The House of Lost Souls

by Cottam, F. G.

  ‘How do we know he’ll see us?’

  ‘Covey said he’ll be expecting us.’

  It was cold inside the taxi. Colder outside, as they climbed higher and the air got thinner. Seaton rubbed his glove against the condensation on his window. It was a borrowed glove, one of a pair of Mason’s skiing gloves he’d been lent for the journey. Splashes of snow looked luminous between the trees in the pond of view the knuckles of his hand had rubbed against the glass. He shifted against the car’s upholstery. He felt his leg and back muscles, stiff and tender after their run of the morning. The run had been long and hard. Mason was as well-conditioned as he looked. But the unaccustomed exercise had left him feeling better than he could have imagined. The car started to climb a steep gradient that pushed him back in his seat. He watched condensation encroach on his diminishing pond of view. It bleared to a puddle. They were rising through the tree line, the boughs coniferous and dense. Through the windscreen, in yellow headlamp glare, snow twirled downward in slow thickening flakes. Music crackled into life on the cab radio, the Quintet of the Hot Club of Paris, the gypsy virtuoso Django Reinhardt nimble on the frets of his guitar.

  ‘Merde!’ their driver said, stabbing buttons on the dash. Behind him, in the light from the glowing radio, his passengers swapped a glance.

  They were left on the cobbles of the monastery courtyard by the cleric sentry who answered Mason’s pull on the door-bell. It was snowing more heavily now, wet flakes that clumped on to their shoulders and bare heads as they waited. Seaton’s impression, looking at the dark arches and the walls above them, was of stone chilled to indifference by centuries of winters like the one on the way. It was a bleak and ancient building. Yellow patches against the brooding mass of the place, sparse and without warmth, suggested candlelight burning through the windows of odd cells and cloisters. Seaton shivered. But only with the dampness and the chill. There was no sense of menace here. That was entirely absent. There was none of the feeling he had felt first in his own flat, so strongly in the humanities block at the university in Surrey; nothing of the subtle foreboding he had felt even in Richard Mason’s house at the edge of the sea in Whitstable. This retreat was a true refuge. How far you had to come to feel safe! He shivered again, aware that Mason was studying him.

  They were shown into a large room lined with leather-and vellum-bound books. A fire of pine logs burned in an iron grate and made the air sweet with the scent of resin. The smell brought a pang of hunger to Seaton’s stomach. They had shared breakfast on the train from Ashford but had eaten nothing really since. A cleric came into the room dressed in the brown fustian and rope belt of a Franciscan monk. He was carrying a tray. He gestured for them to sit in chairs to either side of a wooden table and placed bowls from the tray in front of them. The bowls were filled with a thick dumpling stew. He put down a platter, heaped with chunks of bread. ‘Eat,’ he said. ‘Please, gentlemen, eat freely.’ His English was harsh with mountain vowels. ‘You are to meet with Monsignor Lascalles. You will need for your bellies to be full.’ He laughed at whatever joke he thought he had made and poured water from a pitcher into pewter goblets for them before turning to go.

  ‘Without wishing to sound ungrateful,’ Mason said, ‘when it comes to monks, I’ve always had a preference for the Trappists.’

  Seaton sipped water from his goblet so cold it bit into the nerves of his teeth. Mason tore bread with strong fingers and shoved a piece into his mouth and chewed. Seaton thought he should try to make conversation, make a joke of his own, make light of the circumstances. But he couldn’t think of anything funny to say. And Mason seemed to be avoiding his eyes. He was suddenly struck by the feeling that Mason was nervous, meeting the old priest. So, like his companion at the table, he ate in silence. The only sound in the room was occasional sharp cracks and bursts from the grate as heat exploded pockets of resin under the bark on the burning logs. Both men concentrated on their food until their bowls were empty under resting spoons. Then the handle turned in the door and Lascalles came in.

  They stood. The priest bowed his head briefly, twice, once in courtly acknowledgement of each of them. He wore a soutane to his ankles and his head was bare. His white hair was cropped severely short. He was tall in the soutane and looked very thin. When he walked towards them, Seaton saw that he wore old shoes, vigorously polished to a painstaking lustre. And he felt a completely unexpected and hugely strong wave of pity for the old priest. For his fragility and his proud unflinching faith.

  He wondered would the three of them somehow prevail. Fate linked them, perhaps even predestination. There was something Gothic and strange, and at the same time recognisable, about their situation in this remote and Catholic keep, with its roaring logs and walls of scholarly vellum. It reminded Seaton of the fictions of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker. Three men, civilised and formidable, gathered to plan an assult on the forces of evil armed with valour and learning and staunch moral rectitude. It was a plot that seemed reassuringly familiar from the torchlight reading of his youth under the blankets of his bed. Except that he had been to the Fischer house. And the reality of it was so black and hopeless with evil that it made a nonsense of the cosy collusive fantasy he was tempted to indulge in now. You weren’t staunch in the midst of the slippery chaos dwelling in the gloom in the mansion in Brightstone Forest. You were helpless. You were prey.

  He looked again at the priest. The skin was like taut tissue paper over his facial bones. At one temple, in the firelight, an artery beat feebly with the thin blood that fed his brain. His faith endures, Seaton thought, but whatever strength and vitality he once possessed can only be a decades-old memory to him. Lascalles was dying.

  He looked at Mason, with his distrustful eyes and sullen cheekbones; Mason, lithe and powerful, with the look on him of an angel about to fall. There was strength in Mason, right enough. But it seemed to be entirely of the bludgeoning sort. He’d asked Mason how he’d planned to keep his sister sedated and therefore safer while they were away. Morphine, Mason told him, sourced from a tame doctor in Herne Bay. How do you tame a doctor, Seaton had wondered out loud.

  ‘You make him grateful. He had a problem with a gang of seafront B&B scumbags, living on benefits and demanding methadone scripts with menaces. It got worse after he went to the police. He contacted me in desperation after they beat up his twelve-year-old kid.’

  Seaton had laughed. ‘How many kneecappings did you actually have to perform?’

  ‘Only the one,’ Mason told him.

  Seaton hadn’t been able to tell whether he was joking or not.

  Now, he felt a chill as cold as mountain water seep into his soul. He thought about the long corkscrew of descending turns on the snowbound road beyond the monastery walls, separating him from the skiers sharing Glühwein in their pretty cabins a thousand metres down the slopes from where he sat. Here, he was in the domain of the crag and the blizzard, high, where avalanches gathered their profound and fatal enormity. He felt lonely. It was not an unfamiliar feeling. In truth, he had spent every waking hour of his last twelve years in lonely conditions of varying intensity. But even by his own dismal standards, here and now, he felt very isolated. And it wasn’t just loneliness, was it? What Seaton really felt, what really isolated him, was fear. That was where his Rider Haggard fantasy really fell apart. He wasn’t valorous and staunch. He knew it, in the company now of these two brave men. He was a coward, mortified, alone.

  In the room, the silence was broken. ‘We’ve met before, Father,’ Mason said.

  Lascalles smiled at him. ‘Twice,’ he said.

  Mason looked nonplussed. ‘Twice?’

  ‘On the first occasion, you were very young. I am not offended you do not remember. But I remember, for the joy and the relief the moment brought me. I baptised you, Nicholas.’ He smiled again, more broadly. He gestured for his guests to sit. They sank back on to their chairs at the table and he sat himself, in an armchair facing them. ‘I see I have your attention. But
we need to begin at the beginning, do we not. And I suppose the beginning for me was when I met Wheatley, at the front, at the place history has come to remember as Passchendaele, in the autumn of 1917.’

  His faith had been severely tested even before the outbreak of war. He had been a novice priest when a great passenger vessel foundered five hundred miles from Newfoundland at night in the freezing Atlantic. He had read the newspaper account with greedy incredulity; unable to believe a merciful God could allow so many so young and innocent to perish in such hopeless circumstances.

  ‘April of 1912,’ Lascalles told Seaton and Mason. ‘I was a boy of seventeen when the Titanic went down. My vocation was almost sunk with the doomed ship.’

  But he was young. And the young have enthusiasm. And his enthusiasm renewed his belief in something more exalted than a world of profit and sensation and the imperial hunger of nations. So the outbreak of war in Europe hardly intruded on his own intense speculations on the true meanings of the Gospels. Or of his intense joy at discovering the poetry of his fellow Jesuit, the Welshman Manley Hopkins. In the spring of 1916, he was ordained a priest in Rome by the pontiff himself.

  But it transpired there was little time to rejoice in Eternal Truth or debate theology with other learned servants of God. And there was even less time for poetry. By the summer, Lascalles had been seconded as chaplain to an infantry battalion of the French army. By the autumn, he was reading funeral rites over mass-burial pits filled with quicklime as they interred French dead by the hundreds, by the day, during the battle for Verdun.

  ‘Do either of you know about what happened there?’

  ‘I’d say Paul here is more of an Easter Rising man, Father,’ Mason said. ‘For him, 1916 is all about Patrick Pearse and Michael Collins and the occupation of the Post Office in O’Connell Street.’

  ‘It was still called Sackville Street then,’ Seaton said. ‘But you’re right enough. I don’t know anything about Verdun.’

  ‘It was the collective name for a system of supposedly impenetrable fortresses,’ Mason said. ‘They were built by the French to discourage German thoughts of invasion. The flaw lay in the massiveness of the fortifications and the number of men they committed to a static defensive role. By 1914, all the more astute German commanders knew that Verdun could simply be bypassed by a modern mobile army. But the German Chief of Staff, von Falkenhayn, knew the French would feel obliged to defend it. It had come to represent national pride. A full assault would commit the bulk of the French army and make them an easy target.

  ‘Since the progress of the war had made Verdun a salient in the French line, it could be attacked by heavy artillery bombardment from three sides. The French still refer to Verdun as the last great battle. But, in reality, it was a slaughter, only really distinguished by the number of dead it claimed.’

  ‘The siege began in February,’ Lascalles said. ‘It finally petered out in October. By then a million men had been killed or wounded in the battle.’ He paused for a moment, remembering. And remembering vividly, Seaton thought, from the shadow inflicted by the recollection on his face. ‘By the autumn I was counselling the still-living, comforting the wounded and burying our legions of dead entirely by rote. I believed in nothing. Cruelty and chance and sometimes absurdity dictated human life. Instinct and cunning permitted survival. There was no afterlife. There was no hope. And certainly, there was no God.’

  There was silence. Mason broke it. ‘Why did they send you to Passchendaele?’

  ‘You might think because Falkenhayn had familiarised me with slaughter. And because your General Haig planned another. But the truth is, the British had sufficient chaplains of their own, in all denominations. They had no practical requirement for a French priest who no longer believed.’

  Seaton said, ‘So why did you go? Why were you sent?’

  ‘Wheatley,’ Lascalles told them.

  Twenty-Four

  He had heard the story before being seconded, because rumour spread fast along the front and different languages proved little obstacle to the proliferation in wartime of legend and myth. So he had heard, in the mess, the story of the English artillery officer whose men had become too unnerved to serve any longer under his command. It was an odd situation, because the mutinous artillerymen were campaign veterans, battle-hardened gunners who prided themselves on their professionalism in the field. It was not the usual matter of cowardice or shell shock or exhaustion. Instead, the story was that they had seen something that had subsequently made several of them risk execution for mutiny rather than continue to fight in their particular unit. And they were adamant, these men. They were adamant even in the peculiar light of what they claimed to have seen.

  The officer concerned had been hit by an enemy shell. The violence of the blast should have blown him into vapour. But in the aftermath of the explosion, as soil and debris rained back on the smoking earth, he was seen to clamber from the shell hole, ragged and smouldering, but intact. Incredibly, he seemed entirely unscathed.

  ‘I walked over to him,’ a bombardier facing an insubordination charge was quoted as saying. ‘It was dusk, but you could see pretty well. Better than I would have liked to, it turned out. What I noticed straightaway was that he didn’t move right. He wasn’t staggering, like you see the wounded and the dazed stagger on a battlefield, looking like men seeking somewhere comfortable to fall. Instead he had this stiffness about him, like you see with a strung puppet in a pier-end show. And when I got closer to him, a flare burst directly above us and I found myself staring right at his eyes. You couldn’t look into them. They were dead. They had the sly sparkle you see in the glass eyes of a ventriloquist’s doll. But they were quite deprived of proper life. I pulled up, still with the field dressing in my hands I’d torn from my pack to treat him with in the event there was anything left of him to treat. In the fading light of the flare, you could see his movements becoming smoother and more convincing. More human, if you will. I was still rooted to the spot by the sight of him. And then, as he brushed mud and ash from the rags that were all that was left of his uniform, he cocked his head with a jerk that made me jump and smiled at me. And the smile was the smile of a man deprived of his soul. I can’t put it more truthfully than that. And I can swear to you on a Bible I had not taken a drink. I remember the word from Sunday School. The word is abomination. What I saw that evening at the front was nothing more or less than an abomination.’

  ‘When my colonel showed me this statement, I was intrigued by it,’ Lascalles said. ‘Its contradictions were odd. Here you have a corporal who is clearly a veteran of combat, bravely attempting to assist his officer in the middle of an enemy bombardment. He is experienced and he is courageous. And something makes him insubordinate.’

  ‘And terrified,’ Seaton said.

  Mason sipped water.

  ‘Forgive me,’ Lascalles said to his guests, smiling. ‘Allow me to offer you something stronger to drink.’

  The British requested Lascalles because they needed an expert in magic. An authority in the subject was required to dispel the rumours circulating about the artillery officer it was said had bartered his soul for survival in battle. Soldiers were superstitious. Stories like the one about the Angels of Mons were encouraged, even fostered by the High Command because they suggested that the Almighty fought on their side. But this business was different. Officers were there to lead by example and to be believed in. They could not very well sacrifice this one to appease a single unit of uneasy men. But the fortunes of the war made it difficult in 1917 to end a mutiny at the end of rifle barrels. Firing squads were bad for morale and the planned assault at Passchendaele was going to be difficult enough, without further damage to the spirit and commitment of the troops.

  The Jesuit Lascalles had gained his expertise in the subject as part of his studies. He had researched witchcraft in rural France. He had witnessed an exorcism performed in Madagascar. He had studied apparent accounts of demonic possession in Suez and French Equatorial Af
rica. He knew enough to suspect that the occult was both pernicious and widespread. But he was agnostic about its authenticity. He did not believe in the miracles of God. So he could hardly believe in the miracles of Satan.

  His meeting with the English officer took place in a dugout about a mile behind the line. It was November of 1917 and the afternoon, like every afternoon, was spent under the dark pallor of the bombardment. He went there unescorted. The duckboards were treacherous under his leather-shod feet as he tried to pick his way through the labyrinth of support trenches with a hand-sketched map guiding him. It was raining and the map was limp and wet in his hands and the ink on it ran as he tried to navigate. He was half-lost and very conspicuous in his grey French field uniform and blue-trimmed cape amid the vigilant sentries and well-drilled teams and toiling packhorses of the British rear. This was the idea, of course. His arrival was well-witnessed. And he could see from the expressions on the men’s faces that they all knew why he was there.

  He found Wheatley alone, turning over a tarot pack, his quarters lit by a paraffin lamp artfully hung so that Wheatley’s features were mostly concealed in shadow. He saw that the English officer wore a greatcoat with the collar up and a muffler and leather gloves. It was cold, of course. It was a raw November, cold and always damp, in these tombs hewn for the shelter of the living, in the ground.

  ‘Whisky, Father?’

  Lascalles accepted. He did not drink whisky. He had wanted to see Wheatley’s hands. But in this he was disappointed. The bottle and glasses were reached for from their shelf and the drinks poured with the gloves still on.

  ‘So. What in heaven’s name can I do, I wonder, to assist a Catholic priest.’

  ‘I would like to ask you, if I may, about your time aboard the sailing ship. Before the war. Where you went. What you did. Who you met. And what you might have learned.’