The House of Lost Souls

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘He was good at football and cricket. He stole apples from Bradley’s orchard,’ Seaton said.

  ‘Yes. And this. He was this too,’ Mary Reeve said.

  ‘Was it recognised?’

  ‘Oh, they came from far and wide to court him. Doctor Carter from Cambridge and a fellow from Trinity College and even a chap from the Sorbonne. Professor Covey came up from Oxford at the wheel of a Delage.’

  Seaton almost staggered on his planted feet. ‘Malcolm Covey?’

  ‘He took some of the boys for an ice-cream. He took my uncle. They were treated to double scoops, lashed with rasp-berry sauce. But you couldn’t buy Peter Morgan with a cornet, my uncle said. He was intent on medicine, was Peter. The boy was Edinburgh-bound.’ Mrs Reeve turned and bowed and picked up its shroud and clothed and put the relic back in the drawer of her uncle’s bureau from which she had taken it.

  There was a clock in here, too. But it wasn’t quartz. Seaton could hear the swing of its pendulum. He looked at it now, following the sound. It was mounted above the bureau and he could see the pendulum flicker in its glass-fronted chamber. Its face was porcelain, numbered with roman numerals. Its hands showed the wrong time. It had stirred itself into life, as old clocks in old rooms were sometimes apt to do.

  ‘What happened to Marjory Pegg?’

  Mrs Reeve stiffened with her back to him. ‘She took her life. She loved Peter as a cherished son. She hoped for eight tormented months in the silence following his departure from here and then she could endure the torment no more.’

  ‘You said your uncle’s life was curtailed. It’s a strange word to use.’

  ‘But precise, Mr Seaton. Peter had seven classmates. Two were killed in the war. One died at Normandy and another later in Borneo. But none of the seven ever married. And needless to say, none ever fathered a child.’

  ‘I see.’

  She laughed. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Why did you change your mind, Mrs Reeve? About talking to me?’

  And now she turned. ‘When you left the church I climbed the tower to watch your departure. I didn’t really trust you to leave, I don’t think. And I saw you among the graves. It was clear you had lost your way in finding them. And then you discovered Robert Morgan’s grave. I saw you kneel and cross yourself. I think you wept, Mr Seaton. I saw you wipe your eyes with the heel of your hand.’

  ‘It could have been rain.’

  ‘It could. It could indeed have been rain,’ she said.

  Twenty-Eight

  The rain itself cascaded on the half-mile back to the Penhelig Arms. It was twenty past ten and the last lamb casserole had long been and gone. It didn’t matter. He still wasn’t hungry. He peeled off his soaked clothing and showered and went to find fresh underwear in the bag still unpacked from France on his bed. He unzipped the bag and felt the bulk of its hidden cargo between his folded clothes immediately. Black, voluminous in finely printed pages, it was an old and much-used missal. He held it in his upturned hand and allowed it to open itself against the spine. It did so on a dark green bookmark. But it wasn’t a bookmark at all, when he picked it out. It was a British Library pass, carrying the faded stamp of the British Museum and made out in ink turned violet by age to someone called Susan Green.

  He dropped the pass back into the missal and noticed with a frown that it marked the start of the funeral liturgy. Closing and turning the book in his hand, he looked at the embossed cover, the heraldic defiance of a Maltese Cross still visible, stamped in the hide. He opened the missal to the flyleaf. Lascalles’ name was written there, and under it the date of his ordination. And there also, in much more recent ink, was written a telephone number and the prefix for France.

  There was a phone in his room. He dialed the number. More of Covey’s money tolled across Europe through the night as Seaton waited for an answer. The phone at the other end rang forever. When it was answered, the Franciscan was not roused, in greeting Seaton, to his familiar chuckle of bonhomie. ‘Ach, you have almost killed the Monsignor, you and your gefallene Engel friend.’

  The mountain accent was hard, mulish.

  ‘Please, Brother.’

  ‘He sleeps.’

  Seaton closed his eyes. ‘Then wake him.’

  He waited through another eternity of Dr Malcom Covey’s metred time. Or was it Professor Covey’s largesse, measured out in children’s treats and legitimate travel expenses? He could see Covey, right enough, at the wheel of a vintage Delage. He could see the white walls of the tyres and smell the hide on the seats. But he had met Malcolm Covey, shaken hands with the flesh and blood of him. And he knew with a certainty that Covey was a man. Fat men didn’t wrinkle like the thin. But Covey, fat as he was, was surely nowhere over fifty. Seaton closed his eyes. Figures and algebraic letters danced and flickered in chrome yellow on the blackness of his lids.

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘He was a genius, Father. Their boy. Their sacrificial. He was taken precisely because of who he was.’

  ‘Not who he was, Paul. He was taken because of what he would have become.’

  And Seaton understood. His legs dumped him, strength-less, on the bed next to his bag. He understood. He had to fight to breathe. He held the reciever of the phone against his ear, suddenly dumb. It was the vaccine Peter Morgan might have developed. It was the surgical procedure he could have pioneered, the disease for which he would have found a cure. They had bartered with the Devil over the good for mankind in him. Their sacrificial had been chosen with precise and infinite care.

  ‘And the girls?’ Seaton did not recognise his own voice.

  ‘What do you think?’

  The peace treaty that one of them would broker, Seaton thought. The campaign against some awful endemic corruption. The life-changing charity that one of them might found.

  ‘What should I do, Father?’

  ‘Bury the boy. Make him safe. Put him, finally, to rest. Do this and I believe the evil emanating from that place will altogether cease.’

  ‘I’m not a priest.’

  Lascalles laughed. It sounded awful, the lonely amusement of a dying man, a last consolatory gasp at life. ‘You are what you are, Paul,’ he said. ‘Being what you are, I have every faith that you will find a way.’

  The phone went dead. Seaton knew that he could spend the entire night redialing and its cloistered ring would still remain ignored in the mountain keep. He had everything that the Jesuit Lascalles was going to give him. Give them. He sleeps, the Franciscan had said. And soon his body, at least, would enjoy the profound rest of the dead. He had survived to the age of a hundred, waiting for the promise of what Seaton and Mason had been chosen to accomplish. He had endured patiently from the moment he had broken the seal on Pandora’s confession and discovered the secret for himself. Now he considered his work accomplished. There was nothing in his own mind or conscience left to bind the old priest to the earth.

  I have every faith that you will find a way.

  Except that Seaton didn’t for a moment share that faith. He tossed the old missal back into his bag, knowing it was the Jesuit centurian’s dying bequest to him, certain it was going to be nowhere near what was required.

  He called Mason.

  ‘They’re the same,’ Mason said, in answer to the unasked question. ‘The Americans let their girl come round. She chattered volubly enough, at first. But in the persona of a cigarette girl from a Chicago speakeasy. She seemed to think she worked for Al Capone. Her poor parents were encouraged. Then she began to scream about some guy called Harry Greb. And the Bellevue medics doped her up again and got a clamp into her mouth to stop her biting through her tongue in terror.’

  Seaton gripped the receiver tight. His hand was shaking. He felt the phone tremble against his cheek.

  ‘Useful trip?’

  ‘We’ll know tomorrow,’ Seaton said. ‘We’ll find out then, so we will.’

  Mason grunted and hung up and Seaton remembered that the Franciscan’s fallen angel had never greatly
cared for the Irish.

  They took Covey’s Saab, with its canvas roof and jittery, sometimes disobedient, radio. It was an act of defiance and a signal to their adversary. Mason checked briefly on his sedated sister and filled the car boot with various ominous-looking canvas bags. The Saab would be far less suspicious a vehicle to transport Mason’s ordnance on the Wight ferry in, than his own Land Rover. That was the soldier’s logic.

  ‘I don’t think you can kill it with a gun,’ Seaton said, watching Mason load up the boot.

  ‘The thing that came after you splintered the stairs with its tread, for Christ’s sake,’ Mason said. ‘It had weight and mass. It’s corporeal, at least some of the time. And it’s a fucking big target, by the sound of it. Trust me, Irishman, it’ll take a round.’

  The sun had come out. It was just after four in the afternoon and below them, beyond the shingle, sunbeams glittered through broken cloud on the shifting green surface of the sea. The air was suddenly fresh with salt. A breeze ruffled Seaton’s hair. He got into the car and looked at the backs of his trembling white-knuckled hands. It wasn’t terror that made him shake. It was anger. And it was almost surprising. He could not believe the fury he felt over a sixty-year-old murder. But he did. He kept thinking of the empty journal pages and her body on the strew of pebbles at the river’s edge, cold, daubed under a tarpaulin with river filth. She had been exquisite. And passionate. And on her own humble path to redemption. And she had been slain with brutal degradation and derided for decades following as a suicide, shambolic and dispossessed. He railed at the waste and furious injustice of it.

  He wanted to trap the slippery emissary, Covey, corner him in a place he couldn’t bolt from and kill him with his hands. He had educated hands, had Paul Seaton. And though much of his conditioning had slipped away through self-neglect, his hands had never forgotten the painstaking lesson they had learned in his tender youth. He wanted to corner Malcolm Covey and beat him until he squealed and whimpered and then continue beating him until he stopped breathing altogether. He clenched his hands into fists, unaware of doing so, the nails so tightly pressed into the palms that the skin broke and blood oozed on to the pads of his curled fingers. He was oblivious to it. He was eager to meet Malcolm Covey again. Of course, he was still afraid. But he thought that he felt altogether more anger, now, than dread.

  About the boy, he could allow himself to think barely at all.

  Nick Mason closed the boot lid on the Saab’s lethal cargo and looked at his wristwatch.

  He was uncertain about the Irishman. He had not thought it possible for cowardice and courage to coexist as they seemed to do in Paul Seaton’s troubled nature. Soldiering, he’d seen much cowardice disguised by bluster. And he’d seen courage often enough tempered by fear. He’d felt fear himself, shaken off the disabling grip of it, defied its capacity to disarm a man in combat and carried on doing what he was lethally trained to. But he had never before encountered anyone like this. He looked at the man now, Seaton oblivious to his scrutiny, face set in the interior mirror, eyes hard on the road and jaw clenched tight in resolution. He’d seen too much, had Seaton. He’d seen things men should not. And the experience had terrified and wounded him. And now here he was, against all reason, going back for more. Seaton had been more haunted than hardened by whatever battle he had fought. But here he was, resolved, determined.

  For himself, Mason felt only a sort of gloomy fatalism. Despite the baptism he could not recall, he observed no faith and followed no religion. He had chosen his own vocation as a fighting man. He enjoyed the uncertain and uncompromising nature of what he did. Beyond that, though, there was only what the present circumstances demanded of him. He loved and wanted to secure the life and sanity of his sister. He would do whatever was needed of him. He had never before been found wanting. He would not be found wanting now.

  He suspected that the priest might have been right about the killing of the thing in Africa. He’d felt a power and potency in him when he’d squeezed the trigger like nothing he’d felt before or since. He’d told Seaton he’d been spooked and jumpy in that butchering, butchered chieftain’s hut and certainly that was half-true. He’d been spooked, without a fucking doubt. But when his bullets ripped into the thing that had climbed behind him from its throne and he saw it tumble, cleaved, to the ground, he’d felt exultant.

  He didn’t feel exultant now. He felt foreboding. The Fischer house wanted him, had lured him for the magic endowed in Africa by whatever dark mischief his father had indulged in. But mostly, Mason suspected, of the two of them it wanted the Irishman much more.

  Malcolm Covey, Fischer doppelgänger and slippery fixer, had orchestrated their impending, iminent trip. Covey it was, who had nursed Seaton through his long and demeaning disintegration. A dozen years after, it was Covey who had known of Seaton’s whereabouts in the chaotic aftermath of the visit paid the Fischer house by the seminar group. The Irishman had been living the sorry life of a forgotten fugitive. But Covey had somehow possessed his unlisted number.

  Now, Covey’s subtle guidance was steering them both towards the same opaque destination. He had approached Seaton far too improbably well-informed about what had gone on with the student party for it to be otherwise. Had Covey set up the business with the chest in Gibson-Hoare’s attic? Certainly the original journal had been ridiculously easy for Seaton to find. Gibson-Hoare, a man versed in the secrets of antiques, would surely not have missed a thing so poorly hidden.

  So Covey had sent Seaton on his first innocent visit to the Fischer house. And Seaton had escaped, which had not been at all what Covey had intended. And now Seaton was going back. At Covey’s urging, he was going back. It was all about Seaton, wasn’t it? He himself ranked not much above set-dressing in the overall scheme of things. But why? Was Seaton himself not given to wonder? He looked at the Irishman again. Seaton’s focus was firmly on the road, his thoughts concealed behind the tight eyes and clenched jaw. What possessed the Irishman? More pertinently, what was it that this Irishman possessed?

  Mason shook his head slowly and reached a hand into his jacket pocket. His fingers closed on the sharkskin grip of his jackknife. There was comfort in the familiar weight and shape of it, the recognition. The touch of it spread a feeling through him not dissimilar to gratitude, or relief. He would do that, for now, for want of a choice, he decided. He would take what small comfort was available to him from what he recognised, from the precious little that he fully understood.

  Their crossing was made in bleak driving rain that stippled the grey Solent and made sombre monoliths of the forts rising from the surface of the sea. There was no other shipping traffic visible to them as they huddled under a dripping awning on the promenade deck of the ferry, sipping coffee. When they got to the dock at Fishbourne, the weather worsened, rain drumming an insistent tattoo on the canvas roof of the Saab. Seaton switched on the lights to see and the wipers washed waves of water from the cascading windscreen. This time, at the wheel of a car on empty autumnal roads, he did skirt the perimeter of the forest. And he approached the Fischer house from the south. They flapped and jounced through soaking trees along a forestry trail until their headlamp beam picked out a single gatepost surmounted by a stone griffin still wearing the weathered remnants of a snarl. Seaton slowed. He saw the second gatepost, prone and snarled in ivy. And he shifted from second to first and picked a path between the two, forgotten gravel firm under his tyres on the twisting drive to Fischer’s abandoned mansion.

  Mason spoke. ‘What will we find?’

  ‘The seminar group were armed with keys to padlocks securing the one gate in the barrier they found surrounding the place. They discovered a ruin, fortified by chain-link fencing and barbed wire. That’s what their lecturer remembered, before the confusion and the chaos overcame them. I expect our welcome somehow to be warmer than theirs was.’

  ‘That’s my feeling, too. But we’re armed with a whole lot more than padlock keys.’

  They found no fenc
e to exclude them. The house lights were burning. They were not bright, but they were undeniable. Seaton willed himself to raise his eyes to the tower, before their approach lifted his view of it above the windscreen of the Saab. There, light glowered, blinking reddish through the thick uneven panes. Beside him, he could see Mason load and reload twin magazines for a short snub-barrelled weapon he’d pulled from a bag in the the boot during a roadside stop he’d insisted upon only a few minutes after they’d disembarked. The tower receded over the roof of the car with their approach. Seaton saw now that canvas shrouds were stretched over the curves of majestic cars on the sweep of drive fronting the house. In a tear in one of these he caught the glimmer of chrome and black-waxed bodywork. The soldier to his left was breathing hard and winding coloured adhesive tape around his clips of bullets. It occurred to Seaton that a decade earlier, when vanity and self-consciousness had played the role in him they will among the young, he’d hoped for a significant cameo, at least, in the spectacular movie of life. Be careful what you wish for, he said to himself now, as he drew the car to a halt and got out and approached the door to the Fischer house through the graveyard of limousines, in the heaving thrum of the rain.

  Twenty-Nine

  He found himself alone when he reached the door. No matter. It was too late now for retreat or prevarication. He pushed, but on this occasion he found the door firmly locked. He hammered on the knocker. After a moment, his knock was answered by a tall figure dressed in the livery of a butler.

  Above the servant’s spoiled face, the plates of his skull looked as though a clumsy infant had reconstructed them. Old brain-matter stains still tarnished the bone. From behind him, in the house, Seaton heard the drift of music and faint laughter. The man held a covered salver. He bowed to the visitor.

  ‘Hello, Giuseppe,’ Seaton said. The butler gestured him in and then stooped forward confidentially. His breath was cold with decay, his voice the whispering saw of a Chicago ghost.