The House of Rumour (20 page)

‘We saw some weird things flying around out there, Mary-Lou. Strange-shaped things that came from nowhere, then – whoosh! They’d shoot off. Lights in the sky, balls of fire that seemed to follow you around.’

‘What were they?’

‘I don’t know. We called them the “foo fighters”. There were these things that we could never seem to make sense of. Some of them were these new German aircraft. Stuff from the future. Rocket planes and jet fighters. Experimental weapons, prototypes. But there were times when it seemed like . . .’ Larry shrugged.

‘Maybe they were spaceships.’

‘Yeah.’ He grinned. ‘Wouldn’t that be great? But you know, what with altitude sickness, lack of sleep and so on . . . Remember that labyrinthitis I used to have? It used to give me vertigo and problems with my balance.’

‘I remember that.’

‘Well, I was clear of it in the air force. Fifty-two missions, never a problem. But maybe it was just that the symptoms changed.’

Larry had regained his physical sense of balance, but psychologically he still seemed at a slight angle to the world. When I asked him about his writing he made this queer little shrug, like he had an itch on his back that he couldn’t reach.

‘Gee, Mary-Lou, I’m finding it hard to write that outer-space stuff these days. I mean, don’t you find it difficult?’

I told him that I was busier than ever with my job as script girl at the studio and that it was difficult selling stories to magazines because of the paper shortage but I knew this was an excuse. I had hardly written anything for months.

‘Whatever happened to “The City of the Sun”?’ he asked.

‘
Superlative Stories
went out of business.’

‘But you never finished the story?’

‘No.’

‘You should. It was a good idea.’

‘Thanks. Maybe I will.’

‘But I don’t know, Mary-Lou,’ he went on, ‘sometimes it feels like all our great futures are already behind us.’

I knew what he meant. There was a distinct feeling that the age of wonder was over. A lot of science fiction writers came by number 1003 that summer. Nemo Carvajal would often stay over – he lived close by in Burbank where he had a job at the Lockheed factory. Robert Heinlein was back from doing war work out east for the navy and he came to visit. As did Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton, all of them possessed with a more sombre attitude to the future.

Tony Boucher had written a mystery novel set in the SF and fantasy scene of the time, a
roman-à-clef
, featuring thinly disguised fictional versions of members of the Mañana Literary Society. Jack had appeared in the book as CalTech scientist Hugo Chantrelle. It had conjured much of the wistful optimism of the pre-war science-fiction world. But it was called
Rocket to the Morgue
, and I remember even then how ominous that sounded to me. Now, of course, I see how accurate a prediction it was of Jack’s death, even of the headline in the
LA Times
. But then the mid-forties would be the last time that science fiction really had the edge of prophecy. Cleve Cartmill wrote a story for
Astounding
in 1944 that so accurately described a Uranium 235 atom bomb that he was investigated by the FBI.

And though the summer of 1945 began as a summer of hope – peace in Europe, imminent victory in the Pacific, people coming home – it ended with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We had foreseen it, we had made it possible. So it was hard for us, as science fiction writers, to find any detachment from the horror of these weapons, or to share the numbing sense of disbelief that stunned the average citizen. We were to blame, in our imaginations anyway. And we had to adjust to the reality of the worst of our fantasies. It was a cold world that Larry had come back to.

He was living with his mother once more and supporting them both thanks to the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act – the GI Bill that guaranteed him one year of self-employed income. As a freelance writer he could claim twenty dollars a week for any time he wasn’t earning. But as he admitted to me this well-meaning subsidy acted as a disincentive at a time when he was already so unsure about his work. He went into stasis, overwhelmed with ideas that he could not transmit. Larry and Nemo spent long hours together talking, drinking beer and smoking marijuana. Nemo was very taken by Larry’s tales of the strange objects seen in the skies over the Rhineland. But Larry was genuinely troubled by the ‘foo fighters’ and speculation as to what he might or might not have seen became the basis of much of his later work.

‘Maybe they were just hallucinations,’ he once said to me. ‘But
real
hallucinations.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I told him.

He tried to explain to me that he had found out there was another possible symptom of his labyrinthitis that could be manifesting itself. It was known as ‘derealisation’, an alteration in the perception of the external world that could be caused by a chronic disorder in the inner ear.

‘I mean, if everything seems unreal,’ he said, ‘how do I know if I’m seeing things or not? How do you know I’m really seeing you?’

I felt an edge to that last comment, a new sharpness in his tone. Whatever problems Larry had with reality, he was certainly more knowing than he had been before the war. I missed that awkward innocence of his. He had grown up the hard way, adjusting to the obvious horrors of war and then to the more subtle terrors of peacetime. But despite any mental anguish he might have been suffering, he seemed more confident physically and emotionally. I gently ribbed him about the many girlfriends he must have had as a glamorous airman, expecting him to go all coy on me. Instead he spoke softly of a dispatch rider called Joyce who he had dated when he was stationed in England and I found myself nursing a pang of jealousy that I had no right to bear. We went to the movies one night and he casually snaked an arm around my shoulder during the second feature. I snuggled up to him, unsure of what this careless intimacy might mean but happy enough for the comfort of it. He drove me back to number 1003 that evening and we dallied on the porch in a moment of charm and uncertainty. I went to kiss him but he drew back and fixed me with a pair of steel-blue eyes.

‘You’re still in love with Jack, aren’t you?’ he asked.

‘Larry—’

‘Mary-Lou, look, I don’t want to give you a hard time. I care about you. But if you really do love him—’ he shrugged.

‘What?’

‘You can’t just hang around hoping it’s all going to work out somehow. You’ve got to do something about it.’

Larry was right. I knew that things couldn’t carry on as they were. The Lodge, indeed the whole Order, had encouraged the rejection of possessiveness in relationships but the house at number 1003 had become an exhausted burlesque of anxiety and confusion. Individuals were dogged by expectation and disappointment; partnerships were strained by instability and suspicion. Jealousy became all the more potent an enemy because we were supposed to have become immune to its poison. And I was the worst of the lot. I wanted Jack Parsons all to myself.

And I knew I had long felt that this was meant to be. I had become bonded to him: emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and sexually. A casual relationship was not enough. The problem was that Jack had more or less settled down with Betty, his own sister-in-law (his wife Helen had gone off with Wilfred Smith, the former High Priest of the Lodge). Adultery with a hint of incest gave the thrill of trespass to what was essentially a domestic arrangement. Petite and blonde, Betty played this little-girl act that I found nauseating, though it sure as hell worked on most of the male occupants of number 1003. Jack was fixated on her and she knew just how to manipulate him. She was supposed to be taking writing classes at UCLA, but she always seemed to find a reason to skip them. Instead she liked to run the household, collecting rent money and food stamps. But she was so busy ruling the roost she didn’t notice how unhappy Jack had become.

The world had caught up with him. The war had taken all his idealistic dreams of rocketry and burnt them up in its grim purpose. Ballistics became respectable and developed an orthodoxy. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory that he had helped set up had become a fully funded military enterprise more concerned with missiles and weaponry than the exploration of space. There was no room now for the eccentric pioneer whose ideas bordered on the subversive. He became sidelined: never fully accepted at CalTech (he was not a conventionally trained scientist; he didn’t even have a degree) and persuaded to sell his shares in Aerojet, the aeronautical company he had co-founded.

‘Besides, they’ve got a whole bunch of captured Nazi scientists out in New Mexico,’ he explained to me. ‘They’ve got all that German rocket technology. They sure as hell don’t need me any more.’

With time on his hands, Jack became morose and indolent. He started drinking quite heavily, his drug use now habitual as much as ritual. He retained a taste for reckless experimentation: denied outer space, he was determined to journey inward to test himself with the dangers of his own psyche. He looked for the extremes in magic. The Order had always warned against this; indeed, Crowley himself had written to Jack, urging caution against rituals that risked invoking evil or causing harm. But Jack liked high odds and he loved the forbidden. And I encouraged him. I felt a connection with his darker energies. It was what had attracted me to him in the first place.

I tried to muster my own occult forces. I had got to know a new arrival at number 1003, Astrid Nagengast, who had just come over from Germany. She was a formidable woman, a senior member of the OTO. A friend of Aleister Crowley, she had even known Theodor Reuss, the founder of the Order. She worked as a fortune-teller and as some sort of voice coach. I studied the Tarot with her and we talked about other forms of clairvoyance and ways of channelling the unseen. She insisted that the most important thing was the power of the will: the principle of Thelema, a central tenet of the Order. Astrid had been through hard times: she had been part of a resistance movement during the war. She was convinced that supernatural powers had helped her survive under the Nazis. Though I wasn’t sure how much I believed this, there was something very inspiring about Astrid and I realised, as Larry had so bluntly pointed out, that I had to do something about my feelings for Jack.

One night we met at the pergola in the grounds of number 1003 that was sometimes used for ceremonies and the Gnostic Mass. Betty had gone to bed; the sky was heavy with stars. We talked of the new Tarot pack that Crowley had been creating with a woman artist in London. The Strength card was now designated as Lust. The image of a female form wrestling with a lion.

‘The Scarlet Woman,’ said Jack, ‘who rides the Beast.’

I pulled his face towards mine by his thick mane of hair.

‘Strength is vigour,’ I whispered. ‘The rapture of vigour.’

He kissed me, his breath scented with smoke and liquor. Sweet tokay and reefer. His locks slipped through my fingers, chrismed with brilliantine.

‘Knowledge and delight,’ he murmured. ‘And bright glory. Wine and strange drugs, divine drunkenness and ecstasy.’

Soon we were naked. He bade me kneel and then crouched behind, his hot mouth against my neck, murmuring obscene incantations. As he covered me I bowed down on the tiled floor in supplication. I arched my back as he pushed against me. There was pain, my whole body rising up against his onslaught. Then the siege was broken and a sudden rush of pleasure overwhelmed me. We rutted with a bestial frenzy, consummating the love of Baphomet, the eleventh degree of sex magic that Betty had denied him. I felt a sense of sinful transcendence, convinced that this manner of ritual sacrifice would give me power over him.

Afterwards we lay on our backs, looking down on the heavens.

‘I remember being a star,’ he whispered to the night air. ‘A moving, burning ember going deathward to the womb.’

‘Let’s go away, Jack,’ I said. ‘Just me and you.’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Up into space.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘So am I, Mary-Lou. Or I once was. I once thought I would live to see the time when we make it up there.’

He pointed up at the cosmos.

‘Maybe you will.’

‘No,’ he declared flatly. ‘I won’t live long enough.’

‘Jack—’

‘And in the meantime I’m supposed to be a normal honest citizen.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Betty—’

‘What about Betty?’

‘She wants a baby,’ he told me.

‘And you?’

‘Hell, no,’ he muttered. ‘I want to conjure a demon or create a homunculus. I don’t want a real child. Maybe a moonchild.’

‘A moonchild?’

Jack started to explain about how one could create a magical child, born on an astral plane, mightier than all the kings of the earth. He began to mutter oaths and curses. I knew that I should try to understand what he meant. That this might be a clue to possessing him. But it all seemed so absurd and as he rambled on I fell asleep.

The next morning there was still a furtive charge between us but I felt it wane as the hours passed. Whatever charm of the night I held, Jack was still in thrall to Betty by day. She seemed a little bored, though, and there was some spark of an idea in my head that I might use that somehow, that maybe I should not simply concentrate on getting Jack away from Betty. Perhaps I should find a way of drawing Betty away from him.