The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [102]
‘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