The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [133]
‘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