`Oh no, it was nothing like that. It was simply that his ambition was so great that he over reached himself. If he could have bent Pan to his will he would have been the most powerful being on earth. With Pan's pipes playing as he directed he could have made even governments dance to his tune. He attempted to master Pan, but he wasn't quite strong enough; so he paid the price of failure: that's all.'
`I find this most interesting,' said Copely Syle in a low voice. `Do you happen to know any details of what took place?'
`Yes. As a matter of fact I was still one of his disciples, so with him at the time.' C. B. was on safer ground now, as he had actually had a first hand account of this grim affair from one of Crowley's young men, and he went on
`The attempt took place in Paris. Crowley made up a coven, so including himself there were thirteen of us; and in this instance we were naturally all males. We were staying at an hotel on the Left Bank. The proprietor was an initiate, and it was quite a small place; so we took the whole premises for the night, and all the servants were got rid of from mid day to mid day. There was a big room at the top of the house which seemed just the thing for the purpose. In the afternoon we moved out every scrap of furniture and cleaned it with the utmost thoroughness. Then in the evening all of us assisted at the purificatory rites; but fortunately as it turned out, Crowley had decided that only his senior disciple, a chap who had taken the name of McAleister, should assist him at the actual evocation.
`At ten o'clock the rest of us robed them, then left them there, and Crowley locked the door behind us. He had already issued strict injunctions that whatever sounds we might hear coming from the room, even if they were cries for help, we were in no circumstances to attempt to enter it; as such cries might be a trick of Pan's made in an endeavour to evade him, and any interruption of the ritual would render the spell abortive. We had fasted all day, so our associate, the landlord, had prepared an excellent cold buffet for us downstairs in the dining room. It wasn't a very gay meal, as all of us were aware of the magnitude of the task the Master Therion had set himself. We had great confidence in his powers, but it was probably several centuries since any adept had had the audacity to attempt to summon the horned God in person, so we were naturally a bit nervy.
`It was just on midnight when we heard the first noises upstairs. There were thumping’s and shouts, then all Hell seemed to break loose. Piercing screams were mingled with what sounded like sacks of potatoes being flung about. We had the impression that the whole building was rocking. In fact it was, as the chandelier above us began to swing, the glasses jingled on the sideboard and a picture fell from the wall with a loud crash. It was like being in the middle of an earthquake, and the room in which we were sitting had suddenly become icy cold.
`We had all been inmates of the Abbaye at one time or another and had passed pretty severe tests in standing up to Satanic manifestations, so we were by no means a chicken hearted lot. But on this occasion we were seized by abject terror, and none of us made the least effort to hide it. We just sat there, white to the gills and paralyzed by the thought that at any second the terrible Being up above might descend on us.
`After a few moments the pandemonium subsided, and we tried to pull ourselves together. With our teeth chattering from the cold, we debated whether we had better not ignore Crowley's orders and go up to find out what had happened. But the room began to get warm again and that, together with the continued silence, led us to hope that Crowley had won his battle and succeeded in binding Pan. If so, for us to have gone in then might still have ruined everything, and Crowley's rage would have been beyond all reckoning. Knowing his powers, none of us felt inclined to risk the sort of punishment he might have inflicted on us for disobeying him; so we decided to let matters be, and I for one was not sorry about that.
`We were all too scared to face the solitude of going to bed, and started to drink in an attempt to keep our spirits up; but that didn't work. Somehow we couldn't even get tight, and we sat on hour after hour, hardly speaking.
`At last that miserable night ended. Dawn came and we began to hope that Crowley would soon come down, his fat face beaming with triumph, to make our fears seem ridiculous; but he didn't. We waited till seven o'clock. There was still not a sound from the top of the house, so by then we felt that we were no longer justified in evading the issue. All the same, we didn't exactly run upstairs, as by that time we were feeling pretty apprehensive about what we might find when we got there. For a moment or two all eleven of us stood huddled on top of the landing, listening; but with the early morning noises coming up from the street we could not definitely make out any sound coming from the room. Someone suggested that after their exhausting ordeal Crowley and McAleister might still be sleeping, and the idea gave us fresh hope for the moment; but another fellow knocked hard on the door, and there was no reply. That left us with no alternative but to break down the door.'
15
Chamber of Horrors
Like the good raconteur that he was, C. B. paused to knock out his pipe. Copely Syle jerked his head forward and exclaimed in a breathless whisper, `Go on, man! Go on! What did you find?'
C. B. looked him straight in the eyes, and, certain of his facts on this final point, said quietly, 'McAleister was dead. He was stretched out on his back with his arms flung wide, absolutely rigid, just as though he had been electrocuted, and with an appalling look of stark horror on his face such as I never wish to see again. Crowley's pontifical robes were scattered in ribbons about the floor. It looked as if they had been ripped from his body by some ferocious animal. He was crouching in a corner naked. He didn't know any of us. He had become a gibbering idiot.'
The Canon took a quick gulp at his drink and muttered, `Horrible, horrible! Have you any idea what went wrong?'
`No; none of us had. We could only suppose that McAleister had been unable to take it, and cracked at the critical moment. Crowley was in a private asylum outside Paris for six months. He was very lucky to recover his sanity, and afterwards he would never speak of the affair. In fact, I doubt very much if he had any definite memory of what had happened. But you'll understand now why from that time on he seemed like a washed out rag, and why when you met him he entirely failed to impress you.'
`Yes,' the Canon nodded, `I was not introduced to him
until the early 'thirties, and what you have told me explains
the disappointment I felt at the time. But we have not yet recalled where it was that I met you.'
Again C. B. was on dangerous ground, but he knew that Crowley had spent much of the 'thirties in London, and that the better off mystics preferred the privacy of houses to living in flats; so he punted for that area of the capital which then had a greater number of moderate sized private houses than any other, and said, `For the life of me I can't recall the occasion definitely, but I have the impression that it was at a party held out Regent's Park way, or in St. John's Wood.'
'Ah!' said the Canon. .'Then it must have been at Mocata's house: at least at a house just behind Lord's that he made his headquarters for a while; although I believe it was actually owned by a wealthy young Jew who had become a disciple of his.'
This was the acid test. C. B. was acutely aware that, if Copely Syle entertained any suspicions of his bona fides, in the question of where they might have met before lay the perfect opportunity to set a trap. He had only to suggest a place in which he had never been and, if his visitor accepted it, unmask him as a fraud. But C. B. felt it reasonable to hope that their talk of Aleister Crowley had gone a long way to still any early doubts about himself that the Canon might have held, and that his suggestion was free from guile. Gambling boldly on that, and using his excellent knowledge of London even to gild the lily a little, he replied