The Whispering House (2 page)

Chapter Two

Cowleigh Lodge

H
ANNAH HADN'T REALLY MOVED;
at least not permanently. It was just that after three very dry summers, the Price family home had “settled.” This wasn't nearly as reassuring as it sounded, and had a thoroughly unsettling effect on Hannah and her parents, as it turned out to be a polite way of saying that the house was collapsing. In fact, when the surveyor came to make his report, he shook his head so gloomily and left so hurriedly afterward that Mr. Price understood there was no time to lose and made immediate plans to move his family out.

The house he found was in a quiet residential district about a quarter of a mile from the city center and within easy walking distance of the school. It was on a bus route, with a post office and a small grocery store a few minutes' walk away.

“The rent's pretty low for that neighborhood, isn't it?” Mom frowned thoughtfully. “Why d'you think that is?”

“No idea,” said Dad. “What's more important is that it's available straightaway and we can move in as soon as we like. It's only for a few months, after all.”

And when they first went to inspect it, there didn't seem to be any problems. The house itself had been built in the 1850s and was of red brick, similar to its neighbors on either side but well detached from them and surrounded by an overgrown garden with a high laurel hedge. The garden was reached by a small iron gate opening onto a paved path, which led unswervingly to a blue front door flanked on either side by ground-floor windows. There were two identical upper-story windows above, and a tiled roof with two chimneys, exactly centered. It looked, thought Hannah, seeing it for the first time, like a child's drawing in its simple symmetry, but at the same time prim and, despite its not-too-distant neighbors, rather lonely. This impression was reinforced rather than dispelled on the inside, where any character the house might once have had was now either removed or covered up by a bland coat of cream paint.

The only slight drawback was that out of the three bedrooms, one was excluded from the rental agreement owing to storm damage, and was therefore locked. But as Dad pointed out, although the extra space would have been useful for storing things, they really needed only two bedrooms, and in any case, they were getting the house cheaply enough considering the area.

Five days later, on a bright, sunny day in the second week in May, the family moved in. To begin with, there was so much to do, carrying crates and boxes, unloading and stacking books, hanging clothes in the musty-smelling wardrobes and generally trying to make the place feel like home, that Hannah didn't get a chance to consider whether she liked the house or not. It was simply a space into which they somehow had to fit all their possessions, and for a while it seemed less like a house than a rather challenging jigsaw puzzle they were all trying to solve. But gradually Hannah's mother came to terms with the smallness of the kitchen, her father found space for his books and CDs, Toby figured out how to use the cat flap, and the furniture mostly stopped looking like a bunch of uninvited guests at a party and settled itself down.

They had been there about a week when the weather turned close and humid, giving way to a spell of light but persistent rain. That night Hannah had a dream.

She was lying on her back in a wood, surrounded by bright-green leaves on which the sunlight struck, making them sparkle. The leaves were quite still—the sky between them creamy white, as though faintly overcast—and nearby, birds were singing. Somewhere a fire was lit. She couldn't see it, but she could hear the gentle crackle and snapping of twigs. And she could see a face. A face with a smiling mouth and curious, rather expressionless eyes.

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

T
HE 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 bed 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.