The Whispers of Wilderwood Hall (6 page)

OK, I got that wrong. Like I often get things wrong with her. And I understand – Shaniya lives in a small flat in a not-great estate and has to share a bedroom with her little sister, who's pretty severely autistic. I know that, and I always listen to her talk about what her home life's like and sympathize or try to help.

“I'm sorry,” I say, flustered. “I didn't mean it to…”

I drift away, not sure what exactly I'm apologizing for but feeling bad for my friend anyway.

“Look I've got to go,” says Shaniya. “Mum wants me. Talk to you later, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I reply, but she's already gone.

And hearing the empty drone of nobody there, I crumple, feeling light years from home and so, so alone. Except I have Mum, of course. I take a deep breath, and try and steady myself.

I don't care whether Mum is peering down drains or talking toilets with Mr Fraser, I just want to be
close
to her right now. She might be small, but when I'm with her, I'm surrounded by her force field of love, and that's a pretty special place to be.

And once we're alone, I can tell her about the whisperings and the noises I've been hearing. Somehow, she'll make some kind of sense of it all, I know she will.

Scrambling to my feet, I pull the door open and aim for the back stairs.

But then I hear the crunch and roar of a vehicle on gravel, and through the window in the stairwell I see a white van – Mr Fraser's, presumably – drive off.

Perfect!

So it's back to just being me and Mum, and it'll be that way for a whole month, till RJ's back from his promotional tour with the band, I remind myself.

Even if I'm marooned in this strange new world, as long as me and Mum are together, I'll be OK.

First, of course, I have to find her, in this stupidly huge house.

“Mum?” I call out, thundering down the back stairs and opening the door to the warren of kitchen rooms. My heart pitter-patters as I walk over to the doorway of the room with the huge cooking range –
but
everything is still, quiet as an empty church. Tentatively, I put my hand on the door frame, but there's only a reassuring silence.

Turning around, I follow the passageway that leads to the main house. When I came the other way earlier, with Cam right behind me, I was too frazzled to notice the hand-painted, beautifully neat gold lettering on each of the many dark green doors along here.
Servants' Hall
,
Cook's Rooms
,
Scullery
,
Larder
,
Pantry.
I turn the brass handle of each as I pass, but none opens. Rooms to be explored another time, when I get Mum to show me where the keys are.

And now I'm out in the main house, with four open doors off the wide corridor leading to what used to be the billiard room, the library, the drawing room and the dining room, and are now just cavernous spaces waiting for new life to be breathed into them.

“Mum?” I call out again, as I pad along, wondering where she is. And then I see her, past the staircase and in the vestibule. She's by the open front door, and from the way Mum's head is tilted to one side and her elbow sticks out, I can tell she's on her phone.

Practically
skipping over to her, I wrap my hands around her waist, as glad as I ever have been to see my gorgeous mother.

But Mum does something she's never done before.

She shrugs me off.

“Look – I've only
just
got a signal, Ellis, and I don't want to lose it. This is important, OK?” she practically snaps at me.

I don't know what to do, or how to react. Mum being like that towards me … it makes me feel more like I'm losing my mind than I did when I heard the sounds that weren't there. With waves suddenly rushing in, I back off and run, running from the rising anxiety and running from Mum.

As I hurtle up the swoop of the main stairs, I listen out for her coming after me, or at least shouting her sorries. But she doesn't come, she doesn't call out.

Now on the first floor of Wilderwood Hall, I hurry past the blank and beat-up “grand” bedrooms, aiming for the panelled door near the far end of the landing that'll take me through to the East Wing, back to the servants' quarters and the sanctuary of my new bedroom.

But before I get there, I see brightness beaming
from
the furthest-away “grand” bedroom. Its doorway faces the panelled one I'm headed for. My heart rate slows, and instead of turning left into the servants' quarters, as I'd planned, I turn right, drawn into the sunbeam room.

Because it's positioned at the corner of the building, it has these big, wide windows on two sides. I drift to the closest and see that it has views of the rooftops of nearby Glenmill – same as my room. The second overlooks the gardens, the driveway, the rusted, wedged-open iron gates, as well as the woods and the snow-capped mountains beyond.

Even with my head filled with muddle and misery, I can't help wondering who might have slept in this room, in the long-ago days when Wilderwood was alive with some fancy rich family and their hard-working staff.

Leaning against a wall that's powdery with old paint, I gaze around for clues, though there's nothing much to see apart from debris on the floor and a hole in the wall where a fireplace must've once stood.

Was this the master bedroom, for Mr Richards – the original landowner – and his wife? Probably not … it's too close to the servants' quarters for
that.
Then perhaps it was a guest room? Or a child's bedroom, or the nursery, maybe?

Then I hear something. A sound, a noise, that's enough to make my rambling thoughts grind to a halt. The noise isn't loud, but in the quiet of this empty room it stands out like a black crow in a snowstorm. It's a noise like the hissing of escaping gas or air. Or some distant, hazy voice that flits by on the radio, when you're trying to find the right station.

OK, OK, I
know
it's only the rush and fizz of my own pounding blood, but – dumbly – I try and listen in to the murmuring hiss, as if I'll somehow be able to decipher it.

Hold still. My breath still too. Tuning in. And then my stomach lurches. I just made out a word in the whisperings.

“
Leave
…”

It's a small voice. A child's.

“
Leave, leave, leave
…” I hear the ever-so-faint, scratchy voice repeat over and over again.

(Whirl, tilt, shift.)

Lurching unsteadily, I make it out of the room and on to the landing – and stop dead.

Directly in front of me is the connecting door to the servants' quarters. Two minutes ago, it was propped open with one of our packing boxes … but now it's closed.

The cream-coloured paint of the door; it's glossy and new, I realize as I walk over to touch it in wonder. It's as new as the ivory wallpaper all the way down the landing, with its pretty pattern of something I think might be honeysuckle. And my feet … my scruffy trainers are standing on something that shouldn't be there.

With my breath caught in my throat, I stare
down
at an ornately patterned long runner of carpet that covers the landing's highly polished dark floorboards.

“
LEAVE!
” I hear a child's voice screech this time.

The voice is coming from behind me in the room, and – completely rigid with shock – I don't know what to do or what to think.

“All right, I'm leaving, I'm leaving…” another voice grumbles in a Scottish accent, and I turn to see a teenage girl coming out of the bedroom behind me, carrying a heavy-looking coal scuttle.

She's wearing the long black dress and the white apron and cap of a servant. She's small and scrawny and doesn't look strong enough to be carrying anything so bulky as that scuttle.

But here's the most important thing about her: she can't be real. I mean, there was no one and
nothing
in that room just now – except for the whisperings in the walls.

Or maybe it's
me
who isn't real…

The girl's just passed so close to me that our shoulders nearly touched, and yet it's as if I'm invisible. She doesn't react to me at all – she only pauses long enough to tuck a stray sweaty curl of brown hair behind her ear and sigh unhappily.

And
now I watch with breath-held, numb curiosity as the servant girl tugs desperately at the handle of a stiff door in the wall just along from me. It's one of those I thought must lead to old storage cupboards when I walked past them earlier. The muscles in her jaw clench as the door handle resists her grip, or maybe it's the high-pitched, bad-tempered squalling of the child back in the bedroom that's causing her stress.

“
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!
”

“Shush that shouting, Master Archibald!” a stern voice now pipes up from the direction of the staircase I hurried up only a few minutes ago.

Frozen as a chill marble statue, I watch horrified as a young woman appears at the top of the stairwell and shuffles daintily along the landing at high speed towards me, only the tips of her black shoes visible under her long grey skirt. She is looking in my direction. I am clearly here.

But it's clear she can't see me either.

And now the grumbling servant girl gives the reluctant door a final, frantic tug and it opens outwards. She hurriedly goes inside, pulling the door closed behind her, brass scuttle clanking.

With the screeching of the child – the
boy
–
continuing,
the young woman lifts her skirts and breaks into as much of a run as her clothing will allow her.

“Stop that noise this instant, Master Archibald – you'll disturb your mamma!” she calls out.

She is so close that I can see the cameo brooch at the high neck of her stiff blouse, the pale silhouette of a girl's face on a terracotta background.

As the woman rustles by me and into the bedroom, I gasp at the small brush of air, the proof of her living, breathing real self.

And as she disappears into the room, the scent of a flowery perfume lingers in her wake.

“But Miss Matilda!” I hear the boy in the bedroom whine. “Flora banged into me and—”

“And you're tittle-tattling on the girl again, Master Archibald. Now let her get on with her work and we'll get on with ours. I would like to hear you recite the alphabet again, please.”

As the boy continues to moan and protest, I feel prickles of pins and needles in my hands and feet, as if I've been suspended in ice-cold water and I'm now warming my way back to life.

With a sudden surge of urgency and sureness, I know I need to get through to the servants' quarters.
I
wrap my tingling fingers around the shiny brass doorknob and feel stupidly grateful as I hear and feel the clunk of the mechanism turn in my hand.

But in the split second before I step through to the other side, something makes me look left, up the long length of the landing. And I see the servant girl, peeking out of the tiniest crack in the cupboard door. Flora, the boy called her.

She is poised at the gap, listening to the griping and grizzling of the spoilt, troublesome little boy, and the telling off he's getting from the woman, who must be his governess.

But Flora isn't just listening; with eyes wide, she's watching too. Watching
me
…

I flatten myself, pressing my whole weight against the connecting door to keep the weirdness safely on the other side.

To stop it following me through to the reassuringly tatty, twenty-first-century servants' quarters.

Because in the here and now, still-unpacked boxes line the corridor – and the normality of that makes me almost giddy with relief.

Just so I'm absolutely sure that I'm definitely, positively, safely back in the present day, I turn my head left and get a glimpse inside the dusty, drab room where our old futon is plonked. At the sight of it, I get a flash of memory, an image of the moment I spilt blackcurrant juice on it, when I'd
jumped
at a “scary” moment in
Scooby-Doo
years ago.