The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (21 page)

I almost shut the system down there and then, but something urged me on. Under Jasper’s baleful stare, I looked closely at the icons. Two depicted individuals unknown to me; one other was clearly that of Sam Prentice, although it seemed to have been scrawled through with a dark cross; the last was of Jasper himself. I touched the Jasper head.

As I remember, the game begins with the approach through a wood to a great gothic doorway. Over it—and this was new—had been written the words ALL HOPE ABANDON YE WHO ENTER HERE. Some skill is required to open the door: I had to move carefully through a circle that described a five-pointed star with its apex facing downwards. Once that had been done, the head of a horned goat appears in the pentacle for a brief flash and the doors open.

The game of
Know Your Enemy!
consists initially in making one’s way through a maze of stone corridors in such a way that one surprises one’s quarry. (A small map in the top right hand corner of the screen tells you where you are and where your prey is.) I negotiated this first part with practised ease and found what I was looking for. There was Jasper again, fully and accurately represented on the screen by means of my own graphic art. Everything about him seemed real and alive, even the facial expression. The image of Jasper looked round at me and there again was the pleading look in his eyes. He was being compelled by an irresistible force towards something dreadful. There was something about the whole experience of the game which shocked me. It was somehow more real than virtual, not just ‘virtually’ real.

The fleeing figure of Jasper tried in vain to escape me. Eventually I cornered him in front of a dark entrance on either side of which two monstrous hooded figures in stone held up the lintel. What was beyond the entrance I half guessed because I had designed its building blocks myself. This was going to be the Black Cathedral. I touched the screen on a point in the black opening and suddenly we were inside. It was a vast windowless Gothic structure with ribbed vaulting. The decorations on the capitals of the piers and the bosses of the vaults were grotesque, crooked, grimacing figures and masks, all of them twisted into a separate agony of desire or rage. They were all my designs, but somehow, in some subtle way, hideously enhanced. In the centre of a vast space stood a black draped altar on which stood two candlesticks of the kind we had found in Jasper’s sitting room and which I, for my sins, had also designed. Between the two candlesticks on the altar crouched the all too familiar hooded figure of Asmodeus. I saw the image of Jasper turn to me and I swear that there was a pleading look in his virtual eyes. He was still being compelled forwards against his will, this time towards the altar.

‘Stop! Stop!’ screamed Jenny. ‘Don’t do any more! Switch it off! Get out of the game now!’ I touched the Escape icon but nothing happened. I pressed it again frantically and the game froze but I could not get out of the game. There was nothing for it but to switch off the whole computer. The whole system went down with a strange, melancholy moan, in which I thought I heard a faint but distinctly human cry.

Jenny and I looked at each other, stupefied. She said she would tell the police of Jasper’s disappearance, though I think we both knew this was useless.

What I did next was my own initiative. Whether it was right or wrong I don’t know. I borrowed Jenny’s keys and returned to the flat next day. Wearing gloves, I took the statuette of Asmodeus, wrapped it in a cloth and placed it in a cardboard box. I then looked through the section entitled Antiquarian Booksellers in
Yellow Pages
.

**

Plimson’s establishment was in one of those little streets by the British Museum full of old fashioned glass-fronted shops selling specialist books and prints, or oriental curios. His shop had a kind of inn sign hanging over the door with the words ‘A.J. PLIMSON—OCCULT BOOKS AND CURIOSA’ in dull gold letters on a background of midnight blue gloss paint. ‘Curiosa and curiosa,’ I remember thinking childishly, as I went in. The place was lined from floor to ceiling with books. Apart from me it contained a solitary browser and Plimson who was installed behind a desk on my immediate right as I came in. Hearing the shop-door bell, which clanked rather than tinkled, Plimson looked up. To my relief he did not recognise me. I was wearing the light but effective disguise of a woolly hat. Woolly hats, in my experience, especially when pulled well down over the forehead, give even the sanest looking man an air of mental derangement.

Plimson seemed rather greyer in complexion than when I had last seen him and had lost that deceptively cherubic look. When I approached him he seemed irritated. I put on my most timid manner. I said that I had with me an object which I believed to be of some occult significance, but I had no idea what it was. I had heard he was an expert in such matters: perhaps he could help me? Perhaps he might even be able to sell it for me? Plimson relaxed. He shifted the spectacles on his nose and his lips began to curve into the familiar condescending smile. I handed over the cardboard box. He opened it and took out the statuette wrapped in a cloth. As soon as he had removed the cloth I saw his skin turn from greyish pink to bone white. He gripped the little image of Asmodeus, trembling violently, then turned his terrified eyes on me.

‘How the hell did you get hold of this?’

‘I’m a friend of Jasper Webb’s.’

‘Take it back!’

I put my hands in my pockets.

‘It’s yours,’ I said. ‘A gift.’

‘Take it back!’ shrieked Plimson. The browser, an old man who had been looking at books on astrology in the corner, stared at us with a kind of vacant curiosity, as if he were watching television. Plimson was still holding onto the statuette. He was screaming. I don’t know how it was, but his hands seemed somehow to have become stuck to the object and his attempts to tear them off it were causing him intense agony. The old man continued to stare in passive fascination, blinking his watery grey eyes.

Plimson began to whimper, begging me to take the statuette back. I said I would take it back if he told me where Jasper was. He wailed that he didn’t know. I said that I thought he did know, that he was in the Black Cathedral, and that he must get him out of there. Then Plimson started screaming again.

‘But don’t you understand! I can’t! The Black Cathedral is nowhere. It’s everywhere! It’s here! Oh, God it’s here! Let me out!’

I told him that if he couldn’t get Jasper out, I certainly couldn’t get
him
out. I was sorry for him now, but there was nothing I could do. I walked out of the shop and went on walking, leaving Plimson with Asmodeus and the old browser. I stopped my ears and mind to the screams. Next day I read in the papers that Plimson had died that afternoon of heart failure. No reference to a little black statuette was made. One gathered from the reports that Aidan Plimson was a well-known character but that his passing, for various reasons, was unlamented; so why do I still feel guilty?

Know Your Enemy!
was never put on the market, but I know that people have somehow managed to get hold of unofficial copies of the game. A website known as Blackcath.com has mysteriously appeared, though I have not been able to find out who hosts it or how it is maintained. I have visited it several times in the hope of picking up some clue to Jasper’s whereabouts, even for a mention of his name. The messages to be found there are densely cryptic so that anyone lacking the inside knowledge would think the site was dotty but harmless. On one occasion I visited the site with my speakers switched on, a precaution I now carefully guard against. Initially I was intrigued, as the background noise at first seemed to be very similar to that found in a large cathedral—whispered invocations, distant choral recitals, the echoing clack of leather shoes on stone floors—but there was something wrong. Listening to the choir I found that the sequences of chords were always unresolved and the end of each phrase was unnaturally swallowed up in silence
.
Then I understood: everything was being played backwards, everything, that is, but the faint cries of utter despair which could be heard behind the other noises. My hand went to the volume control to turn off the dreadful noise. As I fumbled desperately with the dial a simple sentence among the usual litter of cabalistic signs and phrases flashed up onto the screen. The sentence read:

‘Do not try to trace me.’

THE BOY IN GREEN VELVET

I met Uncle Alfred for the first time at my father’s funeral. I was eight years old and just about to go to a preparatory school in Oxford. I had known that my father had a brother and that his name was Alfred—never Alf—but further than that, nothing. I was an inquisitive boy and might well have asked my parents about him had I not been somehow aware that enquiries about Uncle Alfred were not welcome.

My father had been a chemistry don at St Saviour’s College, Oxford and my mother, at the time of his death, was on the point of becoming Headmistress of a girls’ high school in Banbury. They were brisk, kind people who had organised their lives with immaculate good sense and efficiency, so it seemed like an affront to their rational world when my father died very unexpectedly of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of forty-three. I remember people saying that my father’s death was ‘so unfair,’ but I did not think like this. It was horrible and it happened: that was all there was to be said, as far as I was concerned.

A pompous funeral service in St Saviour’s College chapel was followed by a short committal at a crematorium and it was here that my Uncle Alfred put in his appearance. I was first aware of him from my mother’s reaction. Throughout the day she had been in a state of uncontrollable, almost hysterical grief. It had surprised and worried me, because my mother was a calm, disciplined person, and, even when she first received the news of my father’s death, her reaction had been more stoical. I was barely beginning to understand the processes of my own bereavement, let alone anyone else’s. In retrospect I realise that she was suffering from delayed reaction: only on the day of the funeral did the full enormity of a life without my father hit her.

We had taken our places in the crematorium chapel, waiting for the service to begin. I was on one side of my mother in the pew; her sister Margaret was supporting her on the other. I was studying the stuff of my mother’s black coat and watching it quiver and shake from the sobbing body inside it. I had no idea what to do, so I left it all to my Aunt Margaret whose line in clucking and soothing noises seemed to me more suitable to a sick animal than my mother. I kept my eyes on the black coat, not wishing to see any more of my mother’s red-rimmed eyes and collapsed face. Suddenly the black coat seemed to stiffen; the body inside had stopped shaking. My mother sat upright and I heard her say: ‘Good God! What’s he doing here?’

‘Isn’t that Alfred?’ said Aunt Margaret.

‘Sssh!’ said my mother, and then to me, ‘Don’t look round!’

But it was too late; I already had. Standing in the aisle was a tall man in a dark blue velvet-collared overcoat. I think I would have known it was my Uncle Alfred even if I had not been told. The resemblance to my father was not in anything obvious, except perhaps for the shape of the mouth; it was more in the way he held himself, his head thrust forward, chin raised, blinking watchfully at the assembled mourners. It had been absolutely my father’s stance in moments of deep abstracted thought, except that Alfred’s version was more pronounced, like a caricature of my father’s mannerism.

In the few seconds allowed to me before my mother told me sharply to stop staring, I took him in greedily, vividly. That first sight of him is still my clearest visual memory of Uncle Alfred.

He was some seven years older than my father and approaching fifty, but his skin was smooth and shiny. He had virtually no hair and his head was an almost perfect oval. I wondered later whether my father’s beard, his general shagginess of dress and grooming, had been a calculated antithesis to his brother’s sleekness. The beakiness of Uncle Alfred’s nose, together with his habit of making small quick movements with his head (another characteristic shared with my father), gave him a birdlike appearance. For a fleeting moment our glances met and I was aware of two pale grey eyes searching mine with a look of intense but utterly detached interest.

After the service everyone stood around in the crematorium courtyard, pretending to admire the flowers and exchanging awkward banalities. My mother by this time no longer needed her sister. Calm and smiling she thanked people politely for their attendance, but when she saw Alfred approach she stiffened and seemed to make herself a couple of inches taller by an act of will.

‘Alfred!’ she said when he was about four feet away from her. Her tone was that of a teacher addressing a disobedient pupil and the intention was to stop him in his tracks, but it had no effect. He came right up to her and before she could take evasive action he had sandwiched her hand between his two, which were gloved in pearl grey suede. I saw her jerk her head back in anticipation of a kiss which he did not proffer.

‘I came because I saw the notice in the
Times
,’ he said. ‘Nobody had informed me.’ If there was an implied rebuke it was in the words, not in his tone of voice which betrayed nothing. His speech was low and well-modulated.

My mother said defensively: ‘I’m afraid I had no idea what your address was, otherwise . . .’

‘It was on the card I sent you at Christmas.’

‘Was it? I didn’t know . . . Anyway, what with everything . . .’

‘I quite understand. I wasn’t in any way . . .’

‘No. Naturally.’ There was a pause and I became aware of my mother struggling with herself. Eventually she said: ‘I do hope you can come back to the house.’

‘Of course I will,’ said Uncle Alfred in an unctuous tone, as if he were conferring a great kindness. My mother merely sniffed. I think for the first time in my life I became aware that a conversation can signify more than the literal meaning of its sentences.

‘Hell!’ said my mother when he had withdrawn from earshot.

In the car on the way back to the house I pestered my mother and Aunt Margaret for information about Uncle Alfred. I felt I was entitled to it now that I had seen him in the flesh. What was his job? Apparently he was a musician, but he did not need to work because he had ‘inherited all the family money’. I detected no envy or resentment in these words, only scorn at his drone status. Aunt Margaret, who was rather more neutrally disposed towards Uncle Alfred than my mother, told me that some of his compositions had been performed and he had once written a ballet score for Covent Garden
.
(Called
Olabolika,
and based on the drawings done in Bedlam by Richard Dadd, with a scenario by Osbert Sitwell, it was one of Frederic Ashton’s least successful ventures.) ‘He was crazy about the theatre,’ my mother added. ‘Still is, as far as I know.’ With a sophistication beyond my years, I asked if he was unmarried. I knew from snippets I had picked up from adult conversation that people who had to do with theatre and ballet were often ‘not the marrying kind’. No, he was not married. ‘But he did live for quite a while with that little ballerina,’ my Aunt added carelessly. ‘What was her name? She was rather sweet, as I remember. Now what happened to her? Didn’t she—’

‘George,’ broke in my mother. ‘When we get home, would you mind making yourself useful by handing round sandwiches and things? It’s a dreadful bore, I know, but I think it’s best to keep busy on these occasions. All right, darling?’

Poor mother. I think she genuinely thought I was as grief-stricken over my father’s death as she was. At that moment I was still too bewildered to feel anything except perhaps the vaguely comforting sensation that I was now the most important person in my mother’s life.

By the time Uncle Alfred arrived at the house I was busily handing round refreshments. It was a good thing to be doing because it kept me from being stuck with one person. I suspected everyone of wanting to smother me with sympathy which was what I least wanted. Suddenly I found myself face to face, or rather face to paunch with Uncle Alfred. Even the superb tailoring of his dark blue double-breasted suit could not disguise the ungainliness of his figure.

He took a glass of sherry from my proffered tray and sniffed it. Putting it to one side, he took the tray from me and set it down on a nearby table, keeping his eyes on me the whole time. I did not feel intimidated so much as disquieted by the interest he took in me.

‘So. George . . .’ he said in his round theatrical voice. He paused, as if expecting me to respond.

‘Hello, Uncle Alfred,’ I said feebly. This amused him for some reason.

‘Hello, indeed!’ Then he remembered the occasion. ‘This is a sad day. Sad day. Your father and I . . . We didn’t . . . communicate, perhaps, as often as we should have done. Different worlds.’ He waved his hand at the room and looked round, as if to illustrate the fact that he was in alien territory. No secret was made of his disdain at the functional furnishings, and the pictures which were all reproductions of well-known masterpieces in cheap frames. Suddenly, as his gaze took in the mantelpiece, his expression changed. For a moment there was a look of shock and guilt on his face, like that of a child who has been caught rifling through the drawers in an adult’s bedroom. A second later the mask was on again.

‘Ah,’ he said very casually. ‘You have the Boulle clock, I see.’ I had not heard the name before, but I knew what he meant: an elegant eighteenth-century clock decorated with brass and tortoiseshell marquetry which stood proudly in the centre of our mantelpiece. It was known to us as ‘the antique’ because it was the only old thing in the house.

‘It’s an antique,’ I told him.

‘It is indeed,’ said Alfred condescendingly. ‘And did you know it was quite a family heirloom? By rights it should be . . . I must talk to your mother about it. Perhaps now would not be the best moment. You must both come and visit me in London. Would you like that? I could show you
my
antiques. I have quite a collection. Here’s my card.’

He presented me with a visiting card. His name, Alfred Vilier, Esq., was on it, his Chelsea address and his telephone number. I was impressed.

‘Feel the surface of the card,’ he commanded. I felt the smooth silky pasteboard and the slight roughness of the raised lettering. ‘Can you feel that? Now I’ll tell you something. If you can feel the embossed lettering, that means the card has been produced by an engraving process rather than mere printing. You can always tell a gentleman by the fact that his cards have been engraved rather than printed.’

My mother had already tried to imbue me with a steely common sense about matters of class, so I knew this was pretentious rubbish. That is to say, I knew that if I told my mother what he had said (which I did not) she would dismiss it as pretentious rubbish. Soon after that Uncle Alfred left the house, never to visit it again.

**

A few weeks after the funeral my mother had a letter from Alfred. She did not communicate its contents to me, but I heard her talking to Margaret about it on several occasions. They had a habit of returning again and again to a topic that interested them, mulling it over, looking at it from all angles and, when there was indignation to be expressed, expressing it at enormous length.

The letter concerned the Boulle clock. It began by stating in a roundabout way that because the clock was a Vilier family heirloom, it was technically the property of Uncle Alfred, he having inherited all the family effects on my paternal grandfather’s death. However, magnanimously, he was not going to press his claim, but he would like to have it in order to ‘keep the family collection together’. Would my mother be prepared to sell it? A generous sum was suggested. My mother and Margaret agreed that Alfred’s letter was both insulting and suspicious. They concluded that the clock was obviously worth far more than he had offered, but they took no steps to confirm whether this was so. (I later discovered that he had suggested a very fair price.) After much discussion Mother and Aunt Margaret decided that the best course was not to reply to the letter at all.

More weeks went by before another letter came from Uncle Alfred, again on the subject of the Boulle clock. He perfectly understood if my mother was unwilling to part with the clock, but he was concerned about its safety, it being a family heirloom. Were there proper safety locks on her windows to deter burglars? In addition he had noticed that some of the brass inlay had begun to peel away from the tortoiseshell background. If this was allowed to go on, the clock might become irreparably damaged. He knew an excellent restorer of Boulle work in London and would be very happy to pay for its repair. This time my mother wrote back a curt letter stating that she was perfectly capable of looking after her own clock and that there must be no further correspondence on the subject.

My first term at my preparatory school came and went. The reports were good and, as a reward, my mother decided to treat me to a day in London. We would visit the Science and Natural History museums in the morning, have lunch at the Victoria and Albert and round the day off with the National Gallery later in the afternoon. My mother was a relentless educator, and I was not totally averse to being educated. We were only just beginning to recognise where our paths diverged: she preferred knowledge, I beauty. As it happened, our proposed day out was a good compromise between the two.