Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1

by Price, Robert M.

  King Kane

  by John Howard

  “Citizen Kane?” Welles asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Citizen Kane?” he continued. “That’s a good one. It said that in Times Square?”

  “That’s right,” I replied. “I saw it just now. CHARLES FOSTER KANE DEAD. And the Enquirer is calling him Citizen Kane.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have believed it if he’d told me so himself! Citizen! That’s a good one, all right. Walter Thatcher thought that he was nothing less than a communist, labour said he was their enemy.”

  Welles turned away, and faced the window. I knew what he was thinking, already. “Death comes to us all,” he mused out loud. “Even to King Kane. You know what this means?” He turned, and faced me again.

  “Another film?”

  “Uh-huh. I made American, ah, ten years ago. It was good, but not quite good enough. It still wasn’t the whole story. That lush Mankiewicz and I gave it our best, but it wasn’t good enough, even with Bernstein’s help and Kane’s so-called co-operation. There’s more. There must be. The pattern must be complete now the King’s dead.”

  I knew where Welles was heading, right enough. Ten years ago it had been much the same. A long visit to Xanadu, Kane’s vast and ghastly pleasure-dome in the boondocks of the Florida coast. King Kane living in his self-created world, still powerful – even though not as he had been – and certainly no longer fully connected to reality. Mrs Kane talking enough for everyone, but not spilling the beans. And the growing oddness of Kane’s appearance. It all came back.

  “A sequel to American?”

  Welles pushed his hands into his pockets and threw his shoulders back. I’d seen this one before. The Kane Impersonation. It was pretty good. “No, my boy,” his voice rumbled out. “Something bigger and better. A whole new film, a real rosebud of a movie! Let’s expose everything once and for all. Let’s get inside the Kane, ah, mythos, and find out what made it work. I want to know all there is to know – what we didn’t get last time round, when he was still, well, alive. Yes! We’ll write this one together, you and me. Mank’s too far gone, anyway. Go and see the grieving widow. See his associates. See them again, ask more questions. Thompson can get the contacts. Ask different questions. We’ll get to the bottom of it all yet.”

  “There might not be anything new.”

  “No, there might not. But there’s something behind it all, something I couldn’t quite get to ten years ago. I want to find it out now. I want the world to see the real Kane at last!”

  I didn’t stand about. Welles couldn’t stand people standing about, wasting time. He arranged and paid for a flight, and I went straight down to Xanadu. He also arranged for a car for me to pick up at the airfield. Then there was the drive through the wilderness to the outposts of the Kane estate. And even then it was still a long drive to Xanadu itself, the palace on its mountain.

  Back in 1941, when I’d last been there, FDR was only in his third term. Pearl Harbor was still in the future, and we hadn’t even heard of the Bomb. Among other things.

  But there had been Kane. I’d travelled most of the way on Kane’s special train where there had been shutters over the windows of his personal carriages. At the station, a car had been waiting, complete with bar and all other necessities for the final part of the journey to Xanadu. I’d been grateful. In 1941 Xanadu had not been finished. The Alhambra was colliding with Westminster Hall, a few French chateaux were there, still in crates, and gothic and Moorish towers stuck out like needles in a pincushion.

  Now, the palace was complete but things seemed to have ground to a halt. Not surprisingly. I doubted that I would’ve got any further than the airfield if I’d waited for the Kane Organisation to make a move. I drove on along the coastal road to Xanadu. The fun would start at the main gate to the estate.

  The distance wore away. I opened the window, but it made no difference. The breeze was warm and humid. Eventually the road leading to the estate itself appeared, and I turned on to it. If I remembered rightly it wouldn’t be much longer, as I followed the curve of the coast, before Xanadu’s hill appeared on the horizon. And sure enough, it soon did. It was still only a lump on the horizon, but I knew that it was a lump where a lump had no right to be, and only twenty years before hadn’t been. All its hundreds of thousands of tons of rock and soil had been put there by the will of one man: Kane himself. There were vast gardens surrounding the hill: thousands of acres of grass and flowers and trees; canals and a chain of artificial lakes, all kept fresh and growing by an army of gardeners and all washed by the constant flow of millions upon millions of dollars. And all there merely to provide the setting for Xanadu itself, the jewel that was Kane’s own decreed residence, built from the assembled architectural loot of the world.

  The lump grew larger every moment. Soon it was the size of a man’s hand. It even looked a bit like one, at this distance. I imagined a mountain of sand, with a gigantic human hand thrusting through, wrist twisted and fingers pointing outwards and upwards. That’s how Xanadu looked to me, still miles away and silhouetted against the Florida sky.

  And then I was at the main gates. They were huge and magnificent wrought-iron barriers, each with an elaborate K inset near the top, slammed across the road. Tall wire fences stretched away on either side as far as I could see. Although the gates were firmly shut, I saw there was someone lurking just inside them, standing by the door of the entrance lodge.

  The lodge itself was comparable in size and appearance to the White House. In 1941 a nameless gatekeeper had been on duty, and had already opened the gate for me. But now, as I drew to a halt, I could see that the man standing there was Raymond, Kane’s butler. So the sly bastard was actually working for his money at last. I was glad that the heavy ironwork with its fantastic designs was between us.

  “Raymond,” I said. “Remember me?”

  I’d never worked out what his accent was, but he sounded as if he should be wearing an opera cloak and flitting along the lengthy corridors of some castle in the Balkans.

  “Yes, I remember you, Mr Houseman, sir. I see to everything now, sir.”

  Raymond looked expansively around. Literally everything, it seemed, then. He still had the same smile, like a vulture discovering a pram-load of babies left alone in Death Valley. The ‘sirs’ bothered me, too.

  “We were expecting you.”

  “We were?”

  “Mrs Kane and I.”

  “How is Susie?”

  “She is OK. And she is waiting for you.” Raymond motioned the car forward. I drove on, and the gates, I assumed, closed once more behind me.

  The base of the great hill was still some way off, but the ground began to rise and the road began to spiral upwards slowly in enormous slow curves between smooth grass and palm trees. Soon terraces appeared – hill-girdling ramparts and colonnades of rusticated stone and brick, with occasional wide staircases, fountains and cascades to interrupt the giant boredom. Not for the first time I wondered just how many palaces in Europe had vanished as a result of building this place.

  The road changed from concrete to large flagstones, and then again to mellow pink brick as I reached the main gatehouse of Xanadu itself. I must have been about two-thirds up the mountain. The sides of the road opened out and spread away in front of the gatehouse, forming a plateau large enough to contain a suburb. A sizeable proportion of Xanadu and its mountain towered above me. The gatehouse looked like the front of an English cathedral; I didn’t recall of any of them going missing. I was confronted by two massive gothic towers with a vast stained-glass window and deeply recessed arched doorway between them. But instead of a pair of heavy wooden doors, iron-bound, there was just the open arch, inviting a direct entrance. I drove on through.

  Eventually I reached a vast courtyard, flanked on either side by a triple layer of classical columns. There was a forum or several in there, I thought; probably courtesy of one of Kane’s erstwhile admirers, Il Duce Mussolini. I aimed the car to
ward the matching triumphal arch in the distance at the other end of the courtyard. At length I reached it, and journeyed on through. I was now in the England of Good Queen Bess, in a large square court surrounded by mullioned windows rising to three storeys. A tower rose from each corner, and straight ahead, just as I remembered, was the extraordinarily modest entrance to Xanadu’s main hall.

  In 1941 a visitor’s car – if he’d had to use his own – vanished within seconds, driven away by some servant to an underground garage the size of a stadium, where it would receive valet treatment scarcely any less sumptuous than that available to the visitor himself. But there seemed to be nobody about now. Raymond was the only man that I’d seen – no gardeners or other staff in the grounds, no servants now rushing out to take my bag and park my car. But then, despite the fact that I was expected, I had not been invited, and would probably not be staying. Not if I knew Susie.

  The ancient door under the small round-arched entrance was shut. I pulled the bell-chain, a device that looked large enough to launch an ocean liner, and waited. There was no sound. The door remained shut. If Raymond was at the main gate to the estate, none of his subordinates seemed to be doing anything around here.

  I pushed at the door, and it opened smoothly. I went on in.

  I remembered well enough what was on the other side: a hall the size of an airship hangar, with a couple of throne rooms thrown in for good measure. Gigantic stained glass windows threw a kaleidoscope of colour on the stone floor; tunnel-sized fireplaces were gaping empty and black in the clammy heat inside. There were sofas like landing-craft adrift in the hall, and ahead of me, in the distance, was the great staircase leading on upwards and inwards, deeper into the heart of King Kane’s personal domain.

  Suddenly I heard the sound of smashing glass ahead of me: a tumbler or something must have been dropped from the heights to the flagstones below. I strained my eyes up into the hot gloom of the staircase, and barely made out a small figure about halfway up. Susie!

  Mrs Susan Alexander Kane, easily thirty years younger than her husband, shop assistant turned would-be opera star. As Kane’s first marriage, to Emily Norton – niece of the President of the day – slowly fossilized, Kane had found solace with Susan, whom he had met on a street corner in New York. Her simplicity charmed and calmed him, and she had fallen in love with the handsome, worldly – and totally rich – Kane before she knew who he was. The exposure of their relationship in the press, the subsequent collapse of Kane’s embryonic political career, and his separation from Emily, had all been covered in American. Kane had revelled in it in 1916, and still had in 1941. He’d turned the scandal to his advantage, and won the hearts of millions more than he’d lost. Susan Alexander: the second Mrs Kane after Emily’s death in an automobile accident, the amateur singer for whom Kane had built an opera house, and then a palace.

  “Well, come on up, why don’cha?” she yelled down at me. “I’m having a swell party.”

  I’d reached the bottom of the stairs. They swept up in front of me like a frozen landslide of stone. There was a groan from above, and a swift glint of coloured sunlight on glass, and another tumbler came hurtling down, this time full of liquid. The heavy crystal exploded into glittering shards not three feet from where I stood. The stagnant air reeked with the tang of a decent Scotch.

  “Well, ya comin’ up or not?” Susie shouted. “There’s plenty more where that came from!”

  “Susie!” I shouted. “I’m coming up. Stay right there!”

  I began to climb the tremendous stair. Just as I thought I might need extra oxygen, I reached the place where Susie was still gazing down, leaning against the stone balustrade and dangerously unsteady. There were several more tumblers at her feet, and she held a half-empty bottle in one hand. With her other hand she gripped the balustrade.

  When I drew level with her, she swung round and faced me. The bottle came close enough to my nose for me to feel its passing.

  “So ya came back. D’ya wanna see the corpse? Didn’cha believe the reports?”

  The coloured light threw a weird glare on Susie’s face, and the white dress she wore. She was heavily made up. That much was the same as in 1941. Susie didn’t need to plaster on all that stuff, but perhaps Kane had insisted on it, so she still looked like a singer about to step out in front of an audience, all made up for the lights. She looked harsh, with staring dark eyes, ringed, and dark lips against a pale face and blonde hair. And the tear-stains and sweat; the coloured glow over everything.

  “Mrs Kane, I was asked to come here. Like before.”

  “So ya didn’t wanta, then?”

  I looked right at her. “No, not really, no. It was hard enough when Mr Kane was alive.”

  She took a swig of whisky, and then held the bottle out to me. She didn’t offer me a glass, or gesture for me to pick one up.

  “No thanks, Mrs Kane.”

  “So ya wanna get down to business?”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK. Come on. Let’s go up to Charlie’s room.”

  She started to lead the way, waveringly, on up the stairs. There were still plenty of them left before we reached the expanse of landing on the next floor. But we made it.

  The landing was floored with black and white marble. Corridors stretched away to the left and right, with pillars supporting fancy Moorish arches to break up the monotony. She went straight to an ornate door made of heavy wood, deeply carved.

  “In here. Go on in.”

  I pushed the door open. Mrs Kane followed me in, putting her bottle down on a small table.

  Directly in front of me, raised up on several carpeted tiers, was an enormous bed. On it something was concealed under a sheet. Charles Foster ‘Citizen’ Kane, All-American, late of this world. King Kane. I looked at Mrs Kane enquiringly.

  “That’s him,” she said. “Funeral in a couple of days. Gotta get him stored till then.”

  I didn’t want to go any closer. I looked down at the floor near the bed. There was a stain on the carpet, as if water or something had been spilt and not too well mopped up, leaving a mark likely to become permanent. I pointed at it.

  “What’s that?”

  Mrs Kane had been giving the Scotch bottle the eye. She looked down at the stain.

  “That was when he died,” she said. “I was outside the room with the nurse. Then we heard a tinkling sound. We rushed in. Charlie’d been holding a little glass ornament that he’d had since he was a child. Or so he always told me. It was a glass ball with a little house in it, full of water, and you shook it and fake snow whirled around it. Like a winter somewhere in New England. He had just sat up and dropped it. He said ‘Innsmouth’ and slumped back dead. Hey, what’s ‘Innsmouth’ anyway?”

  Hell, I thought. That’s what it’s all about. Thatcher, Bernstein, Leland, where are you now?

  The manuscript memoirs of Walter Parks Thatcher, Charles Foster Kane’s guardian, and somewhat reluctant financial mentor, had played quite a large part in American. There was a superb scene in which Thompson, the reporter who had been detailed to trail Kane for the purposes of the film, had visited the Thatcher Memorial Library, and had been allowed to see the manuscript. It had been played like being ushered into the presence of English royalty. To get the feel of it all, Welles and I had also sat around in that huge empty room – empty that is apart from a table where Thompson could sit and read – and watched while Thompson turned the pages as the camera filmed Thatcher’s precise copperplate handwriting over the reporter’s shoulder. This had been our way into throwing some light onto Kane’s early life and career, including the source of his fabulous wealth. It was one of the great parts of a great film. I wish that I’d actually got to play in it, even the part of the security guard or something like that.

  But it was all total bunkum. Sure, there was, and I suppose still is, a Thatcher Manuscript, but it certainly isn’t what we made it out to be in the film. That part, at least, was biopic without the bio.

  Charl
es Foster Kane had been born in Massachusetts, not Colorado. He had been born into the orbit of Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Boston State House, rather than gold prospectors and a boarding house. Welles got one bit right in the film, though: the real Mrs Kane senior had looked a lot like that actress Agnes Moorhead. But in the film we also saw her husband, an ineffectual apology for a man if ever there were one. In reality I don’t think that Kane ever knew his father. Mrs Kane senior might have known who the father of her child was, but she hadn’t known what he was.

  Kane was her maiden name, and she kept using it after her marriage and the ‘disappearance’ of her husband – if she had actually ever been legally married. I knew all this because I’d seen the real Thatcher Manuscript. Even King Kane hadn’t been able to do anything about that. It lay, and I expect still lies, in its marble room under the great dome in the Thatcher Memorial Library, safe even from the power of Kane’s fortune. Thatcher had made millions enough of his own to be able to have ensured that. I’d been able to see the memoirs because Welles had swung it for us, using the charm he could conjure up when it suited him. I guessed, too, that the Thatcher Trustees had owed Welles. Maybe it was the price of playing with reality in 1941. Anyway, I’d seen the Thatcher Manuscript, and it had been quite some read.

  Mrs Kane was really Mrs Marsh. Her husband had been from Innsmouth, a decaying seaport on the Massachusetts coast not far from Arkham, where she was born. Already in the 1860s Innsmouth was on the way down, its trade declining fast, and the vitality of the population with it, as its gracious Colonial buildings slowly fell apart.

  The fortunes of the Marsh family and their associates bucked the trend. For them the trading situation, with certain islands in the Pacific, meant that things had never been better. For their boats there was a constant supply of fish near at hand, just off the Innsmouth shore; and from the Pacific, any amount of gold. Their refinery made the Marshes richer than the robber barons. But they kept the true source of their wealth hidden. Only a few rumours ever got out.