Iain Sinclair - Downriver

I knew that, whatever the price , I would have to carry the bundle away from this place and destroy it. The thing was too volatile. It must never be published. The bargain it represented was no longer one I was prepared to honour. I clawed myself, frantically, out from the hissing leatherette chair.

Millom put his hand against my chest. I was relieved to find that it did not pass directly through the mantle of flesh. He signalled for me to follow him.

‘I have a gift already prepared for you. Take it when you go, but be sure not to open it until you are safely back indoors.’

I agreed eagerly, intending to drop whatever it was, sight unseen, into the nearest bin. Millom blocked my path and — swivelling on his heels — opened a door which led into what might have been a bedroom. He scratched at the walls, looking for a light switch. Nothing had prepared me for this.

I would not cross the threshold. I remained outside, staring into a chamber of blasphemy, from which escaped bands of stifling air, the low smoke of wet leaves burning. Millom, in a palsied dance of celebration, waved the corset-spring key in my face. This, I realized, was the heart of the matter, the revelation he was desperate to share.

‘Shaped,’ he whispered, ‘like the Egyptian character for neter , the one supreme God; this insignificant metal tool activates the entire operation. Its outline describes the passage through which we travel to communicate with the world of spirits.’

The only spirits I was interested in, at that moment, were in a bottle. I needed a stiff pull before I could take another step. But nothing of the sort was on offer. The floor of the room was divided into lettered squares; in its centre was a circular raised platform, a table masquerading as a bed. Placed, obviously, at the four cardinal points were narrow-lipped jars, filled with something dark, earth or ashes. Millom now reached into his jacket pocket and — ceremoniously — added the latest graveyard transfusion to the eastern jar. Silver wires ran from these earth-batteries, across the canopy of the bed, to a gilded ring, a serpent swallowing its own tail; on which Millom laid the key. The canopy itself was a grey and lumpy conglomerate: rags of faded cloth, ribbons, dried flowers, hair curls, maggoty earth-meat. A body had been shaped from pillaged clay, dressed in wisps of net; wigged, laced, booted. Sufficient space had been left on this necrophile altar for the unthinkable implication that Millom himself would lie beside his mud-bride in a form of vermicular marriage.

‘With this key,’ Millom said, ‘the dead man, whose rituals ensured both his invisibility, and his immortality, escaped from the asylum. Without memory, or a past, he paddled over the marshes, to pass unremarked among the houses and the traffic of East London. He left behind his pentacle of victims — not as a barrier warding off future evils, but as an achieved act of occult geometry, sealing the secrets of that room for ever.’

The burial place had been physically shifted, cup by cup, from the cemetery into Millom’s chamber. He had dug his nails into corruption: listening attentively while his mind split, and branched into previously untested chapters of madness. This self-recording conjurer was trapped, under a carapace of hysterical conformity, in degradation. He personified all the furtive impulses of his time and his city. Like a ruthless bibliophile, he collected dead whispers. He walled himself in bad faith, in fantasies of decay. He attempted to demonstrate with his septic wax tableau, the ultimate extension of horror. He had earned the right of becoming, in his own words, ‘one of us’.

VIII

If the council had provided a litter bin anywhere between Calderon Road and the station I would certainly have dumped the whole loathsome parcel straight into it. It wasn’t an item to chuck in the street, or to jettison on an innocent doorstep, along with the milk bottles. (‘Must be the new telephone directory, dear.’) And so, when the train halted in the tunnel, between Stepney Green and Whitechapel, and the lights began to flicker and dim, I make the excuse that I needed some intricate task to occupy my still trembling fingers.

I slashed the twine with my clasp knife (only slightly amputating my little finger), and unwound the stiff skirts of brown paper. I was left, after a short struggle, with nothing more alarming than a copy of my own novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (made ‘safe’ by the addition of a prophylactic glassine wrapper). By habit, I leafed through the opening salvo, taking a slightly guilty pleasure in the company of these refreshingly materialist monsters. The pages were virgin; mercifully untainted by Millom’s attentions. The Bodonia paper was fresh as when it came from the hands of Sig. Mardersteig in Verona. But, with the introduction of William Withey Gull, a chronic dementia of red-ink annotations spattered the margins: ‘ NOT TRUE !!! Wordy evasions — grip the FACTS, boy. EVIDENCE? Stolen from other men’s books .’ Revisions breed in the white spaces, feverishly overwriting the original version, to clarify some imagined authorial intention. Millom worked the pages like a speed-crazed collaborator. He was the uninvited Ford to my sullen Conrad.

The train labours, shivers, jerks; shudders a few yards forwards, stops. The lights go out. I am left in a comfortable darkness, polarized by those ever-active bulwarks of local history: the London Hospital and the Jewish Burial Ground. It is easy in this enforced silence to imagine the novel on my lap as a brick of impacted light: a freak reaction has converted the text into a pack of unrepressed images. They have a startling bacterial luminescence; giddy and dangerous. If I dared to turn the pages I know that I would reveal all the word-inhibited secrets: the steel engravings would begin to move, stone figures would shake off their shadows; white buildings would open their flaps to disperse the panicked basements. There would be a remission of violence.

When the lights came back on the book in my hand was a square of black cloth: the dustwrapper had slipped on its glassine hinge to reveal Millom’s final critique; an effort coming as close as his nature would allow to a jest. He had pasted a reduced photocopy over the snapshot portrait my wife had taken for the rear flap: Tenniel’s illustration of Alice in the Train . The windows have been Tipp-Exed; Africa reduced to a phantom. The linear whirlwind of the railway carriage is now a radiant plaster skull — with Alice and the ‘gentleman in white’ clinging, pathetically, to the zygomatic arches. They are the handles of a drinking vessel, balanced in the symmetry of perpetual confrontation.

Millom knew from the start that I would open his parcel as soon as I got on to the train. He had probably succeeded in ‘withdrawing’ enough electricity to hold us in the tunnel. That was his message, or his warning. But there is something else: book worms, I can accept, but Millom’s pun is grossly literalist. A slithering sightless string-inch breasts the fore-edge of the novel, like a Polish cartoon; wriggles free, drops on to the tartan-covered seat. The heart of the book has been hollowed out, cut away; scooped like melon-flesh. Millom has filled the wounded cavity with contraband earth. Moist pink and grey things are knotting on the carriage floor, covering my boots; multiplying. The shape of a key has been pressed into the miniature grave.

IX

The spiteful pulsing of the rods in their frozen canisters became the pulsing of Cec Whitenettle’s heart. His hand squeezed gently on the geared control. The power of the track travelled through him, so that his hair turned to fire. He was the messenger of the immortal ones. His softly lit cab did not move: it was the tunnel that rushed past him, a hood of black velvet. He was restored, revived; he outpaced the darkness. Rodents scuttled to escape his bladed monster. The slanting walls of the embankment washed over him in green waves. The train was a water snake; it twisted and burrowed beneath the sleeping streets. It absorbed the dream-jungles of all the sleepers. The streamlined observation window became the visor of a winged and wired helmet. Cec listened to a scatter-speak of voices, living and dead: the controllers. It had happened; he was himself the core of the fusion, the germinator of the force he was riding.