1
I was told that the night I was born, my mother saw a terrible face at the window of the midwife’s house, of a man who seemed the very devil.
Given that I have spent most of my life in the devil’s shadow, I believe my mother saw the truth.
2
I was born a monster, and I grew from a monstrous life, and if you read of this, you will understand. I had no choice in my monstrosity.
Fate takes us by the hand and leads us where we are meant to go, and, in turn, we bite her for the pleasure of it. I am a murderer and a scoundrel, but once, I was a child, just as you once have been. Once I sought the goodness of all creation.
Once, I was a common urchin in a tidal pool, surrounded by eagerly devouring eels.
It is all a charade! This life! How we see it! How I saw my own! My life was never my own, but was drawn up as if by a great draughtsman, this Necromancer who had found the relics and used them to enslave me and bring me into the Veil!
I should have burned my books and instead turned to the quiet rustic life to which I had been born, and died with coal-dust in my throat and seven babies ’round the room, and a wife at the hearth! Instead, I allowed the curse that had been laid upon me at the hour of my birth to grow and fester. I followed my will, my flesh, and those who guided me, to this most wondrous and terrible place! Read this and know!
I have seen the other side of existence and it has torn away all conscience from me, and yet, I love the horror more than I love life itself and would not turn back if given the choice.
3
Pleasure and its humours in the human body are what allow us to experience the mystical world. My first pleasure was my mother’s nipple and my last, in my twenty-first year, was found at the breast of the Whore of Babylon, that visionary salve, that nectar of the necropolis, the supreme Lotos of the Visionary.
Why me? We each cry, alone, to the universe, to the mute gods or God. Why this fate? Why my destiny and not the destiny of the comfortable life, free of terror and abominations of the flesh? Why not the hypocritical, cushioned life of the normal man? Why not the world in which God is for Sundays and life consists of hours of labor followed by a few hours of entertainment and rest? Why this soul searing?
This I cannot answer satisfactorily. I was chosen before I even knew a choice could be made. My only answer can be that it was destiny itself, carved on my bones and sung within the chambers of my heart.
I had a sponsor to bring me to the attention of that secret society called the Chymera Magick. I could not have avoided my destiny had I desired to do so.
My life is written on my skin, tattooed as surely as if needles had been pressed into me, in the pathways of my blood and the subcutaneous layers, the prick of life—and of the Occult Arts—dug chigger-like into me, and it is there. We are not mind, although we feel we are. We are body, we are flesh, we are the points of hair and the torn skin, and it is the obliteration of the mind that brings us in contact with the visions and the truth. It is through the destruction of social hypocrisy, of taboo, of restraint. This opens us up, finds doorways where there have been none. This bores holes into us, opening us to the vibrant hum of the cosmos. In the story of my life, you will read of terrible things, by your standards. You will read of vows broken, of demons raised, of bodies used unnaturally, of deviancy and unholy ritual, of nuns brought into the orgy pit, and of men used as women, and women used as men. Do not flinch from this, for that is the squint of the weak human mind we believe we possess.
Use these shocking acts as a way of awakening the creature within its cage.
The one who is the Many. The Lord of the Flies is no devil. The Lord of Pestilence is no beekeeper of souls.
He is our brother.
Use this to gain wisdom and seek your heaven. I have seen the afterworld, and I will tell you it is more terrible than the worst tortures of this fair land. Do you walk the Earth and believe it unmerciful and unjust? The life beyond this one is ten thousand times more horrible. It is a screaming moment frozen in an eternal chamber of torment. You would do well to seek the disordering of your senses now, to ungird yourselves of your weighty prison of the mind and unleash every desire of your flesh, every forbidden thing you can imagine, let it come to pass. For the end of your life already circles around you. You shall be bitten by its ravening silver teeth, and torn by its pincers. You must embrace it and open yourself to it.
As I did.
4
I came into the world feeling as if something important had been taken from me. And it is this, more than my want of wealth and power and happiness, which has driven me to my current state.
My name is Justin Gravesend, although this was not my name at birth.
Then, I was named Iestyn, a Welsh form of Justin, meaning, of course, “the just.” It was an old-fashioned name to have when I was a boy, but it was a relief to avoid the Biblical names that were so popular then. I was born near an ancient colliery and its spoil heaps, in operation since the Middle Ages, which seemed fitting since it was its own kind of torture chamber. The coalfields were the dark heart of all our existences, with the wool industry taking second place. The village where I grew up was small then, called Cwthshire, pronounced Coo-shire, and our nearest city, a good forty miles away, was called Llangolen, and even that was not much of a city then. I am sorry to say that our little village no longer exists, abandoned when the local mining ended with several explosions that killed many miners and closed off the mine itself.
When I was a child, it was my kingdom.
We lived near three rivers, one wide and broad that ran through the village, tamed as a canal before my birth, called the Range for a reason I never have understood, and two slimmer ones that seemed mere streams to me as a boy. I did not speak Welsh well, owing in part to the fact that my parents both discouraged it. We were not really a Welsh family, although my father’s Welshness-by-way-of-Manchester-and-Liverpool existed in much the same way as my mother’s slight Irishness: in a few names, a few phrases, and not much else. They had arrived in Cwthshire to find work and life in the colliery and the sheep meadows. My mother was Catholic, from Ireland by way of Scotland by way of Cornwall. My father was Methodist. He had been born in Wales and was taken to Liverpool while a child. He had grown to hate all things English and all things about his father and brothers. He had come to the mines and fields for work, young. He had adopted the harsh local church’s ways to such an extent that the locals called him Deacon, and on Sundays, would give fire and brimstone speeches, nearly stealing the pulpit from the local minister.
He believed that hell lay in wait for all of us, for we had been baptized in what he called “The Devil’s pagan church,” his term for the Roman Catholic Church. He was certain that we all would die without resurrection, and that our mother, whom he claimed to love dearly, had already lost her mortal soul to the fires of hell, but that his good Christian nature tried to redeem her throughout their lives together. He believed that heaven was harder to get into than the local pub on a Saturday night. He typified the Welsh phrase: Angel pen ffordd, a diawl pen tan. An angel abroad, a devil at home.
Whereas he was an inspiration to the local congregation and considered one of the great local men of God (on Sundays, although he was well-ignored by the villagers the rest of the time), he was a cold, hard taskmaster to his children.
He used God to squelch us, and the threat of hell to keep us silent. He continued his Methodist traditions within our family and had named the first five of my siblings biblically. Thus, I had brothers Shadrac, Mishac, and Abednego, and sisters Sephera and Bathsheba. I had escaped this fate when my mother insisted on naming me for her grandfather, who had recently died, and my twin, for my father’s father.
My father’s family was called ap Graver or sometimes Graver-Son (or Son of Graver, as my birth record reads: “Baptized this day, July, Iestyn, son of the Son of Graver”), and was from the ancient and country people, with peasants and yeomen in our ancestry, of Wales mixed with the conquering English. My father was a fallen son of a fallen son. This meant he had cousins and even brothers who had some wealth, but through a series of bad events, my father had no contact with them. He had been slothful (I can truthfully write now, but I could never think this when living under his roof), and had believed that one ought not to work for one’s daily bread, but must convince others to pass their bread over for his convenience. My father, unlike my brothers and me, never worked the mines or the field. He was not a laborer, my mother would tell us, as she worked in peoples’ homes and swept the alleyways behind the shops to make the pittance that supported all of us. My father was a ne’er-do-well, and not of the romantic variety. His face was like a crazed eagle—the nose hooked, the eyes blue, the nostrils flared, and the filthy mop of hair across his forehead like some overgrown barley field.
My mother was a martyr who refused to die—she lived through the deaths of four of her children. She worked any job she could find, still managed to say the rosary at the local church twice a day, and believed that Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary had given her these burdens in order to prepare her for sainthood in the next life. I honestly believe she wanted to die and be remembered for her Faith. Instead, the poor woman—whom I loved dearly, despite my talk of her—lived until she was ninety-three, and saw all she loved destroyed, and all she feared, come to pass.
I was born when she was thirty-six, and my father was forty. My earliest memory is looking up at my mother’s face, as I, at three, was still at her tit, nursing. She looked like the Virgin Mother to me then, and I remembered being disappointed when I could no longer drink that sacred milk.
In my generation was the beginning of my regeneration. In my father’s loins and my mother’s womb, a mystery arrived to the world. I was not that mystery, but I was born with it. I was born in the year 1831, during a cholera epidemic, which was then simply called the Miasma. According to legend (for I heard of it years later), the Miasma swept through like a broom from hell (“A scourge!” my father shouted from the pulpit, no doubt), taking with it the breath of many children in ours and other villages. The cities beyond us also were in its path, and many died during this time, particularly among the very young and the very old.
Mother Death (as the locals called her) spared me.
As I grew, I seemed to develop a taste for the morbid, and often went to the graveyard of the children who had died, feeling as if I somehow knew them better than the children who were alive. I can’t say for certain that this came from any particular event. It was simply something about death that drew me to it, rather than repulsed me.
My mother later told me the hand of God was upon me, and protected me from the Miasma.
But God was nowhere to be found for my twin. When I learned of his name and his death, I wept and was inconsolable. I had always felt a strange emptiness, as if I were only half a boy, as if I had another part of me that was somehow missing, as one is missing an arm or a leg—a phantom self that I had knowledge of, but knew not. It is difficult to express, but it was like knowing that one isn’t completely alive. A lung that does not function. A nostril that cannot inhale and exhale breath. I felt that my brothers and sisters and friends in the mines and in the schoolhouse, all seemed whole. But I did not. And when my mother told me about my dead twin, I knew why.
My twin died six months after we were born. His name was Lloyd. I visited his little grave in the field beyond the village, sometimes weekly, and thought of how close I had gotten to Mother Death, but she had instead chosen to suckle my brother. I sometimes attribute my need for “the Other” and some of the unsuitable attachments I’ve made in my life to the loss of that unknowable twin.
My only experience with the spirit world as a child came while I sat by my twin’s grave. I wasn’t then sure of what it meant, if it was anything at all. I just heard someone say the words, “Carry me to the water, look, and know the truth.”
5
Carry me to the water? Know the truth? These words seemed too profound to have come just from my childish mind.
And yet, more than anything, I wanted to know. I wanted to know my twin in some way. I wanted to understand what, even then, I considered a mystical experience.
I went to my older sister Bathsheba, who was my only true confidante among my siblings. She was sixteen, and ready to be married, and in some ways had been more my mother than our mother had been. I asked her about this strange voice, and she told me that I should ignore such things.
“These are demons of ill omen,” she said, for she had become a staunch puritan in her beliefs, influenced as she was by our father. “Do not go to those graves. Your brother is not sanctified.”
Then she told me the story of how on the day my brother had died, our father buried him quickly in the middle of the night, embarrassed that the child had neither been baptized nor saved in any outward way. She had been five years old at the time, and she had asked our mother why she must not mention her dead brother again.
Our mother had told her, “God has taken him. Let God keep his secrets.”
As Bathsheba explained it to me, there were demons and terrible spirits that lurked among the graves, and I should not wander there, nor seek solace at my twin’s side. “The Lord Jesus wishes you to seek salvation only,” she said. I was young enough to half believe her words, although I doubted that my brother was surrounded by demons, for if he were my twin, he slept with angels.
The voice, and these words, haunted me. Perhaps it was God, I thought, or just a voice that might arise in my head now and then. But I had the distinct impression that it was a voice I had never before heard, and, because I sat by the baby’s grave, I attributed it to him.
The grave was one of several where the babies were buried, called in Welsh the Baban Claddfa, from the old days. It was on a hillside overlooking a slender river that ran for several miles.
I didn’t know why the voice bade me carry it to the river.
I felt it was my brother, though how a baby dead many years would learn the English language and speak from heaven as a much older child, I had no notion.
I let this incident go by the wayside, although I mentioned it to my mother, who suggested that it might be the Virgin, despite the fact that it sounded like the voice of a boy very much my own age.
I doubt that I mentioned this to my father, who was a stern and unloving figure to me.
When, finally, vexed by the memory of this voice, I went one morning in the mud of spring to truly see for myself what this voice might’ve meant.