I shrugged in confusion. “I need your help,” she said, peering over my shoulder. Then she put her finger to her lips and pointed to a solitary walker who came into view, and glanced in our direction as he went by. I was beginning to enjoy my close proximity to Rose in the shadowy doorway, but she pushed me out into the rain, whispering, “We’ve got to keep him in sight, but don’t let him see us.”
So I found myself tailing a complete stranger through the strengthening rain, ducking into doorways now and then, and worrying as I did so about the condition of my drooping, saturated hat. Soon the whole thing became rather exciting. My inborn flair for detection, nurtured on Dupin and Holmes, got the better of me. Whenever the man passed under a street-lamp I scrutinized him. It was strange, I reflected; he looked like a man walking home in the rain! He paddled along with his hands thrust into the pockets of his sodden overcoat, apart from the moments when a stronger gust came, lashing along the street, and he clutched desperately at his trilby. I found myself wondering ruefully whether it was a new one. We followed him for miles before losing him in a positive warren of alleys. Rose hovered for a moment, seemingly quite rattled, then said, “We’ve got to get there first.”
“Where?” I cried, but she was already off with a brisk step. Then followed the most exhausting hour I have ever experienced. Rose might have been frail of form, but she set a fast pace and held it up hill and down dale.
I was soon trailing behind with a stitch, my breath steaming out into the chill drizzle. When she was obliged to wait until I caught up, the stream of invective to which she subjected me would have staggered a stevedore. I would never have guessed how rich and fruity her language could be. Eventually we came onto a steep lane where the gutters were awash, causing our sodden shoes to slip on the smooth flagstones. Beside a set of high, barred gates set in a towering wall we stopped, and I realized that we were in Swains Lane, at the old gates of Highgate Cemetery. The place should have been locked up at such an hour, but inexplicably, Rose must have known that the lock had not been turned for she threw her weight against the wet iron bars, and with a deep and ominous groan, the gates rolled back on their rusty hinges.
Here, let me confess, I loitered somewhat. Highgate Cemetery is ruinous, overgrown, shadow-haunted and choked to overflowing with more than four thousand corpses. An unwholesome necropolis of crumbling tombs, it has never figured highly in my list of daytime haunts. By night, “a blended scene of moles, fanes, arches, domes and palaces, where, with his brother Horror, Ruin sits,” it was the last place on earth I would have chosen to pursue some nameless and doubtless unpleasant errand.
Rose, though, was striding off along a gloomy, rain-washed path hemmed in by ivied slabs, stone crosses and contorted, leafless trees. An owl actually had the audacity to hoot. I stuck close and whistled carelessly as we descended some ruined steps and followed the path to a tall gate built on the design of an Egyptian temple, as if a normal gateway were not sepulchral enough. Here Rose turned and gripped my arm.
“Wait here,” she said firmly. “And no talking to strangers.”
Then she turned and disappeared up the path by which she had come.
My initial desire was to follow her, but I set my back against the wall on one side of the gate and tried to think beautiful thoughts. Although I had become oblivious to the rain, the wind seemed suddenly to penetrate my drenched mackintosh, cutting me to the bone. I began to shiver. My imagination was playing up too. There I was, trying desperately to keep my mind on something sensible and healthy, and all the while my inner eye was plagued by images of death and decay. Every novel, every theory I had ever read concerning the horrors that reach from beyond the grave unwound before me. I was scaring myself stiff.
In annoyance as much as anything, I began to pace up and down the path along which Rose had departed, that is, first away from, and then toward, the Egyptian gate. It was while turning away from it for the tenth time that I heard a distinct slow scuffing of feet walking out of the darkness toward my back! There could be no mistake. I was being approached out of the dark central labyrinth of the cemetery.
I must have aged visibly at that moment. It was my first taste of supernatural fear, and it robbed me of all volition. All I could do was to stand paralyzed as the steps drew nearer. My heart lurched violently as fingers tightened on my shoulder, then a voice close to my ear whispered, “It’s only me.”
I have never struck a woman, but it was a close thing at that moment.
“What in God’s name are you playing at?” I gasped, too shaken up to shout. Rose set off along the path.
“Nothing in God’s name,” she called back. “All the paths return to that spot—I came round that way to save time.”
“What are we doing here, Rose?” I asked, recovering a little composure as I caught up with her.
“That,” she replied wittily, “would be telling.”
Not much more than an hour later we were in Hallam’s front room drying out, and I had still received no satisfactory explanation for the adventure. The room was not what I had expected of Hallam. There were no vast cases of old tomes, no Gothic trappings and no luxurious furniture. The place had a spartan, Oriental look to it, with acres of bare floor scattered with cushions, a folded screen, and two glass cabinets of simple but sound workmanship which contained small ornaments and perhaps a dozen volumes with fine but hardly extravagant bindings. A few silken banners hanging on the walls showed brilliantly colored images of fierce Tibetan gods, and a crystal ball supported on the coils of a magnificent gilt dragon sat on a low cabinet. There was, too, a small but exquisitely detailed statue of some female deity of the East, not Kali, who has many arms and blue skin, but a being with a normal quota of limbs and skin the color of flame, her voluptuous body twisted into a dancing posture. She wore a grisly torque of human skulls.
I was squatting, a little self-consciously, in a silk kimono sipping a glass of cognac. Rose was reclining on the opposite side of the fireplace, her eyes on the vortex of steam that was swirling above our drying clothes. Hallam had just entered wearing a robe of black velvet and was pacing back and forth before the fire like a caged tiger, gesticulating grandly and chuckling, as though he were as high as a kite.
“Rose is right, of course,” he decided. “It is better that you don’t know her purposes tonight. There are some things,” he concluded darkly, “which man ought not to know.”
He took the decanter from the low cabinet and refilled my glass with cognac. “In any case,” he continued on a lighter note, “you have had an intense experience, which is surely our purpose in being here if we have one at all. To be where the vital forces of life unite most intensely. For an hour or so you did have a quickening sense of life.”
That had been the case, but I had no intention of conceding without reasoned arguments, so I said, “Piffle!”
“Pater actually,” he pointed out, quite unperturbed, “but no matter. I must admit you disappoint me, Lenihan. I had such high hopes for you, but it seems your hard, gemlike flame is guttering.”
I gave up gracefully; there was no arguing with either of them. In any case, having accepted a glass of brandy to warm me up, I had begun to see what people saw in the stuff, and with each refill had sunk deeper into the warm lagoon of intoxication. Now I had reached the point where the gears of the mind had started to slip and the commonplace takes on an unguessed profundity. Even as he spoke, I was watching the smoke of the fire billowing in slow, ghostly waves of unendurable beauty. I was suddenly overcome with an inexplicable melancholy.
“Really, I’m not mocking you, Lenihan,” Hallam was saying. “I merely wish to impress upon you one important fact—the most important it may be! Simply that life is a desperate business; you should seek experience itself and not some imagined goal that you may never live to see. You have had an experience this evening, that is all. The reasons, the rights and wrongs of it do not concern you, nor should they. Now come on, Lenihan, have another drink and relax.�
�
I glanced vacantly about me, searching vainly for some blade of wit that had not been blunted by the brandy. A mahogany display case just behind me, quite plain and simple but looking at that moment like no other display case in creation, caught my eyes. I moved over to look at it. The interior was lined with crumpled red silk, a waste of frozen blood across which was trekking an ivory figure no larger than a thumbnail. He was an old Japanese gentleman in short breeches and a ragged vest. His tiny arms were withered to sinew and bone, his lean jaw locked in an agony of exhaustion. The burden under which he struggled so grimly was a lion-headed demon riding his back, one foreclaw tangled in the old man’s hair, the other thrown back in a finely observed struggle for balance. So perfect was the impression of pain and unendurable weight that it seemed the old man had staggered for days across those cruel wastes while the monster threw back its finely-carved jaws in triumphant laughter. It was a beautiful and a terrible vision seen only for a second before my breath defiled the glass and swallowed the scene in mist.
“Netsuke,” said Hallam at my elbow, conjuring back the vision with a magical pass of his handkerchief. “I have quite a few, though it would be rather ostentatious to display more than one at a time. Many of the designs are based on legends.” He handed me my glass and went on to describe a few, which I cannot honestly pretend to remember in any detail, though one concerned a deity on the floating bridge of Heaven, whatever that is, forming islands from the foam that dripped from the tip of his celestial spear, and another told of a dwarf who traveled in a vessel of gooseskins and had once bitten the cheek of some god or other. (Strangely enough, I do remember the name of the little god-nibbler, though why it stuck in my mind I can’t imagine. If ever anyone is lost for that name, I hope I will be there to prompt, casually, “Sukuna Bikona.”) Rose had taken a peach from a bowl by her side and was tearing the luscious flesh with wet, sucking bites, like a rapacious Oriental succubus.
That much impressed itself upon my fuddled brain but no more. I was engulfed in the warm flood, and Hallam’s voice became steadily more remote. I remember the spines of the few leather-bound books in a case, glowing like crystal columns full of green and gold amber liquor, full of the liquor of the gods; and the gilded lettering on one, a copy of Pater’s Greek Studies, at which I stared until the word “greek” became the most stupid combination of letters imaginable. My next distinct recollection is of Rose drawing back the drapes and a faint, pinkish radiance giving a suggestion of living color to her face. Hallam was saying, angrily I thought, “Too risky—one is enough.” Then he saw that I was awake and his tone changed.
“Dawn, Lenihan,” he said. “Time to go. You can walk home across Parliament Hill Fields. See the dawn over London. Another priceless experience.”
He was laughing to himself as he said it.
The drenching mist must have left me with a cold, because I was shivery and lethargic for days after. Every morning I searched the papers with fear, expecting reports of some dark deed among the tombs of Highgate Cemetery, but I found nothing of significance.
One day about a fortnight later, I met Hallam and Diane outside the Bargate Cafe in York Street. This was the occasion on which I realized that they were lovers. It was also the first time I noticed Diane’s failing health. As they talked, betraying their new-found intimacy with every tone and gesture, I took in her drawn, pale face and lackluster gaze. What disturbed me most was her mirthless, lethargic manner. I gave her the openings for a couple of her usual digs at my expense and she let them go without a word. Watching them off into the gray, overcast afternoon, I kept thinking “first Rose, now Diane.” Whatever Hallam got up to, it seemed to take a fearsome toll on his women.
I wondered, too, how Rose would take this change of affections. Somehow I could not see her sitting back meekly and accepting such a state of affairs. To my surprise, I found myself hoping that those blank, pitiless eyes might turn toward me. By some obscure alchemy of her own, she had transformed the slightest gesture of human acknowledgment—a glance, a sarcastic smile—into gold. The indifference was a challenge. I don’t know that I was foolish enough to fall in love with her, but I did apparently want her to like me.
Hallam’s romance with Diane began to stimulate gossip among mutual friends and without actually prying I kept my ears open. Unfortunately, where facts are scarce, opinion is generally most plentiful among the uninformed. There is always the friend of a friend—more often it is the friend of an enemy—who is willing to extemporize. The view of the man that emerged was nothing if not comprehensive.
Hallam, it seemed, was a penniless sponger; he was a millionaire. A student of Ancient Mysteries, he “dabbled” in the Black Mass. He was a scholar of no mean repute, and the author of some fine poetry. He affected false scholarship and coined pornographic verse. He had published some distinguished essays on comparative religion; he produced spurious “studies” of pseudooccultism. He was a homosexual, though it seemed that no woman was safe with him.
For a while I did my best to keep track of this pendulum of opinion as it swung its crazy way between adulation and scorn, but growing sick and dizzy with it all, I decided to hold my judgment and size up the man on the basis of my own experience. One piece of evidence a little more substantial than talk did give me cause for concern though. There had been newspaper reports a few years earlier that Hallam used dangerous drugs and encouraged his acolytes to do the same. It could have been scandal-mongering of course, but I couldn’t see the newspaper in question throwing mud so blatantly unless sure that a certain amount of it was going to stick. It was significant, too, that Hallam had not sued.
Around this time, the firm to which I had given ten years’ faithful service decided that I was surplus to requirements, thus fulfilling Hallam’s resolution at our first meeting. I had not lasted the month!
For a while my financial circumstances, which had never been exactly healthy, were precarious, a factor which no doubt contributed greatly to a renewal of my asthma. Things were pretty black, one way and another, and I lost contact with our main protagonists for some weeks. Only when my health began to return did I venture out to visit Diane. I ragged her about her laziness and gave her an outrageously exaggerated account of my own illness, but all the while I was inwardly appalled by her condition. She was thin and listless, quite drained of her old energy and her complexion was sickly white. Most disturbing of all, she had quite lost the last spark from her eyes. It was a shell of Diane that I spoke to.
My concern rapidly gave way to suspicion when she admitted that she had not seen a doctor. “Nicholas says I have a leak in my aura,” she explained seriously. “I’ve been losing energy for ages. It’s a good job he knows about these things because he can put it right.”
Just how he was achieving this Diane was unwilling to say, but it involved an ancient ritual into which she had been initiated at Hallam’s flat, by Hallam and Rose! At least it had been Hallam and Rose at the start, but on that first occasion they had been interrupted by the doorbell. Rose had left to answer the door and had not returned.
Then the penny dropped and I guessed who the unexpected visitor had been. Diane could not remember the date but she did remember that it had been raining that night!
So I knew the answer to the mystery of Highgate Cemetery! It had been a way of keeping me occupied for a couple of hours. The method, and choice of destination, had probably been left to Rose’s peculiar sense of humor!
After that, I was in the mood for a confrontation with Hallam and made straight for his flat. I was some thirty yards from the house when a taxi drew up outside and Hallam emerged, followed by a woman in a dark coat and slouch hat. Even without the familiar clothing from the night of the wild chase, the slow pantherine sway would have identified Rose. Hallam paid the driver, put his arm around her shoulder and together they entered his flat.
I walked by and kept on walking. The realization that Hallam was seeing both women did not surprise me overmuch but Diane
’s state made the whole thing seem doubly squalid. There was something petty and two-faced about pulling such a trick on a sick girl, especially as Hallam was in all probability the one who had made her sick in the first place. It was then that I decided to set my scruples aside and get down to some serious prying.
An afternoon in the reading room of the British Library with Hallam’s published works proved edifying. All the books were de luxe, privately printed editions with exquisite bindings. Some were poetry, metrically dextrous and clearly influenced by Baudelaire and Swinburne. Others dealt with Egyptian Magic, Tibetan Tantric Yoga and the erotic temple sculptures of India. One work entitled The Serpent of Khem had an acrostic on the title page that spelled out the identity of the personage whose worship was recounted within.
Serpent of Khem, by old mysterious Art.
Allures with the coiling favors of the Worm.
Twines with the knot of love about my heart.
Abomination in beguiling form!
Nature supreme who rules our every part!
Altogether a charming dedication. Little that I read made sense to me then, but I could hardly fail to notice the constant references to drugs, from peyote to the deadly refinements of heroin. In the powers of magic I did not at that time believe, but in the deleterious power of drugs I certainly did.
One of the most striking features of these wonderfully printed books was the wealth of weird and disturbing illustrations by an artist called Alphonsus Gaunt. That name rang a bell. I remembered a quite terrifying edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that had overshadowed much of my early childhood. The plates accompanying one of Hallam’s poetic effusions—Hymns to the Nephilim—surpassed that dark masterpiece by a long way. Then I made a significant discovery. In one of the volumes was a frontispiece drawing of Hallam and Gaunt and both faces were equally familiar. Alphonsus Gaunt was the satyr I had seen speaking to Rose at Diane’s party!
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