The House of Lost Souls

by Cottam, F. G.

  The strings backing Billy Paul did not now sound so lush or lachrymose. They didn’t sound very much any more like strings at all. The notes sounded less drawn from a violin by a bow than ground out by a handle turning a street-corner organ. The music had turned harsh and mechanical and the melody perished in the dead pub on every phrase. Seaton shivered. It was not, out there, the spring of 1983 he had lived through and remembered. He pictured weary slums spreading southward beyond the pub doorway under a soot-spangled sky. The faces of the people dwelling in them were pale and pinched and wretched. It was cobbled and damp and the tenements sagged and the vermin writhed in the plaster lattices and mattress ticking, in the absence of light and heat and soap. It was a wasteland of polio and rickets, of hand-me-downs and head-lice and unremitting, gnawing undernourishment. It was a place of long-perished hope. Joy there was the scant ghost of hopscotch games in chalk washed from the pavements by rain. It was a locality entirely lost to faith. It was the South London of Edwin Poole’s jaded imagination, or his nocturnal travels. Some nagging instinct told Seaton that Poole had been no stranger to the night exotica luring toffs to the dockside dives of Wapping and Rotherhithe seventy years ago. But the North Lambeth lurking beyond the pub door was not exotic. It was a wasteland of the Great Depression, a vaguely remembered and reconstructed limbo, holding scant attraction, ever, for anyone. It owed itself to Poole’s disdainful glances, through the cold blear of cab windows, on his way to, or home from, somewhere else, long ago. It was fearful and grotesque.

  The pub, though. The pub was almost perfect. They had taken a memory from his most treasured time, plucked and traduced it. And he thought he knew how. It had been Covey’s achievement. A willing subject, every bit as suggestible as Mason had assumed he was, he must have told Malcolm Covey all about himself in the secure, intimate betrayal of the hypnotic state the bogus doctor lulled him into at the hospital. How many sessions had there been? They had stolen from him, looted the locked closet of his most secret emotions. And the realisation brought with it not just indignation but confusion, because although he was sure of the how, Seaton had not the remotest understanding of the why of what had been done to him. Why? In God’s name, why pick on him?

  The smell of the beer he had drawn was a rotten, brisk rebuke in his glass on the counter in front of his nose and the music wheezed towards its conclusion in his ears.

  Spare the rod and spoil the child.

  He hefted the poor, velvet-clad remains he gripped in his hand. Oh, well.

  He turned around and walked across and pulled out a chair and sat down with them at their table. He rested the bag in his lap. ‘I’ll go last,’ he said.

  Gibson-Hoare picked first and drew the jack of clubs. Seaton tried to concentrate on the game. It was a simple enough game. And he needed to be cool and he had never needed more to have his wits about him. But in his mind he saw Lucinda, the patella bone flapping through skin when she worked the treadle of her sewing machine. And he felt the fury shake him like a stampede.

  Breene picked. He drew the nine of hearts. Seaton tried to calculate odds as he thought about Mason’s sister, bruised and unconscious in bed in Whitstable, having been dragged naked from the sea in a sheet by her weeping brother.

  Edwin Poole drew with pale and expert fingers and he flipped over the queen of diamonds on to the tabletop with a snap. And all Paul Seaton could see in his mind was a woman with her throat expertly slit, stranded on the mud on a foggy, long-forgotten dawn at Shadwell Stair.

  He expected his own hand to tremble when he drew. But it did not. With his left hand, he turned the drawn card and showed the two of spades. And Poole smiled at him. A gold incisor snagged the smile on its owner’s lower lip. Seaton noticed that the music had stopped. Billy Paul had finished singing his maudlin tribute to the wife of another man. He dropped his card. He put his right hand on the stock of Wheatley’s revolver. And using the thumb of his now idle left, he flicked the deck and the cards flipped in neat procession and he saw that each and every one of them was the two of spades. He smiled back at Poole and shrugged. He lifted the revolver up from the table towards his head. It was such a heavy tool. It lacked the essential attribute of balance. It was altogether a clumsy instrument. You could handle it forever and its ungainly weight would always go on surprising and dismaying you. It was so quiet in the Windmill saloon, you could have heard a drop of blood drip from a chastising cane to the floor, he thought, pulling back the hammer, pressuring the trigger, lowering the weapon and putting a bullet into the right eye of the grinning spectre of Pandora’s murderer.

  ‘Everybody cheats,’ he said. He continued to pull the trigger.

  Thirty-One

  He was back in the vestibule of the Fischer house. He was on his feet. But the gun was in his hand and it was smoking and when he touched the barrel, it was hot. He tried to look at the cylinder to see how many of the shells it housed were now spent but, in the darkness, could neither calculate nor remember how many shots the gun had fired. It did not matter very much. You could not kill a ghost. Not with a gun, you couldn’t. He put the Webley on the floor. Some intuition told him that whatever hope he possessed in this bleak and singular predicament, it did not lie in a gun.

  Transferring the bag from his left hand to his right, he walked out of the front door. He descended the steps to the grounds, fully expecting Giuseppe’s lanky cadaver to emerge from the shadows, voice full of melancholy warning, trying to draw him back. He heard the rain. He heard the crunch of wet gravel under his own feet. He did not hear Giuseppe. He heard a groan he thought might be Mr Greb passing through the vestibule on his way to devour him. And his heart thudded and dread drenched and scalded him in the falling rain. But when his mind made sense of the sound, it was the wail of some old blues singer. It was Bessie Smith, or maybe Leadbelly, the pain of their lamentation roaming the empty house, freed from a shellac disk revolving under a needle and played there long ago in a time of evil and incalculable despair.

  He thought he felt the bag shift in his grip. But he knew it couldn’t be so. He was crying, now, he knew. He was sobbing in the rain and darkness with fear and grief and rage, all mingled. He kept on walking. He turned and the lights of the house were dim and grown quite distant behind him. He wiped tears and snot and rain from his face with the back of his free hand. It was very dark. It was time to get his bearings, locate the stream, find the relative sanctity of the far bank for the burial. He cursed himself for abandoning Mason’s entrenching tool in the basement of the house. No matter. He would dig with his ruined hands. They would have all the time in the world, his hands, afterwards, for repair.

  Looking around, he sensed the density of foliage rather than empty space. Yet his path had been unimpeded. It was a confusing contradiction that made him stop. He extended a hand and touched the obstacle of a rough, dense hedge directly in front of him. The leaves of this obstruction were fleshy, springlike, dry in the deluge. And he laughed, bitterly, knowing where he was. He was in the derelict maze at the hospital to which he’d been sent a decade ago. It had the smell and stillness and familiar, overgrown threat. The velvet bag in his hand seemed to shiver and fret again and he thought; nerves. My nerves. My ould nerves are shot to shit, and little wonder. I’m nowhere near up to any of this. And he sensed the brush of pursuit, closing in on him, from somewhere in the maze to his rear.

  Seaton became aware, with appalling dread, of who it was now approaching him. It was not Mr Greb. Where the beast would have marauded, parading its strength, his pursuer now larked and crept. Jesus, he thought, knowing who it was, or more accurately, who it had once been.

  The nurse from Dundalk who had strayed into the maze with him that afternoon in the hospital grounds had done so with a serious fancy for the young Paul Seaton. He discovered this a week after his rescue from it, when she entered the cell they had put him in to recover from his breakdown and, careful not to loosen his restraints, straddled and mounted him after an intense, smirking period of a
rousal. He was easily aroused. He was twenty-five. It was the first sex he had experienced since Lucinda Grey had abandoned him. By the time he was entered into her, he detested her. But he was unable to voice any feelings he might have had, a rubber clamp having been put into his mouth to prevent his occasional seizures from allowing him to bite off his own tongue.

  She must have died. She must have died to be pursuing him here, decaying, flirtatious.

  ‘Doctor Covey is ready for you, now,’ she said from behind him. There was gravel in her voice. She giggled. The velvet of the bag rippled gently against his thigh. That happened, he thought, amazed. That did occur. I felt it.

  ‘He’s in the dining room,’ said the dead nurse from Dundalk. He could feel the cold soughing off her with the chill of the wind off a lake at night. ‘The doctor thought that you might enjoy dinner together.’

  Seaton sighed and turned. And there was nobody there. He began the walk back to the house. He felt more resigned than afraid. Fate had always meant for it to end like this, he realised. He would never have been allowed to take the coward’s way out. It would have been cheating fate. And fate, above all else, would not be cheated.

  ‘It would have been cheating yourself, too,’ he said, under his breath. He gripped the bag, entirely ignorant now of the pain that doing so inflicted. He looked up at the lozenge windows of the tower, where lurked the beast that had killed his courageous friend. He thought about Malcolm Covey and the life Covey’s machinations had deprived him of. He trod wet ground, and the house and his confrontation there in the room where their ceremonies had been held drew nearer.

  ‘Old chum,’ Covey said, when Giuseppe, liveried in cloth and gilt splendour now, opened the dining-room doors and announced him with an obsequious bow.

  Covey was seated on a sort of throne. He had on a cloak with a goat-head fastening embossed in ebony and gold. There was a broach pinned to his chest with runic symbols carved into its ancient metal. His armour, Seaton thought, almost absently. He’s come here well-protected. There were rings on most of his fat fingers. The fingers drummed and clinked on the surface of the high table he sat at. He looked dark and furious and the table itself heaved with food and accoutrements. It was heaped high with elaborate dishes and clustered with bottles of wine and liquor and spilling flower vases. But the meat on the suckling pig in pride of place smelled rank and the fruit was bruising in its burnished bowls. Petals lay on the tabletop from blooms curling and already dead. This was the place where they had held their feather and horn banquets and the contamination of it stank through the decades to Paul Seaton with the virulence of plague. He looked at Covey, who had aged a good decade since that night not so long ago in Zanzibar. But perhaps that was just the light. The room was illuminated only by the two ornate tabletop candelabra, their candles red, dripping wax like gore and giving everything in the room a bloodshot cast.

  Seaton sat down. It was a long table. He sat carefully out of Covey’s physical reach. ‘You’d have to wonder why, Malcolm,’ he said. ‘You really would.’

  ‘Power,’ Covey said, flatly. ‘Authority. Influence. Wealth. Nothing you would ever, truly, comprehend. So let’s not bother with philosophy or morality or ethics, let’s cut to the chase. You have something in that bag on your lap that doesn’t belong to you. Return it, Paul, and I assure you we will part as friends.’

  ‘If I don’t?’

  Covey’s smile flickered, bloody in the candlelight.

  ‘Mr Greb will shortly join us. You would not wish to encounter Mr Greb.’

  Seaton nodded. This was true enough. Except that the house was quiet.

  ‘You know what I think, Malcolm? And this is only my supposition, mind. But I’ve a sneaky suspicion your beast is hurt. It killed Nick Mason, right enough. And in time you and Mr Greb will be all the stronger for possession of the magic Nick’s father endowed him with. And that’s just as you foresaw and planned it. But he was altogether tougher and more resourceful than you thought he’d be, was Nick. And right now, Harry Greb is feeling badly from the fight. He’s taken a standing count, so he has. It’s my belief he’ll be in need of a rest before he comes for me. To my mind, for the present only, it’s down to the two of us.’

  There was a slouching sound from above, as if in contradiction of what Seaton had just said. And Covey smiled and glimmered. But the sound had betrayed itself in Seaton’s mind with lack of appetite. Mr Greb would recover. The beast would gather itself. But it hadn’t quite done so yet. Covey took a toothpick from a barbed display of them on the tabletop. And Seaton remembered the magic the man’s father had contrived in the bar in Portsmouth to break the back of a belligerent sailor.

  ‘I want the bag in your lap. It doesn’t belong to you. You’ve stolen what it contains. Return it and you will leave here healthy and sane. Give it to me.’

  ‘Ah, Malcolm. Why don’t you go and fuck yourself.’

  The thing above them, gathering obvious strength, murmured and shifted.

  Covey bit the toothpick he’d been playing with and Seaton felt pain blister and grind through him. And the bag soughed in his lap. And he knew, finally, that he would fight with the persistence with which his dead and valiant friend had fought to give the boy the burial he deserved.

  ‘Why me, Covey?’

  Covey shrugged. ‘Give me the bag.’

  And the thing above them found its feet and began to shift down the stairs.

  The bag rippled in Seaton’s lap. Covey took the toothpick from between his teeth and held it out towards a candle flame. Seaton’s clothing was soaked. Lascalles’ old missal was pulp in his jacket pocket. There was a hiss of steam from his sodden cuffs and the heat through him was bright, burning agony.

  ‘Give me the bag.’

  ‘Never.’

  Behind him, Seaton heard the beast burst into the room on a draught that extinguished the candles and pitched them into darkness. It howled and the bag rippled in his lap. Covey cursed and the beast panted and stank at Seaton’s back with fury. He heard Covey’s fingers scrabbling on the tabletop, for a knife? For Wheatley’s revolver? Behind him, he sensed Mr Greb gathering, poised for attack.

  Matches. Covey was searching for matches.

  Seaton laughed out loud. He had remembered something. He had remembered something vital he had probably been schooled by the man opposite him to forget. ‘I’ll give you light,’ he said.

  And Malcolm Covey screamed.

  Seaton put both hands over the bag. He felt the nap of velvet over its sad, small protrusions. He closed his eyes and the darkness behind his lids was cleaved by brightness. ‘I’ll make you safe, Peter, so I will,’ he said.

  He held the beast back with a part of his mind in the way he now remembered he had done it before. He’d used a great amount of his power, then, instinctive and untried. It had been a moment so cataclysmic that the forest itself had been stunned to silence and its birds had shed their feathers on the wing. The Irish myth of running water hadn’t stopped Mr Greb. He had done it. And vanity had caused the collapse in him that followed. Not content with felling the beast, he had approached it where it lay. And he had looked it in the face. That was a mistake he would not repeat.

  It was behind him now, mewling, manacled by a single, ironbound thought. And Covey was scraping matches against the side of a box in a bid to repeat his spiteful trick of a moment ago. But none of them would ignite, because Seaton wouldn’t allow it. Wheatley’s gun was on the table, sure enough. But Covey would find he couldn’t pick it up. Seaton’s mind had welded it where it lay. Covey was crying. He was sobbing, fumbling with the matchbox, dropping matches in the dark. Seaton smiled. He still had his eyes closed. He found that he could see perfectly well without the use of them. But he had far more important business to attend to than Malcolm Covey, with his shallow tricks, his tawdry ambitions. Seaton had made a solemn promise to the boy. He intended to keep it.

  The velvet thrummed under his touch. His mind travelled to a plateau next to a chu
rch overlooking the sea. Trees provided seclusion and shade and there was the late glimmer of sunshine on the water. Robert Morgan’s gravestone rose from the cut grass. Paul Seaton called on his power. His power was keen and almost unused and he dragged deep and so martialled and gathered the sum of himself. He concentrated. And it was as though the physical world conspired and colluded with him, belief confounding fact, matter shifting on the strength and clarity of what he willed. With profound resolution, with great tenderness, Seaton willed all there was left of Peter, the precious whole and the heal of him, to lie between his father’s arms, safe forever, bathed in the granite beam of his father’s light.

  He sighed and lowered his head. The bag on his lap lay empty. The beast behind where he sat was gone, the baleful magic that had conjured it, abruptly and entirely defeated. He felt the house sag with perished illusion into the neglected ruin it should long ago have become. He opened his eyes and looked at Malcolm Covey over the spoiled food. Covey looked sad and careworn in his cloak and rings and symbols, deprived of his music and ghosts. He was rolling a cigar between his fingers. But he couldn’t smoke it. None of the matches spilled on to his banqueting table would strike.

  ‘Now I understand.’

  ‘You understand nothing,’ Covey said. ‘What a waste. What an appalling waste. Damn you.’

  ‘I could kill you.’

  ‘You could do anything. But you won’t.’ He shook his head and looked at his redundant cigar. ‘What a waste.’

  In Klaus Fischer’s mansion, the walls were scabrous and pockmarked now where pictures had hung. Rain pattered unimpeded through gaping holes.

  Seaton stood and turned and picked a careful path through debris. He walked out of the ruined house into the night. He walked in rain until he was a distance away from it in what he judged to be the direction of the shore. He could not bear the idea of getting back into Covey’s Saab and staring at the empty passenger seat. A strong intuition told him he would reach the shore and find a boat. Pandora had not found a boat. But he was confident that he would. He turned back once to look at the house, just before the trees grew so thick as to obstruct his view. He saw light on the glass of one of the tower’s thick windows. But it was no more than a hint of moonlight and even from here, he could see that the pane was broken. The house was broken, derelict, bereft of the corrupting power it had possessed.