The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [80]
I ran into Dennis this morning in the grounds. Or rather, he ran into me. I was smoking a cigarette among the covered cars on the drive. He must have spotted me from his window. It was not unusual or suspicious of him to discover me there, not really. He is an habitual early riser, regardless of whatever the antics of the night before. It’s an old navy habit, he says. Together, we walked around the house to see if coffee could be scrounged before breakfast at the scullery door. And together, we happened on the remains of Fischer’s man. He was clothed in the pinstripe trousers and waistcoat of a blue suit and there was a shoulder holster strapped under one arm. The holster was of brown leather and rain-soaked, suggesting he had been there some time. Dennis remarked that a dumdum bullet had been used to do the damage. It was the gangster’s ammunition of choice, he said. His nonchalance in the face of death did not surprise me. It is a consequence of the war, a characteristic shared by many of those with his exposure to it. They are inured to loss, hardened to violent death. This callousness has spread as a kind of fashion among them.
I would have been more upset myself, had I not followed the man the previous afternoon to the coop he built for the boy. I am in no position to judge anyone, but still think it an impossible crime to forgive. Still. At least he baulked at committing a worse one.
Dennis said he would go and break the news about the death to Fischer. They would need to find some discreet way to dispose of the corpse. And then he said something peculiar. He said it was a shame Giuseppe couldn’t have elected to leave us in another twenty-four hours. I asked, why? The spawning, he said. Suicides can be very useful to the thing Fischer is to spawn.
These are the last words I shall write. I write them in my room, as the others attend the grisly cabaret of Giuseppe’s death scene. His final act has drawn a full house, judging from the stillness and the quiet. But I am cautious and afraid. I dare not even go and retrieve my hidden film from its resting place in the guest quarters at the top of the stairs. There is something about that room I did not like. I would not willingly enter it again. And there isn’t anyway time, now, to go up there. And I have not seen Crowley at all today, which worries me.
I must go to the boy. For the first time in my life, I must try to do something truly brave, rather than self-indulgently bold. I have stolen a brass poker from the fire-set of one of Fischer’s countless baronial hearths to use to lever off the little padlock on the boy’s prison. I have money. I have a rough idea of island geography. I pray the boy is as sound as he looked. My thumb has started to throb once again. It is probably only my imagination. It is like the memory of pain.
God help me.
God help both of us.
Pandora Gibson-Hoare
Nineteen
Seaton flicked through the empty pages of flimsy at the back of the notebook. But there were no more words to find. He had read the entire account. He could barely believe how brave she had been. She had been enormously courageous, given the depth of the delusion she was under. Had she been hypnotised? Autosuggestion was, he supposed, a possibility. He drained his Director’s and went and fetched another pint from the bar. He sat down to ‘Who’s That Lady?’ by the Isley Brothers. It was probably the most cheerful tune on the landlord’s loop-tape, almost recklessly