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

them, had reneged on the bargain. This because they were so deeply afraid of the Kheddi, enthroned in pomp in their midst, honoured, fêted daily. The Kheddi made slaves of them in its baleful presence and their dread obligation to it. They hated their chief and despised him for the foolishness of his dabbling with diabolical forces. They muttered about killing him, about deserting their own homes and lands and suing for peace with their enemies. They were grief-stricken, remorseful, ashamed and sleepless at night with their own convulsive, deepening terror. It goes against nature for a warrior to know his enemies cannot harm him, the Jesuit said. Men become unbalanced, forced to consider the prospect of their own immortality.
    ‘I’d have laughed at this stuff,’ Mason said to Seaton, ‘before I got there and saw the evidence with my own eyes of how that tribal war was being fought. But it didn’t seem funny, drinking tea and listening by candlelight that night, the way the old priest told it. And neither of the lads were laughing when I sneaked a look at them. And more to the point, since they outnumbered us, none of the Gurkhas were laughing, either.’
    ‘This idol. This…Kheddi?’
    Mason shook his head, slowly. ‘More than an idol. A kind of golem, the priest said. The bogeyman made flesh. He wasn’t very specific about it. He hadn’t seen it himself. For some reason I imagined the tales from my own childhood of the tar baby, extricated from his tarry lair, grown-up and grown nastier. Certainly the Kheddi sounded like more than a totem, though. Animate, somehow. Malevolent. A Jesuit priest was never going to see the devil’s dealings in a charitable light. But even given his theological bias, he made it seem like the Tengwai chieftain had struck a very sticky bargain.’
    Sticky. Tarry.
    ‘Animate?’
    Mason nodded. He reached again for his cigarettes. He had chain-smoked throughout his story. There was a pall of cigarette smoke, thin and bitter, in the room where they sat in the house on the seafront in Whitstable. Rain scrabbled on the windowpanes like thrown grit in fierce, fitful gusts of wind. Seaton remembered the girl, then, sleeping her troubled narcotic sleep in her room at the top of the stairs.
    ‘The priest said it killed his goats,’ Mason said. ‘Gutted them, drank their blood, ate their livers and hearts.’
    Wind howled outside, rattling the windowpanes in their painted wooden frames with a fury that made Seaton jump. He thought suddenly about the man he had left late that afternoon, about the ethics professor and his terminal case of entropy in his building gathering moss behind its enclosure of dripping trees.
    ‘By dawn, fortified by Jesuit tea, we had a plan,’ Mason said. ‘Our strategy was based on the old “cut off the head and the body dies” principle. Our Jesuit ally was able to provide a very detailed hand-drawn map of the village where he insisted we would find the Tengwai chieftain’s quarters. He sketched a route that would take us there in less than a day’s march undetected, an old hunting trail neglected and unused for decades, but there, if you knew where to pick it up. We would surround the village, do the necessary surveillance, establish a field of fire in case everything went pear-shaped. Then, after dusk, one man would go in and slot the chief. All the Gurkhas wanted to do it. There were nine Nepalese in our patrol and every single one of them volunteered. Either of my noncoms from the regiment would have gone in just as willingly. But there were two compelling practical reasons for having a Gurkha do it. They don’t eat the meat-based diet Westerners do and so their scent is harder to pick up than a European’s typically would be. That’s a big consideration in the heat and humidity of the jungle; just ask any of the old American or Aussie combat vets who ever fought in Vietnam.’
    Seaton said, ‘The second consideration?’
    Mason looked at him. ‘The