House of Echoes by Barbara Erskine

home. With one look at their happy oily faces she left them to their mechanical endeavours and clutching the notebookretreated to the study. The sunshine through the window had warmed the room, and she smiled a little to herself as she stooped and throwing on some logs, coaxed the fire back into life. In a few moments it would be almost bearable. Curling up on the arm chair in the corner she opened the notebook at the first page. Laura Manners – Commonplace Book . The inscription in the flyleaf of this notebook was in the same flamboyant hand as that in the other. She glanced at the first few pages and felt a sharp pang of disappointment. She had assumed her mother would have written the poems herself, but these were bits and pieces copied out from many authors – a collection obviously of her favourite poems and pieces of prose. There was Keats’s ode To Autumn , a couple of Shakespeare sonnets, some Byron, Gray’s Elegy .
    Slowly, page after page she leafed through, reading a few lines here and there, trying to form a picture of her mother’s taste and education from the words on the page. Romantic; eclectic, occasionally obscure. There were lines from Racine and Dante in the original French and Italian, a small verse from Schiller. She was something of a linguist then. There were even Latin epigrams. Then suddenly the mood of the book changed. Stuck between two pages was a single sheet, old and torn, very frail, held in place by tape which had discoloured badly. It was an India paper page, torn, Joss guessed from a Roman Missal. On it, in English and in Latin, was a prayer for the blessing of Holy Water.
    … I do this that the evil spirit may be driven away from thee, and that thou mayest banish the enemy’s power entirely, uprooting and casting out the enemy himself with all his rebel angels …
    … so that whatsoever in the homes of the faithful or elsewhere shall have been sprinkled with it may be delivered from everything unclean and hurtful. Let no breath of contagion hover there, no taint of corruption. May all the wiles of the lurking enemy come to nothing, and may anything that threatens the safety or peace of those who dwell there be put to flight by the sprinkling of thiswater …
    Joss stared round, letting the book fall into her lap, realising she had been reading the words out loud. The house was very silent.
    Exorcizo te, in nomine De † Patris omnipotentis, et in nomine Jesu † Christi Filii ejus, Domine nostri, et in virtute Spiritus † Sancti …
    The devil himself lives here …
    Alan Fairchild’s words echoed through her head.
    For several minutes she sat staring into space then, closing the notebook she stood up and going to the desk, she reached for the phone.
       
    David Tregarron was in the staff room marking test papers when her call was put through.
    ‘So, how is life in the outback, Jocelyn?’ His booming voice seemed to echo round the room.
    ‘Quite a strain actually.’ She frowned. The words had come spontaneously, accurately, instead of the easier platitude she had framed in her head. ‘I hope you can come and see us soon.’ She sounded so much more desperate than she had intended. ‘David, would you do me a favour? When you are next in the British Library reading room would you look up Belheddon for me and see if you can find anything about its history?’
    There was a slight pause as he tried to interpret her tone. ‘Of course I will. From what you said before it sounds like a wonderful old place. I’m looking forward to my first visit.’
    ‘So am I.’ She heard the fervour in her voice with surprise. ‘I’d like to know what the name means.’
    ‘Belheddon? That sounds fairly straightforward. Bel – beautiful, of course, or if the name is much older it might come from a Celtic derivation, like the Irish, which if I remember it rightly, has much the same meaning as Aber in Wales or Scotland – the mouth of a river. Or it could come from the old gods Bel, you