The House of Lost Souls (14 page)

I know Mexico, I told him, which is the place to which he was, of course, referring. I told him I was well-travelled. I told him I was sceptical about Sappho having travelled to what was not in ancient times a part of the known world.

Crowley smiled and spread the cards a second time. We were at a card table on the terrace about twenty feet from the main group of diners. An admirer, a sometimes follower, had lent him the villa. Crowley was dressed flamboyantly, as was his fashion I’d been led to believe, whether performing some occult ritual, or promenading along the Brighton seafront. He flaunted convention out of vanity and exhibitionism, the two traits happily encouraging one another in his character. He was dressed for this evening in a coat and velvet tie reminiscent to me of the pariah playwright, Oscar Wilde. He was old enough to have know Wilde. He was around fifty years old on the evening he read my tarot. But he was addicted to heroin and had the pale and unblemished skin the habit often confers on its victims. He looked younger than he was and far healthier than he could possibly have been.

He knew the secret of my sexual predilection. He knew about Mexico and I saw with some certainty that he knew about Consuelo, too. His hair was unfashionably long and as I studied him he hid one eye behind the veil of it and then shook it back in a gesture that was Consuelo’s to the life. And curiously, I didn’t feel threatened by this. He was collusive in exposing me. My secrets were his, but would go no further than him, I was sure. That was our unspoken understanding. His enthusiasms ran much deeper and darker than mere gossip.

If I give the impression of liking Crowley, it’s because I did. He had a charm and capriciousness the dull Germanic Fischer entirely lacks. Where Crowley had spontaneity, Fischer has only plodding and deliberate calculation. Crowley delights in magic. He cavorts dangerously amid its possibilities. Fischer seeks to use it with the calculated deliberation of an engineer.

Before I left him, I asked him if it was true he had killed those men on the Singalila Ridge during the attempt on Kanchenjunga in ’05. An avalanche killed them, he told me, shuffling and re-shuffling his tarot pack. Does the rumour that you killed them make you angry, I asked him? He said that it didn’t in the slightest. He said he was only annoyed because the avalanche was supposed to have wiped out the expedition at 21,000 feet. In fact, he said, we reached 25,000 feet. We were almost at the summit when fate carried out its chaotic intervention.

He was sitting with his back to the lake over the terrace balustrade and the water was entirely black behind him. A tenor sang an aria from the deck of a yacht or the garden of a villa, perhaps, remote on the opposite shore and the sound carried, perhaps for miles, the voice and accompanying music reaching us with a distorted disembodied clarity that was strangely beautiful. There were fireflies around Crowley’s head now, hovering about him, like an aura. Or like the halo around the head of a saint in a Renaissance fresco.

He seemed enthused by talk of mountaineering. He asked did I think Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit of Everest, three years ago, when they were seen to disappear into cloud only a few hundred feet from the peak. They had a camera with them, he said. The camera could provide the proof of their achievement. Did I hold a professional opinion? I thought about this. Their camera was a Kodak vest camera, I said. I’m more familiar with the technicalities of the Leicas I habitually use. But it was a hardy little machine. It was purpose-built. And in the desiccated air of Everest’s upper slopes, the film would not deteriorate. Up there, in the remote cold, the snow never warms enough to thaw. So there would be no water-damage to the film. If the camera was intact, if it had not been damaged by a fall and the film exposed to light, it was possible. The film could be found, developed. The mystery could be solved. I asked him did he think Mallory and Irvine had gained the summit.

I know they did, he said. George Mallory told me himself that they sat on the roof of the world, where they shook hands and shared the last of their chocolate and planted a small flag and recorded the moment with a half-roll of photographic pictures before their descent and the fall that killed them. The dead don’t lie, he told me.

He stood to leave me then, my audience at an end, and when he turned I saw that a cluster of small bats had attached themselves like familiars to his velvet back.

Crowley could read my mind. Quite possibly he could read my fate, though if he was able to, he maintained a poker face concerning that. Fischer, for all his charisma, doesn’t share those gifts. And Dennis is blind to anything but his own philandering ambitions. My true preferences would astonish him, I know. I saw the triumphant gleam when he took his Dunhill lighter from his pocket in the car today and lit my cigarette. In his eyes, I’m a conquest already. A conquest awaiting only the formalities of the bed. Which I fear, with him, would be very formal. But his eyes don’t see much. His vision is opaque, to say the least.

I’d describe the Fischer house, here in its splendid isolation in an island forest. But I’m tired. There will be plenty more opportunity to write tomorrow, on the eve of the ceremony, when the other guests arrive. Forbidden to bring my cameras, I’ve been forced to write my thoughts, to chart my impressions and discoveries. It’s tiring to do so. But I find there’s much to be said for the unequivocation of words.

7 October, 1927

Crowley is here! He arrived this afternoon with an Egyptian woman. I was excited to see him, after the collection of dull grotesques Fischer’s man has been ferrying here all day in the Mercedes. He recognised me instantly and acknowledged the fact with a raised eyebrow and a tightening of the lips that signalled:
Your secret is safe with me
. He has aged quite shockingly in the year since I saw him last at Brescia. Much of his hair has gone and his pallor is deathly. But there was mischief in his eyes. And he was flamboyant in a silk top hat and spats and morning coat, carrying a heavy silver-topped mahogany walking stick. He leaned on the stick, was obliged to do so, in shuffling up the steps to the house. And it was sad to think that he was agile enough once to climb in the Himalayas, amid those peaks on the roof of the world. All the damage done to him is self-inflicted. It was a pathetic thing to witness, nevertheless.

But I’m ahead of myself and should describe the house. Fischer lives amid ugly opulence. His walls are hung with lurid tapestries and lit by sconces fuelled with raw pitch. The floors are bare, flagged and covered in the skins of bears and big cats, trophies, I suppose. All the downstairs rooms are warmed by burning logs in huge fireplaces. They make the house smell of soot and resin. The whole effect is baronial, grand and somehow medieval, too. There is nothing deliberately or even carelessly vulgar here, nothing that signals new money. There is just a sort of picture-house phoniness, all the more phoney for being so authentically done.

What I mean is that the house looks as if it has been styled and furnished with the calculation lavished on a film set, filled with extravagant props. Fischer’s house has not evolved. It has been expensively and stubbornly imposed here. But for all its air of fraudulence, everything is real. There is a pair of broadswords crossed under a shield on the wall of his library. I tested the edge of a blade and my thumb came away from it deeply sliced and painfully dripping blood. The Fischer house is the home of a man who has invented himself. That’s why it seems so new and so bogus, somehow. And if it seems in places slightly unfinished, I suppose that’s because the invention is not yet perfected. It is not yet complete. It won’t be, until the ceremony and the sacrifice and Klaus Fischer’s elevation to who and what he aspires to become.

Our Dempsey doppelgänger is an Italian American from the city of Chicago. I spoke to him briefly after he carried my bag to my room. I know Chicago slightly, and my familiarity with some of its attractions warmed him to me, I think. He used to be a boxer, had sparred, he said, with Dempsey and with Tunney too. And with Harry Greb, a fighter he said was better to his mind than were Dempsey and Tunney combined. His name was Giuseppe, he said, Joe to his friends. He had worked in Chicago for a man called Capone and asked me was the name familiar. I said it wasn’t. I asked was Mr Capone a friend of Klaus Fischer and he seemed amused by that. At the conclusion of our short conversation we shook hands. Or rather, my hand disappeared into his like a finch into the jaws of an alligator. There seemed a ponderous sadness to Joe, an air of reluctant secrecy and regret. He made me feel, for the first time, the absence of my cameras. My new friend would make an intriguing subject for a portrait.

There is no distinct border between the grounds of Fischer’s house and the surrounding forest. The trees simply thicken and spread, until the forest becomes remarkable. Even shorn of their leaves, the trees are so thickly placed that in parts the going becomes totally impossible. I think this is one of the few forests that has survived on English soil since Plantagenet kings and their passion for the hunt. It is not hard to imagine boar crashing through the floor of leaf mulch, driven from impenetrable thickets, shearing the bark of dripping trees with their fierce tusks. It is a place of ancient rite and seclusion, this forest. I somehow doubt Klaus Fischer has ever bothered properly to explore its shadows and glades. I think it is the sort of place that would disconcert him. He would feel lost here.

It is a profoundly English place, the wood surrounding his house. But the kingly connection is only my romantic projection. I know so little of the island’s actual history. The only monarch I know to have cultivated a strong link with Wight is Queen Victoria, who spent long months at Osborne House in the years of her unstoppable grief after her husband’s early death. And Victoria wasn’t English at all, not in blood. She was a German, like my host. And, like him, I suspect she was chiefly attracted to the island by its surprising atmosphere of isolation. It enables easy privacy.

You can look back on Fischer’s house from the wood, on its high gables and the gaunt and solitary turret rising from its roof. The turret houses a guest room, Dennis said. I told him I wouldn’t like to sleep up there. I’m not easily spooked, but I wouldn’t. From outside, the windows of the turret have an odd geometry. Their angles and exaggerated depth suggest menace, somehow. Darkness lurks in their panes instead of them reflecting exterior light. He smirked at my timorousness and said the room at the summit of Fischer’s house was reserved for more exalted guests than me.

An exalted guest arrived today. He came in a seaplane, put its pontoons down in Freshwater Bay, flying in despite the dismal weather. It’s a tribute to his skill as a pilot. He is German, like Fischer. And, like Fischer, he disguises a tendency to obesity in energetic gusto and fine tailoring. He wore splendid riding boots under a greatcoat stitched with campaign ribbons and medals won in the air over the fields of France in the war. I thought Dennis might baulk at this display, at its implications. But he plainly knew and even liked the fellow, greeting him with an embrace to follow their handshake. The German was greatly taken with the forest and I heard him ask our host over cocktails last night about game. There is no game here to distinguish those woods, Fischer told him, laughing. But he added that it always falls to the predator to find prey.

A brook bisects the wood. And the brook was as far as I was able to progress on my brief exploration after we were delivered by the Mercedes and I unpacked in my room here yesterday. It runs deep and rapidly, which is probably the effect of the rains that have persisted in their intensity since we arrived. Or it might not be a brook at all, it might instead be a smallish river with a current made swift by the narrowness of its banks. Either way, it runs dark and deep and was far too formidable an obstacle for me to think of crossing. There’s no escape, it made me think. And the thought was not entirely idle. Nor was it altogether comfortable.

7 October, 1927, later

Much later! There is to be a duel in the morning. It will be a real duel involving injury and possibly even death, fought supposedly to satisfy honour. It seems so anachronistic. In a few hours the two protagonists will walk between the parked Lagondas and Bentleys and Rolls-Royces crowding Fischer’s drive as the very latest and most ostentatious symbols of our technological age. They will find a secluded spot. And they will hack at one another with swords. But even writing that, I become aware of the contradiction implicit in my own logic. We are here to practise magic, after all. We are modern people, have embraced modernity with conviction and enthusiasm and, in some instances, with substantial profit. Yet nothing could be more ancient, or more strictly bound by lore and ritual, than the black art that has brought us all together here.

Nevertheless, the duel is ridiculous, the outcome less likely the ‘satisfaction’ the protagonists seek than some grotesque and dangerous injury to one or both of them. One of them is actually a seasoned duellist. It is our German, of course, the fat aviator who arrived here yesterday festooned in decorations earned during his glorious martial past.

The evening began promisingly enough. Of course, it was the evening of the blood banquet, the first of the ceremonial meals we must endure before the sacrifice. There is an American here, a film producer. He had brought with him the new filmic sensation, a moving picture called
The Jazz Singer
, which comes complete with its own sound thanks to a new process called dubbing. Speech is synchronised so that the characters speak naturally on film with their own voices. In this instance, since
The Jazz Singer
is a musical drama, the actors also sing. Fischer has a projection room and the whole entertainment had been planned in advance for the afternoon prior to the banquet. Given the inclement weather, it seemed a blessing as well as a welcome novelty.

But the star of
The Jazz Singer
is Al Jolson. And Al Jolson is an Americanised Jew. Those of us unaware of this when the film began were made aware of it very quickly by Fischer’s aviator guest, who loudly announced that he would not sit through a two-hour performance by a Jew from Lithuania, expected to consider the ordeal entertaining. He began to jeer and barrack and one or two of the others there, perhaps encouraged by too much wine drunk with their lunch, began to boo and handclap ponderous ironic applause. After a couple of minutes of this the American who had brought the picture here interrupted the projection and turned on the electric lights. He confronted the aviator, his face contorted with fury.

I think he was concerned more for his own dignity than for Al Jolson’s reputation or the merits of the moving picture itself. He had on cotton gloves, used to handle the spools of film without damaging the film stock with secretions from the pads of his fingers. He is tough-looking, the producer from Hollywood, swarthy and sinewy with cruel eyes. He took off one of the gloves and with his bare palm slapped the German, hard, across his face. The German looked startled for only a moment, before smiling at the American and offering him a curt bow. This was the protocol, apparently, for the duel they are to fight; the challenge made and accepted in the heat of a half-drunken moment.

But Dennis tells me it is all deadly serious. The German had fought duels before, was part of a student duelling society in Heidelberg in his youth. And the American, of Italian extraction, was a college fencing champion, good enough at épée and sabre to represent his country in the Olympic Games. The men here seem very excited at the prospect of blood and steel. The women feign indifference, but are excited too, I think.

I have a small problem of my own, concerning blood and steel. The cut on the flesh of my thumb has become infected and swollen. It leaks fluid, which has a sweetish smell, like decay. I have disinfected and bandaged it, but I think I have a slight fever now and am concerned about infection. Beyond that minor worry, I have to confess to a more general and far greater uneasiness. I’ve prattled on about the row prompted by the ‘talkie’ and the prospect of the duel and my septic thumb, avoiding writing this part. But I have to write it, because it is all I can now think about. It is more urgent and important than anything else possibly could be.

I have known for months about the ceremonies and the sacrifice, have had more than sufficient time to prepare myself for what is involved in the rituals being staged here. But tonight the blood banquet was held. And it was vile. It was staged in a huge dining hall reached through the library of the house. This hall is panelled in polished wood with a heavy and elaborate burr. We served ourselves from a cold buffet displayed at one end of the room, the staff having been dismissed after the preparation of the food. There were thirteen of us, of course. We ate by candlelight at the long table running through the centre of the hall, our meal accompanied by music played loudly on Fischer’s gramophone. The machine positively gleams, so new and up-to-date is it. The sound from its horn is shrill and crisp and it runs hot, smelling of metal and Bakelite. The gramophone is another of the uneasy juxtapositions in his house between contrived, Middle Ages décor and the opulent trappings of modernity. The music started staidly enough, emotional arias warbled throbbingly by Caruso and the sweet-voiced Irish tenor John McCormack. Then, with the steady intoxication of the evening, it got darker and more mischievous. It turned first to ragtime, which I’ve always thought sinister, somehow, in the way its simple and deliberate rhythms stalk the mind. And then, of course, it turned to jazz. I recognised a handful of tunes played by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, Bix Beiderbecke soloing on his cornet. And then our host played a recording by the Red Onion Jazz Babies. I saw them in Chicago last year, could hear again now the brass virtuosos Sydney Bechet and Louis Armstrong competing on their crowd favourite, ‘Heebie Jeebies’. I stole a glance at Göring, the German, expecting some new explosion, now about nigger musicians. But none came. Tonight, he had other things than jazz on his mind. The music got ever wilder, less controlled.

What’s this? I asked Fischer, at one point, as piano keys echoed some whorehouse lament. Perhaps it was just me. I was slightly feverish, I suppose, from my infected thumb.

Fats Waller, he said, with an indulgent smile. I had never heard of Fats Waller.

As the night wore on, his guests made free with Fischer’s wine and champagne, his opium and his cocaine. Much of the behaviour was drearily predictable. But some of it still held the capacity to shock. Towards the end of the evening, the Egyptian woman Crowley brought took off her clothes. A jewel sat tucked into her naval. Her nipples were pierced with thickish circles of gold shaped to look like braids of rope. She writhed half-heartedly to the music, doing a sort of belly dance. And then she lay supine on a tabletop, smoking a cigar through her vagina. Some of the men applauded this trick, which I’d heard of, but never seen before. When the cigar was half-smoked, Fischer plucked it out of her and made the ash of it glow with three or four furious puffs, before thrusting the lit end back into her. She moaned in mingled pain and pleasure and the smell of burned flesh and singed hair and sexual release rose about the room. Her orgasm earned another desultory round of cheers and table hammering before she limped off the table and slouched away to put her clothes back on. I looked at her face. But her expression was blank under the exotic application of the kohl around her eyes.

Shortly after, the sacrificial was brought in for everyone to see, not borne aloft on a bier or anything grand like that, but shaking inside the man Giuseppe’s buttoned overcoat, like stolen game in the coat of a poacher. Put down, the sacrificial did not look like the key to Fischer’s impending omnipotence. He was just a young child, shivering in undershorts and a once-white singlet, grey now with wear and washing. He is perhaps six or seven years old. He is undernourished. He looked confused and fearful, as though distrustful of the gaudy apparitions he was seeing. But this is one dream, if he thinks it a dream, he will not awaken from. He stood clutching at his undershorts with one hand, holding them up, the elastic having perished or perhaps snapped in his handling, protective of his infant dignity.

The assembled banqueters began to clap. And I was filled at once with compassion for the child and with heartfelt loathing for what we are here to do. Fischer’s words aboard the boat came back to mock me. And then the giant Giuseppe swept the boy off the floor and made for the door and they were gone. And at once I understood the reason for the look I’d seen earlier on the face of Fischer’s man. Whatever his former employer, Mr Capone of Chicago, had had him do for his pay, it wasn’t this.

I looked at Dennis. His complexion was flushed and sweaty and his eyes still gleaming from witnessing the Egyptian woman’s pain. He is a sadist, of course, which I had forgotten. I looked at the other faces in the room; all drunk or intoxicated in some way, except for the duellists, sullen and sober at separate ends of the table, each hoping, I suppose, that sobriety now would give them an advantage handling sharpened steel come morning. I looked at the assembled throng in their tuxedos and ball gowns and felt the pearls turn to paste around my dry imposter’s throat, because I wasn’t one of them.

And I’m not. And I never can be. Whatever Fischer’s platitudes aboard the boat, I won’t collude in the murder of a child. Absurdly, I found myself resenting Fischer for lying on the boat about the rickets. The child is sound-limbed. Thin, pale, terrified, but apparently healthy. Sound-limbed or crippled, it hardly signifies. I cannot be party to the murder of a child. I cannot.

While I was thinking this, I saw Crowley lift his head and look at me. He was sitting in a club chair over in one corner with a wine goblet rested between his fingers on one of its arms. He had on an oriental skullcap, to conceal his scalp where the hair no longer grows to cover it. He turned the goblet deliberately and one of his feet tapped in its buttoned spat, on the floor. It tapped as though with infinite patience. And then it stopped. And he smiled. And of course, he knew.