Tomorrow morning, if the weather held, the sun would be shining directly down those steps. The door could wait until then. But I would sleep better tonight if I checked the planchette first. I hastened back up to the dining-room for another-well, two more healthy slugs of Braveheart and strode purposefully across the landing to the library, taking the bottle with me.
The stack of butcher's paper on the table was exactly where I had left it. There was my question: WHO IS MY PENFRIEND?
But the planchette was no longer beneath the 'W', and even without the torch, the faint, looping reply was clear enough:
Miss Jessel
I was still in the tunnel, trying to find the basement stairs, but I couldn't see where I was going because someone was shining a light in my face. The light grew brighter until it hurt my head, which was propped at an uncomfortable angle. And someone was calling-no, whispering-my name.
I was lying on the chesterfield below the library windows, with a full moon shining down into my eyes. And a blurred recollection of having drunk too much whisky much too quickly.
'Gerard.'
A slow, insinuating whisper, making two long syllables of my name. It seemed to hang in the air above my head. The moon was painfully bright: everything else was in darkness.
'Ger-ard.'
I lifted my head slightly, trying to locate the sound. Pain shot through my forehead; the moon wavered and lurched.
'Close your eyes, Gerard. You're dreaming.'
I had had dreams before in which I dreamed I woke up, but never as real as this. My throat was parched; my tongue felt sore and swollen.
'I wouldn't try to run if I were you. You're dreaming; you don't know what you might meet.'
The voice was coming from the direction of the gallery.
'Who are you?' It came out as a hoarse croak; I hadn't meant to speak.
'You know who I am'-intimate, caressing-'but you can call me Alice if you like.'
I must wake up. I must wake up. I heard a cry that might have been 'Alice?' and realised it was me.
'I know everything about you, Gerard. You're dreaming, remember; I'm inside your head. Closer than your heartbeat, you might say.'
Another incoherent sound.
'Why don't you ask me something? I'm dead, you know. The dead know everything.'
This is a terrible hallucination. I must wake up.
'Wouldn't you like to ask me about Anne?' the whispering voice insinuated. 'She left you a message last night. She's dead, of course, but you know all about that. You've seen the scratches in the cupboard.'
'Who are you?'
'That would be telling, wouldn't it? I might be you.'
'Me?'
'That's very good, Gerard. I might be you. Or Hugh. I might be Hugh Montfort.'
The whispering lingered on the last two syllables. There was no sound of breathing, only soft, insinuating words floating in darkness.
We're all dead, you see. Filly killed us all, one by one. Hugh too. She killed Hugh too, Gerard, you just don't know it yet. And soon, very soon, we'll be together for ever and ever.
'You can go back to sleep now Gerard. Sweet dreams.'
The moon still shone through my eyelids. A barred shadow touched my face. I shot bolt upright with a shriek that rang and reverberated around the library and died to a slow drip, drip, drip somewhere beneath the couch. I had lost control of my bladder.
The barred shadow had been thrown by the casement half-way up the window. Slowly, the library beyond the small moonlit area around me began to materialise. I stumbled the few steps from the couch to the table and snatched up the torch.
There was no one on the gallery.
Following the quivering patch of light through the darkness to the front door, with a hundred malignant eyes playing up and down my spine, was almost as terrifying as listening to the voice in the dark. I walked all the way down through Camden to the hotel and arrived at three in the morning, smelling like an incontinent drunk but cold, shivering sober. Even the headache had gone. I showered and made tea and stood at the window, staring down at the yellow vapour lights ranged along the bleak expanse of Euston Road.
I had been awake when I heard the voice. No point pretending otherwise. And no one could have got into the house; not even, to be totally paranoid for a moment, Alice. She didn't have keys, and I hadn't told her about the black thread.
Either my mind was coming apart, or I'd been listening to a real ghost. Though when you thought about it, there wasn't much difference. The voice was part of me; it had said so; it knew everything about me. It knew about Alice; it knew about Filly. It was the embodiment-the disembodiment-of all my worst fears, an escaped nightmare, loose in the house.
You don't know what you might meet. The veiled woman on the gallery. I'd been awake then too.
When we first began writing, Alice had often said that her parents were watching over her, that they appeared to her in dreams, not just as memories but as actual beings. Every emotion, she thought, left some trace in the material world. Ghosts appeared wherever those traces were concentrated, but only certain people could perceive them, and only when they were alone and quiet.
Ghosts or hallucinations-did it make any difference what you called them? The whispering had certainly started in my head. It had been lurking there most of my life; ever since that hot January afternoon in Mawson when I first saw the photograph and Mother stopped talking about Staplefield. And now it had got out of my head and on to the gallery, and I had nearly died of terror, and there was absolutely no limit to what might happen, or what I might meet, if I went back to Ferrier's Close alone.
A police car went tearing west, no siren, red and blue lights flashing wildly.
So far the-manifestations-had been confined to the house, but if something truly monstrous appeared, how did I know it wouldn't cross the threshold? Or walk into this hotel room and send me running head-first through the window rather than meet it face to face?
And supposing Alice came with me to the house, would she hear what I heard, see what I saw? I might believe I was trying to save her from some nightmare creature when I was actually strangling her. All of my doubts and suspicions about Alice might be symptoms of incipient madness.
I remembered the story of the iron bedstead sailing across the empty dormitory, the appalling crash when it hit the wall. The image was still as vivid as if I'd been there myself. If a roomful of troubled adolescents could generate that much psychic energy, why couldn't one very troubled thirty-five-year-old man cause a planchette to move by itself: when he was somewhere else in the house, perhaps, upstairs in another room? I liked that even less than the idea of whispering voices escaping from my head.
How could I be sure Alice would ever be safe with me?
Filly killed us all, one by one. Hugh too. Filly killed Hugh too, Gerard, you just don't know it yet. Or had it said 'you too'?
The dead know everything. No: these were my own worst fears running wild, not the words of an omniscient ghost, and to prove it, maybe even to save my sanity, I would have to prove the voice wrong. Search the deaths in Family Records this morning for Hugh Montfort-as well as the searches I'd already planned for him. Renew my reader's ticket and search The Times on microfilm in the new British Library for any mention of Anne Hatherley or Hugh Montfort. Find out where lists of missing persons were kept. No more speculation.
Another police car hurtled past, heading towards King's Cross.
The police had searched the house; Miss Hamish had said so. I knew her letter almost by heart, but I got it out anyway, to check her exact wording. 'They found nothing amiss, and concluded that Anne had simply packed her things, locked up the house and left.'
I wondered if they had opened the padlocked door in the basement.
I stayed up until well after dawn writing to Alice, telling her as dispassionately as I could manage everything that had happened since my last message, and what I feared might be happening to my mind. Meeting at the house, I said at the end, would be a very bad idea; I would go anywhere she chose, but not Ferrier's Close. I lay down on the bed, not expecting to sleep until the alarm dragged me out of a black, dreamless void.