Satan Wants Me (25 page)

‘Fucking awful handwriting!’ he declared and lapsed into silence.

Felton looked to me.

It took me a while to find the words,

‘Is what Cosmic says there true?’

‘Do you want there to be demons? Then there are demons,’ replied Granville, and then, seeing that I was expecting more, ‘Yes, I used the power of the
Mordo Dolorosa
to bring Sally to my bed.’

‘And that is the truth?’

‘If that is what you want it to be, Non Omnis Moriar,’ said Felton.

This was like punching air. But I had an idea,

‘Can I see the page of Odi Profanum’s diary for the relevant day?’

Granville immediately protested,

‘I only show my diary to the Master!’

‘Shall I call the Master?’ Felton’s hand rested on the telephone.

‘No, of course not. But is he really so important?’

It was not necessary for Felton to reply. We, all three of us, knew that I was so important. Only I did not know why this was so.

I smirked up at Granville. After a long silence, he said that he did not have his diary on him. Felton said that that was fine. He was sure that I could wait until Thursday. Granville went out, not quite slamming the door. Hitherto I had thought of the Lodge as a single body, an organisation of totally like-minded people dedicated to a single thing. But I now see that this may not be the case.

Felton moved on to the next thing. He still felt that I was holding something important back. How did I feel about Brother Vigilante (Cosmic to profane mortals) coming to my room on Sunday morning to propose that we did a joint bunk? Was I not tempted? I said it was all just as I had reported.

Felton’s smile was cold. He stuck doggedly with his point. When I wrote up Cosmic’s visit to my room and his proposal that we should flee the Lodge, I knew that he, Felton, would read what I had written and that there would be consequences. Felton wanted to know how it felt to have betrayed a friend?

But I replied,

‘I have no friends.’

As I left the room, that song by the Loving Spoonful, ‘Do You Believe in Magic?’ was running in my head. This evening we were scheduled to hear a lecture by Agatha on extraterrestrial forces and then to do a short pathworking on the same subject, but things turned out a bit more interesting than that.

First the session started late. We all hung around waiting for Agatha or one of the senior Lodge members to appear. Alice was one of the circle. I tried to think myself back to the drug-intoxicated state in which I had actually desired her body, but that was a seriously bad trip which went nowhere. It was a bit like meditating on the razor-studded banister and I swiftly gave it up. Eventually Granville and Grieves entered and took up positions on either side of the door. They were shortly followed by Felton, Agatha and the rest of the senior members. Then Laura went over to Cosmic and demanded that he fetch his diary and Granville escorted Cosmic as he went off to fetch his diary from his bag which he had left outside Laura’s room. At this stage Cosmic was looking merely puzzled. When they returned, Granville again took up a position beside the door. Now I noticed that he held a sword by his side.

Then Felton asked Cosmic to read from his diary his account of the morning of Sunday, June 11th. We formed a circle and listened to him read,

‘Sunday, June 11th. Got up early enough to walk to Horapollo House. Got changed in Peter’s room. Peter hung-up on not having a record-player, but I put him right on that. Then we went down to the Ritual Room and waited for Alice and – ’

Felton cut him short and, turning to me, asked me to read my account of what happened that morning up to the point at which we descended to the Ritual Room. So I read my version. Then Felton stepped into the circle of Adepts and turned to each of us as he spoke,

‘What should be done with someone who has been planning to leave the Path and betray the Lodge? What is the penalty for such a thing? Non Omnis Moriar, you must speak.’

‘He shall be as one who is dead to the Lodge,’ I replied.

‘Peter – Non Omnis Moriar is lying,’ Cosmic swiftly protested. ‘I never said any of those things that he has put in his diary. I am completely loyal to the Lodge, whereas he is lying. He is cunning and dangerous – ’

Felton cut him short,

‘Non Omnis Moriar has delivered judgement.’

At that, Granville and Grieves advanced on Cosmic and forced him to lie face down on the floor. Then Granville brought the sword down to tap the nape of Cosmic’s neck with the point. Only after this was he allowed to rise and told that he could leave.

‘You are dead to us now.’

I had thought that Cosmic would feel relieved when he was ‘killed’ merely in a symbolical sense, but in fact, as he looked back at me before leaving the room, he looked grim.

The Nine Barbarous Names were invoked and we all went outside briefly to witness first the burning of the Athanor and then the casting of Cosmic’s diary into the same brazier. After that most of us returned inside for what turned out to be a rather dull lecture by Agatha on the winds that blow in outer space and the screaming spirits that travel from planet to planet. However, I was not paying much attention to the lecture. I kept thinking about Cosmic, for it now occurred to me that he was another temptation set to lure me from the Path. Not that he was a manifestation of the Qlippoth as Sally was. I was toying with the idea that I had been dealing with the real Cosmic, but something had got into his head and he was being manipulated by some higher power that did not want us to advance further on the Path. And I kept wondering what he would do now that he was expelled from the Lodge. Would he go to the press? One thing I was pretty sure of was that he would go to Sally and tell tales against me. I was never seriously tempted by Cosmic though. I could never leave the Lodge, for I am just so curious to see what will happen next.

Over the last few weeks one thing has been preying on my mind more than I have let on in these pages. It is the business of being made to learn the Obscene Kiss. The Knights Templar performed it on one another as part of their weird Gnostic initiation rituals. I have been wishing that I had kept my mouth shut about getting lessons in kissing right from the first. I need not have worried. It was a gas. This evening it was Laura who performed it on me. I was trying to protest and suggest that it was not really necessary to go through it all, but she said that it was and that it was necessary that it be her who paid me homage as I outranked her. All quite weird. Fun though.

I woke up worrying about absolutely everything – even including things like why did I have a vision of a man shod with iron shoes? I wish I had the same idea about life as Sally. Sally was always going on about how in reality there is no causation. Just because one thing happens after another, it does not make any sense to say the first caused the second. According to her, the Trobriand Islanders have no words for ‘why’ or ‘because’ and they are much happier as a result. When I pointed out that, if the Trobriand Islanders’ happiness was as a result of not having those words, then that was an example of causation, she got pretty ratty. She said it was typical of the way white men used rationality and causation to make the world work for them. Rationality is a male power thing, whereas Sally was into something more witchy and intuitive. But if I did think like Sally, then I would not be worrying about why, when Laura and I made love last night, she was looking at me with love, yes, but also with such pity and concern. Also I still worry a bit about the possibility that I may be a homo. Is it a regular male thing to enjoy being the recipient of anilinctus? But on the whole, I do not think I can be a homo. Felton seemed pretty emphatic on the point and, besides I have taken so much LSD in the course of the last year and, according to Timothy Leary, LSD is a cure for homosexuality. But it would be good to just switch the brain off and be intuitive.

Towards the end of the afternoon I returned to the Lodge and wrote up my diary. Then I started to get ready for the evening’s date. Now I am feeling pretty grim. First, I do not want to meet this girl and, secondly, I hate wearing the suit. I already wore the suit at the funeral, so this will be the second time in a week that I have worn the suit, and my forthcoming date feels more funereal than the actual funeral was. I have to be dead to my own desires. This evening I have to dress up in such a manner as to impersonate a respectable person, in order to impress a girl whom I have no desire to impress – particularly if respectability is the sort of thing that impresses her. Another thing I hate about suits is that I wear them so rarely that I can never remember which pockets I have put things in. I keep resolving to put everything in a single pocket, but then I invariably forget my resolution, so that by the time I actually need, say, my wallet, I have to slap at every pocket, as if I was frisking myself for a hidden weapon. And then at the end of the day when I am quite likely to be very tired, I have all that fag of hanging the damn thing up and hunting for creases. Why cannot tailors make the creases run along the seams?

But the suit it has to be, as Felton has insisted on booking a table at the Gay Hussar for my date, and, just as I was about to go out, Laura caught me in the hallway and told me how smart I was looking in my suit and she ran her hand over my hair. I made my way to Piccadilly and took up a position under the Statue of Eros. I was surrounded by agreeably scruffy-looking registered addicts nerving themselves up to take their prescriptions across the road to the chemist. Whereas I, dressed in a suit and prominently displaying my copy of Aleister Crowley’s
Magick in Theory and Practice
, felt a complete idiot. Fortunately I did not have to wait long.

‘Peter Keswick? I am Maud.’

Maud was wearing a mini-dress with some kind of peacock’s feather pattern and shiny, black boots which come up to her thighs, and a feathery boa round her neck.

There are hundreds of girls dressed like her walking up and down the King’s Road on any evening of the week. But the very short mini did not work on such a big girl. Maud is tall and thick-thighed. She is not exactly ugly, but she is not attractive either. Her face, which is alabaster-white and with thickly applied eye-make-up, makes me think of a clown. Only her hair, heavy, dark and lustrous, is OK. The instant I saw her I knew that I did not fancy her. So that was it. Except, of course, that we had the whole evening ahead of us. I saw her sizing me up too. There was a just barely perceptible shrug.

We shook hands awkwardly and I told her where we were going for dinner. As we walked along towards the Gay Hussar, we talked about travelling about in London and restaurants and stuff like that. Only once we were seated at our table, did we begin to exchange serious information about ourselves. I thought Maud’s life sounded pretty dull, but, to be fair, I do not think mine sounded all that interesting either (for I was hardly going to tell her about kissing lessons, satanic rituals on cocaine and the sound of horseshoes and screaming in the night).

Maud works as a hairdresser’s assistant. She had wanted to be an air-stewardess, but she failed most of her O-levels, but then she is really pleased she failed, because being a hairdresser is so nice.

‘Every person’s hair is different and needs different treatment, but it is not so much the cutting, shampooing, blow-drying, shaping and perming. It is working with people that is so nice – I mean good manners and remembering to smile are so important and they make all the difference in a well-run salon.’

She went on and on about the salon and the nice people she met there. It was so boring. I half wanted to tell her to shut up and to listen to me instead, so that I could tell her about the emissaries of Satan, Choronzon’s power, ritual invocations, placating the Qlippoth and the importance of virgin sacrifice and I wanted her to realise how much more interesting I was than her. But then again, when I thought about it, I did not really want to make myself interesting to her. Basically I just wanted this wasted evening to be over and not to see her again. So I let her lecture me about stand-up pin curls, roller curls, barrel pin curls, reverse curls, finger waving, backcombing and perms, without my letting on how spectacularly bored I was. And I watched her eat. She had quite an appetite and the chomping of her heavy jaws made her seem distinctly bovine. There was something a little eerie about the whiteness of her soft flesh in the candlelight. Sally was pale enough, but Maud looks as though she has spent her childhood living under a large stone.

Eventually she did get around to asking me about myself. She was disappointed that I was a student.

‘I was hoping that you would be a soldier, or a professional sportsman, or something like that. Or a doctor, I think doctors are interesting. My pa wanted me to become a university student, but I didn’t want to. Students are scruffs. I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to be rude. You are quite smart, for at least you are wearing a suit and, even though your hair is terribly long, it looks quite nice. I do think that one of the wonderful things about being young is that long hair hangs naturally and usually looks good. Who do you get to cut your hair?’

‘I cut it myself.’ (This was a lie. Sally always used to trim my hair, but I did not want to talk about her.)

We talked a bit about the boxes we had ticked on the computer form. Maud likes Gilbert and Sullivan and Strauss waltzes and so on. When she went on to remark that it was not just classical music she liked, but she liked anything with a good tune, so she thought some pop music was nice too, I briefly entertained the hope that we might have something in common to talk about, but when she listed her favourite artists as being Manfred Mann, Lulu, Sandy Shaw and the Seekers, I felt a terrible despair.

For her part, she was disappointed that I was not sporty. She is mad about karate. Apart from hairdressing, karate seems to be the only thing which interests her. As she went on enthusing about karate and how she got into it at school and, as she went on about the inter-school karate matches which she had won, I felt a jolt of surprise. I had been assuming that Maud was lower class. The fact that she went into hairdressing after failing her O-levels made me think this. But actually she failed her O-levels and took lessons in karate at Roedean.