Gethsemane Hall (11 page)

The northwest doorway brought them to the staircase hall and another change in style. The fireplace and panelling in the Great Hall, Gray explained, were Elizabethan. The staircase was Jacobean. A grotesque, snarling face stared back at Meacham from the newel post. Its features bore the anger of a defeated enemy. Gray started up the stairs. “I’ll show you your rooms,” he said.

“What’s through there?” Corderman asked. He was standing by the hall’s other doorway, peering into gloom.

“The crypt,” Gray said. He didn’t come back down the stairs.

“Can we check it out?” Corderman was shifting from foot to foot, drawn by Gothic stone, seduced even more by the evocative name of the room.

Gray hesitated, then shrugged. “Of course,” he said. He followed as they entered the crypt, but Meacham saw him hang back by the entrance.

The room was ancient emptiness. Meacham couldn’t see the interest beyond the obvious ghost story atmosphere. Then Pertwee squealed. “There’s a cold spot!” she said, as if it were the bestest Christmas ever. She was standing beneath the central keystone, spreading her arms in ecstasy. She was also shivering. “Really strong,” she murmured. Christmas and birthday combined. She shot an accusing look at Gray. “Didn’t you know this was here?” Gray shrugged again. He was watching Pertwee intently, as if expecting her to combust. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she demanded.

“I think,” Crawford said, “that he’s letting us gather our own first impressions of the Hall.”

“Free of suggestion,” Sturghill put in.

“I’m not imagining this,” Pertwee said. She moved aside. “Go ahead, you try.”

Crawford stepped forward. He froze, his eyes startled wide. Pertwee’s smile was told-you-so. Christmas and birthday and summer vacation all in one. Crawford jumped back, stared at the spot he’d been standing. He reached forward. He snatched his hand back, bitten, then tried again. He kept his hand out this time. Meacham watched him work to reacquire his composure, recapture the scientist and tamp down the freaked-out caveman. “Very striking,” he said.

“Well?” Pertwee asked. “Explain that away.”

“I’m not drawing any conclusions until I’ve examined the phenomenon properly. You won’t mind if I don’t completely ditch the scientific method? Ta, darling.”

Pertwee reddened, embarrassed and annoyed, eyes to the floor. Meacham thought the ghost hunter’s anger was aimed as much at herself as at Crawford.
No shortcuts if you want to be taken seriously, honey
, she thought. Then she waded into the spot herself, while she was still feeling snarky.

It was like opening a door to January. There was no transition. The air around Meacham went from room temperature to numbing in an eye-blink switch. The cold sucked at her, trying to pull her down through the floor. Her heart stopped, then sprinted loud and hard. The rules of her universe were broken. She wanted to run. She made herself stay put.
Environmental conditions
, she reminded herself.
You don’t know what’s going on, so you want to howl and pray to the dragon not to eat the sun.
She was used to being out of the loop. Her years at the Agency had taught her this was a normal state of affairs. No matter how much you thought you knew, there was always a whole new realm of magical and incomprehensible manoeuvring going on above you. And the wizards were always just as stupid and venal and human as everybody else. They just had better intel and leverage. She fought down the urge to exclaim. She said, “Pretty weird,” and that was good enough. She let someone else try the ride.

Gray was frowning. “You’re all just experiencing cold?” he asked.

Sturghill, checking things out, yelped and laughed and nodded.

“Nothing else?”

Heads shaking.
What more was he expecting?
Meacham wondered.

“What did you experience?” Pertwee asked.

Gray didn’t answer. He turned and headed back up the stairs again. They followed, and he brought them to the Old Chapel. “While you’re at it,” he said, and he gestured for them to enter. His face was unreadable.

Corderman scampered forward, first one in, no rotten egg. He stopped with a jerk and a yelp. He pumped his fist. “Found it!” he yelled, victor of the scavenger hunt.

Give the boy a balloon,
Meacham thought. But he was right. There was another cold spot here. Even knowing what to expect, it was still a shock when she touched it. It didn’t seem as cold as the one in the crypt. She said so.

“You’re right,” Pertwee said, too excited to worry about agreeing with the CIA bogeywoman. She looked around the room, measuring the spot’s distance from the outside wall. “Isn’t it directly above the one downstairs?” she asked. When Gray nodded, she said, “Have you explored any deeper?”

“There’s a basement?” Meacham asked, surprised.

“No,” said Gray.

“There are caverns,” Pertwee declared.

Gray rolled his eyes. “That’s folklore.”

“What,” Meacham demanded, “are you two talking about?”

“Saint Rose lived on this site,” Pertwee explained, “but not in this house. It wasn’t built yet. There was a grotto on the grounds, and it led to a network of caves big enough to live in. She worked and ate and slept there. The caves became a pilgrimage site. People would come —”

“— from miles around to hear her preach,” Gray finished, adding a sing-song rhythm to the cliché. “The saintly hermit in a cave. Can you imagine anything more picturesque? I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there are no underground shrines here.”

“You can’t prove that,” Pertwee said.

“I don’t have to prove a negative. I think I would know if such a thing existed.”

“Have you ever looked? Haven’t you ever noticed any architectural anomalies?”

“No,” Gray said, but Meacham thought he hesitated for a fraction of a second. “Now if you’re done playing, I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

There were four bedrooms linked to each other off the Old Chapel, and a fifth that had a door opening onto the staircase. Gray scooped up some clothing as they passed through the small corner room. “Someone else can stay here,” he said. “I’ll be on the other side of this floor.” The two larger spaces, the one furthest from the chapel and the one off the staircase, were solar bedrooms, with much bigger windows, and had doors onto a shared bathroom. Pertwee and Corderman took the room near the stairs. It was, Gray said, called the Sunset Room. Its oriel window faced west. Hudson took the room beside the chapel, Crawford the corner, with Sturghill next to him. That gave Meacham the other solar bedroom. This was the Garden Room. Its north-facing window looked out over the grounds. “Luxury,” Meacham said and meant it. But the real luxury was in that view. The furniture was old, valuable, and stiff as an upper lip. The couch was overstuffed, the chairs hardbacked and forbidding. There was the stale smell of disuse and old dust. The fabric was slightly oily to the touch. The room was a still life to the garden’s exuberance of green. Standing at the window, Meacham saw Gray make his way up the drive. A few minutes later, he reappeared, followed by a small van. He’d sent for their luggage.
Well,
Meacham thought.
Here we are, and here we stay.

Hudson had to cut through Meacham’s room to reach the New Chapel. He knocked on her door, poked his head in, and smiled an apology as she waved him through. She was unpacking her suitcase. Hudson saw a profusion of papers already spreading out on the Victorian tables. She had a collection of utilitarian suits laid out on the bed. There weren’t many, and they could mix and match with each other. She struck Hudson as someone who approached dressing with the same dispassionate efficiency she would bring to intelligence work. “Settling in all right?” he asked.

She skipped the pleasantry. “What did you think of the cold spot?”

“I don’t know.” He didn’t.

“A bit disturbing, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Still think there’s no such thing as ghosts?”

“I don’t understand the cold spot. That doesn’t mean it’s supernatural. I don’t pretend to understand the internal combustion engine, either, but I don’t think cars are powered by black magic.”

“True.” She went back to her unpacking.

Interesting
, Hudson thought as he left the room. He’d been prepared to dislike Meacham. He’d had the occasional run-in with the CIA in Africa. The encounters had been brief, tangential to the agendas of both parties, and nothing he cared to repeat. He had been bothered not just by their means, but by their rock-of-ages commitment to an unquestioned end. Crossing paths with the agents was a clash of religions. At least, he told himself, he had the decency to wrestle with doubts now and then. Meacham was different. Maybe the few of her colleagues he’d met were exceptions, but there was no fervour in her. Her jaundiced openness about who she was and why she was here was refreshing. He even liked her sardonic fatalism. What impressed him the most was a more open mind than he had expected. She didn’t hide that she was here as the force of debunking, and that Crawford was her big gun. But she was asking questions without, he felt, already knowing the answers. She was looking around with her eyes open.
So there,
he thought.
Proof that no one is beyond redemption
. There was comfort in that.

He stopped in the New Chapel and knelt at the altar. The pews and pulpit here were beautiful, ornate, and looked much older than they were. Though they were more Victorian aping of the antique, they were now venerable in their own right. They were not, however, the original pieces from the Old Chapel. Hudson wondered what had been done with those. He found that he didn’t care. He was glad that
this
was the space devoted to worship now, and not the other room. He believed what he’d said to Meacham, but the cold spot still bothered him. It would until there was an explanation. On this front, he was Crawford’s big backer. He wanted the rationalist explanation. He wanted the spooky loose end snipped, then shut up in a box. There was no point pretending he could pray in a chapel with that freezing distraction waiting for him to stumble back into it.

He shut his eyes and prayed. He prayed a lot for Gray. He very consciously did not wait for answers or inspirations. That kind of waiting wouldn’t do his peace of mind any good. When he was done, he stood up and bowed to the cross on the altar. He turned to go, but the cross held his attention. It looked too cold and inert. He was struck by the emptiness of the chapel. It seemed as if its sanctity was as phony as the antiquity of the pulpits. All just for show. The cross was suddenly a widget in a useless shape.

He shook his head, trying to tear himself from suffocating cobwebs of doubt. He left the chapel, crossed another staircase landing, and entered the drawing room. This was one of the lighter spaces in the house. The furniture was more recent, submitting to the last century’s demands for comfort. There were more Chinese vases here, small ones in alcoves of the ornate Jacobean mantelpieces. The wallpaper also was Chinese. Light streamed in north- and west-facing windows. Movement on the ceiling drew Hudson’s eye. Reflections from the moat rippled over the plaster in a sinuous movement of shadow and light.

Gray was sitting in an armchair beside the west window. He was watching the reflections too. “Hypnotic,” Hudson offered.

It took a moment for Gray to react and lower his eyes. It seemed to take another second before he registered who Hudson was. Then he nodded.

“I think you had a lot of fun with that press conference.” Hudson took a seat facing Gray’s at the window.

“I did.”

“What are you up to?”

Gray smiled, animation coming back into his eyes. “What does it look like?”

“A cynical mind might say you’re setting up teams to go at each other’s throats.”

“
Survivor: Haunted House
?”

“Very droll. I don’t want to have a cynical mind.”

“I’ll admit that we’ll probably see some entertaining shouting matches.”

“That doesn’t sound like you.”

“Don’t worry. This isn’t just an elaborate practical joke. I’m not that bored with my own company already. I really do want to know what’s happening here.”

“What do
you
think is going on?”

A smile again, but tired, and maybe a bit frightened. “I think all of you are wrong.”

Now the question he really wanted to ask. “What are you
hoping
for?”

Gray didn’t answer. He turned to face the window again. He muttered a curse: “Hope.” Above his head, the reflections twitched violently. Outside, the moat was mirror-placid.

scene settings

They had dinner in the Great Hall. They sat at the monster table, in the evening light of spring, surrounded by the accumulated strata of history, and ate store-bought pizza. The meal was a sham. They were not eating together. They were consolidating alliances, probing for the weakness of enemies. The skeptics and the believers settled into their trenches. Each side made assumptions about the other and about their host. Gray watched the positioning, and it amused him, sometimes cutting through the tension that constricted his appetite. He made it through one slice of the pizza, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the night. It was the time of year when days were growing noticeably longer, but night still arrived. With the dark, it seemed, came revelations. He feared sleep. He wanted to run from the house. He needed, with even more strength, to stay in his home. He said very little.

Pertwee said a lot. She was feeling defensive, so she went on the attack. She needled Crawford. She tried to use colleagues against him. But every Ph.D. she brought up was shot down as a discredited kook. Crawford never took any bait. He smiled a lot. He was polite. He drove her mad. He was exactly the sort of person she most wanted to have respect her and her research, and accept her as a peer. He was Nemesis. She finally said, “Can’t you concede at least that you are predisposed not to believe in spiritual manifestations, and that this bias could be skewing your results? Because your mind is committed to one perspective, you might miss or ignore contradictory data.”

His smile didn’t falter. “Shouldn’t you concede exactly the same thing?” he asked. And when she couldn’t come up with the perfect response right away, he said, “Our experiments should complement each other nicely, then. Two closed minds attacking the same problem.” He turned back to his pizza.

Pertwee knew she would find the perfect comeback sometime in the next eight hours, when trotting it out would be the worst kind of infantile irrelevance. She fumed. She didn’t think about the house at all.

Corderman tried to be angrier on her behalf than he was, though he was ready to strike the moment he heard something really offensive. Getting his dander up might help with his nerves. It wasn’t that his faith was faltering. That was the problem. He and Pertwee had never overnighted in one of their sites before. Ghost-hunting was the big and important adventure, and he believed completely in what they were doing, but the cool factor had kept the research at the level of a game. He had played Dungeons and Dragons in his teens, and more lately a couple of MMORPGs had taken more nights from him than he would own up to Pertwee. He knew what it was to play obsessively. He knew what it was when games had more depth and heft than real life. He’d participated in live role-playing too. Ghost-hunting was the real deal, he understood this, but the experience was part of the gaming continuum. But a man had died here. He knew what Pertwee believed about that. He was just as incensed about the slander the papers had levelled at Gethsemane Hall. But. He was here, now. Night was coming, now. He’d seen his share of horror films, too. He was thinking quite a bit about the house.

Sturghill listened to the duel between Crawford and Pertwee, chuckled a few times, but kept her powder dry. She was going to bury this New Age flake. Hers was the kind of thinking that had taken Adams down. Sturghill wasn’t going to reveal the stake up her sleeve before she plunged it into gullibility’s heart.

Hudson tried to steer the conversation into lighter areas. He asked questions about families and interests. Everyone thought he was very nice. He wanted to know who these people were. He wanted to know if they were going to make things better or worse for his best friend. He was thinking about the house, but not about ghosts. The wrong combination of people could be just as poisonous.

Meacham asked questions, too. She established herself as a terrific listener. She lived up to her training. She did her job well. When she asked Pertwee about her work, she did so without sarcasm. When Pertwee answered briefly, cautiously, Meacham asked follow-up questions. It didn’t take much before Pertwee was opening up and going on at length. This was where the training really made the difference. It would have been easy to glaze over. Meacham forced herself to listen, to absorb the information as if it weren’t raving bullshit, because this wasn’t a situation where it would be useful, yet, to have enemies. Come out of here with a debunking report from Crawford but Pertwee softened up? Sweet. Meacham had a few thoughts about the house during the meal. She was looking forward to exploring its age. The experiments might be fun, before she had to marshal her arguments. A bit of a holiday in luxury.

There were other thoughts in the Hall. They circled the diners. They calculated. They carried a gospel.

The meal ended. The diners parted. They retired to their rooms, to plan campaigns and to prepare for the night. Pertwee went for a stroll before bed. An evening constitutional. She wanted to walk the sacred grounds and be touched by them, be revitalized by them. She wanted to walk them alone, away from the siege of hostility inside, and away from Corderman’s tense chivalry. Over dinner, he had been poised for the right provocation and the right dose of courage to rise up in righteous wrath. His cues hadn’t come, thank God. Her credibility with this crowd was zero, as things stood. She would fight for better, and she would do so under whatever rules the opposing team imposed on her. What she didn’t need was Corderman’s puppy histrionics plunging her standing into the negative figures.

She breathed deeply, clearing her head, purging tension. She crunched across the gravel, walking away from the gatehouse tower. A small flight of stone steps lured her through an open iron gate and into a walled garden. The brickwork on the inside was overgrown with ivy and moss. The garden was laid out along rigid lines. The rectangular paving stones framed a rectangular pond with a clutch of reeds growing at each corner. A small marble Cupid pranced on a rock island in the centre of the pond. In the moonlight, Cupid had a pale glow. Wings and limbs, body and face, he was white and cold. Pertwee smiled at him. She felt the enclosure of the walls and was comforted. She spread her arms in a stretch that turned into a benediction. She smiled her thanks and greeting to the spirits of the Hall.

She noticed a darker rectangular patch in the far wall. At first she thought it was a shadow, but there was no source for it. She approached. In the corner, the walls did not meet. They gave way to hedge, and there was a narrow passage. Pertwee walked through and found herself in another walled garden.
I found a secret,
she thought and giggled. The stone walls here were almost bare, except in one corner where there was a luxuriance of peonies and valerian. There was a pond here, too. It was smaller, circular, and the water was pea-soup stagnant. Pertwee walked the perimeter of the garden, delighting in a storybook shiver.
No one else knows about this,
she thought.
This is something the Hall has given to me. Alone.

The moon went out.

Cloud cover. She knew that had to be it. But the loss of light was so sudden. Flick of a switch, and she was in darkness. Alone. An afterimage of peonies shone on her retina, then faded. She didn’t have a flashlight. She couldn’t see. She looked up, expecting to see the moon as a faint smear behind clouds. The sky was black as isolation. Pertwee tried to laugh at the anxiety she felt rising. The sound came out as a choked gasp.
Wait it out,
she thought.
A minute or two, and we’re off.
The minutes passed. The blackness remained pure. It was as if it were wrapped around her head, a snake-coil shroud.

She took a cautious step, reaching out with her hands. All she had to do was get to the wall, feel her way around it, reach the entrance to the secret garden. If she could do that, she felt against all reason, there would be light when she reached the other garden.
That’s silly
, she tried to tell herself. She didn’t listen. She hunted the wall. Her fingers brushed nothing but air. She took another step. The scuffing noise against the pavement was harsh. Another step. She couldn’t be far from the wall. The garden wasn’t more than ten yards across, and there was that pond in the middle. Still no wall. She moved her foot forward again, and as it came down, it touched emptiness. She almost lost her balance. She stepped back.
All right,
she thought.
You were moving toward the pond. Turn around.
She did.
Wall is this way
. She stepped, and her foot hit nothing again. She froze. She didn’t see how she could have turned three-sixty and be facing the pond again. But she must have. Disorientation in the dark. She lowered herself to her knees. She reached forward. Her hand dropped below knee level, wanted to keep going into the void.
That’s the pond,
she thought. She reached behind.

No paving stone here either. Only the drop. She toppled backward. She fell further than she should, and then she was embraced by liquid thick as muscle but ten times colder, and she knew she was
alone
. She paid the tribute and screamed.

Lights on. The moon was back. The peonies nodded from the passage of a breeze that had just left. Pertwee was sitting on stone, two arm’s lengths from the pond. She stood and looked up. There were no clouds. The Milky Way, brighter than she’d ever seen it, shone its implacable age down.

So she’d made contact. She rubbed her arms. She’d never experienced anything that strong before. She’d never been frightened. She shouldn’t have been, she decided. She hadn’t been harmed. She had received a message. It was up to her to decipher it, to understand what was being asked of her. “Thank you.” She said it like she meant it.

She made her way back to the Hall, building a high palisade of rationalizations. And then she, like all the others, went to bed. She lost her fear. The air was fresh in Roseminster, and she went to sleep quickly. She wasn’t alone.

Fast and deep sleepers all. Except for Gray. He lay awake, waiting. He was in the master bedroom. It took up the southwest corner of the first floor and was almost as big as the entire bedroom suite on the other side of the house. The bed was a four-poster monolith, the frame three hundred years old, and the mattress didn’t feel much more recent. Gray kept the bedside light on. He was pretending, for his own benefit, that he might want to read. The lamp cast a bright yellow aura around the bed. The shadows in the recesses of the room were darker for the contrast. Gray didn’t look at them. He closed his eyes and wondered why he refused every impulse to leave. He wondered why he was frightened. His room was a long way from the Old Chapel and the crypt. He wasn’t going near them, no fear. Gray turned over, facing into the lamp. Its light penetrated his lids, making him squint. There was still darkness leaking in. He didn’t want to meet its gaze.

Gray did sleep. Like the rest, he did not wake until the morning. He did not wake rested. None of them did. Sleep came down that night like a judgment. Gethsemane Hall rolled its inhabitants over foam-capped waves. It had them struggling to break surface and breathe, but it always pushed their heads back under. Their lungs choked with thick, unconscious bile. They tangled sheets into sweat and knots. Their brows furrowed as their eyes shut tight against a greater darkness. The storm blasted the entire night, and it didn’t calm with the morning. Instead, it built up a momentum roar of rage, a wind that piled the breakers into rogue mountains, and the dreamless black smashed down on the sleepers, swamping them, driving them so far down into the deeps that survival instincts screamed and woke them up. They came to, gasping, eyes blind for a moment, still oil-slicked by the dark that had come with the night. When their eyes cleared, and they saw it was morning, all of them, skeptics and faithful, near-sobbed with the relief of being awake, and the night being over. They lay in their beds, exhausted, needing rest, but when they felt as if they might drop back to sleep, they jerked with apprehension and jumped up. Those who shared rooms exchanged a look, but didn’t ask,
You too?
because sometimes it is better to avoid confirmation.

And then the day began.

The equipment arrived after breakfast. They had foraged, bleary-eyed, in the kitchen for cereal and eggs. Gray gave Corderman some money and the keys to his car and sent him off to Tesco to lay in enough supplies for the duration. Corderman must have crossed the delivery truck coming in. As they began to unload the boxes, Crawford started to laugh. “Whose is whose?” he asked Pertwee.

“Why,” she asked, “is it so surprising that I know a thing or two about science?”

Crawford refused to be drawn in. “At least we should have a redundancy of data.”

Gray looked over the devices piling up in the outer hall. He shared Crawford’s amusement. Identical means, opposite faiths.
There’s a lesson aborning,
he thought. “What are these?” he asked. Most of the devices were handhelds of one sort or another. They didn’t take up a lot of space on their own. It was the sheer number that filled the boxes, along with multiple tripods and a backup generator. The only differences between Crawford’s equipment and Pertwee’s were that it looked more expensive and there was a lot more duplication.

“This is the Trifield Natural EM Meter,” Pertwee said. It looked simple enough: a knob on the lower half, and an analogue gauge with three scales. “It detects very small fluctuations in electric, magnetic, and radio and microwave fields. I have to be careful because it’s sensitive enough to pick up fields generated by people or animals.”

“It would be just awful to learn that positive findings are the result of mishandled equipment,” Crawford deadpanned. He showed Gray his variations on Pertwee’s theme. “These are the sensors,” he said. There were six of them. “They have three axes. A magnetic field has static and dynamic components, and these measure both. The data is sent here.” He tapped a laptop.

“What’s the difference, besides expense?” Meacham asked.