by F. G. Cottam
Seaton grunted and dug. He was through the crust, using the blunt of the entrenching tool to rake stones from the soil, deepening the impression in the cool loam underneath. He could tell from their odd dry tingle on the shaft of the tool that his palms were flayed. No matter. Should he survive, the skin of his hands would grow back. There were more noises from above. The entire house seemed to screech and shudder. It shifted. Floors buckled and walls bellowed inward and outward with shock and repercussion. Noise came in savage and frenetic squalls and faded abruptly. Drafts erupted and rippled and were gone. The music, though, had entirely ceased. Its absence was unnerving in the house, in the fine, falling precipitation of dust induced by Mason’s fight. There was a rumble and a roar from a landing above. It was a cry of primeval triumph.
‘On my way, Irishman,’ said a rough voice. ‘I’ll be down to you directly.’ Mason was dead. He had lost the battle he never could have won. Seaton heard the thing that had defeated him saunter and crash downwards. He thought he heard music again; Al Bowley, The Hot Club Quintet, something faint and frenetic and almost comically irrelevant. He saw a bone gleam palely in the loam, not much bigger than a rabbit bone, and he choked on sobs and cursed a miserable God that he hadn’t been given the time to complete the task he knew now to be his sole and urgent obligation. He looked at the entrenching tool, its shaft sticky with his own gore between bloody hands. It was no sort of weapon. He would fight with it anyway.
The thud of hooves was imperious down the stairs. Seaton stood upright and hefted the tool. And then there was a cry and it was human, Mason’s fierce cry of defiance as he raked gunfire into the beast once more in a desperate rally somewhere above. He was exacting his vengeance for his sister’s suffering, was Mason. More than that, the fallen angel was selling himself to buy his sister some sort of salvation.
A dark universe crashed and shuddered in pain and rage above his head and from somewhere in the games room, Seaton found a velvet bag containing billiard balls and emptied it and crouched and sifted loam for precious bones to carry away. The sounds of conflict subsided above. He filled his bag. Unhurried and tender, thorough and methodical, he filled his velvet bag with all the precious remains the black soil surrendered to his combing, sifting fingers. And then a weight subsided in him and he knew he had them all.
He felt the fight above was truly over, now. He felt sadness and pity at the death of his valiant friend. He admonished himself for the pity. It was an emotion he was prey to. It was one Nicholas Mason had never had need of. He listened for Mr Greb, but heard nothing. He carried the bag into the corridor. There were many doors in the gloom of its considerable length. But there was light under only one of them. It was pale in a narrow strip and softly inviting. He tried to rub the soil from where it had stuck to the raw of his hands. He listened for the approach of Mr Greb. Still nothing. Licking its wounds, perhaps. Slowed and even hurt by its desperate adversary. He needed to get his bearings and couldn’t do so in the darkness. He moved with the bag in one fist to the lure of the light.
Thirty
The door opened on to a school classroom lit by opaque globes of glass suspended from its ceiling by electrical wires, the wires covered by black fabric woven into plaits. Miniature desks occupied four precise rows. The desks were built in pairs and each had a bench seat attached. The desks had white porcelain inkwells set into them and carved grooves above the hinges on their tops in which to place pencils and pens. The classroom wore the mingled odour of chalk dust and wax polish and wet gabardine wool and carbolic soap. It smelled of childhoods spent in the secure discipline of long ago. They were weathered and scored and blackened at their edges, but there was no graffiti carved into the desktops. There was a neat pile of prayer books or hymnals on a shelf in a bookcase to Seaton’s right. Their black cloth spines were threadbare with devotion. It was night, because outside the narrow windows all was dark. Seaton had entered from the rear of the classroom. The row of windows was in the wall to his left. In the electric light, landscape pictures looked lurid and childish in poster paint on coloured paper tacked to the walls.
Marjory Pegg stood at the front of the classroom with her back to him. Her hair was splayed, grey and unkempt, across her shoulders. She was chalking a sentence in neat script on to the blackboard. The characters were too small for him to be able to recognise individual letters and so distinguish words. The light was feeble. It was very dark outside. And from the back of the class, under the dim yellow globes hanging from the ceiling, he could not make out the writing on the blackboard.
There was a door with frosted panes in its upper half to the left of the blackboard. Seaton knew, without looking, that the door through which he had entered just now had gone. It had no logical place here. It had been a part of the Fischer house. And he wasn’t there any longer. He was in Peter Morgan’s village school at Penhelig. He could hear the ticking of the radiator on the wall under the row of windows to the left of him as its pipes contracted and cooled. On the draught from under the door in the classroom corner, he caught the dead-cinders whiff of a coke-fired boiler allowed to go out.
He suffered a start of blind panic at the thought that logic might have stolen the bag from him. But it was there, in his right hand, the velvet tacky in his tender grip.
The teacher shuffled and turned to face him. She was dull-eyed in death, her complexion cold and the flesh of her arms blue and ragged where she had opened her arteries in long slashes to let the blood escape. It was the way you did it if you really meant it, Seaton remembered old Bob Halliwell saying to him, once. You didn’t slash haphazardly at your wrists. What you did was cut deeply into the tender flesh from the crook of your elbow to the heel of your hand. You cut the blood vessels lengthways so they could not be cauterised and staunched.
From the front of the classroom, Miss Pegg raised her head and looked at him. Her movements seemed clumsy and somehow reluctant. The classroom was authentic with detail, down to the spotless condition of the inkwells, each obediently rinsed as the final ritual carried out at the end of each dutiful school day. But its teacher was a troubled, troubling figure, lurching and scary, wretched with lack of life. Her feet made a slithering sound when she shifted. From the back of the class, Seaton could see that they were wrapped in bits of newspaper bound by rags. She smiled and her mouth was a chasm of decay. He remembered the shoes Marjory Pegg had worn in her picture, punctilious with repair. Had she become destitute after the events described? Perhaps she would tell him. He wanted, less than anything just then, to hear the apparition speak.
Watching her, he remembered something else. Wheatley had made the remark to Pandora on the way to the Fischer house scullery as they went to scrounge coffee early on a November morning in 1927. He had said that suicides could be very useful to the beast they intended to spawn. He hadn’t bothered to explain to her precisely how.
Light twinkled through the windows. There was a pattern to it, a line of progressing dots of brightness, evenly placed, each about the height of a man. Seaton knew what it was. It was the helmet lamps of miners on their trudge to the pithead for their shift. Miss Pegg turned her head to the lights and she dropped her chalk to the floor with a small clatter and held her hand over her open mouth. They were singing, the miners. It was something heartfelt they were singing, something rousing, inspirational. Was it ‘Men Of Harlech’? Had there ever been coal deposits to bore and dig for in this part of Wales? Seaton struggled to remember. He hadn’t thought there were. He thought there might be slate quarries within marching distance of Aberdyfi. But he didn’t think there were pits.
Marjory Pegg, her hair an unkempt shawl across her shoulders, rocked on ragged feet. To his right, next to the bookcase, Seaton saw that a row of coat hooks had been screwed into the wood. The pupils had collected their coats before their departure, of course. Except for one. A child’s raincoat, blue with a belt trailing from sewn loops, hung on the nearest hook. There was a blue scarf hung over the coat. And above these items,
a blue cap with a single hoop of white and a badge embroidered in silver and red, neat above the peak. Then there was nothing until the farthest hook, at Miss Page’s end of the classroom. A cane hung by its curved handle from the farthest hook. The cane was about three feet long and the final eight inches or so of its jointed length, to the tip, were stained with some dark stuff that had dripped into a small puddle on the floor beneath. Seaton’s eyes shifted and he saw that the teacher was watching him, had noticed him looking at the cane. He could no longer see her eyes. They were just hollows now, filled with unreadable shadow.
Had the light dimmed? It must have done. It wasn’t ‘Men Of Harlech’ they were singing outside. It was something maddeningly familiar and at the same time strange. But it wasn’t ‘Men Of Harlech’. And looking through the window, he was no longer sure that the procession of lights came from the lamps on miners’ heads. They seemed too violent and uncertain, torn out of the general blackness, more like naked flames. In the charged stillness in the classroom, Seaton heard blood drip from the tip of the cane into the congealing puddle under it. And the teacher moaned. And he launched himself and bolted past her and threw himself at the classroom door, praying for the night breath of Brightstone Forest in the rain and escape.
Except that the door opened on to the saloon bar of the Windmill pub in Lambeth High Street.
The pub interior was almost exactly as he would have remembered it. It must have been after closing time, though, because there was no one behind the bar itself and present, only a trio of late customers, playing cards around one of the bar’s small, circular wooden tables. All three players were attired in evening wear. They smelled strongly of Turkish tobacco and cologne, something old-fashioned and expensive. Tabarome, perhaps. Or Mouchoir de Monsieur. The scent mingled leather and lavender. But there was a taint to it, a base-note of sweet decay.
Sebastian Gibson-Hoare merely nodded at him. Young Mr Breene stood. The third man did not glance up from the cards. ‘Allow me to introduce you,’ Breene said.
‘No need,’ Seaton said. ‘Mr Gibson-Hoare and myself have previously met. The murderer, Edwin Poole, I have no wish to become acquainted with.’
‘Very good,’ Gibson-Hoare said. He chuckled. Poole still had not looked up from his cards. ‘You spotted the family likeness?’
Poole did not much resemble his cousin and victim. He had the vapid monochromatic handsomeness of his time. His hair was sleekly oiled and his jaw smooth from a professional shave, expensively administered. Outside, the torches flickered with the burn of pitch and there were screams and glass shattering and the lusty voices sang. Seaton had finally recognised what it was they were singing, at the same moment as he read the words on the blackboard, bolting from Peter Morgan’s classroom. It was the ‘Horst Wessel Song’.
‘What on earth do you think that commotion is outside?’ Breene said to him. He had sat back down.
‘It’s nothing on earth,’ Seaton said, thinking, its Göring and his wolf pack, marauding through the past these men had all of them helped contrive.
‘You were never a fighter pilot,’ Seaton said to Breene. ‘Archie McIndoe didn’t reconstruct your face. Some black-magic ritual that went wrong, was it, the scarring? Some sick ceremony that didn’t come off quite as you’d intended?’
Breene just looked at him. Gibson-Hoare chuckled.
‘You must all be very proud of what you’ve accomplished.’
‘Oh, you’ve no idea,’ Breene said. ‘My goodness. The fun we’ve had.’
Spare the rod and spoil the child, the teacher suicide had written on the blackboard. Seaton said, ‘How often is she obliged to beat the boy?’
And now, Edwin Poole did look up from the study of his hand. ‘As often as Mr Greb requires it,’ he said. He looked at the bag in Seaton’s fist. ‘Why don’t you rest your burden. Put it down somewhere.’ He gestured vaguely to a corner with his eyes. ‘You’re among friends, old man. You can relax.’
But Seaton had no intention of letting go of what he held. Poole was handsome, callow, unlined. Unlike the other two, raddled spectres at the table, he had apparently died young. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled Wheatley’s revolver out of it and put the weapon on the table. ‘Are you after being a gambling man at all, Mr Seaton?’ His stab at the accent was better than fair. But then, they were all of them skilled at mimicry.
Seaton looked at the revolver. The habitués of the house were showing an ominous, stubborn fondness for the weapon. ‘Malcolm Covey is Klaus Fischer’s son, isn’t he?’
‘Don’t you go minding all that, Pauly Boy,’ Gibson-Hoare said. ‘Now are you, or are you not, after having a little flutter here at the table with your ould pals?’
‘I’m not.’
‘Ah, come on with you.’
It was quiet outside now. Inside the pub, the tape behind the bar had started to play. Marvin Gaye was singing ‘Abraham, Martin and John’.
‘Coolie music,’ Breene said to him. ‘Sure, you’re fierce partial to it, so you are.’
‘Play with us,’ Gibson-Hoare said.
‘What would be the point?’ Seaton said. ‘You cheat.’
‘Doesn’t everyone cheat now,’ Breene said.
‘The point,’ Poole said, ‘is the stakes. Your ould pal Nicky has breathed his last breath. And you! Mr Greb is after being furious with yourself. Your prospects are looking gloomy, lad. But Mr Greb is terrible prey to his own obliging nature. And he’d give even the likes of you a sporting chance of survival.’ Poole had gathered the cards and he shuffled them above the tabletop between both hands, expertly, now, as he spoke. His facility with the cards, in death, was almost mesmerising. It was a skill contagious with the thrilling affliction of risk. ‘Let me explain how this simplest of games is played,’ he said. ‘We each choose a card from the pack. Draw any but the lowest card, Paul, and you can walk out of that door and into the rest of your natural life.’
Seaton hesitated.
‘Come,’ Poole said. ‘Join us.’ He was serious now. This was a serious offer. The pantomimic Irish brogue was absent from his voice. ‘The odds are very generous,’ he said. His own accent was uncanny, a phonetic relic, the received pronunciation you might hear in a wireless broadcast recorded seventy years ago.
‘And if I draw the lowest card?’
‘You do the honourable thing,’ Gibson-Hoare said. ‘It’s why the gun is on the table.’
Seaton nodded. Poole stared at him. Marvin Gaye had been superseded by Billy Paul and ‘Me And Mrs Jones’.
‘The year out there is 1983,’ Gibson-Hoare said, softly, nodding at the door of the pub. ‘It is springtime. The cherry tree in the little public garden across the road is ripe with pink and fragrant blossom. It is four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Lucinda Grey is sitting out there on the grass, reading the very latest edition of Vogue. She is lovely in a pale, pleated linen skirt and an ivory blouse, both of her own design. She is waiting for you, Paul. The tennis court is booked for five. You are sharing lasagne and a bottle of Frascati for your supper.’
Seaton looked towards the door. Above its frame, in the line of clear panes that topped all the frosting and engraving of the coloured glass in the pub’s facade, he could now see a sickly spread of pewter light.
‘The year is 1995,’ Seaton said.
‘You’re mistaken,’ Gibson-Hoare said. He said it gently, like a sad but essential reproach. ‘Tomorrow night, you will meet Greg and Stuart. Mike has promised to come. And Patrick will be there.’
‘Step out of that door, Paul, and you’ll be twenty-three years old again,’ Poole said, ‘in a world as young and unsullied as yourself. Put down the bag. Relax. Trust us.’
‘I need a drink.’
He reached over the bar and put a pint glass under the Director’s tap and pushed the pump from the wrong side until the glass was full. He straightened up and raised it. The beer was black and smelled brackish, as though brewed from a source grown stagnant.
‘Sure to hit the spot,’ Poole said, idly, from behind him.
‘Bejaysus,’ Gibson-Hoare said, the roaring boy again, Brendan Behan to the syllable, now Seaton had his back to them. ‘There’s nothing on God’s good earth touches a drop of the Liffey water.’
‘Who was the girl, Poole, when you were posing as Antrobus? Who was the girl with you in Perdoni’s, the two of you watching me that morning?’
‘One of Crowley’s cast-off acoloytes,’ Poole said. He sounded bored. ‘She entertained me, briefly. And then I grew as tired of her as he had.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Depends on your perspective. She’s where I left her. At the bottom of an Antwerp canal.’
Gibson-Hoare sniggered.
‘Or she’s in the lavatory here, powdering her nose.’
Seaton looked around in the thin forgotten light seeping through the clear panes from whatever Lambeth lay under their spring sky of nightmare. Where the pub walls met the ceiling there were splotches of mould spreading. It was as though he had entered a world malevolent with decay. Outside, it would be careless and worse, wretched duplication, pastiche and chaos. He put his drink down on the bar and steeled himself and lifted his eyes and looked at the three of them through the mirror behind the bar.
He’d discovered in the tower on his first visit to the Fischer house and had it confirmed often in the hospital, that reflection was never kind to them. Now, in the Windmill mirror, their clothing was reduced to wormy rags and moss pitted the dead flesh of their faces. All three were looking with their corpse eyes at the bag he held in his hand. Even in death, he could see that the rictus of terror gripped their collective gaze. He looked down at the worn and faded velvet of the sack. It bulged gently and felt pitifully insubstantial.