‘Maurice Calendar? What’s that flash ’arry doin’ outdoors this late in the decade? I’d ’ave thought ’e’d ’ave ’imself cocooned away by now. Nah, ’e’s alright, is Maurice. Easy to get on with, don’t yer think, for sayin’ that ’e’s from the other London? Born and raised there, Maurice was. ’Im and ’is market-trader mate, ol’ log face, Blincoe, they’re a couple o’ the ones who spend a lot o’ time in this world, nippin’ back an’ forth between the two like yo-yos. I should think as all the mob up that way would ’ave been keepin’ an eye out for yer – Blincoe, Maurice, Monolulu, Ironfoot. They’d ’ave got wind o’ yer ’ampole book the minute it washed up in Soho, penny to a quid. Let’s ’ave a butcher’s at it, then, this bit o’ tat what’s causin’ all the uproar.’

  Idly supposing ‘Ironfoot’ to be the disproportionate man with the built-up shoe he’d seen in Berwick Street, Dennis reached nervously into his carrier bag and noticed that his hand was shaking as he passed A London Walk to the engaging subterranean.

  ‘Sorry. It still frightens me a bit, to tell the truth. Maurice said that I’d got to get it to some people that he called the City Heads.’

  Riffling through the badly weathered volume with a scowl of disapproval, Spare looked up at Dennis momentarily before returning to his vexed inspection of the Reverend Hampole’s Meditations in the Streets of the Metropolis.

  ‘Well, they’re not people, or not any more they’re not, but looking at this bag o’ tricks, I’d say Maurice is spot on. Supernatural glimpses ’ere and there, that’s not a problem, but an artefact like this, it’s evidence. Bring the ’ole lot down, this could. It’s a breach, an indiscretion as you might say, and the ’eads will want it takin’ back. It’s not a good idea to keep ’em waitin’, but I can’t go anywhere today because there’s people what I’m meetin’ up with, later on. You come by earlyish tomorrer and I’ll see what I can do. And in the meantime, I’ll ’ang on to this, if that’s no skin off your nose.’ Spare waggled the Hampole book. ‘It’ll be safe with me, but I don’t know as you’d be safe with it. When one o’ these things is about, all sorts can ’appen.’

  Dennis, very much aware that ‘all sorts’ was a category that included ‘inside out’, could only nod his acquiescence and his gratitude that somebody would willingly take the infernal object off his hands. He knew that this would still require a second visit to the place he couldn’t bear to think about, but reasoned that this time it wouldn’t be as bad. He’d have Spare with him, it would be during the hours of daylight, and this time he’d be prepared for the experience, he was confident. Starting to feel a bit uncomfortable at being eyed by all the slithering chimeras that decorated the unearthly illustrator’s studio-cum-coffin, Dennis wondered if he should confirm their rendezvous for Thursday morning and then take his leave. The artist, though, did not seem in a tearing hurry to be rid of him.

  ‘’ere, I just ’ad a thought. You said as this thing ’ad escaped out of an Arthur Machen story, if I ’eard yer right.’ He once more held the book up in one hand, before consigning it with a dismissive toss to the untidy pile of amputees and hieroglyphics teetering beside his chair. ‘Well, in that case, these people what I’m meetin’ later, you might want to come along. It’s these two dabblers, Ken Grant and his missus, Steffi. Ken, he knew ol’ Crowley, who dropped off the twig a year or two back, and I reckon that they’re ’opin’ I’ll be a replacement Beast. No thanks, mate. Not my cup o’ tea. Still, they’ve got cash, they’re interested in me drawings, and that Steffi, she’s a little smasher, so that’s why I knock about with ’em. Thing is, they don’t ’alf know a lot o’ people what they’re keen to introduce me to, and one they said they’d bring along tonight is Johnny Gawsworth. ’e’s a proper lush, but ’e was Machen’s publisher and ’is biographer. We said we’d get together at the Elephant and Castle, sevenish, so come along if you’ve a mind. It might be you could learn a thing or two.’

  While not entirely certain that he wanted to learn anything about the works of Arthur Machen, the youth thought it would be rude not to accept Spare’s invitation when the man was going so far out of his way to be helpful. And besides, the Elephant and Castle was on his route back to Grace’s flat in Spitalfields. It wouldn’t hurt to pop in for a drink with Austin and his magic mates before he carried on home, would it? Mumbling that it sounded great if Spare was sure he wouldn’t be intruding, Dennis found his gaze drawn to one of the cryptic, ink-limned forms that lined the sunken studio, realising too late that it was an intricately wrinkled and misshapen penis of absurd proportions. In fact, now his eye was in, he noticed genitalia crawling everywhere about the chilly premises like bearded molluscs, and could feel the colour rising to his cheeks unbidden. Fortunately, his host appeared too pleased by the prospect of a forthcoming night out to notice.

  ‘It might be a laugh, you never know. Come on up top, and we can have a nose about to find a bit o’ nosh before we go. It’s always best to line yer belly ’fore you ’ave a drink.’

  The painter was already up and heading for the cellar steps, with all the basement’s cats immediately on the alert, a furry torrent flowing up the twilit flight before him. Picking up his noticeably lighter carrier, Dennis checked to make sure that the Reverend Hampole’s book was still where Spare had chucked it – and not rustling after him across the studio’s marvel-cluttered floor – before he followed his new colleague and the feline exodus up the brick stairway. Making polite conversation as they stumped back to street level, Dennis offered up a casual enquiry.

  ‘You’ve got rooms upstairs here, then?’

  Almost at the top step, the fog-haired figure stopped and turned to peer back down at Dennis, furrowing a wart-jewelled brow in puzzlement.

  ‘What d’yer mean? That’s my room we’re just come from. Studio, livin’ room, and if I put the two chairs facin’ one another, where I kip as well. It’s not a palace, granted, but when Millie offered me it after Jerry blew me last ’ouse down, I moved in sharpish. Beggars can’t be choosers.’

  Now they were both up in the occluded hallway where the cats were waiting for them, circling and mewing, hard to make out against carpeting as mangy and discoloured as themselves. Dennis was speechless, struggling to assimilate the fact that somebody of such ability lived, worked and slept in a dank oubliette hardly as big as Coffin Ada’s flowerbed. No wonder that the man looked ill save for the vigour in his wildfire eyes; a more than healthy soul incarcerated in a more than ailing flesh. Preceding Dennis down the hall towards the nearest of its doors, the mildewed genius was still muttering about the dematerialisation of his previous digs.

  ‘’itler, that was, ’oo bombed that, gettin’ ’is own back ’cause I wouldn’t do ’is portrait. Paint that fascist arse’ole? I should cocoa! It was that same air raid buggered up me drawin’ arm, what meant that for a few years I was leadin’ with me left, before I managed with me right again. ’ere, tell yer what, come through into the kitchen. I made a few bob from dirty pictures last week, so I shelled out for a bag o’ coal, and Millie said as we should ’ave a fire goin’ later on.’

  The house’s kitchen, small and poorly stocked, was nonetheless much cheerier and more spacious than its underground accommodation, with the promised coal fire spitting from an inset hearth and chequered tiling underfoot, rather than crumpled monsters. Told to sit beside the kitchen table while his many-coated host hunted for something edible, Dennis was still attempting to take in the down-at-heel enchanter’s previous statement. Hitler’s portrait? Dirty pictures? He became suspicious that his new acquaintance might have simply made these details up, then wondered why he was contesting things which were at least remotely possible after their talk about a place that wasn’t; straining at a gnat. He busied himself with a copy of last week’s Reveille that he found there on the tabletop – an article reconstituting meat from the Whitechapel murders sixty years ago – while Spare discovered, on the stove, a half-full saucepan of bubble and squeak, which he proceeded to warm up.

  This welcome mess of remnant cabbage, spud, boiled bacon, who knew what, turned out to be a meal intended just for Dennis, with the illustrator’s only nourishment being the last few mouthfuls in a pint bottle of milk retrieved from a corroded meat safe by the back door. Wolfing down his banquet of leftovers, Dennis asked himself how anyone could stay alive in such conditions, let alone still fill a canvas, or a room, with their unearthly energy and coarse refinement?

  When the pair of them were finishing their various repasts, there came a funny incident that it was hard to pick the bones out of: simply to fill the silence that descended once he was no longer chewing, Dennis gestured to the weekly pseudo-newspaper with its reheated Ripper speculations on the open centrefold. Remarking that he was himself at present lodged in Spitalfields, he asked Spare if the artist harboured any thoughts concerning the still-popular historic homicides. Austin replied by crumpling the middle pages of the rag into a ball that he bowled underhand into the roaring fireplace, meanwhile raising a cautionary finger to his lips and fixing the eighteen-year-old with his incendiary sockets. Stranger still, he then said something that seemed wholly unconnected with the recently incinerated article, though everything about Spare’s bearing and delivery conveyed the exact opposite.

  ‘And lissen, same thing goes for this lot that we’re meetin’ up with later – not a dicky bird about the different London. Gawsworth and the Grants, they’ve never ’eard of it, and best we keep it that way. Machen knew, apparently, and so did Crowley and old angel britches, Dion Fortune. Perhaps Mathers and a couple o’ the others, but beyond that it’s a secret between us poor sods who only know about it ’cause we ’ave to. On the matter o’ the Great When, we keep shtum, alright? There are some rotten ways to perish in this world, but blabbin’ about that place is amongst the very worst of ’em, in my experience. So not another word until tomorrer.’

  Was the antique carnival of Jack the Ripper, then, somehow related to the other London? After the alleged magician’s admonitions, Dennis wasn’t going to ask. They discussed other subjects, and the cellar dweller, with his mushroom pallor, swilled Dennis’s plate and fork off underneath the cold tap, then called goodbye to his landlady before the two men went out into risen mist and already descended dark. As they walked to the Elephant and Castle, both the pub and district named for it, Spare chatted amiably about Brixton, hands deep in his pockets, near invisible against the curdling night save for an intermittent headlight splash of egg-yolk yellow.

  ‘Brixton’s gone downhill since I first come ’ere. Used to be that if you ’appened on a woman leanin’ out a window and you took her from behind, she’d ’ave at least looked round to find out ’oo it was. The area still ’ad a bit o’ class back then, I’m tellin’ yer. All airs and graces.’

  By the time they reached the famous hostelry, the other parties were already there, nervously seated in a corner of the lounge bar and conspicuously better dressed than the assembled regulars of the establishment, which wasn’t jam-packed, being the midweek, but was still boisterous. A darts match was in progress, weighted metal hummingbirds thudding their beaks into the pitted board, and at the pub’s Joanna a deadpan cadaver tinkled his way through the ‘Harry Lime Theme’, the tune winding in amongst the chuckling bar crowd with its poisoner’s cakewalk. Several of the rubicund and beefy patrons called hellos to ‘Awstin’ and seemed pleased to see him, none more than the trio of interlopers backed into their anxious corner.

  The Grants looked like a presentable young couple, both with dark coiffures, the husband’s hair having a liquorice glister and the wife’s descending in an inky tumble to her shoulders. They gazed marvelstruck at Spare as if he were a griffin, albeit one who’d fallen on hard times. The other fellow, Gawsworth, wearing stained tweed inappropriate for both that century and that end of town, was already invertebrate with booze and looked to have been poured like mustard into an oak chair, from where his legs had overflowed on to the varnished floorboards. Spare, if anything more undernourished-looking in the lounge’s stronger light, introduced Dennis as ‘a student what I’m ’elpin’ with perspective’ – a nice way of putting it – and Kenneth Grant insisted on providing both the artist and his suddenly inducted understudy with a pint of stout. They talked across the crowded table, with a loose net of blue cigarette smoke trembling above them, knotting itself briefly into one of Spare’s grotesques before unravelling into another.

  Ken and Steffi, as they styled themselves, quickly monopolised the wan delineator with a gush of occult queries, while the ‘Harry Lime Theme’ shaded into ‘Don’t Bring Lulu’. Hadn’t Spare once worked with Crowley on the latter’s periodical, The Equinox? What had been his impression of the late Great Beast? When the reply was ‘an Italian ponce ’oo’s out o’ work’, the conversation shifted to the duo’s reminiscences of those last years at Netherwood, the boarding house in Hastings, where Ken recollected being present for a reconciliation with Christian magician Dion Fortune, herself recently deceased. ‘They got on rather well, as I recall, but now they’re gone, the occult landscape’s looking somewhat empty. One could even say that you are its last mountain, Austin. I remember Crowley once said …’ It became apparent that the table was divided between those lucky enough to have once known Aleister Crowley and those lucky enough not to have done, these being Dennis and John Gawsworth who, disqualified, fell into their own outcast conversation.

  Gawsworth was immensely likeable, perhaps in his late thirties or his early forties, with an earnest face that wore a neat beard and a permanent expression of wary surprise, that of a burglar by unexpected torchlight. Crumpling forward in his chair to make himself heard over cheers or groans resulting from the darts game, Arthur Machen’s self-appointed Sancho Panza voiced conspiratorial asides in the perplexed tones of a country gent marooned on the harsh streets of an abominable city.

  ‘They’re right, of course. These last few years have been jolly unkind to occult types. Dropping like flies: old Crowley, Fortune, Harry Price, the lot of ’em. Damned shame and all that, but when Arthur Machen passed away the Christmas before last, the magic-wallahs seemed to have forgotten him as thoroughly as the reviewers.’

  Here the literary squire shook his large head despondently and took another gulp of gin, one elbow resting in the table’s film of spillage where the Guinness toucans smirked from sodden beer mats. Dennis asked if Machen, then, had been connected to the world of magic, at which Gawsworth gruffed his affirmation.

  ‘Crikey, I should say! He joined the Golden Dawn, you know, in the mauve nineties, when you had a lot of writers doing that, Algernon Blackwood, Sax Rohmer and so on. But with Machen – I don’t know. I think losing his first wife, Amy, had a lot to do with it. He told me he was inconsolable, the poor chap, wracked with sorrow and in a precarious mental state. So much so that he seemed to be accosted by the characters of his own fictions, or that’s what he said, and that his nightly strolls were through a London which had been replaced by an entirely different city. It was after this experience that he became a member of the Golden Dawn. Hoping to find out what had happened to him, I suppose, although I don’t think that he had much luck. He wasn’t with the order very long, at any rate. He thought Kabbalah was intriguing, but he found the rest of it – the dressing-up and secret names and all that – to be self-important twaddle. Always spoke his mind, did Machen.’

  At the bar, somebody in a cloth cap made a questionable comment to a skinny barmaid and was violently acquainted with the outside pavement by a bull-sized landlord. Trying to look scholarly, Dennis regarded Gawsworth with a quizzical expression.

  ‘So, this different city Machen thought he saw, it made a big impression on him, then?’

  Gawsworth, even through his gin haze, was emphatic.

  ‘Oh, my word, yes. The idea that there might be a higher world concealed behind our own was central to his work, right to the end, but London seemed to be the only place that he could see it from. On his first visit here, he had what I suppose you’d call a vision, standing awestruck in the Strand and witnessing what he described as London’s sacred essence; its “Theoria”, as Machen put it. He could be a bugger for obscure religious terminology, if he was in the mood. Then, after Amy Hogg died, he had further glimpses, as I’ve said. I used to think that he was speaking metaphorically, about the different world available to someone of poetic insight, but these days I’m not so sure. Sometimes I harbour the unsettling suspicion he was being literal, talking about somewhere that – to him, at least – existed physically. I’d say those revelations were the most profound experiences that he ever had.’

  Across the table, Steffi Grant was sounding vexed as she reviewed the difficulties of succession raised by Crowley’s passing, while her husband nodded thoughtfully and Spare examined his black fingernails. Increasingly absorbed in what Gawsworth was saying, Dennis steered their discourse to the matter that was foremost in his mind.

  ‘It’s funny, I was reading one of Machen’s stories just last night, about another London hidden behind this one. For a title, it had just the letter “N”. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it …’

  From his nostalgic melancholy, Gawsworth lit up like an alcoholic Christmas tree whose cheeks were coloured bulbs.

  ‘Heard of it? My dear boy, I was the one who got it published! There were all these tales that nobody had seen outside the ghost-story anthologies of lovely Cynthia Asquith, and I thought they should be gathered up in a collection. Machen didn’t like the idea, and tried hard to talk me out of it. Said all the stories were substandard and not worth the bother, which was tommyrot, but then he often found my runaway enthusiasms irritating, I suspect. Finally, he insisted on including a new story, so that the collection should, at least in his eyes, have some proper merit. That was “N”. To my mind, it’s one of his greatest pieces and, as it turned out, one of his last important works.’