The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [90]
They were behind him. There were three of them, three men in top hats and long black coats with silk mufflers draped around their necks. One of them wore a monocle. They were smiling at him and he could see that they were dead. The one at the centre had a gold incisor that looked black in the absence of light. Seaton closed his eyes because by doing so he thought he could make the apparition go away. There was a smell in the room now. The room smelled of camphor and brilliantine and cigar ash. He opened his eyes again and saw that they were a step closer to him now. The ghost with the gold tooth was almost close enough to reach out and touch him. They seemed to be finding something funny, looking at him. Each wore an empty grin, mirth cavorting in their empty eyes, their dead expressions.
Seaton fled. He fell down the narrow flight of walled-in steps he’d climbed to reach the tower. He was on the second descending flight of the stairway proper, running down it reckless with panic, when he heard a scream from above so pained and tormented that it forced him into a questioning pause.
There was a silence. It was absolute.
‘Paul?’
His leg was bleeding. He had gashed his knee falling down the top steps. He could feel the blood trickling down his shin into his sock, seeping into his shoe.
‘Paul?’
He swallowed. It was a woman’s voice. He knew whose voice it was.
‘You must be very brave now and try to help me, Paul.’
Her voice was velvety with breeding and the strong tobacco they all used to smoke back then. As if reading the thought, she cleared her throat. ‘Please wait for me.’
He heard the staccato clack of high heels on wood as she started to descend the stairs from the darkness above him. Pandora’s approaching footsteps sounded terribly loud in the silence of Klaus Fischer’s empty mansion. As they got closer, he heard wood splinter and groan under their impact. And he began to think that whatever was coming down the stairs was certainly bearing its considerable weight on two legs. But the thing climbing down to him wasn’t on heels, it dawned on him, with horror. It was coming down on hooves.
It screamed again, in anger and frustration, as he fled a second time. And now Seaton did not pause or hesitate. He ran out of the house, followed by whatever it was he had awoken and unwittingly antagonised. He could hear its bulk behind him as it marauded through undergrowth and snapped branches in pursuit. He smelled its foul breath when it bellowed, closing, in his wake. It tore the rucksack from his back, trying to take him. And then the stream was on him, he was waist-deep in it, struggling for the other bank, fatally slowed and surely done for.
But it did not follow. It screamed with bestial fury and nesting birds exploded from the forest trees in sudden flights. And on the far bank, as he lay bleeding and prone, Seaton thought he heard it finally slouching back towards the house.
‘Mother of God,’ he said, his head in his hands. He thought from the pain he was in he had broken a rib against a tree branch. He knew his face and hands were pretty badly cut and his injured knee was swelling. He’d been very lucky. ‘Sweet Mother of Jesus,’ he said. And he started to sob into his hands. And it was a long time before he was able to stop, as the terror and self-pity competed in him for ascendancy.
When he came to, it was daylight and he saw he’d slept in a foetal crouch on the forest floor. He sat up and the grass and wildflower stems were flat on the earth where the weight of his body had lain. He was caked in dried blood from his numerous cuts. His injured knee was purple and grotesque.