The Silence of Ghosts Page 20

  The children play a game they call Maculell. It is a dance performed with sticks, that bears great similarity to our country Morris dances, but the children say they were taught this dance for entertainment by a black slave they knew in Portugal. And they do not always dance themselves, but use fome rag dolls with their features painted black, like they were black fellows from the Africas or the Brazils. They hold the dolls and speak to them as they speak to thofe others, and fometimes they do paint their own faces, as it were in a masque. And then they do sometimes dance on their bare feet, and the sound of their bal mafqué, with the clacking of sticks and the beating of their feet comes down from the attic loud enough to awaken the dead.

  ‘Sir, the dance is called maculelé. It is still danced by the descendants of the African slaves in Brazil.’

  ‘Dominic, please.’

  I told him about the dancing children I had seen in the house, their stamping feet and twirling and beating of sticks.

  ‘And is that it?’ I asked.

  ‘Not quite. You say you smelled something like bodies of the dead in Hallinhag House?

  ‘Yes, on one evening in particular.’

  ‘Let me explain to you what they brought in with the port. William imported corpses, mostly nailed up inside casks that had been used for port. No customs inspector ever asked a question. The corpses came from contacts of his around Europe, from France, Portugal and Spain, and they were transported to Ullswater. I believe they were kept in the attic, and that the children lived with them. Some were mummified, others trussed up in burlap sacks. Others came from friends of William’s in Britain.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, with horror. ‘Why would anyone collect corpses? I just can’t see the point of it.’

  ‘They were for the children. The children spoke to them and asked questions, and the corpses answered, answers from beyond the grave. It was a power the children had or had been taught. They were “ghost talkers”: that’s what William calls them. His Portuguese correspondents call them much the same: faladores de fantasmas. The dead would speak, and those who had reason would write down questions for the children. “Where is the gold, where are my mother’s jewels, where did you put your last will and testament?” What’s more, it worked. Secrets were revealed that could have come from no other source. Some of William’s circle wanted more, of course. The mysteries of the universe, the secrets of the human soul. They had disinterred bodies belonging to philosophers, poets and even saints. Either the children couldn’t handle that sort of material or ghosts know no more than we do and refused to answer.’

  ‘And you think these mummies were kept in an attic at Hallinhag.’

  ‘There’s no doubt about the attic, Dominic, and there’s no doubt that it was boxed in at some point. We just have to use the architect’s drawings I found earlier and work out how to get at the attic.’

  ‘We’ll start in the morning,’ I said. ‘I’ll find some builders.’

  Cecil shook his head.

  ‘Not a good idea. If they find anything, word of it will be round Howtown and Pooley Bridge in an hour, and in Keswick and Penrith in another, and before you know it the local press will force their way in with cameras and sharp-nosed reporters. Then it will be on the radio. Dominic, while the war is on, the press are desperate for domestic stories. This would keep them going for weeks. It’s not good for the business, or your future family.’

  ‘Then what do you suggest?’

  ‘Get us all together, you, me, the doc and the minister. It shouldn’t be hard work, trust me.’

  ‘The morning, then. We’ll do it together.’

  Monday, 13 January

  Waking the next morning, we found that the temperature had risen a little and the lake had shed its ice. We – Rose, myself, Dr Raverat, Cecil and the Reverend Braithwaite – all piled into the two cars belonging to the doctor and the vicar and set off south along the lake’s edge. We knew we were taking a risk, since the road was still much covered in snow and slippery with ice. We went equipped with crowbars, hammers and an axe I found in Jeanie’s shed. She asked no questions about the nature of our expedition.

  We arrived outside the house without mishap. No lamps were lit, but the front door was open. I pushed it back further, and we could see that snow had blown into the wide hallway and icicles had formed everywhere.

  We all got inside and I closed the door. It fell to with a heavy bang. I shivered, grateful for the light that came through the windows. It was all familiar, yet unfamiliar. Things had happened here that I will never forget so long as I live.

  We were all waiting for something. A sound, the image of a dead child, dancing slaves, the beating of a drum, voices, whispers, the high voices of children caught between death and the end of death, fear creeping across the floor on muffled feet, a pounding of feet on the stairs, cold creeping round our necks like a noose of ice, eyes in the darkness looking at us without compassion or guilt, the cold hands of ghost talkers, their whispers and the whispers of their dead . . .

  I opened the door of the dining room. No one was there. But on the table I noticed a jigsaw of Octavia’s. When we had last been here, the puzzle had been half-finished. Now it was complete.

  ‘Octavia?’ I asked. ‘Are you here?’

  Nothing. A perfect silence. Rose took me away. I was clumsy on my leg.

  ‘My leg,’ I said. ‘It hurts like hell.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she replied. ‘I’ll look at it once we’re done. Dr Raverat’s here. He can give you some morphia. Is it bad enough for that?’

  I nodded, and Raverat came with his bag and his needle and a smile on his face as he injected me. Minutes passed and the pain was gone, but I felt a little groggy. Rose kissed my forehead. Her face spun for a moment, then cleared. She took my hand. The others were standing in the doorway.

  We went all through the ground floor. Apart from the bitter cold, all was just as it had been.

  We headed for the stairs. The treads creaked, and I heard whispers above my head. The doctor went first, then Oliver and Cecil. Rose and I came last.

  As we got to the top, I started to feel dizzy. The morphia was making me feel drowsy. There was a chair on the landing. I sat down and felt myself spin off into a half-dreaming half-awake state, and as I did so I could see dancing figures in a haze, their faces blackened as before, turning in the dance like rag dolls with wooden hands and wooden feet and eyes that were always turned towards me. They danced in my direction but never came any closer. I shouted at them to go back, but they kept on coming without ever reaching me.

  Then the dancing men grew smaller and smaller and faded, and when I came to Rose was kneeling beside me, holding my hand and whispering softly in my ear. Dr Raverat was there.

  ‘I think we’ve got to get you back home,’ he said. ‘The rest of us can manage here. Oliver will drive you back.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I won’t go back till I’ve seen what’s up here. It was just too much morphia. It has happened before, Rose can tell you. I’ll be fine.’

  Raverat seemed sceptical, but he looked at my eyes with the help of a tiny torch he always carried.

  ‘Very well, but please be careful. If there are any shocks, tell Rose or one of us to get you down and outside.’

  Rose helped me round, and I soon gained strength. The top floor was as I remembered it from my earlier stays. Bedrooms ready for occupation, a large bathroom and toilet, some cupboards, five electric heaters. The bedrooms contained beds that were all in serious need of an airing. There were photographs on the bedside tables, and oil lamps, and paintings on the wall showing the first signs of damp.

  Without the drawings, we should have been forced to tear down most of the walls in order to find a way into the attic space, but they showed very clearly where the attics had been. We focused on a broad expanse of wall next to the master bedroom. If the drawing was right, this would be where the stairs had been. Very old wallpaper in a pattern of Chinese bir
ds ran across this entire section. We scraped it off and found planking underneath. It was simply a matter of using the crowbars and hammers to pull back the planks. With two or three out of the way, I was able to put a torch into the space. Right behind it lay a short flight of wooden steps, exactly as we had anticipated. We forced the other planks from the horizontal struts on to which they had been nailed. The struts themselves came away easily. It had fallen completely silent. I could hear nothing but the sound of my own breathing. I realized I was sweating in spite of the cold. With one hand I loosened my scarf. Then I shone my torch onto the steep stairwell. Oliver and Dr Raverat switched on their torches as well. All along and above the stairs was a wash of cobwebs, but there were few spiders among them. The space had been shut off for a very long time, and I could not think how spiders might have survived there without prey to feed on.

  Rose had found a witch’s broom downstairs and used it now to clear the stairway. We went up slowly, one stair at a time, and in a very short time I found myself face to face with a wooden door. It was grimy. In front of me was a handwritten inscription bearing a single word. I read it out letter by letter while Cecil wrote it down. I guessed it was Portuguese. The word was Aleijadinhos.

  ‘I came across this in several letters from Sir William,’ Cecil said. ‘Literally, it means “little cripples”, but somehow it became a sort of slang for lepers. The formal word would be leprosos nowadays, but aleijadinho was current in William’s day.’

  A crowbar took care of the lock, which swung away from us. We stepped inside, one at a time. As I came through the door, I felt lightheaded again. But I knew I was at the heart of this thing. I took a step forward and let the beam of my torch go all the way to the other end of the attic. I heard a tapping, like the feet of tap dancers or Irish dancers. But this was more staccato. It would break off for long moments, then resume, then stop again. As my torch travelled round the long room, I saw something. I halted the torch and looked more closely, and my heart almost gave out. I heard Rose gasp with horror, then the doctor, then Oliver and Cecil.

  Everywhere I looked was a tumble of coffins and corpses, some mummified, some skeletons, many clothed in mouldering habits, the treasure trove of one man’s obsession with the dreams of the dead, the febrile nightmares of the departed. They filled the attic. Some corpses sat on chairs, wisps of hair on their bald pates, their jaws fallen, others lay half in, half out of their coffins, yet others had been wrapped in burlap and tied up with string.

  I noticed an array of four mummified bodies dressed in eighteenth-century clothes, and in the same moment I realized they were no bigger than children. I looked more closely and saw that one was dressed in the grave clothes that had appeared in Rose’s photograph of Clara. Three had long hair, the fourth was almost bald, and only one wore boy’s clothes. Four dolls with black faces lay next to them. Rose squeezed my hand so hard her nails dug into my palm.

  I had expected to see the children themselves, or other figures raised by the ghost talkers out of their own sleep, but none appeared. I was horrified by the possibility that Octavia’s spirit could be here, condemned to lie in this long room with the other lepers. The children perhaps.

  Just as I thought we should turn and board this charnel-house up again, something moved at the far end. I strained to see, and slowly a figure came into view, a phantom illuminated by the light of my torch.

  It was a man in eighteenth-century clothes. He wore a black justaucorps, a gilet, also black, a lawn cravat in the Steenkerk fashion, a bourse wig tied back with a black ribbon, a small black tricorne hat and black shoes with low heels and silver buckles. The very height of fashion, or so it seemed to me. He carried a thin-bladed sword at his waist and a silver-topped cane in his right hand. I could have recognized him anywhere.

  He looked at me appraisingly, standing cocksure and arrogant in front of me.

  ‘You must be Sir Dominic,’ he said. ‘I am Sir William Lancaster, your many times grandfather. Have you found what you were looking for here, or is this all a disappointment? Do tell me. I’d love to have a short conversation. I fear you’ve grown disillusioned with me. You think this was evil. You believe I am to be reprimanded on account of what has happened here. But these are mere mortal remains. You will find the like in any country churchyard or in the crypt of any large church or cathedral. No one pays them heed. No one gives them gratuitous attention. Yet some are murderers, some have been brought to the hangman’s noose, others to the executioner’s sword, some innocent yet put to death, others steeped in sin and properly hanged and quartered. You say nothing of those, yet here you protest that something evil has been done. Fie on you for a mawkish, condoling buffoon.’

  I said nothing. What can one say to the dead? He was the picture of elegance, a doyen of wit, and clearly my father’s predecessor, yet underneath he was but a rotting carcass, and beneath that he had a heart as black and unfeeling as any you might hope to find with Adolf Hitler and his circle of the damned. I had always boasted that I did not believe in hell, but now I hoped for it, hoped that William Lancaster and his associates might tumble into its deepest pit. And then I guessed that they might be in hell already. I could almost smell the faggots burning.

  I called to the others, and I could see they were as eager as I was to get out of there. They joined me, and we locked the door, shutting the attic away from sight. We hurried back down the stairway, bunched together. I told them what I wanted to do and, though reluctant, they helped me nail the boards back in place. They went back firmly, and when we had finished it was hard to see any difference from the way the wall was now and how it was when we arrived. All it needed was some wallpaper to turn it back to what was there before.

  It was silent behind the wall and door. A perfect silence had fallen on the house, a silence of ghosts quiet as the corpses in their graves, as quiet as the bones in the attic. The silence of ghosts. With each other they never talk, they never sing. With the living, they whisper in our ears and scream in our heads.

  We left and the cold air licked at our wounds. There was nothing more I could do. I no longer had the strength, my thoughts could take no more of it. I needed to think of Rose and the life I would live with her.

  Saturday, 10 May

  There have been large air raids on Barrow for several days now. The German planes pass over the lakes, and the booming of their engines puts fear into all our hearts. There’s a special service in the church tomorrow, to pray for our neighbours over there and to remember the many who have died. We dare not show a light now, for fear an over-hasty German bomber gets it into his head and presses the button to send a torrent of Sprengbrand C50 incendiaries on top of Pooley Bridge. It will soon be time to leave Ullswater and return to London.

  Rose and I were married last Sunday, on a gloriously sunny day. We had guests from Pooley Bridge, Howtown and beyond, and there was barely enough room in the church for everyone. Oliver Braithwaite married us, as we had asked him to, and Hugh Raverat gave Rose away. Jeanie sat in the front pew and cried her eyes out, as is only natural. That same day, Jeanie went off on a holiday, to stay with relatives in Keswick, who took her there in their car.

  She left us her cottage to stay in for our honeymoon, and we’ve barely set foot outside. The baker leaves a loaf of bread, the dairy farmer bottles of milk, and the grocer everything else we need. We just leave our ration books on the doorstep, and a basket for the groceries. We are in perfect heaven.

  And when we’re in bed and I run my hands along her naked back, I feel nothing but her skin. The fear has gone.

  We have done what we can down at Hallinhag House. Oliver Braithwaite said prayers for all those who had died, nameless and faceless, before being left in that attic of horrors. I have done with the house now and will leave it to return to the silence I found it in.

  Octavia’s tombstone was made of local granite and inscribed by a stonemason from Penrith. She sleeps in silence now, like those other dead. I no longer dream of dancing men
and I do not hear the stamping of children’s feet as they dance the maculelé. Hallinhag House sits where it has been for centuries, its rooms empty, its windows unpolished, shunned by young and old. The people of Howtown know only that it has a bad reputation. But some of us know better.

  Afterword by Charles Lancaster

  So, it falls to me to have the last word. What sort of inheritance will I leave to my children? A truncated history of their ancestors and their doings? Images of our family’s graves, a rattling of Lancaster bones shaken by our living hands in their sealed sarcophagi or little ossuaries. Shall I leave them a house that is haunted, shall I bring them into the company of ghosts, remind them that the dead can speak, the dead can scream, the dead can kill?

  Little William is five, his sister Octavia is twice his age, somewhere around the age Dominic’s sister had reached when she died. He had told me her name and that she had been profoundly deaf and that she had died young. To me, my children are immortal. I talked to Jess about it yesterday. She agrees. We both know that our children will die one day, but we are confident that neither of us will still be alive when that moment comes. Of course, we may be wrong. There are accidents, diseases, unlawful killings, attacks by wild animals, drownings, fire and all the many incidents to which we humans are always exposed. We pray not, and every night we watch over them.

  I met Octavia again three weeks ago, when I went to Hallinhag. For the last time, perhaps.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ I asked, and I was trembling because I knew all too well who she was and what she was.

  She nodded. ‘You must be my brother’s grandson. You are one of us. One of the family.’

  ‘Dominic and Rose were my grandparents. Rose died a few years ago, and Dominic after her.’