Babylon (24 page)

The table was strewn, not only with maps, but with antiquities: a stele of the Hittite god Teshup, bearer of the North Wind; a cylinder of lapis-lazuli; little serpent-headed dragons and winged bulls; statues from Mari; and fragments of bas-reliefs blackened by fire. Lord Azrael, it seemed, was a collector. And not only of bric-à-brac. As I continued to inspect the room, I saw, halfhidden in the shadows that swarmed about its recesses, several distinct human forms. Slouched in heavy armchairs, their heads lolling forward, backward, or to one side, perched on windowseats, or else laid out on sofas and chaise-longues, were more than a dozen life-size dolls.

‘How beautiful!’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Lord Azrael. ‘They are indeed beautiful.’

I disengaged myself from his arm and walked across the room, my nightgown billowing a little in the breeze that gusted through the open windows, until I stood before a doll whose head rested against the wing of a great, black leather fauteuil. Like the other dolls in Lord Azrael’s collection, she resembled a full-sized version of Cliticia’s fashion-plate moppet, Nixie, but made from white porcelain rather than black. Her hair complemented her complexion. It was Rapunzel’s, as rendered by the golden palette of a Botticelli.

I reached out and touched her cheek.

‘But that’s not porcelain,’ I said, perplexed. ‘In fact, if it weren’t so smooth and cold, you could almost mistake it for flesh.’

‘It is called
plastic
,’ said Lord Azrael. ‘It is a new material, a by-product of the artefacts we have developed by harnessing
vril
.’ He walked to the table and picked up what seemed, at first, to be an item of crockery—a china plate, perhaps. Unless this too was made of the thing he called ‘plastic’. He held it up. ‘Behold: a model of the prototype flying machine we call the
Manisola.
It is a biological machine. And it travels ten, no, perhaps a hundred times faster than any train that has ever been built. We have developed many new weapons, too, which will soon allow us to consolidate our hold on Babylon and thereby bring about the dawn of our New Order.’ He set the model down. ‘Miss Fell—’ He paused, and then, pitching his voice lower, said, ‘Or may I call you ... Madeleine?’

I nodded, smiling weakly. ‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Madeleine,’ he began again, ‘there is something I must tell you. Something I must explain before it is ... too late.’

‘I’m not sure I—’

‘Please, Madeleine, listen.’ He averted his gaze. He seemed to be studying something on the table. It was a map, and one much like the others spread out across the marble surface, except that it seemed partly rendered in three-dimensions so that it resembled a scaled-down model of a city—perhaps Babylon the Great itself. From my compromised vantage point several feet away it was difficult to decide. ‘It was a wretched business,’ he continued, his voice and attitude forlorn. ‘But it was necessary. Necessary to impregnate those unfortunate young women with the aboriginal energies of Thule.’ He shook his head violently, like a dog that has taken a dousing; and like a dog, he sniffed, as if able to scent the tension in the air. ‘Yes, Madeleine, I am talking about the moral and physical virtue obtained from
vril
—that potent, electromagnetic, nay,
electrosexual
force of universal utility that will soon give us flying machines and automata!’

He began to gesticulate, the words tripping off his tongue with ever-greater facility. ‘A woman’s mental processes are hostage to her ovarian secretions. Excessive secretions give rise to impure thoughts, to, to—’ He seemed to have difficulty catching his breath. ‘—To
sexual insanity
.’ He paused, walked to the table, took a handkerchief from his hip pocket, and mopped his brow. ‘The female sex chemical is antagonistic to the masculine ideal. Are not those beguiled by the Shulamite subject, these latter days, to alarming incidences of spermatorrhoea and priapism? Cliteridectomy has, it is true, had some effect in moderating female toxins. Dr Isaac Baker Brown was surely at the forefront of medical science in not only recognizing that female self-abuse led to hysteria, epilepsy, and neurasthenia, but that “moral treatment” was not enough! But, really, what long-term benefits have these strategies achieved, apart from offering a sop to public opinion?’ He threw the handkerchief down on the table, clenched his hands together, and then raised them to his chest in an act of truculent supplication. ‘Listen, Madeleine. And listen well! The Black Order has never cared about
public opinion.
Neither has it cared about finding a “cure”—at least not one sanctified by medical science. Instead, it seeks to extract, distil, and use female toxicity to further its own political ends!’

He turned to face me. His pensiveness had left him, and his eyes glowed with fervour. ‘During these last few months the Black Order has uncovered some of the most precious secrets of Babylonian sex-magic. The opening of portals, the use of energetic shields—both have their roots in the
hieros gamos,
that is, the union of the Goddess with the masculine elect. Shulamites practise these rites of sacred marriage, of course, with the Illuminati, each time they return to Earth Prime on sabbatical. But there are other, forgotten rites, detailed in some of the more obscure, and darker, grimoires that can undo the
hieros gamos
and the power that it confers. These are the rites of estrangement, separation, annulment, and mystic divorce.’

His arms dropped to his side. The afflatus seemed to leave him. ‘We are not barbarians, Madeleine. You must believe me when I say that each uterus was harvested with as much speed and compassion as time would allow. I can assure you that any pain that the victims may have suffered was as inadvertent as it was minimal. But we had to have them. We had to have those uteri! How else could we understand the secrets of the black wedding— how else could we learn how to harness the power of the ancient, dark, Babylonian arts?’ He combed his fingers through his hair, a mad sorcerer lecturing an apprentice whose own sanity was about to be totally eclipsed. ‘I truly hope I am making myself clear. I recall that I tried to similarly explain myself to little Marie Jeanette, with somewhat limited success. Oh yes, I remember whispering in her ear:
‘Vers les trésors de tapersonne,
et faire à ton flanc étonné une blessure large et creuse, et, vertigineuse douceurl À travers ces lèvres nouvelles
,
plus éclatantes et plus belles, t'infuser mon vénin, ma soeurV

He clenched and unclenched his fists. ‘Yes, we infused them with our venom,’ he continued. ‘We transformed them into receptacles of
vril!’
He took a few steps towards me, and then stopped. ‘It is the only way to open new Gates! The only way to bring down the force-fields!’ Again, he brought his fists to his chest in that ambivalent pose that communicated both threat and prayer. ‘Think, Madeleine. Until recently, we have been confined to using those secret portals our ancestors set up and the expedient of raiding trains as they travel from Earth and through Babylon. But now we will be able to raid the temples themselves. Think of it! Oh, Madeleine.’ His face was enraptured. ‘Babylon will fall!’

It was then, I think, that I was graced with my last few seconds of mental equilibrium. And during that brief, strangely lucid, moment, I thought only of going to him, putting my arms around his neck and then, while I blinded him with kisses, taking his revolver from its holster and holding him hostage, or else shooting him through the head. Perhaps there might have even been one of his prototype
Manisolas
nearby which I could have stolen and flown to an interdimensional Gate. But that brief spell of sanity was swiftly dispelled; the sun turned black, the sorcerer’s apprentice succumbed; and I was lost inside a disorienting fog of passion.

‘The crystals in the laboratory,’ I said, holding myself unnaturally stiff. ‘They’re—’

‘The crystallized wombs of Stride, Eddowes, and Kelly,’ he said, enumerating the Ripper’s last three Earthly victims. ‘Three Shulamites born in London—Shulamites whose uteri were infused, not merely with the sacrifice of my own, precious seed, but with the dark, ancestral energies of Spitalfields. Yes, Madeleine, it was only upon such unholy ground—the ground of plague-pits and Dionysiac temples like Christ Church—that the modern
hieros gamos
between god and whore became possible.’ The floor seemed to give way, yet I still stood, like a murderess who has cheated the hangman and floats above the open trap, her body turned to air.

‘D-do you like my dolls?’ he said, unaccountably changing his tone from one of high rhetoric to that of a nervous, courting schoolboy. ‘Such blonde hair,’ he added, as he turned upon them an appraising gaze. ‘And such eyes. Such beautiful eyes!’

‘Eyes blue as ice,’ I said. A few minutes earlier I might have hoped to win a compliment for possessing eyes that were not merely comparably blue, but superior, surely, for being imbued with sight. But I spoke now like one of the automata he had said would soon swell his battalions: mechanically, and with all the élan of a somnambulist. ‘They’re lovely dolls.’ Each was attired in a powder-blue frock, white pinafore, and blue-striped stockings.

‘Mr Tenniel gave me the idea,’ he said. But Alice had never been quite so tightly laced. Nor had she ever had such recourse to cosmetics. These Wonderland children, it must be said, with their tiny waists and faces of blasted innocence, were evil little strumpets, just like me.

I looked across the room towards the window, its diaphanous, white curtain like a gently bellying sail, the breeze so mild, so unemphatic, that it could almost have been spiritual. But beyond the window, and readily apparent through its quivering, thistledown veil, was a night sky whose moony softness had been usurped by a hard, metallic lustre.

‘Who are you?’ I said, my words, distant, foreign, as if somebody else had spoken them. ‘Who are you
really
?’

His response was over-quick, too carefree, too evocative of my own, fatalistic thoughts. ‘Does it matter?’

‘The High Priestess of Ereshkigal said—’

‘The woman was ill,’ he interrupted. ‘Very ill.’

‘I think you should tell me,’ I said. ‘I think you owe me that much.’

He smiled. ‘What is there to tell?’

I stared down at the floorboards. The swirling patterns of wood grain seemed to coalesce, jump out at me, like the illustrations in a picture book I had read as a child, but had long ago forgotten about, until now.

‘I have the feeling that I’ve known you ever since I was a little girl,’ I said. ‘I had a name for you then: Lord Barbarossa. I suppose it was neither less nor more real than the name you have now.’ I looked up and walked towards him. ‘But I must know, I
must
know who you really are.’ Whoever he was, I needed him to be real. Only by being real could he make me real too, and bring my promised land into being.

As I drew flush to the table I saw that what he had earlier been staring at was indeed both a map and something of a model village: a big Mercator projection of Modern Babylon and the continent and world it was a part of, with the city, and its environs, picked out in miniature, three-dimensional relief.

I leant over the table and committed myself to study. The city was represented as a great square in the middle of a ragged land- mass. To the east of the city was Edom, a place of deserts, scattered oases, and an inland sea. In shape it resembled the projection of western Africa, though Edom was held to be something like twice as big. To the west was the great mountain range of Elam that ran north into Akkad and formed the spine of the narrow 3,000-mile long Anatolian peninsula. To the south was Sumer. There, the Euphrates and Tigris ran through jungles and marshland until they eventually flowed into the Sea of Ashtoreth. All four regions contained little six-pointed stars to indicate the locations where new temples were being built outside the city walls. And all four regions contained little warning signs, such as might be found on a medieval map, signalling multitudinous dangers:
Here be spiders,
said one that had been superimposed on Sumer. And others read
Here be worms, Here be serpents, Here be kobolds, Here be wolves
, or quite simply,
Here be terrors.

I let my hand settle on the map’s western segment. ‘Edom,’ I said, numbly. ‘Named after the land near the Red Sea where Lilith fled after being cast from Eden. It was there that she gave birth to the succubi.’

‘The Princess Salome was an Edomite,’ he said, reaching out to stroke my hair.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Her ancestry was traceable all the way back to Esau the Wicked, whom biblical tradition regarded as the forefather of the Edomites, the most hateful of all pagans.’

 ‘And are you my Salome, Madeleine? Would you have my head on a platter, if the opportunity should present itself?’

‘The police can’t arrest you here,’ I said. ‘Besides, with the way they’ve handled the Whitechapel murders, I shouldn’t say you had much to worry about even if you should travel back to Earth Prime.’

‘Yes, I must say, my recent mission was accomplished with a speed and effectiveness I had hardly thought possible.’

‘No one cares about a few dead Shulamites,’ I said. ‘Not the police, and not the Illuminati, it seems.’ I laughed, grimly. ‘I’m beginning to sound like my father.’

‘Not your father in heaven, I hope?’ he said. ‘Not Jehovah?’

I traced a line through the yellow sand of Edom with my fingernail.

‘I don’t have a father,’ I said. ‘I only have a mother: Lilith.’

He ran a hand down my hair, a gesture at once affectionate and impersonal, like a caress bestowed upon a pet cat. ‘Pretty succubus,’ he murmured. My sphinx-nature rose to the surface. Cats took pleasure in their selfish, treacherous ways; and I must admit to feeling a slight
frisson
myself at the prospect of indulging in an act of betrayal.

‘So you think that, if I should find myself back on Earth Prime, I might inform on you?’ I turned to look up at him, taking care to smile in a manner that I knew would becomingly dimple my cheek. ‘Why not put me to the test? After all, you could always jump in one of your flying machines and hide away at the North Pole.’ Again, I thought of all that the Serpentessa at Ereshkigal had told me: that perhaps Lord Azrael was not from a strange, Hyperborean land, or indeed, from foreign parts at all, but was one of us. ‘If, of course,’ I concluded, placing a finger beneath my chin and growing increasingly alarmed at the fact that my coquetry seemed to possess a life of its own, ‘Hyperborea actually exists.’