It was when he stopped singing that Prickles woke up. She looked at him, in the dim green light of the instrument panel, and he was sweating and pale.
‘Daddy?’ she said.
He didn’t answer.
‘Daddy? What’s the matter?’
Dr. Petrie smiled as much as he could. There was a sharp pain in his groin, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could drive. He gradually slowed the Mercedes down, and pulled it in towards the side of the highway.
He stopped the car and switched off the engine. They were in Delaware, just outside of Wilmington. The night was dark, and there was the sound of insects from the highway verge.
Prickles said, ‘Daddy – are you sick?’
Dr. Petrie shook his head. He touched her honey-colored hair, and her serious, beautiful, unpretty face.
‘Do you know something?’ he whispered. She looked at him attentively. The pains were worse, and he was beginning to feel nauseous.
‘What, Daddy?’ she asked, when he didn’t say anything more.
Things seemed to be advancing and receding. Leonard Petrie felt sharp tearing pains start up in his bowels.
He stared at Prickles and said quietly, ‘You will never forgive us for this.’
Read on for an exclusive preview of The House of a Hundred Whispers
On a windswept moor, an old house guards its secrets.
Allhallows Hall is a rambling Tudor mansion on the edge of the bleak and misty Dartmoor. It is not a place many would choose to live. Yet the former Governor of Dartmoor Prison did just that. Now he’s dead, and his children – long estranged – are set to inherit his estate.
But when the dead man’s family come to stay, the atmosphere of the moors seems to drift into every room. Floorboards creak, secret passageways echo, and wind whistles in the house’s famous priest hole. And then, on the same morning the family decide to leave Allhallows Hall and never come back, their young son Timmy disappears – from inside the house.
Does evil linger in the walls? Or is evil only ever found inside the minds of men?
1
As he reached the top of the staircase, Herbert heard a door opening. He paused, one hand on the newel post, listening intently. The full moon was shining so brightly through the diamond-patterned windows that there had been no need for him to switch on the landing light.
‘Who’s there?’ he demanded. He was trying to sound authoritative, but he could feel his heart beating against his ribcage and he was breathing hard. After forty-two years he had become inured to the musty old-oak aroma of Allhallows Hall, but he could smell it strongly now, almost as if the house were sweating with anticipation.
He heard a creak of floorboards behind him and he turned around, but there was nobody there, only the dark oil portraits of the Wilmington family that hung around the landing, staring back at him balefully through four hundred years of walnut-coloured varnish.
He hadn’t intended to come back into the house, not after dark. Whenever the moon was full, he left Allhallows Hall for three days and went to stay at the Marine Hotel in Paignton. This time, though, he had forgotten to take his accounts book, and he was already two weeks late in filing his annual tax return.
He waited a full minute longer. The only sound was the wind whistling sadly down the chimneys, but he had been living on Dartmoor for so long that he was used to that constant wind, too, and he no longer found it eerie.
‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘Whoever you are, you miserable reprobate, enjoy your weekend.’
With that, he took the first step downstairs. As he did so, though, he heard footsteps running towards him. Before he could turn around again, he was hit on the bald spot on the back of his head with what felt like a hammer. He pitched forward and tumbled down the first flight of stairs, his arms and legs flailing and his accounts book flying, so that he was surrounded by a shower of bills and receipts and train tickets.
He collided with the panelling halfway down the stairs, striking the left side of his forehead against the skirting board, and jarring his shoulder. Stunned, disorientated, he tried to climb up onto his hands and knees, but he lost his balance and tilted sideways down the second flight of stairs. He fell head over heels, so that he felt and heard his spine crack. When he reached the hallway, he lay with his cheek against the threadbare Agra rug, staring at a faded yellow lotus flower. His heart bumped slower and slower.
Footsteps came slowly down the stairs from the landing, and Herbert’s receipts and invoices were kicked aside like dead leaves. A figure appeared at the top of the second flight, silhouetted against the windows. If Herbert’s neck hadn’t been broken, and he had been able to look up, he would have recognised this figure by his hair, shaved up at the sides and then gelled up into a point like a shiny shark’s fin.
The figure stood looking down at Herbert for over a minute, as if he were reluctant to go down to the hallway to check his pulse, but still wanted to be sure that he was never going to get up again.
After a while, though, he climbed back upstairs. If Herbert had still been conscious, he would have heard the squeaking of floorboards as he crossed the landing, and then the soft faraway click as he closed the bedroom door.
2
Rob was sitting in front of his computer, frowning in concentration, when the phone started to warble.
‘Vicky!’ he called out. ‘Can you answer that?’
‘I’m right in the middle of grilling Timmy’s
