Masks of the Illuminati

by Robert A. Wilson

  This incident occurred in the glen just behind my church. Of course, every village in Scotland [and in Ireland, also] has such eldritch encounters reported occasionally, and I am quite sure that most of them are, as the atheistic psychologists say, self-induced delusion brought on by listening to old-wives’ tales. But young Murdoch was known to me as a boy of higher than normal intelligence, adventurous spirits and emotional stability. He is now a neurasthenic case, and I can only believe that something most terrible did accost him in the gloaming that evening.

  Next came the sinister Oriental gentleman in black clothing. Now this is most inconclusive, but for that very reason it disturbs me oddly. This personage—whether he were Chinese or Japanese or some other barbarian is in much dispute among those who met him—arrived in Inverness about a month after the incident of the Ferguson boy and the faery-creature. He visited at least two dozen families, always arriving at night in a black carriage. He wore Western clothing, all in black, and spoke a kind of English that was of neither the upper nor the lower classes—an uninflected, almost mechanical English, the witnesses say.

  He always requested directions to my church and then lingered a while to ask sly and seemingly pointless questions about myself my wife and my older brother, Bertrán. On taking his leave, this heathen in black always said, in the most peculiar way, “Evil to him who thinks evil.” The strangest part of this story is that, although he always asked how to reach my church, he never did arrive here, although these visits to neighbors occurred over a period of more than two months.

  What is even stranger, however, is that, although everybody this Oriental visited saw his black carriage distinctly, nobody else ever saw such a carriage traveling these back roads in daytime or at night. It is as if he and the carriage materialized from nowhere before each visit, and then dematerialized afterward—although I know that remark may sound as if I am beginning to let my imagination run away with me.

  [Incidentally, I would be most obliged to you if you could inform me if that mysterious sentence, “Evil to him who thinks evil,” has any meaning in white or black magick, besides being the motto of the Order of Saint George.]

  To proceed: in the last six months, since about the time the spectral Oriental ceased prowling these parts, there have been reports of an enormous bat-winged creature, with glaring red eyes, seen near my church at night. I believe that, by now, the number of persons who allege to have seen this creature is about twenty. Certainly, one can argue or attempt to argue that, in the ambience created by Nessie’s appearances in the Loch, the experience of the Ferguson lad, plus the swarthy Oriental, a mood of hysteria is sweeping the countryside and people are becoming suggestible to rumor and mob psychology.

  Alas, would that it were so! For I myself have seen the giant bat-creature—once, certainly, and on another occasion, possibly. The latter incident was really only a flapping of wings and a huge shadow—perhaps just an exceptionally large hawk. [But, on my word of honor, I have never seen or heard of a hawk of so vast a wingspan….]

  ACTION SOUND

  EXTERIOR. VEREYS FARMYARD: SUBJECTIVE SHOT. [VEREYS POINT OF VIEW]

  CAMERA tracks toward a Well. Footsteps. Verey’s voice [over]: “The other occasion was much clearer, Since I had gone out with a lantern to the well.”

  EXTERIOR. FARMYARD: SUBJECTIVE CLOSE-UP. [VEREYS POINT OF VIEW]

  Huge hawk-creature swoops toward camera. Verey’s voice [over]: “And the Thing swooped down and flew within a few feet of my head.”

  I worry that even you will attribute one further detail to my imagination: but the fact is that I thought I heard it titter in a voice close to that of humanity.

  If it were not for my love of these old Highland glens and hills, I think I would acquiesce to the increasing demands of my wife, Annie, and move to a more urban, less lonely place. As it is, even my older brother, Bertrán, a veteran of thiry years in the army and a man of iron courage, has begun to agree with Annie and has several times suggested we all leave this abominable place.

  I beg you to remember us in your prayers.

  Rev. C. Verey

  Could a man be turned into a camel? The question which had seemed merely absurd two years earlier was now horrible to contemplate, without ceasing to be ridiculous. The evil “wee people” whose contact has the power to disrupt totally the normal functioning of the human brain, abolishing space and time as we know them … the Creature so many had seen in Loch Ness … a bat-winged monstrosity that tittered in a human-like voice … Sir John found himself re-reading Verey’s letter several times, with growing apprehension and disquiet. “The mind has both a rational and an irrational aspect,” Jones had said, long ago, and Sir John had seen enough of the reasonless denizens of Chapel Perilous to fear their power, to know that they could on occasion cross over into the material universe and disrupt its normal laws entirely.

  Sir Walter Scott had written of these creatures in his famous Letters on Witchcraft, and Sir John found himself recalling, over and over, a phrase from Scott about “the crew that never rests.” Finally, he went to the library to look up the actual passage. Scott explained that “glamour” originally meant illusion, as every etymologist knows, and went on to discuss the abrupt way in which the glamour cast by these creatures could turn into sudden loathsome horror—as had perhaps happened to the poor Ferguson lad. Scott wrote:

  The young knights and beautiful ladies showed them-selves [as the glamour faded] wrinkled and odious hags. The stately halls were turned into miserable damp caverns—all the delights of the Elfin Elysium vanished at once. In a word, their pleasures were showy but totally unsubstantial—their activity unceasing, but fruitless and unavailing—and their condemnation appears to have consisted in the necessity of maintaining the appearance of industry or enjoyment, though their toil was fruitless and their pleasures shadowy and unsubstantial. Hence poets have designated them as “the crew that never rests.” Besides the unceasing and useless bustle in which these spirits seemed to live, they had propensities unfavourable and distressing to mortals.

  Sir John remembered his own first contact with the “crew that never rests.” Midway between dream and astral vision: the huge, incomprehensible machinery, the incessant muttering of nonsense phrases…. “Mulligan Milligan Hooligan Halligan” and all the rest. Cabala referred to them as the qliphothic entities—souls of those who had died insane; orthodox Christian theology simply called them demons; in Tibet they were known as Tulpas, and usually appeared in solid black garb like the mysterious “Orientar” who had gone about Inverness asking questions about the Verey household; to the American Indians, they were allies or avatars of Coyote, the prankster-god, or of the mysterious “people from the stars”; there seemed to be no part of the Earth in which they did not appear in horrified tales of malign humor, regarded as myth only by those who had never personally encountered them.

  Sir John remembered suddenly that the very word “panic” is derived from the name of the Great God Pan; and that the ancients believed that any close encounter with Him or His cohort of satyrs and nymphs—the crew that never rests—was more likely to lead to madness than to ecstasy, or that the ecstasy could easily turn to madness.

  The traditional old ballad “Thomas the Rhymer” came back to him, seeming not quaint at all but stealthily sinister:

  And see ye not yon bonny road

  That winds aboon the fernie brae?

  That is the road to fair Elfland

  Where you and I this night maun gae.

  He remembered that William Blake, the poet, had soberly told friends of seeing a faery procession in his own garden once; that Sir Walter Scott seriously reported on a man he described as “a scholar and a gentleman” who insisted he had observed faery rings—circles of mushrooms where the weird folk were said to dance—and had seen imprints of small feet within them; that the folklorist Rev. S. Baring-Gould had sworn to an encounter, in 1838, in which “legions of dwarfs about two feet high” had circled his carria
ge and ran laughing alongside it for some distance, then vanished “into thin air” in the traditional manner; that as recently as 1907 Lady Archibald Campbell had reported a case of a man and wife, in Ireland, who had captured a “faery” and held it prisoner two weeks before it escaped.

  Thinking, Do I dare, still, to consider all these cases as “hallucination”? and remembering the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, of similar reports from all ages and places: the Bigfoot of Canada, the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, the huge winged creatures of a thousand folk traditions—the vast dark company of unearthly beings (or the incredible variety of forms in which “the crew that never rests” can manifest to human consciousness, when the membrane between the visible and invisible worlds becomes temporarily ripped and They come prancing and dancing and slithering and tittering from their reality into ours)—remembering too his own experience when the most terrible of Them, the bisexual Baphomet, the Hideous God, had broken through to contact with him: Was that thunderous crash and that cracked mirror only a “coincidence,” or was it the tearing of the membrane, the opening of the door between the worlds?

  Remembering, too, the great blind spot of the eighteenth century, the much-vaunted Age of Reason, when science, unable to explain meteorites, had dogmatically declared that there were no meteorites; and when meteorites continued to fall and were reported by farmers and Bishops and tradesmen and housewives and philosophers and mayors and thousands of independent witnesses, including even dissident scientists, the French Academy and the Royal Scientific Society blandly dismissed each report as hoax or hallucination; thinking, just as today the continuing activities of the crew that never rests, reported weekly from someplace or other in the daily press and investigated with painstaking care by the Society for Psychic Research, are also dismissed as hoaxes or hallucinations. Belief in Verey’s letter was impossible to resist: though the dwarf and the alleged “Oriental” in black and even the bat-winged Thing that tittered were all glamours, phantasms, illusions, yet the force, the malign intelligence, behind these phenomena was something humanity had confronted from before the dawn of history and could not, ever, escape.

  Since his first researches into medieval magick, Sir John had vacillated between real belief, pretended-belief, real skepticism and pretended-skepticism. Now he no longer could resist simple uncomplicated belief. The Great God Pan was still alive, two thousand years after Christianity had correctly recognized and denounced Him as the devil; and his kith and kin were active all about us, even if they remained as invisible to educated opinion as meteorites to the intelligentsia of Voltaire’s age.

  ACTION SOUND

  EXTERIOR. LOCH NESS, TWILIGHT. TRACKING SHOT.

  Panorama of storm-tossed waters. The camera seems to be hunting purposefully over wave after wave after wave. Voodoo drums.

  Something moves in the water.

  Quick Fade.

  Cut to:

  CLOSE-UP

  TV Narrator [same actor as previous TV sequence] sits at desk grimly staring into Camera, which pans back slowly during this speech to MEDIUM SHOT. Narrator: “These reports of mysterious dwarf-like humanoids are found in folklore and legend allover the world, and continue to the present. What Does It All Mean? Science Cannot Answer, but we have in our studio a man who has given many years to the study of this subject …”

  Pan to:

  JOHN LEEK, an earnest, bespectacled, balding Writer in his mid-forties. Narrator [voice-over]: “Mr. John Leek, author of This Planet Is Haunted, Men in Black and 3000 Years of UFO’s. Mr. Leek, do you believe in these … um … Humanoids?”

  CAMERA moves to CLOSE-UP on Leek Leek: “It’s not a question of belief. It is cold fact that these creatures have been described in virtually identical details by nearly every society in history.”

  Pan to Narrator. Narrator: “And you believe they are extraterrestrials?”

  Medium shot: Narrator and Leek Leek: “Extraterrestrials, extradimensionals, time-travelers … They could be any number of things.”

  Narrator: “But they are basically the same as the UFO-Nauts reported by modern Contactees?”

  Leek: “Oh, no doubt about That. With the Age of Science, They’ve just changed their Game. For instance, they pretend to travel in mechanical craft now, to fit the extraterrestrial idea—but as all the skeptics point out, the craft make movements that would tear any mechanical ship apart. They are basically manipulating our minds, not our physical reality.”

  Close-Up: Narrator. Narrator: “But do you have any concrete evidence that these are the same creatures reported in earlier folklore?”

  Close-Up: Leek. Leek: “Well, here’s a drawing of one of the Enochian Intelligences, invoked by the Enochian Keys of Dr. John Dee. The drawing was made by Aleister Crowley, after invoking the Being. Is it not identical with the UFOnauts reported by thousands of Contactees in recent years?”

  Medium shot: Narrator and Leek. Narrator: “And you really believe Our minds are subject to seeing or hearing whatever They want us to see or hear?”

  CLOSE-UP: Leek. Leek: “That’s right. They are our Manipulators. Our reality is whatever They want it to be.”

  CLOSE-UP: Narrator. Narrator: “Well, that’s certainly an interesting theory, Mr. Leek. We’ll have another view, from Dr. Carl Sagan, after this brief message from our sponsor.”

  Q: Quote a scholarly source that at least tentatively supports the extreme views of Mr. Leek.

  A: “In the myths of every race and clime we see the hallmarks of those extra-cosmic denizens that populate the pages of the Necronomicon. In the Himalayas the legend of the Abominable Snowman is by no means dead but continues to be resurrected by even the most prosaic members of mountaineering expeditions…. Sightings of the West Virginia Mothman—a brown humanoid endowed with wings—continue to be reported; sea serpents and monsters fill the oceans and lakes; UFO encounters have become an almost everyday occurrence.” Commentary by Robert Turner, The Necronomicon, Neville Spearman, Suffolk, 1978.

  PART THREE

  Our Lord had no doubts as to the reality of demonic possession; why should we?

  —Rev. Charles Verey, Clouds Without Water

  The Bible speaks of “the dragon … and his angels” [Revelations, 12:7], indicating that along with Lucifer, myriads of angels also chose to deny the authority of God…. Watch out, they are dangerous, vicious and deadly. They want you under their control and they will pay any price to get you!

  —Rev. Billy Graham, Angels: God’s Secret Messengers

  If God is all, how can I be evil?

  —Charlie Manson

  It was the afternoon of the following day, June 27, and the Föhn had not yet ceased to suffocate Zürich in its dank embrace. Thrice the stifling wind had faltered, almost subsided: thrice it had resumed, hot and foul as ever: people’s tempers were growing short.

  Einstein, Joyce and Babcock were together again, this time in Einstein’s study, having agreed to meet there at three. The professor was the most chipper of the trio, being recuperated from the long night with the aid of only a few hours’ sleep and the intellectual stimulation of teaching his noon physics class. Joyce was still somewhat hung over, and looked it. Babcock, after drowsing fitfully on a divan in Joyce’s sitting room for most of the morning, was only a little less desperate than the previous night.

  “Well, Jeem,” Einstein began, “what do you make of our friend’s remarkable adventures, speaking honestly?”

  “Speaking honestly?” Joyce repeated. “I begin to ask myself whether that is possible.”

  Einstein said nothing; but his glance mutely invited Joyce to continue.

  “Once,” Joyce said thoughtfully, “a fair named Araby came to Dublin. I was perhaps ten at the time and devouring all sorts of romantic literature about the mysterious East, the secrets of the Sufis, the magick of the Dervishes, Aladdin and Ali Baba and much more of that sort. Can you imagine what the word ‘Araby’ connoted to me? My eagerness and excitement as the day of th
e fair approached were of the same order as my emotions, a few years later, when I nerved myself to enter the Red Light District and seek a prostitute for the first time. I thought a whole new world would open before me, a world of magick and wonder. What I found, of course, was an ordinary touring carnival, intended to amuse morons and empty the pockets of fools.”

  Babcock looked confused by this speech; Einstein was solemn. The silence stretched out until Joyce spoke again.

  “Mr. William Butler Yeats and his friends,” Joyce said simply, “live in Araby. It is real to them. More real than their servants, certainly. We go forth each day into the world of experience but we do not go mentally naked like Adam in Eden. We bring certain fixed ideas along whether we go to the corner pub, to a fair called Araby, or to the South Pole with Amundsen, I dare say. If a pickpocket enters this room he will see pockets to be picked; if Socrates were to be ushered in by the fair Mileva”—he bowed chivalrously toward the kitchen, where Mrs. Einstein could be heard puttering—“Socrates would see minds to be probed with annoying questions. If Mr. Yeats were here, he would see mere material shadows of the Eternal Spiritual Ideas known as Science,” indicating Einstein, “Art,” indicating himself ironically, “and Mysticism,” indicating Sir John. “I see three people with different life histories,” he concluded abruptly.

  “All of which,” Einstein asked drily, “is your way of saying that the Golden Dawn people seem no more mad to you than anybody else?”

  “I am saying,” Joyce replied, “that I can see the world as Yeats and the occultists do—as a spiritual adventure full of Omens and Symbols. I can also see it, if I choose, as the Jesuits taught me to see it in youth: as a vale of tears and a web of sin. Or I can see it as a Homeric epic, or a depressing naturalistic novel by Zola. I am interested in seeing all of its facets.”