The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [91]
He tried not to think about what had happened. He tried not to speculate on the state he would be in now if he had awoken in darkness and not bright morning sunshine. His world had shifted. His world was a different place suddenly, slippery and ambiguous and infinitely more dangerous than he could ever have imagined, or feared. His perceptions would never be the same and he knew that dread would always follow him now, would be with him like some grave medical condition newly and devastatingly diagnosed. He’d been very ignorant about the world. And already, he felt an intense nostalgia for the bliss of the ignorance he had so recently lost.
He could not dwell on it. He had to push it all away from him. He looked at the soft impression his sleeping weight had left on the ground. He grasped grass in broken blades between his fingers and lifted them to his face and smelled their torn summer sweetness. He had to exist in the here and now. He had to think practically. He had to do that to preserve his sanity. And his practical problems, right now, were considerable.
Everything had been in the bag torn from his back. His NUJ and cheque cards and cash were in his wallet. So was his return ticket for the ferry. One of the two good suits he owned had been folded on top of a pair of Bass Weejun loafers in his grip. All that stuff was gone forever. And, of course, Pandora’s journal was gone. He couldn’t discover it now, in the Fischer house, as he’d planned. Like her final role of film, it was lost. Worse, he could not prove it had ever existed. And with its lost existence now, was lost any proof of the film.
He had nothing on him. He patted the pockets of his shorts as if to prove the point. Nothing. But in the breast pocket of his track top he found, where he had forgotten he’d put it, the key to the lock chaining the hired mountain bike to its tree on the other side of the hill. The adventure shop had kept his Access card as security for the bike. The card would get him back to London. But first, he had to find the bike.
And before that, he had to wash away the blood covering him. He limped towards the sound of the stream. He took off his clothes and walked into the cool, clear water. He crouched in the stream so that the water covered his head. He felt the current tug at his skin and hair. And when he emerged from the stream, with the blood cleansed from him, he felt the temptation extended by the warm earth and wildflower smell of the bright day to believe that what had happened had been only some dark turmoil of the mind. It was so much easier just to consider it all no more than a lurid dream. And he might have surrendered to that temptation, if the ground all about, under the trees, had not been still thickly carpeted with the fallen feathers of startled birds.
Twenty-One
It was after eight o’clock on Sunday evening when Seaton finally reached the door of the flat on Old Paradise Street. And there was a policeman standing outside it. Lucinda must be at college, he thought, dumbly, as the police officer removed his helmet and looked into a space over Seaton’s shoulder with an expression of awkwardness and pain.
‘It’s Mike, isn’t it?’ Seaton said, thinking absurdly of water wings. The police officer turned his helmet in his hands and licked his lips. ‘I’m here about your brother, Patrick, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid there’s been a tragic accident.’
A researcher from London Tonight called him on the Monday. Someone from a number for the Hackney Gazette had called Social Services in Hampshire claiming to be from the programme. Hampshire