The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (30 page)

When I awoke it was dark outside and my candle was guttering. I fetched another from the kitchen, lit it and looked at my watch. It was past six and I had missed the last train down the mountain. It was still raining. Having no torch, I did not feel like a three-hour tramp down a dark, wet mountainside, with all the attendant risks of losing myself or my footing, so I decided to bed down for the night in Panter’s old room and take the first train down from the Col the following morning.

There was nothing to eat of course, but fortunately I had lunched well—rather too well as it turned out—but there were some old logs and kindling in the log basket. With these I made a fire in the cast iron stove that stood in the centre of the sitting room. The fire would also warm Panter’s old room since the stove pipe passed through it on its way to the roof. To ignite the kindling in the grate I sacrificed some pages from a Tauchnitz edition of
Marius the Epicurean.
It had never been a favourite of mine, but I remember that it had been one of the few books about which Panter, who rarely expressed an opinion about anything, had shown enthusiasm. I speculated whether, like Wilde, the young Panter had been to its author’s lectures at Oxford.

Once the fire was established and I had dampened it down a little, I decided on an early night. The rain was still pattering away and it was utterly black outside. I riddled the stove with a poker, then, on an instinct, I took the poker up to bed with me.

With pillows and blankets from the armoire I managed to make myself comfortable on Panter’s bed. It was warm and the gentle fall of rain had a soothing effect. Nothing barred sleep except the slight unease that prevented me from extinguishing my candle which I put on my bedside table next to the poker.

Sleep, of a thick and troubled kind, came eventually. It must have lasted seven hours or so because it was past one o’clock when I woke again, yet I was woken not by noise, but by silence. The rain had stopped, there was no wind, and I was engulfed in the utter isolation of the mountain. Though my candle had expired long ago my room was lit from the window by a full moon in the clear night sky.

I cannot now remember how long I lay listening to the silence, but I think it was no more than a few minutes before small sounds began to intrude. They were the usual little creaks and ticks that you hear in any building made entirely of wood. Indeed, I was surprised that I had not heard them before, but perhaps the joists and boards had paused before addressing themselves to the task of drying out after the rain. I imagined the Chalet as being like a great dog, shaking its body and scratching itself to be rid of the wet.

Then came another sound, very faint to begin with, like the patter of running feet. I thought at first it might be a recurrence of rain, but the noise was localised: it appeared to come from the passage outside my door. The noise would recede, then return, and each time it returned, it would come closer to my door which was at one end of the Chalet’s long upper corridor. I could make it out clearly now, and it was a sound I had heard before. It was the stamping, stuttering step of a child who has just learned to walk, a triumphant slapping of little bare feet on bare boards.

The thumping came nearer and seemed to fill the house. If it was a child it was a giant, a monster child weighing as much as a fully grown man. Then it thumped against the door of my room. In my stupid terror I closed my eyes, willing it to go away.

When I opened them again I saw in the moonlight a face staring at me directly from the end of my bed. Good God, that face! It was a bloated grey face which should by rights have been old, but it was not, it was that of a child, almost a baby, but too big for any child. I could not really tell if it was looking at me because its eyes were black. Its mouth was open and that revealed not the usual pink inner parts of the mouth, the incipient teeth, but a gulf of infinite and infernal blackness. I shouted at the thing. I told it to go to Hell. I said mad things to it, but it continued to gape. I wanted to throw something, beat it with the poker, but I had no strength. Then the face leaned back, let out a great gurgling yell, and appeared to fall away from the end of the bed. At any rate it disappeared, and at the same moment I heard a thump as something heavy fell onto the floorboards.

Released, I leapt out of bed grasping the poker, but the room was empty. It was utterly empty, so I looked in the armoire, but that had nothing in it but sheets and blankets; then I fetched another candle from the kitchen and roamed the house but found nothing. I knew that the creature had disappeared, yet I could not rest.

I have no idea how long this went on but I remember the relief I felt when, standing by a window in the corridor of the upper floor, I saw a slight greying in the sky where the mountains across the valley rose up to meet it. I thought that this was the beginning of the end of my ordeal until I heard something move downstairs. It was a sustained creak, and it sounded like a body sitting down in one of the sitting room’s wicker armchairs. I did not fear what I had heard as my sense of fear had been numbed. Poker in one hand, lighted candle in the other, I descended the stairs.

What I saw shocked me, not because it was unexpected, but because my mind had so accurately predicted it. Sitting in the armchair by the stove, and facing me as I came down, was Stanley Seddon.

‘Hello, Cordery,’ he said.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘You do know that you are trespassing. This Chalet now belongs to the college. Panter left it to us.’

‘He had no right to! It’s mine!’ said Seddon, almost shouting. Those aggressive eyes were now liquid with rage; the lower lip thrust itself out even further, quivering. ‘He gave it to me.’

‘When?’

Seddon took a moment to recover some composure before replying: ‘That’s none of your business.’

‘Why did he give it to you??’

‘Because I treated him.’

‘You are a doctor?’

‘I am a psychiatrist.’

‘A trick cyclist, eh?’

‘Yes, I thought you might be the sort of person to employ that puerile term of abuse.’

I apologised diplomatically and sat down. It would have been quite useless to be angry with him; besides, I had to find out what I could. I asked him what brought him here.

‘I thought I’d drop by. I have been at Cap d’Antibes attending to the King’s sexual problems.’

I said: ‘Don’t try to shock me with that nonsense, Seddon. I know perfectly well that the King is not at Cap d’Antibes; he is at Sandringham.’ Seddon laughed.

‘I am talking about
the
King, Cordery. The true king, Edward VIII. He may be returning to his rightful place on the throne of England sooner than you think.’

I merely nodded. Seddon was a curious creature: at one moment self-contained and authoritative, the next full of rage, almost a madman. He told me quite steadily that he was the owner of the Chalet, because he had a document signed by Panter himself before witnesses, which transferred the ownership of the Chalet to him. I asked to see it, but he said we would be hearing from his solicitors.

On an impulse I said: ‘I’m not sure we’d want to keep this place anyway.’

He asked why not. I thought he seemed disappointed by this capitulation. I gave him a brief account of what I had heard and seen in the night. He nodded several times and asked me to describe my vision in greater detail. Reluctantly I complied. He nodded again. ‘You have seen the Babe of the Abyss,’ he said.

I merely raised my eyebrows in enquiry. He leaned back in his chair and for a while there was silence. I think both of us were expecting to hear those footsteps above our heads but none came.

‘It was the Summer of ’16 just before the big July offensive on the Somme,’ he said. ‘There were four of us, Maddern, Tommy Johnson, Peters and I, all of us subalterns in the Somerset Light Infantry. Yes, I was an officer then. For a short while, before we went up to the line again, our battalion was billeted at a place called Maulincourt. They put us subalterns in a place that called itself the Château de Maulincourt. It sounds grand, but actually it was a terrible old place, little better than a ruin: damp, great holes in the roof, bats everywhere. The Maulincourt family had abandoned it years before, having fallen on hard times, and I heard that the last Baron de Maulincourt was living in a hovel somewhere in the village. Well, thanks to some sort of administrative lash-up among the brass hats at HQ, we found ourselves stuck in this hole for over a week with no orders, and virtually nothing to do. It was a dump, as I say, but we found that there was one room in the Château which was almost habitable and it was the library, so that was where we passed most of our time. There was an ancient piano on which Tommy Johnson tried to beat out some tune or other. The others drank or played cards, but I explored the books which were still on the shelves and looked as if they hadn’t been touched for generations. Most of them dated from the eighteenth century or before and were in French, or some other foreign language, and many were so riddled with damp and mildew that they were quite useless. But I noticed that there was one locked glass-fronted case that looked as if it contained some comparatively undamaged volumes. In war everyone is a vandal, you know, so I thought nothing of smashing the case open with an iron bar.

‘The books inside were in a remarkable state of preservation, all things considered. They were mostly very old, vellum bound, and some were in manuscript. There was one in particular which attracted my attention because it was handwritten on parchment and contained a number of diagrams, also hand drawn. I noticed that various hands had contributed to it, and that the scribes had signed and dated their entries, the first of them being a Joffroi de Maulincourt in—would you believe it?—the year 1343.

‘It looked like an old family recipe book, which in a curious way it was. It turned out to be a Grimoire, a book of spells. The last entry was dated 1866, which meant there must have been quite a long tradition of sorcery in the family.

‘I don’t know whether you know anything about this sort of thing, Cordery. You probably don’t; you’ve led a sheltered life, but take it from me, most occult writing makes no sense at all, or at any rate takes half a lifetime to decipher. That was the case with nearly all of this stuff which anyway, up to the late seventeenth century, was written in the most appalling Latin. But there were some pages written during the late 1770s by one Etienne Leroyer de Maulincourt which were exquisitely lucid and legible. They were penned in a beautiful eighteenth century copperplate, not crabbed, but flowing and elegant, the sepia ink barely faded. It detailed several ceremonies with clarity and even wit: for instance, Etienne had headed his section of the book
Moyen Court de la Magie Luciferienne,
no doubt with a mocking nod towards the famous Christian prayer manual known as
Le Moyen Court
. I suspected that a sly pun on his own family name was also intended.

‘For my own amusement I began to transcribe and translate some of Etienne’s formulae, at which point my chums began to take an interest. Dear God, we must have been bored out of our silly heads, but one night when we had had too much cognac, a barrel of which we had liberated from a local
estaminet
, we decided to give one of old Etienne’s spells a try.

‘It was a ceremony for summoning a demon called Nybbas. Nybbas is often called “the Babe of the Abyss” because he usually manifests himself in the form of a child about two years old, though somewhat larger than life size. I don’t mean that he really exists in the way that this chair exists, but he is an archetype of the collective unconscious. Read any Jung? No, I thought not. He represents the primacy of what some call evil. He asserts that evil is not somehow the corruption of innocence, but is itself, in its way, innocent. He stands for what theologians call “original sin”, the state into which we are all born. Psychologically he symbolizes a great and unacknowledged truth, that we spring from the womb wicked, or rather, untrammelled by any notion of either good or evil. We are all the children of hellfire and we hide the fact from ourselves at our peril.

‘Well, we performed the little ritual in the library one night, and you will be disappointed to hear that nothing much happened except that the whole place became filled with a thick, disgusting smoke that made mustard gas seem like Attar of Roses by comparison. It seemed like a total failure.

‘Then, the next day, as it happens, our orders came to go up to the line. It was July, and, in the Somme push that followed, Maddern, Tommy Johnson and Peters all bought it. Only I was left, and I soon discovered that that night had left its legacy.’

‘In what way?’ I asked.

‘I don’t want to go into it. You wouldn’t understand anyhow. But I will say this. I don’t regret it. Never in a million years because the Babe has given me my life’s work. I had already begun to read Freud and Jung; now my experiences told me of the necessity to awake and acknowledge the demon within us. If we do not admit to its presence we become its prey. I do not want to talk about Panter. I warned him, but he was fool enough to allow himself to become a victim.

‘Everything is in a state of flux. It must be. For there to be Peace, there must be Chaos; for there to be Chaos, there must be Peace. We are entering the age of Chaos and Chaos will purge the world. It is not so much wrong to suppress it as useless. . . .’

He went on and on like this, talking interminable rubbish. Already the sun was beginning to rise and I knew from the voices within me that unless I did something about it I would become a victim too. So I did what I was told because I still had the poker in my hand.

As I beat his head into a pulp, I could distinctly hear above the confusion the obscene, gurgling laughter of a child.

When I had washed the blood out of the wooden floor of the Chalet, I dragged the body outside to the edge of the lawn and buried him in a shallow grave. It was dawn and, as the sun rose, it shone aslant the rough grass, turning its green to gold, and its heavy burden of dew into a crown of diamonds.