The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  ‘He is very brave,’ he added, as if to reassure her. ‘Had his mission failed there would have been no hope of rescue.’

  Hamilton had flown over the world’s highest mountain in 1933 when such an endeavour was only just technically possible, pushing the limits of the high-altitude flight, into the stratosphere and the edges of space.

  The book had astonishing aerial photographs of the Himalayas that reminded Hess of Arnold Fanck’s mountain films with the young Leni Riefenstahl, when she was still just an actress. The stark sunlight on monumental rock and ice; the purity of a cold and frozen landscape.

  Yes, flying had given Hamilton a greater understanding. Like Lindbergh, he must have a broad, clear vision of the world. Above all, he would comprehend the symbolism of Hess’s mission. The sporting gesture of it, replete with chivalry and mysticism. The aeroplane a deus ex machina in a flight of peace to bring to an end the war between brother nations.

  Albrecht Haushofer had told him of his close personal relationship with Hamilton before the war. Hess had seen the man once, at a banquet in Berlin in 1936 during the Olympic Games. He was indeed handsome, with a strong and noble bearing. Hess had checked and found that a duke was the highest rank in British aristocracy below the monarch. Hamilton was an officer in the RAF, commanding the air defence of an important sector in Scotland. Albrecht had stayed at his country estate, Dungavel House, and had observed that it had its own airstrip.

  This would be the chance for Hess to re-establish his authority in the Reich and in the eyes of his leader — his Tribune. In the last few years his star had been eclipsed but his mission would be spectacular. Yes, he would outshine them all.

  He said goodbye to his wife. He kissed her hand.

  He put on his trench coat and took a valise containing his charts, a wallet of family photographs, Albrecht Haushofer’s calling card and a flat box of homeopathic medicines. He walked out to his waiting Mercedes. They started out towards the Messerschmitt works at Augsburg, but they were ahead of schedule so Hess bade them stop by a wooded glade by the road and in the fading sunlight he walked among the spring flowers.

  On the runway at the Augsburg works it was waiting for him: the Messerschmitt Bf110D, radio code VJ+OQ, fitted with heavy drop-fuel tanks for long-distance flight. His chariot. He was ready for take-off. Ready as he waited in the summerhouse. Ready as he sat in his cell listening to the broadcast of the Apollo mission:

  Thirty seconds and counting. Astronauts reported, ‘Feels good’. T-25 seconds. Twenty seconds and counting. T-15 seconds, guidance is internal, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, ignition sequence start, six, five, four, three, two, one, zero, all engines running. lift-off. We have a lift-off, thirty-two minutes past the hour. Lift-off on Apollo 11.

  He flew north over Hanover and Hamburg, over the North Sea coast, tuning his radio compass to the Kalundborg radio station in Denmark that was on the same latitude as his intended landfall in England. Kalundborg transmitted directional beams, interspersed with classical music. That night Wagner’s Parsifal was being broadcast. Or had he imagined that? Albrecht Haushofer had called him a Parsifal. The innocent seeker.

  He was approaching the point at which he would have to turn due west, out of friendly airspace, towards the unknown. Like the Apollo astronauts he would have to leave orbit and head into deep space.

  CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston at one minute. Trajectory and guidance look good and the stage is good. Over.

  ARMSTRONG: Apollo 11. Roger.

  CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. Thrust is good. Everything is still looking good.

  ARMSTRONG: Roger.

  The signals kept coming in from Kalundborg. In Act One of Parsifal, the old knight Gurnemanz rebukes the young Parsifal for shooting down a flying swan but when he learns that the boy has been raised in ignorance of courtly manners, he suspects that he might be the prophesied ‘pure fool’. He tells him of the Grail.

  PARSIFAL

  Who is the Grail?

  GURNEMANZ

  There’s no saying; but

  If you are the chosen one,

  The knowledge shall not escape you.

  Yes, thought Hess. He had been chosen. This had been his quest, his Everest, his moon-shot. He was reaching the point of alignment with the radio transmitter.

  CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. Around three and a half minutes. You’re still looking good. Your predicted cut-off is right on the nominal.

  ARMSTRONG: Roger. Apollo 11’s GO.

  They completed their final manoeuvre around the earth and prepared for translunar injection. Hess turned due west, the Jutland coastline falling away below him. It was nearing twilight.

  PARSIFAL

  I hardly move,

  Yet far I seem to come.

  GURNEMANZ

  You see, my son, time

  Changes here to space.

  Time and space and a holy mission. Six planets in the constellation of Taurus. Full moon in the Second House.

  CAPCOM: Apollo 11, this is Houston. We show cut-off and we copy the numbers in noun sixty-two…

  ARMSTRONG: Roger, Houston. Apollo 11. We’re reading the VIL 35 579 and the EMS was plus 3.3. Over.

  CAPCOM: Roger. Plus 3.3 on the EMS. And we copy the VI.

  ARMSTRONG: Hey, Houston. Apollo 11. This Saturn gave us a magnificent ride.

  CAPCOM: Roger, 11, we’ll pass that on, and it looks like you are well on your way now.

  They jettisoned the final stage of von Braun’s Saturn V. Soon Hess would jettison the drop tanks from his Messerschmitt.

  The astronauts blasted out of orbit and fired up towards the moon.

  Hess was out of German radar range now, out over the cold, deep North Sea. He had never flown above open water before.

  GURNEMANZ

  Now take heed and let me see,

  If you be a fool and pure,

  What knowledge may be granted you.

  What knowledge! To find the Grail Castle at Dungavel House. He was the bringer of peace.

  The evening light over the ocean was magically beautiful; small clusters of red-tinged clouds bejewelled the shimmering sea. He found himself profoundly affected by the northern latitudes, feeling a surge of magnetism. What was this? he wondered. Then at once he remembered his childhood fancy. Thule! Yes, the mythic island of the black sun. This was the journey he had foreseen amid the hot and dusty afternoons of Alexandria. The Hyperborean Atlantis spoken of at the Four Seasons Hotel in Munich as they valiantly resisted the Bavarian Soviet.

  It was not yet fully dark, the time of civil twilight when the sun descends to six degrees below the horizon. He could just make out land, the knoll of Holy Island marking out the far edge of the Northumbrian coastline. A veil of mist hung over England. The full moon had risen above the thin cloud, shrouding it in phosphorescence. Hess gasped at the brightness of the heavenly body. For a moment it shone, the blazing beacon of his great purpose. Then he had a moment of doubt.

  Hitler had always despised the moon.

  His Tribune might think that this flight was out of fear, not love of hazard. Hess had left him a letter that alluded to Schopenhauer’s notion of a heroic passage through life encountering great difficulties that receives a poor reward or no reward at all. He had assured his leader that should the project fail, it need not have any evil consequence for Germany. They need only declare him mad.

  Moonstruck. In a second he saw the clear and stark lunacy of it. If you be a fool and pure, what knowledge might you be granted. He could see the sharp details in the pock-marked face. Mountains and craters, sublime desolation.

  ARMSTRONG: We’re about 95 degrees east, coming up on Smyth’s Sea… Sort of hilly-looking area… looking back at Marginus… Crater Schubert and Gilbert the centre right now… a triple crater with a small crater between the first and the second, and the one at the bottom of the screen is Schubert Y… zooming in now on a crater called Schubert N… very conical inside wall… coming up on the Bombing Sea… Alpha
1… a great bright crater. It is not a large one but an extremely bright one. It looks like a very recent and, I would guess, impact crater with rays streaming out in all directions… The crater in the centre of the screen now is Webb… coming back toward the bottom of the screen into the left, you can see a series of depressions. It is this type of connective craters that give us most interest…

  CAPCOM: We are getting a beautiful picture of Langrenus now with its really conspicuous central peak.

  COLLINS: The Sea of Fertility doesn’t look very fertile to me. I don’t know who named it.

  ARMSTRONG: Well, it may have been the gentleman who this crater was named after, Langrenus. Langrenus was a cartographer to the King of Spain and made one of the early reasonably accurate maps of the moon.

  CAPCOM: Roger, that is very interesting.

  ARMSTRONG: At least it sounds better for our purposes than the Sea of Crises.

  Enemy radar would have detected him by now, and the moon had become a celestial searchlight. He had to get below what cloud cover there was. He put the Messerschmitt into a dive and flew at full throttle, greeting England with the wild scream of his engines. The aeroplane burrowed through the light haze. At low altitude and high velocity he turned to starboard, then to port, heading almost due west to Dungavel House. He was enjoying himself, hedge-hopping mere metres above trees and rooftops. He reached the Cheviot Hills and climbed the slope with both throttles open, dropping down the other side, across the border. He was in Scotland.

  He had the chart of his route strapped to his right thigh but he had memorised every landscape that marked his way to Dungavel House. He passed through the peaks of Broad Law and Pikestone, banking right and descending towards his destination. He flew over Hamilton’s country seat, trying to discern the runway. He could barely make out a blacked-out house below. Had he expected the landing strip to be marked somehow?

  He flew further west to check his position on the coastline. He turned around over the Firth, its waters as flat and silvered as a looking-glass. Turning southwards he followed a spur of land curling out to the sea at Ardrossan, then inland he spotted the glint of the railway line that led north-easterly to Glasgow. The track made a bow at Dungavel; a small lake shimmered at the south of the estate. Illuminated by the moon, the Grail Castle now appeared to him and for an instant he felt triumphant. Then he saw that the duke’s airstrip was nothing more than a landing field for sports biplanes. There was no flare path or marking of any kind. It would be suicide to attempt a landing here in the heavy two-engined Messerschmitt.

  All at once the whole enterprise seemed transformed into some awful trick. So close to triumph, he was now facing utter defeat. And an interceptor was closing in on him, a Hurricane perhaps, flying low. He climbed to two thousand metres and shut off the engine ignition. The propellers feathered as he set the pitch of the airscrews to zero. He would make a parachute jump, something he had never attempted before. He opened the cockpit canopy and tried to bail out. But as the plane was still at cruising speed, the pressure of the airstream pushed him back into his seat. Then he remembered something a fighter commander had once told him: that the best way to get out of a moving plane was to turn it over and simply fall out. He pulled up and went into a sharp loop. He blacked out.

  Radio silence from the lunar module. Programme alarms and low-fuel warnings.

  CAPCOM: Eagle, Houston. If you read, you’re GO for powered descent. Over.

  COLLINS: Eagle, this is Columbia. They just gave you GO for powered descent.

  CAPCOM: Columbia, Houston. We’ve lost them on the high gain again. Would you please… We’re recommending yaw right 10 degrees and reacquire.

  When he came to he was in a complete stall. The speed gauge was at zero, his aeroplane on its tail, hanging upright in space. He kicked with his legs and pushed himself out into the night air.

  He pulled the ripcord and his parachute blossomed abruptly above him. He felt the sudden lift of its soaring drag. His machine crashed into the moorland beyond.

  CAPCOM: You are GO to continue powered descent.

  ALDRIN: Roger.

  CAPCOM: And Eagle, Houston. We’ve got data dropout. You’re still looking good.

  ALDRIN: Okay. We got good lock on. Altitude light is out. Delta H is minus 2900.

  CAPCOM: Roger, we copy.

  ALDRIN: Got the earth straight out our front window.

  He floated down over the moonlit meadow. Suspended between heaven and earth. Exposed and triumphantly alone. You see, my son, time changes here to space.

  As above, so below. He was ready once more. Ready as he listened in his cell. Ready as he waited in the summerhouse. He reached for the cable.

  ALDRIN: Drifting forward just a little bit; that’s good. Contact light. Okay. Engine stop. ACA out of detent.

  ARMSTRONG: Out of detent. Auto.

  ALDRIN: Mode control, both auto. Descent engine command override, off. Engine arm, off. 413 is in.

  CAPCOM: We copy you down, Eagle.

  Space changes to time.

  He hit the ground hard and blacked out once more.

  19

  the sun

  She thought she spotted him standing in a corner, staring absently at a gently oscillating light projection. It was the after party for the première of the Fugitive Alien remake, a nightclub in West Hollywood transformed into a spaceship interior. Supporting pillars of the open space encased in airbrushed fibreglass, dressed with glowing tubes and pulsing hieroglyphs; waiting staff in lycra costumes, extraterrestrial hair and make-up; a bar at one end decked out as a huge control panel.

  She weaved through the crowd, still not quite sure if it was him. Stiffened into a rented tuxedo, white hair ponytailed, he held a frosted green highball in one hand. Something about the angle of his head, the goofy half-grin, the curious-child eyes that stared out of the collapsed mask of his face. Recognition. Memory. Loss.

  ‘Larry,’ she said, trying to catch his gaze.

  He frowned and dropped his line of sight. Could he see her properly? she wondered. He seemed to be gaping into the middle distance. Maybe his vision was shot, though he wasn’t wearing glasses. Maybe his hearing was shot.

  ‘Zagorski!’ she called out.

  His face opened up into a smile and slowly she saw the Larry she had known all those years ago. Her perception shifting, making that illusory adjustment whereby all the traces of age fade in one who is familiar and an expression long remembered pulls into focus. He reached out and grabbed her elbow, as if steadying them both from a sudden earth tremor. His hand was gnarled and spattered with liver spots. Blue veins stood out like wiring.

  ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Mary-Lou. Look at you.’

  Her hair was up in a loose chignon and she was wearing the fuchsia Issey Miyake Pleats Please dress she had bought back in 1993. She had thought it would be just right for this event, a clever choice. Maybe it was just too bold for a seventy-nine-year-old.

  ‘Well, look at yourself, Zagorski.’ She bristled in his grip. ‘All got up in a monkey suit.’

  ‘No, I mean…’ He let go of her and made a vague gesture with his hand. ‘I mean, you look fantastic.’

  A sparkle in his rheumy eyes. She smiled then looked away. A waitress sidled by in pale-blue face-paint offering a tray of tiny dishes. Larry looked over at an arrangement of delicately tentacled canapés.

  ‘So,’ he asked the waitress. ‘What do we have here?’

  ‘Seared baby squid with truffle oil on a mango–lime pipette skewer,’ she replied.

  ‘Mmm, yeah.’ Larry picked one out and popped it into his mouth whole.

  ‘Well,’ said Mary-Lou. ‘We’ve sure come a long way from Clifton’s Cafeteria.’

  ‘Uh-uh.’ Larry swallowed and wiped his lips with a napkin. ‘Some of us are still here for the free limeade.’

  He held up his glass to her then took a sip.

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘Mojito. Thought I’d have a drink for Nemo. You know, i
t was his idea in the first place.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The story that became Fugitive Alien. He just had the sense to take his name off the credits of the original.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mary-Lou drily.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’ Larry gestured vaguely at something. ‘I meant the script. Your film, you know, it was a cult classic.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Larry, let’s not be precious.’

  ‘It’s true. This remake, I suppose it’s meant to be clever, post-modern or whatever. But it’s not. It’s just dumb.’

  ‘So why did you come?’

  ‘Well, I sort of know Danny Osiris, but the real reason I’m here,’ he shrugged, ‘is I thought I might just bump into you.’

  ‘That’s sweet.’

  An alien waiter passed with a tray of champagne flutes. Mary-Lou took one and clinked it against Larry’s glass.

  ‘It’s really good to see you, Mary-Lou,’ he said.

  ‘You too, Larry. Here’s to Nemo. Have you heard from him lately?’

  ‘Aw, Jesus, you don’t know, do you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He died last year.’

  As she let out a groan of exasperated resignation, an eerie wail pierced the air. On a stage at the far end of the club a girl in a silver dress was playing the theremin, furiously sculpting the air with her hands.

  ‘Let’s find somewhere to sit down,’ Mary-Lou suggested.

  Larry got another drink and they grabbed a booth in a quiet lounge area.

  ‘I guess you’re used to these things,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Film premières, smart parties, you know. You were a studio executive.’

  ‘Yeah, in television. And nearly twenty years ago. What happened to Nemo?’