Satan Wants Me (31 page)

I just had to step out of character to ask why.

‘Why? I just hate you, that’s why,’ replied Alice. ‘I don’t have to have a reason. You just make my flesh creep.’ And, resuming her parody, ‘Rationality and causality were yesterday’s bag – just crazes which had their day in the nineteenth century. If you are not into non-causational, emotional lability, you are just not where it’s at, man. Intelligence is the most powerful aphrodisiac and most chicks really dig my brains …’

I would have liked to have turned away, but I felt trapped in my portrayal of ‘Maud’. If I was to stay true to my version of ‘Maud’, I had to cling to ‘Peter’ and hang on to his every word. I had to bat my eyelashes and interrupt from time to time to get ‘Peter’ to explain difficult things. So I stayed there for my verbal flagellation. Alice’s version was so madly exaggerated as to make me look seriously repulsive, but it was clear that this was how she actually saw me and she put all her heart into the impersonation. So I was having to ask myself how Maud, the real Maud, could ever have cared at all for the real Peter?

Pathworkings do not come any more gruesome than this. After it was all over, I came upstairs to write this all up, thereby tasting it again in all its nastiness. My participation in Shibboleth is supposed to have purged me of my hatred of Maud, but I do not think that things work like that and if, for example, you tell someone that you hate them, it does not mean you stop hating them, just because you have told them so. Hitler kept shouting that he hated Jews and he hated them until the day he died. And what is catharsis anyway?

It is late now. I am depressed and worried, but really too tired to think. Another dreary day at the playground tomorrow and Maud has a day off on Thursday, when I have promised to take her to the Zoo. Soon Laura will be here. She has promised to wear shiny leather boots tonight. After the Obscene Kiss, what?

There is a gap in the record since my awkward diary meeting with Felton and Bridget and my participation in that hideous game of Shibboleth. I am writing this by torch light in the middle of a wood, somewhere, I don’t actually know where. Sally is dancing around me and imploring me to close this little book and be finished with it forever. Yes, I had thought that when I left the Lodge I would be able to ditch all this diary-writing. But I now find that I am unable to say farewell to my
Doppelganger
. Indeed, the White-Night Scribe of Mysteries, I am madly driven to write all night. My writing hand, like a mutated breed of racing spider, runs across the diary’s pages, faster, ever faster. Blood and ink rage through me. I am burning up in life and faint with longing to fill all the blank pages that are before me. Speed, fierce and intoxicating, courses through mine and Sally’s blood. There’s methedrine to our madness.

But I suppose I better go back and fill in the gap in the record. Perhaps, when I have done so, I shall be better able to understand how me sitting in the middle of a dark wood (through which the right way remains obscure) can have caused the things which happened before this and how, in reverse causation, my present condition can have led to that confrontation with Felton and his wife two days ago now. Jeezus! I am confused.

As I have already noted, on the night of Tuesday June 20th, I sat up late writing my diary. I then sat up later yet, trying to get my thoughts in order, trying to decide what to do next. I came to no decision. On Wednesday morning when I went down to breakfast, I noticed that there was an odd atmosphere. Grieves was standing by the front door as if he was on guard. I sort of noticed this, but did not pay attention to it. As I ate my breakfast, I was thinking about last night and about the game of Shibboleth and what it must be like really to be Maud. Felton’s desire to see the children in the playground seemed so creepy. And I was trying to come to terms with what I had learned about Granville and Sally. I kept coming back to the image of those gaiters on Granville’s white legs.

But then after breakfast Felton said, ‘Well, Non Omnis Moriar, let’s be off then.’

And Bridget took me by the wrist and said, ‘Take me to the little children. I want to see them.’

‘We think that it is time for us to visit your school,’ Felton added.

‘Sure thing,’ I said. ‘No sweat. But I need my research files.’

I went upstairs and picked up my research files – and my red and black books, my cheque book and my address book. I was flustered and my hands were shaking. I couldn’t think what else to take, except my tooth brush which I put in my trouser pocket. I paused to kneel by the toilet with my head hanging over the basin, for I thought that I might throw up from sheer terror, but it was no use. Nothing came. Bridget and Felton were waiting for me downstairs. We walked down the hill. It felt like I was a prisoner being frog-marched to the gallows, with the prison governor on one side of me and the padre on the other. We climbed on the 78 bus which was supposed to take us close to St Joseph’s School, but then, as the bus was pulling away from the stop and beginning to accelerate, I leapt off the rear platform and started running, heading back past Horapollo House towards Swiss Cottage Underground Station. There seemed to be no pursuit and, of course, Charles and Bridget Felton were far too old to emulate my leap. Even so, waiting on the southbound platform at Swiss Cottage, I found myself sweating with fear. I kept looking round, fearing lest a Lodge member should have followed me into the station.

When I arrived at Sally’s place, I rang the bell and kept on ringing it. There was no answer, but I was out of my mind with fear and I kept ringing it for about fifteen minutes. In God’s name why did she not come to the door? Then I remembered that, of course, she was at work, but I still could not remember where. It could be any one of thirty theatres. But I could not wait at her door. The Lodge will have her address on their files. Sooner or later they are bound to come looking for us here. The overwhelming probability was that she would be coming in from the West End. She usually comes out at Notting Hill Gate tube station. Having worked this out, I hurried up Portobello Road and slipped into Abdullah’s Paradise Garden. I sat in the shadows with a glass of mint tea and watched the window and waited. If Sally was dressing for an actual performance, it would be a long wait, until maybe late in the evening. So I sat there taking stock. I’d had to leave most of my life behind at Horapollo House. But what was that? Changes of clothes, a fair number of sociology textbooks, some novels. The hardest things to part with are my LPs. They are going to be expensive to replace. But then I suppose that there are quite a few that I have outgrown or sucked dry of all emotional content, because of my habit of playing records again and again and again, until they mean nothing to me. I wondered what had happened to Cosmic when he was expelled from the Lodge. Was he still alive? Then those gaiters were on my mind again. The gaiters and the spittle-smeared photograph of Sally. She did not tell me about Granville and now I could not tell her about everything which happened on the previous day. I doubted if things could ever be as open and easy between us ever again.

Abdullah’s Paradise Garden has always been a good place to score and I was not surprised when I was approached by a dealer. He was dressed like a Tibetan sherpa and he seemed to be carrying a small pharmacy concealed in the heavy folds of his clothes. I could see that I was definitely going to need some chemical assistance to get me through the days and weeks to come. All the while that we were negotiating I kept my eyes on the window.

The dealer, noticing this, said,

‘It’s cool man. The fuzz busted us yesterday and they never do this place more than once a week.’

I nodded, but I kept watching the window. The dealer found this unnerving,

‘Wow, you’re really paranoid! What are you afraid of?

‘Satanists.’

‘Freeeeaky! Are they into drug busts?’

I think that the dealer thought he was dealing with a madman and he was about to break off negotiations, but I produced some money and ended up scoring four ampoules of methedrine, a couple of ampoules of amyl nitrate, half a dozen cubes of LSD, a tiny sachet of heroin and a couple of grams of dope. It was that dealer’s lucky day.

It was my lucky day too. Towards the end of the afternoon, Sally came walking past the cafe. I grabbed her and dragged her inside. Sally had been expecting something like this to happen. Even so, it took a while to sink in how much danger we are both in. I was adamant that it was not safe for her to go back to her flat, so, after some argument, she went to a phonebox and rang Patsy, a friend, who is also a theatrical dresser, though ‘resting’ that day. Patsy came straight round to Abdullah’s and Sally offered her job to Patsy. In exchange, she got Patsy to promise to get her things out of her room and store them for her. Sally sat there scribbling the great list of vital things in her life: toothbrush, Donovan records, raincoat, Red Indian poster, paperback of
Lord of the Rings
, dowsing amulet, teddy-bear, chillum, plastic bust of J.F.K., and the vibrator. That night we dossed down at the Arts Lab. Since I had taken Granville there a couple of weeks previously, it was a bit risky, but we could not think of anywhere else. They were showing old Eisenstein films all night and I fell asleep with the nightmare image of Ivan the Terrible stooped over me.

The next day which was Thursday, while Sally went off to collect some of her stuff from Patsy, I went round to Michael’s flat. That was really a bummer. I was expecting him to do something, though God knows what. Perhaps I was subliminally entertaining the hope that LSE maintained a ‘safe house’, for those of its sociological researchers whose lives were threatened by their research samples. However, all he could suggest was that I went to the police. But what could I tell the police? I have no evidence that the Black Book Lodge has done anything illegal. I am sure that they killed Julian, yet at the same time I am sure they did not murder him. They just told him to murder himself. Besides my own position as someone who has been participating in what were effectively black masses is none too clear. Michael just faffed around in a perfectly useless fashion. His main concern was that I had been able to come away with enough primary research data to enable me to complete my thesis. The possibility that the Lodge might not let me live long enough to finish my thesis did not apparently interest him and it seems that Talcott Parsons’s methodology offers no kind of protection against being hexed or killed by Satanists.

However, Michael did allow me to use his phone to talk to Dad. I was on the phone a long time, first explaining the new situation and the possible consequences and options and then I got on to describing to him how I had been faking accounts in my diary of arguments with him and other people. When I read from the diary my ludicrous and wholly fictitious argument with the minister at the funeral, he actually laughed. It is the first time in over a year that I have heard him laugh. I promised to get in touch again when I knew what the hell I was doing.

By pre-arrangement I met Sally in a cafe near Cosmic’s pad. After all, Cosmic and I should now be allies in exile from the Lodge. I wanted his advice, plus I wanted to know if and in what manner he had been hassled since his expulsion. First, of course, I would have to apologise for having written what I wrote about him in my diary, but at that stage I obviously could not have afforded to have had my cover blown. I had had to stick to the Lodge’s rules. Well, all this was irrelevant, because no one came to the door. As I kept on pointlessly ringing the bell, it came to me how much I needed him now. Then I thought that maybe he was dead, just like in that dream I had. He looked so pale and shifty when I last saw him lurking by the Lodge. Maybe an emissary of the Lodge had got to him and commanded him to commit suicide. Maybe they did not even need to do that. They might just think bad thoughts at him and he would lose his will to eat and he would starve to death at the foot of his cardboard pyramid. Death is Life’s Answer to the question “Why?” Then I thought that maybe the Lodge’s Adepts would go to the cemetery and resurrect Cosmic’s corpse and use it as a deathly bloodhound to hunt me down. Then I thought I must be going mad to be thinking such thoughts. This is London in the summer of 67, not England at the height of the witch-craze or Voodoo-ridden Haiti. Still, it seemed risky to linger and after ten minutes more of ringing the bell we hurried away. Since then the thought has occurred to me that maybe Cosmic is OK, but very paranoid. Maybe he was looking down on us from his window and not answering the door because he thought that I was an emissary from the Lodge.

For want of a better idea, we went on to Robert Drapers’s place. He has a tiny room in one of those little houses behind Stamford Street. Back in the 1870s Rimbaud and Verlaine smoked dope in Stamford Street and worked in a cardboard-box factory nearby. Through living in the same area, Robert hopes to acquire some of their
mana
, or
baraka
, or whatever. But, as Sally pointed out, he’s just as likely to catch the
mana
of the owner of the cardboard-box factory. Robert has a fuggy little room with a bed and just enough space for a record-player at the foot of the bed. Bert Jansch was playing. We crowded on to the bed, rolled a few joints and talked. I kept trying to get across the message that the Lodge was really dangerous and that no one should mix with it, but Robert was too high to take it seriously. He said that it sounded just like a novel and that he had always wanted to live in a novel. Apart from anything else, there would be more space in a novel than there was in his tiny room. I tried to get him to promise not to go near Horapollo House, but he said that I was just trying to hog all its wonderful magical powers to myself.

We had lunch downstairs in the shared kitchen. Robert belongs to the Cosmic school of chefs, so what we had was muesli, brussels sprouts and condensed milk, followed by Tizer to wash away the taste of the condensed milk. Robert was telling us about the Notting Hill Project, Rachmanism, the history of race riots in West London and stuff like that. Then Sally started talking about her dreams and how Daffy Duck has been warning her in her dreams that something pretty heavy was going to happen. Sally’s dreams are always in bright technicolour and they are entirely peopled by characters like Yogi Bear, Woody Woodpecker, Dylan the Rabbit and Tom and Jerry. Until a few months ago, when we had a conversation about dreaming, she had assumed that everyone had cartoon-film dreams, just like she did. When she has nightmares about the Lodge, it’s Goofy, Zebedee and Sweet-pea who emerge from the shadows and with low mutterings begin to invoke the Evil One.