Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

This was the belief system for our times: the flickering needle of an electronic device, the immortal soul measured by the galvanic response of human flesh. I wondered at first if Dexter might have had something to do with it. He denied it strenuously.

‘Believe me, Mary-Lou, I’d love to have control over something like that. In actual fact my friends in the Bureau are quite worried about it.’

And I wondered, too, if anyone had been involved in the death of Jack Parsons. ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION: the report said that he had died in a blast that had ripped apart his garage laboratory. That he had dropped a flask of fulminate of mercury, a highly volatile compound, which had ignited other chemicals in the room, causing an infernal holocaust.

If it was murder, it was cleverly done. More likely is was an accident, perhaps suicide. Maybe it was somewhere between the two. I imagine Jack a little high on something, halfway through some absurd ritual or obscure experiment, sad and weary, he who had seen too much, though never enough, just letting go, letting the explosive slip between his fingers.

I can mourn for him now as I do for that whole part of my life. A time of illusion and a hopeless search for enlightenment. I think of how he looked on the last occasion I ever saw him as we were setting up the special effects for Fugitive Alien . The expression of delight on his face as the flares ignited to fake the flying saucer landing. The young man who had tested rockets in the Arroyo Seco, the child who had played with fireworks and dreamt of space travel. It’s how I’ll always remember him.

Cato found a room in a boarding house in Hastings Street. He’d decided that the best thing was to come to Detroit and start all over again. A new town, a new beginning. It was a good enough place to find work as a musician. Jimmy had said that the Flame Show Bar house band was looking for a new rhythm guitarist. And if he couldn’t get a gig somewhere soon there was always the automobile factory. Jimmy was coming by that evening to take him to this meeting he’d talked about. Cato wasn’t keen but Jimmy had insisted he come along. ‘It’s a good place to make contacts,’ he had said.

The room was small, bare and gloomy. Cato heard a distant wailing. He went to the window. The view was the brick wall of the adjacent apartment block. He dropped his case by the bed and his whole body shook for a second in a sickening shudder of grief. There was something hard and heavy in the pit of his stomach, a solid lump of remorse that he could not shift. As he sat down on the edge of the bed the mattress let out a sorrowful creak.

Taking off his shoes, he stretched out, closed his eyes and tried to take a nap, but he felt restless. It was hard to sleep during the day with no radio to keep him company. His head just filled up with unwelcome thoughts. He felt so goddamn lonely, that was the worst of it. He sat up and hauled his suitcase onto the bed. Rummaging through his things, he found a handful of magazines: Reader’s Digest, Confidential , a Time from last year with Martin Luther King on the cover, and an old copy of a garish pulp called Incredible Stories .

Something to read on the bus ride, he’d thought, though in the end he had simply stared out of the window at the passing world. He picked out Incredible Stories . It had a battered cover showing a blue-skinned humanoid flying through a red sky with a ringed planet on the horizon.

He stared at it, trying to work out why he had put this thing in his case. It belonged to Sharleen, of course. She loved this craziness. She had even been in one of those flying saucer B-movies back in the fifties. And she’d been married to a guy called Larry who wrote this kind of stuff. There were times when they got drunk or high that she would tell him weird stories of people from other planets and secret societies on earth who had made contact with them. Cato wondered if it hadn’t been science fiction that had sent her a little mad. Or maybe all those bad things she said had happened to her when she was a kid were true.

He couldn’t work out why she had kept this old pulp magazine. It was metaphysically out of date. With stories supposed to be set in a future that was already lost in the distant past. He read the date on the masthead. June 1941 . Hell, that was three months before he was born. Over twenty-five years ago. He opened the book and one of the stories was called ‘Armageddon 2243’. Numbers reeled in his head for a moment. Jimmy had told him that numbers were the key. According to him, the whole universe was some kind of numbers racket.

‘God has three hundred and sixty degrees of knowledge,’ he had told Cato. ‘The devil has only thirty-three degrees. That’s how the Masons calculate their learning. Masons are in the power of the devil, that’s how they run things. They in charge of white folks.’ And at another time: ‘Eighty-five per cent of the people are the dumb masses controlled by the ten per cent who are the slave-makers. The other five per cent are the poor righteous teachers. Them that know the truth.’

Cato flipped through the magazine. There were advertisements for mouthwash and correspondence courses; line-drawing illustrations for far-out tales called ‘Plague Planet’ and ‘Robot Mission to Alpha Centauri’. One story caught his eye, perhaps because it was shorter than the rest. He lay on the bed and began to read:

In saffron robes and with flowing white hair and beard, the Hermit was a familiar sight on Hollywood Boulevard. He patrolled that stretch of sidewalk between Orange Drive and Highland Avenue in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater. He would never ask for money directly, though he would show passers-by his open palm and entreat them with a smile: ‘Please, let me help you.’ At other times he would offer this advice from Matthew 19: 21: ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell what thou hast and give it to the poor — and thou shalt have treasure in the heavens — and come, follow me.’ But he knew it was hard for most people to understand his mission on earth. They judged him merely as one of the many eccentrics who furnished the streets of this absurd city. Progress was slow. Most days he simply noted observations and looked for possible new developments to transmit in his daily report.

Noticing a beat cop approach, he prodded Sirius, the spotted mongrel curled up at his feet. Sirius gave a plaintive whimper and looked up at him imploringly. The Hermit reached down and patted him gently. Dogs (he had noted long ago) were the only animals on this planet that had a clear understanding of injustice. They could hear a higher frequency and it gave them a more finely tuned moral instinct. Their howls were the lamentations of worldly iniquity and dispossession. It was a clear signal but one that only the Higher Ones seemed to understand. Most humans had no conception of injustice. They thought only of justice, never the lack of it. They failed to register the canine wail that could provide them with such precious information and guidance. They would insist upon some warped sense of entitlement, a self-righteousness that could lead to nothing but an escalation of suffering.

The Hermit started to walk towards the cop so that he would be on the move by the time the cop reached him. Sirius trotted along beside him. He found a gait that would match the confident stroll of the beat officer, so that when they met they were travelling at the same pace. A little dance to the jaunty swing of the cop’s night-stick.

‘Hi, Pete,’ the officer called out with a smile.