The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [72]
As the night wore on, his guests made free with Fischer’s wine and champagne, his opium and his cocaine. Much of the behaviour was drearily predictable. But some of it still held the capacity to shock. Towards the end of the evening, the Egyptian woman Crowley brought took off her clothes. A jewel sat tucked into her naval. Her nipples were pierced with thickish circles of gold shaped to look like braids of rope. She writhed half-heartedly to the music, doing a sort of belly dance. And then she lay supine on a tabletop, smoking a cigar through her vagina. Some of the men applauded this trick, which I’d heard of, but never seen before. When the cigar was half-smoked, Fischer plucked it out of her and made the ash of it glow with three or four furious puffs, before thrusting the lit end back into her. She moaned in mingled pain and pleasure and the smell of burned flesh and singed hair and sexual release rose about the room. Her orgasm earned another desultory round of cheers and table hammering before she limped off the table and slouched away to put her clothes back on. I looked at her face. But her expression was blank under the exotic application of the kohl around her eyes.
Shortly after, the sacrificial was brought in for everyone to see, not borne aloft on a bier or anything grand like that, but shaking inside the man Giuseppe’s buttoned overcoat, like stolen game in the coat of a poacher. Put down, the sacrificial did not look like the key to Fischer’s impending omnipotence. He was just a young child, shivering in undershorts and a once-white singlet, grey now with wear and washing. He is perhaps six or seven years old. He is undernourished. He looked confused and fearful, as though distrustful of the gaudy apparitions he was seeing. But this is one dream, if he thinks it a dream, he will not awaken from. He stood clutching at his undershorts with one hand, holding them up, the elastic having perished or perhaps snapped in his handling, protective of his infant dignity.
The assembled banqueters began to clap. And I was filled at once with compassion for the child and with heartfelt loathing for what we are here to do. Fischer’s words aboard the boat came back to mock me. And then the giant Giuseppe swept the boy off the floor and made for the door and they were gone. And at once I understood the reason for the look I’d seen earlier on the face of Fischer’s man. Whatever his former employer, Mr Capone of Chicago, had had him do for his pay, it wasn’t this.
I looked at Dennis. His complexion was flushed and sweaty and his eyes still gleaming from witnessing the Egyptian woman’s pain. He is a sadist, of course, which I had forgotten. I looked at the other faces in the room; all drunk or intoxicated in some way, except for the duellists, sullen and sober at separate ends of the table, each hoping, I suppose, that sobriety now would give them an advantage handling sharpened steel come morning. I looked at the assembled throng in their tuxedos and ball gowns and felt the pearls turn to paste around my dry imposter’s throat, because I wasn’t one of them.
And I’m not. And I never can be. Whatever Fischer’s platitudes aboard the boat, I won’t collude in the murder of a child. Absurdly, I found myself resenting Fischer for lying on the boat about the rickets. The child is sound-limbed. Thin, pale, terrified, but apparently healthy. Sound-limbed or crippled, it hardly signifies. I cannot be party to the murder of a child. I cannot.
While I was thinking this, I saw Crowley lift his head and look at me. He was sitting in a club chair over in one corner with a wine goblet rested between his fingers on one of its arms. He had on an oriental skullcap, to conceal his scalp where the hair no longer grows to cover it. He turned the goblet deliberately and one of his feet tapped in its buttoned spat, on the floor. It tapped as though with infinite patience. And then it stopped. And he smiled. And of course, he knew.
8 October, 1927
I walked down with Dennis for the duel. My fever was worse