by F. G. Cottam
Eventually, when I had listened to as much information about wine auctions as I was prepared to, I just came right out with it and asked him. And he smiled with a smile that stayed remote from his eyes. And he said, ‘It’s a contract, Miss Gibson-Hoare.’
And, puzzled, I asked would he take it off and let me look at it, properly, out of the crepuscular shadows of my father’s cellar.
And he said, you don’t understand. Wearing it is part of the contract I committed to. And taking it from my wrist now would be more than my life is worth.
And I believed him. Quite simply, in the stillness and the gloom down there, I knew he was telling the truth. And I wanted to know more, about the runic mystery, about whatever deal had been struck, and with whom. And over time, he began to tell me. And I met other acolytes. And I attended the ceremonies and saw the extraordinary things I’ve seen. And then Dennis introduced me to Klaus Fischer and I heard about the ambition Fischer had and what he apparently dared to attempt. And, of course, I met Aleister Crowley.
And I was lost, I’m tempted to write. Because sitting here in my room in Fischer’s morbid temple of a house, I feel trapped and compromised and even terrified. We are a few hours away from tonight’s feather banquet. It will be another tawdry and indulgent affair. I don’t honestly think the reckless energy, that contagious impulse of attraction, is there for the evening to descend into outright orgy. But on the strength of last night’s antics, it promises to be sordid enough. The cruel American and the wounded exhibitionist, Göring, will be in celebratory mood. I think that Crowley is bored, which is dangerous. We might see more unstable miracles than the little ones he performed for us today. It is Fischer’s show, this. But Crowley is obviously jealous that the spotlight isn’t his. I don’t think he would try to sabotage the ceremonial, it would be far too dangerous. But his mischief sometimes seems barely his to control. I can’t understand why Fischer allowed him to come. Unless his invitation was a deliberate and symbolic gesture of Fischer’s assumption of superiority.
If the ceremonies go as planned, Fischer will spawn a beast that will, in gratitude, endow him with great knowledge and enormous influence. Do demons understand gratitude? Is an abomination summoned to the earth filled with a sense of obligation to any man? At the least of it, it strikes me as a volatile bargain. But it won’t now be effectively struck, I don’t think. And not because of Crowley’s showy meddling. The spawning will not take place because the final ceremony depends upon the sacrifice. And the sacrifice will not take place.
Because I intend to save the child.
There, I’ve written it. And it wasn’t even terribly hard to do. The truth is, I think I’d resolved to try to save the boy the moment I saw him. I’ve been thinking about the mechanics of it, subconsciously at least, every moment since then. At first I thought I might be able to enlist the help of the sad-eyed pugilist, Giuseppe, in my plan. But I asked the American duellist at lunch about Mr Capone of Chicago and, after hearing some of his stories concerning Capone’s exploits, I doubt there’s a heart in my new friend Joe to appeal to any more. So I’m alone.
Fischer has charged me with a commission. He wants me to use his camera to take a portrait photograph of each member of his coven. And himself, of course. It is to be formally staged, the subject seated on the throne Fischer is supposed to occupy tomorrow evening during the horn banquet and the sacrifice to follow. I’m to take the pictures before lunch and to present him with the undeveloped film afterwards. He has a Rollei camera, which is an excellent tool for the task of taking what will amount to thirteen snapshots. A volunteer will have to take mine. After lunch I intend to slip away and see if I can find where it is they are keeping the boy. I have to find him today. I fear tomorrow will be too late. And I feel that the longer it takes, the likelier it is that my courage might fail. If there is a God, God help me now.
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, concea
led 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
Nineteen
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 act
or, 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.
