He said this with a fruitier than usual rumble in his voice. I was in two minds how to respond to it. Here was a man who had once annoyed and tantalised me in equal measure with the straight-faced claim to have seen, and handled, a lavishly bound Hodder & Stoughton collaboration between the two Arthurs, Machen and Rackham, entitled The Great God Pan in Kensington Gardens. Nobody in their right mind would really believe it existed, but he knew damn well that I would want it to, so he had sown the seed.
“A de Sade,” I heard myself saying, “illustrated by Austin Spare? That was an invention of Kyril Bonfiglioli wasn’t it?”
“You think so? Well I’ve seen the book in question, a goatskin-bound large paper copy, hand-decorated in pen and watercolour by Spare throughout. The most staggering depictions of demonic sex magic I have ever seen. And don’t waste your time fishing for more information, because I am sworn to secrecy, and my very faint, and fading, chance of ever being allowed to see it again depends on me keeping my mouth shut. So you do the same, or you’ll never darken my door again.”
I knew when to change the subject.
“How did you come to know Midnight’s real name, anyway?”
“I knew someone who was close to him. No one you would know. Remember that Machen story, ‘Out of the Picture’? About an artist who paints landscapes full of horror and doom inhabited by a twisted figure that seems to be able to emerge into the real World. Well I’m pretty sure Machen based the painter on Youlden.”
“Did they know each other, then?”
“I don’t know, but I do know Youlden did other drawings for Machen stories, because I’ve seen some.”
There was no hint of a fruity chortle this time. He seemed to be stating a fact.
“You’re familiar with the Knopf Ornaments in Jade?” he went on. “Lavish thing isn’t it? Three blank sheets before you even get to the contents at the front and three more after the limitation and signature at the back. That is to say six sides, or what the ordinary reader calls ‘pages’, in each case, making twelve in all.
“Well, I’ve seen a copy with all twelve ‘pages’ decorated by Youlden—ten full-page drawings, one for each story, a frontispiece and an elaborate end piece or colophon.
“They were all remarkable, but some, ‘The Idealist’, ‘Witchcraft’, ‘The Ceremony’ and ‘Midsummer’, were very unpleasant. And the one for ‘The Holy Things’ didn’t deal with even the ‘90s Machen’s idea of ‘Holy’.
“It must have been a commission from a private collector. One thing I do know; if the sample John Lane saw had been anything like the Jade drawings, he would have had a coronary. They were in many ways similar to your description of the drawing at Bullingers: no clear distinction between animal, vegetable and mineral; loathsome-looking creatures performing ritualistic—I might almost say Eucharistic—actions in spaces that were mid-way between constructions and half-natural, or rather decidedly unnatural, growths.
“There was just one, for ‘The Ceremony’, that was set in a normal room; a child’s bedroom. The child was asleep in a big four-poster bed. Something long and thin with its head and limbs in subtly wrong places had come through a kind of living orifice in the wall, and was standing over the bed. The idea of it reaching out and touching the child was so unpleasant my flesh crawled. It struck me as strange that he hadn’t depicted the central event of the story, but some childhood experience not even referred to. It was the only one that had anything more than the title written below it. Youlden had written in pencil, The Alala.
“That was odd in itself, because that is a reference to ‘The White People’, not to anything in Ornaments in Jade!”
“Was it a penchant for the occult that made Youlden choose a pseudonym like Midnight?”
“No, I don’t think so. Apart from the obvious fact that it made his initials the same as Arthur Machen, I think he may have chosen Adam Midnight because it also resonated with the name of someone who may have been an intended collaborator, a writer called Owen Maddock.”
“Never heard of him.”
“I’m not surprised. He was spectacularly unsuccessful; Celtic mysticism, sub-Machen stuff, but not without interest. A few people have heard of a couple of his poems; ‘Epsilon’—very pessimistic, with a supposedly hidden meaning I’ve never deciphered—and ‘Sabazius’, on the Thracian Mysteries. I actually keep a list of some of his works here on the desk in case something turns up. The Island in the Sunset, A Coracle of Glass, The Luminous Union, The Tavern of Elysium and The Night Before Winter.
“I’ve never had so much as a glimpse of any of them. He was born in Caermaen, and moved to London with high hopes of a writing career; had a hard time of it, evidently. Suffered some sort of nervous breakdown and came close to suicide. Something stopped him and he went back to Gwent; stayed with a local family called Howell; a father and daughter. The father supposedly had in his possession a stone head with some sort of oracular power, and a diary of a girl that had inspired Machen’s ‘The White People’.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because Maddock wrote a pretty fantastical account of it, and subsequent events, in a slim volume of fifty-odd pages called The White Road. That title I don’t have to have written down, because I have a copy of it; I’ll dig it out and let you read it. Some of the descriptions resemble Youlden’s drawings. Cross-fertilisation, I suppose. It’s hard to say who influenced whom.
“Anyway, Youlden just vanished one day, and very little was made of it. Can you imagine if any of the really well known book illustrators from the time had ever just disappeared off the face of the Earth? They’d still be writing about it today.”
When I asked why Youlden was not better known, he was uncharacteristically tight-lipped.
Rupert proved true to his word, and in due course sent me the Owen Maddock volume. It was a modest affair, in paper wrappers, but well enough printed.
The contents were broadly similar to that recounted by Rupert up to the return to Gwent. It was the following part that I found most fascinating. Owen returns to his birthplace in Gwent, and stays with a Professor John Howell and his daughter Morwyn. At first his stay is idyllic, but he begins to suspect that father and daughter are conniving in keeping secret dark dealings with the Twlydd Teg.
Following their method, Owen uses a stone head, “The Brute Stone”, to cross over, and has to be rescued by Morwyn. The account of the faery realm was written with such conviction and detail—much of it disturbing—that I found it strangely persuasive.
It made me want to know more, but accessible sources on the life and work of Phillip Youlden proved limited and repetitive. What little they said was either wrong or already known to me, except for the tantalising snippet that he had exhibited once in a joint show with John Austen, Harry Clarke, Alan Odle and Austin Osman Spare at the Osney gallery in the 1920s. I managed to locate a copy of the catalogue by library loan, but was disappointed to find only two works by him were illustrated, and they were fairly tame subjects, based on classic stories for children, quite unlike Chapel.
After that the necessities of earning a living intruded, and for a while the matter ceased to be at the forefront of my mind.
It was a sad event that changed this. Rupert Gildney died quite suddenly.
The funeral was a dismal affair. It rained incessantly. One of those occasions where the ritual of casting earth into the grave left more mud on the mourners’ hands than on the lid of the coffin. There were drinks and sandwiches afterwards, with everyone unsure of the right mood to strike. Strident laughter was as common as muted conversation.
If we should judge a person by their friends, the gathering made a case for Rupert being a pretty remarkable person. I had the feeling that at any moment I might have been amazed, educated, seduced or murdered, or all of them at once.
I was approached early by a large, florid woman trying to look much younger than she was, and failing valiantly. She seemed to have attained a remarkable degree of inebriation in
so short a time. She introduced herself as Nicola Ottoway.
“Dear Rupey was quite insistent that we meet. He said you are interested in Adam Midnight.”
I was about to reply when someone called for silence and launched into a rambling impromptu speech about the deceased that bordered on the embarrassing. My attention was further distracted by a decidedly peculiar-looking individual in ragged period costume gorging himself on the buffet. It was difficult not to speculate whether he was one of Rupert’s more “iffy” book sources, or even a sexual fling.
I almost asked who he was, but something about him made me think better of it, and a few moments later he was not to be seen.
I made a couple of attempts to talk to Ms. Ottoway after that, but she was always in conversation.
As I left, though, she pressed a piece of paper into my hand.
“Give me a call, and we’ll arrange when you can come round for a drink and a chat.”
I was, to say the least, wary. Rupert had tried to play matchmaker before; his complete lack of interest in women meant that his choices had been utterly disastrous. I suspected I was being set up.
However, the lure of the artist’s name, so redolent of darkness and secrets, was too strong. Armed with a ready excuse to leave at short notice, I duly arrived at her house, and soon found that I had done Rupert a grave injustice. He had not been up to his old tricks. Nicola Ottoway really had known “Adam Midnight”.
A drink was the first order of the day. Or rather another drink in her case. She was well gone already.
“I knew his real name was Phillip, of course, but I always thought Adam Midnight suited him better—all that beautiful hair and dark good looks. He was getting on when I met him, much too old for me, but I was smitten. Of course he wasn’t interested in me. It crossed my mind at the time that he might be gay. Still, you can’t choose who you fall for, can you? I hung around. You could say that I became an interested observer.
“His indifference wasn’t because he was gay, as it turned out. It was just that he didn’t fancy me. He ended up falling for some weird folk singer, or pop star or something, hideous woman with a foreign name.
“What was I about to say? Yes, people don’t talk much about Adam because unpleasant things tended to happen around him, and around his pictures.
“For instance, I bet Rupey didn’t tell you how he came to burn a book, did he? I didn’t think so. The “Crown Prince of Bibliophiles”, Rupert Gildney, of all people, burning a rare, beautiful book, would you believe? Yes, and it was a Youlden.”
She paused to refill her glass.
“When Rupert was a young man, just starting out in the trade, he came across a folio-size sketchbook of drawings by Adam, The Mad God’s Call.
“Mesmerising stuff, he claimed: strange creatures, some of them with goaty bits, cavorting in desert landscapes. Meaningless strings of words written around the border of every page. Just the kind of horrible, weird stuff people like Rupey seem to be attracted to. Don’t understand the appeal myself. Well, he sat drinking and looking at the book—Rupey always drank too much—and he tried reading out the words. You know, aloud.
“He said he felt strange, and fell asleep, and had an unpleasant dream, very vivid. He was running through woods at night, under a bright moon. I remember he said that vines were sort of coiling up the trees like snakes as he passed, and there were wild animals running with him. Not ordinary ones, leopards and bears and such. He said he’d never felt so alive.
“He was chasing a woman who was wearing a kind of white robe. Caught her. Saw absolute terror in her eyes.”
“Not the sort of dream I would expect Rupert to have,” I couldn’t help saying.
“I know, but it wasn’t an ordinary dream, according to him. He wouldn’t say any more about it in detail, but there was a report of an attack on a girl in a public park, and one of the papers was rotten enough to publish a picture of her. He took one look at it and immediately tore the sketchbook up and burned it.
“Of course when he had time to think about it, he regretted it. It had just been a coincidence, he said, but coincidences tended to happen where Adam was concerned; and worse.
“He grew up in South Wales, and as a child he befriended a local boy who was—well, you know—we’re not allowed to say ‘deformed’ these days are we? Badly disabled, shall we say? The kid evidently had a very odd appearance and even odder ways. He whistled to himself and muttered all the time, and laughed about nothing. Evidently he was an altar boy, though, very devout, and absolutely obsessed with the Mass, always mumbling about eating the body and blood of God all the time. What was it Adam said they called him? Plentyn newid. The Change Child. That was it. The Change Child.
“No one else would have anything to do with him, but Adam evidently loved him. They were inseparable. Played at the Mass with Adam as the priest and the Child serving. And other games involving local children. One day the Change Child did something to one of them that got him locked up in a secure mental hospital. Adam was given an alibi by a local girl, so he didn’t become involved.”
She paused for a refill.
“All of Adam’s old studios are still haunted, did you know that? Dark, twisted shapes processing round and round in a circle in the middle of one; something that rises up, slowly revolving and howling, out of the floor in another. I can believe it.”
“Stories of that kind have a way of taking on a spurious life of their own,” I offered.
“Oh yes? Well it’s a different matter when you’ve seen for yourself, when something happens to you.”
She lit a cigarette and sucked in the smoke hungrily.
“One day when I was staying near the house he was sharing in Wales—on a visit, just hoping I suppose—I called in on Adam when his ugly, weird girlfriend was away somewhere. I walked into the basement, which Adam was using as his studio at the time, without knocking. The air was thick with the smell of something burning on a brazier. We were always smoking or inhaling something or other, but I didn’t recognise it. Very unpleasant.
“And there was a sort of television screen on, too. No, there were no televisions that big in those days, were there? I suppose it was a projector screen, shiny and flickering, showing film of countryside, I think.
“I don’t know why it was on, because he wasn’t watching it. He was working, drawing a still life. He worked with all kinds of peculiar things, to introduce unusual details into his pictures: objects he’d found, fragments arranged as still life subjects, and so on. This seemed to be a big statue, or sculpture of sorts. A modern type of thing, as if a disciple of Giacometti had ditched metal and worked in white marble. A life-size stick figure in white marble. I thought it must have come from the garden, because it had discoloration in places, and clumps of moss on it. And I remember it had rough, horny protuberances like coral sticking up like a crown on its head, and the most remarkable greenish, facetted crystal the size of a fist embedded in its chest, as if it had been fired into it and stuck there. I thought how typical it was of Adam to find something so unusual, and wondered what part it would play in some projected painting.”
She stopped and crossed to the sideboard, poured herself another drink without offering me one. When she gulped it, the glass rattled against her teeth.
“Then it turned its head very slowly and blinked its eyes like a sloth. Made a sort of noise, stepped forward and raised an arm, or whatever it was. Very smoothly—horrible. It was alive. It walked towards me. After all these years I can’t stop seeing it and hearing the noise it made.
“Adam was furious. I’ve never seen him so angry. I just got out. I had to get out. We never spoke of it. I’ve never been able to forget it, but I’ve never understood exactly what it was I’d seen.”
She became distracted, and I left soon after.
It was fascinating, but I had a living to earn. The necessities of everyday life intruded, and for a while the matter faded from the forefront of my mind.
Then
Rupert’s estate was sorted out, and I found he had left me a few things.
I was surprised and touched. It could hardly have been the modest business I had brought his way that merited such generosity. I could only conclude that our conversations over tea had been as congenial to him as they had been to me.
There was a copy of that Selected Poems of Swinburne illustrated by Harry Clarke, inscribed with typical depth of knowledge:
Sorry this isn’t one of the two copies that Clarke had the suppressed drawing bound into, laddie!
Rupert.
He also left me what I thought must be a supply of his Romeo y Julieta Cuban cigars, but the box had been reused to hold a small stone carving of a head, and some photocopied pages of written text.
The carving was rather ugly, not at all to my more classical taste, but it was certainly interesting, and clearly old, despite the rather modern fluid lines.
Turning to the pages, it was immediately apparent that they were not Roger’s handwriting. I was a little relieved that he had not seen fit to burden me with a record of scurrilous gossip from the book trade or, even worse, some intimate memoir.
The contents were far more interesting. The writer, clearly a child, was describing how her nurse told her of a lady who cried at happy things, and laughed at a funeral, and that when she did so she was doing a very important ceremony for those who understood that good could be bad, and bad good, and that only special people could understand, and that was the secret of the Comedies. She said the White People sometimes took human babies and left their own babies in exchange, and there were people who could live and walk in both worlds without humans knowing. Their work was very secret, and they were called something that meant “Interpreters”.
The pages had clearly been copied from a diary very much like that described in Machen’s ‘The White People’. Such a work had also been described in Owen Maddock’s book, and there had been mention of a stone head.
Rupert had explicitly linked Maddock with Youlden. He must have altered his will after our conversation with the intention of encouraging me to pursue the connection.
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