Masks of the Illuminati

by Robert A. Wilson

  “For God’s sake!” Babcock cried. “Don’t! You can’t be absolutely sure of your theory, whatever it is. You may not be immune to the danger.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried,” Einstein said, tearing and ripping until the book emerged. Then he began to laugh, a small chortle at first, and then louder and louder until his face was contorted and tears appeared in his eyes.

  The laughter of hysterical madness? No: Einstein finally regained control and held the book up so Joyce and Babcock could see it. “Here it is, gentlemen,” he said, “the horror of horrors….”

  The book he held was titled Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes.

  “Mo … ther … go …” Joyce said slowly. “It fits together the fragments we heard.”

  “And it’s all magick secrets in code!” Babcock cried. “Crowley wasn’t joking about that at all.”

  “Yes, he was,” Einstein said. “This is the punch line to the joke.” He resumed his seat, wiping further tears of laughter from his owl-wide eyes with bunched knuckles helplessly.

  “It’s a Divine Comedy,” Joyce gasped, also gurgling a laugh half-born far back in his throat. “We’ll all be hauled off to Dante’s Infirmary with the whooping laugh.”

  “Am I to gather,” Babcock asked, not amused, “that I have been having my leg pulled all along?”

  “Yes and no,” said Einstein.

  “Another paradox!” Babcock cried. “Is there no unequivocal yes or absolute no in any of this business?”

  Joyce, still half-laughing, sang softly:

  A paradox, a paradox,

  A most ingenious paradox …

  “For Christ’s sake!” Babcock said. “Let me in on the jest, gentlemen.”

  Einstein nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said. “At this point I’m not at all sure I should explain to you; you might never forgive me. What do you think, Jeem?”

  “I think,” Joyce said, “that this script has been so brilliantly constructed that it doesn’t matter how much you explain. The doorbell will ring again, before you are very far along, and the Author will provide the climax he intended from the beginning.”

  “Yes,” Einstein said, “I suppose you are right. Well, then,” he addressed Babcock, “to at least begin an explanation …”

  “When the doorbell rings the second time,” Joyce pronounced, “we undoubtedly shall all turn to pumpkins.”

  “Before that happens,” Einstein said, “I think I do owe Sir John the rest of the explanation of what is going on here.”

  “At last!” Babcock said with some heat.

  “Until the doorbell rings …” Joyce intoned.

  Einstein concentrated for a moment. “Let us begin with basics. In the context of modern thought, that means with David Hume. In his discussion of miracles, Hume points out what argument is both totally satisfactory, and also totally necessary, to demonstrate the reality of an alleged miracle. That argument is, briefly, to be able to demonstrate that any other explanation of the event would itself be more miraculous than the alleged miracle itself. This is Hume’s equivalent of Occam’s Razor. For instance, if I were to claim that my dear wife, Milly, is floating around the kitchen two feet above the floor, you would in reason be justified in believing me only if it were even more miraculous that I, Albert Einstein, could tell a lie. Now, I treasure my reputation for integrity, but I do not think you would have any doubt in choosing which interpretation is more miraculous in that case—[a] that Milly really is flying around like a witch, or [b] that I am lying to you. No: there has never been a man of such supernatural honesty that it would strictly be more miraculous for him to lie than for his wife to levitate.

  “This is ordinary common sense, as is everything in Hume. We never believe an incredible story of strange things in the sky or strange beings on the ground when only one man claims to be the witness. We begin to wonder a bit if there are several witnesses, but even then we skeptically seek evidence that some conspiracy may exist between them, or that drunkenness or some traumatic shock, such as explosion, might have caused them all to hallucinate.

  “Now, let us apply this Razor of Hume’s to the Miracle of the Murdered Cat on the Altar. From whose testimony do we obtain this yarn? From that of Reverend Verey, and nobody else. Even the supporting detail about Mrs. Verey finding some of the evidence afterward is not her testimony [we have never met her] but part of Verey’s own yarn.

  “So,” Einstein said, “on the basis of the logic of David Hume and the ordinary common sense of humankind, let us ask: Is it more miraculous that mysterious diabolists can walk through walls or that a most peculiar old man like Verey might be lying to us? The answer is obvious: it is less miraculous that Verey might lie. It is more miraculous that someone walked through solid walls. So, in reason, we must choose the less miraculous theory: Verey lied.”

  “This does not at all clarify the greater mystery of the suicides,” Sir John said. “There we are not relying on Verey’s unsupported word. We have a newspaper story …” His voice trailed off.

  “Yes?” Einstein said. “We have a newspaper story, or so it appears. Where did the newspaper story come from?”

  “From the Inverness Express-Journal,” said Babcock.

  “Not exactly,” said Einstein. “It came from the pocket of George Cecil Jones, who only told you it came from the Inverness Express-Journal. In this connection, I note also that Jones told you he sent his secretary out to buy ‘a copy’ of that newspaper. He did not say ‘two copies,’ and there is no reason, taking his story at face value, why he should have asked for two. And yet you pocketed the copy of the story he gave you, and Verey was reading another copy at breakfast the next morning. This is the Marvelous Multiplication I mentioned. It does not make sense; so, again, somebody is lying to us. Now, we have several people here associated with publications of various sorts. Reverend Verey and the Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth published Clouds Without Water, at least, and possibly other works even more curious. Jones and/or his associates publish instruction manuals for Golden Dawn students. Crowley publishes his own books, we have been informed. Certainly, among these three most mysterious mystery-mongers it would be easy to produce what looked like a story cut from a newspaper?”

  “My God,” Babcock said. “But I actually heard Verey talking to Inspector McIntosh of the Inverness police about the suicides…. I mean …”

  “Yes,” Einstein said, “you see it already, do you not? You heard Verey talking to somebody at some Inverness number, and you assumed that he had actually called an Inspector at the Inverness police. Again, is it more miraculous to believe in these incredible suicides, brought on”—he smiled whimsically—“by Mother Goose—as we are now supposed to believe—or is it more miraculous to assume that Verey and a confederate in Inverness performed a charade with the telephone? Again, I think, the answer is obvious: the latter is less miraculous.”

  “It all sounds so plausible,” Babcock said. “Yet I find it hard to believe that Jones and Verey and Crowley were conspiring together all through this….”

  “I also found that hard at first,” Einstein said, “until you described your telephone conversation with Jones the morning you met Verey. Jones said, and the words struck me intensely, ‘Be careful, Sir John; remember that a man with Verey’s hunched back is a rather conspicuous figure.’ Now, I asked myself: How on earth did he know that Verey was a hunchback? He had allegedly never met the man. Well, I said, maybe Sir John told him and neglected to mention that while recounting the conversation to us. Then I remembered, Sir John, that you said Verey was at your side all through that telephone call. You are much too well mannered to say, ‘Oh, by the way, he’s a hunchback,’ while the hunchback stands beside you. So, then, how the devil did Jones know? This is the Casual Telepathy, if we believe it. I do not believe it.

  “The obvious alternative is that Jones and Verey were working together all along. Verey tells you, first by mail and then in person, a series of frightening tales well calculated
to fill you with dread, and Jones produces the alleged ‘newspaper’ clipping that seemingly confirms these yarns.”

  Einstein paused to re-light his pipe. “To proceed,” he said, “if Jones and Verey are co-conspirators, we begin to clear away some of the other dark mysteries in this most mysterious business. For instance, I believe that coincidences can multiply at an astonishing rate—especially in the perceptual coordinate system of a man trained to look for them, regarding them as occult signals or omens. But your tale, Sir John, has altogether too many coincidences for any sane universe. I refer in particular to the insistent and terrifying way that details from your dreams and astral visions—the latter of which you must permit me to consider a species of half-waking dreams—come to life in the real world as your involvement with Verey and his problems increases. So I ask myself: How could these Superabundant Coincidences have been accomplished?

  “There is only one answer,” Einstein said. “One man had access to your ‘Magick Diary.’ One man looked at it every month, as you have told us, to guide you in your spiritual progress. One man, George Cecil Jones, could have collaborated with Verey in creating the impression that these dream-terrors were manifesting in the physical universe. George Cecil Jones, who somehow knew Verey was a hunchback when he allegedly had never met him.”

  “My God,” Babcock said again.

  “Let us return to the newspaper clipping,” Einstein continued. “I think that without that clipping, you would eventually have begun to notice that you had only Verey’s word for this whole story, patently borrowed from the Gothic horror school of fiction in general and Arthur Machen and Robert W. Chambers in particular. The newspaper clipping, then, was planned all along, like the conversation with ‘Inspector McIntosh,’ to prevent such suspicions from entering your head.”

  “But,” Babcock said, “as reasonable as all this sounds, I still find it hard to believe that a Christian clergyman like Verey—even if he had the multiple split personality suggested by Mr. Joyce—could collaborate with so vile a creature as Crowley.”

  Einstein grinned. “Let us look into that a bit. Joyce has suggested that ‘Arthur Angus Verey’ never existed, that Charles Verey wrote the whole of Clouds Without Water. Let us turn that around, and try the alternative. Suppose ‘Charles Verey’ never existed and the whole book was written by ‘Arthur Angus Verey.’”

  “But I met Charles Verey!” Babcock exclaimed.

  “No,” Einstein said. “To be parsimonious in our conceptualizing, you met and received letters from a man who alleged he was named Charles Verey. A man with a hunchback, which is so striking a feature that it generally captures the attention entirely. Very few people, I believe, could describe a hunchback accurately: they would remember the hunch so centrally that the other features would be vague, quickly forgotten. One other fact about ‘Verey’ did stick with you, however, and you mentioned it several times. I refer to his paleness. I was particularly struck when you stated that, at first glance, he seemed as pale as an actor made up for a death scene. This is the Over-Defined Image, and it suggests theatrics. I started to think: why, with a hunchback and some makeup, I could come into this room and ask for Professor Einstein and the two of you would tell me that Professor Einstein was out.”

  “The Cabalistic style!” Joyce cried. “My God, why didn’t I see it sooner! Of course! The style is the same. The real author of Clouds Without Water—both the ‘Arthur Verey’ poems and the ‘Charles Verey’ sermonettes tacked on—is Aleister Crowley.”

  “Aleister Crowley, the son of a very rich brewer,” Einstein said, “and therefore capable, like many rich Englishmen, of keeping a flat in London and a fine old home in Scotland, too. Perhaps in Inverness? I think investigation would quickly reveal that such was the case.”

  “And the phone number would be Inverness-418,” Joyce said, “the number ‘Verey’ called when he spoke to the alleged ‘Inspector McIntosh.’ In fact, it was Crowley disguised as the imaginary Verey, calling his own home and staging a scene to impress Sir John.”

  “We can go further than that,” Einstein said. “Yesterday, we heard that the Laird of Boleskine was in Switzerland to climb mountains. We know that Crowley is a mountain-climber and now we have an Extra Mountain-Climber. Let us hypothesize that the two are Cabalistically One. And recall that the ‘devil’ Sir John saw on Bahnhofstrasse last night appeared after the arrival of this Laird of Boleskine. The package delivered tonight also suggests that Crowley is in the neighborhood. I suggest, therefore, that Crowley not only has a home in Inverness, but somehow acquired, or bestowed upon himself, a title to go with the home, and is the Laird of Boleskine. And that the ‘Reverend Charles Verey’ and the ‘Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth’ are entirely his creations.”

  “Damn it all!” Babcock cried. “What an ass I have been!”

  “You were deceived by masters at that art,” Einstein said gently. “The author of The Book of Lies is a genius in the trade of mystification.”

  “But one thing is still unclear,” Joyce said. “Why does Mr. George Cecil Jones fit into this?”

  “It has stared us in the face all along,” Einstein said. “Crowley has played perfectly fair—mostly, I suppose, because he is as much fascinated by lies that look like truth as he is by truth that looks like lies. At the very beginning, the first Golden Dawn lesson warned Sir John that Crowley, among others, was running a Golden Dawn order. The fact that Crowley and his particular Golden Dawn group were violently denounced is a misdirection typical of his sense of humor as we have come to know it. Sir John was always in Crowley’s branch of the Golden Dawn. Mr. Jones is perhaps Crowley’s second-in-command, or at least a high officer of that lodge. They have been initiating Sir John all along according to the oldest form of initiation known to anthropologists: the ordeal by terror. The Rite of Passage. It is just an enormous extension of the simpler drama staged by Crowley with his so-called ‘psychoboulometer,’ and it is even coded into the I.N.R.I. sequence Sir John was given for meditation at the beginning: the ritual of death and rebirth.”

  “And that horrible recording that ‘Verey’ made …” Joyce prompted.

  “I could make a recording just as impressive with the aid of a few professional actors,” Einstein finished simply.

  There was a pause.

  “We come now,” Joyce prompted again, “to the Miracle on Regent Street. Are we to believe that Baron Zaharov is also a co-conspirator, and that his Eastern Orthodox piety is another masquerade?”

  “Well,” Einstein said, “it is certainly peculiar for an anti-Semite whose government has been distributing the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and who allegedly has an uncle high in the hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, to have as a middle name Salmonovitch. Jeem, tell Sir John the equivalent of that in English.”

  “Solomonson,” Joyce said. “My God, I missed that at first. It would mean that the Baron’s father was a Jew.”

  “An improbability in that government and unbelievable in that church at this time,” Einstein said. “The Clue of the Impossible Name. Crowley has been fair with us again, bestowing the hint that allows us to see behind the masquerade if we are intelligent enough.”

  “And the testimony of Miss Sturgis?” Joyce asked.

  “Miss Sturgis, as secretary to the notorious Isadora Duncan,” Einstein said, “obviously travels in circles that would be called bohemian, avant-garde or revolutionary, yes? It is not hard to imagine some relationship, romantic or otherwise, between her and Crowley.”

  “Well,” Babcock said, “if Baron Zaharov is not a real Russian nobleman, who or what is he?”

  “Oh,” said Einstein, “I think it is fairly clear that he must be Aleister Crowley again, in another masquerade.”

  “But the height differences between Crowley, Verey and Zaharov,” Joyce complained. “How was all that managed?”

  “Crowley is a man of medium height, Sir John informs us. With a fake hunchback and the crouch to accompany it, h
e could easily appear four or five inches shorter.” Einstein stood up and walked a few steps hunched over in the manner of those with curvature of the spine. “Observe: Do I not seem several inches shorter?”

  “That is totally convincing,” Joyce said. “The other is not so easy to comprehend, however. Anybody can scrunch over and look a bit shorter, but how does one look a bit taller?”

  “Remember that Sir John only saw Crowley, as Crowley, once,” Einstein said. “Recall, also, that Crowley was not present in that garden, as himself, to provide any comparisons. Sir John saw a very short man go into the garden and then encountered there a man who seemed quite a bit taller than that. A man whose height he could not remember exactly because, as he told us, the ‘Baron’s’ manner was so overbearing he seemed perhaps taller than he was. We always remember very powerful, overwhelming, angry men as taller than they are—it is some sort of mammalian instinct which equates superior size with superiority in the herd. The large Russian fur hat, of course, also added to the ‘Baron’s’ apparent size. Relativity of Dimensions.

  “So, then, if ‘Verey’ and the ‘Baron’ were both Aleister Crowley, there was no need for the garden to be disturbed. No person, and no masquerade props, needed to travel horizontally through the garden at all. The transformation was almost certainly managed vertically. The accessories of the Zaharov personality—chiefly the black beard, the fur hat and an overcoat—were hanging down, behind the oak tree, on a strong elastic band such as spiritualist mediums and stage magicians often use. Crowley-as-Verey dashes into the garden, grabs those props, attaches the Verey props—suit with clerical collar and hunchback built in—and unhooks the elastic band from the fence post to which it was presumably fixed. It is immediately yanked upward with the Verey props to a perch I would imagine would be high above the ordinary line of vision.

  “I would also imagine,” Einstein concluded, “that the house was actually unrented at the time. The ‘Baron’ never existed aside from the brief charade in the garden and the tales Miss Sturgis recited.”