Whispers in the Dark (27 page)

I settled down to wait for Anthony. Mrs. Johnson’s words, far from comforting me, had set me on edge. The silence seemed more than ever full of menace. Then, faintly echoing somewhere behind the silence, I could hear the sound of voices again. Not arguing this time, but murmuring ceaselessly. And among them I could just distinguish isolated voices singing. There was music somewhere, too, quiet music played on a harp or a harpsichord. I strained my ears, wondering where the sounds could be coming from, but it was useless, they were too faint and too far away.

It must have been about an hour after that that the door opened and Antonia came into the room. She looked flushed and unhappy, as though under a great strain. Her face had been powdered and rouged, but the makeup did not conceal her own high color or the unhealthy brightness in her eyes. She closed the door and told me to stand.

“Turn around, turn around. I want to see how you look.”

I twisted awkwardly. She tutted with dissatisfaction and began to fuss about my dress and hair. Pulling and nipping me, she straightened a seam here and a lock there.

“What is to happen, Antonia? I’m frightened. I want to know.”

“Better you don’t, child. You needn’t worry, it won’t take long.”

“I’m to be killed, aren’t I? Like Caroline and Arthur, that’s what happens, isn’t it?”

“Killed? If it were only that simple, my dear. If it were only that easy.”

“What are all the voices? And I can hear music.”

“Music?”

She paused, listening. The tinny echoes of the harpsichord could still be heard from somewhere almost out of earshot.

“It’s your birthday in a couple of hours, Charlotte. They’re gathering for your party. You'll meet them soon.”

“Meet them? Who are they?”

"Don’t ask questions, Charlotte. You’ll know soon enough.”

She stood back and examined me.

“You’ll do,” she said. I noticed that she had been biting her nails. Her movements were jittery. She was like someone who barely manages to remain sane while all the time teetering on the edge of madness.

I ran toward her, thinking she must relent, thinking I must be able to reach her. My hands clutched at her dress, I tried to throw my arms about her neck.

“For God’s sake, Antonia, don’t leave me here like this. You’re my cousin, you’re my friend. Why don’t you help me get out of here?”

She looked at me as though her heart were breaking. I think she saw not me, but her own daughter, Caroline.

“Oh, if only I could, if only I could. But it’s out of my hands, can’t you see that?”

She pulled herself away, pressing my hands aside. Stumbling to the door, she opened it and ran out, locking it hard behind her. I heard her footsteps clatter down the stairs then fade along the passage.

After a while I began to brush my hair again. Moving the looking glass to one side, I started. Behind me, bathed in the light of the candle, was a second face.

Caroline’s face, white, with black eyes that stared hard at me. I turned, but there were only shadows.

“Caroline? I saw you watching me. I’m not afraid of you. I want to speak to you. Please. Please don’t be frightened. I came back as you asked. I’ve read your diary, I know all that happened.”

This time she answered. Her voice seemed very close, yet coming from nowhere in particular. I was certain of one thing, that it was not inside my head.

“Listen to me, Charlotte,” she said. "Listen carefully. I want to help you, but I don’t know how. The others are near me, very near.”

"Others? What others?”

“You’ll meet them soon. Some of them are very old. They’ve been here for centuries. Even before this house was built. They want you, just as they wanted me. It’s how they keep their strength, how they stop the loneliness and the pain of age. They need company, our company. Don’t you see? Don’t you understand, Charlotte? That’s what this is all about. They always need more, they’re never satisfied. And the older they become, the more they need. They won’t leave the living in peace until they are given what they want. And then again and again. It never ends. Never.”

I could see her now. She was quite plain, a dull gray figure seated on the bed, watching me with sad, sad eyes. I remembered Annie’s eyes, that haunted look in them, the recurrent pain and humiliation of her father’s abuse. Caroline’s eyes held something worse again. Something more sordid, more deeply violated.

"What did you see on the lawn?” I asked, for I was desperate to know everything, to be prepared for whatever it was I had to face. “What was it?”

She drew violently away from me, shaking her head backward and forward, her eyes glittering with refusal.

“You must tell me,” I insisted. “I have to know.”

She stopped and slowly sank to the floor. It was the posture I had seen her in before, defeated, withdrawn. I crossed the room, no longer afraid of the poor creature, and kneeled down in front of her. Tentatively I stretched out my hand to touch her, but my fingers passed through air. No, not quite air, but a coldness that was more than air.

“Please,” I said.

She looked at me softly.

“I want you to be my friend,” she said.

I nodded.

“Yes,” I said.

“James Ayrton dabbled in forbidden things.” Her voice was a whisper from very far away. “He wanted power. Eternal life. He was willing to risk damnation for it. But he . . . called up something he should not have. Not a spirit. There are other things. He was already very old, and it destroyed him. And then it took possession of his tomb. He feeds it when he can.”

“Feeds?”

She shook her head.

“Not flesh. I don’t mean that—or not quite that. I’m not exactly sure. It—” She stopped. “No more, please. I’ve seen it. I don’t want to talk about it.”

It was as far as she got. At that moment the temperature in the room dropped at an alarming rate, as though dry ice had been poured into it. Caroline looked up. I saw her draw back, shaking her head. Snatching up the candle, I stepped toward her as though I could protect her bodily from whatever it was that threatened her. The next moment she was gone. I heard a rustling sound, then the room was full of silence. A hateful, angry silence.

Anthony came for me as promised about half an hour before midnight. Unlike his sister, he was perfectly calm and self-possessed. He looked me up and down with an appraising air, like a show judge examining a heifer. It was the first time in my life I had ever experienced that close scrutiny of a man’s eyes, that attentiveness to my body. Even now I am not sure whether there was anything sexual in his gaze. If there was, it was well enough masked, muffled by a different sort of hunger. Anthony Ayrton wanted peace at any cost, and I was just the latest coin in the ongoing payment he made to his tormentors.

"Exquisite,” he murmured. He ran a hand through my long hair. “He will be so pleased. They will all be pleased.”

“ ‘He’?” I asked. “Who is ‘he’?”

“You haven’t guessed? I thought you cleverer than that. My ancestor James, of course, James Ayrton.”

“I’ve seen him,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. "I know you have. We have all seen him.”

“Why does he wear a veil? Why does he want to hide his face?”

He looked troubled, then shook his head.

“Too many questions. You’ll find out everything in the end. I promise. Now, Charlotte, it’s time to go. We mustn’t keep them waiting.”

He took me by the left arm, with a very firm grip, and opened the door. The passage at the foot of the stairs was lit up brilliantly. Candle holders of one kind or another had been placed every few yards: flambeaux, stubby candelabras on torcheres, girandoles attached to the wall, sconces on either side of each window, all blazing with tall white candles.

“This is all for you,” said Anthony. “In celebration of your coming of age.”

“I shall only be fifteen,” I said.

“Tonight you come of age. It is your destiny.”

He led me down the passage and through the house, shining everywhere with light. The voices and the music had fallen silent. The only sounds were our footsteps passing from carpet to stone and from stone back to carpet.

Anthony had a fur-lined cape ready for me at the door. He himself put on a thick black coat and a fur hat.

“Where is Antonia?” I asked.

“She will stay here until I return,” he said. “She sends her apologies.”

He took his watch from his pocket and tutted.

“Come. It’s almost midnight.”

Outside, it was bitterly cold. We hurried into the woods, taking the familiar path that I knew led to the folly. Anthony carried a storm lantern in his left hand while keeping his grip on me with the other. The light revealed his profile every time I turned, heavy and angular, his lips set hard, like a man going into battle. I was his trophy, I supposed, or his oriflamme.

I had expected—no, I am not sure now what possibilities had passed through my mind. But lights, certainly, a brightness comparable to that now filling the house; and noises, singing perhaps, the dead gathering in shrouds to meet me. Instead the woods were silent and dreadful, without light anywhere. I caught sight of the folly once by chance, etched against the skyline as we came up to it from a hollow. It was just a dark mass of stone. The next moment it disappeared again behind a screen of trees.

Minutes later we turned at a bend in the narrow pathway and the temple was in front of us. I now saw that two small lights were burning in front of it, one on either side of the door. Otherwise it was in darkness. The door was lying wide open.

The very sight of that open door filled me with terror. I pulled back, forcing Anthony to halt.

“No,” I said, “I won’t go.”

“Damn it, you’ll go where I say you'll go.”

“Not in there!”

He said nothing further, but yanked my arm and continued pulling me down the path. He was strong, I could not possibly resist him.

We reached the door. Inside, the folly was in blackness. I could already smell it from where I stood, a dark, stale odor that made me gag. Anthony pulled me in. Near the door a chain had been fixed to the wall, ending in a sort of manacle. He fastened this around my wrist without saying a word, and left me.

I heard the doors being closed. Then Anthony lit a candle. It burned dully in the heavy air, revealing nothing but his shadowed form. I heard him sigh as though he was in pain, or like someone who, having known pain, senses its return. He now began to light candles, thick flax-colored candles arranged in groups on top of tall torcheres placed at regular intervals around the sides of the folly.

The light grew slowly, wakening shadows from their profound slumber. And not only shadows, but whispers, as though these too had been secreted in the blackness. Out of the shadows, something else emerged. I had expected some sort of emptiness, a tall, abandoned room flanked by stone walls. This was vastly different. From the ceiling hung vast clouds of spiderwebs, thicknesses of them, intricate, dark and matted with a century and a half of filth. The walls were encrusted with them. The air was weighed down by their heaviness.

In the gaps between the torcheres stood cold pillars of black marble. Atop each one was set a bronze figure or head, rather like the busts that graced the marble pedestals in the entrance to the hall. But these figures were not the likenesses of Greek athletes or Roman emperors. Those that I could see from where I stood were grotesque: black angels with the wings of bats, demons with the horns of rams or goats, griffins with claws like scythes. The heads were leering, demoniac, threatening. Everything was folded and tangled in swaths of cobwebs, among which dark shapes climbed or hung suspended.

All about the floor were scattered gilded chairs, old chairs, their velvet seats long rotted, their wood crumbling, coated in dust and yet more webs. The walls were hung with huge golden mirrors, now tarnished and cracked and smeared with dust, in whose faces were reflected every so often the lost glimmer of a candle flame. There were ragged tapestries, and beside them paintings, moldy, threadbare with age, in which dim figures of men in strange garments, like priests or hangmen, could be discerned.

Light fell upon light. Anthony had almost completed his circuit. The whispering had become a steady drone. And now for the first time I was able to see that the far end of the folly was not empty, that the shadows that gathered there were alive and moving.

I almost fainted. The smell, the fetid air, the moving figures up there in the darkness, the sense of greedy expectation—all bewildered and dizzied me. Closing my eyes, I bent my head and breathed in deeply in an attempt to steady myself. As I opened my eyes again I noticed something on the floor beside me, next to the door. It was red and colorful, and out of curiosity I bent down as far as I could to pick it up. It was a toy soldier, a painted lead soldier in a red coat and bearskin hat, identical in every respect to the one I had given Arthur two Christmases previously. The longer I looked at it, the more certain I became that it was the very same soldier, not a duplicate.

Anthony returned.

“I’m sorry I have had to chain you like this,” he said. “But if you tried to run . . . There would be trouble. Do you understand me? It would anger him.”

I held up the soldier.

“You told me Arthur never came here. You pretended to search for him. Why? Why did you lie to me?”

He reached out his hand and took the soldier from me, turning it around and around between finger and thumb, like a collector examining an item of great rarity and value.

“He must have dropped this,” he said. “I’m surprised I didn’t notice it.”

“Then you admit he was here?”

He handed the soldier back to me.

“Of course. He has been here all along. He is still here.”

“Here?”

“In the folly. Where he has been almost from the day he arrived. We had to wait, of course. We knew he would draw you here, like a bee to honey. Sir James insisted nothing be done with him until tonight.”

“You kept Arthur here? In this stinking place?”

“Please calm yourself, Charlotte. He has been well looked after. Not as well as you, perhaps, but Sir James wanted it that way.”