The House of a Hundred Whispers

or even to find out what either of them wanted for Christmas, they had to ask Portia.
‘I’ll help you,’ said Grace, as Vicky went back towards the kitchen. ‘Does anybody else want tea?’
Before she had reached the door to the kitchen, it suddenly burst open, and Timmy came out. He stopped and looked at them all in bewilderment.
‘What’s up, Timmy?’ asked Rob. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘Who’s that upstairs?’
‘There’s nobody upstairs, darling,’ said Vicky. ‘We’re the only people here.’
‘There had jolly well better not be anybody upstairs,’ put in Martin, rising from his throne. ‘The last thing we want is squatters.’
‘You saw somebody?’ said Rob. ‘What did they look like?’
‘I didn’t see them. Only heard them.’
‘Oh yes? And where were they?’
‘In one of the rooms, right down at the end, by the coloured window.’
Martin turned around and said to the rest of them, loudly, ‘He must mean the stained-glass window,’ as if none of them could guess.
‘I was looking through the different-coloured glass, so that the garden went red, and then it went blue, and then it went yellow.’
‘And that’s when you heard them? How did you know it was more than one? What – were they talking?’
Timmy nodded. Rob had rarely seen him look so serious, with his wide eyes and that little sprig of hair sticking up at the back of his head.
‘Did you hear what they were saying?’
Timmy said, ‘No. I couldn’t. I pressed my ear up against the door, but they were whispering.’
Martin turned to Rob. ‘Right! I think we’d better take a shufti, don’t you, Rob. Can’t have uninvited guests!’
*
Rob and Martin climbed the stairs to the first-floor landing. Rob hadn’t been up here since the day he left for art college, and he had forgotten how low the ceilings were, and how the floorboards creaked, and how strongly the corridors smelled of oak and wood polish and dried-out horse-hair plaster.
Two corridors led off from the landing: one directly ahead of them, with three bedroom doors on the left-hand side and the large stained-glass window at the end. The other led off to the right, with another five bedroom doors and a door at the end to the bathroom.
‘I still find it hard to believe that we’ll never see Dad again,’ said Rob, pausing at the top of the stairs. ‘I keep thinking that at any minute I’m going to hear him shouting up at us to stop making so much bloody noise up here.’
‘I think a lot of people misjudged him,’ said Martin. ‘He meant well. He didn’t have such an easy childhood himself.’
‘Just because he didn’t have an easy childhood himself didn’t mean that he had to take it out on us. Or Mum, God bless her.’
‘Well, let’s go and see if we’ve got any unwelcome visitors, shall we?’
They walked along the corridor towards the stained-glass window, and Martin opened each of the first two bedroom doors. They had dark oak dados all around them, and stained-glass windows, too, although these were much smaller and glazed with diamond patterns in red and yellow and green. Ventilation and a little more illumination came from skylights in their sloping ceilings; both were streaked grey with lichen and bird droppings.
There was nobody in either bedroom, only antique beds with faded cotton quilts, and bedside tables with dusty lamps on them.
‘Shh,’ said Martin, cupping his hand to his ear. ‘Do you hear any whispering?’
They waited in silence, their faces lit up by the harlequin patterns of coloured light shining through the stained glass.
The window depicted Walkham Valley under a dark-blue sky, with a leat running through it. Beside the leat, with his back turned and his arms spread wide, was an impossibly tall man wearing a long black cloak with a high collar turned up. All around him, bristling black hounds were standing in a circle on their hind legs, their fangs bared and their red tongues hanging out.
According to the previous owner of Allhallows Hall, the man in the black cloak was Old Dewer, which was the Dartmoor name for the Devil. The story went that on certain nights of the year, Old Dewer would mount a huge black horse and take his pack of ferocious hounds out hunting across the moor, searching for young women who hadn’t been able to reach home before it grew dark.
Whether it was true or not, the window had apparently been installed to make Old Dewer believe that he was respected by the owners of this house, and so that he wouldn’t come snuffling around it looking for souls to steal, especially the souls of their daughters.
‘I’ll bet you it was the wind that Timmy heard,’ said Martin. ‘Or maybe the plumbing. The front and the back doors were both locked when we got here, and the burglar alarm was still on. I can’t see how anybody could have got in.’
‘Martin, there’s no wind. And the plumbing has never sounded like whispering. It sounds more like somebody slaughtering a pig.’
Martin opened the last door. There was no bed in here, only an assortment of half a dozen spare chairs, some of them stacked on top of each other, and a wine table crowded with tarnished brass candlesticks and inkwells, all of which were draped with dusty spiderwebs.
Under the window there was an oak window seat, with a hinged lid covered in cracked green leather. Rob went over and lifted the lid. It was full of nothing but legal documents, all rolled up and tied around with faded red ribbons.
‘See? Nobody here. And it doesn’t look as if Dad’s been in here for years.’
‘Oh, well. Maybe Timmy imagined it. He does have quite an imagination. He won a prize at school for a story he wrote about a bad egg that fell in love with a bullying centipede.’
‘Takes after his father then. Always making things up.’
Martin closed the door. But as soon as they started to walk back along the corridor, Rob heard what sounded like a man’s