The House of Lost Souls Read Online Free PDF Page A

now, lying in his nest in his rented flat in the night in Waterloo. Rain whickered and spat on his bedroom window. That had been the start of it. Not the Fischer house nor any of the other subsequent things, but that. It had been ‘Tam Lin’, all those years ago, that had sparked the fear in him that eventually found its proper cause and terrible justification.
    ‘How flattering that you remembered,’ Seaton lay on his back in bed and said aloud, descending into sleep, perhaps emboldened by the beer consumed listening to the loquacious Malcolm Covey. But despite the bravado, he wasn’t really thinking this. He was really thinking how awful, how defeating, that they should have known in the first place. As they knew everything, every detail, each debilitating flaw. Above him, in the puddles of the flat rainy roof of his block, he heard a skittering sound. It could have been the claws of some capering demon. But, more likely, it was a crow or a feral cat night-scavenging. It was much more likely that, Seaton thought.
    And sleep claimed him.

Four
    He sat sipping coffee outside a café on Kennington Road at nine thirty the following morning, glad it was a Saturday. He didn’t pursue his research work at weekends. He had tried to simplify his life, to reduce it to a series of habits and routines undeserving of challenge or even rigorous thought. But life was going to be vastly more complicated now, after Covey’s intervention. It was going to be more dangerous, too. To his surprise, Seaton found he almost welcomed that. The prospect of action was almost a relief to him, after the months and years of concealment and dread. Wakeful in the small hours, fearful after the tape-machine cabaret, he’d decided he was unlikely to survive what he intended to try to do. But his bitter conclusion had been that his life was not worth living anyway. Not as it was. And, unchallenged, he knew its condition would never greatly improve.
    The café was an Italian place called Perdoni’s. It was double-fronted and had an optimistic array of metal chairs and zinc tables placed on the pavement outside. And it was at one of these tables that Seaton sat, the pavement flags under his feet still wet with rain from the previous night. Inside, the trade was mostly black-cab drivers, sharing the red leather bench seats with a smattering of tourists just off the Eurostar. On the other side of the road sat the brutalist brick and glass edifice of Kennington police station. To the left of the station, from where Seaton sat, was Lambeth North Underground station. To his right, he could see the black railings and leaf-thinned trees of the War Museum grounds. The War Museum was the attraction for the Germans and Dutch and Belgians in Perdoni’s, chain-smoking over their empty espresso cups, to the general irritation of the cabbies in the café. Most of the cabbies smoked, of course. When all was said and done, they were cabbies. But they were more furtive about their habit than the tourists were when they dragged on their crimped and hidden gaspers.
    Overhead, the morning sky was a vivid blue, intersected by fading vapour trails. It was a bright enough blue, the sky. But it had a depth and stillness suggestive of the steady retreat of sunlight and warmth through autumn. Halloween was not long past. In the newsagent’s window a few doors down from the café, they were still trying to sell leftover werewolf gloves and pointy hats in a cut-price window display. The British had really taken to Halloween over recent years, the kids trick-or-treating in their witch and skeleton costumes and ghoul masks in faithful imitation of their American counterparts. It threatened to become a bigger celebration than Guy Fawkes Night. Maybe it already was. Seaton could see the irony in All Hallows Eve becoming no more in the public mind than an excuse for children to beg sweets at the doors of strangers. But he couldn’t enjoy it. He had seen real ghouls. Magic was