The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [60]
He squeezed sweat out of his eyebrows with his thumb. A moment ago, he had been on the brink of giving up, the trunk lid a fraction of an inch away from being closed and locked forever on Pandora and her mysteries. Except that he hadn’t been about to give up. Not really, he hadn’t. The closing of the trunk lid had been a gesture made to common sense and common decency. But it had only been a gesture. He couldn’t have given up, not until all hope was exhausted. His instinct simply wouldn’t have allowed it. A sensation ran through him like a strong and vibrant current. Asked, he would have called it the thrill of vindication. But what it actually felt like, up there in the heat and the dusty light, was triumph.
He heard music, then, the notes drifting upward from two floors below as Sebastian Gibson-Hoare played the piano. The effect of it was instant on the rodent sharing the attic with Seaton. There was an explosion of sound over in the corner and the canvas of the paintings stacked there seemed almost to ripple with shock in its aftermath. Then nothing, the creature having apparently fled. Seaton recognised the tune, which was ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now?’. And even as his fingers scrabbled for purchase against the fabric lining the trunk, he thought what a very cultured method Sebastian Gibson-Hoare had of pest control.
It was a nonsensical thought and its intrusion into his mind almost caused him to laugh out loud. He was giddy with excitement. He was damaging property that wasn’t his. He was humming the tune to himself at a speed that kept forcing him to loop back to the melancholy tempo set by Gibson-Hoare at the piano downstairs. The old cloth gave with a rent like a gasp of asthmatic breath and he held up into the daylight a flat package tightly wrapped in oilskin bound with twine. As he lifted his jacket, as he pulled his shirt free of his belt, he could feel the sweat glossy on his back in the heat, and the enormity of his crime. He tucked his shirt back in over the package, his find held snug against his spine by the tension of his belt. He closed and locked the trunk and then turned it around so that the lock faced the wall and the hinges faced the room. As though such a childish ploy could conceal the theft. But then, how could you be accused of stealing something no one living had even known was there? He pulled the trunk back around to its original position, wiped his hands on his trousers and took a deliberate breath. He buttoned his jacket. It was an absurd thing to do in the heat, so he unbuttoned it again. The song on the piano had wandered into ‘I Get A Kick Out Of You’. The light in the attic had subtly diminished. Gibson-Hoare could really play the piano. It must be talent, pure and simple, he thought. The man would never have possessed the application for painstaking practice. Seaton looked at his watch. He’d been up there only fifteen minutes. He climbed down the ladder carefully, closing the hatch softly above himself as he descended.
It was a quarter to seven when he was shown cordially out of the house, Gibson-Hoare almost apologetic that the visit hadn’t been a success, but managing to suggest subtly also that Seaton’s expectations had been naïvely optimistic. ‘History isn’t as convenient a calling as journalism, my boy. Your sources tend to lie beyond the reaches of a contacts book. And my distant cousin was precisely that, wasn’t she? Pandora was elusive both by nature and design.’ He shrugged. They shook hands. And doing so they brought to its conclusion what Seaton supposed for Sebastian Gibson-Hoare had been an amusing, if forgettable, interlude.
Sixteen