by F. G. Cottam
‘One of them is already dead. The others are in a desperate situation. Four of them visited the house.’
Five, Seaton thought.
‘Five,’ Covey said. ‘If you count the tutor who was supposed to be monitoring their course. He was the idiot who took them there.’
Seaton had his head in his hands.
‘Paul? I need you. They need you. There is no time for prevarication on this.’
Another silence.
‘There’s a bar, improbably named, not far from where I believe you live these days.’
Zanzibar, Seaton said to himself.
‘Zanzibar,’ Covey said, and he chuckled. ‘Who’d have thought it, Paul, in Southwark?’
But Seaton’s mind was on the Fischer house.
‘I’ll meet you there at eight this evening. Please be there. Be there, Paul, for God’s sake.’
Seaton rose from his chair thinking that God had very little to do with anything that had ever occurred within the grounds or walls of Klaus Fischer’s gloomy domain. He walked back to his window. He turned his wrist so that his watch face showed in the flare of the sodium lights from the busy intersection below. He studied the hurl of indifferent traffic for a moment. It was just after a quarter to eight.
If he thought about it objectively, his life did not amount to very much. He occupied a rented flat in a block that smelled of frying onions and old semen stains and rodent droppings and damp. He commuted by Underground to the British Museum where he scraped a few hundred pounds a month checking facts for writers too idle to carry out their own research. He didn’t own a desktop computer or a credit card or a decent suit of clothes. He didn’t possess a television set. His only diversion in the flat was a second-hand cassette player he’d picked up on a market stall in Lower Marsh, and he didn’t tend to play that often because the tapes he owned brought reminiscences unbearable to him. He’d plugged the machine into a wall socket and put on Everything But The Girl, heard the opening song of the album Eden and cried salt, self-pitying tears on his knees with his face between his hands. He hid in a part of the city fondly remembered, known from his own young adulthood. He hid there because he’d been confident there once, and happy. He hid there because its familiar streets and tender memories were the only consolation left to him now. It was no sort of a life at all, when you thought about it. But it was the only one he had. He believed that Malcolm Covey’s intervention, now, could take it away from him.
You exited the lift and took your life in your hands crossing St George’s Road against the traffic hurtling from the right. Then there was a gated passage flanking the cathedral that led to the made-over pub. This short walk was always an ordeal, the cathedral’s length a sinister mass in the darkness. He shared the passage with no one. Odd doors and gated entrances punctuated the length of the building to his right. Leaves and city debris stirred and floundered on sets of descending steps and in dark recesses. There was a Gothic, deliberate atmosphere about the place, a sepulchral character to the mass of its stone buttresses and retreats. Shapes snatched inexplicably at his eyes as vagrant shadows shuffled and sulked in the night there. And he heard laughter, high-pitched with contempt or teasing mockery, that made him hurry on, even as he rationalised the sound into the squeal of brakes on the road beyond, or cold wind gusting through elaborate masonry.
Malcolm Covey sat smoking a cigar. Even in the crush, he’d found a table, kept a vacant chair. In the intervening decade, Covey seemed not so much to have aged as to have grown even more comfortably into himself. The hair and the beard were silvery grey rather than salt and pepper. He had looked distinguished before. Now he looked almost eminent. His huge body was buttoned into a dark-grey, three-piece suit. Rings adorned two of his thick fingers. One was plain gold. The other housed a fat ruby. The whole impression was of ease and stature and affluence, until he spoke. The voice was betrayed slightly now by the weight he carried and, Seaton assumed, by the number of Havanas he had burned his way through over the years. There was a shrill, short-of-breath quality to it that Seaton didn’t remember from before and that hadn’t been noticeable earlier over the telephone.
Seaton knew he was someone prey more than most to easy sentimentality and, particularly, to the cheap warmth of nostalgia. But he felt neither sentimental nor nostalgic facing the figure in front of him. He did not even feel the faint pleasure of familiarity assumed lost. This was partly because of the urgency that had brought Covey so abruptly back into his life. But it was mostly because he had always felt ambivalent about the man. It was hard to warm to any person instinct warned you not to trust.
‘You look good, Malcolm. Wish I could say it was good to see you.’
Covey puffed and nodded. He had risen to greet Seaton with a handshake. Now he sat back down. ‘You look pretty good yourself. All things considered. You’ve every right to look like hell.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Which is where they’re going, Paul. Those girls who went to the Fischer house. Unless you can help them?’
Seaton shivered. ‘I was a victim, Malcolm, not an adversary. I did not win. I merely survived. You surely know that better than anybody does.’
‘Survival was a sort of victory.’
‘If you’d been there, you wouldn’t think so. And if you were me, you would certainly know differently.’
‘Perhaps going back can help you get closure.’
‘I’m not after closure.’
Covey frowned.
‘I’ll help them if I can. I just don’t know how I’m equipped to.’
The three surviving students had attended their dead friend’s funeral. And they had all seen her there.
‘An open coffin?’ Seaton asked, misunderstanding.
‘No. They saw her attending,’ Covey said.
They each thought they saw her among the mourners. Each of the three put it down in the moment to private anxiety, or grief. They were shocked and very upset, after all. The girl who subsequently tried to take her own life got the worst glimpse. She saw her dead friend loitering at the graveside in a hat and veil, her mouth a dim contortion shaping incoherent curses, soil slithering into the grave under the toes of her pointed leather shoes. Afterwards, the three discussed what they’d seen. ‘And,’ Covey said, ‘the real terror began.’
Seaton thought about what he’d been told. ‘When did they go to the Fischer house?’
‘Almost three weeks ago. The dead girl killed herself a week later and was buried a week after that.’
‘And the attempted suicide?’
‘Two nights after the funeral,’ Covey said. ‘She’s out of hospital now, recovering with her brother at his house in Whitstable.’
‘Recovery being a relative term,’ Seaton said.
Covey shrugged.
‘What were they doing there?’
‘They’re not students of the paranormal,’ Covey said. ‘They attend a legitimate university. In Surrey. It has a charter. It receives government funding. It awards recognised degrees.’
‘And employs morons,’ Seaton said.
‘The moron to whom you’re referring teaches ethics,’ Covey said. ‘The girls were – they are – philosophy students. They were examining the possibility of evil, apparently. They got on to the notion of evil as something communicable. Something that can, as it were, contaminate. They began to discuss the possibility, then, of residual evil. And they sought and were granted access to the Fischer house as part of their study.’
Seaton put his head in his hands. ‘Oh, Christ.’
‘Most of the time, as you must long have concluded by now yourself, the place is benign,’ Covey said. ‘On this occasion, it wasn’t. Unfortunately, they found exactly what they were looking for. It’s out, Paul. It’s abroad.’
‘They’re out, you mean.’
‘Don’t confuse evil and its manifestations.’
‘I’ll do what I fucking well please.’
‘You haven’t done that for some years, Paul
. You haven’t been allowed to.’
Seaton was silent for a moment. The bar they were in was smoky and loud. Garlic had burned in the kitchen to the rear of the bar and its smell was pungent in the other smells of wet clothing from the rain, scent on warm skin and beer and damp hair, all compressed and heating between nicotine walls. There was a steady thrum of conversation, the chink of glasses, laughter. He had to speak loudly himself to be heard. ‘What exactly would you like me to do, Malcolm?’
Covey sighed. ‘I think you should see the Whitstable girl.’ He reached for his briefcase under the table between them and pulled a thick Manila envelope from it and placed the envelope on the tabletop. ‘The address is in there. Along with twelve hundred pounds in cash and the keys to a car parked in a lock-up under the railway arches around the corner from here in Hercules Road. You are a psychologist and an expert in trauma. The envelope contains identification in your own name. There’s a letter of accreditation from the BMA and some other departmental stuff from the Guys St Thomas Hospital Trust.’
‘And her family are amenable?’
‘Her brother is the only family she has. And he’s more than amenable. He’s desperate, Paul. He doesn’t want his sister to die.’
Seaton put his hand on top of the envelope. ‘I’d like to see the tutor first.’
Covey nodded. ‘And so you shall. Your appointment with him is at two tomorrow afternoon. It was arranged using the same set of credentials. I’d suggest you drive straight on to Whitstable after that.’
‘It will mean getting to Whitstable after nightfall, Malcolm.’
‘You’ll find the brother interesting, I think. From what I’ve heard of him, I don’t necessarily think you’ll bond, as the current terminology has it. But he’s a formidable chap. After his fashion.’
‘I’ll be arriving there after dark.’
‘There’s no time to do otherwise.’
Seaton thought about this. ‘Whitstable is on the coast, right?’
‘Right.’
That was something. He pulled the envelope towards him. He could feel its contents shifting. Its keys, its forged documentation and, of course, its cash. Twelve hundred: four hundred for each tender life. The ethicist was outside this equation, his life beyond consideration, forfeited by his having taken them there. As though money could save them. As though their lives could simply be bought.
‘Why the Whitstable girl?’
Covey looked at him. He looked almost amused. ‘Your bedside manner wouldn’t offer a shred of comfort or salvation. We both know that. To visit them all would be an enervating waste of time. But the brother of Sarah Mason might prove an ally. As I say, he’s formidable. And, of course, you’ll find him at his ailing sister’s side.’
‘Why me, Malcolm?’
‘A naïve question, Paul.’
‘Seriously. Why me?’
‘Because you beat it, once. Because you have the power in you to beat it once again.’
‘I won’t do it,’ Seaton said. ‘I’m not qualified.’ He dropped the envelope back on to their table. ‘I won’t do it.’
‘You’ve no choice,’ Covey said, reclining magisterially in his seat amid the loudness and the crush of Zanzibar. His voice was flat, devoid of inflection. He extended his arm and flicked ash from his cigar on to the floor. With his free hand, he pushed the envelope of cash and bogus credentials back towards Seaton. ‘Now listen very carefully to what I have to say,’ he said. He held Seaton with his eyes. ‘Listen to my every word.’
Three
They parted thirty minutes later on the street, Covey folding his bulk into the cosy refuge of a black cab. Seaton leaned into the open doorway to say goodbye in the rain and Covey blinked in the glow of the cab’s interior light and gestured at the cathedral building looming over where they stood, a few feet of pavement away from the yellow pub. He nodded. ‘Insurance?’
Seaton shook his head. Rain, hard in a dancing thrum on the roof of the cab, made him blink. ‘It would only make things worse. They’d see it as provocation,’ he said.
‘You really think they’re that…informed?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid I do.’
Now, Covey blinked. He looked more sad than shocked.
‘I’ll think about what you’ve said, Malcolm.’
‘No time,’ Covey said. ‘No time for thought.’ He tugged hard at the door handle, Seaton let go of its frame and the door slammed shut and the cab was away in a spray of water from its rear tyres. Seaton straightened up. For the second time over the course of a single evening, he was soaked to the skin.
He’d been in bed half an hour when he heard the music playing softly from his sitting room next door. He’d bought a duvet cover and sheets, offering the enveloping childhood comfort of cotton fleece, on taking the tenancy of the flat. He’d bought them expensively from the Army & Navy department store in Victoria along with soft pillows and a plump goosedown duvet. The plan had been to bury his solitary nights in cosy oblivion. And it had worked. Until now. Now, the music from his sitting room made stiff shrouds of his sheets against his rigid body. He listened to the same, faintly relentless song. He counted seven minutes off the luminous dial of his wristwatch. He started to sweat and to grow cold in his bed. He recognised the song. Or he thought he did. And it continued. It wavered through the wall and door-frame in strained, distended chords and choruses, swelling and fading, ragged and persistent. The door was to his right. On the wall to his left, behind the heavy drape of his curtains, he could get out of bed and look out at the night view spread below. At the busy thoroughfare and, beyond it, the War Museum dome, floodlit beyond the drip in its tended grounds of sodden, autumnal trees. The older locals still called the place Bedlam. The building that housed the museum had once been a lunatic asylum.
But the madness now was coming from the right. So Seaton pulled back the duvet and got out of bed and walked through the door into his sitting room.
Where the music was louder.
He had no curtains there. The room was lit in whitish monochrome from the sodium lights on the intersection down below. Shadows jumped and scattered on his walls and ceiling as traffic slid by. And the music persisted, repetitious, frightening him.
It was the Fairport Convention song ‘Tam Lin’. Poor, dead Sandy Denny was singing it. It was her slightly disembodied voice, or a voice at least sharing the perfect pitch and cut-crystal enunciation of the late Sandy Denny. Seaton could hear the whoops and whistles of the band, the Fairports – or their facsimile – in full cry, with their virtuoso fiddle-playing and frenetic picking of guitars and mandolins and drum rhythms. And something under that, unruly and discordant. An occasional noise like the close snagging of cloth and what sounded like the odd snicker of vindictive laughter.
Seaton sank into his armchair. He stared at his cassette machine, on the floor, over by the wall. The plug was still pulled from the socket and lay where he had left it after his tearful failure weeks earlier to listen to Eden. There’d been no batteries in the machine when he had bought it from the market stall so he knew bloody well there were none in it now. It didn’t even play with the pretence of a lit red power light to signal genuine electronic life. Denny’s roused ghost sang and her band went through their antic thrumming of the tune, and Seaton thought about the old couple who manned the weekend junk and bric-a-brac stall in Lower Marsh and had sold him the player. They were ordinary people, he had no doubt. Ordinary people plying an innocent trade for pin money.
He got up and pressed the ‘reverse’ button that would play the other side of the tape he knew the machine didn’t really house. And after a pause, he heard laughter and the sibilant hiss of his own name, repeated, recited, delivered like the punchline of some dark and secret joke. Then that stopped and there was only the spooling of phantom tape. And then there was a snatch of conversation he recognised from what dialogue he had shared in Zanzibar with Malcolm Covey. More laughter followed, viperish, and that noise again, familiar like the tearin
g of cloth. The bump of furniture. The drag of thin chair legs across a polished hardwood floor. He pressed the ‘stop’ button, and there was abrupt silence. He pressed ‘open’ and the cassette tray opened, empty. He stood and turned to get a glass of water from the kitchen tap and behind him heard the cassette tray snap shut again. The ghost of Sandy Denny wavered back into voice and sang ‘Tam Lin’. She was unaccompanied now. And she sounded bedraggled and somehow abject.
‘It’s a good trick,’ Seaton said, out loud. ‘If a touch domestic.’
The singing stopped. There was a moment’s silence. Then Seaton felt the shudder through the darkness of the cathedral bell as it pealed, once, booming between buildings in the rain and then reverberating into rest. He looked at his watch. It was fourteen minutes past one in the morning. It was no time at all for the cathedral bell to toll.
He nodded in acknowledgement and appreciation. The bell had been somewhat more than domestic. And instinct told him it was circumspect, just now, to pander to their vanity. He didn’t think he could be hurt from this distance. Not physically hurt. But he was very shaken. If the intention had been to disconcert him, then that had been achieved with great effect.
Seaton drank a glass of water drawn from the tap in his kitchen sink and went and lay back in his bed. For a time he feared that the song would groan back into its gruesome pastiche of life on his little cassette player. He thought that the bell in the cathedral might suddenly start to toll its iron angelus, defying calendar and hour through the depths of the night. But he was a long way away from the Fischer house. And there were three students of philosophy and their foolish tutor far more deserving of attention now than he. So he lay in bed and waited for sleep to come. But he lay for a long time and it came only reluctantly. Through his bedroom window, he was aware in their reflection on his roof of lights going on in the secular part of the cathedral building over on the other side of St George’s Road. The dean or the deacon, possibly, roused from their quarters. Possibly the warden. They’d discover no bell-ringer. Unless they were really very unlucky indeed.