The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [137]
He felt the fight above was truly over, now. He felt sadness and pity at the death of his valiant friend. He admonished himself for the pity. It was an emotion he was prey to. It was one Nicholas Mason had never had need of. He listened for Mr Greb, but heard nothing. He carried the bag into the corridor. There were many doors in the gloom of its considerable length. But there was light under only one of them. It was pale in a narrow strip and softly inviting. He tried to rub the soil from where it had stuck to the raw of his hands. He listened for the approach of Mr Greb. Still nothing. Licking its wounds, perhaps. Slowed and even hurt by its desperate adversary. He needed to get his bearings and couldn’t do so in the darkness. He moved with the bag in one fist to the lure of the light.
Thirty
The door opened on to a school classroom lit by opaque globes of glass suspended from its ceiling by electrical wires, the wires covered by black fabric woven into plaits. Miniature desks occupied four precise rows. The desks were built in pairs and each had a bench seat attached. The desks had white porcelain inkwells set into them and carved grooves above the hinges on their tops in which to place pencils and pens. The classroom wore the mingled odour of chalk dust and wax polish and wet gabardine wool and carbolic soap. It smelled of childhoods spent in the secure discipline of long ago. They were weathered and scored and blackened at their edges, but there was no graffiti carved into the desktops. There was a neat pile of prayer books or hymnals on a shelf in a bookcase to Seaton’s right. Their black cloth spines were threadbare with devotion. It was night, because outside the narrow windows all was dark. Seaton had entered from the rear of the classroom. The row of windows was in the wall to his left. In the electric light, landscape pictures looked lurid and childish in poster paint on coloured paper tacked to the walls.
Marjory Pegg stood at the front of the classroom with her back to him. Her hair was splayed, grey and unkempt, across her shoulders. She was chalking a sentence in neat script on to the blackboard. The characters were too small for him to be able to recognise individual letters and so distinguish words. The light was feeble. It was very dark outside. And from the back of the class, under the dim yellow globes hanging from the ceiling, he could not make out the writing on the blackboard.
There was a door with frosted panes in its upper half to the left of the blackboard. Seaton knew, without looking, that the door through which he had entered just now had gone. It had no logical place here. It had been a part of the Fischer house. And he wasn’t there any longer. He was in Peter Morgan’s village school at Penhelig. He could hear the ticking of the radiator on the wall under the row of windows to the left of him as its pipes contracted and cooled. On the draught from under the door in the classroom corner, he caught the dead-cinders whiff of a coke-fired boiler allowed to go out.
He suffered a start of blind panic at the thought that logic might have stolen the bag from him. But it was there, in his right hand, the velvet tacky in his tender grip.
The teacher shuffled and turned to face him. She was dull-eyed in death, her complexion cold and the flesh of her arms blue and ragged where she had opened her arteries in long slashes to let the blood escape. It was the way you did it if you really meant it, Seaton remembered old Bob Halliwell saying to him, once. You didn’t slash haphazardly at your wrists. What you did was cut deeply into the tender flesh from the crook of your elbow to the heel of your hand. You cut the blood vessels lengthways so they could not be cauterised and staunched.
From the front of