by Paul Magrs
‘You were sent to be schooled as have generations of Soamses. You were sent there for a particular purpose.’
‘I see,’ I said, though I didn’t at all.
‘You were sent there so as to be untrammelled by workaday morality. So that your spirit would be free and open to the universe.’
Her words discomfited me. She seemed so passionate and earnest. People of my generation were always put off by talk that grew too earnest. Magda and I belonged to that peer group that came between the two world wars and we were determined not to let anything matter as much as all that.
What could I say to this old woman? Protest that my spirit was indeed unfettered? I baulked at such words.
‘You were put there to be educated properly. To venerate the name of the Lord of This World.’
Well, that was easy to take on board. I had never questioned the religion of my upbringing, though I had perhaps, neglected it of late.
‘You have chosen one of the uninitiated as your bride-to-be,’ said Great Aunt Helen, calmly licking a stamp. ‘Even you must realise that she will have to be brought in.’
My throat was dry. ‘Of course.’ I was shocked to hear how she took it all so seriously. I had no idea what to be ‘brought in’ entailed. I thought, with no living relative apart from my haggard aunt, I had escaped all trappings of tradition. Apparently not.
She nodded at me with some satisfaction. ‘There will be a gathering. Here. This Saturday night. People will come from all corners to attend. We can have Magda initiated then. Since you are so set upon taking her as your bride.’ Her expression was rather fierce at this and I knew I couldn’t argue. ‘You will inform her, Fox. You will let her know what is likely to happen to her.’
‘Very well,’ I acquiesced. The details, however, were somewhat hazy to me. I cursed myself for never having paid much attention to my divinity classes.
My Great Aunt Helen’s face softened and, for a moment, I could imagine that she gazed on me almost fondly. ‘One more thing, Fox. To do with what I told you last night. When I was in the midst of my … distress.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘It is to do with the pressure on my brain. That is the most urgent of my concerns. The demon in possession of my immortal soul is making himself a rather uncomfortable lodger. You must help me relieve myself of that encumbrance.’
I was an idiot. ‘Indeed?’
‘During the Saturday night ceremony. As my closest living blood relation on this earthly plane. You must take the sacred implement and punch a hole into my skull. Help me bleed the excess spirit away. The Brethren will, of course, coach you through the exact procedure.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see.’
‘You don’t mind, do you, dear? I realise that it sounds rather grisly …’
‘No, no, not at all …’
‘But it has, as I’ve said, become a rather pressing matter.’ She took up her fountain pen with a flourish, preparing to dismiss me from her presence. ‘It really is quite straightforward. Our family have been opening up their skulls for generations. That is what keeps us open to the universe. To the divine word and breath of the Lord of This World himself.’
I smiled. ‘Quite,’ I said.
‘Well, off you toddle.’ She smiled benignly. ‘You hurry off and tell that little strumpet of yours what a treat she has in store for her, hm?’
So then I turned on my heel and left my great aunt to her stack of correspondence. The study door snicked shut at my heels. I was alone in the gloom of the corridor, my mind a sickening whirl. It was Thursday now. Saturday sounded as if it was going to be rather hectic.
And all of a sudden I felt like screaming.
So.
You come again to hear another of my fireside tales. You draw up your chair and hold out your balloon glass so expectantly, ready for these heady fumes.
Let us sit together in this stifling warm study air. And you profess not to enjoy stories like these. You believe you credit them with no truth nor validity in this rational age. But here you are back.
How I reel you in. Just as I did when I was a bestseller. When sturdy businessmen bought me at airport stalls and sat in a chill sweat of fear in air-conditioned and pressurised cabins, high above the earth. Or housewives, at home at the kitchen table, neglecting their daily chores for the sake of gobbling up every morsel I lovingly prepared for them. All that Satanism, all that witchcraft. Oh, they knew what they were getting when they sat down to listen to my voice. Just as, years later, cinema audiences came to sit in the dark and watch my terrible tales unspool on the smutty gauze of the screen. Boys and girls would clutch each other on the back row, chilled to the bone as adepts and ghosthunters stalked each other through the thousand wicked nights of my imagination. Those hormones stirred and thrilled and trembled in pleasure palaces the world over. A million gropings and fingerings went on in my name and the fear I inspired. A great deal of unharnessed naughtiness was spurred and engendered by plots set in motion by me.
Oh, though I sought to warn the world of the devil’s dark motives, my stories themselves pushed my audience to give into their fears, their desires, their wildest dreams. I got them all going. I got them to give in.
Just as you have. Coming to sit here, beside me again.
You want to know more. Like they all do. And I, decrepit raconteur, savouring my brandy, thinking back to where we got to in this latest, oldest tale, I let my hampered mind drift back and back on the eddies and tides of myriad ironies …
Ah. I’d had my little interview with Aunt Helen. In this very room. At that very walnut desk. Didn’t I tell you that one day I would inherit the manor?
But you have a modern sensibility. Not for you some long and weighty exegesis on witchcraft and the cabbalistic tradition. If you are interested you will simply insert a few key words into a – what do you call them? A search engine? – and pull out a few bizarre and probably misinformed virtual documents. Then you might learn how Satan had come to be Lord of This World. And how some people come to follow the Left Hand Path, as they call it. Or you might consult these volumes in this study of mine. Everything you might need is right here. Grimoires, everything. Books you might not come across or even be able to request in your local lottery-sponsored Millennium library. All of the important works are, of course, in private hands.
You want to be pressing on with the story. You want to involve yourself in the human element: the character-driven plot. And why shouldn’t you? Why shouldn’t you want to learn how my sweetheart took the news that she was, within the next two days, to be somehow initiated?
Of her own account, she had grown nosy and intrigued that morning. She was that kind of girl and that was one of the reasons I wanted her. She was just the type – resourceful, independent, thoroughly, thoroughly modern in every way – to support me in my literary endeavours and (I felt sure) my marvellously successful career as a writer of popular novels.
While I had been consulting my Great Aunt Helen, Magda had been browsing in the library. Now, she wasn’t really one for books (as I was to discover) but sheer boredom and irksomeness that morning in the stately pile had driven her to the extreme measure of plucking out several hidebound volumes and glancing through them in the hope of finding something marginally distracting. She had flicked, first sighing, exasperated by page after page of impenetrable text, and then she felt herself compelled to look further. To look at the pictures, to scan through the writing itself. My Magda was shocked, awed, appalled.
I found her red-cheeked and hissing. ‘These books are absolutely filthy!’ She thrust one example under my nose. It quivered in her grasp and I could see a large number of other, similar volumes, splayed open on the table behind her. ‘Your aunty hasn’t got a single decent book in this whole place. They are all utterly vile.’
I was attempting to focus on a black and white etching on the page she held shaking before me. In that plate, a number of winged beasts were circling around a naked and corpulent wom
an. One of them appeared to be squatting on her, but that was about all I could make out.
‘Rare editions,’ I said, paling under Magda’s affronted gaze. ‘My family has made a habit of collecting them up.’
She wasn’t about to let ancestry and tradition assuage her. Collecting up big houses with neatly-laid grounds and respectable treasures was one thing. Dirty old books were quite another.
Magda was seething. ‘I knew it. She is a nasty old woman. All that crying out in the night. These evil books …’ Suddenly I saw that my beloved was looking rather frightened. I wanted to gather her up in my arms and smother her back into normality. ‘I don’t want to stay here, Fox. I can’t sleep in a place like this.’
Her eyes looked rather wild then. It was as if she was realising what kind of reception was awaiting her, should she go running back to her parents. It was without the blessing of her rather common grocer father that she had come to me and become my common-law wife. It would be hard on her to return to them, disgraced. For a moment she looked stricken and I knew what she was thinking.
But she wouldn’t have to leave me. She was all mine. I would protect her. All she had seen was my eccentric great aunt’s admittedly strange collection of books. Nothing to get the wind up about. Certainly nothing to flee from.
I held my Magda tight. Pushing her face into my neck. I stroked her soft, fragrant hair. I felt the warm wetness of her tears on my flesh. I let her sob gently and, when she was calm again, braced by my strength and my common sense, I told her: ‘There may be one or two things I need to explain to you, my darling.’
Maybe you can’t credit the innocence of my darling Magda back then? If only you had met her in her youth. She was quite something. She was like dew on the furled and fleshy whorls of white lilies. That distinct, almost too stuffy and sweet scent. The kind of purity that’s just about teetering over into rank corruption.
She became horribly fascinated by the Left Hand Path, of course. You’ve guessed as much from what I have said before in my interviews and my various bestselling memoirs. She was hooked from that very first day when I – callow, stuttering buffoon that I was – explained to her my family’s tradition and closely-guarded secret sidelines. She was – shall we say – agog.
Agog is one of my favourite words, incidentally. It’s how I like my audience to be and it has about it a certain ring of the old gods, eh? Gog, Magog, Agog. These are the words of a shaman, inspired by divine fire, plugged into the real life of the world.
This is why I have always felt as if I were in the very centre of the world. Wherever we went upon the surface of the globe – book tours, lecture tours, exotic adventurings undertaken for profit and fun – we always felt that we were the locus mundi. Magda was always by my side, from that very first trip to Great Aunt Helen’s pile to the fateful day of her death. All the invisible eyes were trained upon us, as were all the vibrations on the ether.
With that weekend approaching, it really felt as if we had become the centre of things. There came a flurry of telegrams, of cryptic messages in code, announcing the imminent arrival of her Saturday guests. Aunt Helen would receive these at breakfast, smile in a self-satisfied way, and then crumple them up. A great air of expectancy was sweeping through the old house, stirring up the old servants into activity, causing them to call on other servants and soon a frenetic pace was established in the draughty halls. You could hear them in the kitchens, bashing and clashing and preparing a banquet. Delivery vans slid up on the gravel at the back of the manor. We saw them carrying whole pigs and lambs indoors. One van brought wicker cages containing live beasts – goats and chickens. They sounded alarmed and doomed in that brief moment of daylight between van and cellar kitchen. These live creatures disconcerted Magda and I when we peered out of our bedroom window to see what the ruckus was. We had a feeling we knew what they were for.
Soon, as Saturday drew near, Aunt Helen’s guests started to arrive. Sleek black cars were pulling up on the drive. Impressive, expensive cars with tinted windows and little flags on their front fenders. Flags of all nations. It was like a secret summit meeting. The servants ushered these guests into the building quickly, before we could get a good look at them. The place was large enough for them to be installed before we bumped into them. Guest after guest after guest. Most ducked in swiftly, as if nervous of being observed. They were furtive, and we peered out and glimpsed the vivid peacock colours of saris; the lightly flowing robes of Middle Eastern gentlemen, and the dove-grey and ebony regalia of Nazi officers. Magda and I were a little shocked at who was being welcomed into our future home.
Of Great Aunt Helen, the gracious hostess, there was no sign. Her distinguished multicultured visitors were taken in and presumably urged to make the place their own. All of them seemed to know and to understand the routine. Magda and I didn’t.
In later years it was Magda who knew more about the occult than I did. Indeed, she proved the more susceptible to its wicked charms and had I not had my native fortitude and strength of mind, she may have been damned forever. I was her rock. And at least I know she is in paradise waiting for me. I salvaged her soul, if nothing else.
The first tangible evidence of her lifelong fascination came with her enthusiasm for the rather shapeless black satin robes with which we were presented by one of the servants. He explained that they were the required uniform for the Saturday night proceedings and then he left us with the things. We’d been taking a spin in the country that Saturday afternoon, intending to keep ourselves out of everyone’s hair and, when we returned, the place was thrumming along with all these polite strangers. We sought solace in our room and had been surprised by this gift of new outfits, folded neatly at the bottom of our bed like satanic guest towels.
‘His-and-hers,’ Magda said, pulling a face. ‘Your Great Aunt Helen thinks of everything. She must have known that we’d forget to pack our ceremonial robes.’
Something clutched at my heart. It was the way Magda managed to sound so breezy and blithe. She’d had the wind through her auburn hair and the fresh Norfolk air had put two spots of red on her creamy pale cheeks. My beloved was treating all of these preparations like they belonged to some ridiculous game. A charade; an elaborate fancy dress party. Somewhere below us there was a band tuning up. They were making weird, unearthly sounds, distorted by the eccentric twists and turns of the ancient corridors and I couldn’t begin to imagine what kind of instruments they were using.
‘Darling,’ I said, watching her hold up the black robes. She smoothed them over her svelte form, gazing critically at herself in the looking glass. ‘I rather think this is more serious than you imagine. Aunt Helen means what she says. About the … um, initiation.’
Magda shot me a strange, ironic look.
‘You see,’ I stammered, ‘I think I’ve managed to get us into this pretty deep.’
She came over and punched me lightly on the shoulder. ‘Oh, shut up, Fox. It might be amusing. Just a load of her funny friends dancing about in frocks. I’m rather glad to hear that the old girl still has some life in her. It’s better than sitting over another of those interminable dinners of hers.’ Suddenly her green, tigerish eyes widened. ‘I say, you don’t think there’ll be an orgy, do you?’ Then she started struggling out of her outer garments and working out how to go about slipping into the donated black robes. I pointed out that one was supposed to be completely naked underneath.
‘Oh!’ she cried, delightedly. ‘Been to one of these do’s before, have you? Sly old Fox?’
I coloured. ‘School assemblies.’
She was stripping with great gusto by now. She looked at me quizzically. ‘That school of yours begins to sound stranger and stranger.’
‘I thought every school was like that,’ I said glumly. ‘Now I realise that we were quite unique.’
Magda was standing in the bright light of the opened curtains. There were golden motes of dust swimming between us. I was staring at her pale, shapely body and I was growing arou
sed as she unlaced the last of her vestments.
‘They will ask you to do certain things,’ I said. ‘During the initiation. And you must perform them. Once the sacred ceremony is underway, you must obey.’
Magda shrugged. ‘In for a penny,’ she smiled. ‘I’m a game girl.’
It was I, I realised, who was having all the qualms. ‘I’m not sure I can stand to see other men looking at you … touching you …’ This was very hard for me to say. It went against all of my conditioning. I wasn’t supposed to think of her as a possession. She was as free a spirit as I. I shook my head to clear it. ‘I am afraid I may become rather jealous.’
Magda smiled indulgently.
‘I know I shouldn’t feel like this,’ I choked. ‘I shouldn’t seek to restrain you … any more than you would dream of restraining me … men and women are equal in wills and potential, I know …’
She stepped up to me, into my clumsy embrace, allowing me to take hold of her. ‘You silly thing, Fox,’ she murmured. ‘You know I am yours. Now, get your black satin robes on and you’ll feel much better about it all.’ She pulled back, gazed at me and, as she often did, in order to puncture my seriousness, pulled on my nose. ‘There’s something very interesting going on here, Fox. I can sense it. At first I was somewhat shocked at finding those books in the library. But I see now that I was simply being prudish and bourgeois. I was reacting as my father would, or my mother. But we are different, Fox. We really have to learn to give ourselves up to novel experiences. Isn’t that what marriage is all about?’
I was wondering if she would be singing the same tune come midnight.
‘Come on, Fox,’ she said. ‘You’re the one who wants to be a writer. You need material! You need adventures! You have to look life in the face and be open to all of it!’
