by F. G. Cottam
‘I should warn you that Mr Greb has been drinking, sir.’ Giuseppe cocked his ruined head towards the stairs. Seaton willed himself to look. They were carpeted with a plush pile that receded into blackness after six or seven steps. The house had changed in other ways. The vestibule had been improvised into a sort of ballroom, tables pushed in a circle against remote walls, the figures seated at them formally dressed, indistinct under the fractured splash of odd glitterballs. But watchful.
‘His mood at present is convivial enough,’ Giuseppe said. ‘But we all know how easily Mr Greb’s aspect can darken.’
Seaton was wondering what lay under the lid of the salver.
‘If you would be so good as to follow me, sir, I would like to take the liberty of reuniting you with an old and valued acquaintance.’
Seaton followed the dead factotum around the perimeter of the room, picking his way between tables, trying not to look at the faces of the guests, each as lifeless as Fischer’s man and watching him with empty curiosity. They gained a corridor and walked along its length of uniform doors. Light from under one in a feeble ribbon on the floor distinguished it. There was music along the corridor, grimy with needle-dust, busy with remembered static. It was the John Lennon song ‘Imagine’, sung in a baritone growl to barrelhouse piano accompaniment. Seaton took it to mean that Nicholas Mason must be somewhere in the house.
Giuseppe opened the door and stood back from it. Lucinda Grey, surprise showing in her once-lovely features, looked up from where she sat over her sewing machine. Her pale body was clothed only in an underskirt and bra. When she pressed on the treadle of the old machine, Seaton could see her kneebone flap through a tear in the skin of a wasted leg.
‘I’ll be joining the party the minute my dress is finished,’ she said. The flat, familiar vowels of her northern accent were heartrending to him. But there was no garment under the needle and no thread on the spindle to sew one with.
‘Oh, Lucinda,’ Seaton said. He was trembling suddenly, overwhelmed with shock and grief. He had not prepared himself for this. He had put Lucinda Grey away in the safe refuge of his mind where the sun always shone on her lambent skin and she could go on forever being twenty-one and beautiful. Surely her life could not be over. Surely not her. He groaned.
‘Why did you have to die?’
‘Dying is easy,’ she said. ‘Living was the complicated part. You remember the night you wouldn’t come to the opening of that bar David Haliday had painted?’
He nodded. And he noticed the shape of someone else, indistinct, in the corner of the room. It didn’t matter. Only Lucinda mattered.
‘We went on to Tabu, that night, Paul, after the place with David’s murals. And I snorted heroin. I was low because you hadn’t come and someone had a wrap at Tabu and I snorted a line of it. And the disappointment melted away. And I felt I was floating on air.’
He remembered. He had met her coming home. He’d had Pandora’s journal hidden in his pocket. She had looked like she was floating on air as she came around the corner into his vision on Lambeth High Street.
‘I went back to York, after you. Couldn’t deal with London any more. And the low feeling got worse. And heroin was very fashionable then. It took the pain away, Paul. And it was cheap.’
‘Oh, Lucinda.’
‘Did you not wonder why we never ran into one another? Even accidentally? I don’t think you could have helped me. That said, of course, it never occurred to you to try. But the overdose was accidental.’ She frowned. Her eyes were coloured an absent, recollected green under the dead strands of her fringe. Her bobbed hair, its texture once satin, had been turned by death into a coarse wig. ‘At least, I think it was accidental.’
The figure emerged from the corner. It was Patrick, as Seaton had guessed it would be. He had thought for a moment that his own anticipation might prepare him. But it did not. When he saw his brother’s face, lost and sorrowful in death, he began to weep. He had missed him so. Behind him, Fischer’s man coughed politely. ‘Sir?’ Giuseppe said. He had taken the lid off the salver. He held the salver out. A gun lay on it, an ancient Webley revolver pocked with shrapnel scars. It had new grips on the stock and a shiny new nickel-plated cylinder. The hammer was cocked and Seaton saw the seat of a bullet, snugly poised in the cylinder’s uppermost chamber.
‘What happened, Patrick?’
‘It’s hard to say.’ There was something wet and noisome in Patrick’s chest. He coughed, and the odour from him was dank and cold. ‘I didn’t come up,’ he said. ‘It just seemed easier not to.’
Less complicated, Seaton thought, nodding, his hand reaching absently for the butt of the gun on the salver proffered by the ghost. Life could be unbearable, at times. He heard a baritone snigger and a chord shift in the song.
‘You’d be as well to finish up, sir,’ Giuseppe said. Lucinda and his brother were sullen, watching him. ‘The mood of Mr Greb might turn sour at any moment. And then where would all of us be?’
Where indeed. Seaton lifted the revolver from the plate. It had a reassuring heaviness in his hand. He put the barrel into his mouth. It seemed so natural a thing to do.
‘Very good, sir.’
He would escort Lucinda to the ball. Patrick would be there as well. They would have fun, like they used to do. They would have fun, that light and fondly remembered feeling he hadn’t encountered in years. It would be just exactly like old times. They would drink Lambrusco on the rooftop at St Martin’s. There would be tennis in the park and picnics. He could feel the welcoming warmth of the sun on his back on the bench by the cherry tree and smell its forgotten blossom. His finger curled on the tension of the trigger and he closed his eyes.
‘Imagine’ grew suddenly enormously loud and there was a slap on his arm that jerked the Webley out of his mouth and his grip. The gun fell to the floor and the hammer came down and the report crashed loudly through Seaton’s head. He blinked. Mason stood in front of him. He had camouflage cream smeared across his face and weapons and ammunition strung from bandoliers and webbing across his combat fatigues. Seaton looked around. They were in the vestibule, the house derelict, the stairs behind Mason naked and decrepit. There were no lights lit in the house now. And in the unremitting rain outside, there was no moonlight. Seaton could hear the rain beat fierce on the panes of the windows. What little he was seeing, he was seeing only in the beam of a torch attached to Mason’s combat jacket and pointed at the ground.
Mason slapped him, hard. ‘What’s that in your pocket?’
‘The missal Lascalles gave to me.’
‘What do you need to do?’
‘Find the remains of the boy. Give him the burial to which he’s entitled.’
‘Don’t wander off again, Paul. It’s too dangerous.’ Mason looked at the revolver, smoking slightly, smelling strongly of cordite, and lying between their feet on the parquet floor. He kicked it away into the gloom. ‘Something to do with Covey and the hypnosis, I expect.’ He licked his lips. His eyes skittered like the kicked gun. ‘You were very suggestible,’ he said, quietly, as though to himself.
Seaton looked at him. Mason was a soldier. And he didn’t know what to do. He had just saved Seaton’s life, but there was no standard operational procedure to follow, now, in the blossoming madness of the Fischer house. He was festooned with destructive weaponry. And he was completely impotent. Seaton thought Mason too brave and disciplined to panic. But the next step had to lead somewhere. And it was entirely up to him. He looked around and saw that the central staircase now went down as well as up. Shame burned through him at the way he’d just been exposed by the forces in the house, stripped naked, lured to the brink of willing self-destruction. But he hadn’t the time to suffer the shame, to castigate himself. He was compelled to act. If he didn’t, they were damned anyway.
There was a noise from some remote floor above, a dry chuckle like the scrape of lazy chains.
‘Mr Greb,’ Seaton said. ‘Their beast has awoken. We have to recover the
boy’s remains before it’s properly aroused.’
The voice above them tightened and then broke with a roar.
Mason gripped the machine pistol hanging across his chest and looked back towards the dark maw of the descending stairs.
‘We need to find the games room,’ Seaton said. ‘It was all a game to them, Nick. Always. They were the players of a diabolical game. Serving a playful master, they were obliged to be. And that’s our clue. We need to be in the basement.’
They descended stairs, carpet remnants sticky under their feet. A corridor followed. The bellowing fury above them faded slightly. But that was no comfort. The corridor was catacomb-like, dank and dripping. Seaton felt more deeply entombed with every step.
‘In here,’ Mason said.
They entered a billiards room. It was low and narrow and four tables had been arranged along its length. There were racks of cues. There was a shelf heaped with rotting boxes of board games. Baccarat counters and casino chips formed greedy neglected piles. Music was playing. Seaton thought he recognised Frank Rosolino’s mournful trombone. The sound was euphonic, soft at its sonic edges, as though played through an old-fashioned valve amplifier. The lights over the tables, one by one, switched on with a weary fizz.
There were framed pictures on the walls and Seaton saw that, of course, they were Pandora’s photographs. They were the lost archive, retrieved and printed up and mounted and hung in here. Passing them, Seaton identified Aleister Crowley, something preternaturally old in the sunken skin around the eyes and coarsely textured about his complexion. His shoulders were bunched under the black vanity of the silk embroidered robe he wore. His neck was a wattle of flesh. The eyes themselves were only partially focused, as though mostly lost to some wild and sly avenue of speculation. It was the study of a man who had lived too much and far too extremely. He had dug too deep into what wiser and less ambitious men avoid. The experience had left him frayed, had dispossessed him, it seemed, of his vitality and senses. As Seaton passed by, the portrait’s eyes followed him and the lips cracked a confidential smile.
Wheatley was almost beatific, by comparison. He had a pale face too pudgy for distinction and his glossy black hair was centre-parted, after the fashion of the period. He wore a for-the-camera smile that seemed strictly the minimum of effort required by the protocol of the moment. There was something about the eyes, though, that gave their owner away. They were focused on the photographer, rather than on the lens. And although they were dark eyes, lacking naturally in transparency, the lust in them for Pandora was nakedly apparent. Seaton paused in front of Wheatley’s picture. He looked for telltale scars from the explosion in Flanders that should by rights have completely obliterated all trace of the man. But the magic had been strong and complete and there were none. His complexion was innocently smooth. It had taken a lifetime’s indulgent thirst for the best vintages in his well-kept cellar to kill Wheatley. He had been almost eighty when his liver eventually failed, and death was finally permitted to claim him.
Fischer was confident and debauched. His was the picture of a man smugly and completely given over to evil. Seaton knew he was looking at the darker and more sinister progenitor of Malcolm Covey. This was apparently what Covey was destined to become. Had Covey looked like this at their first encounter, he thought, he might have screamed as he did on the afternoon he became lost in the forgotten turns of the hospital maze. What was the difference between them? Covey was more human, Seaton decided. There was not much left that was human any more in Pandora’s last portrait of Klaus Fischer. It was the depiction of a willing monster. They had all been monsters. What they had done had been monstrous, too.
There was baize still on the billiard tables. It was frayed and faded to yellow under the lights. When they reached it, Seaton saw that the far billiard table was spread with an ancient stain. It was a thick, black excrescence that had once welled across the baize and dribbled into the pockets.
‘Steady, Paul,’ Mason said.
But there had been no way to steel his resolve for this. Grief shuddered through him. He felt the grip of comforting fingers on his shoulder. He stared at the stain on the table. He groaned and his breath faltered and he touched the ruined baize. From far above, he heard the beast’s cavorting laughter. Tears blurred his eyes. The blood had been everywhere.
‘Marvellous!’ said a voice.
There were two figures by the entrance to the room. They were attired in evening wear and white silk mufflers and top hats. The glass of a monocle glittered above the spoiled grin of one of them. Even from forty feet distant, they smelled of cigars and brilliantine. And they stank of feral rot.
‘It’s Crowley,’ Seaton whispered. ‘And Fischer.’
‘Crowley and Fischer burn in Hell,’ Mason said. His voice was raw with scorn. He hawked and spat on the floor.
‘Golly,’ the Crowley apparition said. ‘You’re no fun.’
Mason spat again. He gripped the weapon across his chest.
The figures began to fade. They had receded from sight almost entirely when the Crowley apparition said, ‘You’ve angered Mr Greb. And Mr Greb will settle with you shortly.’
‘Why is it called Mr Greb?
‘Harry Greb,’ Seaton said. ‘A prizefighter Fischer’s manservant knew in the days when he worked for Al Capone.’
Mason nodded. He shone his torch at the floor. He held the beam poised over a section patched and paler than the rest. He took something from the pack on his back and opened it and handed it to Seaton. It was an entrenching tool. He nodded at the ground. ‘A layer of concrete over hardcore and then earth,’ he said. ‘Tough going, but it could be worse. I’ve scraped graves on battlefields from less hospitable ground.’
Seaton looked at his own soft, unaccustomed hands. And a voice that caused the skin on his head to itch and crawl icily called down all the way from the top of the stairs to reach them where they stood.
‘My name is Harry Greb. I licked Tunney. I licked Tunney good! And I’ll lick any man, alive or dead.’
There was a pause. ‘Are youse coming up to fight? Or am I coming down for youse?’
Mason handed the entrenching tool to Seaton. Seaton took it. Mason fingered the weapon around his neck. He was sweating, the breath coming shuddering out of him.
‘You can’t go up there.’
‘It’s coming down here, if I don’t,’ Mason said. He said it flatly. He was dealing with fact. ‘You have to recover the child’s remains and get them out of the house. You have to do as Lascalles said and bury the bones beyond the influence of this place.’ He nodded at the entrenching tool. He licked his lips and looked at the ceiling. The house was warming with the baleful threat of the thing above. In the basement, it was becoming harder to breath. ‘Now fucking dig, Seaton. Dig like your life depends upon it, which I very much suspect it does. You’re an Irishman, aren’t you? You’re a Mick. You’re a Paddy. So it shouldn’t be beyond you to dig a fucking hole.’ He grinned. He walked towards the entrance of the room. He was breathing hard, sweating, a sheen of fear on his face. He was clearly and mortally afraid. But he would go, because he was brave as well as frightened. His bravado was there to try to conceal the fear. But Seaton saw that the fear could do nothing at all to mask Nick Mason’s appalling courage. He would go. Of course he would go. This was what he did. This was who he was and had always been. He was a fighting man. And so he would fight and try his best to win.
In the doorway, he paused. ‘If I don’t make it, keep an eye on Sarah for me, Paul. Don’t get any ideas about her, though. So much as put a finger on her, and I swear to Christ I’ll fucking come back and haunt you myself.’ He turned.
‘Wait,’ Seaton said. ‘Wait. I know something about boxing. About its history.’
There was a thud above them. It was hard to tell how far.
‘Mate. There’s no time for this.’
‘The devil enjoys games, does he not?’
There was a mauling, capering sound from above
.
‘It thinks it’s Harry Greb. And Greb was truly formidable. The first time they met, he slaughtered Gene Tunney. He was more than a match for Dempsey on every occasion they sparred together. In his entire career, he was only put down the once. But every time he climbed through the ropes, he took a secret into the ring with him. Harry Greb was blind in one eye,’ Seaton said.
The thing upstairs moaned and scrabbled and they heard the screech of rent timber.
‘That isn’t Harry Greb,’ Mason said. ‘I only wish to Christ it was.’
‘But it thinks it is. At least some of the time, it does.’
Mason looked at him. ‘Completely blind?’
‘Profoundly so.’
‘Do you remember which eye?’
‘I do. Sure I do. It was the right.’
Mason frowned and nodded. He walked across the room and the two men embraced one another.
‘There’s a stream to the south of the house. I’ll bury the remains beyond it. I’ll cross where it narrows and meet you on the other side of the stream.’
There was a heavy scrape from above as the thing at the top of the house took its first step down to them. After finding its voice, it had assumed some sort of shape. Puffs of old plaster dust were shaken out of the games-room ceiling around its wooden supports. It’s grown, Seaton thought. It’s got bigger since the last time I was here.
‘Dig, Paul,’ Mason said, quietly, from the doorway. ‘For Sarah’s sake. For the sake of all our souls.’ He chambered a round in the weapon across his chest and kissed its muzzle. ‘Dig,’ he said. And he was gone.
Seaton spread his feet and raised the entrenching tool above his head in the grip of both hands and smashed the pointed tip against the ground. Again and again he drove the tip against the stubborn crust of concrete on the games-room floor. I should have spat on my hands, he thought, breathing hard, aware of the fierce heated friction of the shaft. But his mouth had been too dry with fear for him to have found the required spit. There were raking bursts of gunfire from upstairs, crumps of sound that Seaton thought might be stun grenades. The odour of combat drifted down to him, hard and metallic-smelling. He heard the bestial roar of something surprised, maybe even hurt. But sorely enraged.
