The House of Rumour A Novel

The House of Rumour A Novel - By Jake Arnott




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the fool





I still look up to the stars for some sort of meaning. As a kid I thought I was seeing the future. Space, this was where we were headed, I was sure of it. Now I know that it was always the distant past I gazed at. With the light pollution over LA at night it’s sometimes hard even to trace a constellation.

As a science fiction writer I dreamt of other worlds and other possibilities. We saw such changes it seemed that fantasy itself had conjured them into being. Now the space shuttle has just been cancelled and for the first time in fifty years America no longer has a working manned space programme. It’s become old-fashioned, that foolish optimism we had about reaching faraway stars and planets.

Yet I look up at the heavens with some sort of hope. I think of the Voyager probe, still travelling over thirty years into its mission, still responding to its ground control and sending data back from the far reaches of our solar system. It’s on its way out into the galaxy. So we did launch a starship, after all. Unmanned, of course, but maybe hope is unmanned.

As above, so below.

The past becomes more uncertain than the future. I am of the generation that filled pulp magazines with cheap prophesy. Now the events in my own lifetime seem more fantastic still.

For example, an obituary has just appeared in a British newspaper:



‘The Times, Tuesday, 24 September 2011. Sir Marius Trevelyan GCB, CMG, diplomat and intelligence officer, died on 30 December, aged 91. He was born on 12 February, 1920. Marius Trevelyan’s long and distinguished career in the art of deception was characterised by his taciturn nature and an essential modesty. An acknowledged genius in counter-intelligence and disinformation, he was one of the last of the cold warriors for whom discretion was not merely the better part of valour but the very name of the game. A testament to this is his brief entry in Who’s Who, in which his career is simply given as “HM Diplomatic Service” long after MI6 and its departmental chiefs had been officially identified.’



Five paragraphs giving discreet details of his career in the Intelligence Service follow, then an intriguing conclusion:



‘In November 1987, Trevelyan was questioned by Scotland Yard detectives over a brief sexual encounter he had had with a male transvestite prostitute who was later found dead in suspicious circumstances. Official concern over this affair stemmed from a series of allegations by the prostitute, known as Vita Lampada, including a claim that he had acquired a document containing official secrets from Trevelyan. In the event, Ministry of Defence officials satisfied themselves that this episode had constituted no threat to national security.’



What does this curious fragment of history have to do with me? Well, the ‘document’ mentioned is almost certainly the one in my possession. A manuscript that carries a fascinating narrative; an artefact with a provenance that is quite a story in its own right. Passed and palmed like a marked card in a shuffled deck, it somehow ended up in my hands. I became the custodian of a mystery, even though mystery was never really my genre. I’ll leave it to others to give you the whole story, but here are the facts surrounding the matter.

Marius Trevelyan first worked for British Intelligence during the Second World War, serving with the Political Warfare Executive, an organisation specialising in counter-intelligence and disinformation. He was part of black propaganda operations around the time of the curious episode involving Rudolf Hess: the Deputy Führer who flew to Scotland in the spring of 1941, a crucial point in the war. In 1987, Trevelyan was brought out of retirement by the Service to compile a report on the suicide of Hess in Spandau prison that year.

Enter Vita Lampada, a transsexual hustler who picked up the retired spy in Mayfair. They went back to Trevelyan’s flat. There’s a good reason why prostitutes call it ‘turning a trick’. Vita was something of an unstable element; he or she was a wild card, a joker in the pack. Vita stole Trevelyan’s briefcase with the aforementioned document. Now this wasn’t the official report on Hess, but some sort of personal account of the case.

Vita had convictions for fraud, had fed stories to the gossip columns and was even known to have indulged in blackmail on occasion, but she was way out of her depth here. She played a game with the press as she had done in the past and for a while they were interested, until they realised how much trouble it might bring them. When she was found dead from a drug overdose in her flat a few weeks later some people suspected foul play, though most figured it was suicide. Vita, whose real name was David Fenwick, had a history of mental illness and had been seeing a psychiatrist as part of her gender reassignment process. An inquest delivered an open verdict.

What she stole from Sir Marius Trevelyan was never recovered by the authorities. Vita had given it to a friend of hers, a performance artist who went by the name of Pirate Jenny. Jenny herself went missing soon afterwards and is still officially a missing person. Whatever happened to her is the real mystery. But I know that the document was passed on to Danny Osiris, a British singer living in LA, because ten years later he gave it to me.

Those are the facts, but even here we’re dealing with uncertainties, improbabilities. Looking back, I find all kinds of other obscure data that connect me with Marius Trevelyan’s story: no clear linear narrative, merely quanta of information, free particles that fire off each other. Wonderful stuff, with cults and charismatic rocket scientists, and an unlikely conspiracy known as Operation Mistletoe. It’s like something out of Amazing Stories magazine, with tales that split and converge. A whole arcana of speculation, playing cards that can be used for games of chance or sleight of hand, even for divination.

Yes, those of a psychic inclination are liable to look for what they call a ‘reading’, but you have to be careful when you look for meanings. I’ve tried to keep a clear head when it comes to theories and conspiracies, because I saw my first wife go crazy with them. I’ve tried to accept that my life, like any other, has no special face value, that it could be played high or low. And that I was less of a joker, more of a fool, stepping out into the abyss. Come to think of it this is a useful image to start with. This is what the world was like when all this began in 1941. As I’ve said, it was a crucial point in the war and perhaps this moment in history is the one thing that connects everything. Time and space, seventy years ago, when the whole world was on the edge.



Yet when I think of southern California back in the early spring of that year, I see it as a kind of paradise. The land around the coast was so empty then. We would drive out to the point at Palo Verdes, park above the cliffs and climb down to deserted beaches. An uninhabited planet we could colonise with our dreams. I remember the thump and hiss of the breaking surf, the sun going down over the Pacific, as we gathered driftwood to build huge bonfires that would snap and crackle and spit great sparks up into the night.

I tend to idealise this part of my life and think of it as a time when I was still innocent. But innocent is such a big solemn word. Dumb would be more to the point. I knew nothing about the world. In fact for most of the time I was looking away from it, gazing out into the universe with a naive sense of wonder. I was a shy and awkward young man who still lived with his mother, struggling to become some sort of writer. A self-confessed fantasist. Oh, I was a fool all right. And my memories of that time become fractured, unstable. Yes, it was a time of uncertainty. Nuclear fission had just been discovered. But there was also a cataclysmic split in the unsteady matter of my self. It was, after all, the year I first had my heart broken.

I’d had a bad case of mumps as a child and all through my teenage years I’d had trouble with my sense of balance. At first I was diagnosed with labyrinthitis, an inflammation of the inner ear. It seemed that there was a dysfunction in the vestibular system, the bony maze of passages that regulate and guide our sense of motion. But when no physical evidence of this could be detected, it was suggested that my problem might be psychological. In extreme stress I could experience panic attacks and heart palpitations. These could be symptoms of labyrinthitis, or perhaps the manifestation of an emotional trauma that was the true cause of my sense of imbalance. So I had been seeing an analyst called Dr Furedi who had a practice in Beverly Hills.

It was a golden age of sorts. It’s now generally thought of as the start of the ‘Golden Age of Science Fiction’. And I had just sold my first full-length story, a twenty-eight-thousand-word novelette. Lords of the Black Sun was set in 2150 with the Third Reich of the future, having conquered earth, embarking on an interstellar blitzkrieg. Fabulous Tales ran it as a three-issue serial and it was featured on the cover for the first part with a four-colour illustration of a fearsome-looking spaceship with swastika markings. Fabulous paid a cent a word, which was the going rate back then. I was nineteen years old and $280 seemed a king’s ransom.

I’d had some early success with a short piece called ‘The Tower’ that had run in Amazing Stories, but for a long time I had felt blocked. It was my analyst’s suggestion that I write something based on my long-absent father and I think that gave me some sort of breakthrough. So Graaf Thule, the intergalactic Nazi warlord, was born.

The Los Angeles Science Fiction Society met at Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown LA. The place served free limeade, which suited a good deal of our membership who had scarcely a nickel or dime to spend. And yet I felt a bit gauche when I first attended the Thursday-night meetings, more nervous fan than serious writer. The decor of Clifton’s was absurdly kitsch. A waterfall cascaded through an artificial glade with plastic foliage and plaster rocks. A forest mural covered one wall. A gallery above held a tiny chapel with piped organ music and a neon cross. I always felt unduly sickened by this bizarre interior, which seemed to exacerbate my labyrinthitis. Dr Furedi explained this feeling as an ‘externalisation of inner anxiety’ and suggested that I obviously feared not being good enough to be part of this group. But once I had really achieved something, I felt a bit more confident.

The only person I really wanted to impress, though, was Mary-Lou Gunderson. She had sold as few stories as I had but she had a fierce presence. She seemed as self-possessed and outspoken as any who attended the weekly meetings of LASFS. Tall, blonde and athletic, she always made me feel ludicrously tongue-tied whenever she was near. I liked her stuff too. Thrilling Wonder ran her story ‘Atom Priestess’ in the summer of 1940. Set in a future that had descended into barbarism, it was about a religious sect that unknowingly worships long-lost theories of particle physics. And she had just started to write the series ‘Zodiac Empire’ for Superlative Stories. Mary-Lou was proud but she never bragged about her work; in fact she was meticulously self-deprecating. I think it allowed her to feel a little aloof about the strange trade that we had found ourselves in. She wanted to go beyond the ray guns and bug-eyed monsters. And secretly I did too.

‘Well, if it isn’t Larry Zagorski,’ she called across the table at Clifton’s. ‘The man who put the goddamn Nazis in space. What did you want to go and do that for?’

‘Er, um, well, Mary-Lou,’ I stuttered. ‘Lords of the Black Sun is, you know, speculative.’

‘Well, of course it’s speculative,’ she boomed. ‘But what, you want them to win?’

‘Of course not, no. It’s like, you know, a warning.’

‘A warning?’

‘Yeah,’ I said with a sudden certainty. ‘A warning from the future.’

‘Hmm,’ she pondered. ‘A warning from the future. I like that.’

Many years later a ‘serious’ science-fiction critic cited Lords of the Black Sun as an influence on Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream and countless other novels that dwelt on what might have happened if the Axis powers had gained world domination. But I certainly wasn’t the first to come up with what has now become almost a sub-genre of literature. I got the idea from a strange English novel titled Swastika Night by Murray Constantine, though I did have something like an original twist to the idea and I wanted to share that with Mary-Lou.

‘I got this idea from Jack Parsons. You remember, that rocket scientist at Caltech who sometimes comes to the meetings?’

‘I’ll say,’ she drawled. ‘He’s cute.’

I gave an embarrassed cough.

‘That’s as may be,’ I went on. ‘What I remember was that he said German rocketry is already far in advance of anyone else’s. And that got me thinking. What if the Nazis conquer space?’

‘Yeah, terrifying thought,’ she muttered. ‘They say he’s into black magic, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Jack Parsons.’

Parsons was something of a legend even then: tall, dark, strikingly handsome, a brilliant scientist who dabbled in the occult, like some fully formed figure from fantasy fiction. I was hardly surprised that he intrigued Mary-Lou, but I had no idea then that her flippant comments were my own warning from the future.

And looking back now I can see something else I didn’t know at the time: Parsons was an acolyte of a notorious English occultist who became linked with the Hess case.

I felt just about bold enough to offer Mary-Lou a lift home to her boarding house in West Hollywood. She invited me up to her room for a nightcap where she produced the remains of a bottle of kosher slivovitz. As we sipped plum brandy she asked me about quantum mechanics.

‘Cause and effect start to get weird on an atomic level,’ I tried to explain, wrestling with ideas I didn’t really understand. ‘You know, with Newtonian physics it’s like pool. The cue ball hits a colour, that hits the eight-ball and so on. In quantum theory one particle can influence another without the need for intermediate agents joining the two objects in space.’

She frowned and I struggled on, speaking of wave and particle duality, geodesics and the Uncertainty Principle.

‘It hardly makes any sense to me,’ she complained.

‘Well, that’s okay, Mary-Lou. They say that anyone who isn’t confused by quantum mechanics doesn’t understand it.’

‘Oh, Zagorski, I just knew you’d come out with something like that!’

‘Why?’

She smiled and poured me another slug of liquor.

‘Because it’s just the sort of dumb thing you would say.’

‘Gee, Mary-Lou, I really don’t understand it. Most of what I learnt about it I got from Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Time. That was the first time I’d heard that time and space can be warped. You remember the story? Astounding ran it a couple of years ago. There are two possible futures: one like an ideal society, the other a horrific dictatorship. The hero is contacted by each of them because his actions will determine which one comes to pass.’

‘Oh yeah, I read it. He’s visited by a winsome girl from utopia, and an evil vamp from dystopia.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Hmm, that figures. Don’t they choose him because his actions will determine whether some kid becomes a scientist or not?’

‘John Barr, yes; his ideas will go to create the perfect city of Jonbar. But only if he picks up the right object one day when he’s a child. If he chooses a magnet, he becomes interested in science and goes on to discover new theories that make this bright future possible. If he picks up the stone next to it for his slingshot, we’re headed for this totalitarian nightmare.’

‘What’s this got to do with quantum mechanics?’

‘Well, it’s as much to do with the Uncertainty Principle. By observing something you can change it, so the measurement of the position of a particle alters its trajectory.’

‘But it’s a political conundrum too, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’

‘Of course it is. Like you said, a warning from the future. That’s what we should be writing, don’t you think?’

‘Er, yeah.’

Along with everything else, I was politically naive at that point in my life. I had worked out that Mary-Lou was left wing and that somehow this did not necessarily mean she was pro-Soviet Russia, but beyond that I was liable to get confused. I wanted to show willing because of the way I felt about her but I was never sure I was doing the right thing. Lords of the Black Sun was meant to be anti-fascist but the illustrator had made the Nazi spaceship look so impressive that the cover issue became a favourite with the German–American Bund.

‘We’ve got to fight for the future, Mary-Lou!’ I declared, emboldened by the second glass of slivovitz.

‘That’s right, Larry. And it’s finely balanced. Just like in The Legion of Time, it could go either way. In Europe, in Africa, in Asia. In the whole world!’

We were staring into each other’s eyes and it seemed to me like a portentous moment of epiphany, as though we shared the destiny of planet earth and the vast dominions of space beyond. I made a silent promise that I would learn more about politics and philosophy, that I would try to understand science properly so that I could share this precious wisdom with Mary-Lou Gunderson. Her eyes appeared to blaze with all the hope of some great utopian future. Then she yawned.

‘Sorry, Zagorski,’ she sighed. ‘I’m beat. And I need to sleep. Got to work tomorrow.’

She had a part-time job reading scripts for one of the studios. She saw me to the door.

‘Thanks for trying to explain all that long-hair stuff,’ she murmured.

‘I’ll see if I can’t find out some more,’ I offered.

‘Thing is, Larry, I’m just too impatient. I want to know it all. And right now.’

‘Yeah, well—’

‘I do,’ she cut in, as if the idea had come to her at that moment. ‘I want to know everything! Goodnight, Larry.’

She quickly kissed me on the cheek and hustled me out of the door. I staggered into the clear cold LA night. I was light-headed but, for once, steady on my feet. My mind fuzzed with ideologies, theoretical physics and plum brandy. My soul reeled in speculative fantasy. I was in love.

I was also a virgin. Perhaps my attraction to writing about the future was that it was only there that I had any worldly experience. I was as keen to rid myself of my childlike imagination and wonder as I was to use them to generate stories. Dr Furedi had encouraged my writing as a cathartic process, though he was concerned that my obsession with fantasy and science fiction reflected my neurotic condition. He pointed out that many of the problems I’d had with it were symptomatic of an unconscious resistance within myself. Now I’d had a small breakthrough with my fiction and, I felt, had made real progress towards the possibility of a relationship.

I was finding it hard to get on with my next story, though. ‘Lightship 7 from Andromeda’ now seemed a banal space adventure. I obsessed about my feelings for Mary-Lou and easily lost concentration when I sat down at my typewriter or would wander about in an unco-ordinated daze. At bookstores or news-stands it had long been my habit to scan the racks of the pulp magazines, for inspiration as well as just to see what was out there. The gaudy covers would often carry a female form: amazon warrior in sleek and curvaceous armour, or bound and barely clothed captives. But what had once been cheap titillation had now become a nagging reminder of an infatuation I had no idea what to do with.

We went to the cinema together: Dr Cyclops was playing in a double feature with The Monster and the Girl. Afterwards, over a soda, we agreed that both films were absolute trash and the sort of thing that gave science fiction a bad name, but it was hardly a romantic evening. We did meet to talk about work, though. Mary-Lou had none of the problems I was encountering with output. She seemed unsatisfied with ‘Zodiac Empire’ but she could produce copy at a phenomenal rate. She dismissed it as her ‘space-opera’ (some fanzine had just come up with the term) but she did have a strong idea that she wanted to pursue: that the different planets of the solar system had specific characteristics and influences – an astrology for the future, she called it.

Meanwhile I was trying to give myself a political education. Fascism was evil: that seemed clear enough. Capitalism was wrong, not just because it was unfair but also because it was unscientific. But Soviet communism wasn’t the answer. What was needed was some kind of socialism that wasn’t totalitarian. The pact the Russians had made with the Nazis had done a lot to discredit the USSR, but America wasn’t in the war either. Haunted by distant cataclysm, we all felt a peculiar sense of detached speculation. The world seemed as awkwardly balanced as I was.

One afternoon on passing a news-stand Mary-Lou pointed to all the catastrophic headlines – LONDON BLITZED, THE ATLANTIC WAR CONTINUES, TANK BATTLES IN NORTH AFRICA – then to a little man who had picked up a magazine.

‘After all that,’ she remarked darkly, ‘he still wants Action Stories. What are we doing, writing for the pulps?’

‘Maybe we’re finding a solution. You see the news? What’s real now? Submarines, flying machines: that was the science fiction of a hundred years ago. What we are imagining now: that might be next century’s news.’

‘Jesus, Zagorski, think of the horrors we might come up with then.’

‘That’s why it’s important how we use our imaginations,’ I said, instinctively reaching for the latest issue of Astounding.

‘In dreams begins responsibility,’ said Mary-Lou.

‘Huh?’ I grunted, already absorbed by the glossy binding.

‘Don’t worry, Larry. Just quoting W.B. Yeats at you.’

‘Magic City’ was the cover story with a ruined Statue of Liberty rising out of a post-apocalyptic wilderness, a lithe huntress in furs standing in the foreground and a long-haired caveman crouching before her.

‘At least Astounding runs interesting stuff,’ I said, holding it up.

‘Yeah,’ Mary-Lou agreed. ‘That’s who we should be writing for.’

It was clear to both of us that Astounding Science Fiction was by far the best and most ground-breaking of any of the pulp magazines of the time. Its new editor, John W. Campbell, had completely transformed the field, nurturing a group of exciting new writers: Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon and especially Robert Heinlein, who lived in LA and was said to run some kind of literary circle. This was the world that we wanted to be part of.

Mary-Lou had grown tired of the LASFS Thursday meetings and would sometimes disparagingly refer to that crowd as the ‘limeade brigade’. I still attended. I had sold ‘Lightship 7 from Andromeda’ to Fantastic Tales and it looked as if I was becoming something of a regular writer for them, so I now was shown quite a lot of respect at Clifton’s Cafeteria. Mary-Lou never said as much but I got the feeling she thought it was playing safe, mixing with them, that we should really be taking more risks with our writing rather than churning out the usual stuff. And maybe thinking of her made me bold because when Robert Heinlein walked in one night I wasted little time in making a beeline for him.

Heinlein had a presence that was more than a little intimidating. Gaunt and saturnine, with swept-back hair and a pencil moustache, he looked very much like a gloomy Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. And he had seemed to come from nowhere. Having published his first story only a couple of years before, he was by then one of the brightest stars in the genre. There were all sorts of rumours about him: that he was a radical, that he had made his fortune silver prospecting, that he was into free love. I praised his latest story, ‘– And He Built a Crooked House –’ that had been in the issue of Astounding I’d picked up at the news-stand with Mary-Lou. It was about an architect who designs a four-dimensional house, a hypercube in the form of a tesseract that collapses in on itself after an earthquake into what appears to be a single cube. Those trapped inside can still pass through the original eight rooms, all of which appear to occupy the same space, with the stairs now forming a closed loop so that on reaching what they think is the top storey, the people find themselves back on the ground floor. At one point they look down a hallway to observe their own backs. I seem to remember that I said it was like a prose version of an M.C. Escher woodcut and that Heinlein smiled and nodded. What I am certain of is that, as his attention began to drift and he started to turn away, I boldly thrust out my hand and announced:

‘I’m Larry Zagorski, sir. I wrote Lords of the Black Sun.’

Heinlein laughed and clasped my palm in a firm grip. He frowned at me.

‘Yeah?’ He shook my hand the way a dog shakes a rabbit. ‘I saw the story. In Fabulous, wasn’t it? Made the fascists seem a bit glamorous, didn’t you?’

‘That was the illustrator’s fault,’ I protested.

He laughed again.

‘Only kidding with you. I liked it. But we got to be careful sometimes, haven’t we? You know, being of the devil’s party without knowing it.’

He tapped his nose. I nodded sagely but I had no idea what he meant.

‘Look, kid,’ he went on. ‘We have a little soirée every now and then at my place. Call it the Mañana Literary Society. Why don’t you come along?’

‘Can I bring someone?’

‘Your girl?’

‘Yes,’ I blurted, then thought better of it. ‘I mean, no, I mean, well . . . she’s another writer. A good one.’

Heinlein laughed once more and wrote out his address for me. He lived with his wife Leslyn in Laurel Canyon, on Lookout Mountain Avenue, a side road that twists up into the Hollywood Hills. And when I took Mary-Lou with me to our first meeting with the Mañana Literary Society, I felt that a whole new bright world was opening up for the both of us. It was the closest thing to a salon that science fiction had at that time and we were a part of it. Most of all I hoped it would mean that Mary-Lou would take me seriously and that I would be able to find the courage finally to say how I really felt about her. Oh yes, I felt really pleased with myself at the start of that evening. I thought I was so clever. But I was a fool, a complete fool.