The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [96]
There was a maze in the grounds. It had fallen into neglect. It was a dense and careless topiary it was not clear had been planned as a maze until you stumbled into it. Seaton could imagine some mercantile prince having commissioned the mock-Gothic splendour of the whole estate in a prolonged fit of Pre-Raphaelite whimsy. That whimsy had dictated the garden and inspired the dense and mysterious puzzle of leafy passages on its eastern border. One day, towards dusk, a fortnight after his arrival and accompanied by a pretty nurse from Dundalk, Seaton wandered into the maze and they became separated. He tried very hard to find his way out as the terror blossomed in him and the afternoon light diminished. But when he knew he was completely lost, he cracked. The orderlies located him by his screams. He had soiled himself. He had to be strapped down and sedated after, so great was the panic in him brought on by his isolation in the maze. They injected him with Thorazin and it was two days before he regained consciousness and a full week before he came properly to his senses and wept with bitter shame at the spectacle he must have made of himself and the condition he had descended to.
It was at the hospital that he saw his first ghosts. Strictly speaking, he classed the three grinning figures seen in the mirror at the Fischer house as ghosts, too. But they had been malevolent, had meant him physical harm, he was sure. The ghosts he started to see at the hospital merely watched him through eyes that were dead, stiff in their period clothes, lurking in unexpected places. But he came to anticipate them, as he grew more watchful and less easy to shock. He hated it most when he awoke in the night to sense them clustered in the far corner of his room observing him in his sleep. Moonlight would stroke their musty clothes and vacant faces. They watched him silently. But he thought their still scrutiny intrusive nevertheless. He recognized none of them as people Pandora had mentioned in her journal. Perhaps she had met them and thought them unworthy of comment. Perhaps she had never known them at all. She had been a Fischer acolyte briefly, after all, intrigued by his powers only for a short and catastrophic period in the course of her enigmatic life.
He opted not to converse with the staff psychiatrists. Instead, he gazed at the walls of the rooms where they held what they called their interviews until the time was up. He felt guilty about this, about the scarce resources in public-health provision he was wasting week after week. But the sessions were scarce enough themselves. And the waste wasn’t wilful. They asked him about his dreams. In truth, he would dream about Lucinda in pleated summer silk, with the brim of a mourner’s topper forced down over her tawny bob and a monocle screwed into one eye above her death’s head grin. Or he would dream of a woman fleeing with a small boy through a familiar wood, the boy shivering in tattered underwear as the pearls around her throat snagged against branches thick as thorns. Or he would dream of a foul, thick-breathed beast that lurked on the edge of his vision and caused him to piss his pants, gushing, unmanned. He couldn’t describe his dreams, he didn’t think. If he did, he feared he would end up wearing those constraints he’d imagined being used behind the multitudes of doors spreading from the landings of Klaus Fischer’s madhouse.
His mother came. She walked with a stick, he saw, since his brother’s death. She patted his hand and told him he’d lost weight. He winked at her and told her he’d be okay with time. Time was all he