“I certainly agree with that,” Derek said, though he felt that he had stumbled into something much vaster than he’d realized at first. Elias Mooney did not speak quite the same language as the rest of the planet; there were all those alien tongues to reckon with.
“Why don’t you tell me about some of the places you visited astrally when you were a child,” he said, steering stubbornly toward what he hoped would be more accessible topics. “Those other worlds and civilizations you hinted at in your letter. If you don’t mind.”
“Mind? No, not at all. I’d be delighted. I hope you brought a lot of tape.”
“An endless supply.”
“Good, good, and—well, I hope this won’t be our only time together.”
“I’m sure it won’t be.” Unless, Derek thought, you can’t come up with something more commercial than paranoid schizophrenia. “I look forward to a long working relationship.”
“All right, then. Well… the first world I remember visiting, the very first, was inside a little bit of cracked knothole in the pine wall near my bed. I used to stare into that crack, that little jag of darkness, until one day I found myself plunging bodily into it. In my astral body, of course, but from the very beginning my silver form has felt as substantial to me as this frail flesh—and as I age it has become even stronger, while my body sloughs away. Oh, every sensation is magnified in the silver twin….”
Distant planets, Derek thought. I’ve got to get him talking about distant planets, ghosts, and ESP. Things people can grasp right away.
But before he could make others understand Elias Mooney, he would have to understand the old man himself. And that was to be the work of months.
17
Your Psychognostic Powers! was not Derek Crowe’s first book, nor was Your Psychic Allies—the one that brought Elias Mooney’s letter—his second. They were his fourth and fifth books, respectively, but the first three had been published under pseudonyms, for which he was grateful. They had been miserable failures.
Sick of the hypocrisy and stress of the advertising agencies where he had worked since college, increasingly repulsed by the clammy handshakes of plump junior executives who, scarcely his senior, were already cutting their way remorselessly and single-mindedly past him in their quest for the shimmering grail of a name partnership (imagine fat white barracudas, and you will have them), Derek had managed to save enough to keep him solvent for a few years of impoverished experimentation while he began a long-planned assault on the bestseller list. He began by composing novels—hastily written but schematically constructed impressions of gothic romances, sci-fi thrillers, and horror epics, based on a thorough reading of the bestsellers and classics in each market. He had read The Exorcist, The Other, Ghost Story, The Books of Blood, Interview with the Vampire, six or seven tomes by Stephen King, and then sat down to outline and write Horror Hotel in three weeks. After reading Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Martian Chronicles, the Bladerunner novelization, and Neuromancer, he likewise hammered out Cybernaut’s Quest. He read three gothics, all he could stomach, before turning out his own rendition, titled Captive Flesh.
The three books appeared under three different names—none of them his own—and vanished within weeks, lingering on the paperback racks for about as long as it had taken him to write them. The problem, apparently, was that scores if not hundreds of other writers were on the same track, taking the same jaundiced approach to literature. There was no way to carve himself a niche without years of hard labor; not to mention dedication, inspiration, and something—however trivial—to say. He might as well have remained a copywriter. Fiction had failed him utterly.
Nights he lay awake thinking of what he might write and publish under his own name. Something real, something true to himself. Writing was all he felt qualified for, but nonfiction seemed like too much work. He didn’t have a specialist’s knowledge of anything. As a layman, he was easily confused by technical explanations, so he couldn’t be one of those popularizers of abstruse knowledge. He had already proven himself a failure in math, despite his early interest in the sciences; he had shown himself lacking in the necessary logical or anal tendencies needed to pursue a career in the law—or at least to pass the LSATs. In everything he’d ever tried or been goaded into trying, he’d managed to undermine himself somehow; there had always been one element indispensible to his success, which turned out to be exactly where his failings lay. And he had many failings. They seemed custom-fit to doom whatever new enterprise he set himself.
But he was determined not to let himself decline any farther. As a writer he was dependent on nothing but his own mind; there was no one to rely on, no one to blame. It was a way of keeping faith with himself, after years of laboring along as his own worst enemy. He would succeed at it somehow.
And so he lay awake wondering: What can I write? Who should I be? What sort of author is Derek Crowe?
At times his own name sounded phony to him, like a stage name, better suited to an old-time magician. An illusionist, or maybe an actual wizard. Who was that one they called the Great Beast? Oh, yes, Aleister Crowley. Similar….
He fell asleep dreaming of magic and sorcery and woke with a new reading plan fully realized. Within the year he was receiving letters addressing him as Adept, Teacher, or even “Grand Master Crowe.”
The only subject Derek had truly mastered was the occult “nonfiction” format. By skimming a hundred such volumes, he learned to distill them to an essence, creating a boilerplate on which almost any sort of flimsy half-baked supposition might be built up into a complete popular philosophy.
It had all succeeded far better than he had dreamed that first morning. No matter how many writers ran the same scam, there was always room for another. Half-literate halfwits who never read novels didn’t mind picking up a book about psychic phenomena, full of tips on securing a better life by developing one’s innate clairvoyance. Most never read the book once they bought it. Those who did might try an exercise or two and blame a lack of results on their inability to concentrate. No one could sue him if latent powers didn’t blossom overnight. And next week, the fools would buy another book that promised to give easier mastery than the first: five easy steps to telepathy, instead of ten. Lay your money down, boys. They were addicts.
The gypsies made their money on these suckers with no regrets. A palm-reader at an L.A. street fair had once told him he was shrouded by a halo of dark luck, which she would be only too glad to dispel by burning eighty candles over the next three months, for the modest price of thirty dollars per candle. He had laughed, admiring her guts, not even bothering to tell her off. Anyone who fell for such crap deserved to be taken. Her example inspired the rationale for his own scam. He need depend on no confederate; the real shill was the idiot mind of the eternally hopeful, prodding them to take another foolish chance because you never know, this might be the one….