The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [67]
He seemed enthused by talk of mountaineering. He asked did I think Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit of Everest, three years ago, when they were seen to disappear into cloud only a few hundred feet from the peak. They had a camera with them, he said. The camera could provide the proof of their achievement. Did I hold a professional opinion? I thought about this. Their camera was a Kodak vest camera, I said. I’m more familiar with the technicalities of the Leicas I habitually use. But it was a hardy little machine. It was purpose-built. And in the desiccated air of Everest’s upper slopes, the film would not deteriorate. Up there, in the remote cold, the snow never warms enough to thaw. So there would be no water-damage to the film. If the camera was intact, if it had not been damaged by a fall and the film exposed to light, it was possible. The film could be found, developed. The mystery could be solved. I asked him did he think Mallory and Irvine had gained the summit.
I know they did, he said. George Mallory told me himself that they sat on the roof of the world, where they shook hands and shared the last of their chocolate and planted a small flag and recorded the moment with a half-roll of photographic pictures before their descent and the fall that killed them. The dead don’t lie, he told me.
He stood to leave me then, my audience at an end, and when he turned I saw that a cluster of small bats had attached themselves like familiars to his velvet back.
Crowley could read my mind. Quite possibly he could read my fate, though if he was able to, he maintained a poker face concerning that. Fischer, for all his charisma, doesn’t share those gifts. And Dennis is blind to anything but his own philandering ambitions. My true preferences would astonish him, I know. I saw the triumphant gleam when he took his Dunhill lighter from his pocket in the car today and lit my cigarette. In his eyes, I’m a conquest already. A conquest awaiting only the formalities of the bed. Which I fear, with him, would be very formal. But his eyes don’t see much. His vision is opaque, to say the least.
I’d describe the Fischer house, here in its splendid isolation in an island forest. But I’m tired. There will be plenty more opportunity to write tomorrow, on the eve of the ceremony, when the other guests arrive. Forbidden to bring my cameras, I’ve been forced to write my thoughts, to chart my impressions and discoveries. It’s tiring to do so. But I find there’s much to be said for the unequivocation of words.
Seventeen
Seaton stopped because it was too dark in the gardens to read on any further. The sun was descending, pinking vapour trails above the river over towards Battersea. The shadows of the trees in the gardens had lengthened and grown dense and their foliage had darkened, concealing the birds that chirped now thickly as if to signal the dusk. He thought of Sebastian Gibson-Hoare, exploring his open hemisphere of alcohol in a blue pallor of French tobacco smoke. He thought of the Irishman, dark in his odd pendulous trance. He thought of the vision that had visited him of Pandora, dead on a stretch of riverbank at Shadwell. And he could not connect at all the wretchedness of that death with the vibrant life of the woman who described herself in the journal he held in his hands. He closed the notebook. He put it back as carefully as he could in its oilskin wrapper and pushed the package into a jacket pocket, where its bulk rested reasonably discreetly, just about hidden by the flap.
He needed to think. He knew he could not tell Lucinda about the theft. And sitting there, he could think of no plausible alternative explanation for the discovery of what he had stolen. He felt that the journal was likely to give him a true insight into the mind and motivations of an enigmatic talent. But he could substantiate none of it. Not without admitting the