The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [69]
What I mean is that the house looks as if it has been styled and furnished with the calculation lavished on a film set, filled with extravagant props. Fischer’s house has not evolved. It has been expensively and stubbornly imposed here. But for all its air of fraudulence, everything is real. There is a pair of broadswords crossed under a shield on the wall of his library. I tested the edge of a blade and my thumb came away from it deeply sliced and painfully dripping blood. The Fischer house is the home of a man who has invented himself. That’s why it seems so new and so bogus, somehow. And if it seems in places slightly unfinished, I suppose that’s because the invention is not yet perfected. It is not yet complete. It won’t be, until the ceremony and the sacrifice and Klaus Fischer’s elevation to who and what he aspires to become.
Our Dempsey doppelgänger is an Italian American from the city of Chicago. I spoke to him briefly after he carried my bag to my room. I know Chicago slightly, and my familiarity with some of its attractions warmed him to me, I think. He used to be a boxer, had sparred, he said, with Dempsey and with Tunney too. And with Harry Greb, a fighter he said was better to his mind than were Dempsey and Tunney combined. His name was Giuseppe, he said, Joe to his friends. He had worked in Chicago for a man called Capone and asked me was the name familiar. I said it wasn’t. I asked was Mr Capone a friend of Klaus Fischer and he seemed amused by that. At the conclusion of our short conversation we shook hands. Or rather, my hand disappeared into his like a finch into the jaws of an alligator. There seemed a ponderous sadness to Joe, an air of reluctant secrecy and regret. He made me feel, for the first time, the absence of my cameras. My new friend would make an intriguing subject for a portrait.
There is no distinct border between the grounds of Fischer’s house and the surrounding forest. The trees simply thicken and spread, until the forest becomes remarkable. Even shorn of their leaves, the trees are so thickly placed that in parts the going becomes totally impossible. I think this is one of the few forests that has survived on English soil since Plantagenet kings and their passion for the hunt. It is not hard to imagine boar crashing through the floor of leaf mulch, driven from impenetrable thickets, shearing the bark of dripping trees with their fierce tusks. It is a place of ancient rite and seclusion, this forest. I somehow doubt Klaus Fischer has ever bothered properly to explore its shadows and glades. I think it is the sort of place that would disconcert him. He would feel lost here.
It is a profoundly English place, the wood surrounding his house. But the kingly connection is only my romantic projection. I know so little of the island’s actual history. The only monarch I know to have cultivated a strong link with Wight is Queen Victoria, who spent long months at Osborne House in the years of her unstoppable grief after her husband’s early death. And Victoria wasn’t English at all, not in blood. She was a German, like my host. And, like him, I suspect she was chiefly attracted to the island by its surprising atmosphere of isolation. It enables easy privacy.
You can look back on Fischer’s house from the wood, on its high gables and the gaunt and solitary turret rising from its roof. The turret houses a guest room, Dennis said. I told him I wouldn’t like to sleep up there. I’m not easily spooked, but I wouldn’t. From outside, the windows of the turret have an odd geometry. Their angles and exaggerated depth suggest menace, somehow. Darkness lurks in their panes instead of them reflecting exterior light. He smirked at my timorousness and said the room at the summit of Fischer’s