The place was a crumbling ruin,
It sat on the top of a hill,
If we hadn’t been travelling tired that day
We may have been travelling still,
But you said we ought to seek shelter there
From a sudden deluge of rain,
So I parked outside its terraces
And entered the palace of pain.

You were the first to say ‘It’s strange,
The feeling within these halls,’
While all I could hear were the scraping sounds
That came from the whispering walls.
It must have been long deserted, it
Was just like a pile of bones,
That someone left when its throat was cleft
And lay fading into its moans.

The night came down with a vengeance once
We’d made our camp on the floor,
And rain poured in at the windows that
Were probably there before,
You said we’d leave when the morning came
Once the sun was up, and bright,
We didn’t know that an age of shame
Wrapped that place in an endless night.

I tried to sleep but you’d wake me up
Each time that I dropped my head,
‘Didn’t you hear that dreadful scream?’
I seem to remember you said.
But all I heard were the awful groans
That echoed around the halls,
I couldn’t explain the sense of dread
That came from the whispering walls.

I thought that the rain poured down on us
I thought that we lay in mud,
I lit a match in the early hours
To see you covered in blood.
I said, ‘We’d better go back to sleep
Till the nightmare hour is past,
But then you noticed the blood on me
And you screamed, and lay aghast.

I wish that we’d never gone near the place
I wish we’d stayed in the car,
Then you’d still be who you used to be
And I would know where you are!
But you ran screaming into the night
When they came with their hoods and gowns,
With their bloodied hands and their burning brands
To burn the place to the ground.

David Lewis Paget