The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [99]
‘The iconography can be explained in one of two ways,’ Covey said, in their final session at the hospital, after the hypnosis.
‘The iconography?’
‘The stuff you thought you heard and saw. The period detail.’
‘Hear and see. It’s still very much with me.’
‘The things you hear and see, then. The music played on shellac 78s. The camphor and lavender water and spats and morning-coat paraphernalia.’
‘I wish I could dismiss it as mere paraphernalia.’
‘It could simply be that you are suggestible. You are, quite, you know. It comes, of course, from Pandora’s account. The trappings of her narrative inform your mind and, crucially, your imagination in ways that disturb you. Consequently, you devise your own nightmare movie and fill it with period props.’
‘To what end?’
Covey hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know? You can surely do better than that, doctor. It’s your job to know.’
‘There’s a bleaker possibility,’ Covey said.
‘Illuminate me,’ Seaton said.
‘You won’t be illuminated, Paul. The alternative explanation is much darker, you see.’
Seaton exhaled. He felt frightened. Covey’s voice had taken on a gentler and more sympathetic tone. He realised that he had tensed his own wasting muscles, had braced himself in his chair in the way someone might steel themselves against the delivery of awful news. He thought, though, despite his fear, that even bad news would be a welcome change from the staleness and tedium of hospital routine. Seaton knew enough, now, to know that the routine here would keep him stable. He knew, equally, that it would never be enough to make him well. This part, what the doctor was about to say, was why Covey was here. Everything else had been preamble. All of it. Sigmund Freud and Freddie Laker. Wittgenstein and Jesus Christ.
‘Illuminate me,’ Seaton said again.
‘The second possibility, is that the thing really does exist. They brought it into being. In the terminology of their own coven, they spawned it. This would have taken powerful magic and it would have been done only at terrible risk. But Crowley and Fischer were powerful magicians. So, I believe, was Wheatley, however buffoonishly he came across to you in the Gibson-Hoare journal.
‘What the demon knows of us, mankind if you will, it first learned from Fischer and his circle. We’re all at our most impressionable in youth. And it was so very young and hungry and impatient for sensation in those far-off days of Fischer’s house parties, was it not?’
‘I don’t know,’ Seaton said. ‘I don’t know anything about demonology, Doctor Covey. I don’t know why something from hell would have a taste for Fats Waller. I don’t care, frankly. I’m beginning to doubt, though, that you are who you say you are.’ And beginning to regret, too, allowing himself to be hypnotised.
Covey leaned back in his chair. ‘Do you think your brother’s death was accidental?’
‘I do. It was a coincidence. Thinking otherwise is very tempting. But Patrick died because he was in a hazardous place, careless because the day had been long and hot and he was drunk.’
‘Why were you not taken by the beast?’
‘Because it can’t cross running water. It had me. And then it didn’t. It’s the only explanation.’
‘You’ve just told me you know nothing about demonology.’
‘It’s the reason they spawned the thing on an island,’ Seaton said. ‘I’ve had a great deal of time to ponder on this. Tides, Doctor Covey. Currents. They wanted to keep the thing corralled. After a fashion, for more than fifty years, they’ve succeeded.’
‘Why would a demon suffer earthly constraints?’
‘I think that was part of the craft of its invoking,’ Seaton said. ‘It was obliged to accept certain preconditions in order to come