Masks of the Illuminati

by Robert A. Wilson

  “As an Irishman, you are of course a mystic,” Babcock pronounced, thereby putting his foot into his mouth while, as it were, simultaneously stepping for the second time on Joyce’s most sensitive corn. “You know that there are vast invisible forces and intelligences behind the charade of material reality. Do you perhaps know of Yeats?”

  “Yes,” Joyce said evasively, maneuvering them both to miss a pile of dog shit, which he would most certainly include if he were ever to write this scene, and which Yeats would most certainly exclude. “Is he not the fellow who is so terrified that the future might be different from the past?”

  “I would not state the case that way,” Babcock said with a disapproving frown at the flippant and belittling witticism. “Mr. Yeats is a man who fears that the future will be cold, scientific, materialistic, without the romance and mystery of the past.”

  Einstein said nothing. They were now abreast of the FIAT “automobile,” and Joyce looked at it and at every part of it with a meticulous curiosity that seemed almost obsessive to Babcock. “You see more of these every year,” Joyce said. “And I read recently that a man in America named Olds is turning them out, and selling them to customers, at the rate of six thousand and more per annum. How the hell they run is as much a romance and a mystery to me as anything in that fabulous past Mr. Yeats’ autobiographical hero wishes so fervently to clutch to his bosom. There’s a magick Wand inside, called the clutch, that propels this mystic chariot to velocities up to forty kilometers an hour. I wish I knew more about mechanical physics.”

  “It’s a simple natural phenomenon,” Einstein said helpfully. “But I’m sure you don’t want a lecture on internal combustion at this hour.” Actually, he was more interested in observing his two odd companions, hoping that further clues might clarify why Devil Masks were so terrifying to Babcock and what little dollink had heard the chimes at midnight. “It runs on controlled explosions,” he added, hoping that would satisfy them.

  “Um, yes, certainly,” Babcock said uncertainly. “I wouldn’t drive one for a million pounds. You hear the most gruesome stories about accidents. Surely God gave us the horse so we wouldn’t have to invent such dangerous contraptions. I shudder to think what the world will be like in ten years when the streets are full of them.”

  “Of course,” Joyce said, although the logical progression here was totally inscrutable to Babcock, “if we, like Mr. Yeats, want a really deep, endless, bottomless and topless mystery, we can always try to understand our wives. Or the man next to us on the street, n’est ce pas?”

  Babcock meditated on that cynical-sounding notion for a few moments and then became aware that another man was in fact approaching them on the street, a most singular person with a high-domed Shakespearean forehead, ibis eyes of monkey like Mongolian cruelty and a spadelike black beard. So striking was this figure that, somewhat influenced by Joyce’s last remark, Babcock peered after the Slavic stranger as he turned down toward the Limmat River area and then commented aloud, “I shared a compartment with him on the train. One might indeed find deep mysteries in an individual of that sort.”

  “He seems to have very important business,” Einstein ventured.

  “Damn this wind,” Joyce said, jabbing the air with his walkingstick as a caduceus. “The natives call it the witch-wind. Whenever it blows, half of Zürich goes mad. We Northerners feel it more, since we expect a wind to be cold and biting. A hot wind that suffocates you slowly is like an unwanted, unlovely and unbathed paramour in your bed.”

  A dog howled suddenly in the distance with an eerie rising cadence like a wolf or coyote. “You see?” Joyce said. “Even the animals go barmy when the Föhn blows.”

  “It is like incense of white sandal,” Einstein agreed. “Too thick and heavy to be pleasant.”

  “The local police have records,” Joyce said in an opalhush tone, mystically, “showing that the murder rate always rises when the Föhn blows, and the local alienists say that the number of nervous breakdowns definitely increases. Most sinister and eerie, is it not? Mr. Yeats would say that the undines and water-spirits are attempting to overcome the air-elementals on the astral plane, which makes the material plane so mucking filthy to walk in.” Like Thoth, he shifted again, adding cynically, “But it is only a change in the ionization of the air and can be measured with those heathen scientific instruments Mr. Yeats so dreads.”

  But this led them into a full-scale imbroglio which lasted in fact all the way to Joyce’s hotel, and in the course of it Joyce learned that Babcock was an ardent admirer not only of the puerile (if elegant) poetry of Mr. William Butler Yeats, but of the detestable (if kindly) Mr. Yeats himself, and was even a member (with Yeats) of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a group of London occultists of which Joyce had long ago formed a decidedly unfavorable opinion, regarding them in cold fact as being a bit funny in all their heads. Babcock in turn gathered from various sardonic and downright unkind remarks dropped en passant by Joyce that he, Joyce, regarded Yeats (along with the Golden Dawn, Blavatsky and the whole of modern mysticism) with a disdain that seemed, to him, Babcock, to be unwarrantedly venomous. Things began to clear up after a bit, at least in Babcock’s muddled mind, when it gradually emerged that Mr. Joyce was also a writer, considerably less successful than Yeats, if not virtually unknown, and suspicions concerning the emblematic Sour Grapes and the well-known Green-eyed Monster were almost, but not quite, articulated at this point by Babcock, because only the madman is absolutely sure.

  “I take it,” Babcock said when they were finally arrived at Gasthaus Doeblin, “that you are a socialist, or an anarchist, if not both.”

  “You behold in me a dreadful example of unbridled anarchistic individualism,” Joyce replied suavely. “I loathe all nations equally. The State is concentric, but the individual is eccentric. Welcome to the ghastliest house this side of Dublin,” he added, indicating the sign: GASTHAUS DOEBLIN (and perversely mistranslating it according to his own dubious whimsy).

  “Thank God were out of that foul wind,” Einstein said fervently as they crossed a yellow-carpeted lobby bedecked with wallpaper showing palm trees and grinning monkeys. (“Mine innkeeper hath strange notions of decor,” Joyce commented sotto voce.) The building seemed to be an octagon, and Joyce led Babcock and Einstein around seven sides of it before arriving at Room 23, which was, he announced, “complete with breakfast alcove, where I have some of the best Italian espresso coffee this side of Trieste, because I brought it from Trieste.”

  They were tiptoeing now, Babcock and Einstein imitating Joyce in this, and stopped, once, as Joyce opened slowly and quietly a door to peer briefly into an untidy bedroom where a stoutish, pretty-faced woman was sleeping amid crumpled blankets.

  “That would be Mrs. Joyce,” said Babcock.

  “Undoubtedly,” Joyce retorted, “but it is Miss Barnacle.”

  More than a little taken aback by this frank avowal of barbaric contempt for civilized morals and the canons of elementary decency, Babcock had to remind himself that the arrogant Irishman was, after all, his host and had already exhibited somewhat more than the customary degree of charity to him, a perfect stranger in the first place and one who might sound a bit mad in the second place and beyond that a member of the conquering and therefore probably loathed English race in the third place. But by now they were in the kitchenette alcove and Joyce was making coffee, after setting the Devil Mask at a dapper angle above the cuckoo clock.

  “So,” Joyce said, “this goat-faced fellow has pursued you all the way from Loch Ness, you say.”

  “With your opinions,” Babcock replied, “you must regard all this as fantasy and I daresay you fancy yourself as humoring a lunatic. I remind you, sir, that three people have already died horrible deaths in this accursed affair.”

  “Pursued,” Einstein inquired softly, “by the same demon that now pursues you?” With one probing finger he chucked the Devil Mask under the chin, sharkishly playful. “A masquerade with nothing behind the masks?�
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  “A devil’s masquerade,” Babcock bitterly replied.

  This somewhat staggered Joyce, who recalled again the poem he had recollected on Bahnhofstrasse, although he still could not remember the author’s name if it were not his favorite ancient bard, Anon of Ibid. Another stanza drifted unbidden up to the surface of his mind:

  Demons drink from human skulls

  And souls are up for trade

  Take wine and drugs and join us in

  The Devil’s Masquerade

  That kind of damned peculiar coincidence was multiplying rapidly tonight, Joyce realized (and wondered if Dr. Carl Jung ought to be here to take notes). Reflecting thus in silence for a few minutes, the Irish freethinker steeped the coffee and began to absently roll a cigarette, glancing thoughtfully at the English mystic. “Saint Thomas tells us,” Joyce said soberly, “that the Devil has no power to do real injury to those who trust in the Lord, although he may admittedly frighten or discomfit them, to test their faith. In fact, sir, it is rank heresy to claim real harm can occur in such cases, since that implies lack of faith in God’s goodness. Ah,” he interrupted himself, “I see you are astonished that I can speak that language. Well, sir, if I were to believe in any mysticism, it would be that of Thomas, who is logical, coherent and full of cold common sense, and not that of your modern occultists, who are illogical, absurd and full of hot air. But let that pass for the moment.” He lit his cigarette and pointed at the mask. “What sort of second-rate, bargain-basement devil is it that needs theatrical props to do his dirty business?”

  Babcock, who had been growing steadier by the minute, smiled wryly at this sharply pointed sally. “You misconstrue me,” he said. “I am well aware that there are human beings involved in this terrible affair, but they have powers not ordinarily vouchsafed to mere men, because they serve a being who is not human. You think, evidently, that I am the sort who can be frightened by a mere theatrical prop, as you call it, but I have already faced terrors that you can scarcely conceive. For instance, I would not be frightened merely to see what I saw tonight—a figure with that Satanic face coming at me suddenly out of the dark. What was truly diabolical was that they found me here when I have taken elaborate precautions to cover my tracks and elude them.”

  Joyce poured coffee silently, the red-tipped cigarette not looked at in his left hand not feeling it. From Loch Ness to Zürich: to me. The terrors I knew as a child: howls of the damned, pitchforked, baboon-faced demons, flame-garbed figures screaming. Many a civic monster. Ancient Zoroastrian nightmare from which the West is struggling to awaken.

  “And how,” Joyce asked, “did these three persons come to die? Their throats torn by the talons of some terrible beast in the Gothic thriller style of Walpole?”

  Sir John, actuated by motives of inherent delicacy, inasmuch as he always believed in agreeing with one’s host for courtesy’s sake, however irascible said host might be, restrained several sharp answers that almost leaped to his lips, and said merely, “They were all driven to suicide.”

  “By masks and mummery,” Joyce exclaimed, not bothering to conceal his irony. Seizing the mask, he held it before his own flushed face and leaned menacingly across the table. “By theatrical props like this?” his voice asked from behind the mask in sardonic Dublin brogue.

  “They were driven to suicide by a book,” said Sir John, “a book so vile that it should not exist. Just by looking into this foul piece of literature, all three victims were driven mad by horror and destroyed themselves. It was as if they had learned something that made life on this planet so unspeakably awful to them that they could not bear another instant of consciousness.”

  Einstein stared at the young Englishman with something akin to the well-known wild surmise on the emblematic peak in Darien. “This is something you have really been involved in?” he asked quietly. “Not just something you’ve heard about, a rumor or a yarn?”

  “It’s as real as this coffee, this saucer, this table,” Babcock said flatly, indicating all three objects with emphatic gestures while his haunted eyes mutely recalled some dreadful history of Godless and unspeakable monkey business that might stab anyone in the back at any moment, anytime, anywhere, like the proverbial snake in the grass, if it were not judiciously nipped in the bud by brave and farseeing men taking prompt and prudent corrective action at the psychological moment and striking when the iron is hot.

  Joyce and Einstein exchanged mute meaningful glances.

  “Let me show you what I’ve been involved in,” Babcock said, reaching into his straw traveling case. “This is from the Inverness Express-Journal,” he said, passing over a clipping. Joyce and Einstein read it together.

  THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES

  Terror Stalks Loch Ness; Police Baffled

  Q: What paragraph caused the most puzzlement to Professor Einstein?

  A: “Other residents regard the inspector’s skepticism with the strict rule of no wife, no horse, no mustache, always anger and derision.”

  Q: Did Einstein refer to this particular befuddlement?

  A: With embarrassment, with awkwardness, with a suspicion that the problem might be caused by his own deficient knowledge of English, diffidently, he did.

  Q: Was that matter, at least, clarified at once?

  A: It was, by Mr. Joyce’s terse explanation: “That’s what’s called bitched type. Part of a line that got in from another column.”

  Einstein looked at Sir John with renewed interest. “Let me hear your whole story,” he said, beginning to fill a pipe.

  Joyce nodded, slouching in his chair like a boneless man. The Föhn wind shook the window behind him like a goblin seeking entrance.

  ACTION SOUND

  EXTERIOR. BABCOCK MANOR. LONG SHOT.

  The penny-farthing bicycle standing in a path near the house. Babcock’s voice: “… promise to always hele, never reveal, any art or arts, part or parts …”

  The bicycle falls over. There is no wind or other evident cause; it simply falls. The Merry Widow Waltz rises to drown out Babcock’s words.

  Q: With what species of animal and plant life was Babcock Manor most plentifully supplied?

  A: A murder of crows, an exaltation of larks, a clowder of cats, a muster of peacocks, a skulk of foxes, a watch of nightingales, a labor of moles, a gaggle of geese, a peep of chickens, a parliament of owls, a paddling of ducks, a knot of toads, a siege of herons, a trip of goats, a drift of hogs, a charm of finches, a murmuration of starlings, a pitying of turtledoves, a dawn of roses, a hover of trout, a tiding of magpies, a glory of violets, a zonker of hedges, a kindle of kittens, a hallucination of morning glories, a sunset of fuchsia, a stateliness of oaks, a midnight of ravens, a noon of fern, a cover of coots, a weeping of willows, a laughter of cosmos, a hilarity of gardenias, a sauna of beeches, a blather of crickets and a millennium of moss.

  Q: With what books was the library of Babcock Manor stocked by Sir John?

  A: A prevarication of politics, a chronology of history, a gnome of mythology, a schiz of theology [including a serenity of Buddhists, a cosmology of Hindus, an inscrutability of Taoists and a war of Christians], an eldritch of Alhazreds, a fume of alchemists, a tree of Cabalists, a heresiarch of Brunos, a lot of Lulls, an ova of Bacons, a mystification of Rosycrosses, a silence of Sufis, an enoch of Dees, a wisdom of Gnostics and a small snivel of romances.

  The night after meeting George Cecil Jones, Sir John dreamed again of Chapel Perilous, which was now a heavily armed, scarlet-walled castle owned by a man-eating ogre named Sir Talis. “You must enter without being sown,” said Judge Everyman, “for bleating runes are red.”

  King Edward III, wearing the conventional business suit of George Cecil Jones, wandered in numinous room incandescent muttering something about the impotence of being honest.

  “The moover hoovered,” He He Commons added helpfully. “The door opens to the wastebule, past eggnaughts to oldfresser Poop in the Watercan.”

  “The unheatable and the
unsbrickable,” shrieked a giant owl.

  “Sol is buried inside,” muttered Uncle Bentley. “Talk id and hoot!”

  Sir John realized he was in the Temple of Solomon the King as described in Freemasonic literature.

  “Wee-knee got Thor, Sir Talis war bore,” roared a Lion.

  “Passing as some dew-mist too dense upon the air,” whizzed an Eagle.

  “Bloog ardor!” howled Sir Knott the Almighty. “Take heed and hate!” Sir John, a solo man under sectualism, stumbled into the owld cavern of skeletons, a tripentoctocon where the morn’s dozen sheens. A sign said:

  DO NOT MEDDLE IN THE AFFAIRS OF WIZARDS: IT MAKES THEM SOGGY AND HARD TO LIGHT

  “Said, the old servant of Envy,” the Angel was lecturing, “tore him to shredded wheat and planeted him where the somn dozing snore, but he gnaw not weth the dew. For they whisked in a flicker, Jenny Peg and Brother Rot and Hamster, prinzipdungmark, and, slack it, a mouse with seven gerbils.”