Iain Sinclair - White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

His uncle, yes, locked away now, many years, safe, a madhouse in the Surrey hills. Gestures, vaguely, with arm of raincoat lifted above the city, something blue and beyond. The uncle is freed for this time; while he is spoken of, he is with us. He hangs from the old man’s mouth in white beads of spittle.

The uncle in uniform had been one of the first into Belsen. Not believing: it changed everything. The smell, hanging for miles, of death. Solicitor; new pips, cap badge, pipe, polished spectacles. Whether he became something new, or whether that experience simply cut out some spectre that was always within him, is unknown.

The full-stomached officer is suddenly confronted with a vision of hell. The stench. The ground that had been blasted for ever by a mad vision, the essence of a whole people potentised, ashes cast on the wind, cursing the earth, seeding it with bone and desolate fear, taking it from use; divorced, alienated, made terrible.

He split his life. Brittle, but still functioning, he appeared on Saturdays at Farringdon Road, shabby, a fouled raincoat. Books were his world. He combed the stalls, looking for guidance, diving at Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Stein’s World History in the Light of the Holy Grail, Faust, The Rig-Veda, The Egyptian Book of the Dead , Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parsival . He hoarded, annotated, quested. Snatched at discarded pamphlets, crawled under the wheels to scrape the dirt from loose signatures of The Psychic Review .

His obsession could no longer be fed in a single day. He disappeared, went under. Now he stood in rags, coat tied with string; now came the dreams of the lance and the cup. Wet hair hung over his face. He haunted the backrooms of theological book-suppliers with doubtful political allegiances.

And then it was done. He was gone. Back to the grove of cherry blossom: a fully-convinced Nazi. The Reich of the Final Days. He went right over. But it was secret. At first there was almost nothing to see. The theatre was gradual: black Mercedes, leather gloves, wire spectacles. Violent gestures offered to wife and family. Perversions of the cupboard. The chemical form was morphine addiction. Let it soak into what he had become, tinting his memory. He preserved and sharpened his surface routine. Until the panic spider broke through and the scream became hot metal in his throat, guttural commands stuttered in his mouth; he howled bunkers, ash, suit soaked with urine. A fist-sized microphone pressed under his chin. At the mercy of his voices. An unborn head forcing his teeth apart. Heavy velour curtains drape it, shut out the quiet suburban street.

The stallholder nods, the word is given, we tumble forward. The punters shovel up all the books their arms can hold, stacking them against the wall. Ransack the shreds of dead lives. Golden Dawn texts were found here. The Magical Revival began with planted documents. There are bricks of gold to be found beneath the tattered dross. They dig with nail and elbow. If you pause, you are lost. See yourself and it is gone forever. Too late. The hunger is dead with me.

I pick up a worn booklet in buff wrappers, from the pavement, lettered in red and blue, Longmans, 1886, Fifth Edition, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . I walk away.

Dr Loew drove a Buick and had twin sons. It was a matter of routine for all of them on Saturday mornings to visit the Farringdon Road stalls. Like many medical men he bought books, he collected them, shelved them and one day issued a catalogue and found himself a bookdealer.

Eye-specialists favoured the stalls, gut men preferred the monthly fairs at the Russell Hotel, soothed by a sense of regularity, psychiatrists stuck with jumble sales: one wretched GP, exiled in Brondesbury Park, hoarded nothing but publishers’ advance proof copies, shelf upon shelf of pink and pale blue unlettered spines, ghosts that would never become books.

Dr Loew’s boys pelted each other with loose bricks from the wall, while the doctor, distracted, paced the line, examining the inert volumes, and waiting for his receptionist to announce them.

A deal was struck: in return for nothing very much the doctor agreed to conduct me into the London Hospital Medical College Museum to view the skeleton and cast of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. Joblard would accompany us, with his leather bag and his sketch book.

Altruism today is beardless: above the turn of the stairs, the portrait of Sir Frederick Treves. Above a successful moustache, he hangs in oil. Fist on hip, a table of subservient bone fragments, paper in his hand, watchchain like an anchor. He stares us out.

Treves’ simple act of charity had to be explained. Fiction was its truth. There were errors in the account he gave: the names of streets faltered, time flowing always in the direction of decay, improving upon a clumsy excess of detail. The truth can only be remade out of lies. What horror! A life struck out of pure invention.

His monster was found, crouching, heated by a single warmed brick. Was taken in. Other freaks were also received: you will not read their stories. They are still there. Bottles in the pathology lab, abortions floating in sympathetic oils. Their life: a circle of blinded eyes.

The story of the Elephant Man rushes at you. You cannot avoid it. Ganesa of the Last Days, Elephant Head. The place was prepared.

The chamber was ready. The unfulfilled man stalked the streets. He did not ride, contained in his hansom, like that eminence, Gull, static, stone presence, lifted above the road, seated, hands among grapes, prayer wheels spinning, repeating, infecting and sealing the padded leather space. He did not hack through victimology to the oracle. But he was after the same cup. The doctors were all tuned to the millennial flare, the century dying, the erosion of imperial certainties.

He went into the streets, into the warrens, rat holes, spikes, spielers, caves: strolling with horror.

By the collaboration of the four, Aysch, Mayim, Ruach, Aphar, was made the Golem of the fourth element. Red clay of the brickfields, complete in all his members, laid out in the field of Matfellon, in that absence, where a church had been.

Treves walking seven times through the labyrinth, from right to left, so the body grew dark, red like fire. Treves again, returning into the spiral, from left to right, seven times, around the body, through Lion Yard, Old Montague, Bakers, Buxton, Spicers, Brick, Hanbury, Great Garden, so that the redness was extinguished, and water flowed through the clay, hair sprouted, nails grew. Then Treves placed in its mouth a piece of parchment, with the secret name; he bowed to the East and the West, the South and the North, reciting the words of the ritual. He blew breath into its nostrils and the Golem opened his eyes.

At daybreak Treves addressed his creature: ‘Know that we have formed thee from a clod of earth. Thou shalt be called Joseph and thou shalt lodge within my house.

‘Thou, Joseph, must obey my commands, when and whither I may send thee — in fire or water; or if I command you to jump from the housetop, or if I send thee to the bed of the sea!’

The chamber was prepared and the creature secured. And then it began. You can call it benevolence. You can call it good will. But that is to curse it and make it nothing.

Treves wanted a reverse alchemy. He wanted to take gold and turn it to dross. He found a being composed of radical waters, a liquid thing swimming in its own inks, lost from the light. He took it up into the cape of myth. Its world was of his making. He made himself God.

But, equally, Merrick controlled him; appearing in the seductive guise of pure deformity. Making Treves vampire; returning compulsively. Visits by day and night. Arrangements.

Treves had the Elephant Man fed on powdered gold. Gold salts had proved effective in treating rheumatoid arthritis. Was there a gold toxicity? Adverse reaction? Rashes? Bone marrow depression? Homeopathy. Physiological Physic. Treating like with like. Treating light with stronger light. Treating darkness with death. Blood dyserasias. Gold stored in the tissue for prolonged periods.