Karl Wagner - The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

“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.