The House of Lost Souls Read Online Free PDF

something that could be harnessed and exploited and there were people in the world with hunger for power and influence enough to risk dabbling in its dark, cruel possibilities.
    It was easier not to think about it. It was much more enjoyable to think, instead, of the psychological warfare being waged inside Perdoni’s between the cabbies and the foreigners. He sneaked a look through the glass. The cabbies huddled, bellicose behind their swinging brass badges, in front of stroke-inducing fry-ups and mugs of sweet tea. The foreigners were pale and impassive in spectacles with narrow black frames and dark clothes he knew would have costly labels. They tinkered with expensive camcorders in preparation for their museum visit. These were taken from and put back into little leather knapsacks embossed with discreet logos. Occasionally, their owners checked the time on their expensive wristwatches. And all the while they smoked.
    There was one particularly good-looking couple at the periphery of this chic cluster. Both the man and the woman were tall and very slender. You would have said that each was even beautiful in a pale, bloodless sort of way. She wore black lipstick and it capped half the cream-coloured stubs in the teeming ashtray on the table in front of them. Something about this pair intrigued Seaton. He would have felt self-conscious, rude even, scrutinising them. But they seemed to be staring through the window back at him, brazenly enough. Then the weight of a passing lorry shivered the glass of the café window, making the tableau behind it blurry and indistinct for a moment, and Seaton turned his attention elsewhere.
    After Perdoni’s, he packed a few things into an overnight bag and then walked the short distance to the lock-up under the arches in Hercules Road. There was a key to the padlock on the door in Covey’s padded envelope. The car key the envelope contained had already told him that he would be driving a Saab. The car was fairly new, black, its exterior spotless and its carpets and upholstery freshly vacuumed. The tank was full and Seaton had studied the route using a road atlas in the morning at his table outside the café.
    He had not driven for a while but had barely drunk anything the evening before with Covey and driving was a skill he considered rudimentary enough. Nevertheless, he had one bad moment on the journey. It occurred on the A3, the bulk of Guildford cathedral looming monolithic to his left, when the Saab’s radio switched itself on. He looked down at the green lights of the display, so shocked that the wheel seemed to convulse in his hand, veering the car violently to the left. A furious horn blatted from behind and he saw the lorry he’d almost hit shuddering under the force of its air brakes in his rear-view mirror. He corrected his steering with sweaty hands and could feel his heart, light in his chest, as he waited for Sandy Denny’s cold and ragged delivery of the posthumous ‘Tam Lin’ through the speakers behind the door panels. But when he made sense of the sound, it was a white soul song he didn’t know, the station innocent, the presenter talking inanely about the weather or his wife or something over the melody as it faded in and out of coherence with the strength of the signal. Some piece of software built into the Saab’s dashboard had elected to turn the radio on, that was all. The last person to use the car must have preprogrammed it. He pushed the radio’s ‘mute’ button and the music and talking stopped as his pulse began to slow reluctantly to its normal rate.
    The university was new, half-timbered buildings with thick panes of tinted glass, set amid gravel paths and thickets and avenues of mature trees on one side of a slope that grew less gentle the higher and more exposed to the weather it became. A chapel and an administration building topped the rise. The chapel surprised Seaton. He thought that perhaps it meant American or Catholic funding. The blue sky