by Mick Farren
Chapter Four
WINDEMERE PASSED THE ornate silver-and-ivory pipe to Gibson. "The problem with contemporary culture is that it suffers from the metallic KO, so to speak."
Windemere had a definite tendency to pontificate, but Gibson didn't mind. In the hour that the two of them had been together, it had become very obvious to Gibson that Gideon Windemere had a decidedly superior mind, and if he tended to become a little arrogant in the way that he delivered his ideas, the quality of the ideas certainly entitled him to a degree of self-congratulation.
Gibson sank into the deep leather armchair. He was exhausted, but the Methedrine that Smith had shot into him just before the plane landed wasn't going to let him sleep for a while, if at all. Apparently they thought that he still ran the risk of succumbing to psych attack if he closed his eyes. Sprawling was the next best thing. He applied the flame of a Bic lighter to the bowl of the pipe and sucked hard. The smoke went deep into his lungs and filled him with a sense of heavy-limbed well-being. It was a mixture of premier Lebanese hashish and opium, and it did a great deal to take the edge off the speed. He and Windemere were alone in the man's crowded study. He passed back the pipe. Windemere took it and relit it without missing a phrase.
"The industrialized society thinks in terms of metal. Cans and containers, generators and dynamos, magnetism and electricity, even chemistry is aggressively mundane. We take a trip to the moon in a steel-and-plastic container while the gossamer wing is relegated to the realm of song and fantasy. Everyone can drive an automobile but few can astral travel and almost no one can levitate. Not even the medical arts can be raised above the knife, the isotope, and the pill. The metal mind is so bloody unyielding. It doesn't flex. It entertains no alternative to its hammer and anvil. Even simple bioenergies are all but ignored, and advanced bioenergies are still looked on as witchcraft."
Smith, Klein, and French were in some other part of the house inspecting the security with Windemere's two live-in minders, Cadiz and O'Neal. The house was Number Thirteen Ladbroke Grove, a threejstory detached town house that from the outside looked perfectly normal, apart from the way the small front garden was heavily overgrown, but on the inside was anything but. Windemere's home was also museum, a chaotic jumble of art and objects. Warhols and Mondrians rubbed shoulders with models from the various productions of Star Trek. In the hallway, an Edward Hopper was mounted next to a framed original poster for the show that Hank Williams had been due to play the night after he died,"if the Good Lord's willing and the creek don't rise." Gibson could only stand in awe. Windemere's home was even more crammed with junk than his own apartment on Central Park West. It was quite understandable, though. Now in his mid-fifties, Windemere was not only fabulously rich and extensively traveled but he was also one of the great unsung outlaws of the sixties and seventies. He was unsung because he had always avoided being caught. Gideon Windemere was the one, above all, who had been too smart for them. He'd made his first fortune by being one of the great Owsley Stanley III's major subdistributors during the acid summer of 1967. The very few photographs that remained of him from those days were paparazzi shots of the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, or Morgan Luthor, in which he could be seen blurrily lurking in the background. During the seventies, he surfaced again as the inventor of the designer hypnotic Mandrake but almost immediately had to vanish, one step ahead of the DEA and the Hell's Angels. Rumor had it that he'd hidden out on the private tropical island of a legendary movie actor. Somewhere along the line, he'd also acquired an intimate knowledge of the back hills of Afghanistan that greatly exceeded that of the CIA, a fact that later insured his liberty during a brush with the Roy Cohn Justice Department in the mid-eighties. His studies of the occult and allied subjects, the reason that Casillas had entrusted Gibson into his care in the first place, went back to even before his acid days, and he had, according to Casillas, delved in quite as deep as Sebastian Rampton. He had certainly been on nodding terms with the Manson Family, but fortunately nothing had rubbed off. Unlike Rampton, he had never courted publicity, although it virtually went without saying that there had been times when he'd behaved with equal weirdness. As a consequence, nobody went around calling him the Great Beast or the Antichrist. Gideon Windemere simply lived in strange semiretirement in his large house at the smart end of one of London's traditional rock 'n' roll neighborhoods, just up the street from the local police station.
Gibson and the streamheat had driven in from Luton in another white Cadillac that was almost identical to the one that they had left at Kennedy Airport. After the UFO, Gibson had ceased to sweat the details or worry about how the streamheat could find identical cars in strange cities at a moment's notice. He was doing his best to learn relaxation, to float on the stream of events. The banana boat had left, and he was irreversibly on board with no chances of swimming back to shore.
It had been some years since he'd been in Ladbroke Grove, and at first he had scarcely recognized the neighborhood. There were still reminders of glory days when it had been the stronghold of hippies and punks, rudies and dreads, and a large assorted population of the down-at-heel and plain crazy, but all over there were the same signs of creeping gentrification common in so many once-bohemian enclaves in the big cities of the west. It was no longer the place were Gibson had once lounged around smoking ganja with a bunch of Rastafarians and a couple of guys from The Clash. Sometimes it seemed that the whole world was going to yuppie hell.
Windemere began carefully refilling the pipe. Gibson wasn't sure if it was the excellent dope, but he felt perfectly relaxed around the man. The retired swashbuckler was the kind who, having done most everything, had nothing left to prove. He was open, assured, seemingly very generous, and Gibson was left with the feeling that, if he was safe anywhere, it was here at Thirteen Ladbroke Grove.
Windemere leaned forward and again handed the pipe to Gibson. "Why don't you light this while I find us something to drink? You do drink, don't you?"
Gibson nodded. "Oh, yes."
Windemere stood up and left the room, and Gibson had a chance to look around the man's study. It was the dense epicenter of the clutter, the heart of the anarchic museum, and Gibson marveled at how trusting the man was to leave someone he'd just met alone with his treasures. The study was literally bursting at the seams. The only empty space in the room was the smoke-stained ceiling, and even that had its complement of elaborate cherub moldings. All four walls were lined with dark mahogany shelving. Three were filled with books and dozens of small pictures and knickknacks-a lava lamp from the fifties, a set of impossibly large crystals, a human skull from God knew where- while the shelves on the fourth wall contained records, CDs, tapes, and electronic equipment. Gibson stood up and ambled over to look at the record collection. He noted with satisfaction that Windemere had a copy of everything that he'd ever released, both with the band and the later solo albums. At least that put the two of them at about level pegging, egowise.
Windemere returned with a dusty bottle that had no label and a pair of brandy snifters. " How do you feel about cognac?"
Gibson smiled. "I feel pretty good until the hangover sets in."
Windemere held up the bottle. "This is almost a hundred years old."
"No shit."
Both men sat down again, each in an old leather armchair, on opposite sides of Windemere's antique desk. A mellow golden light came from a Tiffany desk lamp, endowing the study with a rich, shadow-filled comfort. Windemere carefully poured one cognac and passed it to Gibson. Then he poured himself one and raised his glass.
"Your good health."
Gibson returned the toast. "Thank you. I'll do my best to keep it."
He slowly inhaled the fumes in the top of the balloon snifter and then took a first experimental sip of the cognac. "This is very fine."
Windemere nodded with the agreement of a proud host. It was no empty compliment; the brandy was truly remarkable. After allowing a decent interval for contemplation of the liquor, Gibson went back to th
e original conversation.
"You know, all this stuff you've been saying about bioenergy. It sounds an awful lot like Wilhelm Reich's orgone theories."
Windemere nodded enthusiastically. "Of course, it is. It's exactly that. Old Reich was coming very close to grasping the handle. Why else do you think the man was impaled so quickly and efficiently by the FBI, the guardians of capitalism and the transactional universe? If indeed it actually was the FBI."
"Who else would have busted his ass?"
"A lot of people over the years have tried to hang it on the Men in Black."
"The Men in Black who show up after close UFO encounters and tell Vern and Bubba to shut the fuck up or else."
"The very same."
"Does anyone really know who or what they are?"
Wtndemere shrugged but his eyes twinkled. Beneath his English gentleman's veneer, he was all piratical rogue. "The only time that I crossed paths with them, I got the distinct impression that they were something other than us."
The twinkle had started Gibson wondering just how real Windemere really was and how much of his act was master-class put-on.
Windemere's thoughts took a sudden, sideways, grasshopper leap. Either the hashish or the brandy was getting to him. "Talking of impaling, did you know that the idea of incapacitating a vampire with a wooden stake was actually an invention of Bram Stoker?"
"I always thought that it was just poetic justice for Vlad the Impaler."
"The real tradition was iron stake. What does that suggest to you?"
"That they were grounding the vampire?"
"Exactly, dear boy. Running its energies to an earth. Isn't that a nice phrase? Grounding the vampire."
"What do you mean by the transactional universe?"
Windemere was sucking on the pipe. "It's just another phrase."
Gibson had enough Meth in him not to settle for any Zen double-talk. "Yes, but what does it mean?"
"Simply that our metallic world's other great error is to look on everything according to a capitalist model. Everything is a transaction. The sun shines and the crops grow. Everything's a deal. You do a deal to cop some fossil fuel and your car carries you to Birmingham. You smoke too many cigarettes and you get cancer. We look at energy as a transaction, as a commodity. Almost no one except Albert Einstein ever thought of it as an interface with the universe, as a dialogue, so to speak. We release energy constantly without a clue to its possible effects-sexual energy, philosophical energy, the massive jolt that comes with the moment of death."
"Death?" Gibson didn't like the word.
"Yes, death. This century in particular can be viewed as little more than a sequence of death cults."
"You mean the Manson Family and stuff like that?"
Windemere laughed. "Charlie? Oh, dear me, no. Old Charlie was nothing more than a very lowly servant of Abraxas. All he did was snuff that Polish movie director and his starlet wife, and a bunch of other decadent rich folk. He just got too much media coverage. No, I'm talking about the generals who ran World War I or Adolf Hitler or Pol Pot or Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb, and all the others who babble about limited nuclear war."
"Surely they aren't cults, though, are they? Monsters but not cults?"
Windemere's face became grim.
"What do you think World War I was but a conspiracy by old men to maintain power and potency by the mass sacrifice of the young? In one afternoon on the Somme, the British general, Haig, lost almost twice the American casualty list for the whole of Vietnam. Think about the trouble that the Aztecs caused with just one sacrificial victim and a pyramid amplifier and then think of the power that Auschwitz must have put out in a single day."
Gibson wanted to ask what trouble the Aztecs had caused, but Windemere was still running.
"That is exactly the kind of stuff that wakes Necrom."
"You know about Necrom?"
Windemere nodded. "Oh, yes, I doubt that Carlos Casillas would have sent you here if I didn't."
"Do you have any idea why I'm getting so much attention? Do you know that we were followed by a UFO on the way over here?"
Windemere's eyes narrowed.
"No, nobody told me that. All I heard was that a bunch of tontons tried to ice you and Don Carlos."
"I think they were actually trying to take us alive."
"Every dark cloud has a silver lining."
"With tontons, dying may be the decided lesser evil.". Windemere topped up Gibson's drink. "You have a point there, old son," He paused to fill his own glass and then changed the subject. "You say that you saw a UFO over the Atlantic?
"We didn't just see it. It played tag with our plane and put us out for something like ten minutes."
"Out?"
"Gone, unconscious, dead to the world, everyone on the plane."
"You really do seem to be attracting attention."
Gibson twisted uncomfortably in his chair. "But why me, goddamn it?"
"Maybe someone thinks that you're a threat."
"I doubt I could be a threat if I tried."
Windemere laughed. "That's something you really can never know."
"I'm glad you find it amusing."
"If you can't see the cosmic joke, you're liable to go crazy in the process."
"I can't help feeling that I'm still waiting for the cosmic punch line and I may be the one falling over on the cosmic banana peel."
"That's the chance that you take."
"Thanks."
"Lighten up, Joe. You're in safe hands right now."
Gibson sighed and sipped his cognac. "I'm sorry. It's been a hard day."
"Tell me about the saucer. What did it look like?"
Gibson wondered if Windemere was really interested or whether he was merely decoying him away from his latest attempt at self-pity.
"In fact, it wasn't a saucer, it was more like an egg."
Windemere grinned wryly. "Shades of Mark and Mindy."
Despite himself Gibson also had to grin. "I hadn't thought of it that way."
"So what did this egg do?"
Gibson shrugged. "Up until it put us out, nothing very much. The captain said it was zigzagging a lot when he first picked it up on the radar. Then it came alongside and mostly just kept on changing color."
"And what happened when it put you out?"
"There was a blinding light, like a massive burst of radiation, and that was all she wrote. Next thing, we're waking up ten minutes later. You have any inside track on UFOs?"
Windemere shook his head."Not much, aside from what I've read, and, as far as I can see, about ninety percent of that is pure bullshit."
"That's pretty much what the streamheat said."
Windemere looked at Gibson questioningly. "The streamheat claimed that they didn't know anything about UFOs?"
Gibson nodded. "That's what they said."
"I thought they knew everything."
"Apparently not."
Windemere leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Maybe I shouldn't say this while they're in the house, but I don't altogether trust your newfound chaperones."
It was Gibson's turn to look questioning, "Why not?"
Windemere frowned. "I don't know, it's just a feeling. They're a little too… metallic, if you know what I mean."
Gibson nodded. "I know what you mean."
Windemere held his brandy glass, warming it between his cupped hands and staring thoughtfully into the amber liquid.
"It could be that someone out there believes that you're some sort of catalyst or pivot, that somehow some minor action of yours is going to trigger major events."
"William Storm Eagle said something of the sort."
"He's a wise old bird, Storm Eagle."
Gibson winced at the terrible pun. Windemere spread his hands. "It just came out."
"What makes you think I'm a catalyst?"
Windemere inhaled the fumes from his glass. "It's one explanation of all the shit that seems to have come down on yo
ur head since you hooked up with Casillas. You certainly don't seem to have done anything to merit it, unless there's something that no one's telling me. I very much doubt that UFOs are chasing you because some alien doesn't like your old records."
"Are you telling me that all this is happening to me because of something I might do in the future?"
"You have to remember that telling the future is a big deal in what, for want of a better term, gets called the paranormal. Projection's a growth industry, and there are a lot of people, not only in this dimension, that are very hung up on plotting the future. You should talk to your streamheat friends. From what I've heard, their dimension has made a high-tech science out of trying to figure out what's going to happen. They've got data banks from here to Thursday chock-full of nonlinear projection models and societal convection rolls and ways of suppressing the sensitivity to initial conditions. It's all very grand, but I have a sneaking feeling that it's all just fortune-telling when you get down to it, and I've never really trusted fortune-tellers. Even Nostradamus tends to fuck up. It's hard enough to predict a crap game, let alone the whole of everything interacting. If Lorenz's butterfly proves anything, it's that there's only so much you can do to constrain chaos."
Gibson put his brandy glass down on the desk. He had lost Windemere about three sentences back, but he didn't really care.
"How does all this affect you and me?"
"You mean in terms of your remaining here when it seems like half the multidimensional universe is down on your ass?"
"I'd hate to find myself out on the street."
Windemere gestured dismissively, as though his continued hospitality went without saying. "There's no chance of that. I gave my word to Don Carlos that I'd take care of you, and I don't intend to go back on it. On the other hand, though, if it gets hairy we may have to come up with some sort of backup plan."
