Marvin and Ethel Held drove us to the mansion, since we might have had trouble finding it in an unfamiliar city by ourselves. Robert Hopkins was not with us. Having promised to meet us at the Bannister house, he had gone to fetch his own girl friend.
There was a delay getting in. A pair of muscular Agapeans in black robes guarded the front door. They would not admit us until Robert came to vouch for us, and Robert was late. When the formalities had at last been complied with, we were shooed into the huge living room just as the lights were being turned down for the big show.
"Sandy and I gotta get dressed," whispered Robert. "Visitors sit in the last row. You go ahead and sit; we'll be with you in, like, half a minute."
The seats were arranged in concentric crescents. We found four vacant chairs at one end of the rear row. Thence we could see many of the others present, either in profile or in three-quarters full-face.
As our eyes became accustomed to the dim light, Denise gasped. The front rows, composed of sofas, divans, and ottomans placed end to end, were occupied by thirty-odd people, in couples. Most were young, and all were naked. Some were petting.
Robert Hopkins, looking like a plucked chicken without his clothes and followed by his equally naked girl, stole in from the other side and took seats at the end of one of the forward rows. Robert's idea of "getting dressed" was not what most would understand by the term.
Denise whispered: "Willy, I do not think we ought to stay here. C'est une indécence, donc!"
"Oh, come!" I whispered back. "You took me to that nudist place in France."
"That was different—the clean, healthy nature. This is a depravity."
"Stick around," I said. "Nobody claims we have to strip, too."
Denise subsided. In front of the seats, a temporary wooden dais rose a foot from the floor. On this platform, a stand upheld a small glass tank. In the tank was water and something pink and wriggly. I recognized a urechis worm, doubtless the one stolen from the biology laboratory.
At each end of the dais, a huge candle burned in an oversized brass holder, standing high above the floor. To one side, an incense burner sent up a thread of fragrant smoke.
A man in a red robe strode out of the shadows and took his stance on the dais, behind the tank with the worm. He was a slight, balding man of about my age, with a thin film of black hair combed across his bare cranium.
"Good evening, companions in transcendental adventure," intoned the Master Daubeny. "May infinite love be yours. Tonight we shall undertake the greatest of our magical operations, to secure for ourselves and for all of factious mankind the infinite blessing of love. We shall invoke love in its purest, most concentrated form, the form of the god Priapus, the god of the ultimate act of love, personified by this marine creature before me.
"By the laws of sympathetic magic, an invocation directed at this animal, which by its form symbolizes the outstanding characteristic of the god, will draw the god himself unto us. We shall then perform the appropriate—here, here!" He spoke chidingly to Robert and Sandy, who had been fondling each other's persons and gave every sign of being about to jump the gun. "You must wait till after the god manifests himself. Patience, patience!
"To continue. We shall perform the ultimate act of love as a reverent tribute to the god. For what ails mankind today? Why wars, crimes, and strikes? Because there is not enough love. With the help of Priapus, we shall, by our command of the occult currents, instill more love, first into our fellow countrymen and then into all the world ..."
He went on for half an hour, talking about the different planes of existence, the materialization of spiritual abstractions, and the need for transcendental currents of love throughout the seven-dimensional universe. These currents were to be set flowing by a mass act of communal copulation.
From what I could see of the young men in the audience, they were ready to perform their roles in the rite. The soldiers of my outfit in the Second World War never stood up straighter. All the couples were kissing and fondling. I itched to grab Denise and join the revel, but her expression of stern disapproval squelched that idea. She whispered:
"Willy, I will not stay here longer, to see the beautiful making of the love turned into a circus!"
"Oh, come on!" I said. "What they do won't hurt us. Besides, if you left me here, who knows what mischief I might not get into?"
On the other side of her, a similar argument had broken out between the Helds. With them, however, it was the man who wished to leave and the woman to stay. As a psychologist, Ethel Held did not want to miss anything.
At last the sermon was over. Daubeny pulled a wand out of his baggy sleeve and began to utter his incantation. He faced in various directions, moved his wand as if he were leading an invisible orchestra, and chanted.
The Master's voice rose to a shout. From an occasional word, I realized that he was speaking Latin. He ended with a scream:
"Veni, magistre venereonum! Veni, ueni, veni!"
I was braced for a bit of conjuring or other hocus-pocus but not for what happened. The flames of the two big candles shrank to mere points, glowing like stationary fireflies. Then came a brilliant flash of cold, white light and a clap of thunder.
A young woman stood at one end of the dais, facing the Master Daubeny. Tall, slim, dark, and aquiline-nosed, she wore a knee-length Classical chiton, which left one small, virginal breast bare. In her left hand she bore a strung double-curved bow. A quiver of arrows hung at her back from a leathern baldric.
Standing in the darkened room in a blaze of light from no source that I could see, the maiden stared at the Master, then at the audience. The naked worshipers were sitting up, their foreplay forgotten. They stared—I suppose "aghast" is the word.
"So!" she said in a ringing alto. "You calla me for your— how you say—your comissatione turpi—your obscena misbehaviors?"
It had not occurred to me that Diana—for such I presumed our transcendental visitor to be—would speak English with a strong Italian accent.
"Willy!" said Marvin Held in a low, tense voice. "Let's get ' the hell out of here, pronto! I'll explain outside."
He rose. So did Denise and Ethel Held. Being at the end of the row, I had to rise, too.
"Quick!" said- Held. "Don't argue; I'll tell you later." I meekly accompanied the others of our quartet.
"So," continued the apparition, "I fixa you dissolutos!"
We stumbled out into the entrance hall. As we reached the front door of the mansion, the spectral presence ripped out a long sentence in Latin. I caught only the final words: "... cum impotentia, sterilitate, et frigore!"
We were on our way to the Helds' car when a call of "Hey!" made us pause. It was Robert and Sandy. Robert wore his shirt and ragged blue jeans but had fled barefoot; the girl was equally disheveled.
"What—what happened?" he panted. "All I know is, Sandy and I couldn't wait, so we split to the bedroom and were screwing away when the big boom came. It kind of, like, took our minds off what we were doing. When I stuck my nose in the meeting hall, there was this dame on the platform, hollering in some language, and the four of you running out. So I grabbed Sandy, and we high-tailed it out of there. What happened?"
Held explained: "Your wizard invoked Priapus, the phallic god, but got Diana instead. Being the goddess of chastity as well as of the moon and of hunting, she was outraged by what she saw. Therefore she cursed everybody in the room with impotence, sterility, and frigidity. Knowing the Classical myths, I guessed what might be coming."
(According to what the older Hopkinses wrote us later, the curse worked. I don't know if the effect ever wore off.)