“It is nothing serious,” I said, regretting the lie.
“Call me if you need any real help,” Rawles said. “And promise me that you’ll tell me what this is all about when it finished.”
I said that I would, and meant it; Rawles was a kind and generous friend who had been a great help to me many times in the past. I left the pub and strolled through the neat, pretty streets of Chelsea to Cheyne Walk, with its ghosts and memories and heavy mantle of history. Here was the house where the young engineer who had shared my first adventure in this city had once lived with his father; here was the house where the irascible old painter, known to his neighbours only as either the Admiral or “Puggy” Booth had ended his days in hiding from his public. Here was the house of John Martyn, whose ability to glimpse a little of the city of the dead that surrounds and interpenetrates the city of the living had informed his apocalyptic paintings (his brother, who once had tried to burn down York Minster, had been driven insane by the same gift); and here the house where one memorable evening I once visited Hilaire Belloc in the company of Gilbert Chesterton.
The address Rawles had given me was at the eastern end of Cheyne Walk, in the middle of a row of old, red-brick houses shielded from the headlong roar of traffic along the Chelsea Embankment by a narrow public garden of shrubbery and grass. Expensive motor vehicles stood nose to tail at the kerb of the narrow road that ran between the houses and the park. There was a quiet, dignified air of prosperity, the smell of fresh paint.
I found a bench in the public garden and studied Rainer Sue’s house through a gap in the shrubbery. There was no sign of the blood-red Mark 1 Jaguar. A huge wisteria flopped pale green leaves and spikes of purple flowers over the black railings of the front garden. The curtains were closed at every window, as if in mourning, or as if those who ordinarily lived in it had picked up and moved elsewhere for the season, and I quickly realized that in one sense it really was uninhabited. Unlike all the other houses in this old, much-haunted street, it was quite without ghosts or any kind of revenant, and none came near it; not even the smallest batsqueak of an imp clung anywhere close. It was as quiet as a tomb set under a bell jar in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, so completely still that its silence vibrated in the ear like a gnat. Sealed deep in that silence, like a fly in amber, was a tiny, dense knot of impacted energies that would have escaped the attention of someone only a little less skilled than I.
The ghost of a sulky young housemaid who had drowned herself more than a century ago, after she had become pregnant from a dalliance with a coachman, loitered by the river wall on the far side of the Embankment. I called her over (she drifted across the busy road quite oblivious to the traffic), but she would not do my bidding, said that she’d do anything else for me, anything at all, but not that. I felt a sudden spark of exasperation at this unhappy remnant’s simpering refusal and dismissed her — erased her entire, as easily as blowing out a candle, and allowed my anger to balloon, sucking up all the discarded emotions that blew about the street like scraps of litter. Prickly shards of anger, suffocating rags of distress; flecks of shock and fear bright as fragments of glass; slimy strands of disgust; even a few pure motes of joy, that most effervescent of emotions: I drew in all of them. The baggy crowd whirled about me like a pocket thunderstorm, growing ever darker and denser. The leaves of the dusty young plane tree under which I sat began to tremble. On the Embankment road, drivers unconsciously tapped on their accelerators to speed past.
When I had called up every imp within reach, I threw the entire flock at the front door of the house, straight into the heart of its bubble of preternatural quiet. The house swallowed the thick, lively rope whole. For several minutes nothing happened. Traffic continued to chase itself along the Embankment. An aeroplane made a dull roar above the low grey clouds that sagged over the trees on the other side of the river. Then I felt a swelling pressure, and the ordinary fabric of the house — the red-brick walls, the wrought-iron balcony, the slate roof — was overlaid by a filmy black wave, like a photograph blistering in the heat of a fire. Things seethed within it, shadows on shadows, imps of every kind twisting around each other like a myriad of snakes eating each other’s tails, many more than I had poured into the house, released from the trap buried deep in its fabric and flying outward in every direction. I dissolved hundreds of imps as the expanding wavefront boiled over me, but it was like trying to flick away every drop of rain that pelts you in a thunderstorm. I felt a moment of intense dislocation as several dozen surviors passed straight through me, and managed to save a few of them. The rest flew on, across the road, across the river. A white van broadsided by the impalpable storm swerved and smashed into an oncoming car; the car spun around and its rear slammed into a tree. Broken branches collapsed onto it, fell into the road. A bus braked with an explosive sneeze; horns sounded along the two lanes of stalled traffic.
I had no doubt that the trap had been designed to collapse had I entered the house unprepared; and if I had been caught in the midst of thousands of suddenly freed imps, I would have been stripped bare by their frenzy of anger and fear and delirium and disgust. It would have taken me days to recover, and meanwhile I would have been quite helpless. As it was, there would be a sudden and inexplicable increase in violence in this part of the city tonight — arguments, fights, perhaps even murders — but I had escaped the worst of the trap.
Traffic was building up on either side of the road accident. The driver of the car which had smashed into the tree was climbing out of his wrecked vehicle. Two men wrenched back the door of the van; the driver slumped into their arms. And the front door of Rainer Sue’s house opened and a woman in a nylon housecoat walked down the steps, unlocked the gate, sat down at the kerb, put her head between her knees and was sick. I ducked through the shrubbery and walked straight past her, into the house.
A vacuum cleaner moaned in the hallway, whispering into silence when I pulled out its plug. I called out Rainer Sue’s name, called out Donny Halliwell’s, and when there was no reply walked into the living room. Its pale yellow walls were hung with framed gold records and intricate paintings by Australian aboriginals that whispered of landscapes I would never know, dreams I would never have. There was a huge white couch facing a widescreen TV. There were vases of white lilies, vases of eucalyptus branches. There was a tall bookcase crammed with leather-bound volumes, mostly fake grimoires and incunabulae, although amongst the rubbish was a worm-eaten set of the three volumes of del Rio ’s Disquisitionum Magicarum, and a rather fine copy of Casiano’s Summa Diabolica in Moroccan leather. The raised wing of a grand piano gave back my reflection as I hurried past it, through open French windows and down a flight of steps into the garden. A gravel path ran between raised beds of white lavender, white roses, grey thistles and tiger-striped grasses to a pergola grown over with an enormous, ancient grape vine that was perhaps as old as the house. Glassy bunches of grapes, transparent as teardrops, dangled amongst hand-shaped leaves. In one corner a plywood construct not much bigger than a coffin stood on its end. I opened its door. It was lined with wards and layers of soil and tinfoil — it was a form of orgone box, although infinitely more sophisticated — and the man who squatted inside on a narrow bench seat blinked at me.
He was in his early forties, bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only white jeans and a deep tan, and possessed of a delicate, androgynous beauty. His face was unlined; his blond quiff artfully dishevelled. There were marks like little bee stings along the insides of his forearms, yet no imps of delirium clung to him. He smiled tremulously at me, his eyes clouded and vague, and said, “Do I know you?”