The House of Lost Souls

by F. G. Cottam

  Far from being a Jew he is a Jew-hater, one of the new breed of Germans apt to blame obscure conspiracies for their defeat in the war. And I was surprised at how tolerant Dennis seemed of his views, having seen the slaughter on the Western Front first hand. But there is a charm about Fischer, a magnetic quality in the face of which one is apt to forgive his brutality. He tears the tips from his cigars with his teeth. I saw him hawk and spit in the street while we waited for our cab. He curses, albeit in German, at great length and irrespective of the company he finds himself in. He is physically obese and the smell of fat, alive and labouring, is always there under his expensive soaps and colognes. But he has energy and the charismatic quality of someone who absorbs attention and at the same time seems to radiate his own kind of dark light. It’s almost as though with him, you share his orbit. It isn’t a quality one could photograph, I don’t think. It’s something invisible, almost hypnotic. It’s like a parlour trick, but played with enormous power. He has power. Though I don’t believe he is wise to use it in the vindictive playful way he did with that hapless sailor. The charisma might be entirely lost on Dennis, who was drunk again after the restaurant. But Fischer’s wealth and influence have made a deep impression. Klaus Fischer is an important, influential man. And then there is his mystery, a quality which is not lost on Dennis, one feels, at all.

  I don’t believe Dennis really shares Fischer’s conspiratorial beliefs about the origins and outcome of the war. It’s just that there’s a general cynicism about him that makes him a sympathetic audience for this kind of talk. He won’t challenge it because he lacks any strong principles or even beliefs of his own. He has no religion. Certainly politics provides him with no hope. Perhaps that’s the attraction for him of Fischer. Perhaps Klaus Fischer can provide Dennis Wheatley with a kind of faith. And perhaps he craves that. Along with power, which he certainly covets enormously.

  On the morning of the crossing I joined them both for breakfast, early, the gaslights in the hotel restaurant lit to defeat the darkness and the unaired smell of the previous evening’s cigars still present in the chair fabric and curtains there, and in the air above us beneath the dark crystal of the chandeliers. And when Fischer went to settle the bill, Dennis boasted about the way Fischer had felled the insolent sailor of the night before with no more than a vindictive gesture. He had inflicted a crippling blow on the man, Dennis said, with some relish, cutting bacon and slicing sausages on his plate. He had done it with nothing more concrete than a thought. That was power, he said. But sitting there, listening to the squeak of cutlery in that dismal hotel restaurant, it seemed to me not so much power as a petulant abuse of it.

  Our boat cast off from a slipway to the east of Portsmouth Harbour, its engine labouring against the run of the tide in the cold and damp of the morning. Warships loomed at anchor to our right as we chugged along and, at the wheel, Dennis offered them a stagy salute. They looked like ragged grey castles in their stillness in the soft light. The water around us was glossy with floating slicks of oil and yellow in patches with scum from the bilge tanks of the anchored fleet. Hooray for the Empire, I thought, loyally. Seagulls flapped above the water in ragged squadrons, diving now and then. We passed a lifebelt, thrown overboard probably for a jape, Dennis said. He’d put on a white canvas cap with a peak. Watching the circle of painted cork bobbing on the surface, it didn’t look much to cling to. Monosyllabic since his arrival at breakfast, Fischer seemed to contemplate the lifebelt, gripping the rail atop the gunwale with both hands. He grunted and spat into the sea.

  We were well into the Solent, about two miles out, when the squall hit. It hit suddenly. The wheelhouse was very cramped with the three of us sheltering in it. Dennis tapped a glass tube that displayed the barometric pressure next to the ship’s compass and asked quietly had I ever been to sea before. Only aboard a liner, I told him. Liners don’t count, he said, with a dry sort of laugh. Looking out over the rising sea, I began to think him a frightful bore for this old-salt stuff he kept indulging. But I was grateful too, suddenly, for his expertise. On our projected course, he intended to round the Needles, expose us in this weather to the open seas of the Atlantic. This was no Cowes Week jaunt aboard a well-appointed yacht.

  He sent us both down, to the boat’s single cramped cabin, neither of us inclined to protest against our sudden demotion to below decks. As the boat lurched and the wind capered and roared about her timbers, Fischer’s complexion took on a greenish tinge. He didn’t look frightened. He didn’t look particularly nauseous. He looked sinister and sulky, still in his overcoat, hidden inside his gloves and Homburg hat and woollen muffler. The small portholes misted with our breath in the cold and we sat on the hard wooden berths silent and uncomfortable for a while. Then, with nothing to look at or do, he instigated our first real conversation. He asked me about Crowley and about what I’d seen Crowley do, and I confessed it was why I was there, aboard that wretched craft at the mercy of the squall. Because of what I had seen Crowley accomplish that evening in Brescia and because of what Dennis had subsequently told me about his friend Klaus Fischer, a far more powerful adept than Crowley ever dreamed of being. The levitation was real, I told him. The levitated man was suspended absolutely without support, six feet off the ground. I saw Houdini once in New York, was aware of the pursuasive potency of illusion. But this was no illusion. Crowley rose and lowered the man at will, at leisure, while we dined and chatted and drank champagne on a terrace at a villa in Brescia with the lake lapping on the shore beneath us.

  Fischer nodded. A wave slapped at the boat and the boat juddered with the force of it and we heard seawater sluice across the deck above our heads. And Fischer said quietly that he had more respect for Houdini and his conjuring than for Crowley and his impish magic. Crowley would damn himself, was damned, he said. Houdini had tricked and entranced the world, while Crowley dabbled at the edge of an abyss, he said. Remembering, then, the sailor felled in the Pompey bar at the snap of a toothpick, I thought him hypocritical for saying it. But I didn’t bring that up. I was already frightened of him by then, I suppose. Not frightened for anything particular he’d done, or said. But instinctively afraid. Fearful in the way a rabbit outside its burrow might fear the approaching howl of a hungry wolf.

  Fischer asked me was I resolute about what we intended to do. He asked was I committed to the ceremony and I told him I was. But then I admitted, truthfully, that the sacrifice itself was a part of the ritual I dreaded. It isn’t easy for any of us, he said, and his voice was a soft croon now, an intimate contrast to the elemental noise outside. He spoke about the random tragedies of fate. Take this year alone, he said. Seven hundred dead in the earthquake in Yugoslavia in February. The earth shivers and lives are randomly ended. In March, he reminded me, 1,000 people a week were dying in London at the height of the most recent influenza epidemic. Their deaths were arbitrary, unremarkable.

  But not unmourned, I remarked.

  And his eyes glinted with the challenge in the gloom of the cabin.

  Thousands dead in the Great Mississippi Flood in the spring, he said. A quarter of a million killed by the earthquake in Quinghai Province in China. And so the litany went softly on, as Fischer crooned about human death and its meaninglessness and inevitability, until I was almost convinced. Is there much point, he pondered, in a life of want and rickets, eked out in poverty in a teeming slum, under soot-defeated skies? It would be a life inevitably prey to polio and tuberculosis, endured in the grim anonymity of shared hardship, its passing years made indistinguishable by their endless and relentless toil. And so he painted a picture of stinking privies and constant damp and squalor, the lives lived in the somnolent tenements and terraces of English cities, under the shadow of chimney stacks; the sad, incurious lives lived for the sake of existence alone, without change or improvement or hope. That was a life not worth valuing, he said. There was nothing in it to cherish, or warm to. It was a life, if you thought about it with detachment and objectivity, barely worth havi
ng at all.

  And I nodded, knowing that his talk had left me no more comfortable at heart about the realities of the sacrifice. Knowing also, though, that I had been right in the hotel to think of his powers as sometimes hypnotic.

  We docked at a quiet spot to the west of Compton Bay where Fischer’s man met us and carried what light luggage we had brought to Fischer’s car, a large Mercedes-Benz. Even on the short walk from the jetty to the car, the air felt somehow different, a different pressure and texture on the skin, fresher, the distinct and singular way it does on a small island. Blindfolded, I knew I would still have sensed the change. The squall had settled now into persistent rain driven from the east, out of a lowering sky. The interior of the car was warm and roomy, its upholstery rich with the smell of oiled leather and waxed teak after the brief misery of the boat. And Fischer’s man provided rugs and hot coffee from a brace of vacuum flasks. He was deferential in his manner, but possessed the dormant power of a Carpentier, a Dempsey even, in his neck and shoulders. Looking at him, I doubted driving was the most important talent he possessed. He spoke English only with a heavy accent. He pulled on driving gauntlets and switched on the electric headlamps as soon as he started up the motor. The Mercedes was equipped with a powerful magneto. Twin beams carved a bright yellow path through the wet and the gloom. Dennis offered cigarettes, and I took one and he lit it for me. Fischer’s man put the great car into gear and we roared forward. I was on my way to the Fischer House. I smoked and sipped coffee, hot and bitter, watching the sodden green fields of the island undulate to either side through rain-bleared glass, knowing now that there was to be no going back.

  My thoughts during the drive were of what Klaus Fischer did and didn’t know. He made a pass at me on the boat. It was subtle enough, the lightest touch with his fingers on my thigh, and could have been taken as no more than a clumsy attempt to comfort me as the boat rolled and shuddered through the angry sea. It was an easy gesture to ignore without giving the offence of outright rejection. But it was a pass. And I don’t believe he would have made it, risked making the fool of himself he was, had he known as much about me as he thought he did. He only knew about me what his friend Wheatley had told him. I was sure of that. He couldn’t read minds. He could no more read minds than Dennis could. He couldn’t read minds the way that Brescia had convinced me Aleister Crowley was able to do.

  That night in Brescia, Crowley gave me a tarot reading. He said nothing during his first turning of the cards. But when he gathered them into a pack there was something knowing, leering in his smile. And he made a remark about Sappho. He told me Sappho had been as famous in her lifetime for her lust for travel as for the distinction of her verse. He said he’d seen a vision of Sappho in a mantilla and Spanish silk. He asked me had I read an English novelist called D. H. Lawrence. He wondered if I’d ever attended a festival held under a volcano to celebrate the dead. Have you ever drunk mescal, he asked me. It comes in a bottle with a worm. He stuck out his tongue, it lolled mischievously between his morphine-stained teeth. You have to drink mescal all the way down to the worm, he said.

  I know Mexico, I told him, which is the place to which he was, of course, referring. I told him I was well-travelled. I told him I was sceptical about Sappho having travelled to what was not in ancient times a part of the known world.

  Crowley smiled and spread the cards a second time. We were at a card table on the terrace about twenty feet from the main group of diners. An admirer, a sometimes follower, had lent him the villa. Crowley was dressed flamboyantly, as was his fashion I’d been led to believe, whether performing some occult ritual, or promenading along the Brighton seafront. He flaunted convention out of vanity and exhibitionism, the two traits happily encouraging one another in his character. He was dressed for this evening in a coat and velvet tie reminiscent to me of the pariah playwright, Oscar Wilde. He was old enough to have know Wilde. He was around fifty years old on the evening he read my tarot. But he was addicted to heroin and had the pale and unblemished skin the habit often confers on its victims. He looked younger than he was and far healthier than he could possibly have been.

  He knew the secret of my sexual predilection. He knew about Mexico and I saw with some certainty that he knew about Consuelo, too. His hair was unfashionably long and as I studied him he hid one eye behind the veil of it and then shook it back in a gesture that was Consuelo’s to the life. And curiously, I didn’t feel threatened by this. He was collusive in exposing me. My secrets were his, but would go no further than him, I was sure. That was our unspoken understanding. His enthusiasms ran much deeper and darker than mere gossip.

  If I give the impression of liking Crowley, it’s because I did. He had a charm and capriciousness the dull Germanic Fischer entirely lacks. Where Crowley had spontaneity, Fischer has only plodding and deliberate calculation. Crowley delights in magic. He cavorts dangerously amid its possibilities. Fischer seeks to use it with the calculated deliberation of an engineer.

  Before I left him, I asked him if it was true he had killed those men on the Singalila Ridge during the attempt on Kanchenjunga in ’05. An avalanche killed them, he told me, shuffling and re-shuffling his tarot pack. Does the rumour that you killed them make you angry, I asked him? He said that it didn’t in the slightest. He said he was only annoyed because the avalanche was supposed to have wiped out the expedition at 21,000 feet. In fact, he said, we reached 25,000 feet. We were almost at the summit when fate carried out its chaotic intervention.

  He was sitting with his back to the lake over the terrace balustrade and the water was entirely black behind him. A tenor sang an aria from the deck of a yacht or the garden of a villa, perhaps, remote on the opposite shore and the sound carried, perhaps for miles, the voice and accompanying music reaching us with a distorted disembodied clarity that was strangely beautiful. There were fireflies around Crowley’s head now, hovering about him, like an aura. Or like the halo around the head of a saint in a Renaissance fresco.

  He seemed enthused by talk of mountaineering. He asked did I think Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit of Everest, three years ago, when they were seen to disappear into cloud only a few hundred feet from the peak. They had a camera with them, he said. The camera could provide the proof of their achievement. Did I hold a professional opinion? I thought about this. Their camera was a Kodak vest camera, I said. I’m more familiar with the technicalities of the Leicas I habitually use. But it was a hardy little machine. It was purpose-built. And in the desiccated air of Everest’s upper slopes, the film would not deteriorate. Up there, in the remote cold, the snow never warms enough to thaw. So there would be no water-damage to the film. If the camera was intact, if it had not been damaged by a fall and the film exposed to light, it was possible. The film could be found, developed. The mystery could be solved. I asked him did he think Mallory and Irvine had gained the summit.

  I know they did, he said. George Mallory told me himself that they sat on the roof of the world, where they shook hands and shared the last of their chocolate and planted a small flag and recorded the moment with a half-roll of photographic pictures before their descent and the fall that killed them. The dead don’t lie, he told me.

  He stood to leave me then, my audience at an end, and when he turned I saw that a cluster of small bats had attached themselves like familiars to his velvet back.

  Crowley could read my mind. Quite possibly he could read my fate, though if he was able to, he maintained a poker face concerning that. Fischer, for all his charisma, doesn’t share those gifts. And Dennis is blind to anything but his own philandering ambitions. My true preferences would astonish him, I know. I saw the triumphant gleam when he took his Dunhill lighter from his pocket in the car today and lit my cigarette. In his eyes, I’m a conquest already. A conquest awaiting only the formalities of the bed. Which I fear, with him, would be very formal. But his eyes don’t see much. His vision is opaque, to say the least.

  I’d describe the Fischer house, here in its sp
lendid isolation in an island forest. But I’m tired. There will be plenty more opportunity to write tomorrow, on the eve of the ceremony, when the other guests arrive. Forbidden to bring my cameras, I’ve been forced to write my thoughts, to chart my impressions and discoveries. It’s tiring to do so. But I find there’s much to be said for the unequivocation of words.

  Seventeen

  Seaton stopped because it was too dark in the gardens to read on any further. The sun was descending, pinking vapour trails above the river over towards Battersea. The shadows of the trees in the gardens had lengthened and grown dense and their foliage had darkened, concealing the birds that chirped now thickly as if to signal the dusk. He thought of Sebastian Gibson-Hoare, exploring his open hemisphere of alcohol in a blue pallor of French tobacco smoke. He thought of the Irishman, dark in his odd pendulous trance. He thought of the vision that had visited him of Pandora, dead on a stretch of riverbank at Shadwell. And he could not connect at all the wretchedness of that death with the vibrant life of the woman who described herself in the journal he held in his hands. He closed the notebook. He put it back as carefully as he could in its oilskin wrapper and pushed the package into a jacket pocket, where its bulk rested reasonably discreetly, just about hidden by the flap.

  He needed to think. He knew he could not tell Lucinda about the theft. And sitting there, he could think of no plausible alternative explanation for the discovery of what he had stolen. He felt that the journal was likely to give him a true insight into the mind and motivations of an enigmatic talent. But he could substantiate none of it. Not without admitting the source and therefore the theft, he couldn’t. It was Tuesday evening. He had till a week on Friday to come up with 8,000 detailed, fluent, plausible words on the subject of Pandora Gibson-Hoare. What he had in his pocket, in terms of what was known about her, was already sensational. Her lesbianism alone would cause the whole canon to be examined with a fresh eye for its subject matter and symbolism. That, and the hankering for magic which seemed to have seduced the woman.