The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

CHINA ROSE by Ron Weighell

It was the French detective Vidocq, I think, who used to say that every act of evil had its own distinctive odor; that in a crowd of a thousand persons he could tell transgressors of the moral law by the sense of smell alone. What would a man of such singular olfactory accomplishments have made of Nicholas Hallam and Rose Seaford, I wonder? Nothing redolent of brimstone or corruption: rather a subtle whiff of something clinical masked by a sweet incense. And about Rose, of course, always the troubling fragrance of hibiscus.

It began one golden autumn morning in 1923, when I, young, poor and happier than I knew, walked over Parliament Hill Fields to deliver a belated birthday present to my cousin, Diane Harewood. An attack of asthma had prevented me from attending her fancy-dress party the night before, robbing me of the chance to appear as a swashbuckling pirate. The Theda Baras and Nell Gwynns would never know what they had missed. I remember worrying as I rang the bell in case I woke Diane, which shows how little I knew then of her riotous life style. Coming from the poorer side of the family, I had no experience of life among the Hampstead set. So I was surprised to find the door answered by Napoleon Bonaparte, who let me into a scene of chaos.

It appeared that some colossus had lifted the lid off the house and buried the floor under a ton of streamers, balloons and unconscious bodies. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the fumes of alcohol, the lounge curtains still drawn, so all was seen in an unearthly half-light. The clouds of noxious smoke and the notorious historical figures lying around in postures of pain and despair made it all a bit like Hades, but at the far end of the room a Lalique lamp cast a golden glow across armchairs drawn up around a coffee table laden with empty bottles. There sat Diane, transformed by white silk pajamas, bathing cap and greasepaint into a fetchingly malevolent Pierrot. She was deep in conversation with a 90s dandy in the Des Esseintes style.

I edged past two exhausted females shuffling together beside a gramophone. The rasping voice was exhorting them to “Charleston, Charleston!” but I could see they didn’t have it in them.

Diane accepted my carefully chosen gift with no interest whatsoever and after a kiss and a gushing greeting, proceeded to ignore me. The dandy was telling her of an encounter he had had on a plateau in the Himalayas with a two-hundred-year-old man who lived in an underground chamber, guarding an enormous book with clasps of horn. He claimed to have won the old man’s confidence by some yogic trick of sitting naked in the ice fields and melting the snow by generating bodily heat. (I commented that two-hundred-year-old men were notoriously easy to impress, but no one took any notice of me.) He learned that the book contained the whole history of the human race, and the old man had inherited the job of turning over a page each day until his successor should come. The dandy had had a devil of a job convincing the old sage that he was not the man, but he had got a sneaky glimpse of our future! The earth was soon to be destroyed by fire. It seemed that we were only here to prepare the way for another species!

It was while I was listening to this account that I first saw the strange couple seated in a corner of the room. One was a tousle-headed, handsome and athletic youth with the look of one of Aubrey Beardsley’s more sinister satyrs. It seemed the trousers and shoes he wore were only there to hide his shaggy legs and cloven hooves. The other was the most unhealthy-looking woman I have ever seen. The wrist of the hand that supported her chin looked so thin, so horribly fragile, that it seemed the grip of anger or an accidental blow would have broken it like a twig. She drew on a cigarette held lightly between the first and second fingers of the other hand, flapping the wrist back limply after each inhalation and pouting a lazy gray cloud toward the ceiling. I noticed a curious silver ring on her index finger. It showed a homed serpent coiling back and forth inside the oval collet.

Her features were angular and ordinary, her skin was positively yellow, like old ivory jaundiced by years. Her teeth, which would become visible as she pouted out the smoke, were finely shaped but faintly tinged with blue and jagged along the edges.

She had about her a strange, sickly charm such as Poe might have delighted in, or Rossetti taken for an image of deathly elegance; another Beatrice. As I looked at her wide, dead eyes shadowed beneath the lower lashes by restless nights, I could almost see a ghostly pillow hovering behind her head. That was the first of two very perceptive fancies.

The most disturbing thing about her was her absolute lack of human response. She was not listening to the young man who sat beside her, she was watching him talk to her, observing him like some peculiar and only vaguely interesting phenomenon. The only sign of emotion I could discern was a fleeting twist to the corners of her mouth which suggested sarcastic amusement. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that she was too withdrawn to find direct humor in her surroundings. The real source, I felt, must be more secret than that. The second fancy came to me then, of an unseen companion, a familiar as it were, crouching at her shoulder, its mouth to her ear. It was this creature, and not she, who thought human beings were all bloody fools, and who twisted her mouth, despite herself, with a stream of evil, whispered observations.

My attention was drawn back at that moment to the dandy, who had taken Diane to the window and drawn back the curtain. A wave of sunshine flooded the room, edging their forms in a shared aura of gold.

“Awake!” he cried melodiously. “For Morning in the Bowl of Night has flung the stone that put the stars to flight, and lo! the Hunter of the East has caught St Pancras Station in a noose of light!”

Diane turned her grotesquely made-up face to his and laughingly called him a fool, and something in the tone of her voice made me sorry that no woman had ever spoken to me in such a way.

I found myself rising to join them, so we stood close together peering out into the bright world. Close to, the dandy smelled strongly of some musky perfume. Diane introduced us and I learned that his name was Nicholas Hallam. When he learned that I was a clerk, he looked at me with sympathy.

“You’re always telling me that my life is too selfish, Diane”—the sarcastic twist that came to her mouth suggested that she had said no such thing—“I have decided to make Thomas my good cause. I will save this poor wretch from himself. If he’s still a clerk in one month, there is no hope for him. Be honest, young man. Do you really wish to spend this sequence of precious and unrepeatable sensations we call a day languishing in the dungeons of Messrs. Kneebone and Kneebone, or whatever they are called, pining for adventure while your life goes drifting away, along with the desks and the uncounted dirty ledgers, toward the grave?”

“Not particularly,” I conceded, “but I have rent to pay, and lately I’ve developed some expensive habits like eating. So I’m afraid,” I finished checking my pocket watch, “I must push off, or the desks and ledgers will be drifting toward the grave with my replacement at the helm.”

“Yes, and we must leave too, Diane,” said Hallam, glancing across her to the woman in the corner who had so aroused my interest. “Our young friend has reminded us of our duty. Rose and I have a hard day too. It is our plan to walk away the morning, giving common people a chance to look at us and dream. Then a good lunch with fine wine in a little restaurant I know, and a trip to my bookbinders, where my volumes of Swinburne await me clad in a new raiment of leather, scarlet as the tongue of Sin.” He sighed deeply. “And if we have the strength after such a day of toil, a whole decanter of cognac remains at home to be disposed of unaided. I hardly think we shall have the energy left to invoke Ashtoreth tonight!” Bending forward he kissed Diane’s hand and whispered, “Goodbye for now, my sweet Pierrot.”

Diane simpered and let go of his hand with reluctance.

“Call in on us some time, Lenihan,” he added to me, holding out an expensive-looking calling card. The address was 13 Tamar Gardens, Hampstead.

A couple of days later I took the umpteenth look at that black and gold card, pondered again the weird charm of Rose Seaford, for such apparently was her name, and decided to take Hallam up on his invitation. The evening wind was blowing fine rain down the streets, and my asthma had been playing up a little, but I had just bought a rather snappy trilby which, I thought, gave me a touch of style, so I said “what the hell” and took a taxi.

Tamar Gardens sounded very plush. It turned out to be a rather rundown block of flats. Somewhat disillusioned, I rang the bell and waited; and waited. Just when I was about to give up and go home, Rose Seaford opened the door and stepped out, wearing a voluminous black raincoat and a black slouch hat. Drawing me in out of the lamplight, she whispered fearfully, “Did you see anyone watching the flat?”

I shrugged in confusion. “I need your help,” she said, peering over my shoulder. Then she put her finger to her lips and pointed to a solitary walker who came into view, and glanced in our direction as he went by. I was beginning to enjoy my close proximity to Rose in the shadowy doorway, but she pushed me out into the rain, whispering, “We’ve got to keep him in sight, but don’t let him see us.”

So I found myself tailing a complete stranger through the strengthening rain, ducking into doorways now and then, and worrying as I did so about the condition of my drooping, saturated hat. Soon the whole thing became rather exciting. My inborn flair for detection, nurtured on Dupin and Holmes, got the better of me. Whenever the man passed under a street-lamp I scrutinized him. It was strange, I reflected; he looked like a man walking home in the rain! He paddled along with his hands thrust into the pockets of his sodden overcoat, apart from the moments when a stronger gust came, lashing along the street, and he clutched desperately at his trilby. I found myself wondering ruefully whether it was a new one. We followed him for miles before losing him in a positive warren of alleys. Rose hovered for a moment, seemingly quite rattled, then said, “We’ve got to get there first.”

“Where?” I cried, but she was already off with a brisk step. Then followed the most exhausting hour I have ever experienced. Rose might have been frail of form, but she set a fast pace and held it up hill and down dale.

I was soon trailing behind with a stitch, my breath steaming out into the chill drizzle. When she was obliged to wait until I caught up, the stream of invective to which she subjected me would have staggered a stevedore. I would never have guessed how rich and fruity her language could be. Eventually we came onto a steep lane where the gutters were awash, causing our sodden shoes to slip on the smooth flagstones. Beside a set of high, barred gates set in a towering wall we stopped, and I realized that we were in Swains Lane, at the old gates of Highgate Cemetery. The place should have been locked up at such an hour, but inexplicably, Rose must have known that the lock had not been turned for she threw her weight against the wet iron bars, and with a deep and ominous groan, the gates rolled back on their rusty hinges.

Here, let me confess, I loitered somewhat. Highgate Cemetery is ruinous, overgrown, shadow-haunted and choked to overflowing with more than four thousand corpses. An unwholesome necropolis of crumbling tombs, it has never figured highly in my list of daytime haunts. By night, “a blended scene of moles, fanes, arches, domes and palaces, where, with his brother Horror, Ruin sits,” it was the last place on earth I would have chosen to pursue some nameless and doubtless unpleasant errand.

Rose, though, was striding off along a gloomy, rain-washed path hemmed in by ivied slabs, stone crosses and contorted, leafless trees. An owl actually had the audacity to hoot. I stuck close and whistled carelessly as we descended some ruined steps and followed the path to a tall gate built on the design of an Egyptian temple, as if a normal gateway were not sepulchral enough. Here Rose turned and gripped my arm.

“Wait here,” she said firmly. “And no talking to strangers.”

Then she turned and disappeared up the path by which she had come.

My initial desire was to follow her, but I set my back against the wall on one side of the gate and tried to think beautiful thoughts. Although I had become oblivious to the rain, the wind seemed suddenly to penetrate my drenched mackintosh, cutting me to the bone. I began to shiver. My imagination was playing up too. There I was, trying desperately to keep my mind on something sensible and healthy, and all the while my inner eye was plagued by images of death and decay. Every novel, every theory I had ever read concerning the horrors that reach from beyond the grave unwound before me. I was scaring myself stiff.

In annoyance as much as anything, I began to pace up and down the path along which Rose had departed, that is, first away from, and then toward, the Egyptian gate. It was while turning away from it for the tenth time that I heard a distinct slow scuffing of feet walking out of the darkness toward my back! There could be no mistake. I was being approached out of the dark central labyrinth of the cemetery.

I must have aged visibly at that moment. It was my first taste of supernatural fear, and it robbed me of all volition. All I could do was to stand paralyzed as the steps drew nearer. My heart lurched violently as fingers tightened on my shoulder, then a voice close to my ear whispered, “It’s only me.”

I have never struck a woman, but it was a close thing at that moment.

“What in God’s name are you playing at?” I gasped, too shaken up to shout. Rose set off along the path.

“Nothing in God’s name,” she called back. “All the paths return to that spot—I came round that way to save time.”

“What are we doing here, Rose?” I asked, recovering a little composure as I caught up with her.

“That,” she replied wittily, “would be telling.”

Not much more than an hour later we were in Hallam’s front room drying out, and I had still received no satisfactory explanation for the adventure. The room was not what I had expected of Hallam. There were no vast cases of old tomes, no Gothic trappings and no luxurious furniture. The place had a spartan, Oriental look to it, with acres of bare floor scattered with cushions, a folded screen, and two glass cabinets of simple but sound workmanship which contained small ornaments and perhaps a dozen volumes with fine but hardly extravagant bindings. A few silken banners hanging on the walls showed brilliantly colored images of fierce Tibetan gods, and a crystal ball supported on the coils of a magnificent gilt dragon sat on a low cabinet. There was, too, a small but exquisitely detailed statue of some female deity of the East, not Kali, who has many arms and blue skin, but a being with a normal quota of limbs and skin the color of flame, her voluptuous body twisted into a dancing posture. She wore a grisly torque of human skulls.

I was squatting, a little self-consciously, in a silk kimono sipping a glass of cognac. Rose was reclining on the opposite side of the fireplace, her eyes on the vortex of steam that was swirling above our drying clothes. Hallam had just entered wearing a robe of black velvet and was pacing back and forth before the fire like a caged tiger, gesticulating grandly and chuckling, as though he were as high as a kite.

“Rose is right, of course,” he decided. “It is better that you don’t know her purposes tonight. There are some things,” he concluded darkly, “which man ought not to know.”

He took the decanter from the low cabinet and refilled my glass with cognac. “In any case,” he continued on a lighter note, “you have had an intense experience, which is surely our purpose in being here if we have one at all. To be where the vital forces of life unite most intensely. For an hour or so you did have a quickening sense of life.”

That had been the case, but I had no intention of conceding without reasoned arguments, so I said, “Piffle!”

“Pater actually,” he pointed out, quite unperturbed, “but no matter. I must admit you disappoint me, Lenihan. I had such high hopes for you, but it seems your hard, gemlike flame is guttering.”

I gave up gracefully; there was no arguing with either of them. In any case, having accepted a glass of brandy to warm me up, I had begun to see what people saw in the stuff, and with each refill had sunk deeper into the warm lagoon of intoxication. Now I had reached the point where the gears of the mind had started to slip and the commonplace takes on an unguessed profundity. Even as he spoke, I was watching the smoke of the fire billowing in slow, ghostly waves of unendurable beauty. I was suddenly overcome with an inexplicable melancholy.

“Really, I’m not mocking you, Lenihan,” Hallam was saying. “I merely wish to impress upon you one important fact—the most important it may be! Simply that life is a desperate business; you should seek experience itself and not some imagined goal that you may never live to see. You have had an experience this evening, that is all. The reasons, the rights and wrongs of it do not concern you, nor should they. Now come on, Lenihan, have another drink and relax.”

I glanced vacantly about me, searching vainly for some blade of wit that had not been blunted by the brandy. A mahogany display case just behind me, quite plain and simple but looking at that moment like no other display case in creation, caught my eyes. I moved over to look at it. The interior was lined with crumpled red silk, a waste of frozen blood across which was trekking an ivory figure no larger than a thumbnail. He was an old Japanese gentleman in short breeches and a ragged vest. His tiny arms were withered to sinew and bone, his lean jaw locked in an agony of exhaustion. The burden under which he struggled so grimly was a lion-headed demon riding his back, one foreclaw tangled in the old man’s hair, the other thrown back in a finely observed struggle for balance. So perfect was the impression of pain and unendurable weight that it seemed the old man had staggered for days across those cruel wastes while the monster threw back its finely-carved jaws in triumphant laughter. It was a beautiful and a terrible vision seen only for a second before my breath defiled the glass and swallowed the scene in mist.

“Netsuke,” said Hallam at my elbow, conjuring back the vision with a magical pass of his handkerchief. “I have quite a few, though it would be rather ostentatious to display more than one at a time. Many of the designs are based on legends.” He handed me my glass and went on to describe a few, which I cannot honestly pretend to remember in any detail, though one concerned a deity on the floating bridge of Heaven, whatever that is, forming islands from the foam that dripped from the tip of his celestial spear, and another told of a dwarf who traveled in a vessel of gooseskins and had once bitten the cheek of some god or other. (Strangely enough, I do remember the name of the little god-nibbler, though why it stuck in my mind I can’t imagine. If ever anyone is lost for that name, I hope I will be there to prompt, casually, “Sukuna Bikona.”) Rose had taken a peach from a bowl by her side and was tearing the luscious flesh with wet, sucking bites, like a rapacious Oriental succubus.

That much impressed itself upon my fuddled brain but no more. I was engulfed in the warm flood, and Hallam’s voice became steadily more remote. I remember the spines of the few leather-bound books in a case, glowing like crystal columns full of green and gold amber liquor, full of the liquor of the gods; and the gilded lettering on one, a copy of Pater’s Greek Studies, at which I stared until the word “greek” became the most stupid combination of letters imaginable. My next distinct recollection is of Rose drawing back the drapes and a faint, pinkish radiance giving a suggestion of living color to her face. Hallam was saying, angrily I thought, “Too risky—one is enough.” Then he saw that I was awake and his tone changed.

“Dawn, Lenihan,” he said. “Time to go. You can walk home across Parliament Hill Fields. See the dawn over London. Another priceless experience.”

He was laughing to himself as he said it.

The drenching mist must have left me with a cold, because I was shivery and lethargic for days after. Every morning I searched the papers with fear, expecting reports of some dark deed among the tombs of Highgate Cemetery, but I found nothing of significance.

One day about a fortnight later, I met Hallam and Diane outside the Bargate Cafe in York Street. This was the occasion on which I realized that they were lovers. It was also the first time I noticed Diane’s failing health. As they talked, betraying their new-found intimacy with every tone and gesture, I took in her drawn, pale face and lackluster gaze. What disturbed me most was her mirthless, lethargic manner. I gave her the openings for a couple of her usual digs at my expense and she let them go without a word. Watching them off into the gray, overcast afternoon, I kept thinking “first Rose, now Diane.” Whatever Hallam got up to, it seemed to take a fearsome toll on his women.

I wondered, too, how Rose would take this change of affections. Somehow I could not see her sitting back meekly and accepting such a state of affairs. To my surprise, I found myself hoping that those blank, pitiless eyes might turn toward me. By some obscure alchemy of her own, she had transformed the slightest gesture of human acknowledgment—a glance, a sarcastic smile—into gold. The indifference was a challenge. I don’t know that I was foolish enough to fall in love with her, but I did apparently want her to like me.

Hallam’s romance with Diane began to stimulate gossip among mutual friends and without actually prying I kept my ears open. Unfortunately, where facts are scarce, opinion is generally most plentiful among the uninformed. There is always the friend of a friend—more often it is the friend of an enemy—who is willing to extemporize. The view of the man that emerged was nothing if not comprehensive.

Hallam, it seemed, was a penniless sponger; he was a millionaire. A student of Ancient Mysteries, he “dabbled” in the Black Mass. He was a scholar of no mean repute, and the author of some fine poetry. He affected false scholarship and coined pornographic verse. He had published some distinguished essays on comparative religion; he produced spurious “studies” of pseudooccultism. He was a homosexual, though it seemed that no woman was safe with him.

For a while I did my best to keep track of this pendulum of opinion as it swung its crazy way between adulation and scorn, but growing sick and dizzy with it all, I decided to hold my judgment and size up the man on the basis of my own experience. One piece of evidence a little more substantial than talk did give me cause for concern though. There had been newspaper reports a few years earlier that Hallam used dangerous drugs and encouraged his acolytes to do the same. It could have been scandal-mongering of course, but I couldn’t see the newspaper in question throwing mud so blatantly unless sure that a certain amount of it was going to stick. It was significant, too, that Hallam had not sued.

Around this time, the firm to which I had given ten years’ faithful service decided that I was surplus to requirements, thus fulfilling Hallam’s resolution at our first meeting. I had not lasted the month!

For a while my financial circumstances, which had never been exactly healthy, were precarious, a factor which no doubt contributed greatly to a renewal of my asthma. Things were pretty black, one way and another, and I lost contact with our main protagonists for some weeks. Only when my health began to return did I venture out to visit Diane. I ragged her about her laziness and gave her an outrageously exaggerated account of my own illness, but all the while I was inwardly appalled by her condition. She was thin and listless, quite drained of her old energy and her complexion was sickly white. Most disturbing of all, she had quite lost the last spark from her eyes. It was a shell of Diane that I spoke to.

My concern rapidly gave way to suspicion when she admitted that she had not seen a doctor. “Nicholas says I have a leak in my aura,” she explained seriously. “I’ve been losing energy for ages. It’s a good job he knows about these things because he can put it right.”

Just how he was achieving this Diane was unwilling to say, but it involved an ancient ritual into which she had been initiated at Hallam’s flat, by Hallam and Rose! At least it had been Hallam and Rose at the start, but on that first occasion they had been interrupted by the doorbell. Rose had left to answer the door and had not returned.

Then the penny dropped and I guessed who the unexpected visitor had been. Diane could not remember the date but she did remember that it had been raining that night!

So I knew the answer to the mystery of Highgate Cemetery! It had been a way of keeping me occupied for a couple of hours. The method, and choice of destination, had probably been left to Rose’s peculiar sense of humor!

After that, I was in the mood for a confrontation with Hallam and made straight for his flat. I was some thirty yards from the house when a taxi drew up outside and Hallam emerged, followed by a woman in a dark coat and slouch hat. Even without the familiar clothing from the night of the wild chase, the slow pantherine sway would have identified Rose. Hallam paid the driver, put his arm around her shoulder and together they entered his flat.

I walked by and kept on walking. The realization that Hallam was seeing both women did not surprise me overmuch but Diane’s state made the whole thing seem doubly squalid. There was something petty and two-faced about pulling such a trick on a sick girl, especially as Hallam was in all probability the one who had made her sick in the first place. It was then that I decided to set my scruples aside and get down to some serious prying.

An afternoon in the reading room of the British Library with Hallam’s published works proved edifying. All the books were de luxe, privately printed editions with exquisite bindings. Some were poetry, metrically dextrous and clearly influenced by Baudelaire and Swinburne. Others dealt with Egyptian Magic, Tibetan Tantric Yoga and the erotic temple sculptures of India. One work entitled The Serpent of Khem had an acrostic on the title page that spelled out the identity of the personage whose worship was recounted within.

Altogether a charming dedication. Little that I read made sense to me then, but I could hardly fail to notice the constant references to drugs, from peyote to the deadly refinements of heroin. In the powers of magic I did not at that time believe, but in the deleterious power of drugs I certainly did.

One of the most striking features of these wonderfully printed books was the wealth of weird and disturbing illustrations by an artist called Alphonsus Gaunt. That name rang a bell. I remembered a quite terrifying edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that had overshadowed much of my early childhood. The plates accompanying one of Hallam’s poetic effusions—Hymns to the Nephilim—surpassed that dark masterpiece by a long way. Then I made a significant discovery. In one of the volumes was a frontispiece drawing of Hallam and Gaunt and both faces were equally familiar. Alphonsus Gaunt was the satyr I had seen speaking to Rose at Diane’s party!

That threw me for a moment. Either Gaunt had been a boy-genius when he illustrated the Grimm’s, or he was older than he looked. In any case I might have found a source of inside information on the Hallam ménage.

Alphonsus Gaunts were not plentiful in the street directory. I traced him to a basement flat of a once-grand house in Deyton Street: not quite the residence I had expected of a distinguished artist! My ring was answered by an incredibly pale and shriveled old woman, who nodded at the mention of Gaunt’s name and gestured me to enter.

The flickering radiance of a candle cupped in her hand gave enough light to show the way between stacks of magazines and newspapers smelling of damp. We passed through a kitchen with a huge sink and cold-stone flags underfoot, where an immense range lay, long ago choked on soot and fat. There was a sound of dripping water. Coming at last to a great door of oak, she threw open the carved panels and shrank away into the gloom. I stepped through and the door closed behind me.

Many candles were burning in the room. I saw skulls of men and animals; distorted, elongated sculptures of stone and clay; the tattered spines of a thousand old books. And I saw a host of faces watching me.

In the candlelight were faces benign and malevolent, beautiful and hideous. One I will never forget, bony and blotched, with a cruel, wet-lipped mouth and obliquely-slanting eye-pits, watery, yellow and alive with a vile intelligence. The head was crowned with a thatch of white, downy fur, and above it, as though unfurling from a hunched back, immensely powerful wings, serrated and membranous like those of a bat, but gnarled and shaggy at the joints like the forelegs of a dray horse.

Then my eyes adjusted and I made out frames and easels. They were paintings, wonderful, living faces on canvas and wood, even on the sound boards of old radio sets. Then one face, a benign and monumental Greek head, let out a slow breath and moved.

It was Gaunt, seated crossed-legged before an odd little altarlike table. He held a pencil, which was moving swiftly over a sheet of paper. It seemed the pencil lead was kindling a black fire on the page, tongues and billows of a sinuous burning that licked and swirled to engulf the virgin parchment. Out of the swiftly and perfectly formed flames and smoke, faces began to form, receding ranks and columns of profiles, sphinxlike and vigilant. Soon a half-formed monstrosity of a face emerged, growing under the moving pencil, a soft, twisted mask that watched me with living eyes. It was a shock to realize that, in order to produce an image that was the right way up for me, Gaunt had to be drawing it upside down. But not as great as the one I got when I looked closely at the artist, for his eyes were tightly closed.

He was himself as singular as anything in that weirdly disturbing place. I could now put his age at around forty, but he had a honed, hawklike handsomeness of features and an unruly thatch of dark, curly hair that would give an impression of youth from a distance. He was dressed not in some garment of ritual, but in a threadbare jacket over a tattered, paint-spotted pullover and no shirt. He might have been a laborer hardened by hears of toil in the sun and wind. Yet there was about him the look of a magus.

Laying down his pencil, he opened his eyes and looked on me without the slightest sign of surprise. The appearance of strangers in his room was apparently a common occurrence. Leaning forward, he touched my arm.

“A flesh and blood visitor for a change,” he observed mildly. “Who are you, an emissary from the parasites and eaters of filth? Another sleepwalker from the dung heaps of society?”

“I saw you at Diane’s party. You were with Rose Seaford—”

“The whore of Hell,” he interjected. “Do you follow the cult of the Ku?”

I hesitated, unsure of the answer that was most likely to win his confidence. The delay betrayed me.

“No, you don’t, do you? What are you here for? My work is no longer for sale.”

“I’m not here to buy—although I do find your work fascinating.”

My choice of words seemed to please him. Encouraged, I poured out the whole story of Hallam’s activities. When I’d finished, he pondered a moment, then offered a tobacco tin full of roll-ups. When I refused he lit one up himself and proceeded to make a pot of tea. There was something incongruous about that figure, who looked, in the smoke of his cigarette like an alchemist crouched over his alembics, engaged in so domestic a task.

The tea, however, was strong and good. Gaunt sized me up for a while, then said abruptly, “When I called her the whore of Hell just now—it wasn’t an insult. It was a title—” He took a sip of tea. “You really don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” His voice was heavy with contempt. “That silly little girl of yours—has she any idea what she’s involved in? I thought not. Sleepwalkers! She’s in real danger, boy!”

“I know. Hallam uses drugs—”

“I’m not talking about drugs, fool! Do you think a book like Hymns to the Nephilim can be made without a cost? They have to be lured to visible appearance and that takes energy. What is drained has to be replenished. The Kiss of the Shade, boy—the Mors Osculi. The soundless reverberation of silent gongs. Get your girl out of it now, right away. Tonight! Stay with her—keep them away!”

Despite myself, I was letting him get through to me. I felt terrified. I must have looked it, too, because Gaunt shook his head and said, “Wait—I may have something that will help you.” I found myself thanking him.

“I’m not doing it for you—or that stupid girl. I have a difference of opinion with Hallam over Rose.”

He produced, of all things, a small plate or shallow dish painted with spirals of looping script and a symbol reminiscent of the outline of a bat. Holding it up before his face, he focused all his attention on it.

As I sat waiting, my mind began to play strange tricks on me. It seemed to grow darker in the room, and much colder. I swear that some of the paintings seemed to move, so that I seemed to be sitting in the middle of a decidedly hostile crowd. Then Gaunt took up a piece of white linen and wrapped up the plate. As he handed the bundle to me he said: “Take this and place it in the girl’s room. Close to her as you can get it. She’ll be all right then.”

I took the thing to humor him. By that time my only thought was to get out of the place before I ended up as mad as he was. Doubtful of my ability to find the way out, I asked if the old woman could show me back to the door. In the candlelight his expression became more than ever that of a malevolent satyr as he answered “There’s no old woman living in this house.”

That did it. I got out of the room as quickly as I could and made my own way through the dark labyrinth of the house. If there were any light switches, I didn’t find them so I stumbled through the piles of papers in the passages, ridiculously afraid of coming upon that wizened old woman who, in Gaunt’s ambiguously stressed expression, did not live in the house at all. It was just an irrational fear of the dark, I told myself, but that didn’t help me one bit. By the time I found the door and let myself out into the deserted streets, my nerves were in a sorry state.

Let me admit that my only thought was to go home and forget all the mumbo-jumbo. I actually got to my own front door, but I didn’t go in. Something told me that I was right about Diane being in danger, if only from the drugs that Hallam was so fond of. And if Gaunt was an example of the adherents of this Ku cult, Diane’s sanity was doubly in danger.

So despite the lateness of the hour, I made my way to Diane’s house. I got no reply to my knock, and all the windows were in darkness, but when I looked through the letterbox, I glimpsed the distinctive fur lining of Hallam’s overcoat hanging in the hall.

All the tension of the previous few hours came out in anger. I began pounding at the door and shouting through the letter box. Just as curtains were drawing back all over the street and shouts of complaint began, I heard a sound of bolts drawn, and Hallam’s face appeared in the doorway.

At first he refused to let me in, but when I began to shout about the police he had a sudden change of heart. The house was unheated, but Hallam was bathed in sweat. He was dressed in a black robe with wide sleeves and a thrown-back hood that gave him the look of a sensual and worldly monk, an impression compounded by the smell of some heavy incense that hung in the air. If Hallam intended to keep me talking in the hall, he was out of luck. A glance had shown that the living-room was in darkness, and that a light was glinting through the crack of the bedroom door. Before he had a chance to say, or do, anything, I had crossed the hall and thrown open the door.

The image frozen by my sudden entry will never fade from my mind. Diane lay on her bed, her face pale and slick as a mask of white silk. She was naked, and running with sweat, or some glistening unguent. A heavy gold plate, or plaque, lay over her groin. The air in the room was thick with incense and pulsed with a deep, throbbing that troubled the eardrums without creating a sensation of actual sound. Rose Seaford stood over Diane, her hands gesturing over the throat and breast regions with the movements of one warming her hands over a fire. Rose’s hair was disheveled, her yellow skin glinting with sweat. She wore a long, diaphanous garment of flame-colored silk, gathered at the waist with a single black cord. On her forehead was a disk of polished metal. A heavy choker at her throat held a second disk and suspended from it on a fine chain hung a variety of geometric shapes.

There was nothing languid or sickly about the gaze she turned on me then. She radiated quite diabolic power. Hallam began to say something, but she silenced him with a venomous look, and returned her wide, white gaze to me. The gash of her mouth tightened hard, and the muscles of her jaw flexed spasmodically. I really thought she was about to launch herself on me like a great cat. Instead she straightened up and extended her arms in my direction. I felt a crawling over my flesh, and the atmosphere grew suffocating, as though the very pressure in the room had increased. Suddenly, I felt fear, a blind, unreasoning urge to run, to escape the stifling radiation that beat out from her like waves of intolerable heat. My brow felt as though it would burst. And then the face of Rose Seaford began to change.

How can I describe what happened in the pulsing, smoky atmosphere of that room? If I say she grew old, you will not understand. She became ancient, as the visage of the Sphinx is ancient, as the colossi at Memnon are ancient. It was a face that might have gazed for eons upon desolation, or brooded through time in some jungle-draped ruin. And out of her body, coiling thickly down both arms, came a black flowing of serpents.

But this was not the greatest horror. For she multiplied before my eyes, generated a host of identical snake goddesses on every side, until the spiraling black coils of her hatred filled the space between us, and the air became black with it.

Against that onslaught a puny human could have done nothing. I was frozen with terror, and could only close my eyes and wait to be engulfed in the seething blackness.

Then the pulsing on the air stopped, and the room became very still. I opened my eyes and saw that the blackness had dispersed. There was only one figure before me, one Rose Seaford staring with a look of puzzlement at the region of my chest. I felt a warm, bracing sensation radiating from that spot, like a gulp of brandy on a cold day. The source was the inside pocket of my coat, where I had placed Gaunt’s amulet.

With trembling fingers I drew it out and tore off the linen wrapping. Holding it before me I moved toward the bed, and as I did so Rose Seaford drew back and skirted the room until she and Hallam stood between me and the door. Close to, I could see that the metal plate on Diane’s groin was engraved with animal-headed gods and snakes. I picked the thing up and shied it at the watching couple. It was probably just as well it missed them. The impact took a two-inch chunk out of the wall. Hallam scooped up the plate and took Rose’s arm.

“Come on,” he said levelly. “You’ve got what you wanted. “Turning to me he added, “You wasted your time, Lenihan. We’d finished with her tonight in any case.”

When they had gone I breathed for what seemed to the first time in minutes, and covered Diane with a sheet from the floor.

Diane recovered in time, but she was never quite as vital again. She was devastated when Hallam would have nothing more to do with her, and, ironically, blamed me for driving him away. Hallam, she said, had done everything he could to cure her “loss of energy” and my interference with the rites had offended him! We were never as close after that, which was a pity.

One bitter December night the following year, I made the short journey to the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead to see Coward’s The Vortex, which by only its second week had ensured a successful run in the West End, establishing once and for all the name of its already famous young author. I caught one of the last performances before the play left the confines of that “converted drill-hall” for the more salubrious setting of the Royalty. It seemed to me in my naiveté a tremendously powerful piece, and the wild response of the audience could not but have an unsettling effect on a ragged-arsed clerk a whole year older than the author whose hour of triumph he had just witnessed. I left the theater dizzy with fantasies of suddenly discovered talent and critical acclaim. It was with something of a shock that I glimpsed those two familiar faces in the buffeting crowd. Slipping behind a nearby stanchion, I paused to watch them.

Hallam was deep in conversation with a young couple, smiling the smile of one who has no need of dreams to sustain him. He was wearing immaculate evening dress, and a cloak thrown back at the shoulders to reveal the crimson lining; all very Mephistophelean. In fact, with his elegant appearance and those bloody gashes at the shoulders like torn wings, he looked every inch the fallen angel. Rose stood beside him, her arm linked so lightly with his that her gray leather glove barely compressed his sleeve. There was no clinging with her, no sacrifice of her independence for anything as human as love. Her tawny hair was drawn tightly back into an elaborate knot at the nape of her neck, displaying the fine, strong line of her jaw. She was engulfed in a mist of gray furs piled pillow deep behind her head and tucked snugly under her chin like a winter blanket. She stood apart, even in the crowd, sweeping the passersby with her cold, heartless expression. As I watched, her other, unseen companion must have whispered something, because she smiled that nasty secret smile. And I knew that somewhere they had found another victim and completed the dreadful process of reparation. This knowledge did not come from the smile of Rose Seaford as she scanned the crowd flocking home through the December darkness. It was the healthy bloom of her skin, and her eyes, no longer blank and dead, but ablaze with replenished inner fire.