The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [28]
It was more than a hut, of course. It was vaulted, timbered in hardwood, the high dome spreading above a spacious circular room, flagged in smooth stone under strewn rugs, opulently furnished in teak and ivory and marble and blood. The headless torso of the chief lay in a thickening pool of gore, small and still at the carved feet of the ebony throne on which the Kheddi sat, shambolic and grotesque, much worse a sight in the anaemic light of Mason’s torch beam than the priest had led him to believe it could ever be. Its skin was some greyish animal hide, scraped and seasoned, maybe the softened hides of boar or buffalo, crudely stitched over its stuffing in the rough shape and posture of a man. Standing, it would have been about eight feet tall. But it would never have stood, Mason thought, thinking of the priest’s butchered goats. It was a lifeless thing, an abomination slouched on its throne, with its cloven buffalo hooves for feet, with its hands taken from some slaughtered ape and clenched now, the fingernails black with rictus and crafty decay. It was an abomination, right enough, but crudely inanimate.
Mason raised his torch beam and studied the head. It was large and pale and bald, sunken in places in shallow depressions where the stuffing didn’t seem to be sufficient and gave it a deformed and almost sullen aspect. The eyes were blank discs of ivory perforated at their edges and stitched on to the face. And the mouth under them was a black, leering gash. Mason shook his head. He turned his back on the thing. And he felt the hairs rise on his neck in dread as he heard the Kheddi shift behind him in its seat.
‘I was wired anyway, so pumped with adrenaline I thought my heart was going to explode out of my chest. I spun, already squeezing the trigger, and gave it the full mag,’ he told Seaton. ‘High-velocity rounds. Point-blank range. I hit it with a burst that cut the fucking monstrosity in half. Next thing I knew there were half a dozen very jumpy blokes in the hut with me, safeties off, trigger-happy as fuck, shouting their heads off in the dark. It was fucking bedlam.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We buried our dead comrade. We torched the camp. We marched on no sleep for two solid days and were air lifted out at our agreed rendezvous aboard a Chinook.’
‘Did you tell anyone what happened in the hut?’
Mason laughed. A bitter sound. ‘Back in Blighty at the debrief? No.’
‘On the march out of the camp?’
‘I didn’t need to. Like I said, I fired a burst that cut the thing, the Kheddi, in half. And we all saw the contents of its stomach. Straw stuffing, like you’d expect. Other random things, bits of gold, plaits of old rope, rags, coins, what looked like a couple of dozen semi-precious stones. And five small human skulls. And the skulls were partially digested.’
Seaton sat and considered what he was hearing. ‘You mean in a state of decomposition?’
‘No, Mr Seaton. I mean what I say. We all saw it.’ He reached for another cigarette. ‘I can close my eyes and see it now. It’s what makes me broad-minded, you see, about whatever’s going on now with these poor girls.’
Both men were silent for a while. Seaton had questions about the story to which he wanted answers, but he thought Mason looked exhausted in the chair opposite his. So he didn’t ask them. But the silence began to unnerve him with the fitful wind outside and the imagined noises from the room occupied by the sleeping girl upstairs. And so he was compelled to speak.
‘Did the priest give the demon a name?’
‘My name is Legion,’ Mason said. His voice was flat, devoid of emotion, spent after the telling of his tale. ‘He seemed to think it’s always the same demon, irrespective of what it calls itself. But you’d know that, wouldn’t you? So I don’t really know why you bother to ask.’
‘What do you think