The Dulwich Horror & Others

by David Hambling

  George was a connoisseur of secret societies. He joined absolutely everything at university from the Bullingdon to the Yellow Room, worming and burrowing his way towards the beating heart of power, quickly dropping out of those which gave no benefits. His view was that there were really two sorts. One type were dining clubs for like-minded chaps which gave them a chance to make connections and talk shop without being overheard by anyone who wasn’t the right sort. The other type were genuinely clandestine, with layers and layers of hidden hierarchy above the rank and file. Those were the interesting ones, the dangerous ones.

  “A secret society mainly keeps secrets from its members,” George told me. “Especially about what its real purpose is and who’s really running the show.”

  I wondered just who had directed George to take an interest in that church, and whether he had been expendable to them.

  “Do you actually know who you’re working for?”

  I asked. “I know who I’m working against,” Estelle fired back.

  We travelled on in silence for a minute while I digested this.

  “Are you taking me for a ride?” I asked flippantly, in a mock American accent.

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said. She was only half-joking. Estelle was used to being in control. She was pleasant and radiated a little human warmth, but she had a burnished hardness about her.

  I scanned her face, looking for lines around her eyes and mouth. How old was she exactly? A perfectly frozen twenty-five, I decided. A wizened heart under an enamelled, scratchproof surface of youth.

  Estelle seemed like the sort of person who appreciated the direct approach.

  “What is this about—what is Cthulhu?” I asked.

  “Nobody knows anything about Cthulhu,” she said. “And anybody who tells you otherwise is talking bull. Pinning Cthulhu down is like trying to shine a spotlight on a shadow. All you get are contradictions. I guess you’ve seen enough of him to know which side you’re on.”

  She gave me a meaningful look.

  “So which side are you on?” she asked at last.

  “I’m a deserter,” I said. “You say there’s a war on; well, I’ve deserted. I’m not fighting on anybody’s side. I’ve seen too much—I’ve seen—Daniel—”

  And then I started crying. I could not stop, could not form a sentence. Estelle patted my knee and handed me paper tissues from a small packet. I kept wiping my eyes and blowing my nose and breaking out in sobs again. I had never seen paper tissues before.

  They took me home and helped me into the house, Estelle and her driver. They sat me down in an armchair and gave me a glass of brandy. The driver stood over me while Estelle prowled the house, looking for something. The driver was not a big man. His suit was cut well enough to disguise most of his bulk, but he was muscle-bound, one of those American football player types. When I tried to get up he pushed me back down again, harder than he needed to. His eyes were dark and unfriendly.

  I could hear Estelle murmuring, and she passed by the doorway with one hand outstretched as though dowsing for water. After a while she found what she was looking for. She appeared in the doorway with a parcel under her arm.

  “Let’s go,” she said. The driver shot a questioning look towards me. “Leave her be.”

  “You’re kidding me,” said the driver. “Her?”

  Estelle’s mouth set in a hard line. “Let’s go.”

  The driver drew a knife—the biggest knife I have ever seen, with saw teeth down one side, one of those trench knives—and turned on me. He held the point under my chin so I was forced to look up into his cold eyes.

  “We know what you are,” he said. “We’re watching you. Any monkey business and you’ll see what happens.” I felt the cold metal of the knife blade against my chin, forcing me to raise my head until I was looking at the ceiling. “You got that?”

  His tone suggested he did not see me as a person but as something else, something that could be exterminated without conscience. Those who fight monsters may become monsters themselves…Nietzsche is dreadfully overrated, but he was right about some things.

  “She’s got it,” said Estelle.

  The driver stepped back and sheathed his knife with great deliberation. The blade had an engraved pattern of four runes etched into it. I thought of Daniel’s magic words carved into rocks.

  The driver gave me a final look of contempt and stalked out.

  Estelle patted my arm sympathetically.

  “I’m sorry about that,” she said. “We’re no angels…but I guess you know how it is in wars. Don’t worry about him; I can take care of him if he tries to bother you.”

  I said nothing.

  “Deserting’s a smart choice. You’re best off out of this whole business,” said Estelle. “Get yourself a nice husband, have babies, have a regular life.” She looked around the place one last time. I don’t know if she was envious of my settled existence or appalled by the ramshackle condition of my living room. “Look after yourself, sweetie.”

  They were gone and I was all alone.

  I could not imagine ever having a normal life. Daniel was dead and I could not care about anything anymore. All gone. The worst had happened and it was over. I might see mirages from time to time, but I would not dream again of Daisy. The connection, whatever it was, had been cut.

  The oddest thing was the expression on Daniel’s face as the illumination burst out from him. He looked quite serene, happy even, for the first and last time, even as his flesh melted and dissolved into the roaring flames, haloed with smoke like a mediaeval martyr.

  It felt like the end of everything.

  It was not the end.

  II

  “My new collection is a radical exploration—the first true exploration!—of the most important of all human emotions,” announced Herbert, as soon as I signalled that all the visitors had their drinks.

  There were twenty-three of them—I know, I counted the glasses—a mixed flock of possible buyers, small-time critics and some friends Herbert had slipped in as plants to make admiring sounds. The tradition of the professional claque in the audience extends across all the performing arts, and presenting sculpture is one.

  Herbert’s studio was a sort of abandoned factory or workshop for assembling bicycles. It smelled faintly of gear-oil and leather. It was spacious but unheated, and the temperature was arctic; the guests kept their coats on. The space was artfully lit with just a few spotlights. This created dramatic shadows, a few bright pools to focus the concentration on the works beneath their dustsheets. It also hid all the clutter and decay in the corners.

  Herbert was not an imposing figure, but like other artists he made the most of what he had. With his shaved head, neat beard, and workman’s jacket he looked unusual enough and evoked shades of Lenin. He had a riding crop which he used as a pointer or slapped his leg with to emphasise a point. He spoke loudly and his sentences got slower and slower as he went on.

  “The most primal, the most neglected of human emotions. My sculptures are the concrete expression of that intangible sense which runs deep across every culture, every civilisation, and every race in human history. What is that emotion?”

  He had slowed almost to a stop, and the audience was rapt now. It was so cold I could see their breath in the air.

  “What is that emotion?” Herbert repeated, speeding up again and waving the riding crop. “What is deeper than hate, deeper than love, deeper than fear—deeper even than lust?”

  The shrouded forms gave no hint. Whatever was under those white sheets was impossible to guess. Even I had not seen them; Herbert had covered everything up before we started making preparations for the show.

  “What is that feeling, which is so essential to our survival?”

  “Boredom,” suggested the man from the Norwood News. He was a middle-aged hack who had downed his Sekt in one gulp and tried to pick up another before I whisked the tray away from him.

  “No!” said Herbert, pointing at
him with the crop. “Boredom is the affliction of the over-civilised, the idle middle classes—the diseased brains of those who have not discovered what it is to work, to create! Pah, boredom, I spit on it! No, what I bring you comes from mankind’s furthest history, it is the key to our survival and the greatness of our aesthetic power as human beings.”

  Even I was beginning to get interested now, but I did wonder if Herbert’s creation could be equal to the build-up he was giving it.

  “What I bring you, ladies and gentlemen, is the pure essence of disgust!” And with that he whipped the dust sheet off the nearest sculpture. It was painted plaster over cloth and wooden battens—Herbert was not the sort who could afford stone—but competently executed. It was not completely human, but approached humanity in some degree. The body was roughly bipedal with a forward-slumping aspect, and an unpleasant rubberiness about it. Black wings rose over it like broken umbrellas. It was in the act of feeding, and its face was buried in a mass of entrails—real entrails, I realised, remembering the butcher’s boy who had visited while I was helping with the glasses. I had assumed he was bringing cold meat or something, but of course it was the finishing touch.

  The audience gasped in unison. Some sounded more staged than others. “The monstrous, the hideously deformed, dripping necrotic ichor, squamous forms pulsating and plashing—”

  Ah, Bohemia!

  Where talent is less important than aspiration. Where to flout convention is the mark of genius. Where skill is redundant if not actually passé, and complete ignorance of artistic convention (except to mock it) is very heaven.

  We all sneer—or at least I do—at that American who sells painting courses by post with the slogan “Every Man a Rembrandt.” In Bohemia, every man is a Picasso, every woman an Isadora Duncan, a Zelda Fitzgerald or a Virginia Woolf, heaven help us.

  I met the Bohemians through a young man called Carl whom I found at the greengrocer’s sorting through the cabbages. He wanted one for a still life, and was looking for exactly the right vegetable. The greengrocer was completely baffled by this performance.

  “Too Impressionist, do you think?” he said, holding one up to the greengrocer. “What do you think, what is this cabbage trying to say to us?”

  “I don’t talk to ’em myself,” said the greengrocer, suspecting he was being made fun of.

  “Ask for a Cubist one,” I suggested.

  “What about this?” Carl said, holding up a Brussels sprout. “A miniature, perhaps?”

  I picked up a cauliflower. “Perhaps a Surrealist approach?”

  “Excuse me,” said the greengrocer. “I got customers to serve. You two can carry on outside if you want.”

  We giggled like schoolchildren and ran out together. It was the first time I had laughed since…well, for quite some time. Half an hour later we were holding hands in a tea room and still laughing. Carl had a boyish enthusiasm for life and an infectious good humour. He also mixed splendid cocktails and had divinely thick eyelashes. No, I never was the sort who would get myself to a nunnery. The dead heart comes back to life, beating painfully, dull roots stirred by spring rain.

  When Carl left school his parents offered him a choice between the law, the army, or banking. Carl chose art. Paris was daunting, but he found his niche in South London and had been devoting himself to painting with like-minded friends for more than a year. Carl needed a patron. I needed a lover. It was a perfect arrangement. I was a vamp, a vampire, feeding off Carl’s energy and joie de vivre. The transfusion gradually revived me.

  Carl belonged to an artistic set inhabiting the corners and crevices of Norwood. These soi-disant Bohemians were less talented, less ambitious, and less wealthy than their fellows in Bloomsbury and Chelsea. Lacking salons, they met in dingy apartments and cafés and jazz clubs.

  The Bohemians have a hard life; they have to listen to bad music and worse poetry, and admire one another’s excruciating artworks. There was Carl’s older friend Herbert, who sported a goatee beard and disguised his Northern accent, except when he was drunk, and another sculptor called Richard and a playwright called Gregory. There was an earnest bespectacled American called—of all things!—Chuck, who was researching an academic treatise, and a cynic called Julian alleged to be a writer. Carl said that Julian wrote lucrative filth under a pen-name. I doubted whether Julian had ever published anything, but he was a remittance man whose family paid him to keep his flamboyance away from their county.

  The women, sadly, were mainly uneducated camp followers and hangers-on, chorus girls who aspired to be dancers and the occasional slumming deb like me. My special friend was Claudia, who also wore black. She was tall and slender with long dark hair, and clung to me like an elongated shadow. She was a neurotic thing, but easy company, so long as one didn’t mind hearing about her heartless lovers and how beastly they were, in great detail. Claudia was an accomplished shoplifter and could drink any amount of wine at any hour without visible effects—both talents which impressed me greatly. When she could be bothered, Claudia was literary. She had written a series of lengthy suicide notes which she was in the process of turning into an epic poem, or a play, or perhaps an opera, depending on the day of the week.

  It all felt awfully déclassé, a step down into an inferior society. All of us in George’s coterie we were the crème de la crème; we were the finest of our kind; we were Olympian. George was a kind of miniature Zeus, a powerful ruler complete with his weakness for mortal women. Tom was a clear-sighted Apollo, master of light and arts with a Leica instead of a lyre; Jessica was virginal Athena, invincible on the tennis court, builder of cities; Daisy was Aphrodite, goddess of love unmatched in beauty. But perhaps that immortal aura which surrounds them is nothing but the glow of nostalgia.

  The Bohemians were a properly motley crew, leftovers and remnants without a first-class degree or a first-class mind among them. One needed a strong nerve to listen to some of their inane conversation, but alcohol does soothe the mind wonderfully. As do other substances; we even visited opium dens in the East End.

  They were eclectic. They lived precariously without real jobs or family money. They could not afford to dress well, so they shunned fine clothes; the boys dressed like Continental labourers, the girls like gypsies. My colourful cast-offs were soon redistributed in unlikely fashion combinations. Something always turned up to keep them in cheap wine for another week. They were truly bohemian in that they moved around at need, staying in one another’s rented rooms or houses or lofts or garrets. If anyone’s uncle or cousin had an empty property they would ‘look after’ it and it would become a kind of commune for a few months.

  I found myself hostess to a constantly changing cast of houseguests acting out their dramas around me. Carl officially occupied the guest bedroom, and the others took what rooms they could or camped out on sofas or chaises longues or floors. The housekeeper muttered darkly in her Irish brogue and cleaned around them.

  One of the boys fixed the old grandfather clock. For some reason it only chimed at midnight. Conversation stopped, the fire crackled, and the shadows seemed to quiver as though the house hesitated slightly before entering the new day, as though it might be going somewhere else. I invented a ritual which said that when the clock chimed everyone had to empty their glass and refill from the nearest bottle, and that cheered things up.

  I had, in effect, acquired an entire salon to lord it over. I was never tyrannical, but I like to feel I quashed a few of the more vividly atrocious oeuvres before they could be released on a helpless world, so I did some good.

  An old black tomcat with a ragged ear took up residence, taking advantage of the supply of scraps to scavenge and dirty plates to lick, and making himself at home. This small feline bohemian was quickly christened Griddlebone. Like the others, he was a friendly creature who would happily share a bed with anyone and forget about it the next morning.

  I did not permit Carl to use the house as a studio. That would have seemed too much like a permanent arrangement.
We kept things très casual.

  Bohemians came and went; many became disillusioned with the lifestyle after a few weeks. Free thinking and free love are wonderful things, but the lack of hot water and the irregular eating arrangements do grate after a while. The poor dears get discouraged when they haven’t discovered the meaning of life and realise that they don’t have the talent even to be a Surrealist painter. They drift back to proper jobs, marriage, and the inevitable small rented house in Penge with brown wallpaper and furniture on the instalment plan.

  They say that Elizabeth and Leicester once rowed up the River Effra as far as Hermitage Road. Now the Effra is an underground sewer carrying away all our waste. From royalty to excrement: isn’t that a metaphor for the modern age?

  I loved the Bohemians because they were harmless and determined in their resistance to the ordinary. Not one of them had a political bone in his body, and while they preached a lazy Bolshevism, none of them knew what it actually meant. Ideas were for display, not for discussion. Their only goal was épater le bourgeoisie—to shock the respectable middle classes with their unconventional ways. They dressed shockingly, they talked shockingly. They read shocking books, listened to shocking music and, when possible, saw shocking plays and films.

  They shunned brown and decorated their rooms with exciting wallpaper.

  This gave them the most tremendous airs of artistic self-righteousness and superiority. Picasso might have talent, but he had become rather— commercial, don’t you think?

  Money was always short, and we all rallied round to help one another, which is why I was playing waitress at Herbert’s studio event. It was the first time I had seen his work. Aside from the shock value of the tripe, brains, and pig’s blood which were liberally splashed around the sculptures, there was not much to it. The sculptures did not have much variation. The one he displayed was by the best, the others having a crude, unfinished look to them. In all of them the faces were covered by a wing or buried in food. Faces are always the hardest to do.