Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  “So long as he doesn’t call me sir,” I said.

  It was a rare light moment. My work was grim at times, and my anxiety over the lack of contact from Miss De Vere was starting to gnaw at me. The news was equally dark. It was all talk of Chancellor Hindenburg taking over in Germany and the prospects for another war, which was sounding all but inevitable. There was something new every day. The latest talk was of a Royal Observer Corps being set up to watch out for bombers over our cities. Life needed something cheerful.

  Sally and I got on very well, for the present. But my situation was hardly a stable one. It did not need Gillespy’s death to remind me of the risks implicit in my position. Any talk of the future was discouraged.

  The note waiting for me was a single line from Sally telling me to go to her as soon as I received it. I supposed that she might have preferred to wait there for me, except that female visitors were not allowed. And she could hardly be expected to wait on the doorstep, though the weather was mild enough.

  Sally still lived at Mrs Berry’s rooming house, in that very room where Mabel Brown had met such a tragic end. That always bothered me, but Sally said it was a nice enough place, and the likelihood of lightning striking twice was low, and besides, Mabel Brown had been messing with things she did not understand. None of that was exactly reassuring. I had seen lightning strike the same spot twice with my own eyes, and not so very far away. And by being involved with me, Sally was also messing with things she did not understand.

  However, I had come to a better appreciation of when argument is pointless, and with Sally, it was most of the time. At least her room was pleasant, and the house was conveniently situated.

  I was ten paces from the door when Sally came out to meet me, handbag clutched in her fist.

  “Hello, Harry,” she said. “We’ve got to go to the pictures. There’s something you have to see.”

  She stuck her arm through mine and led me off in the direction of the Roxy. She was lively enough, but not her usual cheerful self. It was not an outing for a whim, which was more Sally’s style—this was something more serious.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I can’t explain,” she said. “There’s a strange picture. You have to see it. You’ll understand. In fact, you’re probably the only one who will understand. It’s horrible.”

  Sally had worked the early shift at the pickle factory and had caught a matinee showing at the cinema. Films were one of our shared interests, but our tastes did not quite coincide, and the Phantom of the Opera was more her cup of tea than mine. It had opened that day, and Sally had decided to see it on her own.

  I knew the film’s reputation. Lon Chaney had made a career out of playing deformed and mutilated characters, from the Hunchback of Notre Dame onwards. Strange, perhaps, that Sally, who had experience of real-life horror, would choose Mr Chaney’s work for entertainment. But then, I hadn’t stopped reading fantastic tales of adventure either, despite of everything. She would not explain what had disturbed her, but I gathered it was not the main feature but something else in the program.

  We arrived after the program had started. The usual bill of fare is a balanced blend of serious and lighter pieces: a newsreel, a cartoon, a serial, comedy short, and a travelogue or documentary before the film proper.

  “There weren’t so many in the matinee,” said Sally, shouting over the sound of a beer-hall polka from the cinema organ.

  We had to look for seats. I find pushing past others a tricky business, and we settled for two end seats near the back of the stalls.

  On the screen, a man was finishing demonstrating the art of glassblowing. An amorphous, glowing blob of material on the end of a tube was transformed into a glass vase, turning and turning all the while so it did not fall out of shape.

  “This is it next,” said Sally, looking about her. “There’re a lot of people here.”

  The image of the finished glass vase, on a display stand with several others, faded from the screen, and the organ was silent. The submerged buzz of chatter, coughing, and the rustling of sweet papers rose to the surface.

  Sally took my arm. “I’m closing my eyes,” she said.

  The screen remained black, but the organ started a new tune. Less of a tune, more of a whine, like giant mosquitoes.

  “The Phantom of the Cinema,” announced the title card. Of course, it was a companion piece to the Phantom of the Opera. I assumed from the title that it would be a short comedy, with Buster Keaton or somebody burlesquing his way through a parody of the main feature. I could not have been more mistaken.

  On the screen was the inside of a cinema, a bigger place than the one we were in, and a full house by the look of it.

  The music changed to an ominous rumbling, drumming rhythm. On the screen, hooded men carrying flaming torches raced through a ruined city at night. It was not clear if they were chasing or being chased.

  Suddenly, the scene changed to a desert landscape of rocky pinnacles.

  Mutters rose from the cinema audience. The transition from one scene to another was too abrupt. The projectionist must have made a mistake.

  It was a fantastic scene; the pinnacles were a thousand feet high, and must have been added afterwards by a special-effects artist. Dark birds with jagged wings and curved beaks circled high in the sky. A lone man, a hooded figure who might have been one of those from the ruined city, struggled onwards, steadying himself on a rock. He was dragging a load behind him. His face could not be seen.

  He passed a row of people who were carrying out ritual obeisance: standing, kneeling, lying down, and standing again. The object of their veneration was just off the screen, and the shadow which fell across them was oddly suggesting of a living being.

  The music changed again to suggest the Orient. Three women in elaborate costumes danced slowly around a gigantic black egg. They circled the egg, stooped, bowed to it, caressed it, circled again. The organ thumped, drumming, as though a huge heart was beating inside the egg.

  “What is this?” I asked Sally, but she had her eyes squeezed tightly shut and shook her head.

  Then we were back in the cinema again. The film jumped around as though it had been edited by a madman. You barely had time to apprehend one scene before it was snatched away, and you were somewhere else. The cinema audience on the screen leaned forward, clutched their seats, wiped their brows. They were seeing something alarming.

  “HE HAS MANY FACES,” said the inter-title card.

  The hooded men were threading their way through a maze of metal prisms, which turned and shifted as they passed. Pits opened in front of them, and they leapt across, agile as goats. When they came to an open space, you could see that the sky behind them was full of shooting stars, a torrent crossing the sky.

  “This is very strange,” I said. I felt Sally shake her head again, waiting for it to be over.

  Then, the scene jumped to a sailing ship, riding the waves on a storm-tossed sea. The audience was no longer shouting at each transition. It was carrying them along. The clouds were so thick you could not tell whether it was day or night, but there was white water everywhere—what Captain Hall called “white horses” of foam at the summit of every wave. They were such towering waves that the schooner seemed to hesitate with each one, as if it might not crest it but would slide into the water.

  The crew clung to the rigging, soaked through from the spray, pointing to something below. Then, the camera pulled back, and confusingly, the waves had become sand dunes in the desert. The desert traveller stopped, got down on his knees, and started brushing at the sand with his gloved hands. He was uncovering something, but we could not see what it was. He stood up and walked several deliberate paces with his hood tilted down towards the ground before stopping again to repeat the act.

  The dancers had begun to move more vigorously and less elegantly. They looked as though they had been dancing a long time. Their faces, which had been blank and serene, showed something of panic. The drumming
grew louder. The huge egg moved—or seemed to move—and a woman screamed.

  “IT WILL BE BORN AGAIN,” said the inter-title.

  There were a few indignant cries from the audience, and one scornful laugh. People do not like being messed around, and the picture made less and less sense.

  “Rubbish!” shouted someone. Nobody told him to be quiet.

  The hooded men were streaming into a building. Again, you could not tell whether they were the pursuers or the pursued. Some of them were carrying knives or other weapons. Strange markings were painted on the walls of a corridor they ran through. Then they were in a cinema, too, an empty, deserted one. They ran towards the blank screen, faster than ever.

  The ship was still struggling with tall waves, and now you could tell it was night because a full moon appeared between the clouds. The bearded captain pointed up at it.

  “THE GREEN MOON DRAWS THEM!”

  Heads broke the water, glittering wetly in the moonlight. One turned, showing a big-eyed face that was not a seal or a manatee, or anything else wholesome and natural. People gasped around me.

  It was all happening too fast; there was no chance to piece the scenes together or make sense of the film—if it did make any sense.

  The next scene was blanked out by smoke or steam, like when a train arrives at a station. You could not make out what was behind it.

  “Foggy today!” shouted someone, which drew nervous laughter.

  “This is rubbish!” came another shout. “Take it off!”

  The desert traveller crouched by a rock pillar, his eyes fixed on something in the distance. Shifting shadows suggested something colossal. The dark birds wheeled around him.

  “THE FATHER OF TERROR”

  Then, back in the cinema, hooded figures burst out of the screen. The audience panicked, trying to climb under their chairs or scramble away over others, who sat paralysed. The hooded ones looked odd compared to the normal people, as though their robes covered deformities.

  Women were screaming—women in the real-life cinema around me.

  The screen showed a close-up of a single hooded figure then went white, the brilliance suddenly dazzling.

  I was momentarily confused. A hooded figure ran past, and I genuinely thought it must be one of the characters from the screen until I saw it was just a woman in a shawl, scattering caramels behind her in her haste to get out.

  The house lights went up.

  The screams had stopped, and there was a gust of male laughter, tension being released. Others joined in less certainly. It was all a big practical joke to scare us, and it had worked a little too well. Some of the women were laughing, too, but friends were crowding round another who had fainted.

  “Lie her down,” one of them was saying.

  “Give her some air,” urged another.

  I saw a trembling elderly woman make her way out, resting her hand on a seatback at every step. Some of the others looked like they would have liked to join her.

  “What a shocker,” a man behind me was saying cheerfully. “That was a proper shocker, wasn’t it?”

  “Nearly made me jump out of my skin,” said his companion. “They shouldn’t show things like that without warning you.”

  “You had to see it,” said Sally, her eyes open again. “What are we going to do?”

  “Well… the first thing is, I’m going to see the manager,” I said.

  The cinema manager, a silver-haired man in a dinner jacket and bow tie, had his back to his office door, which bore a silver plaque: Mr J Bellingham BICM.

  Others had arrived before me. The commissionaire, who sported impressive whiskers and plenty of gold braid, was arguing with two men who were trying to get to the manager. Two others had outflanked him and were remonstrating with the manager. The womenfolk stood back at a safe distance.

  Others jostled alongside me, all with the same mission in mind, but as soon as I approached, everyone made space and deferred to me, presumably on the grounds that I looked like an individual who would make their complaint forcefully if not physically.

  “There are women and children in that audience,” a red-faced man was shouting. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”

  “I was trying to explain—” Bellingham waved his hands in calming gestures.

  “It wasn’t even on the bill,” said another.

  “There’s two of them fainted in the lower circle.”

  “Please!” I said, loud enough to cut through the competing voices. “Let’s hear this explanation, shall we?”

  I said it with enough menace for the others to quiet down and look to the manager, who addressed his reply to me.

  “I have been on the telephone with the distributors,” he said. “There was some sort of mix-up.”

  “You!” Someone pushed past me and put both his hands round the startled manager’s throat. A second later, the two of them were grappling on the floor.

  I stooped and lifted the assailant bodily off the ground. I might as well have been back at the asylum, as it was such a familiar type of assault. The furious cinemagoer still clung on to his victim, and it was only by twisting both arms that I could get him to relinquish his grip and let the poor manager breathe again.

  The attacker thrashed and struck out at me with his elbows and heels. I suffered a few bruising blows, but experience and training counted for something. I had him in a secure armlock before too long.

  “I’ll kill him!”

  “Stop it!” I told him. “You’ll injure yourself.”

  His eyes rolled as he tried to struggle, pulling this way and that. There were men at the hospital who were less crazy than he was.

  “Him! Him!” he kept saying, grinding his teeth. “I’ll kill him!”

  As is the way of these things, with all except the most frenzied, the flare-up burned itself out before long, and his struggles subsided. The sudden outburst of violence had shocked the other cinemagoers, and they had calmed down. They were still complaining, but the manager was no longer the target of their wrath.

  “You can let go of me now,” the man I had pinned down said in a quiet voice.

  “Are you going to behave?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes. I’m sorry.”

  I released him quickly and stood back, watching for signs of a renewed outburst, but as he got up, he only rubbed his arms and worked his shoulder joints. He was embarrassed rather than angry.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked.

  “Nah. Are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what happened,” he said, looking at the carpet, wondering at his own behaviour. “I saw that thing on the screen, and… well, something snapped.” A thought suddenly hit him. “The manager, is he—”

  “He’s not hurt,” I said.

  “Thank Christ for that.” He was genuinely relieved.

  “Maybe,” I suggested, “you had better slide off now, and we’ll say no more.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “Thanks, mate.”

  The manager was sending away the last of the disgruntled patrons, handing out little red vouchers for free tickets. The commissionaire had returned to his station, judging that the danger to his superior had passed.

  “The – customer has gone,” I told the manager. I had to force myself not to call him an inmate; it was hard to appreciate that I was not at work. “He won’t bother you again.”

  “I’m very grateful to you,” he said, raising a hand to his neck. He had straightened his bow tie, but there were scratches and a livid red mark on his throat. “As I told the others, it was the distributors. They sent us the wrong reel of film. The entire program is delivered in one package, you see. All the projectionist does is play the reels through, one after another.”

  “It happened in the matinee as well,” I said.

  “Unfortunately, neither the projectionist nor I was watching it then,” he said, a trifle too defensively.

  “That seems a bit careless.” I would
not usually be so forward, but I had saved him some personal damage, and I was more than a little curious to find out what was going on.

  “I am extremely sorry, believe me. I’ve been manager here for twenty years, and nothing like this has ever occurred before.”

  “I’ve never seen a film like that ever before,” I said. “What was it?”

  “God knows,” he said with some force. “God knows what it was. I’m tempted to take the celluloid out and burn it. I’ve never seen an audience react like that before.”

  “But who made it?” I asked. “And why?”

  Seeing that my interest was genuine, and appreciating he owed me a favour, the manager gestured for me to follow him to the projectionist’s booth, a short distance down the corridor. He smoothed his hair.

  “I’ve a pretty wide experience of films,” he said. “What it reminded me of, a lot, was those Expressionist pictures coming out of Germany. The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Nosferatu, The Golem—ever seen those?”

  “I haven’t even heard of them.”

  He stopped by the door.

  “Films like those are not commercial over here, but you have to keep an eye on trends. Modernist filmmaking is all very… weird. Like this.”

  There was not enough room for both of us to go into the projectionist’s booth, but I saw a small, bearded man in silhouette, illuminated by flickering background light, shrugging and gesturing as exaggeratedly as one of his silent film stars. Even from there, I got a waft of hot celluloid from the booth. After a brief but pointed exchange, he passed something to Bellingham, who withdrew a minute later and closed the door.

  “Here’s the poison,” he said, holding up a flat silver can and looking at the label in the light. “Well, that’s suspicious for a start. No distributor’s name on it. No nothing, in fact.”

  A plain, typed rectangle, the size of a business card, was slotted into a holder like a luggage label: Phantom of the Cinema. 8 mins. Reel 1 of 1.

  He drummed his fingers on the film canister thoughtfully.

  “The distributors—” I started.

  “They denied all knowledge,” he said. “You know, I think somebody slipped this little piece of mischief into the program after the delivery was made.”