“And now that the house is gone, the beast feels able to feed freely, perhaps for the first time in its life. And it is coming to enjoy it.”
“That’s quite a theory, Mr. Seton,” Banks said. “Does it go any way to telling us where the beast might be or how to find it?”
“Alas, no. I was pinning my hopes on finding something at the house. Beyond that, I planned to sail the length of the loch tomorrow and attempt some incantations, but I have no idea if they will prove useful or not.”
“Whether your magic works or not is neither here nor there to me,” Banks said. “But we could use the boat. We’ll come out on the water with you tomorrow. At least that way we can cover a much wider area than on foot.”
“And I’ll be glad of the company. What about tonight?”
“Going out on the loch in the dark is asking for trouble we don’t need. And if the beast is, as you say, tied somehow to the house, here is as good a place to search. I’ll set watches, and we’ll sit moored here until dawn. The lads need their kip anyway; we’ve been on our feet all day.”
“There’s four berths below,” Seton said. “I hardly sleep, so they’re all empty. You’re welcome to them.”
“I must say, you’re the cheeriest wee burglar I’ve ever met,” Wiggins said, and Seton laughed.
Banks took first watch again; the other three were heads down and asleep before nine o’clock. He smoked a cigarette as he stepped up onto the wooden dock and walked up to the roadway. He stood there for as long as it took to finish the smoke. No traffic came either way, and the night was quiet, so much so that he heard the honk of a car horn coming from clear across the other side of the loch. He ground the butt of the smoke out, had one last look up and down the road, then went back along the dock to the boat and stood at the rear viewing deck.
Seton came out to join him, bringing a toasted cheese sandwich and a mug of coffee for each of them. They stood in silence for a while as they ate, looking out over the still waters of the loch, what little they could see of it. The mist was thicker now, and colder, so much so that Banks was glad of the fleeced jacket of his camo suit, and the warmth in his belly as the coffee went down. Seton wore only his worn tweed suit, but showed no signs of the cold affecting him.
“It doesn’t bother me much. These old bones are too used to long winters,” he said when Banks asked. “Plus, you’ve got to take into account the general benefits regular consumption of good whisky brings, of course.”
“I look forward to testing that out for myself in years to come,” Banks replied, before turning the conversation around to matters he had been mulling over. “Do you really believe that stuff you were spouting earlier? You think your theory about the monster being of Crowley’s doing is valid?”
“I do,” Seton said. “And so do you, I think. I saw it in the eyes of you and your men. I know from bitter experience that not many people would have heard me out so readily with so few questions. You’re obviously not run-of-the-mill soldiers. You’ve all encountered something like this before, haven’t you?”
“Not exactly like this,” Banks said and without realizing he was going to do it, launched into the story of their encounter with the saucer and the occult experiments of the Nazis in their base in Antarctica. It took a while in the telling, and he needed another smoke during it as the memory of the icy tomb brought a fresh chill to his bones. He spoke of the secret experiments of Carnacki and Churchill, and how they almost led, inadvertently, to giving Nazi Germany a decisive weapon, almost 30 years later. Then he related how the S-Squad had gone in, over 60 more years more on, to clean it up, and at what cost. He wished the older man had brought scotch rather than coffee, for he had lost men on that mission, and the memory was still raw.
Seton listened, and if he was at all incredulous, he did not show it.
“That is quite a tale, Captain,” he said. “And not one I expected to hear when I set out on this jaunt. I know Carnacki’s work, of course. A fine fellow and everybody in the field is indebted to him. I did not know he had got involved with Churchill before WW1 though; everybody played that one close to their chests, and there’s not a hint of it in the literature.”
“How about you? How did you get into all this esoteric stuff?” Banks asked, looking to change the subject and stop the surge of memories that threatened to throw everything else out of his mind.
Seton laughed.
“It’s a family tradition, just like my name. No, really, there was an ancestor of mine, Alexander Seton, an alchemist, at Robert the Bruce’s bedside, healing him when no other physician could help. He wrote a book about his process that’s rare as hen’s teeth now, worth a small fortune, and purports to be a true telling of a successful experiment on the path to enlightenment. It is known as ‘The Twelve Concordances of the Red Serpent’ and it is said that Crowley had one of the few copies still known to exist.
“A couple of hundred years after that original Sandy, an Alexander Seton was getting into trouble making gold for Dutch shipping magnates; that one got a castle, and eventually a town, named after him down the coast from Edinburgh. There are rumors he was the same man, ageless and wise, as had been at Bruce’s bedside, and there are other rumors that he’s still running around somewhere to this day, although if he is, he’s not one for checking in with family. There has been other Alexander Setons, with Queen Mary of Scotland at Fotheringhay, on the Highland side in both Jacobite rebellions, and another at Trafalgar with Nelson. All were purported to be ‘advisors’ to the powerful, on matters arcane and dark. As for the name itself, I was lucky to get Alexander. There’s another scion of the family tree that gets named Augustus, but they went to the dark side centuries ago, the first one selling his soul for a shiny sword to a strange wee man in a Dundee bar. We don’t talk about them.”
Banks laughed, then saw the man was serious.
“As with you, that’s a story I wasn’t expecting when I set out on this mission. But I understand. Soldiering is my family way,” he replied, “so I know only too well how history and family bonds affects a man when he’s growing up. It just seeps in, doesn’t it?”
Seton nodded.
“That it does. And on hearing your story, I see now why you heard me out; you are open to these kinds of possibilities. That might prove to our advantage, should we find the beast.”
Banks laughed.
“If it comes to that, I’ll be relying on my family way. It’s what saved us in Antarctica… a fuckload of bullets and blind luck.”
Seton left Banks alone and went to sit in the cabin, writing in a journal. Banks stood at the rear of the boat, unable to find the calm, trace-state he’d fallen into so easily the night before. Thinking of Antarctica had dredged up too many memories and they flitted to and fro in his head, refusing to be banished, fleeting images of dead men, and some who should have been dead but weren’t. He tried to concentrate on the task at hand, smoking a succession of cigarettes as he pondered Seton’s story and its implications.
He still couldn’t come to any conclusions, and the long day walking in the hills was taking its toll. He felt tired down to his bones, and was almost dead on his feet by the time Hynd came to relieve him. He was lost to sleep seconds after his head hit the pillow, the soft roll of the boat at the dock acting to rock him away and down into blessed oblivion.