The Satanic Bible

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The Satanic Bible Page 26

by Michael A Aquino


  164 Togare arrived as a cute little cub, retiring to Tippi Hedren’s

  Shambala great cat sanctuary near Los Angeles when as a 500-

  lb adult his nocturnal roars kept the neighbors awake. While

  he lived with them, moreover, the LaVeys had no concerns

  about burglars.

  - 323 -

  leopard to the [social/audience] Purple Room, with

  its entire-wall bookcase (concealing a secret

  passage), Anton’s Charles Addamsesque oil

  paintings, tombstone coffee-table, glass-encased

  skeleton, and “infinity mirror”.

  Here they might be greeted by Diane, described

  by journalist John Godwin as a “smiling, outgoing,

  hospitable little blonde”, and by Susan Atkins as

  “soft-voiced, impeccably mannered, and possessed

  of the longest hair I’d ever seen”. 165

  As befitting Hell’s High Priest, Anton often

  arrived in flames - through the fireplace:

  Beyond the bookcase lay the Red Room -

  master bedroom (elevated) & Anton’s office

  (beneath). Hanging on the walls: animal masks for

  the H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau-theme

  Tierdrama (“animal play”) ceremony of the Church:

  165 Godwin, John, Occult America. Garden City: Doubleday &

  Company, Inc., 1972, page #243. Atkins, Susan, Child of Satan,

  Child of God. New York: Bantam Books #11472, 1978, page

  #65. Don’t believe Susan about Diane’s hair? See page #27!

  - 324 -

  Another secret passage through Pharaoh

  Tutankhamen’s gold mummy-case led to the famous

  main Ritual Chamber, with its fireplace/altar built

  after the 1906 Fire from old street cobblestones:

  - 325 -

  Below all the aforementioned rooms was the

  ground floor, on which the two principal rooms were

  the “Den of Iniquity” bar [patronized by Anton’s

  Day of the Locust166 android clientele] with Satan

  himself tending bar167. Alongside sat a period Rock-

  Ola 45rpm vinyl jukebox.

  Trough a concealed door from the Den was

  6114’s most secret and exclusive venue for magical

  workings, the “Council Chamber” (named for the

  Church’s Council of Nine). Restricted to Anton

  alone, or with one or two participants, it was also

  rigged with various electromagnetic mechanisms.

  Through a visible door at the back of the Den’s

  bar was what had originally been called the Blue

  Room. Painted in bewildering iridescence, its

  interior was a forest of mirrors surrounding a raised

  platform on which there rested an open trapezoidal

  166 Nathaniel West’s savage 1939 novel about the “Boulevard of

  Broken Dreams” human tragedies of peripheral Hollywood.

  167 Wearing a commercial rubber Devil mask modeled from

  Anton LaVey’s features.

  - 326 -

  coffin: rarely used because of its obvious

  psychological dangers.

  By 1973 the Blue Room had been changed to

  something radically different, if not dangerous in a

  different way. Now it appeared as a seedy hotel

  room with old, cheap furniture; a “light-box

  window” showed a dark alley with a fitfully-

  flickering neon sign for the flophouse. Hanging

  inside the door was Anton’s collection of famous

  female movie stars’ “unmentionables”.

  There remains to disclose only the darkest and

  most terrifying secret of the Black House: one so

  unnerving that I strongly suspect Anton never told

  Diane, Karla, or Zeena about it so as not to afflict

  them with frightful nightmares. 168

  It had to do with an obscure, locked third door

  on the east wall of the Den of Iniquity.

  As far as family and aides such as John Ferro

  knew, this just led to a tiny utility room that served

  only two purposes: Anton’s hideaway desk & files;

  and the ladder to the Purple Room’s fireplace.

  It was here that Anton kept the strongbox

  containing his personal Pact with Satan, as well as

  items he did not trust to his formal Red Room office

  or the bookshelves of the Purple Room, such as his

  first edition of The King in Yellow.

  But there was something else in that alcove.

  One evening in early 1975, Anton and I had

  been discussing H.P. Lovecraft’s novel The Case of

  Charles Dexter Ward, notable for an ordinary New

  England farmhouse concealing a warren of

  168 It may also have been the reason Anton’s father left 6114

  with his wife, though apparently unable to convince his son to

  abandon it as well. By 1971 Joseph apparently decided that

  Anton had deterred any immediate danger.

  - 327 -

  underground tunnels and caverns with the usual

  HPL horrors lurking therein.

  “How much do you know about this part of San

  Francisco?” asked my host, then led the way from

  the Purple Room through the bookcase to the Red

  Room, thence into the mummy-case concealing the

  ladder down into the Den of Iniquity.

  Anton unlocked the alcove door, and we went

  inside, where he pulled up the carpet on the rough

  cement floor, revealing an obviously very old iron

  manhole-cover:

  Without touching it, Anton replaced the rug.

  Shortly before his parents had moved out, he said,

  his father had shown him this feature in what

  originally was just unfinished basement crawlspace.

  Young Tony had been told just to leave it alone,

  which he did.

  Years later, when remodeling the house to its

  present exotica, he’d come across it again while

  constructing the Purple Room’s fireplace-ladder. He

  opened it, revealing a vertical tunnel of utter

  darkness beneath. There was no ladder or the

  remains of one, and a flashlight beam was not strong

  enough to illuminate its lower terminus. He’d then

  replaced the iron lid and hadn’t disturbed it since.

  - 328 -

  From a drawer of the alcove’s desk, Anton

  retrieved a document. Back in the Purple Room he

  spread it out on the tombstone-coffeetable.

  “This is the storm-drain network beneath the

  Richmond District, Sea Cliff, and Land’s End. After

  the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, there was a great deal

  of engineering effort put into the city’s water-supply

  and -drainage systems. Apparently the old North

  Beach and Financial Districts just needed repairs to

  their existing networks, but out in the Avenues,

  Sunset, and Richmond there was major excavation.

  “As best I can determine from these old charts,

  6114’s sitting slightly off-center above the main

  storm-drain artery, a gigantic spillway called the

  ‘Mile Rock Tunnel’. It’s about 300 feet down and

  several thousand feet long, ending in the Land’s End

  crags below the Sutro Baths.

  “A great many tributaries, both planned and

  ‘encountered’, were connected to Mile Rock.

  - 329 -

  “So this entire district is sitting over a labyrinth


  that would put Lovecraft to shame.

  “I think it’s obvious that the pit below this

  house is one of those, if not part of Mile Rock itself.

  “In the Chronicle archives,” - he produced

  another paper from the desk - “I found just this one

  old photo of it before it was sealed off from sight:

  “The main tunnel was so huge that the

  engineers celebrated its completion by driving a car

  through it all the way to the cliffs. Ironically they’d

  forgotten there was no place to turn around, so the

  car had then to reverse all the way back.

  “But this certainly solves the mystery of the

  gigantic sinkholes that have regularly plagued this

  district during severe storms: various collapses of

  the tributaries. I hate to think what might happen if

  the main tunnel beneath this house ever experiences

  a whole or even partial collapse. Look at this photo

  from the last such sinkhole, just a few blocks away:

  - 330 -

  “Judging from the bewilderment at such times,

  I don’t think anyone but myself knows the existence

  or extent of the abandoned subterra, else they’d be

  terrified to live here. And it also lays bare the

  blighted devastation haunting the ruins of the Sutro

  Baths.” 169

  Anton paused, pulled a moldering volume from

  the highest corner of the bookshelf. Its cover seemed

  to be some sort of aged leather or skin, crudely

  branded or burned on the front only:

  al-Azif

  I knew immediately with a thrill of shocked

  incredulity that it was indeed the abhorred

  Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred ...

  but it was well-known that this terrible tome was

  169 Concerning the Sutro Baths, see Appendix #3 of my Ghost

  Rides (2018), in which Eric Kauschen examines their

  catastrophic fate, and relates how he and a fellow spelunker

  nearly didn’t survive an exploration of one of the now-sealed

  burrows beneath those spectral ruins. Do not venture therein!

  - 331 -

  merely a whimsical invention by Lovecraft. So how

  on Earth [or out of it] could Anton LaVey possibly

  possess it?!

  Undeterred, indeed apparently driven by some

  subtle madness emanating from the iron-sealed

  chasm below us, my host feverishly pawed through

  the disintegrating pages, then intoned in a voice

  alternately maniacally triumphant and quaveringly

  hysterical:

  “The nethermost caverns are not for the

  fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are

  strange and terrific.

  “Cursed the ground where dead thoughts

  live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that

  is held by no head.

  “Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is

  the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the

  town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is

  of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought

  hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and

  instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of

  corruption horrid life springs, and the dull

  scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell

  monstrous to plague it.

  “Great holes secretly are digged where

  earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have

  learnt to walk that ought to crawl.” 170

  Anton slammed that blasphemous book closed

  and stared wild-eyed into the Infinity Mirror across

  the room; innumerable metaphysical monstrosities

  glared and gibbered mockingly back at him as I ran

  shrieking mindlessly from that hideous house and

  the labyrinthian loathsomeness biding beneath.

  I recall naught else of that noxious night -

  170 al-Hazred, Abdul, Al Azif (“the Necronomicon”), rashly

  reproduced by H.P. Lovecraft in The Festival (1923).

  - 332 -

  An obviously mystified Park Service Police

  report said I’d been found at Land’s End howling

  something like “Ee-yah Yogsohthoth! Suhthulooh

  fuhtaggin!”. I was finally subdued by several taser-

  shots and gentle mauling by a K-9 wooficer.

  Then came a time which pulled down

  antiquities. Then the words were spoken: The

  house must die.

  But the house was stronger than the words,

  as it was stronger than the centuries. With

  suddenly-falling stones it slew those who laid

  hands on its walls. It opened the floor under their

  feet, dragging them down into a shaft, of which no

  man had previously had any knowledge.

  It was as though the plague, which had

  formerly wandered in the wake of the red shoes of

  the magician, still crouched in the corners of the

  narrow house, springing out at men from behind,

  to seize them by the neck. They died, and no

  doctor knew the illness.

  The house resisted its destruction with so

  great a force that word of its malignity went out

  over the borders of the city, spreading far over the

  land, that, at last, there was no honest man to be

  found who would have ventured to make war

  against it.

  Yes, even the thieves and the rogues, who

  were promised remission of their sentence

  provided that they declared themselves ready to

  pull down the magician’s house, preferred to go to

  the pillory, or even to the scaffold, rather than to

  enter within these spiteful walls, these latchless

  d o o r s , w h i c h w e r e s e a l e d w i t h S a t a n ’ s

  pentagram. 171

  171 von Harbou, op.cit. , page #48.

  - 333 -

  Over the next score of years the house endured,

  gradually falling into disrepair after first Diane, then

  Anton LaVey abandoned it. Finally it was past

  restoration: As the commercial firm acquiring the

  property put it, “That house is just held up by the

  buildings on both sides.”

  6114 California Street ended its existence,

  impudently enough, on my birthday, October

  16th, in the year 2001.

  The newspapers ignorantly assumed and

  reported that it had been a routine demolition, but

  they had not been there just after mid-night to hear

  - as incredulous neighbors later put it - that obscene

  sucking sound as the black spectre shuddered, then

  collapsed horrifyingly inward, until nothing

  remained but a small, pulsing Darkness adjacent to

  a flung-aside circlet of cold iron. A Mr. Fred

  Farnsworth, visiting friends at 6135 California, took

  the only known photograph, though he was quickly

  accused of faking it:

  The inexplicably-sheered lot was immediately

  concealed for months behind a hastily-erected

  chainlink fence, behind which the weeds and bushes

  overgrew with certain peculiar mutations as

  glimpsed through cracks in the slatted fencing.

  - 334 -

  A year later Lilith and I were invited to the

  open house-showing of the condominiums which

  had been built on the site.

  For reasons t
he agents could [or, more

  probably, would] not explain, it was now named

  “611[]” - not “6114”. It appeared that the Other Gods

  had decreed that not only the original structure, but

  even its very address, should cease ever to have

  been.

  I was somehow not surprised to see that the

  new building also had no excavated basement, but

  rested on a freshly-poured, curiously thicker cement

  slab. The ground-level area previously containing

  the alcove and its surrounds was now a large,

  ordinary recreation room. There was no sign of the

  iron lid.

  It was only then, reassuringly convinced by the

  soothing banality of the condominiums, that I could

  finally put those mocking memories of that terrible

  night to rest.

  Well, almost. One thing persists in vaguely

  disquieting my last glimpse of Anton LaVey as I ran

  desperately for the door.

  He had no business laughing while he

  screamed.

  ... And travellers now within that valley,

  Through the red-litten windows see

  Vast forms that move fantastically

  To a discordant melody;

  While, like a rapid ghastly river,

  Through the pale door;

  A hideous throng rush out forever,

  And laugh - but smile no more.

  - Edgar Allan Poe

  The Fall of the House of Usher

  - 335 -

  18: Ninth Solstice

  Arise! Hear! See with the brilliance of my

  Flame that has been brought before my

  darkened and blasted temple these long

  years. I am Satan, and again the great

  angles of the Universe are conjoined that I

  may manifest my Will to this plane of Earth. I

  have constrained the forces of time that I

  may do this, yet even so I am not full master

  of inertia, as the Cosmos is not entirely a

  thing of my creation.

  I and the High Daimons of Infernus - that is

  Hell - have looked upon the workings of my

  Earthly Church with pleasure and the pride

  that is our nectar. And we too have drawn

  life afresh from this Church. Did I not say

  that we had chosen to invest man with our

  own life essence - that which, being not of

  the natural order of things, we cannot

  recreate from other matter? In giving man

  conscious life, we of the Daimonic race

 

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