The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [140]
Seaton hesitated.
‘Come,’ Poole said. ‘Join us.’ He was serious now. This was a serious offer. The pantomimic Irish brogue was absent from his voice. ‘The odds are very generous,’ he said. His own accent was uncanny, a phonetic relic, the received pronunciation you might hear in a wireless broadcast recorded seventy years ago.
‘And if I draw the lowest card?’
‘You do the honourable thing,’ Gibson-Hoare said. ‘It’s why the gun is on the table.’
Seaton nodded. Poole stared at him. Marvin Gaye had been superseded by Billy Paul and ‘Me And Mrs Jones’.
‘The year out there is 1983,’ Gibson-Hoare said, softly, nodding at the door of the pub. ‘It is springtime. The cherry tree in the little public garden across the road is ripe with pink and fragrant blossom. It is four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Lucinda Grey is sitting out there on the grass, reading the very latest edition of Vogue. She is lovely in a pale, pleated linen skirt and an ivory blouse, both of her own design. She is waiting for you, Paul. The tennis court is booked for five. You are sharing lasagne and a bottle of Frascati for your supper.’
Seaton looked towards the door. Above its frame, in the line of clear panes that topped all the frosting and engraving of the coloured glass in the pub’s facade, he could now see a sickly spread of pewter light.
‘The year is 1995,’ Seaton said.
‘You’re mistaken,’ Gibson-Hoare said. He said it gently, like a sad but essential reproach. ‘Tomorrow night, you will meet Greg and Stuart. Mike has promised to come. And Patrick will be there.’
‘Step out of that door, Paul, and you’ll be twenty-three years old again,’ Poole said, ‘in a world as young and unsullied as yourself. Put down the bag. Relax. Trust us.’
‘I need a drink.’
He reached over the bar and put a pint glass under the Director’s tap and pushed the pump from the wrong side until the glass was full. He straightened up and raised it. The beer was black and smelled brackish, as though brewed from a source grown stagnant.
‘Sure to hit the spot,’ Poole said, idly, from behind him.
‘Bejaysus,’ Gibson-Hoare said, the roaring boy again, Brendan Behan to the syllable, now Seaton had his back to them. ‘There’s nothing on God’s good earth touches a drop of the Liffey water.’
‘Who was the girl, Poole, when you were posing as Antrobus? Who was the girl with you in Perdoni’s, the two of you watching me that morning?’
‘One of Crowley’s cast-off acoloytes,’ Poole said. He sounded bored. ‘She entertained me, briefly. And then I grew as tired of her as he had.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Depends on your perspective. She’s where I left her. At the bottom of an Antwerp canal.’
Gibson-Hoare sniggered.
‘Or she’s in the lavatory here, powdering her nose.’
Seaton looked around in the thin forgotten light seeping through the clear panes from whatever Lambeth lay under their spring sky of nightmare. Where the pub walls met the ceiling there were splotches of mould spreading. It was as though he had entered a world malevolent with decay. Outside, it would be careless and worse, wretched duplication, pastiche and chaos. He put his drink down on the bar and steeled himself and lifted his eyes and looked at the three of them through the mirror behind the bar.
He’d discovered in the tower on his first visit to the Fischer house and had it confirmed often in the hospital, that reflection was never kind to them. Now, in the Windmill mirror, their clothing was reduced to wormy rags and moss pitted the dead flesh of their faces. All three were looking with their corpse eyes at the bag he held in his hand. Even in death, he could see that the rictus of terror gripped their collective gaze. He looked down at the worn and faded velvet of the sack. It bulged gently and felt pitifully insubstantial.
The strings backing Billy Paul did not now sound so lush or lachrymose. They didn’t sound very much