The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [81]
Who was that lady?
She had gone to see Houdini in New York. She had travelled to Italy for an audience with Aleister Crowley. She was someone who hankered after magic. It was a paradoxical feature of an age assaulted as no age had been before by the onslaught of technology. Four years of world war had accelerated scientific progress, and the stranded Edwardians of the 1920s found it difficult to cope with their new unrecognisable world. Something in them reacted against it. The craze for magic was well-documented. But it was still hard to credit the extent to which an intelligent and travelled sophisticate like Pandora had fallen for shysters like Crowley and Fischer and their assemblage of misfits and freaks. A spawning, for Christ’s sake, Seaton thought. The summoning of a beast, wouldn’t you know. Human sacrifice.
He was somewhat puzzled by the references to the boy. Perhaps Peter was some sort of maternal illusion fostered by Pandora’s guilt over her lesbianism. But she hadn’t seemed at all guilty about her sexuality in referring to it herself. She was understandably coy, but she didn’t seem guilty. She was only young and her lifestyle did not exactly point to a hankering for motherhood. Neither did what work of hers he’d seen. No, he doubted the truth lay in far-fetched Freudianism. More likely it was a piece of theatre stage-managed by Fischer, the boy a child actor, the whole thing a dramatic ruse. There had been a guest from Hollywood at the Fischer house, after all. To anyone but someone as deluded as Pandora had been, that fact alone would have been a certain giveaway.
The quote from Eliot was after Dante, a reference in the first quarter of The Waste Land to Dante’s Inferno. And the inference was obvious. Pandora had sought redemption in magic from a world that reminded her of hell. That was what she depicted in her photographs. Her subjects were grim isolated souls enduring damnation. What he had seen in her portraits as their subjects’ stoicism and ugliness was her own expression of profound despair.
I had not thought death had undone so many.
How could he link Gibson-Hoare in his essay with Eliot’s great nihilistic poem? The answer was that he couldn’t. Because he could not reveal the stolen journal as his source. Seaton paced the pavement outside the empty pub. He kicked a loose stone towards a grid in the gutter. His aim was true enough, but the stone made no sound, so low had the drought caused by the heatwave reduced the water level in London’s sewers. It was left entirely to his imagination to contrive a splash for the lost object.
He heard a sound in the quiet of his reverie and turned towards where it came from, to where Lambeth High Street ended in the dark T-junction of Black Prince Road. It had sounded like the snort and whinny of a horse. And he heard the metal clop of a hoof and wondered, idly now, why the mounted police were patrolling at all in so quiet a backstreet at night. They should be galloping through Trafalgar Square, providing a show to compensate the tourists forced to leave the pubs at eleven o’clock.
There had to be a convincing way for him to pretend he had stumbled innocently upon the journal. The solution to this problem was half-formed already somewhere in his mind. But befuddled by beer, it would not come into clear focus for him. He’d only had a couple. But his brace of beers had followed a workout in the unrelenting heat. And he hadn’t eaten any dinner, to speak of. It had been foolish of him.
Bridle leather strained against muscle and sinew and iron-shod wheels rolled along the macadam as they approached under some thunderous burden, and Seaton’s head snapped back towards Black Prince Road and he gripped the journal in its oilskin sleeve in a hand loose and sweaty now with fear thinking, What in God’s name was that?
But all was innocent again. He heard behind him George, the Windmill landlord, whistling as he shuttered and locked and bolted for the night. River noise. It was river