Bazza looped Pluto’s lead twice more around his fist and started to walk the collie towards the house. He had only gone three or four steps, though, before Pluto stopped, and went completely rigid, his legs as stiff as pokers.
‘Come on, Ploots, what’s got into you, ya mackerel?’
Bazza tugged at Pluto’s lead again and again, and whistled, and clucked, and snapped, ‘Come on, will ya?’ but the collie refused to budge. When Bazza began to drag him across the courtyard, he started to bark, not just angrily, but hysterically, almost as if he were screaming, and wouldn’t stop.
‘What the devil’s got into him, Bazza?’ called John.
‘I don’t have a notion. He’s never behaved this way before. Normally, like, he’s not scared off by nothing! You could drive a tractor straight at him and he wouldn’t flinch an inch!’
‘Look, there must be something about this house that gives dogs the willies,’ said Rob. ‘There was a police dog here the other day and he wouldn’t come near it either. Perhaps it has a smell to it that puts them off, even though humans can’t smell it. I’ll bring the blanket out and he can have a sniff of it outside.’
He went back inside and returned with the blanket over his arm, which he carried over to Bazza and Pluto. The other two volunteers were watching, half in interest and half in amusement.
‘You’ve lost control of him there, Baz! Just like your missus!’
‘You shut your cakehole!’ Bazza retorted, although Pluto was barking so furiously now and straining on his lead so hard that he was having trouble keeping his balance. ‘For Christ’s sake, Ploots, you gurt gawk! Hold still, will you?’
Rob patiently waited, but it was obvious that Pluto wasn’t going to calm down.
‘It’s no use,’ John told him. ‘Whatever’s got into Pluto there, it’s spookified him good and proper. Bazza – why don’t you take the poor fellow away before he barks his head off?’
Bazza took Pluto off down the shingle driveway, although it was Pluto who was doing all the pulling, as if he couldn’t put enough distance between himself and Allhallows Hall. When he reached the road he stopped barking, but he turned his head around to look back at the house and Rob could see that his eyes were bulging as if he had been seriously frightened.
Rob and John went back inside. Rob dropped the blanket down behind the elephant’s-foot umbrella stand and sniffed his fingers. ‘I don’t know about this blanket. I can smell grease and dried sweat, but nothing else. Obviously poor old Pluto picked up some smell that really scared him.’
He looked around the hallway and said, ‘This house only smells musty to me, but for some reason dogs hate it.’
‘Yes, but a dog’s sense of smell is forty times keener than ours, isn’t it?’ said John. ‘And they’ve done some recent tests that show that when dogs pick up a scent, they can actually create a mental picture of it. Like a ball, or a toy, or even a lost child. Whatever it is that scares them about this house, they can actually see it.’
‘It’s a pity they can’t talk. Then they could tell us what it is.’
Vicky was waiting for Rob by the fire. Katharine was still hunched up on the sofa, bundled up in her coat, and Grace had made her a mug of tea to warm her up. Portia was standing in front of the painting of the pagan mass, with its gathering of hooded figures. She was studying it with such concentration that Rob could have imagined she was trying to pick out the face of somebody she knew.
‘What happened?’ asked Vicky. ‘I heard barking.’
‘Barking!’ said Rob. ‘I think that just about sums up the whole of these past few days.’
He clamped his hand over his mouth for a moment, and squeezed his eyes tight shut to hold back the tears. When he took his hand away, he said miserably, ‘All I want is Timmy back, safe and sound. That’s all I want. And I want to know that Martin’s safe too. But how do people bear it when they lose their children? How do they bear it? How can you keep on going into the future when you’ve left your child in the past?’
Vicky came up to him and put her arms around him, and Grace came up and embraced him, too. John could only stand there, looking grave, while they hugged each and wept.
Portia turned round from the painting and said, ‘Just look at this picture. It’s like everything that’s been happening in this house. If you ask me, it’s all the Devil’s work.’
25
Ada felt overwhelmingly tired, and she would have done anything to lie on her side on the horsehair matting and close her eyes for an hour or two. But she stayed sitting upright. She was all too aware of the men gathered at the far end of the room, and how they were glancing in her direction from time to time as if they were checking that she was still awake.
She had read dozens of books by mediums who had made believable claims that they had encountered spirits and departed souls. Even more convincingly, she had seen and felt for herself the resonance of more than thirty people who had left this world and gone to the Otherland. She had never agreed with Francis that their resonance was nothing more than an emotional echo of the life they had recently left, and that it would eventually fade altogether, in the same way that an echo eventually dies.
She had seen the spirits of at least three people who had been deceased for more than five years. The most memorable had been a widow standing on the beach at Heybrook Bay, waiting for a drowned husband who would never return to her. This widow had been visible only intermittently, nothing more than a darker shadow that flickered in the persistent sea
