The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [10]
And sleep claimed him.
Four
He sat sipping coffee outside a café on Kennington Road at nine thirty the following morning, glad it was a Saturday. He didn’t pursue his research work at weekends. He had tried to simplify his life, to reduce it to a series of habits and routines undeserving of challenge or even rigorous thought. But life was going to be vastly more complicated now, after Covey’s intervention. It was going to be more dangerous, too. To his surprise, Seaton found he almost welcomed that. The prospect of action was almost a relief to him, after the months and years of concealment and dread. Wakeful in the small hours, fearful after the tape-machine cabaret, he’d decided he was unlikely to survive what he intended to try to do. But his bitter conclusion had been that his life was not worth living anyway. Not as it was. And, unchallenged, he knew its condition would never greatly improve.
The café was an Italian place called Perdoni’s. It was double-fronted and had an optimistic array of metal chairs and zinc tables placed on the pavement outside. And it was at one of these tables that Seaton sat, the pavement flags under his feet still wet with rain from the previous night. Inside, the trade was mostly black-cab drivers, sharing the red leather bench seats with a smattering of tourists just off the Eurostar. On the other side of the road sat the brutalist brick and glass edifice of Kennington police station. To the left of the station, from where Seaton sat, was Lambeth North Underground station. To his right, he could see the black railings and leaf-thinned trees of the War Museum grounds. The War Museum was the attraction for the Germans and Dutch and Belgians in Perdoni’s, chain-smoking over their empty espresso cups, to the general irritation of the cabbies in the café. Most of the cabbies smoked, of course. When all was said and done, they were cabbies. But they were more furtive about their habit than the tourists were when they dragged on their crimped and hidden gaspers.
Overhead, the morning sky was a vivid blue, intersected by fading vapour trails. It was a bright enough blue, the sky. But it had a depth and stillness suggestive of the steady retreat of sunlight and warmth through autumn. Halloween was not long past. In the newsagent’s window a few doors down from the café, they were still trying to sell leftover werewolf gloves and pointy hats in a cut-price window display. The British had really taken to Halloween over recent years, the kids trick-or-treating in their witch and skeleton costumes and ghoul masks in faithful imitation of their American counterparts. It threatened to become a bigger celebration than Guy Fawkes Night. Maybe it already was. Seaton could see the irony in All Hallows Eve becoming no more in the public mind than an excuse for children to beg sweets at the doors of strangers. But he couldn’t enjoy it. He had seen real ghouls. Magic was something that could be harnessed and exploited and there were people in the world with hunger for power and influence enough to risk dabbling in its dark, cruel possibilities.
It was easier not to think about it. It was much more enjoyable to think, instead, of the psychological warfare being waged inside Perdoni’s between the cabbies and the foreigners. He sneaked a look through the glass. The cabbies huddled, bellicose behind their swinging brass badges, in front of stroke-inducing fry-ups and mugs of sweet tea. The foreigners were pale and impassive in spectacles with narrow black frames and dark clothes he knew would have costly labels. They tinkered with expensive camcorders in preparation for their museum visit. These were taken from and put back into little leather knapsacks embossed with discreet logos. Occasionally, their owners checked the time on their expensive wristwatches. And all the while they smoked.
There was one particularly good-looking couple at the periphery of this chic cluster.