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By Root 844 0

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.