Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

In the last two days of our stay the bad feeling between the Flemings became almost unbearable. Ian became tetchy even with me. I had been told that if I went for a morning swim, I was to make a detour around the front of the house because he didn’t like anything passing in front of his view out to sea at that time. It was then that he gazed out at the ocean and thought about what he was going to write that day. Well, I forgot and he bawled me out for it.

Later he was in a more sombre mood. He said that the greatest sadness in life was the failure to make the one you loved happy. He told me of his quantum theory of affection: that if not a single particle of comfort existed between two people, then they might as well both be dead.

And Clarissa was shocked when Ann confessed to her that being with Ian was like living with a wounded animal and at times she simply wanted to put him out of his misery.

‘Of course,’ she added with a cold smile, ‘I still love him, you see.’

So it was with great relief that we left the following morning. There were breezy farewells and promises to meet up back in London. Behind the clenched smiles and alert eyes, one felt the murderous intensity between them. It made one almost fearful to leave them on their own together.

We had gone only two or three miles when Clarissa realised that she had left a bracelet behind.

‘Can’t we get them to send it on?’ I reasoned.

‘For goodness’ sake, Marius, it belonged to the duchess.’ She meant her grandmother. ‘It’s a priceless heirloom.’

I turned the car around and drove back to the entrance to their driveway.

‘Please,’ pleaded Clarissa, ‘will you go? I don’t think I can bear going back there. It’s on the table in the garden.’

As I approached the house my first thought was to walk around the side but that would mean passing Ian’s window and interfering with his precious morning view. So I went up to the front door and knocked. It was off the latch so I let myself in. There was no sign of Violet the housekeeper. As I passed through the living room I heard a fearful row. The sound of violence, of blows, of cries of pain and harsh oaths. It was coming from the Flemings’ bedroom.

The door was ajar. I readied myself for the ghastly task of coming between them, of breaking up some pitiful domestic fight. But as I gently pushed at the door I saw the two of them standing naked, Ann armed with a riding crop, Ian with a thin bamboo cane, gleefully taking turns at one another. They were utterly oblivious to my presence in the doorway. The air sang with the swoosh of their thrashing, with loud yelps, exquisite insults and obscenities.

I turned on my heel and swiftly made for the garden to retrieve Clarissa’s bauble. Then around and back out to the driveway. I felt a spring in my step as I made my way back to the car. My mind still vivid with the image of them, the look of sheer joy beaming from their faces. The pure, bright energy of it. I remembered what Clarissa had said those few nights before and I found myself laughing out loud. Who knows what true happiness is? It’s the greatest mystery of all.

Haven’t you noticed how aliens always seem to look like pre-pubescent girls? Their heads too big for their skinny little bodies. You see them naked with no hair, no external genitalia. These are the ones called the Greys. I was ten years old when I became one. For them. They took off all my clothes and put a nylon stocking over my head, covering my hair, making my head bulge a little. My ears were flattened, my nose became two nostrils, my mouth a slit. Then they put dark goggles over my eyes and dusted me all over with talcum powder. Becoming a Grey was just one of the many rituals I performed for the cult that ran Operation Paperclip.

This was just after the war in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County. Mother drove me out to a big house there one evening. She had spent years pimping me out as a child actress. I figured that this was just another job.

Larry always thought I was making this stuff up. He never called me a liar to my face. He couldn’t. Lying and stealing, that was his job. He stole all my life experiences for his stories and novels. Fantasy, that was his racket. He admitted it. He told me once that he had developed this problem with reality. And he said himself that science fiction was a ridiculous conjunction, a contradiction in terms. I mean, how can fiction be scientific or vice versa? No, I know the truth. He took it from me. And he used it to give his stuff credibility.

I know now what happened in that mansion in Manhattan Beach. At the time I was a confused child, made to think of it all as a game. They took pictures of me. Some as a Grey alien, some of me naked. I was made to pose with other kids, with adults. Then there were parties where me and other children were made to work the room. The cult used blackmail as control. Operation Paperclip was a secret mission to recruit Nazi scientists after the war. Their files would be sheep-dipped. That meant they would falsify their employment records, clear them of war crimes, cover up the fact that they had been Nazi Party members.

Most important of all were the rocket scientists and the ones who had been experimenting with anti-gravity technology. That’s why they needed pictures of aliens: to spread rumours about the Greys, to hide the fact that the Nazis were in possession of advanced interplanetary knowledge and had now established themselves in America. That was the cult that used me and countless other children. And every new religion needs a new devil to blame the bad things in creation on. Something to frighten people. The Grey alien became a sort of scientific Satan.

And when they had finished posing me and the other children as Greys, they would take pornographic photographs and get us ready for the evening parties. It has taken me a long time to recover the awful memories from that time. For many years I suffered from traumatic amnesia. Now I can recall everything, just as I can recall many of my past lives.

I was abused not merely for pleasure but as a form of control for the people who attended the parties. Influential figures that the cult could use: the rich, the powerful. I remember how I watched them and felt their desires, their ambition. Their fear. They weren’t necessarily paedophiles; often our job was to trick them. Drunk or drugged, the guests could be fooled into incriminating positions. I remember Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun. I remember Ronald Reagan and Howard Hughes.

And I remember the devil. I mean, the real devil. He ran the show and sometimes he would appear in person. In disguise. He wore a lounge suit and dark glasses. He had a little goatee beard. He smiled and spoke softly but when he took his sunglasses off you could see the infinite cruelty in his eyes. Red-lined, the whites yellow as brimstone, jet-black irises like scorch marks burning into you, making you do whatever he pleased. He cast a spell with a simple gesture, a sign of abominable power.

The devil’s device is a five-pointed star, inverted so that the two points stick up like horns. Like legs in the air. You see, the pentagram is a benign symbol when it is the right way up. It represents humanity. A human figure, star-shaped, with the head on top, two arms, two legs. But when it gets turned upside down, it loses all reason. Its genitalia are exposed and above all the other organs of the body. Then the head is at the lowest point, where the private parts should be, the mind hanging down, all dizzy and shameless. Every man and every woman is a star but when they get turned over they become a fallen star, a fallen angel, a demon. A slave to desire and debasement. This is how the devil exerts his power. The devil knows all about sex, you see.