That Old Black Magic

by Cathi Unsworth

  The man from MI5 had continued to visit him and Karl came to wonder if some form of white magic had been used upon him during these interrogations about his life with Clara. For it was then that he could remember it all with such clarity.

  In the past six months, Karl’s memories had begun to unravel, along with his nerves. Long hours with nothing to do except play cards or attempt to stumble his way through the simplest books in the hospital library had provided no distraction from his limbo. He knew he was now a man with no future. But this did not incline him to revisit his past and ponder on what might have been. He knew that way was signposted madness and he wanted to keep what shreds of his sanity he still possessed for as long as he could.

  Instead, each time he closed his eyes he visited the snowy fields. His journey across them was now made with weighted feet across clinging mud. He knew he must get to the trees to attempt communication with Clara, but his path lay in darkness, with no moon to guide him at all. When he opened his attaché case, he found it empty, the radio gone. Alone in the dark, unable to communicate – it took him a while for the significance to sink in.

  It was because Clara was no longer there.

  He hadn’t wanted to believe his interrogator when he first came to tell him, back in the middle of February, that he had put a halt to the search for Clara because he had reason to believe that she was dead. But as the listless weeks dragged on, and his visits, which at least provided intellectual stimulus, became fewer, the possibility that he was being told the truth grew more persuasive. On his last night in Wandsworth prison, where he had been held since the court martial, he had a final caller.

  “Here,” his visitor said, “I thought I should return this to you. It may give you some comfort.” He placed the Baphomet on the table between them. “Though my own feelings are that it would be better for you to renounce it, so that you may face whatever is to come next with the hope of God’s mercy.”

  Karl stared at his former talisman without reaching for it. “What are you trying to say?”

  “You once told me that when you faced the prospect of jumping out of that aeroplane you were so terrified that you began to pray,” said the Chief. “You called upon God for His mercy.”

  “Ja,” said Karl, “and what mercy did He show me?” He looked around the cell walls, the barred window with the sentry outside it and back to his visitor. “Is this what you would call it? Being shot at dawn is a sign of His mercy?”

  “Tomorrow you will face a far greater peril than the firing squad,” said the Chief. “Once you have passed from this world, what will you have to face on the other side? Are you willing to let Satan take your soul for all eternity?”

  “You seriously believe that?” Karl said. Images rushed through his mind unbidden, as vivid as if he were watching a lurid film of his life. He remembered the taste of the sacrament Clara had baptised him with: a mixture of urine, blood and bitter herbs. The visions he had seen afterwards, the couplings before the altar, those men of power and commerce fornicating like the Goat they worshipped. Then, in stark contrast, he saw his church wedding, before the First War, when he was young and life was full of promise. He saw the wife he had long ago abandoned in white silk, holding the single stem of a lily as she stood at the altar, a smile on her face that was like a shaft of pure sunlight against the crimson hues of all those previous recollections.

  “I’m afraid that I do,” his interrogator’s face was sombre. “I speak only with your interests at heart. Your time here is nearly up, but you will have all eternity to find out if I am wrong. There is a chaplain here who I can call upon to assist you, if you should wish to cleanse yourself before your ordeal. You only have to say the word.”

  Hot tears sprung from Karl’s eyes without him being able to control them. He pushed the Baphomet back across the table and bowed his head. “Fetch him,” he said.

  Spooner was dreaming of Rauceby hospital for the first time since he had driven away from it, six months earlier. It was sunset, the turrets stark against the flat horizon and a red and gold sky that looked like the whole world was aflame. He was staring up at the top windows, where he knew Nicholas Ralphe was imprisoned in his pentagram. All around him he could hear the rustling of the trees that surrounded the hospital, the sighing of wind through the leaves, which gradually altered into the whine of a long-wave radio being tuned in, the crackling of static as the station was picked up.

  “This is Germany calling, Germany calling,” a voice travelling though the airwaves, clipped, aristocratic tones that Spooner had heard before, in smoky London clubrooms in 1939. “This is our first news bulletin of the day from the Führer’s headquarters in Berlin.” A voice that had begun to be heard across the land since the beginning of March, on nighttime broadcasts timed to co-ordinate with a fresh campaign of bombing in London, outlining forthcoming acts of terror between sessions from an in-house dance band. Now it was invading Spooner’s subconscious.

  In his dream, he felt the branches of the trees scratch at his face, tendrils reaching towards his feet to try to trip him. Peals of girlish laughter floated through the air as the sky darkened, laying a silvery trail through the woods.

  “Spooner!” Ralphe’s voice called out. “Don’t listen! They’re all trying to trick you!”

  Spooner looked back up. Through the window he could see Ralphe’s ravaged eyes pleading with him. Then his ankle turned on a gnarled root and he found himself falling. His eyes opened, before he landed, on the wallpaper of another boarding house room.

  Spooner pushed himself up. He was covered in sweat, his feet tangled around a sheet he had kicked half off in the night, which must have given him the sensation of tripping, but his heart was hammering as if he really had just been for a run through the woods. He glanced at the bedside table where his glasses rested on top of the book he had been reading before he fell asleep, The Witch Cult in Western Europe by Professor Margot Melvin, a tome that had no doubt inspired some of his nightmare. Within it was a description of the ritual known as the Hand of Glory.

  The alarm clock told him it was six-fifteen. As he slid out of bed to pull up the blackout, Spooner was well aware what his subconscious had been alluding to. Having been found guilty of an offence against the Treachery Act 1940, in precisely an hour’s time, Karl Kohl would be facing a firing squad at the Tower of London. Then both of Belladonna’s Beaux, as the Chief liked to call them, would be no more.

  Poor Nicholas Ralphe had died before Spooner had even finished his journey to London. He had heard the rest of the story from the Chief a week later, in the living room of his flat in Dolphin Square, where he had been welcomed back from Birmingham for a fireside debriefing over a bottle of Talisker.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you that he suffered a massive heart attack, and passed away probably no more than ten minutes after you last saw him. A man who had scored As for fitness at his RAF medical only the year before, frightened out of his wits and then his life.”

  Spooner put down his glass, the peaty aroma of mountain air floating in his nostrils. “That’s astonishing,” he said. “All of it. I mean, the man I saw didn’t look as if he could possibly be only thirty. Most of his hair had turned white and he’d the face of an old man. How could they do that to him in such a short space of time?”

  The Chief rolled his tumbler in his hand as he regarded Spooner. “Dr Bishop told you that we had reason to work together once before on a similar case, years ago,” he said.

  “Aye,” Spooner nodded. “He seemed a bit taken aback by my ignorance on the subject.”

  The Chief shook his head. “Brusque is his usual setting, it helps to be as pragmatic as possible in his profession. But I should like to explain a bit more to you. It will help you to understand more clearly, perhaps. I regret to say that, on consideration, I may have sent you out into the field without adequate ammunition for all you have faced out there.”

  Spooner felt the colour rising in his cheeks. Instead of a cosy firesid
e chat, he had been expecting to be hauled over the coals for losing Anna and tangling with Houlston. He lifted his glass for another drop of courage, in case this was the prelude to a roasting.

  “A few years after the First War,” said the Chief, “I began employing an unusual young man to infiltrate a group I considered dangerous, who were meeting in the East End. It was an area he had a great deal of knowledge about, despite being a resident of Hampstead with a private income, because he was an enthusiast of both Oscar Wilde and sailors, something that he was at no pains to hide.”

  Spooner took a larger gulp than he had been intending. At the same time as it hit the back of his throat, the Chief’s bulldog, Dorothy, who had been sleeping peacefully at his feet, gave a loud grunt, as if commentating on her master’s words.

  “Indeed,” he went on, “not many of my colleagues would have had truck with such a person, but he had a genius for the work, which is all that mattered to me. He twined his way around secret societies like bindweed, sinuously and with an unnerving grip, showing nothing but the pretty flower until they were firmly in his grasp. That was, until the summer of 1923, when he appeared to vanish.

  “He had been dealing with some dangerous people and, given the way he disported himself, this was perhaps an inevitable consequence. His interests had recently taken him away from the rough pastures of Aldgate and Soho and into the rather more refined setting of St John’s Wood, where he had fallen in with a group of White Russians. He had always been fascinated with magic and witchcraft and, as an understandably lapsed Catholic, had taken some pleasure in mocking the church he had grown up in. But what these people got up to went a little beyond absinthe tea parties. Because he was such a social chameleon and so good at making the right impression, he was rapidly promoted through their ranks and chosen to assist a Magister Templi in performing a serious ritual.

  “News of this came back to me through various sources, and I couldn’t help but blame myself for putting him in such peril. I sought out experts in white magic, who convinced me to look closer to home for the missing man and indeed, when I finally tracked him down, it was to his own house. He had boarded himself up in the attic in similar circumstances to those in which you found the unfortunate Ralphe. There was nothing I could say to convince him to come out of his pentangle, so, as Dr Bishop was, and still is, the best psychiatrist I know, I asked him if he could help try to restore this young man’s sanity. In doing so, we learned the full extent of what he had been through. Believe it or not, he claimed to have seen a demon conjured up in St John’s Wood.”

  The Chief noted Spooner’s expression and leaned forward to refresh his empty glass.

  “The ritual he described to us was very similar in its detail to the ordeal Ralphe was made to go through last Hallowe’en – or Samhain, as the followers of Satan would call it.”

  Spooner put his glass down carefully. “You mean, Ralphe said he saw a demon too?”

  The Chief’s blue eyes held Spooner’s in an unwavering gaze. “Ralphe said he saw the Goat of Mendes manifest in a temple in the grounds of a house on the Worcestershire borders which you and I both believe to be Hagley Hall.”

  “But Ralphe told me didn’t know De Vere. That was when he started to get really agitated and…” Spooner began.

  “I know,” his companion cut him off. “Which tallies with my previous experience. After undergoing such an ordeal, the victim finds himself unable to speak of the person who put him through it. It may be that is part of the enchantment they believe they have been placed under, or, more likely, orders they have received while under a state of hypnosis. What he saw could have been the work of a trained magician. As Norrie no doubt told you, such masters of illusion can fool hundreds of people that they are seeing an elephant disappear in front of their eyes, so to conjure up a demon in circumstances over which they had complete control is entirely possible. In both cases, Dr Bishop assisted in trying to break the spell by having them renounce Satan, the fear of whom was the root cause of any messages, subliminal or otherwise, that had been planted in their minds. And in both cases, the shock of doing so was what caused the premature ageing that you witnessed in Ralphe. The only explanation I can offer you is that the mental trauma they have endured is the equivalent to severe physical torture.”

  “What happened to your other man?” Spooner trusted himself to raise his glass again.

  “He survived, and has since become a priest,” the Chief replied. “Though, of course, only the Church of England would have him.” At his feet, Dorothy gave another loud grunt.

  “So what happens now?” asked Spooner. “Will you be questioning De Vere?”

  The Chief put his glass down. “Would that I could,” he said. “But I’ve not had any luck locating him. He’s not to be found at his Chelsea residence nor Hagley Hall, and though his parents, the Earl and Countess, took themselves off to stay with friends in New Hampshire before Christmas, he didn’t join them there.”

  “This past Christmas?” said Spooner. “The same time that Clara went back to Germany?”

  “Yes,” said the Chief, staring into the fire. A shadow stole across his face, making him look older and more wearied than he had only moments before. “That is a rather chilling coincidence, isn’t it?” He looked back at Spooner. “Look, if all this puts you off undertaking any further work for my department, I will fully understand and return you to your previous duties with my commendation.”

  Spooner shook his head. “It’s a lot to take in,” he admitted. “But d’you really think I did a good enough job back there? Make no bones about it, Chief, did I no’ botch the whole thing up letting Anna go?”

  The older man smiled. “Not a bit of it, Ross. You returned every bit of faith I had in your adaptability. And I see you have kept this new look of yours.”

  Spooner looked down at his tweeds. “Maybe it’s something I picked up from Norrie’s world, a bit of stagecraft, but I feel more at home like this. Can you understand that?”

  “I have an inkling,” said the Chief. “How did you like working with Norrie?”

  Spooner frowned. “I enjoyed it all right. But I don’t think it’s quite right for me,” he said. “See, there was another thing occurred to me in Birmingham. All the best pieces of information came my way from women. I don’t know if this get-up makes me more approachable, but I got on better with the fairer sex than I ever have before.” He swirled the whisky in his glass. “I think women are the key to this work. They’ve their own secret networks, away from the world of men. I think they let me in on some of that because I didn’t look like authority to them. And I’ve an idea of where I might continue to do this work a little less conspicuously. Somewhere I think I’d blend in and be privy to more information that could be of interest. In fact,” he saw again the magazine rack by Mrs Smith’s fireplace, “it was a woman I met in West Bromwich gave me the idea…”

  Spooner pulled up the blackout. Dawn was bathing the terraced roofs of Ancoats in sunlight. These digs were not as nice as High View and neither was the landlady a patch on Janet; but they were still better than what he’d left in Woodstock. From here, it was just a short tram ride to the city centre, where he had recently begun his new job as Assistant Editor on the spiritualist publication taken by Mrs Smith and hundreds more like her across the land: Two Worlds magazine.

  Spooner had begun submitting articles to the editor, Ernest Oaten, shortly after his debriefing with the Chief. Short pieces drew on the subject he had discussed with Anna: his knowledge of folklore and traditional songs and how heartening it was to remember these during the current conflict. Oaten had enjoyed them enough to offer him a regular column and invited Spooner to visit his office, at the Spiritualists’ National Union building on 18 Corporation Street, where he ran a frugal operation with the help of one elderly secretary and the typesetter and press operator in the union print shop below.

  During the course of a long conversation there, and subsequently at Oaten’s club on
Deansgate, Spooner had expounded on his bookish background and occult interests. From then on, his contributions to the magazine and visits to Manchester became more frequent, until he had persuaded Oaten to give him a job. In return for learning how to run a publication, Spooner had offered his services free, getting paid only for his articles. So far, it had proved interesting and enjoyable, a beneficial arrangement to all concerned.

  On a day that, for him, was still so full of promise, he felt a strange kind of sadness as he looked out – a day which Karl Kohl would see very little more of. After all, it was only Kohl’s bad luck that had brought him here.

  The last glimpse Karl had this morning, as he was escorted the short distance between the armoured car and the long, narrow wooden building that was his final destination, was of 900-year-old battlements, two rounded towers between walls fifteen-feet thick and ninety-feet high. Beyond that, the gothic spires of Tower Bridge glinted in the sunlight, carrying traffic to and fro across the water, unheeding of his fate. He breathed in his last few lungfuls of fresh air – although, being London air, it was suffused with smoke, sulphur and the watery miasmas of the Thames. Surrounded by soldiers of the Scots Guards, only the ravens and the gulls that wheeled overhead witnessed his progress into the miniature rifle range between the Bowyer Tower and the Flint Tower.

  Once inside this sinister hangar, smells of wood and sawdust filled his nostrils, and something else lingering there: a combination of fear and death waiting, a potent aroma he recognised at once from the trenches. At the end of the range, he could see the marks previous firing squads had made on the brick walls.

  Because of his broken ankle, Karl was not tied to a post like previous men in his position had been. Instead, a sturdy brown Windsor chair awaited him. The men who tied him to it did not look at Karl’s face, but one pressed a hand on his shoulder for a moment before he moved away, and another placed a canvas hood over Karl’s head in order that he could see no more, before pinning a target to his chest. He could only hear their departing feet, the click of their rifles as they loaded their ammunition.