The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [18]
There was a sound then outside the door. It sounded like something slithering against the wood. It was followed by what sounded like a giggle, suppressed, further along the corridor. There was a key in the lock on the door. Seaton got up and turned it and sat back down again.
‘Bother,’ drawled a voice from beyond the door. Neither man in the room reacted to it.
Seaton swallowed. ‘What do you remember of the Fischer House?’
‘Nothing,’ Clarke said. ‘Nothing at all. I’ve searched my memory and continue to search it. But I honestly don’t remember a thing.’
Six
Seaton had left the professor, drunk, convinced that he really did remember nothing. He didn’t remember it when he was awake, anyway. The booze suggested that his memory improved when he was asleep, though. He was drinking because he remembered the dreams the Polish vodka was intended to obliterate. Seaton had tried the same remedy. It didn’t work, but it didn’t seem worth telling the professor that. He had the moss growing on his building to contend with. He had the lurker in the woods. There was the mildew problem and the failing electrical circuitry. There was the visitor in the spats. Seaton left thinking that the professor had his work cut out with the visitor in the spats. Drunk or sober, Clarke had unwittingly given himself a great deal to contend with.
‘Antrobus?’ It had been Seaton’s parting shot. Unnecessary, really, he thought, as the professor recoiled at the mention of the name. ‘I couldn’t help noticing you refer to him in the past tense.’
‘He’s disappeared,’ the professor said. ‘I sometimes wonder.’
‘What?’
‘Whether he was ever here, Mr Seaton. I passed the coach house the other day. Drove past it deliberately and stopped. And it’s derelict, you know. It doesn’t look as though anyone has lived in it for years.’
Seaton, who thought the descriptions of Antrobus and Marthe uncomfortably close to those of two people he’d seen looking back at him that morning through the glass frontage of Perdoni’s, thought it best to refrain from comment.
He looked again around the professor’s office. At the books he’d written and the framed citations. At a triptych of family photographs taken at a barbecue, with a playful Labrador dog in their foreground. Nothing, really, remained to be said. He stood and shook hands over the Coleman lantern and he left.
He was tired when he got to Whitstable. And it was later than it should have been. He got there shortly after seven, unable to explain to himself quite why the journey had taken so long. He came down the hill on to the high street and in the persistence of rain and a strong gust of wind off the sea the town looked shuttered and dismal. The wind rocked the car on its springs in blasts of exposure where high-street buildings were breached by the narrow lanes to his left leading to the water. If there were lights lit on Whitstable’s high street, Seaton did not see them. The buildings were mostly shops, all closed, a dank, dumb procession of two-storey facades. The windsurfers and dinghy sailors who gave the place its summer life had long departed. Through the condensation and rain on his nearside window, he thought he saw the wood portal and battening sign of a pub. But he knew it wasn’t the Pearson’s Arms. He had precise instructions on how to get to the Pearson’s Arms. Just then the radio began to play, making him jump, as John Lennon launched into the plodding piano introduction to ‘Imagine’. Seaton scrabbled for the controls and found the ‘mute’ button, wishing he owned the Saab, because if he owned it he’d tear the fucking radio right out of the dashboard. Maybe he’d get lucky and some desperate Whitstable fucker would steal it. He hadn’t seen a single pedestrian so far. Much less a skulking thief. With the ‘mute’ button pressed, the ghost of Lennon singing