Masks of the Illuminati

It was the afternoon of the following day, June 27, and the Föhn had not yet ceased to suffocate Zürich in its dank embrace. Thrice the stifling wind had faltered, almost subsided: thrice it had resumed, hot and foul as ever: people’s tempers were growing short.

Einstein, Joyce and Babcock were together again, this time in Einstein’s study, having agreed to meet there at three. The professor was the most chipper of the trio, being recuperated from the long night with the aid of only a few hours’ sleep and the intellectual stimulation of teaching his noon physics class. Joyce was still somewhat hung over, and looked it. Babcock, after drowsing fitfully on a divan in Joyce’s sitting room for most of the morning, was only a little less desperate than the previous night.

“Well, Jeem,” Einstein began, “what do you make of our friend’s remarkable adventures, speaking honestly?”

“Speaking honestly?” Joyce repeated. “I begin to ask myself whether that is possible.”

“Once,” Joyce said thoughtfully, “a fair named Araby came to Dublin. I was perhaps ten at the time and devouring all sorts of romantic literature about the mysterious East, the secrets of the Sufis, the magick of the Dervishes, Aladdin and Ali Baba and much more of that sort. Can you imagine what the word ‘Araby’ connoted to me? My eagerness and excitement as the day of the fair approached were of the same order as my emotions, a few years later, when I nerved myself to enter the Red Light District and seek a prostitute for the first time. I thought a whole new world would open before me, a world of magick and wonder. What I found, of course, was an ordinary touring carnival, intended to amuse morons and empty the pockets of fools.”

Babcock looked confused by this speech; Einstein was solemn. The silence stretched out until Joyce spoke again.

“Mr. William Butler Yeats and his friends,” Joyce said simply, “live in Araby. It is real to them. More real than their servants, certainly. We go forth each day into the world of experience but we do not go mentally naked like Adam in Eden. We bring certain fixed ideas along whether we go to the corner pub, to a fair called Araby, or to the South Pole with Amundsen, I dare say. If a pickpocket enters this room he will see pockets to be picked; if Socrates were to be ushered in by the fair Mileva”—he bowed chivalrously toward the kitchen, where Mrs. Einstein could be heard puttering—“Socrates would see minds to be probed with annoying questions. If Mr. Yeats were here, he would see mere material shadows of the Eternal Spiritual Ideas known as Science,” indicating Einstein, “Art,” indicating himself ironically, “and Mysticism,” indicating Sir John. “I see three people with different life histories,” he concluded abruptly.

“All of which,” Einstein asked drily, “is your way of saying that the Golden Dawn people seem no more mad to you than anybody else?”

“I am saying,” Joyce replied, “that I can see the world as Yeats and the occultists do—as a spiritual adventure full of Omens and Symbols. I can also see it, if I choose, as the Jesuits taught me to see it in youth: as a vale of tears and a web of sin. Or I can see it as a Homeric epic, or a depressing naturalistic novel by Zola. I am interested in seeing all of its facets.”

Sir John leaned forward, suddenly interested. “I think I begin to understand you a bit,” he said. “You are saying that I am living in a Gothic novel, while you prefer to live in a Zola novel.”

“Not that at all,” Joyce said. “The Zola school is one-dimensional. I am seeking multi-dimensional vision. I wish to see deeply into Gothic novels, Zola novels and all other masquerades, and then beyond them.”

“Your parable of Araby,” Einstein said to Joyce, “reminds me curiously of a parable of my own. Imagine that we three are physicists seated here in this room. Unknown to us, this room is actually an elevator—a lift, Sir John—which is rising rapidly through outer space. Since we do not imagine that we are inside an elevator, but are educated in physics and curious about our environment, we begin to conduct experiments. We find that objects dropped from our hands fall to the floor. We find further that if the objects are thrown horizontally instead of dropped, they also fall, but in a parabola. We find, in fact, that as we experiment and write the simplest possible mathematical equations to describe our observations, we can derive the whole Newtonian theory of gravity. We decide that beneath this box in which we find ourselves is a planet which ‘draws’ objects to it.”

“Is that true?” Joyce asked, startled. “It is more wonderful than anything you have told me of your theories thus far.”

“I am in the process of proving it,” Einstein said, “in a paper I’m writing. Now, it so happens that one physicist in the room, or the elevator, by some strange process of creative reorganization of sense-data—perhaps akin to these mind-bending Cabalistic experiments of the Golden Dawn people—has made the leap to another way of thinking. He conceives of the room as an elevator and imagines the cable and the machinery that is rapidly drawing us upward. He sits down and performs his own experiments and writes his own equations. He derives eventually the whole theory of inertia as found in classical mechanics. There is no planet beneath us at all, he decides.

“Now,” Einstein said, “we are in the predicament that the doors are locked and we cannot get out of the room. How do we determine who has the correct explanation of the lawful phenomena that we observe—those who attribute them to gravity [a planet beneath us], or the one who attributes them to inertia [a cable above us, pulling us through free zero-gravity space]?”

“Both are correct, in a sense,” Joyce said firmly. “If both systems of equations will describe our situation, there is no reason to prefer one over the other, except esthetic preference. Within the terms of the problem we can never see the planet beneath us or the cable above us. You set us up for the wrong answer by telling the situation from the point of view of the man outside.”

“Precisely,” Einstein said. “Any coordinate system acts like the room I was talking about, and if there is an outside observer we cannot scientifically know it. From inside the room—inside any coordinate system—there is no way of saying whether gravity or inertia is the true explanation of the phenomena we observe. It is the same with Sir John’s narrative—that is to say, it is either a random series of odd coincidences and Freudian dream symbols, given a totally artificial meaning by Sir John’s occult beliefs, or it is a series of real occult Omens, depending on the interpretation of the observer.”

“Precisely,” Joyce said. “I can do as well as Sir John, in the department of odd coincidences. For instance, my first teaching job was at a school on Vico Road in Dublin. More recently, in Trieste, I have had to walk the Via Giambattista Vico twice a day, to go to and from the home of one of my language students. Then I had a student who was fascinated by Vico’s theory of the cycle in history. Naturally, I became interested in the life and philosophy of Vico after all that, and I found numerous parallels with my own life and thought, so that now everything I write is influenced by Vico. You may interpret this sequence in whatever way you choose. Either, Unum, the gods arranged for me to encounter Vico’s name over and over in order to influence my writing; or, Duum, it was mere coincidence, and I gave it meaning by taking it seriously. There is no way of proving either hypothesis to the man who insists on seeing it the other way.”

“Not quite,” Einstein said sharply. “When it becomes possible to choose between two theories, we should choose the one that best accords with the facts. Or, we should develop a higher-order theory that reconciles the differences between the two conflicting interpretations—as I am trying to do with this gravity and inertia conundrum. Without such creative effort to make our concepts square with our percepts, our thought is just an exercise in wish fulfillment.”

“Surprising as it may be,” Babcock said wearily, “I agree with all you gentlemen have said. One of the first lessons I learned in the Golden Dawn is that perception depends on the mind of the observer, just as what is revealed through a lens depends on the angle of refraction. Your reminding me of that is a work of supererogation and does not at all relieve the fundamental terror of my position as one under attack by black magicians who have already shown their capacity to unhinge the minds of three people and drive them to suicide.”

“Well, as to that,” Einstein said mildly, “you are certainly a man with dangerous enemies, we all agree. What remains to be determined is whether they can actually manipulate the physical universe with their, um, magick, or whether they are merely superlatively clever at manipulating the minds of the human beings on whom they prey. In that connection, we would both be most interested to hear the rest of your story.”

“Yes,” Joyce said. “I certainly want you to get on with it. I have already formed a tentative hypothesis about what is actually afoot here—behind all the masques and masquerades—and I would be most intrigued to learn whether that theory will mesh with the subsequent facts.”

And, as the Föhn wind continued to batter the window, he told Joyce and Einstein a tale that confounded all their expectations.

DE ILLUMINATORUM OPERIBUS DIVERSIS

Sir John found Verey’s letter about the bat-winged creature so disturbing that he determined to learn all he could about the enigmatic Aleister Crowley—the man described by Jones as the leader of a false Golden Dawn lodge dedicated to licentiousness and black magick; the lover of Lola Levine, according to Ezekiel (or Ezra or Jeremiah) Pound; the wizard who had perhaps once turned Victor Neuberg into a camel; and, in Sir John’s growing suspicions, the human channel through which the crew that never rests had been set loose upon the Verey family.

He began at the British Museum, uneasily recalling the dream in which he had encountered Karl Marx there and heard a confusing history of Freemasonry all muddled together with the assassination of Julius Caesar.

Reviews of Current Literature for the past decade revealed that Crowley was the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, every one of which had received uncommonly mixed reviews. The critic in The Listener did not seem at all to be able to make up his mind about one of Crowley’s volumes, The Sword of Song, describing it as “fearless,” “serious and intrepid” and “increasingly repellent” in a single paragraph. The Seeker was more charitable: “Crowley has been reproached in some thoughtless or malicious quarters…. It is undoubtedly no easy task to follow the royal bird in his dazzling flight”; while The Clarion frankly gave up in despair: “We must confess that our intelligence is not equal to the task.” The Cambridge Review was simply furious at another Crowley volume, complaining that it was “obscene,” “revolting” and a “monstrosity” that “demands an emphatic protest from lovers of literature and decency.” The Arboath Herald, like the Clarion, surrendered to despair, designating Crowley’s verse as “so clever one finds some of it utterly unintelligible.” The Atheist, on the other hand, grudgingly praised Crowley while denouncing him: “Far as we are from admiring his dreamy romanticism, yet his staunch denial of the supernatural, the divine, the mystical must command our respect”; but, paradoxically, the Prophetic Mercury found the same verses hopeful for the opposite reason, saying, “The ever-present sense of God in the mind of the poet leads us to the prayerful hope that one day he may be enlightened.” Again the Yorkshire Post was simply aghast: “Mr. Crowley’s poetry, if such it may be called, is not serious”; but the Literary Guide was rhapsodic: “A masterpiece of learning and satire.”

Q: Give a succinct and representative example of the controversial verse of Mr. Crowley.

Blow the tom-tom, bang the flute!
  Let us all be merry!
I’m a party with acute
  Chronic beri-beri.
Monday I’m a skinny critter
  Quite Felicien-Ropsy.
Blow the cymbal, bang the zither!
  Tuesday I have dropsy.
Wednesday cardiac symptoms come;
  Thursday diabetic.
Blow the fiddle, strum the drum!
  Friday I’m paretic.
If on Saturday my foes
  Join in legions serried,
Then on Sunday, I suppose,
  I’ll be beri-beried!

Sir John next tried the newspapers. In the Times for 1909—the year Sir John himself had graduated from Cambridge and the mad Picasso had shocked the Paris art world with his first incomprehensible “Cubist” painting—Crowley had been involved in a lawsuit with MacGregor Mathers. The Times reporter was not sympathetic to either Crowley or Mathers, but Sir John was able to gather that the ostensible purpose of the trial—Mathers’ attempt to prevent Crowley from publishing, in a magazine called The Equinox, certain rituals of the original Golden Dawn—was only an excuse to air the real conflict between them, which hinged on the fact that each claimed to be the real head of the Invisible College of the Rosicrucians. Well, that was hardly news to Sir John; Jones had told him that Crowley, Mathers and others were operating fake Rosicrucian lodges in competition with the real Golden Dawn. The judge, Sir John learned with amusement, refused to allow the trial to degenerate into a debate about such claims, which by their very nature could not be settled in an ordinary law court, and had merely ruled that Mathers had no authority to prevent Crowley from publishing documents of unknown age and authorship which both litigants admitted, and even stipulated, were written by superhuman intelligences unwilling to take corporeal form to testify on their own behalf.

Sir John was also amused to find that Mathers, under cross-examination, was forced to confess that he had, on occasion, alleged himself to be the reincarnation of King Charles I. He also found a clue to further information about Crowley in a casual remark, during the testimony, indicating that Crowley regarded himself as the worlds greatest living mountain climber.

A visit to the Alpine Club quickly brought vehement denials of that claim. “Aleister Crowley,” said the Club’s secretary, a Mr. Mortimer, “is the world’s greatest living braggart. None of his climbs is accepted as authenticated by us.” But further questioning soon produced the usual ambiguity that seemed to cling to Crowley like fog to the London streets: it was obvious that the feud between Crowley and the Alpine Club went all the way back to the 1890s and that both sides had accused the other of lying so often that an outside observer could not form an impartial judgment. Mortimer did let slip one remark that suggested Crowley’s mountaineering exploits might not be entirely contemptible, admitting that Oscar Eckenstein, Germany’s greatest climber, had often called Crowley England’s best contender—“but,” Mortimer added hastily, “Eckenstein is a German Jew and has a grudge against us, so naturally he’d support Crowley’s lies.”

Sir John moved on to seek further clues to his enigmatic antagonist from various people who were reputed to know London high life extensively.

“Crowley is certainly a rascal, and an amusing one,” said Max Beerbohm. “Whether he also is a true scoundrel I cannot say, but he does devote a great deal of his energy to convincing the world that he’s a scoundrel.”

“Um, yes,” Sir John said doubtfully, “but just how do you distinguish a rascal from a true scoundrel?”

“A rascal,” said Beerbohm precisely, “doesn’t care a brass farthing for contemporary morals, but still possesses his own kind of honor. A scoundrel has neither morals nor honor.”

“Oh,” Sir John said, still dubiously. “Could you give me an example of Crowley’s, uh, rascality?”

Beerbohm chuckled. The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years showed as the daylight fell level across his face. “There are a thousand examples,” he said, the stiffness from spats to collar relaxing into grace. “My own favorite involves the statue of Oscar Wilde in Paris, by that very talented young man Jacob Epstein. The French, you know, put the statue up to show they were more broadminded about, uh, Wilde’s sexual proclivities than we are and would recognize a great artist whatever his, uh, peculiarities.” He chuckled again. “They weren’t quite broadminded enough for Epstein’s statue, which was a nude, you see. That was a bit thick, in connection with Wilde’s, um, reputation, but they couldn’t, ah, insult Epstein by rejecting the statue after commissioning it. So they hired some hack to attach a fig leaf at the ah-uh-um sensitive point, if I make myself clear. Well, sir, do you know what Crowley did? He crept into the park after dark, with a hammer and chisel, and removed the fig leaf. Then, to add scandal to outrage, he walked into Claridge’s here in London, that same night, wearing the fig leaf over the front of his own trousers!” Beerbohm laughed. “That is what I would call rascality, although I doubt it is scoundrelism.”

The beautiful Florence Farr, London’s most famous actress, was as paradoxical as most of the reviewers of Crow-ley’s poetry. “Aleister,” she said, “was, when I knew him ten years ago, the handsomest, wittiest, most brilliant young man in London. He was also the most unmitigated cad and blackguard I have ever encountered. From what I hear now and then about his life, these contradictions in him are growing more violent all the time. I am quite sure he will end either on the gallows or being canonized as a saint.”

Victor Neuberg, the young poet who had allegedly been turned into a camel by Crowley, refused to meet with Sir John at all, sending merely a card saying in tiny script: “No man living understands, or can understand, Aleister Crowley, but those who value their sanity will not get involved with him.”

Richard Aldington, the editor, commented: “Rodin considers Crowley our greatest living poet, but I fear that is due entirely to the fact that Crowley wrote a volume of verse glorifying Rodin’s sculpture. Personally, I can’t stand Crowley’s verse. It’s Victorian, and rhetorical, and windy. Totally without the modern note.”

Gerald Kelly, the most fashionable painter in England, looking like exactly what he was—a man who would soon be elected to the Royal Academy—said, “I can’t talk about Aleister Crowley, Sir John. You evidently haven’t heard that he’s my former brother-in-law. All I will say is that when my sister divorced him I was not unhappy.”

Bertránd Russell, the mathematician, stated precisely, “I have never met a layman who understands modern mathematics as well as Aleister Crowley, but aside from that his head is a swamp of mushy mysticism. I hear he plays excellent chess, so you might learn more at the London Chess Club.”

The London Chess Club turned out to be full of admirers of Crowley, all of whom regretted that he hadn’t devoted more time to the game. “He could be a Grandmaster,” one member said sadly, “if he didn’t waste himself on nonsense like mountain-climbing and poetry and was not constantly running off to the East to ruin his mind with Hindu superstitions.”

“Aleister,” said another chess buff, “is the only man I have ever seen, short of Grandmaster status, who can really play blindfold chess against several opponents and win most of the games. In fact”—here he lowered his voice—“one of his sports is almost preternatural. He actually has, on more than one occasion, retired to a bedroom with his mistress of the moment and called out his moves to a player sitting at a board in the next room, and won. He says he does it to show us what real concentration means.”

Sir John blushed furiously. “What a contemptible way to treat a woman,” he said stiffly.

“Well,” said the informant with a leer, “from what I heard about it, the sounds from the bedroom indicated that the lady was having a most gratifying experience; or several gratifications, in fact.”

Sir John went off pondering that specialists can look right into the Devil’s face and not recognize it. What seemed a mixture of vulgar stunt and intellectual gymnastics to the chess player was obviously far worse, to anyone aware of the sexual aspects of black magick: it was part of Crowley’s continuous training for the ordeals of the ritual of Pan, in which prolonged sensuality is used to intoxicate the senses and open the door to the astral entities.

Sir John next went browsing in bookstores and after a frustrating search finally came upon one of Crowley’s books—a prose work entitled Book Four, which claimed to explain all the mysteries of yoga and magick in simple words that the man in the street could understand. Sir John purchased this at once and took it home for study.

When Sir John returned to Babcock Manor after collecting all this contradictory but disturbing intelligence about the Enemy, he found that a small package had arrived from the Golden Dawn post office box in London. That was strange, since Jones was still in Paris; but then Sir John did not know for a fact that Jones was in charge of these mailings. Perhaps some other officer of the Order sent out appropriate lessons to students at pre-arranged dates. Sir John opened the package, with a wistful hope that it might contain the secret of the Rose Cross ritual—something for which Jones had told him he might soon qualify.

DE OCULO HOOR

Class A Publication
Hermetic Order of the G∴D∴

Sir John retired to the library to read this with considerable curiosity. It said:

1. This is the Book of the Opening of the Eye of Horus, of which the symbol in the profane world is the eye in the triangle, and of which the meaning is Illumination.

2. Thou who readest this doth not read; thou who seeketh shall not attain; thou who understandeth doth not understand. For attainment and understanding cometh only when thou art not thou, yea, when thou art nothing.

3. Once there was a monk, a disciple of that great Magus of our Order whom men name the Buddha which signifieth He Who Is Awake. For men asked the Lord Gotama, Are you a God? And he answered, No. And they asked again, Are you a saint? And he answered again, No. And they asked then, What are you? And he answered: I am awake. Thence is he known as the Buddha, the Awakened One.

4. And the monk, in order to awaken himself, practised the Art of Meditation as taught by Buddha, which in its original form before being distorted by False Imaginings and Elaborations of Theologians, was but this: To look upon all incidents and events and Remember to Say Unto Thine Soul of each: This is transitory.

5. And the monk looked upon all incidents and events, Reminding himself always: This is transitory.

6. And the monk came close to Awakening, and therefore was he in great peril, for The Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations, whom Buddhists call Mara, the Tempter, cometh quickly to one near Awakening, to hypnotize him again into the Sleep of Fools which is the ordinary consciousness of Men.

7. And Mara did sorely afflict the monk with death of offspring, and insanity of loved ones, and eye-troubles, and slander, and malice, and the great curse of Law Suits, and diverse sufferings; but the monk thought only: This is transitory. And he was closer to Awakening.

8. And Mara, the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations, then caused the monk to die and reincarnate as an almost Mindless creature, a Parrot, which flitted from tree to tree deep in the jungle; and Mara thought, Now he has no chance of Awakening.

9. But a brother Monk of the Buddhist order came one day through the jungle, chanting the Teachings, and the Parrot heard, and repeated the one phrase over and over: This is transitory.

10. And Mental Activity began in the Parrot, and the memories of his past life came to him, and the meaning of the teaching, This is transitory; and Mara cursed horribly in frustration, and caused him to die again and reincarnate as an Elephant, even deeper in the jungle and further from the languages of men.

11. And many years passed, and there seemed no chance of Awakening for that soul; but the effects of good karma, like those of bad, continueth forever; and eventually Men came to the jungle, and took the Elephant captive, to sell him to a great Rajah.

12. And the Elephant lived in the courtyard of the Rajah, and many years passed.

13. And another monk of the Ruddhist order came to the Rajah, and taught in the courtyard, and his teaching was: This is transitory. And memories awoke in the Elephant, and meaning was understood in the memories, and Awakening again came close.

14. And Mara cursed wrathfully, and caused the Elephant to die; and this time Mara took good care that reincarnation would recur at the furthest possible remove from all chance of Awakening, for Mara caused that the monk be reborn this time as an American Evangelist.

15. And the Evangelist was of the Moral Majority [bocca grande giganticus] and he journeyed across the American nation, North and South and East and West, preaching that all were in danger of hellfire, and that there was only One Path to Salvation, and that this Path lay in believing All he Said and doing All he Demanded.

16. And he enslaved many, who became mental Automatons, and these Automatons went about crying, Hallelujah, We Are Saved.

17. And Mara was gleeful, for now the soul of the monk was further from Illumination than ever; for previously he had been a Subjectively Hopeless Idiot—id est, one who is aware of his own hopeless idiocy—but now he was an Objectively Hopeless Idiot—id est, one who Thinks that he Knows when in fact he doth Know Nothing.

18. But the Evangelist met with others of the Clergy to discuss sending Missionaries to the Heathen of the East; and there One spoke of the superstitions of the Orient, and he mentioned the Buddhist teaching that All is transitory.

19. And Mental Activity began in the Evangelist, and memories of Past Incarnations stirred; and Mara, in bitter frustration, attempted the Last Trap of All, and caused the Evangelist to become Mahabrahma, Lord of Lords, God of all possible Universes.

20. And Mahabrahma abode in Divine Bliss for billions of billions of years, creating many lesser Brahmas who created Their own universes and were Gods to them; and Mahabrahma watched all this Activity and rejoiced in it with High Indifference; for Mahabrahma was Consciousness Without Desire.

21. And the monk now seemed at last cut off from Illumination forever.

22. But finally Mahabrahma observed, after watching many Gods come and go, and all Their universes grow and flourish and perish, that the great Law of Laws is that All is transitory.

23. And Mahabrahma realized that He, too, was transitory.

24. And Mahabrahma achieved Illumination.

25. And Mahabrahma came back to ordinary consciousness in the mind of the monk practising the Buddhist meditation of looking on all things and thinking, This is transitory.

26. And the monk did not know if he was a monk imagining he had been Mahabrahma or Mahabrahma playing at being a monk; and thus was his Illumination perfected.

DE FRATRIBUS NIGRIS, FILIIS INIQUITATIS

The next day brought another letter from Verey, and Sir John’s heart sank when he saw that the handwriting on the envelope was now visibly shaky and erratic. He tore it open prepared for almost anything.

Dear Sir John,

The forces invoked by my wicked young brother Arthur and the accursed Lola are more terrible than I had ever imagined. I realize now—at last—that I have never really taken Holy Writ [especially the Book of Revelations] literally enough. The “principalities and powers” of Hell are no figure of speech.

“Woe to them who believe not, for they are damned already.”

To come to the point: I have reached the climax of the horrors.

The blasphemous horror of that sight still haunts my imagination, but even worse is the fact that I have been able to conceive of no way mere human servitors of the Demon could have accomplished this atrocity. The window [which, I remind you, does not open] was unbroken, and the rusted door could not have been passed by any other means than the hammering apart of the lock which I myself employed—yet the lock was undamaged, save for the rust, when I found it.

Naturally, I removed the cat, cleaned up the blood and erased the pentagram before the worshippers arrived [so as to avoid spreading further fear among the countryfolk], but my wife came upon me in the midst of this gruesome operation and I had no choice but to admit what had happened. She has lived in anxiety for this day week, and wishes more fervently to leave this lonely place. Yet I am attached to these fair hills and glens, as I have said before, and I really do not know that we would be safer anywhere else.

I have, incidentally, attempted to arrive at an explanation of this mystery in purely human terms. To hire a debased Oriental for any evil business is easy. To dress a dwarf in a weird costume, even to unleash an unusually large bird, and to count on fear and superstition to magnify all this into a reign of terror—all that would be possible to malignantly disposed humans. Then, I ask myself: Could not somebody have surreptitiously entered my house that Saturday night after I was asleep and borrowed the church key, using it before the rain caused further rust and made the lock into a hermetic seal? Alas, that explanation will not hold water. I keep the key on a small chain attached to a bracelet on my wrist, and the chain was unbroken in the morning. It is preposterous to imagine an intruder breaking the chain, doing the disgusting deed in the church, then returning to my room to solder the chain together, in the dark, without waking me.

I can only conclude that we are dealing with an entity that can pass through solid walls.

May the protection of the Lord be upon all of us.

Sincerely,

Rev. C. Verey

Joyce raised dim eyes behind thick glasses, a slow smile dawning. “How alike we are,” he said. “That was my first thought, also.”

“It is a fairly easy process,” Einstein went on. “You wish to terrorize an aging religious fanatic such as the Reverend Verey. Obtain a few assistants and props—the dwarf, the Oriental confederate, the hypothetical bird of unusual size [which might even be a cardboard kite or a machine of some sort]; the stage is set for the wildest imaginings. Then, one dark night, very quietly, simply go to the church and pour hot wax into the lock. In a few moments, the wax has solidified. You carefully slide it out and you have a model of the key. You then take this to any competent locksmith and he will provide you with a duplicate. The stage is set for your miracle.”

“Well, in fact,” Sir John said, “although my beliefs are admittedly more mystical than those of you gentlemen, I am not without intelligence of my own. I also thought of the duplicate key explanation and wrote at once to suggest it to poor old Verey.”

“Well,” Sir John said carefully, “the objections are as follows. First, the Verey property includes the church, the house and a small pasture where goats, pigs and the family horse are kept. Nobody has ever approached that establishment after dark, Verey says, without alerting the dogs, whose barking generally sets off all the other animals and creates a sufficient racket to wake the whole family—Verey, his wife, Annie, and his older brother, Bertrán.

“Now, gentlemen, stretch your imaginations to the ultimate and conceive of a professional cat-burglar so adroit that he moves with the legendary silence of the American Apache Indians. He gets through the pasture to the church and makes his wax model, as you have suggested. He is very light-footed, indeed; but I will stipulate that such an improbably skillful burglar might exist.

“Very well, then,” Babcock went on. “Our man has his duplicate key. He returns on that rainy Saturday night and again manages to get by all the animals without arousing a stir. He enters the church and does his blasphemous and brutal deed. Then he leaves. Very good. The only trouble is that Reverend Verey noted, as soon as he discovered the horror on the altar, that his own were the only tracks in the mud approaching the church door. It appears that our super-housebreaker not only moved through a lively farm without waking any of the animals, on two separate nights—when he made his model and when he returned for his Satanic sacrifice—but also, on the second occasion, crossed the yard without leaving footprints in the mud.” Sir John smiled thinly. “How does Free Thought explain this, my skeptical friends?”

Einstein examined his pipe thoughtfully and then began with careful fingers cleaning it. His face was impassive.

“This older brother, Bertrán,” he said, peering into the pipe ash like Sherlock Holmes looking for a clue, “all he is, so far, is a name. We know nothing of him at all.”

“Ah,” Joyce said, “you are looking for a confederate of the conspirators within the household itself. Very keen, Professor. If one brother in three may be a renegade, why not two? Reminds me of my theory of Hamlet, which I must tell you sometime. I can even see a possible scenario, if the house and the church are close enough to each other. The sinister Bertrán, like a Highlands d’Artagnan, crosses the roof of the house, leaps to the roof of the church, then lowers himself head downward to the door. Very athletic for the older brother of Reverend Verey, who is himself, we have heard, sixty-two years old. Implausible, but not impossible, and as Holmes himself often reminds us: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ I must sadly inform you, Professor, that I can’t believe it for a moment.”

“A balloon,” Einstein said thoughtfully, rummaging about for fresh tobacco. [A nine-pipe case, Joyce thought.] “A small balloon, filled with helium, with a carriage for one or two passengers, such as one sees at fairs. No,” he added, “don’t bother mocking me. I am, at this point, grasping at straws. The balloon is possible, but I actually find it harder to believe our intruder descended from the sky that way, without alarming all the animals, than to believe he walked through a solid wall. I begin to realize that we are dealing with some diabolically clever conspirators here. Getting to the bottom of this will test all my powers of analysis.”

“On with the narrative,” Einstein said. “We need more facts before we can form any conclusion.”

The vicar said “Gracious/If’s Brother Ignatius.” Yes: I’m getting it finally. Ed eran duo in uno. Yes.

DE SAPIENTIA ET STULTITIA

Waiting with growing impatience for Jones’ return from Paris, and waiting also with dread and foreboding for the next events at Loch Ness, Sir John began studying Crowley’s Book Four. It was indeed a very simple and down-to-earth explanation of the occult arts and sciences—at least in its opening chapters.

Crowley began by rejecting both Faith and Reason as ultimate answers to the mystery of existence—Faith because it may be Faith in the wrong god, the wrong church or the wrong teacher; Reason because it cannot get beyond the permutations and combinations of its own axioms. There remains only the method of Experiment, and Crowley defined every true occult system as a technique of physiological and neurological Experiment whereby consciousness is multiplied and evolution accelerated.

All of this, Sir John realized, came from the Golden Dawn teachings, but—to give the devil his due—Crowley certainly had a gift for explaining it with marvelous clarity and scientific precision.

Book Four went on to explain the techniques of yoga as physiological experiments.

Asana, the contorted gymnastics which Sir John had learned so painfully from Jones, was simply a method of bringing the body to maximum relaxation without actually going to sleep. Pranayama, the special yogic breathing technique, Crowley went on, was similarly a method of bringing the emotions under the control of the Will. Sir John again found himself grudgingly admitting that the Enemy had a real gift for making the occult arts scientifically clear.

The first sinister note entered in the discussion of yama and niyama, chastity and self-control. Crowley denounced all the traditional teachings on this subject as superstitious, pernicious and superfluous; in their place he offered the anarchistic advice: “Let the student decide for himself what form of life, what moral code, will least tend to excite his mind.” This was totally insidious, Sir John realized: while pretending to scientific objectivity, it opened the door to any system of morality or amorality the reader might personally prefer.

Crowley then turned to ceremonial magick and explained it as an aid to yoga. The mind alone, he said, cannot achieve its own transcendence, even by the techniques of yoga, until the Will has become a weapon capable of absolute dictatorship over the body, over the body’s raging emotions and over all mechanical habits. Every technique of magick, Crowley said, was simply a trick or gimmick to aid the student in developing such a self-transcending Will. Moral considerations about the handling of this Will were entirely ignored, Sir John noted; the perversity of Crowley’s system was becoming more obvious.

“Every nursery rhyme contains profound magickal secrets,” Crowley began blandly, in the same rationalistic tone as the rest of his treatise. He then offered an example:

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her poor dog a bone …

Who is this ancient and venerable mother of whom it is spoken? Verily she is none other than Binah, as is evident in the use of the holy letter H, with which her name begins.

Sir John stared at the page, dumbfounded. It was, damn the man, quite plausible Cabala. Binah was the dark secondary aspect of God, coequal with Chockmah, Divinity’s primary or rational aspect. And Binah is usually symbolized as an old woman, just as Chockmah is symbolized as a white-bearded old man. The Cabalists taught that the vulgar could only understand the male or patriarchal aspect of Divinity, but the first step to Illumination is to understand, by direct intuition, the Most Highest’s feminine, passive aspect. And Hé as the second letter of the Divine Name, Yod Hé Vau Hé, is identified with this secondary aspect of Divinity—because Hé means a window and symbolizes the womb. Crowley was engaged in a very complicated Cabalistic in-joke, to say the least of the matter. Sir John read on with astonishment:

And who is this dog? Is it not the name of God spelled Cabalistically backward? And what is this bone? This bone is the Wand, the holy Lingam!

The complete interpretation of the rune is now open. This rime is the legend of the murder of Osiris by Typhon.

The limbs of Osiris were scattered in the Nile.

Isis sought them in every corner of the Universe, and she found them all except the sacred lingam, which was not found until quite recently.

This was not only sound Cabala but good comparative mythology. Isis, Sir John realized with awe, really did fit in with the dog symbolism, since she was identified with the Dog Star, Sirius. But it was also a wicked parody of Cabala to pretend to find all this in Mother Goose.

Crowley went on to explain the profound mystical meanings in Little Bo Peep (Buddha beneath the bo tree) and her sheep (the Lamb, the Saviour); in Little Miss Muffet (Malkus, the world of illusion) and the spider (Death, the great illusion); and so on, and on, through Little Jack Horner, Humpty Dumpty and all the rest.

Book Four, which had started out as the clearest and most empirical volume on mysticism Sir John had ever seen, had turned into an enormous practical joke on the reader. Sir John found himself remembering Victor Neuberg’s terse note: “No man living understands, or can understand, Aleister Crowley, but those who value their sanity will not get involved with him.”

When Mr. George Cecil Jones returned from his holiday in France, Sir John immediately met with him to recount the whole saga of Lola Levine, Clouds Without Water, The Great God Pan and the Rev. Verey’s dead cat.

The meeting occurred at Jones’ home in the Soho section of London. Jones introduced his wife and children—a pleasant and ordinary English family—and then retired with Sir John to a book-lined study on the ground floor. “You have been meddling with the Abramelin spirits,” he said at once.

“Well, then, they have been meddling with you,” Jones replied. “Tell me all about it.” And he sat with an attentive, but impassive, face—much as he might sit through a business meeting at his chemical company—as Sir John poured out the whole story. There were perhaps a dozen candles about, two in brass candlesticks and several in sconces, so that the room was brilliantly illuminated; but Sir John still felt that each dank shadow that moved contained an adumbration of dark foreboding.

“Well,” said Jones when Sir John’s narrative was concluded, “you have certainly uncovered a very nasty situation, indeed. Are you afraid?”

“I know, I know; that is what you are supposed to believe,” Jones interrupted. “The question is: How deeply do you believe it at this point?”

“Moments,” Sir John said. “I think that, between the technique of pranayama and the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, I have learned to vanquish any negative emotional state before it can take full possession of me.”

“That much, at least, is expected of the rank of Practicus,” Jones replied. “If you were put to higher tests, however … If, say, I arranged with a surgeon friend of mine to have you observe while he performed major surgery, or an autopsy … or if I managed to pull the proper strings in government and you were admitted to see a hanging at Newgate Prison … could you stand as a Buddha, clear-eyed, without fear or loathing?”

“Not entirely,” Sir John admitted. “But I have attained such degree of detachment from the body-emotions that I would guarantee not to faint or become ill.”

Jones arose and began to pace the room, silent and inscrutable as a caged panther. “Suppose,” he said finally, “I were to take you on a jaunt to Paris and brought you to one of those clubs, of which you must have heard rumors, where sexual orgies are staged for the amusement of the spectators. Could you watch as a Buddha, clear-eyed, without lust and without the conditioned reflexes of horror from your Victorian upbringing?”

Sir John looked into the fire, sermons on hell running through his memory. “No,” he said hoarsely. “I think I would be disturbed by both desire and disgust.”

Jones smiled reassuringly. “At least you are honest,” he said simply. He ceased his pacing, drew a chair close to Sir John, and asked quietly, “Suppose I were to instruct you to take the next train to Inverness, go to the home of Reverend Verey, and employ the great ritual of exorcism to expel the forces that threaten his unfortunate household?”

Sir John’s heart sank. “I could not do it,” he said abjectly. “I have not yet sufficient confidence in myself and my control over the astral forces.”

Jones laughed, and clapped the younger man on the shoulder. “Excellent, most excellent,” he said unexpectedly. “You have gone far into a dreadful business,” he continued, his eyes warm with admiration, “and I must allow that I am torn between the highest regard for your courage and the most dismal apprehensions about your foolhardiness. If you had acquiesced in my suggestion about the exorcism, I would have had to conclude that you are not only foolish but suffering from a bad case of premature self-confidence verging closely upon the Biblical sin of Pride. Nobody of the rank of Practicus should attempt what I just suggested. To accomplish an exorcism requires at least the rank of Adeptus Major.”

Sir John breathed a great sigh of relief. “Thank you,” he said, meaning more than two words could convey.

“I will have to think about this overnight,” Jones added. “Perhaps I may even have to consult my Superior in the Order, although I hope this matter is not that serious. Mostly what we have here is malicious mischief, I think.”

“Oh, certainly,” Jones agreed. “But calm yourself a bit and think about the matter more rationally. Have you ever seen me levitate or walk through walls? Do you imagine that I can perform such wonders but have hidden them from you, out of modesty perhaps? I assure you that such siddhis, as the Hindus call these powers, are very rare, and are mostly a distraction from the Great Work anyway. That a group of debauched diabolists is very advanced in the siddhis is simply preposterous, Sir John. They have magnified egos usually, not magnified powers. There is much evil here, certainly, but there is also much trickery and sheer bluff. Let me think upon it.”

DE CLAVICULA SOMNIORUM

Once again that night, Sir John’s dreams were beastly and terrifying. Lola, Lola, Lola was everywhere he wandered in the gnomic caverns of sleep. Old Celine was guiding Sir John through some dark, Hispanic sort of museleum and they came upon Goya’s Maja Naked: the face on the portrait was Lola’s, and her eyes were live, looking into Sir John’s soul with obscene mockery. “Wait,” Celine started to object, “it is only Art …” But Sir John was racing through a garden past a tree around which curled a blue gartersnake the size of a python: under the tree, still nude and mocking, Lola called to him, “See you when tea is hot.” NO TRESPASSING said a sign. “C.U.N.T. is hot,” said an echo. He was in the Boulak Museum in Cairo (where was Celine?) and an ancient Stele was before him showing hawk-headed Horus, a winged globe and the naked star-goddess Nuit. Surgeon Peel sang:

Priests in black gowns are going their rounds
Choking with briars our joys and desires

Sir John was in Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, examining a most intricately jeweled Eastern Orthodox crucifix. “Speak,” Sur Loin said, “if you see Kay?” And Sir John noted that the initials I.N.R.I, were followed by a smaller script, saying:

Ipsum Nomen Res Ipsa
[Eat It With Catsup]

“The name itself is the thing itself,” Sir John translated. “What on Earth does that mean?”

But the cross became the bodhi of Lola, arms extended, glowing goldly. “Yod: Isis: Virgin Mother,” she said hermetically. “The seamen at dawn.”

“Nun: Death: Apophis, the Destroyer,” said old Verey morbidly. “Sir Talis at noon.”

“Resh: the Sun: Osiris Risen,” Celine added soulfully. “Rest, erection.”

THE NAME ITSELF IS THE THING ITSELF, Sir John was writing desperately in his journal: this was too important to be forgotten.

And then it was morning. The birds sang outside, sunlight poured in a golden flood through the windows; and Sir John wondered whether we approach ultimate reality more closely in ordinary consciousness or in the gnomic symbolism of our dreams. He recorded the whole vision in his magical diary before it could fade and went down to breakfast still puzzling over Ipsum Nomen Res Ipsa: The Name Itself is the Thing Itself. I.N.R.I.: Isis, Apophis, Osiris: IAO.

The morning mail contained an oddly shaped package from the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth, Inverness, Scotland. Sir John tore it open as he sat down to breakfast, and found it contained a letter from Verey and a cylindrical phonograph record. He turned to the letter at once.

Verey’s handwriting was so shaky, now, that it was difficult to read in places. He began without formality:

My Dear Sir John:

The worst has happened. I can scarcely gather my wits to write a coherent account. God help us all.

The night before last, the buzzing and tittering of the weird creatures that lately haunt this misfortunate place became more terrifying than ever. I resolved to make a recording of these sounds, so that others may hear it and judge if it be only my imagination that these bat-winged things were actually aping human speech. Now, I can think of no use for this record except to send it to you. Others, I am sure, would reject it out of hand, saying that I had faked it; playing it back has made me realize that even I would disbelieve it if I had not been on the scene when it was made.

But a worse horror has occurred.

In yesterday’s post there was a package for my brother, Bertrán. I happened to notice that the sender used an abbreviation, M.M.M., which meant nothing to me but was puzzling. Under these initials was an address on Jermyn Street in London, but I cannot recall the number.

While I was reading my own mail, Bertrán wandered into the library to open the package. After a few moments I became aware of a sound that few people, I suppose, have ever heard; at first, I could not decide if it were laughter or weeping. I then realized it was the laughter of hysterical madness. I rushed at once to the library, but, alas, I was too late.

My God, Sir John, as I entered the room, Bertrán already had a hunting rifle held to his head. I shouted, “Stop!” and ran forward, but he only looked at me with mad, terrified eyes and pulled the trigger. I actually saw the disgusting sight of the back of his head exploding and—The details are too hideous to write. I wonder how doctors and policemen ever learn to look on such sights without going mad themselves. Certainly, I must have been mad for a few moments; I remember sitting on the floor, holding Bertrán’s dead body in my lap as a mother might hold a child, weeping. I thought, irrelevantly but with terrible emotion, that the writers of “murder mysteries” do not know of what they write if they imagine such scenes are matters for entertainment. My God, I [unintelligible words] work of Satan.

Then I began to look about for the package that had evidently triggered this inexplicable crisis of suicidal melancholy. I realized suddenly that there was a fire in the grate, where none had been before Bertrán entered the library, and I made the correct deduction. But try as I might, it was too late to save any particle from the flames. I saw only that the object had been a book of some sort—a rather thin volume, it appeared.

I must be off to the coroner’s inquest and will post this on my way. If you can find an M.M.M. on Jermyn Street, Sir John, for God’s sake, do not enter its premises, but please inform me whatever you can learn from outside.

In haste,

C. Verey

Sir John became aware that his poached egg and ham were growing cold on the plate. It was not at all clear to him how long he had been sitting, staring into space, the letter fallen to the floor beside him. Mourning doves were cooing softly just outside the window. He was in the real, tangible universe and the forces of nightmare and magick were active here, too, not just in the astral dream realms.

“It wasn’t suicide,” he said aloud, not even realizing that he had succumbed to the symptom of talking-to-oneself. “It was murder.” M.M.M., whoever or whatever it was, had sent Bertrán Verey a book that drove him to choose death rather than continued existence in this universe.

Then Sir John remembered the phonograph record of the “buzzing, tittering” voices. Numbly, like one walking in a dream, he took the cylinder to the music room and inserted it into his phonograph machine.

What he heard—the voices of the creatures afflicting Loch Ness—was an insectoid parody of human speech.

[Buzzing, unintelligible sounds]

[A dog barks with a shrill sound of animal fear.]

DEMENTED FEMALE VOICE

Tae hell! Tae hell! Ye shall all gang tae hell!

MALE VOICE

No escape, no escape, no escape, no escape, no escape, no escape, no escape … [voice degenerates into sub-human buzzing]

SECOND MALE VOICE

That’s right. That’s right. That’s right.

SEXLESS MACHINE VOICE

They’ll all go crazy in that house.

DEMENTED FEMALE VOICE

Aye, they’ll all gae daft. Charlie and Bertie and Annie, they’ll all gae daft.

MALE VOICE [singing]

Charlie’s going crazy, Charlie’s going crazy, Charlie’s going crazy …

THIRD MALE VOICE

The giant cockroaches are coming!

BESTIAL VOICE

The ants are coming …

DEMENTED MALE VOICE

The centipedes are coming …

DEMENTED FEMALE VOICE

No wife, no horse, no mustache!

THIRD MALE VOICE

Tis blood, thou stinkard, I’ll learn ye how to gust.

BESTIAL VOICE

The Death Mosquitoes! Killer Moths in the streets!
[Unintelligible sounds]
[Thunder]

MACHINE VOICE

One part sodium chloride and one part garters …

THIRD MALE VOICE [chanting]

From the depths of space, from the dark planets, from the stars that gleam with evil … [unintelligible] … the crypt of the Eyeless Eaters, the cursed valley of Pnath, He Who Shall Not Be Named …

BESTIAL VOICE

Tha want coont, Charlie. Tha want coont.

DEMENTED MALE VOICE

In the ghoul-haunted Woodland of Weir, stranger pause to shed a tear.

DEMENTED FEMALE VOICE

Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones and cursed be he that moves my bones!

THIRD MALE VOICE

All aboard for Elfland. Check your mind at the door.

BESTIAL VOICE

Charlie’s going crazy, Charlie’s going crazy, Charlie’s going crazy …

[Dog howls again in terror.]

MACHINE VOICE

That’s right: you’re wrong. That’s right: you’re wrong. That’s right: you’re wrong.

BUZZING, BARELY HUMAN VOICE

Wolde ye swinke me thikke wys?

THIRD MALE VOICE

To Pan! lo Pan Pan! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!

DEMENTED FEMALE VOICE

Aye, my coont, Charlie. Tha wants my coont.

FOURTH MALE VOICE

… to the Black Goat of the Woods, to the altar of the seventy thousand steps leading down, to the bowels of the earth and the Abomination of Abominations …

DEMENTED FEMALE VOICE

Magna Mater! Magna Mater! Atys! Dia ad aghaidh’s ad Adoin! Agus bas dunach ort!

The record stopped abruptly. Sir John sat in a daze, knowing that he had heard the voices of insane nightmare somehow unleashed from the darkest side of human fantasy and fear to take on substance real enough not just to torment poor Verey but to leave an impress on the record. The interpenetration of the worlds of dream and reality was complete.

Arthur Machen’s words, from The Great God Pan, came back to him: “There must be some explanation, some way out of the terror. Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare.”

They were in Jones’ study and Sir John could see, even in the candlelight, how pale the chemist had become.

“Of course,” Jones said. “It’s a bookstore. Mysteria Mystica Maxima—Occult and Mystical Books of All Ages; 93 Jermyn Street.”

“Yes, Verey mentions that the address was on Jermyn Street—but a bookstore?”

Jones smiled thinly. “You would expect some sort of Satanic temple with gargoyles grimacing at the passersby? An occult bookstore is as good a lure as any—if your prey is the individual seeking mystical secrets and your purpose is to lead him away from the path of light onto the path of darkness. Can you imagine Scotland Yard being persuaded to place a bookstore under surveillance, in this land of liberty and constitutional rights? Oh, a bookstore is an ideal trap for fools …” He shook his head, wearily. “The Mysteria Mystica Maxima is a creature that we in the Golden Dawn have watched with great interest since it opened two years ago. It has a quite adequate stock of mystical books of all traditions, but there are more volumes there by Mr. Aleister Crowley than by any other author. It also offers lectures, quite frequently, by Mr. Crowley.”

Sir John leaped from his chair and stood over Jones. “By God!” he shouted. “A man has been driven mad by a book! Murder has been done—murder that can probably never be proven in a court, but murder, nonetheless. Bat-winged creatures that titter and talk like the delusions of madness—malign dwarfs out of Celtic mythology—monstrous things—that abominable sacrifice on the altar—Jones, Jones, stop being the inscrutable teacher: it is too late for that. Tell me in plain words, for God’s sake, what we confront here.”

“Sit down,” Jones said quietly, “and do stop panting. Of course, I will tell you all that we know. Pray believe we do not engage in mystery-mongering for its own sake. It is well that beginners do not know the whole truth, just as it is well that soldiers do not have too real a picture of battle before they are sent to the front.”

“It was to be expected under the circumstances,” Jones replied reassuringly. “Now, then, to be brief and precise …”

Freemasonry, Jones said, began with the Knights Templar, as Sir John had argued in his book, The Secret Chiefs. Though non-Masonic historians regard this story of the origin of Masonry as a myth, that is because they only know the rituals and teachings of the public Masonic orders—like the Free and Accepted Scottish Rite and the Royal Arch. Those privy to the secrets of the more arcane orders, such as the Brethren of the Rose Croix and the Golden Dawn, can easily see, Jones said, the direct continuity from the Knights Templar to the present.

Moreover, Jones continued, there have been, ever since the destruction of the Templars by the Holy Inquisition in 1314, two distinct traditions of mystical Freemasonry, each denouncing the other as false and absurd.

“Yes,” said Sir John, “I believe I know what you mean. There are those who accept the guilt of the Templars and those who deny it.”

“Precisely,” said Jones. He rose to throw another log on the fire and then continued thoughtfully.

The charges against the Templars, Jones reminded Sir John, included blasphemy, sexual perversion and black magick. All historians agree that these accusations were brought by Philip II, the King of France, in order to seize the enormous wealth of the Templars. But no two historians have ever come to total agreement about which, if any, of the charges happened to be true. The whole matter is made more complicated by the inconsistent behavior of Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Templars.

“His behavior,” Sir John interjected, “is all too painfully clear to anybody who has investigated the instruments the Inquisition used in those days in order to obtain confessions.”

“Indeed,” Jones said somberly. “The fact remains that de Molay left behind a most ambiguous heritage.” After arrest, he confessed under torture to all the charges made against the Order of Templars, including even such extremities as spitting on the crucifix and every sexual excess imaginable. Brought to trial, de Molay repudiated the entire confession and stated emphatically that he had made these admissions only to escape the sadistic tools of Inquisitorial interrogation. He was then put to the torture again, confessed again, and stood trial a second time without further denials. Then, on the pyre of his execution, before the flames were lit, he again passionately affirmed his innocence and that of the Templar order, denounced the Inquisition and the Royal House of France, and—according to some sources—died with the shout, “Vekam, Adonai!” [Revenge, O Lord!]

“Any objective historian,” Jones went on, “however prejudiced against the claim that Freemasonry is rooted in the secret teachings of the Templars, will admit that all the Templars were not killed in the great purge of 1314. Indeed, it is documented that the Spanish lodges of the Templars were not persecuted at all and continued quite unharmed while the French lodges were systematically exterminated. And even the more open Freemasonic orders, such as the Scottish Rite, still use de Molay’s last words—Vekam, Adonai!—in their Third Degree initiation, although most of them have no clear idea what the words mean or where they come from.”

A continuous series of tragedies has struck the French throne over the centuries, Jones went on. It began with the assassination of Philip II, who had denounced the Templars and seized their wealth; Philip himself was stabbed to death one year and one day after de Molay was burned at the stake. It climaxed with the beheading of Louis XVI during the French Revolution. All this was the work of one lodge of Masonic Templars who were very literal about de Molay’s cry for vengeance. “It is their aim,” Jones said somberly, “having abolished the French monarchy, to overthrow, eventually, every king in Europe, and to destroy the Papacy, also.”

Jones began rummaging in his bookshelves and produced a parchment of recent printing. “This,” he said, “is a document of the lodge to which I refer. It now calls itself the Ordo Templi Orientis—the Order of Oriental Templars—and is the owner of record of the Mysteria Mystica Maxima bookstore at 93 Jermyn Street. All members of the Ordo Templi Orientis must sign three copies of this document. It is the concise summary of the beliefs of the false Masonry which we in the Golden Dawn are pledged to oppose and vanquish.” He handed Sir John the parchment, which read:

There is no God but Man.
Man has the right to live by his own law.
Man has the right to live in the way that he wills to
do.
Man has the right to dress as he wills to do.
Man has the right to dwell where he wills to dwell.
Man has the right to move as he will on the face of the
earth.
Man has the right to eat what he will.
Man has the right to drink what he will.
Man has the right to think what he will.
Man has the right to speak as he will.
Man has the right to write as he will.
Man has the right to mould as he will.
Man has the right to carve as he will.
Man has the right to work as he will.
Man has the right to rest as he will.
Man has the right to love as he will, where, when
and whom he will.
Man has the right to kill those who would thwart
these rights.

“Exactly,” Jones said. “It is a declaration of war against everything we know as Christian civilization.”

“And how insidious it is,” Sir John remarked. “Every person of enlightened sentiments will agree with parts of it. The incitement to promiscuity, assassination and revolution is phrased so as to seem part and parcel of an integrated philosophy of liberty. It would be particularly attractive to young and impressionable minds.”

“Look again at the first line,” Jones said. “That is the kernel of the blasphemy: ‘There is no God but Man.’ Do you see how that could lead weak-minded atheists to a kind of humanistic mysticism, and naïve mystics to atheism, while drawing both into a worldwide plot against both civil government and organized religion? And can you see how this ultra-individualism could even attract some really good minds and noble hearts during the Dark Ages when all government was tyranny and the chief engine of religion was the ungodly terrorism of the Inquisition?”

“And the perversions coded into Clouds Without Water are the same as those charged against the Templars,” Sir John mused. “The continuity is undeniable, over a period of six centuries … But do they really believe that such vile and nameless practices can raise them beyond humanity to Godhood?”

“These erotic practices are central to many cults,” Jones said. “You will find them among certain Taoist alchemists in China, among the Tantrists in India, in the Egyptian and Greek mystery cults, among certain dark sects of Sufis in the Middle Ages—which is probably where this dark, diabolical side of Masonry evolved, alongside of true Masonry.”

“But,” Sir John cried, “how could a man be trained in the Golden Dawn, as this Crowley was, and deliberately turn his back on it and join this perversion of the true Craft?”

Jones sighed. “Why did Lucifer fall?” he asked. “Pride. The desire, not to serve God, but to be God.”

There was a long silence and each man contemplated the horror lurking behind the initials M.M.M.

Sir John spoke first. “What can we do for poor Reverend Verey and his wife?”

“There is only one thing to do,” Jones said decisively. “We must cable him at once and urge, in the strongest possible language, that he and Mrs. Verey come to London straightaway. Here, working with the Chiefs of our Order, we can create a psychic shield to protect them. If they remain in that lonely home on Loch Ness, further horrors will inevitably descend upon them.” Jones shook his head wearily. “We must make the cable as strongly worded as possible,” he repeated. “Any delay on their part might be long enough for a second tragedy to occur.”

DE FORMULA DEORUM MORIENTIUM

Jones and Sir John spent nearly an hour composing the cable; it was nearly two in the morning when Sir John arrived home at Babcock Manor, totally exhausted.

If he had bad dreams again, he was unable to remember them, because his butler, Wildeblood, abruptly awakened him at seven in the morning.

“I’m most sorry, sir,” Wildeblood said, “but there is a gentleman here who is most insistent upon seeing you. He is in a terribly agitated state.”

“At this ungodly hour?” Sir John grumbled, feeling for his slippers groggily. “Who the blazes is he?”

Sir John bolted out of bed, grabbing desperately for his robe. He knew in his bones that fresh horror had struck Inverness before the cable could have arrived. “No tea,” he said. “Coffee—very black. And eggs and bacon for two, I suppose. In the plant room.”

He washed and brushed his hair rapidly, without bothering to shave. Bat-winged monstrosities … the malign Wee People, regarded as quaint and harmless only by ignorant citified folklorists … the Thing in Loch Ness … What new abomination had finally driven old Verey from his beloved Highland hills?

Descending the stairs almost at a gallop, Sir John received two shocks at once. Rev. Verey was a hunchback (but, of course, he would be too sensitive to mention that in his letters …) and he wore the most haggard and tragic face Sir John had ever seen.

Composing his own features with great difficulty, Sir John extended a steady hand. “I am at your service, sir,” he said in a level voice. Keep calm, keep calm, he told himself sternly.

The old man took Sir John’s hand weakly. “You see before you a broken man,” he said hoarsely. “I am almost ready to despair of God’s goodness,” he added, choking back a sob.

“Come,” Sir John said kindly. “You must be exhausted from your trip, in addition to the evil forces you have faced. Let us breakfast together and discuss what can be done.” Verey was so pale, he noticed, that it was almost as if his face were painted for a death scene at the Old Vic.

And so two men, both struggling for self-mastery, sat down in the plant room—where Sir John kept a cheerful collection of ferns, forsythia and morning glories, amid cages of canaries and mynah birds. It was by far the brightest breakfast room in the mansion, and Sir John had chosen it for that reason. Unfortunately, one of the mynahs had apparently picked up an indelicate phrase from one of the workmen who had installed new shelving the past weekend.

“Hold your fucking end up, Bert!” the bird shrieked, as Sir John ushered the aged clergyman to the table.

“Quiet!” Sir John burst out, forgetting that it is better to ignore a mynah at such moments.

“Hold your fucking end up, Bert!” the bird repeated, encouraged by the attention.

“I’m sorry,” Sir John said, feeling inane. “He must have picked that up from a laborer.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Verey said absently. “Annie is dead.” He stared at the tiletop table, seemingly unable to speak further.

“Aye,” Verey cried. “Annie, my wife. My companion for these forty-three years. My treasure, my heaven on earth.” And Sir John looked at the tabletop himself now, not wishing to watch the old man’s struggle against tears.

“Coffee, sir,” said Wildeblood, suddenly appearing from amid the ferns. “The food will be along momentarily.”

“Here, Reverend, take it hot and black,” Sir John said. “It will stimulate and revive you. I can’t tell you how sorry I am—how my heart feels for you at this moment—there are no words …”

“Wildeblood!” Sir John exclaimed, “take that god—… that foul bird outdoors at once!”

“Very good, sir.” Wildeblood withdrew carrying the cage. “Hello. Hello,” the bird cried as it was removed. “Wanna cracker. Hello. Wanna cracker.”

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am,” Sir John began again, realizing he was repeating himself. “What, uh, happened?” he asked. “Get it off your chest, man.”

“It was the day after the inquest on Bertrán,” Verey said tonelessly. [He’s still in shock, Sir John thought.] “I hadn’t told Annie about the package that unhinged Bertrán’s mind—why give her more to worry about? Oh, what a fool I am, what a blind, ignorant fool … If she had known … if she had been warned …”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry….” [The victims of the worst tragedies, Sir John thought, always apologize to others, as if guilty about the debt of pity we owe them.] “It was another package,” Verey went on. “I didn’t notice when the post came. I was in my study, praying … asking God to intervene, to stop these diabolical beings who are afflicting my family. Like Job, I wanted to know that God did hear me and did have a reason for allowing the Adversary to heap these cruelties upon us. I don’t know … I was praying and weeping both, I think. Bertrán was one of the bravest men I have ever known, and I could not begin to imagine what could drive him to the cowardly, un-Christian act of suicide. What was that damnable book? At last, somehow, I composed myself. I said, ‘Not my will but Thine, be done, O Father,’ and resolved to hold my faith despite all.” Verey raised tormented eyes to stare at Sir John like a wounded animal. “That was when I heard that horrible sound for the second time in my life—the laughter of hysterical madness.”

Sir John clenched the old man’s humped shoulder. “Courage,” he said gently.

“I rushed to the kitchen,” Verey went on, his voice again toneless and detached, in traumatic shock. “She had thrown it into the wood stove, but I could see that it was a book. I even read the syllables THER GO on the burning cover. Oh, God—THER GO, THER GO: What can that mean? But Annie was screaming in agony by then and in one horrible instant I could see why. She had swallowed the whole contents of the iodine bottle in our medicine cabinet. The empty bottle was at her feet. I held her for a moment, as she died, and she tried to speak. I think she was attempting to say that she didn’t know suicide by iodine would be that painful….”

The old Scotsman stared into space, reliving the scene. Finally, he spoke again. “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

After breakfast, Sir John and the Rev. Verey brought an extra pot of coffee into the library and discussed the entire series of terrors that had brought them together.

Babcock told what he knew about Lola Levine, Aleister Crowley, the M.M.M. and Machen’s Great God Pan. Verey listened with an abstracted air, as if he had supped so full on horrors that nothing further could stun him.

“The book,” Babcock said finally, “the terrible book that led to both suicides—that may be the key to the whole mystery. Those damnable syllables that you recall—THER GO—are so tantalizingly inconclusive. Can you remember no more?”

“Nothing,” Verey said woodenly, hollowly. “You must remember that I had only an instant to look into the flames, and my mind was in a state of shock at the time.”

Sir John poured more coffee, thinking of phrases like “There you go,” “There they go,” “There we go.” He suddenly had a new thought.

“At least we can avoid two obvious false leads,” he said. “The book wasn’t either Clouds Without Water or The Great God Pan itself. Neither of those has a ther go in the title. Besides, you and I and others have read those books without going mad….”

Verey leaped up and began pacing, a tragic figure with his hunched back and white, ashy face. “The book we are speaking of is not made up of hints or codes, like The Great God Pan or Clouds Without Water,” he said. “The horror of it must be visible on every page, wherever one opens it. Both Bertrán and poor Annie reacted within two or three minutes of opening the volume. They must have been driven mad by only a few sentences … a paragraph at most….”

Babcock himself had grown pale. “I suddenly realize, Reverend, that there is one obvious remaining target for this monstrosity,” he said awkwardly. “Yourself. You must remain here, as my guest, until this whole terrible business is settled. And any packages to you, from M.M.M., must remain unopened, or at the most should be opened only by a man I know who is so advanced in occult knowledge that he might be able to deal with whatever is in this book.”

Verey stared into the fireplace. “I know you are right,” he said wearily, “although, at this point, I would hate to see anyone, however advanced in occult knowledge you may consider him, open a package from that damnable M.M.M.”

“Perhaps,” Sir John replied. “That is for Jones himself—the man of whom I spoke—to decide. But certainly neither you nor I must open such a package. If you are the obvious next target, I may well be the target after you. God,” he cried, “how can such things be, and the world go on in its smug materialistic blindness?”

Verey sighed. “It’s those atheists at Oxford and Cambridge,” he said. “It’s the heritage of Voltaire and Darwin and Nietzsche…. The whole intellectual climate of Eurone rope for one hundred fifty years now has been guided by the Anti-Christ, to blind us …”

“Well, history can’t be changed,” Sir John said, “but our future is always in our own hands. I have had a telephone installed recently, and I am going to put a call through to London, to get Jones out here as soon as possible. Believe me, he is better equipped to deal with this horror than you or I.”

Sir John whirled to confront him. “McPherson?” he exclaimed. “Who’s McPherson?”

“Reverend Duncan McPherson,” Verey said. “My partner and associate in the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth. He received one of the postcards, too.”

Sir John felt as if the solid earth were collapsing into random atoms beneath him. “What postcards?” he cried. “You never mentioned any postcards.”

Verey was virtually jumping up and down with anguish and impatience. “I must warn him,” he said. “You have a telephone, you say. But whom do I know in all of Inverness with a telephone?”

“The police!” Sir John exclaimed. “We must call the police there and have them get in touch with McPherson! But what postcards?”

“In the downstairs hall,” Babcock said. “But how in the world can we explain all this to a policeman?”

They were hurrying to the stairs as they exchanged these incoherent remarks. “The police know all about the suicides,” Verey explained excitedly, “and they have heard my testimony about the packages that came in the post just before the suicides—although I think they only half-believed me….”

But by the time both men were in the telephone alcove in the front hall they were speaking fairly calmly and rationally again. Verey asked the operator to put him through to Inverness-418, and, after the usual annoying delay, he was connected.

“This is Reverend Verey,” he said when the phone was answered at the other end. “I must speak to Inspector McIntosh, in the matter of the suicides.”

Babcock found himself admiring the old man’s sense of diplomacy in the next few minutes. Verey explained only as much as a police officer might be able to understand, even improvising off the top of his head a theory that the mysterious packages from London might unleash a chemical poison that would unhinge the reason. “Under no circumstances,” the hunchbacked clergyman said sharply, “should McPherson open any package from London—or any unusual package, to be on the safe side. These villains may change their return address to catch us off guard.”

When Verey finally hung up the phone, he looked somewhat relieved. “They’re sending a constable around to McPherson’s at once,” he said. “That inspiration of mine about the delirium-producing chemical seems to have impressed him.”

Sir John nodded somberly. “It impressed me, for a moment,” he said. “But it isn’t true, of course. There is no drug with a reaction so specific as in these cases. Even belladonna, the most delirium-producing chemical known, has a wide variety of effects. Some weep hysterically; some laugh insanely; some hallucinate; others die of toxic reaction. Hasheesh is equally variable in its effects. There is nothing in that line of speculation to help us here, although it is at least enough to persuade the police to put McPherson on guard against mysterious packages….”

They returned quietly to the library, where Sir John finally remembered Verey’s incoherent excitement about “the postcards” before their mad rush to the telephone. When they were seated again, he raised that question.

Verey shook his head with humility. “It was totally silly and absurd,” he said. “I attached no meaning at all to it until the moment you saw the thought strike me. Of course, now I’m not sure—it may just be coincidence….”

Just coincidence, Sir John thought bitterly. Those words will always sound idiotic or sinister to me.

“And the postcards weren’t even postmarked London,” Verey said. “They were actually postmarked Inverness: that’s why I didn’t make the connection. But, of course, we know They have agents there, also, like that mysterious vanishing Oriental….”

“The first one came for Bertrán,” Verey said, “exactly two days before the package that provoked his suicide. It was utter nonsense—just a staff with a Hebrew letter on it.”

Verey thought a minute. “Bring me a pad,” he said. “I, of course, had Hebrew in seminary—but that was nigh forty long years ago now. Nonetheless, Scots education is strict, and thorough…. I think I have it.”

Sir John handed him a pad and Verey sketched rapidly. “This is what the card looked like,” he said. “Just this and Bertrán’s name.”

Sir John blushed. “Yes,” he said, “Yod. It means hand or fist.” But he was recalling the opinion of certain scholars who claimed that hand and fist were late euphemisms and that yod originally meant spermatozoa. The whole design was disturbingly phallic. “And the next card?” he asked, suspecting it would contain nun, the fish, again. Another I.N.R.I.

“This came for Annie,” Verey said, “again postmarked Inverness. And, again, I didn’t see the connection—whatever connection there may be—with the tragedy that followed two days later.” He drew rapidly:

“Hé,” Sir John said. “A window. And the first postcard design was not a staff but a wand, since this is a cup. We are getting the implements of magick, in order. Was the postcard to McPherson not a sword?”

“That is most marvelous,” Verey said. “You are absolutely right. It looked like this.” He sketched again:

Both men were pale again. “Some things one doesn’t forget, even in four decades,” Verey said with awe. “Seeing all three together, I discern what the fourth must be.”

“Yes,” Sir John said. “What we have thus far is Yod Hé Vau, the first three letters of the Holy Unspeakable Name of God. The fourth can only be a second Hé, making Yod Hé Vau Hé—YHVH, usually transliterated as ‘Jehovah’ in English. These monsters are using the most sacred name in Holy Cabala as the leitmotif of their chain of murders. This is blasphemy and sacrilege of the most extreme sort, the blackest of black magick. But when did McPherson receive the sword with Vau on it?”

Sir John gasped. “Then the package with the book of horror should be in today’s post!”

“Blessed Saviour,” Verey whispered, eyes closed. “May the police be there before the postman….”

They both heard the phone ringing at the same moment. Afterward, Sir John could never remember if they ran or merely stumbled to the hall.

“This is Inspector McIntosh,” said the electronic voice in his ear. “Is the Reverend Charles Verey there?”

Sir John turned the telephone over to Verey and stood like a zombie as he listened to Verey’s side of the conversation: “Yes … Oh, God, no … Yes … What …? Most certainly … God pity us all, Inspector … I certainly shall.”

The hunchbacked clergyman looked dwarfish and shrunken as he hung up. “It happened again,” he said.

“The constable who was sent round to McPherson’s found him dead already. He had cut his throat violently from ear to ear with a razor. They looked in the fireplace for the remains of a package, as in the two other cases. The constable says there was part of a book still burning, but all he could see were the letters MO.”

“THER GO MO,” Sir John repeated. “Lunacy on top of blasphemy. God held us all, indeed.”

THE RADIO ANNOUNCER: And now, folks, it’s time for our Mystery Call. Who will get the chance to win the one hundred dollars? The engineer is dialing right now … the phone is ringing … ah, I have somebody on the line. Hello, hello?

MALE VOICE: Hello, is this the Mystery Hour? [Brigit, don’t hit your brother with the fire engine!]

ANNOUNCER: Yes, this is the Mystery Hour … and this is your chance to win one hundred dollars!! But, first, what’s your name, sir?

ANNOUNCER: James Patrick Hennesy!!! What a fine Eskimo name! But, seriously, I bet your folks came over from the Old Sod.

ANNOUNCER: Oh. Well, I suppose your grandparents came over from the Old Sod!!!!

ANNOUNCER: A real American family!!!! Well, Mr. Hennesy, you sent in your postcard, and now you’re on the line, and this is your chance to win the hundred dollars. So, now! For one hundred dollars!! This week’s Mystery Question is!!! Are you ready, Mr. Hennesy …? The question is: Are the suicides caused by magick, or is there some rational explanation? What do you think, Mr. Hennesy?

HENNESY: [Stop hitting Brigit with the birdcage, Tommy. You’re frightening the bird.] Oh, ah, uh, I think it’s magick.

ANNOUNCER: You! think!! it’s!!! Magick!!!! Would you tell us why you think that, Mr. Hennesy?

ANNOUNCER: That would be telling, Mr. Hennesy. You’ll find out, with the rest of our audience. But tell us why you think it’s magick.

ANNOUNCER: We don’t give hints, Mr. Hennesy. You have thirty seconds more. Why is it magick?

HENNESY: Well, it stands to reason; that’s all. Nobody can walk through walls, or, uh, drive people to suicide with a book. It must be magick, right?

ANNOUNCER: Well, we’ll see, Mr. Hennesy. And even if you didn’t win the one hundred dollars, you’ll still receive a consolation prize of one year’s supply of Preparation H and complete instructions on how to use it! And now! Back to our show!!

The Fräumünster chimes were striking six, and cinnamon streaks of twilight cast shadows of dying color weirdly into the room, a russet-gold witch’s glamour, Gothic as the tale Sir John told. Einstein, Babcock and Joyce had agreed with Mileva Einstein’s suggestion that they take a break for dinner. The dining room by now reeked with dead heavy smoke from Einstein’s pipe. Mileva had opened a window to freshen the air, with the uninspiring result that the clammy Föhn could be felt in the room now.

Einstein rose to stretch a bit and walk around thoughtfully. Joyce sat immobile in his red plush chair, his face expressionless, introspective.

“Well, Jeem,” Einstein said finally. “It seems as if all the paraphernalia of the Celtic Twilight poets you despise has landed in our laps. Even the faeries …”

Joyce nodded, smiling whimsically. “Even an appropriately eerie sunset,” he said. “It is much like the Tar Baby story of the American Negroes. You become attached to what you attack….”

Einstein stopped pacing and his playful spaniel eyes went entirely out of focus, obviously looking inward, not outward; Joyce wondered if he had stopped thinking in words and was thinking in pictures, as he said he did when he was working on a problem in physics. Babcock and Joyce exchanged the vacant glances of the Apostles at the end of one of the darker parables, both of them thinking of the Tar Baby story and how it could possibly have triggered Einstein’s Fakir-like trance. The more you hit a Tar Baby, the more you are stuck to it: that was the moral of the Negro legend. But what did that have to do with a book that actually drove people into suicidal mania? Did destroying the book destroy the receivers, as an allegory for censors?

“Action and reaction,” Einstein whispered, talking mostly to himself. “Good old Newton still has wisdom for us after three centuries….”

“Professor,” Babcock exclaimed, “is it possible? Are you actually beginning to see a scientific explanation of these incredible events?”

Einstein blinked and sat down again, wearily. “Well, not exactly,” he said. “But I am starting to find some scientific light in this medieval darkness … a hypothesis is beginning to dawn … but I don’t know yet….”

“At this point,” Joyce said, “any hypothesis would be welcome, however, tentative or incomplete. By God, Einstein, I spent several months, last year, writing the most gruesome and fetid sermon on Hell ever composed. I took bits from every theology class and religious retreat of my youth, and from Jesuit textbooks, and organized it into what I hope is a truly blood-freezing, stomach-turning, hair-raising harangue which will give the non-Catholic reader some sense of the cheerful hours which my hero had to endure in the course of a pious Irish Catholic education. But, to be honest, I was having a wonderful and glorious time all the while I was writing this bloody horror, because such things no longer have the power to frighten me and I could write it all down with cold clinical documentary detachment. Listening to Babcock’s tale, on the other hand, almost puts me back into the real rancid terrors of my adolescence.”

“Of course,” Einstein said, ruddy-faced in the dying sunlight. “That is the whole point.”

“Wait,” Einstein said. “It is only a dim light, so far; it may be a false dawn; I am still working on it. But surely you can generalize from the man entangled with the Tar Baby to the more amusing, more interesting situation in which two Tar Babies are fighting with each other?”

The meal began with an antipasto of cheese, olives and anchovies. “I acquired a taste for Italian food during my years in Milan,” Einstein explained. “One of the reasons I like Zürich is that the restaurants here offer such a variety—you can dine Italian style, German style and French style on three different nights—if you can afford to dine out three nights in a row, that is.”

“I dine at the most expensive restaurants in Trieste,” Joyce said, “once a month, on payday. On my income this guarantees that I usually cannot pay the rent on time.”

“It does for my brother,” Joyce said. “The landlords often hound him for the money, when they have had more than they can stand of my foul language and Byronic bad manners.”

“You are shameless,” Mileva said, with a glint of humorously exaggerated maternal disapproval.

“I cannot afford shame,” Joyce replied at once. “It interferes with perception. By provoking my landlords I learn areas of human psychology that are still a closed book to the local wise man, Dr. Jung, or even to his Viennese competitor, Dr. Freud.”

The men seemed to have a tacit agreement not to discuss the horrors of Babcock’s medieval tale during the meal, while Milly was present. Joyce, in fact, quickly engaged Frau Einstein in a discussion of the history of Zürich, in which he astonished everybody by pointing out the Celtic origin of various local customs such as the Secheslaüten festival in spring. “Carrying out a straw dummy that represents winter and burning it,” he said, “is found, in one form or another, in every Celtic culture.”

“But it’s over two thousand years since Switzerland was Celtic,” Mrs. Einstein said, astonished.

“The historical archetypes, as Vico would call them, remain,” Joyce declared. “And the etymologies remain. Do you not know that the very name ‘Zürich’ is derived from the Latin, Turicum?”

“Ah,” Joyce said. “But why did the Romans call this place Turicum? Look it up, as I did, and you will find the original Celtic inhabitants called it Dur, which means roughly ‘the place where the waters join’—where the Limmat River flows into Lake Zürich. The Romans merely Latinized Dur into Turicum.”

Einstein raised an amused eyebrow. “Jeem,” he said, “you look into words like a biologist looking down a microscope. I begin to believe you really meant all those paradoxes you were reciting last night, about the content of mind being nothing but words.”

“The history of consciousness is a history of words,” Joyce said immediately. “Shelley was justified in his bloody unbearable arrogance, when he wrote that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Those whose words make new metaphors that sink into the public consciousness, create new ways of knowing ourselves and others.”

“L’amor che movete il sol e altare Stella,’” Einstein quoted suddenly. “Once you have encountered that phrase in Dante, the music of it does sink into your consciousness. It is very hard to look at the stars at night without thinking of it and feeling a little of what Dante felt. And yet I know, rationally, that the sun and other stars are actually moved by stochastic processes.”

“Random,” Joyce translated. “The professor is talking about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

“The stochastic is not random,” Einstein hastily corrected. “There is always a hidden variable in every stochastic process. A rational law. To think otherwise is to reify and deify Chaos. But is cosmic law the same as the heartbeat of Love that Dante intuited behind the cosmos? Anyone who claims to answer to that is either the king of philosophers or the king of fools.”

“I find it easier to believe in love than in law,” Milly said boldly. “But, being men, you will all say that is because I am a woman.”

“Ah,” said Joyce, “I should not say so. Perhaps the Isle of Man is only a suburb of the Continent of Woman. Biologically, the male is an accessory, an ambulatory seedpod.”

“Much of the universe, alas, is loveless,” Einstein said. “But no aspect of it is lawless.”

“So it seems to logic,” Joyce said argumentatively. “But logic is only Aristotle’s generalization of the laws of Greek grammar. Which is part, but only part, of the great wordriver of consciousness. Chinese logic is not Aristotelian, you know. Other parts of the mindriver of human thought are totally illogical and irrational. You have shown mathematically, Professor, that space and time cannot be separated. The psychoanalytic study of consciousness is rapidly proving what Sir John and I have discovered in different ways, introspectively: namely, that reason and unreason are also seamlessly welded together—like your two Tar Babies after a prolonged fight….”

“You are a most unusual man,” said Mileva, as the dinner concluded. “If there is a Mrs. Joyce, she must be a most remarkable woman.”

“There is no Mrs. Joyce. But I lived with the same woman for ten years, and will certainly live with her the rest of my life, if she can continue to abide my intransigence that long.”

The men retired to Einstein’s study as Mileva began clearing up the dining room.

“Dash it all!” Babcock burst out to Joyce. “Must you parade you immorality on every possible occasion? I’m sure Frau Einstein was terribly shocked. Bragging about cheating landlords and living in open immorality.”

“Frau Einstein is shock-proof,” Einstein said calmly. “Most of my friends are eccentrics. Sometimes I even suspect that I might perhaps be an eccentric myself.”

“Every individual is a deviate,” Joyce said promptly. “I’ve never met a bore in my whole life. The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you’ll see that they’re all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it. The masquerade is the key to human psychology. And, although I’m interested in your unique problems,” he added to Babcock, “I give you no authority to judge any moral decision I make. Nor do I give such authority to any fat-bellied Church or thieving State. Nora lives with me because as a free being she chooses to, not because superstition or law forces her to stay. I would not have a slave, or a concubine, or a wife, but only an equal companion.”

Firm as the mountain ridges where
I flash my antlers in the air

A noble sentiment for a man sick with jealousy. Hear! Hear! The voice is the voice of my youth; the language of Ibsen and Nietzsche. But I am too old to be Stephen Dedalus any longer. If I ask, she will tell me; but I will not ask. Eleutheria. My fate: übermensch or Goddamned Idiot. Heroic posturing: merde.

“Some things,” Babcock rejoined heatedly, “are Simply Not Done in decent society.”

“You are no psychologist,” Joyce said with silky Celtic irony. “They are done all the time. They are simply not talked about.”

“Gentlemen,” said Einstein gravely, “this debate has been raging since the Romantic movement began a century ago. I do not think we will settle it tonight. Let us apply our brains, more profitably, to the Gothic mysteries presented by Sir John’s singular tale.”

Joyce slouched limply in a chair. “I have come to certain conclusions about that,” he said. “Would you be interested in hearing them?”

“Yes,” Einstein said. “I would be curious as to how they match up with my own tentative partial hypothesis.”

“Quite so,” said Babcock, also seating himself after removing a pile of scientific magazines in French and German from the only unoccupied chair.

“To begin with,” Joyce said. “I do not believe in the book that drives men mad, for two reasons. First, it is intrinsically incredible. Just as no drug would have this specific [and melodramatic] effect on every user, no book could have such a power. Second, it has finally dawned on me that I have encountered this story before, in a work of fiction. I suspect that Mr. Aleister Crowley and his associates in the M.M.M. have read the same work of fiction and are merely adapting it as a mask for their true method of murder.”

Einstein almost dropped his pipe. “This is most interesting,” he said. “I begin to believe my own emerging hypothesis, since this would be what the hypothesis predicts. What is the work of fiction you have in mind?”

“It is a book of weird, supernatural stories called The King in Yellow. The author is an American named Robert W. Chambers. The stories all revolve around a horrible book, which is never named, but which causes madness in everybody who reads it. I might also add that there is some interesting allegorical material about masks and masquerades in The King in Yellow, which is also perhaps the most successful horror story since Stoker’s Dracula. Millions must have read it. I think it almost certain that the plot of this book suggested, to the M.M.M., a kind of malign masquerade in which they would create the impression that a book such as Chambers imagined really existed.”

Einstein relit his pipe: a cherry-red glow grew in the dark tobacco. “Masks and masquerades,” he said. “That is indeed what concerns us here. But how do we tear off the masks and see what lies behind? How are these seeming ‘miracles’ actually accomplished? If it weren’t for Ernst Mach and the Tar Baby story, I would not have the beginning of a hint of a theory … And even as it is, for every point that I think I can possibly explain, there are three that still leave me in the dark.

“Suppose,” he went on, “you had read The King in Yellow and were cruel enough to wish to duplicate the plot in real life. The best you could do, it seems to me, is something like this: you include a letter with the book. The letter says: ‘This paper has been saturated with the germs of leprosy’—or syphilis, or whatever disease arouses the desired degree of terror. Would such a device succeed? I say that perhaps one person might be so hysterical and easily suggestible that he or she would believe this at once and commit suicide. Ja? But not three in a row. It is statistically unbelievable. One, at least, would have sense enough to consult a doctor before believing such a sick, slimy poison-pen letter.”

“Even in Calvinist Scotland,” Joyce said agreeably, “that would have to be true. Despite the political news one reads every day, the human race does not consist entirely of gullible dunces. This whole book of horrors is an enormous red herring across the trail, to confuse and distract us. The real method of driving the victims to suicidal mania was quite different, I am sure, and the books were sent to create a supernatural twilight aura around it.”

Joyce shrugged with agnostic resignation. “I am certain of nothing,” he admitted. “I am only theorizing. I have also been working on those mysterious fragments of the alleged book’s title. We have no guarantee that we have received them in correct order, since the witnesses saw only parts of words. I have been trying permutations. Instead of ther-go-mo, how about ther-mo-go? Thermo is a prefix that means heat and appears in ‘thermometer,’ ‘thermodynamics’ and dozens of other redhot scientific words. Do you know of any scientific term beginning thermogo, Professor?”

“The best I can do along those lines,” Einstein said ruefully, “is thermogenetic and thermograph. No thermogo …”

“Well,” Joyce said, “there is always mo-ther-go. I immediately conceive the possible title, Mother, Go to Hell! That might be very distressing to readers of conventional sensibilities, but not quite enough, I think, to drive them to suicidal mania.”

The Föhn wind: a dank, dark breath of wetted ashes: mother, go. Let me be and let me live. I will not serve the god who killed you with cancer. Agenbite. Cruel crabclaws, predators’ teeth.

“Let us hear the rest of the tale,” Einstein said out of the scarlet shadowed chair where he sat slumped in thought. “We have been theorizing, so far, from insufficient data.”

“There is not much more to tell,” Sir John said. “The climax, however, was more terrible and more incredible than anything I have related thus far.”

Nightdank purple shadows were finally gathering in the room, banishing the last golden reds of the sun. The Fräumünster chimes struck seven; the Föhn blew hot dead air into their eyes.

DE STELLA MACROCOSMI

When Sir John telephoned Jones at his home, the day’s post was being brought in by Wildeblood, and Sir John began glancing at the envelopes as he and Jones discussed the latest developments.

“The first rule in chess,” Jones said, his voice rendered electronic and eunuchoid by the instrument, “is protect the king. Verey is the king right now—the piece under attack. I think we should move him.”

Sir John started to disagree. “I have eight servants, five of them rather sturdy males. I think Babcock Manor is as safe as any place in England …” his voice trailing off in uncertainty as the incredible, unthinkable, appeared in the mail: a postcard addressed to:

Rev. Charles Verey
Babcock Manor
Greystoke, Weems

Hardly hearing “I’m not at all sure about that,” Jones saying sharply. “I think it almost certain that they are aware of your correspondence with Verey and, finding him flown from Inverness, will seek him immediately in your vicinity—if they didn’t actually follow him there….”

“You are right,” Sir John said, with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, thinking: such stuff as nightmares are made of, turning the card over and looking at what he expected:

“There is a postcard for him in today’s post,” he heard himself saying. “They are indeed very advanced in the techniques of terrorism. My God, Jones, he only left Inverness on the midnight train and arrived here this morning. But the postcard must have been mailed yesterday to arrive today. It is as if they predicted his movements exactly.”

Yod Hé Vau Hé: the Holy Unspeakable Name was now complete, as was the sequence: wands, cups, swords, pentacles. And time itself had been twisted, to make this possible.

“Never accept a miracle at face value,” Jones said in his ear, a squeaky voice carried by electricity. “Check for the postmark.”

But Sir John was already turning the card over again, seeing, hardly daring to believe: There was no postmark. Thinking: Time has not turned sideways yet.

“There is no postmark. It wasn’t mailed yesterday; it wasn’t mailed at all. They merely slipped it into my post-box after the postman deposited the regular mail, I suppose….” Terror mounting, thinking: They are always ahead of us.

“Do you see now why I want to move the king? They have had the advantage on us all along. Now is the time for us to turn the tables on them by beginning some strategic moves of our own.” Jones paused. “We must assume Babcock Manor is under malign surveillance. Our only advantage is that you know the turf better than they do; you are fighting on your home territory. Think of a method of getting yourself and Verey out of there without being observed. Can you devise such a plan?”

Sir John smiled grimly. “I was a boy here,” he said. “I can think of at least five plans that wouldn’t occur to anyone who hadn’t grown up on these lands.”

“Good. There is one more thing you must consider. Do not go near the railroad.”

“Yes,” said Sir John. “They would, of course, have the station watched, in case I did get Verey out without being seen.” The instruments used against de Molay: the thumbscrew, the rack, the iron boot…. Vekam, Adonai….

“Excellent. You are beginning to think strategically. The next point should be obvious. Do you have a friend who owns an automobile?”

“Viscount Greystoke,” Sir John said at once. “And our best plan of escape is through the woods to the Greystoke estate.”

“Very good. If I remember correctly, you do not drive automobiles. Will Greystoke loan you his chauffeur, as well as his automobile?”

Sir John found himself incongruously remembering his Initiation: Where are you going—The East.—What are you seeking?—The Light.

Jones was silent a moment, thinking. “You can reach London by early evening, with any luck. Of course, you must not come to my house, since that will be the first place they will be seeking the two of you. Go to 201 Paul Street. A friend of mine, Kenneth Campbell, will receive you. You will find him perfectly trustworthy and rather formidable. I will join you and Verey there.”

“Two hundred one Paul Street,” Sir John repeated. “I believe I know the neighborhood. Is it not off Tottenham Court Road?”

“You have it. Not the most distinguished or respectable part of London, but an excellent place to castle our king for a while. I hope all three of us can join Mr. Campbell there by six or seven. Be careful, Sir John: remember that a man with Verey’s hunched back is a rather conspicuous figure.”

Sir John was beginning to feel exhilarated by the time he explained the plan to Verey. He had to remind himself that three people had died horribly already—three crushing tragedies for poor Verey—to keep himself from regarding the day ahead as a splendid adventure.

Encounters with death and danger are only adventures to the survivors, Sir John realized uncomfortably; and it was still far from certain who would survive this horrible affair; but nevertheless, he was still young, damn it all—he was planning to outfox a sinister enemy—it was exciting.

A look at the clergyman’s ashy face reminded him that he was not in a Conan Doyle or Rider Haggard novel but in real life, where the dead are really dead and those who loved them really grieve and do not just sob once into a handkerchief before the novelist rushes on to the next thrill.

When Sir John outlined the escape strategy, Verey agreed almost absently. It was shocking to see how much of the arrogance had been drained from the old man, how docile he was in accepting direction.

Sir John’s plan involved the fact that the wine cellar led into a short tunnel which connected with a deserted outbuilding where an earlier Babcock, generations back, had mounted a private winepress, long since fallen into disuse.

“They may be watching this house with binoculars or even with a high-power telescope,” he explained. “But nobody can see that old winepress cottage unless he practically falls over it. The whole area around it is now very heavily wooded.”

The clergyman nodded gloomily. He did not speak in his normal style, in fact, until they were actually in the wine cellar. “You do be keeping a great amount of spirits,” he said suspiciously, “for a Christian and sober man.”

Sir John was leading the way with a candelabra. “Family stock,” he said apologetically. “Most of the bottles are fifty or a hundred years old, or older. I hardly ever open one, except for special guests.”

“Aye,” said the hunchbacked figure in the gloom. “That’s the way it always starts. Opening a bottle occasionally, for special guests. Every wretch I have ever seen ruined by drink started that way.”

Because of the darkness, Sir John allowed himself a smile. It was comforting, in a way, to see that some of the old man’s character remained intact even after the tragedies he had endured. For a while there, Verey had seemed almost an automaton.

Then Sir John began to realize how huge the wine cellar really was, to the eyes of a Scottish Presbyterian. He hadn’t been down here since childhood, when he had explored the tunnel regularly in hopes of finding pirate treasure, or the caverns of the trolls. As they passed row after row of cob webbed bottles, Sir John began to see the Babcocks as he imagined Verey was seeing them: a family of alcoholic debauchees.

Finally, they found the tunnel. Now it was really dark and the candelabrum shed only a few feet of light in any direction. Sir John began to wish he had brought two candelabras, so that Verey could light his own way. As it was, they necessarily huddled together and walked very slowly.

A confederate in the household: Sir John remembered, suddenly, his suspicions about Verey’s brother Bertrán, back when there was only the mystery of the strangled cat to explain. Could there be a confederate of Crowley’s M.M.M. here in his own household? What might be waiting in this Stygian blackness only a few feet ahead of them?

Then he smiled again in the darkness. The servants had all been with the Babcocks for a long time: they were simple, solid souls he had trusted since childhood. This damnable mystery had begun to infect his mind with the germs of paranoia. My God, suspecting Wildeblood or Dorn or old Mrs. Maple of involvement with black magicians was as ridiculous as suspecting the Royal Family or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

There seemed to be a buzzing sound in the air of the tunnel, reminding Sir John of the insectoid hum of his dreamvisions of Chapel Perilous and Verey’s weird recording: thinking, could bees or wasps have built a hive down here?, recalling also the buzzing sound attributed to the voices of the faery by folklorists, holding on to his courage by act of Will, yet irrelevantly remembering also that the bee was for some inexplicable reason the emblem of the Bavarian Illuminati, the most atheistic and revolutionary of all Masonic offshoots. He would get a grip on himself, damn it to hell; he would not keep wandering into such unwholesome thoughts. But he was remembering an ancient Cabalistic riddle: Why does the Bible begin with B (beth) instead of A (aleph)? Answer: because A is the letter of Arar, cursing, and B the letter of Berakah, blessing. But why was the bee the symbol of the Illuminati? And what was that insectoid buzzing and who were those people in honeysuits in that early dream of Chapel Perilous?

Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure…. He was not that pitiful fieldmouse trapped in the hands of a being incomprehensible to himself. He was a Knight of the Rose Croix on God’s business and “no demon hath power over him whose armor is righteousness.”

Remembering, too, Uncle Bentley explaining that fear of the dark is one of the oldest primate emotions, dating back to the brutal ages when our mute gnomic furry ancestors were subject to clawed attack by many kinds of nocturnal carnivores, and hardly a child in the world does not have some remnant of that primordial fear, which comes back even to the adult in times of strain; and if it was grotesque to suspect the family servants, there was yet the disquieting thought of the workmen who had been all over Babcock Manor when the electricity was installed and the whole house refurbished. One of them could have been an agent of the M.M.M. who had set a trap somewhere, in a dark place like this….

“Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure,” Sir John reminded himself again. Where are you going? The East. What do you seek? The Light.

According to the Welsh, the crew that never rests lived in tunnels like this, under the earth….

With great relief, Sir John finally saw the door at the end of the tunnel. This really was a beastly horrible business, to have made a fearful ordeal out of the journey through the tunnel, which had always been an adventure to him as a boy.

Well, Jones had told him, “A real initiation never ends.” This walk through the dark legend-haunted underworld—the N or Hades stage of the I.N.R.I, process—had been another part of his initiation, another lesson in the courage which the occultist must acquire if he were not to become prey to obsession and possession by every type of demonic entity, real and imaginary. He remembered an American Negro hymn he had once heard:

I must walk this lonesome valley
I must walk it for myself
Nobody else can walk it for me
I must walk it all alone

Understanding suddenly why nun, the fish, was the letter corresponding to this experience of Hades, lord of the underworld; thinking, We do, indeed, begin as fish swimming in the amniotic waters of the womb, and the unconscious always thinks of death, symbolically, as a return to the womb; realizing even why the next stage in I.N.R.I, is Resh, the human head itself, corresponding to the dead-and-risen sun gods, Osiris and Apollo. “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”: within the head, in the cells of the brain itself. Knowing at last in the guts: A true initiation never ends: we go through the same archetypal processes, over and over, understanding them more deeply each time. Isis, Apophis, Osiris! IAO … the Virgin, the halls of Death, Godhood … The Light shined in the darkness, and the darkness knew it not….

With a grunt of male-mammal triumph, Sir John cast open the door to the winepress cottage. “Man is not subject to the angels, nor to Death entirely, save by failure of his Will,” said a Golden Dawn manual, and Sir John believed it and felt brave.

The cottage was even dirtier and more heavily cob-webbed than Sir John remembered, but the winepress still looked as sturdy and indestructible as ever. Reverend Verey stared at it in some astonishment.

He was pointing an angry finger at the Coat of Arms on the winepress: a dark blue garter with a gold buckle, twenty-six gold garters pendant from the collar above it, motto: Honi soit qui mal y pense.

“It’s the Order of Saint George,” Sir John explained, blushing nervously. “It was given to great-grandfather by the King, for some service to the Crown.” Thinking: the nightmare is real, there is no masquerade: the name itself is the thing itself.

“Aye, I know that nobody but the King can confer the Order of the Garter,” Verey said impatiently. “But why did your great-grandfather impress it on a winepress? That indicates disrespect for the Crown and a libertine humor, I’d say.”

Sir John blushed more deeply. “Great-grandfather was a bit odd,” he said. “There are scandalous legends about him, I’m sorry to admit. He was involved with Sir Francis Dashwood and the Hellfire Club, some say. Every family has at least one rascal,” he added pointedly, “as you must know.”

“Aye,” said Verey. “I mean no disrespect for your family. But I can see how occult leanings can be in your blood, Sir John, even if you turn them in more Christian directions than your great-grandfather did.”

It was not the most tactful apology, and Sir John found himself thinking of his blood as tainted in a most unwholesome manner. “The Order of Saint George is the highest knightly order in Great Britain,” he said, defending the Babcock genes as if somehow the accusation had arisen that lycanthropy or witchcraft might be a family trait.

Verey said, “Aye, a most exalted honor for any family to receive from the Crown. But is it not more commonly known as the Order of the Garter?”

The hunchbacked clergyman must still be in shock, he thought; this was a most inane line of conversation. Still he was stammering as he explained, lamely, “I study much medieval history. Often, I slip into the old words and terms instead of the more modern ones. The name Order of the Gar Gar Garter was not in common use until the reign of Edward VI, although the Order goes back, as you undoubtedly know, to Edward III in 1344 and was originally called the Order of Saint George as I just said.” For some reason, he still felt as if he were in a nightmare.

“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” the clergyman read from the Coat of Arms. “A strange motto for a noble order.”

“Well you must know the story … about the Countess of Salisbury …” Sir John almost had the sensation that the hunchback was cross-examining him on a witness stand. “She dropped her gar gar garter at a dance, you know, and the King picked it up, when somebody laughed at her, and put it on his own lay lay leg, you know, and said that. Said Honi soit qui mal y pense.”

“‘Evil to him who evil thinks of it,’” Verey translated. “It’s still a strange story. And why do the Masons wear a garter in their initiations?”

“My God, man, we must be on our way!” Sir John exclaimed. “We can’t stand here discussing the obscure points of medieval history—”

In a few moments they had made their way around the winepress and out the door into a shaded grove circled on all sides by great oaks. Within the grove, beside the cottage, stood only a ghost-white marble Aphrodite.

“Heathen statues,” muttered Verey, but this time he seemed more to be talking to himself than to be accusing the Babcock family.

The walk through the woods was invigorating, after the underground passage and the idiotic but disturbing conversation in the winepress. For a while there, the clergyman had seemed almost demented; or was Sir John merely overly sensitive about great-grandfather’s eccentricities? A hidden grove dedicated to wine and Aphrodite … the rumors about connections with the libertine Hellfire Club … a taint in the blood … blue garters … white stains …

Verey kept a good pace, despite his age; but Scottish Highlanders are notorious for longevity, even fathering children at advanced ages. If only they were not so inclined to telling, with so much ghoulish relish, tales of ghosts and witches “and things that gae bump i’ the night.” But, of course, that was probably because they experienced more of these things in their cold, dank dark Northern nights. The Rationalist, scorning these simple, rugged people as superstitious, without having lived among them and shared the experiences which gave rise to those eldritch tales, was as naïvely chauvinistic as the narrow Englishman who regards all Frenchmen as immoral or all Italians as treacherous.

And then remembering that the motto of the Hellfire Club had been “Do what thou wilt,” from Rabelais, and their blasphemous ikon or idol, at the deserted abbey Sir Francis Dashwood had purchased for their orgies, was a giant phallus inscribed “Saviour of the World.” That very ikon, in fact, had been printed as frontispiece to the lascivious “Essay on Woman” clandestinely printed by John Wilkes under the salacious nom de plume “Pego Borewell”: Wilkes had been expelled from the House of Lords when his authorship of that pamphlet, and his membership in the Hellfire Club, had been exposed by the Earl of Sandwich, himself a former member who had resigned when some horrible Thing (an orang-utan unleashed as a practical joke, Wilkes later claimed) bit him during a Black Mass. All of which was regarded as comical, if unsavory, by most historians; and yet Sir John began to wonder about possible links between that strange cabal and the contemporary Grand Orient lodges of French Masonry, where strange occult and revolutionary doctrines were preached and the mysterious Count Cagliostro was a Grand Master. Were all of these, like the sinister Illuminati of Bavaria, part of the black underground tradition now incarnate in the Ordo Templi Orientis?

The trees were so thick in here that it was heavily shadowed even now, at midday. O dark, dark amid the blaze of noon, Sir John quoted to himself. “What story?” he asked absently.

“The story about King Edward III and the Countess of Salisbury, man,” Verey said impatiently. “I don’t know if it’s true, mind you, but what I heard was that the blue garter was the insignia of a Queen of the Witches in those days. The king, by placing the garter on his own thigh, was telling everybody that they would have to denounce him to the Inquisition if they dared to denounce her. He may have saved her life. That’s the meaning of ‘Evil to him who thinks evil of it.’”

It was an unpleasant subject to be discussing with a grieving and somewhat deranged hunchback in such a dark forest. The selva oscura, Sir John thought. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said irritably, “unless the King himself were a male witch, or warlock. Is the point of the story to make us wonder if the British monarchy itself might be infested with witchery and diabolism?”

“I dinna’ know,” Verey said. “The man who told me this did have some queer notions about the knightly orders of Europe. I gather that he believed the Order of the Garter was the hidden inner circle that governs Freemasonry. Do you happen to know why Masons use garters in their initiations?”

Something flapped by overhead with a sound as if of bat’s wings. But bats did not fly in the daytime, Sir John reminded himself.

“The history of Freemasonry is very complicated,” he said. “I have written a book about it, The Secret Chiefs, and can only claim to have solved about a third of the important historical mysteries. It is true that the King is the head of the Order of the Gar Gar Garter and the Prince of Wales is always made a 33° Freemason, but there is nothing sin sin sinister about it, I assure you. The patron of the Order is Saint George, not Satan.”

“Of course,” Verey said apologetically. “I did say, did I not, that the man who told me all this had many queer notions? He even said the 26 gold garters dependent from the collar had something to do with the Mason Word, but I never understood that. It had something to do with the Jewish Cabala, I believe.”

26: Sir John remembered: Yod = 10; Hé = 5; Vau = 6; second Hé = 5. Total: 26. YHVH, the Holy Unspeakable Name of God—now, due to the hideous M.M.M., inextricably linked in his mind with suicide and madness. And hidden in the numerology of the Order of the Garter.

The bat-winged thing moved overhead again. It must be an ordinary bird. Bats did not fly at noon. And “stone should not walk in the twilight.” Where had he read that?

“It is a queer business all around,” Verey muttered. “Men in garters. Secret meetings. No women admitted. Was the whole Order of Knights Templar of Jerusalem not convicted of the unnatural sin of sodomy?”

“Dash it all!” Babcock burst out. “You have it all confused, Reverend. You are mixing up true mystical Masonry with all its perversions and counterfeits.”

“I know nothing of such matters,” Verey said humbly. “I am merely reporting the opinions of a man I admitted was possessed of odd notions. Secret societies do arouse much speculation, you know. Everybody asks: If they have nothing to hide, why are they secret?”

The more the senile old fool apologized, the more offensive he became. Sir John turned to issue a final crushing retort but then saw the paleness of Verey’s face and the lines of pain around his eyes and mouth. The old man had suffered much and deserved great tolerance. Besides, the true Brother of the Rose Croix was patient and infinitely compassionate toward those ignorant of the mysteries. Sir John said nothing and trudged on.

The bat-flapping receded behind them. Probably it had only been an ordinary bird, magnified by imagination and suggestion.

Then a clearing emerged and the towers of Greystoke were visible in the distance.

“There it is,” Sir John exclaimed, once again thrilled by a sense of adolescent adventure. “Our doorway to escape and to our own surprise counter-attack.”

Q: Cite a contemporary historian, with sufficient brevity to avoid litigation about copyrights, in re: the Countess of Salisbury and the Order of the Garter.

A: “Though the story may be apocryphal, there may be a substratum of truth in it. The confusion of the Countess was not from shock to her modesty—it took more than a dropped garter to shock a lady of the fourteenth century—but the possession of that garter proved that she was not only a member of the Old Religion but that she held the highest place in it…. It is remarkable that the King’s mantle, as Chief of the Order, was powdered over with one hundred and sixty-eight garters which, with his own garter worn on the leg, makes 169, or thirteen times thirteen—i.e., thirteen covens.” Dr. Margaret Murray, The God of the Witches.

Q: Cite, again without exceeding the legal limitations of Fair Usage, another supporting source.

A: “Thus, as we have seen, the Plantagenet [and so traditionally ‘pagan’] King threw away all pretence, and declared himself openly for the Old Religion, establishing a double-coven ‘Brains Trust’—the Order of the Garter—to ‘mastermind’ the return to what Edward and the Fair Maid of Kent, his ‘witch’ Plantagenet cousin, considered to be the True Faith…. The Tudors, too, may not escape suspicion of having belonged to what was evidently the ‘family religion’ of the British Royal Family.” Michael Harrison, The Roots of Witchcraft.

Kenneth Campbell of 201 Paul Street proved to be, as Jones had promised, formidable. He stood somewhere around six and a half feet tall and must have weighed twenty stone. A large poster on his wall showed him, grimacing horribly, under the caption THE LIVERPOOL MANGLER. One did not need the talents of Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Campbell was a wrestler.

“It’s a kip what feeds me,” Campbell said, recognizing Babcock as a gentleman. “Not very hoity-toity, I’ll admit, but what prawce dignity when the belly’s empty, eh, mate?”

“Wrestling was regarded as an accomplishment every gentleman should master in the Athens of Socrates,” he said reassuringly.

“Socrates?” Campbell was delighted. “Wasn’t he the bloke what drank the poison to show the bleedin’ bastards they couldn’t frighten him? Begging your pardon, Reverend.”

Babcock could not bear to look at Verey’s face. “Socrates was indeed a very brave man,” he said evasively.

“Brave?” Campbell shook his head. “I was in Her Majesty’s Army during the Boer Uprising,” he said. “I know all abaht bravery, guv’nor. It isn’t bravery when you sits yourself down and drinks poison to prove a point. Could you do it? Could I do it? Could the bravest manjack in the army do it? Not on your bleeding life [beg your pardon, Reverend]. That ain’t bravery. That’s something else.”

A philosophical wrestler, Babcock thought; but what other sort of wrestler would Jones know? Another of us? There was no point in asking. “What is it that Socrates had that goes beyond bravery?” he inquired instead.

“I dunno,” the wrestler said. “I guess it’s the state beyond humanity, the Next Step that Jones is always talking abaht.”

“Socrates was a heathen,” Verey said suddenly. “He was unfaithful to his wife both with another woman and with Alcibiades, with whom he had unnatural relations. He may have been brave and wise, but he is most certainly burning in Hell right now.”

The wrestler’s face fell. “Don’t be too strict, Vicar,” he said, looking hurt. “None of us is perfect.”

Fortunately, Jones arrived just then and Babcock was spared the ordeal of listening to Socrates’ morals debated by a naïve giant and a self-righteous hunchback.

“Ah, Kenneth, my man,” Jones beamed, taking the wrestler’s hand in a grip Babcock did not recognize. “You are looking splendid!”

The grip was not used in the Golden Dawn; Babcock surmised it was a Scottish Rite grip.

“I have another five good years, maybe,” the giant said modestly. “Then, if I haven’t earned enough to buy a shop or a pub, it’s back to the army for the likes of me.”

“Back to the army?” Jones said. “I think not. I have never understood how you came through one war alive; an enemy needs to be nearly blind to miss a target your size. We could never allow you to come to that pass again. Remember the widow’s son.”

The last phrase confirmed Sir John’s guess; it was the formula describing all charitable activities of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Freemasons. Probably Jones, like Robert Wentworth Little, founder of the Golden Dawn, had been in the Ancient and Accepted Lodge originally, as Campbell still obviously was.

“Reverend Verey,” Jones was saying, shaking the clergyman’s hand warmly and clapping him on the shoulder, “I cannot express how deeply I sympathize with you in this time of grief. I can assure you that I, and the Order I represent, will see to it that no further tragedies occur, and that the villains responsible for your grief will receive a just punishment for their crimes.”

“It is in God’s hands,” Verey said woodenly, regressing back into the emotionless emptiness of the typical shock reaction. It comes in waves, Babcock thought, remembering his own grief when his parents died.

“God’s hands? That will not do,” Jones said sharply, staring into the clergyman’s eyes in a way Babcock had never seen before. “We are God’s hands,” Jones went on, solemnly, “and we have been set here in this world to execute His righteousness. Else is our religion mere theatrics.”

Verey turned away, obviously fighting back tears. “God forgive me,” he said, “that I, an ordained clergyman, should need to be reminded of that.”

Jones softened his tone. “You will not need to be reminded again,” he said. “You will not doubt again, nor will you despair.” He turned the clergyman around, gently, and stared into his eyes again. “You know I speak truth,” he said.

“An ordinary man,” Jones said. “But one trained, a little, in certain arts of healing. For instance”—he touched Verey’s forehead—“I can feel the anguish draining away from you right now. You will not again despair of the goodness of God or ask Job’s questions. In a short while, you will rest.”

The Brother of the Rosy Cross, Babcock remembered, is permitted to perform healings in emergencies, although in all other ways he must hide his superhuman status from the humans among whom he walks.

Jones moved his hand to Verey’s chest. “Yes,” he said, “your breathing is much better now. Your heart chakra is less agitated. We humans are God’s hands, and He acts through us, if we allow Him,” he repeated. He grasped Verey’s shoulders and ran his hands swiftly down the clergyman’s arms, ending by grasping both hands warmly. “You have suffered much, but now you can rest. Remember: ‘For He is like a refiner’s fire.’”

Sir John re-experienced his excitement every time he had heard Handel’s setting of that Biblical verse; it had always been his favorite part of The Messiah. The Vril energy was flowing through him, as when he first translated I.N.R.I, as “the world is remade by fire”; and he could see the energy was flowing in Verey, also.

And in a few moments Verey did announce that he wished to lie down. The Liverpool Mangler ushered the old hunchback to a bedroom and returned, awed.

“Out lahk a baby,” he said. “Every time I see you do that, guv’nor, it fair gives me the shakes.”

“With seven years of concentrated effort you could do it as quickly and efficiently,” Jones said.

“Yes,” Jones said. “A much more efficient system than the hypnotism invented by Mesmer’s ignorant nineteenth-century imitators, although, as I said, it takes longer to learn.”

Babcock was stunned. “But my researches have led me to believe the Grand Orient lodges were infiltrated by the atheistic Bavarian Illuminati and are still allied with the Ordo Templi Orientis!”

“It does get rather complicated,” Jones admitted. “The names mean nothing. You must remember that in addition to the Golden Dawn there are several dozen groups in Europe claiming to be carrying on the work of the original Rose Croix college. And that half the Masonic lodges in England itself do not recognize the other half as legitimate. And, for that matter, the Golden Dawn itself has several competitors using the same name, run by A. E. Waite and Michael Brodie-Innes and others, including the one headed by that scoundrel Crowley himself.”

“I begin to perceive,” Sir John said carefully, “that in joining an occult lodge one does not know what one is joining….”

“The names mean nothing,” Jones repeated. “By their fruits shall ye know them.”

“Now is not the time to re-examine the history of the Invisible College and its offshoots and counterfeits,” Jones said. “I have a task for you this evening, and there is work I must see to myself. Let us leave poor Verey here, under the protection of the Liverpool Mangler, and be on our way. The king is castled and now is the time for a gambit of our own.”

So Sir John found himself out on the street and ushered into a hansom cab before he could quite grasp the acceleration of events.

“I had my secretary fetch me a copy of the Inverness Express-Journal this afternoon,” Jones said, over the horse’s hoofbeats. “Here, take a look at this before we talk further.”

THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES

Terror Stalks Loch Ness;
Police Baffled

INVERNESS, APRIL 23, 1914—Inspector James McIntosh of the Inverness Police Force is facing a mystery more terrible than anything in the tales of Poe or Conan Doyle….

“Do you see what this means?” Jones asked. “By tomorrow this story will be picked up by every London newspaper; mark my words. It may become the biggest horror-scare since Jack the Ripper was prowling the East End. Continental papers will have it by next week.”

Jones was exasperated. “It’s the very worst thing that could happen,” he said with grinding patience. “You should understand by now that human belief-systems determine human experience. Why do you think the Invisible College remains Invisible? Why do you suppose we don’t perform miracles on every street corner and convert the multitudes? Don’t you realize that the philosophy of materialism is the best thing that ever happened to Europe?”

“You are talking in paradoxes,” Sir John complained, noticing that the fog outside was beginning to thicken. The clip-clop of the horse’s hooves seemed to be carrying them into a realm more mysterious than any of his dreams or astral visions of Chapel Perilous.

Jones sighed. “Have you noticed,” he asked patiently, “what happens when a haunted-house story appears in the press? Five more haunted houses are reported, from other parts of the country, within a week. You could not astrally project until you began to believe you could. Cabala was nonsense, until you began to believe it was sense. Why do you think Buddha said, ‘All that we are is the result of all that we have thought’? Do you know why we drum it into every Probationer’s skull that ‘Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure’? Short of a perfectly Illuminated being, all of us see and experience only what we are prepared to see and experience. A newspaper story like this, once it gets picked up and repeated, will open thousands—hundreds of thousands—to similar invasions by the powers of darkness. Every person who reads about events like these is more likely, to a slight degree, to become open to attack by them. Books on such subjects are poison. Why, man, we not only refuse to combat the spread of materialism and atheism; we have positively encouraged them!”

“Of course!” Jones cried. “The ancient Mysteries were closed to all but a small elite, as you know. That was not aristocratic snobbery but pragmatic wisdom. The less the average man or woman knows about such things, the better for them. Only those who have been specially trained, intellectually and morally, can deal with these Forces safely.”

“You think this view unliberal,” Jones said. “But consider the happy results. The uneducated masses have a simple faith, which protects them in most cases from invasions like this horror at Loch Ness. The equally automatized morons turned out in platoons by the universities have a simple skepticism, which also protects them. It is satisfactory all around, and the best accommodation to the age of science possible until human nature is transformed. The ordinary person, if he leaves both faith and skepticism behind and begins to experiment in this area—as you have—would be insane in six months without very careful guidance of the sort I attempt to give you.”

“Yes,” Sir John said. “It is against Liberal principles, but you are right. I would never have gotten safely through some of the astral experiments on my own. It is best that the ordinary man and woman do not probe much into such matters.”

“Faith for the uneducated fools, skepticism for the half-educated fools,” Jones said. “So it must be, until all are ready for the encounter with Him who we call the Holy Guardian Angel—who is, as I reminded Verey back there, like a refiner’s fire.”

Once again, as four years earlier, the horse’s hooves seemed to Sir John to carry the cadence of the Alchemical poem:

Don’t believe the human eye
In sunlight or in shade
The puppet show of sight and sense
Is the Devil’s Masquerade

The Invisible World seemed much more real to him, at that moment, than the material world half-hidden in the London fog.

“I am going to confer with the Inner Head of the Invisible College of the Rosy Cross, for the first time in seven years,” Jones said. “On the way I am dropping you at the M.M.M. bookstore on Jermyn Street.”

Jones smiled thinly. “Yes,” he said, “it is time that you really looked inside Chapel Perilous. You will be quite safe, I assure you, and that fact will strike consternation into the hearts of the Enemy.”

“Look,” Jones said, producing a most singular object from his overcoat pocket. Sir John felt the light flashing all over the cab’s interior before he could quite focus on the object itself.

“A pentacle, similar to those used in all magical invocations,” Jones said. “This one happens to be charged with the entire concentrated spiritual power of the forty-five hundred years of our Order—for we are far older than you guessed, even in the most daring passages of your books. It is also constructed according to special optical principles.”

Sir John found that he could not, however hard he tried, see the pentacle clearly.

“It is the vault,” Jones said. “That is to say, it is an exact miniature. The reason the light within the vault is said to be ‘blinding’ is that each single facet—and there are thousands of facets, even in this miniature—is complementary to the colors next to it, in accord with strict optical and geometric laws. The light is reflected, diffracted and split into myriad prisms in a way no other structure can duplicate. It is the very model of the Cabalistic universe, wherein each part contains and reflects every other part—an analogy of the Undivided Light. Beautiful, is it not? Yet it is but a model, a partial rendering of the divine effulgence you will some day experience when you attain to what we very inadequately call the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.”

Sir John found that he was hallucinating mildly. “It is like ether,” he said, “or some exotic drug like hasheesh….”

“It will not do to stare into it too long on first encounter,” Jones said. “Take it. Put it within your vest pocket, over the heart. You will experience no fear, and will be in no danger, while the talisman is on your person.”

Sir John took the seemingly self-effulgent talisman and felt a distinct tingle as he placed it within his vest.

“By George,” he said. “I can really feel it. I’m ready to face the Devil himself.”

“You will be called on for nothing so melodramatic,” Jones said. “You are, in fact, merely going to sit through a lecture by Mr. Aleister Crowley. If I know that man, he will be aware of the pentacle from the moment you enter. After the lecture, he will almost certainly approach you and attempt, by some ruse or other, to obtain the pentacle with your consent. Neither he nor anyone else can take it from you without your consent, you see. Resist his blandishments and rejoin me at my own home within two hours. That is all.”

“You will learn that by experience better than I could explain it in the few moments we have left,” Jones said. “What is about to transpire will astonish you, and is the second purpose of this task. You will find Mr. Crowley very unlike your mental picture of the villain behind all these horrors. That is important for you to learn at this stage: the reality of the enemy camp as distinct from your fearful imaginings about it. Do you understand?”

I must walk this lonesome valley
I must walk it all alone

Jones smiled in return. “You will do, lad,” he said. “I have never had more confidence in a student, in all my years.”

“Jermyn Street,” said the driver, leaning down. “The number is 93, gents, and here it is.”

ACTION	SOUND
EXTERIOR. OUTSIDE VEREY’S CHURCH, EVENING. SUBJECTIVE SHOT: VEREY’S VIEWPOINT
CAMERA tracks toward door of church.	Verey’s voice [over]: “Last Saturday night, before retiring, I locked up the church as usual and noticed …”
EXTERIOR, SAME. CLOSE-UP: THE DOOR LOCK. SUBJECTIVE SHOT: VEREY’S VIEWPOINT
CAMERA closes on the rusty dcor lock.	Verey’s voice [over]: “… that the huge, old-fashioned door lock was becoming rusty and might need oil. It was extremely hard to turn the key, and I even wondered if it would be harder to open the door for services the following morning.”
EXTERIOR, SAME. SUBJECTIVE TRACKING SHOT: VEREYS VIEWPOINT
CAMERA pans around church to woodshed.	Verey’s voice [over]: “I looked about for some machine oil …”
EXTERIOR, SAME. SUBJECTIVE CLOSE-UP: VEREYS VIEWPOINT
VEREYS hand holding up a long-nosed can of oil, tilts can—no oil flows.	Verey’s voice [over]: “… but found my supply exhausted and made a mental note to buy some on my next visit to town.”
EXTERIOR, SAME. SUBJECTIVE PAN: VEREY’S VIEWPOINT
CAMERA pans back to look up at church and then closes in on the window at the top of the building.	Verey’s voice [over]: “Let me add that the church has only one window, high above the altar, and that this window is built into the wall, so that it neither opens inward nor upward; in fact, it does not move at all.”
EXTERIOR, NIGHT SKY. LONG SHOT.
Black clouds rolling across the sky.	Thunder.
EXTERIOR, NIGHT. LONG SHOT. THE VEREY FARM.
Rain pouring down on the Verey farm. We see the church, the house and the barn, at least.	Verey’s voice [over]: “It rained that night, quite heavily.”
EXTERIOR, DAWN. LONG SHOT. THE VEREY FARM.
The rain has stopped. We see puddles everywhere.
EXTERIOR, DAWN, CLOSE-UP. ROOSTER IN CHICKEN YARD.
The rooster crows.	Rooster: “The crew! The crew! The crew!”
INTERIOR, VEREYS BEDROOM. SUBJECTIVE SHOT: VEREY’S VIEWPOINT
CAMERA “sits up in bed” and looks at the window, through which sunlight pours.	Verey’s voice [over]: “I woke in the morning, thinking at once that this torrential downpour might have contributed even further to the rusting of the door lock of the church.”
EXTERIOR, THE FARMYARD. SUBJECTIVE TRACKING SHOT: VEREY’S VIEWPOINT
CAMERA moves toward the door of the church.	Verey’s voice [over]: “I went out to check the lock….”
EXTERIOR, CHURCH DOOR, CLOSE-UP. SUBJECTIVE SHOT: VEREY’S VIEWPOINT
The lock even more rusted than before. Key is thrust in but will not turn.	Verey’s voice [over]: “I found, as I had feared, that it was now so totally rusted that it would not turn for the key and I was, in effect, locked out of my own church.
Key stuck in lock.	“This was most annoying, since worshippers were due within the hour for morning services.”
EXTERIOR, THE FARM. SUBJECTIVE TRACKING SHOT: VEREY’S VIEWPOINT
CAMERA tracks to the toolshed.	Verey’s voice [over]: “I resorted to brute force …”
	Very faint violin: the Merry Widow Waltz.
EXTERIOR, THE FARM, CLOSE-UP.
Verey’s hand grabbing hammer.	Verey’s voice [over]: “… and fetched a hammer …”
EXTERIOR, CHURCH DOOR, CLOSE-UP.
Hammer pounding lock.	Verey’s voice [over]: “… with which I smashed the lock.”
	Merry Widow Waltz rising slightly; sound of hammering.
INTERIOR, CHURCH. SUBJECTIVE TRACKING SHOT: VEREY’S VIEWPOINT
CAMERA tracks forward to altar, where we find a cat sacrificed within a pentagram. CAMERA picks up each detail as Verey’s voice describes it.	Verey’s voice [over]: “The scene that greeted my eyes was unspeakable. Upon the altar was the body of a dead cat, strangled with a blue garter and impaled by a dirk or Oriental dagger, within a pentagram.
A blood-splattered Bible, open to the Epistle of Jude.	“Bloodstains had even splattered the Bible. God will judge the wretches who do such foulness.”
	Merry Widow Waltz rising to peak of shrill intensity.

ACTION	SOUND
INTERIOR, VEREY’S CHURCH, DAY. SUBJECTIVE TRACKING SHOT.
CAMERA moves jerkily toward the door.	Heavy breathing.
DOOR OF VEREY’S CHURCH, LOOKING OUT. SUBJECTIVE LONG SHOT.
VEREY’S view: the yard, with one set of footprints—his—coming to the door	Voodoo drums.

ACTION	SOUND
INTERIOR, NIGHT. A MASQUERADE. LONG TRACKING SHOT.
CAMERA hunts through the dancers—who include YEATS, TROTSKY, HITLER and BERTRAND RUSSELL—and comes finally to the Robed Figure at the altar.	Merry Widow Waltz. The Robed One: “O thou lion-serpent-sun driving back the demons of night! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!”

DE ILLUMINATORUM OPERIBUS DIVERSIS

DE OCULO HOOR

Class A PublicationHermetic Order of the G∴D∴

DE FRATRIBUS NIGRIS, FILIIS INIQUITATIS

DE SAPIENTIA ET STULTITIA

DE CLAVICULA SOMNIORUM

DE FORMULA DEORUM MORIENTIUM

DE STELLA MACROCOSMI

THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES

Terror Stalks Loch Ness;Police Baffled

Class A Publication
Hermetic Order of the G∴D∴

Terror Stalks Loch Ness;
Police Baffled