by Robert Irwin
I think that there are quite a lot of problems with what I learned yesterday. When I was small, I used to entertain fantasies that, despite my outward appearance as a Cambridge schoolboy in short trousers, I was in fact a prince in exile. One day I should throw off my disguise and reveal myself as the true heir to the Kingdom – a bit like Prince Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. Now I find that I may be Aleister Crowley in disguise – and so heavy is my disguise that even I cannot penetrate it. Well, I do not believe it.
And yet … and yet, it would explain one thing; the intense nostalgia I experience when I watch old newsreels or see old photos of the thirties and forties. How can I possibly feel nostalgia for a time before I was born? And why do some of the scenes and faces seem so very familiar to me? Moreover, there would be another, comforting aspect to discovering that I am a reincarnation and that is, just as I have always found it horrific to contemplate the prospect of my death and the world going on without me, so also I have found it no less horrific to contemplate the possibility of a world existing before I was born. I really mean horrific … the vertiginous prospect of all those millennia and billennia which happened before I was thought of. It might actually be comforting to think of myself as once having been Crowley and, before that, Cagliostro and, before that, a temple-priestess in Crete and, before that, maybe some crustacean trying to crawl out of the sea. One of the troubles I had with the Lodge’s exercises in thinking backwards was that I could not bring myself to think backwards to a time before I was conceived.
My meditation on this subject was interrupted by Maud coming back into the bedroom with a letter in her hand. It is from Dennis Wheatley! That was quick. Not only is there a letter. There is also a signed photograph of the famous author.
Dear Peter Keswick,
Thank you for your kind words about my novels. An author is nothing without his readers and his fans and, believe me, your letter is much appreciated. However, I note with concern that, if your letter is to be taken seriously, you have begun to dabble in both drugs and the occult. I cannot stress too strongly that those who do get involved in such things run the risk of encountering serious dangers of a very real nature. Additionally, I should hardly need to point out that the consumption of hashish or amphetamines without prescription is illegal in this country. After some thought, I have decided not to pass on your letter to the police, as I have decided that the rather odd activities you describe in your letter are the product of a lively imagination, rather than a true record of anything that has actually happened. Please do not feel tempted either to experiment with drugs or to take any steps at all on the Left-Hand Path. Those of my acquaintance who did so invariably came to a bad end. However, rather than end this missive on a sour note, thank you again for reading my books and telling me how much you have enjoyed them. My next novel is entitled Unholy Crusade. It is an exciting thriller with occult elements in it and it is published next month by Sidgwick and Jackson, price £1.
Yours truly,
Dennis Wheatley.
I was getting dressed and just zipping up my jeans, when Maud called out,
‘Stop that!’
‘Stop what?’
‘From now on, my darling, your flies stay open day and night. I want you readily available to me at all times.’
Well, it is a bit embarrassing, but Sally already knows what I have got down there and, as for Cosmic, nothing fazes him. When I showed him the photograph of Wheatley, he said that we might be able to use the image for magical purposes. If we burnt it, while making the right sort of invocations, we might be able to give the old fart a heart-attack. Then, when I told Cosmic that I might be a reincarnation of Crowley, he said that, yes, he had reckoned that it might be on the cards.
A little later, I asked Maud how it was possible to believe simultaneously in reincarnation and Hell. I mean if, for the sake of argument, I was an evil old sorcerer who kept getting reincarnated, then when would I ever meet with the Devil in Hell and experience the tortures of the damned? But Maud was preoccupied with checking that I still had a hard-on and it was Cosmic who replied,
‘Why this is Hell, nor are you out of it. Wherever we are is Hell, for Hell is limitless.’
Then Cosmic, who is really well-up in all the oriental religions, described the Buddhist concept of Hell and the Wheel of Samsara and quoted from The Tibetan Book of the Dead:
‘The mirror in which Yama seems to read your past is your own memory, and also his judgement is your own. It is you yourself who pronounce your own judgement, which in its turn determines your next rebirth.’
OK as far as it goes, I suppose. However I still have problems.
‘If there were any justice in the cosmos, then, when Crowley was next incarnated, surely he would be incarnated as a toad or something like that?’
‘I am afraid that Pa regards sociology students as no better than toads,’ said Maud, and she swiftly gave me a consolatory kiss, before going off to have her bath.
Talking to Cosmic this morning, I now understand that he has been sent by the Black Book Lodge to watch over us and make sure that no harm comes to Maud or me. The whole business of his attempt to get me to defect from the Lodge and his subsequent expulsion from Horapollo House were all bits of play-acting, in which they were testing me.
‘Right now you are a protected person. But if Maud ever ceases to love you, you will be dead meat, for you abused the Lodge’s trust.’
Cosmic did not say this in an abusive or threatening manner. It is just the way things are. He was pretty laid-back about it all.
After shooting the breeze for a bit, Cosmic went off on a gnome-hunting walk and I spent a couple of unsatisfactory hours reading The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. I wanted to see if any of my hypothetical past life would come back to me as I read about it. I don’t think it did really. Perhaps regression under hypnosis might work?
As for Sally, she put some clothes on and goofed off into town to do some shopping. This time she was lucky in that her trip into Farnham coincided with that of Jimmy Hendrix. Sally does not seem very well. I mean, apart from her Hendrix hallucination, she is sweating a lot, her skin is coming out in spots and she needs to be taken for frequent walks in the woods.
Towards the end of the morning a parcel arrived for Maud. That’s really freaky. Weeks with no post at all and now two items in one day! It is something which Maud chose from a mail-order catalogue – a shiny, black, leather cat-suit, just like the one Diana Rigg wears in The Avengers. I help zip Maud into it. Really the suit was made for someone less voluptuously curvy than Maud, but once she was securely zipped into it, she looked really fabulous – so fabulous that I had to unzip her straightaway and fuck her on the floor. Then she got me to zip her up again. When Cosmic and Sally returned from their respective expeditions they too were knocked out by Maud’s appearance. She is like the Queen of the Underworld and I am her consort. Is Maud having me on about her father and his associates believing that she is the Devil made flesh? But no, what she said was all so artless. But then again, if she actually were the Devil, would she be able to present herself as so innocently artless? Presumably. I really don’t know.
Cosmic got his gnome painted before lunch and then in the afternoon got down to burying it. I joined him in the garden and sat there trying to think what to write about nature, but I kept being put off by thoughts of Crowley and the Antichrist. I am sure that Maud is not on the pill. I was so distracted by Sally’s loony count-down routine yesterday that it never even occurred to me to ask. Anyway what is there to be said about nature? The sky is blue, leaves are green, birds flutter about. It all seems to work perfectly well without me having to write about it. I was about to take this line of thought a bit further when we were interrupted by a visit from the fuzz.
They were two constables, one male and one female. They asked if we would mind answering a few questions. The way they put that made it perfectly clear that they didn’t care whether we minded or not. We were going to answer
their questions. Their manner was really heavy and they insisted that the interrogation had to be done inside the cottage. Once inside, they started looking all over the place. It was not a formal search, but they were certainly looking for something. Cosmic looked deathly white and, I don’t know for sure, but I guess I looked at least as pale. We both had the same thought – that this was a drugs bust and, if that was the case, then we were done for, since we had not troubled to hide our stash. It was just kept on one of the shelves of the tiny larder, together with Cosmic’s syringe. So had Wheatley shopped us after all? There was a tiny bit of me that was considering an alternative, equally disagreeable possibility, viz that their visit was something to do with a nation-wide crack-down on Satanism and I was steeling myself to answer difficult questions about ritual defloration, animal sacrifice and stuff like that.
It was clear that they found us a bit much – not at all like the yokels they were used to dealing with. Cosmic was wearing his Arlo Guthrie hat and a gipsy waistcoat. I was in jeans and a T-shirt, which was OK, except it was not until the fuzz had gone that I realised that my flies were undone and my penis was dangling out. We were soon joined by Maud and Sally. Maud was in her cat-suit and she was followed by Sally who crawled on all fours, naked except for the collar and little frilly apron. Cosmic swiftly threw a sheet over her body. The two constables looked at one another. It was impossible to tell what they were thinking.
As is the general rule with police interrogations, they would not say at first what they were after. They just kept asking questions. We had to give our names, occupations and state how long we had been in Farnham and so on.
At last the male constable came to the point,
‘This is by way of a warning visit. There have been a lot of thefts in the area recently and we thought we ought to warn you to be careful.’
I nodded dumbly.
‘There is fuck-all to steal here,’ said Cosmic.
‘Mind your language, sonny. No, what it is … is that the thieves are after one thing and one thing only.’
They looked at us, as if they expected us to guess what the thieves were after.
Genuinely perplexed, we looked back at them.
‘Money?’ ventured Sally.
They looked annoyed.
‘No, it’s not money. No, someone has been going around stealing garden-gnomes. You may smile, but it actually isn’t very funny. People are proud of their gardens in this part of Surrey and it is no joke to have some vandal come into their gardens and steal from them. The gnomes are quite expensive to replace too. If you had spent part of the morning comforting an old lady in tears you would not be smiling now.’
But I could not keep the grin off my face. Not drugs, not ritual sacrifice, just gnomes. And thank goodness Cosmic’s gnomes were safely deep in the earth, busy about their chthonic enterprises. The constables paced about the cottage peering through doors, obviously hoping to catch a glimpse of a stray gnome.
‘God, this place is a tip!’ said the female constable.
We, that is Maud, Cosmic and I, all looked reproachfully at Sally. So then the police turned their attention to her too. Sally gazed up at them smiling and offered her tattoo for inspection.
They took her into another room where they asked her a lot of questions in private. Apparently they wanted to know how old she was. What was the address of her parents? Was she here of her own free will? What washing facilities were available? Had she registered with a G.P.? Did the cottage have many strange men visiting it? All kinds of stuff.
Finally they left, but, just before they did so, the female turned to us and said,
‘We will be back.’
It was all a real downer. The fuzz carry their own atmosphere with them and they are generous in spreading it about. Maud, thank heavens, was the least troubled. As long as she is with me, she is happy and has no fears for what may befall us.
Tuesday, August 15th
Sally was very ill in the night. Cosmic is also in a pretty weird state as he is mixing alcohol and heroin and talking madly about reincarnation and about how everything that happens gets re-enacted again and again. Specifically, we are reliving what happened in the early 1920s at Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema. In Cosmic’s eyes, I am the Great Beast, while Maud and Sally are the First and Second Concubines. The Wheel of Samsara has brought this episode round once more and we have to see if we can make a better fist of it this time. But Cosmic was not making much sense as, at other times, he talked as if Sally was not the reincarnation of the Second Concubine (who was called Ninette Shumway), but she was instead Raoul Loveday, another member of the Brotherhood of Thelema. Raoul died of dysentery in Crowley’s Abbey and that is what Sally is going to die of – an infection she contracted over fifty years ago in a previous life. As for me, I don’t think she is going to die and, if she does, it will be from all that awful dog food. Cosmic, on the other hand, says that the tinned stuff is not that bad and, in order to be comradely with Sally, he even tried some himself. Mind you, he was so stoned, I don’t think he knew what he was tasting.
I have been putting Donovan songs on the record player in the hope of cheering Sally up, but now she tells me that he is no good.
‘He tells lies about the world,’ she whispered.
It is raining and, since the fuzz’s visit yesterday, the cottage feels like it’s under siege. Despite the rain, I said I was going into town. I had it in mind that I might find a doctor and get him to come and examine Sally, but, just as I was going out of the door, Maud caught me by the sleeve,
‘Don’t leave me, Peter. I know I sound silly, but I have the feeling that, if you go far from the cottage … if you go beyond the magical enclosure that you traced with your wand, then the spell will be broken and the enchantment gone. We only have one another.’
Sally has actually forbidden me to play any more Donovan. She cannot bear to hear about sunshine, girls in lace dresses, pure white knights and jolly tinkers. So it is Dylan instead. Dylan’s stuff is intense, driving. But I now wonder how good is intensity? What is the point of intensity? There is no point. Intensity is just the excess intellectual energy of youth.
Sally just lies there now, but earlier on in the day she beckoned me over to her and told me that she did not mind me having spat on her photograph and joined in the ritual cursing at the Lodge. Also that she loved me, and because she loved me – only because she loved me – she loved Maud too.
Then I went out to talk to Cosmic in the garden. It seems that a bit over a week ago Sally came up to him and asked him why he thought things had started to go wrong for her recently. At first Cosmic thought that this was just her questionof-the-week, but then he realised that it was more serious than that, so he told her about how, after she had interrupted the Master’s lecture, she had been ritually cursed by members of the Lodge, including me. (Thanks Cosmic.) Of course Cosmic believes that one has to be open about things, because keeping secrets and bottling up emotions is known to cause cancer. So all should be well now …
Wednesday, August 16th
Frightful.
Thursday, August 17th
Frightful.
Is Christ’s mercy indeed infinite? And what is the sin against the Holy Ghost which can never be forgiven? At school, the rumour was that masturbation was the sin against the Holy Ghost. If so, that’s me done for and, of course, more imminently Sally.
I persuaded Cosmic to go into town and look for a doctor. Difficult, because he was a bit zonked and he came back, having failed to persuade anyone that we had a really urgent problem. However, he did bring more food, vodka and diarrhoea pills plus a home-perm kit and Dr Benjamin Spock’s The Commonsense Book of Baby and Childcare. Only after Cosmic sheepishly produced the book, did Maud tell me that she was certain that she was pregnant.
‘I just know I am. I can tell,’ she said, as she buried her face on my shoulder.
I said nothing, as I tried to work out the consequences of all this. How would we manage for
money? Should we get married? Would the Master arrive and take the new-born baby away so that it could be sacrificed on the altar in Horapollo House? Paranoid this last thought, I know, but that is the trouble with taking so many drugs. They make you paranoid about everything.
‘What are you going to call it?’ Cosmic wanted to know. ‘Apart from Antichrist, of course.’ Cosmic says that we must be sure to eat the placenta, because it is rich in gamma globulin, or, if we are not going to, can he have it please?
Maud has been re-doing my hair with the home-perm kit, while I sit beside Sally (who is now definitely dying) and I read out loud bits of Dr Spock to her. It is quite a groovy book:
‘But strictness is harmful when parents are overbearing, harsh, chronically disapproving, and make no allowances for a child’s age and individuality. This kind of severity produces children who are either meek and colourless or unkind to others.
Parents who incline to an easy-going kind of management, who are satisfied with casual manners as long as the child’s attitude is friendly, or who happen not to be particularly strict – for instance, about promptness or neatness – can also raise children who are considerate and co-operative, as long as the parents are not afraid to be firm about those matters which are important to them.’
I think that I have definitively given up on my thesis. Come to that, apart from Spock and fashion magazines, I have given up on reading. Come to that, I have given up on thinking. I don’t need any of it, when I have Maud. Devil or not, she was surely put on this planet to be worshipped.
Sally is curled up in a corner of the room. Her eyes have filmed over and she looks like a small, shivery animal.
Just a few moments ago, those two police officers were back again. They did not stay more than a moment, after taking a look at Sally. Cosmic took the opportunity of their departure to hurry to the woods and hide our stash somewhere out there. Now Maud is at last fully aware of just how serious our situation is. She is thinking that she will have to breach the magic circle which I drew around the cottage in order to make a phone-call at the end of the road. In the meantime she is seriously panicked that our diaries may incriminate us. She says that we must hide them as well as the drugs.
