The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  ‘I’m feeling adventurous.’

  She laughed.

  ‘That’s good. Because if you come up to the Mass, you’ve got to take communion. That’s the rule.’

  A gong sounded and the party began to make its way up a wooden staircase through a trapdoor. As Mary-Lou went on ahead she turned back to me.

  ‘See you later, Larry. Stick around. We’re going on to Pasadena later. There’s going to be a special party.’

  The attic temple was small and gloomy. Wooden benches faced a raised dais where two obelisks flanked a tiered altar lined with candles. There was a hushing of voices as the congregation settled. A trill of soft laughter ran along the pews and a sharp scent of incense filled the air. There came a low drone of a harmonium playing the slow chords of a prelude, though I’m sure I heard in counterpoint the melody of ‘Barnacle Bill the Sailor’. At the time I thought this was my febrile imagination but I later found out that the organist liked to improvise around a jaunty tune slowed to a funereal pace.

  The Priest and the Priestess entered and the ceremony began. It was not what I had expected. I had imagined some brooding satanic ritual but this seemed almost light-hearted. There was certainly nothing demonic about it. The ceremony had much medieval symbolism: swords parting veils, lances and chalices — Freud knows what Dr Furedi would have made of it all. My mind began to spin very slowly. The drug was taking hold. It was not an unpleasant feeling. The Mass became a long monotonous chant punctuated by sudden moments of exuberant gesture or astonishing verse. Images of burning incense beneath the night stars of the desert, of the serpent flames of rocket launches. Alien dialogue in some far-flung adventure. And I was somehow part of it. I felt relief flood through my usually anxious self. I figure now that it was probably mescaline that had spiced up the punch.

  At times I found myself enthralled by the drama in the temple and at others almost oblivious to the proceedings. The Priest and the Priestess appeared to show real passion for each other as they enacted a strange sensual fertility rite. The woman spoke urgently of pleasure, pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, of a song of rapture to arouse the coiled splendour within and for a moment I was utterly enchanted. Then the Priest began to chant an unintelligible dirge and my thoughts diffused. I drifted into a trancelike state and before I knew it the Mass was at an end and we were all summoned to a communion of wine and rust-coloured wafers. As we filed out the organ played a recessional of ominous chords with a slow ditty over it that sounded much like ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’.

  Back in the lounge I was talking with Nemo. The conversation seemed urgently heightened and languidly casual at the same time. There were moments when we seemed to be having the same thoughts simultaneously. We felt sophisticated, wildly intellectual. Our eyes locked and I noticed that his pupils were as sharp as pencil leads. We both agreed that this Mass would not seem out of place in a pulp fantasy, that so many of the stories we had been exposed to appeared to hark back to a warped idea of the Middle Ages, with knights, maidens, quests and supernatural revelation. Nemo spoke of how so much space-opera seemed to be a rendition of some interstellar Holy Roman Empire. We had begun to speculate on what kind of religion a science-fiction writer would come up with when Mary-Lou came over to join us.

  ‘You took the host then,’ she said to me. ‘You know they’re prepared with animal blood.’

  I shrugged, not knowing what to say but determined not to be shocked as she thought I would be. I noticed Jack Parsons at the far end of the room, holding court amid a small circle of people. The Priest and Priestess stood near him, touching each other with a casual intimacy.

  ‘The Priestess seems to be in love with the Priest,’ I said to Mary-Lou.

  ‘Oh, that’s Helen Parsons,’ she retorted. ‘Jack’s wife.’

  ‘You mean… ?’

  ‘I told you, Larry. We have to reject hypocritical social standards.’

  I felt my face flush at the thought of it. I let out a peculiar giggle.

  ‘Larry?’ said Mary-Lou.

  ‘Mary-Lou,’ I replied.

  I wanted to say that I loved her. Love! To call it out just as the celebrants had done in the Gnostic Mass.

  ‘You’re coming out to Pasadena with us?’ she asked.

  I nodded and my teeth clenched in a manic grin. My head raced with curiosity and delirious expectation.

  The May evening was warm when we reached the Arroyo Seco, the dry ravine that cuts through the San Gabriel Mountains. The scrubland at the edge of Pasadena was then a suburban wilderness, a homely arcadia thick with chaparral, sycamore and tangled thickets of wild grape. The Caltech rocket group had the lease on three acres that had been cleared as a launch site. There was a group of corrugated-sheet metal huts, a sandbag bunker and an arcane assembly of test apparatus. These were the beginnings of the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

  Some kind of party had already begun. There was wine and beer and a sense of pagan revelry. I was passed a thin, hand-rolled cigarette. Marijuana, I thought with an exuberant sense of sinfulness. I took a puff and broke into a spluttering spasm. Nemo took it from me and inhaled the drug with casual expertise. He had tried it in Mexico, he confided to me. Mary-Lou explained to us that tonight was a ritual to influence the space–time continuum. This was the special Mass that Jack Parsons had spoken of that night at the Heinleins’, the one ordered by the Hierophant to change the course of the war.

  Parsons arrived in white robes, clutching a spray of mistletoe in one hand, a sickle in the other. The party started to form itself into a circle around him. It was then that I saw the rocket on its stand. Taller than he was, it seemed to tower above us, a totem, a faceless idol. On the ground around it were scorch marks and what looked like runic markings. Parsons began an ululating invocation to the god Pan. Drunk and drugged, my mind reeled but my body assumed its tranquillised equilibrium. I felt a wonderful balance: my weight in the earth, my head in the sky. I turned to Nemo and he nodded to me, wide-eyed and smiling.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We’re going to make contact, man.’

  I nodded back. I had no idea what he meant but at that moment it all seemed to make sense. The sky darkened and Parsons motioned for the circle to widen. At nightfall the rocket was launched. There was an explosion of thrust, an exultant rush of energy into the heavens. The crowd gasped as one.

  ‘Yes,’ Nemo hissed as the vehicle reached its zenith.

  The rocket released its payload, a parachute flare that floated like an angel of grace over the Arroyo Seco. As it descended, Nemesio pointed to something beyond it high up in the firmament.

  ‘See?’ he implored. ‘They’re here, man!’

  I couldn’t tell what he was gesturing at. All I could see were some dim stars that were just making themselves visible.

  ‘Come on,’ he said and began to make his way towards the San Gabriel Mountains. ‘They’re coming in to land!’

  I went after him for a while but he moved like a man possessed, following a track up into the canyon. I called after him as he began to climb the hillside. Then he was gone.

  I went back to the party. A bonfire had been lit and shadow figures danced in the convulsive firelight. My once-benign mood of narcosis began to fade and the evening’s saturnalia now seemed harsh and sinister. My anxiety returned, unwelcome but familiar. I wandered about, trying to find Mary-Lou. I thought I caught a glimpse of a wild goat gambolling in a darkened glade. I followed and found myself in a clearing. There was a trickle of laughter and by the flickering light I could make out bodies cavorting in this sacramental grove. Yellow flames licked at the pitched gloom and here and there naked flesh glowed amber or albescent. A bright flare from the pyre lit up a face, which turned and caught my gaze. It was Mary-Lou. She smiled as she saw me, her eyes brimstone, her mouth a lewd grimace.

  ‘Come on, Larry,’ she implored in a harsh whisper. ‘Join us!’

  I froze. My whole body clenched into an apoplectic spasm, but for a heart that hammered aw
ay in a wild palpitation. I felt a terrible sadness. The image of the twisted bodies was already seared on my memory, my timid desire overwhelmed by a dreadful sense of loss. This was the death of love, I suddenly thought.

  Perhaps Mary-Lou caught my look of dismay, I don’t know. Her face went blank for a second and then she turned away from me, into the embrace of Jack Parsons and two or three others.

  I stumbled away unsteadily and out of joint, coldly sober but reeling about like a drunken fool. I lay down in the dust and felt the world spin against my back. Looking down at the starry depths, I felt the lonely vertigo of the universe. My own sorry little space-opera stretched out into infinity. Eventually I regained enough balance to pick myself up and walk to my car. I clambered onto the back seat and fell into a troubled sleep.

  I woke to Nemo gently shaking my shoulder. I got out of the car and adjusted my eyes to the powdery haze of morning.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged and stared back at me with dead eyes. He looked as if he had been dragged through a forest.

  ‘It’s hard to explain, Larry,’ he said. ‘I saw something.’

  I never got the whole story of what he witnessed that night. Over the years he would refer to the time when he had seen ‘something from another world’ but he always seemed reluctant to elaborate further. For a while I thought he worried that I might think he was crazy. But maybe he just wanted to keep it to himself. To save it for his fiction. And the influence of this experience can certainly be found in his work, in stories such as ‘Interstellar Epiphany’ and ‘The Uninvited Guest’. At the time neither of us really wanted to talk about the previous night so we drove back to LA mostly in silence.

  Mother was predictably upset when I turned up at the house looking wild-eyed and dishevelled and I was unnecessarily blunt with her when she asked after my whereabouts, loudly declaring that I had been at an orgy.

  ‘Larry!’ she chided me.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, Mother,’ I called out as I went up to my room, ‘your precious son is still a virgin.’

  I came down later to find her in the kitchen. Her face was red and puffy; she had obviously been crying. I said I was sorry and then all her pitiful guilt came out. She declared that she had not been a good mother, that she had driven away my father who had left us when I was three. That useless slob of a husband whom she still loved with a pathetic insistence. Poor Mother, I thought for the millionth time. But it was then I knew that I had to get away from her somehow.

  Mary-Lou phoned me the next day, saying that she wanted to meet up and talk. Part of me wished that I had the strength to say no but I didn’t. So the following Tuesday I walked into Clifton’s to find her sitting at a corner table reading the LA Times.

  ‘See what we did, Larry,’ she declared, holding up the headline for me to read:

  BERLIN DENIES KNOWLEDGE OF LANDING OF REICH LEADER IN SCOTLAND.

  It hardly registered at the time. Recently I’ve got to thinking that the ‘special Mass’ Jack Parsons had officiated at that night was part of Operation Mistletoe. There are stories that Crowley organised similar rituals in a forest in Sussex at about the same time. Whether or not they actually had any effect is another matter. Were they part of some obscure propaganda campaign? At that moment I was so wrapped up in my own private drama that I didn’t pay much attention to the news story. I just sat down opposite Mary-Lou and gave a nervous little shrug. She smiled at me but there was a mournful look in her eyes.

  ‘Look, the other night,’ she said, trying to break through the awkwardness of the moment. ‘I know you don’t approve but—’

  ‘It’s not that,’ I broke in.

  ‘Well—’

  ‘I love you, Mary-Lou.’

  ‘What?’ She frowned at me.

  ‘I’m sorry. I just had to let you know.’

  She gave a weary sigh.

  ‘Well, I kind of guessed,’ she said.

  ‘And it’s a simple, conventional, boring kind of love. I just want you and nobody else.’

  ‘Poor Larry.’

  ‘Please, Mary-Lou, don’t.’

  ‘I know how you feel.’

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘Yes I do. I want Jack. But Jack is in love with Betty.’

  ‘Betty? Who’s Betty?’

  ‘Helen’s sister. Remember Helen? Jack’s wife.’

  ‘Who’s having an affair with the High Priest of the Agape Lodge.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And now Jack’s taken up with his sister-in-law?’

  ‘Uh-huh. You know, being a script reader, you think you know all the plots. I missed that one.’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Oh, carry on loving Jack. All these personal relationships can get melodramatic, but there is a higher love. I’ll stay true to that.’

  ‘How very wild and unconventional of you,’ I muttered bitterly.

  ‘Oh, Larry.’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s just—’

  ‘Can we still be friends?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mary-Lou,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know.’

  As I stood she looked up at me, her sad and plaintive smile like a stab in the heart. I know now that amid all her emotional confusion what she really needed was a friend. She already looked exhausted by the madly idealistic world she had been drawn into.

  Soon after that, all the symptoms of my labyrinthitis seemed to diminish, then disappear. I felt somehow cured and at first was unsure what had restored the equilibrium in that delicate maze of the senses. Had it been the effect of the mescaline or the marijuana, or even some strange influence of ritual magic? All my problems with balance or vertigo began to recede and my anxiety resolved itself into a calm melancholia. Perhaps it was the heartbreak that gave some bifurcated stability to my inner life. Finally I had felt something real in my life, even if was just emotional pain.

  I gave up going to see Dr Furedi and put all my energy into my work. I spent a lot of time with Nemo that summer. We would both snatch a bit of time off from writing and drive out to the coast. On one occasion Nemo arranged a double date for us that predictably didn’t work out for me. Another time we organised a full-scale beach party for the LASFS. But usually it was just me and him walking along the shore, clearing our heads and talking our ideas into life. Then back to the clatter of the typewriter, chasing tight deadlines and new stories. Nemo could take inspiration from almost anywhere and so swiftly transform it into prose. One afternoon he got the spark of an idea from observing the eccentric street hustlers on Hollywood Boulevard and by the next morning he had turned it into ‘The Hermit’, which he sold to Incredible Stories.

  I could talk to Nemo about my feelings, about Mary-Lou and the problems at home with my mother. Dr Furedi had always insisted that most of my emotional hang-ups were somehow connected to being deserted by my father. But Nemo had been through that, too, so I no longer felt strange or weird about it.

  And he eventually got me to understand something of the complicated politics on the left. He even took me along to a few meetings. He was certain that Trotskyism was the last hope for utopian socialism.

  ‘It can’t exist in just one country,’ he insisted to me one night as we sat on the beach and watched the sun go down. ‘It’s got to be international.’

  ‘Maybe it’s got to be more than that, even,’ I countered.

  He turned and squinted at me.

  ‘What?’ he demanded.

  ‘Well,’ I replied, unable to stop myself breaking into a smile, ‘maybe we can’t have socialism on one planet alone. Maybe it’s got to be interstellar!’

  Nemo let out a brief spatter of laughter. Then he sighed and gazed wistfully at the darkening horizon.

  ‘Who knows?’ he murmured.

  Nemo felt proud that he could retain the idealism that had been compromised by orthodox communism. Then Germany invaded the Soviet Union and theoretical discourse became overwhelmed by the practical horrors in
that massive clash of ideologies. I think that he felt helpless and guilty as he was once more a mere spectator to the grinding wheel of history. Party members now became indignant and self-righteous; ordinary citizens seemed relieved that these great behemoths were now slugging it out so bloodily on the Eastern Front. The West seemed safe, at least for the time being.

  I went up in front of a Draft Board in August and remarkably I was designated 1A — available for unrestricted military service. A lot of my contemporaries were looking around for ways of avoiding being called up. Mother offered to put me through college in the fall, which would keep me out of it for a while, but I refused. I was happy enough to have become a healthy specimen at last.

  And for the most part I could get on with my life and not dwell on Mary-Lou or Jack Parsons. But I couldn’t quite shake them off in the fictional world that I sought refuge in. ‘Greek Fire’, which I sold to Fabulous Tales, features a rocket scientist unsure of whether to use solid or liquid fuel, who travels back in time to the Byzantine Empire to investigate the dual properties of the ancient incendiary weapon of the title. I saw it as a cathartic exercise, especially the final scene with its huge laboratory explosion. And though I managed to avoid running into Mary-Lou in person, I found it impossible not to read her work. Her ‘Zodiac Empire’ series became more and more mystical and obscure, an epic of conflicting planet colonies in the solar system set against alien influences from distant constellations. Mary-Lou had told me that it was to culminate in its transcendent conclusion, ‘The City of the Sun’, but that instalment never appeared.

  It had been a year of quantum leaps, of diverging time-lines, alternate futures and crucial moments where things could go either way: ‘jonbar points’ as SF writers had already started to call them after the title of Jack Williamson’s seminal story. So when I heard the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which shocked the whole nation, I felt hardly surprised by it. In fact, a strange calm descended upon me as for the first time in my life I knew exactly what to do.

  On 8 December I joined the USAAF. I didn’t want to wait for the call-up and I had some insane idea that I wanted to fly. It wasn’t so much out of patriotic duty, or a sense of political commitment. It was more a lonely impulse, simply to take action and to be ruled by fate. And I could break free, leave home without any sense of guilt or responsibility. I hadn’t an inkling of what this supposed independence would cost me and Mother was out of her wits with worry. But now we both had something bigger to blame.