Babylon

by Richard Calder

  ‘How beautiful!’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lord Azrael. ‘They are indeed beautiful.’

  I disengaged myself from his arm and walked across the room, my nightgown billowing a little in the breeze that gusted through the open windows, until I stood before a doll whose head rested against the wing of a great, black leather fauteuil. Like the other dolls in Lord Azrael’s collection, she resembled a full-sized version of Cliticia’s fashion-plate moppet, Nixie, but made from white porcelain rather than black. Her hair complemented her complexion. It was Rapunzel’s, as rendered by the golden palette of a Botticelli.

  I reached out and touched her cheek.

  ‘But that’s not porcelain,’ I said, perplexed. ‘In fact, if it weren’t so smooth and cold, you could almost mistake it for flesh.’

  ‘It is called plastic,’ said Lord Azrael. ‘It is a new material, a by-product of the artefacts we have developed by harnessing vril.’ He walked to the table and picked up what seemed, at first, to be an item of crockery—a china plate, perhaps. Unless this too was made of the thing he called ‘plastic’. He held it up. ‘Behold: a model of the prototype flying machine we call the Manisola. It is a biological machine. And it travels ten, no, perhaps a hundred times faster than any train that has ever been built. We have developed many new weapons, too, which will soon allow us to consolidate our hold on Babylon and thereby bring about the dawn of our New Order.’ He set the model down. ‘Miss Fell—’ He paused, and then, pitching his voice lower, said, ‘Or may I call you ... Madeleine?’

  I nodded, smiling weakly. ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Madeleine,’ he began again, ‘there is something I must tell you. Something I must explain before it is ... too late.’

  ‘I’m not sure I—’

  ‘Please, Madeleine, listen.’ He averted his gaze. He seemed to be studying something on the table. It was a map, and one much like the others spread out across the marble surface, except that it seemed partly rendered in three-dimensions so that it resembled a scaled-down model of a city—perhaps Babylon the Great itself. From my compromised vantage point several feet away it was difficult to decide. ‘It was a wretched business,’ he continued, his voice and attitude forlorn. ‘But it was necessary. Necessary to impregnate those unfortunate young women with the aboriginal energies of Thule.’ He shook his head violently, like a dog that has taken a dousing; and like a dog, he sniffed, as if able to scent the tension in the air. ‘Yes, Madeleine, I am talking about the moral and physical virtue obtained from vril—that potent, electromagnetic, nay, electrosexual force of universal utility that will soon give us flying machines and automata!’

  He began to gesticulate, the words tripping off his tongue with ever-greater facility. ‘A woman’s mental processes are hostage to her ovarian secretions. Excessive secretions give rise to impure thoughts, to, to—’ He seemed to have difficulty catching his breath. ‘—To sexual insanity.’ He paused, walked to the table, took a handkerchief from his hip pocket, and mopped his brow. ‘The female sex chemical is antagonistic to the masculine ideal. Are not those beguiled by the Shulamite subject, these latter days, to alarming incidences of spermatorrhoea and priapism? Cliteridectomy has, it is true, had some effect in moderating female toxins. Dr Isaac Baker Brown was surely at the forefront of medical science in not only recognizing that female self-abuse led to hysteria, epilepsy, and neurasthenia, but that “moral treatment” was not enough! But, really, what long-term benefits have these strategies achieved, apart from offering a sop to public opinion?’ He threw the handkerchief down on the table, clenched his hands together, and then raised them to his chest in an act of truculent supplication. ‘Listen, Madeleine. And listen well! The Black Order has never cared about public opinion. Neither has it cared about finding a “cure”—at least not one sanctified by medical science. Instead, it seeks to extract, distil, and use female toxicity to further its own political ends!’

  He turned to face me. His pensiveness had left him, and his eyes glowed with fervour. ‘During these last few months the Black Order has uncovered some of the most precious secrets of Babylonian sex-magic. The opening of portals, the use of energetic shields—both have their roots in the hieros gamos, that is, the union of the Goddess with the masculine elect. Shulamites practise these rites of sacred marriage, of course, with the Illuminati, each time they return to Earth Prime on sabbatical. But there are other, forgotten rites, detailed in some of the more obscure, and darker, grimoires that can undo the hieros gamos and the power that it confers. These are the rites of estrangement, separation, annulment, and mystic divorce.’

  His arms dropped to his side. The afflatus seemed to leave him. ‘We are not barbarians, Madeleine. You must believe me when I say that each uterus was harvested with as much speed and compassion as time would allow. I can assure you that any pain that the victims may have suffered was as inadvertent as it was minimal. But we had to have them. We had to have those uteri! How else could we understand the secrets of the black wedding— how else could we learn how to harness the power of the ancient, dark, Babylonian arts?’ He combed his fingers through his hair, a mad sorcerer lecturing an apprentice whose own sanity was about to be totally eclipsed. ‘I truly hope I am making myself clear. I recall that I tried to similarly explain myself to little Marie Jeanette, with somewhat limited success. Oh yes, I remember whispering in her ear: ‘Vers les trésors de tapersonne, et faire à ton flanc étonné une blessure large et creuse, et, vertigineuse douceurl À travers ces lèvres nouvelles, plus éclatantes et plus belles, t'infuser mon vénin, ma soeurV

  He clenched and unclenched his fists. ‘Yes, we infused them with our venom,’ he continued. ‘We transformed them into receptacles of vril!’ He took a few steps towards me, and then stopped. ‘It is the only way to open new Gates! The only way to bring down the force-fields!’ Again, he brought his fists to his chest in that ambivalent pose that communicated both threat and prayer. ‘Think, Madeleine. Until recently, we have been confined to using those secret portals our ancestors set up and the expedient of raiding trains as they travel from Earth and through Babylon. But now we will be able to raid the temples themselves. Think of it! Oh, Madeleine.’ His face was enraptured. ‘Babylon will fall!’

  It was then, I think, that I was graced with my last few seconds of mental equilibrium. And during that brief, strangely lucid, moment, I thought only of going to him, putting my arms around his neck and then, while I blinded him with kisses, taking his revolver from its holster and holding him hostage, or else shooting him through the head. Perhaps there might have even been one of his prototype Manisolas nearby which I could have stolen and flown to an interdimensional Gate. But that brief spell of sanity was swiftly dispelled; the sun turned black, the sorcerer’s apprentice succumbed; and I was lost inside a disorienting fog of passion.

  ‘The crystals in the laboratory,’ I said, holding myself unnaturally stiff. ‘They’re—’

  ‘The crystallized wombs of Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly,’ he said, enumerating the Ripper’s last three Earthly victims. ‘Three Shulamites born in London—Shulamites whose uteri were infused, not merely with the sacrifice of my own, precious seed, but with the dark, ancestral energies of Spitalfields. Yes, Madeleine, it was only upon such unholy ground—the ground of plague-pits and Dionysiac temples like Christ Church—that the modern hieros gamos between god and whore became possible.’ The floor seemed to give way, yet I still stood, like a murderess who has cheated the hangman and floats above the open trap, her body turned to air.

  ‘D-do you like my dolls?’ he said, unaccountably changing his tone from one of high rhetoric to that of a nervous, courting schoolboy. ‘Such blonde hair,’ he added, as he turned upon them an appraising gaze. ‘And such eyes. Such beautiful eyes!’

  ‘Eyes blue as ice,’ I said. A few minutes earlier I might have hoped to win a compliment for possessing eyes that were not merely comparably blue, but superior, surely, for being imbued with sight. But I spoke now
like one of the automata he had said would soon swell his battalions: mechanically, and with all the élan of a somnambulist. ‘They’re lovely dolls.’ Each was attired in a powder-blue frock, white pinafore, and blue-striped stockings.

  ‘Mr Tenniel gave me the idea,’ he said. But Alice had never been quite so tightly laced. Nor had she ever had such recourse to cosmetics. These Wonderland children, it must be said, with their tiny waists and faces of blasted innocence, were evil little strumpets, just like me.

  I looked across the room towards the window, its diaphanous, white curtain like a gently bellying sail, the breeze so mild, so unemphatic, that it could almost have been spiritual. But beyond the window, and readily apparent through its quivering, thistledown veil, was a night sky whose moony softness had been usurped by a hard, metallic lustre.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said, my words, distant, foreign, as if somebody else had spoken them. ‘Who are you really ?’

  His response was over-quick, too carefree, too evocative of my own, fatalistic thoughts. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘The High Priestess of Ereshkigal said—’

  ‘The woman was ill,’ he interrupted. ‘Very ill.’

  ‘I think you should tell me,’ I said. ‘I think you owe me that much.’

  He smiled. ‘What is there to tell?’

  I stared down at the floorboards. The swirling patterns of wood grain seemed to coalesce, jump out at me, like the illustrations in a picture book I had read as a child, but had long ago forgotten about, until now.

  ‘I have the feeling that I’ve known you ever since I was a little girl,’ I said. ‘I had a name for you then: Lord Barbarossa. I suppose it was neither less nor more real than the name you have now.’ I looked up and walked towards him. ‘But I must know, I must know who you really are.’ Whoever he was, I needed him to be real. Only by being real could he make me real too, and bring my promised land into being.

  As I drew flush to the table I saw that what he had earlier been staring at was indeed both a map and something of a model village: a big Mercator projection of Modern Babylon and the continent and world it was a part of, with the city, and its environs, picked out in miniature, three-dimensional relief.

  I leant over the table and committed myself to study. The city was represented as a great square in the middle of a ragged land- mass. To the east of the city was Edom, a place of deserts, scattered oases, and an inland sea. In shape it resembled the projection of western Africa, though Edom was held to be something like twice as big. To the west was the great mountain range of Elam that ran north into Akkad and formed the spine of the narrow 3,000-mile long Anatolian peninsula. To the south was Sumer. There, the Euphrates and Tigris ran through jungles and marshland until they eventually flowed into the Sea of Ashtoreth. All four regions contained little six-pointed stars to indicate the locations where new temples were being built outside the city walls. And all four regions contained little warning signs, such as might be found on a medieval map, signalling multitudinous dangers: Here be spiders, said one that had been superimposed on Sumer. And others read Here be worms, Here be serpents, Here be kobolds, Here be wolves, or quite simply, Here be terrors.

  I let my hand settle on the map’s western segment. ‘Edom,’ I said, numbly. ‘Named after the land near the Red Sea where Lilith fled after being cast from Eden. It was there that she gave birth to the succubi.’

  ‘The Princess Salome was an Edomite,’ he said, reaching out to stroke my hair.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Her ancestry was traceable all the way back to Esau the Wicked, whom biblical tradition regarded as the forefather of the Edomites, the most hateful of all pagans.’

  ‘And are you my Salome, Madeleine? Would you have my head on a platter, if the opportunity should present itself?’

  ‘The police can’t arrest you here,’ I said. ‘Besides, with the way they’ve handled the Whitechapel murders, I shouldn’t say you had much to worry about even if you should travel back to Earth Prime.’

  ‘Yes, I must say, my recent mission was accomplished with a speed and effectiveness I had hardly thought possible.’

  ‘No one cares about a few dead Shulamites,’ I said. ‘Not the police, and not the Illuminati, it seems.’ I laughed, grimly. ‘I’m beginning to sound like my father.’

  ‘Not your father in heaven, I hope?’ he said. ‘Not Jehovah?’

  I traced a line through the yellow sand of Edom with my fingernail.

  ‘I don’t have a father,’ I said. ‘I only have a mother: Lilith.’

  He ran a hand down my hair, a gesture at once affectionate and impersonal, like a caress bestowed upon a pet cat. ‘Pretty succubus,’ he murmured. My sphinx-nature rose to the surface. Cats took pleasure in their selfish, treacherous ways; and I must admit to feeling a slight frisson myself at the prospect of indulging in an act of betrayal.

  ‘So you think that, if I should find myself back on Earth Prime, I might inform on you?’ I turned to look up at him, taking care to smile in a manner that I knew would becomingly dimple my cheek. ‘Why not put me to the test? After all, you could always jump in one of your flying machines and hide away at the North Pole.’ Again, I thought of all that the Serpentessa at Ereshkigal had told me: that perhaps Lord Azrael was not from a strange, Hyperborean land, or indeed, from foreign parts at all, but was one of us. ‘If, of course,’ I concluded, placing a finger beneath my chin and growing increasingly alarmed at the fact that my coquetry seemed to possess a life of its own, ‘Hyperborea actually exists.’

  ‘It is what we will that matters,’ he said, no longer amused. ‘What we will to be. And, of course, what we will not to be.’

  He pointed at the map and its rash of tiny, model buildings. ‘Politics,’ he continued, ‘is only the means to an end. The true work of great statesmen and military leaders lies in the field of art.’

  ‘You want to remodel Babylon?’

  ‘My dear Madeleine, I want to remodel the universe.’ I leant over the table and inspected the model city more carefully. Narrowing my eyes to focus on the tiny, almost microscopic, detailing, I saw that a great tract of land had been cleared around the Citadel and that new buildings were being erected there. Not only the Shulamites, it seemed, were engaged in a grand, new architectural project.

  Fortress-like, with domineering towers, the adjuncts to the Citadel were constructed of black and grey marble. They dwarfed what indigenous structures still stood.

  ‘The core of the new city is the north-south axis,’ he said. ‘What is now the Processional Way will become a via triumphalis.’ I allowed my gaze to follow his finger as it described a line from a gigantic Arch of Triumph along a thoroughfare lined with monuments and mausoleums. ‘It terminates, here,’ he continued, ‘at the Meeting Hall, which, when completed, will accommodate as many as 180,000 of my soldiers. As such, it will be the largest structure in either Babylon or Earth Prime.’

  ‘And all this,’ I said, looking up at him over my shoulder, ‘will be completed when Babylon falls?’

  He nodded. ‘It can only be completed when Babylon falls.’ He folded his arms across his chest. ‘If I were to assess my work, I would emphasize, first, that in the face of an uncomprehending world I succeeded in making the racial idea the basis of life, and second that I made culture the driving force in Aryan greatness.’ He lifted his chin and stared at me down his long, finely-chiselled nose. ‘Without racial purity, culture is without foundation.’

  I straightened myself and stared at him. Who are you? I asked, but this time the question reverberated only through the confines of my own mind, as cold and empty as the great stone structures that would one day line the Processional Way. Who are you ? The answer bore down on me, like a wolf rushing out of the glades of a midnight forest, in whose eyes you recognize a lover unaccountably transformed from man into beast. Who am I? said a voice that only I could hear. I am nothing. I have always been nothing. There was a pause. It perforated the barrier—ghostly, yet hard as steel—that had so
long separated me from that other world and self that lived beyond the looking glass. ‘Oh, Madeleine, Madeleine, I have always been you.’

  I had lived, it seemed, in a state of liminality, between dream and waking, the real and unreal, life and death. Lord Azrael was a phantom, as much a creation of my own desires as I was a creation of his. We were as contingent upon each other as upon Babylon.

  ‘You have seduced me,’ I said, quietly. ‘But you’ve been doing that all my life, haven’t you?’ I turned my back on him and walked the few steps to the window. Drawing aside the gossamer drape, I stared down at the empty courtyard and its ranks of closed, black doors. ‘Once, I called you Lord Barbarossa. And if you were my enemy, you were my friend, too. My only friend.’

  I knew, now, that there was a love that had nothing to do with the usual relationships that existed between men and women. It was a love that was strange, treacherous, unholy, and yet it was love all the same.

  The universe—Babylon—was as it was because of His will, I told myself; and, for me, it would remain as it was only by a submission to that will and the will of a dark, virile order of masculinity.

  I had thought the Serpentessa mad. But perhaps she was the only one who had been sane. Babylon was mad. It had been built by Nebuchadnezzar, a mad king. Perhaps the history it had engendered was mad, too. No matter. I suspected ‘history’ did not exist. Time and space consisted of multiple histories. They overlapped and interacted with each other. And finally the only question that had to be resolved was: Which history was legitimate and which was to be excluded? I chose. I made my leap of faith.

  For the new world was His world, the world of the Ripper. I yielded, determined to play my part to the end.

  ‘Shall we go?’ he said, so breathlessly as to be unable to convince anybody other than himself that he maintained a slippery grip on his sangfroid.