George was a remarkable man, suffused with a perfectly flammable mixture of ambition and talent. He was not an intellectual, with his Fourth Class Gentleman’s Degree gained after too many years at oxford, but he was a superb manipulator, and he knew how to claw to the top in politics. He never wasted a minute. Everything was grist to his mill, whether he was practising his common touch with porters or interrogating Lord Westbrook’s nephew about scandal over cocktails. I was his Lady Macbeth, his indispensable confidante. Of course George always planned to marry some silly mare from the right political dynasty when the opportunity arose. But I would always have been the mistress he plotted with while she was stuck with the kiddies. The two of us, contra mundum—against the world—as he always said.
Yes, I was as easily fooled as anyone by him.
You always saw George as a jolly buffoon, not a megalomaniac little boy who thought the world was his playroom. He always saw himself as the coming man, and he moved the rest of you around like his toys as it suited him. And I was delighted to be by his side, helping set things up, setting you challenges and getting you to compete with one another. He loved thinking up those peculiar forfeits for the losers.
George might have been less entertaining if he ever gained real power. He had an unhealthy fascination with death warrants. George was very much of the Young Turk tendency and thought that progress meant clearing out the dead wood—or killing it yourself. That was his idea of strong, decisive action.
Then George was directed into this Cthulhu business. Oh, he knew about Whatley before you did, but as ever he did not want to be seen as the prime mover. I found an unsigned letter in his desk suggesting to him that here was a business that he might make his name with, that it would be noted by people who matter. But he was not equal to the challenge of things from outside his little world, and the result was the catastrophe you were caught up in.
George’s funeral was a very grand affair in his people’s village. As fiancée presumptive, and hence the next best thing to a respectable widow, I was given a place of honour. I only survived by inhaling half a decanter of sherry carelessly left unguarded in the drawing room.
At least the funeral wasn’t ruined by some silly girl turning up and claiming she was carrying George’s child. It was far from impossible; politicians and philanderers just want to be adored, and it’s no wonder the two are often the same person. George did have his appetites.
I don’t remember much about the other funerals.
Afterwards I was cut adrift, lost at sea. George had been my career-plan, my future. Without him I was lost, a woman on her own.
You were still in hospital. I wanted to see you, but they stopped me. I think they were worried about your mental state, which was precarious for some time. All my attempts to visit or get in touch were gently but firmly blocked. I did, however, manage to send you Tom’s last photographs, his final proof of the reality of that creature. Perhaps it was the wrong thing to do, but I wanted you to know for sure, just as I know.
After I sent it I understood why we could not see each other again. We would inevitably remind each other of those events, and we would talk about things we should not talk about and open those wounds which we were both still recovering from, tear each other apart. Like reactive chemicals, we needed to be kept apart or destroy each other.
Poor Tom, he gave his life for those pictures. He was the doubting Thomas whose doubts were finally dispelled. Peeping Tom who was finally destroyed by what he saw.
Of course Daisy’s body was never found; nor was Jessica’s. Daniel told the police, rather disjointedly, that she had disappeared into the ground, and they naturally enough thought this must be connected with the collapse of the church. No underground holes were ever found. She was officially declared missing.
It was all over; I dressed entirely in black. I lay in bed all morning and drank my breakfast. Curious, isn’t it, that even the nastiest champagne is perfectly acceptable for breakfast, but decent Chablis is frowned upon? I read Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy for days, and listened to gloomy marches on the gramophone. I took comfort from the endless succession of pages, and things settled into a stable equilibrium. I learned to soldier on through my empty life, melancholy crystallising into a shell around me.
“Now I am strong and lapped in sorrow / As in a coat of magic mail,” as that miserable Stevie Smith woman has it.
An existence took shape around me. I still had Daniel, whom I visited every day and went some way to looking after. For that period he was my raison d’être. And poor Daniel’s raison d’être was to get Daisy back from that other world which had taken her.
A small inheritance meant that I was living in my own house. My house-keeper was a taciturn white-haired Irishwoman who came in every morning and tidied up with grim determination. She was often gone by the time I got up. I did not bother to hide the empty bottles, and she must have thought I was the very embodiment of Sodom and Gomorrah. Being wealthy meant that I was merely an eccentric; if I was poor I would have been mad and would have been punished for my moral failings.
I had been diagnosed as having a nervous condition; I was briefly incarcerated but talked my way out of it. After that, at my family’s insistence I dutifully visited a psychiatrist twice a week. If I hadn’t agreed I would have had to go back to some institution where Mummy could see I was Properly Looked After and wring her hands when she visited on Sundays. The prospect of Mummy’s middle-aged friends clucking over me and what a bad end my intellectual ways had brought was too much to bear.
So I endured Dr Hamilton’s twice-weekly inquisitions. I did not like Dr Hamilton, and as he was being paid a guinea a session, I was not too diplomatic in giving my opinions. Like all classicists, I resent how psychiatrists have commandeered Oedipus, Electra, and the others from our field. He in his turn was professional but faintly sinister, like a prosecuting barrister whose questions seem quite harmless until he suddenly turns on you. Like a barrister, I suspected he was preparing his case, a case against my sanity.
Dr Hamilton was bearded and wore a burgundy-coloured velvet jacket and a range of bowties. He was a quiet-spoken sort and maddeningly persistent in his questions. I lay on the couch while he sat out of my line of sight behind me. There was an expansive bay window on one side, but the couch was positioned so my view was filled with a blank wall decorated with African masks. The doctor quizzed me gently about my family, my upbringing, my feelings for my father, my dreams. I’m sure he sent my family back regular reports on my progress; and I’m sure they kept asking if I should be safely in an institution. For my part I was content to play Scheherazade, telling a new story every time, keeping myself out of the asylum for another day each time.
Dr Hamilton believed I had experienced something like shellshock, but as with all his type he thought the roots of the problem lay much deeper. That was why he wanted to excavate the depths of my unconscious and lay bare whatever noxious creatures lurked therein.
I dreamed of Daisy. I know Daniel did, and I expect you did too. They were not fully formed cinematic dreams with a proper narrative, but those long, slow timeless impression-dreams you get while falling asleep. There was water and a smell of sea things, damp stone, Daisy’s voice mumbling drowsily, and a very faint caress of tentacles on naked skin. They were disturbing dreams that took me down a ramp into the darker places of my unconscious. There I slid into my own particular nightmares which scared me awake. But there was something peculiarly horrible about knowing that Daisy was in there, or out there, or in any case somewhere.
Daisy always said she was psychically sensitive. Poor thing, prey as she was to any passing superstition, but in this case she must have been right. I wondered if the dreams were a form of psychic contact. I tried again and again to write down the words she was saying in my dreams, but they were more of the same formless non-language like bad Modernist poetry. Dr Hamilton was not impressed by those dreams. He preferred ones which were more theatrical and gave him greater scope
to impose his interpretations. I managed not to shout at him, but I don’t think the encounters moved me an inch closer to sanity.
I had broken with our set since what you aptly call The Horror. The deaths were simply too much: everyone simply froze when I was around, as though I were Banquo’s ghost, or else they tried to pretend nothing was wrong, which was worse. I do not mind being despised, but I will not be pitied. I felt like shouting and screaming and crying the entire time. I soon gave up seeing any of them. I gather you did too. It was at this point that I stole in and gained my illicit preview of your version of events. I wanted also to check on your mental state; it did not seem favourable for a reunion, for reasons which will become apparent.
The only thing that kept me going was looking after Daniel. I have never had much in common with him, and you have to admit he was a peculiar little chap, even for a mathematician. George and I relied on you as a translator because you were always able to follow his ideas, which are quite opaque to those of us to whom mathematics is slightly less transparent than Sanskrit.
Daniel was in an even worse state than I. Rather being in limbo, he was ferreting away at his mathematical explorations day and night. I don’t think he ever left his rooms. I brought round food parcels and made sure he ate. I ordered him to take a bath every week and threatened to bathe him myself if he didn’t. I brought a purse of pennies and sixpences to feed the gas meter and the electricity meter. I even—forgive me, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst!— did some light cleaning.
These visits gave me a purpose in life. Daniel already had a purpose in life: Daisy. She had become an even more ideal object of unrequited love, being a beautiful woman who was not now present to shatter his illusions. Even better, there were no longer other suitors to contend with. She was the princess trapped in a tower, and he alone might be able to rescue her. He had no doubt that he would achieve it sooner or later. Her knight in shining glasses, with a pen for a lance and a steed made of mathematical equations. Daniel recounted over and over what he had seen on the night of Daisy’s disappearance. George had stationed them outside the church, ostensibly to prevent anyone else from entering and to keep an eye out, but mainly to keep Daniel out of the way. George was showing signs of racial paranoia—a polite way of describing it—and was convinced that Daniel was a Semitic spy among us in league with the enemy. Fortunately he never suspected just what ran in my blood.
Daniel was happy just to be alone on a summer evening with Daisy. You must have known how much he adored her, even though they barely talked. He was her ardent, tongue-tied admirer, oppressed by how many other admirers she had. Daisy was pure and innocent, but never chaste. Tom would ask Daisy quite casually to come to his studio and pose naked—and she would oblige without batting a beautiful eyelid—but Daniel would no more think of asking her to walk out with him than he would tear off her clothes and ravish her there among the gravestones.
Daniel says they were standing quite close together, by which he means just out of arms’ reach, when there was a terrible rending, thundering noise from inside the church. He and Daisy looked at each other, and he felt the ground shiver under his feet. And instead of being on the grass, they were on that peculiar stonework—crazy paving is just the right term for it—and sinking into a sort of bowl.
Daniel scrambled on to the grass, but when he turned to give Daisy a hand she was just standing there. Daisy never was quick on the uptake. He said the stonework around her was unfolding, and even though she was in the same place Daisy seemed to be getting further and further away, and walls and buildings were growing up around her. Daniel said it was like looking through a kaleidoscope that changed as you watched. The buildings did not seem to have proper shapes—they were like trick pictures which first seem convex and then concave depending on how you look at them. Daniel called to Daisy but she was already beyond reach.
Behind her was a trap-door set at an angle to the ground, an Alice in Wonderland door that was at once tiny and immense. It opened into darkness, and as the angle changed the last Daniel saw was something, or some things, squeezing its way out, and the sight of it blanked out everything else until he found himself alone in the churchyard with the church collapsing into ruin a hundred feet away.
At the time Daniel could make no sense of what he saw through the trap-door, but he later concluded that the long feelers, the rubbery limbs with their prodigious claws, the scaly, gelatinous mass must all have been part of a single entity. It was that thing which is called Cthulhu. And Daisy was looking up and up at the being which loomed over her, a mountain of primordial slime congealed into pulsating, animated life.
It sounded truly vile, but perhaps Daniel’s insensitivity and cool objectivity shielded him when others would have collapsed into hysterics. I could not be quite so insouciant if I literally saw the bottom fall out of my world, fall into a pit filled with squirming monsters.
“And that’s exactly where she is now. You understand, there is no time in R’lyeh,” said Daniel. “It has many spatial dimensions—too many for us to perceive—but no time dimension. Everything there is frozen; there is only the impression of movement. Cthulhu exists permanently, in our past and our future.”
“A sort of tableau,” I said. I thought of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with its eternally youthful lovers always just on the point of kissing but never quite touching, its frozen, silent music. “Or perhaps it might be like a play. The play itself is eternal, but we experience it in our own time. What time is it now in Elsinore—is Hamlet alive or dead?”
“Daisy can’t be there for any length of time, strictly speaking,” said Daniel. “When she reappears no physical time will have passed. Nothing happens in R’lyeh. That thing can’t touch her. Cthulhu can’t ever leave R’lyeh.” He did not sound quite so sure of himself. Maybe even Daniel was guilty of wishful thinking. “I suppose a three-dimensional projection into time might be possible …”
“Just as Hamlet comes alive every time someone plays him?” I asked.
He gave me the look that mathematicians sometimes give non-mathematicians, which is more pity than scorn. Like Pauli’s reaction to a particularly sloppy theory: “It is not only not right, it is not even wrong.”
“But those dreams…” I said.
“Mental images of the last moment before worlds separated,” he said. “Sense impressions. Just dreams.”
Although it made no sense to me—like you, I have trouble telling advanced mathematics from raving madness—he appeared to have some grasp of how her imprisonment worked and thought she might be released. I too was aware of the risk. The way that led to Daisy led also to Cthulhu. If Daniel opened the gates for her to step back through, what rough beast might come with her, its hour come round at last?
Daniel was in thrall to Daisy’s beauty and tormented by dreams. He worked on and on, ignoring day and night. He kept going until he collapsed from exhaustion, then dreamed of Daisy until he woke and took up where he had left off. My visits were perhaps his only distraction from this cycle. I had nothing else to do, and I managed to visit at least once a day.
If he got close to a breakthrough, I wondered whether I would have to lace his meat pies with cyanide. Where does one get cyanide from now? It has become so much more difficult since those poisoning cases; even the man in Boots the Chemist knows to ask questions. As it happens foresight failed me, and there was no need for cyanide.
Sometime around then I paid a visit to you when I knew you were out, and read your account of the Dulwich Horror. I worried that you too might have Plans; it was reassuring that you were not planning anything regrettable, but I was half-sorry not to have an excuse to see you again. Even if it would be for a duel.
I let myself into Daniel’s rooms as usual that evening. He lived in a furnished top-floor flat in a converted Victorian house on Knight’s Hill. The place was run by a sort of Jewish benevolent association. His neighbours were shabbily respectable, retired professional men whose savings had run low and who
hid themselves from the world. They were a queer, reclusive lot; I heard them moving around sometimes. Daniel had a bathroom, bedroom, and a room with a gas fire and a table that served as kitchen, dining room, living room, and parlour. For Daniel it was simply the space where he worked. I referred to it as the domdaniel, but the joke fell flat when I had to explain that a domdaniel is an old word for a wizard’s cave.
Daniel was more responsive than usual, and even greeted me when I came in. He was at the table, with his notes and books spread out in front of him. Nothing else in the room had moved since the previous day. I started unpacking groceries from my basket.
“Tell me the story about the sea-shell again,” he said, putting down his pen and rubbing his eyes. He really was reacting to me.
“Once upon a time,” I said, “a man set an impossible challenge to find the cleverest inventor in the world: threading a cord through a winding sea-shell. The shell was so convoluted that nobody ever succeeded in doing it. The man took the shell, went from country to country, and eventually the puzzle fell to a man called Daedalus.”
I filled the kettle from the single tap and put it on the gas burner. I lit the gas and extinguished the match with a balletic flourish. Old habits die hard.
“Daedalus found an ant and attached a strand of spider’s web to its leg, and lured it into going through the shell by putting a drop of honey at the other end. The ant took the line of spider’s web with it. Then Daedalus attached a very fine silk thread to the web and pulled that through, and then did the same with a thicker silk thread, and he finally tied the thread to the cord and pulled it through.”
I took plates from the wooden rack and laid out bread and cold meats and butter.
“Clever man,” said Daniel. “He realised that to get through to the other side, you just have to find something small enough to go first, and then everything else can follow afterwards.”
The Dulwich Horror & Others Page 33