Satan Wants Me (39 page)

This day started just as weirdly as the last. I awoke to discover that Sally had moved round in the bed and it was now Maud she was embracing. Seeing how Sally now completely ignored me, it hurt me to recognise the intensity of Sally’s passion for Maud. It was Maud who looked desirously at me, while she lazily stroked Sally’s hair. (‘We must do something about your lovely, golden hair.’) After a while, however, Maud wearied of Sally’s attentions and she ordered her out of bed to get the breakfast. Maud and I were cuddling one another and listening to the agreeable clink of cups and plates being put on a tray in the next room, when we heard Sally scream. The bedroom door swung open. Sally stood framed in the early morning sunlight, holding up an ominous trophy for our inspection. It was a black and silver garden-gnome clutching a fishing-rod. Sally had found it on the doorstep where the milk-bottle should have been.

Maud was at first unable to understand why Sally and I were quite so freaked out. I started out with a gabbled explanation about how Mr Cosmic believed that the plaster figures of gnomes, though degraded in their present-day functions, could still serve as the foci for the chthonic powers of the earth. According to
The Archidoxes of Magic
by the sixteenth-century alchemist, Paracelsus:

‘Under the earth do wander half-men, which possess all temporal things, which they want or are delighted with; they are Vulgarly called
Gnomi
, or Inhabiters of the Mountains: but by their proper name they are called
Sylphes
or
Pigmies
… ’

I was struggling to remember and explain Cosmic’s project for the liberation of garden gnomes, when I realised that I had started at the wrong place in all this. So I let Sally take over and explain how it was that we had both known Cosmic, how he had been a friend of ours, how he had joined the Black Book Lodge and kissed the hand of the Master at the same time as me, but how he had been expelled from the Lodge after I had denounced him in my diary.

There can hardly be any doubt that the black and silver garden-gnome is Cosmic’s calling-card. But what does it mean? Is he on the run from the Satanists too? If so, how did he find us? Alternatively, have the Satanists caught up with him and made him their zombie slave? Is the gnome on the doorstep a warning? A threat? A promise? A joke? Whatever may be the case, why does Cosmic not show himself to us? The feeling that he may be hiding on the edge of the woods and watching us is not a pleasant one. Sally wants us to wait until nightfall and then, having taken speed, walk all night and day until we reach Glastonbury. At Glastonbury we shall be under the protection of its good
mana
. But Maud and I have vetoed this, for there can be no hope of reaching Glastonbury without being intercepted.

For want of anything better to do, I took a kitchen knife and spent the first part of the morning cutting and shaping a wand. Then, when I had consecrated my makeshift wand, I drew a circle of protection around the cottage and its garden, and, after I had consulted my red notebook for the right words, I invoked the protection of the spiritual prince, Israfil. Now, on the one hand, I do not actually believe in any of this stuff. On the other hand, maybe the circle of protection will work, whether I believe in it or not. Sally, who watched me doing all this, was reminded of how the Duc de Richelieu makes a protective pentacle in the film of Dennis Wheatley’s novel,
The Devil Rides Out
. Then she had the bright idea that I should write to Dennis Wheatley, care of his publishers, and ask him for help and protection. That seemed reasonable. Writing this letter took most of the rest of the morning, as it was not an easy thing to draft and it took a lot of words to explain exactly how we had got into this mess: my enrolment with the Black Book Lodge, the Satanist’s use of me in their quest for a virgin, Cosmic’s expulsion from the Lodge, Julian’s death, our speedy walk to Farnham, Maud’s LSD vision of my mother, the appearance of Cosmic’s gnome on the doorstep. But, if anyone can help us, it should be Wheatley, for it is pretty clear from reading his books that he has had direct experience of what he is writing about.

Sally did us a fry-up for lunch. (Farnham’s shops do not run to macrobiotic food.) The night’s activities had left me a bit short of sleep and I dozed off on the lawn. I was asleep for hours and was only awoken by Sally shaking me.

‘Peter, wake up! The sun is over the yard-arm and we have still got enough for two more joints.’

Russ Conway, another of Maud’s favourites, was on the record-player. I stretched lazily and opened my eyes. Sally was bending over me to offer me the joint and when I looked at her, I screamed. She was bald and without any eyebrows or eyelashes.

‘Sally asked me to do it,’ said Maud calmly. ‘She told me that she did not want your eyes to linger on her more than was necessary.’

And Sally looked at me submissively as she offered me the joint again. My hands were shaking as I took it from her. Shaven bald and with no eyebrows or eyelashes, Sally looked half-human, half-reptile. I inhaled deeply, but when I tried to pass the joint back, Sally indicated that she did not want any more and that it was all mine – as was the second joint, which was already rolled and waiting for me. She left my side and went to sit beside Maud. She was helping Maud draw up some terribly complicated horoscope. They paid me no attention as they worked away at their calculations.

So I smoked alone, and, as I smoked, I felt myself growing increasingly paranoid. The world was slipping away from my grasp and I could no longer understand anything that was happening. After a while, I asked Maud if she still had the crucifix which I had given her just before Sally and I fled London.

Maud looked up from the astrological chart which she was drawing up under Sally’s advice.

‘Darling, it is the only thing you have ever given me,’ she said in wounded tones. ‘Of course I still have it. It’s in my jewel-box.’

So I went inside and rooted around until I found the jewel-box and the crucifix in it, together with a lock of my hair. (Maud has an amazing amount of jewellery.) Then I settled down again on the grass with the crucifix and the second joint and began to meditate on the mercy of Jesus Christ. The tiny silvered figure of the crucified Christ was attached to a cross of black wood which was pendant to a rosary. After a while, once the second joint was finished, I started to rotate the beads of the rosary through my hands while intoning a low-voiced mantra, ‘Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon me, a miserable sinner.’ But why, I kept thinking, should Jesus have mercy upon me? Particularly when I was not even very convinced that Jesus had ever existed? Even if Jesus did exist, what guarantee did I have that he was stronger and more powerful than the Devil? The Christians say that the mercy of Jesus will always prevail and that God is omnipotent, but they would say that wouldn’t they?

And how miserable was I? It was true that things seemed a bit perilous at the moment. On the other hand, going to bed with two women last night had been pretty good and the joint I had just finished smoking made me feel absurdly, if only briefly cheerful. Was it blasphemously disrespectful to pray to God while high on dope? Then I thought that, even if Christ does not exist and there is in fact no infinite mercy on offer, I have still lost nothing by praying to the void. It could even be therapeutic to do so. But then it occurred to me that, if Christ did exist and He was reading my thoughts as I prayed, He would not be pleased by such a calculating way of praying. So I might forfeit salvation by entertaining such foolish thoughts. So I applied myself once more to humble myself before the tiny figure on the cross. I was trying to dedicate myself to a virtuous life. I thought that when I got out of bed tomorrow I should begin my new life as a Christian. The alternative was a spiralling descent to damnation and torment. But is it ever possible to pray to God? Suppose what I think of as Jesus is really evil? No man can know for sure whether he worships God or the Devil. But that last thought surely came from the Devil …

The twilight came on as I struggled to concentrate on my Redeemer. The girls had finished casting the horoscope and gone inside. I do not know whether or not it was to mock me and my pious meditation, but ‘The Nun’s Chorus’ was being played again and again at top volume. Then Maud came out into the garden once more. She was naked.

‘Give that back to me, Peter. It is mine now,’ she said and she took the crucifix from my hand and hung it round her neck before turning back to the cottage. ‘Come to bed, my love,’ she called over her shoulder and, as I contemplated her shimmering white buttocks, the Jesus mantra died on my lips.

In bed Maud allowed herself to be caressed by Sally and by me. Again I tried to enter Maud, but this time she forestalled me with the words,

‘Not yet, darling. You only need a little patience and I promise you that the day after the day after tomorrow at half past four in the afternoon I shall be wholly yours at last. I swear to you that I long for it more than you do.’

‘The day after the day after tomorrow at half past four in the afternoon,’ I muttered doubtfully.

‘What do you think we have been working on this evening?’ asked Sally. ‘We have consulted the ephemerides and the day after the day after tomorrow in the afternoon is astrologically the best possible time for Maud to yield her virginity to you.’

It crossed my mind that this astrological rubbish might be some trick to delay sex, but the hungry desire on Maud’s face was unmistakable. She longed for it and for me. In the meantime, she actually urged Sally on me again, but now that Sally had lost her hair, I no longer found her at all attractive and so I turned my back upon her and Maud. As I composed myself to sleep, I commended my spirit to Jesus and Israfil, but without much hope in either – nor, for that matter, did I have much hope that I would sleep. Although I was mad with desire for Maud, I was beginning to realise that I was also terrified of her – and even afraid of what she might do next with those hairdresser’s scissors of hers. I was afraid too that, if I slept, I might not waken again and afraid that, if I died in my present unshriven state, I should be damned for all eternity. Then, as I continued to lie frozen in wakefulness, I thought that I could hear whistling which sounded as though it was coming from the woods. The tune seemed familiar, but it was only hours later, as I was at last beginning to doze off that I identified it as ‘Yesterday All My Troubles Seemed So Far Away’.

I dreamt of Pan running wild and whistling in the woods. I slept in late and I awoke to find myself alone in bed. Outside in the garden Maud was doing her karate exercises. Only this time she was using Sally for target practice. She attacked Sally with reverse punches, slapping blocks and roundhouse kicks. However, she was careful to pull her punches, so that, at the end of it all, Sally was only lightly bruised. Sally, for her part, made only perfunctory attempts to defend herself.

I watched for a while and then went inside and fixed myself breakfast. I noticed that a second gnome had joined the first on the kitchen table. Soon after I had started on my cornflakes, it began to rain and Maud rushed in and gave me a big, wet, sweaty hug and, as she did so, I realised that it was entirely by my own free will that I was damned, for I prefer Maud’s body to the mercy of Jesus Christ. This was a pretty freaky thought to be having while eating cornflakes.

As for the second gnome, Sally had found it on the doorstep and once again our milk had been nicked. Setting aside any possible chthonic or Satanic connotations, what this meant was that we were running out of milk. Also the letter to Dennis Wheatley needed posting, as did some mail-order form which Maud had filled in. So it was agreed that Sally should go into town again. Sally tied one of Maud’s silk scarves into a sort of turban to disguise her baldness and borrowed an umbrella, for what had begun as drizzle had turned torrential.

I have, provisionally at least, abandoned my PhD and the morning passed slowly. I have nothing to do, except write in this diary of mine. Thinking about Wednesday’s blast on amyl nitrite, it is not just the ultimate nature of reality that is too subtle to be put down in a notebook.
Everything
is too subtle to be put into a notebook. The looks that pass between Sally and Maud … my vague sense of where Maud is taking me … the precise smell of late summer … None of these things can be captured on paper. Reality is not a sequence of events, not a series of verbs acted out by Maud, Sally and me. Reality is a continuum of evanescent sensations for which I can find no words at all. How things are just the way they are – the spontaneity of falling rain, the suchness of ordinary objects, the passing away of everything and the faint hint of something that lies behind all these transient sensations – I can point to these things with my mind, but there is no way that they can be trapped on paper. In my diary I can write about everything except reality.

As for the story I
can
tell – the one I am writing in my diary – it strikes me that maybe it could form the basis for a really good novel. Maybe a literary artist like Dennis Wheatley can use our story in one of his books. Of course he would have to tart it up and have us speak more eloquently. If I am going to be the hero, I will need more than an apprentice’s knowledge of occultism. I ought to be handy with my fists, an expert on fine wines and a driver of fast sports-cars. Also, the story as it is at the moment lacks a properly impressive Wheatley-style villain. We ought to be on the run from a half-Jewish mulatto with yellowing teeth and a withered hand who goes under the name of the Comte de Sabarthes and who smokes Havana cigars in an ivory cigar-holder.

It is lunch-time, Sally has not reappeared and I am getting worried. Strange things are happening.

Hours passed. The sun went down over the yard-arm and there was still no Sally. It was dark when she reappeared. She was not alone.

‘I saw Brian Epstein in town!’ she announced.