The House of Lost Souls (17 page)

He knew his absence would be no loss to Lucinda. It was the last weekend she would have to prepare for her show. She would be working throughout all of it. She was probably relieved he was going to be out of her way for most of it. She didn’t look relieved when he told her. But she seemed relieved when the moment came for him to go in the morning. It was concrete proof that he was working on the still-unwritten project. He was a fast writer who researched and wrote for a living. He was a professional carrying out what was, in essence, an amateur assignment. But there was only a week to go until the essay’s submission.

Now, he had his overnight things in a canvas grip underneath his newsroom desk. And folded snugly among them was the journal. He didn’t really need to take it. But he hadn’t dared leave it behind, where Lucinda was sure to stumble on it in their tiny flat. And he couldn’t leave it in the
Gazette
office, which until a few moments earlier had been his original plan. There were far too many curious eyes and probing fingers on an idle Friday afternoon in the newsroom for that to be a sensible thing to do. He occupied the couple of remaining work hours making desultory routine calls and meandering rounds of tea. At one o’clock, he made the formal note of his absence in the big diary on its tilted lectern with the Biro chained to the lectern for the purpose. And he closed the diary on his entry and nodded and waved his goodbyes to the rest of the office.

His crossing could not have contrasted more greatly with that described in her journal by Pandora. He took a train from Victoria to Portsmouth and a ferry from Portsmouth Harbour to Fishbourne. Portsmouth itself would have been unrecognisable to her, bombed into dereliction by a war she had chosen not to live to have to endure. It had been rebuilt cheaply in concrete and glass with scant regard for its history, the hulking imperial fleet she had described long towed away and broken up for scrap. Seaton’s passage, enjoyed on the promenade deck in the open air, was a blue playground of smudged sails and trailing wakes out of a Dufy painting. Only the Solent forts, austere and monumental, marred the bobbing, Enid Blyton mood of the sea.

He walked the mile from the dock at Fishbourne to Wootton Creek and rented a mountain bike from an adventure shop. He used the shop’s changing room to get out of his suit and into the shorts and trainers and track top he’d brought with him in his grip. He crammed his work clothes into the grip and the grip into a cheap rucksack the more easily to carry it, pedalling, on his back. And he bought the detailed island map he needed and, after riding a mile to get used to the bike, sat at the side of the road in the shade of a hedge in the heat and plotted his route. And when he’d done that, he paused. It was now just after five o’clock. There were scalloped clouds remote in the sky and the earth was warm under him. The island sky was enormous after the limited vistas of London. He could smell wildflowers entwined in the hedgerow allowing his shade. In the time he’d sat there, two cars had passed him. A 2CV had rocked by on thin tyres, its rear compartment kaleidoscopic with buckets and spades and balls and rolled beach towels, Joni Mitchell shrill on its radio through the open driver’s window, singing something tremulous and folky from the album
Blue
. And a Morris Traveller, resplendent in its timber trim, had happened by towing a caravan. Island life was a lot different from Hackney, he thought, smiling as he climbed on to the saddle of the bike.

It occurred to him that it was a week to the day since he had first heard the name Pandora Gibson-Hoare. He’d been on the roof at St Martin’s with the boys, Stuart Lockyear dressed like Franchot Tone in
Five Graves To Cairo
, sipping cheap Lambrusco in the indolent London heat.
Every silver lining has a cloud
, Stuart had said. The scene on the roof had been played out to a soundtrack, the broken-backed songs of Hank Williams on Foyle’s paint-spattered beatbox. Over the course of just seven days he had become obsessed by Pandora, by her short life and disquieting work and tantalising mysteries. It was odd, really. He didn’t feel he knew or understood her very well. Yet something in his heart and brain and even in his memory suggested that he had known something of this woman always.

Direct, he judged the distance southwest across the island to the forest to be about nine miles. But he chose to skirt around Newport, rather than navigate his way through the island’s busiest town. His route was narrow and hilly and he missed a couple of crucial signposts, forcing him to double back twice. He’d been pedalling hard for over an hour when the ferns and saplings and second growth of the forest outskirts told him he had arrived there. He stopped and took a long drink from the bike’s water bottle, glad the fellow in the adventure shop had thought to fill it for him.

Because he’d skirted Newport, he was approaching the forest from the north, across what the map told him was Newbarn Down. He could see the forest proper rising in front of him to a horizon where dense trees capped a high slope. He reckoned the Fischer house had to be at the bottom of the downward slope on the south side of the hill. The house was on land near a stream or river and Pandora had made no mention of a gorge, so he was assuming the house had been built on the same elevation as the stream, close to sea level. And the other side of the wooded crest in front of him would be more accessible by car from where she and Fischer had landed in the boat piloted by Wheatley. So he knew roughly where he was going. The only problem was that he couldn’t get the bike over the hill. The adventure-shop man had proudly demonstrated the fact that the bike had fifteen gears. It had a tough grippy tread on its thick tyres. But so dense was the wood already that Seaton was wheeling it now rather than riding it. There were not sufficient gaps between trees to steer the thing through.

He looked at his watch. It was seven o’clock. He could double back and find a road and go around the perimeter of the forest and approach it from the seaward side. But he had doubled back enough. He could cut his losses, ride off to the guest house in Ventnor, dump his bag and find a nice seafront bar. The guest-house owner had told him a free house called the Spyglass Inn overlooked the bay and stocked an impressive range of guest ales and lagers. If he came back in the morning, he would have a whole day of sunlight in which to try to discover more than he knew. Maybe he’d find a single bullet casing on the ground by the door to the scullery. Maybe he’d find the spot where Göring and the lithe American had fought their duel as Crowley prowled like a fugitive beyond them in the trees. Perhaps he would discover a roll of undeveloped pictures taken by Pandora Gibson-Hoare of her fellow coven members gathered to practise black magic in secrecy together.

The pictures, if they were there, had waited for fifty-six years to be exposed. Surely they could wait a few hours longer? What were the odds of the Fischer house accidentally catching fire tonight, out of all the thousands of nights it had stood abandoned, and burning to the ground? What possible harm could a small, entirely practical delay do now?

It would do none at all. Waiting until tomorrow would do no harm whatsoever. Seaton knew that with as much certainty as he knew it was impossible to wait a moment longer than he was forced to. Sense didn’t enter into it, the logistics of the enterprise were entirely irrelevant. He was burning with the need to see the Fischer house for himself, to explore its rooms with his own hands and feet and eyes, to solve its mysteries, to wallow in its atmosphere, to raise its reluctant ghosts, to execute his brilliant scholarly coup.

But he had to stop. He had to chain up and abandon the bike. The incline was steepening and the wood becoming thicker by the step. This was not the leaf-denuded autumnal forest of Pandora’s wretched October visit. The trees were dense with leaves and the loam beneath them, veiny with surface roots, gloomy impossible terrain for two wheels.

Seaton locked the bike to a tree trunk, using the chain and padlock from the saddle bag, not at all confident he would be able to find the route back to it. The forest was so dense here that the leaf canopy allowed no shadows. It was so dark that the luminous hands glowed slightly when he looked at the face of his watch. Seven twenty. Still almost two hours of daylight. Above him, he knew the sun was setting sedately, still shining on the island. And he needed daylight. He hadn’t thought to bring a torch with which to search the ruin of the Fischer house. But Pandora had not exaggerated in her description of the wildness and the density of the wood. It was remarkably silent too, he thought, for the time of year. Her account had made no mention of bird-song. But then her mind had been fraught with matters ugly and fearful to her.

He crested the rise. The climb through the wood had not tired him. He was very fit and cycling ten miles or so had only stretched his muscles and alerted his heart to the welcome challenge of extra work. But he accelerated his progress in his descent, partly as a consequence of the sly pull of gravity, partly through excitement and the pressing need to get to his destination. He heard the murmur of running water. And then at once he was upon Pandora’s stream.

A stream was all it was. The rains she talked about must have given it greater life and width and urgency in her October, but in the arid summer now it was only an eight-foot-wide surge of dimpled rushing water. There was a current to it, sure enough. And when he lay down on the bank and scooped a cupped palmful into his mouth, it was fierce cold and brackish. But it wasn’t beyond a leap.

The trick was in finding the space in the press of the trees to take a run. But he walked left along the course of the water for fifty yards or so and came to a clearing of sawn and burned deadfall. It was the first evidence he had seen of any forestry. And he was grateful for it. It was run-up enough. He cleared the water by a clean foot and was on his way in the canopy twilight through the quiet darkening ferns.

As the lie of the land flattened, the forest seemed more and more to Paul Seaton a place of silence and stealth. Something about it encouraged care and watchfulness. It was a place that made a visitor alert. More, it was a place that provoked a visitor into feeling like a trespasser. It did not fill him with Pandora’s fond nostalgia for the hunting blood-lust of Plantagenet kings. The forest beyond the stream made him feel like someone wilfully intruding into a dangerous domain.

He had not travelled much in the English countryside. But he had been packed off to far-flung parts of Ireland as a schoolboy. Some of them had been wild spots, remote places rich with Celtic myth. They didn’t lack atmosphere. They were wildernesses, some of them studded with standing stones. They were places of obdurate inexplicable mystery. They were charged with the questions their existence posed about the lost rites for which they had been chosen and constructed. But nowhere in Ireland had made the spine tingle and the throat dry the way this dense and silent forest was doing to him now.

He’d brought the water bottle with him from the bike. He stopped for a moment and took a drink, emptying it. Oh, well. It was Fischer, he thought, looking at the still, unstirring trees. Fischer’s baleful influence still spread like a faint and poisonous fog across the land he had once lorded over. This pervasive feeling of unease was his lasting legacy. There would be no picnickers or walkers here for Seaton to cross paths with, exchanging a cheery hello as he crashed by. Anyway, he wasn’t crashing by. He knew he was creeping through the forest like wary prey.

And then he saw light. Ahead of him the texture of the gloom shifted and subtly thinned. And he knew where he was. He was approaching the clearing where the duel had been fought. He was on the very ground Crowley had stalked prior to performing his healing miracle on the German’s neck wound. And as he approached it, the emerald grass spreading before him now in the gloaming through the boughs, he saw her. He saw Pandora in a cloche hat and a long tailored coat with a sable collar, elegant and pale, detached and watching, her eyes bright with the fever still coursing through her blood, her feet in buttoned boots on the sodden turf.

At least, he saw her in his mind. What he actually saw, as he emerged into the clearing, was the tower and gables of the Fischer house in gaunt relief against the blue of the sky three hundred feet away. And he saw that the house was massive, acres of grey slate sculpted and contorted into steep asymmetric descents above grey stone walls grown mossy with neglect. He took a breath. He had not expected it to be so huge. It was a mansion, he saw as he approached, the way it brooded and dominated there. In the way its atmosphere extended outward, like a shadow, thickly cast. Pandora would never have thought to remark on the size of the place. To her it was remarkable only in its tastelessness. She was used to grand houses. To Seaton, though, its massiveness spoke volubly about its owner and his self-importance and ambition. Klaus Fischer had been intent on making his mark. Here, in this wilderness, was his enduring monument.

The drive was no longer home to a fleet of opulent cars. And there was no moping giant to rake the gravel any longer. Grass and weeds grew thickly through the thinned remaining patches of it. Ancient oil stains darkened odd areas as though they were blotched with some black disease. Looking up, Seaton saw how, as he approached it, the house seemed to spread and settle, filling his vision. Surprisingly few of the panes in its windows were smashed. Nobody had bothered to daub graffiti on the mossy stonework of its walls. It was high, the house, five storeys from the front door, at the top of a flight of stone steps, to the attic rooms that so contorted the roof to accommodate their windows. And then there was the tower. From the drive, Seaton had to crane his neck to take in its height and narrowness and lonely crenellations. Pandora was right about the windows of the tower. They were as deep and narrow as archery slits, but curiously uneven in size and geometry. And there was glass in them still. He could see the panes glowing faintly orange up there in the setting brightness of the sun.

The door was massive. It was truly baronial, to use Pandora’s ironic term. It was oak, iron-bound and bronze-studded, and Seaton could not really understand how it had survived unmolested for so long. He couldn’t see why some enterprising local builder hadn’t helped himself to something so formidably intact. Or why it had not been hacked at for firewood by an enterprising tramp. But then he looked around, in the stillness, in the pressing silence. The house was very remote. And it was not at all welcoming. A square of old cardboard stapled to the door spelled ‘Danger’ in weathered red paint. Seaton climbed the steps, praying that the secrets inside the house were as intact as its exterior had proven to be.

The flanged hinges of the door were large and elaborate, scrolled with runic symbols that, for all Seaton knew, spelled out some older, more portentous warning than the hasty legend painted on the cardboard sign. He ran a finger across engraved metal, thinking that as a ruin, the house had grown into itself. It no longer looked like the contrived assemblage Pandora had dismissed it as. Fifty-odd years on from her visit, it sat here authentically enough in its brooding dilapidation. But that was from the outside. There was surely more to discover within. He rubbed at the faint rust stains that touching the hinge had left on the pads of his fingers and leaned his full weight against the door.

It opened.

It opened on a huge vestibule paved with blood-red tiles. And then Seaton realised that the tiles were terracotta, tinted to crimson by the setting sun. What light there was in the Fischer house crept in through broken windows and the blear of filthy panes. An atmosphere of quiet gloom hung like a pallor on the place. Dead electric globes forlorn with neglect and lack of power hung down here and there, suspended on dusty chains from a high ceiling. He remembered what Pandora had said about the light, how Fischer had illuminated his mansion with wall sconces lit by smears of pitch. The globes hanging pearly from the ceiling must have been an embellishment from the madhouse years.

There was a staircase, and it was grand. Or, it had once been grand. Its spread, its dimensions, suggested something truly opulent. But whatever carved trappings had been contrived to thrill and impress Klaus Fischer’s guests had long been taken away. There was a functional metal rail where once there must have been a majestic balustrade. And thirty years of neglect had taken its toll on that. It was painted an institutional green and was peeling and rusting, decaying at a rate seemingly faster than the rest of the place. Climbing the stairs, Seaton put a careful hand on the rail. The paint, no doubt cheap unstable stuff, had turned to viscous goo. And his touch left a trail on it, like slime.

Why was he climbing the stairs? He knew bloody well why he was climbing the stairs, of course. He knew where Pandora’s cache of pictures was hidden. In a manner of speaking, she had told him herself. And recovering them was the reason he was here.

There were many doors on every floor, all of them shut. Darkness was stealing out of the corners of the building and encroaching at a steady creep across the interior of the house. There were many doors, and Seaton could see a flapping madman, inconsolable in the canvas and straps of his strait-jacket behind every one of them, if he allowed his imagination rein. But he didn’t. Curious things instead sneaked into his disciplined mind. Stuart, a week ago on the college roof, had been more David Bowie in
Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence
, than he’d been Franchot Tone in
Five Graves To Cairo
. They all loved Bowie, those art-school boys, sure they did. And Mike Whitehall in his water wings! It had been a joke, but there was no refuge for the weak swimmer in any of the Hampstead Ponds. They were far too deep. The men’s pond was for men, whatever their sexual preference. And Mike was a weak swimmer, he knew.

On the third landing, he heard music. It was sudden and undeniable and it withered his balls in terror with its loud proximity. It had to be coming from inside the house. He could hear the chords shake the wood on the very piano frame as its keys hammered against discordant strings. Jesus, he could identify the very room the sound was coming from. But when he walked along the landing and opened the door to it, there was only plaster and dust and shadow, and the thin decades-old reminiscence of tobacco and male sweat. And silence, of course. The silence of the Fischer house didn’t hold. Like a living threat, the silence of the Fischer house impended.

I’m being teased, Seaton thought. The place is haunted. But he didn’t really believe it. He didn’t believe in anything unproven. And it would take a lot to challenge his wilful absence of faith. The music had come from his own provoked mind. The house was dark and atmospheric and there seemed something somehow
poised
about it. But there was no one here, living or dead. There couldn’t possibly be.

The stairs were naked under his feet, scarred to either side where carpet had been roughly ripped away. He could make out wrenches in the wood from stair rods and pulled tacks. The wood itself seemed solid enough, though, under his feet. The odd stair creaked, but so far the house was blessedly free of the ravages of damp. Damp was what he had feared far more than phantom lunatics. Damp would have rotted and destroyed the film in its hiding place.

It was almost as dark as he wanted it to get by the time he reached the door he knew opened on to the guest room in the tower. It was dusk, what light prevailed scant and murky. He didn’t want to be descending the staircase at night. He didn’t want to be here at night at all. The door to the tower was heavy and wooden and looked original. It held an iron handle above a keyhole large enough to suggest a substantial lock. The handle shifted when he tried to turn it, but the door didn’t budge even a fraction in its frame. Seaton swore to himself and looked around. He had ascended a walled-in staircase to get to the very top of the house as it narrowed towards its summit on his climb. He was on a landing now, with a single small window cut into the stone and giving out on to the dark forest stretched out below. He saw that there was a key lying on the sill. He blinked, incredulous. But when he opened his eyes, the key was still there.

The door was on balanced hinges. It opened inwards with a sigh as soon as the key released the lock. The room within was larger than he had thought it would be, the tower bigger, of course, than it looked from the ground. Opaque light, the last of the day, stole in through the glass of its three disparate windows in their deep stone recesses. The windows were also much bigger than they looked from the ground. And they were set at a curious height. They were set about eight feet from the floor, and so impossible for a man to look through.

To his astonishment, Seaton saw that an item of furniture still remained in the room. A full-length rectangular mirror stood against one wall in a wooden frame with four clawed feet. Even in the diminished light, Seaton could see that patches of the mirror’s mercury backing had cracked and peeled away, so that the wall was visible behind the mirror in places through the glass.

He heard the drifting insinuation of music again. It was much more detailed this time, stride piano and a cracked black voice played under the heavy needle of an antique gramophone. His heart began to beat faster in his chest. His scalp began to itch and he could feel the hairs on his neck stiffen with fear. He was very frightened, he realised suddenly. He was truly afraid. On a shellac recording, at 78rpm, he distinctly heard from somewhere down the stairs a long-dead musician indulge in a dry chuckle.

He looked at the floor, at its seamless covering of dusty hardwood boards. You couldn’t get a coin between them, so tightly were they aligned. Bluesy chords drifted up from below. There was very little light. It was almost fully dark. Seaton sank to his hands and knees and felt with his fingers for any cracks or looseness in the floor his eyes might have missed. And then something moved in the mirror. At the very edge of his vision, he just caught sight of a shape in the glass and stood and turned around to see what had been reflected. But there was nothing there. He was at the centre of the room. He turned back and lifted his eyes slowly to the mirror again.

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.