“I want a mystic,” Danny said.
“Palmist, crystal-gazer, witch, astrologer…any preference?” Friday asked.
“The technique doesn’t matter. I want one you’ve never been able to pin anything on. One you investigated and found a little scary…as if she or he really did have something on the ball.”
“I know the one you want,” Friday said emphatically, hitting the intercom button on his phone. “R & I,” he said and waited. “Carella? Send up the package on Mama Sutra.”
The package, when it shot out of the interoffice tube, proved to be all that Danny had hoped for. Mama Sutra had no arrests. She had been investigated several times—usually at the demand of rich husbands who thought she had too much influence over their wives, and once at the demand of the board of directors of a public utility who thought the president of the firm consulted too often with her—but none of her activities involved any claims that could be construed to be in violation of the fraud laws. Furthermore, she had dealt with the extremely wealthy for many years and had never played any games remotely like an okanna borra or Gypsy Switch on any of them. Her business card, included in the package, modestly offered only “spiritual insight,” but she evidently delivered it in horse doctor’s doses: one detective, after interviewing her, quit the force and entered a Trappist monastery in Kentucky, a second became questionable and finally useless in the eyes of his superiors because of an incessant series of memos he wrote urging that New York be the first American city to experiment with the English system of unarmed policemen, and a third announced that he had been a closet queen for two decades and began sporting a Gay Liberation button, necessitating his immediate transfer to the Vice Squad.
“This is my woman,” Pricefixer said; and an hour later, he sat in her waiting room studying the blissful Buddha and other occult accessories, feeling like a horse’s ass. This was really going way out on a limb, he knew, and his only excuse was that Saul Goodman frequently cracked hopeless cases by making equally bizarre jumps. Danny was ready to jump: the disappearance of Professor Marsh, in Arkham, was connected with the Confrontation mystery, and both were connected with Fernando Poo and the gods of Atlantis.
The receptionist, an attractive young Chinese woman named Mao something-or-other, put down her phone and said, “You can go right in.”
Danny opened the door and walked into a completely austere room, white as the North Pole. The white walls had no paintings, the white rug was solid white without any design in it, and Mama Sutra’s desk and the Danish chair facing it were also white. He realized that the total lack of occult paraphernalia, together with the lack of color, was certainly more impressive than heavy curtains, shadows, smoldering candles and a crystal ball.
Mama Sutra looked like Maria Ouspenskaya, the old actress who was always popping up on the late late show to tell Lon Chaney Jr. that he would always walk the “thorny path” of lycanthropy until “all tears empty into the sea.”
“What can I do for you?” she asked in a brisk, businesslike manner.
“I’m a detective on the New York Police,” Danny said, showing her his badge. “I’m not here to hassle you or give you any trouble. I need knowledge and advice, and I’ll pay for it out of my own pocket.”
She smiled gently. “The other officers, who investigated me for fraud in the past, must have created quite a legend at police headquarters. I promise no miracles, and my knowledge is limited. Perhaps I can help you; perhaps not. There will be no fee, in either case. Being in a sensitive profession, I would like to keep on friendly terms with the police.”
Danny nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “Here’s the story …”
“Wait.” Mama Sutra frowned. “I think I am picking up something already. Yes. District Attorney Wade. Clark. The ship is sinking. 2422. If I can’t live as please, let me die when I choose. Does any of that mean anything to you?”
“Only the first part,” Danny said, perplexed. “I suspect that the matter I’m investigating goes back at least as far as the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The man who handled the original investigation of that killing, in Dallas, was District Attorney Henry Wade. The rest of it doesn’t help at all, though. Where did you get it from?”
“There are…vibrations … and I register them.” Mama Sutra smiled again. “That’s the best explanation I can offer. It just happens, and I’ve learned how to use it. Somewhat. I hope someday before I die a psychologist will go far enough out in his investigations to find something that will explain to me what I do. The sinking ship is meaningless? How about the date, June 15, 1904? That seems to be on the same wave.”
Pricefixer shook his head. “No help, as they say in poker.”
“Wait,” Mama Sutra said. “It means something to me. There was an Irish writer, James Joyce, who studied the theosophy of Blavatski and the mysticism of the Golden Dawn Society. He wrote a novel in which all the action takes place on June 16, 1904. The novel is called Ulysses, and is impregnated on every page with coded mystical revelations. And, yes, now I remember, there is a shipwreck mentioned in it. Joyce made all the background details historically accurate, so he included what was actually in the Dublin papers that day—the book takes place in Dublin, you see—and one of the stories concerned the sinking of the ship, General Slocum, in New York Harbor the day before, June 15.”
“Did you say Golden Dawn?” Pricefixer demanded excitedly.
“Yes. Does that help?”
“It just adds to the confusion, but at least it shows you’re on the right track. The case I’m working on seems to be connected with the disappearance of a professor from a university in Massachusetts several years ago, and he left behind some notes that mentioned the Golden Dawn Society and…let’s see…some of its members. Aleister Crowley is one name I remember.”
“To Mega Theiron” Mama Sutra said slowly, beginning to pale slightly. “Young man, what you are involved in is very serious. Much more than an ordinary police officer could understand. But you are not an ordinary police officer or you wouldn’t have come to me in the first place. Let me tell you flatly, then, that what you have stumbled upon is something that could very easily involve both James Joyce’s mysticism and the assassination of President John Kennedy. But to understand it you will have to stretch your mind to the breaking point. Let me suggest that you wait while I have my receptionist make you a rather stiff drink.”
“Can’t drink on duty, ma’am,” Danny said sadly. Mama Sutra took a deep breath. “Very well. You’ll have to take it cold and struggle with it as best you can.”
“Does it involve the lloigor?” Danny asked hesitantly.
“Yes. You already have a large part of the puzzle if you know that much.”
“Ma’am,” Danny said, “I think I’ll have that drink. Bourbon, if you have it.”
2422, he thought while Mama Sutra spoke to the receptionist, that’s even crazier than the rest of this. 2 plus 4 plus 2 plus 2. Adds up to 10. The base of the decimal system. What the hell does that mean? Or 24 plus 22 adds up to 46. That’s two times 23, the number missing in between 24 and 22. Another enigma. And 2 times 4 times 2 times 2 is, let’s see, 32. Law of falling bodies. High school physics class. 32 feet per second per second. And 32 is 23 backwards. Nuts.
Miss Mao entered with a tray. “Your drink, sir,” she said softly. Danny took the glass and watched her gracefully walk back toward the door. Mao is Chinese for cat, he remembered from his years in Army Intelligence, and she certainly moved like a cat. Mao: onomatopoeia they call that. Like kids calling a dog “woof-woof.” Come to think of it, that’s how we got the word “wolf.” Funny, I never thought of that before. Oh, the pentagram outside, and the pentagram in those old Lon Chaney Wolf Man movies. Malik’s mystery mutts. Enough of that.
He took a stiff wallop of the bourbon and said, “Go ahead. Start. I’ll take some more of the medicine when my mind starts crumbling.”
“I’ll give it to you raw,” Mama Sutra said quietly. “The earth has alread
y been invaded from outer space. It is not some threat in the future, for writers to play with. It happened, a long time ago. Fifty million years ago, to be exact.”
Danny took another belt of his drink. “The lloigor,” he said.
“That was their generic name for themselves. There were several races of them. Shoggoths and Tcho-Tchos and Dholes and Tikis and Wendigos, for instance. They were not entirely composed of matter as we understand it, and they do not occupy space and time in the concrete way that furniture does. They are not sound waves or radio waves or anything like that either, but think of them that way for a while. It’s better than not having any mental picture of them at all. Did you take any physics in high school?”
“Nothing like relativity,” Danny said, realizing that he was believing all this.
“Sound and light?” she asked.
“A little.”
“Then you probably know two elementary experiments. Project a white light through a prism and a spectrum appears on the screen behind the prism. You’ve seen that?”
“Yes.”
“And the experiment with a glass tube that has a thin layer of colored powder on the bottom, when you send a sound wave through it?”
“Yeah. And the wave leaves little marks at each of its valleys and you can see them in the powder.” The track of the invisible wave in a visible medium.
“Very well. Now you can picture, perhaps, how the lloigor, although not made of matter as we understand it, can manifest themselves in matter, leaving traces that show, let us say, a cross section of what they really are.”
Danny nodded, totally absorbed.
“From our point of view,” Mama Sutra went on, “they are intolerably hideous in these manifestations. There is a reason for that. They were the source of the worst terrors experienced by the first humans. Our DNA code still carries an aversion and terror toward them, and this activates a part of our minds which the psychologist Jung called the Collective Unconscious. That is where all myth and art come from. Everything frightening, loathsome and terrible—in the folklore, in the paintings and statues, in the legends and epics of every people on earth—contains a partial image of a manifestation of the lloigor. ‘As a foulness shall ye know Them,’ a great Arab poet wrote.”
“And they’ve been at war with us through all history?” Danny asked unhappily.
“Not at all. Are the stockyards at war with the cattle? It’s nothing like war at all,” Mama Sutra said simply.
“It’s just that they own us.”
“I see,” Danny said. “Yes, of course. I see.” He looked into his empty glass dismally. “Could I have another?” he murmured.
After Miss Mao had brought him another bourbon, he took a huge swallow and slouched forward in his chair. “There’s nothing we can do about it?” he asked.
“There is one group that has been trying to liberate humanity,” Mama Sutra said. “But lloigor have great powers to warp and distort minds. This group is the most maligned, slandered and hated people on earth. All the evil they seek to prevent has been attributed to them. They operate in secret because otherwise they would be destroyed. Even now, the John Birch Society and various other fanatics—including an evil genius named Hagbard Celine—struggle ceaselessly to combat the group of whom I speak. They have many names, the Great White Brotherhood, the Brethren of the Rosy Cross, the Golden Dawn…usually, though they are known as the Illuminati.”
“Yes!” Danny cried excitedly. “There was a whole bunch of memos about them at the scene of the crime that started this case.”
“And the memos, I would wager, portrayed them in an unfavorable light?”
“Sure did,” Danny agreed. “Made them seem the worst bastards in history. Pardon me, ma’am.” I’m getting drunk, he thought.
“That is how they are usually portrayed,” Mama Sutra said sadly. “Their enemies are many, and they are few …”
“Who are their enemies?” Danny leaned forward eagerly.
“The Cult of the Yellow Sign,” Mama Sutra replied. “This is a group serving one particular lloigor called Hastur. They live in such terror of this being that they usually call him He Who Is Not To Be Named. Hastur resides in a mysterious place called Hali, which was formerly a lake but is now just desert. Hali was by a great city in the lost civilization of Carcosa. You look as if those names mean something to you?”
“Yes. They were in the notes of the professor who disappeared. The other case that I was convinced was connected with this one,”
“They have been mentioned—unwisely, I think—by certain writers, such as Bierce and Chambers and Lovecraft and Bloch and Derleth. Carcosa was located where the Gobi Desert is at present. The major cities were Hali, Mnar and Sarnath. The Cult of the Yellow Sign has managed to conceal all this rather thoroughly, although a few archeologists have published some interesting speculations about the Gobi area. Most of the evidence of a great civilization before Sumer and Egypt has been either hidden or doctored so that it seems to point to Atlantis. Actually, Atlantis never existed, but the Cult of the Yellow Sign carefully keeps the myth alive so nobody will discover what went on, and still goes on, in the Gobian wastelands. You see, the Cult of the Yellow Sign still goes there, on certain occasions, to worship and make certain transactions with Hastur, and with Shub Niggurath, a lloigor who is known in mystical literature as the Black Goat with a Thousand Young, and with Nyarlathotep, who appears either as a solid black man, not a Negro but black as an abyss, or else as a gigantic faceless flute player. But I repeat: you cannot understand the lloigor by these manifestations or cross sections into our space-time continuum. Do you believe in God?”
“Yes,” Danny answered, startled by the sudden personal question.
“Take a little more of your drink. I must tell you now that your God is another manifestation of some lloigor. That is how religion began, and how the lloigor and their servants in the Cult of the Yellow Sign continue it. Have you ever had what is called a religious or mystical experience?”
“No,” Danny said, embarrassed.
“Good. Then your religion is just a matter of believing what you have been told and not of a personal emotional experience. All such experiences come from the lloigor, to enslave us. Revelations, visions, trances, miracles, all of it is a trap. Ordinary, normal people instinctively avoid such aberrations. Unfortunately, due to their gullibility and a concerted effort to brainwash them, they are willing to follow the witches and wizards and shamans who traffic in these matters. You see, and I urge you to take another drink right now, every religious leader in human history has been a member of the Cult of the Yellow Sign and all their efforts are devoted to hoaxing, deluding and enslaving the rest of us”
Danny finished his glass and asked meekly, “May I have more?”
Mama Sutra buzzed for Miss Mao and said, “You’re taking this part very well. People who have had religious visions take it very poorly; they don’t want to know what foul source those experiences actually came from. The lloigor, of course, can be considered gods— or demons—but it is more profitable, at this point in history, to just consider them another life form cast up by the universe, unfortunately superior to us and even more unfortunately inimical to us. You see, religion is always a matter of sacrifice, and whenever there is a sacrifice there is a victim—and also a person or entity profiting from the sacrifice. There is no religion in the world—not one—that is not a front for the Cult of the Yellow Sign. The Cult itself, like the lloigor, is of prehuman origin. It began among the snake people of Valusia, the peninsula that is now Europe, and then spread eastward to be adopted by the first humans in Carcosa. Always the purpose of the Cult has been to serve the lloigor, at the expense of other human beings. Since the rise of the Illuminati, the Cult has also acted to combat their work and discredit them.”
Danny was glad that Miss Mao arrived then with his third stiff bourbon. “And who are the Illuminati and what is their goal?” he asked, belting away a strong swallow.
“Their founder,” Mama Sutra said, “was the first man to think rationally about the lloigor. He realized that they were not supernatural, but just another aspect of nature; not all-powerful, but just more powerful than us; and that when they came ‘out of the heavens’ they came from other worlds like this one. His name has come down to us in certain secret teachings and documents. It was Ma-lik.”
“Jesus,” Danny said, “that’s the name of the guy whose disappearance started all this.”
“The name meant ‘one who knows’ in the Carcosan tongue. Among the Persians and some Arabs today it still exists but means ‘one who leads.’ His followers, the Illuminati, are those who have seen the light of reason—which is quite distinct from the stupefying and mind-destroying light in which the lloigor sometimes appear to overwhelm and mystify their servants in the Cult of the Yellow Sign. What Ma-lik sought, what the Illuminati still seek, is scientific knowledge that will surpass the powers of the lloigor, end mankind’s enslavement and allow us to become self-owners instead of property.”
“How large is the Illuminati?”
“Very small. I don’t know the exact number.” Mama Sutra sighed. “I have never been accepted for membership. Their standards are quite high. One must virtually be a walking encyclopedia to qualify for an initial interview. You must remember that this is the most dedicated, most persecuted, most secret group in the world. Everything they do, if not wiped off the records by the Cult of the Yellow Sign, is always misrepresented and pictured as malign, devious and totally evil. Indeed, any effort to be rational, to think scientifically, to discover or publish a new truth, even by those outside the Illuminati, is always pictured in those colors by the Cult and all the religions which serve as its fronts. All churches, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist or whatever, have always opposed and persecuted science. The Cult of the Yellow Sign even fills the mass media with this propaganda. Their favorite stories are the one about the scientist who isn’t fully human until he has a religious insight and recognizes ‘the higher powers’—the lloigor, that is—and the other one about the scientist who seeks truth without fear and causes a disaster. ‘He meddled with things man should leave alone’ is always the punch line on that one. The same hatred of knowledge and glorification of superstition and ignorance permeates all human societies. How much more of this can you stand?” Mama Sutra asked abruptly.
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 57