The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [2]
Then he heard his sister scream from the graveside. Sarah screamed. And the sound pierced Mason’s heart in his hide among the tombs with its terror and its bewilderment, carried to him on the stink of the sorry autumn wind.
Two
Paul Seaton knew it was back when a gust of rain lashed with vindictive fury at the windows of the bus he was on. They were halfway over Westminster Bridge in a stalled procession of bleary rush-hour traffic. The squall shuddered at the bus windows and left them dripping without. It rocked the old Routemaster on its springs. And Seaton knew. There was nothing unusual about rain in London on a raw evening early in November. It didn’t signify anything other than itself and the bleakness of the season. But Seaton knew then that the thing he’d almost come to believe he had escaped was back, had returned to seek him out. He stood and threaded through the obstruction of standing passengers there on the lower deck and stepped from the tailboard on to wet London pavement. The wind whistled through the gaps between the bridge balustrades, the rain it drove soaking his trousers from the knee so that the fabric gathered and clung with the rhythm of walking against his shins and calves. The cloth of his trousers felt cold and greasy and he was aware of rain scouring off the river into his hair and the collar of his coat.
Since he was headed south, the famous view, the sweeping fairytale of House of Commons and clock tower was behind him to his right, obscured anyway by the throbbing convoy of buses. The river was to his left. But he resisted any temptation to look at that. He didn’t look at the river until he reached the foot of the bridge and descended the steps to the Embankment under the pale stone gaze of the Southbank Lion. He risked a glimpse at the statue on its plinth, at the lion’s fierce and familiar head. Rain ran through its stone mane and dribbled from the corner of an eye.
The river dimpled under the rain. Seaton shivered, already soaked. He looked up to the lamps strung along the Embankment, for comfort. But there was nothing cheerful this evening about their light. The tide was uneasily high and the water close and pale in the cast of the lamps. There were old mooring rings in lions’ mouths in lions’ heads all along this stretch of the Thames. They were green and imperious with algae and invisible, now, in a strung pride of bronze along the bank beneath him. When the river was high, it rose to reach the rings in the lions’ mouths. It was how you measured the height of the tide. Now, he thought, tonight, the lions guarding the bank beneath him were surely engulfed. The river was drowning them. He fancied he could hear the dim clank of their rings against the current.
He looked at the water. The dark width of it was stippled in ribbons of urgent force. In other places it was black and still. Odd bits of debris carried past him borne on the current, half-sunk, ambiguous in the rain and the cast of light from the lamps on the bridge. As he stood and watched, his eyes were taken by a patch of something on the river surface, its shape shifting, more a contrast in texture than a solid object, whatever it was absorbing rather than reflecting any light. From out towards the far bank, it drifted closer. It began to look like the dark material of a garment, a floating slick of tweed or gabardine, a coat lost on a bad night to lose one. Only would cloth stay on the surface like that, Seaton wondered, as the shape in the water wallowed and shifted, resolved into a meagre body, the scant ballast of the corpse keeping the fabric that wrapped it only just afloat. Then, still thirty feet from him, the shape seemed to sigh in the water and it sank from sight and further speculation. There was an odour on the rain, a long-forgotten river smell of coal tar from chugging funnels and hemp