Satan Wants Me (18 page)

By the time the fitting was over, I decided that I had had enough for the day and I made my way back to Horapollo House. Unusually, there was no one about. So I decided to explore the place – not the private rooms or anything like that, for, after all, I am not a spy but a resident. So I confined my investigations to the communal areas and those bits of the house which did not seem to be used for anything in particular. I was just orienting myself in my new home. Despite the innocence of my intention, I kept having this fantasy about the overbold sorcerer’s apprentice taking advantage of his master’s absence. The apprentice would proceed, all wide-eyed and tippy-toes, from room to room, pushing the doors open and finding marvel after marvel, each room more marvellous than the last – until, that is, he comes to the last door. He knows he should not go near it, but it swings open of its own accord and then the horrified apprentice beholds a room full of naked bodies hanging on meat-hooks. There is just one meat-hook on which there is no body …

Well, I found no meat-hooks, nor any skeletons in cupboards, but what I did find was, in an odd sort of way, almost as disquieting. The centre of the house and its east wing are in good repair and recently decorated. There are those antique carpets and the candelabra in the hallway and the modern furniture for the two lecture rooms, and so on. But the west wing is so very different. Once I turned in that direction, I found rooms with no lights but only loose wiring, holes in the floor, broken window panes, in one room a dead bird surrounded by shattered glass and in another signs that it had been camped in and that someone had tried to start a fire in the middle of the floor. I believe that this wing was once properly occupied by the Lodge, for there are flaking Thelemic frescoes in the corridor on the first floor – a naked man making the sign of the
manu cornuta
, a black beast sodomising a white nymph, a cat crucified on an ash tree. The frescoed corridor seemed to go on forever – I think it might even run on into the next building – but I turned back rather than press on through the murk to the end. I returned to my room very thoughtful. It is just so odd – the brilliantly lit opulence in the hallway and all that squalor and dereliction in the wing – as if Horapollo House were just a stage set.

What is it with the west wing?
What was it with the west wing? The wind blows up in the west and beats against the walls and windows of the house, requiring entrance. It will not be denied. It will find a way. It always does. Is not the house an emblem of a man’s mind and of necessity a place to dream in? He who dreams is like a man who squats in his skull and takes his pleasures in the world and hopes for power and wealth and entertains his acquaintance at his comfort. He stands at the entrance of his head to welcome his friends and neighbours into his private place, bidding them take their ease within and telling them that there they may find shelter from the howling, angry wind. Yet, though it is certain that the walls of the house are very strong, its windows are eyes which cannot be shielded and when the Enemy comes riding on the wind, he will set his lance and gallop pell-mell, heading for an eye. No man can deny entrance to what comes in through his eyes. So you may conceive of the man of the house and his feasting companions making merry in the dining hall and heedless of the Enemy within. And the Enemy, having made his entrance and found a private room in some upper part of the house, he too makes a feast and having invited the moth and worm to join with him, they set to consuming the fabrics and furnishings of the house. Then, invigorated by his mouldy banquet, the agile Enemy will set to digging pitfalls in the floors and laying snares for the night. Is not this the very figure of an ageing mind?

Such stuff is daft. As soon as my hand had written the above, I dropped the pen and decided to think about Sally instead, in the hope that thoughts of her would drive out thoughts of the Enemy – whoever he is. I put Alan Price’s single, ‘Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear’ on the record player. A repeated phrase on the piano introduces the insouciantly innocent lyric. As I listen with my head in my hands, I fantasise that a ghostly Sally, materialised by the call of the music, is with me in the room. ‘Oh, who could think that a boy and bear could be well-accepted everywhere?’ A year ago Sally and I were at a Christmas party at which the Alan Price number was played again and again, and every time it was played, we danced. We were like possessed by the tarantella or something. We just had to. Now once more ‘Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear’ is played again and again. The music is jaunty, yet its joy is not for me, yet, when I think of her moving to the music, I cannot get it out of my head that her last words to me were, ‘You are evil!’ Breaking with Sally was kind of heavy. Heavy? What kind of heavy?
Oh, it is a heaviness which weighs upon the breast and squeezes out the heart’s juices. It is a weight which, once it presses upon the cushion of the heart, never shall be shifted.

After writing those words, I hurled my biro away from me. I ran to the bathroom, for I thought that I was close to vomiting. I hung over the bowl of the lavatory, watching my reflection and waiting for the spew to come, but nothing came. I considered putting my finger down my throat to force the sickness out of me. All this crazy stuff I find myself writing in my diary. It is as if I am being dictated to by something which wants to think my thoughts for me. If I find that I keep on writing things like that, I may have to cut my right hand off, so that I may not end up as the slave-stenographer of the Unseen. I was roused from thoughts of scribal servitude by the ringing of the phone.

It was ringing in an empty house. Where was Grieves? I decided to leave it. But it kept ringing and ringing. It was like an accusation. I should not have been there to hear it. I crept down to the hall and picked up the receiver. It was for me. It was dad at the other end and I started to explain how I hoped to be able to come up this weekend. But he cut me short.

‘There is no need. She is dead.’

He waited for me to say something, but I could not. I had my fist in my mouth. He sighed heavily,

‘Well, try to come to the funeral at least. It is on Monday at the Baptist Church – you know – the one she started going to when she became ill. If you are going to be in the cortège, you need to be here about an hour and a half beforehand.’

‘I’ll be there. Dad, I’m sorry.’

He put the phone down without replying.

I walked out into the garden and paced about in the sun. Though the sun was now low, the light was still very bright and, besides, I did not want anyone to see my eyes. So I put on the shades.
Though the garden is summery, the young man is cool in his shades. His darkening vision takes in the creatures standing in the shadows, who wait and hide from the sun and he senses that they, like him, are waiting for the descent of the Black Light and the door which swings open on Eternity.

The Hell with Eternity. I was worrying about Felton and what his likely reaction to my news would be. I thought that he would probably try to forbid me from going to the funeral. But when eventually, just before dinner, I found him, he seemed affable – even, perhaps pleased that I sought his permission to go to my mother’s funeral. Perhaps it was the fact that I sought his permission. Perhaps it was that he was pleased that my mother, an obstacle on my occult path, had been removed by fate. Perhaps he thinks that funerals are good for one. I do not know. He merely wanted to know in which cemetery my mother was being buried.

Before switching the light off, I committed the Mass of the Phoenix to memory. Although I had feared that I would not sleep, I drifted off almost immediately. I do not think that I had been asleep for very long before I was awoken with a kiss. Only half awake, I was almost choking on the tongue in my mouth. It was Laura. I must have been crying in my sleep and in the pitch darkness I felt her hands touching the wetness on my cheeks. Silently we made love.

‘Laura?’

‘It is not Laura who has been lying with you, it is your new mother, the Lady Babalon.’

When I next awoke, Laura was no longer there. It was still the middle of the night, but there was a terrible noise coming from somewhere in the house. I lay there listening and trying to decide what the noise above me was – a mixture of screaming and banging. Then, since there was no chance of drifting off, I decided to get up and have a pee. So I padded off down the corridor to the bathroom. I was on my way back to my bedroom when I became aware that the sound was much louder and closer. I turned and was just in time to see a naked man come clattering up behind me. His screaming red mouth was open wider than I have ever seen on any human being. I got smartly out of his way and watched him go past and turn to go clumping down the stairs. It was all very fast, but I just caught a glimpse of his disappearing feet. They were bloody and shod with horseshoes. The noises died down and I went back to bed and eventually got back to sleep.

There is no way that I can work today. Sometime after breakfast I give Cosmic a ring. He sounds bleary and it is clear that I have woken him up, but I arrange to go round to his place for lunch. (The honour of a freak is like that of an Arab tribal sheikh, for a freak never refuses hospitality. His records can be borrowed, his food must be shared, his joints may never be hogged. If you want his old lady, be his guest.)

Almost the first thing I say when I get there is,

‘My mother is dead’.

Cosmic does not bat an eyelid. It is like he already knew.

He passes me a joint. He had six joints all ready, rolled and lined up on the wooden altar at the foot of the pyramid. He finds me a light, before speaking,

‘It’s nothing to be bugged about. “Dead” is a straight’s word. “Dead” is like a line drawn at the bottom of a bank account that has been closed, but a person’s life is not a bank account. It is often overdrawn, but it is never closed. We all go on forever and ever.’

I inhale and then reply,

‘On Monday they are going to put her body in the earth. In a matter of a few more days, that body will start to rot and liquefy. My mother is dead.’ My words come out all mixed up with smoke – like that scene in the film of
The Golem
.

Cosmic shakes his head. He is seriously shocked,

‘You should not talk about her like that. Quite likely she is listening to us now, hovering about on the astral. She isn’t going to want to hear you describing what will happen to her body. That is irrelevant to her present state. You have heard the news in the lectures. The soul travels from body to body. Your mother will spend about six weeks in the astral plane before reincarnating. She will probably decide to become a man this next time. Remember how Aleister Crowley was a Cretan temple priestess called Aia in a previous incarnation.’

I pass the joint to Cosmic and he draws heavily on it, as if for inspiration. Then he crawls over to the record-player and puts some music on.

‘Many years on from now,’ he continues, ‘you will pass a young man in the street and he will look at you as if you are strangely familiar to him, and you, when you look at him will think that, yeah, there is something familiar about him too and yet you are sure you have never met. You will put it down to
déjà vu
. You can’t argue with
déjà vu
. We have all had it and it is proof that we have all had previous existences.’

This is a shouted declaration of faith, as ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ is really loud on the record-player and Dylan’s sarcastic snarling fills the room. Last year, heads I knew were going around saying that Dylan was ‘the God that had failed’. After ‘Blowing in the Wind’ and ‘Masters of War’, he had sold out and turned his back on his authentic folk roots. It was not on to accompany protest songs with an electrified guitar and do so in good faith. Could it be possible! The people in the market-place hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead! But after Dylan’s motor cycle accident last July, now people are not so sure. Sally (who is a Donovan freak) still thinks that Dylan is evil, a ruined archangel punished for the arrogance and excess of his genius. There are rumours that he is now hideously disfigured. Cosmic reads things differently. He thinks that Dylan, following his appointed path, has gone into occultation. It is like when Wotan left Valhalla and submitted to being hung for nine days and nine nights on the Tree of Ygraddisil so that he might learn the wisdom of the Norns. Soon, very soon, Dylan will emerge from occultation with the new higher truth.

Once we have got down to the roach of the joint, Cosmic brings out lunch. Lunch: brown rice, hot green chillies and a couple of cans of beer. But first there is a preprandial drink – Cosmic is really pushing the boat out – and we each swallow a whole bottle of Dr J. Collis Browne’s Chlorodyne. The thick brown liquid tastes disgusting, a bit like drinking stewed opium (another thing which sometimes emerges from Cosmic’s cocktail cabinet) and the chillies are partly there to take away the aftertaste. Chlorodyne is supposed to be taken by old ladies for rheumatism or something, but, according to the label, it has opium in it, plus all sorts of other interesting substances. It produces a really good woozy blast, especially if one follows it up with hash.

Cosmic is really very, very generous with the joints. The room is full of smoke which I try to sculpt with my hands. Listening to Dylan, it comes to me in a flash of illumination how good music is. It is a whole lot of sounds all strung together. On their own they would not mean anything, but when they are strung together, they make really nice patterns. It is really good that …

We get on to talking about my guitar-playing, which Cosmic says is not so hot. He is coughing and giggly and really apologetic about it, but no way do I sound like Dylan. I have to agree. I say that I have to find time to practice more.

‘Practice is not necessary,’ replies Cosmic. ‘Your problem is that you have not come to terms with the elementals in your guitar. You don’t know how music works do you? Can you explain in scientific terms what is happening when you hear some music?’