Surrender to Mr. X Page 23

  Alden’s torso is naked other than a goat’s head medallion hanging round his neck and a blackish red cloth draped over his knees with an upside down cross badly embroidered on it. Where does one buy such things? I remember a lawsuit. A store in Minneapolis selling love potions: “The law is not made for experts but to protect the public, that vast multitude which includes the ignorant, the unthinking and the credulous, who, in making purchases, do not stop to analyze but too often are governed by appearances and general impressions.” Aronberg et al. v. Federal Trade Commission, 132 F.2d 165. There’s a voice in my head. It’s the simpleton: Joan, “Stop it, stop it, Vanessa. Think! Help us!” Yes, I can see this is fairly drastic. You don’t have to be a virgin to be a sacrifice. The dying gurgle of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon would fill a sound-track just as nicely.

  Only Lam, behind Alden’s chair, is dressed in white. Polo neck. It seems as indecent to think about his lower half as it does about Alden’s. Just a seam at hip level, like a plastic doll.

  Alden says to me, “Just one last note from you, Vanessa. One last chord for me.” As I thought. “But you were brilliant,” he adds. “So brilliant! I owe you a great deal.”

  It is never nice to be spoken of in the past tense. The smell of incense is heavy. Background music turns in to foreground music. Thelemy, Lust for Life, the latest unheard, virgin version, renamed and re-mixed, bass-heavy and throbbing. He’ll have to work some more on it before tomorrow’s opening, or nobody’s going to buy anything: they’ll just want to go home. But the guests are singing along to it, chanting. It occurs to me they’ve practiced.

  I see the picture from above. The wreathed girl being led to the altar. Who can she be? I remember now, she’s the Hotel Olivier’s tame whore Vanessa, the one who told herself and everyone she was “doing good.” That sex was a fine and lovely delight, a gift from the Almighty, the Good God. I mount the steps. I lie upon the altar. A bright, bright spotlight shines down on me. Scissors cut my gown down the middle; the fabric is draped around me. It won’t be enough to sop up the blood, or perhaps they mean to drink it? Probably. I am naked on the altar, except for white silk shoes with high heels, the throwaway kind people wear for suburban weddings. Yes, this time it is a snuff movie. It’s my real death that is required: my sacrificial blood to feed the home computers of the world, to keep Google and the porn sites sated.

  Alden raises the knife. He is not going to stab. He will slit my throat. The life expectancy of a porn star is not great at the best of times. “Shemhaforash,” he intones. “So God spoke when he created the world.”

  The Scarlet Woman, the Whore of Babylon, butchered to make a Thelemite holiday! It will be necrophilia. The last resort. He will burst within me, finally, explode. Dead, I will not destroy him. I cannot laugh at him or even with him. I can never compare him with anyone else, and find him wanting. I will not be Vanessa, I will not be Joan, I will be nothing: he will come, the consummation devoutly to be wished.

  The knife is poised, long handled, well-balanced, the easier for a man in a wheel-chair to wield. The knife’s familiar. Normally it hangs from a magnet in the Crabtree kitchen. Alden has found his solution. He will complete his composition as my power moves into him: he feels no guilt: my body—and soul-death will be immortalized in his music: I am the muse, he the artist. Alden will blaze through the firmament as Liber AL, the star foretold, as revealed to poor mad Crowley over three consecutive lunchtimes in April 1904 by Aiwass, minister of Hoor-paar-kraat, the Sun God, whose kinsfolk are Lords of the Earth. Through the whore’s death Alden will be made physically whole. Riches and powers unknown until now will be his. The whore must have accumulated a great deal of other people’s life force during her days in the Divan; that no doubt was what she was doing there, accumulating the stuff. It’s just now she has to hand her takings over. Probably Aiwass is in this dismal room right now. Light glints off the blade.

  “Oh mother, save me now!” That’s Joan bleating: I, Vanessa, am far too proud to murmur.

  “Aiwass, aiwass, aiwass,” chants the crowd.

  “Do what thou wilt,” cries Alden, “shall be all of the Law!”

  “Shemhaforash!” they reply. “Shemhaforash!”

  “Mummy, Mummy!” cries Joan.

  I am my mother’s daughter. I want to pray. But to whom? Who is there?

  “St. Michael,” my mother tells me. “Pray to St. Michael!”

  “Why him?” I am bewildered. Surely St. Michael is the patron saint of grocers, mariners, paratroopers, police and sickness?

  “St. Michael guards the body of Eve,” she whispers. “Quick, quick.”

  She’s right. The Revelation of Moses section in the Apocryphal Gospels.

  “We’re hardly Eve,” I say.

  “It hardly matters,” says my mother. “He lives next door. For God’s sake, Vanessa!”

  And of course she’s right. St. Michael’s, my mother’s church, the church on the hill, the boy next door.

  “Shemhaforash!” they cry. “Shemhaforash!”

  “What thou wilt be done!” cries Alden and now the knife glints at my throat.

  “St. Michael,” I pray, “please help! I know I’ve been bad but we’re neighbors.”

  There is a sudden savage gust of wind which blows the door open, and the candles out. It is pitch black, save for the beam of light on to the altar. That goes out too. A power cut? A peal of thunder crashes over Parliament Hill. St. Michael, God’s enforcer: in charge of all nature, wind, rain, thunder, lightning? Alden’s touch pads glow in the dark. A peal of thunder crashes over Parliament Hill. The guests squeal and panic. “The great sow takes the hindmost!” shouts someone, and they scatter. I can hear them though I can’t see them. A harsh breathing, as of the sow rushing through, but it might just be the sound of cameras dying for lack of electricity.

  All is confusion. I ease myself down from the altar. Obviously I must run. I don’t know whither exactly because the house will be sealed, and Alden’s touch pad controls the exits, but at least I know the house as the others may not. I’ve made my way from bed to bed in the dark often enough. Everyone else is milling and squawking. I grope my way to where I hope the front door is. Slimy things brush my face, as on the Ghost Train at Disneyland. I feel for my Lacroix jacket on the peg—and it’s there. Everything is going to be all right. And Lam is holding the front door open for me. Lam, my brother, is nodding me through. A gleam of light comes from his eyes, or seems to.

  “Good girl,” he says. “Live happy.”

  I have to know, even now.

  “Lam, where do you come from?” I ask.

  “Me Tzaddikim,” he says. “Righteous one. Thirty-six of us. Watchers,” and he laughs uproariously. My betting is Tibet, and some glandular deficiency. But Joan is egging me to on get out of here. God, how she will panic!

  And I am out in the street, without a purse, no money, after midnight, just a jacket which barely covers my crotch, miles from home, in white shoes with high heels but the thinnest of soles, and for a moment I contemplate going back inside. They can’t really have been serious! People don’t do human sacrifice. And that’s when I feel for and find the twenty pound note folded small in my pocket, and know that if I can only find a cab I can get home. One comes along. It is not even Loki’s. It has a proper identifying plate from the Public Carriage Office, number 299929: twenty-nine nine, nine twenty-nine, I say to myself.

  The twenty-ninth of September is the feast day of Saints Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, Archangels.

  I am back in the world of the non-Thelemites. I will never go back. I want to live.

  A Scandal

  I SEE IT ON THE TV. It is not the Twin Towers, it is not the Waco siege, it is not Princess Diana confessing adultery but it will make minor TV history for years. It is the opening of Lady O’s art gallery in her London town house down the road from Mrs. Thatcher’s. The arts media is there in force. The footage is very dull at first, apart from the commissioned piece, The Blue Box, by t
he up-and-coming conceptual artist Ray Franchi, all mirrors and glitter, which quite takes the camera’s eye. And the music is said to be interesting, but the sound system isn’t all that good—Lady O must have taken her eye off the ball at some stage—and someone is heard to complain it sounds as if there was something wrong with the central heating.

  And then the extraordinary happens. It’s all there on film. A couple burst through the security cordon, each wielding a cricket bat. One is a woman in long robes wearing a dog collar, as if she was a woman vicar; the other looks a perfectly decent man of the school-teacher variety. The woman goes for The Blue Box with the bat: glass splinters burst everywhere: the man just lays about him, getting the sound system, sculptures, paintings. The art crowd dive for cover. Mobile phones are pointed. The couple flee before the police arrive.

  The twins, I guess, went home and told. Probably boasted. My parents did their parental duty.

  And that’s it. There seem to be no consequences. The police do not prosecute. They may know a thing or two about Alden. Modern art is not popular. People just laugh. As when the Momart warehouse in Leyton burned to the ground and no-one thought that what was lost was of any value at all. Good riddance to bad rubbish, it was universally agreed. The O’s faces, comical in their surprise, were on too many cell phone cameras to be ever taken seriously ever again. They abandoned their art patron activities and I believe went to Africa where they try to save wild apes from extinction.

  As for Alden, the BBC never played his piece. It was too closely associated with scandal for their comfort. They don’t like anything which attracts too much attention. Alden will end up like Crowley: blaze across the sky, the promised star Liber AL, just to burn out. Every generation or so Aiwass needs a victim to suck dry. It was Alden, not me.

  And Ray? Ray lapsed into obscurity, as happens to so many artists who take themselves too seriously. At any rate I never came across his name in any publication again. Nor did I hear from Lam. I tried to get in touch with the Southgate Branch but it had disbanded.

  When next I went home we sat around the table—Mother, Dad, the twins, Robert and me—and none of us said a word about any of it. We’re like that. I went off and did my PhD with Professor Freddie Wilques, whose wife had left him. When the college health center once again suggested I go back on lithium, I didn’t.

  FINIS