Vicky said, ‘These presences, Ada. Did they look human?’
‘As far as I could tell. I only saw them for a split second before my scrying mirror broke. They looked like ordinary men, though. No horns or wings or anything like that.’
‘Three minutes,’ said Francis.
‘Are you going to tell us what we’re waiting for?’ Rob asked him.
‘If I’m wrong about this room, it won’t matter.’
‘But if you’re right?’
‘Then I’m not at all sure what we’re going to do. I’ve heard about these rooms but I’ve never actually come across one before. Not in the flesh, so to speak.’
‘But what? Are they evil, these rooms? Are they dangerous? Are we going to need an exorcist?’
Francis gave a shake of his head that was almost imperceptible, and the faintest of smiles. ‘You only need exorcists when a person or a house is possessed by Satan or one of the seventy-two demons listed in the Lesser Key of Solomon.’
‘But you don’t think that’s what we have here?’
‘No, because Satan doesn’t exist and neither do any of his demons. The only evil in this world is in the minds of men. And women, of course. I don’t want you accusing me of sexism.’
He lifted up his pocket watch again. ‘There… five minutes. That should do it. Let’s all go back in.’
Francis ducked under the dado rail first and the rest of them followed. The sun had gone behind the clouds now, and the room had become colourless and gloomy. When they stood up straight, though, they saw that the match stuck into the windowsill was still alight, and that it hadn’t burned down even a fraction since Francis had wedged it there.
Rob went over to examine it closely. It continued to burn, but it still stayed the same length.
‘This is a conjuring trick, right? You rubbed some grease on it, or something like that, so that it burns like a candle.’
‘I did nothing to it. And it isn’t a trick. What you’re seeing is a natural phenomenon.’
‘Matches that last forever? I never heard of those before.’
Francis looked around the room again. His expression was different now, more wary than it had been before. He leaned forward slightly and stared with his eyes narrowed at the corner where Ada said she had seen the presences.
‘Ada, do you want to try your powder test?’
‘They’re there, aren’t they?’ Ada asked him.
‘I don’t know. They may have left when they saw me lighting the match. I have no idea if they’re restricted to this room only, or if they’re free to roam around other rooms, too. Judging by what happened to Rob and Vicky here, they can wander about the whole house.’
‘All right. But let’s hope it doesn’t annoy them, this powder test, and they decide to attack us.’
Ada reached into her conjure-bag and took out a hexagonal green glass bottle with a silver cap.
‘This is battlefield dust,’ she explained. ‘It was originally used by bereaved relatives who had lost a soldier in battle but the body had never been found. They would go to the battlefield long after it was all over and collect any bones they could dig up from where their loved one was thought to have fallen – or as near as they could tell from what their surviving comrades had told them. Then they would take these bones home and grind them into powder, rather like they do in crematoriums.’
‘So what would they do with this powder? Bury it? Scatter it?’
‘No, no. They would blow it up into the air in the rooms that their loved one used to frequent, usually their bedrooms. They hoped that if he was still haunting the house where he used to live, the powder would settle on his ghost. In that way they would at least be able to see his outline.’
‘But we’re not related to these presences, are we?’
‘That doesn’t matter. Battlefield dust works for all spirits, not only relatives. I’ve used it myself twice now and seen the outline of two people who were long dead. One was a grandmother in Cadover Bridge. I distinctly saw her sitting in front of her fire in her parlour, and as far as I could make out she was knitting. The other was a young farmer in Bellever, who had been run over by his father’s tractor. I saw him in his bedroom sitting on his bed, and even though I couldn’t hear him, his shoulders were shaking like he was crying.’
She unscrewed the cap of the green glass bottle and held it up. ‘This particular dust is supposed to have come from the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. I bought it three years ago when I went to a spiritualists’ fair in Germany. It’s supposed to have enormous spiritual potency, because over ninety thousand soldiers died in that battle, and hundreds of their bodies were never recovered. There were so many skeletons left on the battlefield that more than fifteen years after it was over, tons of bones were collected up and shipped to Scotland for fertiliser. However—’
She stopped, and glanced uneasily over to the far corner of the room.
‘I don’t know. Even if these presences are still there, Frankie, I’m not at all sure now that I really want to see them.’
‘Ada, we have to. Most of all we need to know if they have anything at all to do with Rob and Vicky’s little boy disappearing. And even if they don’t, we can’t just leave them trapped in this house forever. They need to be laid to rest, and when you’ve carried out this test I’ll tell you why.’
‘All right, then. But don’t give me a hard time if I scream. Talking to spirits in the Otherland, that’s one thing. They’re never threatening. Almost every one of them is sad to have died, and some of them are not even
