Cefalu, Sicily
“I still can’t believe you’re descended from Aleister Crowley,” Rose said.
From the cluster of white buildings with terracotta-colored roofs, and the beautiful sandy beach with crystal clear water, Crowley and Rose had climbed into the hills behind Cefalu. The contrast was stark, from the quiet, pleasant town to the scrubby, overgrown ground near the infamous Abbey of Thelema.
“Not exactly descended from,” Crowley said. “Distantly related to. It’s not quite the same.”
Rose gave him a studied look, raised one eyebrow. “You’re really going to draw that distinction?”
Crowley laughed. “Yeah, well. It is kinda cool, in a creepy sort of way. Which is, of course, the best sort of cool. I just don’t bring it up on a first date.”
The small city of Cefalu sat behind them in the curve of its beach, the Tyrrhenian Sea glittering beyond. The huge Norman Cathedral dominated the eastern side of the town, its exterior well preserved, largely decorated with interlacing pointed arches and pointed windows. On each side of the façade, a massive four story tower rose into the bright sunny day.
Through the trees and scrub, they could just make out the Abbey of Thelema, their target, with the large flat expanse of the Cefalu Stadium overshadowing it from above, perched atop the hills. The Abbey building itself, nothing more than an old house despite its grandiose name, was nonetheless forbidding, almost foreboding.
Crowley was secretly proud of his connections to Aleister Crowley, the English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer who founded the religion and philosophy of Thelema. The man’s own mother had called him “the Great Beast” and he was denounced in the popular press of the time as “the wickedest man in the world”, and a Satanist. None of which the man denied, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Aeon of Horus in the early 20th century. Though he had died in 1947, his influence was still strong throughout modern occultism. Crowley’s own study of the man for personal and historical reasons had left him keen to know more, only lack of time had prevented deeper study. The mysteries around the strange fellow were legion.
Maybe none more so than this building, which Aleister had called the Abbey of Thelema. Though only a small house, it had been used as a temple and spiritual center founded by Crowley and Leah Hirsig in 1920. One of the primary tenets of Thelema was the law, “Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law”. The Abbey was named in accordance with the concept, the name borrowed from François Rabelais's satire Gargantua and Pantagruel, where an Abbaye de Thélème was described as an “anti-monastery” where the peoples’ lives were “spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure.” Rather fitting, Crowley thought now as they approached, that the building was run-down and dilapidated, as broken down as the man himself had become in later life. He had always wanted to see the place, since his earliest studies into the Great Beast. Now he was distinctly underwhelmed.
Modern day followers of Thelema no doubt visited the site often, but Aleister Crowley himself had been kicked out of Sicily by Mussolini after the Great Beast’s reputation for wickedness became too much for even that dictator to bear, and the man’s Abbey had been degrading ever since. Crowley had told all this and more to Rose as they traveled to Sicily, yet he was still underwhelmed to finally see the place for real.
“Did your friend say where we should look for the bible?” Rose asked, breaking his train of thought.
“Just that he found a number of references to indicate the Codex Gigas was here,” Crowley said, staring up at the grubby white walls of the building. “And that Crowley paid a visit to Prague Castle shortly beforehand. They have Intel that Aleister Crowley boasted of some great and secret discovery at Dalibor. We have good reason to believe the Codex had been stored in the golem there, but it’s gone now.”
“So your mate thinks Aleister Crowley stole it?”
“Aleister Crowley definitely read the book, or at least some of it. Passages from it are quoted in the Holy Books of Thelema, including some apocryphal lines that might be from the real codex, if perhaps he did have it rather than studying a copy. There’s no way we can know that unless we see the real Devil’s Bible, of course, but hopefully we’ll find it here. Probably too much to hope, but you never know.”
“I feel like we’re running from one amazing discovery to another, but always one step behind seekers who came before us.”
“We are, but the people hunting us are yet another step behind. Hopefully we’ll catch up with all this and learn something useful before they catch up with us.”
Rose grimaced. “Even if we do learn something, it might not help us.”
“Any other ideas?”
She sighed. “Still no. Oh well, ever onwards!”
“It’s a pretty exciting adventure all the same, isn’t it?” Crowley couldn’t keep the enthusiasm form his voice. “I mean, purely from both our interests as historians?”
Rose’s face brightened. “Yeah, that’s true. Once this is all over I have enough stuff to go back and investigate to fill three more careers!”
The building had a tiled roof, an old TV aerial mounted on the short porch over the front door, but the doorway itself was blocked and boarded up. An open window to one side, a red 666 and Star of David spray-painted on the white stucco beneath, looked like it might provide the only access.
Crowley glanced around, ensured no one was nearby, then pushed himself up onto the sill. “Come on then.” He dropped inside and Rose quickly followed.
Inside was dim and cool but not dark, plenty of sunlight penetrating through gaps in the roof and open windows. Inside was more dilapidated than the exterior, the roof fallen in in many places, paper and plaster peeling and falling from the walls. Broken furniture remained in places; tiles were missing from bathroom and kitchen walls. The place smelled of damp and rot, with an over tang of sharp ammonia, no doubt from the droppings of animals or even, maybe, people.
“We need to find the main room, I guess,” Crowley said. “La Chambre des Cauchemars.”
Rose wrinkled her brow, probably drawing on school French lessons. “The Chamber of Nightmares?” she asked.
“That’s what Aleister Crowley called it. He and Jane Wolfe decorated the entire room with mystical murals, but apparently only some of the paintings remain. Cameron said they have records of Crowley consulting the Codex Gigas in there. Who knows where it might lead, but it’s all we have.”
They stepped into the next room and knew instantly it was the one they sought. Large areas of green painted plaster contained images of trees and portraits, symbols and animals. Uneven text ran in crooked lines around the images, all of it with an almost child-like bearing. Crowley and Wolfe had not been great realist painters, it appeared, but their work was evocative and powerful nonetheless.
“So if clues are to be found, they’ll be found in here,” Crowley said. “At least, let’s search here carefully before we start poking around in the rest of this garbage dump.”
They walked opposite ways around the room, peering closely at the murals. Crowley remembered some of the names from the top-up research he had done on the journey here. La Nature Malade, the Mural of Heaven, the portraits of the Degenerates. He paused to look more closely at one detail of the Mural of Heaven, a shape almost like a keyhole, with sharp points to either side, rendered in red paint. Words and numbers in white in Thelemic script were contained inside. Rose joined Crowley as he crouched and stared.
“I can’t find anything,” she said, voice heavy with disappointment. “What’s that?”
“‘Aiwass gave Will as a Law to Mankind through the mind of The Beast 666’,” Crowley quoted from memory. He sat back on his heels. “You see, Aleister Crowley never claimed to have thought up the religion of Thelema himself. Rather it was dictated to him via Aiwass. By his account, a possibly non-corporeal being that called itself Aiwass contacted him and dictated the text that became known as Liber AL vel Legis, or The Book of the Law, which outlined all the principles of Thelema.”
“Fascinating,” Rose said. “But that’s not what I meant.” She leaned forward to point past him, to a tiny depiction not far from the red keyhole design. “What’s that?”
Crowley shuffled sideways and squinted to see more clearly. “Well spotted!” he said. The painting showed a dark gray man of short, wide proportions, almost exactly like those of the giant golem he had recently seen below Dalibor Tower. The depiction of the golem was separated in the center, its upper half hovering above an even smaller depiction that was nevertheless undoubtedly the squatting Devil from the Codex Gigas. Below the recreation of the Devil were the golem’s wide legs, and below the legs a series of small vertical lines.
Rose moved closer, pressing against Crowley as she leaned in for a better look. He enjoyed the proximity of her, the warmth of her body. He also enjoyed the unselfconscious way she leaned against him.
“They’re arrows,” she breathed.
“Hmm?” Crowley jumped slightly, felt his cheeks redden as she looked at him with a crooked smile.
“Keep your mind on the job at hand, soldier.”
He laughed. “Sorry, slightly distracted there.” He looked to where she pointed, secretly ecstatic that she made no move away from him, their hips and shoulders still touching. And she was right. The small vertical lines were arrows pointing downwards.
Crowley looked to their feet and the detritus they squatted on. Reluctantly he made the move away from Rose’s warmth and picked up a broken roof tile to scrape at the floor, dragging dirt and broken wood aside. Under the filth was nothing but a floor tile. Crowley frowned, pulled a penknife from his pocket. As he dug the tip of the blade under the tile, it lifted easily.
“Not fixed down,” he muttered, almost to himself, and slipped his fingers underneath to lift it. It came up to reveal plain cement beneath, but written on the cement were several tiny letters and numbers, with strange symbols at the start of each line.
“They look like coordinates,” Rose said. “But they’re too short to be actual map coordinates, I think.”
Crowley nodded, lips pursed in thought. “They are. I’ve done more than enough orienteering and stuff in the military to recognize any kind of map notation. That’s not what this is. But maybe it’s something similar.” He stood and looked around the room. “Hmm, maybe...”
Rose stayed crouching, quietly watching, as he paced back and forth a couple of times. After a moment he returned to the revealed notes and placed his hands on the floor. He put one hand against the wall, placed his other hand in line with it, then moved on his knees marking out the width of four fingers at a time, hand by hand, doing a strange crab-walk as he counted. After a few feet, he stopped. “What’s the second line say?” he asked.
Rose looked down, brow creased in confusion. “Well, there’s a strange symbol like the first line, then W, and hash marks totaling nine.”
“Right.” Crowley turned ninety degrees to his left and measured out nine sets of his fingers.
“Next?”
Rose read out the next line and Crowley moved again. After a couple of minutes and Crowley zig-zagging across the room, hands and knees filthy now, she said, “That’s the last one.”
Crowley was across the room from her, smiling. He dug around under where his hands had last been and his smile widened. He lifted a floor tile out of the way and then pulled against something. A leather strap emerged from the dirt. He pulled harder and a section of tiled floor lifted as one like a trapdoor.
“Wow,” Rose said. “What did you just do?”
“History in effect!” Crowley said. “The symbol at the start of each line is a shesep, an old Egyptian unit of measurement. It’s based on hands. The shesep is four fingers wide. I remember teaching this earlier in the year. So those notes are a unit of measurement, then a compass direction, then the number of units in hash marks. They’re like a code to find this strap that was concealed under a tile. The strap released the mechanism of this trapdoor.”
“Well, look at you, genius history teacher.” Rose moved over to kneel beside him. “What’s down there?”
Wooden steps led down into darkness. Crowley pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and flicked it on. “Only one way to find out.”
They descended the steps and immediately came to a solid-looking wooden door. It had two iron hasps—one high, one low. Each hasp was secured with a padlock, each padlock the kind with rolling wheels and numbers.
“Well, that’s annoying,” Rose said. “Any guesses at the combinations?”
“One has three numbers, the other four,” Crowley said, looking more closely.
“666 might be a little too obvious,” Rose said doubtfully.
“But Aleister Crowley did attach significance to it,” Crowley said and turned the tumblers. The three wheel lock popped open. “That was easy!”
He crouched to the lower lock, with four rollers. “Now what? Maybe dates?”
“When was Aleister Crowley born?” Rose asked.
“1875.” He put that in, but the lock remained closed.
Crowley pulled out his phone and tapped up the browser to look up some more dates. They tried the birth dates of several of Aleister Crowley’s partners and lovers, the date the house in which they stood had been purchased, but quickly ran out of ideas and the lock remained stubbornly closed.
“This is infuriating!” Crowley said. “Maybe I should just kick it down.”
“Looks pretty solid,” Rose said. She flicked him a grin. “Not that I doubt your strength and manliness, of course.”
He couldn’t help smiling, despite the frustration, but he turned back to the door, seriously considering violence against it.
“Hey, wait,” Rose said. “When was this Thelema thing founded? Like, did it have a particular date of inception?”
Crowley lifted an index finger. “Good call! Aleister Crowley’s great spiritual moment came when he and his wife of the time, Edith, were in Egypt. That’s when he claims the being, Aiwass, dictated the Book of the Law to him. That was in 1904, if I remember correctly.”
Rose smiled and nodded at the lock.
Crowley turned the tumblers to 1-9-0-4 and the lock popped open. “Ha!” He turned to Rose, close beside him in the confines of the basement stairwell, and kissed her cheek. “Well done!”
She grinned, seemingly not offended at all by his enthusiasm. He stepped back, gestured for her to open the door.
She shook her head. “I’d rather you went first.”
“Fair enough!”
Crowley pushed the door open and shined his torch around inside. The room was small, plastered walls battered and broken, old stone showing through. All around the space were the remains of smashed statues. Crowley recognized several pagan deities, and assumed the others were similar creatures he didn’t recognize. In the center of the room stood a pedestal, and upon it an old carved book holder, like a lectern without the stand. The wood of the thing was dark and highly polished, the edges an intricately carved curling serpent’s body. It was wide and broad, easily big enough to have held the Codex Gigas. A beautiful thing to behold, but Crowley found it rather disturbing too. And no giant book rested on it.
“It feels different down here,” Rose said quietly, as if too loud a voice might disturb more than the dust. “Older... more real, maybe.” She pointed to the wooden stand. “You think it was there?”
“I think it might have been. But it’s not now. I guess someone else figured out all this stuff before us. Again!” Crowley moved closer to inspect the stone pedestal on which the book rest sat. Where carvings on the sides had been chipped away, he saw a depiction of horns and a faint TAVRB.
He turned to Rose, his eyebrows high. “This was a taurobolium.”
“Now that I do know from the museum,” Rose said. “Something to do with Roman bull sacrifice, right?”
“Right.”
“So what does that tell us?”
Crowley sighed. “Nothing really.”
“So if the book was here, what happened to it?” Rose asked, but the question wasn’t directed to him. More to the world at large.
“It would suck if we’ve got this far to hit a dead end,” Crowley said. “Then again, I’ve thought we’d met a dead end before now and we found another way forward.” He made a slow circuit of the small room and found nothing but broken statuary. Desolate, he returned to Rose, still beside the taurobolium.
His attention became suddenly focused and he leaned forward.
Rose moved closer. “What is it?”
Crowley brushed dust off the top of the stone to reveal two words in Latin, not faint and worn like the rest of the pedestal, but sharp and recent. The carving deep, stamped across the surface like a curse, or perhaps a cleansing. SEDES SACRORUM.
Crowley read it aloud, dark certainty filling his mind. He turned to Rose. “I know who took the book.”