Satan Wants Me (23 page)

I had spoken boldly about adrenalin, but now I was thinking about Alice. The adrenalin was fierce within me, but it was fear, not desire, that was pumping the stuff out, so that my whole body felt squelchy with chemical fear.

We were silent for a bit. I guess that Cosmic was depressed by thoughts of a world populated by
Doppelgangers
and, for my part, I was communing with my fears. The new meditation on public sex with Alice was giving the old one, about the razor-studded banister, a fair run.

But then
Doppelgangers
made Cosmic think of zombies and he got going on a manic rap about voodoo and the use of zombie huntsmen to pursue the living and voodoo music. When I complained about not having a record-player any more, Cosmic told me it did not really matter.

‘You can
see
the music in the patterns made by the dead elementals trapped in the vinyl.’

He got a Dylan record and a Donovan record out of their sleeves and showed me how different the patterns were on the discs recorded by two superficially similar artists. We spent an interesting time catching the sunlight on the vinyl and silently ‘playing’ ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and ‘A Gift from a Flower to the Garden’.

I was thoroughly absorbed in all this and my impending ordeal was momentarily forgotten. But then there was a rap on the door. It was Grieves.

‘The Master wants to see you.’

Just like being back at school again! I struggled hastily into my robes and hurried to follow Grieves down to the Master’s office. Cosmic stayed in my room to change at a more leisurely pace. The Master’s office was just like the office of a wealthy banker. There were no hints of arcane rites and obscene practices. I guess that, from time to time, the Master used this room to receive outsiders visiting Horapollo House on business. Today, however, the Master, sitting behind the big desk, could not have been mistaken for a wealthy banker, for all he wore was a black loincloth and a pharaonic head-dress crowned with a rampant cobra. With that lean and muscular physique, the Master could easily have been taken for a film-star. Grieves, who was standing beside him, was dressed in his ordinary working clothes. In front of them on the desk was a low lamp, just like the ones in the casino, and in the centre of the pool of light cast by that lamp there was a snuff-box and on its enamelled lid shepherdesses were courted by their swains.

I wanted to know exactly what was going to happen. I wanted to be given my script, but I was much too afraid to ask. Or maybe it was that I had the sense that the Master already knew exactly what I was thinking and, if he thought that I needed to be told anything, he would tell me. Or maybe he would not even bother to speak. He would just transmit his instructions directly to my brain. I was dead in the hands of the Master. He was gazing steadily into my eyes. At first I thought that he was trying to hypnotise me, but then I thought that it was more as if he was looking for something in my soul. I do not know anything worth knowing about the Master. All I know is that I am afraid of Felton and that Felton is afraid of the Master. ‘Know Thyself,’ say the occult masters. For me, acquiring self-knowledge has mostly been the discovery of my cowardice. I was dead-scared in the hands of the Master.

There was a knock on the door and Alice entered. She was conventionally veiled and dressed as a bride. The Master indicated that we should sit. Then he muttered something in Latin over the snuff-box and Grieves leant forward to open it. It was full of a white powder. At first I thought that it was a Satanic powder – a special powder concocted from the ground-up bones of unfrocked priests, or something. Well it was a Satanic powder in a way. Grieves filled an oddly-shaped little silver ladle with the powder and raised it to my nostril. I snorted hard. Then it was Alice’s turn. She raised her veil and sniffed determinedly, but she sneezed and had to try a second time.

Hitherto I had experimented with hash, speed, heroin, opium, LSD, mescalin and amyl nitrate. But never cocaine. It was just one of those things. I had never got round to it. But this was obviously what was racing round my body like an animal looking for a way out. Cocaine is rather an old-fashioned drug, but it seems to be the drug of choice at the Lodge. (Horapollo House is a counter-culture phenomenon, but it is old-fashioned counter-culture.) My nostrils tingled and there was a metallic feeling in the throat. I recall that Cosmic, who has tried the drug, said that the thing with both cocaine and heroin is that it is not exactly that they give positive pleasure, but rather that these drugs achieve their effects by suppressing the normal pains of the body. Without drugs, we are in agony every minute of our lives, as bones, muscles and veins press and scrape against one another. Merely living is very painful indeed. Only the pain of the physicalness of our existence is such a basic thing that we are not really aware of the day-by-day, minute-by-minute agony of our bodies. Our pain is just like the hum of a busy refrigerator; one does not realise that one has been hearing it until it stops.

The Master had left the room without me really noticing. Grieves stood against the door with his arms folded. I could hear the sound of muffled chanting, so the ritual invocations must have already started. I looked to Alice. Her veil was thrown back over her chaplet of flowers and her eyes were weirdly bright and she was licking her lips and smiling. In the Dennis Wheatley novels, the women who are about to be sacrificed to the Devil are always beautiful. I can now report from experience that this is not invariably so. With those bright eyes and big smile, Alice looked just like a white golliwog. I could not bear to look at her, partly of course because of her natural hideousness, but also because of the effects of the drug which was making me twitchy, so that it was hard to look at anything in particular. My heart was ripping away. Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Go Ask Alice’ was silently pounding in my head. Also there was a feeling of little animals rippling under my skin which was not unpleasant. My courage was coming up. I felt clever, good-looking and powerful. I was ready for a party. Feeling this mounting self-assurance (and I use those words advisedly), I was even ready to bless Alice with my seed.

I glanced swiftly at her and away. She was trembling. I tried to think of something reassuring to say. The best I could come up with was,

‘In a couple of hours it will all be over.’

She moved closer to me and placed a trembling hand on mine. I could feel my flesh creep – really creep, as if it was trying to crawl away from under her touch.

She brought her mouth close to my ear and whispered,

‘It is already over. We would not be the persons we are now, if we had not already given ourselves to the Master in the future. The universe vibrates at a certain rate. In order to exist, to truly exist, one has to pulsate at the same rate.’

(Cosmic was right. Her breath was turnip-scented.)

Her words were freaky and not what anyone in their right mind would have thought of as sexy, but, in my toxic dream, I knew exactly what she meant. Also, despite my raging physical aversion and her leguminous breath, I found that I had a hard-on. I would like to have concentrated more on my cocaine-high, but there was a rap upon the door and Grieves moved aside. Felton in the doorway crooked his finger. We were to follow him.

We were caught on camera as we entered the hall which had been prepared for the Consecration. Granville, operating a hand-held cine-camera, cautiously trod backwards in front of us as we processed towards the central altar which was also a bed. Junior Lodge members wore monkishly cowled robes. But the Master, Felton, Granville and others were dressed as ancient Egyptian hierophants. It now strikes me that most of the Lodge’s business consists of charades and impersonations. We all find our identities in the dressing-up box. Crowley was the same. There are framed photos of him in the dining room. In them he appears dressed as an Egyptian, as a Scottish laird, as an Indian mahatma, as an English gentleman. He took on his personality with the clothes. Magic is about appearance, style, glamour. There is no reality.

Alice was made to sit on the black sheet draped over the altar. I was directed to my place in the circle of celebrants gathered round her. Now Colonel Chalmers pointed the Sword of Exorcism at the four corners of the room to drive out any of the larvae which might be gathering on the edges in the hope of feeding off the energies generated by our ritual. When this operation had been completed, the man standing to the left of me began to intone the opening catechism. I recognised the voice as that of Julian. (I had not known that he would be here today.) In a ragged chorus, we gave him the required answers.

‘What is the hour?’

‘When time hath no power.’

‘What is the place?’

‘At the limits of space.’

‘What God do we wake?’

‘The Lord of the Snake!’

‘With what do we serve?’

‘Brain, muscle and nerve.’

‘The shrine in the gloom.’

Then Felton walked into the circle and, turning to the Master, he declaimed,

‘Son of Astaroth and Asmodeus! My Lord! My secret self beyond self, Hadith, All Father! Hail, On, thou Sun, thou Life of Man, thou Fivefold Sword of Flame! Thou Goat exalted upon Earth in Lust, thou snake extended upon Earth in Life! Spirit most Holy! Seed most Wise! Innocent Babe. Inviolate Maid! Begetter of Being! Soul of all Souls! Word of all Words, Come forth, most hidden light!’

The Master paused in front of Felton and bowed his head so that the latter could remove the head-dress. Then he tore off his loincloth and, turning in all directions, he displayed his erect and swollen penis to the celebrants. And what was I thinking while all this was going on? I was wondering if he was on cocaine too. Yes, of course, what was about to happen was shocking in terms of conventional morality, but Ashtaroth and Asmodeus are princes of love, and what we were about to witness was an act of love at the highest level. And the love-making had to be in public, because what was taking place was no mere physical act, but more a celebration of loving bonding which involved all of the Lodge’s celebrants. It is true that for a moment, just for a moment, I caught myself thinking, ‘Dear God, what have I got myself into?’ but then I answered myself, ‘I have got myself into the robes of a sorcerer and I have at last left the world of the ordinary and made my way to a place where something is happening.’ The coke-fired adrenalin, surging within me, told me that. To know, to dare, to will, to be silent.

The Master pulled Alice’s skirt up and mounted her.

Alice cried out, ‘I am with the angels!’ (Her voice was muffled, but I think that was what it was.)

At this point, if God existed, He would surely have brought the proceedings to a close, but the Master thrust into Alice and, as he kept thrusting, we celebrants clapped in time to his thrusts and our rhythmic clapping reminded me a bit of ‘Whenever a Teenager Cries’ as rendered by Reparata and the Delrons. (It should not have done, but there it is.) Besides the clapping, there was a lot of hissing and sighing in the circle of robed and cowled diary-keepers. (Tomorrow, if the Master so chooses, he may find his dark rapture on the altar of Asmodeus, reflected in so many diaries and in Granville’s hand-held filming, as in so many shards of a splintered mirror.) I kept trying to think the ritual backwards, as I had been trained to. Working backwards, Alice and I and the rest of the celebrants might return to an age of wholesomeness and innocence – an age of good-hearted films like
Genevieve
, of cartoons of the Gambols family in the
Daily Express
, of
The Reader’s Digest
, cheerful bobbies on the beat, Connie Francis, skiffle and flared skirts. However, my mental powers are still weak and, as far as I can see, we are all still trapped in 1967. Intellectually, I knew that the Master was investing Alice with the gift of virginity. Suddenly, in the midst of being fucked, she turned her head sideways and looked directly at me. Her red mouth was wide open, unbelievably wide. It was like one of the mouths of Hell in one of those old Flemish paintings.

Then Chalmers came forward with the cockerel and the sword and, as the Master climaxed, he slashed at the bird’s throat and held it over the entwined couple, showering them with blood.

And we chorused, as instructed by the ritual,

‘Lo! the out-splashing of the seeds of Immortality!’

The next section of the ritual was one of those bits in Latin, so I was wondering what was scheduled to happen next. Alice was lying back peacefully with her head turned in my direction. She was leering at me. Then the Master, who still lay on top of her, crooked his finger. So I came forward and he rose from the altar and presented his still-erect penis to me for a kiss of homage. Then he gestured me towards Alice who lay there looking very strange under a sheen of sweat, a bit like a doll whose face was cracking and losing its paint. The bridal dress spotted with blood was hoicked up round her hips. Everything was so weird, like being in a strange film – and of course it was being filmed. As I struggled out of my robe and clambered on to the altar, she put a hand out to slow me down, then rolled over and looked back at me. Again I thought of a doll, as I was surprised how far back her neck could turn.

‘The first was reserved for the Master,’ she said. ‘You use the tradesman’s entrance.’

And, lest there could be any doubt about what she meant, she pulled the cheeks of her arse apart. Our coupling was an act of mutual loathing. My hatred for her was so powerful, so fierce that it was exhilarating and I guessed that Alice was similarly moved. Somebody brought the Master a chalice and he stood drinking from it and watching over me as I sodomised the bride. It was hard and pleasureless, but when I finally penetrated her, the celebrants broke into the ‘Dirge of Isis’, as if Alice’s screams had given them the cue. The Master passed the chalice to me. It was soma, or sarcostemma, the Indian god-drink and bitter to taste. There could be no doubting that Ashtaroth and Asmodeus were in the room and their wings were fanning up a storm. We were, all of us, caught in this storm of incense, silk, chanting, blood, soma and sperm. Whatever I had been in the past was now changed beyond all recognition, for I was now embarked on a mighty and perilous adventure.