by Adam Nevill
When he began to talk about ‘Max Ferdinand Sebaldt von Werth’s five volumes of Genesis, a white supremacist treatise on eroticism, Bacchanalia, sexology and libido’, she lost the thread of his argument and her thoughts wandered back and forth, in and out of the lecture, and settled on comparing his ideas about Hessen with what she’d learned from reading Miles’s book.
She’d read how the young Hessen had been obsessed by Wotanism, the pagan cults and the millenarian sects of nineteenth-century Austria and Germany – racist mystical ideas that influenced Germany’s ideas of nationality between the wars. Hessen seemed to have approached it with the same passion modern kids follow rock or rap music. But Miles had been baffled as to how it had informed Hessen’s studies of cadavers, his grotesque primitivist sketches of animal-human hybrids, and his ghastly puppet triptych of the 1930s. That interest, surely, must have come from his schooling in medicine.
But Herndl insisted that Hessen’s sketches represented ‘a middle-class reaction to the industrialization of Europe’. They showed, he claimed, how he was predicting both the bovine passivity in urban man and the loss of control and will ‘zat ve see around us today’.
That contradicted what Miles had written. According to him, Hessen eventually mocked his own youthful interests in remote and rare folk movements, and acknowledged that they marked a young outsider’s flight from mainstream culture. As did his dabbling with orientalism, hypnotism, and fascism. They were all part of his detachment and alienation from the status quo, a terrible force that he saw as the antithesis of original creativity. And as Miles had pointed out, Hessen’s drawings reflected nothing of Nazi neo-classicism, or Aryan folk art. There was nothing idealistic or mythical in his art. It drew deeply from a complicated but brilliant imagination. Or whatever it was he saw in the shadows, or looking out from the murky windows of abandoned basements.
Miles Butler believed Hessen’s disappointment with the Nazis and their nationalist occultism, after travelling to Berlin, was colossal. He’d pursued one subculture too far and hated the reality up close. Hessen never understood anti-Semitism, and Vortex championed Hebrew mysticism.
His failure in Germany and then his imprisonment signalled his final withdrawal from society, its ideas and purposes. But despite the inconvenience of prison, Miles suspected that everything he’d experimented with until 1938 was mere preparation for the Vortex. It was the source not only of his inspiration, but of nightmares, melancholia and despair too: ‘the society of tragedy’, Hessen called it in volume 4 of Vortex, which was entitled ‘A World Behind This World’.
For her to be able to contradict Otto Herndl in this way, Apryl realized with horror, meant she’d remembered far too much about the man who’d cast such a spell over her great-aunt. The painter was fast turning into an unhealthy compulsion. She could even vividly recall what Hessen had written about the Vortex, because it seemed uncomfortably relevant to what Lillian had recorded.
I just want to dip my face into it. Now and again. And to paint what I see down there. But sometimes it shows itself to me: coming through the walls, or inside a laughing mouth, behind a vacant stare, or gathering itself in a wretched place. Either I am getting closer to it, or it is drawing nearer to me. Sometimes I can feel its breath on my neck. And my sleep is filled with it. Though my conscious mind banishes it, as if it has an in-built resistance to such things. But it is always there. Waiting. When I look over my shoulder, or walk past a mirror quickly and absently, I see it. Or when I slip into a torpor, it will creep into the room like a strange dark animal looking for food.
After an hour and fifteen minutes of the lecture Apryl sat on the dirty floor, behind a sofa. While Herndl barked out the names of summoning rituals Hessen had purchased from Crowley and had performed ‘with abzolute success’, her head spun. Fatigued by the heat, the nervous excitement, and the thin, dirty air of the city, when she heard the smattering of applause and a final cessation in the bewildering broken-English monologue of the speaker, she rose to her feet to leave. But Harold was upon her before she could find her coat.
‘Leaving so soon? No, you can’t – we haven’t had our little chat about your great-aunt yet. And if you go now you’ll miss the best part – the interpretations. Or, as we like to call them, the ‘study of dreamers in a room’. You see, the Friends share their connection to Hessen’s vision through a recounting of their dreams experienced under the influence of his art. We all try and find the missing paintings via trance. People resort to all sorts of means to get within the presence of the Vortex.’
‘Really? Amazing.’ Apryl barely had the energy to speak. ‘I must get on. I have plans for dinner.’
Harold wasn’t listening. ‘You’ll see why it’s so important.’
At the front of the room, as soon as Harold called for order, a forest of tatty arms shot into the air to begin the procedure. The music was turned off. The chatter died. A shabby-looking man wearing an overcoat, and with a white chinless face and bulging eyes, was the first to take the floor. ‘I returned to the same place twice. Lit up, but not with natural light.’
There was a murmur of acknowledgement. Or was it unrest?
‘And in the gases, that were yellow, I saw the clothed face again. A tall figure briefly walked forward, at me, with its face covered in red. Then it stopped and seemed to be suddenly some distance away from me. It repeated the movement several times. Then I woke up and thought I was having a heart attack.’
Before he could continue, Harold pointed to one of the young men wearing cavalry boots and a trench coat.
‘I was in my front room fasting and had deprived myself of any visual stimulation but the Puppet Triptych IV for two days and two nights. And when I slept, I glimpsed figures about a fire. Stick figures. Some of them fell in.’
There was a great impatience in the room. They weren’t exactly dismissive of each other’s dreams or hallucinations or visions or whatever they were, but each clearly felt his or her own to be more significant.
‘. . . I saw hateful faces. Black and red with rage.’
‘. . . they looked like clowns in dirty pyjamas.’
‘. . . two women and one man, dressed in an Edwardian fashion. But they had no flesh on their bones. I couldn’t wake up or run from the two women, who were unfurling the nets from the front of their bonnets.’
‘. . . crouching on all fours, in the corner of a basement. The walls were wet, made from brick.’
Thirsty, Apryl gulped at a second glass of wine. It was a mistake. She hadn’t eaten and felt light-headed. They were all jabbering out disjointed fragments of nightmares that had punched them from sleep and into the dreary alienation of their lives. What was the point of it all? Of them? The close stale air and the woollen heat and the crazy surrealist ranting of the guests made her move once again for the door.
‘. . . teeth like an ape. Eyes completely red. But no legs. Just dragging itself about in the sawdust.’
‘. . . The whole city was blackened by fire. Ash and dust in piles. But freezing cold. No sign of life—’ The gentleman wearing a cloth cap that shadowed a purple face was suddenly interrupted by Alice.
‘And they’re all about my bed!’ she wailed. ‘They come out of the walls, you see! No use in talking to them. They’re not there for that.’
‘I object to this!’ the figure in the cloth cap roared. ‘Must she always interrupt?’
Other voices murmured their assent. Harold appealed for calm. ‘Now, now, if you please. There is time—’
But Alice was not to be stopped. ‘Swirling up, all around, with backwards noises. Up in the corners of the rooms. I saw them once before the war and they never leave you.’
Irritated, the crowd began to chatter.
Harold leant towards Alice, a tense smile on his face while his eyes flitted about looking for the dissenters in the crowd. ‘Alice, my dear, we agreed you should talk last. The others must be allowed to have their say too.’
The man who had stared at Apr
yl’s legs and offered to take her to the Hessen pubs elbowed his way towards her. His fat face was shiny with sweat and it grinned lecherously. ‘I wouldn’t bother with this lot again,’ he said. ‘You should come and see us. The Scholars of Felix Hessen. Not so dreamy. This is a circus.’ His fat fingers rustled inside a leather satchel that hung from one shoulder. He produced a flyer and pushed it at her. ‘On the hush hush, we’re breaking away. This lot won’t get anywhere. Harriet’s too wishy-washy and Harold puts far too much faith in Alice. She’s as mad as a snake.’ He laughed, unpleasantly.
On the other side of the room Alice had begun to sing ‘Roll out the barrel’ in a childlike voice. Others had begun to shout over her. Through the chaos Apryl caught sight of the little figure of Otto Herndl. His grin was wide but his eyes were full of confusion. He seemed even more unsteady on his feet, as if someone had finally severed the strings.
‘I really don’t think so,’ Apryl told the leader of the splinter group. She struggled into her coat.
‘Can I see you again?’ he said.
‘I, I shan’t be in London for much longer. I’m very busy.’ But in the din she wasn’t sure he had heard her. She turned and pushed her way to the door.
Outside, the cold air rushed in to stifle her. It seemed unnaturally dark by the tower blocks and on the main road the traffic was relentless and moving too fast. She headed towards the lit-up area, to the centre of Camden Town. She wanted to get into a normal environment with normal people, and began walking away from the unlit buildings and ugly cafes, the empty fast-food restaurants and decrepit sunken pubs.
The meeting had depressed her. She’d expected the Friends to be eccentric after reading bits of their obscure website, but this fancy-dress party with its internal politics, splinter groups, and ludicrous claims of mystical dream connections struck her as adolescent. It was all fantasy. A gaggle of misfits attaching themselves to an artist who they imagined was a representation of their own alienation. They did nothing for Hessen’s reputation, while masquerading as guardians of his legacy.
Apryl huddled deeper into her scarf and pulled the collar of her coat up, but it was as if a residue of the meeting’s surreal dysfunction still clung to her. And pulled things in.
A junkie with a dirty whitish blanket across his shoulders ran across the road at her, narrowly avoiding two cars that sounded their horns. The violence of the sudden sharp sounds startled her. She held her breath, and then felt her skin ice with fear at the approach of the beggar. His thin, ashen face was scarred with purple lumps. A scrawny woman wearing a white baseball cap waited for him on the opposite side of the road, holding a can of beer.
‘Can you spare us firty pee for a cuppa tea? Just to keep warm, like.’
She hadn’t anything smaller than a ten-pound note. Apryl shook her head without looking at the beggar and increased her pace. He didn’t follow, but she heard a long sigh of disappointment and frustration before he said, ‘Oh fucking hell.’ It wasn’t directed at her, but at the cold, relentless misery of his life. At the dirty streets, the grey ugly council housing, the bent iron railings and the dying black grass, only lit up in part by the thin orange light of the street lamps that shrunk in the dense absorbing shadows all around the edges of anything solid.
The people here didn’t need to dream of such terrible things. They lived among them.
TWENTY-TWO
Seth entered his room at the Green Man. In the dark, in the sudden stench of turpentine, he shrugged off his overcoat and let it fall to the sheets he had laid over the floor. He was almost hallucinating from sleep deprivation; felt like he could just lie down on the greasy dust sheets in his clothes and pass out. He’d been pushing himself too hard. Needed to sleep all day before the next shift. The strain of having just spent another two hours in apartment sixteen made him clutch both sides of his skull as if to still the carousel of wretchedness screaming through his mind. He thought of the blood-mired surgeons who amputated limbs for hours after battles. Reaching behind, he felt for the light fitting, then flicked the switch on. And fell against the door.
He stared at the wall over the radiator and at the section above the fireplace. At yesterday’s work, at the things he’d painted before leaving for Barrington House. They punched him to immobility and left him breathless. They’d been waiting for him to come home.
He knew in an instant that these were the sorts of things the criminally insane produced in prison, where he might very well end his days. They looked like the nightmares that make you wake up with a gasp and then leave you nervous all day.
Animal teeth filled the stretched mouths. Pupils red with pain and rage were directed right at him, the creator. And what were these things that walked on their hind legs but looked like apes with doggish faces? Hyena snouts and jackal laughter, piggish eyes and cattle-bone limbs: this was the work of a broken mind.
His genius. His attempts to mimic the work in apartment sixteen. Distorting the individual into fragments. Shattering the sense of being whole in an ordered universe. But all he had done was mortify and then shatter himself. In a cold and damning moment of clarity, he wondered if perhaps these were not images of any hidden truth, but only the suggestions of how a deeply disturbed mind sees itself.
He experienced a sudden hot desire to mutilate himself with a knife before erasing his face against a wall.
Falling to his knees, his eyes and teeth and fists clenched hard, he bit down on the hysteria that tried to burn its way up his throat. ‘Jesus, God. Jesus, God. Jesus, God. What am I?’ he muttered and then began to sob. He’d never seen so many tears. His soul was sick and melting away through his eyes.
The murk and dross inside his reddish thoughts were briefly rinsed away by the scalding salt of his grief, allowing him to think as he had once done so long ago. To know himself again for a moment. Something resembling free will, some final shred of his former self, seemed to have been washed clean. A tiny bright place within him grew in proportion to the dull mackerel light silvering the thin curtains.
But then he turned and saw the little girl with the tear-streaked face sitting up by his pillows, watching the door. Always watching the door.
He walked across to the curtains, his breath sobbing in and out of him. A small part of him still clung on to a denial that such things could exist, and on to a belief that his exhaustion was just inserting part of his sickened and subconscious mind into his waking eyes. He would open the curtains and the window and take a deep breath and then, when he turned around, that tear-stained face would no longer be looking at the door.
But when he drew the curtain, his eyes were immediately pulled down to the scruffy yard at the back of the Green Man. Beneath whatever the adjacent apartment block had been built over, it seemed that a small assembly of former tenants were looking up at him from out of hollow sockets. Behind the railings and inside the little concrete moat outside the basement flats, he saw fragments of things whitish and indistinct reaching up to claw at the cold metal bars. The angle of their heads and the movement of the papery mouths suggested to him that they had suddenly seen a curtain twitch above them, and were now eager to engage the help of whoever was looking down upon their wretched state.
He let the curtains drop and stumbled back to the bed with his eyes clenched shut. Slapped off the lights. Then curled up at the foot of the mattress and whimpered.
‘Me dad’s coming soon. He told me to wait,’ the girl said.
TWENTY-THREE
Behind the large desk Piotr moved heavily to his feet and wiped at his forehead. ‘Hello Miss Apryl. How can I help you today? Maybe the umbrella it is you need?’
It was raining again and she’d been caught in a downpour walking to Knightsbridge from Bayswater. Her mood had slipped further into the black when she’d seen Piotr grinning behind the desk. She’d been hoping for Stephen. ‘Sorry, I’m dripping on the carpet.’ Slowly, she warmed up after the chill from the wind and the heavy burst of rain outside, leaving her slightly dizzy
in the heat of the lobby.
All about her brass door handles sparkled. Glass shone on the doors and picture frames. And the thick clean carpets beneath the heels of her boots made her feel self-conscious about tramping dirt inside. This part of the building was immaculate – dust free and show-home lit – but still unable to conceal the fragrance of age that seeped down from elsewhere. The reception area was nothing but a front. Behind this little capsule of bright light and warmth she could already sense the sepia gloom of its stairwells and rotten apartments, waiting up there to frighten her. How soon her impression of the place had changed. Staying in the hotel room and taking a few days out to explore the city had given her a distance, put her back in touch with herself, and now just the merest whiff of Barrington House made her remember the fear and confusion of her nights here.
But not long now and she would be free of the place. The cleaners would be in this week and then the estate agents. After that she’d never have to come back here again. Ever.
‘Got caught in quite a storm out there,’ she laughed and patted at her hair; the rain had flattened it. ‘I never know what the weather’s doing in this city. The sky was blue when I left Bayswater.’
She kept up her smile, but the affability of the fat porter failed to put her at ease. It always felt like he was making a pass. He came around the desk and stood too close, one hand reaching out to take her elbow. ‘Please. Sit down. You must rest, no?’ His shirt seemed too tight again, as if the collar was squeezing his round head up and out of his body, and then strangling him.
She took a step to the side and placed one hand on top of the desk to regain her personal space. ‘I’m fine. Just a bit damp.’ She put her bag on the counter, patted her leather coat down and then removed her black gloves. She couldn’t avoid Piotr today; she needed him.
He maintained a constant and irritating banter. ‘You know, it is nice to be in the warm and dry, no? And I am always happy to let the beautiful ladies come inside from the weather, yes?’ He finished with a loud, excitable laugh.
