Chaos Magic (8 page)

Chapter 20

BLACK TIDE

As I made my sorry way back towards Hammersmith Bridge the phrase,
‘til tide turns
- seemed to mark time with each step of my progress. Eventually I was able to reach a track and then a road and although I kept looking over my shoulder for a bus that might bear me back to my lodgings in order to get changed from my damp shoes and socks, none passed me by until I was putting my foot on the first few yards of the bridge itself and of course here there were no bus stops.

Down below I saw that although the tide had receded, the stacking effect of the highest of tides coupled with the fluvial flow caused by heavy rains over the Thames Valley, meant that the brown and debris filled river water was running fast, like the plug had been pulled somewhere down stream.

Halfway across the there were several wooden benches built into the super-structure and for no other reason than I was exhausted I availed myself of one. Exhausted
and
weirded-out, not just by the small explosions of alkaloid induced sensation detonating on the periphery of my consciousness, but a dawning certainty that a unwished for future was approaching my sad shack of a life, like a runaway express train – and here I was powerless to act, with my life, everyone’s lives, Lorna’s life – soon to be matchwood.

The sky was the silver and blue backcloth to a multitude of baguette shaped clouds that were marching north-west, beneath me billions of cubic tons of river water were rushing away to the distant estuary and then the ocean beyond; I by contrast was going nowhere, anchored to a spot dealt to me by random fate, high above Eliot’s and Blake’s river of dreams, searching for my fallen angel – lost somewhere between heaven and earth. Lorna, Lorna, Lorna.

Despite the beauty of the moment, the dance of creation, the hope that is always manifested in life itself and the glory of the natural world – I felt that I was being lowered into a deep and dark tomb, from which I would certainly never emerge. I remembered the graffiti I had seen on the night I had been given the key to the tower in Mortlake by Alan -
Don’t let the dark past eat you up
, were the words, and back then they had struck a chord of hope – now there was none. It pinged-off back on the riverbank when someone flipped the hourglass on me, an infernal gear meshed and the golden trans-dimensional porpoise of love departed from the tainted, turd-molested waters of the Thames...

The only message I had heard was one of doom so I checked my man-bag for something that might help all this make sense - and it was there. The paperback version of
the Alembic Valise
; I thumbed through the pages until I found the description of where
JoKanu
shows up, or rather an etheric hologram of
JoKanu
, a paradoxical figure whose appearance is the foreshadowing of a redemptive event, a moment of retrieval that is open to all mankind.

I read:

There is a tower to the east made of glass and titanium – it serves as a pylon for the ingress of demonic entities. And another to the west where angel magic once unsealed divine forces; but that was centuries ago. Between these twin pylons the voodoo ray will arc when it is midnight on earth, then JoKanu will sail away and from the depths new outriders will emerge.

At this time - the bells of the abandoned tower between vineyard and tinderbox - must once again awaken the sleeper. The taproot of the Yddrasil runs deep beneath the London soil.

It was cryptic, to say the least but it was also all I had to go on. The tower in Mortlake, I reasoned, was once a magical weapon – and this Wesak it would be again. For tonight was Tuesday and according to Alan was the practice night for the bell ringers of the parish. That would be the beginning, and then I would have to find
Jokanu
himself to guide me to my station in tonight’s battleground, for it seemed that contrary to tradition, Wesak was happening right here and not in some Himalayan ‘La la’.

Beneath the soil of London runs the taproot of the World Tree
– I thought, I read it in a book.

I must have nodded off because flickering eyelids revealed a sepia sky; a smoky pelmet of rain swept in. The tangled cloudscape fashioned itself into an avian cryptid with the face of Nosferatu’s cousin-fucking cousin. I stuffed my book into my bag and ran, feeling the suspension bridge moving under my feet.

No matter, I told myself recalling the line: I intend to live forever – or die trying. Above the handrail things were bad but down below I saw in the gloom a number of boats moored. I galloped the final yards and lunged down the stone steps to the embankment. My intention was to shelter beneath the bridge before Beelzebub gained traction; the gale issuing from the underpass swiftly banished that notion so instead I walked briskly along the floodwall towards the boats that were bobbing gaily up and down in the tempest.

There is no
JoKanu
. Only the constellated sentience of mankind and the retrieval opportunity for a kind of redemptive dharma to remember to remember itself and shift energy from the world-egg’s solar plexus chakra - to it’s heart’s. And yet an equal progenitor to the
JoKanu
current was the one foreshadowed by the appearance of the avian cryptid.

There is no
Jokanu
, I repeated, a refrain of the departed spirits of the river. The cold power of
the
Blake Organisation
was cranking up to subvert the God-given energy of the Wesak. Their use of Chaos Magic had swiftly brought them to a tipping point, where the redemptive remedy for the pure blasphemic evil that they were unleashing could never be found.

I kept walking, not knowing where to or even why, any more, past shuttered boathouses, past the boats wildly rocking on their moorings, the only sound the clacking of flagpoles and the low drone of the wind. Where the floodwall ended the high waters had deposited the usual tidal debris on the path. I skirted around the lager items – bits of tree, old oil cans – a child’s toy boat caught my eye and on impulse I stooped and picked it up. It was a yellow plastic canoe, snapped in half; on the prow I was able to read the name –
Jokanu
, and see the symbol of the all-seeing eye. If, at that moment, I was the kind of fellow who might easily fall to his knees, weeping and crying out that all was lost, I would have done so. I was not that fellow. My response was to turn my tearless cheek into the diminishing gale and gaze upwards whilst silently and impudently asking whichever deity was presiding over my own particular shonky life – what the merry fuck?

It was then that I heard the bells, their discordant peals coming around the bend in the river to be delivered to my ears by some uncanny auditory phenomenon. The tintinabulists of Mortlake were unleashing ‘Hell’s Bells’ and part one of the final battle was beginning.

I followed the tidal slipway, an ancient causeway of granite cobbles, across the mud and down to the low water; it was still seething but just a comparative trickle. The tide had once again turned. The sound of the bells ebbed and flowed in the windings of the wind as the spiral processes both metrological and trans-dimensional paused between exhalation and inhalation. I dropped
Jokanu
into the water.

When I lifted my eyes from the tidal dregs that were boiling around the rocks at my feet and looked out across the river, I saw coming round the bend, out in midstream, a boat. Instinctively I raised my arm and began to wave.

At first I just dumbly stared at the approaching boat as I stood on the greasy causeway cursing my luck. I waved again and then when my greeting was reciprocated I began to get the message that beneath the event horizon of my own dumb ego, something momentous was emerging. Finally I saw that it was Detective Z out there in midstream and that he was doing more than waving – he was shouting, but the wind took his words away leaving me to guess as to his meaning. Then I divined that he was aboard
the Alembic Valise
. How, I had no idea, but there he was nevertheless.

Getting aboard
the Alembic Valise
was not going to be simple because all the jetties along that stretch of river were high and dry in the mud and although the causeway had once been used in medieval times to cross the river, wading out and taking my chances in the fluvial flow, albeit much reduced at that point, was not something I was willing to try.

However, by dint of my imaginative response to adversity, only minutes later
I scrambled on board. I had managed to get myself onto the Chiswick Eeyot and then from there, using of all things a stolen surfboard, paddle frantically across the thirty feet of fast-flowing open water to be deposited onto the slippery deck of
the Alembic Valise
.

“Permission to come aboard, Captain?” I had flippantly enquired.

“Denied,” said Detective Z. “But you seem to be here anyway, ye scurvy scum.”

Chapter 21

THE ENERGY OF SLAVES

It was to be a six-hour ceremony. A dozen veves were already traced on the black marble floor, including: the Bucket of Blood – a representation of a dagger embedded in the heart; the Coffin – the magical cabinet of Dieucifer; and the Black Hole - over which was positioned the table, already prepared for the ritual offering.

Astral energies would be focused by the apex of the glass pyramid under which the final operation would take place and then the spectral components repurposed in order to energize the adherents of the serpent, and the serpents themselves, who were no longer sleeping beneath their silk shrouds but uncoiling and slithering languidly within the confines of the glass tanks.

Upon reaching its climax the ceremony would deliver the Omega Paradigm to the manifest world and from that moment all traffic between worlds would be within the domain of the
Vertical Abyss
– effectively reducing the existence of those excluded from the ‘citadel of repression’ to that of slaves, forever trapped in beta world.

In an anteroom Lorna was being prepared – her eyelids were painted purple and there was gunpowder beneath her fingernails. She herself was already deep within the Loa, held there by the action of the deadly nightshade –
Burundanga
, which Eddie had administered and then re-administered to her on three occasions. But there was movement, although below the threshold of detection, as Lorna was moving within a field of light towards her own Ogun – a matrix of energies that would be both her refuge and her battle station.

Eddie strode through the Great Hall. It was now quiet as candles were lit and all other lighting subdued, the storm raging outside unseen and unheard within the shuttered pyramid. He was fully appraised of the meaning and importance of Wesak, the yearly relighting of mankind’s connection with spiritual illumination, cosmic fire, the Icarus Paradigm - that was played out as part of the ancient yearly cycle, when the ignition of hope and redemption became possible for mankind like an offering not to the gods, the old gods, but from them.

But tonight this must not happen – if the firebrand was to be snatched from the bonfires of eternity it would not be for the people of this earth, it would be for the adherents of the
Brotherhood of the Serpent
. And these dark pilgrims on the downwards road would then use the isotope they had stolen, to navigate the Tunnels of Set where Quilothic and demonic entities were lurking; waiting to cross over into the mauve zone, their aeons of banishment would be ended and once again they would tread upon the earth.

Eddie also knew that giant semi-aquatic carnivores who usually snack on fish, rodents, birds, dogs or very occasionally people, are best kept on the right side of the dividing line between famished and sated, when expected to participate in social occasions where the other participants are keen to be excluded from the menu. With this algorithm in mind he had the unconscious personage of the old oxygen thief brought down with the idea of feeding him to the Anacondas. The handler was agitated by the suggestion, saying that a couple of live rats would be sufficient, but Eddie insisted that it was Alan’s turn to die.

“Interfering old fuck,” he said and had his men dump the inert Alan in the nearest tank.

He watched for a while and then stalked off in disgust after the larger of the two anacondas failed to erupt into a gastronomic frenzy but simply chewed on the old man’s leg for a couple of minutes before sliding away to the other end of the tank.

“Take him out and throw him down the chute,” he ordered.

His men moved to obey, to cast the old man into the deep pit that the
Vertical Abyss
straddled, where the detritus of
the Blake Organisation’s
activities was flushed away into oblivion.

Simon Magus was off taking a nap before the big occasion so Eddie headed for the anteroom to watch as Lorna was anointed with scented oil of his own choosing. Ambergris and patchouli were the main components of a fragrance that was formulated to inflame and produce waves of euphoric olfactory pleasure throughout the rite, at least for him. As the masseur worked the amber liquid into Lorna’s torso and limbs Eddie found that he was simply unable to watch, such was the frisson of excitement rising through the quick of his being.

He was mesmerised by the rise and fall of her breasts, by the proportions of her hands and feet, by the splendor of her brow. She - the priestess of Isis who would soon bend to his will. He rubbed his right eye; his tick had reasserted itself due to fatigue, the eyelid flickering uncontrollably. He rubbed again, this time harder, but it did no good.

In the end he took the elevator to his own quarters to imbibe Cuervo Gold and fine Columbian in order to cool down sufficiently until the appointed hour arrived.