Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

I felt my face flush at the thought of it. I let out a peculiar giggle.

‘Larry?’ said Mary-Lou.

‘Mary-Lou,’ I replied.

I wanted to say that I loved her. Love! To call it out just as the celebrants had done in the Gnostic Mass.

‘You’re coming out to Pasadena with us?’ she asked.

I nodded and my teeth clenched in a manic grin. My head raced with curiosity and delirious expectation.

The May evening was warm when we reached the Arroyo Seco, the dry ravine that cuts through the San Gabriel Mountains. The scrubland at the edge of Pasadena was then a suburban wilderness, a homely arcadia thick with chaparral, sycamore and tangled thickets of wild grape. The Caltech rocket group had the lease on three acres that had been cleared as a launch site. There was a group of corrugated-sheet metal huts, a sandbag bunker and an arcane assembly of test apparatus. These were the beginnings of the famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Some kind of party had already begun. There was wine and beer and a sense of pagan revelry. I was passed a thin, hand-rolled cigarette. Marijuana, I thought with an exuberant sense of sinfulness. I took a puff and broke into a spluttering spasm. Nemo took it from me and inhaled the drug with casual expertise. He had tried it in Mexico, he confided to me. Mary-Lou explained to us that tonight was a ritual to influence the space–time continuum. This was the special Mass that Jack Parsons had spoken of that night at the Heinleins’, the one ordered by the Hierophant to change the course of the war.

Parsons arrived in white robes, clutching a spray of mistletoe in one hand, a sickle in the other. The party started to form itself into a circle around him. It was then that I saw the rocket on its stand. Taller than he was, it seemed to tower above us, a totem, a faceless idol. On the ground around it were scorch marks and what looked like runic markings. Parsons began an ululating invocation to the god Pan. Drunk and drugged, my mind reeled but my body assumed its tranquillised equilibrium. I felt a wonderful balance: my weight in the earth, my head in the sky. I turned to Nemo and he nodded to me, wide-eyed and smiling.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘We’re going to make contact, man.’

I nodded back. I had no idea what he meant but at that moment it all seemed to make sense. The sky darkened and Parsons motioned for the circle to widen. At nightfall the rocket was launched. There was an explosion of thrust, an exultant rush of energy into the heavens. The crowd gasped as one.

‘Yes,’ Nemo hissed as the vehicle reached its zenith.

The rocket released its payload, a parachute flare that floated like an angel of grace over the Arroyo Seco. As it descended, Nemesio pointed to something beyond it high up in the firmament.

‘See?’ he implored. ‘They’re here, man!’

I couldn’t tell what he was gesturing at. All I could see were some dim stars that were just making themselves visible.

‘Come on,’ he said and began to make his way towards the San Gabriel Mountains. ‘They’re coming in to land!’

I went after him for a while but he moved like a man possessed, following a track up into the canyon. I called after him as he began to climb the hillside. Then he was gone.

I went back to the party. A bonfire had been lit and shadow figures danced in the convulsive firelight. My once-benign mood of narcosis began to fade and the evening’s saturnalia now seemed harsh and sinister. My anxiety returned, unwelcome but familiar. I wandered about, trying to find Mary-Lou. I thought I caught a glimpse of a wild goat gambolling in a darkened glade. I followed and found myself in a clearing. There was a trickle of laughter and by the flickering light I could make out bodies cavorting in this sacramental grove. Yellow flames licked at the pitched gloom and here and there naked flesh glowed amber or albescent. A bright flare from the pyre lit up a face, which turned and caught my gaze. It was Mary-Lou. She smiled as she saw me, her eyes brimstone, her mouth a lewd grimace.

‘Come on, Larry,’ she implored in a harsh whisper. ‘Join us!’

I froze. My whole body clenched into an apoplectic spasm, but for a heart that hammered away in a wild palpitation. I felt a terrible sadness. The image of the twisted bodies was already seared on my memory, my timid desire overwhelmed by a dreadful sense of loss. This was the death of love, I suddenly thought.

Perhaps Mary-Lou caught my look of dismay, I don’t know. Her face went blank for a second and then she turned away from me, into the embrace of Jack Parsons and two or three others.

I stumbled away unsteadily and out of joint, coldly sober but reeling about like a drunken fool. I lay down in the dust and felt the world spin against my back. Looking down at the starry depths, I felt the lonely vertigo of the universe. My own sorry little space-opera stretched out into infinity. Eventually I regained enough balance to pick myself up and walk to my car. I clambered onto the back seat and fell into a troubled sleep.

I woke to Nemo gently shaking my shoulder. I got out of the car and adjusted my eyes to the powdery haze of morning.

‘What happened to you?’ I asked him.

He shrugged and stared back at me with dead eyes. He looked as if he had been dragged through a forest.

‘It’s hard to explain, Larry,’ he said. ‘I saw something.’

I never got the whole story of what he witnessed that night. Over the years he would refer to the time when he had seen ‘something from another world’ but he always seemed reluctant to elaborate further. For a while I thought he worried that I might think he was crazy. But maybe he just wanted to keep it to himself. To save it for his fiction. And the influence of this experience can certainly be found in his work, in stories such as ‘Interstellar Epiphany’ and ‘The Uninvited Guest’. At the time neither of us really wanted to talk about the previous night so we drove back to LA mostly in silence.

Mother was predictably upset when I turned up at the house looking wild-eyed and dishevelled and I was unnecessarily blunt with her when she asked after my whereabouts, loudly declaring that I had been at an orgy.

‘Larry!’ she chided me.

‘Oh, don’t worry, Mother,’ I called out as I went up to my room, ‘your precious son is still a virgin.’

I came down later to find her in the kitchen. Her face was red and puffy; she had obviously been crying. I said I was sorry and then all her pitiful guilt came out. She declared that she had not been a good mother, that she had driven away my father who had left us when I was three. That useless slob of a husband whom she still loved with a pathetic insistence. Poor Mother, I thought for the millionth time. But it was then I knew that I had to get away from her somehow.

Mary-Lou phoned me the next day, saying that she wanted to meet up and talk. Part of me wished that I had the strength to say no but I didn’t. So the following Tuesday I walked into Clifton’s to find her sitting at a corner table reading the LA Times .

‘See what we did, Larry,’ she declared, holding up the headline for me to read:

BERLIN DENIES KNOWLEDGE OF LANDING OF REICH LEADER IN SCOTLAND.

It hardly registered at the time. Recently I’ve got to thinking that the ‘special Mass’ Jack Parsons had officiated at that night was part of Operation Mistletoe. There are stories that Crowley organised similar rituals in a forest in Sussex at about the same time. Whether or not they actually had any effect is another matter. Were they part of some obscure propaganda campaign? At that moment I was so wrapped up in my own private drama that I didn’t pay much attention to the news story. I just sat down opposite Mary-Lou and gave a nervous little shrug. She smiled at me but there was a mournful look in her eyes.