Satan Wants Me (12 page)

‘Please leave us our book,’ says Neufer-Ka-Ptah.

‘We who are dead have more need of it than you,’ says his wife.

‘It would be sacrilege to take it,’ he adds.

‘I have to take it,’ I reply. ‘It is what I have come for.’ (Dimly I am conscious of other voices beside me, echoing my words.)

‘We shall play for it,’ says the wizard calmly and his wife places a squared board at the foot of the wizard’s slab. I do not want to play, but I must. I play and I lose, but I insist on another game. I lose again. The third game shall be the determinant. However, I lose this one too. No one can win against sorcery. So I shall take the book anyway.

I scoop up the book and I hurry up the steep and narrow passageway. The gibbering of the corpses becomes fainter behind me. By the time I find my way to the Temple precinct of Memphis, it is morning. Baboons look down from the roof of the Temple. A young maiden, Tbubi, approaches and displays her body to me. She invites me to kiss her nipples and this I do. She has been waiting a long time, she says, a very long time, and this body of hers belongs to me and to me only. Unfortunately, there is a condition – and it is a condition that she fears that I cannot fulfil. She turns her back and starts to walk away. I briefly contemplate her waggling hips before following her. What is the condition? She tells me that I must kill my children. My children? She insists and promises that she will give me other children.

‘That is why you must kill your children, O Setem Khaimwese. So that they do not compete with mine.’

I bow my head and follow her to my house. In an upstairs room she hands me a glass of wine and I look down on the dogs chewing on the flesh of my children. She spreads herself out on a bed of ivory and ebony and I lie beside her. She opens her legs, but then, as I ease myself into her, she opens her mouth in a foul-smelling scream. The stink of her breath reminds me of something. Perhaps I am reminded of the smell of the wizard’s wife, for it is certainly her whom I am lying with. Her rib-cage has buckled under the weight of my body and I withdraw from her in holy dread. My wits are confused, but I know that I now have no hope of using the
Book of Thoth
, for it is closed to the man who has committed the sacrilege of sleeping with a corpse.

Then I hear a voice calling me back, back to the source. No time has passed on this quest. The children are alive and the dogs still hungry. Above the great lake, my spirit begins to rise and draw away from Africa, so as to answer the summons of a voice from another time. Back in the Meditation Hall, there is, as usual, time for us to lie quiet and reflect on the significance of our pathworking. I lie there quiet and afraid. I am certain that tonight’s exercise was directed at me and only at me. Although the seductive maiden, Tbubi, had dark hair, I can see that she is an earlier incarnation of Sally. As in ancient Egypt, so in modern London. Sally is a seduction on the path, sent to prise the book of secret knowledge out of my hands. Although the kisses of yesterday morning were sweet, it is certain that, in time, Sally’s breath will carry the stink of carrion, for that is what is entailed in ordinary mortality. Those who cannot break free from the cycle of birth and death are condemned to rot. Now that I knew what it was like to embrace a corpse, I was more than ever afraid of death. I was also afraid of Felton and his power to take me where I did not want to go.

The pathworking had finished earlier than usual. I shakily got to my feet and started to follow the others hurrying out of the Hall, only Felton barred my way with a ceremonial flail. Behind him stood Granville and Granville was clutching a copy of
Penthouse
. What was going on? I must have looked apprehensive. Seeing this, Felton smiled benignly,

‘I said that the Lodge would find you a new girl and it will. There is no time to lose.’

Granville followed Felton in mugging a reassuring smile. They insisted that I return with them to Felton’s study. Felton spoke.

‘A girl, but not any girl. A consort fit for a future Adept of High Magick. Where shall such a girl be found and what is her name? There are so very many girls. Place your ear to the ground and it may be that you shall hear the clacking of their heels on the pavements of the world’s cities. Their pretty shoes all drum out messages of seduction. Yet there is one pair of heels which beats out a tattoo which is destined to be heard by one man and one man only. There is one particular girl, preserved by destiny as a virgin, whose steps take her, as if sleepwalking, towards your bed. One girl among so many millions. We shall find her for you, Peter. Do not doubt it.’

Felton’s monotonously intoned, crazy speech increased my fear. Granville, though, was more matter-of-fact. Having opened the copy of
Penthouse
and pressed it flat on Felton’s desk, he beckoned me over.

‘Here it is. The latest thing. A computer-dating form. If you fill it in now, it will catch the first post tomorrow morning.’

The double-page advertisement spread in the middle of the magazine consisted of a long series of questions with boxes to tick, interspersed with matchbox-sized photographs of happy couples who had already found happiness through computer-dating. Granville pressed me into the chair and put a pen in my hand. My first thought was that I was to tick the boxes I chose, thus, stroke by stroke, shaping my perfect woman, a bit like Pygmalion. I was swiftly put right about this. I was to tick the boxes they chose.

‘It is most important that she be a Scorpio,’ said Felton. ‘And even more vital that she be a virgin.’

Box by box, under their guidance, my perfect consort was constructed. She will be a virgin Caucasian, tall with long dark hair, aged about twenty. She lives in London. She will be looking for love or marriage rather than friendship. She is not close to her family. She reads avidly, is politically indifferent, but well-groomed. She is serious, shy and beautiful. Her interests include wining and dining, theatre, cinema and astrology. I wanted rock music to be included, but Felton and Granville were adamant that she should only care about classical stuff.

‘She will be nothing like Sally,’ said Felton.

‘It must be someone you have never met before,’ explained Granville unhelpfully.

‘And she must be a virgin,’ Felton reiterated. ‘Eventually you will bring her to the Lodge and we will welcome her as your consort.’

Felton, still in his Egyptian priest’s robes, performed the ritual of the Nine Barbarous Names over the completed form,

‘I am Ankh-F-N-Khonsu, thy Prophet, unto Who, Thou didst commit thy Mysteries, the Ceremonies of Khem. Thou didst produce the moist and the dry, and that which nourisheth all created life … ’

And while Felton stood there in hieratic pose and continued to invoke the Borneless One, I sat at his desk, wondering why was I going along with all this craziness. I had had it in my mind for some time that if there was even the shadow of a chance that the magical version of the world was the right one, then the prizes would be incalculable. But now I also sensed that the penalties for leaving the Path or failing on the Path were unthinkably nasty. (Visions of the banister studded with razor blades and of the slug condemned to eternal life flitted through my mind.) And yet curiosity competed with fear. I was terribly interested to see what would happen next. Among other things, I find it hard to imagine how I am going to strike up a relationship with a virginal lover of classical music and then, having done so, induct her into the path of sorcery. I picture myself a Hellfire seducer in an eighteenth-century novel whispering into her innocent ear. It would be good if my blind date turned out to be a Scientologist, but I doubt if I shall be so lucky.

Granville addressed the envelope and said that he would post it off straight away. Then he added that he would be sending one of his men round with the shop’s van to move my stuff from Notting Hill to the Lodge on Friday afternoon. So I have a new name and very soon a new address and a new girlfriend too. At this rate the old Peter, the Peter who began this diary, will have vanished in a matter of weeks.

Come to think of it, Ron was not at the pathworking. He is not someone I am going to miss.

It is sunny but unreasonably cold for May. I did a session on the playground wall, but I was not really concentrating. I kept thinking about the previous evening. Belatedly it occurs to me that last night’s pathworking might relate in some way to the Cairo Working which the Master and Felton performed in Egypt so many years ago.

I spent most of the afternoon in my pad, throwing some stuff away and putting the rest in cardboard boxes cadged from the grocer round the corner. I rang Dad and told him that I was moving. I lied to him and told him that the move was taking place at the weekend. He said nothing, except that my new address sounded rather grand, but he sounded disappointed. He will expect me the following weekend.

I met Sally under the statue of Eros. I was going to tell her before we went into the cinema and saw
Elvira Madigan
, but I chickened out. So I spent the next hour and a half watching a sequence of brightly coloured images: period uniforms, lacy dresses, pretty faces, blossoms, and twirling parasols with no idea of what connected them all, for I was rehearsing my lines. Sally was unusually clingy and she nestled up against me with her head on my shoulder.

We practically never go to pubs. Sally does not like the noise and darkness, whereas I am not very fond of the taste of beer. But this time I insisted. In the pub, she tried to talk about the film, unfazed by the fact that I was incapable of making any coherent comment about what had been going on in it. But she kept trying. There was really something rather frantic in her determination to talk about Swedish films.

‘Sally, I have something to say.’

‘Oh yes?’ She did not look at me. How could she have known what was coming next? She did.

‘I am moving out of Melchett’s place. Obviously I have no choice about that … Well the Lodge is taking me in, for a while at least.’

‘So that’s it? Well, OK – if that is what you want.’ She looked sulky, which did not suit her. ‘Personally I wouldn’t spend a night there. The place gives me the creeps.’

She shrugged. I pressed on.

‘And it is not going to be so easy for me to see you in the future. The Lodge has strict rules and I shall have duties.’

She shrugged again. The cow was determined not to make it easy for me.

‘Well, whenever,’ she said. ‘I am always around for you. When shall we go out again? Not a film next time. Let’s go back to Middle Earth.’

‘Maybe. That would be really nice, but first I have to sort my life out. You know how … .’

At last, this was too much for her. She crumpled and started crying.

‘You are evil!’ she cried out through her tears.

‘What is evil? I can’t get my head round this “evil” you are talking about.’

‘Oh Peter, you really do know what I mean. People used to talk about evil and I thought that it was something abstract – and therefore, in a way non-existent. I was so very wrong … ’

Her voice tailed off in a whisper. I sounded indignant,

‘If you think that I am evil, you can’t possibly have loved me then.’

She was crying buckets and everyone in the pub was looking at us, though some were pretending not to.

‘I feel so sorry for you, Peter. So sorry.’

‘I’m sorry too.’

And I hurried out of the pub.

I wish that, at some time before we finally split up I could have got her to release me from my oath to screw her when she is dead, but obviously it would have been inappropriate to raise the matter this evening.

A great day! Having woken early, I reached the HMV shop in Oxford Street soon after opening time and, after queuing for about twenty minutes, I secured my own copy of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. The sleeve gave me a start, for there, standing towards the left in the Beatles’ fantasy entourage, was a scowling Aleister Crowley. Maybe Cosmic is right about the Beatles after all. Anyway there seems something fated about this record. In some way, I do not yet know in what way, this record is part of my destiny.

Back at my pad, I played the record again and again. This is a need with me. I have to hear music again and again in order to internalise it. ‘Sgt. Pepper’ is this summer’s record, yet by autumn I know that all its tunes will be dead and lifeless in my ears. Only perhaps in returning to the record years later will I be able to capture some of that initial summery enthusiasm. For now, on a June morning, the record is amazing – that wall of sound, the tracks sliding one into another, and the kaleidoscopic tumble of lyrical images and sound effects. The music is as brassy and percussive as the sleeve is gaudy. At first, as I listen, I am fiercely elated, but slowly it comes to me that the themes are really rather sad – about getting old, dying in car accidents and things like that. This is the music of the summer of 67 and by putting it on the turntable I shall always be able to return to that momentous summer. But then who will I be when I play this record in twenty years time?

In the course of packing to leave, I found a tiny stash of opium which I had totally forgotten about. I hesitated a bit, because the thing is that opium gives me the most frightful constipation. On the other hand, it is a subtle drug and I can still operate effectively under its influence. So I rolled the stuff into a joint for a farewell blast. It went great with the ‘Mr Kite’ track. Straights just cannot hear our music, since it is written to be heard on drugs. The tamburas and sitars give an eerie trippiness to some of ‘Sgt Pepper’s’ tracks – like my life, the music is out of control. I play it as loud as the speaker will allow, as part of my farewell to Melchett. Besides, music is no good unless it is played really loud. I think that I had listened to ‘Sgt. Pepper’ seven and a bit times by the time Phil arrived with his van. Phil has a military haircut and a trim little moustache. He apparently does odd jobs for Granville, shifting antiques around the country, and he vaguely knows Cosmic, since they are in the same line of business. Phil helped me get my stuff into the van. There was not all that much to shift, but the records were heavy. As we drive out of Notting Hill, I notice that ‘She’s Leaving Home’ is silently playing in my head.