Satan Wants Me (44 page)

But I could not keep the grin off my face. Not drugs, not ritual sacrifice, just gnomes. And thank goodness Cosmic’s gnomes were safely deep in the earth, busy about their chthonic enterprises. The constables paced about the cottage peering through doors, obviously hoping to catch a glimpse of a stray gnome.

‘God, this place is a tip!’ said the female constable.

We, that is Maud, Cosmic and I, all looked reproachfully at Sally. So then the police turned their attention to her too. Sally gazed up at them smiling and offered her tattoo for inspection.

They took her into another room where they asked her a lot of questions in private. Apparently they wanted to know how old she was. What was the address of her parents? Was she here of her own free will? What washing facilities were available? Had she registered with a G.P.? Did the cottage have many strange men visiting it? All kinds of stuff.

Finally they left, but, just before they did so, the female turned to us and said,

‘We will be back.’

It was all a real downer. The fuzz carry their own atmosphere with them and they are generous in spreading it about. Maud, thank heavens, was the least troubled. As long as she is with me, she is happy and has no fears for what may befall us.

Sally was very ill in the night. Cosmic is also in a pretty weird state as he is mixing alcohol and heroin and talking madly about reincarnation and about how everything that happens gets re-enacted again and again. Specifically, we are reliving what happened in the early 1920s at Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema. In Cosmic’s eyes, I am the Great Beast, while Maud and Sally are the First and Second Concubines. The Wheel of Samsara has brought this episode round once more and we have to see if we can make a better fist of it this time. But Cosmic was not making much sense as, at other times, he talked as if Sally was not the reincarnation of the Second Concubine (who was called Ninette Shumway), but she was instead Raoul Loveday, another member of the Brotherhood of Thelema. Raoul died of dysentery in Crowley’s Abbey and that is what Sally is going to die of – an infection she contracted over fifty years ago in a previous life. As for me, I don’t think she is going to die and, if she does, it will be from all that awful dog food. Cosmic, on the other hand, says that the tinned stuff is not that bad and, in order to be comradely with Sally, he even tried some himself. Mind you, he was so stoned, I don’t think he knew what he was tasting.

I have been putting Donovan songs on the record player in the hope of cheering Sally up, but now she tells me that he is no good.

‘He tells lies about the world,’ she whispered.

It is raining and, since the fuzz’s visit yesterday, the cottage feels like it’s under siege. Despite the rain, I said I was going into town. I had it in mind that I might find a doctor and get him to come and examine Sally, but, just as I was going out of the door, Maud caught me by the sleeve,

‘Don’t leave me, Peter. I know I sound silly, but I have the feeling that, if you go far from the cottage … if you go beyond the magical enclosure that you traced with your wand, then the spell will be broken and the enchantment gone. We only have one another.’

Sally has actually forbidden me to play any more Donovan. She cannot bear to hear about sunshine, girls in lace dresses, pure white knights and jolly tinkers. So it is Dylan instead. Dylan’s stuff is intense, driving. But I now wonder how good is intensity? What is the point of intensity? There is no point. Intensity is just the excess intellectual energy of youth.

Sally just lies there now, but earlier on in the day she beckoned me over to her and told me that she did not mind me having spat on her photograph and joined in the ritual cursing at the Lodge. Also that she loved me, and because she loved me – only because she loved me – she loved Maud too.

Then I went out to talk to Cosmic in the garden. It seems that a bit over a week ago Sally came up to him and asked him why he thought things had started to go wrong for her recently. At first Cosmic thought that this was just her questionof-the-week, but then he realised that it was more serious than that, so he told her about how, after she had interrupted the Master’s lecture, she had been ritually cursed by members of the Lodge, including me. (Thanks Cosmic.) Of course Cosmic believes that one has to be open about things, because keeping secrets and bottling up emotions is known to cause cancer. So all should be well now …

Frightful.

Frightful.

Is Christ’s mercy indeed infinite? And what is the sin against the Holy Ghost which can never be forgiven? At school, the rumour was that masturbation was the sin against the Holy Ghost. If so, that’s me done for and, of course, more imminently Sally.

I persuaded Cosmic to go into town and look for a doctor. Difficult, because he was a bit zonked and he came back, having failed to persuade anyone that we had a really urgent problem. However, he did bring more food, vodka and diarrhoea pills plus a home-perm kit and Dr Benjamin Spock’s
The Commonsense Book of Baby and Childcare
. Only after Cosmic sheepishly produced the book, did Maud tell me that she was certain that she was pregnant.

‘I just know I am. I can tell,’ she said, as she buried her face on my shoulder.

I said nothing, as I tried to work out the consequences of all this. How would we manage for money? Should we get married? Would the Master arrive and take the new-born baby away so that it could be sacrificed on the altar in Horapollo House? Paranoid this last thought, I know, but that is the trouble with taking so many drugs. They make you paranoid about everything.

‘What are you going to call it?’ Cosmic wanted to know. ‘Apart from Antichrist, of course.’ Cosmic says that we must be sure to eat the placenta, because it is rich in gamma globulin, or, if we are not going to, can he have it please?

Maud has been re-doing my hair with the home-perm kit, while I sit beside Sally (who is now definitely dying) and I read out loud bits of Dr Spock to her. It is quite a groovy book:

‘But strictness
is
harmful when parents are overbearing, harsh, chronically disapproving, and make no allowances for a child’s age and individuality. This kind of severity produces children who are either meek and colourless or unkind to others.

Parents who incline to an easy-going kind of management, who are satisfied with casual manners as long as the child’s attitude is friendly, or who happen not to be particularly strict – for instance, about promptness or neatness – can also raise children who are considerate and co-operative, as long as the parents are not afraid to be firm about those matters which are important to them.’

I think that I have definitively given up on my thesis. Come to that, apart from Spock and fashion magazines, I have given up on reading. Come to that, I have given up on thinking. I don’t need any of it, when I have Maud. Devil or not, she was surely put on this planet to be worshipped.

Sally is curled up in a corner of the room. Her eyes have filmed over and she looks like a small, shivery animal.

Just a few moments ago, those two police officers were back again. They did not stay more than a moment, after taking a look at Sally. Cosmic took the opportunity of their departure to hurry to the woods and hide our stash somewhere out there. Now Maud is at last fully aware of just how serious our situation is. She is thinking that she will have to breach the magic circle which I drew around the cottage in order to make a phone-call at the end of the road. In the meantime she is seriously panicked that our diaries may incriminate us. She says that we must hide them as well as the drugs.

So my mistress has commanded me to discontinue my diary.

Maud died five days ago. Her funeral was today and I had a most unsettling encounter at the cemetery.

It is thirty years since I last looked at these notebooks. It was a relief to discontinue diary-writing. When I did so, my writing hand ceased to be possessed by that over-eloquent, high-styled, writing demon, Pyewhacket (or the ‘Hand of Splendour’, as I have since heard the Master refer to this sort of phenomenon). Now that I have reread these old notebooks, I am feeling a little wistful – even though the last few days described in their pages were pretty terrible.

Summoned by his daughter’s message, Robert Kelley arrived in Farnham later on that final Thursday. He was accompanied by Granville and Laura. Although there was a tremendous amount to be sorted out, the resources that the Black Book Lodge can call upon in a time of crisis are truly impressive. By the time the Master had arrived, a whole team of police and forensic experts, excited by signs of freshly turned earth on the edge of the woods, were about to start digging and they were mentally preparing themselves to exhume what they expected to be a series of hippy corpses – probably corpses with shaven heads. However, Maud’s father definitely has an impressive presence. Not only did he get the dig stopped, he even persuaded the police that it was not worth charging Cosmic with theft of the gnomes.

My own Dad arrived some hours later. We sat in the corner of a hotel lounge just off the High Street and he listened quietly as I talked and, in talking, tried to put the events of the last few weeks in some order. I do not know what I expected from him, but, at the end of it all, what he said was,

‘The Devil does not have to exist for there to be evil in this world.’ Then, after a short pause, ‘You are on your own now.’

I never saw him again.

The Master made all the arrangements for Sally’s funeral. He also squared the police. Everything was made easy. I just had one very difficult moment. This was when the Master and his daughter had gone into town to confer with the undertaker, so that Cosmic and I were alone with the corpse.

Then Cosmic, pointed to it and looked at me,

‘It was her dying wish,’ he said. ‘She expects you to fulfil your oath.’

It had been bad enough months ago to contemplate the idea of fucking Sally’s corpse. That was when the prospect did not seem very imminent and when I imagined that the corpse in question would have Sally’s fresh, pale complexion and long golden hair. But now we were looking down on this emaciated and shaven-headed thing which lay hunched on the leaking mattress and looking like a dead rat.

I shook my head. There was nothing I could say.

‘I was there at her last moment, while you were pissing about with Maud. Sally really wants you now. She is watching on the astral. She waits to see you fuck her corpse.’

I still said nothing, so then Cosmic was really angry,

‘You have betrayed her. You have betrayed yourself. You have betrayed everything we ever stood for. You are a total cop-out and a living lie from beginning to end.’

I walked out of the room, leaving Sally to Cosmic.

The Master had several difficult meetings with Sally’s parents. He was, of course, furious with us, but his anger abated somewhat when Maud told him that she thought she was pregnant. Laura and Granville got Maud and me packed and that same night Granville delivered us to a hotel in London. Granville wept on and off throughout the day. ‘I really loved your hippy girl,’ he said to me at one point. But if so, why had he joined me in spitting on her photograph? Then again, I reckon, if he had not seduced her, probably none of this would have happened.

I suppose the way things have turned out is a bit like that film I saw once,
Room at the Top
. I married the boss’s daughter and, having done so, I have been doing very well ever since. Not that he took me into the family firm, as it were. Indeed, I have been forbidden to set foot in Horapollo House ever again. Since the summer of 1967, I have had as little to do with the Lodge and occult matters as I have had with academic sociology. The daylight hours have been dedicated to making money; the dark belonged to Maud. I inherited Julian’s money of course, but it was thought proper that I should have a job. So I was sent into the City. I worked first for a merchant bank with strong Levantine interests. Later, I set up my own company to invest in information technology. I became a ‘name’ and a member of one of the livery companies. It is a hard, tough world in the City, but I find that suits me. Maud was set up with her own hairdressing salon, but after the birth of little Robert, she was happy to leave most of its running to others.

I grew up. In time I shed my ‘blasted sense of humour’, as Felton termed it. Furthermore I no longer believe in the possibility of interconnecting parallel universes, encountering dead parents and friends in new incarnations, the governance of the world by Hidden Occult Masters, or any of that sort of stuff. The world is exactly as it seems. As with my computer screen, what you see is what you get.

I am proud of my son’s career in politics. The Lodge still nourishes hopes that our son is indeed the Antichrist. Speaking as his father, all I can say is that, for an Antichrist, his GCSEs were decidedly average. I am afraid that Maud never cared much for her son. He was looked after by women sent over from Horapollo House who answered to Laura. Later, the boy was sent to Winchester. All Maud’s love was reserved for me and only me.

I have often reflected on the revelations of those August days and I am pretty sure that the Master and his trusted astrologers were mistaken. I am not the reincarnation of Crowley they were looking for. Be that as it may, they brought Maud and me together and made us happy.

Cosmic sold out too. He now works in the legal department of the Home Office (but we never speak). Everybody sold out. I lived through years of the Great Betrayal and Sell-Out of the hippy dream. We were going to change things. We were going to set free the hearts and minds of our generation – and not just our generation. ‘Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids.’ People would cease to own people. There would have been a gentler, more generous and more colourful world. There was a lot of energy about. By the end of the sixties, we should have been witnessing the ultimate transformation of humanity. As Nietzsche put it, ‘Man is a bridge, not a goal.’