Satan Wants Me (30 page)

Sally is a hippy slut. She is also an unattainable Snow Queen. I love her kookiness. I love the fact that she despises me. By now Peter is on his way to the lecture at Horapollo House. As I write these lines my hand trembles. I have just realised that there is no need for me to be there too. I will visit Sally. I have no idea what will happen.

I rang the bell. Her face was hard and hostile. I told her that I happened to be passing. She did not believe me. She said something polite and tried to close the door on me. Then I told her that the real reason for coming to see her was that Peter was in danger. She showed me into her room. It was full of hippy kitsch. I made myself as comfortable as I could. She wanted to know about the danger Peter was in. I told her the truth that it was I who was in danger. I would die if I could not have her. She was unmoved, my darling slut. I would rather she had given herself to me of her own free will, but this was not going to happen. I used the Gaze and she came forward to undo my trousers. “Wow, gaiters!” She was excited by them and made me keep them on while we made love. Afterwards, as we lay beside one another panting, she asked me if I liked the smell of my own farts.

A few minutes later she wanted me to leave. I told her again that she was adorable. She turned a cold ear to me. She told me that if I did love her, I should never tell Peter. She told me to go away. I must never return. Why did she ask me that question? Did I fart while making love to her? It is anguish to me to think of it. I cannot bear to think of my future life without my darling slut.

I was not allowed to read any more. Granville, who had been watching me coldly, took his diary back. I had at first thought that the diary entry might have been faked – just as the dog had been trained in advance to find Granville the previous time. Granville had plenty of time to fake those pages after all. I would have liked the story of his magical seduction of Sally to have been a lie, but, in fact, I was pretty sure that this was not the case. ‘Do you like the smell of your own farts?’ was one of Sally’s questions-of-the-week that April. My feelings about what I had read were confused. In principle, Sally was nothing to me now, since we had split up. Even before we split up, she was always a free agent, free to sleep with whoever she chose. That was no big deal. On the other hand, on this occasion, she was not free. Confusing, but I suppose it is not really important.

Felton passed my diary to Granville and showed him a page. Then,

‘See to it,’ he said and Granville left the room.

If we are all going to be reading each others’ diaries then it will be like living in a nudist colony with everything dangling out. Felton took me through my recent diary entries. First he was grumbling about how he had been unable to find the school I was working at in his
A to Z
and he was muttering about how my diary had made him curious to see these little children whom I had evoked so vividly in my writing. Then, he pounced on, ‘I can relate to what you are saying about adrenalin’ and harangued me on the hideous imprecision of the verb I had used. Did I mean that I actually agreed with Maud? If so, why not say so? Or did I merely mean that I could understand what she was saying without agreeing with it? Or did I vaguely empathise with what she had said without even fully understanding it? Or did I have something to contribute on the subject of adrenalin without necessarily agreeing with her contribution? Was I ‘relating’ emotionally or intellectually, or was some other kind of relationship being posited? Felton went on and on until I felt quite dizzy contemplating the multiple levels of unintended meaning and ambiguity in what I had written.

While Felton was talking, the door swung open behind me. He raised his eyebrows, but continued talking. I did not dare look back. Felton abruptly stopped nit-picking at my use of language.

‘I can see that I do not emerge as an impressive figure in the pages of your diary. Ah well … Years ago I was faced with a great test, the greatest test of my life … which I failed. You, when your testing-time comes, must not fail.’ Felton was speaking rapidly and urgently. ‘People come to the Lodge for all sorts of reasons. Not all those reasons are worthy ones, but that does not matter. Some come to scoff, but then stay to be converted. Others come to us because they hope that the Lodge will provide them with good business contacts, or sexual gratification, or simple entertainment that will brighten up their otherwise rather dull days. These are naive and mistaken motivations, but we can work with the people who have them. Some come to us because they are lonely. We provide these people with new friends – some visible, some invisible. But really only the End matters… . What I am saying, Non Omnis Moriar, is that you can speak the truth about your reason for kissing the hand of the Master. It does not matter what initially brought you into the Lodge. The only thing that matters is what we are going to make of you.’

What is all this rubbish? He has been reading the truth in my diaries for week after week. I was going to point this out to him, before asking him how much longer before the farcical chore of courting Maud could be concluded? I never got a chance to ask my question.

‘Charles dear, could I have a word?’ The voice was a woman’s.

‘Bridget, can’t it wait? As you can see, I am in the middle of a diary session with this young man.’

I turned round. Bridget was immensely tall and wiry, with thick black eyebrows, dark eyes and long white hair.

‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘The exorcism and the Shibboleth exercise will start in a few minutes and the matter is really rather private.’

‘Oh, very well. Oh Bridget, this is, as you must have guessed, Non Omnis Moriar. Non Omnis Moriar, this is my wife. Bridget’s name on the Path is Dolor Mundi. She is just back from a tour of our Lodges in the United States.’

I rose to shake hands with Bridget, before she went out with Felton into the corridor to confer. The door was not fully closed and I heard them muttering something about the Church of Satan, Anton La Vey and ‘that insufferable Mansfield woman’ and ‘all those groups which lost their way after the death of Crowley’. But what they were muttering was not so important to me. So Felton has a wife! And Felton is Charles Felton!

A mad thought strikes me and, while they are still on the other side of the door, I ease
How Boys Bathe in Finland
off the shelves and swiftly flick through its pages. Dark waters lap the shore of the sacrificial island. The water spirit, Vu-Murt, is always hungry for human sacrifice. Finnish waters are dangerous to young men, for the pools and rivers are infested with female water-spirits. The Swan of Tuonela floats on the infernal river as the guardian of the Lands of the Dead. And so on. The book turns out to be a commentary on certain esoteric aspects of the
Kalevala
, Finland’s national epic, and, in short, it is not what I thought it was at all.

‘She will pay. There is always a price,’ was the last thing Felton said (I suppose that should be Charles Felton, or Charles now), before he bade Bridget farewell and rejoined me in the room. Bridget’s complaints, or whatever they were, had apparently driven my problems out of his mind and all he said was that I should make more effort to understand why Maud and I had been brought together. Then he told me to hurry to get changed and descend to the Ritual Chamber.

Granville opened the session in the Ritual Chamber by announcing that Dolor Mundi, just returned from America, would be introducing us to a different sort of pathworking technique – a technique which Lodge members in the States were having some success with.

But then Granville continued,

‘Before that, the Lodge has some outstanding business to attend to. On the evening of Thursday, June 8th, a young woman called Sally Vernon disrupted a meeting in this room. It is necessary now that we not only complete the purification of the House and purge it of all defilement, but that we also offer propitiation to the spiritual presences who have been so grievously insulted.’

Granville looked grim, but there was no break in his voice. He was speaking like a robot. In retrospect, I think that one of the things that was going on was that I was being given a lesson in obedience. Granville was passing another test on the Path.

We started with an opening invocation in which we sought the blessing of the Headless One, ‘who is Light in the Underworld’. As the coloured smoke rose from the brazier, it struck me, not for the first time, that I had entered a different world from that inhabited by the men in grey suits. ‘The few and secret shall rule the many and known.’ The rituals of the Path are very beautiful. There is a kind of natural music in the mingling of muttered incantations, the crackle of burning herbs and hiss of silken robes. It was even so a thousand years ago – and a thousand years before that.

A dirty milk-bottle was produced and placed in the middle of the pentacle. A Lodge member had nicked it from Sally’s doorstep. The milk-bottle was there because it was something which had recently been touched by the object of the exorcism. It was joined by a photograph of Sally. (Where did the Lodge get that from?) The photograph was, of course necessary to provide an image which could act as a focus for our concentration. Granville and I were first to spit on Sally’s portrait. By the time everyone had had a go, she was practically invisible in a storm of spittle. Then we around the Pentacle combined our spiritual energies and summoned up half a dozen of the larvae one after another. As the presence of each was sensed, Granville chanted the refrain,

‘I entered in with woe; with mirth

I now go forth and with thanksgiving,

To do my pleasure on the earth

Among the legions of the living.’

Then Alice entered the pentacle and, taking the bottle in one hand and the soggy photograph in the other, she assumed the Death Posture. We are to understand that the larvae came crowding round her and that they sniffed the milk bottle and they studied the photograph, so that Sally’s image and smell become part of their confused dreams. The larvae will serve as sort of bloodhounds running ahead of the Lady Babalon.

We then moved on to the commencement of the raising of the Lady Babalon, in order that she may mount the Beast and ride off in search of her prey. This is, of course, a lengthier and more perilous business. It is an operation, which, though begun this evening, will take weeks or perhaps even months to complete. It is not lightly done.

‘There is no grace, there is no guilt. This is the Law. Do What Thou Wilt.’

Is it possible that this sort of thing actually works? Even now that I know about the potency of the Gaze, I still find the power of magic at a distance hard to believe in. Obviously, if I had really thought that Sally was going to die because I had spat on her photo, I would not have done it. The freaky thing is that Sally does believe in vibes and voodoo stuff. If she ever found out that she had been ritually cursed in this way, I think that she might indeed just curl up and die. However, that is not going to happen.

Since the exorcism ritual was concluded, Bridget took over the direction of the pathworking. We sat round the edge of the Ritual Chamber, while she explained how we were to engage in a performance of Shibboleth. In Shibboleth one is supposed to achieve catharsis by identifying with the person one most hates and acting out those of his or her characteristics that one most detests, for hatred is like a cancer that gnaws within one, unless one acts it out.

Bridget was first to step out into the centre of the Chamber. She was Jayne Mansfield. It was eerie. I have seen Jayne Mansfield in films and Bridget looked nothing whatsoever like her. Yet in an odd sort of way, Bridget did not just resemble the bulgy film star. She was her. Bridget drifted in and out of focus before my eyes. Sometimes, I saw a glittering-eyed, skinny, old woman. At other times, I was conscious only of a hyper-sexed bimbo parading her enormous breasts. Then ‘Jayne Mansfield’ was joined by Granville. Granville had chosen to parody his saintly, but much-detested father. One by one we all followed him onto the floor.

Up until the second I stood up and opened my mouth I did not know who I would be.

‘I am Maud Boleskine,’ I said.

I had spent so much time with her in the last couple of weeks that it was not difficult for me to get inside her skin. I was confused and embarrassed to be among so many strange people. Faced with Jayne Mansfield, I found myself stumbling and muttering. First I claimed to have seen all her films. Then, when pressed, I had to admit that I could not remember a single one that she had been in. The only film I came up with was one in which Shirley Eaton, not Jayne Mansfield, had been the star. I turned and plunged away and continued to nervously edge round the room, looking for people to talk to, attaching myself to the edges of other people’s conversations, saying things that were simultaneously nice and pointless and dull. I knew that I so desperately wanted to be the life and soul of the party. I kept telling wonky jokes and, since no one else would laugh at them, I went into wild peals of laughter all by myself. There was something about ‘Maud’ that made people nervously edge away.

Shibboleth was like a nightmare cocktail party. Apart from ‘Mansfield’, ‘Mother Theresa’ was the only famous person I met. Otherwise the room was full of nice people – solid, unassuming, well-meaning, clean-living, prim, outgoing, responsible. They were parents, brothers, teachers, employers and they were dull and ghastly. I loved it – and I loved being Maud, so eager to please, so desperate for love.

I was having a really good time, until I encountered Alice. I could not work out what role Alice had chosen at first. It was obviously a man. But who was this aloof, sly person, so fond of using pompously long words, yet so keen to pose as a hipster? It came as a horrible cold shock to realise that Alice was playing me. Not that I thought she was portraying me at all fairly. Her mimicry verged on the unrecognisable. No, it was the renewed shock of coming face to face with someone who hated me more than anyone else in the world. Her hatred was simultaneously mystifying and hurtful.