Satan Wants Me

by Robert Irwin

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Wow! What are you doing here?’

  ‘I died in a car crash. That was in October last year, but it feels like eternity,’ he replied.

  ‘No, I mean what are you doing here?’

  ‘I am your appointed psychopomp,’ he declared. Then, seeing the expression on my face, he added, ‘Look it up in a dictionary sometime.’

  Of course, I thought, I should not have to look it up in a dictionary. It must be in my mind, filed away somewhere. The whole trip comes from within my head. It is important to keep a grip on that. He gestured that I should follow him inside and I accompanied him into the kitchen. I was without fear. This, even though the total overload phase of the trip was commencing. I was well protected, as Johnny Kidd walked before me as my guide and an honour-guard of toad-headed pikemen marched with me. Now I was blessed or cursed with double vision, for I could see that I was in the kitchen, but I could also see that I stood in one of the pits of Hell. The place was a tip. Last night’s washing-up had not been done, never mind the breakfast things. Rotting rubbish overflowed the bin beside the sink. Cosmic’s vomit was congealing in the saucepan. That was to start with, but then all the garbage and the kitchen implements fornicated together and produced new and Hellish hybrids.

  The lower half of the egg-timer sprouted a woman’s arse. Eyeballs rose up bubbling out of a half-opened tin. Tiny mites danced round a thing that was half an eggshell and half a coffee-grinder. A chunk of raw liver on the sideboard kept on emitting sulphurous farts. A kitchen knife, which used ears for wheels, rumbled across the floor seeking another damned soul to stab at. The screaming damned were in free fall and hot ash and gouts of lava fell with them in an unending stream. Why do all medieval painters show Hell as pretty much the same? Why are there so many pictures which show tormented throngs of naked men and women, monstrous hybrids, blood-red skies and demon foremen with pitchforks? It is simple. They paint Hell that way because that is the way Hell looks.

  The population of Hell increases hour by hour and the place is one vast building site – scaffolding, ladders, temporary tent cities and half-finished ramparts in all directions. Evil-looking creatures scurry about with buckets of tar and hods of bricks, but despite all their business, nothing ever quite gets finished. The first person we met in Hell was sitting in a tub of excrement. Johnny Kidd introduced me to Robert Johnson, the legendary founder of Blues music. Did playing the Blues merit such punishment? Seeing that I showed compassion for the man’s suffering, Johnny explained that there could be no help for Johnson, since he had sold his soul to the Voodoo god, Legba. Then, in the circle of suicides, I saw Julian come crawling out from a culvert. Julian, when he saw me, shrieked and covered his eyes. Straightaway he dropped onto all fours and ran off as fast as he could. Julian was naked and a little monster rode upon his back and sought to open up his arse with a tin-opener. The unclothed bodies of the tormented are so spongily soft and vulnerable. They are skewered, fried, flayed, sawed and gnawed.

  Suddenly I had a nasty, queasy thought,

  ‘Is my Mum here?’

  But Johnny smiled reassuringly,

  ‘In the final stages of her illness, your mother started going to services at the Baptist Church and in the last year of her life she had herself baptised, so, though her repentance came late, through the mercy of the One Whose Name We Do Not Speak Here, she is in Another, Better Place.’

  Johnny went on to point out to me the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens and the Marquis de Sade, but when I asked about Aleister Crowley and if I could meet him, my guide looked at me strangely and shook his head. He walked on a bit and beckoned that I should follow. So, thinking that I was about to meet Crowley, I scrambled down behind him, all the way down to the lowest pit. At the centre of this pit was a little hill covered with skulls and on the hill a cross and on the cross a naked person was crucified. I looked up and saw that it was not Aleister Crowley, but Maud.

  Actually, if I took a grip on myself and concentrated, I could see that Maud was sitting beside me in the kitchen. She was holding my hand and worrying because she was under the impression that I was having a bad trip. It was only if I let my vision slide, that the Hellspawn came frothing out of jars and packets and the vegetables decomposed into souls in torment and I stood once more on a parody of the Hill of Golgotha.

  ‘What are you doing on the cross?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘I am practising.’

  Her exercise struck me as both bizarre and blasphemous and a very strange thought flashed through my mind.

  ‘You are the Devil, aren’t you?’

  ‘I can be anything you want me to be, darling, but I think you prefer me as a beautiful woman,’ she replied.

  Somewhere in the background, Russ Conway was playing ‘The Moonlight Sonata’.

  I turned to Johnny Kidd, who stood beside me sombre and with head bowed in thought.

  ‘Am I lost to the mercy and love of God?’ I demanded.

  ‘God could not love you as I do,’ Maud called down from her chosen place of torment.

  And I recited,

  ‘I am counted among them that go down to the pit: I am become like a man without help, free among the dead. They laid me in a lower pit in dark places and in the shadow of death.’

  No sooner had I recited those words than I became aware that the trip was fading. It did not happen all at once. I saw Clara Petacci suckling a pig and, not far away, King Farouk sprawled on an altar while a stake was hammered up his anus. I saw Ruth Ellis running on the shore of a lake of fire. Suicide-trees dripped venom. Bellies exploded. Pretty young girls in mini-skirts covered the path in front of me with their spew. However, the whole infernal scenario was losing colour and power. I was master of this place. It was my kitchen. I had the rent-book of Hell. I became increasingly aware of Maud anxiously holding my hand and of Sally bustling about to make me a cup of tea with lots of sugar in it. I was drifting into a grey, purgatorial state in which I just had to sit quiet and wait until the Hellish visions should fade entirely away.

  Another hour passed before I was able to communicate coherently with my companions in the kitchen. Sally had come back from her shopping ages ago.

  ‘Who did you see this time?’ (I really wanted to know.) ‘Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys? No, don’t tell me … Brian the Snail from The Magic Roundabout?’

  Sally looked baffled and angry.

  ‘No, but I did run into Janis Joplin,’ she replied. ‘And I said how much I admired her singing and she told me where there was a pet shop.’

  Flipped. Completely flipped.

  Following on from Janis Joplin’s alleged directions, Sally had indeed been to a pet shop and bought a dog collar, a lead, a dog bowl and tins of dog food, but, as Cosmic had perceptively pointed out, she had not bought a dog.

  ‘I am the dog,’ Sally replied.

  She had also bought some more vodka and more women’s magazines, plus a copy of Melody Maker for me. Tonight Sally, wearing the frilly apron and a spiky dog collar, cooked chilli con carne. Our domestic arrangements are becoming increasingly complicated. Thus Maud and I had our dinner at the kitchen table and we drank vodka out of glasses like normal people. Cosmic, however, ate in the lying-room and, after he had established that we had run out of Bovril, he decided to try something new. He mainlined his vodka straight into his veins. Evidently this produced quite a blast and Cosmic passed out before he had finished his dinner. I had to check that he had not died. I think he is going to be all right, though it is quite hard to tell. As for Sally, once she had served us our food, she spooned herself out some dog-food and got down on hands and knees to eat it on the floor of the kitchen.

  Now Maud and I are lying in bed and writing our diaries. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

  Sunday, August 13th

  Yesterday Hell and Purgatory. Today the bliss of Paradise.

  First thing in the morning Maud was out in the garden, doing her karate exercises as usual. Cosmic and Sal
ly were nowhere to be seen. After a while Maud took a breather and explained that Sally had asked Cosmic to put a lead on her and take her for a walk in the woods. Apparently the thing is that Sally has declared that she is unworthy to use the same lavatory on which Maud has sat, so now she must shit and pee in the woods. It is a little bit freaky, but I have to think of what is happening as not so much losing an old girlfriend as gaining a new talking dog. Anyway it is a relief to learn that Cosmic has recovered from his shot of alcohol. According to Cosmic, Sally is getting her reincarnation in early.

  Then Maud went inside and started preparing the bedroom. She plumped up the pillows and put out candles and incense sticks and stuff like that. Then she had a long bath and even longer session in front of the mirror with her vast armoury of cosmetics and perfumes. Cosmic and Sally came back from their walk. They both claimed to have enjoyed it, even though Sally’s knees were horribly scratched and bleeding.

  Although I really wanted to talk to Cosmic, he put me on hold. He had by now accumulated some half a dozen gnomes stolen from Farnham gardens and he had decided that it was urgent that they should be buried straightaway. Yesterday’s rain had softened up the ground a bit and, once the gnomes had been placed deep in the ground, they could start mining away and gathering treasure.

  I cannot get much sense out of Sally these days. While Cosmic is labouring away with a spade in the corner of the garden, I have chosen a spot nearby and, now that I have caught up in my diary with recent events, I have decided to get down to making nature notes – literally down to it, as I am lying on my belly at the edge of the wood with my diary in front of me and I am watching a couple of butterflies dancing through the trees. The silver birches -

  While I was getting going on writing this, Sally crawled up beside me.

  ‘An hour and a half to go,’ she said.

  I recoiled a bit from the smell of dog-food on her breath, but she did not notice.

  ‘Don’t you miss London, Peter?’

  ‘Oh yeah, of course. But God knows when it will be safe to return to London – if ever.’

  And I looked inquiringly at her.

  ‘Meeting Maud and serving her has been the greatest experience of my life,’ Sally declared emphatically. ‘But I long for London. I miss the Mangrove and the Joyboy … and the King’s Road … and curries. I have walked every street in Farnham without finding a single Indian restaurant. And I want to dance at Middle Earth. That would be such a groove. I long for it, but I do not think that I shall ever dance again.’

  When will it be safe to return to London? Only after some unimaginable catastrophe has befallen the city and, in that greater catastrophe, Horapollo House is no more than a burnt-out shell and its inhabitants shall be dispersed or dead. I am seized with nostalgia for the future. In this future, Sally and I will be dancing in the streets, for the sound of the music has changed and the walls of the city have fallen. We and all our friends will be hand-in-hand and capering through mossed-over arcades and grassy squares. Cattle shelter in the shadow of the Stock Exchange, unguarded while feckless shepherdesses and their swains make love amongst its ruins. The rubble of the Festival Hall runs tumbling into the Thames where gipsyish women sit on its foreshore, washing garishly coloured linen, while a band of horsemen canters along the remaining solitary walkway. The Dome of St Pauls is down and there are nightly bonfires in its great nave. Skulls of cattle adorned with flowers decorate the Cathedral’s arches. A raggle-taggle throng of tinkers, drovers and roadies, all in the bright and distinctive robes of their crafts, like to gather there and entertain themselves with pipes and guitars. A few of those partying, more thoughtful than the rest, may gaze up at the remnants of the great stone drum of the ruined edifice and muse. Surely they were giants who built this city? The churches and public buildings are now guarded only by the enigmatic statues of forgotten generals and politicians – so many lost gods of England.

  For it is not just London. All of England has surrendered to wood magic and gone wild. It is a land fit for heads and the time when people and roads were straight is only a horrid memory. Wagon-trains of gaily-painted caravans follow the traces of old tracks across the south-western plains, heading for …

  Sally, who now knelt beside the back door, broke my reverie by calling out, ‘Half an hour now, Peter.’

  So then I decided to write all the above down. It was not the kind of nature note that I had had in mind, but it still seemed necessary to record it. In fact, my hand wished to write it and I let Pyewhacket get away with it again.

  Then, before I have quite finished writing, Sally calls again,

  ‘Twenty minutes.’

  Just as Sally was presumably about to declare that there was a quarter of an hour to go, Maud appeared at the door and, half-shy, half-proud, struck a pose. She was wearing a black and pink peignoir, a suspender belt and shiny black stockings. She looked at me and put a finger to her mouth. I followed her into the bedroom which was now thick with incense.

  Maud was still kneeling and struggling with the buckle of my belt, when Sally from the next room called out, ‘Ten minutes!’ but a few minutes later Maud and I were in bed. I was resting on my elbows, poised over her, when Sally commenced the count-down proper.

  ‘100, 99, 98, 97 …’

  Maud looked terrified.

  ‘Blast off!’

  It was not much of a blast-off. The entry was difficult and Maud was intensely concentrated. Her nails on my back drew blood. When it was over, she contemplated the stains on the sheets and declared,

  ‘Gosh! Isn’t being human a messy business?’

  The next thing was that she leapt out of bed and went galumphing into the next room.

  ‘Sally! Sally! We did it!’

  ‘Oh, well done!’ Sally was faint.

  ‘It didn’t hurt! Well, not more than having my ears pierced did.’

  Then Maud galumphed back and threw herself on me.

  ‘Let’s do it again!’

  I think we did it eight times that day. Sally brought us lunch in bed and we did not actually get dressed until evening. Now it is late in the night and Maud is asleep and snoring, but I have been lying in bed and I have been thinking about what Maud told me this afternoon. After the fourth fuck, I remember that I was looking down on her and thinking that she looked so angelic with her luxuriant black hair fanned across the pillow, like the halo of a dark spirit. And the words just came tripping out of my mouth,

  ‘When I was on acid I saw you as the Devil’

  She smiled lazily.

  ‘Yes well, that is who my Pa says I am.’

  ‘Your Pa?’

  ‘Robert Kelley.’

  ‘Robert Kelley … the Master?’

  ‘You silly, yes, of course. I thought that you had worked that out by now. Even Sally is faster than you! I adopted my maiden name when I fell out with Pa and went to work as a hairdresser. Boleskine is my mother’s surname.’

  I thought about this for a few minutes, before replying,

  ‘OK, but being the daughter of a leading Satanist does not mean that you are the Devil.’

  Now it was her turn to pause and reflect.

  ‘I think that the time has come to tell you how it was that I was born,’ she said.

  It took Maud hours to tell the full story. She kept getting things in the wrong order and forgetting that she had not yet explained certain other things. Also we broke off a couple of times for more sex. However, Maud’s story, as I have reconstructed it in my mind is as follows:

  It all began with Aleister Crowley and the horoscopes which were cast for him on the day of his birth and the day of his death. Crowley (who, in his immediately previous incarnation had been the notorious French occultist, Eliphas Levi) was born on October 12, 1875 and christened Edward Alexander. He was born under the Crab with his Sun in Virgo and his Moon between Aquarius and Pisces. He died on the 1st December 1947, under the sign of Sagittarius and he was cremated on December 5th at Brighton Crematorium. Relat
ions between Crowley and his disciples on the one hand and on the other hand the Adepts of the Black Book Lodge had been strained for some years. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that Robert Kelley and Charles Felton should have attended Crowley’s funeral. While down in Brighton, they consulted with Gerald Yorke and other old associates of Crowley and together they drew up a detailed horoscope of the hour of Crowley’s death. The leaders of the Lodge knew that they had to move swiftly. A small group of Adepts was selected and tickets were purchased for them on the first available boat to Alexandria.

  The currency restrictions which were then in force were irksome and arrangements took longer than might have been hoped, and it was not until February 10th, 1948 that Robert Kelley and his party arrived in Cairo. They were cheerful – delighted to have escaped post-war Britain, smog, and the austerities of rationing, and, besides, they were young and wild and they had embarked on a mighty and dangerous adventure. ‘They’, were Robert and his wife, Elspeth, Charles and Bridget Felton, Colonel Chalmers, Julian and Ronald Silvers. Julian and Ronald were very close. It was Ronald who had got Julian so interested in Egyptology in the first place. Ronald, who was thought to be a promising scholar and linguist, was a deputy curator at the British Museum, but he had negotiated an extended leave for himself. The party put up at Shepheard’s Hotel and most of them enjoyed a few days of pale sun on the verandah, sipping glasses of mint tea brought to them by servants wearing tarbooshes and long white robes. Robert and Elspeth actually slept in the same room that Crowley had occupied when he stayed in Cairo on his return from the Himalayas. Meanwhile Chalmers and Silvers set about hiring servants and donkeys. (From our perspective in 1967, it is hard for Maud and me to imagine Chalmers as ever having had all his marbles and being up to organising an Egyptian donkey train, but it was so. It is even harder for us to imagine Felton as a slim and dashing young man, but he was apparently handsome in those days, though not as handsome as Ronald.) Chalmers also purchased several black cockerels.

  By the third evening after their arrival in Cairo – that is February 12th – they were ready to depart for Memphis. Although the conjuration which Kelley and Felton organised in 1948 is conventionally known as the ‘Cairo Working’, what happened really took place in Memphis. Memphis is some distance to the south of Cairo and the pyramids of Giza. Coptic guides carrying flares led them out into the desert, heading for the group of small villages which partially occupied the site of the capital of the Old Kingdom. Though wild dogs barked and jackals howled on the horizon, the mood of those on the night-journey was crazily cheerful. Everyone was smoking hashish cigarettes. Most walked, but Ronald sat on his donkey and serenaded Elspeth with his violin. Elspeth, who wore a dark-blue priestess’s robe, danced in front of him. Her beauty was ethereal and all the men were in love with her. (As I gazed on Maud, her daughter, I found no difficulty in believing this.) Correction: all the men, except Julian, lusted after Elspeth. Julian lusted after Ronald, but he had said nothing to Ronald and perhaps he had not even admitted the truth to himself.