by Robert Irwin
So now I have become a librarian! Maybe I can get a book out of my experiences – something along the lines of Adventures in Librarianship or Memories of Heroic Librarians. After hours spent surveying my dusty empire, I take a break for lunch – sandwiches in the kitchen with Mrs Grieves. She doesn’t talk much. Then I return to the library. There are some pretty strange books here – like John Campbell’s Hermippus Revived, which turns out to be about the rejuvenating power of the breath of young girls. I am like a medieval scholar immured in his study, while on the road beneath his window the motley-coloured throng stream down the road with flutes, drums and bells – jongleurs, pilgrims, squires and ladies bearing hawks on their wrists. But I, the sorcerer’s apprentice, have no eyes for them, as I am close to discovering the Elixir.
Although it is still raining, I am tempted to rush out and go for a walk. But an absurd and fantastic fear restrains me. I have this nutty fantasy that Sally is lurking beyond the threshold, waiting beyond the cypress trees, waiting for me to emerge. Then she will fall upon me and overwhelm me with her anger and her grief. I am safe, I tell myself, but only so long as I stay within the library. She said I was ‘evil’. What is evil? I do not grok evil. Good and evil are social constructs. There are higher realities and I am about to enter a territory in which I cannot bring any passengers with me – not Sally anyway.
I reckon that I did Sally a favour by leaving her. I mean seriously. She wanted to possess me, to take over my time and my tastes, but real love must go beyond the desire to possess. Just as I have given her freedom, so she must give me mine. Love is the Law. Love Under the Will. Now she is thinking that I am a shit. If I am honest, that does bug me a bit. It should not. I have not been put on this planet to live up to her expectations. What I am is me. For that I came.
I felt drowsy while writing this and for a while I was tempted to put my head down on the table and take a nap. Sleep is so seductive, but then I remembered Felton’s warning about not sleeping in the daylight in this house. Something to do with the larvae, I guess. I force myself to stand and move around the library, sorting books into subject groupings. So many grimoires and magical diaries here. Is Satanism more than a reading mystery? Suppose the Book of Thoth, the book which instructs one in the language of the winds and on the power to enchant one’s sleep, was to be found in this library … What I think is this. There are so very many ways that the world may not be what it seems that, from a statistical point of view, it is downright improbable that the world actually is as it seems.
For example, Horapollo House could be a mirage, a castle of Fair-Seeming Welcome, a sort of spiritual obstacle set in my path. At the utterance of a certain word, the whole structure will dissolve in gusts of air and flame and the black demons will arise shrieking into the sky, leaving me standing bewildered in the middle of some empty space somewhere in the vicinity of Swiss Cottage tube station.
Or the Black Book Lodge could be a front for a British Secret Service operation.
Or Sally, instead of being the dippy, hippy flower-child that she seems, is really a senior figure in a rival organisation of Satanists and that is why she has been trying to persuade me to leave the Lodge.
Or then again, as I have heard Mr Cosmic suggest, the whole earth is just a kind of maze in a vast laboratory and the aliens in charge of this laboratory are running various sorts of tests on us.
Or it seems to me to be perfectly possible that this instant of time in this library is the only instant of time I shall ever experience. My memories of the past are fakes and, in the same way, my anticipations of the future are unreal.
The alternative is that eternal recurrence is true and that I am the millionth Peter to have entered the millionth version of Horapollo House and whatsoever I shall do in the coming months and years I am destined to repeat in every detail for all eternity.
Then again, I may not be what I seem to myself to be. I may be a larva that has forgotten its true identity. Or I might be ‘Peter’, the imaginary boyfriend of a girl called Sally who suffers from acute schizophrenia. I may be a pet labrador on an extended fantasy that it is human.
It seems to me (whoever I am) that if so many alternative realities are possible, then the obvious becomes downright improbable. Bearing this in mind, then one would be a fool not to seek the Key with which to unlock the World’s great Mystery. Magick is that Key.
Felton was present at the dinner table tonight. He keeps nagging me to read The Moonchild. He claims that Crowley has been underestimated as a novelist.
‘A great man, Crowley, a novelist, poet, swordsman, mountaineer, chess-player … You will find that you have a lot in common with him.’
Towards the end of the meal, Felton warned me to be up early in the morning with an overnight bag packed and ready to set off for Julian’s place. I have no idea who this Julian is. I started reading Moonchild in bed. I am not sure about it. It is a bit preachy and it is full of stuff about the generation of a magical child and about the Fourth Dimension, but it does not actually explain how to enter this dimension. I slept badly, for I had no alarm clock, and I wanted to be sure that I would be awake in good time.
Saturday, June 3
Once I have packed, Granville checks my packing to make sure that I have a suit and tie in my case, as well as a clean shirt – plus of course my ritual robe. During the drive out to Herefordshire, he and Felton give me an intensive and patronising tutorial on how to behave during a country-house weekend. Stuff like:
‘On arrival, do not unpack your suitcase. Julian’s butler will do that for you.’
‘When Julian says “Make yourself at home”, this does not mean that you should take him literally and put your feet up on one of his Louis XV chairs.’
‘When you sit down to lunch today, you will find more than the usual amount of silverware (and it is silver). The general rule is to work from the outermost utensils inwards.’
‘We will give you money with which to tip the butler when we leave tomorrow.’
‘Also, do not forget to sign the visitor’s book.’
‘Also, on your return, you must write a letter thanking your host.’
Seeing me become more and more gloomy, Granville mischievously wound up with,
‘And do smile and be relaxed. The courteous house-guest will always wish to appear relaxed, for, if he appeared otherwise, his host might take it as a signal that he had failed in his duties.’
Julian came out to greet us on the drive. I guess that he was in his sixties. His hair was white and wispy and his complexion was a blotchy pinkish white. There was a curious sheen to that skin, as if he had had cosmetic surgery. He was very nervous. He was even nervous of me.
‘So this is the chosen one,’ he said, as he timidly shook my hand.
The butler, who had the build of a pugilist and who wore white gloves, stood close behind Julian and, at a nod from him, went over to the car and took our luggage inside.
Half an hour later, we all met for a game of croquet on one of the lawns at the back. Croquet was new to me. It is a vicious game for it comes close to being what I think is called a “zero-sum game”, a game in which one gains and only gains by damaging one’s opponent, so that your wins are precisely the sum of his losses. The point of croquet is not so much to get one’s own balls through the prescribed sequence of hoops as to knock one’s opponent’s balls out of play. In croquet, the joy of winning pales by comparison with the joy of ensuring that one’s opponent is losing. Despite its viciousness, we played as if we were courtly and well-tempered gentlemen.
At the end of the game (which Julian and Felton won) we moved on to pre-dinner drinks on the terrace. The gins were pretty strong, but Julian was drinking the stuff twice as fast as Felton and Granville and I had been trying to keep pace with Julian. I walked over – staggered, maybe – to sit on the stone parapet and looked over the grounds. Julian was conducting a muttered argument with Felton. He wanted something to be ‘finished with’. Granville came over to j
oin me.
My Doctor Strange comics have lots of small ads offering things like ‘AN ATLAS BODY IN SEVEN DAYS, thanks to the dynamic tension method’, ‘Earn big money and respect as a locksmith’, ‘Impress your friends with your phenomenal memory powers’, and ‘Silently command, control, dominate anyone. Say nothing, watch even perfect strangers do what you wish willingly and cheerfully. Absolutely uncanny! Awe-inspiring details revealed in SUCCESS Manual Review Folio. Send $1 for postage to SCHOOL OF SUCCESS SCIENCE.’ Granville makes me think of the people who actually answer this sort of small ad, for he joined the Lodge with the sole aim of acquiring power over women. You would not guess this to look at him, as he does not look like a lonely heart. Saturnine, bronzed and with thick curly hair, he actually looks like the hero of a romantic story in a woman’s magazine. But apparently not all women go for his kind of sultry looks and only a 100% success-rate would satisfy Granville. He believes that this was the deal he got when he took the hand of the Master.
He has been in the Lodge for almost four years now. Initially he set himself to learn a special type of ogling called the Mordo Dolorosa, whose magnetic power infallibly draws chicks to him and makes them hot for it. He only has to look at them and breathe in a special way and they cream their jeans. But that is just apprentice stuff. (I can’t wait!) More recently, the Master has been instructing Granville in the Ars Congressus cum Daemone, as it is described in a certain treatise called De Nuptiis. It is pretty arcane stuff, but basically it seems to be sleeping with shades and demons. I remarked that this did not sound like fun, for surely demons had horns and hair coming out of their nostrils and boils all over their bodies and stuff like that? But Granville put me right on this. All demons are naturally beautiful with bodies that shine like Lucifer’s. They only assume those hideous forms if they want to escape the control of the sorcerer, but, if the sex is good, there is no reason why they should wish to leave the sorcerer’s bed.
It really is quite weird that I know all this, for Granville gives the air of being a man of mystery. However, being a man of mystery seems to involve him in dropping lots and lots of dark hints about everything he is doing, so over the last few months I have actually got to know quite a lot about him and about sleeping with demons. I think that what he thinks is that, if no one is told a secret, then it would be as if the secret never existed at all. So, through piecing together Granville’s crypticisms (Is that a word? If not, it ought to be), I have got to know quite a bit about things I am not supposed to know about yet – like the uses of sperm deposited in sealed jars underground and how, during intercourse with a demon, a man’s mouth may become a vagina … but, no, there are some things it would be better not to report in the pages of my diary.
On this occasion too, as we waited for dinner, Granville dropped a number of crypticisms about Julian and how he became the way he is. It all seems quite freaky. I asked how anyone got to be this rich and I was expecting to be told something ordinary about either inherited wealth or good contacts on the stock exchange. But the story that I have so far put together from Granville’s rushed series of give-away hints is stranger than that. Julian is only rich in name, for, despite his impersonation of the lord of the manor, he is really more a kind of steward for the Black Book Lodge’s wealth until the Lodge has a better use for it. This house and its grounds are on loan to him. But it is even weirder than that. It seems that in some way Julian’s life is also on loan to him. Although Granville was not very clear about this, as the evening developed, I was better able to understand how this might be.
Felton went indoors for something. Julian came over to us and his butler followed close behind him with the silver tray loaded with more gin.
‘Mr Dunn really gives very satisfactory service, but staff are so hard to get nowadays and I am so frightened of losing him that, whenever I address him, I am conscious of walking on egg-shells … ’
Talk moved on to the difficulty of getting servants. I helped myself to more gin and switched off from it all. As I looked over the deer-park and the lawns, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ was playing in my head, for its stately, baroque harmonies and nonsense lyrics seemed just right for this place. Then I began to think of setting Granville on to Alice. What fun it would be! Such mischief! (The Unstoppable meets the Immovable.) Alice distracted from her sulky meditations on the Ultimate by Granville’s rhythmic breathing and his gaze directed at her navel … Granville having laboriously to explain to Alice what the point of sexual pleasure was … And so on. A wonderful fantasy, but how to achieve it? I would have to become very cunning, like the pander in some intrigue-sodden Jacobean tragedy.
In the meantime, while I had drifted off into fantasising along these lines, Granville and Julian had got into a sort of argument about the Americanisation of the culture of servants and of the working class in general. I say ‘a kind of argument’, because Granville, smiling politely all the time, kept trying to withdraw from it. Whatever point Julian made, Granville agreed with it, but this was not good enough for Julian …
‘You can take that smile off your face Granville! I love this country. I really love it. There is an English way of life and there is an English tradition and it goes hard to see it destroyed piecemeal and replaced with something so crass and so garish as the celluloid culture of the United States. It sticks in my craw. The old deferences and customary politenesses are going – no one can deny that – and it is sad. And I’m not talking about anything abstract. I’m talking about an England of wood and stone and water. I’m talking about an England shaped by men who had the patience and the public spirit to plant avenues of oak trees, even though they knew that they would not live to see those trees grow to maturity. I’m talking about an England of lych-gates, village smithies, brass-band fanfares, cathedral precincts, hop-picking, fox hunts, May dances on the village green and the old gods waiting under the hill. One can still touch, smell and taste the England I love, but only sometimes, for it is fading fast and I ask myself will it last my time?’
Julian concluded in an exhalation of regret. I thought, ‘Oh for Christ’s sake! Olde Worlde kitsch will certainly last your time – and my time too, unless I get lucky. Bloody old England goes on forever.’
I happen to know that Granville is quite fond of American culture, particularly the music of the Beach Boys and Jefferson Aeroplane. But on this occasion, Granville just shrugged his shoulders, yet even this non-committal gesture was a provocation to Julian.
‘You wait and see – this island will have become nothing more than the fifty-first state of the United States of America. I now think that we would have done better to have fought with Germany against America and the commies. I tell you this beatnik thing, which has reached us from America, offers a much bigger threat to the British way of life than does communism. At least the communists are men who know how to work for a living, whereas beatniks – ’
Granville smoothly interrupted,
‘Julian, please, you will not find any beatniks in either Britain or America today. Perhaps it is hippies that you are thinking of?’
Julian looked momentarily baffled. It had not occurred to him that there could be any fine grades of distinction between the various kinds of youth-scum. While he stood there, perplexed and speechless, the dinner-gong sounded. As Julian led the way towards the house, Granville fell back to walk with me. He told me that I was not to get into an argument with Julian or upset him in any way. Julian is ‘temperamentally frail’.
Well, ‘frail’ is one way of putting it.
We sat down at the table. Julian took one look at the soup and said, ‘I wish I were dead.’
Then he abruptly turned to Felton,
‘But, then again, I sometimes think that I am dead already. You would tell me the truth wouldn’t you?’
A horrible kind of creepy coldness crept over me, for this was just the same as one of those strange thoughts I had been playing about with only yesterday.
Julian rose to his feet and with h
is arms in supplication, he chanted over the soup,
‘What I doubly detest, I will not eat; what I detest is shit, and I will not eat it; excrement, I will not consume it. It shall not fall from my belly, it shall not come near my fingers, and I will not touch it with my toes. “What will you live on,” say the gods and spirits to me, “in this place to which you have been brought?” I will live on seven loaves which have been brought to me; four loaves are with Horus and three loaves which are with Thoth. What I detest, I will not eat; what I detest is shit and I will not eat it; what my ka detests is shit, and it shall not enter my body, I will not approach it with my hands, I will not tread on it with my sandals. I will not flow for you into a bowl, I will not empty out for you into a basin. I will not take anything from upon the banks of your ponds, I will not depart upside down for you.’
Then he sat down again.
‘There is plenty of life in you yet, Julian,’ said Felton.
We three continued to spoon away at our soup in a sort of embarrassed, surreptitious fashion. Julian tried to get the butler to remove his bowl, but Felton countermanded this and forced him to consume every single spoonful. Julian made the most horrible faces. Although Felton had told Julian that he was still alive, the tone in which this was said had not been reassuring. Julian looked terrified. Perhaps he was right? If so, I had never had dinner with a dead man before. And, if Julian was dead, then quite likely I was dead too. Perhaps this dinner in a country house with its ordinary-seeming menu and napery was a kindly illusion which might soon fade. Then Julian and I would see things as they really were and we would find ourselves in the Antechamber of the Final Judgement. It really was shit being dished out to us in the soup-bowls. Anubis-Granville would hold us by our arms and Felton-Thoth would point to the scales. Together they would watch and see our hearts weighed against the feather of Maat. And just beyond the next threshold the Eater of the Dead would be waiting to mangle and chomp on our bodies.
