The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [88]
The door was massive. It was truly baronial, to use Pandora’s ironic term. It was oak, iron-bound and bronze-studded, and Seaton could not really understand how it had survived unmolested for so long. He couldn’t see why some enterprising local builder hadn’t helped himself to something so formidably intact. Or why it had not been hacked at for firewood by an enterprising tramp. But then he looked around, in the stillness, in the pressing silence. The house was very remote. And it was not at all welcoming. A square of old cardboard stapled to the door spelled ‘Danger’ in weathered red paint. Seaton climbed the steps, praying that the secrets inside the house were as intact as its exterior had proven to be.
The flanged hinges of the door were large and elaborate, scrolled with runic symbols that, for all Seaton knew, spelled out some older, more portentous warning than the hasty legend painted on the cardboard sign. He ran a finger across engraved metal, thinking that as a ruin, the house had grown into itself. It no longer looked like the contrived assemblage Pandora had dismissed it as. Fifty-odd years on from her visit, it sat here authentically enough in its brooding dilapidation. But that was from the outside. There was surely more to discover within. He rubbed at the faint rust stains that touching the hinge had left on the pads of his fingers and leaned his full weight against the door.
It opened.
It opened on a huge vestibule paved with blood-red tiles. And then Seaton realised that the tiles were terracotta, tinted to crimson by the setting sun. What light there was in the Fischer house crept in through broken windows and the blear of filthy panes. An atmosphere of quiet gloom hung like a pallor on the place. Dead electric globes forlorn with neglect and lack of power hung down here and there, suspended on dusty chains from a high ceiling. He remembered what Pandora had said about the light, how Fischer had illuminated his mansion with wall sconces lit by smears of pitch. The globes hanging pearly from the ceiling must have been an embellishment from the madhouse years.
There was a staircase, and it was grand. Or, it had once been grand. Its spread, its dimensions, suggested something truly opulent. But whatever carved trappings had been contrived to thrill and impress Klaus Fischer’s guests had long been taken away. There was a functional metal rail where once there must have been a majestic balustrade. And thirty years of neglect had taken its toll on that. It was painted an institutional green and was peeling and rusting, decaying at a rate seemingly faster than the rest of the place. Climbing the stairs, Seaton put a careful hand on the rail. The paint, no doubt cheap unstable stuff, had turned to viscous goo. And his touch left a trail on it, like slime.
Why was he climbing the stairs? He knew bloody well why he was climbing the stairs, of course. He knew where Pandora’s cache of pictures was hidden. In a manner of speaking, she had told him herself. And recovering them was the reason he was here.
There were many doors on every floor, all of them shut. Darkness was stealing out of the corners of the building and encroaching at a steady creep across the interior of the house. There were many doors, and Seaton could see a flapping madman, inconsolable in the canvas and straps of his strait-jacket behind every one of them, if he allowed his imagination rein. But he didn’t. Curious things instead sneaked into his disciplined mind. Stuart, a week ago on the college roof, had been more David Bowie in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence, than he’d been Franchot Tone in Five Graves To Cairo. They all loved Bowie, those art-school boys, sure they did. And Mike Whitehall in his water wings! It had been a joke, but there was no refuge for the weak swimmer in any of the Hampstead Ponds. They were far too deep. The men’s pond was for men, whatever their sexual preference. And Mike was a weak swimmer, he knew.
On the third landing,