The Whispering House (3 page)

Chapter Four

The Attic

T
HE NEXT THING SHE
was conscious of was what sounded like the persistent wailing of a young child just below her window. Getting out of bed, she peered out the window to see a grayish, murky daylight with a fine drizzle falling and Toby having a standoff with a rangy-looking ginger tomcat. She glanced at her watch. Eight thirty. So she must have fallen asleep again, eventually.

Hannah showered and dressed, wondering why the house was so quiet, until she remembered that her mother had taken Dad to the airport and wouldn't be back until the afternoon. As she crossed the upstairs landing, her eye fell on the door of the locked bedroom. What was behind that door? Probably four damp walls and a lot of flaking plaster, she told herself firmly.

The dull paintwork had a depressing feel in this light, and she wandered disconsolately downstairs to the pale, tidy kitchen that now smelled faintly of bleach and poured herself a bowl of cereal.

Afterward, she went into the living room to do some studying. Searching in her schoolbag for a textbook, she noticed, with a mixture of amusement and irritation, one of Sam's paper airplanes at the bottom. There was no point throwing it away just now—she'd do a real clear out later, if she had time.

After working steadily for an hour on some geography notes, she felt more cheerful and rewarded herself with a mug of hot chocolate and a couple of cookies, pleased that her mother wasn't there to comment on the probable effect on her waistline.

Now for some biology. She opened the textbook and began to read.

Photosynthesis is the way a plant makes food for itself. Chlorophyll in the green part of the leaves captures energy from the sunlight, which powers the building of food from carbon dioxide and water.

Green leaves. Sunlight. Why that sudden prickle of unease? She stood up and walked to the window. The drizzle was still falling. Sitting down again, she tried to concentrate on work, but the edginess refused to go, making her get up from time to time to wander restlessly around the room.

When the doorbell rang, she almost jumped out of her skin. She froze for a moment, then walked nervously across the hallway and opened the door a couple of inches.

Sam stood on the step.

Hannah opened the door wide, and he walked in, carrying a cellophane-wrapped bunch of purple tulips. “From my mom,” he said, holding the flowers at arm's length as if he wanted to get rid of them as soon as possible. “Housewarming present.”

“Thanks.” Hannah grinned and took the flowers from him.

He glanced speculatively at the mug on the table. “Hot chocolate?”

“Sure. And I'll have some more to keep you company.” She resolutely dismissed the image of her mother's outraged stare and led him into the kitchen, where she got the milk out of the refrigerator and put it in a saucepan on the stove, arranging the flowers in a vase while it heated up.

Five minutes later they were back in the living room, the tin of cookies on the table between them, and Hannah wondered why she'd ever been spooked by a biology textbook.

“Nice place.” He glanced around him, sipping noisily.

“It's okay. A bit small.” Then she felt guilty, remembering the apartment, half the size of this, where Sam lived with his parents and younger brother and sister, who were twins. “We've got too much furniture. And there's no garage or shed. That's why it feels small.”

He finished his drink and stood up. “Come on, then. Give me that guided tour.”

“Okay. We may as well start with the garden. There's not much to see, but never mind.” She opened the French doors at the end of the room and led him down some stone steps onto a small terrace, beyond which was an overgrown lawn surrounded by borders that clearly hadn't been weeded for a long time. Just beyond the terrace, facing the house, was a slatted wooden bench with ornate wrought-iron armrests. Until that moment, Hannah hadn't noticed that it was odd that the bench was facing the house when it would surely have been more natural that it should look out onto the garden. But then, she thought, just now the garden was hardly worth looking at. In any case, Sam showed little interest, so she took him back into the house.

The other room on the ground floor had the same cream-painted walls and beige carpet as the one they'd been sitting in, and both rooms had high mantel-pieces above what must once have been handsome fireplaces but were now, like the one in Hannah's bedroom, boarded up. In the first room, a modern electric heater stood in the hearth. Here, someone had tried unsuccessfully to liven up the blank board with a vase of dusty dried flowers. In both cases the effect was depressing. Hannah and Sam didn't stay long.

The predictably beige-colored staircase led to a landing with four doors leading off it. Hannah showed him the bathroom, the large room at the front that her parents slept in, and the smaller one at the back, which was hers.

When they came to the fourth door, Sam tried it and frowned. “Why's this one locked?”

“We're not allowed to use it. The real estate agent has the key.”

“What's in there?”

“I've no idea. Like I said, we don't have the key.”

He looked at her as if she'd said that she was sitting in the dark because she couldn't figure out how to use the light switch. “Do you own a screwdriver?”

“I guess so. Dad was using one to fix a hinge on a cupboard last night.” She went back down to the kitchen and returned with a toolbox.

Sam ran a professional eye over the assembled contents and selected a small screwdriver.

“What are you going to do?”

“Unscrew the lock, of course.”

“But the agent said not to use that room.”

“Well, we're not going to use it, are we? We're just going to take a look inside.”

“Maybe they have a reason for not wanting us to go in,” she said lamely, but she knew when she was beaten, and in any case, Sam had already loosened all four screws and was carefully removing the lock. He laid it on the floor, tipped the screws inside, and pushed open the door.

A first glance told them there was nothing sinister in that room, unless you counted bare floorboards and discolored walls as sinister. In shape it was very like its opposite number on the other side of the landing, the one taken by her parents, except that it was slightly larger and had two windows, not one, which gave it a lighter, more welcoming feel. The smell of mildew was unpleasant, though, and the room felt cold.

“Let's go,” Hannah said, shivering. “There's nothing to see in here. The real estate agent was right—it's just storm damaged. I guess the roof has leaked sometime.”

“Mmm.” Sam ran his hand over a gray-mottled wall. “This paper looks likes it's as old as the house. You can feel the plaster underneath.”

She noticed that the walls had been stripped down, leaving a faint pattern of very pale pink stripes on what would once have been a creamy background, maybe. It was hard to tell in some places, but in others the damage wasn't so bad, and the wall opposite the front window was in fair condition. You could even see the darker squares and rectangles where somebody had once hung pictures. There was something faintly indecent about those marks. It was as though the house, elsewhere so clean and primly covered up, here was revealed in its grubby underwear. She shivered again. “Come on. It's freezing in here.”

“Do you want me to put the lock back?” he asked when they were outside.

“Wait till Mom gets home. She might think it's okay to store stuff in there. I don't see that the house people can object to that, if we're prepared to take the risk. We're really short of space here.”

“Isn't there an attic?”

“I don't think so. No one ever said anything about an attic.”

“There may be a trapdoor,” he said, thoughtfully scanning the landing ceiling, but it was smooth and bare and innocent of trapdoors. He walked slowly along the hall, then stopped outside the door to Hannah's bedroom.

“Ha!” He smiled proudly, and she noticed for the first time that just to the left of the door was a strip of board, about six feet high and a couple of feet wide, screwed to the wall and painted over in the same cream color as the rest of the landing, which was presumably why she hadn't noticed it before.

“Can there be another locked room behind there?” She didn't know whether to be scared or excited.

“Doubt it. It must be covering up something, though. Oh, well.” He grinned cheerfully. “Only one way to find out!” And before Hannah could stop him, he had run back to the toolbox and returned with another screwdriver—bigger this time—and set to work.

Remembering his father's previous occupation, she found herself wondering if Mr. Fallon had taught his son to see all barred entrances as a challenge, or if he was just biologically programmed that way.

Even once the screws were out, the board was difficult to dislodge, and in the end Sam had to run the blade of a knife around it before it eventually came unstuck, slightly damaging the paintwork as it did so.

“I hope they don't take that off the deposit,” she said dubiously.

“No problem. There's a can of this paint in that room you're not supposed to use. Down on the floor by the door. You can touch it up later.”

Hannah wasn't sure if her mother would necessarily feel that redecorating the house was a small price to pay for possible extra storage space, but now Sam had eased the board away from the wall to reveal a proper door behind it. It was painted a dark brown, was very dirty, and had a couple of small holes in the woodwork where the lock and handle had been removed.

“Got a coat hanger?” asked Sam.

Since they'd come as far as this, there seemed little point in stopping now, so Hannah reluctantly fetched the already-bent wire hanger she'd used to fish for the book of fairy tales. “Just remember this wasn't my idea. Okay?” she muttered.

But Sam wasn't listening. He'd inserted the end of the wire hook into the keyhole and was tugging like mad. Suddenly the door shot open, knocking him backward with such force that he cannoned into Hannah and they both landed on the floor in a shower of dust.

“Sorry about that. You okay?” He coughed.

“Just a couple of broken bones and a dislocated shoulder. Nothing serious.” She rubbed her arm and stood up, brushing the dust out of her hair. “Seems like you got the door open, at any rate.”

They were looking at a flight of uncarpeted stairs that led straight upward to the left, and to what looked like another door at the top.

Sam turned to her, his eyes alight with triumph. “What did I tell you? Every house has an attic!”

He hadn't told her anything of the kind, but she ignored this, as now he was making his way up the steps at as fast a pace as the absence of light would allow, and she seemed to have no choice but to follow. She couldn't help remembering the time, a year and a half ago, when they had discovered another staircase—one that had led down, not up. She had followed him then too. She tried to banish this thought from her mind.

The door at the top of the stairs didn't have a handle either, and it was already slightly ajar. Sam pushed it open, and they walked into a long, narrow room with a sloping ceiling and a grubby casement window with a pane of glass missing. In one corner of the windowsill were half a dozen dead flies. It was hard to see what else was in the room, as everything was covered in a thick, greasy coating of black dust and cobwebs, which concealed its identity as effectively as snow.

When Sam put out a hand to brush away the mess, they discovered a couple of old fire grates, a rusty, tub-shaped object, and a small bathtub lying on its side, displaying clawed feet. The only other contents of the room lay just inside the door or propped against the wall, and seemed to be odds and ends of timber and pieces of broken masonry.

“Doesn't look like anyone's been up here for years,” said Sam. “All this junk's ancient.”

“There's some space, though. It could be used for storage, I suppose, but I'm not sure Mom will want to.” Hannah wrinkled her nose and sneezed. “This dust's getting to me. Let's go down.”

“Wait a minute. There's something here. . . .” Sam bent down and reached into the pile of timber. When he straightened up, she saw that he was holding a shallow wooden box.

“What's that?”

“Not sure. Can't see how it opens. Oh. I get it.” Applying slight pressure to the lid of the box, Sam slid it fractionally aside. “It's stuck,” he muttered. “There are grooves on the inside for the lid to run on, but they're clogged with dirt.”

“Can't you get it out?”

“Maybe.” Grunting with the effort, he pushed hard on the lid, and it suddenly slid out of its grooves altogether, almost scattering about a dozen colored tablets. “What are they?” he asked, mystified. “Soap?”

Hannah peered closely, running her finger over one of the tablets. “They're paints! Watercolors. This box is wooden, though, not metal or plastic, so they must be old.”

“They're also probably useless. Shall I leave it here?”

“I suppose so.” But she continued to look at the little tablets thoughtfully. “That's odd. Whoever used these paints must have had a liking for gloomy subjects.”

“Why?”

“Because the bright colors haven't been touched. But the dark blue, the black, and the indigo are almost completely used up.”

Sam shrugged. “Since whoever used them probably died years ago, I don't see it matters much.” He put the box down on the floor and moved toward the staircase. Hannah was about to follow, giving a final glance around the room, when she spotted something lying in the dust beneath the window.

It was a very small hand. And it was attached to a very small body.

For a moment she stood there, frozen in horror. She couldn't even scream. Then, slowly, she breathed out, as she realized that what she was looking at wasn't the mummified corpse of a baby, but a doll.