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By Root 781 0

with him that afternoon in the hospital grounds had done so with a serious fancy for the young Paul Seaton. He discovered this a week after his rescue from it, when she entered the cell they had put him in to recover from his breakdown and, careful not to loosen his restraints, straddled and mounted him after an intense, smirking period of arousal. He was easily aroused. He was twenty-five. It was the first sex he had experienced since Lucinda Grey had abandoned him. By the time he was entered into her, he detested her. But he was unable to voice any feelings he might have had, a rubber clamp having been put into his mouth to prevent his occasional seizures from allowing him to bite off his own tongue.

She must have died. She must have died to be pursuing him here, decaying, flirtatious.

‘Doctor Covey is ready for you, now,’ she said from behind him. There was gravel in her voice. She giggled. The velvet of the bag rippled gently against his thigh. That happened, he thought, amazed. That did occur. I felt it.

‘He’s in the dining room,’ said the dead nurse from Dundalk. He could feel the cold soughing off her with the chill of the wind off a lake at night. ‘The doctor thought that you might enjoy dinner together.’

Seaton sighed and turned. And there was nobody there. He began the walk back to the house. He felt more resigned than afraid. Fate had always meant for it to end like this, he realised. He would never have been allowed to take the coward’s way out. It would have been cheating fate. And fate, above all else, would not be cheated.

‘It would have been cheating yourself, too,’ he said, under his breath. He gripped the bag, entirely ignorant now of the pain that doing so inflicted. He looked up at the lozenge windows of the tower, where lurked the beast that had killed his courageous friend. He thought about Malcolm Covey and the life Covey’s machinations had deprived him of. He trod wet ground, and the house and his confrontation there in the room where their ceremonies had been held drew nearer.

‘Old chum,’ Covey said, when Giuseppe, liveried in cloth and gilt splendour now, opened the dining-room doors and announced him with an obsequious bow.

Covey was seated on a sort of throne. He had on a cloak with a goat-head fastening embossed in ebony and gold. There was a broach pinned to his chest with runic symbols carved into its ancient metal. His armour, Seaton thought, almost absently. He’s come here well-protected. There were rings on most of his fat fingers. The fingers drummed and clinked on the surface of the high table he sat at. He looked dark and furious and the table itself heaved with food and accoutrements. It was heaped high with elaborate dishes and clustered with bottles of wine and liquor and spilling flower vases. But the meat on the suckling pig in pride of place smelled rank and the fruit was bruising in its burnished bowls. Petals lay on the tabletop from blooms curling and already dead. This was the place where they had held their feather and horn banquets and the contamination of it stank through the decades to Paul Seaton with the virulence of plague. He looked at Covey, who had aged a good decade since that night not so long ago in Zanzibar. But perhaps that was just the light. The room was illuminated only by the two ornate tabletop candelabra, their candles red, dripping wax like gore and giving everything in the room a bloodshot cast.

Seaton sat down. It was a long table. He sat carefully out of Covey’s physical reach. ‘You’d have to wonder why, Malcolm,’ he said. ‘You really would.’

‘Power,’ Covey said, flatly. ‘Authority. Influence. Wealth. Nothing you would ever, truly, comprehend. So let’s not bother with philosophy or morality or ethics, let’s cut to the chase. You have something in that bag on your lap that doesn’t belong to you. Return it, Paul, and I assure you we will part as friends.’

‘If I don’t?’

Covey’s smile flickered, bloody in the candlelight.

‘Mr Greb will shortly join us. You would not wish to encounter Mr Greb.’

Seaton nodded. This was true enough. Except that