The Silence of Ghosts (15 page)

I nodded.

‘Very good. Now, I would like one of you to repeat to me what you remember, what you have seen, what you have heard.’

I told him what I could, and Rose corrected me a couple of times. He listened impassively and said nothing until I had come to a finish.

‘Thank you, Dominic. That is all very helpful. Your account tallies almost exactly with that of the good reverend here. Now, he has told me that you asked him if he could perform an exorcism in your house. Is that correct?’

We both nodded.

‘And he has, I am sure, explained to you the difficulties he faces in doing this from within his church. He does not rule it out, but he foresees difficulties in bringing in their nearest expert in this field, a field in which the Reverend Braithwaite has no experience at all. Now, it was his conclusion that he might instruct me to perform the exorcism for you in his place. I take it you would have been agreeable to this proposal? That you harbour no negative feelings about Catholics? I would ask you to be honest about such feelings, if you do have them.’

I had no idea what Rose felt on the subject, but what she said summed up for us both.

‘Father,’ she said, ‘if what you do get rid of the things in the house, then I don’t care if you’re a witch doctor from the depths of Africa.’

‘Very good. I can see you’re both in agreement on that score. But here is what I have to say. Thinking this through, I cannot see my way to performing an exorcism, nor will I approach my bishop, nor will I recommend that the Reverend Braithwaite go to his. An exorcism is not appropriate to this situation, and I think it could make things worse.’

‘But surely,’ I said, ‘the house is possessed in some way. Surely there is something there that has to be exorcised.’

‘Mr Lancaster, you must let me be the judge of that. I do not believe there is anything in the nature of demonic possession. There appear to be some children who haunt the building. Four of them have been seen outside the house, and one was standing next to your sister, Octavia.’

‘She seemed very real at the time. The little girl, I mean. Her name was Clare.’

The priest nodded.

‘Yes, ghosts can often seem as real as the living. Not for very long, of course, but for a while. Let me tell you what I propose. I will go with you to the house tonight. I will go inside alone, and I will try to speak to the children and persuade them to go.’

‘What about the other thing?’ Rose asked. ‘The thing we heard coming down the stairs?’

Father Carbery shook his head.

‘You have never actually seen anything on the stairs, and I don’t believe there was necessarily anything there. We must focus our energies on those poor children, who have been only too visible.’

He hesitated for a second, then got to his feet.

‘Since it has been a long way from Ambleside, I’d like to get this over with before it gets too late. Are you in agreement?’

We looked at one another. I could see that Rose had misgivings, but she nodded.

We sent Octavia to bed, but I think she guessed what we were up to. She took my hand tightly and wrote something on my palm that I could barely understand. ‘Don’t go inside’ and ‘Look after Rose’. Rose came up behind me and kissed her on the forehead. The car was waiting for us outside.

Later

Coming to Hallinhag House late at night and in the dark, we saw that a full moon lay nailed to a sky of stars, bright points of freezing light that held the silver disc in its orbit. The house faced us, lightless, like an enormous shadow that had come out of the end of things to be here, to entice us inside. Not one of us wanted to be there. I argued again with the priest, but he spoke to me calmly and with authority. He was the expert, and I could not deny him.

Wrapped in blankets, the three of us stayed in the car. Rose’s mother had prepared hot flasks with soup and tea, and we drank to keep our spirits up. We’d been supplied with hot water bottles, and though Jeanie must have guessed something was up, she never once enquired. Father Carbery went inside alone. The door was still open, as I had left it. He closed it behind him, and the last thing we saw was the light of his torch. It is hard to know what he saw, if anything, as he entered. I cannot believe he was not frightened.

‘It’s such a lovely house, I’ve noticed it before. Dominic, your family is very fortunate to own a place like this,’ said the Reverend Braithwaite, ‘but, to be honest, I’m not unhappy we haven’t
gone in. The very thought of phantoms makes me shake, it’s such an unnatural thing. I would hate to go in there and see or hear anything uncanny.’

‘There may be nothing tonight,’ I said.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Octavia isn’t inside. All this started when she appeared. She was never in the house before, on account of her asthma. I can remember many happy years in the house, and there are no family stories that I know of that talk about strange appearances.’

We talked like this for a while, then distracted ourselves with stories of the sea and the local parish. Rose remained quiet, even when we asked her for her nursing tales.

I don’t know how much time passed. Half an hour? An hour? It felt more like two, and it was very cold. Our hot water bottles had long ago lost the least trace of heat. Fresh snow had started to come down and was drifting over the windscreen. An owl, shivering in its nest somewhere, cried out against the cold, and moments later I heard a robin call from a lakeside tree. It brought back memories of the night-birds who sang outside my window, the corncrake whose rasping calls kept us all awake into the early hours.

Frustrated by such a passage of time and no activity that I could see, I made up my mind.

‘I’m going in,’ I said. ‘Something has happened, and I don’t think it’s something good.’

Oliver Braithwaite turned in his seat and looked back at me.

‘I won’t let you go alone. This is my parish, you are my parishioner, and this is a spiritual matter.’

‘Me too,’ said Rose. If I touched her, I could feel her shiver from the cold. ‘You need someone to help you stay steady on those crutches.’

‘Then come to the door with me,’ I said, ‘but don’t come in.
If I call, then join me inside. But I don’t think we should all pile in together.’

Thinking it over after we got home, it seemed to me that Rose’s offer had made her love for me clearer than any number of declarations of simple attachment would have done. I know how much she loathed the very thought of returning to the house, yet there she was, defying her own fears to go in with me.

When we reached the door, I noticed straight away that all was silent inside. Rose and Oliver Braithwaite protested again that I should not go inside without them, but they quickly saw that I was adamant in the matter.

‘The first sign of anything being wrong,’ I said, ‘and I’ll be out of here faster than you can guess.’

‘Darling, you’re hardly nimble on your feet. What if you trip and fall, what if you’re knocked out? We wouldn’t hear a thing. You’ve got five minutes to look round, then we’ll go in, regardless of what you say.’

I weighed this up, then nodded. My brain was screaming to get far away, to get all of us out of there. But I pushed the door fully open and stepped into the hall. Oliver Braithwaite had made me a curious little device, using a band of elastic to hold my torch on my head, so that I could use both hands for my crutches. I was glad for the light, but the moment I entered I knew something was wrong, something I had not anticipated. As the beam of torchlight played across the stairs and walls, I had to think twice. It looked as though I had stepped into a different house. Everywhere, wallpaper had fallen away in strips and rotted. The carpet beneath my feet felt spongy, and when I looked down I could see that it too had rotted and had developed holes in places.

Father Carbery had said he would head for the dining room, since that was where the children had been seen before. But
when I went there, I could see no sign of him. I went to the living room, the kitchen and several other rooms on the ground floor. He was in none of them. My heart sank, realizing that he must have gone upstairs. It was the only possibility. But what else waited for me upstairs, if I went up there?

I left my crutches against the wall at the bottom of the staircase. I could smell the rottenness, as if something had died. Using the banister to hold me upright, I slowly began to climb. I could hear nothing, but as I neared the top, I saw something flicker past my line of vision. Something silent. I thought about Octavia, and the idea that she focused the voices of the children and made them audible.

I looked up and saw four children, standing on the landing above: Adam, Helen, Margaret and Clare. They held dolls in their hands, dolls with blackened faces holding sticks, and they moved the dolls to and they moved the dolls fro, and the dolls danced, and when they touched the sticks together the children laughed. The children, like lords of this house of the dead.

‘Father Carbery?’ I called. I ignored the children. The priest did not answer. I was deeply troubled, seriously worried about the old man. I should not have agreed to let him come here alone. We should have stood up to him and gone in with him, as I had originally planned.

I reached the top of the stairs, fearing one of the treads might give way. But none did.

‘Father Carbery? It’s Dominic Lancaster. Are you up here?’

There was no answer. Nor was there any other sound. But when I looked along the corridor that straddled the upper floor, my torch picked out something. One of the children was standing there, the boy, the pallor of his skin intensified by strips of moonlight that fell through a side window. Moments later, the other children appeared beside him.

‘Father Carbery?!’ I yelled. Then the children moved to one side and I saw him, prostrate and crumpled, like a man who has fallen from a great height.

I went straight to him. Bending down was hard for me, but I managed it. I put my hand to his neck. He was freezing cold and there was no pulse.

At that moment, two things happened. Rose’s voice called out for me from downstairs and a man’s voice said something I could not at first understand. Then I did understand it, he was telling me to take the priest and go, never to return, to leave the house and the children here where they belong, to lock the door and never come back.

I shouted down to Rose and Oliver Braithwaite and told them to come up to help me take Father Carbery away, since it was not something I could do on my own.

While they manhandled the priest’s body, I got down holding fast to the banister. At the bottom, I found my crutches. Above, I heard a sneering laugh, and when I looked up I saw him, a man in what looked to be the clothes of an eighteenth-century aristocrat.

Then another man’s voice came from above. I looked up and saw, half-way along the staircase, a second man in eighteenth-century clothes.

‘You heard the man. You’re no longer welcome in my house. Leave now and don’t come back again.’

How we got the priest through the door I hardly know. I had the key this time, and I locked the door, as though it would make any difference. We had to put the dead man sitting upright in the front seat. Oliver Braithwaite drove. He seemed very shaken by whatever he’d seen when he went up the stairs.

‘Where do we go with him?’ I asked. ‘Do we have to get to the hospital?’

Rose said we should just drive to Dr Raverat’s and ask him to examine the body. After that, no one said a thing. The car hummed through the night. I could still smell that fetid odour, that rotting smell. As we got near Pooley Bridge, Rose turned to me.

‘What did the first man say?’ she asked. ‘Could either of you make out what he said?’

I knew the answer. None of the others would have known.

‘ “Get out,” he said. “Never come back.” Something like that.’

‘But what language?’ she demanded. ‘It wasn’t English, I’m sure of it.’

I nodded.

‘No, it wasn’t English,’ I said. ‘It was Portuguese.’

Saturday, 28 December

Raverat had turned a light Bedford van into an ambulance. It was still pretty much a van, and would not have been suitable for any badly injured patient, but it turned out to be perfect for transporting a dead body. He drove off at first light to take Father Carbery’s body down to the morgue at North Lonsdale in Barrow. That was this morning, and we don’t expect him back till tomorrow. They’ll perform a post-mortem, and he’ll report back to us when he returns. I’ve no idea what they’ll find, but I’m confident they’ll put it down to old age. Whether something frightened him to death, whether he’d taken himself out of his depth spiritually and mentally, we’ll never know. I doubt very much they’ll find anything of an overtly physical nature. The Reverend Braithwaite says he’ll give a heavily doctored account to Carbery’s bishop and hope no questions
are asked. Braithwaite himself is badly shaken. He’s at home now.

When we got back last night, Octavia was still waiting up for us, although Rose’s mother had gone to bed a couple of hours earlier. My little sister looked tired, but it was clear to me that she had been unable to sleep until she knew all was well. I had decided to tell her nothing about Father Carbery’s death. We persuaded her to go to bed, which she did reluctantly.

Jeanie had left out a flask of hot milk, a small bottle of brandy and some honey. We made milk toddies in a pair of mugs adorned with drawings of cats, and we drank them without speaking. That made me feel a lot better, I can tell you.

As I put my empty mug down, I smacked my lips and turned to Rose.

‘Rose, I’ve decided to marry your mother instead.’

‘That may be a good decision. And if I marry your father, I can become a lady of leisure. ’

I shook my head.

‘Don’t even joke about it. You won’t like him and he won’t like you.’

‘I don’t have to like him. But if I marry him, I’ll be quite rich, and if you marry my mother, you’ll be well looked after. I warn you, though, that you’ll be better off with me in bed. I’ve never been in bed with a man before, but I’m a nurse and I know what’s what and what goes where. On the other hand, if you marry me, my mother comes as well, so you’ll get a double bargain, a mother-in-law to make you toddies and a wife to take you to bed.’