“The time for the Scarlet Woman is ended,” Crowley continued, back in flight. “Her purpose was always to birth the perfect being, and now that has been superseded. I hurried here on the boat train when news reached me that she had appeared on Earth. She who will truly bring to an end the stifling, milk-and-water age of the cloddish carpenter.”
“I find your tone objectionable, man,” Sir Arthur said. “A clergyman is dead.”
“A modest achievement, I admit, but a good start.”
“The fellow’s mad,” Sir Arthur blustered. “Quite cuckoo.”
Winthrop tended to agree but wanted to hear Crowley out.
He nodded towards the smashed window. “What do you think she is, Crowley? The creature you saw attacking us?”
“I suppose Anti-Christ is too masculine a term. We shall have to get used to calling her the Anti-Christine.”
Catriona, perhaps unwisely, giggled. She was rewarded with a lightning-look from the magus.
“She was brought to us by demons, in the centre of a circle of ancient sacrifice, enlivened by blood offerings. I have been working for many years to prepare the Earth for her coming, and to open the way for her appearance upon the great stage of magickal history. She has begun her reign. She has many faces. She is the get of the Whore of Babylon and the Goat of Mendes. She will cut a swathe through human society, mark my words. I shall be her tutor in sublime wickedness. There will be bloodletting and licence.”
“For such a committed foe of Christianity, you talk a lot of Bible phrases,” Winthrop said. “Your parents were Plymouth Brethren, were they not?”
“I sprang whole from the earth of Warwickshire. Is it not strange that such a small county could sire both of England’s greatest poets?”
Everyone looked at him in utter amazement.
“Shakespeare was the other,” he explained. “You know, the Hamlet fellow.”
Sir Arthur was impatient and Catriona amused, but Winthrop was alert. This man could still be dangerous.
‘“The Great God Pan,’“ Catriona said.
Crowley beamed, assuming she was describing him.
“It’s a short story,” she said. “By Arthur Machen. That’s where he’s getting all this nonsense. He’s casting Rose in the role of the anti-heroine of that fiction.”
“Truths are revealed to us in fictions,” Crowley said. “Sir Arthur, who has so skilfully blended the real and the imagined throughout his career, will agree. And so would Mr. Stoker, whom you mentioned. There are many, indeed, who believe your employers, Mr. Winthrop, are but the inventions of this literary knight.”
Sir Arthur grumbled.
“At any rate, since the object of my quest is no longer here, I shall depart. It has been an unalloyed pleasure to meet you at such an exhilarating juncture.”
Crowley gave a grunting little bow, and withdrew.
* * * *
XI: “a living looking-glass”
“Well,” said Catriona, hardly needing to elaborate on the syllable.
“He’s an experience, and no mistake,” Edwin admitted.
Having been yanked from horror into comedy, she was light-headed. It seemed absurd now, but she had been near death when the Rose Thing was closing on her throat.
“I see it,” said Sir Arthur, suddenly.
He lifted the blanket from the rector’s head and pointed to the ghastly wound with the crucifix. Despite everything else, Sir Arthur was pleased with himself, and amazed.
“I’ve made a deduction,” he announced. “I’ve written too often of them, but never until now truly understood. It’s like little wheels in your head, coming into alignment. Truly, a marvellous thing.”
Sam Farrar looked up from his hands. He was glumly drained of all emotion, a common fellow unable to keep up with the high-flown characters, human and otherwise, who had descended into his life.
“The creature we saw had extended eye-teeth,” Sir Arthur lectured. “Like a snake’s fangs. Perhaps they were what put me in mind of Bram Stoker’s vampires. Yet this wound, in the unfortunate Reverend Mr. Haskins’s throat, suggests a single stabbing implement. It is larger, rounder, more of a gouge than a bite. The thing we saw would have left two small puckered holes. Haskins was attacked by something different.”
“Or something differently shaped,” Edwin suggested.
“Yes, indeed. We have seen how the Changeling can alter her form. Evidently, she has a large repertoire.”
Catriona tried to imagine what might have made the wound.
“It looks like an insect bite, Sir Arthur,” she said, shuddering, “made by... good lord... a gigantic mosquito.”
“Bart hated insects,” Farrar put in, blankly. “Had a bad experience years ago. Never did get the whole story of it. If a wasp came in the room, he was froze up with fear.”
An idea began to shape in her mind.
The Reverend Mr. Haskins hated insects. And she had a horror of snakes. Earlier, she had thought Rose was the sort of child who presented herself to suit who she was with. That had been a real insight.
“She’s who we think she is,” she said.
Sir Arthur shook his head, not catching her drift.
“She is who we want her to be, or what we’re afraid she is,” she continued. “Sir Arthur wished to think her a friend to the fairies, and so she seemed to be. Edwin, for you it would be most convenient if she were a fraud; when you thought that most strongly, she made the slip about the telephone. The Reverend Mr. Haskins was in terror of insects, and she became one; I am not best partial to crawling reptiles, and so she took the form of a snake woman. Every little thing, she reacts to. When I asked her what her name was, she quoted mine back to me. Sir Arthur, you thought of a scene in a novel, and she played it out. She’s like a living looking-glass, taking whatever we think of her and becoming exactly that thing.”
Sir Arthur nodded, convinced at once. She was not a little flattered to detect admiration in his eyes. She had made a deduction too.
Edwin was more concerned.
“We’ve got to stop Crowley,” he said.
“Crowley?” she questioned.
“If he gets hold of her, she’ll become what he thinks she is. And he thinks she’s the end the world.”
* * * *
XII: “the altar of sex magick”
There was only one place the Anti-Christine could have flown to: Angel Field, where once had stood a stone circle. Crowley knew Farrar Farm, since he had called there first, assuming the divine creature would be in the care of her supposed nephew. But Angel Field was a mystery, and there were no streetlights out here in the wilds of Sussex to guide the way.
Before departing, penniless, for England, he had telegraphed several of his few remaining disciples, beseeching funds and the loan of a car and driver. He was an international fugitive, driven from his Abbey of Thelema in Sicily at the express order of the odious Mussolini, and reduced to grubbing a living in Paris, with the aid of a former Scarlet Woman who was willing to sell her body on the streets to keep the magus in something approaching comfort.
He had left these damp, dreary islands for ever, he had hoped. He was no longer welcome in magical circles in London, brought low by the conspirings of lesser men who failed stubbornly to appreciate his genius.
No chauffeured car awaited him at Victoria, so he had hired one, trusting his manner and force of personality to convince one Alfred Jenkinsop, Esq., that he was good for the fee once the new age had dawned. As it happened, he expected the concept of money to be wiped away with all the other detritus of the dead past.
He found Jenkinsop in his car, outside Farrar Farm, reading The Sporting Life by torchlight. The fellow perked up to see him, and stuck his head out of the window.
“Have you seen a female pass this way?” Crowley asked.
Jenkinsop was remarkably obtuse on the point. It took him some moments to remember that he had, in fact, happened to see a girl, clad only in a dressing gown, running down the road fro
m the rectory and onto the farm.
“Which way did she go?”
Jenkinsop shrugged. Crowley made a mental note to erase his somewhat comical name from the record of this evening when he came to write the official history of how the Anti-Christine was brought to London as a protégé of the Great Beast.
“Come, man,” he said, “follow me.”
The driver showed no willingness to get out of the car.
“It’s a cold night, guv,” he said, as if that explained all.
Crowley left him to “the pink ‘un,” and trudged through Farrar’s open front gate. His once-expensive shoes sank in mud and he felt icy moisture seep in through their somewhat strained seams. Nothing to one who had survived the treacherous glacial slopes of Chogo-Ri, but still a damned nuisance.
If Farrar’s vandal of a grandfather hadn’t smashed the stones, it would have been easier to find Angel Field. It was a cloudless night, but the moon was just a shining rind. He could make out the shapes of hedgerows, but little more.
He had an alarming encounter with a startled cow.
“Mistress Perfection,” he called out.
Only mooing came back.
Finally, he discerned a fire in the night and made his way towards it. He knew his feet stood upon the sod of Angel Field. For the Anti-Christine was at the centre of the light, surrounded by her impish acolytes.
They were attendant demons, Crowley knew. Naked, hairless, and without genitals. They had smooth, grey, dwarf bodies and large black insect eyes. Some held peculiar implements with lights at their extremities. They all turned, with one fluid movement, to look at him.
She was magnificent. Having shed her snakeskin, she had become the essence of voluptuous harlotry, masses of electric gorgon-hair confined by a shining circlet of silver, robe gaping open immodestly over her gently swelling belly, wicked green eyes darting like flames. Her teeth were still sharp. She looked from side to side, smile twisted off-centre.
This was the rapturous creature who would degrade the world.
Crowley worshipped her.
The occasion of their meeting called for a ceremony. The imps gathered around him, heads bobbing about his waist-height. Some extended spindle-fingered hands, tipped with sucker-like appendages, and touched him.
He unloosed his belt and dropped his trousers and drawers. He knelt, knees well-spaced, and touched his forehead to the cold, wet ground.
One of the imps took its implement and inserted it into Crowley’s rectum. He bit a mouthful of grassy sod as the implement expanded inside him.
Crowley’s body was the altar of sex magick.
The commingling of pain and pleasure was not new to him. This was quite consistent with the theory and practice of magick he had devised over many years of unparalleled scholarship. As the metallic probe pulsed inside him like living flesh, he was thrust forward into his new golden dawn.
The imp’s implement was withdrawn.
Hands took Crowley’s head and lifted it from the dirt. The Anti-Christine looked at him with loathing and love. Their mouths opened, and they pounced. Crowley trapped her lower lip between his teeth and bit until his mouth was full of her blood. He broke the serpent’s kiss, and she returned in kind, nipping and nibbling at his nose and dewlaps.
Her lips were rouged with her own blood, and marked with his teeth.
Oh joy!
“Infernal epitome,” he addressed her, “we must get you quickly to London, where you can spread your leathery wings, open your scaled legs, and begin to exert a real influence. We shall start with a few seductions, of men and women naturally, petty and great persons, reprobates and saints. Each shall spread your glorious taint, which will flash through society like a new tonic.”
She looked pleased by the prospect.
“There will be fire and pestilence,” he continued. “Duels and murders and many, many suicides. Piccadilly Circus will burn like Nero’s Rome. Pall Mall will fall to the barbarians. The Thames will run red and brown with the blood and ordure of the King and his courtiers. We shall dig up the mouldy skeletons of Victoria and Albert and revivify them with demon spells, to set them copulating like mindless mink in Horseguard’s Parade. St. Paul’s shall be turned into a brothel of Italianate vileness, and Westminster Abbey made an adjunct to the London Zoological Gardens, turned over to obscene apes who will defecate and fornicate where the foolishly pious once sat. The London Times will publish blasphemies and pornography, illustrated only by the greatest artists of the age. The Lord Mayor’s head will be used as a ball in the Association Football Cup Final. Cocaine, heroin, and the services of child prostitutes will be advertised in posters plastered to the sides of all omnibuses. Willie Blasted Yeats shall be burned in effigy in place of Saint Guy Fawkes on every November 5th, and all the other usurpers of the Golden Dawn laid low in their own filth. All governments, all moralities, all churches, will collapse. The City will burn, must burn. Only we Secret Chiefs will retain our authority. You shall beget many children, homunculi. It will be a magnificent age, extending for a thousand times a thousand years.”
In her shining, darting eyes, he saw it was all true. He buttoned up his trousers and spirited her away to where Jenkinsop waited with the car, unwitting herald of welcome apocalypse.
* * * *
XIII: “the fire-wheel”
Winthrop held Katie’s stick back, flying at an angle, nose into the wind, so the dark, shadowed quilt of Sussex filled his view. The dawnlight just pricked at the East, flashing off ponds and streams. Night-flying was tricky in a country dotted with telegraph poles and tall trees, but at least there wasn’t some Fokker stalking him. He tried to keep the Camel level with the tiny light funnels that were the headlamps of what must be Crowley’s car.
They had got to Farrar Farm just after Crowley’s departure, with Rose or Christine or whatever the girl chose to be called. Winthrop had set Catriona and Sir Arthur on their tail in the Bentley, and borrowed Sir Arthur’s surprisingly sprightly runabout to make his way to the airfield at Falmer, where his aeroplane was hangared. It was like the War again, rousing a tired ground staff to get him into the air within minutes of his strapping on helmet and boots.
He had assumed few automobiles would be on the roads of Sussex at this hour of the morning, but had homed in on a couple of trundling milk trucks before picking up the two vehicles he assumed were Crowley’s car and his own Bentley He trusted Catriona at the wheel, though Sir Arthur had seemed as startled at the prospect of being driven by a woman as he had when confronted by the girl’s monstrous snake-shape. When Winthrop had last seen them, Sir Arthur was still clutching his crucifix and Catriona was tucking stray hair under her sweet little hat.
He wished he had time to savour the thrill of being in the air again. He also regretted not storing ammunition and even a couple of bombs with Katie. Her twin machine-guns were still in working order, synchronised to fire through the prop blades, but he had nothing to fire out of them. His revolver was under his jacket, but would be almost useless: It was hard to give accurate fire while flying one-handed, with one’s gun-arm flapping about in sixty-mile-an-hour airwash.
Suddenly, the sun rose. In the West.
A blast of daylight fell on one side of Winthrop’s face. He felt a tingle as if he were being sunburned. For a moment, the air currents were all wrong, and he nearly lost control ofKatie.
The landscape below was bleached by light. The two cars were quite distinct on the road. They were travelling between harvested wheat-fields. There were circles and triangles etched into the stubble, shapes that reminded Winthrop of those on Rose’s silver ribbon.
Winthrop looked at the new sun.
It was a wheel of fire, travelling in parallel with Katie. He pushed the stick forward and climbed up into the sky, and the fire-shape climbed with him. Then it whizzed underneath the Camel and came up on his right side.
He looped up, back and below, feeling the tug of gravity in his head and the safety harness cutting into his
shoulders. It would take a demon from hell to outfly a Sopwith Camel in anger, as the fire-wheel recognised instantly by shooting off like a Guy Fawkes rocket, whooshing up in a train of sparks.
Katie was now flying even, and sparks fell fizzing all around. Winthrop was afraid they were incendiaries of unknown design, but they passed through his fuselage and wings, dispersing across the fields.
His eyes were blotched with light-bursts. It was dark again and the fire-wheel gone. Winthrop recalled the stories of the signs in the sky at the time of Rose Farrar’s disappearance. He assumed he had just had personal experience of them. He would make sure they went into the report.
The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02] Page 20
