Babylon (27 page)

Milord has become bored with us. We are transported to a mausoleum—a series of catacombs beneath the Reichs Chancellory. Dressed in white, diaphanous shrouds, our eyes closed by a mortician’s expert hand, glass coffins bedecked with poppies, roses, and lilies, and with our hands chastely crossed upon our breasts, we lie in peace, surrounded by thousands of other dead girls, entombed within cool, black marble walls. We resemble, I am told, the collection of wax anatomical models in the Royal and Imperial Museum of Physics and Natural History called ‘La Specola’ established sometime between 1776 and 1780 in Florence.

Sometimes I hear the sound of whispered voices, as if from outside my bedroom door in Wilmot Street, in the days when I was still a human being.

‘The beauty,’ I hear a man say, ‘remains.’

‘Yes,’ agrees another. ‘It is as it should be. The human female has, after all, neither a soul, nor a need for immortality. But, of course, she does have beauty. And in death, it is at last released.’

‘Beauty like a crossed-out name, articulated under erasure.’

‘They are our greatest works of art. Greater, by far, in beauty, than the city above us.’

‘Our harvest of beauty would seem this year to have been a particularly fine one, for I have heard that much of the East has been declared
Madchenfrei.’

‘Indeed. I believe there are several new consignments this evening from the
Vernichtungslager
at Belzec.’

‘If that is the case, perhaps Lord Azrael will be throwing another one of his famous dinner parties.’

I hear the sound of jackboots stepping over the stone floor, receding into the distance.

And again, all is still, with only the distant sound of trickling water to remind me that the world suffers at the hands of Time and the Minotaurs.

Sleeping Beauty could hope for an awakening kiss. And so could Snow White. But Cliticia and I must sleep forever, for we are fairy-tale princesses whose happy endings were perverted by crueller, more modern, fantasies.

And the world, I know now, will end, not in war, but in the playing out of fantasy. A fantasy of death ...

There are some men, it seems, whose only contribution to society is the ability to create delusions. Whether they are mad or sane, good or evil, seems hardly to matter. We crave their rhetoric, their dithyrambs, their romantic charisma, because they revive deep, buried longings that make ordinary people feel alive and part of a universe of significance.

They seduce us all. And we are party to these seductions, just as we are complicit in our own deaths. We crave their mystique, their pronouncements, just as we crave disaster and war. Political extremists, religious fanatics, and incendiaries of all persuasions, bestow upon us the rational fabrications that justify our increasingly irrational behaviour. We subscribe to lies, cant, and hysteria, because such things sanction our unconscious needs.

Ours is a Sadeian society, and one, moreover, that doesn’t know, or understand, its own nature. Repressed, fearful, it literalizes and externalizes its dark side through laws, wars, prisons, and panics. Literalism is poverty of the imagination, the inability to live through chthonic myth, art, and dream. And so I ask: Is it not ethical to oppose this literalism, this savage, false innocence, through another kind of fantasy? Not the fantasy of the Men. Not the fantasy of the Shulamites. But a perverse fantasy that is opposed to, or at war with, those whose dark, psychic necessities become oppressive, destructive, and cruel because repressed and literalized instead of turned into play, art, or finally, love?

How many more girls have been murdered in the plastination chamber since Madeleine Fell and Cliticia Lipski succumbed to the pink mist? How many years, or decades, have I lain here, so immaculately dead?

‘Nabonidus,’ says the tour guide who shows a party of schoolchildren through the catacombs, ‘was the last king of Babylon. According to Shulamite lore, he neglected the so-called “holy city” and trespassed upon Ishtar’s territory off-world. This led to the Earthly Babylon’s fall. Our great Autarch, Lord Azrael, is our modern-day Nabonidus. He and his soldiers have dared to trespass upon the Modern Babylon, and that trespass will, in time, bring about Babylon’s second, and final, defeat.’ Behind my closed eyes I have a vision of Christ as Shiva, the Son of God come in vengeance, his sword held high, to slay the Scarlet Woman and all her works. I have a vision of his Angel of Death, Azrael, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.

‘The Black Order, it seems to me,’ says one teacher to another in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘cares more about Babylon than Earth Prime.’

‘The Illuminati know as much. They send their Shulamites off- world to quarantine the Black Order. After Stalingrad—’

‘Of course. The Black Order should first and foremost address itself to
worldly
matters. But even now, with the war going so badly, they divert nearly all their resources to harrying the Modern Babylon, instead of defending Germania against the Eastern hordes.’

‘I sometimes believe there is a complicity between Shulamites and the Men. It is almost as if the one cannot do without the other. It is almost as if they were... in love.’

The tour guide leads the schoolchildren, and their accompanying teachers, out into the outlying
Das Museum
der Tod und das Mädchen,
where they may view automata and ‘philosophical toys’ by Vaucanson, Kempelen, and Jacquet-Droz, and—for those that might be able to afford it—buy a Meissen ‘exquisite corpse’ as a souvenir.

Soon, there will come an end, I know. Soon, the angel of death, whose mistress I am, shall whisper: ‘Come, see the Scarlet Woman bestride her beast in the desert, and on her forehead the words: BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES. With her the kings of the Earth committed adultery. Now come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute. See: all her riches and splendour have vanished, never to be recovered. The music of harpists and musicians, flute players, and trumpeters will never be heard in her again. For by her magic spell all the nations were led astray

It has grown quiet. And lying here, I think upon all that has happened, and all that may come to pass.

Oh, Cliticia, we allowed ourselves to be ruined
,
but who first seduced me, if not you
?
I loved you. I still love you. When I think of you lying next to me, dead, I feel rocks in my heart. I wonder, is a tiny flame of consciousness imprisoned within your lifeless flesh, too
?
Or are you nothing more than a pretty little mannequin
?
Oh Cliticia, Cliticia, Cliticia Lipski, you were as smart as paint and done up regardless. You were my cockney belle. You possessed the great Dickensian virtue of kindness.
‘I would advise you to stay away from her,’ the Duenna had said. ‘You will go far, Madeleine. Do not let yourself down. See no more of Cliticia.’ But you were the only star in the Babylonian sky. And if you are white now, like me—your flesh de-nigrified by the immortalizing gas—then your soul was always white as starlight. Indeed, it was always a soul whiter, far, far whiter, than my own.

I dream of Thule, the Midnight Mountain arising from the white continent of Hyperborea, set in the midst of the Chronium Sea. I dream of the revolt against the modern world, and the subjugation of the feminine
demos.

And I dream of Cliticia. I dream of her all the time. And I wonder if she dreams of me, who lies so close, but so far away.

I stand alone in Victoria Park. It is night. I gaze up at the pure steel of Aldebaran, the Pleiades, and the open clusters. And it is then that I feel her ghostly hand touch mine across a space less measurable even than those that divide the stars. ‘
I like to fink I’m a little girl again. I like to imagine I don’t know any fink about the Modern Babylon and never will. Yeh, I like to fink I’m a little girl. A child, Maddy. I like to fink I’m just a child.’

And I know I am not alone.

This is the Age of Plastic. This is the Hysterical Age. This is the Age of Jack the Ripper. We have all been seduced. But at last, Oh God, at last, I am no longer alone. I have Cliticia, and I have more. Much, much, more. I have a world to keep me company, a world that worships at the altar of madness and love. Babylon cannot fall. London is Babylon, and Babylon, London. The Imperial Metropolis is the City of the Night! There was never any chance of escape. The darkness, the universal darkness, falls upon man and woman alike and all walk the fog-shrouded streets of the Empire of Fear.

All is Babylon. I know that now. All, all is Babylon the Great.