This morning I spent ages watching a hare sitting like a sentinel on my front doorstep. Then suddenly – God knows how – it sensed my presence and in a series of bounds it had vanished into the woods. It is five or six weeks since I wrote anything in this book and it is already getting hard to remember how freaky things were. I have arranged to have my student-grant paid into the bank in Castle Street. We have rented a cottage on the edge of some woods. Sally grooves on playing at houses. We have this pretend commuter-husband game going. Towards the end of breakfast I look up from my copy of Rolling Stone, or whatever, and say that I really must hurry or I will miss my train and be late in at the office. Sally dithers about, looking for an umbrella and running a clothes-brush over my T shirt. Then she kisses me goodbye on the front doorstep and I go round and creep in through the back door and set to writing up my notes on group dynamics within a North London group of Satanists and all that load of shit.
Once I came down from speed, I put my diary away, thinking that I never wanted to see its hateful black volumes again. The strain of keeping such a record had been a massive drag. For me, writing down what I had done every day was a counter-instinctual thing, rather like trying to remember my dreams in the morning. As I say, these things just do not want to be remembered. I never sat down to write my diary without feelings of dread and aversion rising within me – except, that is, for when I was on speed, of course. It seemed to me that it was as if I was trying to support two people within one weak and skinny body. There was the Peter who did things and there was the other Peter who wrote about what was done and told lies about it. Nevertheless, in the last few days I have had to consult my diaries in order to supplement my research notes. Looking at old diaries is rather fascinating. It is like the unstopping of so many bottles of time past. Anyway, it is getting a bit boring here. So I have decided to resume diary-writing, but this time my book will not be any kind of Satanist’s logbook. Instead I am going to use the diary, as Thoreau did, in order to get in close touch with nature. I am going to train myself to open my eyes to the world around me. Henry Thoreau, the American anarchist, lived like a hermit in the wilderness and wrote a two-million-word diary in thirty-seven notebooks and when he had no diary to hand he wrote on birch bark. That kind of diary-keeping will purge me of the urban sickness and of the evil memories of Horapollo House. A spirit of the wild, I will fade into the Surrey woods. It is easy to be good in the country.
This place could be any place. The Beatles might have described Farnham,
‘On the corner is a banker with a motor car … dum de dum.
There beneath the blue suburban skies … dum de dum de dum
A pretty nurse is … ’
‘A pretty nurse is’ doing something or other. The trouble is I cannot remember the lyrics properly. ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields’ are just two of the casualties of my flight from London. It will take me years to replace all the records I had to abandon in Horapollo House. Sally got Patsy to send on her record-player and other stuff by rail. Everything arrived OK – this despite Patsy reporting that Sally’s room had been done over. Nothing seems to have been taken however. Also, talking to Dad on the phone, I learn that some odd people have been lurking about his house in Cambridge, pretending to be census takers, gas-board officials or whatever. Anyway, there is no way that the Black Book Lodge is going to suss out where we are shacked up, and, to get back to the main point, for the time being I am pretty much restricted to Sally’s music which means an exceedingly heavy diet of Donovan. So far, the only records I have bought are the Pink Floyd’s ‘Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and a replacement copy of ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ by Jefferson Airplane.
We are deep in commuter-land here. Going up West Street I rub shoulders with sharp-suited young men whose greatest ambition in life is to be admitted to the local Junior Chamber of Commerce and there are women in scarves, and there are dog-walkers, market-gardeners and the odd yob who has not heard that the days of the rocker are over. Sally and I get our highs from reading the Farnham Herald. Yet the town is not quite as straight as I thought it was at first. I spotted a couple of heads trying to buy records in W.H. Smith a few days ago, but they were so obviously stoned and giggling so much that they could not quite manage the transaction and had to leave empty-handed. We sort of smiled at each other as we passed in the door. From Farnham to Findhorn, from Formentara to Katmandu, the hippy brotherhood constitutes an international freemasonry, a brotherhood of heads across the sea.
The morning after we had arrived in Farnham, Sally and I walked every street in the town. It took about an hour and a half. When we had set out walking from London our plan had been to keep on going until we reached the sea or something, but that morning walking around in Farnham, Sally decided that Fate had washed us up here on the shores of West Surrey. So, thanks to what Sally calls ‘ambulomancy’, here we are marooned in the Green Belt. We were too tired to walk any further anyway. In suburbia I can lose my dark shadow and become invisible. Sally wants us to live like hermits – just like Lancelot and Guinevere did in their closing years of repentance after Arthur and Mordred were killed in the last battle at Camlann. Sally is experimenting with batik. Maybe she can sell the stuff on market days. Also she is hustling for a job at the Castle Theatre.
I told Sally about the hare. She said it was a magical animal and that witches change themselves into hares, so that they can do damage to the farmers’ fields and drain all the milk from the cows. I got pretty angry at this, as I had just thought of the hare on the doorstep as being an example of how close to nature we were in this place. The last thing I wanted to hear was some ominous occult interpretation of what I had seen. Then I said that since we had had a witch at the front door, we had to be packed and out of the place within the hour, because it was obvious that the witch would report straight back to Horapollo House. Then I went into the bedroom and started throwing all Sally’s things into boxes. She was crying, but I was so pissed off with all this occult rubbish that I did not care and she was shouting that the darkness was within and that the real witch was me, not the hare. Finally, I walked out of the cottage and went into town and bought a hare at the butchers. I am going to cook it tonight. Sally was pretty subdued when I came back and she did not object when I told her what we were going to have for dinner.
We have talked more calmly about things now and we are agreed that, idyllic though things are down here, they are also pretty boring. Boredom is the most important thing in life, more important than love, more important than fear of death. It is only boredom which from minute to minute drives me forward through time. It is lovely here. The August sun blazes through the curtains and Sally and I lie in bed listening to the wood pigeons and the rustling leaves and we are bored out of our skulls. Fortunately though I have not exhausted my stock of magic beans. I still have the LSD cubes I scored off the Tibetan type in Abdullah’s Paradise Garden. Tonight we are going to take a rustic trip.
I cut the hare up and cooked the joints in cider with shallots. Sally ate every mouthful without protest. Actually it tasted pretty good, but she has just admitted to me that the reason she ate so deliberately was that, by doing so, she could consume all of the morning’s bad feeling as well as any ill luck which comes from it – plus, at another level, she saw eating the hare as a kind of shamanistic thing – a way of acquiring the wisdom of the hare. I pointed out that if the hare was that wise it would not have allowed itself to be caught and eaten. But it was hopeless. Sally is impossible to deal with as a rational human being. For pudding, I served up just two little sugar cubes soaked in acid. Now Sally is seated in the armchair in the tiny living room. She has carefully surrounded herself with things that are beautiful and things that will focus her on life. She says that it is dangerous to have any thoughts about death or dead people while on a trip.
So anyway another magic bean, a different type this time. Nothing is happening. It is almost an hour since I took the sugar cube, but I am not getting anything. Maybe it’s a bad score. Who needs acid anyway, when the world as it is, is such a blast? I have just gone out into the garden with my notebook and I am sitting on the ground poised to observe what there is to be observed. It now strikes me that there is no need to take acid when the world looks so brilliant anyway. The grass around me glows, ripples and pulsates. Seeds popping, shoots thrusting upward, nature is exploding all around me. We just need to see the world as it is. MEMO TO MYSELF: Every morning I should take my eyeballs out and wash them thoroughly in the sink. Why look at the world through dirty windows? I could sit here forever contemplating the single blade of grass that is in my hand. It is a truly amazingly crafted object. If only I could get everybody just to look at the blade of grass in my hand and see it as it actually is … If only I could see myself as I really am.
Then I have an idea and go inside to fetch the big mirror. This I place in the long grass on the edge of the woods, and, having taken all my clothes off, I am beside it like a hermit gazing into a pool of water and in its reflection I can see the branches writhing and I feel the first of my jungle jingles coming on.
Buddhist Poet on Edge of Jungle writes Home to Mother
An animated seething corpse sitting defenceless in the technicoloured garden. It is alone against the crowds who will pull it to pieces. It sits writing, head bowed, as they come up behind.
With automatic hand
The corpse sits writing
Alone in the gardens of the soul
Then down dropped
The Green and Purple Woman
And sat down a spider
Before him.
What a dainty dish for the Spider!
(Mother will laugh. Ho! Ho!)
The corpse sits writing in the garden
A part of the Spider’s larder
She pops in a word
And comes out a sound
And no one was any the wiser!
(NOTE:“ wiser” ought to rhyme with “ Spider” and with “ garden” )
Try again.
First corpse-poetry in the world folks!
Mother!
Have you ever been
conspicuous as a
purple corpse in a garden?
Buddha watching, waiting
from the flower-beds?
I am just writing to pass the time while I wait for the acid to take effect. On my hands and knees I gaze down into my scrying pool and I perceive that it is indeed the Eye of the World. Beneath its surface of rippling glass, I can dimly make out my mother. She is making her way here, walking all the way from Cambridge, but her progress is necessarily slow. The shroud impedes her movements and clods of earth, as well as gobbets of flesh fall away from her, as she takes her stumbling path along the hard edge of the road. She is blind, for her eyeballs liquefied weeks ago. But now she senses that she is under the scrutiny of the Eye of the World. Alas! Alas! It was a mistake for me to have taken drugs, for my late mother has become a sniffer-corpse and as such she is employed by the Underworld to sniff out druggies. She catches my scent in the air. In time she will find me. Alas! Then, as I gaze on appalled, the witching hare leaps within me and I recoil from the pool with a terrible cry.
It is like the Temptation of St Anthony out here in the gathering dark. The garden is full of bats. At first I thought they were moths. My penis was glowing and pulsating like a lighthouse and they were fluttering round it. Much too big to be moths. Bats then. Dark things moving across the brilliant face of the moon. I fear that they will entangle themselves in my hair. A good night for raising the Devil. I begin to chant the invocation which I have heard on the lips of the Master,
‘Adonai! My Lord. My Secret self beyond Self, Hadith, All Father! Hail, ON, thou Sun, thou Life of Man, thou Fivefold Sword of Flame! Thou Goat exalted upon Earth in Lust, thou Snake extended upon the Earth in Life! Spirit most holy! Seed most wise! Inviolate Maid! Begetter of Being! Word of all Words, come forth most hidden Light! Devour me!’
But there is nobody to hear me and my chant is pointless. Sally has stayed inside the cottage. Jefferson Airplane is on the record player. I can see Grace Slick’s voice coming out through the window as white smoke. The smoke coils and writhes and shapes itself into something like a woman. The undulating arabesques of smoke are so very beautiful that I just have to masturbate before them. As my semen comes jetting out, it mingles with the white smoke, so that its coils gain in substance and clarity and I find that it is Maud who has made herself manifest to me.
Gazing on Maud, naked and white-fleshed under the moon, I now understand that she is indeed beautiful. And in great danger too. She writhes in bondage before me. She is shackled and cuffed and bat-like creatures hang on her nipples and flap limply between her thighs. She opens her mouth and my semen comes trickling out down her chin. Then the words ‘HELP ME’ briefly appear, before melting away like ice-cream.
I have to get in touch with Maud. I have to rescue her. The trouble is I cannot move. I am trapped in a total visual overload. The whole world is spread before me like a great net and the world-net ripples and bulges under the pressure of the endless play of transmutation and permutation. It is all a mighty plenum. If I let my eyes rest on a single section of the cosmic latticework, then it opens up as a funnel, down which my eyes can travel endlessly, taking in oriental scripts, giant insects, housing estates, fields full of totem poles, beached transatlantic liners, pencil shavings, centaurs and glass spheres – and there are yet more worlds within these worlds, and all of them powered by moonshine. It is all too much of a good thing. Having said that, it remains to be noted that too much of a good thing is still actually a pretty good thing.
I have to stop writing.
The rest of this report on the trip is retrospective. For over an hour, I lay there in the deep grass with my eyes fully open, but as if dead. I could not move a muscle, this despite the fact that I knew that Maud was in the very greatest danger and I should do something about that fact. But I just lay there and I only wondered if I could go blind gazing at the moon.
At last I was able to rise from the grass, horribly cold and stiff and made my way into the house. I told Sally that Maud was in danger and asked her what I should do. But Sally was completely out of it. Although her pupils were dilated like saucers, she did not even register my presence. She just sat propped against a wall like a smirking corpse stuffed with straw. (In retrospect, I understand that this was probably the point in her trip where she was about to be raped by Bill and Ben, the Flowerpot Men.) So, grumbling and feeling very much on my own, I found some coins and then Maud’s phone number and I set out for the phonebox. On my way to the phonebox, I decided it would be more convenient if I could put the coins in my pocket, but I found that I had no pockets, for I was not wearing any clothes for there to be pockets in. This alerted me to the fact that I had not come down from the trip as much as I thought I had. So when I got to the phonebox at the end of the lane, I carefully rehearsed what I was going to say, before I picked up the receiver.
Finally I was word-perfect with, ‘Hallo Maud. It’s me, Peter. Are you in any danger from the Devil or his minions?’ So I picked up the receiver and very carefully dialled Maud’s number. If a demon had answered the phone, I would have just dropped the receiver and run. However, it was Maud who answered, and as soon as she did so, I knew I was right to have rung her. She sounded terrified.
‘Peter? Is that really you? Thank God! I don’t know what to do. Thank God you rang. A horrible man came round to the salon last weekend and asked the strangest questions. And then someone has been leaving dead animals on my doorstep. And I think that I am being followed to and from work. Please, you have to help me.’
‘OK. Keep calm. How am I going to be able to help you?’
‘Can I come to you? Peter, I need you. You got me into this. You have to protect me. You owe me that. I am so very frightened. Let me come to you. Please.’
I thought about this, but not for very long, for it was clear that she was in trouble and, besides it would be cool to have Maud with us in Farnham. So then, mustering all the straight thinking that I was capable of, I gave her careful directions about what to pack and then how to shake off any possible trail. She was to go to Camden Town Tube Station and wait on the platform for a tube. She was to get on the tube and then get out of the carriage at the last possible moment before the doors closed. Then she was to exit the tube station and take a taxi to John Lewis’s department store and walk quickly through the store and out through a door at the rear and then take a second taxi to Waterloo Station. At Waterloo, she was to buy a ticket to Portsmouth, even though she should get off the train at Farnham. I told her that Sally and I would meet her at the station at noon tomorrow. Although tearful, she sounded terribly relieved. I just hope she lasts the night and that the Satanists do not get to her before she has packed and set out on her way. It now occurs to me that I never even got to say the words I had so carefully rehearsed.
Once I was back at the cottage, I put on the radio. A disc jockey on Radio Caroline informed me that it was half past three in the morning. I had no idea. Thinking about it, it was really weird the way Grace Slick’s voice changed into smoke and the smoke into Maud’s brilliant white body. It was like she was one of those dead spirits that get trapped in the grooves of a record’s vinyl, just as in Mr Cosmic’s theory. I put ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ back on the record player, but this time no smoke issues from the record player. Grace Slick’s voice is just a voice, so I deduce from this that I must be coming down. It has been a pretty good trip and I am pleased with myself for having been able to write throughout the first part of the trip until the total overload took over. My writing hand still trembles from the force of the drug racing through its veins. I fancy that this diary of mine has something of the quality of a scientific record. Straights dismiss tripping as just a way for young people to get their kicks. One year it was a fad for skiffle and hula-hoops, the next year it’s LSD, and so on, blah blah, blah. This is not fair. I always take LSD in the spirit of a psychological investigator. Drug-taking is as much serious research as anything that a university has to offer. I have merely slipped one letter back from LSE to LSD. Sally and I are the conquistadors of inner space. We, all of us, exist on the peripheries of our own minds. Without the guidance of drugs we would be dopily unaware of the vast molten core within ourselves. As it is we are at the beginning of Humanity’s greatest adventure yet. I must sleep now.
Over breakfast, Sally has to tell me about her trip. She is so excited that she cannot sit down, but stands over her cornflakes and rattles away. Sally does not write things down while she is tripping, for she believes that that would spoil the flow of the experience. Nevertheless, she remembers quite a lot of her visionary night-journey. There was the rape by Bill and Ben. She kept asking Ben if he thought she was beautiful and he kept saying no, which was a lie and each time Ben lied his wooden penis grew a bit longer, and, since the penis was inside Sally, the lies of the Flowerpot Man had a definite erotic charge. Then there was more weird sex with Bill, with hundreds of Munchkins and finally with me – except that the fairies had taken away my head and replaced it with the head of a hare. Apparently I liked having my long ears licked. One of the salient features of acid is the way it works on and with one’s sex drive.
Sally was so excited by her long night of imaginary sex, that it was ages before I could get a word in. But then, when I did manage to speak and I explained how Maud was being menaced by the Black Book Lodge and that she needed to take refuge with us and that she would be with us in a matter of hours, Sally was instantly cast down. She reckoned that Maud was making all this voodoo stuff up, simply because she wants to be with me.
‘Peter, can’t you see it? This has got nothing to do with Satanism and everything to do with Maud’s puppy-love for you. She is obsessive. She will eat you up if she can. Besides this place is tiny and she’s pretty tall and hefty for a chick. There is simply no room for her here.’
‘She can sleep on the floor in this room, until she finds a place of her own.’
(We were in what I suppose would be our sitting-room, except that as it has no furniture, only a leaking mattress, so we sprawl about in here and it is therefore more of a lying-room.)
‘I just know that she is going to spoil everything. It’s you I’m thinking of, since she really gets on your nerves. She will drive you mad if you live under the same roof as her for more than a day.’
‘Sally, I’m really sorry, but I have got to do this. I am kind of responsible for her. Whether I like it or not, she has become part of my karma.’
I could not persuade Sally to join me in walking down to the station, so I set off alone and arrived there just in time to see Maud step off the train. She was the only one to alight at Farnham. She was so overloaded with stuff that it was hard to understand how she could have shaken off any kind of tail – particularly as she teetered on stilettos and kept tripping over her luggage. Finally she gave up trying to move with all her cases and bags and waited helplessly until I came up to her. She was wearing a white silk blouse with mutton-sleeves, a very mini black mini, black leather gloves and lots of jangly silver bracelets. Her idea of dressing for the country, I suppose. She stood amongst her luggage clutching a handbag and a little umbrella.
I walked up to her, ready to stoop to pick up as many of her cases as I could manage, but then I just stood before her, gazing at her and not knowing what to say. The weird thing was that this morning, once I was sure that I was down from the trip, I had gone out into the garden and picked a blade of grass and gazed at it with full attention and I had seen that it was just a blade of grass. It did not pulsate or anything, nor did gazing at it offer any special help in understanding how the universe worked. That is always the way with trips and it is a real drag – except the really weird thing was that on that same trip last night I had had a vision of Maud as incredibly beautiful and now that I was gazing at Maud in the flesh on the sunny station platform, she still looked incredibly beautiful. It was as if the LSD was continuing to act selectively on my head and heart, so that I was experiencing a hallucinatory vision of the arrival of a mighty sex goddess in this small Surrey town. I wanted to lay her there and then in front of the ticket-office.
So we just stood there silently gazing at one another. Then she suddenly burst into tears.
‘Peter, dearest Peter, these last few days have just been so horrible, but now I am with you I know it will be all right.’
I stepped forward to give her a comforting hug and she practically overbalanced on her high heels, so she had to cling very tight in order not to fall right over and I almost fainted in her arms.
‘You know I have been so worried about you,’ she whispered, her breath cool in my ear. ‘After what you told me, I was more afraid for you than anything.’
Then we broke apart and she started fishing in her handbag, for her make-up kit. She had to redo her mascara, before we could set out walking past the Maltings and up the hill between the laburnum hedges towards the cottage. Maud has become a fever in my head and a pain between my legs. I cannot think of anything except Maud. God knows how I am going to square this with Sally.
As we walked into the cottage, Maud turned to me and said, ‘We can be happy here.’ Then having realised what she had said, she blushed. ‘I mean, I know that you and Sally will be very happy here together.’
Sally, who had been standing on her head in the lotus position when we entered, hastily untangled herself and got to her feet so that she was face to face with Maud – no that is not right, for Sally’s head came no higher than Maud’s bosom. Maud, somewhat startled, looked down on her.
‘Hello again.’ And Maud extended her hand, holding it out in a way that suggested that she expected it to be kissed. Sally muttered something inaudible (for all I know, it was a curse), but she took Maud’s hand and shook it.
Then Sally turned to me and asked, ‘How long is she staying?’
Maud looked at me in mute appeal.
‘As long as she needs to, Sally,’ I said firmly.
Then Maud broke into tears again. Between sobs, she explained to Sally how she had left her job and fled her flat. How she had no friends in the world except me, Peter, and that she hoped Sally would be a good friend too. She knew she was being a drag, coming down here when the place was so small and only just big enough for the two of us, but she had nowhere else to go and she was absolutely terrified of all this supernatural stuff, and the dead animals on her doorstep in London had had pins stuck in their eyes. Maud did not want the Satanists to put pins in her eyeballs. After a while she was unable to get any more words out even in gulps. She just stood there bawling noisily like a small child.
‘Oh for God’s sake!’ Sally snorted and disappeared into the bedroom. I put an arm round Maud and she slowly quietened down. After about ten minutes, Sally reappeared with her sleeping bag.
‘She will have to sleep on the mattress in this room, until she has found a place to move to and she will have to roll up the bedding every morning.’
And Sally busied herself in laying out the bag and pushing all Maud’s luggage to one corner of the room, while Maud sat on a corner of the mattress and set about once more redoing her make-up. Then Maud started to unpack, but it was not long before she discovered that, in her panicky flight from London, she had forgotten to pack all sorts of things, including any underwear. So she set off into Farnham to do some shopping. When she reappeared hours later, she found Sally and me sitting out on the grass at the back of the cottage. Sally was still doing her yogic breathing exercises, while I was struggling to sort out some kind of filecard system for my thesis. However, Maud, who was evidently an enthusiastic shopper insisted on interrupting our peace by displaying her purchases. She put out her newly purchased items of underwear on the grass for our inspection. There were about a dozen items: several pairs of ornately lacy panties, some bras, a basque, a mulberry-coloured camisole, a midnight-blue slip. Sally thinks that less is more where underwear is concerned and she gazed on Maud’s purchases with incredulous distaste.
‘What do you think?’ Maud asked, looking carefully to her, as if Sally was her older sister.
Sally laughed incredulously.
‘Maud, you are absurd! Put them away.’
Maud blushed crimson and hastily gathered up the underwear and disappeared into the cottage. At length, she reemerged with her handbag. From this she extracted a diary and, seating herself some distance away from us, she busied herself in writing it. And I too am writing in my diary, surreptitiously looking up from time to time to gaze with bated lust on Maud, who scribbles away, biting her lips as she does so. I think that she must find spelling difficult. I had forgotten that Maud kept a diary. It obviously is a diary, one of those school-girly affairs with a heart-shaped lock. Well, at least now she has got something worth recording in it.
The afternoon, though still very warm, had turned dark and heavy. There were lots of midges about. For a long time there was no sound except the scratching of pens and the cooing of wood pigeons. Finally Sally broke the silence.
‘The sun is down over the yard-arm.’
What the hell is a yard-arm? Whatever. In our new ménage in the country, reference to the yard-arm is the traditional prelude to rolling an early-evening joint or two. Sally went to fetch the ritual Indian brass tray. Then she set to work slowly melting and crumbling the hash, rolling the cardboard tips and sprinkling tobacco on the Rizla papers. Sally maintains that the preparation of the joints is as important as their consumption. The whole business is like a Zen tea-making ritual and has to be done with slow ceremony. Maud, who still sat at a distance from us, looked uncomfortable and I guess that she was trying to nerve herself up to make some protest about drug-taking being illegal, or dangerous to mental health, or something, but she was too embarrassed and too conscious of her status as guest to make her protest.
At last Sally was ready to light up and, having taken one big draw on the joint, she crawled over to Maud to present her with it.
Maud raised a hand in an attempt to avert the evil object.
‘I’m afraid I don’t smoke.’
‘This isn’t smoking,’ Sally insisted. ‘It is a kind of initiation. You don’t smoke a joint. You just inhale from it and then you pass it to Peter. You have to participate.’
‘Yes, we are very strong on conformity here,’ I added.
Maud raised her eyebrows, but she took the joint and drew hard on it. The smoke filled her mouth so that her cheeks were swollen like a chipmunk’s as she struggled to get any of the smoke into her lungs. But she failed and fell into such a violent bout of coughing and wheezing that she bent double and threw the joint away. I retrieved it and then showed her how to take the experience more coolly. Part of the trouble with Maud was sheer nerves. She was expecting violent hallucinations the moment she had ingested any of the smoke. But hash is not like that. Not usually anyway. It is mild and subtle. Not that one would guess this from reading Aleister Crowley on the subject. This thought having struck me, I went inside to fetch one of my red sorcery notebooks in which I have transcribed a quotation from Crowley’s essay, ‘The Herb Dangerous – The Psychology of Hashish’:
‘Of the investigators who have pierced even for a moment the magic veil of its glamour ecstatic many have been appalled, many disappointed. Few have dared to crush in arms of steel this burning daughter of the Jinn; to ravish from her poisonous scarlet lips the kisses of death; to force her serpent-smooth and serpent-stinging body down to some infernal torture-couch, and strike her into spasm as the lightning splits the cloud-wrack, only to read in her infinite sea-green eyes the awful price of her virginity – black madness …. ’
In a way, Crowley was a great man, one of the forerunners of the Spirit of the 60s indeed, but this stuff was just so over the top that I had to desist from reading more. Sally and Maud were leaning against one another and giggling fit to bust. For a few moments it was a really good scene and I felt like the Old Man of the Mountains secluded in his paradise garden with a couple of members of his harem. The laughter got madder and madder and I was laughing too and I was vaguely aware of being possessed by the laughter, as if I had been invaded by a demonic Thing. I experienced it as an entity which did not care what I did, or whether I lived or died. I was merely a vehicle for laughter, to be discarded once the Laughing Thing, hunting for another victim, had passed on its way.
This happened – the laughter passing, that is – when Maud wiped her eyes and tried to straighten up enough to talk. I believe that she was trying to prolong the mirthful spirit of things …
‘Sally, listen to this! This is really good! A man goes into a pub and he has got an insect with him. I have forgotten what insect it was, but that does not matter. Say it was a dragonfly – no hang on a minute – the insect has got to have legs. A cricket then. A cricket has definitely got legs. So anyway he says to the man – I mean the man he has met at the bar – “I have established that insects hear with their legs.” Then, the other man, the man he is talking to, asks “How have you worked that out?” Now, let me think … the other man says “As you can see, this cricket has no legs and when I ask it to move, it does not …”’
‘Hang on a moment,’ Sally interrupted. ‘Just a moment ago, you were saying that the cricket definitely did have legs. Are you sure you don’t mean that he had a dragonfly? That would make more sense.’
Maud was trying to work out why Sally was not right about this, when I tried to help her by pointing out that in fact dragonflies did have legs, contrary to what Sally was insinuating. However, this only seemed to make Maud more confused.
‘No, what I meant is that crickets in general do have legs, but this particular cricket did not have legs, because the man in the pub – the first man in the pub – had taken them off in order to demonstrate that crickets hear with their legs, because they don’t move when they are told to when their legs are taken off. Er … only I think I have told it slightly wrong. The cricket had its legs on when it was brought into the pub – ’
‘That would make it more like the rest of the cricket species,’ Sally added helpfully.
‘But then the man took the legs off to prove the point … But anyway, you get the point. He was not thinking logically, you see.’
Sally thought about it and, having thought about it, she was seriously pissed off.
‘That is just so dumb. It’s a real downer. Anyway, I don’t see how else the man could demonstrate that crickets hear with their legs. I certainly don’t believe that they hear with their ears, because I have never seen a cricket with ears.’
Maud was cast down. I thought of challenging Sally on how many crickets she has seen in her life, for I don’t believe that she has seen any, except for Jimminy Cricket in the Pinocchio film, but then I decided against saying anything. So, suddenly we were all silent once more and Sally set to work, rolling the second joint of the evening.
I was sleepily nodding to myself and thinking that Farnham was a good place to lie low in when I dozed off. Yet lie how low? Deep, deep, deep below the black waters. These waters which came rushing up from beneath me and engulfed not only me but also the whole of the lost town of Farnham. Slow, silent and alone I passed between the columns of moonlight which descended through the blackness and then I floated away from those refracted shafts of brightness, down the dark submarine snickets and alleyways which were beyond the reach of any illumination and consequently, from time to time, I blundered against barnacle-encrusted walls and doors. Once I emerged again into the High Street, I noticed how the moonlight conferred a dead-white glitter on the shop-fronts. I found that with some difficulty I could shimmy my way up to roof-level and, turning backwards from whence I had swum, I observed the scarlet roof of the Maltings, shining as bright as Satan’s Pandemonium. I observed everything. I remarked without regret how a filthy silt was drifting up to cover the lower shelves in the public library and how a ceaseless flow of bubbles rose from decomposing books. I visited the abandoned tennis-courts where shoals of minnows passed backwards and forwards through their netting. I saw without surprise that the familiar country streams and rivulets continued to flow quite unimpeded by the heavy tides of black water above them. I paddled over the foliage of the hop-fields which undulated with lazy menace, like the weed-banks of a dreadful Sargasso Sea, and beyond the hop fields I swam out to the halcyon peace of Surrey lawns. Everything was perfectly silent, except for the muffled tolling of church bells which, moved by the dark tides, never stopped and which kept time with the beating of my terrified heart. Otherwise the place was silent, abandoned, asleep in time, so that here where I am is not only now but forever August 7th, 1967. The spires of the churches and the towers of the Castle strain towards the surface so very far above. Deep, deep down below, I can only dream of flicking and kicking my way up until finally I might break through the surface and gaze on the limitless expanse of water rolling on forever under its dancing net of moonlight. The trouble is that I have water on the brain and it is this which makes me so heavy.
Such was my dream. Yet, when I come to think about it, I do not actually know whether I had this dream or not. It is only Pyewhacket, the hand which sees itself as a writer in its own right, which tells me that I had it and, once again, I fear that Pyewhacket has a mind of its own, not really mine at all. It is a warm summer evening, but I feel cold now. I had thought that I had escaped that hand, that literary voice. Somehow it has found me again. Perhaps Farnham will not be such a good place to lie low in after all.
I opened my eyes on my two beautiful houris. They were bent over the Indian tray and talking quietly to one another and I heard the raven-haired one whisper to the blonde,
‘You have beautiful hair. I should love to do your hair for you.’
But then Sally, suddenly suspicious that she was being buttered up, pulled away. The second joint was now ready for circulation. We passed it amongst one another without talking. I was not feeling better for my submarine doze. Also, I think I was feeling a bit guilty at having pressed Maud to join us in smoking dope. It was as if Sally and I had colluded in debauching this pathetically innocent girl. Maud is so eager to please and so young. But then we three are all very young. Everything is before us. The juices of youth are so fierce within us. Straights may suppose that we take dope to get high. Not so. Sally and I are high on being young – most of the time anyway. We take dope to come down.
The third time the joint came round, it was practically down to its nasty-tasting, cardboard roach, and I stubbed it out.
‘Gosh! Well, that was quite fun I suppose,’ said Maud as, yet again, she ferreted about for stuff in her handbag. ‘And, thank you, but I don’t think that I will ever take dope again. I would not like to become dependent on it. I do think that one can have a good time without being hooked on anything.’
‘Maud, you are being ridiculous again,’ said Sally patronisingly. ‘I’ve been taking hash practically every day for over a year now and I’m not addicted.’ Then, having thought about what she had just said, Sally got the giggles again.
Maud looked doubtfully at Sally.
‘Hash is less addictive than alcohol,’ I reassured Maud. Then unthinkingly, I added. ‘The same goes for LSD. That’s not addictive at all.’
Sally’s eyes lit up.
‘Yeah! You have got to trip. You’ll love it, Maud. Tripping is a fantastic buzz. Tomorrow, if it’s sunny, we’ll all take a trip together. It’s great, if it’s sunny, cos’ it will make the sunlight brighter.’
I can see that, on one level, Sally’s enthusiasm for LSD is perfectly genuine. She is always proselytising on behalf of ‘the miracle drug’. She really does believe that it is tragic that it is only a relatively small number of heads, like her and me, who have discovered what it can do. However, at another level, I know that Sally was pressing LSD onto Maud in order to wind her up and, if tomorrow, Maud did have a bad trip, Sally would not be at all displeased.
Indeed, Maud looked terrified.
‘Can’t I just watch?’
‘No. As long as you are here, you’ve got to participate. You have to see what we see. Peter and I will serve as spirit guides on your trip. LSD is a friendly drug. It is thanks to LSD that you are here at all. It was the drug that warned Peter that you were in danger. So you definitely owe it something.’
Well, those were the main events of the day. Eventually we decided that the midges were too much for us and we went inside. Sally decided to cook Welsh-rabbit. Maud went over to stand beside Sally in the tiny kitchen and told her how she wished she had learned to cook. Would Sally teach her? But Sally was not interested in talking about cooking. Instead, smiling gently, she started reminiscing about former trips that she had taken.
That night Sally was extra-demanding in bed and she allowed me little sleep. But even when Sally had her legs wrapped tight around my head, I could hear Maud weeping in the next room.
I woke up before Sally and went out to the sitting room – I mean lying room. Maud was nowhere to be seen and I briefly panicked that she might have left us. But then I saw that her dresses and underwear and lots of magazines were strewn all over the place. The back-door was open. I went out and stood on its step. In the sharp-edged light of early morning, I saw Maud moving swiftly from tree to tree. She punched the air and wheeled about to kick at trees, time and again just failing to connect with their trunks. Then she abruptly plunged to her knees and started knee-walking backwards and forwards across the grass. She moved at an eerie pace, like a dwarf on amphetamines. After a while, she somersaulted back onto her feet and resumed combat with her invisible adversaries. Maud was in her karate kit, coarse white trousers and a loose jacket secured by a brown belt. In her fighting gear, she appeared amazingly relaxed and graceful – not clumsy at all.
After watching for a while, I went inside and started tidying Maud’s things up. Sally emerged from the bedroom before I had finished.
‘You are not Maud’s slave, you know,’ she said. ‘Maud will have to pull her weight around here. Either that, or she will have to go. Where is she, anyway?’
I nodded towards the back door and together we went and looked out. Maud had finished her karate exercises (katas, I think they may be called) and we were just in time to see her formally bowing towards the trees.
‘Weird,’ breathed Sally.
Then Maud came in and changed out of her karate kit into a longish black dress decorated with a pattern of gold medallions. While Maud was in the lavatory, Sally was on the attack again.
‘That dress must have cost a hundred pounds. It blows my mind. Where does a Camden hairdresser get the bread for something like that?’
‘It is easy, I suppose, if you are straight,’ I replied. ‘Maud doesn’t spend money on clubs, records, mystical treatises, or dope. What is not cheap, on the other hand, is being any kind of hippy.’
Sally did not look convinced.
‘I think it’s rich parents,’ she said.
Maud had a huge breakfast. While she ate, she talked vaguely of looking for work in some hairdressing salon in town.
‘So you are staying in Farnham then?’ asked Sally.
‘Oh yes.’
The trip was scheduled for the afternoon. Maud spent much of the morning looking up at the sky, visibly willing rain-clouds to appear, but to no avail. We do not usually have a cooked lunch, but since we were going to be tripping that afternoon, Sally would not necessarily be up to anything very much that evening. She was singing ‘The sun has got its hat on’, as she cooked us an egg-curry. We ate on the mattress with the plates balanced precariously on our knees. The curry was frightful and the grit of the curry powder kept getting lodged between our teeth, so we all had lots of orange juice to wash it down.
For pudding, Sally produced just two acid-laden sugar cubes – one for her and one for me. Maud looked relieved.
‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I’d just decided that I could not go through with it. I know it is weedy of me. But I am utterly terrified of going mad and saying or doing the wrong things. Besides right now I am not on tip-top form. In fact I feel a bit peculiar.’
‘I am not surprised,’ said Sally. ‘That will be the trip coming on. I thought that you would try to back off, so I put your cube in your orange juice. It’s probably best that you go and lie down.’ Then she added gleefully, ‘You’ve got a date with Mr Mickey Finn.’
Maud moaned. Her hands went briefly to her throat, as if she would prevent the passage of the deadly substance into her body. Then she moved away to the edge of the mattress and sat with her arms hugging her knees. She did indeed look like she was waiting to go mad. I went over and knelt before her.
‘Don’t worry, Maud,’ I said. ‘The first trip is usually a good one.’
‘Yeah, it’s quite rare to get the horrors on the first trip,’ added Sally.
I have gone into the bedroom to fetch this notebook, so that, as scientist of the invisible, I can record whatever may transpire on this trip. Now I am going to persuade Maud to come out into the garden with me and look at the grass. That is bound to be a good scene.
Indeed it is a good scene. Maud suffered me to lead her out by the hand and, together with Sally, we are looking at the grass waving and curving like hair on the earth’s skull. Now I am aware of the first anticipatory rush of adrenalin. I pick a blade of grass and pass it to first Maud and then Sally for inspection. Words are unnecessary. The medallions on Maud’s dress have become spinning sun-wheels and this is a sign that we are properly off on the trip. The sun becomes a giant factory for the production of illusions. Looking round, I can see that I am in good company. There is Pan slipping into the shadows of the trees. Just short of the wood, a Persian peacock-prince holds court in an emerald pavilion. On the left hand there is Yama, the death-god, with a clockwork, rotating nose. On the right hand, there is Marcel Proust talking to the sharks assembled in the bay of his beloved Cabourg. A great man for sharks, Proust. Brigitte Bardot approaches in an undulating walk. Then she hitches up her skirt to reveal a stocking-top and I can see that there is another, miniature Bardot, tucked into the stocking-top, signalling madly to be let free.
Sally is topping up her acid with a joint. She needs a light, but she just holds the joint up and elephant-headed Ganesha who is sitting in the lotus posture upside-down on the surface of the sky reaches down with a cigarette-lighter. Then Sally farts and the fart comes out all rainbow-coloured and decorated with little silver stars. It is really lovely. But Maud cannot see this. She is moaning and hissing. She is clinging to me so tightly that I am going to have to stop writing.
What happened next is that Sally and I realised that Maud was having a bad trip. We were trying as best we could to straighten up. I could not move because Maud was clinging on to me so tightly. So Sally went indoors to fetch our LSD survival handbook, which is called The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and is by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert.
‘You are experiencing the Wrathful Visions,’ announced Sally. ‘This is a sign of bad karma, but it is a good phase to pass through, on your way to losing your ego. Not that you have any choice.’
Sally danced about in front of us with the book in her hands and read from it in a sing-song voice, ‘ “Thus in the Tibetan Thödol, after the seven peaceful deities, there come seven visions of wrathful deities, fifty-eight in number, male and female, flame-enhaloed, wrathful, blood-drinking. These Herukas as they are called, will not be described in detail, especially since Westerners are liable to experience the wrathful deities in different forms. Instead of many-headed fierce mythological demons, they are more likely to be engulfed and ground up by impersonal machinery, manipulated by scientific, torturing control-devices and other space-fiction horrors … ” ’
Sally was miming the Herukas and the torturing machinery as she read on. Maud closed her eyes to it all. She kept whimpering, ‘Help me, please. Please help me.’ Although her eyes were closed, I could see her eyeballs flicking backwards and forwards under the translucent lids. The exposed parts of her body were white as the skin of a leper. Then, as I gazed on, the brightness of her pallor intensified, until it was like the white heat of a nuclear explosion. I dared not look at Maud any more.
My eyes dropped to the open pages of my diary. This was a horrid mistake, for once they had fallen there, I could not extricate them. Now I had already reached the deepest part of my trip and I was experiencing a total overload, in which I found myself locked forever in the pages of my diary. I was condemned to live in the past and only the past and the only past I had was what I had recorded in the pages of my diary. I visited and revisited everything I had taken note of. It was a tremendous gas at first, particularly the early choices – balling Sally, smoking dope with Cosmic, listening to ‘Sgt Pepper’ – but, in the longer run, the pleasure just drained away. It was like when I hear a record. After a while, the music loses all its emotional charge and I can no longer bear to listen to it. This deep part of my trip was like that, except that it was every single incident which I had recorded in my diary that was turning grey and becoming first meaningless, then actually repellent to me. It was like repeating the word ‘dog’ hundreds of times. I lunched with Maud at the Gay Hussar a thousand times and then another thousand, until I had analysed every fold of my napkin, memorised every item on the menu and counted every strand of Maud’s hair.
Taking my seat in the Gay Hussar for the millionth time, I suddenly remembered how the guy in Abdullah’s Paradise Garden, who sold me the drug I was now on, had been dressed like a Tibetan (indeed I re-encountered this character thousands of times and struck the same deal with him thousands of times) and it now came to me that I was in some special kind of accursed Tibetan afterlife, in which the wrathful visions drew their lives from mine. Although, at first, I beheld this afterlife as a vast house with many corridors, I soon gained the sense that, though there were indeed many, many corridors, their number was still finite and every single one of these corridors went nowhere. Those corners I had failed to turn in real life, I would never be able to see round in my new and wearisome form of existence. Those corners which were not there in my diary were forever lost to me and I often had occasion to curse my literary idleness. If only I had written more! If only I had provided just a few more details about what I had seen and done! Just a few extra incidents would have made all the difference, I told myself.
What was especially weird was that I could visit and indeed was obliged to visit and revisit every scene recorded in my diary and this even included things which had never happened, but which I had made up for Felton’s benefit. So it was that I often found myself sitting on the wall of the playground of the wholly imaginary St Joseph’s primary school and there I conversed with its phantom children. I was in a sealed maze of my own construction and this maze, though vast, was all the time diminishing in my imagination, losing not only scale, but also colour and sense. I perceived that Maud, who continued to sit patiently at our table in the Gay Hussar, occupied the centre of the maze of my twilit afterlife. The woman I am condemned to love for all Eternity ….
Maud was shaking me awake. I opened my eyes. After aeons in my diary-scripted past, I was astonished to find myself back in the garden of the cottage on the edge of Farnham.
‘Peter, wake up! Wake up!’ Maud was urgent, ‘Peter, your mother is here!’
‘That is impossible,’ I said, suddenly feeling very straight. ‘She is dead.’
But Maud replied,
‘Yes, I can see that,’ and she pointed.
I looked to where she was pointing, but I could see only trees and little wispy, grey tendrils, which I knew were an effect of the LSD and which trembled on the edge of becoming proper hallucinations, but which, since my trip was beginning to wear off, did not actually do so.
‘I can’t see anything,’ I said.
‘Me neither,’ said Sally. She was now sitting on my other side and also looking to where Maud was pointing.
‘Yes, she is standing just in front of you, Peter.’ Maud insisted. ‘You must see her. She wants to be seen by you. She is dressed in her grave-cloths. Say hello to her, Peter. She wants you to acknowledge her presence.’
I said,
‘Hello Mum,’ and I waited to see if she would become manifest.
But Sally said,
‘Maud, you’re tripping. Peter’s mother is not here. She’s just a hallucination in your head.’
Maud was obstinate,
‘I know that I am tripping. But she really is here. She is stretching her withered arms out to you, Peter. And she is not alone. There is a fat man wearing a bow tie, standing beside her. Who is he? And there is another younger man with curly hair. And behind those two there are lots of people in brown robes. Your mother is their prisoner. There are lots of dogs, blind dogs – I mean that the dogs have had needles put in their eyes.’
The sun was hot on my face. I stared hard at the grass rippling and branches swaying in a gentle breeze. It terrified me that I could not see what Maud was seeing. Sally was, if anything, in an even worse state. She had scrunched herself up in a ball and was shaking all over.
‘The plump man in the bow tie also wants to talk to you,’ continued Maud. ‘He thinks that you owe him something. Your mother tells me that she is very cold, for there is almost no skin on her bones. She wants our help. What shall I do?’
‘Send her away. Send them all away, Maud’, I croaked. ‘Please. I don’t want to see any of them.’
‘Very well then,’ and Maud rose to her feet. She pointed to the invisible throng and spoke in a peremptory voice,
‘Go away. We have no need of you. This is private property.’
She watched them go – at least I presume that was what she was doing. Then she turned back to me and saw that my face was wet with tears. She lowered herself to sit once more beside me and put her arms around me.
‘They’ve gone,’ she said. ‘Though I think they will be back.’
‘Save me from them Maud,’ and I buried my face between her breasts. She started to stroke my hair. After a while, I began to unbutton her dress. She made no attempt to stop me, but shifted about so as to make it easier for me to get her clothes off. Over Maud’s shoulder, I noticed that Sally was now pressed face-down on the grass with her arms extended, like a penitent monk meditating on the crucifixion. Once Maud was undressed, I undressed and applied myself to browsing over her body, as if it were an illustrated encyclopedia. I was going to study to become an expert on her legs and breasts. Blessed with dilated vision, I was able to take in every pore of her skin and I saw that her pores were set out in an amazing, quincuncial pattern of lozenges. Her skin had become the Net of Indira and I willingly allowed myself to be entangled in this, the World’s Illusion.
‘I love you, Maud,’ I mumbled.
‘That’s good,’ she replied.
She was wallowing in my affection, rolling around in such a way as to allow all parts of her body to be successively inspected and embraced. But then, when I got on top of her and tried to part her legs, she resisted.
‘Not now, Peter. Not now. The time is not right. The appointed hour has not yet come. I solemnly promise that I will deliver my virginity to you, but it cannot be today.’
‘I will die if I can’t have you.’
‘You will die anyway,’ and she actually laughed at my disappointment. ‘I want you too. I’m desperate for you. Feel how wet I am.’
But moments later she pushed me off and stood up. She walked over to the edge of the woods and called out,
‘Peterkin! Here, Peterkin! Peterkin! Peterkin, come to me. Here I am. Come to Maud who loves you dearly.’
I crawled behind her. I was crazy with desire for her heavy flanks.
‘Maud, what are you doing?’
She looked back down at me. Her drug-dilated eyes were like saucers.
‘I am summoning your fucking double.’
‘My double?’
‘Yes, Peter, your fucking double. Don’t say anything more. I need to concentrate. If I concentrate, he will emerge from the trees.’
This was all so very weird. It is true that when one is on a trip then everything seems weird. But what particularly struck me as supernaturally weird was Maud’s utterance of the word ‘fucking’. I had not thought that that verb was in her vocabulary.
Maud paid no more attention to me. She was panting heavily. She raised her arms as in a gesture of surrender and declared in ringing tones of absolute conviction,
‘My lover comes! My true lover!’
She dropped to her knees and then with an awful cry she performed a contortionist’s flip onto her back and swiftly spread her legs. I knelt a little distance away from her and looked on appalled. Of course, I could see not so much as a wisp of my simulacrum. All I was aware of was the way Maud responded to ‘Peterkin’. Her back was arched, her tongue protruded and her eyes rolled. Momentarily (though only momentarily) she looked quite ugly. It was while Maud was moaning, bucking and thrashing under the invisible man that Sally gave out a deep sigh and picked herself off the ground, but she walked back into the cottage without appearing to notice either of us. A few minutes later Maud gave out a long shuddering moan, before rolling onto her side and falling into a kind of post-coital doze. I sat watching over her and, for all I know, my Doppelganger was beside me, doing the same.
When I saw that Maud was coming round again, I told her that I was going in for a few minutes to make us both some tea, but she said that she was not safe alone. So, brushing leaves and stuff off her body, she followed me into the cottage, and while I, with the slow deliberation of the drugged, set about the reassuringly familiar rituals of tea-making, Maud stood close beside me. Sally was not in sight. Maud had found a hairbrush and worked hard on the tangles of her hair. It was as if the hairbrush was some kind of exorcism-tool with which she was brushing away the horrors. She admitted that this was the case when, over tea in the lying-room, we started talking and swapping our trippy horror stories.
I told her about my experiencing an eternity of repetitious, diary-scripted boredom in a few moments of time. In retrospect, I am amazed I ever came out of that part of my trip. I am lucky that my mind was not trapped there forever. It is not a risk I would ever take again and I told Maud that I was finished with acid. Maud looked pleased. Her own visions of my mother’s walking corpse and the congregation of spectral Satanists had also been nightmarish, though in a different way.
‘I do think that the drug itself was warning us that we should not take it,’ she said. ‘I am sure that those magicians you were mixed up with can sense you when you take drugs and it makes you vulnerable to their attack.’
This struck me as a rather Sally-like way of thinking and I spent ages trying to argue Maud out of this notion. Maud was indeed seriously confused in her attitude to what she had seen. I think that she was still suffering from some residual drug-generated paranoia. She thought that the drug was warning us that the Satanists were on our track. I told her that I no more expected members of the Black Book Lodge to turn up here than I expected to meet Yama, the Death-God with the clockwork, rotating nose, walking down Farnham High Street. Such hallucinations were just miscellaneous scrapings from the mind’s detritus.
At length I asked about Peterkin and, as I did so, she blushed. (It was lovely to see how the blush spread over her body.) At first she was rather vague, but as I pressed her relentlessly, she admitted that, ever since we first met, Peterkin had been her night-time fantasy and that she never went to sleep without thinking about him, mentally undressing him and whispering endearments to the darkness. Peterkin was just like me in every detail, except that, whereas I was obviously cool and uncomfortable with her, Peterkin actually loved her and adored her to distraction. Yet, though he was madly in love with her, she loved him even more. She worshipped him. Literally. Before getting into bed in that bleak little flat of hers, she used to kneel beside the bed and with eyes closed she used to pray to him, asking in her prayers that he make her worthy of him.
‘Now you have me, you don’t need him,’ I said.
She just smiled.
We sat in silence gazing at one another for a long time. Then Maud thought that we ought to go into the garden and gather up our clothes, but I pointed out that it was already too dark to see outside.
‘Let’s go to bed, Maud.’
I took her by the hand and led her into the bedroom. I had quite forgotten about Sally, but there she was, fully dressed on top of the bedclothes asleep with the light on. Her breathing was stertorous. It was a surprisingly loud noise to issue from such a waif-like body. I turned away from the bed and tried to lead Maud back to the lying-room, but Maud removed her hand from mine and went over to the bed,
‘We should be here,’ she said and she picked Sally up and laid her gently on the floor beside the bed. Then she pulled back the sheet and, having got into bed, she patted the space beside her. I switched the light off before joining Maud. I had no choice really, for I was trapped by her beauty like a man in a net and besides, even if that had not been the case, I had a premonition of bad things coming and I sensed that I needed Maud’s protection.
In bed it was Maud’s turn to explore my body and, though she was still adamant in defence of her virginity, in all other respects she behaved as my body-slave. I taught her to take me in her mouth and, when she swallowed, it seemed a solemn and eerie moment – a kind of fulfilment of the prophecy of the first trip. Maud fell asleep before me. I lay awake for a long while, straining to hear the Satanists and the blindly-sniffing dogs gathering outside the cottage, but all I could hear was Sally’s snoring.
I awoke with a sudden jerk. It was still pitch-dark. Something crashed against the door. Then there were several thumps and a lot of hissing. I reached for Maud, but she was no longer beside me. A high-pitched scream came from the next room. I was like a man in a nightmare who has to confront the object of his terror, because there is no choice, for that is what his nightmare is and for him there can be no way back down the narrowing tunnel. I groped my way out of bed, switched on the bedroom light and opened the door onto the lying-room.
Sally and Maud were locked in combat on the mattress in the middle of the room. Sally had her teeth into one of Maud’s breasts and at the same time she was tugging at Maud’s hair. Maud had already been bitten several times and was bleeding. Yet Sally had no chance whatsoever, for, of course, Maud was bigger, stronger and a karate brown-belt. I watched her deliver a chop to Sally’s neck. Sally wheezed, and letting go of Maud’s hair, staggered back. Maud kicked her hard in the stomach and Sally went down. Then Maud stood over Sally and Sally looked up at her in the half-light and Sally … submitted. As Sally embraced Maud’s knees, Maud stroked her head. It seemed to me, as I looked on, that Sally had submitted not to Maud’s kicks and punches, but to her naked beauty.
Maud turned proudly to me,
‘Let’s go back to bed, my love,’ she said.
Sally brought us breakfast in bed in the morning. Later in the day, Maud and Sally drew up a shopping-list and Sally went into town to buy the stuff. Meanwhile we moved Sally’s things out of the bedroom and moved Maud’s things in. I imagined that Sally would be stressed by this, but when she came back she was all lit-up.
‘I saw Brian Jones in town,’ she explained.
‘A member of the Rolling Stones,’ I added hastily, in case Maud might think that Brian Jones was an old mate of Sally’s, or even a Satanist on our trail.
‘He was standing in Castle Street, looking as though he was lost. I went up to him and asked if I could help him. He said no, he’d be seeing me soon enough, which I thought was a pretty weird thing to say.’
‘It is pretty hard to get lost in Farnham,’ I observed. ‘It is really only two big streets.’
Sally continued to talk about her encounter with Brian Jones as if it were something miraculous, to be ranked with a vision of the Holy Virgin of Loretto, or something. However, if one thinks about it, it is not so astounding, as quite a few rock stars have big houses in Surrey. It would not surprise me to learn that some or all of the Stones are living nearby. One or two of the Beatles have settled in Weybridge, if I remember rightly.
Sally had brought back a lot of stuff from the shops. Maud had added to Sally’s list of basic provisions a whole lot of other stuff, including yet more underwear, some LPs of classical music and a copy of the Telegraph (so that Maud could follow the fortunes of the British karate team in Holland).
Maud and I went to bed for the first part of the afternoon, while Sally busied herself in arranging her stuff in the next room. I was due to ring Dad that day and I thought it would be best to do that before I got stoned, so I went to the call-box at the end of the road. Dad was just back from work. He sounded curiously reluctant to talk to me and I was having at least as much difficulty as I usually did thinking of things to say, particularly as I did not want to get into explaining how it was that Sally and I had got Maud staying with us now. I was maundering on about how I was writing up my research, when he interrupted,
‘Peter, I think you should be careful. The police came round here yesterday. They had some rather unpleasant news. Your mother’s grave has been desecrated and her body has been taken. The sergeant was talking about ‘resurrection men’ and people who dig up skeletons for medical research. I knew he was wrong, but I did not mention your Satanist chums.’
It was one thing for Maud on a trip to have had a hallucination of Mum in a dirty shroud, it was another for Dad to be talking calmly about police procedures for dealing with body-snatchers. Was Dad on drugs too? But I know that he was not. There is an ugly inevitability about the way things are developing. I actually do not like to think about it too clearly.
Before Dad could finish describing how he had visited the graveyard with the police, he broke down in tears and it became impossible to talk any more. I told him I would be in touch again soon and replaced the receiver.
Sally and Maud looked up smilingly as I re-entered the garden. Sally was bent over the Indian tray in accordance with the sacred ritual of the sun over the yard-arm. Maud had the Telegraph spread out on her lap. One of Maud’s newly acquired records was playing from inside the cottage. It was ‘Bach Before the Mast’ and then ‘The Flight of the Bumble-Bee’ played on a harpsichord. Sally offered the joint that she had just finished rolling to Maud.
‘Thank you, but I have had quite enough druggy horrors to last a lifetime,’ she replied. ‘I have no wish to see Peter’s dead mother again.’
‘I am not sure that we have any choice,’ I said.
I told them about the conversation I had just had with Dad. So then we got into weird territory, as we discussed the meaning of Maud’s vision yesterday afternoon. Apparently it was not after all, some part of her mind’s detritus – something she might have picked up from my descriptions of Mum and my attendance at her funeral. In some sense – God knows what sense – it now seems possible that some sort of manifestation of my mother did visit our garden yesterday.
‘Are you sure that you saw my mother? It wasn’t just that you were thinking that, though my mother was dead, she could still be spiritually present in this world?’
‘Oh no, I saw her – or bits of her at least, where the shroud had come apart. Her eyeballs had gone and her skin had gone all sorts of different colours. I think it was due to various kinds of mould,’ Maud looked anxiously to me. ‘I’m sorry, Peter, but you mustn’t keep pressing me about this. It wasn’t very nice for me either, you know.’
I thought it strange that Mum had been visible only to Maud, but Sally said that it was obvious that Maud was special (and Maud did not correct her on this).
My head is in such a turmoil about everything that I cannot think straight. Should we go on the run again? No point, if they can use my dead mother and blind bloodhounds to track us down once more. And then, trivial though it may be, it occurs to me to ask myself what about my doctoral thesis? My approach to the psycho-dynamics of group interaction in a North London lodge of Satanists will have to be quite different, once I have recognised the reality of a supernatural level of explanation. If I accept that Horapollo House is inhabited by demons as well as by people, then the psycho-dynamics will become that much more complex and, no matter how I dress it up, I cannot see any way that the examiners appointed by London University will take me seriously. Then there is another thing to be thought of. If the universe is as the Satanists and, for that matter, serious Christians say it is, then I have pledged my immortal soul to the Devil and I am damned forever. There is grim irony in realising that no sooner am I prepared to consider the notion that I may have an immortal soul, than I realise that I have lost it. Too grim to linger on this consideration …. Then it occurs to me that, if it is only me whom the Lodge wants, then perhaps Maud and Sally should leave Farnham and as soon as possible. However, when I suggested this, they were both adamant that they would never leave me.
‘You are mine now and for all eternity,’ Maud declared dramatically and she went in to put another record on the record-player. Smoking dope to a background of classical music is quite freaky. The next record she put on was entitled ‘The Best of the Classics’. We listened to ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’, ‘The Nun’s Chorus’, ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’ and stuff like that. What a con it all is. People who listen to classical music give themselves such airs, but why? As far as I could hear, there was nothing in the best of the classics that was as good as Jefferson Airplane or The Velvet Underground. Even Donovan, when he is on form, can produce music which is more sophisticated than the classical best. He certainly comes up with better lyrics than Verdi does. Such were my thoughts as, skimming and dipping, I began to travel on my hash high.
Meanwhile, Sally wittered on about making use of white magic to combat our Satanic visitants and to put Mum back to rest in her grave. Sally is convinced that there is a White Brotherhood – reincarnated avatars of Gandalf and Merlin – roaming Harold Wilson’s Britain and doing good by stealth. Our only problem is how to get in touch with one of these white wizards. It made no difference to her when I pointed out that Gandalf was only a character in a novel. Apparently there is still some sense in which Gandalf is real – or indeed realer than real. But I was pissed-off with her for harping on our problems with the forces of darkness and not letting me drift off for even a moment on a hash fugue, so I baited her by reminding her of Robert Drapers’s projected anti-Tolkien book, provisionally entitled Kicking the Hobbit.
Maud, listening to our argument, raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. She went back to her newspaper. Sally and I have always agreed on one thing at least and that is in not reading newspapers. Reading a newspaper is always a downer which contaminates the mind with reports of murder, rape, famine, war and the rumour of war – as today with the fighting in Biafra and the aftermath of the Six-Day conflict. Maud was like us, uninterested in politics or war, and, having read the karate report avidly, she was idly turning over the rest of the pages.
Then she let out a schoolgirlish squeal,
‘Eeek, Peter! Look at this!’
And she showed me a notice in the law page of the Telegraph. Julian’s solicitors had placed an advertisement asking Peter Keswick to get in touch with them, for as heir to Julian Manciple he would learn something to his advantage. I had been trying to drift away on the ‘The Nun’s Chorus’, but everything that afternoon conspired to remind me of suicide, damnation and hell. The chill was back again. It was so very freaky that Maud, who had only wanted to see the karate results, should have stumbled across precisely this appeal directed at me by solicitors, who were doubtless acting under instructions from the Black Book Lodge.
Sally and I needed to recharge our highs. The trouble was, there was not much hash left. There was still some acid, but neither of us felt like risking that in our present mental state. So that left poppers. Maud of course declined to join us. I can see that she does not like being out of control. The poppers came in mesh-covered capsules. Sally and I broke them open and inhaled simultaneously. A slaves’ chorus from some opera or other filled the garden as the amyl nitrite surged through my body. I collapsed onto my back and surrendered myself to the five-minute high. My heart was beating like a butterfly trapped in a cage and my whole body was juddering in time to the vibrations of reality. This was hard-edged, fierce, demanding. With poppers there are no hallucinations or mystic glows. Everything looks exactly as it is, only more so. As on previous experiments with this stuff, for a fraction of an instant, I grokked the ultimate nature of reality, but unfortunately this ultimate truth is too subtle to be put into a notebook. Stupid drug to have taken in the circumstances. After five minutes, it just put me back more firmly in the predicament that I was in, haunted and damned.
The day which started weird, ended weird. Maud and I were eager to be in one another’s arms once more, and we went to bed early. But, after an hour or two, Maud’s eyelids began to droop, though I was frustratedly randy as ever. Maud smiled lovingly at me before getting out of bed and going into the lying-room. When she reappeared a few minutes later she was leading Sally by the hand. Maud watched lazily as Sally made love to me and then drifted off to sleep just as Sally and I began to fuck.
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.
However, the man who stood beside her in the doorway looking drenched and miserable, was not the Beatles’ manager, but Mr Cosmic.
‘Epstein did not say anything,’ Sally continued. ‘He just looked at me rather strangely.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ I replied. ‘With no eyebrows and no eyelashes, you do look rather strange. Hello, Cosmic. What brings you here?’
‘Hi man,’ was all he said.
Then Maud walked in from the bedroom.
‘I am David Hargreaves, but they call me Mr Cosmic,’ he said.
‘Oh yes, I have heard all about you,’ Maud replied and she extended her hand in that slightly absurd, ladylike manner of hers and he stooped to kiss it.
‘What are you doing here?’ I persisted.
‘What do you think? I’m looking after you.’
Before I could press him more on this, Sally danced between us and -
‘Taraa!’ she shouted as she ripped the turban from her head. Sally had had her skull tattooed with a coiling snake and, in the middle of the snake’s coils, one could read in rainbow lettering the words, ‘I AM SALLY, THE SLAVE OF MAUD AND PETER’.
‘Wow! That’s cool,’ said Cosmic.
‘That is why I was away so long,’ she said. ‘I had to go all the way to Aldershot to get it done,’ and she looked to Maud for approval.
But all Maud said was,
‘Now that you are here, perhaps we can eat.’
Cosmic went back out into the rain to retrieve his sleeping-bag and the provisions which he had stashed in the woods. Sally explained that she had stumbled across Cosmic looking fed-up and trying to shelter under a tree at the end of our road and, when she suggested that he came back with her to the cottage, he had just shrugged his shoulders and agreed. But Sally was more preoccupied with her sighting of Brian Epstein. I do not believe that she has seen Brian Epstein. Two days after running into Brian Jones, that would be too much of a coincidence. Just possibly she might have seen someone who looked like Epstein. But is she going to keep on running into famous Brians every time that she goes into Farnham? Not that I can think of any more Brians who have become famous. The truth is, of course, that Sally has completely flipped. Presumably it is all the drugs she has been taking recently. Thank God Maud is here, for I would not like to be alone in the cottage with this mad girl, whom I now feel I do not know at all.
Sally unpacked the shopping. One of the things she had bought was a frilly apron. Before starting the cooking, she took off all her clothes and put on the apron. Maud and I ate at the table in the kitchen with Sally waiting on us. It was a weird buzz, to see a plate of pork chops displayed beneath Sally’s pointy breasts. Then Sally and Cosmic ate on the mattress in the lying-room. Cosmic produced a bottle of vodka from his rucksack and, after rooting around in the kitchen, he found a jar of Bovril. So then we all drank a mixture of vodka and Bovril – Polish Bison is what it’s called apparently – and Maud, who had a lot of it, was pawing me drunkenly. It flashed through my mind that what started out in this cottage as a kind of rustic idyll, is turning out to be something like a small-scale, green-belt version of the Playboy Club. It seems to be only me who does not know what the hell is going on.
Cosmic seems in a bad way. He sweats and scratches himself a lot. He was talking in a low monotone, almost as if he was talking to himself. His drone was in praise of alcohol and about how each culture has its own drug. In the Middle East it is hash. In China it is opium. In Central America it is peyote. But the great drug of Christian and European culture is alcohol.
‘One should not underrate alcohol just because straights take it. It is the best, most predictable drug that it is possible to score. With hash you can never tell in advance the quality of what you have scored. The heroin currently sold is often contaminated. It is easy to have a bad trip on acid – everyone does sooner or later. But the alcohol high is fast and rock solid-predictable. Looking back over the history of the last two millennia, I think it is plain to see that it is alcohol which has fuelled the triumph of the West … ’
Sally had crashed out. Maud and I staggered off to bed, leaving Cosmic drunkenly talking to himself.
Still raining. Maud was doing her press-ups and stretching exercises beyond the foot of the bed. I watched with pleasure for a while, before deciding that I really needed to talk to Cosmic and get some sense out of him. I staggered out into the kitchen, but I was too late. He had finished breakfast and he was preparing to shoot up. I had seen Cosmic skin-pop heroin from time to time when I visited him in London. But now it seemed that he had switched to mainlining. A saucepan was nestling between his legs and a tourniquet fashioned from a rubber strap of some kind was already tight on his upper arm. He gave me a funny kind of rictus smile as he plunged the needle in. First time lucky. He flushed the syringe full of blood before sending it back into the vein and gasped as the stuff began to hit. He slumped backwards with his eyes closed, but then he abruptly jerked forwards and vomited into the saucepan. Cosmic always throws up when he is on heroin. He claims to actually enjoy the experience. Be that as it may, it is definitely off-putting to be having breakfast in the same room in which Cosmic is shooting up.
It was also irritating, of course, to have listened to all that stuff about the wonders of alcohol coming out of the mouth of someone who is really hooked, it now seems, on heroin. Tanked-up the way he was, he was going to be no sort of company for the next few hours. It might have been a good scene if we had shared a trip together, but then, even if he had not been so zonked, I remembered that Cosmic does not do LSD. He is very puritanical about the subject and believes it fucks up the mind in the long term. According to him, a trip does not necessarily stop when it seems to stop and hallucinations can surge up years or even decades later. Cosmic’s body is a temple, albeit a somewhat bizarrely furnished temple.
Sally said that she had shopping to do. I said that I would go with her. If she was going to run into any more famous Brians, I wanted to be there too. However, Maud, who had gone back to bed called from the bedroom, asking me to stay with her. She said that we would both be safer if I stayed close to the cottage. I went in to see her. Maud was sitting up in bed reading old copies of Vogue. She patted the space beside her. So I joined her in bed and set to work stroking her breasts and thighs. But after a while, she shifted restlessly under my hands.
‘Just be patient, darling. Tomorrow is the big day.’
So I got out of bed and went and fetched what turned out to be the last of my acid-impregnated sugar cubes.
‘I am going to take a trip.’
‘Must you, darling?’
‘Yeah. I’m bored out of my skull.’
So now I am sitting cross-legged in the lotus position by the open door looking out on the spears of rain. My diary rests on my knees and I am waiting for the hallucinations to kick in. Every trip is completely different. So, whatever is going to happen this time, I know that I will not be trapped in the pages of my diary, nor will I re-encounter Proust and his conversational sharks. What I am hoping is to get into grooving on nature and discovering a more Thoreauesque mode of existence. I want to observe lesser-crested nuthatches, spotted grebes, hedge corncrakes and God knows what else and write lovingly detailed evocations of convolvuli, oak leaves and stuff like that. Rather than waste page after page of this notebook on the bizarre antics of Sally and Cosmic, I ought to dedicate myself to simply recording the shapes assumed by the dirty brown clouds as they roll endlessly by.
The rest of this is written in retrospect, as at that point the hallucinations did indeed start to kick in and they came so thick and fast that I had to drop my biro and just let it all wash over me. What happened was that I looked up at the dirty brown clouds and fancied that I could see shapes in their billowing coils. Behold, I beheld the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse riding high in the Surrey skies! First there was skinny John with his pitchfork, the very figure of famine. Chubby-faced Paul rode beside John and threatened the world with his balances. Behind them rode George brandishing a sword and Ringo with a bow and a quiver of deadly arrows. They went forth conquering and to conquer. I thought that they might make a landing in our garden and that I should throw myself on their mercy. So I went and lay on the grass and got pretty wet in the process, but they galloped on by. And I kept looking … and beheld a pale horse; and his name was Death and Hell followed with him. And power was given to them over the fourth part of the world … Why, I cried out, are the dead grateful?
Having received no answer and having then turned back to the cottage, I found myself confronted at the door by a handsome young man who wore a black leather jacket and a black eye-patch. He raised a hand in salutation.
‘Johnny Kidd,’ he said.
‘Johnny Kidd of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates?’
‘The same.’
‘Wow! What are you doing here?’
‘I died in a car crash. That was in October last year, but it feels like eternity,’ he replied.
‘No, I mean what are you doing here?’
‘I am your appointed psychopomp,’ he declared. Then, seeing the expression on my face, he added, ‘Look it up in a dictionary sometime.’
Of course, I thought, I should not have to look it up in a dictionary. It must be in my mind, filed away somewhere. The whole trip comes from within my head. It is important to keep a grip on that. He gestured that I should follow him inside and I accompanied him into the kitchen. I was without fear. This, even though the total overload phase of the trip was commencing. I was well protected, as Johnny Kidd walked before me as my guide and an honour-guard of toad-headed pikemen marched with me. Now I was blessed or cursed with double vision, for I could see that I was in the kitchen, but I could also see that I stood in one of the pits of Hell. The place was a tip. Last night’s washing-up had not been done, never mind the breakfast things. Rotting rubbish overflowed the bin beside the sink. Cosmic’s vomit was congealing in the saucepan. That was to start with, but then all the garbage and the kitchen implements fornicated together and produced new and Hellish hybrids.
The lower half of the egg-timer sprouted a woman’s arse. Eyeballs rose up bubbling out of a half-opened tin. Tiny mites danced round a thing that was half an eggshell and half a coffee-grinder. A chunk of raw liver on the sideboard kept on emitting sulphurous farts. A kitchen knife, which used ears for wheels, rumbled across the floor seeking another damned soul to stab at. The screaming damned were in free fall and hot ash and gouts of lava fell with them in an unending stream. Why do all medieval painters show Hell as pretty much the same? Why are there so many pictures which show tormented throngs of naked men and women, monstrous hybrids, blood-red skies and demon foremen with pitchforks? It is simple. They paint Hell that way because that is the way Hell looks.
The population of Hell increases hour by hour and the place is one vast building site – scaffolding, ladders, temporary tent cities and half-finished ramparts in all directions. Evil-looking creatures scurry about with buckets of tar and hods of bricks, but despite all their business, nothing ever quite gets finished. The first person we met in Hell was sitting in a tub of excrement. Johnny Kidd introduced me to Robert Johnson, the legendary founder of Blues music. Did playing the Blues merit such punishment? Seeing that I showed compassion for the man’s suffering, Johnny explained that there could be no help for Johnson, since he had sold his soul to the Voodoo god, Legba. Then, in the circle of suicides, I saw Julian come crawling out from a culvert. Julian, when he saw me, shrieked and covered his eyes. Straightaway he dropped onto all fours and ran off as fast as he could. Julian was naked and a little monster rode upon his back and sought to open up his arse with a tin-opener. The unclothed bodies of the tormented are so spongily soft and vulnerable. They are skewered, fried, flayed, sawed and gnawed.
Suddenly I had a nasty, queasy thought,
‘Is my Mum here?’
But Johnny smiled reassuringly,
‘In the final stages of her illness, your mother started going to services at the Baptist Church and in the last year of her life she had herself baptised, so, though her repentance came late, through the mercy of the One Whose Name We Do Not Speak Here, she is in Another, Better Place.’
Johnny went on to point out to me the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens and the Marquis de Sade, but when I asked about Aleister Crowley and if I could meet him, my guide looked at me strangely and shook his head. He walked on a bit and beckoned that I should follow. So, thinking that I was about to meet Crowley, I scrambled down behind him, all the way down to the lowest pit. At the centre of this pit was a little hill covered with skulls and on the hill a cross and on the cross a naked person was crucified. I looked up and saw that it was not Aleister Crowley, but Maud.
Actually, if I took a grip on myself and concentrated, I could see that Maud was sitting beside me in the kitchen. She was holding my hand and worrying because she was under the impression that I was having a bad trip. It was only if I let my vision slide, that the Hellspawn came frothing out of jars and packets and the vegetables decomposed into souls in torment and I stood once more on a parody of the Hill of Golgotha.
‘What are you doing on the cross?’ I wanted to know.
‘I am practising.’
Her exercise struck me as both bizarre and blasphemous and a very strange thought flashed through my mind.
‘You are the Devil, aren’t you?’
‘I can be anything you want me to be, darling, but I think you prefer me as a beautiful woman,’ she replied.
Somewhere in the background, Russ Conway was playing ‘The Moonlight Sonata’.
I turned to Johnny Kidd, who stood beside me sombre and with head bowed in thought.
‘Am I lost to the mercy and love of God?’ I demanded.
‘God could not love you as I do,’ Maud called down from her chosen place of torment.
And I recited,
‘I am counted among them that go down to the pit: I am become like a man without help, free among the dead. They laid me in a lower pit in dark places and in the shadow of death.’
No sooner had I recited those words than I became aware that the trip was fading. It did not happen all at once. I saw Clara Petacci suckling a pig and, not far away, King Farouk sprawled on an altar while a stake was hammered up his anus. I saw Ruth Ellis running on the shore of a lake of fire. Suicide-trees dripped venom. Bellies exploded. Pretty young girls in mini-skirts covered the path in front of me with their spew. However, the whole infernal scenario was losing colour and power. I was master of this place. It was my kitchen. I had the rent-book of Hell. I became increasingly aware of Maud anxiously holding my hand and of Sally bustling about to make me a cup of tea with lots of sugar in it. I was drifting into a grey, purgatorial state in which I just had to sit quiet and wait until the Hellish visions should fade entirely away.
Another hour passed before I was able to communicate coherently with my companions in the kitchen. Sally had come back from her shopping ages ago.
‘Who did you see this time?’ (I really wanted to know.) ‘Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys? No, don’t tell me … Brian the Snail from The Magic Roundabout?’
Sally looked baffled and angry.
‘No, but I did run into Janis Joplin,’ she replied. ‘And I said how much I admired her singing and she told me where there was a pet shop.’
Flipped. Completely flipped.
Following on from Janis Joplin’s alleged directions, Sally had indeed been to a pet shop and bought a dog collar, a lead, a dog bowl and tins of dog food, but, as Cosmic had perceptively pointed out, she had not bought a dog.
‘I am the dog,’ Sally replied.
She had also bought some more vodka and more women’s magazines, plus a copy of Melody Maker for me. Tonight Sally, wearing the frilly apron and a spiky dog collar, cooked chilli con carne. Our domestic arrangements are becoming increasingly complicated. Thus Maud and I had our dinner at the kitchen table and we drank vodka out of glasses like normal people. Cosmic, however, ate in the lying-room and, after he had established that we had run out of Bovril, he decided to try something new. He mainlined his vodka straight into his veins. Evidently this produced quite a blast and Cosmic passed out before he had finished his dinner. I had to check that he had not died. I think he is going to be all right, though it is quite hard to tell. As for Sally, once she had served us our food, she spooned herself out some dog-food and got down on hands and knees to eat it on the floor of the kitchen.
Now Maud and I are lying in bed and writing our diaries. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?
Yesterday Hell and Purgatory. Today the bliss of Paradise.
First thing in the morning Maud was out in the garden, doing her karate exercises as usual. Cosmic and Sally were nowhere to be seen. After a while Maud took a breather and explained that Sally had asked Cosmic to put a lead on her and take her for a walk in the woods. Apparently the thing is that Sally has declared that she is unworthy to use the same lavatory on which Maud has sat, so now she must shit and pee in the woods. It is a little bit freaky, but I have to think of what is happening as not so much losing an old girlfriend as gaining a new talking dog. Anyway it is a relief to learn that Cosmic has recovered from his shot of alcohol. According to Cosmic, Sally is getting her reincarnation in early.
Then Maud went inside and started preparing the bedroom. She plumped up the pillows and put out candles and incense sticks and stuff like that. Then she had a long bath and even longer session in front of the mirror with her vast armoury of cosmetics and perfumes. Cosmic and Sally came back from their walk. They both claimed to have enjoyed it, even though Sally’s knees were horribly scratched and bleeding.
Although I really wanted to talk to Cosmic, he put me on hold. He had by now accumulated some half a dozen gnomes stolen from Farnham gardens and he had decided that it was urgent that they should be buried straightaway. Yesterday’s rain had softened up the ground a bit and, once the gnomes had been placed deep in the ground, they could start mining away and gathering treasure.
I cannot get much sense out of Sally these days. While Cosmic is labouring away with a spade in the corner of the garden, I have chosen a spot nearby and, now that I have caught up in my diary with recent events, I have decided to get down to making nature notes – literally down to it, as I am lying on my belly at the edge of the wood with my diary in front of me and I am watching a couple of butterflies dancing through the trees. The silver birches -
While I was getting going on writing this, Sally crawled up beside me.
‘An hour and a half to go,’ she said.
I recoiled a bit from the smell of dog-food on her breath, but she did not notice.
‘Don’t you miss London, Peter?’
‘Oh yeah, of course. But God knows when it will be safe to return to London – if ever.’
And I looked inquiringly at her.
‘Meeting Maud and serving her has been the greatest experience of my life,’ Sally declared emphatically. ‘But I long for London. I miss the Mangrove and the Joyboy … and the King’s Road … and curries. I have walked every street in Farnham without finding a single Indian restaurant. And I want to dance at Middle Earth. That would be such a groove. I long for it, but I do not think that I shall ever dance again.’
When will it be safe to return to London? Only after some unimaginable catastrophe has befallen the city and, in that greater catastrophe, Horapollo House is no more than a burnt-out shell and its inhabitants shall be dispersed or dead. I am seized with nostalgia for the future. In this future, Sally and I will be dancing in the streets, for the sound of the music has changed and the walls of the city have fallen. We and all our friends will be hand-in-hand and capering through mossed-over arcades and grassy squares. Cattle shelter in the shadow of the Stock Exchange, unguarded while feckless shepherdesses and their swains make love amongst its ruins. The rubble of the Festival Hall runs tumbling into the Thames where gipsyish women sit on its foreshore, washing garishly coloured linen, while a band of horsemen canters along the remaining solitary walkway. The Dome of St Pauls is down and there are nightly bonfires in its great nave. Skulls of cattle adorned with flowers decorate the Cathedral’s arches. A raggle-taggle throng of tinkers, drovers and roadies, all in the bright and distinctive robes of their crafts, like to gather there and entertain themselves with pipes and guitars. A few of those partying, more thoughtful than the rest, may gaze up at the remnants of the great stone drum of the ruined edifice and muse. Surely they were giants who built this city? The churches and public buildings are now guarded only by the enigmatic statues of forgotten generals and politicians – so many lost gods of England.
For it is not just London. All of England has surrendered to wood magic and gone wild. It is a land fit for heads and the time when people and roads were straight is only a horrid memory. Wagon-trains of gaily-painted caravans follow the traces of old tracks across the south-western plains, heading for …
Sally, who now knelt beside the back door, broke my reverie by calling out, ‘Half an hour now, Peter.’
So then I decided to write all the above down. It was not the kind of nature note that I had had in mind, but it still seemed necessary to record it. In fact, my hand wished to write it and I let Pyewhacket get away with it again.
Then, before I have quite finished writing, Sally calls again,
‘Twenty minutes.’
Just as Sally was presumably about to declare that there was a quarter of an hour to go, Maud appeared at the door and, half-shy, half-proud, struck a pose. She was wearing a black and pink peignoir, a suspender belt and shiny black stockings. She looked at me and put a finger to her mouth. I followed her into the bedroom which was now thick with incense.
Maud was still kneeling and struggling with the buckle of my belt, when Sally from the next room called out, ‘Ten minutes!’ but a few minutes later Maud and I were in bed. I was resting on my elbows, poised over her, when Sally commenced the count-down proper.
‘100, 99, 98, 97 …’
Maud looked terrified.
‘Blast off!’
It was not much of a blast-off. The entry was difficult and Maud was intensely concentrated. Her nails on my back drew blood. When it was over, she contemplated the stains on the sheets and declared,
‘Gosh! Isn’t being human a messy business?’
The next thing was that she leapt out of bed and went galumphing into the next room.
‘Sally! Sally! We did it!’
‘Oh, well done!’ Sally was faint.
‘It didn’t hurt! Well, not more than having my ears pierced did.’
Then Maud galumphed back and threw herself on me.
‘Let’s do it again!’
I think we did it eight times that day. Sally brought us lunch in bed and we did not actually get dressed until evening. Now it is late in the night and Maud is asleep and snoring, but I have been lying in bed and I have been thinking about what Maud told me this afternoon. After the fourth fuck, I remember that I was looking down on her and thinking that she looked so angelic with her luxuriant black hair fanned across the pillow, like the halo of a dark spirit. And the words just came tripping out of my mouth,
‘When I was on acid I saw you as the Devil’
She smiled lazily.
‘Yes well, that is who my Pa says I am.’
‘Your Pa?’
‘Robert Kelley.’
‘Robert Kelley … the Master?’
‘You silly, yes, of course. I thought that you had worked that out by now. Even Sally is faster than you! I adopted my maiden name when I fell out with Pa and went to work as a hairdresser. Boleskine is my mother’s surname.’
I thought about this for a few minutes, before replying,
‘OK, but being the daughter of a leading Satanist does not mean that you are the Devil.’
Now it was her turn to pause and reflect.
‘I think that the time has come to tell you how it was that I was born,’ she said.
It took Maud hours to tell the full story. She kept getting things in the wrong order and forgetting that she had not yet explained certain other things. Also we broke off a couple of times for more sex. However, Maud’s story, as I have reconstructed it in my mind is as follows:
It all began with Aleister Crowley and the horoscopes which were cast for him on the day of his birth and the day of his death. Crowley (who, in his immediately previous incarnation had been the notorious French occultist, Eliphas Levi) was born on October 12, 1875 and christened Edward Alexander. He was born under the Crab with his Sun in Virgo and his Moon between Aquarius and Pisces. He died on the 1st December 1947, under the sign of Sagittarius and he was cremated on December 5th at Brighton Crematorium. Relations between Crowley and his disciples on the one hand and on the other hand the Adepts of the Black Book Lodge had been strained for some years. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that Robert Kelley and Charles Felton should have attended Crowley’s funeral. While down in Brighton, they consulted with Gerald Yorke and other old associates of Crowley and together they drew up a detailed horoscope of the hour of Crowley’s death. The leaders of the Lodge knew that they had to move swiftly. A small group of Adepts was selected and tickets were purchased for them on the first available boat to Alexandria.
The currency restrictions which were then in force were irksome and arrangements took longer than might have been hoped, and it was not until February 10th, 1948 that Robert Kelley and his party arrived in Cairo. They were cheerful – delighted to have escaped post-war Britain, smog, and the austerities of rationing, and, besides, they were young and wild and they had embarked on a mighty and dangerous adventure. ‘They’, were Robert and his wife, Elspeth, Charles and Bridget Felton, Colonel Chalmers, Julian and Ronald Silvers. Julian and Ronald were very close. It was Ronald who had got Julian so interested in Egyptology in the first place. Ronald, who was thought to be a promising scholar and linguist, was a deputy curator at the British Museum, but he had negotiated an extended leave for himself. The party put up at Shepheard’s Hotel and most of them enjoyed a few days of pale sun on the verandah, sipping glasses of mint tea brought to them by servants wearing tarbooshes and long white robes. Robert and Elspeth actually slept in the same room that Crowley had occupied when he stayed in Cairo on his return from the Himalayas. Meanwhile Chalmers and Silvers set about hiring servants and donkeys. (From our perspective in 1967, it is hard for Maud and me to imagine Chalmers as ever having had all his marbles and being up to organising an Egyptian donkey train, but it was so. It is even harder for us to imagine Felton as a slim and dashing young man, but he was apparently handsome in those days, though not as handsome as Ronald.) Chalmers also purchased several black cockerels.
By the third evening after their arrival in Cairo – that is February 12th – they were ready to depart for Memphis. Although the conjuration which Kelley and Felton organised in 1948 is conventionally known as the ‘Cairo Working’, what happened really took place in Memphis. Memphis is some distance to the south of Cairo and the pyramids of Giza. Coptic guides carrying flares led them out into the desert, heading for the group of small villages which partially occupied the site of the capital of the Old Kingdom. Though wild dogs barked and jackals howled on the horizon, the mood of those on the night-journey was crazily cheerful. Everyone was smoking hashish cigarettes. Most walked, but Ronald sat on his donkey and serenaded Elspeth with his violin. Elspeth, who wore a dark-blue priestess’s robe, danced in front of him. Her beauty was ethereal and all the men were in love with her. (As I gazed on Maud, her daughter, I found no difficulty in believing this.) Correction: all the men, except Julian, lusted after Elspeth. Julian lusted after Ronald, but he had said nothing to Ronald and perhaps he had not even admitted the truth to himself.
The garden village of Mit Rahina is situated in the heart of what was once Memphis. In the pre-dawn the sorcerers made their way between the hovels and palm groves and came at last to the area of the former temple enclosure of Ptah. (Ptah is the mummiform god of necropolises.) Servants were organised to start a fire in the vicinity of the Alabaster Sphinx. Although it was still early and the muezzin had not yet made the fajr (dawn) call, their arrival in Memphis had not gone unnoticed and Kelley had to pay the headman of Mit Rahina to keep the villagers and their children away from the ritual spot.
The first of the thirteen Chokmah days commenced with the rising of the sun and it was then possible to begin the invocation of Aiwass. The blood of slaughtered cockerels made the fire hiss. Then Robert, having called out the private names of Aiwass, cast Crowley’s special talisman – an Abramelin square soaked in menstrual blood – on to the fire. The purpose of the invocation was to hold converse with Aiwass and to seek that mighty spirit’s assistance in guiding the dead spirit of Crowley into his next incarnation. Robert and Elspeth went so far as to hope that they might be found acceptable as the future parents of Crowley in his next incarnation. (‘So you are the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley?’ I interrupted. ‘No, it is stranger than that,’ Maud replied. ‘Listen.’)
‘Aiwass! Manifest yourself! We shall be content with none other!’
No sooner had Robert completed his call to Aiwass than a wind arose in the north-west and fanned the fire, sending sparks into the air. Felton sat closest to the fire, as he was the party’s designated scryer. However, in fact all of the party saw Aiwass when he manifested himself in the heart of the fire. This demon had taken the form of a naked old man and the old man jumped on Felton and attacked his throat. But Kelley had his exorcism dagger at the ready and he used this to drive Aiwass back into the fire. Then they watched the demon writhe, for Aiwass suffered from the flames as much as any human would. There was nothing shadowy or fanciful about the manifestation of this spirit. All six of them clearly saw Aiwass in the hard-edged light of early morning, even though to see him was to be on the outer edge of sanity.
So Robert held Aiwass in the fire and was thus able to interrogate him under duress. Everything had gone well so far. But when Robert asked for the demon’s assistance in guiding them to Crowley’s next incarnation, the demon told him that he was too late and that Crowley had already taken his next human form. In fact, he had been born in early January. This was an unforeseen development. The Lodge had expected that Crowley would linger for about six months in the world of shades before taking human form again. That would have been normal. Robert now had a whispered consultation with Felton, before turning once more to Aiwass and demanding that spirit’s assistance in guiding them to Crowley’s new incarnation. Then they saw something which no occultist has seen before. They saw Aiwass make invocation in turn to his master and they saw the old man in the fire talking to the monstrous spirit who governed him, though the spirit itself remained invisible, for they were, it must be remembered, at the outer limit of what it was possible to see and still live.
At length Aiwass replied that his master would bring the new incarnation of Crowley to them. However, his master had also decided to take human form and, shortly after the latest incarnation of Crowley should have presented himself to the Adepts of the Lodge. Then his master in human guise would hold intercourse with Crowley. Until those two had met, the Antichrist, that son of perdition who would deceive people into worshipping him, could not appear on earth. So Aiwass’s master would bring Crowley to them. Then Aiwass’s master would come to seek Crowley among their number. When Robert asked the name of the entity seeking incarnation, Aiwass replied that he dared not pronounce the name. Then Robert fell to his knees, for he understood who, or perhaps it should be what it was that sought to descend to earth in human form. Felton took over the conversation with the demon and, after seeking detailed directions about how they were to assist Aiwass’s master in taking flesh, he swiftly dismissed the lesser demon.
Now, of course, everyone in Kelley’s party was familiar with the theory and practice of congressus cum daemone. Such intercourse between men, or more often women and spirits has taken place for thousands of years. Indeed, Herodotus described this practice when he came to discuss the curious dealings of the temple prostitutes of Egypt. Moreover, the Black Book Lodge had already supervised several experiments in inseminating and rearing ‘moonchildren’. Nevertheless, the pact that Aiwass seemed to be proposing went beyond anything that had ever been envisaged by the Black Book Lodge or by any of their predecessors.
Therefore, the rest of the day passed in argument, as Felton and Kelley raged at one another on the threshold of the Temple of Ptah while Elspeth and Bridget sat silently listening to their dispute. It was Kelley who wished to break off. He wanted them all to return to England, where surely they would be able to research some other way of locating the infant incarnation of Crowley. But Felton replied that it would be shameful to go back to London with so little achieved. That was the least of it. Beyond that, Felton pointed out the grandeur and honour of the enterprise which had been proposed to them by Aiwass. If they performed the ritual which they were commanded to carry out, they would have decisively undermined the central pillar of the Christian faith and would have changed the history of the world in a most spectacular and terrible fashion. Surely they would be rewarded and most generously rewarded for their indispensable assistance in such an undertaking? Besides it was discourteous to refuse a request from Aiwass’s master. It was certain that such discourtesy would, sooner or later, be painfully avenged.
Although this last argument carried some weight with Robert, he still would not agree that they should proceed with this terrible ritual. Then Elspeth suddenly said that she was eager to perform according to the instructions which had been dictated by the old man in the fire and that she longed to offer her body to the unseen, but Robert stopped her, saying that, if Felton was so keen to carry this thing through, then it ought to be his wife, Bridget, who should be the vehicle of the insemination. So Felton went off to fetch Bridget from her tent and, after some more debate, Robert presented a fist with two straws to the women. Elspeth drew the short straw, which was the one she said she had wanted.
The next bit is, perforce a bit vague, as nobody in the Lodge had ever actually spelt out to Maud exactly what happened next, though by piecing bits of information together she eventually got a fairly good idea. After the dismissal of Aiwass, Ronald had gone off into the desert to amuse himself by taking pot-shots at jackals. Chalmers was sent to bring him back. Meanwhile a goat and a dog were purchased from the village.
The dog was promptly killed and their dinner that night consisted of dog’s flesh with unleavened bread, washed down with a great deal of wine. Accompanied by Charles and Ronald on violins, Bridget chanted hymns by Crowley, while Elspeth made herself ready as a bride for the bridegroom. When the night was well advanced, Robert and Elspeth went off into the desert and they were accompanied by Julian who had charge of the animal, which was now consecrated as the Goat of Memphis. The possibility of bi-semination, though still widely believed in Renaissance times, has since fallen into disrepute with the scientific community. Nevertheless, it is still believed in certain occult circles that, in the right circumstances, the double seeding of a woman’s womb can be successfully carried out.
It was dawn before Robert, Elspeth and Julian returned. Elspeth had to be supported by Robert. Julian had the dead goat slung over his shoulder. Its meat was consumed in a second ritual meal. Although a great deal of wine was consumed, there was little conversation. The following day, they returned to Cairo. Elspeth travelled in a litter, for she was unable to walk for almost a fortnight. In Cairo, Ronald started behaving strangely, but the Master was preoccupied with Elspeth and as for Felton, he was brooding over what he now perceived to be a lost opportunity. For if he had been prepared to push Bridget forward, he might have become step-father of the Devil. Of course, Julian did notice Ronald’s strange state and he stayed close to his friend. However, he may have seen Ronald’s moodiness and his alienation from Elspeth as more of an opportunity than anything else.
Maud is not exactly sure what happened in Cairo, except that Ronald shot himself. She heard contradictory things, but what she thinks happened is that Julian attached himself to Ronald as his shadow. Ronald kept pestering Julian for precise details of what happened to Elspeth with the goat. At length Julian wearied of being evasive and told him straight out. An hour later Ronald shot himself. Julian who was only in the next room rushed in when he heard the shot. He found that Ronald had botched the job, so that, although a large part of his face had been blasted away, he was still alive. Julian finished the job with a second shot. It seems likely that he was going to follow Ronald to Hell, but before he could reload the gun, the Master and Felton came in and took charge of things. Looking backwards on things (literally that is), Julian realised that it was Ronald’s death which had caused him to fall in love with him in the first place.
Three weeks after their return to Cairo, what was left of the party embarked on a boat bound for Southampton. By the time they reached England, Elspeth was certain that she was carrying a baby. From the first, it was a difficult pregnancy as she kept vomiting up hair-balls and what looked like tiny bits of gravel. Towards the end of her time, Elspeth made two bungled attempts at suicide, as she belatedly began to panic at the thought of what was growing in her womb. So Maud was actually born in a mental asylum. Robert and his associates had been expecting that the Devil would choose the male sex for his human incarnation and they had not thought of any girl’s names for the baby when it came. However, Elspeth had been a devotee of Tennyson’s poetry, so Maud was the name on the birth certificate – though, of course, there was also a secret baptism, in which the little girl was given the name of the Lady Lillith Nuit Ma Ahathoor.
Elspeth did not spend long in the asylum – just long enough for Robert to make the arrangements for her to be nursed and guarded in the attic of Horapollo House. Robert himself moved out of the House, having purchased an ordinary semi-detached in Highbury and this was where Maud, reared by a foster mother and a series of governesses, grew up. From time to time, senior Adepts of the Black Book Lodge came to visit her. They respectfully asked her questions and set her tests and they performed curious little rituals which were designed to awaken her memory of her true nature and to activate her dark power. Maud sulkily submitted to these indignities and then went back to her doll’s-house. Once she could read, Robert timidly put texts by Sinistrari and Crowley beside her bed, but Maud stayed obstinately loyal to Bunty and Jill. She was not an easy child and, later yet, she conducted a vigorous, though unsuccessful campaign to be given a pony. (Refused as hardly practical in north London.) The adolescent Maud was no easier. She mulishly rebuffed her father’s attempts to instruct her in her true nature, for she preferred karate, make-up, clothes and dreaming about boys to all that stuff about the Devil and Satanism.
God so loved mankind that He made himself incarnate as a man and, though relinquishing none of His Divine nature, He then became fully human. Now, the Devil had outdone God by descending to earth in female form and making himself subject to all the travails of womankind, including period pains, the perils of pregnancy and a taste for fashion magazines. The dark power was in abeyance, but only for a time and for a purpose. Thus the Master reasoned to himself and, in time, he became comfortable with this way of thinking. Even so, he still had Aiwass’s promise in his head and how that spirit had foretold that the Devil would bring Crowley to him and that he would bring Crowley to the Devil.
I had always thought of the Master as a terrifying figure and I had seen grown men tremble when he made one of his rare appearances at Horapollo House. Maud, however, thought of her father as one hell of a sad man. Not only had he failed to make the Devil fully manifest in the world and failed also to locate Crowley (though these concerns seemed of little importance to her), but he had also failed to rescue her mother from madness and, above all, he had failed to treat Maud as a human being, never mind love her as his child. Their rows became fiercer and more frequent and eventually Maud found work as a hairdresser and moved into that shared flat which I had once visited. She continued to see her father occasionally and he generously topped up her rather meagre wages.
Maud had hoped that, once she was on her own, she would find it easier to meet and date boys. This was not the case. Although she was beautiful and several boys did try to pick her up, her awkward manner always ensured that the first date with any boy was also the last. Eventually she resorted to computer dating.
When, after quite a few diversions and recapitulations, she reached this point, I interrupted,
‘It is unbelievable! It is one hell of a coincidence that I, a disciple of the Master, should meet his daughter on a blind computer-date. I just can’t get my head round that.’
Maud looked at me with fond contempt,
‘Peter, you are such a thicko! No sorry, you are lovely, but your brain does not seem to be functioning this evening. That was a set-up, you see! Granville never posted your form. Pa and Felton just wanted to bring us together and the computer-dating dodge was my idea, as I did not want you to be told by Felton or someone else that it was your occult duty to love me and then have you frogmarched by Adepts of the Lodge to your first date with me. I was right, wasn’t I?’
‘But why me anyway?’
‘When is your next birthday?
‘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.’
But I could not keep the grin off my face. Not drugs, not ritual sacrifice, just gnomes. And thank goodness Cosmic’s gnomes were safely deep in the earth, busy about their chthonic enterprises. The constables paced about the cottage peering through doors, obviously hoping to catch a glimpse of a stray gnome.
‘God, this place is a tip!’ said the female constable.
We, that is Maud, Cosmic and I, all looked reproachfully at Sally. So then the police turned their attention to her too. Sally gazed up at them smiling and offered her tattoo for inspection.
They took her into another room where they asked her a lot of questions in private. Apparently they wanted to know how old she was. What was the address of her parents? Was she here of her own free will? What washing facilities were available? Had she registered with a G.P.? Did the cottage have many strange men visiting it? All kinds of stuff.
Finally they left, but, just before they did so, the female turned to us and said,
‘We will be back.’
It was all a real downer. The fuzz carry their own atmosphere with them and they are generous in spreading it about. Maud, thank heavens, was the least troubled. As long as she is with me, she is happy and has no fears for what may befall us.
Sally was very ill in the night. Cosmic is also in a pretty weird state as he is mixing alcohol and heroin and talking madly about reincarnation and about how everything that happens gets re-enacted again and again. Specifically, we are reliving what happened in the early 1920s at Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema. In Cosmic’s eyes, I am the Great Beast, while Maud and Sally are the First and Second Concubines. The Wheel of Samsara has brought this episode round once more and we have to see if we can make a better fist of it this time. But Cosmic was not making much sense as, at other times, he talked as if Sally was not the reincarnation of the Second Concubine (who was called Ninette Shumway), but she was instead Raoul Loveday, another member of the Brotherhood of Thelema. Raoul died of dysentery in Crowley’s Abbey and that is what Sally is going to die of – an infection she contracted over fifty years ago in a previous life. As for me, I don’t think she is going to die and, if she does, it will be from all that awful dog food. Cosmic, on the other hand, says that the tinned stuff is not that bad and, in order to be comradely with Sally, he even tried some himself. Mind you, he was so stoned, I don’t think he knew what he was tasting.
I have been putting Donovan songs on the record player in the hope of cheering Sally up, but now she tells me that he is no good.
‘He tells lies about the world,’ she whispered.
It is raining and, since the fuzz’s visit yesterday, the cottage feels like it’s under siege. Despite the rain, I said I was going into town. I had it in mind that I might find a doctor and get him to come and examine Sally, but, just as I was going out of the door, Maud caught me by the sleeve,
‘Don’t leave me, Peter. I know I sound silly, but I have the feeling that, if you go far from the cottage … if you go beyond the magical enclosure that you traced with your wand, then the spell will be broken and the enchantment gone. We only have one another.’
Sally has actually forbidden me to play any more Donovan. She cannot bear to hear about sunshine, girls in lace dresses, pure white knights and jolly tinkers. So it is Dylan instead. Dylan’s stuff is intense, driving. But I now wonder how good is intensity? What is the point of intensity? There is no point. Intensity is just the excess intellectual energy of youth.
Sally just lies there now, but earlier on in the day she beckoned me over to her and told me that she did not mind me having spat on her photograph and joined in the ritual cursing at the Lodge. Also that she loved me, and because she loved me – only because she loved me – she loved Maud too.
Then I went out to talk to Cosmic in the garden. It seems that a bit over a week ago Sally came up to him and asked him why he thought things had started to go wrong for her recently. At first Cosmic thought that this was just her questionof-the-week, but then he realised that it was more serious than that, so he told her about how, after she had interrupted the Master’s lecture, she had been ritually cursed by members of the Lodge, including me. (Thanks Cosmic.) Of course Cosmic believes that one has to be open about things, because keeping secrets and bottling up emotions is known to cause cancer. So all should be well now …
Frightful.
Frightful.
Is Christ’s mercy indeed infinite? And what is the sin against the Holy Ghost which can never be forgiven? At school, the rumour was that masturbation was the sin against the Holy Ghost. If so, that’s me done for and, of course, more imminently Sally.
I persuaded Cosmic to go into town and look for a doctor. Difficult, because he was a bit zonked and he came back, having failed to persuade anyone that we had a really urgent problem. However, he did bring more food, vodka and diarrhoea pills plus a home-perm kit and Dr Benjamin Spock’s The Commonsense Book of Baby and Childcare. Only after Cosmic sheepishly produced the book, did Maud tell me that she was certain that she was pregnant.
‘I just know I am. I can tell,’ she said, as she buried her face on my shoulder.
I said nothing, as I tried to work out the consequences of all this. How would we manage for money? Should we get married? Would the Master arrive and take the new-born baby away so that it could be sacrificed on the altar in Horapollo House? Paranoid this last thought, I know, but that is the trouble with taking so many drugs. They make you paranoid about everything.
‘What are you going to call it?’ Cosmic wanted to know. ‘Apart from Antichrist, of course.’ Cosmic says that we must be sure to eat the placenta, because it is rich in gamma globulin, or, if we are not going to, can he have it please?
Maud has been re-doing my hair with the home-perm kit, while I sit beside Sally (who is now definitely dying) and I read out loud bits of Dr Spock to her. It is quite a groovy book:
‘But strictness is harmful when parents are overbearing, harsh, chronically disapproving, and make no allowances for a child’s age and individuality. This kind of severity produces children who are either meek and colourless or unkind to others.
Parents who incline to an easy-going kind of management, who are satisfied with casual manners as long as the child’s attitude is friendly, or who happen not to be particularly strict – for instance, about promptness or neatness – can also raise children who are considerate and co-operative, as long as the parents are not afraid to be firm about those matters which are important to them.’
I think that I have definitively given up on my thesis. Come to that, apart from Spock and fashion magazines, I have given up on reading. Come to that, I have given up on thinking. I don’t need any of it, when I have Maud. Devil or not, she was surely put on this planet to be worshipped.
Sally is curled up in a corner of the room. Her eyes have filmed over and she looks like a small, shivery animal.
Just a few moments ago, those two police officers were back again. They did not stay more than a moment, after taking a look at Sally. Cosmic took the opportunity of their departure to hurry to the woods and hide our stash somewhere out there. Now Maud is at last fully aware of just how serious our situation is. She is thinking that she will have to breach the magic circle which I drew around the cottage in order to make a phone-call at the end of the road. In the meantime she is seriously panicked that our diaries may incriminate us. She says that we must hide them as well as the drugs.
So my mistress has commanded me to discontinue my diary.
Maud died five days ago. Her funeral was today and I had a most unsettling encounter at the cemetery.
It is thirty years since I last looked at these notebooks. It was a relief to discontinue diary-writing. When I did so, my writing hand ceased to be possessed by that over-eloquent, high-styled, writing demon, Pyewhacket (or the ‘Hand of Splendour’, as I have since heard the Master refer to this sort of phenomenon). Now that I have reread these old notebooks, I am feeling a little wistful – even though the last few days described in their pages were pretty terrible.
Summoned by his daughter’s message, Robert Kelley arrived in Farnham later on that final Thursday. He was accompanied by Granville and Laura. Although there was a tremendous amount to be sorted out, the resources that the Black Book Lodge can call upon in a time of crisis are truly impressive. By the time the Master had arrived, a whole team of police and forensic experts, excited by signs of freshly turned earth on the edge of the woods, were about to start digging and they were mentally preparing themselves to exhume what they expected to be a series of hippy corpses – probably corpses with shaven heads. However, Maud’s father definitely has an impressive presence. Not only did he get the dig stopped, he even persuaded the police that it was not worth charging Cosmic with theft of the gnomes.
My own Dad arrived some hours later. We sat in the corner of a hotel lounge just off the High Street and he listened quietly as I talked and, in talking, tried to put the events of the last few weeks in some order. I do not know what I expected from him, but, at the end of it all, what he said was,
‘The Devil does not have to exist for there to be evil in this world.’ Then, after a short pause, ‘You are on your own now.’
I never saw him again.
The Master made all the arrangements for Sally’s funeral. He also squared the police. Everything was made easy. I just had one very difficult moment. This was when the Master and his daughter had gone into town to confer with the undertaker, so that Cosmic and I were alone with the corpse.
Then Cosmic, pointed to it and looked at me,
‘It was her dying wish,’ he said. ‘She expects you to fulfil your oath.’
It had been bad enough months ago to contemplate the idea of fucking Sally’s corpse. That was when the prospect did not seem very imminent and when I imagined that the corpse in question would have Sally’s fresh, pale complexion and long golden hair. But now we were looking down on this emaciated and shaven-headed thing which lay hunched on the leaking mattress and looking like a dead rat.
I shook my head. There was nothing I could say.
‘I was there at her last moment, while you were pissing about with Maud. Sally really wants you now. She is watching on the astral. She waits to see you fuck her corpse.’
I still said nothing, so then Cosmic was really angry,
‘You have betrayed her. You have betrayed yourself. You have betrayed everything we ever stood for. You are a total cop-out and a living lie from beginning to end.’
I walked out of the room, leaving Sally to Cosmic.
The Master had several difficult meetings with Sally’s parents. He was, of course, furious with us, but his anger abated somewhat when Maud told him that she thought she was pregnant. Laura and Granville got Maud and me packed and that same night Granville delivered us to a hotel in London. Granville wept on and off throughout the day. ‘I really loved your hippy girl,’ he said to me at one point. But if so, why had he joined me in spitting on her photograph? Then again, I reckon, if he had not seduced her, probably none of this would have happened.
I suppose the way things have turned out is a bit like that film I saw once, Room at the Top. I married the boss’s daughter and, having done so, I have been doing very well ever since. Not that he took me into the family firm, as it were. Indeed, I have been forbidden to set foot in Horapollo House ever again. Since the summer of 1967, I have had as little to do with the Lodge and occult matters as I have had with academic sociology. The daylight hours have been dedicated to making money; the dark belonged to Maud. I inherited Julian’s money of course, but it was thought proper that I should have a job. So I was sent into the City. I worked first for a merchant bank with strong Levantine interests. Later, I set up my own company to invest in information technology. I became a ‘name’ and a member of one of the livery companies. It is a hard, tough world in the City, but I find that suits me. Maud was set up with her own hairdressing salon, but after the birth of little Robert, she was happy to leave most of its running to others.
I grew up. In time I shed my ‘blasted sense of humour’, as Felton termed it. Furthermore I no longer believe in the possibility of interconnecting parallel universes, encountering dead parents and friends in new incarnations, the governance of the world by Hidden Occult Masters, or any of that sort of stuff. The world is exactly as it seems. As with my computer screen, what you see is what you get.
I am proud of my son’s career in politics. The Lodge still nourishes hopes that our son is indeed the Antichrist. Speaking as his father, all I can say is that, for an Antichrist, his GCSEs were decidedly average. I am afraid that Maud never cared much for her son. He was looked after by women sent over from Horapollo House who answered to Laura. Later, the boy was sent to Winchester. All Maud’s love was reserved for me and only me.
I have often reflected on the revelations of those August days and I am pretty sure that the Master and his trusted astrologers were mistaken. I am not the reincarnation of Crowley they were looking for. Be that as it may, they brought Maud and me together and made us happy.
Cosmic sold out too. He now works in the legal department of the Home Office (but we never speak). Everybody sold out. I lived through years of the Great Betrayal and Sell-Out of the hippy dream. We were going to change things. We were going to set free the hearts and minds of our generation – and not just our generation. ‘Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids.’ People would cease to own people. There would have been a gentler, more generous and more colourful world. There was a lot of energy about. By the end of the sixties, we should have been witnessing the ultimate transformation of humanity. As Nietzsche put it, ‘Man is a bridge, not a goal.’
But we lost. The old bankers, generals, policemen and professors prevailed. And I am they. They, the men in suits, who every morning walk across Waterloo Bridge, heading for the City are no better than war criminals. The Juggernaut rolls on. First we lost the battle and then our souls. Sally was the only one I ever knew who remained true to herself and I am the only one who seems to care for what was lost. ‘First girl I loved … ’ We were young and mad as hares.
Maud was buried in Hampstead cemetery this afternoon. In the coffin she was clutching the crucifix I had given her all those years ago. The Master (it is Granville these days) and Laura were among the mourners. There was no reception afterwards, as I had no desire to spend more time than I had to with Lodge members. Having dismissed my chauffeur, I was setting out to walk back to our, now my house, when I was accosted by two strange creatures. One was cowled and one was shaven-headed and they were dressed in orange and red robes – somewhat like the pusher who sold me those drugs in Abdullah’s Paradise Garden all those years ago. There was a whiff of oriental incense about them and at first I thought that they must be Hare Krishna people. These days one occasionally sees a Hare Krishna procession snaking its way down Oxford Street, banging toms-toms and jingling little bells, but they used to be around a lot more at the end of the sixties. I make a point of stopping to watch these people, orange-robed and shaven-headed, because I want to try and figure out why they always look so bloody miserable. But that is by the way. These two turned out not to be Hare Krishna devotees.
‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ said the cowled figure lurking at the gates of the cemetery. He thrust a leaflet into my hands.
‘JESUS SAVES! DON’T BE LONELY! JOIN HIS FAMILY AND HAVE A BALL, SECURE IN THE LOVE OF GOD’S FAMILY.’ Beneath the big print was some comic-strip story about the sufferings of a soul in Hell, but, with the lengthening sight I have these days, I had trouble in focusing on the little print in the speech balloons.
‘You are blind and do not see,’ said the cowled figure. ‘But you stand on the brink of a sea of fire. Once you are launched upon that sea, there will be no instant in which you will be free from pain. Your bones will be pulled out from your flesh. Your eyeballs will be squeezed from your skull. Your scrotum will be pierced by blades much sharper than those of a razor. Then, in a cauldron of boiling spittle, you will be reconstituted to suffer it all over again, but this time and the next and the next you will anticipate the pain. Your sweat will burn through metal. After a million years of this have passed, it will be as if you have yet to begin to truly suffer. Now consider how in this life how angry you are with yourself when you forget to post a letter and then consider how angry you will be with yourself when you find that you have neglected to take advantage of the offer of eternal salvation! Turn then to the love of your Lord Jesus and be saved.’
‘We love you,’ said the shaven-headed figure and, it was only when she spoke that I realised that she was a young woman. ‘I love you and I want to bring you to Jesus. Cos’ for you it’s Jesus or the eternal torments of Hell.’
She pressed herself up against me so that I could feel her pointy breasts and she ran her fingers up and down my black tie.
‘I want you to come to Jesus. I want you to come for Jesus. I can give you a really great time.’
‘What about him?’ I said, gesturing at her companion.
‘Jesus doesn’t mind,’ she whispered. ‘He knows that it’s all in a good cause and that I’m a Hooker for Christ. He knows that, because I love you, I want to save you from the flames of Hell. Jesus has taught me that I must be ready to die for others. How much more then should I be prepared to have sex for others, in order to save their souls? Come on, it’s a good deal we are offering here – some great sex, plus eternal salvation. Don’t worry about anything. He likes to watch.’
Then, and in retrospect I can hardly believe it, she knelt to fumble at my flies.
‘Get away from me woman! I have just come from burying my wife. If, in the circumstances, you think I am going to get a hard-on as a result of the ministrations of a bald religious fanatic in fancy dress, you are very much mistaken.’
She looked up smiling sweetly,
‘Let’s suck it and see, shall we?’
‘Oh go fuck yourself!’ and, zipping up my trousers, I turned and hurried away from them.
It was outrageous, really so outrageous and tasteless for these freaks to have intruded on the funeral of my wife in this way. Hours later, I am still quite upset. I have heard about this sort of sexual evangelising. I believe that it is called ‘lovebombing’ or ‘flirty-fishing’. Coincidentally, I now recall that Robin Williamson in that Incredible String Band song, ‘First Girl I Loved’, sings about how he has heard that his old girlfriend has since joined the Church of Jesus. Probably a lot of the old hippy riff-raff have actually ended up in evangelical Christianity.
The encounter at the cemetery gates was, as they say, ‘a blast from the past’. The old Peter, the 1967 version of Peter, would have played with the idea that he had just encountered some sort of astral manifestation of Sally come down to earth in a final attempt to rescue him from the clutches of Maud and the jaws of Hell. Or perhaps the shaven-headed little freak might be one of those Tibetan visions which prepare one for the afterlife, Verukas, or whatever it was that Sally used to call them. But such notions, as the actress said to the bishop, are just a load of cock. The girl at the cemetery was not Sally, there was no tattoo on her head and the dead do not live again. What I saw was what there was – a pair of crackpot Christian evangelists. However, be that as it may, it got me thinking, in a way I have not done before, about the sixties and about how sixties ways of talking and behaving still linger on at the edges of our society. There is, I think, a metaphorical sense in which those two Christian freaks were indeed ghosts from another world.
Now, thirty years on, when I came back to an empty house after Maud’s funeral, I have fetched these diaries out. Of course, I am wistful. I was thin then and I had limitless energy, but, even so, I find that I have no desire to travel back through time. Youth is rarely a happy stage in life. I was then so ignorant, Maud was so gauche and both of us were terrified by the real world. Since then, we found our place in that world and we have been happily married for thirty years.
It was painful for Maud to shed her human form and surrender to the cancer.
Her last words to me were, ‘I will come back for you.’
Soon, I hope.