The House of Lost Souls (16 page)
8 October, 1927, later
Two things, one momentous, the other merely curious. I’ve found where they have the boy hidden and imprisoned. But I’ll deal with events in the order they occurred. Doing so will help me stay calmer. Preserving my sanity, I realise now, has been one of the functions of writing all this madness down. Firstly, the portrait shoot, which passed off uneventfully. Crowley is vain and his pleasure in being photographed competed in his expression with a certain tautness around the mouth I took to be suspicion. I think he likes me, in so far as he likes anybody. His healing act this morning after the duel was one of compassion, as well as showing off. But he doesn’t trust me.
Dennis has a pale bland face betrayed by a hint of lasciviousness. He has the look about him of tainted milk.
Fischer was serene, a squatting toad on his wooden throne, basking for his picture in the spotlight.
I think the Egyptian woman is hypnotised. There is something predetermined, trancelike about her movements. And her eyes are shallow to the point of blankness. It could be drugs, I suppose. It could be some potent narcotic someone has pumped into her veins. But shuffling on to the throne where she slouched for her picture, she reminded me of a story Dennis told about the walking dead in Haiti. When I saw her through the camera’s viewfinder, the impression was strengthened to the point where I was so unnerved I could barely keep the camera still.
Fischer’s German aviator wore a corset under his coat. I’m sure of it. He looked much slighter and better proportioned a figure than he appeared at any time yesterday. He was pale from blood loss, of course, but had a certain bearing about him, a certain martial dignity I thought lost on the circumstances. They are an odd lot. The remainder were equally odd, but unworthy of individual comment here.
When I took the film roll from the camera I substituted it for one from Fischer’s camera box that was blank. I can’t explain why I did this. I just did not want to surrender the film. There was no time to light the pictures properly, the sittings were hurried, the whole assignment executed almost in the manner of a factory production line. But I think the pictures will have something. The Rollei is an excellent camera and the film stock first-rate. I have hidden the roll and hope to recover it later. It lies between the joists, under a loose board pried from the floor of the room at the top of the stairs Fischer keeps for his most exalted guests. As I said, I can’t explain why I did it. But I don’t believe I will ever be held to account. By the time the deception is discovered, I will have committed a far more serious betrayal than stealing pictures.
After lunch, while almost everyone dozed, I followed Giuseppe as he carried a covered pail of our table slops outside from the scullery. We had pheasant in oyster sauce for lunch and the trailing smell of it congealing in the cold air told me what the pail contained. The falling rain was loud, percussive on the stiff leaves, dead still on the branches of the trees, and on those already fallen and not yet softened to mulch on the forest floor. And he did not hear me as I followed him. He stopped once, as though sensing he was not alone. And his huge shoulders stiffened under the rain slicker he wore and I felt the hair on the backs of my arms stiffen in response like the hackles of a frightened cat. But though he paused, Fischer’s man did not turn.
He trailed through the thickening trees and I followed him. And after a while I became aware of a sound, like the rumour of running water. And it strengthened and I knew we were headed for the furious brook, or small river, that cleaves the forest. We were to the east of the trail I had followed to it before. The wood was dense, but watching the burly figure ahead of me, I was able to pick his path and avoid the snapping twigs and trailing underbrush that would have given me away.
It was on the very bank of the stream. It was built of wooden boards and felt-roofed and had no windows. It did not stand high enough for the child to have stood up straight in. Inside would be darkness, I saw, as there were no windows. The boards were bonded and weathered together by black smears of creosote, and holes had been drilled at intervals about halfway up the shelter for ventilation.
It was quite new. Even from where I stood, concealed behind the trunk of a squat sycamore tree a hundred feet away, I could see yellow deposits of sodden sawdust from the recent cutting to length of the structure’s planks on the dark forest floor. The water was a chilly roar even from the distance where I hid, and I wondered what rest the child could possibly accomplish in his dark, cramped little prison. Was he clothed? Dear Christ! My fingers shook, smearing the moss grown on to the bark of my concealing tree as I fought to compose myself. I was indignant at their cruelty and disgusted at my own lazy collusion in it.
Rickets.
A slum child.
What had Fischer said on the boat? Better dead than alive. Anger and rage shook me. I trembled in the indifferent dripping forest. And I heard a voice, clear, human, pitched beyond the roar of urgent water.
‘Peter,’ it called. ‘Peter? I have food for you, Peter,’ Giuseppe said.
So the boy had a name.
And Fischer’s man put the pail on the ground and sank to his haunches and I saw that a small brass padlock was all that secured a hinged trapdoor cut into the boards to confine their sacrificial.
I fled. I did not have it in me to see the boy again before my attempted rescue in the morning. And I feared discovery there, and catastrophe for us both.
Seaton looked up from the journal, aware he was dangerously close to its conclusion. There were thirty or so pages of flimsy left in Pandora’s notebook. But the writing ran out in them over the course of only a couple more. He went to the bar and bought a drink and sat down and rubbed his eyes, their focus on the blue marbling of the book’s cover. The story did not have a happy ending. He’d guessed that from the fact of her missing thumb. Crowley’s miracle had been reversed, out of spite or revenge. She had died, self-murdered, a decade after the epiphany described in the pages he had so far read.
He thought he knew what happened next. But he sipped beer and picked up the book again with half his mind on what could be salvaged from the tragedy.
9 October, 1927, 8.15 a.m.
I misjudged poor, sad Giuseppe. I said that he would have no heart to appeal to after his work for Mr Capone, the gangster and bootlegger in Chicago, the man who likes to chastise with baseball bats and concrete boots and razors scrupulously stropped. But I was neglecting to take account of the torment done to his soul.
We found him this morning. He had seated himself on the wet ground outside the scullery and put the barrel of his pistol under his chin and pulled the trigger. There was nothing left of the top of his head, the pink slush of his brainpan exposed. The giant who held his own with Dempsey and Tunney and Harry Greb had finally been defeated by his conscience. He was a Catholic and his Catholic conscience was the one opponent he could never better with his strength, or successfully avoid.
I know the gory particulars because it was Dennis and I who found him. Last night’s feather banquet was fairly subdued, everyone saving themselves for tonight’s climactic activity, I suppose. The Egyptian woman, Crowley’s plaything, allowed herself to be bitten on the neck by a snake charmed from a basket he produced. But Fischer mumbled some incantation to disperse the venom harmlessly. I think the event was supposed to be symbolic, a rapprochement between the two magicians. It left the girl’s neck badly bitten, scarred. And the serpent was allowed the freedom of the room. It still lay in thick menacing coils around a table leg when I retired.
I ran into Dennis this morning in the grounds. Or rather, he ran into me. I was smoking a cigarette among the covered cars on the drive. He must have spotted me from his window. It was not unusual or suspicious of him to discover me there, not really. He is an habitual early riser, regardless of whatever the antics of the night before. It’s an old navy habit, he says. Together, we walked around the house to see if coffee could be scrounged before breakfast at the scullery door. And together, we happened on the remains of Fischer’s man. He was clothed in the pinstripe trousers and waistcoat of a blue suit and there was a shoulder holster strapped under one arm. The holster was of brown leather and rain-soaked, suggesting he had been there some time. Dennis remarked that a dumdum bullet had been used to do the damage. It was the gangster’s ammunition of choice, he said. His nonchalance in the face of death did not surprise me. It is a consequence of the war, a characteristic shared by many of those with his exposure to it. They are inured to loss, hardened to violent death. This callousness has spread as a kind of fashion among them.
I would have been more upset myself, had I not followed the man the previous afternoon to the coop he built for the boy. I am in no position to judge anyone, but still think it an impossible crime to forgive. Still. At least he baulked at committing a worse one.
Dennis said he would go and break the news about the death to Fischer. They would need to find some discreet way to dispose of the corpse. And then he said something peculiar. He said it was a shame Giuseppe couldn’t have elected to leave us in another twenty-four hours. I asked, why? The spawning, he said. Suicides can be very useful to the thing Fischer is to spawn.
These are the last words I shall write. I write them in my room, as the others attend the grisly cabaret of Giuseppe’s death scene. His final act has drawn a full house, judging from the stillness and the quiet. But I am cautious and afraid. I dare not even go and retrieve my hidden film from its resting place in the guest quarters at the top of the stairs. There is something about that room I did not like. I would not willingly enter it again. And there isn’t anyway time, now, to go up there. And I have not seen Crowley at all today, which worries me.
I must go to the boy. For the first time in my life, I must try to do something truly brave, rather than self-indulgently bold. I have stolen a brass poker from the fire-set of one of Fischer’s countless baronial hearths to use to lever off the little padlock on the boy’s prison. I have money. I have a rough idea of island geography. I pray the boy is as sound as he looked. My thumb has started to throb once again. It is probably only my imagination. It is like the memory of pain.
God help me.
God help both of us.
Pandora Gibson-Hoare
Seaton flicked through the empty pages of flimsy at the back of the notebook. But there were no more words to find. He had read the entire account. He could barely believe how brave she had been. She had been enormously courageous, given the depth of the delusion she was under. Had she been hypnotised? Autosuggestion was, he supposed, a possibility. He drained his Director’s and went and fetched another pint from the bar. He sat down to ‘Who’s That Lady?’ by the Isley Brothers. It was probably the most cheerful tune on the landlord’s loop-tape, almost recklessly upbeat by the standards set by the rest of it. And the question was pertinent to him.
Who was that lady?
She had gone to see Houdini in New York. She had travelled to Italy for an audience with Aleister Crowley. She was someone who hankered after magic. It was a paradoxical feature of an age assaulted as no age had been before by the onslaught of technology. Four years of world war had accelerated scientific progress, and the stranded Edwardians of the 1920s found it difficult to cope with their new unrecognisable world. Something in them reacted against it. The craze for magic was well-documented. But it was still hard to credit the extent to which an intelligent and travelled sophisticate like Pandora had fallen for shysters like Crowley and Fischer and their assemblage of misfits and freaks. A spawning, for Christ’s sake, Seaton thought. The summoning of a beast, wouldn’t you know. Human sacrifice.
He was somewhat puzzled by the references to the boy. Perhaps Peter was some sort of maternal illusion fostered by Pandora’s guilt over her lesbianism. But she hadn’t seemed at all guilty about her sexuality in referring to it herself. She was understandably coy, but she didn’t seem guilty. She was only young and her lifestyle did not exactly point to a hankering for motherhood. Neither did what work of hers he’d seen. No, he doubted the truth lay in far-fetched Freudianism. More likely it was a piece of theatre stage-managed by Fischer, the boy a child actor, the whole thing a dramatic ruse. There had been a guest from Hollywood at the Fischer house, after all. To anyone but someone as deluded as Pandora had been, that fact alone would have been a certain giveaway.
The quote from Eliot was after Dante, a reference in the first quarter of
The Waste Land
to Dante’s
Inferno
. And the inference was obvious. Pandora had sought redemption in magic from a world that reminded her of hell. That was what she depicted in her photographs. Her subjects were grim isolated souls enduring damnation. What he had seen in her portraits as their subjects’ stoicism and ugliness was her own expression of profound despair.
I had not thought death had undone so many.
How could he link Gibson-Hoare in his essay with Eliot’s great nihilistic poem? The answer was that he couldn’t. Because he could not reveal the stolen journal as his source. Seaton paced the pavement outside the empty pub. He kicked a loose stone towards a grid in the gutter. His aim was true enough, but the stone made no sound, so low had the drought caused by the heatwave reduced the water level in London’s sewers. It was left entirely to his imagination to contrive a splash for the lost object.
He heard a sound in the quiet of his reverie and turned towards where it came from, to where Lambeth High Street ended in the dark T-junction of Black Prince Road. It had sounded like the snort and whinny of a horse. And he heard the metal clop of a hoof and wondered, idly now, why the mounted police were patrolling at all in so quiet a backstreet at night. They should be galloping through Trafalgar Square, providing a show to compensate the tourists forced to leave the pubs at eleven o’clock.
There had to be a convincing way for him to pretend he had stumbled innocently upon the journal. The solution to this problem was half-formed already somewhere in his mind. But befuddled by beer, it would not come into clear focus for him. He’d only had a couple. But his brace of beers had followed a workout in the unrelenting heat. And he hadn’t eaten any dinner, to speak of. It had been foolish of him.
Bridle leather strained against muscle and sinew and iron-shod wheels rolled along the macadam as they approached under some thunderous burden, and Seaton’s head snapped back towards Black Prince Road and he gripped the journal in its oilskin sleeve in a hand loose and sweaty now with fear thinking,
What in God’s name was that?
But all was innocent again. He heard behind him George, the Windmill landlord, whistling as he shuttered and locked and bolted for the night. River noise. It was river noise. The proximity of the river distorted and carried sound sometimes, in a way for which the senses possessed no ready explanation. Seaton sighed and relaxed.
She really had taken those pictures for Fischer. The slighted professionalism was unmistakable in her tone in the journal, even with everything else on her mind. She had even name-checked the equipment, Fischer’s Rollei rather than one of her own beloved Leica cameras. Rollei, the Swiss engineer who created Rolleiflex a year or two after the autumn in which Pandora had written. Those pictures, that commission, as she called it, had been professionally executed. She’d even found space in the journal to complain about the short time she’d been given with each sitter,
like a factory production line
. The shoot had really taken place. And the film had really been switched and hidden. And, whatever her other grumbles, the pictures had been taken with film stock she described as excellent. She’d been a woman in extremis, falling back on where her instinctive craft and talent lay, when she took that set of portraits she chose to deride as snapshots. Among all the illusion during her apparent breakdown at the Fischer house, they had been real.
Seaton’s eyes were drawn reluctantly back to the top of the road. And he waited for a carriage hearse to turn the corner, pulled by velvet-flanked stallions wearing black plumes on snorting heads, followed by a procession of mourners, whey-faced under their top hats because they walked in death to a long-forgotten destination.
And he shook his head and tried to slow his accelerating heart. Where had that come from? There was nothing there, at the end of the road, but night gloom. George had completed his locking-up routine behind him in the pub. The only sound was the ambient drift of night traffic along the road. He turned left and looked along Lambeth High Street to the bulk of the block where he lived, listening for their loud neighbour, for the drift of ‘Red, Red Wine’. But even their neighbour was subdued tonight. Yet he did not want to tempt sight by looking again to his right. It was ridiculous. He was spooked by his own imagination, stirred by the clandestine reading matter carried in his hand. But why that? Why the funeral cortège?
He took a step towards home and cleared his thoughts.
And suddenly he had it.
The solution to his conundrum dropped neatly into his mind.
He would go to the Fischer House himself. The chances were remote that a place so large would still be in private hands. Odds were it would be a guesthouse by now, its great rooms divided; its occupants tourists, walkers, island nature lovers looking for a bit of seclusion off the beaten. It would be no bother to book a room for a couple of nights. He could leave tomorrow afternoon, come back Sunday, be back in time to make the swim on Sunday afternoon at Hampstead Ponds with the boys, and the beer after. Unless the place was full, of course. But it was still early in the season. The schools weren’t off. And the Isle of Wight in June was hardly Devon or Cornwall in August. Of course they’d have a room. He’d look for the lost film and he might even find it. And if he did, what a coup for Lucinda. What he would certainly find there, though, would be the journal. He’d find that secreted under floorboards in its rightful place. Because that was where it ought to be found, wasn’t it? Wasn’t there a compelling logic for finding the thing in the very place where its last entry had been completed?
He lifted his head, resolute for home, no longer concerned about the beat and panoply of deadly grief rounding the corner behind him. And he stopped.
A couple of hundred feet distant, coming from Lambeth Bridge Road ahead of him, he saw the figure of a woman, turned wraithlike by the streetlamps, pale and gliding over the pavement towards him as though her feet didn’t touch the ground. Her bobbed hair framed her face and her smile was a dark, night crimson shaping her mouth. Where else would you see such a sight, Seaton thought. It was Lucinda, coming home. He slipped the journal sly into his pocket, thanking fate for his having the habit of always needing somewhere to put his wallet when he went out.
* * *
He got into the office early the following morning, determined to book his accommodation at the heart of Brightstone Forest for the weekend without a curious audience. He was in at nine, confident that none of the other lads would get there until ten. Mike Whitehall tended to arrive at nine thirty or so, but his doing so was thought by the rest of the editorial staff a northern eccentricity. The lax hours the NUJ had negotiated on their behalf was the jealously held revenge, after all, for what the printers were being paid in comparison with them.
It was nine thirty before he was able to reach some clueless typist from the Isle of Wight Tourist Board who told him that there was no accommodation whatsoever in Brightstone Forest and no, she wasn’t mistaken.
A brief study of the AA map of Britain told him the forest was National Trust land now. He really needed the close detail of an Ordnance Survey map, but they didn’t have one in the
Gazette
office, where there wasn’t much call for them and certainly not for one of Wight. When he called them, the National Trust couldn’t help. As far as they knew, there was nobody domiciled in Brightstone Forest. There were visits made to it by forest wardens. And the wardens would have built a shelter. But the shelter would be rudimentary, nothing more elaborate than a hut. And Forestry only manned their phones from eleven until three, and then only on Mondays through Wednesdays.
Thoroughly frustrated, at ten to ten he went to make himself a mug of tea. Mike was in the kitchen, doing the same for himself and Eddie Harrington. ‘Give me your mug,’ he said. ‘I’ll be mother.’
Seaton handed over his mug.
‘How did you find Young Mr Breene?’
‘Picturesque.’
Mike laughed.
‘You could have warned me.’
‘I’m warning you now. You should leave it, Paul. Whatever it is. No good will come of it.’
This was unlike Mike, who was characteristically as inquisitive as they come.
‘You don’t want to know what it’s about?’
Mike stirred sugar into his tea. He raised his cup to his lips and took an exploratory sip. ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ he said. Which was a phrase Seaton had heard before. Mike didn’t look himself this morning. There were these sullen unfamiliar shadows under his eyes.
‘The boys are going to Hampstead on Sunday afternoon,’ Seaton said. ‘Swimming in the men’s pond. We’re all going. Patrick been in touch?’
‘No,’ Mike said. ‘I mean, yes. What I mean is, I said no. I’m not exactly Mark Spitz in the water. I’m not even Esther Williams.’
‘It’ll be a laugh.’
Mike looked doubtful. ‘Isn’t it a bit homo, though? And a bit deep?’
‘It’s deeply homo. It’s far more Judy Garland than Esther Williams, to be fair. But it’s a lovely place for a swim in the weather. And your virtue will be safe enough among a crowd.’
‘I’ll bring my water wings, then,’ Mike said. He sipped his tea.
Back in the newsroom, on no more than a reporter’s hunch, Seaton rang a number for the County of Hampshire Civic Authority and asked for Social Services. This time, for the first time, he referred specifically to the Fischer house.
‘Just a minute,’ said a clerk.
Seaton didn’t know if he had a minute. He looked at his watch. It was five past ten. But the stairwell outside the office door was still silent. And a spy couldn’t climb through its cold acoustics without making a clatter. A ghost couldn’t do it.
He heard the phone picked up and fumbled. He heard a match struck, tobacco inhaled. ‘Who is this?’
‘It’s
London Tonight
. We’re doing a piece about Home Counties provision for the elderly. And the infirm.’
‘We’re not the Home Counties, mate,’ the voice said. ‘And the Fischer house was an insane asylum.’
Seaton’s heart thumped. The stairwell was still blessedly absent of feet. ‘Was?’
The voice broke into laughter. ‘If it was still going, I’d call it a place for the mentally challenged, wouldn’t I? I’m fluent enough in the euphemistic new lingo. But it was an insane asylum when it closed. That was what they still called them back in the bad old nineteen fifties.’
‘Is the building still there?’
There was a pause. ‘Why? Is
London Tonight
doing a piece on Isle of Wight architecture, now? Building conservation? Who exactly are you, mate?’
‘Is it still there?’
‘So far as I know, it is. Derelict. Boarded-up and forgotten. It’s a madhouse full of rats. Now fuck off, mate, whoever you are. You’re a fucking timewaster and I’ve got more important things to do.’
He made a booking at a guest house in Ventnor. It wasn’t ideal, but he didn’t have time to shop around. Terry Messenger or Tim Cooper or someone was coming up the stairs as they told him his name and work phone number were enough to secure the booking and he dropped the receiver on to the cradle.
The afternoon was his. He was owed an afternoon or morning in lieu, for covering full council.
He’d told Lucinda he was going, the previous night, as she undressed, tipsy after the Soho bar launch. She’d nodded, immediately accepting of his story of how he’d learned that the Klaus Fischer in the Café Royal photograph had owned a house on the Isle of Wight where he was famed for his hospitality. There might be pictures of their gatherings on its walls, he’d told her, amazed at his own accelerating capacity for voicing the convincing lie. There might be something there to flesh Pandora out. Sober, she might have asked how he expected to be given access to the place. Sober, she might have asked how he could be confident that there would be anything of Pandora there, forty-odd years after her suicide, for him to find. But she wasn’t sober. She just nodded and smiled with the slight diminishing of focus with which drink softened her eyes. And she didn’t ask.