The House of Rumour A Novel

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ROCKET SCENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION. The front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times was stark and strange, like comic book arcana, past prophecies of pulp magazines and science fiction B-movies. Cosmically terse, like a one-line horoscope. I knew at once that it was about Jack. But the real shock was that there was no shock. I’d somehow always known that this was going to happen. I had long since given up on the supernatural but in that instant I knew that I had always had a prescient sense of Jack’s end. And I couldn’t bring myself to read the news. I had to adjust to this moment. So I kept my gaze up and scanned the masthead: Late News, 9 a.m. Final, 18 June 1952: the exact point in time that I was finally free of Jack Parsons.

I remembered something he had told me about rocket science. When they brought the captured German V2 missiles back to America, they took them apart to see how they worked. They call it ‘reverse engineering’. And I knew that that was what I would have to do. I’d have to take it all apart and put it back together again.

A photo of Jack by the headline. A blurred headshot: a pattern of dots tracing the perfect curve of his cheekbones, his soul-deep eyes. Even in inky pointillism he looked absurdly handsome. My dark angel. My bright demon. The most beautiful man I ever knew, cursed with a mercurial genius and a sublime gift for enchantment. No one could blame me for falling in love with Jack, for making a fool of myself over him. And no one could blame me for betraying him in the end. Sometimes you have to kill love or it will destroy you.

When we began our strange affair I thought that I could deal with the fact that he was with somebody else. Jack had so many lovers, it was ludicrous to hope he would be faithful only to me. And for a while I imagined that I was above all the petty jealousies of life. I was on a mystical path, after all, on my way to a higher order of enlightenment, which he had become master of. Sexual freedom was to be a sacrament to this greater love. But I soon learnt that it wasn’t enough. That it wasn’t freedom, rather some kind of enslavement. I felt lost. Life had seemed a series of adjustments I had never been able to keep pace with. But the real problems started in 1945. The war had changed everything. The whole world was readjusting itself. I only really started to notice how different things had become when Larry Zagorski came back from Europe.

Larry was on terminal leave from the USAAF when he came to visit at 1003 Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena in the late summer of 1945.

‘Wow,’ he murmured as I showed him through the grand hall with its sweeping mahogany staircase. ‘So this is the famous commune.’

Jack Parsons had leased the mansion in 1942 as a new headquarters for the Agape Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis, and I moved in along with other serious members of the Order. It was to be a ‘Profess House’, a utopian mission where we could live according to the ideals of our new religion, the Church of Thelema. An ideal community where we would realise the dreams of our Hierophant, Aleister Crowley, whose vigilant likeness watched over us from above the stairway. It didn’t quite work out like that. Despite the resolute optimism of our little spiritual collective, so much of our actual communion was taken up with emotional tension and nagging quarrels over practicalities. And there had been endless splits and schisms in the Lodge. Many of the original members left and new people moved in who were not necessarily part of the Order. We even gave up holding a Gnostic Mass on a regular basis. Number 1003 (as the house came to be known) became more of a pragmatic refuge, a boarding-house sanctuary for the weird and wonderful.

‘We’ve tried to make it work here,’ I said to Larry as I led him into the kitchen. ‘It hasn’t always been easy.’

‘I guess not, Mary-Lou.’

He still had that goofy grin but his baby-blue eyes now gazed hard and distant. That off-kilter stoop of his had been replaced with a neurotic swagger.

‘So, how are you?’ I said.

‘Well, I’m back. At least I think I am.’

I asked about his experiences but you could tell that he didn’t want to talk about them. He had seen far beyond anything purely rational. He had flown as a radio operator in B-24s over Germany and occupied Europe, and was full of grim tales he had no urge to relive. So he made light of it all. And suspecting that I missed the shy kid full of amazement at the heavens, he picked out the fantastic from the dread horrors he must have witnessed.

‘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.

I started to practise with the Tarot deck. I learnt the Major Arcana. I asked Astrid about the Justice card, hoping it could mean redress, particularly for what I saw as the unfairness in my situation with Jack.

‘The most misunderstood card in the whole pack. Justice does not belong to us. When I think of who was spared and who was lost,’ she said, referring to her time under the Nazis. ‘And these trials. So many will still get away with it. No, this card does not mean a human notion of justice. Oh no, this is the natural kind. Nature is a harsh judge but precise when she finds her balance. Exact, you might say. So you be careful when you go looking for justice.’

But I was impatient. I began to find ways of palming the deck to turn up the cards that I wanted. One evening I did a reading for Jack and I fixed the spread so I could offer him a provocative interpretation. It was a three-card divination (though in this case more of a three-card trick). The Two of Swords was the centre card between Strength and the Ten of Cups. The Two of Swords shows a blindfolded woman holding crossed swords, like Justice without her scales, indicating a difficult choice to be decided on instinct rather than logic. Strength, of course, referred to our lustful night, the Beast and his Scarlet Woman. The Ten of Cups depicts a couple embracing as their children dance – family life and faithfulness, that bliss of domesticity that I knew he dreaded.

This was a sort of spell aimed at Jack. I wondered what I might use against Betty. I had tried curses and blessings and all kinds of charms, but nothing had seemed to make any particular sense or had any effect. I decided to concentrate on willing a kind of animus that might work in my favour, a spirit that might tempt Betty away from Jack. One night I asked for a sign or a portent. The next day L. Ron Hubbard turned up.

He had just got out of the navy and he was looking for somewhere to stay. Hubbard was a veteran pulp writer, well known in the fantasy and science fiction world. That’s how he got to hear about our little commune in Pasadena. I never much liked him. We had met at Robert Heinlein’s house before the war, the very same night I first saw Jack Parsons. Hubbard’s presence was such a contrast to Jack’s subtle charisma. I remembered then a domineering manner, an incessant craving for attention. A sly wariness in his eyes, a cunning twist about his mouth; he seemed alert to any opportunity. It was his gloating nature I found repulsive; there was something almost reptilian about him. With men he was merely arrogant, with women he was predatory.

His prose style was as brash and arrogant as he was but it was hard not to respect his sheer output and his power of invention. Ron was a verbal illusionist, a writer who had become convinced by his own fantasies and now seemed ready to try to fool others. He would constantly push the credulity of his audience as if searching for those who might believe in him unconditionally.

And it was clear that he was looking for something beyond the merely fictional for his powers of speculation. He boasted that he had written a manuscript that he could no longer submit to publishers as it had sent mad all those who had read it. In one of his better stories, a man finds himself a fictional character in a pirate romance and learns to anticipate action or danger when he hears the clatter of typewriter keys in the sky above him. Even back then the audacious storyteller dreamt of a higher calling.

For some of the household he provided much needed entertainment. He was a skilled raconteur, holding court around the big table in the kitchen at suppertime, telling tall tales that many fell for. He had learnt his trade on all types of pulp magazine and could rattle off stories of any genre, claiming them as his own experience. And he was full of bluster about his wartime exploits, though one could tell that duty had taken its toll in some way. There was a weariness in his pale eyes. They would gaze off in mid-sentence as if hunting for another racket.

I noticed them light up when they fell on Betty. It was easy to see he found her attractive and she clearly enjoyed the attention of this mysterious new member of the commune. They flirted openly. It was a performance, a game, but one that could easily turn serious. All at once it struck me that my prayer might have been answered.

I found Ron in the library one afternoon. He looked up furtively as I entered. He had been studying The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley.

‘Looking for ideas, Ron?’

‘It’s brilliant stuff,’ he replied. ‘A whole new religion. Needs to be more, well, scientific.’

He was fascinated by Jack’s persona and curious about his ideas. Ron was a professional, always on the lookout for any material he could use.

‘What do you think of Betty?’ I asked him.

He shrugged, trying to look nonchalant, but his eyes flickered mischievously.

‘She likes you,’ I went on.

‘She’s Jack’s girl.’

‘The Order’s in favour of free love, you know that. Betty wants you. And Jack wants what Betty wants.’

His lips pursed in a cruel smirk.

‘She’ll make her feelings known soon,’ I told him. ‘Make sure you act quickly before her passion cools.’

I was about to contrive a moment to talk to Betty on her own but it was she who instigated it. She actually confided in me.

‘What do you think of Ron?’ she asked me and I measured my response carefully.

‘Oh, he’s fascinating.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Betty. ‘I think he’s cute.’

I winced. Only Betty could think of L. Ron Hubbard as cute. But at least there was a kind of poetic justice in it. They deserved each other.

‘What should I do?’

‘Oh, you must act on your feelings,’ I told her. ‘Anything else would be dishonest. You must let him know how you feel.’

‘What, tell him?’

‘Oh no. Some sort of gesture would be better.’

Two days later in the garden Jack and Ron were fencing at sunset. The vigorous exchange of thrust and parry charged the air. There was a new intensity between the two men. I didn’t realise it at the time but Jack was becoming just as obsessed with Ron as Ron was with Jack. But looking back now, I think Betty already knew it and was jealous of them both. The light was failing and as they were not wearing masks each new lunge became wilder and more provocative. Betty became agitated as she watched until she could bear it no longer. She grabbed the foil from Jack and launched a fierce attack on Hubbard, swiping at his unprotected face, forcing him to retreat. Stepping back, he regained his posture and with a sharp riposte knocked her sword to the ground. The sky had turned blood red. Betty and Ron glared at each other. It had begun.

We were all used to the wild affairs that would flare up at number 1003; they had become our sport. But this was different and the tension in the house became palpable. Ron and Betty made no attempt to conceal their lovemaking. It was a gruesome spectacle. But now everyone was watching Jack to see how he would respond to this direct challenge.

I felt sure that he would crack. He had been so devoted to Betty and now she had betrayed him openly. Hubbard had obscenely abused his hospitality. I thought that it was only a matter of time before he would throw them both out. But I underestimated his resilience.

‘It is a test,’ he insisted to me one night when we were alone together. ‘I must suffer this ordeal of love and jealousy. I will find a way.’

‘Yes,’ I whispered urgently. ‘Come to me.’

‘I have to find my own way first. I have to find the darkness.’

‘What?’

‘Of myself. This is a sign, Mary-Lou. I must attend to magical ceremony. I have to go deeper within.’

So I left him to it, hoping that he merely needed time to get over Betty. But soon he became absorbed in new experiments of the spirit. He had been investigating Enochian rituals that had been used by Doctor John Dee, Elizabeth I’s court magician, who had used arcane language to communicate with the unseen. Jack now sought divine wisdom through angelic conversation.

Astrid knew all about Doctor Dee.

‘He was the most brilliant man of his generation. A Renaissance magician with deep knowledge of astrology and mathematics. I suppose if he lived in these days he would have been a scientist. But he wanted to know too much. Like Faust he went too far. He fell under the influence of a charlatan named Kelley. Well, they practised magic together but in the end Kelley conned Dee out of everything – his wife, his fortune, even his knowledge.’

This should have been a warning for Jack but he embraced its dread premonition. He started to enact magic rituals with Hubbard. Ron had made many explorations into the unseen in his writing. He had known H.P. Lovecraft when they had both sold stories to Weird Tales magazine and had learnt that faked occult wisdom was far more plausible than any actual arcane knowledge that might exist. With a demon of an imagination, he was now ready to use his fictional prowess to influence reality. He had enchanted Jack and there was nothing I could do to break the spell. And Hubbard seemed all the more convincing now that he had so forcefully demonstrated his dominance over Jack by seducing Betty. They formed the passionate connection some men can achieve only when they have a woman in common to safely mediate it. Jack needed desperately to break through what he saw as his human weaknesses. And Hubbard preyed on him, willing to steal everything from the other man.

Jack had looked for the darkness and found it in L. Ron Hubbard, a man possessed with all the cunning and ruthlessness that he yearned for. They began to enact absurd rites, meaningless liturgies that seemed merely to solemnise Jack’s degradation. The house became possessed with a grim and sickly atmosphere. Strange noises by day, hellish screams that pierced the night, the stench of incense and sulphur. They constantly played a record of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto at full volume as prelude to their ceremony. Ritualism became contagious, as members of the Order would themselves enact banishing ceremonies to ward off ugly spirits.

It became clear that most of the senior members of the OTO were appalled by Jack’s sinister workings with Hubbard. Crowley himself wrote a letter denouncing them both. Astrid was quietly furious.

‘When I think of how we have been persecuted down the ages,’ she said, ‘just so that these men can behave so foolishly.’ She told me that she herself had been a victim of a Gestapo clampdown on astrologers and occultists in 1941 and had spent two months in a concentration camp.

After two weeks of tension and near madness at number 1003, Jack announced that he and Ron were heading off to the Mojave Desert together.

‘We are going to attempt the Babalon Working,’ he told me.

I nodded absently. I had long since lost touch with what any of this really meant. I just hoped that he would find some sort of catharsis.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘Love is the law,’ he replied with a crazed smile. He hadn’t slept properly for days. I kissed him gently on the lips and said:

‘I hope you find what you’re looking for.’

‘I want to summon an elemental.’

I know now that I should have paid more attention at this point, but I was tired too. So I kissed him again and said:

‘I’ll be waiting for you.’

And so I waited. And like a fool I imagined that my patience would be rewarded. But somebody else got there before me.

No one seemed quite sure where Candy came from. She was an artist or something. So many people drifted in and out of number 1003, it was impossible to keep track of them all. Maybe Jack really did conjure her up through the spirit world as he would later claim. All that is really certain is that there she was, standing on the front porch when he got back from the desert. And she was perfect. His ‘elemental’, the Scarlet Woman par excellence. Candy had a shock of flame-red hair, bright-blue eyes and a broad-lipped snarl of a mouth. I didn’t stand a chance. I watched as Jack slapped the dust from his jacket and walked right past me, transfixed by this vision of his delirium.

They fell in love with each other right there and then. Right in front of my eyes. I was devastated, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking that I had only myself to blame. I had meddled too much and yet not enough. I had set things up so perfectly, but for somebody else. I thought about what Astrid had said. This was how natural justice felt.

And there was yet another adjustment we all had to make. It was 1946, the year when everything at number 1003 fell apart. Hubbard conned Jack into a business proposition and promptly ran off to Florida with Betty and twenty thousand dollars of Jack’s money. There was a court case and Jack managed to get some of it back but he had to sell the lease on the house. I think he’d had enough of it by then. He left the Order and married Candy. By October, number 1003 was empty. The big old mansion was torn down to make way for modern apartments. I was ready to move on at that point but I couldn’t help feeling some nostalgia for the place, for the fleeting sense of a community of misfits. All the writers, thinkers, out-of-work actors and aspiring magicians. It had been a flawed utopia for people who believed in free living and emotional honesty. A commune for lovers of science fiction and the occult. We had been too ahead of our time. But all the post-war hope was running out. Things were about to get bleaker.

I went back to live in LA. I was lucky in some ways. I still had my job at the studio, so I threw myself into work. I had started assisting the German émigré director Max Iann. He was adapting a hard-boiled novel titled Hell is Empty. A man comes back from the war and picks up a girl in a bar. At first neither of them remembers that they were once childhood sweethearts. He has been traumatised by combat; she has become a drunk and fallen in with an evil racketeer. Despite the brief glimpses of a sentimental past, they are unable to avoid destroying each other through confusion and betrayal. It was one of those noir movies that caught a dark mood lurking beneath the official optimism of victory.

‘It’s fear,’ Max insisted. ‘That’s what’s behind Technicolor. That’s why people want happy films, because they’re terrified. Of atom bombs and communism. But most of all of themselves. It’s a neurosis of forced euphoria. But they’re not smiling, they’re gritting their teeth.’

I liked working with Max; he was a radical with bold artistic ideas who had worked in the Expressionist theatre in Berlin in the 1920s. A tall, broad-shouldered man in his forties, Max had impeccable manners, a quality rarely found in Hollywood. And I found comfort in the bleak melancholia of the script. In a strange way it meant that I didn’t feel quite so alone.

LA seemed to have become a malevolent creature. It had grown crowded since the war, a ruthless boomtown teeming with strangers desperate for the main chance, full of failed dreams and broken promises, a bright and guilty place. The harsh noonday glare cast deep shadows, the light so fierce as to conjure a blinding darkness. A city of screens and blinds, of obfuscation, its watchful eyes hooded or concealed behind dark glasses, waiting patiently for you to grow old and die. Years would pass beneath the same sad blue sky. Then at sundown, beneath the hum of neon, the relentless drones of pleasure would seek out the night to settle the score.

We started filming Hell is Empty at the beginning of 1947, mostly on a studio lot, though Max liked to use LA locations for the outside scenes. By mischance or ill fate we found ourselves shooting in Leimart Park only two blocks down from the vacant lot where the mutilated corpse of Elizabeth Short was found. This became the infamous ‘Black Dahlia’ case, an unsolved murder that haunted the city that year.

I worked on the film right the way through from the script editing, continuity on set, to the final edit. Max had this deadpan humour and a sense of the absurd, but he was undeniably serious about the work and was always generous in the praise of others when things went right. For him cinema was an art form, even when it was just a low-budget thriller.

He was hoping that his next project would be another adaptation with a bit more money spent on it. He handed me this novel titled Nightmare Alley by William Lindsey Gresham, set in the carnival world of fairgrounds and freak-shows. The central character is a conman who works a mind-reading act and tries to make a fortune out of what he calls the ‘spook-racket’.

‘Tyrone Power has the rights,’ Max told me. ‘He’s had enough of playing romantic, swashbuckling types. And you’ll be interested in this book, my dear. You see, every chapter is named after one of those Tarot cards you’re so fond of.’

Nightmare Alley was certainly an intriguing work, an American picaresque novel viewed through the lens of the darker side of spiritualism. The writing was hard-boiled and cynical but touched with the sophistication of one who must have known enough of this world to be disillusioned by it. Using the Major Arcana as a structure looks like a gimmick at first but in the end the Tarot bestows an ominous gravity on the narrative. The novel seems to suggest that human degradation is the ultimate spiritual journey. It made me think of Jack.

Near the end of the post-production for Hell is Empty, Max became withdrawn; he was brooding on something. At first I thought it was just the slight grief that comes at the end of a project. When I told him how much I had learnt from him and that I would like to work with him again, he smiled and said:

‘You best stay away from me in future, my dear.’

I laughed, thinking that he was making a joke, but he added:

‘I’ve been summoned as a witness before the House of Un-American Activities Committee.’

‘What about Nightmare Alley?’ I asked.

‘They’ve given it to this Englishman, Edmund Goulding. Not his sort of thing at all but,’ Max shrugged, ‘I’m already persona non grata.’

I knew what this meant, of course. A Red Scare. I don’t think that I really took it seriously at the time. There had been Red Scares in Hollywood before and they had never amounted to much. But Astrid warned me that this was something different. She was working in LA, too. Her fortune-telling business was doing well.

‘People are very superstitious at the moment,’ she told me. ‘It’s always like this at the time of a witch-hunt.’

‘A witch-hunt?’

‘Oh yes. You wait and see.’

And there was something strange in the atmosphere that summer. Nemo and Larry had been having this long-term argument over strange lights in the sky and mysterious objects seen in the heavens. The previous year there had been a whole spate of ‘ghost rocket’ sightings over Scandinavia. Larry took the line that it could be the Soviets testing reverse-engineered Nazi rocket technology. Nemo always liked to speculate about extraterrestrial activity.

Then in June a pilot in Washington State claimed to have spotted nine circular objects shooting past him in perfect formation. The newspapers picked up the story and some subeditor plucked a snappy headline out of the report of the weird craft. There was a word for them now – the ‘flying saucers’ had arrived. More sightings followed.

‘Larry doesn’t want to believe in them,’ Nemo complained.

‘Well, I’m yet to be convinced,’ Larry retorted.

‘What about those things you saw in the war?’

‘Just because you see something doesn’t make it real.’

‘So what is this, mass hysteria?’

‘A sign of the times,’ Larry insisted. ‘An adjustment between inner space and outer space.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The flying saucers hover, don’t they? They hover between disenchantment and re-enchantment.’

‘Yeah.’ Nemo nodded with a smile, obviously liking the idea.

‘Remember what we said before the war?’ Larry went on. ‘ “If you can’t change the world, build a spaceship.” Well, that’s what’s happening now. We’re building spaceships in the air. Spaceships of the imagination.’

By that fall the whole nation was delirious with visions of flying saucers, with eyewitness accounts almost every week. Flying saucer clubs were set up across the country and regular articles in the press speculated about the phenomenon. They caused a split in the whole of the SF world, not just between Larry and Nemo. Most of the writers I knew didn’t believe in them. I had this nagging feeling that they resented losing the monopoly of contact with other worlds. The craze certainly revitalised the genre, though. There was a demand for new stories and much reprinting of old ones. One of mine from 1941, ‘Atom Priestess’, was bought by a New York publishing house for a hardback anthology of short stories.

But elsewhere things were not looking so bright. In November, Max Iann was cited for contempt for refusing to give testimony to the House of Un-American Activities. He was blacklisted. I was known to have radical connections, I’d even been to a few Communist Party meetings before the war, but I wasn’t important enough to warrant complete excommunication. Instead I joined that peculiar purgatory that came to be known as the ‘greylist’. None of the big studios would hire me for the time being but I could get work on Poverty Row, that notorious collection of small-time production companies that churned out cheap B-movies.

Nemo lost his job at Lockheed. He’d been involved in the union and was still very politically active. Now he was certain that the FBI were keeping tabs on him. He and Larry were planning a road trip to Mexico.

Then in December, Aleister Crowley died. He had been in poor health for some time and addicted to heroin. He had worn himself out from his wild life, it seemed. I heard that Jack Parsons had wanted to be reconciled with his former master but had left it too late. I hadn’t been to any Lodge meetings since leaving number 1003, nor had I kept in touch with any members of the Order. But it was the death of Crowley that finally marked the end of that part of my life, as it did, I think, for many others. I formally quit the Ordo Templi Orientis. And I kidded myself that I had finally got over Jack Parsons.

Larry came to see me the night before he and Nemo were to set off on their journey south.

‘I just came to say goodbye,’ he said.

‘I hope you and Nemo have a good time.’

‘He’s driving me crazy with all this flying saucer stuff.’

‘Maybe there is something in it.’

‘Well, he says he saw something years ago. Remember that night at the Arroyo Seco?’

There was an awkward moment when I remembered what Larry had seen that night. That group of us, drugged and naked, making out in a glade.

‘It certainly was a mystical night,’ Larry continued, seemingly oblivious to my embarrassment, either arch or innocent: it was so hard to tell with him these days. ‘That was the night we hexed the Deputy Führer into flying to Scotland, wasn’t it?’

‘Well.’ I shrugged.

‘Do you still believe in that stuff, Mary-Lou?’

He was staring at me intently. I felt sure that he meant whether or not I still believed in Jack Parsons.

‘I don’t know any more,’ I told him.

‘I remember you once said that you wanted to know everything.’

I laughed.

‘I don’t blame you,’ he said. ‘But, you know, in the 458th Bomber Squadron, when we were flying missions, we had this deal as aircrew that when we were talking informally and off the radio, there would be no real difference between fact and fiction. It made sense when you were up in the air, helped you through it.’

Larry hunched up a little as he said this and I could see the anxiety in his eyes.

‘I’m having trouble on the ground, Mary-Lou. I’m writing this novel, you know, a proper novel.’

‘That’s good.’

‘No it’s not. It’s not any good. I—’ He sighed. ‘I just need to get it out of my system. I’m still having trouble with reality, you know, this derealisation thing I told you about. How about you?’

‘What?’

‘Are you writing anything?’

‘Just script notes.’

‘You never did finish “The City of the Sun”, did you?’

‘No. Maybe you should have a go at it.’

‘Yeah.’ He grinned at me. ‘Maybe I will.’

In the New Year I began work on Zombie Lagoon. The director was drunk for the entire four-week shoot, and with no first or second assistant I found myself having to take over at times. The producer was young and smart and sober. I always assumed that Dexter Roth had found himself on the greylist too. There seemed no other reason that someone as bright and ambitious would end up producing trash in Poverty Row. He would wear bright sports jackets with open-necked shirts and horn-rimmed glasses, looking every bit the hip intellectual. He liked to argue that mass culture could be experimental, and he was meticulous about the script, constantly tweaking lines of dialogue or even changing the emphasis of a line. He seemed to look for hidden meaning in the cheapest material.

And he had respect for my work as a writer. He read some of the stories I had written for the pulp magazines and he said that he loved science fiction and fantasy. He wanted to find a really good idea from that genre once we had finished the zombie movie.

Dexter was sensitive, with perfect manners and a fussiness about his appearance. I assumed he was a fruit until he made a pass at me on the night of the wrap party. I told him that I’d had my heart broken.

‘What a dumb guy,’ he said.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘He’s a genius.’

I thought that this would rile him but instead Dexter was intrigued. He seemed genuinely curious about everything and everybody, which made him easy to talk to. I told him all about Jack and my strange life at number 1003.

‘So you, like, believe in magic?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know what I believe in any more. What about you?’

‘Me?’ He smiled. ‘I like to keep an open mind.’

By the time Larry and Nemo got back from Mexico, Dexter and I had started dating. It was a tentative kind of courtship, which suited me fine. I wasn’t really ready to get too emotionally involved with anyone just then. And I wasn’t sure what I felt about Dexter yet, except that I really enjoyed his company and I felt safe with him. And he had this ability to get on with almost anybody. He and Nemo hit it off the first time they met, engaging in a deep discussion about politics in Latin America. Even Larry, who was very wary of Dexter at first, soon warmed to him. I even felt a little disappointed that Larry didn’t seem to be jealous.

We all ended up in a bar on South Broadway one night. It wasn’t long before the conversation turned to science fiction and the flying saucer story Larry and Nemo had been working on together, which had come out of their long-running discussions on the subject. A spacecraft is spotted in the sky above Los Angeles. There is panic in the streets and an attempt by the authorities to explain the incident as natural phenomena. An exile from another planet seeks refuge on earth. As more spaceships arrive, looking for him, the alien goes into hiding.

Dexter got very excited and declared that this would make a great movie. The nation was still gripped in a flying saucer craze, after all. We talked into the night, soon convincing ourselves that this could be a vehicle for so many interesting ideas and a way of exploiting a popular market.

That week Nemo and Larry got a story treatment together and Dexter used it to raise some finance for them to write the script. We called it Fugitive Alien, and it all started to come together very quickly. I loved working with Dexter; he was so good at talking an idea into reality. I spent a lot of time with him at meetings, and it was fascinating watching him operate. And we went out to all kinds of places. He was into bebop and modern art, poetry and European cinema. He always seemed easy to be with. Cool but affable, sophisticated but relaxed with it.

There were constant notes and suggestions from him at script meetings. He had an original, playful mind and he was good at drawing out the thoughts of others, particularly Nemo. A theme emerged of a dissident from an advanced civilisation, exiled from a planet where once-utopian ideals had been corrupted by absolute power. Dexter declared that he was serious about using complex concepts in a popular genre.

Speculative fiction continued to be on the rise. There were reprints of our old stories in magazines and anthologies as well as a demand for new ones. And although Larry’s ‘proper’ novel was roundly rejected, a New York publisher reissued Lords of the Black Sun as a paperback original that summer. Our once-beloved Astounding may have gone into decline (John W. Campbell had got taken in by a new therapy idea that L. Ron Hubbard was peddling, something called ‘Dianetics’, and was devoting the main pages to it) but we learnt that Tony Boucher was going to edit a new title: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. And Boucher had just made the first English translation of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer that Nemo had told us about all those years ago at Robert Heinlein’s house. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ made its first appearance in English in the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1948.

We were about to go into pre-production with Fugitive Alien. I had taken what Larry and Nemo had done and edited it into a shooting script. We had cast the leads: Trey Anderson, an ageing juvenile with an other-wordly charm as the alien; Sharleen Stirling, a seventeen-year-old newcomer, as the earthly blonde ingénue who falls for him. A crew was being assembled and we were using the designer from Zombie Lagoon. All we really needed was a director. Dexter told me that he had somebody in mind but he wouldn’t say who. Instead he suggested that we take the weekend off and go to Palm Springs together.

‘But we really need to confirm who’s directing,’ I said.

‘Well.’ He gave me a sly smile. ‘We can do that right now, can’t we?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I can’t think of anyone who could do it better.’

‘You mean . . .’

‘You know this trade inside out. All good script girls do. And I saw you taking over on the zombie film, remember?’

‘But I couldn’t—’

‘Why not? Because you’re a woman?’

‘No, it’s just . . .’

‘Don’t worry, of course everyone is going to try to hold you back but just don’t do their job for them. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Right. You’re hired. We’ve got a lot of prepping to do this week and I’ll want your input. As a director.’

All at once I felt ridiculously happy. At last things were going right for me. I went over and kissed Dexter on the mouth. He pulled away from me and smiled.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you better get to work. I’ll pick you up on Friday afternoon.’

I was packing an overnight bag on Thursday evening when the phone rang. I assumed it would be Dexter. It was Jack. His voice was hoarse and slurred, tragic. Candy had left him. He needed to see me. He was staying in a motel out on 53rd and Western.

For an instant I was overwhelmed by a sense of relief. That finally I could say no to Jack Parsons, that everything in my life would be turned around by my saying no to him. This would be my way of getting over all the hurt I had been carrying around since he came back from the Mojave Desert that day. All I had to do was say a few words and put the phone down. But I couldn’t speak and the receiver stayed in my hand as I heard Jack tell me his room number.

‘Okay,’ I mumbled and the line went dead.

I felt all the mad passion and desire come to claim me once more. And suddenly I knew that a luxurious weekend in Palm Springs with the kind and charming Dexter was nothing compared with a night in a seedy motel room with my fallen angel.

I called Dexter and told him that I had a family crisis. My mother was sick and I needed to go to the hospital. I was sorry but I couldn’t go away with him that weekend. Then I finished packing and drove out to see Jack. He came to the door wearing a grubby singlet. Unshaven, wild-eyed and dishevelled, he’d put on a bit of weight but he was still beautiful. He was doomed, I saw that even then. Jack was a real romantic, full of danger and self-destructiveness. I knew that, like a drowning man, he would drag down those who came close to him. My love for him could ruin me but I didn’t care.

As I moved into the room I saw an ashtray on the bedside table with reefer butts in it, and a bottle of tequila on the dresser. Jack went to the window, nervously fingering the slants on the blind.

‘Did anyone see you come?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got to be careful. They’re watching me.’

Jack explained that he had been investigated over his past activities. He’d managed to get security clearance for a job at Hughes Aircraft in Culver City, but he was sure that he was still under surveillance.

‘It’s only temporary. I’m just a pen-pusher in their rocket propulsion department. But I’ve got plans. I’m going to make a fresh start, Mary-Lou.’

He came over to me, his hands held out plaintively.

‘What about Candy?’ I asked.

‘She’s in San Miguel de Allende, south of the border. Some kind of artists’ colony. She never really understood me, not the way you did.’

‘I waited for you, Jack. All that time that you were with Betty. Then out in the desert with Ron. I waited for you and then you went off with her. It wasn’t fair.’

‘I know, Mary-Lou, I know. I’ve been bad. Everything’s gone wrong.’

He poured us both a drink and told me how, left on his own, he had descended into madness and horror, conducting strange ceremonies on peyote and mescaline, hiring hookers to perform sex magic rituals with him. The Babalon Working had failed, he groaned; he had lost his Scarlet Woman and a chance to conjure a moonchild.

‘Maybe it’s all nonsense anyway,’ I said.

He laughed. I wanted to free myself from all my beliefs and delusions. I wanted to obliterate my desire for Jack and break the spell that he still held over me. But the strangest mystery of all is how we can be utterly taken in by our own stupid emotions. Jack lit a reefer and sat on the bed.

‘I’ve got a new quest,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out of this wretched place. I’m going to make the Black Pilgrimage.’

‘What’s the Black Pilgrimage?’

He started to explain about Chorazin, a cursed ancient city near the Sea of Galilee, with a black temple built of basalt. I tried to follow as he talked of a journey to a place where, it was said, the Antichrist would be born. But by then he had passed me the reefer and I was on my way to getting as drunk and as high as he was.

‘Come with me,’ he mumbled as he pulled off what remained of his clothes.

I undressed and got into bed with him.

I got back to my flat on Sunday afternoon. I had been there for only half an hour when my buzzer went. It was Dexter.

‘How’s Mother?’ he asked breezily as I let him in. He had a briefcase with him.

‘What?’

‘Oh it doesn’t matter. I know where you’ve been.’

His tone was at once flat and cold.

‘Dexter, what’s all this about?’

‘I know you were with Jack Parsons.’

I felt a shiver in the pit of my stomach.

‘But how did you know?’

‘Maybe I have psychic powers, Mary-Lou. I certainly have access to hidden knowledge.’

Dexter’s mouth twisted into a parody of a smile.

‘Look,’ I struggled to appear calm, ‘this isn’t funny. If you’ve been snooping around me—’

‘Shh,’ he shushed me, a finger to his mouth.

He patted the couch.

‘Sit, Mary-Lou.’ His voice was all soft authority. ‘I need you to listen to me.’

He stared me down, his eyes hard and impassive.

‘You want occult wisdom?’ he went on, leaning over me and pulling something out of the briefcase. ‘Take a look at this.’

He handed me a loosely bound sheaf of papers. New pages for the script, that was my first thought. Then I looked at it. Bureau File was the heading on the title page, then Subject: Mary-Lou Gunderson; File No. 67-59674. As I flicked through, strange details about my life leapt up at me: Reported to have attended CP meetings and study groups in 1940 . . . Whilst residing at 1003 Orange Grove Avenue, Pasadena, California, she was a member of a religious cult believed to advocate sexual perversion . . . known associate of Nemesio (‘Nemo’) Carvajal, Cuban national, union organiser at Lockheed Corp., Burbank, California, and known communist agitator . . .

It was as though I was in an awful waking dream. Dexter patted me gently on the shoulder in a delicate gesture of possession.

‘You’re a lucky girl,’ he murmured. ‘Not everyone gets to see their FBI file.’

‘You work for the FBI?’

Dexter’s laugh was dark and soft.

‘God, no. My department is more, let’s say, strategic. But we have a reciprocal relationship with the Bureau.’

‘The film, that’s just some sort of front?’

‘Oh no. It’s an important project. And I really do want you to direct it, despite your duplicitous behaviour. And this,’ he tapped the file in my hands. ‘Well, some things could be added, some things could be taken away. It all depends on what you tell me.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No. But you will. What did Larry say about you? That you wanted to know everything, yes, that was it.’

‘You talked to Larry about me?’

‘I talk to everybody about everybody. It’s my job. Now, I need some answers. About Jack Parsons.’

He went into a brisk interrogation routine. Demanding to know what had happened, what we had talked about. I found myself telling Dexter everything. I mentioned the Black Pilgrimage.

‘What’s the Black Pilgrimage?’

‘I don’t know. It’s something about a city, I can’t remember its name.’

‘Try to remember.’

‘It was somewhere in Galilee.’

‘Galilee?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Are you sure he said Galilee?’

‘I don’t know. Yes.’

‘Did he mention Israel?’

‘Israel?’

‘Yes, Israel. Specifically the newly founded State of Israel, keen to develop its own rocket programme.’

‘No.’

‘I want you to ask him about Israel, Mary-Lou.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, the next time you see him. Soon, I hope.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Oh, I think you will. Besides anything else, you’re intrigued. The file, please.’

I handed it back to him.

‘Don’t worry,’ he told me. ‘Do this right and I’ll explain everything.’

I went back to work on Monday but Dexter was nowhere to be seen. I tried working on the script but I couldn’t think. I called the motel. Jack had checked out. I phoned some of the Lodge members that I still had numbers for but no one seemed to know where he was. In the end I thought of Astrid. She had a fortune-telling stall on Sunset and Vine so I went there.

‘You’re looking for Jack, aren’t you?’ she said.

‘Well, you’d hardly need second sight to know that, Astrid.’

‘He’s in trouble, isn’t he?’

‘He’s been in trouble all his life.’

‘I know, dear.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I’m getting some sort of a fix on him. I see the sea. Don’t worry, I’ll find him for you.’

Astrid phoned me two days later to say that the rumour was that he was renting a place in Redondo Beach on the Esplanade, a strange Moorish-style villa with arches and crenellations all rendered in concrete. I found it but it was empty. I left a note and went down to the shore. There he was, staring out at the sea. I called out through the crash and hiss of surf. He smiled as he saw me. We walked along the beach together.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I thought that I could warn him, even save him in some way. I had this mad dream that we would run off to Israel together and live on a kibbutz. But first I had to know what he intended to do.

‘You’re planning to go away, aren’t you?’ I asked.

‘Maybe.’

‘To that place in Galilee?’

He laughed.

‘Well,’ I went on, ‘you could visit there, couldn’t you?’

He stopped. He turned and frowned at me.

‘What do you mean?’ he demanded.

‘If you went to Israel.’

‘Who says I’m going to Israel?’

‘I worked it out. I’m a clever girl, you see. The Black Pilgrimage was a clue, wasn’t it?’

He looked around anxiously.

‘No one’s supposed to know. Not even Candy. You see, I’ve been approached by the Israelis and they want a detailed breakdown of equipment costs for a rocket programme. So I’ve borrowed the proposal document I put together for Hughes Aircraft.’

‘What do you mean Candy’s not supposed to know?’

‘The thing is, I’ve taken that and some details about rocket fuels and propellants. It’s all my work, but it kind of belongs to the company.’

‘Jack, why does it matter if Candy knows or not?’

‘What? Well, it could get me into trouble over my security clearance.’

‘But Candy’s not even here, is she? Is she?’

‘Well—’

‘She’s coming back. That’s it, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘But that’s what you want, isn’t it?’

‘Mary-Lou, wait—’

But I had already turned and walked away.

It was a small gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. A private viewing, the opening of a new exhibition, a sophisticated crowd. Dexter floating gently through space, one hand holding a wineglass, the other stroking his chin thoughtfully. I walked over and stood next to him.

‘What do you think?’ he said.

Large unframed canvases with abstract blocks of shimmering oil, jagged sprays of colour.

‘I saw Jack.’

‘Good, good,’ he muttered absently, gesturing at the artwork. ‘But what do you think of this? You wouldn’t say this was un-American, would you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s democratic, that’s what I’d say. And the good thing about abstract art is that it’s empty. It’s politically silent, you know? Though there are some people who actually believe that there are hidden messages in stuff like this, even maps of our secret defence complexes. That’s wonderfully mad, isn’t it?’

‘Dexter, we need to talk.’

‘I know, I know. Look, if you ask me, America really does have to establish its own modern movement. You can’t be a great power without the great art to go with it. Right,’ he declared, handing his wineglass to a passing waiter and clapping his hands together. ‘Let’s get out of here and get a proper drink.’

We went to a bar and Dexter ordered cocktails. I remember him getting drunk, him talking: not the way I imagined the evening would run. He was enjoying himself. This was his entertainment, his delight in invention.

‘Here’s to mass culture, Mary-Lou,’ he announced, holding up his martini glass. ‘So much more important than that long-hair stuff. And no one can deny that it’s all-American. It’s what we do best and I’m proud of it. Now, you have some information for me.’

I told him about Jack stealing documents from Hughes Aircraft to support his application to work for the Israelis.

‘Good work, Mary-Lou. I’ll pass it on.’

‘But don’t you want any more details?’

‘Oh, don’t worry. The Bureau will follow it up. And they’ll be appreciative, too. We can get them to sheep-dip your file. What?’

I was transfixed, staring at him, not knowing quite what to say.

‘Oh, yeah,’ he continued. ‘Of course, it’s the moment, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘The moment. You’ve just sold somebody out. No big deal, Mary-Lou. Everybody named names and snitched on their buddies. You loved the guy. I take it that you’re through with that now, huh?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Good. Believe me, disillusionment is a marvellously liberating experience.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. You’ve done the right thing. You’ve proved that you can work for us.’

‘Who are you?’

‘We’re the good guys. Psychological strategy, that’s our remit.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Pax Americana, Mary-Lou. This is our century now. So, we have to win the Cold War in terms of culture. The Soviets fund high art heavily. We need to try to match them, but through the private sector, with the fruits of capitalism. Then there’s the obvious propaganda, the Technicolor stuff, our version of socialist realism, you know, the bright, cheerful, our-way-of-life-is-best attitude. Hollywood can deal with that; it polices itself, blacklists anyone out of line. With modernism, meanwhile, we’ve got to have the appearance of a liberal agenda to win over the European intellectuals. Now look, what’s down here at the bottom of the pile? B-movies, horror and fantasy double features, all the stuff people tend to think of as junk. But it’s as important as any other part of the culture. You know, I got sent to Poverty Row just to keep an eye on the greylist. But I’ve been able to clear our little project with my higher-ups. I told them that science fiction is the best propaganda of all. Why? Because it’s prophecy. Yes. It’s about the future and if you can imply that your future is better than your opponent’s, what could be better than that?’

‘So you really do want the film to go ahead?’

‘Of course! We’ve got a great team. Nemo’s better at the anti-Soviet stuff than any right-winger. He’s got a more nuanced sense. And the good thing about Trotskyists is they really know how to split left-wing opinion. It’s like nuclear fission with those guys. Larry, well, he’s disaffected, but it’s the kind of disaffection that neutralises itself. Deflects it somewhere else. He understands the popular instinctively, how it tends towards conspiracy and suspicion.’

‘And me?’

‘You were always something of a wild card, Mary-Lou. But occult knowledge is extremely useful, especially when it gives you an understanding of your enemies’ superstitions. When I was with the OSS in London during the war I worked with British Intelligence. We learnt so much from them about counter-intelligence and disinformation. They were masters of the black arts. They knew that so many of the top Nazis had mystical leanings. You know, they forged this German astrological magazine and managed to distribute it behind the lines. Some copies were antedated so they appeared to include astonishingly accurate forecasts of events that had already happened and from then on the magazine was used to question everything from the choice of Hitler’s doctor to the timing of U-boat launches. They played around with the unknown, the unseen.

‘That’s why this flying saucer storyline is such a good one. Larry’s right, it’s shaping up to be a new cultural phenomenon. A new belief system, even. Nemo’s convinced that there’s been some governmental cover-up about extraterrestrial activity. That’s already part of the mythology of this thing. And we can use that too.’

‘How?’

‘By subtly encouraging the sense of a cover-up. Then if we want to keep new aircraft or rocket technology secret, put a tracking device in a weather balloon, if something goes wrong with a test flight or, God forbid, a controlled nuclear detonation, an incomplete report might lead people to believe that it was one of these strange spacecraft everyone keeps talking about. And it enhances the image of our power if it’s perceived that we’ve got access to secret knowledge, especially if there’s an official denial of it. The Russians have got the atom bomb by now, we’re sure of that, and we know they’re developing missile technology. We need to maintain complete air superiority. That includes extraterrestrial activity, even the way it’s represented. Our flying saucers have to be better than their flying saucers.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘I know. But this is how we tell the truth, Mary-Lou. Isn’t it wonderful? The rumour mill, that’s what we have to grind. Start a conspiracy and watch how it gets passed on. We can see how information moves through the culture. Like a marked card in a shuffled deck.’

We started shooting Fugitive Alien a month later. Nemo became increasingly suspicious about changes in the script. Larry had an air of distraction on set. It was soon clear that he was falling for the female lead, Sharleen Stirling. With her milky-blue eyes full of fear and wonder, there was something damaged and ethereal about Sharleen. A natural blonde, almost albino, she had a light peach fuzz on her deathly-pale skin that carried a sheen of luminescence so that her face glowed under the lights. She had a real screen presence. But there was a sad hunger in her gaze, imploring and seductive, caught in a bad childhood she could never escape from.

I heard that Jack got fired from Hughes Aircraft and had lost his security clearance after an FBI investigation. This disqualified him from any job in serious rocket research in the US and, given the circumstances, the Israelis withdrew their offer of work. I felt a little bad about how things had turned out but it was all in the balance. For all those years that he had power over me, I was the one who finally controlled his destiny. Funnily enough, we ended up in the same business. He got a job with an explosives company that specialised in developing pyrotechnics for the film industry.

And now that I had caught a glimpse of the real secret world, I got over my fascination with the occult and a search for hidden meaning. Oh, I still believe in the supernatural, in something beyond. I just don’t take it personally any more. After all, I managed to sell my soul. And I can’t tell you how much of a relief that turned out to be. I could get what I wanted out of life. With a clean file I’d be off the greylist, and Fugitive Alien could be my calling card to getting work in the big studios. I knew that it was going to be difficult for a woman director to succeed, but I was determined to try.

There were arguments on the set over Dexter’s suggestion that Zoltar, our ‘dissident’ alien, should discover the good things about the American way of life. This wasn’t in the original script and Nemo wasn’t happy. But when Dexter proposed that Sharleen’s part be made bigger, that she should show Zoltar the benefits of our great nation, Larry was only too happy to write new scenes for her. I was worried that this might be too much for Sharleen to carry.

‘Oh, she can’t act, but then she doesn’t have to,’ Dexter reassured me. ‘She believes in this stuff. It gives her this real intensity.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yeah. She thinks she’s seen one.’

‘What?’

‘A flying saucer. She has all these strange stories about her childhood too. She thinks Larry’s a genius. I tell you, Sharleen’s a whole project in herself.’

Soon after that Nemo stopped coming to the set, though Larry never missed a day’s shooting. I wasn’t happy about him and Sharleen falling in love but it was none of my business and I was far too busy to do anything about it. Dexter began to leave things to me with the filming but he would always come to watch the dailies. He was already planning his post-production strategy. He had decided that he would instigate rumours about the film: that the alien language used by Zoltar when he is aboard his ship is an occult incantation; that the mention of an air force report concerning flying saucer sightings refers to an existing top-secret memorandum (Dexter even suggested that a copy of this could be forged and used at a later date). His cleverest trick was to put about the story that we had used actual footage of a flying saucer landing as part of the movie. It meant that some of the special effects sequences were to be made deliberately blurred.

It was my idea to use Jack Parsons’ pyrotechnics company for these scenes. I knew he’d understand what we were after and would get it right. He believed in these things, of course. He told me that it was no coincidence that the spate of flying saucer sightings began just after he had been performing magical workings in the Mojave Desert. ‘We opened a portal,’ he said, ‘and something flew in.’ Dexter, of course, loved this notion and did nothing to discourage it. It was odd for me, to be with Jack again after all that had happened. It was astonishing really, though I just felt a calm detachment. But he was bitter at the way things had turned out: other people who had worked on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s early rocket tests had also lost jobs in the McCarthy clampdown, while captured Nazi scientists had had their war records laundered and were now in charge of research in the field.

‘You know, when I was a kid I thought that science was going to save the world, that it would give us a universal language, progress, peace,’ he lamented. ‘The military men took it over. Science means one word now: security.’

When he was just a teenage rocket enthusiast in the early 1930s, Jack had written to the German aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun and had received a reply. An intermittent correspondence came to an abrupt end once Hitler had come to power. Von Braun was a science fiction fan too. It is said that even during the war he kept up his subscription to Astounding magazine, obtaining copies via a mail drop in neutral Sweden. And he had now become part of the fantasy. Countless space films used stock footage of the testing launches of captured Nazi rockets in White Sands, New Mexico. And the new annual prizes for best SF works and achievements, the Hugo Awards, were presented in the form of a statuette looking disturbingly like a V2.

But Jack Parsons became the forgotten story in the dream of space. It was sadly apt that he should play some part in our movie. I knew he would never suspect me for what had happened to him and I was glad that I could put some work his way. We lowered the plywood spacecraft, and Jack detonated its retro rockets. It looked fantastic. I caught sight of his face in the fierce firelight, alive once more in transcendent wonder.

The film came in on budget and it made a reasonable profit at the box office, going on to become something of a B-movie classic. A spate of flying saucer features followed.

Nemo went back to Cuba in 1951. He’d had enough of the USA. He felt harassed and constantly under surveillance (though he never guessed how close the watchers really were). There was real change happening in Latin America, he told me. That was where the future was.

Larry and Sharleen got married in the fall of that year. I don’t know why I felt so resentful about it but I did. I’d taken him for granted for so long. And he’d stopped loving me just when I could have loved him back. Another adjustment. Who knows what could have been? So I concentrated on work. I had a career now.

Television, that was the new big thing for the 1950s. I got a job with an anthology series called The Scanner: half-hour dramas of fantasy and science fiction. You are now tuned to The Scanner. Your television set is picking up signals from distant worlds, images from other dimensions . . . I was hired to direct twelve of the episodes of the first season. We adapted existing stories by established writers including Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein (as well as Larry Zagorski and Nemo Carvajal). I was even asked if I wanted to write something myself, or have one of my stories used, but I said no. I still loved the genre but now felt too detached about it. I didn’t want to come up with any new ideas, or to end up in that world of fiction where reality and fantasy start to coincide.

Dexter came to see me at the television studio. He took me to lunch and told me that he had a new job as an art dealer, specialising in Abstract Expressionism. He hinted that he had moved on in his secret career as well. I had expected him to ask me to put little touches of his into some of my programmes but when I tentatively mentioned ‘psychological strategy’ he smiled and shook his head.

‘There’s no big conspiracy, Mary-Lou, really there isn’t,’ he insisted. ‘We can let things run by themselves for a while. But you know what’s really interesting? We all live in a science-fiction world now. It’s become part of mass consciousness.’

It reminded me of what Larry had said about the great future being already behind us. Within our short lives so many fantasies had been made commonplace: atomic power, computers, rockets, automation, jet travel, television. With them came the horrors of nuclear weapons, biological warfare, radiation, eugenics and seemingly endless nightmares of power. Only space travel was as yet unrealised, and even that seemed already confirmed by countless flying saucer sightings. The biggest adjustment was in what and how people believed.

Soon after the best-selling success of Dianetics, his psychological therapy system, L. Ron Hubbard announced his new creation: the Church of Scientology. That someone from the field of speculative fiction was founding a religion was hardly a surprise to any of us. Every pulp writer I knew had at one time had that drunken conversation about setting up a cult; most of us had written stories based on the premise. But it took a truly brilliant charlatan to actually make it work.

Hubbard stole some basic elements from the Ordo Templi Orientis from his time at the Lodge at number 1003. And he looted all kinds of theosophical and esoteric traditions (some real, some taken from Weird Tales magazine). But his real genius was the instinct that pre-war mystical societies needed updating in order to succeed in the flying saucer age. So he added modern terminology and gadgetry: auditing techniques, engrams and e-meters; he used the very present fear of mind-control and brainwashing that had come out of horror stories of GIs captured by the communists in the Korean War. And he gave his faith a cosmic theology: a creation myth of aliens banished to earth by an intergalactic warlord. He took Jack Parsons’ arcane utopia of rocketry and the occult, and transformed it into a grotesque space-opera. And he had a business plan: to charge high prices for his therapy system and cash in on tax concessions available to churches.

This was the belief system for our times: the flickering needle of an electronic device, the immortal soul measured by the galvanic response of human flesh. I wondered at first if Dexter might have had something to do with it. He denied it strenuously.

‘Believe me, Mary-Lou, I’d love to have control over something like that. In actual fact my friends in the Bureau are quite worried about it.’

And I wondered, too, if anyone had been involved in the death of Jack Parsons. ROCKET SCIENTIST KILLED IN PASADENA EXPLOSION: the report said that he had died in a blast that had ripped apart his garage laboratory. That he had dropped a flask of fulminate of mercury, a highly volatile compound, which had ignited other chemicals in the room, causing an infernal holocaust.

If it was murder, it was cleverly done. More likely is was an accident, perhaps suicide. Maybe it was somewhere between the two. I imagine Jack a little high on something, halfway through some absurd ritual or obscure experiment, sad and weary, he who had seen too much, though never enough, just letting go, letting the explosive slip between his fingers.

I can mourn for him now as I do for that whole part of my life. A time of illusion and a hopeless search for enlightenment. I think of how he looked on the last occasion I ever saw him as we were setting up the special effects for Fugitive Alien. The expression of delight on his face as the flares ignited to fake the flying saucer landing. The young man who had tested rockets in the Arroyo Seco, the child who had played with fireworks and dreamt of space travel. It’s how I’ll always remember him.