’s why I didn’t bother telling you before. Only on Friday night I had another one. And another last night.”

  She glanced up, but Sam wasn’t looking at her. He was winding another forkful. So she went on.

  “I’m lying on my back in some kind of wood or forest, because there are green leaves everywhere. Ash leaves, with the sun shining on them. And somewhere there’s a fire lit. I can’t see it, but I can hear it. And there’s somebody with me. It has this weird smile.”

  “It?”

  “What?”

  “It. You said ‘it.’ Why not ‘they’?”

  “Because . . . because it looked exactly like that doll! Okay, okay, I know what you’re going to say,” she went on defensively. “That I dreamed about it because we’d found the doll a couple of days before and it was probably still on my mind, but that doesn’t explain how I came to dream about that face before we found it. I tried to tell myself it was just imagination, but the fact is I saw it, Sam. It was with me in the wood!”

  Sam, having successfully negotiated the laden fork to his mouth, chewed thoughtfully for a few moments. Then he swallowed.

  “Is that it?”

  “No. Not quite. Last night, there was another person. They were walking toward me, holding a cup. But when I took the cup, I didn’t drink from it. I just threw it away.”

  “Was it a nightmare?” he asked after she seemed to have finished.

  Hannah thought about it. “No,” she said, frowning. “At least, not at the time. It was only after I’d woken up that I was scared, like it had been a nightmare. Does that make sense?”

  “Mmm. Kind of. What makes you think they’re not your own dreams?”

  “Because last night, after I’d woken up, I saw things in the room . . . old-fashioned things, which weren’t there. Except they were there and they weren’t old, they were quite new, and . . . they were familiar, as if . . .” She paused as her voice shook. “As if I was seeing them through somebody else’s eyes!”

  “How do you know you were awake when you saw them, and not still dreaming?”

  “Because I’d already woken up. My eyes were open. I was still shaking!”

  “Or maybe you only dreamed you’d woken up. Isn’t that a bit more likely?”

  She sighed and shook her head. “I don’t know. Those things seemed so real. I could have touched them.” Then she remembered that when she’d tried to pick up the glass, her hand had simply knocked over the lamp. Perhaps Sam was right after all.

  “There’s something else.” She reached into a plastic bag on her lap and produced the book of fairy tales.

  Sam put down his fork and took the book from her. He spent some minutes turning the pages. When he came to the illustrations, he looked searchingly at them. Then he gave the book back and picked up his fork.

  “I suppose you’re saying that this kid Maisie read these stories, or maybe had them read to her, at bedtime, with her doll beside her, and they gave her the same nightmares you’re having now?”

  “It’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “And she would have looked at, or been shown, the pictures?”

  “Of course.”

  “Right, then. These leaves you see. The ash leaves. Could you draw them? Were they that clear?”

  “I . . . I think so. Yes.”

  Sam picked up a paper napkin from her tray, found a stub of pencil in his pocket, and put both on the table in front of her. “Here, try it.”

  She closed her eyes for a few moments. Then she opened them and pulled the napkin toward her. The drawing took only a few seconds. She turned it around, and he stared at it hard before glancing through the book’s illustrations, one by one.

  “Nope,” he said at last, shaking his head. “I don’t see anything here to connect your leaves with this book.”

  “But look at the stories! You must have read them before. What do almost all of them have in common? A wood! And in that wood is something scary. Something that means harm to the child!”

  “What are you afraid of, exactly? More dreams?”

  Hannah looked bleakly at her untouched plate. “Yes.”

  “You think the next thing that’s going to appear is the big bad wolf? The wicked fairy?”

  If it was an attempt to make her lighten up, it failed.

  “It’s not just the dreams.”

  “What else?”

  “The doll. It . . . I don’t know, it feels wrong somehow.”

  He grinned. “So would you feel if you’d had a load of pins stuck in you.”

  “But Maisie died, Sam,” persisted Hannah. “She died a few months after getting that book.”

  Sam swallowed his last mouthful and laid the fork carefully on the plate. He looked up. “Okay, I give in. What you need to do now is try to find out how she died. You never know—there could be someone who knows something about the history of that house. But right now, I think you should eat some lunch.”

  Chapter Nine

  Lucky Break

  IT WAS ALL VERY well for Sam to airily issue advice, thought Hannah, but how exactly was she going to find out anything about the death of a child after so much time had gone by? Unless that death had been suspicious, there would be no newspaper reports to look back on, and in any case, with exams approaching she couldn’t afford to go investigating anything that didn’t have to do with schoolwork.

  Besides, over the next week the weather improved. The days were sunnier, the nights lost their close heaviness, and she slept well. For the time being, at least, there was no recurrence of the dreams.

  And then, one evening toward the end of the following week, something rather unexpected happened.

  She had gone to the local grocery store to buy lettuce to go with dinner and had just put it down on the counter when the woman serving looked at her curiously.

  “Are you the one who’s moved into Cowleigh Lodge?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Everything okay, is it?” The woman rang up the lettuce on the register.

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “Staying long?”

  “Just for a few months, probably.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “That’ll be a first, then.”

  “A first? How d’you mean?” Hannah looked puzzled.

  “First time I’ve known anyone to stay beyond the end of June. Long as I’ve been here, that place has lain empty through July and August. Then new folk move in around September.”

  “D’you know why?”

  “Roof’s in a bad state, could be one reason.” The woman stuffed the lettuce into a paper bag and held out her hand. “People always seem to move out after a spell of wet weather. They should get it fixed. Sixty pence, please.”

  Hannah handed over the money. Then an idea occurred to her. She glanced behind her to check there wasn’t a queue, but there was only an old man propped against the counter reading a newspaper. She turned back. “I don’t suppose you know anything . . . anything about the history of that house, do you?”

  “History?” The woman looked baffled. “It’s Victorian, if that’s what you mean. Same as all the other houses in that road.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course. Well, thanks anyway.” Hannah picked up the lettuce and was about to leave when the old man leaning against the counter looked up from his newspaper.

  “You could try asking Eileen Grocott,” he said.

 
“What, old Mrs. Grocott down in Laurel Drive?” The woman leaned over the counter to straighten some newspapers. “What’ll she know about it, Jim?”

  “Her grandmother used to work up at Cowleigh Lodge. Way back.”

  “How far back?” Hannah felt a little stab of excitement.

  “Well . . .” The old man sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “Eileen must be close on a hundred now, I’d think, but her gran was just a young girl when she was in service up there. . . .” He shook his head. “You work it out.”

  Hannah was bad at math, but even she could calculate that if the old lady had been born in, say, 1915, her grandmother might have been born around fifty years earlier, which could well have made her a young girl at roughly the time Maisie had died. “D’you think I could go and see her?” she asked. “Would she talk to me?”

  The old man shrugged. “You could try. Number three, Laurel Drive. Down by the gas station. Lives with her daughter. Mrs. Wilson’s her name, but she’s a widow now, so it’s just the two of them there.”

  Hannah thanked him and left the shop. Walking home, she could hardly believe her luck. Sam had said she should find out about the history of the house, and the opportunity had fallen into her lap! Now that the dreams seemed to be a thing of the past, the thought of finding out more about Maisie Holt didn’t feel frightening anymore, just intriguing. Today was Thursday. If she went to the house on Saturday morning, with luck someone would be in.

  It was much later that evening when it struck her that something the shop woman had said didn’t seem to quite add up. If the problem with Cowleigh Lodge was just a leaking roof, why would that be worse in June than at any other time of year? Then she dismissed it. It was odd, certainly, but probably not important.