The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [87]
He had not travelled much in the English countryside. But he had been packed off to far-flung parts of Ireland as a schoolboy. Some of them had been wild spots, remote places rich with Celtic myth. They didn’t lack atmosphere. They were wildernesses, some of them studded with standing stones. They were places of obdurate inexplicable mystery. They were charged with the questions their existence posed about the lost rites for which they had been chosen and constructed. But nowhere in Ireland had made the spine tingle and the throat dry the way this dense and silent forest was doing to him now.
He’d brought the water bottle with him from the bike. He stopped for a moment and took a drink, emptying it. Oh, well. It was Fischer, he thought, looking at the still, unstirring trees. Fischer’s baleful influence still spread like a faint and poisonous fog across the land he had once lorded over. This pervasive feeling of unease was his lasting legacy. There would be no picnickers or walkers here for Seaton to cross paths with, exchanging a cheery hello as he crashed by. Anyway, he wasn’t crashing by. He knew he was creeping through the forest like wary prey.
And then he saw light. Ahead of him the texture of the gloom shifted and subtly thinned. And he knew where he was. He was approaching the clearing where the duel had been fought. He was on the very ground Crowley had stalked prior to performing his healing miracle on the German’s neck wound. And as he approached it, the emerald grass spreading before him now in the gloaming through the boughs, he saw her. He saw Pandora in a cloche hat and a long tailored coat with a sable collar, elegant and pale, detached and watching, her eyes bright with the fever still coursing through her blood, her feet in buttoned boots on the sodden turf.
At least, he saw her in his mind. What he actually saw, as he emerged into the clearing, was the tower and gables of the Fischer house in gaunt relief against the blue of the sky three hundred feet away. And he saw that the house was massive, acres of grey slate sculpted and contorted into steep asymmetric descents above grey stone walls grown mossy with neglect. He took a breath. He had not expected it to be so huge. It was a mansion, he saw as he approached, the way it brooded and dominated there. In the way its atmosphere extended outward, like a shadow, thickly cast. Pandora would never have thought to remark on the size of the place. To her it was remarkable only in its tastelessness. She was used to grand houses. To Seaton, though, its massiveness spoke volubly about its owner and his self-importance and ambition. Klaus Fischer had been intent on making his mark. Here, in this wilderness, was his enduring monument.
The drive was no longer home to a fleet of opulent cars. And there was no moping giant to rake the gravel any longer. Grass and weeds grew thickly through the thinned remaining patches of it. Ancient oil stains darkened odd areas as though they were blotched with some black disease. Looking up, Seaton saw how, as he approached it, the house seemed to spread and settle, filling his vision. Surprisingly few of the panes in its windows were smashed. Nobody had bothered to daub graffiti on the mossy stonework of its walls. It was high, the house, five storeys from the front door, at the top of a flight of stone steps, to the attic rooms that so contorted the roof to accommodate their windows. And then there was the tower. From the drive, Seaton had to crane his neck to take in its height and narrowness and lonely crenellations. Pandora was right about the windows of the tower. They were as deep and narrow as archery slits, but curiously uneven in size and geometry. And there was glass in them still.