by Robert Irwin
‘Now you have me, you don’t need him,’ I said.
She just smiled.
We sat in silence gazing at one another for a long time. Then Maud thought that we ought to go into the garden and gather up our clothes, but I pointed out that it was already too dark to see outside.
‘Let’s go to bed, Maud.’
I took her by the hand and led her into the bedroom. I had quite forgotten about Sally, but there she was, fully dressed on top of the bedclothes asleep with the light on. Her breathing was stertorous. It was a surprisingly loud noise to issue from such a waif-like body. I turned away from the bed and tried to lead Maud back to the lying-room, but Maud removed her hand from mine and went over to the bed,
‘We should be here,’ she said and she picked Sally up and laid her gently on the floor beside the bed. Then she pulled back the sheet and, having got into bed, she patted the space beside her. I switched the light off before joining Maud. I had no choice really, for I was trapped by her beauty like a man in a net and besides, even if that had not been the case, I had a premonition of bad things coming and I sensed that I needed Maud’s protection.
In bed it was Maud’s turn to explore my body and, though she was still adamant in defence of her virginity, in all other respects she behaved as my body-slave. I taught her to take me in her mouth and, when she swallowed, it seemed a solemn and eerie moment – a kind of fulfilment of the prophecy of the first trip. Maud fell asleep before me. I lay awake for a long while, straining to hear the Satanists and the blindly-sniffing dogs gathering outside the cottage, but all I could hear was Sally’s snoring.
Wednesday, August 9th
I awoke with a sudden jerk. It was still pitch-dark. Something crashed against the door. Then there were several thumps and a lot of hissing. I reached for Maud, but she was no longer beside me. A high-pitched scream came from the next room. I was like a man in a nightmare who has to confront the object of his terror, because there is no choice, for that is what his nightmare is and for him there can be no way back down the narrowing tunnel. I groped my way out of bed, switched on the bedroom light and opened the door onto the lying-room.
Sally and Maud were locked in combat on the mattress in the middle of the room. Sally had her teeth into one of Maud’s breasts and at the same time she was tugging at Maud’s hair. Maud had already been bitten several times and was bleeding. Yet Sally had no chance whatsoever, for, of course, Maud was bigger, stronger and a karate brown-belt. I watched her deliver a chop to Sally’s neck. Sally wheezed, and letting go of Maud’s hair, staggered back. Maud kicked her hard in the stomach and Sally went down. Then Maud stood over Sally and Sally looked up at her in the half-light and Sally … submitted. As Sally embraced Maud’s knees, Maud stroked her head. It seemed to me, as I looked on, that Sally had submitted not to Maud’s kicks and punches, but to her naked beauty.
Maud turned proudly to me,
‘Let’s go back to bed, my love,’ she said.
Sally brought us breakfast in bed in the morning. Later in the day, Maud and Sally drew up a shopping-list and Sally went into town to buy the stuff. Meanwhile we moved Sally’s things out of the bedroom and moved Maud’s things in. I imagined that Sally would be stressed by this, but when she came back she was all lit-up.
‘I saw Brian Jones in town,’ she explained.
‘A member of the Rolling Stones,’ I added hastily, in case Maud might think that Brian Jones was an old mate of Sally’s, or even a Satanist on our trail.
‘He was standing in Castle Street, looking as though he was lost. I went up to him and asked if I could help him. He said no, he’d be seeing me soon enough, which I thought was a pretty weird thing to say.’
‘It is pretty hard to get lost in Farnham,’ I observed. ‘It is really only two big streets.’
Sally continued to talk about her encounter with Brian Jones as if it were something miraculous, to be ranked with a vision of the Holy Virgin of Loretto, or something. However, if one thinks about it, it is not so astounding, as quite a few rock stars have big houses in Surrey. It would not surprise me to learn that some or all of the Stones are living nearby. One or two of the Beatles have settled in Weybridge, if I remember rightly.
Sally had brought back a lot of stuff from the shops. Maud had added to Sally’s list of basic provisions a whole lot of other stuff, including yet more underwear, some LPs of classical music and a copy of the Telegraph (so that Maud could follow the fortunes of the British karate team in Holland).
Maud and I went to bed for the first part of the afternoon, while Sally busied herself in arranging her stuff in the next room. I was due to ring Dad that day and I thought it would be best to do that before I got stoned, so I went to the call-box at the end of the road. Dad was just back from work. He sounded curiously reluctant to talk to me and I was having at least as much difficulty as I usually did thinking of things to say, particularly as I did not want to get into explaining how it was that Sally and I had got Maud staying with us now. I was maundering on about how I was writing up my research, when he interrupted,
‘Peter, I think you should be careful. The police came round here yesterday. They had some rather unpleasant news. Your mother’s grave has been desecrated and her body has been taken. The sergeant was talking about ‘resurrection men’ and people who dig up skeletons for medical research. I knew he was wrong, but I did not mention your Satanist chums.’
It was one thing for Maud on a trip to have had a hallucination of Mum in a dirty shroud, it was another for Dad to be talking calmly about police procedures for dealing with body-snatchers. Was Dad on drugs too? But I know that he was not. There is an ugly inevitability about the way things are developing. I actually do not like to think about it too clearly.
Before Dad could finish describing how he had visited the graveyard with the police, he broke down in tears and it became impossible to talk any more. I told him I would be in touch again soon and replaced the receiver.
Sally and Maud looked up smilingly as I re-entered the garden. Sally was bent over the Indian tray in accordance with the sacred ritual of the sun over the yard-arm. Maud had the Telegraph spread out on her lap. One of Maud’s newly acquired records was playing from inside the cottage. It was ‘Bach Before the Mast’ and then ‘The Flight of the Bumble-Bee’ played on a harpsichord. Sally offered the joint that she had just finished rolling to Maud.
‘Thank you, but I have had quite enough druggy horrors to last a lifetime,’ she replied. ‘I have no wish to see Peter’s dead mother again.’
‘I am not sure that we have any choice,’ I said.
I told them about the conversation I had just had with Dad. So then we got into weird territory, as we discussed the meaning of Maud’s vision yesterday afternoon. Apparently it was not after all, some part of her mind’s detritus – something she might have picked up from my descriptions of Mum and my attendance at her funeral. In some sense – God knows what sense – it now seems possible that some sort of manifestation of my mother did visit our garden yesterday.
‘Are you sure that you saw my mother? It wasn’t just that you were thinking that, though my mother was dead, she could still be spiritually present in this world?’
‘Oh no, I saw her – or bits of her at least, where the shroud had come apart. Her eyeballs had gone and her skin had gone all sorts of different colours. I think it was due to various kinds of mould,’ Maud looked anxiously to me. ‘I’m sorry, Peter, but you mustn’t keep pressing me about this. It wasn’t very nice for me either, you know.’
I thought it strange that Mum had been visible only to Maud, but Sally said that it was obvious that Maud was special (and Maud did not correct her on this).
My head is in such a turmoil about everything that I cannot think straight. Should we go on the run again? No point, if they can use my dead mother and blind bloodhounds to track us down once more. And then, trivial though it may be, it occurs to me to ask myself what about my doctoral thesis? My approach
to the psycho-dynamics of group interaction in a North London lodge of Satanists will have to be quite different, once I have recognised the reality of a supernatural level of explanation. If I accept that Horapollo House is inhabited by demons as well as by people, then the psycho-dynamics will become that much more complex and, no matter how I dress it up, I cannot see any way that the examiners appointed by London University will take me seriously. Then there is another thing to be thought of. If the universe is as the Satanists and, for that matter, serious Christians say it is, then I have pledged my immortal soul to the Devil and I am damned forever. There is grim irony in realising that no sooner am I prepared to consider the notion that I may have an immortal soul, than I realise that I have lost it. Too grim to linger on this consideration …. Then it occurs to me that, if it is only me whom the Lodge wants, then perhaps Maud and Sally should leave Farnham and as soon as possible. However, when I suggested this, they were both adamant that they would never leave me.
‘You are mine now and for all eternity,’ Maud declared dramatically and she went in to put another record on the record-player. Smoking dope to a background of classical music is quite freaky. The next record she put on was entitled ‘The Best of the Classics’. We listened to ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’, ‘The Nun’s Chorus’, ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’ and stuff like that. What a con it all is. People who listen to classical music give themselves such airs, but why? As far as I could hear, there was nothing in the best of the classics that was as good as Jefferson Airplane or The Velvet Underground. Even Donovan, when he is on form, can produce music which is more sophisticated than the classical best. He certainly comes up with better lyrics than Verdi does. Such were my thoughts as, skimming and dipping, I began to travel on my hash high.
Meanwhile, Sally wittered on about making use of white magic to combat our Satanic visitants and to put Mum back to rest in her grave. Sally is convinced that there is a White Brotherhood – reincarnated avatars of Gandalf and Merlin – roaming Harold Wilson’s Britain and doing good by stealth. Our only problem is how to get in touch with one of these white wizards. It made no difference to her when I pointed out that Gandalf was only a character in a novel. Apparently there is still some sense in which Gandalf is real – or indeed realer than real. But I was pissed-off with her for harping on our problems with the forces of darkness and not letting me drift off for even a moment on a hash fugue, so I baited her by reminding her of Robert Drapers’s projected anti-Tolkien book, provisionally entitled Kicking the Hobbit.
Maud, listening to our argument, raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. She went back to her newspaper. Sally and I have always agreed on one thing at least and that is in not reading newspapers. Reading a newspaper is always a downer which contaminates the mind with reports of murder, rape, famine, war and the rumour of war – as today with the fighting in Biafra and the aftermath of the Six-Day conflict. Maud was like us, uninterested in politics or war, and, having read the karate report avidly, she was idly turning over the rest of the pages.
Then she let out a schoolgirlish squeal,
‘Eeek, Peter! Look at this!’
And she showed me a notice in the law page of the Telegraph. Julian’s solicitors had placed an advertisement asking Peter Keswick to get in touch with them, for as heir to Julian Manciple he would learn something to his advantage. I had been trying to drift away on the ‘The Nun’s Chorus’, but everything that afternoon conspired to remind me of suicide, damnation and hell. The chill was back again. It was so very freaky that Maud, who had only wanted to see the karate results, should have stumbled across precisely this appeal directed at me by solicitors, who were doubtless acting under instructions from the Black Book Lodge.
Sally and I needed to recharge our highs. The trouble was, there was not much hash left. There was still some acid, but neither of us felt like risking that in our present mental state. So that left poppers. Maud of course declined to join us. I can see that she does not like being out of control. The poppers came in mesh-covered capsules. Sally and I broke them open and inhaled simultaneously. A slaves’ chorus from some opera or other filled the garden as the amyl nitrite surged through my body. I collapsed onto my back and surrendered myself to the five-minute high. My heart was beating like a butterfly trapped in a cage and my whole body was juddering in time to the vibrations of reality. This was hard-edged, fierce, demanding. With poppers there are no hallucinations or mystic glows. Everything looks exactly as it is, only more so. As on previous experiments with this stuff, for a fraction of an instant, I grokked the ultimate nature of reality, but unfortunately this ultimate truth is too subtle to be put into a notebook. Stupid drug to have taken in the circumstances. After five minutes, it just put me back more firmly in the predicament that I was in, haunted and damned.
The day which started weird, ended weird. Maud and I were eager to be in one another’s arms once more, and we went to bed early. But, after an hour or two, Maud’s eyelids began to droop, though I was frustratedly randy as ever. Maud smiled lovingly at me before getting out of bed and going into the lying-room. When she reappeared a few minutes later she was leading Sally by the hand. Maud watched lazily as Sally made love to me and then drifted off to sleep just as Sally and I began to fuck.
Thursday, August 10th
This day started just as weirdly as the last. I awoke to discover that Sally had moved round in the bed and it was now Maud she was embracing. Seeing how Sally now completely ignored me, it hurt me to recognise the intensity of Sally’s passion for Maud. It was Maud who looked desirously at me, while she lazily stroked Sally’s hair. (‘We must do something about your lovely, golden hair.’) After a while, however, Maud wearied of Sally’s attentions and she ordered her out of bed to get the breakfast. Maud and I were cuddling one another and listening to the agreeable clink of cups and plates being put on a tray in the next room, when we heard Sally scream. The bedroom door swung open. Sally stood framed in the early morning sunlight, holding up an ominous trophy for our inspection. It was a black and silver garden-gnome clutching a fishing-rod. Sally had found it on the doorstep where the milk-bottle should have been.
Maud was at first unable to understand why Sally and I were quite so freaked out. I started out with a gabbled explanation about how Mr Cosmic believed that the plaster figures of gnomes, though degraded in their present-day functions, could still serve as the foci for the chthonic powers of the earth. According to The Archidoxes of Magic by the sixteenth-century alchemist, Paracelsus:
‘Under the earth do wander half-men, which possess all temporal things, which they want or are delighted with; they are Vulgarly called Gnomi, or Inhabiters of the Mountains: but by their proper name they are called Sylphes or Pigmies … ’
I was struggling to remember and explain Cosmic’s project for the liberation of garden gnomes, when I realised that I had started at the wrong place in all this. So I let Sally take over and explain how it was that we had both known Cosmic, how he had been a friend of ours, how he had joined the Black Book Lodge and kissed the hand of the Master at the same time as me, but how he had been expelled from the Lodge after I had denounced him in my diary.
There can hardly be any doubt that the black and silver garden-gnome is Cosmic’s calling-card. But what does it mean? Is he on the run from the Satanists too? If so, how did he find us? Alternatively, have the Satanists caught up with him and made him their zombie slave? Is the gnome on the doorstep a warning? A threat? A promise? A joke? Whatever may be the case, why does Cosmic not show himself to us? The feeling that he may be hiding on the edge of the woods and watching us is not a pleasant one. Sally wants us to wait until nightfall and then, having taken speed, walk all night and day until we reach Glastonbury. At Glastonbury we shall be under the protection of its good mana. But Maud and I have vetoed this, for there can be no hope of reaching Glastonbury without being intercepted.
For want of anything better to do, I took a kitchen knife and spent the first part of th
e morning cutting and shaping a wand. Then, when I had consecrated my makeshift wand, I drew a circle of protection around the cottage and its garden, and, after I had consulted my red notebook for the right words, I invoked the protection of the spiritual prince, Israfil. Now, on the one hand, I do not actually believe in any of this stuff. On the other hand, maybe the circle of protection will work, whether I believe in it or not. Sally, who watched me doing all this, was reminded of how the Duc de Richelieu makes a protective pentacle in the film of Dennis Wheatley’s novel, The Devil Rides Out. Then she had the bright idea that I should write to Dennis Wheatley, care of his publishers, and ask him for help and protection. That seemed reasonable. Writing this letter took most of the rest of the morning, as it was not an easy thing to draft and it took a lot of words to explain exactly how we had got into this mess: my enrolment with the Black Book Lodge, the Satanist’s use of me in their quest for a virgin, Cosmic’s expulsion from the Lodge, Julian’s death, our speedy walk to Farnham, Maud’s LSD vision of my mother, the appearance of Cosmic’s gnome on the doorstep. But, if anyone can help us, it should be Wheatley, for it is pretty clear from reading his books that he has had direct experience of what he is writing about.
Sally did us a fry-up for lunch. (Farnham’s shops do not run to macrobiotic food.) The night’s activities had left me a bit short of sleep and I dozed off on the lawn. I was asleep for hours and was only awoken by Sally shaking me.
‘Peter, wake up! The sun is over the yard-arm and we have still got enough for two more joints.’
Russ Conway, another of Maud’s favourites, was on the record-player. I stretched lazily and opened my eyes. Sally was bending over me to offer me the joint and when I looked at her, I screamed. She was bald and without any eyebrows or eyelashes.