The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [5]
You exited the lift and took your life in your hands crossing St George’s Road against the traffic hurtling from the right. Then there was a gated passage flanking the cathedral that led to the made-over pub. This short walk was always an ordeal, the cathedral’s length a sinister mass in the darkness. He shared the passage with no one. Odd doors and gated entrances punctuated the length of the building to his right. Leaves and city debris stirred and floundered on sets of descending steps and in dark recesses. There was a Gothic, deliberate atmosphere about the place, a sepulchral character to the mass of its stone buttresses and retreats. Shapes snatched inexplicably at his eyes as vagrant shadows shuffled and sulked in the night there. And he heard laughter, high-pitched with contempt or teasing mockery, that made him hurry on, even as he rationalised the sound into the squeal of brakes on the road beyond, or cold wind gusting through elaborate masonry.
Malcolm Covey sat smoking a cigar. Even in the crush, he’d found a table, kept a vacant chair. In the intervening decade, Covey seemed not so much to have aged as to have grown even more comfortably into himself. The hair and the beard were silvery grey rather than salt and pepper. He had looked distinguished before. Now he looked almost eminent. His huge body was buttoned into a dark-grey, three-piece suit. Rings adorned two of his thick fingers. One was plain gold. The other housed a fat ruby. The whole impression was of ease and stature and affluence, until he spoke. The voice was betrayed slightly now by the weight he carried and, Seaton assumed, by the number of Havanas he had burned his way through over the years. There was a shrill, short-of-breath quality to it that Seaton didn’t remember from before and that hadn’t been noticeable earlier over the telephone.
Seaton knew he was someone prey more than most to easy sentimentality and, particularly, to the cheap warmth of nostalgia. But he felt neither sentimental nor nostalgic facing the figure in front of him. He did not even feel the faint pleasure of familiarity assumed lost. This was partly because of the urgency that had brought Covey so abruptly back into his life. But it was mostly because he had always felt ambivalent about the man. It was hard to warm to any person instinct warned you not to trust.
‘You look good, Malcolm. Wish I could say it was good to see you.’
Covey puffed and nodded. He had risen to greet Seaton with a handshake. Now he sat back down. ‘You look pretty good yourself. All things considered. You’ve every right to look like hell.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Which is where they’re going, Paul. Those girls who went to the Fischer house. Unless you can help them?’
Seaton shivered. ‘I was a victim, Malcolm, not an adversary. I did not win. I merely survived. You surely know that better than anybody does.’
‘Survival was a sort of victory.’
‘If you’d been there, you wouldn’t think so. And if you were me, you would certainly know differently.’
‘Perhaps going back can help you get closure.’
‘I’m not after closure.’
Covey frowned.
‘I’ll help them if I can. I just don’t know how I’m equipped to.’
The three surviving students had attended their dead friend’s funeral. And they had all seen her there.
‘An open coffin?’ Seaton asked, misunderstanding.
‘No. They saw her attending,’ Covey said.
They each thought they saw her among the mourners. Each of the three put it down in the moment to private anxiety, or grief. They were shocked and very upset, after all. The girl who subsequently tried to take her own life got the worst glimpse. She saw her dead friend loitering at the graveside in a hat and veil, her mouth a dim contortion shaping incoherent curses, soil slithering into the grave under the toes of her pointed leather shoes. Afterwards, the three discussed what they’d seen. ‘And,’ Covey said, ‘the real terror began.’
Seaton thought about what he’d been told. ‘When did they go to the Fischer house?’
‘Almost three weeks ago. The dead girl killed herself a week later