The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [98]
‘The architect commissioned to carry out the conversion, a local man, was found at the foot of the cliff overlooking Freshwater Bay. It was thought to be a walking accident. But then the surveyor was discovered, dead of a fatal gunshot wound from a Luger pistol his wife said he’d brought back in his duffel bag as a souvenir from the war. It was the Great War she referred to, not the war so recently concluded. It could have been an accident. He could have been cleaning or playing with a loaded weapon.’
‘Rare bit of misfortune, though,’ Seaton said. ‘Given that he had owned the pistol for close on thirty years.’
Covey nodded and smoked. ‘Just so. Then a week after the cliff fall, two workmen disappeared from the site. They were not discovered until forty-eight hours after it was first realised they were missing. They were not searched for. It was assumed they’d walked off the job, in the manner common enough to itinerant labour at the time. Gone to a better-paid job, or to one working more companionable hours or nearer home. But they were found hanged, next to one another, from coat hooks on the wall of the billiard room in Fischer’s warren of a basement.’
Seaton had started to sweat. The thought of Fischer’s warren of a basement and the horrors that might lurk there had dragged him reluctantly back to Brightstone Forest. In his mind, the sun glinted, orange and baleful on the glass of the asymmetric windows of the tower through thinning trees. ‘I can’t go back there,’ he said out loud.
If Covey thought this remark directed towards him, he showed no indication of it. He didn’t react to Seaton’s words at all. ‘Work stopped on the lunatic scheme after that,’ he said. ‘The property remained an asset on the books of the county council. But I think the Fischer house is essentially an asset no one has ever known quite how to realise, or to profit from. No one since Fischer, at any rate.’
Seaton said, ‘Why does my case interest you?’
‘I’ve an interest in the paranormal,’ Covey said.
‘You’ve already told me that.’
‘Klaus Fischer had a similar interest, I believe, though he pursued it for reasons very different from mine. I’ve learned that he held ceremonies at the property in Brightstone Forest, in the guise of parties, until 1933. In 1933, he very abruptly left. It seems that fifty years ago he quite fled from his domain. But in the seven years he owned the house, I suspect he was rather industrious, after his own peculiar fashion.’
‘Psychiatrists don’t believe in magic,’ Seaton said.
‘I’m here to be persuaded,’ Covey said.
‘It isn’t my job to persuade you.’
‘Nevertheless. I’d like to know what happened to you over that weekend.’
‘I’m disinclined to tell you.’
Covey shrugged. ‘You might change your mind. The man who doesn’t change his mind, doesn’t think. Do you know who said that?’
‘No.’
‘Take a guess.’ Take a card. Take any card.
‘Wittgenstein,’ Seaton said.
Covey smiled. ‘Freddie Laker,’ he said.
And Seaton laughed again.
He saw Malcolm Covey once a week for a month. Over four hour-long sessions, he told him everything. Or he thought he did. At the end of the month, he agreed to let Covey hypnotise him. Covey told him the hypnosis was to enable him to recall details about the weekend on the Isle of Wight he might have forgotten. He might have been so shocked or scared by some of the things he had seen and heard there that he had suppressed them in the manner common to victims of trauma. The time Seaton had spent asleep on the forest floor near the stream seemed particularly to interest Covey.
Seaton agreed to the hypnosis, even though he knew that undergoing it would, in a way, break his own pledge never to revisit the Fischer domain.
He agreed because, so far, his experience of talking to Covey had helped him. He was better able to sleep, much less prey to nightmares. The panic attacks he had suffered in the shower at the hospital, and on one horrible occasion in a hospital lift, stopped occurring.