Henry, Mark, and Charles commandeered the last remaining table in the far corner, ordered various kinds of coffee from the gum-chewing, white-plastic-clad waitress, then poured over the latest issue of OZ magazine, the special Nightside issue. Charles had just picked up his copy, and Mark grabbed it from him, to check if they'd printed his letter about Elvis being the real shooter of JFK. Walker had already read the issue, of course. He was always the first at everything.
We all listened as the three young men talked. It seemed they were impatient, for all their good humour. Their inevitable bright future seemed unfairly far off. They were being held back, by entrenched interests and people who weren't interested in trying anything new—anything that hadn't been around for decades, and preferably centuries. Fashion was one thing, sin always thrived on the very latest fashions; but no-one at the top wanted to know about institutional change. These three young men were determined to seize power and influence, if necessary, so that they could force through necessary changes. For the greater good of all, of course. They wanted to usher in the Age of Aquarius, and the mind's true liberation. Everyone young was a dreamer and an idealist in 1967.
When they'd finished with the magazine, it was time for show-and-tell. Mark was a collector even back then, and had got his hands on something special. He took it out of his shoulder bag, looking quickly about to make sure no-one was watching, then laid his find reverentially on the table before them. Henry and Charles looked dubiously at the cardboard box full of tatty, handwritten pages.
"All right," said Walker. "What is it this time? And it had better not be about Roswell again. I am sick to death of Roswell. If anything had really happened there, we'd know about it by now."
"You just wait," Mark said darkly. "I'll get you proof yet. I know someone who knows someone who claims one guy actually filmed the autopsy on the aliens... Of course, this is the same man who claims we'll be landing men on the moon in two years, so ..."
"What have you found, Mark?" Charles said patiently. "And what good does it do us?"
"Is it something we can blackmail people with?" Walker said wistfully. "I've always wanted to be able to blackmail someone."
Mark grinned wolfishly, one hand pressed possessively on the pile of papers, as though afraid someone might sneak up and steal them. "This, my friends, is the real thing. The mother lode. An unpublished manuscript by the one and only Aleister Crowley—the Magus, the Great Beast, the Most Evil Man in the World. If you believe the newspapers, which mostly I don't. But Crowley was the real thing, for a time at least, and there have always been those who said his best, or more properly his worst, stuff was never published. This manuscript was apparently put on the market some years back, when Crowley was desperately short of money, but no-one was interested. He was out of favour among the conjuring classes, and the papers were bored with him. Eventually a copy of this manuscript turned up at the International limes, and a sub-editor there passed it on to me, in return for a complete set of Mars Attacks! cards. Unlike most of the fools whose hands the manuscript passed through, I actually read it from end to end, and I am here to tell you, my friends ... this is the answer to all our prayers. A direct means to our much desired end."
"God, you love the sound of your own voice, " said Henry. "What is it, Mark? Not just another grimoire, I hope."
Mark was still grinning widely. "One chapter in this manuscript describes a particularly powerful spell, or Working, that Crowley began but never dared finish. And let us not forget, Crowley dared a lot. He started the Working, to summon and bind to his will a most powerful Being, but abandoned the ritual after catching a glimpse of just what it was he was attempting to summon. Beautiful, terrible, he wrote ... and that was all. He ran away from his splendid home on the bank of a Scottish loch, and never returned."
"Hold everything," said Charles. "We're supposed to attempt something that was too scary and too dangerous for Aleister Crowleyl Called by many, not least himself, the Most Evil Man in the World?"
"Ah," Mark said smugly, "but we will succeed where he failed, because I have knowledge that Crowley lacked. I recently acquired a sheaf of letters from an ex-friend of Kenneth Anger, in which the writer positively identifies which spirit Crowley was trying to summon, and the means whereby it can be safely controlled. My friends, we have the means to summon up and bind to our will the Transient Being known as Babalon; a physical incarnation of an abstract ideal."
"Which ideal?" said Henry.
"All right, I'm still working on that," Mark admitted. "Depending on how you translate certain parts of the letters, the Being is either the personification of love, or lust, or obsession. Or perhaps even some combination of the three. Look, does it really matter? We've been searching for a power source, something we could use as a weapon to bring about change, and this is it!"
"What if it backfires?" said Charles. "This doesn't sound like the kind of magic you can afford to make mistakes with."
"What if we get found out?" said Henry. "Ambition is all very well, but we do have our careers to think of."
Mark glared at them both. "It's not enough to talk the talk; you have to be prepared to walk the walk! Anything worth having entails risks. We're not going to overthrow the Authorities with just good intentions!"
Henry sniffed, unconvinced. "Are you sure about the provenance of the letters, Mark? Are you sure they contain everything we're going to need?"
"Yes and yes," said Mark. "Now are you in, or out?"
"We'll need somewhere secure for the Working," Henry said thoughtfully. "I may know somewhere ... leave it with me. Charles?"
"I want to study the manuscript, and the letters, first," said Charles. "And I want enough time to do some research of my own. Make sure of what it is we're getting ourselves into ... But if it all checks out... Yes. We have to do this. We'd be fools not to seize an opportunity like this."
The vision changed abruptly, now showing the three young men looking around what seemed to be an empty warehouse. Shafts of gaudy neon light streaming through boarded-up windows revealed a large open space, with bare floor-boards and walls plastered over with peeling posters for long-forgotten rock groups and political organisations, dagon shall rise again! declared a particularly faded example. The walls also featured large crude paintings of flowers and rainbows and the occasional exaggerated male and female genitalia. There were waxy candle stubs and scuffed-out chalk-markings all over the floor. Henry looked around the place with a certain pride. Mark stalked back and forth, pointing out things of interest, burning with nervous energy. Charles was leaning his back against the securely closed door, jotting things down in a thick notebook, scowling heavily.
"It's damp, it smells, and I can hear what I really hope are just rats in the walls," he said heavily, without looking up from his notebook. "And I have a horrible suspicion I'm standing on a used condom, but I'm afraid to raise my foot and look. Honestly, Henry, is this the best you could do? How much are we paying for this dump?"
"Practically nothing," Henry said smoothly. "The owner owes me a favour. It's not that bad ... All right, it is that bad, but then we're not planning to live here, are we?"
"What's the history?" said Mark. "Anything that might interfere with what we're planning?"
"The history is dubious, bordering on squalid, but nothing that need concern us," said Henry. "I came here a few years ago, with a girl I knew then. Jessica something. The owner rents this place out for new groups to show off their stuff, and the occasional hippie happening. Whole room is probably permeated with drug residues. Try not to breathe too heavily, and don't lick the walls."
"I can honestly say the thought had never occurred to me," said Charles. "Though I'm now having a hard time forcing it out of my mind. How long have we got the room for?"
"We'll have the whole building for ten days," said Henry. "More than sufficient."
"And in a dodgy neighbourhood like this, no-one is going to stick their nose in and ask questions," said Mark, rubbing
his hands together briskly. "Perfect!"
Henry looked at Charles. "Are you happy about this? You've hardly left the Michael Scott Library for the past week. Did you turn up anything we ought to know about?"
Charles scowled. "Not really. The Babalon Working is nothing new. It's been around for ages, in one form or another. There's quite a bit about it in Dr. Dee's The Sigillum Aemeth, and of course Babalon is mentioned in the Book of Revelations, and not in a good way. The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that it's a very dangerous undertaking. I can't find a single report of anyone completing the ritual successfully."
"That's because they didn't have the information in my letters!" said Mark. "Come on, we have to do this! We can't turn back now! Not when we're so close to everything we ever dreamed of!"
"It's up to you, Charles," said Henry, ignoring Mark. "You're the brains. Do we go ahead, or not?"
Charles thought for a long moment, then shrugged. "Oh hell. Let's do it."
They were all very young then. It's important to remember that.
The vision changed again, to show us the Babalon Working. Only edited highlights, of course, but it was still pretty impressive. The lengthy ritual was designed to summon, hold, and physically incarnate one of the Transient Beings; not just a demon or spirit, but one of the real Powers and Dominations. The living embodiment of an abstract concept, in this case love or lust or sexual obsession. (Babalon was an old, old name, and no two sources could agree on exactly what it represented.) The three young men saw it only as a weapon they could use against those they perceived as the villains of the day, and those in the Authorities who might try to obstruct the forthcoming changes. The three young men were determined not to be stopped. They would bring about freedom by force, if necessary. Like most fanatics, they were blind to irony, and even if they had seen it, they probably wouldn't have cared. They were doing this for the greater good, after all.
The Babalon Working involved days of fasting for all three men, and almost continual chanting, drawing circles and pentagrams on the floor, and protective sigils and wards on the walls, along with the regular ingestion of sacred herbs and drugs. They guzzled thirstily at bottled water and sweated it all out again as they stamped then-way through ritual dances. They weren't allowed to sleep, or even rest. By the end of the sixth day they were all looking pretty ragged round the edges. They worked naked now, stinking from dried sweat and the human wastes that piled up in the room's corners. Their eyes were red and staring, their voices hoarse and pained from the endless chants, and their hands shook so badly the sigils they drew had to be traced over and over again to get them right. They were beyond hunger, beyond thirst, chemicals roaring through their veins, expanded thoughts clamouring in their minds. They staggered in spiral patterns across a floor covered in chalk-marks of all shapes and colours, timing the rhythm of their ragged voices to the pounding of their bare feet on the bare boards. They were half out of their minds, half out of the world, pushing their thoughts by brute force into another level of reality, until finally they found what they were looking for.
Or it found them. It was much bigger than they'd thought, bigger than they could bear, but they held their nerve. They retreated to the physical plane of existence, calling it after them, and it followed them home. That ancient Force, that terrible female principle known as Babalon. The three men could feel it drawing closer, and a new strength pounded through their racked bodies and raw voices. Their minds snapped into sharp focus as their intent crystallised, and Babalon grew clearer in their linked thoughts. She was indeed beautiful and terrible, and intoxicating in her power.
And that was when it all went wrong. Horribly wrong. An inhuman howl filled the warehouse, resonating in every physical surface, as the entity known as Babalon was suddenly thrust aside by something else; something far more powerful. Somehow it had detected the opening between the planes of existence and seized the opportunity to manifest in Babalon's place. The Transient Being was forced back, for all its power, and this new thing came forward in its place. The whole warehouse shook, the walls bending and twisting. The three men were thrown around like rag dolls, until they were left clinging to the shuddering floor like mariners on a raft, all their carefully traced circles and pentagrams and wards nothing more than chalk-dust, meaningless in the face of the unknown Force that was incarnating. Something impossibly old and powerful, terrifying, bewildering, something that had been banned from the material world since time out of time, but was now forcing its way back into reality. There was a blast of unbearable light, the sound of all the birds in the world singing at once, as Something impossibly vast and complicated compressed itself into physical existence. The three men clung together, helpless in the face of what they had allowed back into the world. They caught a glimpse of something that was denied to those of us watching the vision, and they all cried out miserably in shock and horror, like children discovering that there are monsters in the dark, after all. And then the Power they had let in erupted out of the warehouse, smashing contemptuously through the walls and the wards marked on them, out and loose in the Nightside.
The whole warehouse was blown apart, and all the buildings surrounding it for a three-block radius. Massive fires raged among the ruins, reducing everyone who lived there to little more than bone and ash. Hundreds died. Nobody could be sure exactly how many. The only survivors were Henry Walker, Mark Robinson, and Charles Taylor, who staggered dazed but unhurt from the smouldering remains of the warehouse. They had been spared, though they didn't know why. They were in shock, most of their memories gone. No-one ever suspected what they'd tried to do, and what they'd actually done. They themselves only remembered after some time had passed. Bits and pieces came back to them, but by then it was far too late to say or do anything. Whatever they had unleashed had gone to ground in the Nightside, and all the people whose deaths they had caused would not be brought back by explanations or apologies. So in the end, they said nothing.
They waited fearfully for a long time, for some sign of whatever they'd let loose, but all went on as it had before, and as the months passed with no unusual reports or warnings, the three young men came to believe that just maybe they had dodged the bullet after all. That the incarnation hadn't taken, and the Power hadn't been able to maintain its presence in the physical world. Henry and Mark congratulated themselves on their lucky escape, but Charles wasn't so sure. He haunted library after library, digging through their deepest stacks in search of old knowledge, trying to make sense of what had happened. And when he couldn't, he went to the others and told them they had to speak out. To warn the Authorities about what might still be out there, somewhere.
Henry and Mark couldn't have that. They decided they had no choice but to discredit Charles, to save themselves. So they started a whispering campaign, the gist of which was that Charles had caused the warehouse area disaster through following his own private, unsanctioned researches. There was no proof, of course, and no charges were ever brought, but Charles's career in the Authorities was finished. He resigned just ahead of being fired and went into private research. He took every paying job going, using the money to continue his own ongoing research, to discover just what he'd been a part of. He became very successful, as the years passed, and kept his obsession strictly private.
The three ex-friends went their own separate ways, each blaming the others for the Working's failure. Walker's position was that the ritual was just too dangerous and should never have been attempted. He stayed on in the Authorities, working for reform from within. He became obsessed with Getting On, rising higher and higher in the ranks. Mark left the Authorities and became the Collector, as obsessed in his own way as the others. And so the years passed, and three no-longer-young men made new lives for themselves.
The vision returned to Henry Walker and Pretty Poison drinking their tea in the Willow Tree. And after such an intense ride, I think all of us were glad of the break. We watched as Walker freshened Pretty Poison's cup. He always
was a gentleman.
"That was all a long time ago," Walker said, in answer to some unheard comment. "We were all different people then."
"Did you ever find out exactly what it was that crashed your Working?" said Pretty Poison, sipping her tea with style and grace.
"No more questions," said Walker. "I've already told you far more than I should. Why are you here, Sophia?"
She smiled at him over her cup. "There are those who say John's mother is coming back."
"Then God help us all."
"Why would she be coming back now, Henry? What is her connection with John's current case?"
For a moment I thought Walker would just order her to leave, or even summon his people and have her dragged away, but the strength seemed to seep right out of him, as though he'd been carrying the burden for far too long and just didn't care any more. He sat back in his chair, looking suddenly old as well as tired, and his eyes were lost in yesterday.
"Mark set it all in motion," he said finally, his voice flat, almost empty. "Back when he introduced Charles to his wife-to-be. I prefer, however, to believe he didn't really know what he was doing. That he was being ... used. By then, he was the Collector. Revered, or despised, depending on whom you talked to. Charles was a research specialist, almost a hermit. He called Mark, in his capacity as the Collector, looking for a research assistant to help him in his very narrow field. (Was that Charles's idea, I wonder, or did some Voice whisper in his ear?) By that time, Charles was investigating the beginnings of the Nightside, using all the money he'd made to fund his new obsession. Mark consulted with various experts, for an exorbitant fee, and finally presented Charles with a young lady called Fennella Davis. An up-and-coming young scholar with an excellent reputation, pretty and bright and articulate, and also very interested in the origins of the Nightside. Soon enough, she and Charles were in love, then they were married."
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