There was no menace or threat in the tone, but that had been the voice of an elderly woman, and a tone weighted by resignation. What had been said was horribly familiar.
Seb saw no one, and nothing behind or around him.
The foliage was dark now, the smell of the flowers fainter. He was reminded of the strangeness of his feelings when near the garden earlier.
Voice shaking, he called out ‘Hello’ several times and circled the oval garden. Went round twice, and wondered why he’d felt compelled to make a second pass of the darkening roses.
No one replied. He never heard the voice again.
The momentum of nightfall encouraged him to return to the building, but as he walked back to the house, a second voice spoke from inside the walled garden. And again, he was sure he had heard the voice of an elderly woman.
Can you ask my daughter to come and get me?
Not a footfall did he hear from within that enclosed area. Not so much as a twig snapping. And yet the more he thought of the voice, which still rang out inside his skull, he also wondered if those words had been generated from within his own mind.
By the time he reached the hall, he was shivering from the cold and had zipped his waterproof jacket up to his throat. Catching sight of the reflection of his pale face and wild eyes in one of the windows that he’d unshuttered filled him with a disgust at his own helplessness.
A dirty, ancient blanket about his shoulders, he sat alone in the part-furnished front room until ten, resting his lower back upon the tall skirting boards beneath the window. His loathing for Ewan, Veronica and Joyce was the only relief from a fear as crippling as a cramp in cold water.
As the light failed outside its dirty windows, his unpleasant sense of expectation gradually evolved into an apprehension about a growing occupancy beneath the roof of Hunter’s Tor Hall. He tried to assure himself that only his imagination was being affected by the atmosphere of a strange, abandoned building. But, as much as he tried to use his reason to defeat these impressions of an impending cohabitation, he remained sensitive to a feeling that the stale air was beginning to move itself in vague currents, as if it were being displaced by the entrance of new forms.
From outside the window came the distant sound of a man weeping. This was just after half ten, when visibility was shrinking by a few metres each minute.
What may have been another two voices outside came soon after the weeping passed away, but from separate directions.
Those who had called out gave an impression of being scattered in the gathering darkness and lost to each other. The noises may even have arisen from the beaks of birds, or even the muzzles of animals. One of the cries had reminded Seb of an anxious sheep.
He stood up and turned his torch on. He shone it at the broad window he’d sat beneath, to make certain that there was no one outside. And unveiled a smudge at the window.
His first thought was that it was a face, looking in. A near negative of a woman’s face. Or maybe an after-image, transparent and almost part of the light’s reflection upon the dirty glass.
Or had it been an illusion partly formed from the grime and the greying air outside?
Within his memory lingered the texture of the hair on what may have been a head, hanging dry and white about empty eye sockets. Seb turned about, in case what he had seen had been a reflection of someone standing behind him. His torch flashed across bare white walls.
Fearing he’d given his position away with the torch, he moved across the reception hall to the adjacent room at the front of the building. His breathing was so loud he imagined he was being followed by someone panting with excitement behind his shoulders.
Another face awaited him in the second room, as if summoned to the walls by his light. At a pane at the foot of a patio door, from within the inky surround of night, Seb detected an impression of human features stricken by despair. So deeply lined was the flesh, the head appeared ready to crumble. The piteous thing was also entirely bereft of hair.
The image blended within the grime on the glass and vanished almost as soon as he became aware of it, and he was left wondering again if he had seen anything at all.
He desperately regretted opening the shutters. Perhaps there was a good reason for the windows being blocked. Joyce had advised against using the torch because light was no asset here. Not using it might be the only way to get through the night. Better only to hear them and not see their faces.
Get through this he must.
Outside, the distant cries gradually increased in frequency and Seb wondered whether people or animals were passing the front of the Hall. Whatever roamed out there seemed to be lost amongst the long grass of the far terraces, and often wept amidst the beseeching sounds of what resembled words. Words that blended with the nocturnal cries of unsettled birds. Only the sudden howl of an animal in great distress finally forced him away from the front of the building altogether. That was around eleven.