Mostly they stayed under my futons, infusing the dust bunnies with dark wisdom. I really have to credit my metaphysical sensitivities to my old television. It’s a black-and-white number with knobs and everything, one for VHF and one for UHF. Small, it had been on my grandmother’s bureau for years, off entirely except on Sundays, when she’d tune in to Channel 67 and watch the Polish language programming. After she died my mother’s brothers and sisters swarmed all over her tiny room, snagging gaudy jewelry-lots of silver and amethysts, and broaches the size of small turtles-the fancy sheets she hadn’t used in the entire time I’d been alive, the passbooks and checkbooks, and then, finally, the dense Old World furniture she’d kept after selling her own place and moving in with us.
By 3 PM that afternoon, when I got home from class, the only things left in grandma’s room were her TV (on the floor in a dusty rectangle where the dresser had been), a doily (still atop the TV) and the smell of her, half-perfume, half-sausage (everywhere). I stood around while my mother cried and father frowned, but I felt nothing except the presence. Grandma on the steps, walking down into the living room. Grandma on the big easy chair, tiny feet in beige stockings poking up on the ottoman, her lips smacking as she turned the page in a newspaper. The sharp wheeze before she spoke to ask for something, her voice a crackling song on a 78 RPM record, tinny and distant. I’d always cringe a bit when she walked into the room, and was cringing now that she was gone. Because she wasn’t.
Alick in Italy, at the height of his powers. The Scarlet Woman, Leah Hirsig, is with him. Two points pierce her flesh just past her palms, like a tiny stigmata run dry. The UK is still out of the question, and Germany, an economic basketcase: Theodor Reuss and the other members of the Ordo Templi Orientis are pushing wheelbarrows full of scrip to the store to buy their daily bread. New York reeks of piss and Irishmen, and Leah’s family up in the Bronx would not understand that she has become Alostrael, the womb of God. Paris has gaping cunts and asses aplenty, but the magus needs time and space enough to remove himself from the world. And Cefalu, in Palermo, Sicily, is cheap and far from the bald old bugger Mussolini. The weather does his lungs good, but the taste of opium, the sizzle of heroin boiling, never leaves his tongue or nostrils.
Sometimes Alick fancies himself the Lord of the Manor when a peasant knocks on the door and offers him a goat. “Milk good yes,” the man says, likely the only English he knows. Twenty minutes later, staggering drunk around the courtyard, eyes crossed, goat following the rope lead in his hand like a reluctant dog, does Alick realize the goat is a male. No milk there. Leah declares, time and again, till she believes it: “I dedicate myself wholly to the great work. I will work for wickedness, I will kill my heart, I will be shameless before all men, I will freely prostitute my body to all creatures.” Alick, for a moment, decides to test her on the peasant, but in the end takes the goat.
The ritual is cramped. Alick had gathered around home a mess of bohemians, whores, and thrillseekers, but there’s real magic to be had, he’s sure of it. Alostrael bends over the altar, and Alick nods for the goat to be brought in. Its phallus is huge and swings low, so Alick himself masturbates it, and then, with his other hand on one of the goat’s horns, leads the animal to Leah. The penetration is clumsy, he misses twice and Leah squirms-Christ, Alick hates it when women squirm, and that’s why he’s always preferred men, and to be the one presenting his anus. He can do it right. Just lay there, bitch!-but finally it is achieved. Leah is a wild woman, all hips and twisted back, and Alick watches her closely. At the moment of orgasm, her orgasm, not the goat’s, he’ll slit the beast’s throat. But the bucking bitch comes too quickly and Alick can’t let go of the goat to reach the knife, so he wraps his thick hands around its neck, fingers searching under the coarse hair to find the vein and throat, and starts to squeeze and crush.
I didn’t get very good reception in the basement, but I had nothing else to do but try, and leaf through some of the books: Liber Ala, 777, but I wasn’t in the right state of mind for them. My reception was as poor of that of the television. I played with the UHF knob for a bit and found, I thought, the station that played the Polish-language programming grandma liked, but it didn’t come through clearly. With a bit of pressure I managed to balance the knob between two stations and got two signals at once, both indistinct and distant under the wall of frizzling static. I sat on the floor, back to the edge of my futon and watched, and then it came to me.
There are two universes. The one we all live in, the one you’re familiar with. Ever stub your toe or have an orgasm or eat a sandwich or have sand in the crack of your ass after a day at the beach or an afternoon in your garden? That’s the universe of Choronzon, the dweller in the Abyss, the dark being who stands between us and our perfect, enlightened selves. Choronzon is not really a being, he is our being, all our flaws and hidden shames, the swirling chaos that we keep down deep in ourselves, and the moments of avoidance and denial we manage to come up with to keep it at bay.
The second universe, that’s the good stuff.
Alick in London, on the wrong side of history. Mussolini had deported him as if the Sicilian countryside wasn’t already full of goatfuckers. Leah’s womb betrayed him, with a girl that died and a miscarriage. The womb of God, the holy grail, was filled with tainted blood. Alick’s bankrupt too, having lost a libel case against bohemian writer Nina Hamnett, who dared call him a “black magician.”
The Germans went crazy again, reveling in the secrets of the Black Lodge, in the evil reflection of Logos known as Da’ath to the Hebrews. The Hebrews being broiled and gassed by Hitler. Rudolph Hess lands in Scotland and a peasant with a pitchfork captures him with ease. Ian Fleming has an idea: send Alick to interview the superstitious Hess. The Nazis were steeped in the occult, and even based some of their troop movements on astrology. Fleming’s superiors nix the plan, but Alick knows Hess. He can sense the German across the moors and miles, twitching and counting on his fingers, dictating plaintive letters to phantom secretaries in his cell, crying for his friend, Hitler.
Alick isn’t the wickedest man in the world anymore; he doesn’t even rank in the top twenty.
Okay, so now I am going to enlighten you all. Liber XV O.T.O. Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae describes the Gnostic mass. Here’s the big secret: in the same way a Catholic or Eastern Orthodox practitioner takes communion and thus eats the body of Christ, the Logos made flesh, the worshippers of the Gnostic mass eat Da’ath. By the way, just knowing this makes you an initiate of the Ninth Degree, so enjoy it and welcome to the club.
Alick in Hastings, nineteen forty-seven. It’s cold. Alick is fat now, and needn’t shave his head to keep up his mien of bald menace. Menace, like a bone-white old man who spends fifteen hours a day in bed is a menace. His Will is gone; he can’t even rouse his own member anymore, much less the members of any of the innumerable little sects and cults that have kept up the chants and the publications of this or that inane ritual. Really, Alick was just pulling it all out of his bum half the time. The other half, well, most of that was just for the opium and the cock, and, rarely, a cunt. And the tiny fraction left over? Well, Alick decides, some of that was almost real.