The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [73]
Not everybody walked down for the duel. A few casualties from the night before were presumably still oblivious in their beds at 10 a.m., the appointed hour. Some came down wearing overcoats over their pyjamas. The pornographer from Rotterdam came and the two industrialists from Antwerp and Lille who like to play cards against one another came. The Danzig shipyard magnate came to watch as well. The casino owner from Marseilles appeared. Perhaps he had taken bets on the outcome. They made a dull troupe, pasty, bloodshot, smelling of last night’s liquor and cigars as they wheezed and gossiped, trailing through the wood. None of the other women attended.
Fischer was taking few chances with the thirteen for his coven, judging by the protective clothing armouring the two swordsmen. Their torsos were plated in heavy leather and their sword arms covered in quilted padding down to the gauntlet each wore. Their legs were unencumbered, though, and they stretched and thrust with their weapons in skilled confident preparation. Their swords were rapiers; antique but deadly, undulled by age as they tore the damp air in practice strokes with a ragged swishing sound. Fischer called the duellists together and made them put on goggles and then helmets such as motorcyclists wear. They seemed very calm. They avoided looking at one another directly, but each made a joke to Fischer as he gave them their instructions and checked the edges of their blades and the buckles on their body plating and I heard him twice bark his harsh, spontaneous laugh in response to what they said to him in jest.
The duelling ground was a flat clearing covered with deep green grass in the seclusion of trees about three hundred yards from the house. I noticed Crowley wandering in the trees with apparent indifference to the spectacle. He had on an embroidered tunic such as the warlock Merlin might have worn. It trailed his feet. I realised with dull certainty that I was afraid of him now. He frightens me more than Klaus Fischer does. In Brescia I had been seduced and foolish. I looked at him gliding through the bracken and ferns and dead leaves of the forest floor and knew with a sinking heart that he had killed his comrades on that mountain all those years ago. They had been sacrificed, for something, on the Singalila Ridge. Crowley and Fischer are the same. Power is all with them. No price is too exacting.
Fischer’s man appeared and unscrewed the top from a flask and I smelled hot buttered rum and the rich full smell of it almost obliged me to vomit on the ground in the nausea gripping my stomach from the fever that persisted in me. He gave the protagonists a silver cup apiece and, with their free hands, they raised the cups and drank. Their drinking hands were impressively steady, given what they were about to do. But the aviator had killed in the war, garlanded for killing. And the film producer looked, too, like the kind of man who could snuff out another’s life without compunction.
I think the war has much to do with it. It is nine years since the war ended but it casts a long shadow on the world we live in. Life became so cheap as to be permanently debased. Faith was destroyed. Now, sensation and novelty are all. If the times we live in were a man, he would be a corpse, a frenzied, ersatz existence galvanised into him only by odd jolts of electricity. What were those lines of Eliot’s? I had not thought death had undone so many.
The duel itself was over fairly