The House of Rumour Read online

  The House of Rumour

  Jake Arnott

  Larry Zagorski spins wild tales of fantasy worlds for pulp magazines. But as the Second World War hangs in the balance, the lines between imagination and reality are starting to blur.

  In London, spymasters enlist occultists in the war of propaganda. In Southern California, a charismatic rocket scientist summons dark forces and an SF writer founds a new religion. In Munich, Nazis consult astrologists as they plot peace with the West and dominion over the East. And a conspiracy is born that will ripple through the decades to come.

  The truth, it seems, is stranger than anything Larry could invent. But when he looks back on the 20th century, the past is as uncertain as the future. Just where does truth end and illusion begin?

  THE HOUSE OF RUMOUR is a novel of soaring ambition, a mind-expanding journey through the ideas that have put man on the moon yet brought us to the brink of self-destruction.

  What will you believe?

  Jake Arnott

  THE HOUSE OF RUMOUR

  At the middle of the world, between earth, sea and sky, a point where all three regions of the universe join, there is a place from which all that exists can be seen, no matter how distant, and every voice heard by listening ears. Here Rumour lives, in a high tower she has chosen for herself, with innumerable avenues and thousands of entrances that are never closed. Open night and day, her house is built of sounding bronze that hums and echoes, repeating all it hears. There is no rest within, no silence in any room, but no clamour neither, only the murmur of voices, like the sea’s waves heard from afar, or the last tremors of thunder after Jupiter has clashed storm-dark clouds together.

  Crowds occupy the hallways, a fickle throng that come and go with myriad rumours, circulating confused words, fiction mixed with truth. Some fill idle ears with gossip, others pass on stories, each consecutive narrator adding some new detail to the telling. This is the haunt of Credulity, rash Error, empty Joy and unreasoning Fear, impulsive Sedition and Whisperings of Doubtful Origin. Rumour herself spies everything that passes through the heavens, every occurrence on earth and at sea, her scrutiny ranges the universe.

  OVID, METAMORPHOSES, BOOK XII: 39–63

  0

  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 ca
n 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.’