Wylding Hall Read Free Page A

else. Palmistry, reading the bumps on your head. Casting spells. He wanted the album itself to be a kind of spell. An enchantment. You’d listen to it and without knowing it, you’d be changed. “Ensorcelled.” That’s his word, not mine! Back then, Julian believed in that kind of thing.
    But you know, given the influence and power that album’s had over the years, I can almost believe it, especially when you consider the shit storm of bad luck when it was first released.

Chapter 3
     
    Will
     
    The house was a glorious wreck. Like some drunken grande dame who’s lost everything except the clothes and jewels she’s wearing and refuses to leave the after-party. I’ve known a few of those girls.
    It wasn’t immense. It wasn’t Hogwarts or Manderley or Downton Abbey. But it was big and sprawling, and it was ancient. The oldest parts were pre-Norman—by “parts,” I mean a few ruined brick walls out by the garden. Julian said there’d been an ancient Bronze Age settlement on the grounds, and he would know—that was Julian’s thing: arcane knowledge. A lot of it was total bollocks, crystal pendulums and incense and tarot cards, all that crap he was into back then.
    Ashton gives me such a goddamned hard time—he thinks I’m superstitious. And okay, yes, I’ll touch wood, and I won’t name the Scottish play in a theater. But mostly I’m just respectful of old ways. I believe things for a reason, and in the old days they did things for a reason. And if you don’t understand why—well, you might end up opening a few doors better left closed. That’s all.
    Julian never met a door he didn’t try to open. He was quite knowledgeable about prehistory—studied at Cambridge for two terms. A very bright lad; you can understand why everyone makes such a fuss about his surname. I don’t know if he’d researched Wylding Hall and that part of Hampshire before we arrived, or if he found some old book in the library, or what.
    But he was the one knew its history. From the moment we arrived, he seemed to know his way around the house. “This is the Tudor Wing, this part’s Norman, this was added after the Civil War, this is the crap Victorian addition.” He just swanned in and began showing us around like he’d grown up there.
    It was very odd, I have to say. I even asked him, have you been here before? He just shook his head and said, “No.” He could just tell, he said.
    That’s why it’s so strange that he didn’t know about the barrow—the superstitions and whatnot. I don’t know how he found it—if it was on the ordnance survey or he simply came upon it during one of his jaunts in the wood. The rest of us never knew it existed—we scarcely left the house some days, practicing. But Julian was always wandering off in the middle of the night or before the rest of us woke. He was always an early riser; when we were boys he’d be up before dawn.
    “The best part of the day,” he’d say. “Before it’s had a chance to get broken.” But everything gets broken eventually.
    Tom
     
    The oldest extant parts of the house were Tudor. An entire small Elizabethan-era manor tucked off to the back, surrounded by yew trees. Very lovely but dark—the trees were hundreds and hundreds of years old and overshadowed everything. A thousand years, maybe. Do trees live to be that old? You reached that part of the house by a narrow passage, very dim, with oak paneling. There was a long, narrow hall with a minstrel’s gallery, stone flags on the floor. On the upper floors, there were any number of rooms. I couldn’t tell you how many, because I only had a very cursory look when the estate agent showed me around. But what I saw was marvelous. Lovely carved paneling, small leaded windows. Beautiful National Heritage stuff. But very dark—not a lot of windows, and most of them deeply set into the walls.
    Nobody slept in the oldest part of the house, though Les says she thinks that’s where Julian and the girl went that