The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [79]
He trailed through the thickening trees and I followed him. And after a while I became aware of a sound, like the rumour of running water. And it strengthened and I knew we were headed for the furious brook, or small river, that cleaves the forest. We were to the east of the trail I had followed to it before. The wood was dense, but watching the burly figure ahead of me, I was able to pick his path and avoid the snapping twigs and trailing underbrush that would have given me away.
It was on the very bank of the stream. It was built of wooden boards and felt-roofed and had no windows. It did not stand high enough for the child to have stood up straight in. Inside would be darkness, I saw, as there were no windows. The boards were bonded and weathered together by black smears of creosote, and holes had been drilled at intervals about halfway up the shelter for ventilation.
It was quite new. Even from where I stood, concealed behind the trunk of a squat sycamore tree a hundred feet away, I could see yellow deposits of sodden sawdust from the recent cutting to length of the structure’s planks on the dark forest floor. The water was a chilly roar even from the distance where I hid, and I wondered what rest the child could possibly accomplish in his dark, cramped little prison. Was he clothed? Dear Christ! My fingers shook, smearing the moss grown on to the bark of my concealing tree as I fought to compose myself. I was indignant at their cruelty and disgusted at my own lazy collusion in it.
Rickets.
A slum child.
What had Fischer said on the boat? Better dead than alive. Anger and rage shook me. I trembled in the indifferent dripping forest. And I heard a voice, clear, human, pitched beyond the roar of urgent water.
‘Peter,’ it called. ‘Peter? I have food for you, Peter,’ Giuseppe said.
So the boy had a name.
And Fischer’s man put the pail on the ground and sank to his haunches and I saw that a small brass padlock was all that secured a hinged trapdoor cut into the boards to confine their sacrificial.
I fled. I did not have it in me to see the boy again before my attempted rescue in the morning. And I feared discovery there, and catastrophe for us both.
Seaton looked up from the journal, aware he was dangerously close to its conclusion. There were thirty or so pages of flimsy left in Pandora’s notebook. But the writing ran out in them over the course of only a couple more. He went to the bar and bought a drink and sat down and rubbed his eyes, their focus on the blue marbling of the book’s cover. The story did not have a happy ending. He’d guessed that from the fact of her missing thumb. Crowley’s miracle had been reversed, out of spite or revenge. She had died, self-murdered, a decade after the epiphany described in the pages he had so far read.
He thought he knew what happened next. But he sipped beer and picked up the book again with half his mind on what could be salvaged from the tragedy.
9 October, 1927, 8.15 a.m.
I misjudged poor, sad Giuseppe. I said that he would have no heart to appeal to after his work for Mr Capone, the gangster and bootlegger in Chicago, the man who likes to chastise with baseball bats and concrete boots and razors scrupulously stropped. But I was neglecting to take account of the torment done to his soul.
We found him this morning. He had seated himself on the wet ground outside the scullery and put the barrel of his pistol under his chin and pulled the trigger. There was nothing left of the top of his head, the pink slush of his brainpan exposed. The giant who held his own with Dempsey and Tunney and Harry Greb had finally been defeated by his conscience. He was a Catholic and his Catholic conscience was the one opponent he could never better with his strength, or successfully avoid.
I know the gory particulars