Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature,
and make them fighting-drunk on bogey tales.
– Aleister Crowley
B reathe, Aleister. Breathe.
One more hour to go.
War was over, and I was at retirement age. Blessed Violet was at school in Cambridge, while thriving in mischief and majoring in thumping. My magnificently dubious lass would soon take a central and pivotal part in my life. My best pal, Winston, lost his election in early July of that year to a landslide, and so I decided to eff awff too before I was pushed.
I intended to sit down and write the second part of Hag. Mandrake Press had published the first two volumes under the title of The Spirit of Solitude an age ago in 1929.
I had received an invigorating reminder of my true artistic calling, over and above espionage and nudging righteousness to victory in wars, in the Occult Review that very week. A man of the church, Reverend Frederick Henry Amphlett Micklewright, had written a six-page feature on me called Aleister Crowley, Poet and Occultist.
It is not always the case that the poems of occultists are essential to an understanding of their work. But Aleister Crowley is fundamentally an artist. He is a creative personality, expressing his individuality in terms of rhythm. His sense of the rhythmic, which ultimately implies the sense of a fundamental beauty, is aptly expressed whether in prose or in verse; his art is a necessary entrance to an understanding of his occultism.
I had decided as a very young man that I would extract fuel from my wise admirers, as I would in equal measure from the seethings of my detractors. I would take great pleasure in having confounded the buffoon, as well as having annoyed the grim of spirit. Joy might be found in all of these reactions. It always so happened that those whom I pleased were precisely those I would have wanted to appreciate my work. And similarly, those who disliked my output were exactly, and to a man, the ones whom I had wanted to displease. Perhaps this is one of my greatest achievements, to divide so accurately while creating one superior mob that mankind should strive to save, while in that other field, a squadron of arses to engulf in flames.
My plan had been to have six volumes in total, but Mandrake went bust shortly after the Crash. Winston wanted me to go to his own publisher. I could have exposed John Bull and the Sunday Express as the most libellous scandal merchants, and cleared the name of this Pimpernel. I would have done so too, had that knock on the door at Boleskine never happened. It was one of those supremely murky days by the loch, barely able to see a hundred feet out to water. The rain had not stopped all day, nor did it appear that it ever would. Just as an ounce of cocaine and shutting up had once forced Frog and me into a forced state of creativity in that very same spot, then the similarly robust constraints of weather, exhaustion from the war, and relief to be free, allowed one to sit back in one’s armchair, stare at the lake and appreciate the most simple of pleasures. Such was the feeling of contentment and a true sense of achievement that I was prompted to pull myself upright in order to walk to the soggy gardens in my untied dressing gown and my bare feet, while holding a very large and lit reefer. I opened the vast door of the southern arch, out to the lake and stood underneath its shelter, and put my feet into the mud. I smoked the rest of the hashish, and felt the effects ameliorate my spirit in all regards. I continued to experience this euphoria uniformly without any faltering sensation. The roach became soggy in my mouth as I stepped out into the torrents from above. There was a squelch underfoot on the lawns, and I took care not to slip on my backside as I tackled the low-gradient slope down to the water’s edge. Somewhere across there, Urquhart Castle maintained her poise, as she had for centuries.
I was now very high. I thought of how much I missed Leah. Long gone were the days when we were able to enjoy the intensity of a tantric separation from one another. I thought of how we would not see each other – nor manhandle ourselves in private – for three months or so, if, say, I was on a mission overseas. These self-imposed conditions were strict, and just like those that dear Frog and I had once imposed to write and paint prodigiously there at Boleskine. But instead of those wayward powders in those hip-high Ottoman vases, hashish had helped Leah and me meditate and practise yoga from a grand distance apart. Even at my age (I was soon to be seventy), to deny oneself could still spark the brain, be its very own hallucinogen. If I were to abstain, I would see melting colours after the ten-day period as if on a mediocre acid trip. And in the spirit of the Rasta man whose dreadlocks become clean after six weeks without a wash, then so the sexual abstainer may also break on through to a higher consciousness. Prodigious smoking of pacific weed aids both processes equally by mauling each and every cell to attain the elevated spiritual plane.
These were the doped-up thoughts that bashed around my mind as I sat down into a lotus pose in the mud, my hands within reach of the minute grey breakers, frothing lightly and at very close quarters. It was hardly the bow’s mast on that boat from Ceylon in the last days of that tinged century or on the Duchess of Cumbria mid-ocean, but there was a hint of it as I began to think how nice, even now, it would be to bend my Monster over and spank her; our faces in the storm. I relished the lapping of the water, and the rain dripping from my happy brow. The rolled hashish soaked and fell to the ground.
We had trained ourselves quite adequately in astral projection, and it was truly surprising for this old cynic to discover how well we were to achieve this glorious feat without the use of drugs. That is, if one does not count the slightest drop of ether as a true aid. Hashish was equally as effective and yet not really considered a major narcotic either.
I sensed a presence in my meditation that came to me, like Rasputin had in the Urals and by that frothing cesspool in Sicily, but without the stench. It was not in my immediate vicinity. Then I heard the rhythm of a fist on the front door on the other side of the house, a fist that seemed to wish urgently to come in from the storm.
I rose, careful to keep my balance. I walked around the house, towards the front. Two tall-ish, well-dressed men stood there, an elderly man and a younger one, it seemed. The younger fellow wore a deerstalker on his head and he looked towards the earth, rain cascading from his hat. The elderly chap, swarthy in appearance, a youthfulness and engaging honesty to him, looked straight ahead at me as I trudged around the side of the old place with my dressing gown open and mud up to my ankles. I noticed the raggedy dog collar around his neck, as he skilfully avoided glancing down at the exposed honesty below.
The elder chap turned on his heel and walked towards me, leaving his friend in an almost meditative state himself. I calculated that they must have walked the eight miles and a quarter from the nearest station, the poor souls. Not everyone is blessed with an adoration of the rain.
He came close to me and stopped, looking at me with a revered intensity. This continued for several seconds, while I waited for him to reveal his intention or his identity. Were they lost? I would gladly invite them in. I made an attempt finally to cover my groin with my dressing gown.
‘You are Aleister Crowley,’ he told me. And he then remained silent.
‘Yes, I am. And I may be the world’s greatest magician but I need some facts to go on as to who you are.’
‘All in good time.’
He looked up at the skies and opened his mouth to catch some rainwater. And he laughed loudly.
‘I am sorry to disturb you. We have travelled a long way to see you,’ he said.
‘Not at all, my friend. Come,’ and I led him back to the door, which I opened and gestured them over the threshold.
I presumed them to be acolytes, for they were often known to turn up at odd times, or even to answer the author’s note in several of my books that encouraged them to communicate with me. I found it always an enthralling encounter when it happened. These were some of those people I mentioned just earlier, whom I was delighted to have pleased with my canon.
The young man said, ‘We are already soaked to the bone, it is not an unpleasant sensation now. May we sit by the lake, please?’
As he said this, he lifted his head to look at me.
‘I know who you are!’
This may have taken some time for me to say.
There was no mistaking Robbie’s dominant but petite and engaging features. I saw myself in there too. Each detail was part her and part me.
Equally as slowly, he replied, ‘My name is Edward Crowley.’
And yes, it indeed rhymed with holy.
He too spoke the precise same inflection of English with the slightest Germanic clip as the elder gentleman.
‘This man has been my father for almost twenty-seven years. This is Zealand, the army chaplain who saw my birth and my mother’s death.’
I babbled quite involuntarily under my breath from the Book of Revelations. I did not mean to, but I know in that moment how my own father must have seen me.
‘I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as if it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire.’
I looked up and fixed my stare on him.
‘Oh Christ. I never knew you that you lived. I am so sorry. You are your mother’s son. She was the love of my life.’
These were not ordered thoughts.
I buckled, and crashed onto my backside in a quite unmanly and ungodly fashion. The stuff I had smoked smacked me in the centre of my brain, and the blood rushed from my face. I dropped my face onto my knees and I then crashed back onto my elbows, all in some visceral attempt to compute this. My nethers exposed themselves again, and I was swifter to cover them this time, as I then told myself of the known facts.
I knew his birthday already. He must have been taken from her guts as she died. He had survived all THAT. He was a stubborn and strong boy, as pride swept over where remorse had held ground. He must know that I did not know of him. This was bound to help our union. They both helped me up, seemingly concerned about my health, and rightly presumed that I was in shock and unstable in bare feet on a muddy slope, but unaware that I was really very high, a state that then vaulted my confusion into true bliss.
I held out my arms to him. What else could one do? Our son stepped forward with a manly grace and an elegance that again had both his mother’s and father’s thumbprint, but surely more of hers.
We met as equals, arms at an angle of twenty minutes to two of the clock that allowed for one of his to dominate and one of mine to. It also seemed right. It seemed well-measured and appropriate.
I sobbed, ‘Our boy, our boy. Our darling boy.’
I believed that the rain on my face masked at least some of the torrents of my own droplets, though there was to be no shame in weeping here and now.
The elder man walked slightly away from us, and seemed to observe the lake quite politely, while carrying the shape and shuffled gait of a chap whose magnum opus had just been completed. Mine would have to wait yet again. Not only would this development put the next immediate volumes of Hag on hold, but any thought of revealing myself as the Pimpernel would now need further consideration. I could not compute why or how the arrival of these strangers impacted on all of that, but I felt that to free myself from pernicious name-calling became once again of zero consequence. I was holding our son, our boy, a man, of whose existence ten minutes ago I did not even know. Glorious confusion and rapture reigned. The empty-headedness I felt was a proximity to the Godhead, a blissful inability to think as a transcendent human being. I had neared this in narcotic, meditative, yogic and tantric highs, but never with this precision and virtue. I held the feeling as I clenched our son, and this god, this Beast, resolved to never let this feeling of ecstasy escape.
That night, I smoked much more hashish, and dreamed of him as a boy. In my dream, I bade farewell to him as I left on the boat train to climb Everest and K2 in the most perilous season. He was a lad of six, and he wept in a browned meadow, as I said, ‘Chin up, my boy. I shall see you in the spring.’ When I awoke, I recalled to the word the letter108 I had penned to him in my mind and in the night as I slept. I immediately walked to my bureau and transcribed the whole thing. There was much of my father in my words, as I felt compelled to arm him with my soul, should I not return. The words had been those of a soldier going to the trenches, leaving his confused lad. I would never desert my family again. I would draw them close as a seamstress pulls on the thread to knit and bind, wrapping the cotton a dozen times around the stitch, before checking its tension, pleased with her work. I resolved to be now a family man. If I worked for England or for a revolution, it would be from the comfort of my dotage with my loved ones close. It was indeed time to ebb, to recede to the idyllic and the pastoral.
Taken from his own kind, Mowgli was raised as a cub amid the magical benevolence of the wolves. There would be snakes to avoid, as well as the bayonet claws of perilous killer tigers that put the bowels of almost all in the jungle on edge. He found life as tough as every other creature in that world, but the curious outsider, a survivor against the most unreasonable odds, was protected by a fearsome love among many brothers and sisters. One day, there was talk among the elders of his returning to his own kind. One day.
Zealand knew some German from his wandering childhood with the gypsies. He was a quick learner too, as the widows of the town of Halle109 took him to their loving breasts, generously teaching him more than grammar, prepositions and the very specific Prussian word order. They enjoyed precision and efficiency. They were good like that, and the utter revulsion of the war changed the perspectives of many a religious man, now simply keen to bask in a woman’s embrace. This he did with several of them, all community-minded and more than happy to share him. Zealand had heard young boys and tough bastards scream for their mothers with their dying breaths, so he felt it only right to do his polite best to bridge some unbridgeable and unendingly sad void on their behalves.
The perilously weak boy grew, and shook off those rudimentary ailments of a premature baby with a remarkable robustness. He walked by six months, was writing by the age of three, reading shortly afterwards and addicted to the cinema by the age of seven. He possessed a mild manner, yet showed a spiky determination were one to scratch his serene surface. He suffered from the familial girthy neck, rotund and bloated ankles and chesty curvature.
Zealand spoke to him of his mother, with whom he had spoken on her deathbed. The lad knew of her towering courage, intrigue and mischief from an early age. The chaplain knew of the antics of his father, and many of these elements were filtered by him. It is one thing fostering a violently perverse public image as a Satanist and a black magician to save one’s country and provoke fascists for decades, it is another thing altogether when that whole sham of a façade keeps one’s own son across a sea, never truly knowing if it were better to step forward and speak. I had done this to myself, but had I have known, well then, everything might have been different. I was quite capable of being a good father and a prancing Pimpernel of vicious intent. If only I had fucking known.
He would have been exposed to no peril from me, his father. For him, the real and present danger would come in the second war, for there was a disease of the mind far more concerning to all who neared it; far more pernicious than cocking around with grubby-ish and leverageable magick.
And when that horror rose, Zealand and Edward were once again encouraged to wanderlust. This time they were pushed to leave not only by a general viciousness and a sweeping fascism, but also, as the son of a gypsy, Edward had been presented with an order to appear at 3.20 p.m. on the following Tuesday (in the same hospital that had allowed him to flourish as a small boy in short trousers). According to the paperwork, he was to be checked for head lice, but was actually, so the nurses said, booked in for his sterilisation. His father had a similar appointment at 4.30 p.m. They packed an almost comically small case between them, embraced several widows and left in the night three days before their expected appearance. The young man, Edward Crowley carried also a chess set, for this was his true passion.
They were both tall chaps of marginally over six feet, and lean-jawed from the austere years. Edward seemed to have mimicked several of Zealand’s characteristics, like his smooth and engaging gait and the way he lifted his shirt to pick at his belly button when he felt relaxed. They chuckled a lot in each other’s company, sometimes without muttering a word, such was their apparent telepathy. It was not unusual for them to hold hands in the most inoffensive, innocent and adoring of fashions.
It was May of 1938, and again the path of least resistance meant they had made it to the Czech borders on a motorbike, given to them by a widow as a final gift of benevolence and once the property of a master baker, father of fifteen and high-jump champion who had perished in the Battle of the Marne. This was only five months before that same Sudetenland would be overrun by Nazis. The journey was still a tricky one. They were fortunate that their schedulas did not indicate the precise minority status of gypsy, tinker or other undesirable. The papers were not stamped with a Star of David, and they both wore donated wedding bands in case they were perceived as homosexuals. They were both sure to urinate quite boldly at the border crossing, in full view of the guards, a gesture that, in itself, would have hinted at the presence of a foreskin. If the guards had cared to glance, they would indeed have seen two of them. Edward might quite reasonably have been within his rights to announce that his birth father was gallivanting with the Führer, but then that may have also complicated things quite nastily. The guard, of course, wanted to know the reason for the journey.
‘Mein Sohn spielt in einer Schach-Herausforderung gegen den Großmeister, Achilles Frydman in Venedig.’110
‘Wirklich! Der Jude! Gut, du musst ihn für Deutschland schlagen.’111
Zealand and Edward were unsure whether the ensuing challenge for a game from the captain came as a test to corroborate their alibi or whether the men on the border were supremely bored, or both, but they threw forward their best player, a fresh-faced, barely pubescent boy, who seemed so young that he should have been cycling and diving naked into warm lakes with sound school chums. He was, however, a formidable opponent, but soon beaten by Edward with a close-ish discomfort, considering that defeat might have had them both shot.
‘Das beste von fünf Spielen?’112
Edward Crowley played those games, and he even did so blindfolded. The victories came more easily than they had in the first game. He was relaxed now, for the threat of an immediate bullet was reduced. There was a sage method to his madness, for at least if he lost while blindfolded and his back to the board (just like in the Waldorf by Central Park between the imposter Svareff and me), there would have been a reasonable excuse. Of course, he won. And then audaciously suggested they play the best of nine. The soldiers lined up to play, and all were vanquished.113 Edward was plied with a rough moonshine, but this just seemed to facilitate victory upon victory. Zealand took some grog out of politeness.
They woke up on scrubland, yards from the border crossing with several thousand marks (worth less than bugger all) shoved in the boy’s top pocket, and to the sight of some young lads filling the bike with gasoline. They were brought icy water from a nearby stream, as well as putrid and gritty coffee and magnificent bratwurst. They sat around with the soldiers, joked about the run of forty-three games unbeaten, and then slipped off as soon as it appeared to be a comfortable auf wiedersehen. They did not speak until they were twenty miles out of sight.
In Edward’s inner top pocket was the single possession that they had guarded together for nineteen and a half years. It would remain close to the boy’s heart throughout their journey that would bring them to Loch Ness seven years later. It was the letter from a dying mother to her child (written with the almost absolute certainty that that foetus would rot in French dirt) and one to the love of her life, a burgeoning Pimpernel, who would crumple when he would one day absorb the impact of its contents.
It is quite reasonable to think that either Zealand or Edward may have destroyed the letter, once they knew that I was now being regularly photographed with high-ranking SS and Gestapo114 officials, and even with Göring, Goebbels, Speer, Hess, Hühnerbein and Adolf Hitler himself. Whenever Zealand and Edward had considered my current acquaintances, they each time came back to Roberta’s sound sense of judgement, and her own status of agent provocateuse behind enemy lines, that the gypsy priest had himself witnessed. They lived on the prayer that I was precisely who I ended up being, a renegade of the most remarkable and dangerous mischief in the closest inner ring of Nazism. Such a keen and accurate sense of character, from afar and with minimal clues, well, this thrills me to the core to this day.
The pair rode on through Czechoslovakia, into Hungary and to the Dalmatian coast. It was slow going on the old bike, but when faced with the alternative of a forced sterilisation and then perhaps a concentration camp, the men were euphoric and free. They took a fishing boat from the magical citadel of Rovinj in Croatia, and set to sea aiming at Rimini on the Adriatic coast of Eastern Italy. From there, the plan was to head to Tunis. They had read one of my books, seen on the dustjacket that I had written it in North Africa, and hoped I was still there. They intended to skirt past Sicily. Perhaps they might find me there too or, at least, validate their wishes that I was the man they had wanted me to be. One might question the wisdom of entering another fascist country, but they planned to remain less than one week, their papers were in order, and there was no war on yet.
All was indeed going to plan until they landed in Italy, where twenty-year-old Wanted posters115 of a chap by the name of Crowley with an uncanny resemblance to the youth with the same name – as well as quite appalling artist impressions of Rasputin – were in railway stations, town halls and ports. The busybody official on a small desk in Rimini, clearly bored out of his skull and spotting an opportunity for a promotion, pulled Edward to one side and fetched the scabby old photograph of me, taken on Cefalù, looking imposing and, even in the picture, a threat to Il Duce.
The men were both held in a cell in Rimini until a thoroughly shoddy and unmotivated native with a camera arrived and took several mug shots of them both. An equally unprofessional police captain had two young carabinieri search the small suitcase and all of their pockets for the proof they really needed, presumably false beards, massive crucifixes and truly stinky robes, the kind worn by someone attempting to impersonate a dead Russian holy man. The silly bastards didn’t even find the letters from Roberta. Another suited chap entered from time to time and spoke in what appeared to be Russian or Romanian in an attempt to engage Zealand and Edward for some unknown reason.
The following day they were charged with sedition in front of a kangaroo court and with no legal representation. They were found guilty within five minutes, cuffed and thrown in a van. They were driven eighty miles to Bologna, where they served seven years in Casa Circondariale, a penitentiary of appalling standards of cleanliness, space and thuggery, but where the food remained remarkably wholesome and plentiful. They were permitted to keep their chess set and Zealand’s Bible. Both stood them in good stead, as the elder fellow gave absolution to sodomites, fellaters and even guilt-ridden self-stimulators, while Edward spent days blindfolded barking coordinates, first in English and German and then in Italian, to stun the inmates with his party trick.
Had Mussolini become more brazen with two decades of power? For, if he had known the identity of the prisoner, the names of Satan and Aleister Crowley were perhaps not so much of a threat anymore? Such is the dizzying effect of power. I could only presume in the maelstrom of combat, he knew fuck all about my boy. In my eyes, he would always remain an unmitigated coward regardless.
Zealand and Edward were in there until the American 5th Army, the British Eighth Army and the Polish II Corps spanked the 26th Panzer Division in the fortnight-long Battle of Bologna in April 1945. It was the Poles who captured the jail and liberated the poor bastards therein. The pair left with their Bible, the chess set and a supremely healthy wedge of cash won – and concealed – over seven years of chess. They slipped south-west to Rome to sit out the war until the inevitable ceasefire. It would, however, all be over by the time they reached the city limits in the back of a farm truck. Then it would be on to their next stop, Dulwich. Or, perhaps, Cambridge. Or even a dignified spot of majestic loneliness by Loch Ness.
When I found out what that flouncing cunt had done to our boy, I even pondered forgetting any consideration of retirement. He had confined him. He had locked up our boy. Our son. For years.
Upon receipt of a pair of letters from me, Dandylyon, Prudence and Winston came to visit us (Violet, Edward, Zealand, Frog and me) at Boleskine. It was the first day of September 1945. It was six years to the day since Poland had been invaded. Dandylyon and Prudence had barely aged, but spoke rarely, as if telepathy between us all was now adequate. They moved slowly, deliberately, relied on occasional glances and half-smiles, and held hands with each other and with me. It was an ecstatic state. Prudence looked as if she could still charm a man or boy.
As we elders (that is, all minus my children and Frog) sat by the back lawns on comfortable chairs, I told them that I had read of the details of how Mussolini had been executed in Mezzegra on the shores of Lake Como three days after our boy had been liberated. Had I been able to administer some slow spiritual torture and that bullet myself, perhaps I would have extinguished that lustful desire for revenge, but it seemed that some fortunate partisan peasant beat me to it and, according to the confused and vague-ish reports, shot and killed Benito. They all shut up and let me ramble.
‘I must tell you all. And I fear the words like I have feared nothing – not even fucking Nazis – since school. The bald and blatant truth is that I am now a tired old man. I am too well known now in Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Rome, Munich, Berlin and Moscow to be of any real use any more, and there are hundreds still lurking out there who would slit my throat as I walked for a pint of milk and a paper.’
The words I dreaded were, ‘I am done, my friends. Finished.’
They all remained silent. Winston stood, chuckled briefly and then shut up again, as he shuffled, rotund and elderly himself.
‘But what will you do, old boy?’
He looked out across the waters, squinting to see Urquhart.
‘Oh, I don’t really know. Maybe I am going to sit down to write now in Cambridge and here. A lot has happened since Hag. And I want to spend time with my children. Perhaps we shall have term-times in Cambridge and holidays here.’
Winston seemed delighted with the plan, as we toasted our victory with newly lit hashish.
‘Cheers,’ all round.
Winston sat back, puffed on the spicy fag, and appeared to struggle to choose his words. ‘If you write your memoirs, you might need to keep your trap shut on a lot of stuff.’
‘Ha ha ha! Do you mean the Russians? Do you mean Grigori?’
‘Yes, that is precisely, whom I mean. The Russians. Grigori. And, I am afraid, much, much more. You could disappear for a while. Go to the mountains, all of you,’ Churchill said.
‘Perhaps we shall. Perhaps let the buggers think that I have finally died,’ I said, mocking my enemies, myself and the path I had chosen.
‘Well, perhaps it is finally time for Shangri-La.’
‘Leah should be most pleased,’ said Prudence.
‘Oh fuck. Yes, Leah.’
I knew immediately that this was the perfect idea. Of course it was.
‘My Monster. My sweet, forgotten Monster.’
We decided that it would be a quite lovely idea if I did indeed fake my death. And if I could not fully and for now reveal the Pimpernel, then at least I could put my family first for a while. For once. This meant removing myself from all circulation in the near future. Perhaps it was time to resurrect Count Svareff, a chap who, if seen around Dulwich or St James, only bore a passing resemblance to the wicked man from the newspapers. A broad hat, a cape and a face for a foggy night should offer enough latitude for doubt and gossip.
That night, as we picnicked by the loch, Winston Churchill took on the role of the magic genie and granted me three wishes.
1. His own publisher would take Hag II. He had just spoken with London on the telephone. Terms as I decreed, though, he insisted, no mention of the Pimpernel.
2. I could take retirement in Shangri-La, as a demigod and halfway to heaven, and we could leave as soon as the death business was looked after. Violet, Frog, Zealand and Edward were, of course, welcome.
3. And he had certainly saved the best until last. The Fat Head Il Duce, Benito Mussolini was still alive, and Churchill had him imprisoned. He was all mine, and a thank-you gift for decades of service from the King of England and the British Empire.
And so, I now learned some new truths. Here I hold one of Winston’s letters to Benito from 1940. Churchill had negotiated with the coward before and then in the early days of the war. There was a cunning and far-sighted madness to his method.
For when thousands wanted to murder him in 1945, Il Duce had thought it infinitely safer to be placed in Winston’s hands were Italy to fall. He had surrendered to an English officer on the sands of Como, in order to prevent a lynching from his compatriots. Winston was a good man, but not a fool.116
Oh! what joy!
Benito was mine! He was, at that very moment, being transferred to his new home in a Sicilian abbey. For safekeeping.
Meanwhile, the plan for my demise was precise and measured. Of course it was.
In June of 1946, I took rooms in a retirement home, Netherwood House in Hastings, that town by the sea whose battle would define these islands for a thousand years and likely more. It was suitably comfortable, as one, like the bank robber who avoids the immediate purchase of diamonds and fast cars, did not want to appear too extravagant. I feigned minor illnesses and the odd fall to make my demise seem plausible. I behaved myself and played the old eccentric to perfection. I practised yoga, read prodigiously and painted signs to hang around the place to keep me busy.
Guests are requested not to tease the Ghosts.
Guests are requested to be as quiet as possible while dying of fright.
Breakfast will be served at 9 a.m. to the survivors of the Night.
The Hastings Borough Cemetery is five minutes’ walk away (ten minutes if carrying a corpse), but it is only one minute as the ghost flies.
Guests are requested not to dig the graves on lawns, but to make full use of newly filled graves under trees.
Guests are requested not to remove corpses from graves or to cut down bodies from trees.
The office has a certain amount of used clothing for sale, the property of guests who have no longer any use for earthly raiment.
The young girls chuckled at me and the saucy old matrons blushed at me and my mischief (crikey! if only they knew), and I had mauve thoughts of them all.
My death was a formality to fake. Sir Winston Churchill’s own doctor signed the death certificate on December the first, 1947 and allowed for heavy weights in the coffin in my absence.
Dandylyon and Churchill’s officialdom looked after the bureaucracy, while, for the optics of laying in wake, I was quite thrilled to try tetrodotoxin, the infamous Haitian zombie drug mixed with Datura stramonium, known also as jimsonweed or Devil’s snare of the nightshade family.117 This would put me to sleep and appear to stop my heart, as I astral projected and lived my seventy-two years again. (Oh Father, I am sorry I wept when I saw you. I have been so much stronger than that, I promise! My darling daughters! Oh Robbie, you would tingle with joy at our boy! Oh Yeats, I have not finished with you yet! Look behind you, Benito! Fuck off, Adolf!)
Chronic bronchitis with pleurisy is quite easy to counterfeit, it seems, as I allowed myself large amounts of prescription-standard heroin throughout the final months. Why not?
Heavily disguised in the large crowd, I dropped in on my own funeral, and was quite thrilled at the turn out, the sobs and the stories I overheard as I slipped through, disguised as a bearded, old Russian count, whom we had all encountered in St Petersburg in ’98.
(‘Is that that Count Svareff chap?’ ‘He is a mysterious one, I hear.’)
Our son spoke at my funeral. ‘He was calm, composed and I was supremely proud, as he quoted me.
Behold! the rituals of the old time are black. Let the evil ones be cast away; let the good ones be purged by the prophet! Then shall this Knowledge go aright. I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am Life, and the giver of Life, yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death. I am the Magician and the Exorcist.
*
Mourners interjected with ‘Do what thou wilt’ and ‘Love shall be the whole of the Law’.
My renegade darling, Violet, even sang a few words. You shall soon learn of this rebellious daughter of mine. Her choice of ditty might give a fair barometer of her twisted mind. These were the lyrics of the bawdy and traditional folk song, ‘Vanessa Picklegin’.
One night for a jar, I went to the bar
And I drunk the barrel dry.
And the thoughts in my head were very far from bad
’Til this harlot catch me eye.
She was withered and small, like a pickled wal(nut)
That her bones had rubbed her sore,
With her teeth in a box, she had got the pox
And her age was fifty-four.
I’ve made very bold with young and old
And I’ve fucked ’em thick and thin;
But I never, never straddled a whore so riddled
As Vanessa Picklegin.
Well, no man knows who soberly goes,
To what that man can sink;
How his brain gets spoiled and he sees the world
Through the rose-coloured specs of drink
So I gazed in her eye ’til beneath my fly
My Y-fronts shockedly rose;
And the stand-in hand grew so bloody grand
That it nearly blocked me nose.
So up comes she and she says to me,
Do you fancy a whore to screw?
I can take without fuss any double-decker bus
So I’ll readily deal with you!
For the average fool with the average tool
I charge an inordinate fee;
But since you’ve got a hard, which is more than a yard
To you the admission is free.
So it’s back to her flat, and we slung out the cat
And to bed without a word,
For she looked, and she felt, and she bloody nearly smelt
Like a week-old, white-washed turd.
But I maintained that horn from night ’til morn
And we fucked the dark hours through
’Til the bones went crack in the middle of her back
And Vanessa fell in two.
Now all you lads that drink ale, be cautioned by my tale
For as I scrambled free,
I loudly wailed, for my prick was left impaled
On Vanessa’s vertibrae.
So, when you’re in the pub, the harlots snub
Or you shall surely find,
Though you may get away and not be asked to pay
You’ll leave a lot behind!
My acolytes hooted and applauded and whistled. As did a proud Svareff. The dozens of journalists frowned and rolled their eyes, and the single-fingered and laboured typing of their sub-editors was as impossibly dreary as usual, the following day.
BLACK MAGICIAN CROWLEY DIES
WORLD’S WORST MAN DIES118
AWFUL ALEISTER,119
UNHOLY DAUGHTER FAR WORSE THAN BEAST
RASCAL’S REGRESS120
ALEISTER CROWLEY DIES; ONCE THE ‘INVISIBLE’ MAN
MYSTIC’S POTION TO PROLONG LIFE FAILS
WORST MAN IN THE WORLD DIES, LEAVES WEIRD PICTURES
Hundreds were there, but they were all outnumbered by the silent and respectful birds in the trees, whom I had fed every day for months. They knew my schedule well, my darlings. Like Eva’s German shepherds who knew to hone in on the musky groin, they were all such remarkable judges of character.
Reporters harangued mourners outside, while one old friend yelled back, ‘Beware what you write. Crowley may strike at you from wherever he is.’ I chuckled in the background, as I heard this.
The rains began, and the same voice then added, ‘See, I told you. Look out.’
The sot drinks, and is drunken: the coward drinks not, and shivers: the wise man, brave and free, drinks, and gives glory to the Most High God.
– from Liber CL: De Lege Libellum, Aleister Crowley
That evening we spoke of the journey to Shangri-La, for it was not an easy one. I was, however, the greatest climber to ever slight the English Mountaineering Club in favour of the Scots, and no doctor (other than my own friends in on the whole scheme) had pulled back my sheets or loosened my shirt all the time that I was in Hastings. I was as fit as a lop.
We were all there, but it was Prudence who spoke alone and without interruption. She considered that Violet, Zealand and Edward knew nothing of the place, and had even, with her usual consideration, taken the train into Edinburgh to purchase half a dozen copies of Lost Horizon.
‘Hilton’s path to Shangri-La in the book is reasonably accurate, though key elements have been changed, of course. You shall take a plane to Yunnan Province in north-western China where it meets with Eastern Tibet. You shall land at an airstrip on a plateau twelve thousand feet up, with just a hut and a store of food left there by Sherpas, well informed by MI-1. It is the path most similar to that taken by the two French priests in 1844, Évariste Régis Huc and Joseph Gabet and described in the 1850 journals, published in Paris, and entitled Souvenirs d’un Voyage. They wrote of a place called Shambha-La, the summation of a core concept and ideal of Tibetan Buddhism and where harmony and peace flourishes between man and nature. It is one that is disconnected from our own concept of time. The place follows its very own selfless Kalachakra.121 The final part of the journey there can be perilous in bad weather, even in the times of year that one is advised to attempt it. You shall hike high, with some of those same friendly Sherpas, into those old pals of yours, Aleister, the Himalayas. And there, an earthly heaven awaits you all.’
‘You? Why do you say, “You”?’ I asked her.
‘Because Dandylyon and I shall stay here, Aleister. It has been decided.’
‘And we shall not unman each other with farewells when the time comes. I sense this is only au revoir and not an adieu,’ said Dandylyon.
There was still the boyish excitement of torturing Benito first.
I had considered keeping this secret news of his capture from Zealand and Edward, for they may have been more principled than I, given all that time with the Bible. But blood is thicker than water or wine. I was so proud to see how thrilled our son was when I told him of Winston’s gift. We kept no secrets from each other now, and I finally began to tell him more fully of my past.
He agreed to type up Hag II when we all arrived in Shangri La. How happy he was to continue to learn of my life, as we floated by Cascais, Gibraltar, Marseille and the Balearics. How thrilled to now know that his suspicions of my righteousness and brave sabotage of the Nazi party had been confirmed.
15 June 1948
We were obliged one last docking en route to those Silk Roads, as we landed once again on my darling Sicily. Mussolini was now in the old abbey, one apparently quite haunted (he thought). Did Etna welcome us with a smoke ring? Perhaps. I was too giddy with anticipation to know if it were a mirage or not. I recall the friendly faces greeting us in the town of Cefalù, the ice-cream parlour as welcoming as ever, the gelato unreasonably delicious. The mayor and many others seemed to know (with their smiles, winks, slaps on the back and even hugs at the knees from small children) that Il Duce was in my Abbey, still conveniently disused according to the municipal paperwork, and our celebrity in the town was a silent, harnessed but joyous one. No one spoke of it, but the British soldiers were treated like lords, for the sashaying clown-turned-prisoner now possessed no friends on the island.
Il Duce was scared of the dark, I recalled Amatore having said. He was scared of sex, I recalled his having said. Oh goody. This was going to be fun, as we were greeted on those familiar slopes to the east and west of the Abbey, dappled in light, overgrown with lanky capweed, dandelions and wild jasmine enveloping the ancient stone walls, with a new mob of golden midges there to dance and greet with boyish excitement. The water was as crisp and clean as I recall, as I supped from the first well. Zealand and Edward approved of the Abbey. She had aged well and with grace. As had Amatore, who was now whistling a lullaby, and dangling his legs over the ancient stone wall. His smile, however, had only increased in beauty.
We said nothing. We embraced.
I walked inside. I stayed six months.
As we ground and chugged through the hugging womb of Suez, I daydreamed of how Winston and I had, many times in those final days in London, walked down to the old fleapit cinema in Waterloo over the river from Westminster. We had watched Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past, Welles and Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai and my favourite, Black Narcissus; Deborah Kerr as a scorching hot nun at a mission high in the Himalayas. The owner of the Rialto had greeted the former prime minister as if Winston had been a regular, and had eyed me as if I were either a massive pervert or a dangerous spy. He had been right, surely, on both counts.
Each time, we had chosen a Technicolor treat. Afterwards, we had headed north. My retinas had seemed scorched from the blue celluloid palettes of the movies, for the brown slow turd-sludge of the Thames had appeared to glint a Mediterranean azure making me think of a Chateau d’Yquem rosé with my imaginary pals on the screen; Niven and Olivier on the beach at St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat with a conveyor belt of crevettes au beurre à l’ail as they flounced and posed and postured in vintage sailing clobber and the finest deck shoes, all designed by Edith Head, art direction by Cedric Gibbons. My mind’s eye had recreated the scene to perfection, though the usually fine pomp of the MGM Orchestra executing the score in my head had played as if they were all quite vilely hung-over, especially the oboist. On cue, a farting barge had brought me abruptly back to Westminster Bridge.
As we passed the southern vulva of the canal at Port Tewfik and still in the afterglow of my time with Benito and my team of obedient brutes and cut-throats, I recalled the final time we had relished ninety such glorious minutes in that South London cinema. We had watched David Lean’s Oliver Twist. I had been most impressed with how the director had not shown the scene where Bill Sykes beats poor Nancy, but instead had implied great horror by a marvellous device. Nancy’s Jack Russell dog scratches at the thick wooden door, as the brutality occurs, and that is all we see as we presume the worst. The very, very worst.
Goodbye, England, old friend. But the reason I pondered the Rialto now is that I knew somehow that I would see that old cinema again.
4 December 1948
As we sailed on, Zealand, my Mowgli, Violet and I continued to speak eagerly and yet with measure of our lives, as the fleshy dog Hühnerbein was slumping and sweating in Nuremberg waiting for his noose. I smiled at the thought, and now I shall tell you, as I told my son on that sturdy boat, about England’s princess, my daughter and me, and how I had kept the King in England during the war, and therefore the future of the world safe. For now.
For once, there were no storms. There was no having myself tied to the mast by reluctant cabin boys. No spilled seed, no heroin, no pacific rafts of smoked weed or aroused incantations to Poseidon. Just we few. Just my family.
I was not content to believe in a personal devil and serve him, in the ordinary sense of the word.
I wanted to get hold of him personally and become his chief of staff.
– Aleister Crowley
108 The letter I wrote sits in the Yorke Collection to this day.
109 To the north-east of Leipzig and Dresden, in what would become East Germany.
110 ‘My son is playing in a chess challenge in Venice against the grandmaster, Achilles Frydman.’
111 ‘Really! The Jew! Good, you must win for Germany.’
112 ‘Best of five games?’
113 I tingle with pride. Robbie would have too, I know.
114 Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Geheimnis Staats Polizei (Secret State Police) or Ge-Sta-Po, two of the most brutal sets of Hitler’s thugs.
115 Edward believed the photograph in the Wanted poster was from one of the images that I had mailed to Mussolini to taunt him when I showed him several old snaps. I still cannot linger too long on the pending impact on my own son at the hands of that bullying Fat Head, but how the hell was I to know?
116 Mussolini’s nephew, Vanni Teodorani – the founder and the director of the powerful Axis of Bastoni – claimed up until his death that Churchill killed Mussolini in order to erase the traces of his talks with Il Duce before the outbreak of war. He was close, but did not know the full story.
ROMA – Churchill fece uccidere Mussolini per cancellare le tracce delle sue trattative col Il Duce prima dello scoppio della Seconda guerra mondiale: questa la tesi dei figli di Vanni Teodorani, nipote di Mussolini, fondatore e direttore dell’Asso di Bastoni.
ROME – Churchill killed Mussolini in order to erase the traces of his talks with the Duce before the outbreak of World War II: this is the thesis of the sons of Vanni Teodorani, nephew of Mussolini, founder and director of the Axis of Bastoni.
117 Also known by the marvellous names of hell’s bells, Devil’s trumpet, Devil’s weed, tolguacha, Jamestown weed, stinkweed, locoweed, prickly burr, and the Devil’s cucumber.
118 My favourite.
119 Rich for a paper that spent years criticising my alliteration.
121 Wheel of Time.