The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [86]
The pictures, if they were there, had waited for fifty-six years to be exposed. Surely they could wait a few hours longer? What were the odds of the Fischer house accidentally catching fire tonight, out of all the thousands of nights it had stood abandoned, and burning to the ground? What possible harm could a small, entirely practical delay do now?
It would do none at all. Waiting until tomorrow would do no harm whatsoever. Seaton knew that with as much certainty as he knew it was impossible to wait a moment longer than he was forced to. Sense didn’t enter into it, the logistics of the enterprise were entirely irrelevant. He was burning with the need to see the Fischer house for himself, to explore its rooms with his own hands and feet and eyes, to solve its mysteries, to wallow in its atmosphere, to raise its reluctant ghosts, to execute his brilliant scholarly coup.
But he had to stop. He had to chain up and abandon the bike. The incline was steepening and the wood becoming thicker by the step. This was not the leaf-denuded autumnal forest of Pandora’s wretched October visit. The trees were dense with leaves and the loam beneath them, veiny with surface roots, gloomy impossible terrain for two wheels.
Seaton locked the bike to a tree trunk, using the chain and padlock from the saddle bag, not at all confident he would be able to find the route back to it. The forest was so dense here that the leaf canopy allowed no shadows. It was so dark that the luminous hands glowed slightly when he looked at the face of his watch. Seven twenty. Still almost two hours of daylight. Above him, he knew the sun was setting sedately, still shining on the island. And he needed daylight. He hadn’t thought to bring a torch with which to search the ruin of the Fischer house. But Pandora had not exaggerated in her description of the wildness and the density of the wood. It was remarkably silent too, he thought, for the time of year. Her account had made no mention of bird-song. But then her mind had been fraught with matters ugly and fearful to her.
He crested the rise. The climb through the wood had not tired him. He was very fit and cycling ten miles or so had only stretched his muscles and alerted his heart to the welcome challenge of extra work. But he accelerated his progress in his descent, partly as a consequence of the sly pull of gravity, partly through excitement and the pressing need to get to his destination. He heard the murmur of running water. And then at once he was upon Pandora’s stream.
Twenty
A stream was all it was. The rains she talked about must have given it greater life and width and urgency in her October, but in the arid summer now it was only an eight-foot-wide surge of dimpled rushing water. There was a current to it, sure enough. And when he lay down on the bank and scooped a cupped palmful into his mouth, it was fierce cold and brackish. But it wasn’t beyond a leap.
The trick was in finding the space in the press of the trees to take a run. But he walked left along the course of the water for fifty yards or so and came to a clearing of sawn and burned deadfall. It was the first evidence he had seen of any forestry. And he was grateful for it. It was run-up enough. He cleared the water by a clean foot and was on his way in the canopy twilight through the quiet darkening ferns.
As the lie of the land flattened, the forest seemed more and more to Paul Seaton a place of silence and stealth. Something about it encouraged