by F. G. Cottam
‘Why would a demon suffer earthly constraints?’
‘I think that was part of the craft of its invoking,’ Seaton said. ‘It was obliged to accept certain preconditions in order to come here. It would have to be. If its power had been unconfined, it would have been no use to the likes of Fischer. It’s only the constraints that make the beast keep its part of the bargain. It’s the Faustian Pact in reverse.’
Covey smiled. It was an impossible smile to read on a man Seaton now knew he would never really warm to. That was partly because of the horrible circumstances that had brought the doctor into his life. He would always associate the man with grief and terror. But it was also because Covey gave nothing of himself away. It was clear that, whatever else he wanted, he didn’t care especially whether or not he was liked. Fuck it, Seaton thought. He was tired, exhausted, truth be told. The hypnotism had worn him out. ‘What do you think?’
‘About your running-water theory?’
‘About any of it.’
Covey was silent. The smile held. ‘I think that you’re as sane as I am,’ he said, eventually.
Seaton was in the hospital for just over eight months. In all that time, Lucinda Grey never came to visit him. He was greatly saddened and hurt by this. But he was also relieved. In order to leave the hospital with any hope of genuine recovery, he knew it would be necessary for him to leave his old self behind. Some decisions about the curtailed life he would lead had already been made on his behalf.
He had been summoned to the county court and had a judgment against him now over an unpaid Access bill for the sum of a hundred and twenty pounds. So he was blacklisted and, without the collateral of property, had no means of getting credit. And he had been sacked from his job, so he was unemployed, his reputation sullied in the only profession he possessed the skills to practise. He was homeless. Perhaps least importantly, but not to his vanity, he was diminished physically. The muscle had shrunk off his frame in the enforced idleness of the hospital and he felt almost insubstantial when he saw in a mirror the puny apparition he’d become. (The briefest of glimpses, this. Paul Seaton no longer possessed his past, preening attachment to mirrors.) So a lot had been done to him without his having felt he’d determined any of it.
But he was obliged to do the rest of what would need to be done. He would have to relinquish all his old pretensions, routines, associates, ambitions; his old persona in its full entirety. And he knew that it would make it much easier to deal with his new diminished existence if he made it possible to believe in his heart that he would never see Lucinda Grey again. He had to store Lucinda, as he had to store his brother, safely in the locked refuge of his memory. There, he could treasure both of them without incurring the risk of further pain. There, they could continue to live. Only there, really, could he hope to have them at all without incurring the risk of his madness coming back again to overwhelm him. And it would overwhelm him, this time. A fresh rejection from Lucinda, a single sighting of his brother’s grinning spectre, and he knew he would be fit only for the deeper and more private recesses of the hospital, with their padded walls and their stiff leather constraints.
On the day of his release, he signed for his belongings at the admissions desk. A porter took him to where they had been taken from the flat, at some time after his own untidy departure from Old Paradise Street, and stored. It was a bad moment for him, this. He signed for a suitcase full of optimistic clothing and his typewriter and tennis racket and a case of albums he knew he would never be able to listen to again. In an envelope there were ticket stubs he’d saved, as souvenirs, after they’d been to see the singer Carmel, on a spellbinding Soho night in Ronnie Scott’s. There was a snapshot of Lucinda, taken at a table aboard a boat that served as a floating pub on the Thames. He raised the photograph to his lips, remembering the heat of the sun on his back as he’d taken it, recalling the perfume of her skin and the lost texture of her lips on those occasions they had brushed against his. There hadn’t been enough of them, of those occasions. There never would be, now. He closed his eyes and rocked on his heels under the tense scrutiny of the watching porter. Then he took from his possessions only the clothes he needed on his back and the shoes he required on his feet to walk respectably out of the place and asked the porter would he please put into the incinerator those remaining things of his he needed now so vitally to part with.
For better than a decade, Paul Seaton did no more than run away. He went first to America, to New York, where he thought the insatiable myth of the Irish diaspora made anyone with a Dublin accent fondly welcome. And the welcome there was warm enough. But it was only ardent if you had it in you to live up to the myth. You were only really warmly welcome, Seaton discovered, if you could play your predictable part in the great and panoramic drama of expatriate Irishness. But he couldn’t. Not at all, he couldn’t. In truth, he lacked the heart. Experience had robbed him of the easy equanimity required to enjoy the craic. He was a troubled soul and he could not conceal his torment. He was morose, fearful, haunted. And he was vindictive, too.
One night, an argument was picked with him by an exiled Provo in a Brooklyn bar. The man was an active-service volunteer from East Belfast with a hatred for Irish accents softened by life in London. That was his excuse, anyway, for singling out Seaton for abuse. Maybe he missed his wife or his children, back home. Perhaps, after a drink, he thought it might ease his frustration to give a Judas such as Seaton a therapeutic pasting. But when it went to the cobbles, all he got was decked twice and what looked to Seaton, running away from the scene, like a bad case of concussion after going down heavily the second time.
It wasn’t a case of being the better man, he thought later, nursing a cheap suitcase and bruised knuckles in the Greyhound station. I was just the angrier of the two of us, possibly the less drunk, certainly even more pissed off at my predicament than he had been at his.
Boston followed. He worked in a boatyard and was even cajoled into rowing in an eight-man crew in the harbour twice a week. He took shifts in an Irish bar, all the better to stop merely drinking in them. In Boston, he found himself able to be more congenial. So much so that one evening in the bar where he worked, an acquaintance got friendly enough to warn him that the East Belfast Provo he’d crossed in Brooklyn was almost entirely recovered and fully conversant with his current movements.
He travelled to Canada. An Irish passport was a wonderful thing to have, he realised, if you’d the instinct to travel at all. He discovered he didn’t mind the winter in British Columbia. He’d a mind by now to believe the chill in his soul would make even Nova Scotia in the winter warm and welcoming. He sensed the scent on him from the gunman he’d hurt grown cold, in Canada. He learned to ski there. He taught English and history at an elementary school. He gave evening lectures at a college running a twice-weekly course on practical journalism. And then he had an affair with a gentle and attractive woman of Danish extraction who taught ceramics there. And the catastrophic finish of it convinced him it was time once again to run away.
They went to a cabin owned by her father in deep woods on the edge of the National Park at Banff. It was snowing hard when they got to the woods. A trail reached, narrow through the dense endless spread of conifers. The going on this trail was heavy through the falling snow. And the woods swiftly enveloped them. The hush of the wilderness was profound, as though they had strayed into some undiscovered ancient place, somewhere humans had yet to intrude upon. Trees steepled over the trail, impenetrable to either side, so they progressed along a dark abyss of them, entirely still under the burden of snow weighing on their foliage. So it remained until they happened on a gap, after an hour’s hard walking, a break in the bank of trees to their left Seaton turned into, assuming it must be the path to the cabin.
‘No,’ the woman said. Her voice caught. She was breathless with the heaviness of the going, he thought. ‘Not that way’, she said. And he thought, that’s fear in her voice. She’s afraid.
He stopped and
looked along the path forced through the wall of conifers. The snow was scattered with fallen branches and the trees themselves were pale and exposed where bark had been torn from them in great patches and strips. Closer, there were grooves and tears in the wood of the trunks. He walked over and fingered one of them in wonderment.
‘No,’ said the woman. He turned back and looked at her. Again, her tone had surprised him. Her breath plumed. She stood rooted to the trail. There were bright spots of colour on her face, under her hat. She had lifted her snow goggles up on to her forehead. Her eyes were pale and wide in the blank whiteness of the ground and sky. Her voice, its urgency, had made the hairs on his neck rise in the chill.
Seaton looked back along the new path rampaged through the wood. Something immense and ferocious had marauded its way through there, cleaving timber, turning nature to chaos and ruin in its strength and rage. Had the damage been done by a heard of stampeding elk, by their tossing antlers? There were no hoofprints. There were no tracks he could see of any kind, but he was no tracker and the snow was falling heavily. Now, in this aftermath, it was very still in the wood. But in the bleeding sap and dripping pine resin, Seaton could smell the violence. No. It had not been a skittish heard of elk. It had been a force far wilder and more formidable than that.
‘A bear,’ Seaton said.
‘Not a bear,’ the woman said. ‘Not in the winter time.’
‘Then what?’
‘Come here, Paul. Stay on the trail and hurry. We are a mile away yet from shelter and light.’
Light. Seaton nodded. He could smell animal piss and sweat now strong on the snow, follow the dark stench of its fury through the tunnel in the trees of the havoc mauled by whatever creature had preceded them.
They talked and drank mulled wine and made love into the night, the cabin dark except for log embers fading in the grate and the twinkling through the window of night fishermen around their braziers, camped on a frozen lake a mile distant through trees. Maybe it was the woods and the memories they recalled in him that did it. Probably it was the path through the woods, forged by the beast. But in the small hours, in the still and the vastness as he held his Danish lover under their blankets and they drowsed, he called out a tender name that wasn’t hers.
Where was home? It was a vexed and vexing question. Before his mother’s death, he would have said Dublin, city of his birth and youthful bruises, education and near-indelible voice. Since then? Surely it had to be London. London was home.
And so he went from Canada to Dublin. And he knew nobody there really intimately, on the outside of a grave. He was isolated. He was, of course, lonely. But loneliness, to Paul Seaton, was by now as is an itch beyond the scratch of reaching limbs. He was resigned to his isolation. It was as normal and regular a condition to him as the regular requirement to breathe. Loneliness had been so long with him, he almost didn’t notice it. And he would have stayed in Dublin. Without fanfare, the 1990s arrived. He got a research job at Trinity and a flat on the canal and life was not intolerable. Prosperity started to change the city, giving its people a pride and purpose he’d never known there as a child. He would have stayed, except that one day, he realised that he was no longer haunted. He was free of the haunting. He stood still on Grafton Street on a Saturday afternoon and sensed only shoppers and tourists and heard only the music made by chancers with acoustic instruments in their hands and caps twinkling with coins on the pavement in front of them. He turned around and looked for dim expected figures, walking dead across the flagstones. But there were none. With a wilfully steady intake of breath, as he passed Brown Thomas, he looked at the reflection cast by one of the great department store’s sombre windows. He could see himself pictured in the glass. He could see, behind him, the moving panorama of the street. But nothing spectral, watching, grinned sardonically back at him. It seemed the haunting had ceased. And so he decided to go back to London, where he had been truly happiest, if only for a brief time, and where he knew he was truly most at home in his damaged Irish soul.
Twenty-Three
Seaton finished his story and then listened for a while to the silence that followed it. The night had passed peaceably enough for the patient sleeping her narcotic sleep above their heads. She had not stirred. Mason had smoked steadily as he listened, the occasional frown his only reaction to what he was being told. They were in the room with the expensive hi-fi equipment and the pretty landscapes painted by the St Ives School of colourists on its walls. The pictures had just been dark oblongs in the night. Now their detail was accruing cautiously, as November light leaked through the wooden shutters over the ground-floor windows. But the storm of the night before, which had threatened the Wavecrest panes with bursts of pounded shingle, had blown itself out. And mercifully, they’d been free of music since leaving the car. All through his story, Seaton had expected the sardonic accompaniment of uninvited song from Mason’s speakers. But none had come.
‘What do you think?’ he said.
Mason looked at his watch. He looked up towards the ceiling, as though looking through the floors to where his sister lay. He lowered his head and levelled his eyes on Seaton.
‘I’ve got a Land Rover garaged in Tankerton. It would take me twenty minutes to get some gear together, maybe another thirty-five to load it so it’s concealed. The ferry crossing could be risky, because ammo is heavy and sometimes they’ll weigh a vehicle. But it’s unlikely, unless we’re very unlucky. And we’ve both had more than our share of bad luck already. My instinct is to try to do what I did to that thing in Africa. But my intuition is that I don’t know everything I need to. There’s stuff I feel I’ve not been told. Know your enemy, they say. Fucking right, I say, if you want to survive. If you want to have a chance of coming out on top.’
‘I’ve told you everything,’ Seaton said.
‘Malcolm Covey,’ Mason said. ‘Even his name sounds like a fucking anagram.’
‘Oh, he’s real enough.’
‘And he sent you to me, didn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you mind telling me why?’
‘We need to talk to the priest,’ Seaton said. ‘We need to go and talk to your Jesuit. Covey told me we’d be wise to do that, before attempting to do anything else.’
Mason pondered. ‘Ever think that Covey wasn’t coming entirely clean with you?’
‘Always,’ Seaton said.
‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t know. As God is my judge, I don’t know. But I spent an hour with him the other night in a bar adjacent to St George’s Cathedral in Lambeth. And he was most insistent that we need to talk to the priest if we’re to have any chance of saving the lives of the girls.’
‘Why does he say you have to go back there, Paul? Out of the goodness of your heart?’
‘He always said it. He always insisted that one day, I would have to go back.’
‘Why?’
The air in the room was yellowish and bitter with smoke grown stale. The light drifting now through the shutters suggested one of those autumnal days that never brightens noticeably beyond its enfeebled dawn. Even the rhythmic slap of the water on the shingle below sounded tired. Seaton sighed with fatigue and the spent effort of all his recent reminiscing.
‘Malcolm Covey said I would have to go back, because the dead don’t bury themselves.’
Mason snorted. He said, ‘What’s that, some sort of psychiatric riddle?’
‘I don’t think so. I think he was just stating a sad and unfortunate fact.’
Mason was still for a moment. Seaton knew this was a man who was very seldom entirely still. Then he shifted and blinked. He looked up again; up through the layers of his inherited house, towards where he no doubt hoped his sister still slept her dreamless sleep. ‘That priest must be so old and frail by now. He was very old in Africa. And Africa was almost seven years ago. And then there’s the job of finding him. Christ.’
‘He’s at a retreat in the French Alps,’ Seaton said. �
�A former monastery, above the town of Chamonix. Covey told me. Covey told me that’s where we’ll find him.’
‘Somewhere secluded he’s gone, reconciled, to die,’ Mason said. ‘Who is Covey?’
‘I told you. I don’t know. I’ve never really known.’
Mason nodded. ‘Get some kip,’ he said. ‘We’ll sleep for a couple of hours and then we’re going for a run to help clear our minds before the trip.’
‘A run?’
‘You were fit once, weren’t you?’
‘Don’t you want to leave immediately?’
‘I don’t want to leave at all. My instinct is to stay with Sarah. But my being here doesn’t seem to be helping my sister very much. That said, I don’t think important things are very often, if ever, achieved in haste. And to be really honest, if I don’t sleep first and then burn off some of this tension, I’m likely to hit something. And you are the clear and present target.’
‘I haven’t got any kit.’
‘I’ll lend you some,’ Mason said. ‘I’m fucked if I’m running on my own. And running kit, mate, is the very least of your problems.’
They took the train to France from Ashford and caught a connecting TGV, mostly full of skiers. On the journey, Mason told Seaton about the condition of the other surviving girls from the ethics seminar. He’d established contact with the families of the English girls in the aftermath of the funeral he’d clandestinely witnessed. Both were in hospitals, sedated and on suicide watch. The American student, older, apparently tougher, had been restrained by air stewards trying to open an emergency door on a flight home, six miles above the Atlantic. She was wearing restraints in Bellevue, now, her distraught parents swapping vigilant shifts outside her room.
The TGV was quick. But Chamonix was the Alps. It was forty-five chilly and discouraging minutes before they were able to find a taxi prepared to take them to the address above the village provided by Malcolm Covey.
