The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [31]
Mason was almost surprised to find himself descending the cellar steps of the Wavecrest house before going after Seaton. He hated the damp, salt odour of his father’s old refuge from his children, from domesticity. It was the part of the house that most unnerved him. But his thoughts were vague on this, as he reached for the weight and threat of his father’s sap, and felt the scrutiny of the hardwood idols brought back by his father from Africa, as they watched him through their carved, incurious eyes from where they were huddled on their shelves against the far wall.
He heard the rumble of the sea, underneath it now, underneath the heavy reproach of its waves broaching on the shingle above. He slapped the lead shot and leather sap into his palm and cursed himself for the futile bravado of the gesture. Nobody was watching, after all. Nobody was here to be impressed, or daunted.
The truth was, his father’s house had always unnerved him. He had slept under this roof with a night light on until the age of fifteen, despite the old man’s taunting. And it wasn’t just the house. He had always felt the small town of his birth a malign and frightening place. He hated its narrow alleys and the gibbet swing of its pub signs in the dark. He grew up loathing the slither of the wind through its winter nights. He thought there was something odd, unfettered, out of kilter about the place. It was cold, underpopulated, meagre. There was a starkness about the shadows and the light. There was the feeling he always had of being followed. There had been two, really terrifying, childhood incidents he fought not to recollect with any clarity. One had taken place at the tea garden in Tankerton. The other had occurred in the old ice-cream parlour on the front when he’d been ten or eleven years old. It had been a relief when his father had sent him away to the boarding school in Cumbria. He hadn’t minded the dark, there. There was night comfort in the sound of the other boys, breathing, asleep in the dorm they shared. And there was something cleansing about the bleak regime of fell-running and forced treks and orienteering on frozen mornings by torchlight. He wondered sometimes if his whole professional life had not been some sort of reaction to, or compensation for, the fears he felt so plagued by as a child growing up here. Maybe. And maybe not. There were plenty of other men in the regiment, rightfully prone to night terrors of their own. Now, in his father’s cellar, amid his father’s stores and stashes of secret collusive things, he slapped the sap against flesh again and self-consciously chuckled at the bite of pain with the impact into his palm. And something shifted softly over by the shelves against the far wall. And Mason swallowed and sauntered with exaggerated slowness towards the dim flight of cellar steps.
‘The sea,’ Seaton said, in the Saab. ‘They find it more difficult to summon their mischief, near the sea. They’re fierce fond of music, so they are. And, of course, they love to have their little joke. But at the edge of the sea…well, it’s always been safe. Safer, at least. Not entirely safe, nowhere is. But certainly safer. Until now.’
‘You’re going to tell me what’s going on,’ Mason said. ‘You are. Aren’t you?’
‘You look about ready to beat it out of me, captain.’
The Irishman had that right. ‘If I had to, I would,’ Mason said. ‘But I don’t need to. Because you came here to tell me. Didn’t you?’
‘We can’t do much about things, about the prevailing circumstances, until I