The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [64]
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