“I’m not that easily finished off.” Crowley gave her a wink. “I thought you looked awfully glad to see me alive and well.” He couldn’t keep the hint of flirtation from his voice.
“Only because it meant I didn’t have to climb down and haul out a corpse!”
Crowley laughed. “Fair comment.” Before he could say more, his phone vibrated. He looked at the screen before answering and smiled. “Cameron, my army intel pal.” He stepped into the shadow of a building, away from the bustling people, to answer.
“How are you, man?” Cameron asked.
Crowley grinned crookedly. There was an awful lot to tell there. Instead he said, “Still alive thankfully. You?”
“Yeah, I’m well. Might have found something for you on the Codex Gigas.”
“I hope it isn’t anything to do with Prague Castle,” Crowley said. “If it is, we’re already ahead of you.”
“Funny you should mention Prague Castle,” Cameron said. “It definitely was there once upon a time. But I think it might have been stolen.”
Crowley felt a mild surge of hope. Maybe this excursion wouldn’t turn out to be the end of their quest after all. “Stolen, you say? By who?”
Cameron chuckled. “That’s the funny part. You’ll like this.”
Chapter 27
“I still can’t believe you’re descended from Aleister Crowley,” Rose said.
From the cluster of white buildings with terracotta-colored roofs, and the beautiful sandy beach with crystal clear water, Crowley and Rose had climbed into the hills behind Cefalu. The contrast was stark, from the quiet, pleasant town to the scrubby, overgrown ground near the infamous Abbey of Thelema.
“Not exactly descended from,” Crowley said. “Distantly related to. It’s not quite the same.”
Rose gave him a studied look, raised one eyebrow. “You’re really going to draw that distinction?”
Crowley laughed. “Yeah, well. It is kinda cool, in a creepy sort of way. Which is, of course, the best sort of cool. I just don’t bring it up on a first date.”
The small city of Cefalu sat behind them in the curve of its beach, the Tyrrhenian Sea glittering beyond. The huge Norman Cathedral dominated the eastern side of the town, its exterior well preserved, largely decorated with interlacing pointed arches and pointed windows. On each side of the façade, a massive four story tower rose into the bright sunny day.
Through the trees and scrub, they could just make out the Abbey of Thelema, their target, with the large flat expanse of the Cefalu Stadium overshadowing it from above, perched atop the hills. The Abbey building itself, nothing more than an old house despite its grandiose name, was nonetheless forbidding, almost foreboding.
Crowley was secretly proud of his connections to Aleister Crowley, the English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer who founded the religion and philosophy of Thelema. The man’s own mother had called him “the Great Beast” and he was denounced in the popular press of the time as “the wickedest man in the world”, and a Satanist. None of which the man denied, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Aeon of Horus in the early 20th century. Though he had died in 1947, his influence was still strong throughout modern occultism. Crowley’s own study of the man for personal and historical reasons had left him keen to know more, only lack of time had prevented deeper study. The mysteries around the strange fellow were legion.
Maybe none more so than this building, which Aleister had called the Abbey of Thelema. Though only a small house, it had been used as a temple and spiritual center founded by Crowley and Leah Hirsig in 1920. One of the primary tenets of Thelema was the law, “Do what thou will shall be the whole of the law”. The Abbey was named in accordance with the concept, the name borrowed from François Rabelais's satire Gargantua and Pantagruel, where an Abbaye de Thélème was described as an “anti-monastery” where the peoples’ lives were “spent not in laws, statutes, or rules, but according to their own free will and pleasure.” Rather fitting, Crowley thought now as they approached, that the building was run-down and dilapidated, as broken down as the man himself had become in later life. He had always wanted to see the place, since his earliest studies into the Great Beast. Now he was distinctly underwhelmed.
Modern day followers of Thelema no doubt visited the site often, but Aleister Crowley himself had been kicked out of Sicily by Mussolini after the Great Beast’s reputation for wickedness became too much for even that dictator to bear, and the man’s Abbey had been degrading ever since. Crowley had told all this and more to Rose as they traveled to Sicily, yet he was still underwhelmed to finally see the place for real.
“Did your friend say where we should look for the bible?” Rose asked, breaking his train of thought.
“Just that he found a number of references to indicate the Codex Gigas was here,” Crowley said, staring up at the grubby white walls of the building. “And that Crowley paid a visit to Prague Castle shortly beforehand. They have Intel that Aleister Crowley boasted of some great and secret discovery at Dalibor. We have good reason to believe the Codex had been stored in the golem there, but it’s gone now.”
“So your mate thinks Aleister Crowley stole it?”
“Aleister Crowley definitely read the book, or at least some of it. Passages from it are quoted in the Holy Books of Thelema, including some apocryphal lines that might be from the real codex, if perhaps he did have it rather than studying a copy. There’s no way we can know that unless we see the real Devil’s Bible, of course, but hopefully we’ll find it here. Probably too much to hope, but you never know.”
“I feel like we’re running from one amazing discovery to another, but always one step behind seekers who came before us.”
“We are, but the people hunting us are yet another step behind. Hopefully we’ll catch up with all this and learn something useful before they catch up with us.”
Rose grimaced. “Even if we do learn something, it might not help us.”
“Any other ideas?”
She sighed. “Still no. Oh well, ever onwards!”
“It’s a pretty exciting adventure all the same, isn’t it?” Crowley couldn’t keep the enthusiasm form his voice. “I mean, purely from both our interests as historians?”
Rose’s face brightened. “Yeah, that’s true. Once this is all over I have enough stuff to go back and investigate to fill three more careers!”
The building had a tiled roof, an old TV aerial mounted on the short porch over the front door, but the doorway itself was blocked and boarded up. An open window to one side, a red 666 and Star of David spray-painted on the white stucco beneath, looked like it might provide the only access.
Crowley glanced around, ensured no one was nearby, then pushed himself up onto the sill. “Come on then.” He dropped inside and Rose quickly followed.
Inside was dim and cool but not dark, plenty of sunlight penetrating through gaps in the roof and open windows. Inside was more dilapidated than the exterior, the roof fallen in in many places, paper and plaster peeling and falling from the walls. Broken furniture remained in places; tiles were missing from bathroom and kitchen walls. The place smelled of damp and rot, with an over tang of sharp ammonia, no doubt from the droppings of animals or even, maybe, people.
“We need to find the main room, I guess,” Crowley said. “La Chambre des Cauchemars.”
Rose wrinkled her brow, probably drawing on school French lessons. “The Chamber of Nightmares?” she asked.