Pull her – pull her, for Christ’s sake! Pull the bitch harder!
Rob managed to heave himself up on one knee, gripping the nearest windowsill to give himself support, but it was then that he saw Ada rammed up against the end wall, still furiously struggling to get herself free.
Yet she wasn’t just rammed up against the wall. She began to disappear into it – swallowed up by the plaster as if she were being dragged behind a thick white curtain. It happened in seconds. Rob saw her right arm waving in a last desperate appeal to be saved, and then she was gone.
There was nothing he could do but stand and stare at the wall in disbelief. Francis stood up, too, and said, ‘My God. I was right. But I never thought – oh, my God. I never realised that could happen.’
Without a word, Rob went back and ducked under the dado rail. He crossed the end bedroom, knocking over two or three candlesticks with a brassy clatter, and then he ran along the corridor to the landing, so that he could look at the other side of the wall through which Ada had disappeared.
There was nobody there. The house was silent. He listened, but he couldn’t even hear any whispering. He walked back and rejoined Vicky and Francis. Vicky was pale with shock, and she caught hold of his arm.
‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘How could she go through the wall like that? You don’t think she’s dead, do you? You don’t think they’ve killed her?’
‘No,’ said Francis. ‘I don’t think they’ve killed her. I think they’ve done something worse than that.’
20
‘Do you think we should call the police?’ asked Vicky.
‘I don’t know,’ said Francis. ‘I really don’t know. What are we going to say to them, if we do? From what Ada told me, the police are already beginning to wonder if you’re all a bit doolally. And even if they do believe us, what can they do about it? What’s happened to Ada isn’t criminal, it’s metaphysical.’
‘But where has she gone?’
‘It’s this room,’ said Francis.
He went up to the end wall and pressed his hand flat against it.
‘It’s solid, see? Perfectly solid. But only in this time.’
‘What do you mean, “in this time”?’ Vicky asked him.
‘I don’t have conclusive proof, but I don’t think that this is a priest’s hide at all. Well, it might have been, to start with. In fact, it’s quite likely that it was. These duplicate stained-glass windows – they could well have been fitted by Nicholas Owen. They’re just the kind of optical illusion that he excelled at.’
He looked around the room, thoughtfully rubbing his bruised right elbow.
‘Like I said before, though, Nicholas Owen would never have used a crucifix as a switch to open the dado. Far too risky. That would have been fixed in much later – I’d guess even centuries later – and probably the whole pulley mechanism was installed then, too. Before that, who knows? To get into this room originally, the priest might have had to lift the floorboards in the bedroom and slide underneath the floor. That was a typical Nicholas Owen trick.’
‘So if this room isn’t a priest’s hole or hide or whatever you want to call it, what is it?’
‘To my mind, this match proves it. Look, it’s still burning. I believe that this is what in the sixteenth century they used to call a “witching room”. I’ve read quite a bit about them. There are all kinds of different names for them in different cultures. The Scandinavians used to call them “frozen rooms”. In Slovenian, I think they’re called something like “ageless chambers”. In Greece, “chronovóres táfoi”, which roughly means “tombs that eat time”.
‘From what I’ve read, an alchemist will have mixed various elements into the plaster so that after the plaster dried the room was kept suspended in time. If you entered the room and somebody recited a particular incantation, that incantation would trigger a metaphysical reaction from the walls, and you would become trapped in the moment that it was spoken to you, forever. You would never age from that moment. Your physical body would remain in that exact second, like an insect in amber, while the rest of the world carries on. The room itself is timeless. That’s why that match will burn and burn but will never go out, ever. We could come back here in twenty years’ time and it will still be there, burning.’
‘So those men who took Ada – those presences – what are they? If they’re stuck in the moment when they first came into this room – how can they walk about the house? How can they walk through walls, and pull Ada through a wall?’
‘It’s not them you saw, Rob. It’s their energy. They’re still here, in this room. Or somewhere in this house, anyway.’
‘I don’t understand. Where?’
‘Let me put it simply. Supposing on Monday you’re standing on a street corner by a letterbox. If I go to that same street corner on Tuesday you won’t appear to be there, will you? But supposing you’re still stuck in Monday. Time will have moved on but your physical existence won’t have moved on with it. You’ll still be there.’
‘But those presences? Those men we saw?’
‘They’re what people mistakenly call our souls, or our spirits. We all have an incredible amount of electrical energy that makes up our physical being and our personality. That energy can leave our bodies, usually when we’re asleep, and roam around. That’s why we dream. Occasionally somebody’s energy can become visible, or partially visible, and that’s what we call ghosts, although ghosts are never the energy of dead people. When you die, your energy dies with you.
‘Those men we saw just now when Ada threw that powder over them… yes, I suppose you could call them ghosts, but they’re not dead yet. They’re still here, in this house, in what
