Satan Wants Me (43 page)

‘December 4th, but what – ’

Neither of us spoke for a long time. I just lay there trying to work all the consequences out. I tried but I could not imagine that I had ever been mountaineering in the Himalayas or practised homo-erotic sex magic in Tunisia. Had I ever really worn plus-fours? Inside my slender body was there a fat sorcerer trying to get out? It was no good. I just could not imagine it. I gave up trying and let Maud finish the story.

Everyone who joins the Black Book Lodge has their natal horoscope cast as a matter of course. Mine, however, caused intense excitement and when Laura, who had done the calculations, presented my birth-chart to Felton, he immediately asked for a meeting with the Master. There could not be much doubt about the matter. Not only had I been born in December 1947, which was when Aiwass had indicated that Crowley had assumed his latest incarnation, but the chart showed that my Sun was in Virgo and my Moon between Aquarius and Pisces. However, Crowley had been born under Cancer, while my birth sign was Sagittarius. Therefore there was some doubt and debate. Finally, it was agreed that, if I was indeed the one foretold, then I was fated to meet Maud and the Master thereupon decided to give that fate a push.

A few days later he treated Maud to lunch in Camden Town. Having told her about the circumstances of my arrival at the Lodge and about my presumed hidden identity, he continued by saying that there was almost nothing he would not do for her, if only she would agree to go out with this young man with the interesting horoscope. She refused. Maud was not prepared to let her body be used as a mere vehicle for the fulfilment of ancient prophecies. But then, when her father produced a photograph of me, she hesitated, as she thought I was actually quite nice looking – sexier than in my previous incarnation as Aleister Crowley anyway. So, in a Greek restaurant in Camden Town, Maud and her father made a Satanic pact. She would date me and take it from there. As I have already noted, the faked computer-dating was her idea. However, she told her father that she would not commit herself in advance to seeing me more than once. They would just have to see how it went. When Robert hinted to Maud that the Lodge might require her to surrender her virginity to me at an astrally favourable time, Maud had exploded in fury and almost called the whole thing off. What kind of girl did he think his daughter was? But of course, the point was that he did not think of Maud as a girl at all. They had to finish their noisy argument on the pavement outside the restaurant. The volume and vehemence of it was so considerable that a few passers-by attempted to join in, only to be baffled by the repeated references to Aiwass, ritual defloration and the Antichrist. The end of it was that Robert had to be content with what Maud was prepared to offer.

Maud, having finished her long, strange story clambered on to me and ran her fingers down my ribs,

‘I have been wanting to ask you for ages. Are you really Aleister Crowley? I mean, do you feel that you might be him?’

‘No, I don’t think I am. I’m just ordinary.’

She looked down lovingly on me.

‘I don’t care whether you are Crowley or not. I just want your body. I want you inside me.’

What further revelations will tomorrow bring?

Now I am writing this, lying in bed and waiting for Maud to return and for Sally to bring us breakfast. I believe that Maud is having Sally lick her feet while she sits on the lavatory. They both seem to enjoy that.

I think that there are quite a lot of problems with what I learned yesterday. When I was small, I used to entertain fantasies that, despite my outward appearance as a Cambridge schoolboy in short trousers, I was in fact a prince in exile. One day I should throw off my disguise and reveal myself as the true heir to the Kingdom – a bit like Prince Aragorn in
The Lord of the Rings
. Now I find that I may be Aleister Crowley in disguise – and so heavy is my disguise that even I cannot penetrate it. Well, I do not believe it.

And yet … and yet, it would explain one thing; the intense nostalgia I experience when I watch old newsreels or see old photos of the thirties and forties. How can I possibly feel nostalgia for a time before I was born? And why do some of the scenes and faces seem so very familiar to me? Moreover, there would be another, comforting aspect to discovering that I am a reincarnation and that is, just as I have always found it horrific to contemplate the prospect of my death and the world going on without me, so also I have found it no less horrific to contemplate the possibility of a world existing before I was born. I really mean horrific … the vertiginous prospect of all those millennia and billennia which happened before I was thought of. It might actually be comforting to think of myself as once having been Crowley and, before that, Cagliostro and, before that, a temple-priestess in Crete and, before that, maybe some crustacean trying to crawl out of the sea. One of the troubles I had with the Lodge’s exercises in thinking backwards was that I could not bring myself to think backwards to a time before I was conceived.

My meditation on this subject was interrupted by Maud coming back into the bedroom with a letter in her hand. It is from Dennis Wheatley! That was quick. Not only is there a letter. There is also a signed photograph of the famous author.

Dear Peter Keswick,

Thank you for your kind words about my novels. An author is nothing without his readers and his fans and, believe me, your letter is much appreciated. However, I note with concern that, if your letter is to be taken seriously, you have begun to dabble in both drugs and the occult. I cannot stress too strongly that those who do get involved in such things run the risk of encountering
serious dangers of a very real nature
. Additionally, I should hardly need to point out that the consumption of hashish or amphetamines without prescription is illegal in this country. After some thought, I have decided not to pass on your letter to the police, as I have decided that the rather odd activities you describe in your letter are the product of a lively imagination, rather than a true record of anything that has actually happened. Please do not feel tempted either to experiment with drugs or to take any steps at all on the Left-Hand Path. Those of my acquaintance who did so invariably came to a bad end. However, rather than end this missive on a sour note, thank you again for reading my books and telling me how much you have enjoyed them. My next novel is entitled
Unholy Crusade
. It is an exciting thriller with occult elements in it and it is published next month by Sidgwick and Jackson, price £1.

Yours truly,

Dennis Wheatley.

I was getting dressed and just zipping up my jeans, when Maud called out,

‘Stop that!’

‘Stop what?’

‘From now on, my darling, your flies stay open day and night. I want you readily available to me at all times.’

Well, it is a bit embarrassing, but Sally already knows what I have got down there and, as for Cosmic, nothing fazes him. When I showed him the photograph of Wheatley, he said that we might be able to use the image for magical purposes. If we burnt it, while making the right sort of invocations, we might be able to give the old fart a heart-attack. Then, when I told Cosmic that I might be a reincarnation of Crowley, he said that, yes, he had reckoned that it might be on the cards.

A little later, I asked Maud how it was possible to believe simultaneously in reincarnation and Hell. I mean if, for the sake of argument, I was an evil old sorcerer who kept getting reincarnated, then when would I ever meet with the Devil in Hell and experience the tortures of the damned? But Maud was preoccupied with checking that I still had a hard-on and it was Cosmic who replied,

‘Why this is Hell, nor are you out of it. Wherever we are is Hell, for Hell is limitless.’

Then Cosmic, who is really well-up in all the oriental religions, described the Buddhist concept of Hell and the Wheel of Samsara and quoted from
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
:

‘The mirror in which Yama seems to read your past is your own memory, and also his judgement is your own. It is you yourself who pronounce your own judgement, which in its turn determines your next rebirth.’

OK as far as it goes, I suppose. However I still have problems.

‘If there were any justice in the cosmos, then, when Crowley was next incarnated, surely he would be incarnated as a toad or something like that?’

‘I am afraid that Pa regards sociology students as no better than toads,’ said Maud, and she swiftly gave me a consolatory kiss, before going off to have her bath.

Talking to Cosmic this morning, I now understand that he has been sent by the Black Book Lodge to watch over us and make sure that no harm comes to Maud or me. The whole business of his attempt to get me to defect from the Lodge and his subsequent expulsion from Horapollo House were all bits of play-acting, in which they were testing me.

‘Right now you are a protected person. But if Maud ever ceases to love you, you will be dead meat, for you abused the Lodge’s trust.’

Cosmic did not say this in an abusive or threatening manner. It is just the way things are. He was pretty laid-back about it all.

After shooting the breeze for a bit, Cosmic went off on a gnome-hunting walk and I spent a couple of unsatisfactory hours reading
The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
. I wanted to see if any of my hypothetical past life would come back to me as I read about it. I don’t think it did really. Perhaps regression under hypnosis might work?

As for Sally, she put some clothes on and goofed off into town to do some shopping. This time she was lucky in that her trip into Farnham coincided with that of Jimmy Hendrix. Sally does not seem very well. I mean, apart from her Hendrix hallucination, she is sweating a lot, her skin is coming out in spots and she needs to be taken for frequent walks in the woods.

Towards the end of the morning a parcel arrived for Maud. That’s really freaky. Weeks with no post at all and now two items in one day! It is something which Maud chose from a mail-order catalogue – a shiny, black, leather cat-suit, just like the one Diana Rigg wears in
The Avengers
. I help zip Maud into it. Really the suit was made for someone less voluptuously curvy than Maud, but once she was securely zipped into it, she looked really fabulous – so fabulous that I had to unzip her straightaway and fuck her on the floor. Then she got me to zip her up again. When Cosmic and Sally returned from their respective expeditions they too were knocked out by Maud’s appearance. She is like the Queen of the Underworld and I am her consort. Is Maud having me on about her father and his associates believing that she is the Devil made flesh? But no, what she said was all so artless. But then again, if she actually were the Devil, would she be able to present herself as so innocently artless? Presumably. I really don’t know.

Cosmic got his gnome painted before lunch and then in the afternoon got down to burying it. I joined him in the garden and sat there trying to think what to write about nature, but I kept being put off by thoughts of Crowley and the Antichrist. I am sure that Maud is not on the pill. I was so distracted by Sally’s loony count-down routine yesterday that it never even occurred to me to ask. Anyway what is there to be said about nature? The sky is blue, leaves are green, birds flutter about. It all seems to work perfectly well without me having to write about it. I was about to take this line of thought a bit further when we were interrupted by a visit from the fuzz.

They were two constables, one male and one female. They asked if we would mind answering a few questions. The way they put that made it perfectly clear that they didn’t care whether we minded or not. We were going to answer their questions. Their manner was really heavy and they insisted that the interrogation had to be done inside the cottage. Once inside, they started looking all over the place. It was not a formal search, but they were certainly looking for something. Cosmic looked deathly white and, I don’t know for sure, but I guess I looked at least as pale. We both had the same thought – that this was a drugs bust and, if that was the case, then we were done for, since we had not troubled to hide our stash. It was just kept on one of the shelves of the tiny larder, together with Cosmic’s syringe. So had Wheatley shopped us after all? There was a tiny bit of me that was considering an alternative, equally disagreeable possibility, viz that their visit was something to do with a nation-wide crack-down on Satanism and I was steeling myself to answer difficult questions about ritual defloration, animal sacrifice and stuff like that.

It was clear that they found us a bit much – not at all like the yokels they were used to dealing with. Cosmic was wearing his Arlo Guthrie hat and a gipsy waistcoat. I was in jeans and a T-shirt, which was OK, except it was not until the fuzz had gone that I realised that my flies were undone and my penis was dangling out. We were soon joined by Maud and Sally. Maud was in her cat-suit and she was followed by Sally who crawled on all fours, naked except for the collar and little frilly apron. Cosmic swiftly threw a sheet over her body. The two constables looked at one another. It was impossible to tell what they were thinking.

As is the general rule with police interrogations, they would not say at first what they were after. They just kept asking questions. We had to give our names, occupations and state how long we had been in Farnham and so on.

At last the male constable came to the point,

‘This is by way of a warning visit. There have been a lot of thefts in the area recently and we thought we ought to warn you to be careful.’

I nodded dumbly.

‘There is fuck-all to steal here,’ said Cosmic.

‘Mind your language, sonny. No, what it is … is that the thieves are after one thing and one thing only.’

They looked at us, as if they expected us to guess what the thieves were after.

Genuinely perplexed, we looked back at them.

‘Money?’ ventured Sally.

They looked annoyed.

‘No, it’s not money. No, someone has been going around stealing garden-gnomes. You may smile, but it actually isn’t very funny. People are proud of their gardens in this part of Surrey and it is no joke to have some vandal come into their gardens and steal from them. The gnomes are quite expensive to replace too. If you had spent part of the morning comforting an old lady in tears you would not be smiling now.’