Satan Wants Me (8 page)

Am I a latent homosexual? If I am a latent one how would I know? It seems to me that I exist only in my face, mouth and a little bit of the top front part of the skull. The rest of me is a complete mystery to me – a dark continent full of exotic horrors.

I returned to studying the children in the playground, but now it is as if I have become the eyes of Dr Felton. As if he is using me to watch these children. Why is he so interested in them? I do not think that the children like me very much. Every now and again one of them looks up from its play and scowls at me. For sure, it is my gloomy humour this morning, but there now seems to me to be something sinister in the play of these little urchins. It is not play at all, but a series of secret messages, coded in the gyrations of their arms and legs, and directed at the adult world. Their games are deliberate parodies of what adults do – going out to work, marrying and dying. Above all dying. ‘Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!’ These kids have one message, only one message, and that is that I and my generation will die before they do. The dangerous thing about small children is that they are still close to the void from which they have so recently emerged. They remember what it is like not to have existed.

I left my place on the wall and headed back to my pad. Sally turned up a few minutes later and we headed off to the cinema as arranged, but then we got into an argument. Sally had wanted to see
Elvira Madigan
, but I am not fond of foreign films and I wanted to see
The Devil Rides Out
, which was playing at the Electric in Portobello Road. I won the argument. I wish I had not. I grooved on the film, especially Charles Gray being sleek and unctuous as the Satanist Mocata and the scene where Christopher Lee (playing the Duke de Richelieu) faces out the forces of Evil from within the pentacle, but I could feel Sally sitting beside me hating it. Actually it was not so much the film she hated as my attitude to it. I could see she was in a mood and when we got back to my room I put Donovan on the record player. I was hoping to change the vibes, but I did not have much luck there.

‘I think that you see yourself as some sort of trainee Duke de Richelieu,’ she said. ‘Or what’s the name of that hero in the comic books you keep reading?’

‘Dr Strange.’

‘Dr Strange, that’s him. You dream about becoming some high-powered white magician ready to do battle against the forces of evil. Whereas the truth is that, in signing up with the Black Book Lodge, you are aligning yourself with precisely those forces of evil.’

‘You have got to listen to yourself Sally. Your voice is all jagged. You are sounding hysterical. The Lodge has nothing to do with forces of evil.’

‘They’re everything to do with darkness. Peter, why are you playing with me? They are fucking Satanists. Look at me and tell me that they are not.’

I pulled her close to me and began to fondle her.

‘Come off it Sally. The Black Book Lodge people are nothing like the people in the Dennis Wheatley novels. In the Wheatley books, people like Mocata and Canon Copely actually worship the Devil. The Lodge’s members, on the other hand, simply believe in developing powers that are innate in man. They – we do not worship anything. There is no commitment of belief, either asked for or given.’

‘If you do not believe in it, then you can easily give it up.’

I noticed that her hand was straying up my leg.

‘I do not believe in it. I am simply going into it in a spirit of scientific enquiry. I find it interesting from a sociological point of view. One of these days I might even get an article out of it – “Internal Group Dynamics in a North London Lodge of Occultists”, or something along those lines.’

‘You are not being straight, Peter, with yourself, or with me. No way have you joined the Lodge in a spirit of sociological enquiry or anything like that. I don’t know what it is, but you are after something hidden, something not for humans, something you will never find. Show me your palm.’

She was all over me. One of her hands held up my right palm for inspection, while the other was playing over my leg.

‘Your palm is changing,’ she said. ‘It is different from when I last looked at it a few months ago. The life-line is threatened.’

‘That’s not possible.’

‘Oh yeah, it’s possible.’

Her hand was playing over my groin. Donovan was singing “Three Kingfishers” to a sitar and tabla accompaniment. I was listening with my eyes closed to the music which seemed to suggest the rippling of flesh and the infinite play of possibilities in life.

‘Isn’t what we have enough?’ she whispered.

I said nothing, just nodded. I was entering a fantasy about Krishna playing his flute before the gopini milkmaids.

‘Let’s go to bed.’

She was testing me and it was pleasant to be so tested. It felt like I had a great lump of iron between my legs. I liked to think about surrendering to her desire. But …

‘I can’t. There isn’t time. I have got to get ready to go out to the Lodge and be formally robed as a Probationer for Adepthood.’

There was a hiss of ‘Bastard!’ and she was out of the door so fast that I never even saw her leave. I put Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ on the record player, sensing that its rich melancholy would be the right accompaniment to my own and I set to writing this all up in the diary.

I arrived early at the Lodge to have my diary picked over by Felton. He started in on me, even before he had looked at the most recent entries.

‘Peter, it occurs to me that you may have been thinking that because I am so old, in your eyes at least, therefore I am not best fitted to give you guidance on the Path. Do not be deceived by appearances, for I am still young. In myself, I am no older than I was on a certain day in 1948. True, I do not appear to be as slim as I once was. Well that, I am afraid, is one of the occupational hazards of becoming a sorcerer – in that respect we resemble wrestlers and opera singers.’

Then he handed over a wodge of five-pound notes and lowered his eyes to the diary. There were the usual gripes about syntax and punctuation. I was holding my breath, waiting to see how he would react to my description of him and of the tantric kissing, but as usual he only had eyes for errors in punctuation and syntax. What upset him most though was my use elsewhere of the word “prestigious”.

‘Yeeugh. I am tempted to give these pages to Boy, if I did not think that they would make him sick. You cannot possibly mean that the restaurants I was talking about were “prestigious” and I could never have said such a thing. “Prestigious” is the adjective derived from prestidigitation (which means conjuring). “Prestigious” therefore means “fraudulent” or “deceitful”. Only the vulgar and ignorant use it in the sense of distinguished or famous. “Prestigious” is part of the threadbare vocabulary of approbation favoured by used-car salesmen, remittance-men and the vendors of snake oil. Such people are lavish with the use of such adjectives as “sumptuous”, “generous” and “discerning”. What was in your head, Peter, when you used this word?’

Actually I was trying to hold back my laughter. I had deliberately used that word because I guessed that it would wind him up. I was desperately wishing that I had put in more stuff like that and I kept asking him questions about the hyphenation and the semicolon in the hope of delaying the inevitable horror of a second lesson on kissing. To no avail … After a while even he became bored with the semicolon and, rising from his chair, he motioned that I should rise and come to him. But, I made no move towards him. Instead,

‘Dr Felton, do you think that I am a homosexual?’

For only the second time in our acquaintance, I had succeeded in surprising him. He was silent for a while, trying to decide, I guess, how much he could tell me. In the end, he settled for very little.

‘How can you be? It is clear from your diary that our last kissing session filled you with revulsion. Besides, for the future purposes of the Lodge it is essential that you be a heterosexual.’

There was a cruel smile on his face as he beckoned to me once more. Then we closed for a kiss … and another and another. I kept trying to make it OK by telling myself that Felton was just a projection of my mind. This time there was less work on the breathing more stress on the exchange of saliva. Felton was explaining some of the weird magical uses that saliva can be put to. Human saliva is really very like snake venom. They share a lot of the same enzymes. Saliva is one of the most precious substances in the Filthy Dispensary of the Hermetic Temple.

I thought the session would be over when we finished the kissing lesson, but no. He then turned to my account of Sally in the diary.

‘I wonder if you quite realise how she emerges in these pages. As I read in your little book, she is a dim-wit who believes in fairy tales about the return of King Arthur. She is a slut who sleeps around. She is a manipulator who tries to use her body to win you round to what she wants.’

‘That’s not true. You do not know her.’

‘You are right that I have never met the lady in question. However, it is not I who accuses her, but you do in your diary. You have been telling me that she is not good enough for you.’

‘You are telling me to get rid of her?’

‘You are telling yourself that.’

‘But she’s my girlfriend!’

‘The Lodge will find you another.’

‘You cannot seriously expect me to give up my girlfriend for two hundred pounds a week! You just can’t buy people like that!’

I was actually wondering if he would up the offer. And I was wondering if I would be happy to give Sally up for, say, a thousand pounds a week. After all, I could give her some of the money – pay her a sort of rent for not being my girlfriend, just like US farmers sometimes get paid by their government not to grow alfalfa.

But Felton insisted that the money was only for the inspection of my diary. That was our pact. He would not dream of bribing me to give up anyone or anything. That would be pointless, for I had to learn to discipline myself. Unless I renounced Sally, I would be unable to take a single further step along the path. How could I achieve Adepthood, unless I died to my desires? And so on and so on.

But I was impatient,

‘Yes, but why all the mystery? What exactly is the Path? What would I be if I became an Adept? All you ever offer are dark hints. Why not spell out exactly what are the gains and losses of following the path of the sorcerer? What will I gain when I give up Sally?’

Felton could not suppress a quick thin smile when he heard the words ‘will’ and ‘when’.

‘If the reward of the Adept could be put into words, it would not be worth having, would it? All I can tell you is that the person you will become – if you follow the Path – will be a person who will not be able to understand your present self with your humdrum, limited and conventional desires. Still less can your present self understand the man of power you are going to become.’

I was not really convinced, but it was close to the time for the robing, so I bowed my head and rose to leave. But he called me back.

‘Oh yes, Peter. There is one thing. You have misspelt the name of the popular music group on the last page. Procol Harum should be Procul Harum meaning ‘Far from These Things’.

‘No. They spell it with an o.’

Felton groaned. I was humming to myself as I walked out of the door. ‘We skipped the light fandango, turned cartwheels across the floor.’

‘A mouth that has no moisture and no breath

Breathless mouths may summon;

I hail the superman;

I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.’

This last is not Procol Harum. That was Mr Cosmic quoting Laura, quoting Yeats. Cosmic has a truly amazing memory. It allows him to connect anything he hears with anything else he has ever learnt. So that he carries around in his head this vast cosmological encyclopedia constructed around energy waves, ley lines, chakras, Sephirotic trees and mandalic maps. He had just come out of another of Laura’s lessons on strange kissing and, while we waited to be robed, we chatted. Cosmic was beginning to get worried about the direction Laura’s teaching was taking them.

‘It’s like the living man lies down with the dead woman and kisses her, but when their union is over, it is not always the man who rises and walks away. According to the seventeenth-century neoplatonist Thomas Vaughan’s
Magica Academica
, “It is written of Jacob that he was asleep, but this is a mystical speech for it signifies death, namely that death which the Kabbalists call
Mors Osculi
or the Death of the Kiss, of which I must not speak one syllable.” Also there is something horrible called the Obscene Kiss which the Knights Templar used to be keen on. Laura says she is looking forward to being on the receiving end of this extreme form of occult kissing. I don’t like it man. It’s very heavy.’

I do not care for the prospect myself. I am not admitting to Cosmic that I am getting instruction in lethal kissing too, as that might get back to Sally. At least Cosmic has Laura whom he claims to find really cuddly. But he was saying that he had a big problem with his penis. I was all agog to hear what this could be, when we were interrupted by Ron. Ron is such a moany drip that we have as little as possible to do with him. One of his problems is that he speaks so slowly that it seems somehow insulting – his cool assumption that we have all the time in the world to listen to his drip-by-drip monotonous rubbish. This evening he was saying that he had had it with the Lodge and he was going to drop out from the apprenticeship and that we should do the same. He thought he might be able to make some money in the process by selling the story of what went on here to the papers. As politely as possible we told him to get lost. Then we returned to Cosmic’s big problem which turned out to be that he is panicking that his penis is actually shrinking, because he has contracted some oriental disease called koro. He keeps checking it with the little ruler he has in his pocket. At this rate he will even have to resign from his position as Founding President of the League of Men with Small Penises. I suggested that he attach a clothes-peg to his foreskin to stop the penis vanishing altogether.