Free The House of Lost Souls by F. G. Cottam Page A

the rosary around his neck and kissing the crucifix again. He looked educated, sallow-skinned, high-born, blue eyes fierce in the candlelight in his ancient bony face; his priestly humility both the gift of, and the penance paid for, his enduring ancient faith.
    ‘A Jesuit,’ Seaton said.
    Mason nodded, remembering. ‘Not just a Jesuit. A French Jesuit,’ he said.
    He twisted his rifle on its strap so that the butt faced forward and he took both hands away from the weapon and held them out in front of him with the fingers splayed. He recited his name and his rank. ‘We mean you no harm, Father,’ he said.
    The priest merely nodded. He showed no sign of being remotely afraid of uninvited visitors, armed to the teeth and smeared in camouflage cream. His composure was completely unruffled. Indeed, the look on his face when his eyes met Mason’s seemed almost to suggest a sort of amusement. ‘You will take tea?’ he said in English. ‘They slaughtered my goats a fortnight ago. So I can offer you no milk with it. But you are welcome to the fortification of tea. And you will need, gentlemen, to be fortified.’
    Seaton said, ‘Was there anything unusual about the church?’ and he could see that his question broke Mason’s reverie, his reminiscences, annoying him.
    ‘Doesn’t it sound unusual enough for you already?’
    ‘Anything else,’ Seaton persisted.
    Mason looked reluctant to consider the question. It was his story, after all. It was his telling of it. ‘It was cold. It wasn’t cool, it was cold in there. It was dense with night heat and humidity outside and the place had a tin roof and wooden walls with chicken wire nailed over gaps in the planking for windows. It should have been stifling, but it was as cold as the grave.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘Yeah. No insects. They are always around you in the jungle, the flies and moths and mozzies, buzzing, crawling, biting, especially at night. But there were none in there. It was still and cold and the air was subdued in that chapel, in the proximity of the priest.
    ‘The sound of running water carries at night. But when I think of it, you couldn’t even hear the trickle of the water in the tributary underneath us,’ Mason said.
    Both men were silent for a moment.
    Mason said, ‘His name was Father Lascalles. He had spent a great amount of time in Africa. He had been in the Congo in the nineteen fifties, he told me. And that was when he asked me whether the trader Philip Mason had been a relative of mine.’
    ‘Your father?’
    Mason nodded. ‘The question at least explained the look on his face when I barged in on his meditations with a rifle in my hands. Lascalles had spotted the resemblance immediately.’
    ‘Was your father famous in the Congo?’
    ‘Notorious, would be a better word,’ Mason said. ‘But we were a long way from the Congo here and decades on from my father’s mischief there. He’s got nothing to do with this story, Paul.’
    Seaton nodded. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I interrupted you. I won’t interrupt again.’
    The priest told them that the chief of the Tengwai had entered into a pact with a demon. He had sacrificed five young, first-born sons of the tribe in return for invincibility in battle against their traditional enemy. The Tengwai warriors would be invulnerable in battle against the Kesabi, on the condition that they remembered each day properly to honour the Kheddi the demon had instructed the Tengwai chief to house in the best-appointed hut in their principal village.
    But the Tengwai had become afraid of their own prowess on the battlefield. They mourned bitterly the loss of their five beloved tribal sons. They saw no honour in defeating an enemy with the diabolical intervention that made their own proud fighting skills obsolete. They admired the obdurate courage of the Kesabi, struggling to continue to wage a war that had become, for them, suicidal. And in their hearts they felt that the demon had tricked