Satan Wants Me

by Robert Irwin

  So my mistress has commanded me to discontinue my diary.

  Saturday, October 11th 1997

  Maud died five days ago. Her funeral was today and I had a most unsettling encounter at the cemetery.

  It is thirty years since I last looked at these notebooks. It was a relief to discontinue diary-writing. When I did so, my writing hand ceased to be possessed by that over-eloquent, high-styled, writing demon, Pyewhacket (or the ‘Hand of Splendour’, as I have since heard the Master refer to this sort of phenomenon). Now that I have reread these old notebooks, I am feeling a little wistful – even though the last few days described in their pages were pretty terrible.

  Summoned by his daughter’s message, Robert Kelley arrived in Farnham later on that final Thursday. He was accompanied by Granville and Laura. Although there was a tremendous amount to be sorted out, the resources that the Black Book Lodge can call upon in a time of crisis are truly impressive. By the time the Master had arrived, a whole team of police and forensic experts, excited by signs of freshly turned earth on the edge of the woods, were about to start digging and they were mentally preparing themselves to exhume what they expected to be a series of hippy corpses – probably corpses with shaven heads. However, Maud’s father definitely has an impressive presence. Not only did he get the dig stopped, he even persuaded the police that it was not worth charging Cosmic with theft of the gnomes.

  My own Dad arrived some hours later. We sat in the corner of a hotel lounge just off the High Street and he listened quietly as I talked and, in talking, tried to put the events of the last few weeks in some order. I do not know what I expected from him, but, at the end of it all, what he said was,

  ‘The Devil does not have to exist for there to be evil in this world.’ Then, after a short pause, ‘You are on your own now.’

  I never saw him again.

  The Master made all the arrangements for Sally’s funeral. He also squared the police. Everything was made easy. I just had one very difficult moment. This was when the Master and his daughter had gone into town to confer with the undertaker, so that Cosmic and I were alone with the corpse.

  Then Cosmic, pointed to it and looked at me,

  ‘It was her dying wish,’ he said. ‘She expects you to fulfil your oath.’

  It had been bad enough months ago to contemplate the idea of fucking Sally’s corpse. That was when the prospect did not seem very imminent and when I imagined that the corpse in question would have Sally’s fresh, pale complexion and long golden hair. But now we were looking down on this emaciated and shaven-headed thing which lay hunched on the leaking mattress and looking like a dead rat.

  I shook my head. There was nothing I could say.

  ‘I was there at her last moment, while you were pissing about with Maud. Sally really wants you now. She is watching on the astral. She waits to see you fuck her corpse.’

  I still said nothing, so then Cosmic was really angry,

  ‘You have betrayed her. You have betrayed yourself. You have betrayed everything we ever stood for. You are a total cop-out and a living lie from beginning to end.’

  I walked out of the room, leaving Sally to Cosmic.

  The Master had several difficult meetings with Sally’s parents. He was, of course, furious with us, but his anger abated somewhat when Maud told him that she thought she was pregnant. Laura and Granville got Maud and me packed and that same night Granville delivered us to a hotel in London. Granville wept on and off throughout the day. ‘I really loved your hippy girl,’ he said to me at one point. But if so, why had he joined me in spitting on her photograph? Then again, I reckon, if he had not seduced her, probably none of this would have happened.

  I suppose the way things have turned out is a bit like that film I saw once, Room at the Top. I married the boss’s daughter and, having done so, I have been doing very well ever since. Not that he took me into the family firm, as it were. Indeed, I have been forbidden to set foot in Horapollo House ever again. Since the summer of 1967, I have had as little to do with the Lodge and occult matters as I have had with academic sociology. The daylight hours have been dedicated to making money; the dark belonged to Maud. I inherited Julian’s money of course, but it was thought proper that I should have a job. So I was sent into the City. I worked first for a merchant bank with strong Levantine interests. Later, I set up my own company to invest in information technology. I became a ‘name’ and a member of one of the livery companies. It is a hard, tough world in the City, but I find that suits me. Maud was set up with her own hairdressing salon, but after the birth of little Robert, she was happy to leave most of its running to others.

  I grew up. In time I shed my ‘blasted sense of humour’, as Felton termed it. Furthermore I no longer believe in the possibility of interconnecting parallel universes, encountering dead parents and friends in new incarnations, the governance of the world by Hidden Occult Masters, or any of that sort of stuff. The world is exactly as it seems. As with my computer screen, what you see is what you get.

  I am proud of my son’s career in politics. The Lodge still nourishes hopes that our son is indeed the Antichrist. Speaking as his father, all I can say is that, for an Antichrist, his GCSEs were decidedly average. I am afraid that Maud never cared much for her son. He was looked after by women sent over from Horapollo House who answered to Laura. Later, the boy was sent to Winchester. All Maud’s love was reserved for me and only me.

  I have often reflected on the revelations of those August days and I am pretty sure that the Master and his trusted astrologers were mistaken. I am not the reincarnation of Crowley they were looking for. Be that as it may, they brought Maud and me together and made us happy.

  Cosmic sold out too. He now works in the legal department of the Home Office (but we never speak). Everybody sold out. I lived through years of the Great Betrayal and Sell-Out of the hippy dream. We were going to change things. We were going to set free the hearts and minds of our generation – and not just our generation. ‘Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids.’ People would cease to own people. There would have been a gentler, more generous and more colourful world. There was a lot of energy about. By the end of the sixties, we should have been witnessing the ultimate transformation of humanity. As Nietzsche put it, ‘Man is a bridge, not a goal.’

  But we lost. The old bankers, generals, policemen and professors prevailed. And I am they. They, the men in suits, who every morning walk across Waterloo Bridge, heading for the City are no better than war criminals. The Juggernaut rolls on. First we lost the battle and then our souls. Sally was the only one I ever knew who remained true to herself and I am the only one who seems to care for what was lost. ‘First girl I loved … ’ We were young and mad as hares.

  Maud was buried in Hampstead cemetery this afternoon. In the coffin she was clutching the crucifix I had given her all those years ago. The Master (it is Granville these days) and Laura were among the mourners. There was no reception afterwards, as I had no desire to spend more time than I had to with Lodge members. Having dismissed my chauffeur, I was setting out to walk back to our, now my house, when I was accosted by two strange creatures. One was cowled and one was shaven-headed and they were dressed in orange and red robes – somewhat like the pusher who sold me those drugs in Abdullah’s Paradise Garden all those years ago. There was a whiff of oriental incense about them and at first I thought that they must be Hare Krishna people. These days one occasionally sees a Hare Krishna procession snaking its way down Oxford Street, banging toms-toms and jingling little bells, but they used to be around a lot more at the end of the sixties. I make a point of stopping to watch these people, orange-robed and shaven-headed, because I want to try and figure out why they always look so bloody miserable. But that is by the way. These two turned out not to be Hare Krishna devotees.

  ‘Let the dead bury their dead,’ said the cowled figure lurking at the gates of the cemetery. He thrust a leaflet into my hands.

  ‘JESUS SAVES! DON’T B
E LONELY! JOIN HIS FAMILY AND HAVE A BALL, SECURE IN THE LOVE OF GOD’S FAMILY.’ Beneath the big print was some comic-strip story about the sufferings of a soul in Hell, but, with the lengthening sight I have these days, I had trouble in focusing on the little print in the speech balloons.

  ‘You are blind and do not see,’ said the cowled figure. ‘But you stand on the brink of a sea of fire. Once you are launched upon that sea, there will be no instant in which you will be free from pain. Your bones will be pulled out from your flesh. Your eyeballs will be squeezed from your skull. Your scrotum will be pierced by blades much sharper than those of a razor. Then, in a cauldron of boiling spittle, you will be reconstituted to suffer it all over again, but this time and the next and the next you will anticipate the pain. Your sweat will burn through metal. After a million years of this have passed, it will be as if you have yet to begin to truly suffer. Now consider how in this life how angry you are with yourself when you forget to post a letter and then consider how angry you will be with yourself when you find that you have neglected to take advantage of the offer of eternal salvation! Turn then to the love of your Lord Jesus and be saved.’

  ‘We love you,’ said the shaven-headed figure and, it was only when she spoke that I realised that she was a young woman. ‘I love you and I want to bring you to Jesus. Cos’ for you it’s Jesus or the eternal torments of Hell.’

  She pressed herself up against me so that I could feel her pointy breasts and she ran her fingers up and down my black tie.

  ‘I want you to come to Jesus. I want you to come for Jesus. I can give you a really great time.’

  ‘What about him?’ I said, gesturing at her companion.

  ‘Jesus doesn’t mind,’ she whispered. ‘He knows that it’s all in a good cause and that I’m a Hooker for Christ. He knows that, because I love you, I want to save you from the flames of Hell. Jesus has taught me that I must be ready to die for others. How much more then should I be prepared to have sex for others, in order to save their souls? Come on, it’s a good deal we are offering here – some great sex, plus eternal salvation. Don’t worry about anything. He likes to watch.’

  Then, and in retrospect I can hardly believe it, she knelt to fumble at my flies.

  ‘Get away from me woman! I have just come from burying my wife. If, in the circumstances, you think I am going to get a hard-on as a result of the ministrations of a bald religious fanatic in fancy dress, you are very much mistaken.’

  She looked up smiling sweetly,

  ‘Let’s suck it and see, shall we?’

  ‘Oh go fuck yourself!’ and, zipping up my trousers, I turned and hurried away from them.

  It was outrageous, really so outrageous and tasteless for these freaks to have intruded on the funeral of my wife in this way. Hours later, I am still quite upset. I have heard about this sort of sexual evangelising. I believe that it is called ‘lovebombing’ or ‘flirty-fishing’. Coincidentally, I now recall that Robin Williamson in that Incredible String Band song, ‘First Girl I Loved’, sings about how he has heard that his old girlfriend has since joined the Church of Jesus. Probably a lot of the old hippy riff-raff have actually ended up in evangelical Christianity.

  The encounter at the cemetery gates was, as they say, ‘a blast from the past’. The old Peter, the 1967 version of Peter, would have played with the idea that he had just encountered some sort of astral manifestation of Sally come down to earth in a final attempt to rescue him from the clutches of Maud and the jaws of Hell. Or perhaps the shaven-headed little freak might be one of those Tibetan visions which prepare one for the afterlife, Verukas, or whatever it was that Sally used to call them. But such notions, as the actress said to the bishop, are just a load of cock. The girl at the cemetery was not Sally, there was no tattoo on her head and the dead do not live again. What I saw was what there was – a pair of crackpot Christian evangelists. However, be that as it may, it got me thinking, in a way I have not done before, about the sixties and about how sixties ways of talking and behaving still linger on at the edges of our society. There is, I think, a metaphorical sense in which those two Christian freaks were indeed ghosts from another world.

  Now, thirty years on, when I came back to an empty house after Maud’s funeral, I have fetched these diaries out. Of course, I am wistful. I was thin then and I had limitless energy, but, even so, I find that I have no desire to travel back through time. Youth is rarely a happy stage in life. I was then so ignorant, Maud was so gauche and both of us were terrified by the real world. Since then, we found our place in that world and we have been happily married for thirty years.

  It was painful for Maud to shed her human form and surrender to the cancer.

  Her last words to me were, ‘I will come back for you.’

  Soon, I hope.

  Copyright

  Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited,

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  ISBN e-book   978 1 909232 08 2

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  Publishing History

  First published by Dedalus in the UK in 1999

  First Bloomsbury paperback edition in the UK in 2000

  First Dedalus paperback edition in 2007

  First published in the USA in 2007

  First ebook edition in 2012

  Copyright © Robert Irwin 1999

  The right of Robert Irwin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Printed in Finland by Bookwell

  Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A C.I.P. Listing for this book is available on request.