The House of a Hundred Whispers by Graham Masterton

Author:Graham Masterton [Masterton, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789544237
Publisher: Head of Zeus

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 breeze, her scarf flapping behind her, but Ada had been able to see her twice. Once, she was sure she had heard her calling out her husband’s name.

Because of this and all her other experiences as a ‘charmer’, Ada was convinced that the men who were gathered in this witching room were not spirits, or ghosts, or phantoms, or however dead souls were usually labelled – they were all still alive. Spellbound, but alive.

In spite of that, their movements appeared to Ada to be narrowly constrained by the spell they were under. ‘Spell’ sounded like something out of a fairy story, but it was the best description of it that she could think of, since it meant both a state of enchantment and an indeterminate period of time.

She guessed that the men were visible at certain times – visible to her, at least, like they were now, and each other – even if nobody else who came into the witching room could see them. While they were visible, it seemed as if they had no choice but to stay penned up in here. At other times, though, they seemed to be able to roam invisibly around the house in some form or another, whispering, angry, frustrated, and even capable of hitting and pushing the people who were staying there.

She wondered if they were angry and frustrated not only because they were trapped in time, but because they were trapped in Allhallows Hall, too. They might be able to wander around the house, but if they couldn’t take their physical bodies with them they wouldn’t be able to leave it.

She tilted her head tiredly back against the wall. She had been friends

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