The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [15]
What fascinated Clarke about Peter Antrobus was his attitude towards morality. The ethics professor said Antrobus approached the subject the way a bright toddler might approach a live hand grenade. He was full of curiosity about it, but he was entirely lacking in preconceptions or fear. It was as though he had never been exposed to the codes that govern and inhibit human behaviour. It was as though he had never been hurt and forced to learn the compassionate lesson of pain.
‘As though he’d never been born,’ Seaton said to himself, at the wheel of the Saab, chasing darkness on the road to Whitstable, putting his foot down now, driving faster.
Antrobus produced a speculative essay about the contagious nature of evil. But it was not the expected stuff about demagoguery, about the charismatic leaders able to stir their followers into acts of casual atrocity in the name of religious or political commitment. There was no mention of persecution or pogroms. Instead, Antrobus argued compellingly that particular locations could infect individual people with what society termed evil. He called these people random victims of contagion. He referred to specific addresses. He mentioned a tenement in Chicago. He talked about a Venice palazzo. The atmosphere at a remote ski lodge in the Austrian Tyrol was evoked in a way that sent a shudder through Clarke when he read the description of the events Antrobus said had taken place there. Two locations in Britain were included in the essay’s litany of malevolent addresses. One was a Glasgow slum dwelling. The other, of course, was the Fischer house.
‘You’d have been better off in the slum,’ Seaton told Clarke. But the stricken look on the professor’s face rightly suggested the time for such levity was long past.
Clarke had Antrobus read the essay aloud to his ethics seminar group, where it caused great excitement. And it was there, in the discussion that followed, that he admitted that Fischer had been a second cousin to his father and that the trust responsible for the property might be persuaded to open it up.
‘For a weekend,’ Antrobus said. ‘In the interests of enlightened philosophical debate.’
‘You described Antrobus as a stranger to morality.’
‘He was,’ the professor told Seaton.
‘Then how did he define this evil he talked about?’
‘In conventional terms. Peter understood badness well enough. He understood the concept and in his essay he listed vivid examples of some of its manifestations. It’s just that he never seemed remotely disapproving of it.’
‘How would you say he was affected by it?’
‘I don’t think he was.’
‘So he was never shocked or disgusted by the evil events and actions he described.’
The professor appeared to think about this. ‘He was far less engaged emotionally by it all than that.’
‘Intrigued?’
‘Entertained,’ the professor said. He put his head in his hands. ‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Oh, God.’ He was sober now. The memory of Peter Antrobus had sobered him.
It took months before arrangements for the Fischer house visit were complete. There was no real urgency. It was not as if the house and its history were a part of the curriculum undertaken by Clarke’s ethics group. It was more of an adventure for the students. But when they researched in preparation for the visit, when they read the history of the house and accounts of the life of the man who had lived there, they became very curious to see if there was any substance to the claims being made by his young relative. The house certainly possessed sufficiently gruesome credentials to qualify as a test location for the theory put forward by Antrobus.
And it was hard not to see the visit as something of a coup. Several newspaper journalists and television programme makers had tried and failed to gain access to the house. So far as Professor Clarke could discover, it had been closed for more than fifty years. Neglected for that length of time, in such a remote location, the house would have deteriorated into ruin, Clarke was sure. But Antrobus was adamant. The Fischer house was not just securely guarded. It was