The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [136]
The thing upstairs moaned and scrabbled and they heard the screech of rent timber.
‘That isn’t Harry Greb,’ Mason said. ‘I only wish to Christ it was.’
‘But it thinks it is. At least some of the time, it does.’
Mason looked at him. ‘Completely blind?’
‘Profoundly so.’
‘Do you remember which eye?’
‘I do. Sure I do. It was the right.’
Mason frowned and nodded. He walked across the room and the two men embraced one another.
‘There’s a stream to the south of the house. I’ll bury the remains beyond it. I’ll cross where it narrows and meet you on the other side of the stream.’
There was a heavy scrape from above as the thing at the top of the house took its first step down to them. After finding its voice, it had assumed some sort of shape. Puffs of old plaster dust were shaken out of the games-room ceiling around its wooden supports. It’s grown, Seaton thought. It’s got bigger since the last time I was here.
‘Dig, Paul,’ Mason said, quietly, from the doorway. ‘For Sarah’s sake. For the sake of all our souls.’ He chambered a round in the weapon across his chest and kissed its muzzle. ‘Dig,’ he said. And he was gone.
Seaton spread his feet and raised the entrenching tool above his head in the grip of both hands and smashed the pointed tip against the ground. Again and again he drove the tip against the stubborn crust of concrete on the games-room floor. I should have spat on my hands, he thought, breathing hard, aware of the fierce heated friction of the shaft. But his mouth had been too dry with fear for him to have found the required spit. There were raking bursts of gunfire from upstairs, crumps of sound that Seaton thought might be stun grenades. The odour of combat drifted down to him, hard and metallic-smelling. He heard the bestial roar of something surprised, maybe even hurt. But sorely enraged.
Seaton grunted and dug. He was through the crust, using the blunt of the entrenching tool to rake stones from the soil, deepening the impression in the cool loam underneath. He could tell from their odd dry tingle on the shaft of the tool that his palms were flayed. No matter. Should he survive, the skin of his hands would grow back. There were more noises from above. The entire house seemed to screech and shudder. It shifted. Floors buckled and walls bellowed inward and outward with shock and repercussion. Noise came in savage and frenetic squalls and faded abruptly. Drafts erupted and rippled and were gone. The music, though, had entirely ceased. Its absence was unnerving in the house, in the fine, falling precipitation of dust induced by Mason’s fight. There was a rumble and a roar from a landing above. It was a cry of primeval triumph.
‘On my way, Irishman,’ said a rough voice. ‘I’ll be down to you directly.’ Mason was dead. He had lost the battle he never could have won. Seaton heard the thing that had defeated him saunter and crash downwards. He thought he heard music again; Al Bowley, The Hot Club Quintet, something faint and frenetic and almost comically irrelevant. He saw a bone gleam palely in the loam, not much bigger than a rabbit bone, and he choked on sobs and cursed a miserable God that he hadn’t been given the time to complete the task he knew now to be his sole and urgent obligation. He looked at the entrenching tool, its shaft sticky with his own gore between bloody hands. It was no sort of weapon. He would fight with it anyway.
The thud of hooves was imperious down the stairs. Seaton stood upright and hefted the tool. And then there was a cry and it was human, Mason’s fierce cry of defiance as he raked gunfire into the beast once more in a desperate rally somewhere above. He was exacting his vengeance for his sister’s suffering, was Mason. More than that, the fallen angel was selling himself to buy his sister some sort of salvation.
A dark universe crashed and shuddered in pain and rage above his head and from somewhere in the games room, Seaton found a velvet bag containing billiard balls and emptied it and crouched and sifted loam for precious bones