1
Then, the smell of pine and sweet treacle in my nose, a gaseous mixture of some sort, I blacked out.
2
I awoke to a strange rumbling, my head pounding. I had been drugged, I thought, and somehow my dream of orgy and its stygian aftermath was simply induced by opium, or perhaps the brandy mixed with some foreign liqueur. Brothels were notorious for this kind of thing, and I could not have expected anything less from a house of ill repute called the Pandemonium.
When I opened my eyes, the sunlight itself seemed like hammers pounding at me. I lay in the bed to which I must have been ushered earlier in the day while passed out—at the house at Regent’s Park owned by my chum James. I tried to retrace my last memories of the night. All I could recall was the terrible scene of horror, surrounded by the beautiful bodies of the dead, and the feeling that I had been fondling, holding, licking, and even physically entering them. I knew of stories of necrophiliacs, those who enjoyed copulation with corpses, and I shuddered to think of what I might have done. Or dreamed. I felt waves of revulsion go through me. I lay a long time, clutching my pillow and bedclothes, looking up at the ceiling of my room, trying to understand how I could’ve had such a dream, or such a strong feeling that it had not been a dream at all.
Yet surely, I argued within myself, you’ve had nights of drunken wanderings in which you imagined things done that may not have been done. Or done things without knowing you had done them, later. Surely, this had been such a night. How many brandies had been drunk before dinner? How much wine with dinner? And the port afterward? And the Madeira? The pint of ale at the brothel, surely I had at least one while there? How could I possibly have experienced the feeling of those women touching me, urging me into their bodies, and how could I have allowed a man to grasp me about the waist without fighting him? Surely this was a dream that meant I should not drink so much in one night!
After several minutes of convincing myself of the impossibility of the previous night’s revel, I rose, trembling from the effects of too much alcohol, and stumbled and fumbled my way to the chamber pot in the well-appointed bath down the hall.
3
The day was a normal one. James and Wendy, too, were suffering the effects of the previous night. When we sat in a parlor, speaking of school and sports, I could not get the images of them out of my head, of their ecstasy and grimace, their groans of animal conquest as they plundered the angel of virtue, fair Anya. Yet I had the distinct impression that they were none the worse, whether it had happened or not. And to be sure, I became convinced by the minute that it could not have happened, for they certainly would be mentioning it now, or alluding to it in some way. To provoke this, I brought up Anya’s name, mentioning her beauty, and James laughed and told me that she was not nearly as beautiful as the whores had been the previous night.
“Do you remember whom you bedded?” I asked.
“The sordid details, mate?” James laughed, heartily, and then groaned because even his laugh caused him distress, he was suffering so from the effects of drink. “I took two for my fun, and they were lovely girls, but this is not a subject for discussion.” Here, his voice quieted, because of the nearby servants. “Suffice it to say, it was sweet and over too fast.”
“And you?” I asked my other friend.
“I don’t talk of this stuff,” Wendy said. “Say, shall we go to the opera tonight?”
“Opera bores me,” James said. “What about the Blackfriars?”
“Wonderful,” Wendy said. He turned to me, “The Blackfriars Club is a sporting place. You will love it, Justin.”
They continued their conversation, turning toward horses and their plans for the next few days, but my mind was elsewhere. The three rooms, the orgy, all of it had seemed so real, but it was as if it were a truth of night, whereas daylight brought a different truth.
I had the unsettling feeling as the day wore on that there was truth to my memory, or at least a beveled truth, bending the last of my memory round the curved edges of my sense of reality.
I began to remember further details of the night, and took leave of my companions and set off for a walk through the gardens of the park, just off the square. It was a gorgeous late spring afternoon, and the park was empty save for ladies walking in groups or nursemaids with their charges at the benches, feeding ducks or buying sugar candy from the vendors. As I watched them, I began to feel what I can only describe as deviant urges. I observed the young ladies, and wished to, in that perfect day, grab them and tear their fineries from them, exposing their white flesh to the burning sun, and taking them right there, in front of the matrons and the nursemaids. Taking them, like some human monster, and enjoying their cries and whimpers. It was a terrible self-loathing that then came over me, that I could watch these decent ladies and imagine pummeling them from mouth to fundament, and savoring their degradation. It was disgusting, and I set off from the park, profoundly disturbed by my dream from the previous night, and from my monstrous thoughts along the garden path.
I knew I was not a monster, and yet I found myself uncomfortable in my own skin.
4
A man may walk many miles in a few hours if he feels the devil at his heels.
I wandered the city, thinking I might need a church, although I tended to avoid them. Yet my upbringing, between my puritanical father and devoutly Catholic mother, could not be denied. I felt better in church, and felt I needed to go there to somehow purge myself of these unnatural feelings. I found a church on Gower Street and entered straightaway. It was empty and cold, but the large crucifix at the front, by the altar, and the windows that depicted the saints and martyrs, brought me some comfort. I went and sat down, and prayed a bit, or tried. But my mind kept returning to sexual force and power, and a feeling of wanting to go into the streets and grab the first man or woman there, and to lick a human ear while tearing at the fabric of trousers, or ripping the bodice from an unsuspecting and chaste maiden. I sat, aroused in God’s house, and when I looked at the stained glass of the windows, I didn’t see St. Francis praying with animals, but saw him, his monk’s robes up around his waist, his enormous phallus rammed into the haunches of a donkey . . . or St. George, his lance going into not a dragon, but a crouching woman.
When I looked up at the cross, it was not Jesus I saw there, but my own father, and beneath him, my older sister Bathsheba, pleasuring him with her tongue. I am cursed! I railed within myself. Blasphemy comes out of my mind! Malicious pictures plague my thoughts!
What drug had been given me the previous night? I wondered. What madness and degeneracy had befallen me that I should see these visions? I covered my eyes, and then bit down hard on my lower lip, drawing blood, just to feel something, to know that I was real, and these mad thoughts and dreams were merely the result of poisoning of some sort.
When I opened my eyes, the church and its figures and windows had returned to their former sacred states.
I felt a sense of panic, as if God watched me now, in His house, watched and judged me, and worse, there was no forgiveness in this sense. I felt the thudding of my own heart in my chest, and wondered if this were what one felt just before death. I went out into the streets, which seemed desolate and unwelcoming. I ran down side streets as one afraid that the devil himself might be chasing me, were I to look back. Any stranger I saw seemed threatening, and I dared not look at women or men, for fear that I would inflict some diabolical act upon them.
I arrived at a public house and went in, thirsty and feverish. I bought several pints, and managed to drown some of my fear. The palpitations in my breast lessened.
I was surrounded by men very much like those from my home village—workmen from Scotland and Wales and the boroughs surrounding the city, tarred nearly black with pitch or coal dust, or covered with the white powder of plastering and bricklaying work. I felt a sense of calm.
After an hour or so, I went out into the now-twilight street, the first of the gas lamps being lit. The street narrowed, and I had a choice of going right onto a wide avenue, or to the left, into a side street with a shambles of lower-class apartments above steamy laundries and other vice houses. Although my conscious mind bid me go to the open boulevard, my body yearned for something in that darkening street, and as I walked, and walked some more, I realized that I had come, at last, to the alley in which stood the place called the Pandemonium.
I knew I had to enter it again.
5
When I crossed its threshold, I was taken aback.
It was empty.
Not empty as if it would later fill, as the midnight hour approached.
But empty as if it had never been full at all.
There were no signs in the corridor of the perverted couplings of men and women, nor of the carnival shouts of the fat, boisterous madam and her small assistant, Rabbit, who hopped along after her. It looked as if it had been abandoned for several days. I went room to room, remembering the shadow figures of heat and flesh, as Rabbit hopped ahead of me, taking me down the hall to the main salon. The murals remained on the walls, with their lewd figures and exotic positions. But it looked as if the place had not been occupied for months.
The door to the salon was missing, and as I stepped through the doorway, I saw that the place had been blackened by some kind of fire. The lamps were aglow, however, which meant that someone was there, someone still kept the lights going. I followed my memory trail into another hall, the way that the Master had taken me, but when I came to the place where the keyhole in the wall had been, there was nothing. Just wall. No door. No keyhole.
A dead end.
And then, someone grabbed me from behind, so swiftly that I got the wind knocked out of me. I held on to consciousness, and tried to fight my attacker with all I had.
Something soft—a kerchief?—went to my mouth. I smelled treacle and tar. It was that same sweet stink I’d detected the previous night. No matter how I fought, I felt myself grow weaker. It was not the smell of the sort of ether used in the medical laboratory, but it seemed to possess similar properties.
I awoke, possibly a few minutes later, in restraints, tied to a bed. I tugged at the strips of leather that held me at my wrists and ankles. A cloth had been wrapped tight over my mouth and jaw to keep me from speaking. I felt utterly powerless and vulnerable.
A voice in the shadowy darkness, the Master of the previous evening: “You have been the one sent to us, you have passed the first test of our Order, and now the most arduous of tests shall press you to the limit of your mind. Yes, against your will. For your will must be broken.”
6
I cannot write here of the degradations that befell me in the dark pit of hell. I close my mind to its memory. To the prodding, and the pleasure that was terror, and what grasped me, and what gave itself to me, but it was all human, and all flesh, and of many types and aspects, a deviant, depraved sort of rape of my body and my will.
I fought against it, and yet, in my mind, my brother’s bones were foremost.
How had this Master gotten them? What had they to do with me here?
I will say that at the end of the hours of pleasure and agony, I prayed for Death.
I prayed to join my brother.
Yet the worst came after.
A large, muscular man who looked as if he were a hired murderer came with two assistants whose faces had been painted egg-shell white, and began pressing needles into my flesh, slowly, methodically. I had no strength to fight, and I was afraid of their needles. They worked for many hours, tattooing images onto my back and buttocks and thighs, across my belly and chest, as well. When they were done, they drew out small tools—as if they were stone carvers. I tried to scream, but found that my throat was unable to emit more than a bleat. They had jewels and rings, and I felt the first pain in my left nipple as a long sharp needle went into it. Then a small ruby was attached, as a gypsy might wear a jewel in his ear. Other parts of my body were thus ringed and jeweled. The horrors of it were minor in the plan of all things. As I lay there, feeling the fire of needles and the cold touch of the rings as they pierced my body, I felt as if I would soon be killed. The pain was excruciating, and waves of unconsciousness befell me, although I awoke, blearily, through the worst of it, wanting to cry out in pain.
7
When it was over, I felt a warm hand untie me. Bare-breasted young women washed me with sponges, and anointed oils and perfumes on my skin and in my scalp. The tattoos were rubbed and gently dressed. Any wounds or cuts I had (for the small knives had sliced bits of my flesh beneath my arms, and near my thigh during a profoundly horrible hour) were taken care of, and a salve of some kind was rubbed into the reddened areas where my body had been pierced with jewels and small golden rings and round studs. My hair was trimmed, and my nails were buffed. I was clothed in a blouse that seemed to be made of gold, and in trousers that were thin and dark. Boots were brought, and slender maidens with veils over their faces pressed my feet into them. I was given water, which I drank greedily, and allowed a place to eliminate wastes; all the while my hands were not free, but held firmly. The degradations were continual, and yet there was a beauty to them. I felt like a child, just being born.
It was my rebirth.
Thus, dressed and cared for, I slept again until someone came and woke me.
8
When I awoke, I was in a very different place. It was a hall of sorts, not unlike the medical amphitheater in Manchester, where I watched corpses being dissected. I lay on a table, as would a corpse, my hands bound on my chest, my feet also bound, and these restraints connected by a leather strop between them to minimize my movements. Above me, in the tiered watchtowers of the theater, an audience. They wore great masks of birds and jackals and unicorns, and other fantastical or otherworldly sorts. Other than this, they were naked, and the men’s phalluses were at erection, the women’s legs were spread, their bodies reddened with face paint and rouge. As I noticed this fakery, I observed that the phallus of each man was not his own, but was also its own kind of mask—an exaggerated erection, designed by some perverse architect.
Standing before me, a man who wore a mask of a stag with great antlers, and his erection, too, was enormous, though I could see no outward sign that it was a counterfeit. His body was covered from chest to knees in an intricate mural of tattoos, images of creatures with mouths and tentacles, of orgies, and of faces too terrifying to describe here. It was an unspeakable canvas, and yet I could not help but look. As I watched the images, they seemed to move, and their lips opened, calling out, their arms wriggled along his skeletal muscularity. I noticed that his testicles and nipples, as well as navel, had the gemstones pressed into them, with a series of thin gold bands that hung from his member. It seemed both primitive, like islands found off the coast of a newly discovered world, with cannibals and headhunters, and yet, this was no doubt an Englishman, and when I heard his voice, I knew who it was.
It was the owner of the Pandemonium.
9
“You will die to the world,” he said, his voice deep and calming. I felt at ease, despite my situation, as if something in his voice alone held power over me. “You will die as all men must die, but do not fear. You will this day find regeneration of body and soul, and you shall become one with us, the Golden Quivers of the Arrows of Apollo and of Baphomet and of Isis and of all who have been buried for thousands of years but who shall rise again through the chosen vessels.” Here, the others, watching me from above, cried out some litany in a language that I had never before heard.
“You shall learn the secrets of Magick and the power of the Chimerical Realm, and gain dominion on this Earth, and speak with those who have spread themselves wide for the rape of Death,” he said. Again, the litany rose from the crowd above us.
“You have been brought to us by a wandering spirit,” he said. He held his hands out, and a woman who wore a swan mask approached, carrying a walnut box. She passed it to him, then receded into the shadows. He opened the box and held it aloft for the onlookers to see.
Then he drew a small skull out of it, setting the box down at the edge of the stone table on which I lay.
“The will of the gods is strong!” he shouted, and the onlookers cheered. “I spent three years seeking out the secrets of the dead, and happened by a cemetery, consecrated by the unholy. A woman of great wealth, her spirit trapped by the very secrets she wished to keep, lay in her grave, unable to find release. I unburdened her, sacrificing a young child I had met along the way, letting the child’s blood run into the grave so as to raise the woman from the dead that she might whisper of her treasures. But instead, another came to me, one who died as a baby, came to me and told me of his brother, this man you see before you, this one who has been known as Justin Gravesend to the world, but shall, after his first death, be known by a new name to us, born within the Chymera.” He brought the skull nearer my face. The stench was revolting; although perfumes had been applied to the skull, I could still scent disease and decay upon it. He pressed the skull to my lips, forcing me to kiss it, forcing the skull itself to kiss me, as well.
“Your brother told me of you. I knew that you were the one prophesied among the ancients and among our brethren, and the one of which many of the dead have spoken. Though you be a callow and pale youth who has ill-understood your role in the world, we have watched you, all of us!” He raised the small skull high, and the masked men and women cheered with renewed vigor. “You have been watched since that moment, followed, understood. We travel through the world, looking for such as you. We search for our messiahs who have been foretold from the lips of the gods themselves. And you shall be the very incarnation of Baphomet! You shall be the one to open the doorway to the Veil, and bring the Age of Gods upon us!”
Somewhere, a thin, reedy pipe began playing, and then a drum, its beat seeming ancient and strange. Not precisely musical or rhythmic, the watchers above us began a slow kind of dance that became a series of complicated, writhing embraces. This cult of orgiasts began their revels.
The Master of Ceremonies leaned over me, bringing the skull to my chest, and his lips to my ear. “Do not fear. Your brother had told me of the sign, and we have learned much of you. This has been ordained by the gods themselves.”
He stood and set the skull in the wooden box.
A young woman came into view, through the incense mist, wearing a thin gossamer tunic, as if she were an actress in a Greek tragedy. She wore no mask, nor veil did she have, and I recognized her immediately.
With her own hands, she let slip her tunic and stood before the infernal congregation, naked.
It was Anya, the beautiful young lady from my recent dinner, and the same that I dreamed I had seen between my school friends in their whoring. The angel of purity who seemed to me now, a goddess from the netherworld itself. Her face was painted with occult symbols, and her breasts each sported the face of Baphomet. Her body scrawled across, in dark ink, words of another tongue. On her belly, above her delta, was the perfectly rendered drawing of the Master himself, who stood before her, his phallus erect and impossibly enormous, his teeth bared like a wolf’s, his arms outstretched to clutch whomever pressed himself against this woman’s body.
The Master of Ceremonies removed his mask, and as I knew, that alabaster face, and those beautiful gemstone eyes were behind it. He lifted Anya up and set her across my thighs. I struggled in my bonds, but found I had no movement. The more I struggled, the tighter my restraints became.
And there, on my body, the Master took her. When he was done, he drew her up. He reached down to me to undo the restraints.
“This,” he said, “is the first sacrifice that shall save you from the embrace of Death herself.”
After my hands were free, and then my legs, he drew out that curious small blue flower and twirling vine from Anya’s ringlets. He squeezed the petals into his hands. Then he pressed his moistened fingers, with the pollen smell of the flower, against my lips, my nostrils, my eyes. He rubbed the ointment—for that is what the crushed petals and vine became—across my body. Finally, with one thick droplet at the edge of his finger, he pressed this into my mouth, setting the warm burning bit of liquid on my tongue. It was sweet and bitter, reminding me of wormwood, and in consistency, viscous but smooth.
I felt its effects immediately, as if I had been hit, all at once, by a coach speeding by through a narrow alleyway. My body jerked as I felt the elixir’s potency.
The shadows and the congregation faded, and a whiteness, as of paint coming from an invisible artist’s brush across the air, swept along the edges of my vision. I experienced a clarity, as if my breathing had become deeper, more calming to me. The whiteness, at first in thick brush strokes, then in a kind of mist, enveloped us, and all I could see was Anya, and the Master of Ceremonies himself.
“Many die when they part the Veil,” the Master said. “The Lotos is poison to all but the chosen. You must now make the six sacrifices if you wish to reach your heart’s desire and your soul’s longing.”
As I was set free from all restraint, I felt something profound release from my mind, a great weight dropped, a mask being removed, like clouds moving out from a sun kept too long hidden from view.
As a dagger pressed into my hand, I had the first of my Visionaries, not merely visions, but a truly fundamental change in what I knew and experienced. I saw the woman before me, the woman I had known as Anya, the temple harlot, the unclean angel, the sacred whore, not as merely herself, but as the meat of the Gods.
I saw my flesh for what it was, the means of opening the sacrifice, of bringing the sacrifice into the realm of the divine.
The hole of flesh as a means of parting the Veil.
Surrounded by whiteness, I watched as small worms grew from my phallus, then from my arms, and from my mouth, a crawling mouth, a human mouth, a second set of teeth, yellowed and curved like the beak of a falcon, all snapping as the mouth emerged, lengthening. I was in communion with the gods. This was holy and not profane at all. These were the true commandments of the most holy: that meat was the only food of the gods of power, and that I had truly been chosen, since the day of my birth, to perform this sacrifice of meat to the devourers that emerged from my own flesh.
To rip open the hole.
To part the Veil.
To feed the gods.
Anya looked at me with her small o of mouth gasping like a fish that has been drawn by the fisherman from water. I went to encompass her, and I entered every part of her, my newborn tentacles finding the tiny pores of her skin and enlarging them as they burrowed beneath her flesh, my extended mouth ripping her lips, her gums, her tongue, her palate.
10
So the day and night passed, and I learned of the sacred texts. I read aloud from the Grimoire Chymera that had been passed from Hermes Trigestimus to the mortal Pandora to the Queen of Carthage, in whose library it was kept for centuries before the fires burned the magnificent Halls of Secrets of the Ancients. From there, it was taken into caves, into burial caverns, where from it, it is said the sacred Lotos grew, that flower of graveyards whose juice produces the poison Listanius, which kills a man on contact if he is not sanctified, or is the portal to the Veil for those who are chosen.
I spoke to the bones of my brother, and he told me of the secrets of Mother Death and the warmth of her bosom. The Master came to be known to me as the Necromancer, and he became more father to me than had my own father or my cherished uncle.
The Necromancer became my king.
But there was one knowledge I would only find, he told me, through my sacrifices. And so I procured my friends James and Wendy, and others of theirs, the old admiral, a young man I found on the streets, the proprietress of the Pandemonium, Lady Caroline. I opened each of them in turn and brought their meat to the gods.
11
And so, in my twenty-first year, I was reborn in the Chymera Magick. I had performed ritual murder and taken all manner of hallucinogenic drugs, including the Lotos that grew within the dankest of graves. I learned to raise the dead, and to speak with them, and learn of the treasures of the earth and of the air, and learned of their mysteries and their wisdoms. I ate of their flesh and drank of their blood. I sacrificed, in my first year, many who offered themselves to me, calling me Messiah and Visionary.
But it was the Necromancer, the one who taught me these things, who brought me together with the others of the Chymerical Circle, to whom I owed my absolute allegiance.
It was he, my brother’s bones in his hands, hearing the words of my brother, that brought him to seek me out, to send the Chymerians to find me in Manchester and to engineer my arrival in London, into a new life, through the Pandemonium. To raise the specters of old, to speak with Lucifage and Abaroeth and the Angel Azriel, and to understand the Veil and its denizens.
Of all these things, it is the power it has granted me that will remain with me forever, until the day I cross over into the Veil’s milky shore.
And there, I will find him, my Necromancer, my Lord, my Master.
But until then, I will do as I have been asked.
I will find the treasures of the earth. I will raise great wealth. I will perform the sacrifices necessary.
And I will build the portal of the Veil one day, and keep it open unto the Earth and let the devourers of that realm enter this world and keep dominion over it.