The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [29]
‘Roon,’ Mason said. ‘Hindip Roon. Tough bloke. Third generation. His grandfather won the Military Cross fighting the Japanese in the 14th Army counteroffensive at Meiktila. He was very proud of what his granddad did in Burma, was Roon.’
‘What do you think Hindip Roon saw?’
‘I think it’s what he heard, Mr Seaton. We found the ears he took as trophy tucked into one of the ammo pouches strapped to his webbing. He did that, and the rest of his blood work, in the hut. That was obvious from the mess around the chief’s corpse, even to me, wired as I was. But he worked with an audience he didn’t know he had. What I think, is this. I think the Kheddi spoke to him. I think the Kheddi spoke to Hindip Roon. And I think, perhaps, he might have heard its laughter.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Seaton said.
‘Its glee,’ Mason said. ‘Its happy appreciation of Roon’s craft.’
Eight
A cry from above took them back up the stairs and on to the threshold of the girl’s room. She was propped against her pillows, awake, alert. Her cheeks were flushed above a bright smile which contrasted dismally with the look of sly and ancient mischief dulling her eyes. The nurse, to one side, her back to her patient, busied herself with a glass-topped trolley crowded with the apparatus of the sick room. There were pills in white plastic cylinders and medicine bottles and a thermometer propped in sterile fluid and a thing with rubber coils and a glass gauge for calculating blood pressure. When you looked at the girl’s face, Seaton thought, you couldn’t blame the nurse for turning her back.
The girl clutched a radio in her lap, a portable with the aerial extended. She’d taken it from her bedside table, where Seaton remembered seeing it earlier, behind a box of tissues. The tissue box was now on the floor. He thought the scream they had heard the nurse’s, alarmed perhaps at the suddenness with which her patient had roused to consciousness and moved. The girl blinked and her head snapped back against her raised pillows. She stabbed at one of the preset buttons on the radio and sound assaulted the room at a volume that caused the nurse to jerk and send her trolley crashing side-ways to the floor.
‘I’m so sorry.’
Her voice was audible only because it carried as a whisper under the anthemic assault of Joy Division, the baritone of Ian Curtis incanting ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.
Mason had crossed the threshold of the room and guided the nurse, with a gentle grip insistent on one elbow, as his sister punched another preset on the radio and Nick Drake intoned something whispery and acoustic that filled the room and with its gentle rhythm and rhymes rocked the girl back and forth against her pillows. The girl was panting, her face awful to look at now, and against the walls and windows of the house the wind had roused itself once more with shuddering, uncertain violence. Things moved in Seaton’s mind, shadowy in the wainscoting. The shadows themselves spread and encroached. Gravel was sprayed against the windowpanes as if in antic glee. Mason had not returned from taking out the nurse. There was a smell of rottenness. Like something stagnant, this dead odour carried on the breath of the panting girl. Seaton had still not dared take the step that would deliver him into her room. But he needed to get the radio away from her. As if reading his mind, the girl punched a preset. He heard Sandy Denny singing ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes?’.
From the bed, the girl leered at Seaton. ‘They know where the time goes,’ she said. ‘They’re so very keen to tell.’ She belched, with a look of surprise, and her breath was the rank air of the crypt. ‘Dying to tell,’ she said.
And Paul Seaton fled.
Mason found him hunched over the wheel of the Saab in the pub car park, his seatbelt buckled but the engine cold when Mason opened the passenger door and sat heavily beside him. Both men were soaked from the hard, heavy rain on their separate journeys there. The car radio was playing. The music was jazz, a weary four-in-the-morning ballad infused with a faint bebop