by Daniel Quinn
It was grotesque. Having gotten into the goddamned investigation, he couldn’t honestly get out of it—not after spending less than four hours on it. To bow out after two brief conversations would be patently unprofessional, and he had no doubt that Aaron would emphatically agree. And he’d do more than agree. He’d see it as an insult, as a mark of contempt for him, his friendship, and his big idea. And Aaron was not the sort of man to overlook an insult—far from it. He’d quietly let it be known at the club that, fine fellow though he may be, Howard was not a man to be trusted in a matter of business. By quitting the job at this point, Howard would be throwing away not only the largest fee of his career but a part of his life that had become very valuable to him.
There was only one way to come out of the fiasco in one piece. He had to turn the whole thing around and look at it a different way. The task was obviously impossible as Aaron had defined it. Howard would therefore redefine it. He would take it as his goal to prove that Aaron’s question was beyond investigation. This was a task he could undertake with complete conviction and without sacrificing his self-respect. Aaron wouldn’t be overjoyed by the results, but, if Howard did the job properly, how could he reasonably quarrel with them?
After a month’s work, Howard would present him with a tome. A ten-thousand-dollar bundle of nonsense assembled in a thoroughly professional way, complete with warnings from the Tarot cards, admonitions from the Bible, and the muddy ping of yoo-hoos.
Sunday Howard spent writing summaries of his conversations with Denise Purcell and Richard Holloway. These established a pattern for his report.
On Monday he made a few phone calls, one of which led to an appointment for Tuesday, and then went downtown to purchase a high-quality miniaturized tape recorder. He debated whether to consider this an expense and decided he would; after all, he’d managed for forty years without such a device and wouldn’t have bought it except for Aaron’s job.
That night around midnight, in a small city eighty miles southeast of Chicago, twelve-year-old Tim Kennesey got out of bed and stood for a moment with his head cocked, as if tracking a distant sound. Then he left the bedroom and walked down the hall past the bathroom, kitchen, and dining room.
As he passed the living room headed for the front door, his mother looked up from her book and said, “Hey, kiddo, where do you think you’re going?”
The boy didn’t seem to hear her. He was unlocking the door when she caught up with him. Holding the door closed, she asked him what he was doing.
He looked up at her vaguely as if unable to place her face. “Someone outside,” he mumbled. “Wants me.”
“You’re sleep-walking, Tim,” the woman said gently. He went on gazing at her without expression. “There’s no one outside. Go back to bed.”
He blinked at her dully for a moment, then turned and obediently marched back to his bedroom.
When she told him about it in the morning over breakfast, he was astonished and more than a little delighted.
“I wonder where I was going?” he said.
“Nowhere,” his father snapped, immediately regretting his tone. The boy’s somnambulistic adventure had stirred some dim memory in him—all he knew was that it was something he didn’t want to think about—and he felt he was beginning the day on the wrong foot.
His son and his wife looked at him with a mixture of wariness and pity.
He’d been in an odd mood all winter, suffering some obscure distress he could neither hide nor explain.
CHAPTER 8
Tuesday, March 23
INTERVIEW: Rabbi Charles Weigand (Temple Shomrei Torah); very serious young man, mid-thirties. Listened attentively to the end, though obviously upset by what he was hearing. Relevant remarks (from tape):
“Really, I have to say that this is the most frivolous conversation I’ve ever been drawn into. I frankly have to question your good faith in asking for an appointment.… Frivolity in such a matter and to this degree approaches blasphemy. I cannot condone or encourage an inquiry of the sort you’re engaged in, and I seriously question the mental health of your client. To seek out these gods—to actively try to put yourself in their way—is to acknowledge them, is in fact to worship them.… I certainly don’t consider myself an old-fashioned or prudish man, but what you’re proposing to do strikes me as irreligious, to say the least.… I certainly do not know of anyone who could be helpful to you, and if I did I couldn’t in good conscience give you their names.… I’m sorry to have to say that I wish you no luck at all in this enterprise.”
Wednesday & Thursday, March 24 & 25
INTERVIEWS: Various personnel, Archdiocese of Chicago; my presence at the archdiocesan offices—and particularly my persistence in trying to find someone who would talk to me—obviously created a lot of dismay. Finally, when I made it clear I wasn’t leaving without some kind of answer to my questions, I was presented with a Fr. McClane, position not specified, who told me:
“Mr. Scheim, as I understand it, you’re not claiming to have any official standing or any official business here. Is that right? You’re not here, for example, as a representative of the government, not an officer of the court, not delegated to speak to us from some educational institution we’ve agreed to cooperate with.”
I told him I wasn’t.
“Then obviously what you’re looking for is someone to sit down and chat unofficially with you about the matters you’re interested in. Believe me, Mr. Scheim, that’s simply not going to happen. Even if you hang around here for the next six months, it’s not going to happen. If what you’re interested in is the Church’s official position on these matters, I can have someone in my office prepare a reading list for you, and, believe me, it’ll be a good one. That’s the very best I can do for you. [In answer to a request for a referral to someone who would talk to me unofficially:] I’m sorry, I couldn’t give you such a referral. Officially I can’t and unofficially I won’t.”
Monday, March 29
INTERVIEW: Fr. Ralph Whitte, editor-in-chief, Greystone, a scholarly journal founded to serve as a forum for liberal-conservative debate within the Church. Fr. Whitte was recommended to me as a very open-minded and knowledgeable person with a broad background in Church and religious matters, and he impressed me as such. Relevant remarks (from tape):
“I’m not surprised you got that reaction [at the archdiocesan offices]. I’d’ve been astonished if you’d gotten any other. The point Fr. McClane was making is very relevant. This is a case in which the Church’s official stance is something of an embarrassment. You see, officially, the Church endorses all sorts of folk-beliefs that the clergy and the educated laity either never took seriously or abandoned long ago. In some cases the endorsement is quite explicit, in others it’s more or less by default—meaning it’s something the church winces at a little bit but doesn’t want to disavow outright. It can’t officially rescind these endorsements without appearing foolish—but it doesn’t like to be put in the position of officially endorsing the endorsements either, if you see what I mean.
“For example, I’d say that nowadays only the very naive believe—in a serious, literal way—that the world is infested with demons who lurk about putting naughty ideas into our heads. But this is still what many Catholics teach their children, having learned it as children themselves, and no one’s leaping up to denounce it, simply because we have much more serious—vastly more serious—problems to solve in the modern church. Do you see what I mean?
“I guess what I’m saying in part is that your client’s question isn’t so much a foolish one as it is a severely unfashionable one. Did the old pagan gods become the demons of modern times? To a present-day theologian, this question wouldn’t even be worth a sneer. But, since I’m a generalist and not a theologian, I’ve done some reading in this area and I don’t mind sharing what little I know.
“Since the 1920s, it’s been fashionable in occult circles to believe that the rites of modern witchcraft can be traced back in an unbroken
line to the pagan rites of pre-Christian times. What this would mean, if it were so, is that the witches of the Middle Ages were cruelly misunderstood. They weren’t worshiping the wicked horned god Satan, they were worshiping that benevolent old pagan horned god Pan. It’s an appealing theory, but it bears almost no relation to historical reality.
“It’s perfectly true, of course, that the worship of the old pagan gods survived long after Europe was presumably Christianized. Jupiter, Minerva, Venus, Diana, Pan, and the others were old, old friends, particularly to the peasants, who saw no conflict between them and Christ. After all, it was just as the priests said: the old gods were gods of this world, while Christ was the god of the other world. But the church had no intention of allowing this to go on. The old gods had to go. The psychologically smart move would have been to Christianize them as angels. Instead, in a terrible blunder, the church Christianized them as devils, hoping to blacken them in the peasants’ imagination. But instead of blackening the old gods what they did was whiten devils. You see, the peasants had known these gods as benevolent protectors for thousands of years. These were gods who looked after the fertility of their fields and their herds—things that were obviously beneath the notice of the austere and remote Christ. So, if the old gods were devils, then devils really couldn’t be all that bad, could they? In other words, instead of making pagan worship abhorrent, the church simply made devil worship an ordinary, almost respectable, part of life.
“Having failed to get the peasantry to recoil in horror from the old gods by calling them devils, the church went on to promulgate a new teaching that was sure to make them recoil in horror. These devils who were the pagan gods were servants of evil incarnate: of Satan. Note well: merely servants. Compared to Satan, the old gods were practically nothing. But Satan was very nearly as powerful as God himself—so powerful they didn’t hesitate to name him Prince of the World. If you put yourself in Satan’s hands, they said, he would and could do almost anything for you. He could make you as wealthy as a baron or as powerful as a king. He could defend you against your enemies and wreak vengeance on your oppressors—and the peasants had plenty of those. All he expected in return was your immortal soul. Now note that these weren’t heretical doctrines or backwoods superstitions. These were mainstream teachings of the Church, and the Church didn’t just teach them, it insisted on them. Well, you can imagine the peasants’ reaction to this news. Far from being horrified, they said, ‘Just exactly how do we go about getting in touch with this paragon of gods?’ Naturally enough, the old pagan gods were completely forgotten in the stampede to get next to Satan. Why deal with Jupiter and Minerva and Pan when you could deal with the boss himself?
“In order to kill off paganism, the church—in one of the greatest promotional campaigns of all time—succeeded in converting the peasantry of Europe to Satanism. Then, of course, they had to spend the next four or five centuries killing off Satanism. On the whole, it was a tragic and colossal fiasco, but it did achieve the original goal. By the end of the Middle Ages, the old pagan gods had been completely obliterated from popular memory. But this is the point you’re really interested in: by the end of the Middle Ages, the god of the witches had been for literally centuries the monstrous and malevolent horned god Satan—nothing whatever to do with jolly old Pan, long forgotten, along with all his brothers and sisters.
“So where does that leave you, Mr. Scheim? You can certainly find modern witches who will tell you that their god is Pan or one of the others. But if they tell you the rituals they use to summon him have been received in an unbroken tradition from ancient times, they’re either lying or deluded.”
CHAPTER 9
One of his contacts told him “there was something about witchcraft in the paper last fall,” and this was the strongest lead Howard got during the first two weeks of April. Three dozen calls had yielded the names of four “practicing witches” and one warlock, but that’s all they were—names. Three of them were obviously assumed and the other two couldn’t be attached to anyone who had a phone, owned property, or paid taxes.
Desperate to find a way into the circle, he consulted an advertised psychic, who offered to balance his aura but had no information about witches. He tracked down a woman on the south side who was said to cast spells for friends, but she claimed this was just “natural magic”; when it came to worship, she was a Baptist. He talked to an anthropologist at Northwestern who became indignant. Finally, with nothing left but “something about witchcraft in the paper last fall,” he went to the library. It took him two days to dig it out. It was the November 2nd issue of the Tribune under the headline “Legislative brew brings witches to the boil.” The U.S. Senate had passed an appropriations bill that included an amendment that would deny tax-exempt status to witchcraft groups and Satanic cults. The bill was currently in committee in the House. A witch in Albuquerque protested that witchcraft shouldn’t be lumped in with Satanism. “Our witchcraft,” she was quoted as saying, “is a pagan religion, which comes from the Latin word paganus, meaning ‘of the country.’ It’s an ancient religion, a folk religion.”
Also quoted was a Chicago warlock, Joel Bailey, a somber, bearded man with dark, wavy hair and a short, blunt nose. “The effect of the bill would be to sort out religions into ‘government approved’ and ‘government non-approved.’ In other words, it would put the government in the position of saying which religions are established and which aren’t. I always had the impression that this was precisely the sort of thing the founders of our country had in mind when they wrote in the first amendment that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.’ ” The story went on: “Bailey makes no bones about being a Satanist, but adds ‘probably fewer than a thousand people in the country know what that really means.’ ”
Joel Bailey was in the phone book, with an address on Commercial, just east of State Street. Since it was only a few minutes away from the library, Howard decided to have a look. The building was a warehouse converted into artists’ studios and apartments. That they were probably very expensive apartments was demonstrated by the outer hall, with its spotless tile floor, grass-cloth covered walls, and brass and steel mailboxes. Bailey’s was the only name listed on the sixth floor—the top floor—which meant either that he had an enormous space or no neighbors. He gave the button a push.
“Yes?”
“Is this Mr. Joel Bailey?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Howard Scheim. I wonder if I could talk to you for a few minutes. I’m not selling anything or collecting for anything.”
“Talk to me about what?”
Howard paused and decided that, if Bailey made no bones about it, why should he?
“Satanism.”
“I see.… Are you a reporter?”
“No.”
“If you are, you’ll just be a wasting your time.”
“I’m not, Mr. Bailey.”
“All right. Wait there. It’ll be a few minutes.”
The bearded warlock sized up Howard carefully before coming through the inner door. He might well have been daunted by Howard’s size, since he was only a few inches over five feet, but if so he didn’t show it. He was wearing a suede windbreaker, jeans, and black patent-leather loafers.
“There’s a place around the corner where we can get some coffee,” he said, not offering his hand.
“That’ll be fine.”
“I know it must seem uncivil not to ask you up,” Bailey said a few minutes later when they were sitting down, “but I’ve become wary of getting cornered in my own apartment by people I can’t get rid of.”
“I understand.”
“So what’s on your mind?” he asked in a tone that wasn’t meant to be too encouraging.
Howard explained what he was doing, summarized his inquiries to date, and, since Bailey seemed interested, described his conversation with the editor of Greystone in detail. The warlock listened to the last with a crooked smile.
�
��I’ve met Whitte,” he said when Howard finished. “A bright man, though his understanding of history is a bit constrained by his training.”
“You don’t agree with his analysis?”
He shrugged indifferently. “It misses the point. Besides, if you accept his analysis, why are you talking to me?”
“I’m groping, Mr. Bailey, and I don’t necessarily swallow Whitte’s theory whole. It makes sense, but I’ve heard a lot of things in my life that made sense but weren’t so.” Bailey smiled sourly as if this were something he himself was fond of saying and Howard had plagiarized it.
“So,” Howard said after a few moments of silence, “what do you think?”
The other’s smile brightened to a kind of cynical innocence. “What do I think?”
“Can you help me?”
Bailey slid a black enamel case from his jacket pocket and thoughtfully withdrew a cigarette, which he lit with a matching lighter. “I can only do what I do, Mr. Scheim. Whether it helps will be for you to decide.”
“Go on, please.”
“Mr. Scheim, I’m sure you must realize that you’re not unique in coming to me. People come to me for all sorts of things. For a giggle, for a jolt, for a kick. Some come simply out of boredom. Some come out of idle curiosity. Some come out of desperation. Some, like you, come in a spirit of inquiry. To all I give exactly the same thing. Some are disappointed. Some get exactly what they expected. Some get vastly more than they expected. Some are deeply moved. Some are deeply shocked. Some leave exalted. Some leave defeated. But for all I do the same.”
He tapped a bit of ash into an ashtray.
“There is a procedure,” he said.
“Okay.”
“For you to come to one of our initiates’ rites would be too much for you. You would be overwhelmed and would misunderstand the things going on around you. You must first be guided through the ritual in slow motion, as it were, with each step fully explained. During this orientation phase, which we call the postulancy, it’s all made very easy for you; we do virtually all the work and simply invite you to participate. Many find the postulancy is enough for them and remain at this level indefinitely. Others who feel capable of participating more fully enter the novitiate after a few weeks or months, if we feel they’re ready for it. And again, usually after a period of a year or more, some who feel capable of participating at the profoundest level go on to become initiates. There are also levels within each level. For example, I wouldn’t want you to begin with an experienced group of postulants but rather with someone exactly like yourself, someone going through it for the very first time.”
