The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [145]
The velvet thrummed under his touch. His mind travelled to a plateau next to a church overlooking the sea. Trees provided seclusion and shade and there was the late glimmer of sunshine on the water. Robert Morgan’s gravestone rose from the cut grass. Paul Seaton called on his power. His power was keen and almost unused and he dragged deep and so martialled and gathered the sum of himself. He concentrated. And it was as though the physical world conspired and colluded with him, belief confounding fact, matter shifting on the strength and clarity of what he willed. With profound resolution, with great tenderness, Seaton willed all there was left of Peter, the precious whole and the heal of him, to lie between his father’s arms, safe forever, bathed in the granite beam of his father’s light.
He sighed and lowered his head. The bag on his lap lay empty. The beast behind where he sat was gone, the baleful magic that had conjured it, abruptly and entirely defeated. He felt the house sag with perished illusion into the neglected ruin it should long ago have become. He opened his eyes and looked at Malcolm Covey over the spoiled food. Covey looked sad and careworn in his cloak and rings and symbols, deprived of his music and ghosts. He was rolling a cigar between his fingers. But he couldn’t smoke it. None of the matches spilled on to his banqueting table would strike.
‘Now I understand.’
‘You understand nothing,’ Covey said. ‘What a waste. What an appalling waste. Damn you.’
‘I could kill you.’
‘You could do anything. But you won’t.’ He shook his head and looked at his redundant cigar. ‘What a waste.’
In Klaus Fischer’s mansion, the walls were scabrous and pockmarked now where pictures had hung. Rain pattered unimpeded through gaping holes.
Seaton stood and turned and picked a careful path through debris. He walked out of the ruined house into the night. He walked in rain until he was a distance away from it in what he judged to be the direction of the shore. He could not bear the idea of getting back into Covey’s Saab and staring at the empty passenger seat. A strong intuition told him he would reach the shore and find a boat. Pandora had not found a boat. But he was confident that he would. He turned back once to look at the house, just before the trees grew so thick as to obstruct his view. He saw light on the glass of one of the tower’s thick windows. But it was no more than a hint of moonlight and even from here, he could see that the pane was broken. The house was broken, derelict, bereft of the corrupting power it had possessed.
He had thought briefly about killing Malcolm Covey. Of course he had. But he had remembered what Nick had said in the basement about saving Sarah Mason and their souls. He thought Sarah Mason would be okay now. She would suffer grief at the loss of her brother. He knew what it was, himself, to lose a sibling. But Nick had courted death throughout his life and Sarah must have prepared, at some level, for his absence one day from hers. The dreams would cease, sanity would return and the chaos, now the ghosts were gone, would gradually be forgotten by her and by the other girls. It was Mason’s caution over souls that most concerned him, and his own soul in particular. He had discovered something potent in himself. But he felt it would be very wrong to squander this awful discovered gift of his on trivia or spite. And though Covey had damned him, it was Covey who was surely damned. The man deserved the leisure of the rest of his life to ponder on the course of his deliverance when dead.
Seaton was nearing the edge of the sea. He could hear the dull percussion of waves breaking under the rain. And there was a boat, a rowing boat with oars, beached above the tideline when he reached it.