‘Don’t be frightened. It’s me, Thomas. I’ll take care of you.’ He was so close that she could smell the stale incense on his cassock, and his musty breath.
‘What’s happening to me? I feel… I feel like a ghost.’
‘You’re having a weary. Your physical body is resting, to recover from the shock of your chanting. But your essence is still awake, as it always will be.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘This is you. Your essence. This is who you are. This is what people mistakenly believe is your soul.’
‘You’re a priest. Don’t you believe that people have souls?’
Ada could almost feel him smiling in the dark. ‘I used to, before I was incarcerated here. Now I know what I really am, and what everybody really is. Our souls are not supernatural. They are not granted to us by God. Our souls, if you want to call them that, are manifestations of the same energy that makes the stars shine and the wind blow and the clouds stream over our heads. That is why you can leave your weary physical presence for a while, as you are doing now.’
‘I want to wake up.’
‘You will, when your brain and your body have recovered.’
‘Thomas – I want to wake up. I want to get out of this room. I want my life back.’
‘What is your name?’
‘What difference does that make? Ada, if you must know.’
‘Ada! That is a beautiful name, Ada. It is one of the first women’s names mentioned in the Book of Genesis. It means “bright”, or an “adornment”, and you are certainly both.’
‘I don’t care if it means “miserable bitch”. I just want to get back to the way I was, before you pulled me through that wall.’
Thomas was silent for a long time, although he didn’t release his chilly grip on her hand. Eventually he said, ‘I’m afraid you underestimate the force that commands this room, and the whole of this house.’
‘What are you talking about? What force?’
‘I cannot speak its name, Ada, and neither can any of the men confined here.’
‘Just tell me what it is. If you think I’m going to stay stuck here for ever and ever amen you have another think coming.’
She felt somebody else approach, and it was only because she could smell Old Spice that she recognised who it was.
‘Father Thomas ain’t giving you no grief, is he, love?’
‘No. But he won’t tell me what it is that’s keeping us all here, or how I can get out.’
‘That’s because you can’t, darling, I’ve told you that. The best you can do is survive. Come on – come with us, we’ll show you how you can make the best of both worlds.’
‘I don’t want to. All I want to do is get back to the way I was.’
‘Ada,’ Thomas coaxed her. ‘One day we may be able to find a way, and if we do, we can all find our freedom. I can’t tell you how desperately we all long to open the door and walk out of this house, into the daylight. But for now, we have to accept that we are where we are, both in time and in space, and thank the Lord that we are still conscious, and able to talk, and that for all of our suffering, death has not yet been able to claim us.’
‘You’ve been stuck here in this house for four hundred years,’ Ada retorted. ‘Four hundred years! Haven’t you had enough? Don’t you want to die?’
Again, Thomas was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘Death will be much the same as this. One dark day after another. So what’s the difference?’
‘Come on,’ said Jaws. He put his arm around Ada’s shoulders and gently pushed her towards the wall.
*
The sensation of passing through the wall was like walking naked through a shower of ice-cold sparkling water. It lasted only a split second, but Ada felt as if her entire personality had been disassembled into atoms so that they could flow between the atoms of the wall, only to be reassembled on the other side. Here she was, standing in the end bedroom, next to the stack of chairs and the table crowded with cobwebby candlesticks.
Enough light filtered along the corridor from the hallway downstairs for Ada to see that Jaws was already here beside her, next to the stack of chairs, although he was semi-transparent, so that she could see the outline of the window frame behind him. There was a soft shushing sound, and then Thomas appeared right through the wall behind her.
‘All right, darling?’ Jaws whispered. ‘You’ll get used to it. Just keep in mind that this is the actual you, but your body’s still sitting in the room back there.’
‘Why do we have to whisper?’ Ada asked him. ‘Why can’t we talk in our normal voices, or shout? What difference would it make? The people who are staying here, the Russells, they’ve already heard you whispering. Why do you think we came looking for you?’
‘It’s not them we’re worried about.’
‘Then who?’
‘Never mind that. Let’s show you what we do while we’re having a weary.’
‘Don’t give me “never mind that”!’ Ada hissed at him. ‘If you’re whispering for some reason, I want to know why! You don’t want to wake somebody up, is that it?’
Thomas laid his hand on Ada’s shoulder. ‘Please, Ada. We can’t answer you, not without jeopardising our lives. We don’t want to live like this, but we don’t want to die.’
Ada could have let out a hysterical laugh. ‘We don’t want to live like this, but we don’t want to die’ was a line from a song by the rock band Vampire Weekend. The same bleak words, she thought – the same hopeless sentiment – spoken by a man from four hundred years ago.
Jaws laid his hand on her shoulder and gently propelled her out of the end bedroom, past the stained-glass window of Old Dewer
