‘How do you mean — recording?’
‘Sound and pictures. It was a shame things went wrong. I guess that was bound to happen between those two.’
The flashes of light seen by Ernie Dunch were now explained. Gwinnett seemed to find the operation, in which he had himself been anyway to some extent engaged, less out of the ordinary, less regrettable, than the fact that some untoward incident had marred the proceedings.
‘Russell, what was all this about? Why were you there? Why was Widmerpool there? I can just understand Murtlock and his crew going on in that sort of way — one’s reading about such things every day in the paper — but what on earth were you and Widmerpool playing at?’
Gwinnett’s features took on an expression part obstinate, part bewildered. It was a look he had assumed before, when asked to be more explicit about something he had said or done. No doubt his present state added to this impression of being half stunned, a condition genuinely present; if not the result of a drug, then fatigue allied to enormously heightened nervous tension. Again, seeming to consider how best to justify his own standpoint, he did not answer for a moment or two.
‘Gibson Delavacquerie said you’d seen something of the Widmerpool set-up, the commune, or whatever he runs. He said Murtlock had joined up with it. Murtlock seems to have taken over.’
Delavacquerie’s name appeared for some reason to bring relief to Gwinnett. His manner became a trifle less tense.
‘I like Delavacquerie.’
‘You probably know he’s abroad at the moment.’
‘He told me he was going. I talked to him about seeing Ken Widmerpool again, but I didn’t tell Delavacquerie the whole story. When Ken sent me a letter after the Magnus Donners Prize presentation last year I said I just didn’t have time, which was true. Anyhow I wasn’t that anxious to see him. I thought he’d forget about it this time, though I may have mentioned I was coming over again. I don’t know how he found out I was in London. I hadn’t told anyone here I was coming over. I only was in touch with Gibson after I arrived. Then someone called me up, and said he was speaking for Ken, who had a young friend — and master — whom he wanted me to meet.’
‘Master?’
‘It was Scorp himself telephoning, I guess. I hadn’t met him then. That was how it started. While he was speaking — and I’ve wondered whether Scorp didn’t somehow put the idea in my head — it came to me in a flash that I’d often thought these weirdos linked up with the early seventeenth-century gothicism I was writing about. Here was an opportunity not to throw away. I was right.’
‘It was worth it?’
‘Sure.’
This was much the way Gwinnett had talked of his Trapnel researches.
‘As soon as I went down there, I knew my hunch was right. Ken was altogether different from the man he had been the year before. He was crazy about Scorp, and Scorp’s ideas. It was Scorp’s wish that I should be present at the rites they were planning. A summoning. Scorp thought my being there might even make better vibrations, if I didn’t take part.’
Gwinnett stopped. He passed his hand over a face of light yellowish colour. He looked uncommonly ill.
‘Scorp said these rites can’t be performed with any hope of success, if those taking part are in a normal state of mind and body. I haven’t had anything to eat or drink myself now for thirty-six hours. I didn’t want to miss the chance of a lifetime, to see played out in the flesh all the things I’d been going over and over in my mind for months — like Tourneur’s scene in the charnel house.’
‘What were they trying to do?’
‘The idea was to summon up a dead man called Trelawney.’
‘How far did they get?’
Gwinnett gave a slight shudder. He was detached, yet far from calm, perhaps no more than his normal state, now aggravated by near collapse.
‘They got no further than the fight between Ken and Scorp.’
Gwinnett’s use of these abbreviated first-names gave a certain additional grotesqueness to what was already a sufficiently grotesque narrative.
‘Did they have a scrap during the rite?’
‘In the middle of it.’
‘The horned dance?’
‘No — during the sexual invocations that followed.’
‘What did those consist of?’
‘Scorp said that — among the ones taking part in the rite — they should have been all with all, each with each, within the sacred circle. I was a short way apart. Not in the circle. Scorp thought that best.’
Gwinnett again put up his hand to his head. He looked as if he might faint. Then he seemed to recover himself. Heavy spots of rain were beginning to fall.
‘Did everyone in the circle achieve sexual relations with everyone else?’
‘If they could.’
‘Were they all up to it?’
‘Only Scorp.’
‘He must be a remarkable young man.’
‘It wasn’t for pleasure. This was an invocation. Scorp was the summoner. He said it would have been far more likely to be successful had it been four times four.’
‘Not Widmerpool?’
‘That was the quarrel.’
‘What was?’
‘It had something to do with the union of opposites. I don’t know enough about the rite to say exactly what happened. Ken was gashed with a knife. That was part of the ritual, but it got out of hand. There was some sort of struggle for power. After a while Scorp and the others managed to revive Ken. By then it was too late to complete the rites. Scorp said the ceremony must be abandoned. It wasn’t easy to get Ken back over the fields, and down the hill. As well as doing the recording — it was all wrecked when he fell — he’d been concentrating the will. He’d been giving it all he had. He wasn’t left with much will to get back to the caravan.’
‘And they just let you take notes?’
‘Scorp didn’t mind that. He even urged me to.’
Gwinnett spoke as if that permission surprised him as much as it might surprise anyone else. He took the black notebook from under his arm, and began to turn its pages. They were full of small spidery handwriting.
‘Listen to this. When I first went to Ken Widmerpool’s place, and met Scorp, I was reminded of something I read not long before in one of the plays by Beaumont and Fletcher I’d been studying. I couldn’t remember just what the passage said. When I got back I hunted it up, and wrote the lines down.’
Gwinnett’s hand shook a little while he held the notebook in front of him, but he managed to read out what was written there.
‘Take heed! this is your mother’s scorpion,
That carries stings ev’n in his tears, whose soul
Is a rank poison thorough; touch not at him;
If you do, you’re gone, if you’d twenty lives.
I knew him for a roguish boy
When he would poison dogs, and keep tame toads;
He lay with his mother, and infected her,
And now she begs i’ th’ hospital, with a patch
Of velvet where her nose stood, like the queen of spades,
And all her teeth in her purse. The devil and
This fellow are so near, ’tis not yet known
Which is the ev’ler animal.’
‘Scorpio Murtiock to the life.’
‘He did shed tears during the rite. They poured down his cheeks. That was just before he gashed Ken.’
‘The familiar contemporary slur of our own day gains force of imagery in additionally giving your mother a dose.’
‘The kid in the play was the prototype maybe. Scorp’s in the same league.’
‘The girl called Fiona is a niece of ours.’
Gwinnett seemed taken aback at that. The information must have started him off on a new train of thought.