With Stubb urging him on, and both of his arms outstretched like a tightrope walker’s, Wells staggered down the tunnel, repeatedly banging his head on the roof, and trying desperately to see more than a foot or two ahead. Through the grimy thick goggles, everything was murky and shadowed, like looking up from under a dirty pond, and the hood made hearing almost as hard. The journey seemed endless, under the stifling hood, and by the time they emerged into the British trenches again—Wells could have kissed the sign that said Euston Square Station—Wells was ripping at the top of his mask and gasping for fresh air.
Stubb and the others snatched theirs off, too, but held them tight until they had ascertained that there was no hint of gas in the air. The sun was shining bright—what a blessing!—and Wells, closing his eyes, put his face up to it, just to feel the unaccustomed warmth.
“Good God, old man! You’re alive!” Lillyfield exulted.
Stubb, crouching down, quietly unwrapped another Victory lozenge, and offered one up to Wells, who declined. They were almost as bad as the chemicals in the hood.
“I’ve received such a blistering communiqué from Colonel Bryce in London, it’s a miracle I wasn’t taken out and put before a firing squad.”
“For what?” Wells managed to get out.
“For what?” Lillyfield exclaimed, incredulously. “For losing H. G. Wells, that’s what! For being entrusted with a national treasure and getting it buried under a ton of mud. We were dispatched just to retrieve your mortal remains, at any cost. And what’ve we done instead? Rescued you, the living specimen himself, and from a bunch of damn ghouls at that!”
“Those ‘damn ghouls,’ as you call them, saved my life.”
“What?”
“They saved my life. After the German grenade went off, it was the Tommy who pulled me out of the tunnel.”
The two sappers, leaning with their rifles against the wall, were immediately dismissed by the captain. Plainly, this was nothing he wanted them to hear.
“And the Frenchman, I’m told, was the one that got me breathing again,” Wells went on. “He was the first one you shot.”
Lillyfield was silent.
“The German—his name was Friedrich—I gather you caught up to him, too.”
“We did.”
Wells debated saying something about the trove of information that the German officer had been imparting, but thought better of it. Either what he’d been told was utter balderdash, the ravings of a deranged deserter—in which case it was all best kept to himself—or it was of such great significance that it would need to be guarded at the highest levels of security. That was a call for Colonel Bryce to make. The notebook was still safely nestled inside his jacket, but it would need to be translated and its contents carefully studied.
As for the letter to Miss Chasubel at Guy’s Hospital, that was different. In gratitude to one of the men who had helped to save his life—one of the despised, and now slaughtered, ghouls—he would deliver that himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“The Earl of Boleskine?” Mrs. Marsden said, looking up from the pages Rebecca had turned in for editing. “Seriously? You saw him there? You talked to him?”
“Yes. Why?” It was just a bit of color that Rebecca had decided to add to her piece about the Machen lecture, especially as the evening had been so truncated by the zeppelin raid. “Is it important? I can easily take that part out, if you prefer.”
Slipping her glasses back up the slope of her nose, Marsden said, “Why would you take out your brief encounter with the wickedest man in the world?”
“Pardon?”
“The Beast 666.”
“Who?”
“The Great Satan himself. Does none of this ring a bell?”
“I’m afraid it does not.”
“Aleister Crowley.”
Ah, at last—that name did. Although unaware of the other monikers, she did know him by his proper name, if “proper” was a word that could ever be attached to a man of such vile reputation. A notorious libertine and self-proclaimed magus, author of pornographic (and thus largely suppressed) poetry and prose, Crowley cut a scurrilous figure on the London, and even international, scene, and Rebecca kicked herself for not recognizing who he was.
“But the Scottish accent? The clothes?”
“Crowley has more getups than a circus clown,” Marsden said. “More impostures, more poses. He bought an estate in Scotland, not far from Loch Ness, called Boleskine House, and went there with his followers—he always has some, usually depraved young women and lost young men—to practice his arcane rites and rituals.”
“Are you talking about the Golden Dawn?” Rebecca asked. The secretive spiritual order had its own reputation for occult mumbo jumbo, though it included W. B. Yeats, among others, as members.
“Not exactly. That whole world is an especially fissiparous one”—Marsden sniffed—“with allegiances changing daily. It’s all hocus-pocus and nonsense, of course, but Crowley manages to keep his name before the public.”
“A charlatan, then.”
“I didn’t say quite that. For all the foolishness, he is a serious man, and in some ways I suspect a dangerous one. I would not want to cross him.”
Her last words stirred something in Rebecca, something with which she was all too familiar. A challenge. What was it about this self-styled Scottish nobleman that inspired such trepidation, even in people as hardheaded and down-to-earth as Dora Marsden?
“Perhaps I should write something more about him,” Rebecca mused aloud. “Interview him even?”
“Not by my authority,” Marsden replied. “I would never send a Christian into the lion’s den.”
“Who says I’m a Christian?”
“I’m saying he’s the lion.”
After responding to Marsden’s edits on the Machen piece, and making the necessary changes, Rebecca used the office files to find out something more about Aleister Crowley. Apparently, the magazine had reviewed a performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salome that Crowley had orchestrated—“salacious as it is inane, overblown as it is underwhelming” was the verdict—and in the editorial notes she found a number of interesting details: Born into a wealthy brewer’s family, who were members of a strict religious sect called the Plymouth Brethren, he had rebelled against their teachings, dropped out of Cambridge just short of earning his degree, and traveled the world as a mountaineer. All of this before he became the master magician, or Scottish earl, he fancied himself today. Most importantly, she found, jotted into the file, his address in London: 67 Chancery Lane.
She could be there in under an hour.
It was late afternoon when she left the office, and the sky was a sulky gray. By the time she arrived at the townhouse Crowley occupied, it was nearly dark, which made the tall narrow house, painted black from roof to cellar, even more ominous. All the curtains were drawn, and the iron railing separating the stairs from the sidewalk was prominently spiked. For a moment, she wondered if she should even knock on the door, but then she thought, I’ve come all this way—why falter now? All the way there, she had been formulating her questions—What did he think of Arthur Machen’s abbreviated speech? Did he accept that the story of the Mons angels was a fiction? What exactly had he been declaiming from the lectern, in some indecipherable tongue, while the zeppelin was thundering overhead and dropping its bombs? And beyond all that . . . how had he known to tell her to sit in the middle of the hall? She didn’t fully accept that it was all a matter of acoustics. It was as if he had anticipated the explosion somehow.
Mounting the front steps, she saw a curtain to one side of the door part an inch, emitting a sliver of light, before closing again. And when she banged the knocker—shaped like the head of the Medusa, with a swirl of snakes for hair—she heard a rustling in the vestibule. The door gave a theatrical creak when it opened, and standing there, in a diaphanous gown and holding a candle in one hand, was a young woman with bright scarlet lips and a fall of long black hair over o
ne shoulder. Rebecca’s first thought was of the belle dame sans merci.
“You were expected,” she said, languidly waving her inside.
“I’m afraid I was not,” Rebecca said. “And this is terribly rude of me, simply to appear without—”
“You were expected,” the woman repeated, closing the door with a decided thump. Behind her rose a steep staircase with a curving banister.
“My name is—”
“Rebecca West,” she heard from the landing, as a man in a long ivory-white caftan came into view. It was unmistakably the earl, but he had shed his Highland garb for the look of a Bedouin chieftain. Mrs. Marsden had been right about his bountiful wardrobe.
“Machen enlightened me,” he went on. “He is a toiler in the same fields as you. Says your stuff is often cutting. Cutting, I like.” The Scottish brogue was gone; now he sounded like any other Cambridge toff.
He had stopped where he was, looking down into the gloomy foyer and, Rebecca surmised, making sure this image was indelibly imprinted on her mind. It was as if he were posing for a portrait.
“Circe,” he said, “where are your manners? Take the girl’s coat.”
Circe? Rebecca thought.
Resting the candle on the bottom stair, the girl held out her pale white arms and allowed Rebecca to drape her coat and scarf over them.
“Come upstairs,” Crowley said, “where I can get a better look at you.”
The idea of being inspected was not a particularly welcome one, but Rebecca followed him up, and then down a narrow hallway, lit by red-shaded sconces, with closed doors on either side. Behind them, she had the sense of other people going about their own business. Behind one, she heard a raised voice, as if in argument, behind another something that sounded suspiciously like the rhythmic hit of a headboard against the wall.
At the end of the hall, Crowley turned into a surprisingly roomy chamber—the house was somehow wider than it appeared from the street—dominated by a massive fireplace, with a roaring fire. But the heat in the room could not be attributed only to that—two radiators hissed before the curtained windows. It was like a hothouse. And leaning with one hand on the mantelpiece was the ferret-like man she had seen at the speech; with his other hand he was feeding the last of some papers into the fire. Gray ashes were flying up the flue. He turned as she entered, looking none too pleased.
“I believe you’ve met,” Crowley said. “Rebecca West, Dr. Anton Graf.”
From behind his little steel-rimmed spectacles, Graf shot an admonitory glance at Crowley, saying nothing.
Rebecca nodded, but kept her distance, taking a chair Crowley beckoned her to. It was a Georgian piece, with a stiff back, tapestry seat, and elaborately carved armrests that were finished in demonic faces. Crowley sat opposite her, in what might have passed for an oaken throne; its back was covered by a silk crimson cloth with a pentagram emblazoned on it.
“I hope I’m not intruding,” Rebecca said, “but—”
“You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t hoped to intrude,” Crowley interrupted, setting her back on her heels. But it wasn’t said with asperity so much as amusement. He was trying to keep her off-balance, just as the girl, Circe, had done, by implying that she had been expected.
“It’s just that I had not known who you were when we met the other night.”
“Ah, but I knew you,” he said. “I knew you by your essence.”
Apparently, he never let up.
“You are no Cicily Fairfield,” he said, crinkling his formidable nose. “A name fit for some garden posy. You’ve got fire and brimstone in you, like that name you purloined from Ibsen.”
He paused, while Circe, who had wafted into the room on bare feet, placed a goblet—silver, chased—of red wine on the small table to her left. At least Rebecca hoped it was red wine—in this house, one had to wonder. The girl drifted out again, as if blown by an errant breeze.
“But you’re here because you want to know what I thought of Arthur Machen’s oration.”
“Yes, among other things.”
“Arthur is a dear friend, so I say this with all the malice that only a friend can muster, but he’s behaving like a perfect ass.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Why? Why, the man has written a sensation, the equivalent of a shilling shocker, and he can’t get out of his own way. Why does he deny the story? Why doesn’t he give the public what it wants—when what it wants is to believe. Every time he opens his mouth he does himself a disservice—and me, too.”
“You?”
“I’ve devoted my life to opening the eyes of the ignorant masses, to lifting their heads out of the trough, to revealing the mysteries of this world, and the next, and here comes old Arthur, like a dray horse fit only for the knacker’s yard, braying about his perfidy.”
“But he is just being honest.”
“Try the wine,” Crowley urged, “it’s come all the way from Provence. Not much of it getting here anymore.”
Hesitantly, Rebecca sipped from the goblet. It was, thank God, nothing more than an exceedingly smooth claret, and blessedly cool. Lifting her eyes, she only now noticed the words etched in stone above the mantel where Dr. Graf still stood: “Do What Thou Wilt.”
“Honesty is one of the simplest and yet most inane of the so-called virtues,” Crowley said. “Machen should give it up.”
At this, Graf, polishing his glasses with a white handkerchief, snorted in agreement.
“Show me an honest man, and I’ll show you a man lying in the gutter, stripped of everything but the rags on his back—a fool destined from birth for just such an ignominious end.”
“The words above your mantelpiece . . .” she said.
Craning his neck as if he needed to be reminded what they were, he replied, “They are the Whole of the Law.”
“What law?”
“The law of Thelema. The philosophy I have created, and preach to my many disciples, thousands of them, the world over.”
One could not accuse him of hiding his light under a bushel. To Rebecca, the words seemed nothing more than a permission to indulge one’s basest appetites.
There was a muffled scream from down the hallway. Rebecca was startled, but Crowley didn’t so much as turn a hair.
Then there was a thump, and another, quickly stifled, from the same quarter.
“Shouldn’t Dr. Graf check to see if someone is in need of medical attention?” Rebecca said, and Crowley laughed.
“Unless that was a pig being stuck, he’d be of precious little use.”
Rebecca was confused.
“Dr. Graf comes to us from the Military Veterinary Academy in Berlin,” he explained, and Dr. Graf, plainly vexed, stepped in to commandeer the conversation.
“I am marooned here,” he declared, “by international circumstance. Nothing more. A temporary problem. But if I may be frank, I am still unclear on what has brought you to this house.”
What had brought her? Other than her innate curiosity—her mother used to remark that curiosity killed the cat, and that if she wasn’t careful, it would get her, too—there was the sense that a story of some kind, a story that she could uncover and then make known to the world, was lurking here. It was all just a matter of rooting it out.
“Beautiful young women, and gifted ones at that, need no excuse to visit my house,” Crowley interjected on her behalf.
“Let her answer,” Graf insisted.
“Who cares what has delivered her to my door? I’m more interested in what she has to say about the wine.”
“It’s very . . . refreshing,” Rebecca said.
“Because the room is so hot?”
“Perhaps.”
“I dress, as you can see, accordingly.” He plucked at the front of his caftan, but in such a way, and in such a spot, as to suggest he wore nothing underneath.
“Have you come as an acolyte?” Graf said, persisting.
“No.”
“Then as a journalist?”
“Yes.”
Graf shot a warning glance at Crowley, lounging on his throne. “Do you think this is wise?” he asked him.
“As our late friend Oscar once said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
“Your friend, not mine,” the doctor shot back, before turning toward the door, where steps were approaching. Not the barefoot steps of the maiden, but the slapping of damp leather shoes.
“Have you seen this?” Machen said, entering in a long shabby overcoat, with a rolled-up newspaper brandished in his hand. His attention was entirely fixed on Crowley.
“What is it?”
“The Times, your letter to the editor. The one in which you dispute my own account—my own account, mind you—of the bowmen story.”
“I’m doing you a favor, as I have just explained to my guest,” Crowley said, gesturing at Rebecca, who sat quietly with goblet in hand.
Machen, still in a lather, only now registered her presence, and it brought him to a full stop.
“Miss West?”
“Yes. I was at your lecture the other night, before the zeppelin so rudely interrupted.”
“And I once heard you declaim in Hyde Park, on suffrage. You were fiery and impressive.”
“Ah, but I didn’t have a finale like yours.”
“One that I’d have been happy to do without,” he said, his lank gray hair plastered to his forehead by the heat in the room. He glanced at the surly Dr. Graf, then at Crowley, and then back to Rebecca. His gaze, she noted, fell on her goblet of wine for a second. It was as if he were assessing a complex chessboard, and making up his mind what move to make.
The Haunting of H. G. Wells Page 14