She looked across at Jaws and the other men. Five of them were sitting down now, with their eyes closed, so that they would fall into a weary. Only Jaws still had his eyes open, and when he saw that she was looking in his direction, he winked. Then he closed his eyes, too.
She did the same, but first she whispered a small prayer to the Druidic goddess Druantia, asking for her protection. Druantia was not only the guardian of women, but the goddess of sexual passion, and the creator of phases of the moon. If any spiritual being could take care of her now, she couldn’t think of a better one.
33
Ada’s energy rose out of her body in the same way that she had risen before. She still found that it made her feel unbalanced, and swimmy, and she wondered if this was what it was like to be a spirit, after you had died. The most disturbing thing was to look down and see herself still sitting propped up against the wall, her eyes closed and her lips slightly parted, breathing her last breath over and over again. That’s me. That’s what I look like to other people.
Down at the far end of the room, Jaws and the other men were rising out of their bodies too. Once they had all taken shape, Jaws approached her and the other men followed him. She had never seen such a hard-looking collection of men in her life. They were stretching and jiggling and sniffing like footballers preparing to run out onto the pitch for a match. Jaws was giving her his usual enigmatic grin but not one of the others was smiling.
‘Ready, love?’ Jaws asked her.
‘I suppose so. What are all these fellows going to be doing?’
‘Them? Oh, I think they’ve got something in mind, haven’t you, lads? Ricky here, he’s been stuck in this room two years longer than what I have. I’m sure he knows what he needs to cheer him up.’
A young man with a blond crew cut and a white T-shirt bulging with steroid-swollen muscles gave Ada a sideways twitch of his head, as if to say ‘awright?’, but he still didn’t smile.
‘Go on, you go first,’ said Jaws, and guided Ada towards the wall that would take her through to the end bedroom.
She turned around to look at the men following them, and she began to feel that something was badly wrong.
‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Maybe I won’t do it.’
‘If you don’t do it now, love, you won’t get another chance until the next full moon.’
‘Yes, I realise that. But I don’t know. If we can’t leave the house, and we’re still going to be trapped when the moon goes down, what’s the point of it?’
‘What’s the point of it? Don’t you want to feel your heart beating again? Don’t you want to breathe some fresh air, in and out? I know it’s only for a few hours, but don’t you want to feel like you’re a real human being again, instead of a fucking spook?’
‘Go on, darling,’ said the young man in the white T-shirt. ‘We ain’t got all fucking night.’
Ada hesitated. But then she thought: whatever my misgivings, this could be the only way to escape from Allhallows Hall. I think I know an incantation that could free me – the same incantation that was used by Alice Kyteler, the first woman to be sentenced to die for witchcraft in Ireland. The night before she was due to be burned at the stake, she had disappeared and was never seen again.
‘Glaoim ar na taibhsí gach doras a oscailt,’ Alice Kyteler’s incantation had begun. ‘I call on the ghosts of every door to open.’ It had been found, written down, in her abandoned cottage, and after she had read a feature about it on the Irish Examiner website, Ada had memorised it.
Jaws placed his hand against the small of Ada’s back and gently pushed her towards the wall. She didn’t resist him. As she penetrated the plaster, she felt the same frosty tingling that she had before, the same sensation of having all her millions of atoms disassembled and mingled with the atoms in the wall before she was reassembled in the bedroom on the other side. All the lights in the house had been switched off, but the door was half open, and she could see the moonlight falling on the floor of the corridor.
Jaws appeared behind her out of the wall, and then the other men, one at a time, until the room was crowded.
‘Right,’ said Jaws. ‘I’ll nip along and lock all them bedroom doors so your mates can’t come out and give us bother. You, my love – you go first and stand in front of the window. Do like I said and stare right into the moonlight. Try not to blink too much, and think hard about what you was like before you was chanted. Once you’re done, all these other geezers will do it, too, me included, and then we’ll all be unlocked.’
He went off along the corridor and Ada found herself standing in front of the stained-glass window with the other five men gathered in a semicircle around her.
‘Get your skates on, darling,’ said a middle-aged man who bore a striking resemblance to Charles Bronson – weathered, baggy-eyed, with a tangled fringe and sideburns. ‘The quicker you get yourself sorted, the longer we got.’
The men were standing so close behind her that Ada could smell them. Stale cigarettes and body odour, and another smell, too, strangely metallic, like chicken that was past its sell-by date. She took a step closer to the window and there right in front of her was the hooded black figure with his black slavering hounds all around him.
Ada could see the full moon shining through a squarish panel in the window that was stained dark blue to represent the night sky. She looked quickly behind her to make
