Satan Wants Me (6 page)

It was raining, so figuring that the children would not be playing out of doors today, I went to work in the library, but the day didn’t really start until evening. I went up to Horapollo House at Swiss Cottage. Felton was waiting for me in the dark hallway. Horapollo House is literally a place of shadows, for no natural light has been allowed in the building for about fifteen years. I had come an hour early, as arranged, so that Felton could hack over my diary. He had a cold and at first he was in an evil humour. There was still a lot in my prose that he finds objectionable. Like my use of the adverb hopefully in the sentence, ‘Hopefully I will get a clearer idea of where this research is going soon’, made Felton spit. Although my diary-writing is improved, I must pay more respect to the rules of grammar.

‘Grammar is not a distraction from magic. Grammar is magic. Grammar and grimoire are the same word. Grammar is also “glamour” and the primary meaning of “glamour” is “spell”, while a grimoire is a manual for the casting of spells. Through grammar we control the universe.’

There are also things I have been reticent about – for Felton is curious, why when Sally asked me about why I was committed to the Lodge, I gave her such a vague answer.

‘You can lie to Sally. There is no reason not to, but you may not lie to your diary. Tell me now, why you have kissed the hand of the Master?’

I told him that it was because I wanted to be young forever – to become the
Puer Aeternus
, the ‘Eternal Boy’, as described in occult textbooks. ‘I have maybe sixty years in which to work out a way of not dying. It seems like a long time, but I know it is not.’ However, Felton seemed dissatisfied with my answer. We shall have to come back to my real motivation.

‘You are playing with me, Peter,’ he said. ‘I know that and I know that you are cleverer than me. But in the long run your cleverness will avail you nothing. I will break you and remake you – just as I have done with countless others who are sitting where you are sitting now.’

Another thing is missing in the diary so far. Sally, Cosmic, Laura and Drapers are described, but Felton is not.

‘But I want to be in your book, Peter. I want to know how you described me to Sally. I want to see myself reflected in the mirror you hold up to me. Make sure that it is a true image that you present.’

OK Felton. He is extraordinarily fat – probably because he drinks so much red wine – and it is the sort of fat which might once have been muscle. His hair is close cropped, as if he had just come out of the army. Though the body is soft and the face wattled, the eyes are hard, octopus eyes. He emphasises the points he is making with odd little waving gestures. He wears bow-ties, of which he seems to have a considerable collection – also waistcoats. I know that he went to Peterhouse, Cambridge (that must have been after the war), but I still have not worked out what he is doctor of. Probably he’s got a doctorate in Classics, since he is always strewing Latin tags about and he was really shocked to hear how I got into university without taking an exam in Latin. Obviously he was in Cairo at the same time as the Master, but I do not know what he was doing there. He has a huge collection of books on the wall behind the armchair: occult treatises like
The Kabbalah Unveiled
,
777
,
The Key of Solomon
,
The Rose of Mysteries
, but also a lot of classic English literature like Milton, Marvell and Browning. I have also noticed some rather odd titles, like
Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden
and
How Boys Bathe in Finland
. He is obviously a bachelor and he keeps that horrible black labrador for company – more like a demonic familiar. Sally is sure that Felton is a poove and that he wants me for my skinny body. I was thinking that that might be the case, but so far the only thing he had got for his hundred pounds was an inspection of my diary. But then it occurred to me that reading someone else’s diary was a bit like sniffing someone else’s underwear. Dead pervey.

Pervey. It was the thought that did it.

‘I want kissing lessons.’

‘What?’

For once I had succeeded in surprising him. He was looking at me as if I was mad. Which, of course I was. I wanted to retract what I had just said, but the demon would not let me. So the next thing which popped out of me was,

‘Cosmic, Ron and Alice are all getting lessons from Laura in occult kissing and I am getting left behind. I want you to give me the same lessons that they are getting.’

Alas! Felton was surprised, but not shocked. I was freaking myself out. Was I really hungry for a fat old man’s kisses in Swiss Cottage? He rose slowly from his chair and motioned that I should stand too. I had to come closer and since I was taller I had to bend to let my mouth touch his. One of his hands went up to my hair. Then his long tongue was in my mouth, like a snake coiling about and making itself comfortable in its lair. Not so much a kiss, it was more like he was sucking and draining my mouth of saliva. Even so I got a little of the acid taste of an old man’s saliva.

We drew apart, while he explained that the next time we kissed, I had to take a long pranic breath –
apana
, the down-breath – which would reach down all the way to the
muladhara
or root
chakra
, which is located between the anus and the testicles and he reached between my legs to show me where he meant. We kissed again and I was concentrating like mad on this oriental breathing, so as not to think of him. And again and again. In between kisses he was giving me little lectures about the transference of energies through the mouth, the left-hand practices of certain Red Cap Lamas and the lighting up of the
chakra
points in the body. I was going dizzy, from the bizarre breathing rhythms and the sheer horror of it all. For his part, he was having difficulty in breathing – either because he was overexcited, or because of his cold. So after only twenty minutes or so we stopped. However, he was making ominous mutterings about future lessons concerning the Mors Osculi and the Obscene Kiss.

Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. But at least it cannot have been much worse than kissing that corseted old bag, Laura. If I knew more about Tantrism than I do, I would have a better idea of what is coming next. Sally knows more about Tantric sex than I do. Last year she was talking about training to become a temple prostitute. Cosmic claims to be in love with Laura, but he just says these things to shock – part of his I-love-ugly-old-people bag.

Then Felton sat down and flourished a handkerchief and wiped his mouth and blew his nose. Then, after having debated with himself for a while, he decided that my diary was worthy (though only just worthy) of being consecrated. Together we consulted the ephemerides tables to see if the time was propitious: Saturn chiefly in the ascendant; Mercury triune to the ascendant; Saturn and Uranus triune to the moon and Jupiter sextile to the Moon. It is a conjunction not without its problems, but it definitely has a power. Then he inscribed a pentacle with oriental sigils on the notebook’s flyleaf and intoned some Latin over it. He handed the diary back to me, together with a copy of Crowley’s
Diary of a Drug Fiend
(another early hippy document apparently).

Just as I was shakily making my way out of the room, he called me back,

‘
Quis custodiet custodies
? I have been talking to you about the importance of memory, but I am a fine one, for I forgot to ask you. Do you have a suit and tie?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘In that case, you will join me for dinner at The Gay Hussar in Greek Street at nine o’clock tomorrow evening.’

‘Oh, thank you for asking. That would be really nice, but unfortunately I cannot. I have promised to take Sally to the cinema tomorrow evening.’

‘Break that promise.’

‘I cannot.’

‘I am not inviting you to dinner. I am giving you an order. Your oath to the Master takes precedence over earlier or subsequent commitments to outsiders.’

‘But what shall I tell Sally?’

‘You will think of something. Why not lie to her? In the months to come you are going to need a lot of practice in lying.’

‘You are just testing me!’ I cried out.

‘Of course I am,’ he replied imperturbably. ‘Don’t forget to take your money … and do not forget to wear a suit and tie – and a clean shirt if possible. Love is the Law. Love under the Will.’

I took the money. It was a test, but what kind of test? Is it possible that Felton despises me for taking the money he offers me? Does he think that I have become Hell’s rent boy?

I only just made it in time to the pathworking downstairs. Granville was conducting it, while Agatha accompanied our meditations on the piano. God knows what she was banging out. It sounded like a Beethoven sonata as rendered by a mad and deaf Turkish dervish. The pathworking was based on
The Tempest
and it was unusually long and complicated with stuff about the storm of human emotions, the isolation of being apparently alone on a desert island, with Ariel and Caliban as representations of the higher and lower souls, and on winning through to gain the hand of the sorcerer’s daughter – a symbol of the Adept’s union with Sophia, or the Higher Wisdom. But I kept returning to the storm and to the song of Ariel: ‘Full fathom five thy father lies … ’ I imagined the eye-sockets of the dead looking up at me through the murky water and the fish darting among the bones.

(By the way, it turns out that Shakespeare was a leading occultist. Everybody seems to have been one. It will probably turn out that Charlie Chaplin and Joseph Stalin were leading occultists too.)

It was late when I got back and by then my mind was made up and I decided that I had to ring Sally straightaway. The morning would be too late, as she would be at her archaeology lectures by then. So I rang her and told her that I had food-poisoning and that I doubted if I would be able to make it the following evening. She sounded seriously concerned – tiresomely so, as she kept wanting details about what I was throwing up, and she even threatened to come round and look after me. She thinks that I might be the victim of a psychic attack and that it is the Lodge which is making me ill. But in the end
Elvira Madigan
got postponed till Thursday.

Before our grisly kissing session, Felton said so much that it is hard to remember it all. He said something about how I was holding back on my emotional reactions to things and people. Oh yes, he did talk again about the magical purpose of training the memory. The Lodge has many enemies and from time to time its Adepts are subject to magical attacks. The commonest form that these psychic assaults take is an attack on the memory of an Adept. If one is attacked and one loses the psychic battle, then parts of one’s past will be accessible only through the record kept in the diary. The diary then is a kind of back-up memory for use in the spiritual warfare which is to come. Felton also said that, by keeping a diary, I was training myself to think backwards and that is one of the essential skills of the Adept. He did not comment on the mysterious disaster at the Cairo Working, even though I had put that bit in specifically hoping that he would.

Woke early. Looking back on yesterday, it wasn’t that bad. I wanted to shock myself and I succeeded in doing so. Great. What is bad is that I now have a cold. Having made up a stupid lie about food poisoning, I now find that I genuinely am a bit ill. After breakfast, put Donovan’s
Sunshine Superman
on the record player to help me think about Sally. All my contemporaries seem to have their own music which is distinctive to them – kind of like a whale’s song. Donovan, ‘the English Dylan’, makes Sally’s music for her. She grooves on its gentleness and dreaminess. (But there is an undercurrent of melancholy in Donovan’s songs which bodes ill for Sally’s future.) Sally likes to dance as much as I do, but her dances are slow and sinuous. This new fashion for sitar music suits her style of dancing perfectly. Whereas, when I dance, it is a high voltage performance and I fantasise that my body is dissolving into waves of energy and light. The dance sets me free from the world’s field of gravity.

There are no hard edges to Sally. It is noticeable that her room is like an extension of herself. One cannot see the floor, ceiling or walls for all the drapes, coloured cloths, beaded curtains, Chinese bells, mattresses and cushions. And, when the candles are not lit, the room is lit by an orange light bulb hidden under a batik cloth. She scrounges a lot of fabrics from the theatres where she works part-time as a dresser and she keeps adding new ones and rearranging them in order to redirect the vibes. Her breath is sweet.

I was disconcerted when Felton pointed out that I was keeping myself and my feelings out of this diary. Do I love Sally? I do not want to be simplistic about this. Maybe I do. (Love is the Law. Love under the Will.) But what does love mean? We are both free spirits. We do not own one another. This business of her trying to order me not to have anything to do with the Lodge is the first time she has ever tried to be authoritarian or possessive about our relationship. It is deeply uncool.

I achieved a major triumph this morning. I took the bus to St Joseph’s and practised the spell of invisibility. Since the conductor never noticed me, I travelled for free. I fancy that the faculty of invisibility could be seriously useful for a sociological observer.

At the end of the first playtime the deputy head came out for a chat. He passed on a few useful observations about patterns in children’s play. Then he wanted to know what I thought I was going to do when I had my PhD. It is the kind of question which is well-calculated to freak me out. I do not want to do anything with my life except dance and maybe play music. The thought of work is cruel. As the Stones put it, ‘What a drag it is getting old.’

I have this horrid feeling that youth is on a holiday and that it is not going to last.1967 will give way to 1968. Sally read me a poem a few weeks back – ‘The Land of Heart’s Desire’ by W.B. Yeats. It was about

‘The lands of faery

Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,