He was still whispering when Ada heard a deep rumbling sound, accompanied by a high-pitched buzzing like dozens of wasps trying to get out of a window. The floor began to vibrate, and the floorboards squeaked against each other. It felt as if Allhallows Hall were being shaken right down to its foundations. One of the oil paintings of the Wilmington family dropped off the wall next to the landing and fell flat on its face, chipping off a corner of its frame.
The rumbling and creaking went on for nearly half a minute, and then it subsided, and the house was silent again. The door to Rob and Vicky’s bedroom opened, and Rob appeared and switched on the light. He stood there for a while, listening; and then the door to Grace and Portia’s bedroom opened, too, and Grace appeared, clutching her dressing gown around her like a survivor from an earthquake.
Grace said, ‘Rob – you’re not going to believe this.’
Jaws tapped Ada on the shoulder and when she turned around he beckoned to her and silently mouthed the words, ‘Come on. Time for us to go back.’
Ada was tempted to run along the corridor to Rob and tell him, too, that she was still here, and still alive, but the huge tremor that had shaken the house had seriously frightened her. Had she set it off herself by screaming like that? And if she had, what force was it that she had disturbed? She had felt hostile vibrations in houses before, when she was holding séances. She had heard eerie whistling and malevolent humming, but nothing like this, ever.
Jaws had warned her to keep her voice to a whisper, hadn’t he, and Thomas had said that if she spoke too loudly she would be jeopardising their lives.
‘We don’t want to live like this, but we don’t want to die.’
28
None of them could sleep for the rest of the night, except for Katharine, who was still deeply sedated with Unisom, and hadn’t stirred even when the house had started shaking. They sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee and talking quietly to each other, while the fire in the range crackled.
Outside, a pearly-grey dawn gradually appeared behind the gnarled veteran trees that surrounded Allhallows Hall. Some of those trees were more than a hundred years old and Rob always thought they looked like elderly women with their hair sticking up in fright.
‘I’ll call Francis as soon as I’m pretty sure that he’s awake,’ said Rob. ‘I can’t think what else we can do. Whatever’s happening in this house, the police won’t be able to deal with it, any more than we can.’
Portia ran her fingertips lightly and thoughtfully across her lips. ‘I had the strangest dream just before Grace woke me up. I dreamed that some man was kissing me. And I don’t mean a peck on the cheek. A proper full-on snog. But I’ve never been kissed by a man like that, not once. Not ever. Grace said she heard a man in our bedroom, but I didn’t.’
‘I’m sure I heard a man, as well as Ada,’ said Grace. ‘I couldn’t see him, but then I couldn’t see Ada, either. When Ada was shouting at me, it sounded like he was telling her not to. I’m not sure. He was whispering, so I couldn’t really hear what he was saying.’
Vicky spooned more sugar into her coffee and stirred it. ‘They all sound so panicky, these whisperers. You know, as if they’re terrified of something. Perhaps if we can find out what it is, we’ll be able to set them all free. Or give them some kind of peace, anyway.’
‘Well, perhaps,’ said Rob. ‘But even supposing we can find a way to bring them back into the real world, what’s going to happen to them then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We don’t have any idea how long they’ve been stuck here, do we? What if some of them have been there ever since the Wilmingtons first converted that priest’s hole into a witching room? I mean, they must have done it for a reason, mustn’t they? Maybe they had some enemy they wanted to trap. Why else would they have had it put in? And that same person could still be there now, that enemy. Or enemies, plural.’
‘You don’t know,’ said Portia. ‘Perhaps they didn’t have it installed to trap anybody. Perhaps one of the family was dying of pneumonia or something, and they wanted to make sure that he or she lived for ever.’
‘That’s a possibility, I suppose. But unlikely, don’t you think? The Wilmingtons were all fervent Catholics. They would have been quite certain that when they died they were going to Paradise – in which case, surely they wouldn’t have thought that dying would be anything to worry about. If they hadn’t been so pious, they wouldn’t have risked having a priest hole built, would they? Like John Kipling said, it was a fantastic risk in those days.’
‘Were they all that pious?’ Portia asked him. ‘They denied knowing that poor Jesuit they’d been hiding, didn’t they, when the priest hunters caught him. I don’t call that being very pious.’
‘Perhaps they didn’t fancy being hung up from the ceiling and having their stomachs cut open, like Nicholas Owen.’
‘Oh, Rob,’ Grace protested. ‘I think we’re all feeling queasy enough as it is.’
‘That’s what they used to do to Catholics, though, if they refused to renounce their faith. And much worse. You ask John.’
They were still talking when Rob’s phone rang. It was Francis.
‘Rob? I was going to call you last night, but then I looked
