The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [142]
‘Everybody cheats,’ he said. He continued to pull the trigger.
Thirty-One
He was back in the vestibule of the Fischer house. He was on his feet. But the gun was in his hand and it was smoking and when he touched the barrel, it was hot. He tried to look at the cylinder to see how many of the shells it housed were now spent but, in the darkness, could neither calculate nor remember how many shots the gun had fired. It did not matter very much. You could not kill a ghost. Not with a gun, you couldn’t. He put the Webley on the floor. Some intuition told him that whatever hope he possessed in this bleak and singular predicament, it did not lie in a gun.
Transferring the bag from his left hand to his right, he walked out of the front door. He descended the steps to the grounds, fully expecting Giuseppe’s lanky cadaver to emerge from the shadows, voice full of melancholy warning, trying to draw him back. He heard the rain. He heard the crunch of wet gravel under his own feet. He did not hear Giuseppe. He heard a groan he thought might be Mr Greb passing through the vestibule on his way to devour him. And his heart thudded and dread drenched and scalded him in the falling rain. But when his mind made sense of the sound, it was the wail of some old blues singer. It was Bessie Smith, or maybe Leadbelly, the pain of their lamentation roaming the empty house, freed from a shellac disk revolving under a needle and played there long ago in a time of evil and incalculable despair.
He thought he felt the bag shift in his grip. But he knew it couldn’t be so. He was crying, now, he knew. He was sobbing in the rain and darkness with fear and grief and rage, all mingled. He kept on walking. He turned and the lights of the house were dim and grown quite distant behind him. He wiped tears and snot and rain from his face with the back of his free hand. It was very dark. It was time to get his bearings, locate the stream, find the relative sanctity of the far bank for the burial. He cursed himself for abandoning Mason’s entrenching tool in the basement of the house. No matter. He would dig with his ruined hands. They would have all the time in the world, his hands, afterwards, for repair.
Looking around, he sensed the density of foliage rather than empty space. Yet his path had been unimpeded. It was a confusing contradiction that made him stop. He extended a hand and touched the obstacle of a rough, dense hedge directly in front of him. The leaves of this obstruction were fleshy, springlike, dry in the deluge. And he laughed, bitterly, knowing where he was. He was in the derelict maze at the hospital to which he’d been sent a decade ago. It had the smell and stillness and familiar, overgrown threat. The velvet bag in his hand seemed to shiver and fret again and he thought; nerves. My nerves. My ould nerves are shot to shit, and little wonder. I’m nowhere near up to any of this. And he sensed the brush of pursuit, closing in on him, from somewhere in the maze to his rear.
Seaton became aware, with appalling dread, of who it was now approaching him. It was not Mr Greb. Where the beast would have marauded, parading its strength, his pursuer now larked and crept. Jesus, he thought, knowing who it was, or more accurately, who it had once been.
The nurse from Dundalk who had strayed into the maze