Chaos Magic (3 page)

It was in the final part of Alan’s journal that I had first learned of Detective Z and his daughter Lorna. The information here was sketchy, Alan was caring for his ailing wife at this point I believe, but it seemed that by working together they were able to firstly strike at and weaken the power of the Blake Oranisation
. This was all very well but what actually happened? I wondered. Then I came across several footnotes on the relevant pages where two books were mentioned:
the Alembic Valise
and another named
Cembali Silvae
– assuming that these were part of the library of John Dee I began to search; I could find neither until I remembered a couple of curiously titled modern paperbacks in one of the desk drawers. Amazingly these were exactly what I had been searching for. They were both written by a Joel Barlow and seemed like the kind of fantasy stories that teenagers might enthuse about, but for me the both the author and the titles were unknown.

It was only when I began to read
the Alembic Valise
whilst riding the bus home that evening to my lodgings in Parsons Green that I realized that the book was a fictionalised account of Lorna Z and her father’s struggle against a sinister cult bearing a striking similarity to
the Blake Organisation
. What is more the book contained precise specifications of the structure and cosmology of the zones where the battle between these fantasy worlds was taking place.

Then one day I had a breakthrough. It was dusk and as had been my practice I had switched on the portable light source that I had added to the rooms facilities in order to extend my studies beyond the daylight hours. But I was not comfortable with the synthetic nature of the light and what is more the damn thing had started to emit a buzzing sound that was annoying me. So I lit the three fat white church candles that were lined up on the big desk and switched off my nasty light; the buzzing continued. I flipped the switch back and forth; it made no difference. I sat back down and considered the possibilities and gradually a drowsy mindful state descended on me and I drifted into a kind of trance. I had closed my eyes and yet I saw colors that flickered from the candle flames and brushed my eyelids, painting strange and glittering dreamscapes. And what is more I now realized that the buzzing sound was within my skull and that it had acquired a depth and resonance that I sought to decipher. And so began my journey into the interior and my discovery of the gift of clairaudience, something I had read about but always thought it was perhaps a lesser cousin of the gift of clairvoyance that everyone is more familiar with.

To deliver the totality of my ‘business’ to the undoubtedly receptive Detective Z in what was left of his lunch-break, whilst seated there on a, admittedly pleasant, park bench was beyond my powers of communication. So instead I elected to throw him a bone; or maybe even two.

“There is a kind of ‘Hellfire Club’ that is comprised of a number of the supra wealthy – billionaires whose wealth is entirely related to their alliances with an organisation of which I know you to be familiar.”

He said nothing but I saw his jaw muscles tighten and he looked away so as to conceal his loathing.

“They never went a
way, Detective Z,” I said.

“Tell me what you know,” he said
.

Before answering I looked around – there were children playing on the grass, kicking an orange ball whilst their parents looked on, someone was trying to get a kite into the air, a dog ran by without any obvious owner in the vicinity. All seemed well in the world. I took the plunge.

“The inner core of
the Blake Organisation
is a dark and evil cell known as the
Brotherhood of the Serpent
, which would be a laughably bad name if they were just a bunch of crackpots, however that is not the case.”

By now the kite was airborne – I was reassured to see a golden dragon etched onto the bright red cloth. Its appearance seemed to confirm the rightness of my meeting with Detective Z.

“Their control over the global shadow banking system is almost total, and therefore they have created dozens of billionaires who are the only visible aspect of the cults increasing dominance. What they demand in return is that the recipients of this wealth promote and practice Chaos Magic at certain times and at certain locations. One such time was last night - the first full moon after the spring equinox – and one such place is very close to where we now are seated. In the ritual, which is a variation of the infamous Baltimore Working, a priestess is depleted of her energy to the point of zombieism, until her shade is subsumed by entities that lurk outside the Circles of Time, in the Mauve Zone.”

“And you would know of this because...?” asked Detective Z.

“I have a contact, a certain Armenian gentleman named Viktor.”

“And what happens, did she quit or was she fired, what does your man Viktor say?” he asked.

“Look there is no Viktor. But if there was he would probably refer you to the star Algol, the source of many of the emergent demonic entities; a real live death star at perpetual war with the race from Sirius a twin binary system which is home to our DNA. This conflict between the First Root Race and the Second Root Race is millennial.”

Dubious does not even begin to describe the look in the detective eyes. So I carried on digging.

“And perhaps the use of the same Draconian current by voodoo adepts of the feared ‘red sects’ of Haiti, who still practice sacrifice, could be sited as a similar contemporary manifestation.”

Detective Z raised an eyebrow.

“Meaning?” he asked.

“This all real, this is their MO,” I answered simply.

He raised his eyebrow further.

“There’s still a lot I am figuring out,”
I said, in order to cover my seeming lack of clarity.

“Sexual arousal to the point of death during a black magic orgy does not sound very mainstream to me,” said the detective.

“Afterwards they close the working and go to church. The effects of the face-full of white powder they ingested the previous night plus their other exertions are then successfully ameliorated by Diazepam, black coffee, and the power of prayer.”

“Are you suggesting that they were in the congregation at the Russian Orthodox Church this morning?” said Detective Z recalling the trio of Bentleys with blacked-out windows that he had earlier seen parked across from the church.

“I am, and I am also suggesting that there will be others,” I said with a shrug.

Detective got to his feet.

“An interesting story, to be sure, but I must be getting back to some real police work in the real world.”

“Wait,” I said. “There is more.”

“Some other time perhaps,” he said turning to leave.

“It’s Lorna,” I called out softly to him.

That stopped him.

“You know she is trapped in a parallel world created by
the Blake Organisation
as part of their twisted plan of utter dominance in all spheres?” I said.

He looked like he might punch me.

“Walk, from the north side, to the centre of Waterloo Bridge at sunset tonight.”

I clapped the stunned looking Detective Z on the shoulder and strode off across the park, not caring about the muddy grass and the horseshit.

“I will be in touch,” were my parting words.

Chapter 4

LORNA Z

Lorna knew that time was a spiral and that one day a moment would arrive when she could simply step sideways and find herself back in the world she had left far behind when she had crossed that metaphorical bridge at midnight all those years ago, in order to help a friend who was in danger. Her action had put her in danger too, and as is so often the case, she had suffered the consequences.

Now as she stood on the penthouse balcony of the Ice Tower, looking westwards and watching the city burning and hearing the frenzied voice of the reporter blaring from the television set behind her in the apartment, she wondered how much worse things would get. In the
beta world she now inhabited large swathes of London had been burning for several weeks, whole areas of once prosperous and law-abiding suburbia had recently been declared no-go zones by the police, as paramilitary protesters were becoming increasingly organized and resourced until they had claimed the streets for themselves.

And yet amazingly she had just that day found an old book in a nearby junk shop, simply titled:
Utopias
. The writings of several dozen hope-filled dreamers collected in one chunky volume had caught her attention, and as she paid for the book she had joked with the elderly gent behind the counter, that in an age where people had stopped writing about imaginary dystopias because the social order was unraveling so fast as to render their creation nugatory – it was a miracle that a book filled with visions of these positive imaginary worlds was permitted to exist at all.

He had given her a sideways look and tapped the side of his nose conspiratorially. Saying, “Read it and weep,” before adding, “It’s from my own collection.”

She shivered from the cold breeze that came off the river and turned away from the red-rimmed horizon before going back into the apartment to switch off the television; not wanting to hear about the reports of violence and looting for a moment longer. Once inside she slid the glass doors shut, drew the curtains and settled down on the sofa to read her book.

After twenty minutes she put it aside and slipped into a light sleep. Lorna was an adept at the technique of lucid dreaming and this time, as many times before, she allowed her dream-self to explore the unfolding narrative of JoKanu. A prescient and synchronistic element of the self, retrieved from the lost highway connecting trans-dimensional worlds, and able travel between multiple dimensions in his craft. An all-seeing eye painted on the prow and his hawk circling high above, picking out the ebb and flow of good and evil and guiding Lorna safely between the parallel worlds that quantum physics now argues are the prima material of the universe. Of course JoKanu had always known this, as had Lorna. They did not seek or require any validation from guys in white coats.

Operating through the senses of her dream avatar she found herself out in mid-stream, on a rising tide. The Thames was far beneath the windows of the Ice Tower but it also flowed in her meta-memory: from source to ocean and from ocean to source, a ceaseless turning of tide and time. And on the absolute margins of her consciousness she felt the synchronistic snapping of synapses and the balancing of trans-hemispheric neuron pathways, as JoKanu and his hologram familiars harvested
golden data
and channeled it to Lorna Z.

The Lorna Z: a sleeper in the realm of the
Brotherhood of the Serpent
, late of the Parish of Mortlake. Lorna Z: fervid opponent of the shadow parasites who were spawned from the Cult, bleeding the life force from the good and the true, replacing those civilizing aspirations with a dark meanness, a cruel intervention that split the one world into alpha and beta, and now ruled the beta world with a deranged psychopathy. Now known simply as the
Blake Oranisation
and with their own army of sentinels and Stasi – creeping around the corner, stealing in the night through the neighborhood, searching for Lorna Z and her kind; holding Lorna a captive in their inverted world – and slowly circling her hiding place, implacably hunting her down, a process which, for all her alliances and powers, she was unable to circumvent.

Lorna awoke with a start
, on a low table at her side was the book she had been reading prior to falling asleep. It had a plain parchment-colored binding and as she opened it on the title page she saw a scrawled signature, the book had been signed by its editor. As she flicked through the pages she caught a glimpse of underlined text and backtracked to find the location. The highlighted section was a song lyric that had somehow been included in the collection – the song detailed a meeting between two lovers at sunset by Waterloo Bridge. Just the one line was underlined. In that moment Lorna had strong feeling of epiphany and leapt to her feet in order to act upon it.

Detective Z was late. He had become tied-up in his role of organizing the investigation; real police work as he had called it. But his meeting with Darren Sprawl had played on his mind. Firstly because of his own hunch that the victim was of Russian origin and secondly because he had scanned the police’s own intra net to discover that another young woman had shown up dead and unclothed in Stratford, East London. Again with no signs of violence about her person – and again leading to the investigating officer’s rather feeble conclusion: that drugs may have been involved. These two facts gave some credence to Darren Sprawl’s ravings. For what else could they be? Reasoned the detective who had always relied on procedural police work, plain and simple.

Detective Z had cordoned off the memory of those lost days when Lorna had first disappeared; they were too painful to revisit. When he had returned to the police force after his ‘breakdown’
, he had simply thrown himself into the day-to-day activity of his job and never really put his head above the parapet; content to be a foot soldier – fighting crime and punching the clock.

He dimly recalled the character in Old Mortlake that Sprawl had referred to – a crazy old man called Alan, painting the railings around the churchyard; he too had alluded to a sinister and shadowy oranisation. But those were troubled times for the detective when his mind became untethered as his grief for the loss of Lorna swept away his very reason.

Detective Z was resentful of the encroachment of the past into the present. And yet a persistent feeling lurked just beyond the grasp of his conscious mind, like an alarm bell ringing far far away. Therefore at five PM he suddenly threw his skepticism aside and took the underground to Embankment Station, walked along the Strand and turned onto Waterloo Bridge just as the streetlights began to glow and the passing vehicles turn on their headlights. He quickened his pace but there seemed to be the whole world and his brother pressing in a frantic throng along every available yard of the footpath. By the time he approached the centre of the bridge it was almost dark, the last rays of the sun were glinting on the tops of the very tallest buildings.

Studying the crowd, there was no one who resembled Lorna and so he pressed on towards the centre of the bridge, all the time wondering if he was walking into a trap but clear in his mind that if there was any possibility of finding Lorna, here in the dusk, above the Thames, that he would come to this spot every night for the rest of his life if necessary.

He wished he had asked Darren Sprawl some proper questions. In fact the detective was more than a little ashamed of himself –
Detective forgets to ask vital questions
– it did not sound too good; now realizing that he had been too wrapped up in himself to even take the man seriously, and yet here he was, on Waterloo Bridge at sunset, just as instructed by the enigmatic Mister Sprawl. He stopped walking suddenly and someone bumped him from behind, the detective did not apologize as his attention was elsewhere – there was a woman in a blue anorak on the opposite side of the road – he could not see her face but she moved in a way that was familiar to him. With an increasing sense of urgency he looked for a break in the long line of cars and buses; he needed to cross quickly because she was walking away – towards the South Bank. By now the sky was deep violet and only to the west was there any luminescence from the departing sun, the preponderance of light was now man-made. He spotted a chance and stepped off the pavement and immediately had to leap back as a cyclist almost mowed him down – shouting ‘idiot’ as he veered and then sped away. A hand grabbed his shoulder and he turned around, savagely reacting to the intrusion.

“Can I suggest you cross the road using the pedestrian crossing,
sir?”

It was a uniformed policeman of all things – obviously thinking Detective Z was a moronic tourist with no understanding of basic safety protocols.

In one smooth movement Detective Z shrugged off the restraining hand, pulled out his ID and spoke firmly to the concerned but misguided young man.

“I am following a
suspect; I need you to stop the traffic for fifteen seconds so I can cross the road. Can you do that for me?” asked the Detective quickly.

The PC nodded and obliged by holding up both arms and flagging down the approaching London Bus – he followed the detective to the centre of the road who then repeated the process for the traffic going the other direction.

“That’s all for now, constable – thank you for your help,” said Detective Z, and began to weave his way through the crowd in pursuit of the blue anorak.