The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [4]
Or erased.
I could always erase it, he thought. A swathe of rain bleared the glass in front of his face and made him blink and recoil slightly. And what, precisely, would erasing the message achieve? It might buy him an hour of queasy ignorance. These things were best confronted, weren’t they? You could not hide from them. The decision made, he was trying to will himself away from the window when the phone behind him began to ring.
He ignored it. He just waited until it stopped. And then he turned and went across and played the message.
‘Hello, Paul.’
The voice of Malcolm Covey.
‘What I have to say concerns the Fischer house.’
A few items of dull furniture occupied the room. Two of these were armchairs. Seaton dumped himself heavily in one of them. Covey had paused, perhaps for effect. But more likely it was to allow Seaton to accommodate himself to the shock. It was coming on for twelve years since he’d seen or heard from Malcolm Covey and in nine words, the man had got right to the point.
‘I’m sorry to intrude on you. But there really isn’t a choice. Like you, probably, I was under the assumption that the place had been long demolished. But apparently it hasn’t been. A party of students went there a couple of weeks ago.’
Were lured there, Seaton thought. There was music in Covey’s background. He had Handel on, distinct and plangent in his silences. But then, Covey’s background was plush. In Seaton’s background, there was traffic noise and the distant roar of a 747 slowing in its descent.
‘One of them is already dead. The others are in a desperate situation. Four of them visited the house.’
Five, Seaton thought.
‘Five,’ Covey said. ‘If you count the tutor who was supposed to be monitoring their course. He was the idiot who took them there.’
Seaton had his head in his hands.
‘Paul? I need you. They need you. There is no time for prevarication on this.’
Another silence.
‘There’s a bar, improbably named, not far from where I believe you live these days.’
Zanzibar, Seaton said to himself.
‘Zanzibar,’ Covey said, and he chuckled. ‘Who’d have thought it, Paul, in Southwark?’
But Seaton’s mind was on the Fischer house.
‘I’ll meet you there at eight this evening. Please be there. Be there, Paul, for God’s sake.’
Seaton rose from his chair thinking that God had very little to do with anything that had ever occurred within the grounds or walls of Klaus Fischer’s gloomy domain. He walked back to his window. He turned his wrist so that his watch face showed in the flare of the sodium lights from the busy intersection below. He studied the hurl of indifferent traffic for a moment. It was just after a quarter to eight.
If he thought about it objectively, his life did not amount to very much. He occupied a rented flat in a block that smelled of frying onions and old semen stains and rodent droppings and damp. He commuted by Underground to the British Museum where he scraped a few hundred pounds a month checking facts for writers too idle to carry out their own research. He didn’t own a desktop computer or a credit card or a decent suit of clothes. He didn’t possess a television set. His only diversion in the flat was a second-hand cassette player he’d picked up on a market stall in Lower Marsh, and he didn’t tend to play that often because the tapes he owned brought reminiscences unbearable to him. He’d plugged the machine into a wall socket and put on Everything But The Girl, heard the opening song of the album Eden and cried salt, self-pitying tears on his knees with his face between his hands. He hid in a part of the city fondly remembered, known from his own young adulthood. He hid there because he’d been confident there once, and happy. He hid there because its familiar streets and tender memories were the only consolation left to him now. It was no sort of a life at all, when you thought about it. But it was the only one he had. He believed that Malcolm Covey’s intervention, now,