MASQUES OF SATAN (10 page)

‘I thought these would amuse you,’ said Mrs de Walter, who was standing behind me. I started. In my absorption I had quite forgotten her presence. Amused was not the word, but I was held by a morbid fascination. These scenes with their lurid subject matter and their dusty gallows humour, were redolent of long-forgotten illustrated books and savage Victorian childhoods.

‘Ah! But you haven’t seen behind the curtain, have you?’ said Mrs de Walter with a dreadful attempt at a roguish smile. It was then that I became very much afraid. I can only account for the suddenness of my panic by the fact that uneasiness had built it up inside me over the course of the afternoon, that it had reached a critical mass, and was now in danger of erupting into sheer terror. One thought dominated — I must not see behind the curtain — and yet, at the same time, I knew I could not look away. Mrs de Walter appeared to take all this in, but she showed neither concern with, nor indifference to, my state of mind, only a kind of intense curiosity. She bent down and looked directly into my eyes.

‘I wonder if you should see this one. It might shock you.’ She approached the curtain and put one hand on it so that in an instant she could pull it aside. There was a pause before she asked me a question.

‘Are you by any chance a pious sort of a boy?’

For several seconds I simply could not grasp what she meant. Of course I understood the word ‘pious’. It was the name of a recent Pope; monks in the Middle Ages were pious; but I had never heard it applied to a living human being, let alone myself. I said I didn’t know. She smiled.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘the tiniest peep, then,’ and she flicked aside the curtain. It was only a few seconds before she released the curtain and all was hidden again, but my impressions, though fragmentary, were all the more vivid for that.

It was a glass case like the others, but the scene within it was very different. I remember the painted background of a lurid and stormy sky, torn apart by zigzags of lightening. Against them the three crosses on a grey mound stood out strongly. I cannot say too much, but it was my impression that the three toads had been still alive when they were nailed to the wood.

I can remember nothing after that until Mrs de Walter and I found ourselves on the terrace again. I saw a table strewn with little glasses and open bottles full of strange coloured liquids. Mr de Walter and my parents appeared to be having a lively discussion about race.

‘I’ve knocked about the world a bit in my time,’ de Walter was saying, ‘and I’ve met all sorts, I can tell you. And of all the peoples I have met, the best, for all their faults, are the English. ’Fraid so. Modesty forbids and all that, but facts is facts. Next best are the Germans. Now, I know what you’re going to say, and I’d agree, your bad German is a Hun of the first water — dammit, I should know! — but your good German is a gentleman. Your Frenchie is an arrogant swine; your Arab is a rogue, but at least he’s an honest rogue, unlike your Turk. Don’t waste your time with the Swiss: they all have the mentalities of small town stationmasters. Nobody understands the Japs, not even the Japs, but your absolute shit of hell, in my experience, is the Bulgarian. Scum of the earth; sodomites to a man; rape a woman soon as look at her, but not in the natural way of things if you understand me.’

‘Hugh!’ said Mrs de Walter reproachfully indicating my presence.

‘What about the Portuguese?’ said my mother quickly, in an attempt to smother any further revelations about the Bulgarians. ‘You must like the Portuguese. We’ve found them to be absolutely charming.’

‘Your Portugoose is not a bad fellow, I grant you,’ said de Walter rather more thoughtfully than before, ‘but he’s a primitive. You’ve seen the folk round here: dark, squat little beggars, stunted by our standards. Well, there’s a reason for that in my opinion. It’s because they’re the direct descendants of the original Iberian natives. There’s been no intermingling with Aryan races, not even the Romans when they invaded, or the Moors for that matter. They’re like another species. I call them the Children of the Earth.’

My parents did not know how to respond to this without either compromising themselves or causing offence, so there was a silence. It was broken by de Walter’s suggestion that he take us on a tour of the house.

The rooms were luxuriously furnished in an opulent Edwardian style, with heavy brocades and potted palms. On side tables of dark polished wood were ranged treasures of the kind that used to be called ‘curios’: ostrich eggs mounted in silver, meerschaum pipes whose bowls were shaped like mermaids or wicked bearded heads, little wild animals carved in green nephrite by Fabergé. On a side table was a gold cigarette case of exquisite workmanship with the letter E emblazoned in diamonds upon it. De Walter opened the case for us. Resting in its glittering interior was a charred and withered tube of white paper that might once have been a cigarette.

‘I’d blush to tell you how I got hold of this little item, or what I paid for it,’ he said. ‘This case once belonged to a very beautiful and tragic lady, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria. And that little scrap of paper was the last cigarette she ever smoked. I have the documents to prove it. She was assassinated, you know. Stabbed by an Italian anarchist in Switzerland of all places. Ghastly people, the Italians: blub over a
bambino
while holding a knife to your guts under the table.’

The books that lined the whole of one wall of what he called his ‘saloon’ were nearly all leather bound and had curious titles which I did not recognise. They were not like the miscellaneous collection of classics and popular novels to be found in our house.

‘Here’s something that might amuse you, old man,’ said de Walter to my father, pulling out a gilt tooled volume in red leather. ‘Crebillon Fils. The engravings are contemporary.’

I saw my father open the book at random. The right hand page was an engraved illustration of some sort, but he shut it too rapidly for me to see what it was.

My eye was attracted to a group of silver-framed photographs on a bureau. Several of them featured younger versions of the de Walters, which showed that they must once have been elegant if not exactly handsome. Others were of strangers, presumably relatives or friends, usually formal portraits, and of these one stood out. It was an old photograph, pre-war at a guess, of a bald man with a short nose, determined mouth and a fierce stare. He looked straight out menacingly at the camera and, it would seem, at us: it was like no photograph I had ever seen before.

‘Know who that is, young feller-me-lad?’ de Walter asked me.

‘
I
do,’ said my mother with evident distaste.

‘Yes,’ said de Walter, sensitive to her reaction but unruffled. ‘He had a certain reputation. The Great Beast and all that. Queer chap, but he knew a thing or two. Know what he said? Remember this, young ’un. “Resolute imagination is the key to all successful magical working.” That’s what he said. Well, Crowley had the imagination all right. Trouble was, he lacked the resolve. Drugs and other beastliness got in the way. I’m afraid he wasn’t quite a gentleman, you see. I visited him once or twice during his last days in Hastings. He was in a bad way because the drugs had caught up with him, as they always do. Ghastly, but useful. Got some handy stuff out of him about the
homunculus
. Ever heard of that, little man?’ he said with a wink. I said I hadn’t.

‘It means “little man”, little man. Except he doesn’t come out of a mother’s tummy, he comes out of an egg. But it’s a special Alchemical egg.’ I was baffled, but I took comfort from the fact that my parents seemed to be equally puzzled. De Walter went on: ‘Making the egg. That’s the hard part. Now, here’s another. Have you heard of a
puerculus
, my boy?’ And he winked again. I shook my head. ‘Well now, use your nous.
Puer
in Latin means——?’

‘Boy.’

‘Good. Right ho, then. So if
homunculus
means little man, then
puerculus
means——’

‘Hugh, dear, hadn’t we better be getting on?’ said Mrs de Walter.

‘Ha! Yes! Call to order from the lady wife!’ De Walter led us out of the room and down a whitewashed corridor towards a stout iron bound oak door with a Gothic arch to it quite unlike the others in the house.

‘Now then,’ said de Walter, putting his hand on a great black key which protruded from the door’s lock, ‘my grand finale. The wine cellars! This way, boys and girls!’

My mother, who had become increasingly nervous throughout the trip, suddenly burst into a stream of agitated speech: ‘No really, that’s awfully kind of you, but we must be on our way. Do forgive us. It’s been really delightful, but there’s a bus from the village in ten minutes — I consulted the man, you see — which we will just be able to catch. Thank you so much, but——’

‘Enough, dear lady, enough!’ said de Walter. He seemed more amused than offended, though even then I recognised the amusement of the bully who has successfully humiliated his victim.

When we were safely on the bus, among a troupe of uniformed schoolchildren and three black-clad old women who were carrying cagefuls of hens into Estoril, my mother said: ‘Never again!’ My father whose courteous soul, I thought, might have been offended by our hastily contrived departure, said nothing. I think he even nodded slightly.

II

One Sunday morning, a year or so after our holiday in Portugal, my parents and I were sitting over breakfast in the kitchen. Sunday papers were, as usual, spread everywhere. One of my father’s indulgences, excused on the grounds of professional interest, was to take a large number of the Sunday papers, including the less ‘quality’ ones, like
The People
and
The News of the World
. I noticed that my father always picked up the latter first and often read it with such avid attention that my mother had to address him several times before he would comply with a simple request, like passing the butter. I had no interest in newspapers at that time and frequently, with my mother’s permission, took a book to the breakfast table.

On this occasion I happened to notice my father turn a page of
The News of the World
and give a sudden start. My mother asked if anything was the matter. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said and left the kitchen, taking the paper with him. When, later that morning, I found
The News of the World
abandoned in the sitting room I noticed that the centre pages were missing, but my father had failed to observe that among the exciting list of contents to be found on the front page were the words: HORROR AT THE VILLA MONTE ROSA.

I forget how I managed to get hold of another copy of that paper, but I did, that day, and I made sure that my parents did not know about it. These little discretions and courtesies were part of the fabric of our life together.

Across the centre page spread was sprawled the familiar headline: HORROR AT THE VILLA MONTE ROSA.

Much of the space was occupied by a large but fuzzy photograph, probably taken with a long lens from a nearby vantage point, of three people being escorted down the drive of the villa by several Portuguese policemen. Two of them I could clearly make out: they were Mr and Mrs de Walter, their expressions stony and sullen. The third, a woman in an overall, had bowed her head and was covering her face with both hands. I guessed this to be their housekeeper Maria, an assumption which was confirmed by the text.

The article itself was short on detail, but long on words such as ‘horror’, ‘gruesome’, ‘grisly’ and, ‘sinister’. The few clear facts that I could ascertain were as follows. Over the course of about eight or nine years a number of boys, all Portuguese, aged between ten and twelve had disappeared from the Monte Rosa district. The last boy to vanish, from the village of Monte Rosa itself, had been seen on the day of his disappearance in the company of the de Walters’ housekeeper, Maria. A police search of the Villa Monte Rosa and its grounds resulted in the discovery not only of the boy’s corpse — ‘hideously mutilated’, according to the article — but also the remains of over a dozen other children. Most of these had been found ‘at the bottom of a disused well in the grounds’. The de Walters, said the article, had ‘been unable to throw any light on these horrific discoveries’, but were still helping the authorities with their investigations.

Some weeks later I confessed to my mother that I had read the article. Her only comment was that I had had a lucky escape, but I am not sure if she was right. The de Walters would not have touched me, and Hal, whom I had met by the well, had not been one of the boys who were killed, because they were all Portuguese. Hal, you see, had been English like me and not a Portugoose.