The House of Rumour (21 page)

I started to practise with the Tarot deck. I learnt the Major Arcana. I asked Astrid about the Justice card, hoping it could mean redress, particularly for what I saw as the unfairness in my situation with Jack.

‘The most misunderstood card in the whole pack. Justice does not belong to us. When I think of who was spared and who was lost,’ she said, referring to her time under the Nazis. ‘And these trials. So many will still get away with it. No, this card does not mean a human notion of justice. Oh no, this is the natural kind. Nature is a harsh judge but precise when she finds her balance. Exact, you might say. So you be careful when you go looking for justice.’

But I was impatient. I began to find ways of palming the deck to turn up the cards that I wanted. One evening I did a reading for Jack and I fixed the spread so I could offer him a provocative interpretation. It was a three-card divination (though in this case more of a three-card trick). The Two of Swords was the centre card between Strength and the Ten of Cups. The Two of Swords shows a blindfolded woman holding crossed swords, like Justice without her scales, indicating a difficult choice to be decided on instinct rather than logic. Strength, of course, referred to our lustful night, the Beast and his Scarlet Woman. The Ten of Cups depicts a couple embracing as their children dance – family life and faithfulness, that bliss of domesticity that I knew he dreaded.

This was a sort of spell aimed at Jack. I wondered what I might use against Betty. I had tried curses and blessings and all kinds of charms, but nothing had seemed to make any particular sense or had any effect. I decided to concentrate on willing a kind of animus that might work in my favour, a spirit that might tempt Betty away from Jack. One night I asked for a sign or a portent. The next day L. Ron Hubbard turned up.

He had just got out of the navy and he was looking for somewhere to stay. Hubbard was a veteran pulp writer, well known in the fantasy and science fiction world. That’s how he got to hear about our little commune in Pasadena. I never much liked him. We had met at Robert Heinlein’s house before the war, the very same night I first saw Jack Parsons. Hubbard’s presence was such a contrast to Jack’s subtle charisma. I remembered then a domineering manner, an incessant craving for attention. A sly wariness in his eyes, a cunning twist about his mouth; he seemed alert to any opportunity. It was his gloating nature I found repulsive; there was something almost reptilian about him. With men he was merely arrogant, with women he was predatory.

His prose style was as brash and arrogant as he was but it was hard not to respect his sheer output and his power of invention. Ron was a verbal illusionist, a writer who had become convinced by his own fantasies and now seemed ready to try to fool others. He would constantly push the credulity of his audience as if searching for those who might believe in him unconditionally.

And it was clear that he was looking for something beyond the merely fictional for his powers of speculation. He boasted that he had written a manuscript that he could no longer submit to publishers as it had sent mad all those who had read it. In one of his better stories, a man finds himself a fictional character in a pirate romance and learns to anticipate action or danger when he hears the clatter of typewriter keys in the sky above him. Even back then the audacious storyteller dreamt of a higher calling.

For some of the household he provided much needed entertainment. He was a skilled raconteur, holding court around the big table in the kitchen at suppertime, telling tall tales that many fell for. He had learnt his trade on all types of pulp magazine and could rattle off stories of any genre, claiming them as his own experience. And he was full of bluster about his wartime exploits, though one could tell that duty had taken its toll in some way. There was a weariness in his pale eyes. They would gaze off in mid-sentence as if hunting for another racket.

I noticed them light up when they fell on Betty. It was easy to see he found her attractive and she clearly enjoyed the attention of this mysterious new member of the commune. They flirted openly. It was a performance, a game, but one that could easily turn serious. All at once it struck me that my prayer might have been answered.

I found Ron in the library one afternoon. He looked up furtively as I entered. He had been studying
The Book of Lies
by Aleister Crowley.

‘Looking for ideas, Ron?’

‘It’s brilliant stuff,’ he replied. ‘A whole new religion. Needs to be more, well, scientific.’

He was fascinated by Jack’s persona and curious about his ideas. Ron was a professional, always on the lookout for any material he could use.

‘What do you think of Betty?’ I asked him.

He shrugged, trying to look nonchalant, but his eyes flickered mischievously.

‘She likes you,’ I went on.

‘She’s Jack’s girl.’

‘The Order’s in favour of free love, you know that. Betty wants you. And Jack wants what Betty wants.’

His lips pursed in a cruel smirk.

‘She’ll make her feelings known soon,’ I told him. ‘Make sure you act quickly before her passion cools.’

I was about to contrive a moment to talk to Betty on her own but it was she who instigated it. She actually confided in me.

‘What do you think of Ron?’ she asked me and I measured my response carefully.

‘Oh, he’s fascinating.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Betty. ‘I think he’s cute.’

I winced. Only Betty could think of L. Ron Hubbard as cute. But at least there was a kind of poetic justice in it. They deserved each other.

‘What should I do?’

‘Oh, you must act on your feelings,’ I told her. ‘Anything else would be dishonest. You must let him know how you feel.’

‘What, tell him?’

‘Oh no. Some sort of gesture would be better.’

Two days later in the garden Jack and Ron were fencing at sunset. The vigorous exchange of thrust and parry charged the air. There was a new intensity between the two men. I didn’t realise it at the time but Jack was becoming just as obsessed with Ron as Ron was with Jack. But looking back now, I think Betty already knew it and was jealous of them both. The light was failing and as they were not wearing masks each new lunge became wilder and more provocative. Betty became agitated as she watched until she could bear it no longer. She grabbed the foil from Jack and launched a fierce attack on Hubbard, swiping at his unprotected face, forcing him to retreat. Stepping back, he regained his posture and with a sharp riposte knocked her sword to the ground. The sky had turned blood red. Betty and Ron glared at each other. It had begun.

We were all used to the wild affairs that would flare up at number 1003; they had become our sport. But this was different and the tension in the house became palpable. Ron and Betty made no attempt to conceal their lovemaking. It was a gruesome spectacle. But now everyone was watching Jack to see how he would respond to this direct challenge.

I felt sure that he would crack. He had been so devoted to Betty and now she had betrayed him openly. Hubbard had obscenely abused his hospitality. I thought that it was only a matter of time before he would throw them both out. But I underestimated his resilience.

‘It is a test,’ he insisted to me one night when we were alone together. ‘I must suffer this ordeal of love and jealousy. I will find a way.’

‘Yes,’ I whispered urgently. ‘Come to me.’

‘I have to find my own way first. I have to find the darkness.’

‘What?’

‘Of myself. This is a sign, Mary-Lou. I must attend to magical ceremony. I have to go deeper within.’

So I left him to it, hoping that he merely needed time to get over Betty. But soon he became absorbed in new experiments of the spirit. He had been investigating Enochian rituals that had been used by Doctor John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court magician, who had used arcane language to communicate with the unseen. Jack now sought divine wisdom through angelic conversation.

Astrid knew all about Doctor Dee.

‘He was the most brilliant man of his generation. A Renaissance magician with deep knowledge of astrology and mathematics. I suppose if he lived in these days he would have been a scientist. But he wanted to know too much. Like Faust he went too far. He fell under the influence of a charlatan named Kelley. Well, they practised magic together but in the end Kelley conned Dee out of everything – his wife, his fortune, even his knowledge.’

This should have been a warning for Jack but he embraced its dread premonition. He started to enact magic rituals with Hubbard. Ron had made many explorations into the unseen in his writing. He had known H.P. Lovecraft when they had both sold stories to
Weird Tales
magazine and had learnt that faked occult wisdom was far more plausible than any actual arcane knowledge that might exist. With a demon of an imagination, he was now ready to use his fictional prowess to influence reality. He had enchanted Jack and there was nothing I could do to break the spell. And Hubbard seemed all the more convincing now that he had so forcefully demonstrated his dominance over Jack by seducing Betty. They formed the passionate connection some men can achieve only when they have a woman in common to safely mediate it. Jack needed desperately to break through what he saw as his human weaknesses. And Hubbard preyed on him, willing to steal everything from the other man.

Jack had looked for the darkness and found it in L. Ron Hubbard, a man possessed with all the cunning and ruthlessness that he yearned for. They began to enact absurd rites, meaningless liturgies that seemed merely to solemnise Jack’s degradation. The house became possessed with a grim and sickly atmosphere. Strange noises by day, hellish screams that pierced the night, the stench of incense and sulphur. They constantly played a record of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto at full volume as prelude to their ceremony. Ritualism became contagious, as members of the Order would themselves enact banishing ceremonies to ward off ugly spirits.

It became clear that most of the senior members of the OTO were appalled by Jack’s sinister workings with Hubbard. Crowley himself wrote a letter denouncing them both. Astrid was quietly furious.

‘When I think of how we have been persecuted down the ages,’ she said, ‘just so that these men can behave so foolishly.’ She told me that she herself had been a victim of a Gestapo clampdown on astrologers and occultists in 1941 and had spent two months in a concentration camp.

After two weeks of tension and near madness at number 1003, Jack announced that he and Ron were heading off to the Mojave Desert together.

‘We are going to attempt the Babalon Working,’ he told me.

I nodded absently. I had long since lost touch with what any of this really meant. I just hoped that he would find some sort of catharsis.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘Love is the law,’ he replied with a crazed smile. He hadn’t slept properly for days. I kissed him gently on the lips and said:

‘I hope you find what you’re looking for.’

‘I want to summon an elemental.’

I know now that I should have paid more attention at this point, but I was tired too. So I kissed him again and said:

‘I’ll be waiting for you.’

And so I waited. And like a fool I imagined that my patience would be rewarded. But somebody else got there before me.

No one seemed quite sure where Candy came from. She was an artist or something. So many people drifted in and out of number 1003, it was impossible to keep track of them all. Maybe Jack really did conjure her up through the spirit world as he would later claim. All that is really certain is that there she was, standing on the front porch when he got back from the desert. And she was perfect. His ‘elemental’, the Scarlet Woman par excellence. Candy had a shock of flame-red hair, bright-blue eyes and a broad-lipped snarl of a mouth. I didn’t stand a chance. I watched as Jack slapped the dust from his jacket and walked right past me, transfixed by this vision of his delirium.

They fell in love with each other right there and then. Right in front of my eyes. I was devastated, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking that I had only myself to blame. I had meddled too much and yet not enough. I had set things up so perfectly, but for somebody else. I thought about what Astrid had said. This was how natural justice felt.

And there was yet another adjustment we all had to make. It was 1946, the year when everything at number 1003 fell apart. Hubbard conned Jack into a business proposition and promptly ran off to Florida with Betty and twenty thousand dollars of Jack’s money. There was a court case and Jack managed to get some of it back but he had to sell the lease on the house. I think he’d had enough of it by then. He left the Order and married Candy. By October, number 1003 was empty. The big old mansion was torn down to make way for modern apartments. I was ready to move on at that point but I couldn’t help feeling some nostalgia for the place, for the fleeting sense of a community of misfits. All the writers, thinkers, out-of-work actors and aspiring magicians. It had been a flawed utopia for people who believed in free living and emotional honesty. A commune for lovers of science fiction and the occult. We had been too ahead of our time. But all the post-war hope was running out. Things were about to get bleaker.

I went back to live in LA. I was lucky in some ways. I still had my job at the studio, so I threw myself into work. I had started assisting the German émigré director Max Iann. He was adapting a hard-boiled novel titled
Hell is Empty
. A man comes back from the war and picks up a girl in a bar. At first neither of them remembers that they were once childhood sweethearts. He has been traumatised by combat; she has become a drunk and fallen in with an evil racketeer. Despite the brief glimpses of a sentimental past, they are unable to avoid destroying each other through confusion and betrayal. It was one of those
noir
movies that caught a dark mood lurking beneath the official optimism of victory.