The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [1]
There was something not right about the sound of the ceremony. The church bell was a muffled, sporadic clang, dim-seeming as though travelling an impossible distance before being heard. If he really concentrated, he could just make out organ music, emphysemic from under the church rafters. But odd melodies kept drifting over it, reminding him of the piano rags and vapid crooning his old grandfather had liked to listen to.
The light was odd. Twice, the jump-cut procession of clergy and mourners and undertakers seemed to fade to black and white in their progress and when this effect occurred, it seemed to Mason that he was watching men in top hats and starched collars carry a black casket on a sombre march to oblivion through a throng of mourners massed in broadcloth and gabardine.
He rubbed his eyes. There was nothing wrong, Mason knew, with his eyesight. When he looked again, the procession was normal. And the dead girl on her final journey had reached the edge of her grave. The weather was strange. There was a fitful wind that swirled fallen leaves in cones and eddies like kaleidoscopic little whirlpools on the grass between headstones. This wind was unseasonably warm, as well as capricious. It carried a light scent, too, Mason thought, subtle but rank. Oddest of all, though, were the girls. There were three girls mourning their dead friend. Strictly speaking, there were two girls and a woman, because the American student was a few years older than Mason’s sister and the student from Merseyside. But there should have been three figures recognisable as students in their youth and togetherness and grief, shouldn’t there? Except that Mason kept counting four.
He knew about pattern recognition. It was one of the most useful of the disciplines the army psychologists had drilled into the men operating in the field. Nature was random. Organised human behaviour wasn’t. The IRA liked people to think that their cold assassinations were spontaneous acts of valour, but everyone knew they were rehearsed until perfected. Pattern recognition could enable you to spot the nondescript car you saw too often in your rear-view mirror, or the bland face that passed yours too frequently on the street. It could help you to come out the winner against a fruit machine, or complete a crossword puzzle miserly with its clues. It could also, on occasion, save your life.
Mason’s training insisted that the pattern at the graveside was wrong, that it was somehow out of kilter. But if he tried to concentrate on the mourners he seemed to lose some of the detail in heat ripple, which was ridiculous, because it was a damp day in late October. There was no heat ripple. There were bereaved family members as stiff-limbed as the walking dead, and there was a fearful-looking priest and burial professionals sallow with some kind of collective sickness. And there was a mourner too many among the girls. He risked moving a hand to wipe his eyes, which were gritty now with sweat and leaf fragments blown into his face by the wind. And he began to feel the ground beat underneath him like impatient hands, cold and flapping.
He had never worried overmuch about death. He had killed three men in Ireland and two in Central America and never given any of them another living thought. Colombia had been a contact, a legitimate firefight, ambushed by foot soldiers from the Medellin cartel when the regiment had been helping out the Yanks with their marching-powder problem. The training had kicked in and he’d scored two hits. It had been kill or be killed. Northern Ireland had been what it was, the Province and its long and dirty, often clandestine war. He’d had nothing to be remorseful about. They’d even given him a medal. None of it had ever troubled his conscience. And he could honestly say that he’d never been frightened.
But Mason was frightened now. And he was spooked. He looked up and through dim ripples of light, thought he saw a team of snorting, black-plumed horses crossing the cemetery pulling a glass coffin mounted on a carriage