Jake Arnott: The House of Rumour

I still look up at its sky, its thin veil of atmosphere a delicate breath. I wait for darkness, a night full of stars, the pattern of our past. It’s 2011, and I realise this was the date for a story I set on Mars, which I tried to sell to Amazing Stories in 1939. I always wanted to live in the future. Well, here I am. Just. I remember Robert Heinlein saying, if you keep going for long enough they’ll find a cure for death. I’m very glad they haven’t. Of course I’d like to hang around a little longer just to see how things turn out. After all, that’s what I spent my working life trying to do. Some say that 2012 will bring a profound spiritual transition, a transformation of the consciousness, a mutazione or something like the ‘Age of Aquarius’ that was all the rage when I lived in that commune in Venice Beach in the 1960s. I’m not so sure of such grandiose notions any more. But then I’ve already had my future, in my work and in my imagination.

My son Martin has moved back to LA. He says he wants to be nearby now that I can’t get about so easily. We were talking about paradise the other day and he told me that the word comes from the Old Persian pairidaeza , meaning ‘walled garden’. ‘So,’ he said, ‘do you think the wall is there to keep people in or out?’ He still has nightmares about Jonestown, that Garden of Earthly Delights that went so horribly wrong. If the world is a book, we should be careful how we read it. Maybe we should stay out of paradise and be wary of what we dream of when we look up at the stars, hoping for something better.

As above, so below.

On the particular level, all is uncertain. Everything has the power to be in two places at once, but as soon as we observe it it stops happening. And we experience only a fraction of reality. We pick a card from a shuffled deck and make that one choice out of an infinite number of possibilities. Yet all the possibilities that can occur, do occur.

And we never face the direction of travel; like Voyager 1 we turn and send our tremulous signals back home. So with the past in front of us we can go backwards into the future. History is unpredictable. Any number of things might have happened. On parallel worlds or in counter-factual realities, at forking paths and at jonbar points, the world is a speculative fiction. A breath of conspiracy. Whisperings of Doubtful Origin in the House of Rumour. Utopia or dystopia are a moment away, just waiting for creation. At every point.

The world holds its breath.

Thanks and praise to Stephanie Theobald, Jonny Geller, Carole Welch, Jasper Stocker, Hamish Arnott, Michael Arnott, (all the Arnotts and those that dwell among them), Tanya de Villiers, Pablo Robledo, Melissa Pimental, Patricia Duncker, Michelle Graham, Mandy Colleran, Jeremy Reed, Ib Melchior, Cleo Baldon, Rodrigo Fresán, Stephen and Anastasia Webster, Geraldine Beskin, Mark Simpson, Lucy Foster, Celia Levett, Amber Burlinson, Alasdair Oliver, Simon Blow, Ben McManus, Barnaby Rogerson and the two lesbians who ran the illegal club by Beach 16 in Miramar, Havana in 1994.

In The House of Rumour , fiction is mixed with the truth. Some readers will note the similarities between Vita Lampada and real-life transvestite con artist Vikki de Lambray ( né David Lloyd Gibbon), who died in suspicious circumstances after being involved in a sex scandal with a retired senior intelligence officer. ‘The Watchers’ flying saucer cult is partly based on When Prophecy Fails , the 1956 classic sociological study of a UFO religion by Festinger, Riecken and Schachter. Larry Zagorski and Danny Osiris share my wonder and confusion at Professor Leonard Susskind’s sublime and actual theory of the World as a Hologram. The poem in Larry’s story is an extract from John Addington Symonds’ translation of Tommaso Campanella’s sonnet ‘The Book of Nature’.

Rudolf Hess’s flight remains the most puzzling event of the Second World War, and was a contentious issue throughout the Cold War and beyond. At a banquet at the Kremlin in October 1941 attended by Stalin and Churchill, the Soviet leader proposed a toast to the British secret services for their skill in luring the Deputy Führer to Britain. When Churchill protested that his government knew nothing of the flight beforehand, Stalin replied archly: ‘well, there are many things my intelligence service does not tell me about’.

For further sources, bibliographies and other ‘whisperings of doubtful origin’ visit: www.houseofrumour.com.

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First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Sceptre

An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Jake Arnott 2012

The right of Jake Arnott to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 9781848945067

Hardback ISBN 9780340922729

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