Masks of the Illuminati (12 page)

Sir John grimly continued his efforts at astral projection. Jones, meanwhile, became more bizarre in his teaching methods. At one of their fortnightly meetings, he showed Sir John a cartoon from
Punch
, depicting a very disgruntled gentleman and a very officious customs inspector glaring at each other. The customs inspector was saying, “These cats is dogs and the rabbits is dogs, but that bloody turtle is a
hinsect!”

Sir John smiled uncertainly. “Amusing,” he ventured tentatively.

“It is the whole secret of Illumination,” Jones said solemnly, “if you consider it deeply enough.”

He insisted on giving the cartoon to Sir John, who obediently took it home, hung it in his bedroom and contemplated it once or twice a day. Illumination eluded him. The differing epistemologies of common-sense travelers and the authors of the customs regulations were symptomatic of primordial ontological confusions everywhere, perhaps. But what did that have to do with matters spiritual?

At their next meeting, Jones presented Sir John with
the
Complete Works
of Lewis Carroll. “Here,” he said gravely, “is the condensed essence of Holy Cabala.”

Sir John flushed angrily. “This time I
know
you’re having me on,” he said. “It isn’t worthy of you, Jones.”

“So,” Jones said, “you know more than your Teacher already?”

“I know a hoax, sir, when it’s right in front of my nose.”

Jones remained placid. “How many times,” he asked, “have you encountered the saying, ‘When the student is ready, the Master speaks?’ Do you know why that is true? The door opens
inward
. The Master is everywhere, but the student has to open his mind to hear the Master’s Voice. Read carefully, Sir John, ponder the hidden meanings, and see if the Master does not speak to you through this book.”

Sir John, feeling more like an idiot than ever, took Lewis Carroll home and re-read all of it, cover to cover; and he was astonished at how much of it coincided with his own limited successes in astral projection. Were there even deeper meanings that would become clear when he had progressed farther in the Work?

A few nights later he awoke from sleep convinced that he understood the Secret of Secrets. It was in one of Carroll’s couplets:

The elation lasted for several minutes. Then he looked at the cracked mirror and saw his own reflection split in two. The whole world split in shatters, broken glass and jewels. This time he knew the explosion was psychic: neither Wildeblood nor any of the other servants would hear the demolition.

He got out of bed very carefully and lit a candle. Sitting
in the windowseat, listening to the beating of his heart, trying to breathe normally, he was overwhelmed by the crack’s sudden ability to change rhythmically from an acute angle to an obtuse angle while visions poured through of worlds with seven moons, worlds with nineteen suns, somadust and 358 and fnord, magick castles in the mist, paladins in white and black armor, aeons of the rhythmic alteration from acute angle to obtuse angle, vast insectoid intelligences, wider and wider vistas of planets, galaxies, whole universes profoundly alien, the Demon-Sultan howling in the darkness where the moon doesn’t shine. “These dogs is cats and these mice is 3.141593, but those bloody garters are incest. Illigan Nillagain Rilligan Illagain. Eat a live toad before breakfast and
nothing worse
will happen to you all day.” Sir John did exactly the right thing. From memory, concentrating deeply, ignoring the semenduets and obtuse rondels, he wrote in pen the five axioms and twenty-three definitions from Euclid’s Geometry. Within half an hour he was in normal space-time again and the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations had been vanquished.

Ineluctible network of coincidence: at least that if no more. Myriads of worldlines, Professor Einstein would say, but behind them, invisible, intangible, the enigmatic links of a dark design; indifferent, paring their fingernails. Dialectic: Yeats, the one man in all Ireland who has tried to help me, to advance my career, yet the one against whom I must struggle to the end, since either his vision or mine will define the future of our literature.

Joyce contemplated worldlines coiling back to the beginning. Karma, or the cause of all causes. Inexplicable and inextricable. Garters, by all that’s holy. Network of coincidence. Ezra, son of Homer, by damn.

Strangest of all: in Babcock’s life this episode of Pound and Yeats is just a subplot, an incident. Was Hamlet a subplot in the career of Fortinbras similarly?

I.N.R.I.: Iron Nails Ran In. A guess made by a Protestant boy in Dublin how many years ago?

Einstein’s intelligent spaniel eyes: so much less prepared for this than I, who listened half-believing once to the Dublin annex of this Golden Dawn. What can he be thinking of Yeats and Babcock and their friends trying to leap outside space-time entirely?

But the series of Barter Carter Darter Farter? What comes next? Garter.

Genus eutaenia
, of course. Ancient tempter. They eat mice, shed skins in spring: in a garden, the man and woman naked and unashamed. One bite of the apple and kerflooey.

Maybe they should have taken two bites.

Bite, again. Again, bite.

Homosexual terror behind a great deal of it. The card old Queensborough sent to Wilde at his club, to provoke the Libel trial: “To Mr. Oscar Wilde, posing as somdomist.” Must have spotted that five or six times in those dreams.

Wonder if Babcock knows, any better than Queens-borough, that it should be spelled “sodomist.”

But the solace berry? Some link with Salisbury? Can’t quite make that one yet. Very Oedipal overtones, though.

Got it, by Jesus. “My goodness gracious,” said Brother Ignatius.

Not that at all. Start all over.

Hunter: Odysseus in Dublin. Time’s cuckold. A wife too long alone.
Honi soit qui mal
…

Nora, Stanislaus: Did they? Once, even? Or many times? No matter. Having rejected monogamy once, may I assert it now? Nobody is property. Noninvasion of the noninvasive individual.
Non serviam
. Back to my Byronic posturing. But did they? Will I ever know? Not in this world, certainly.

Worldlines, crossing, intersecting, splitting: Minkowski’s geometric image of the professor’s theory.

But did she? Nora, panting, eyes rolling upward all white, again again again. In her. Deeper, deeper. Fucking her. Fucking deeper. In her. Hot cunt, his then not mine. Hot wet cuntmouth.

Masochism. Stop this.

A horned man’s a monster, lago
.

Wordlines: Nora and Jim and Stanislaus, crossing, intersecting, splitting: Giorgio and Lucia splitting and going off as new vectors. Ever-branching time-river.

Mother, Nora,
die Lorelei:
sucking us down, calling us home. Human body 80, 90% saline: the topaz sea, the salt taste of her body’s caverns. Odysseus put wax in his ears against the dark uterine call, the song of the drowned kingdom. Davy Jones’ locker. Cold dank clammy death it must be, to drown. Not Wagner:
ertrinken, versinken, Unbewusst, hochste’ Lust
. Not that at all. But the Thing in the Loch?

Probably just some large relative of
Natrix
.

But if all time is one time: me in 1904 and me here now. Both real, adamantine, forever. Spring does not turn into summer. Worldlines. So that if, say, twenty years from now the names of Joyce and Einstein are known to all Europe? Then, that, too, is eternally fixed, next turn in the worldline.

And those who are ahead of us in linear time, looking back, our future their past: they will see exactly what we are half-blindly stumbling toward. Tomorrow’s tragedy and joy. Who will die and who will live.

THE RADIO ANNOUNCER
: And now another fast-breaking story from our Linz correspondent. It appears that Sir John Babcock was not the only impressionable youth whose life was powerfully influenced by Bulwer-Lytton’s romantic novels of the Vril energy. We have in our studio August Kubizek, a longtime friend of Adolf Hitler. Would you mind telling our audience, Herr Kubizek, what you were just telling us about the Linz Opera House in 1906? VOICE OF KUBIZEK [aged and weak]: Well, sir, it was in June of 06, I think. Adolf and I went to hear Wagner’s opera
Rienzi
, you see …

ANNOUNCER
: And what was the source of that opera, Mr. Kubizek?

KUBIZEK
: It was adapted from the novel of the same name, by Lord Bulwer-Lytton.

ANNOUNCER
: And did it concern the Vril energy?

KUBIZEK
: Oh,
ja
, of course. Everything Bulwer-Lytton wrote had something to do with the Vril and the mutation to a super-race.

ANNOUNCER
: And how did the opera affect young Adolf Hitler?

KUBIZEK
: It was astounding. I never before saw Adolf like that. He literally seemed to be in trance. In fact, when we came out of the Opera House, he started to walk in the wrong direction … not toward our homes, but in the opposite direction, if you follow me. I had to run after him and shake him to get his attention.

ANNOUNCER
: And then what happened, Herr Kubizek?

KUBIZEK
: It was unbelievable. As I said, I never saw Adolf like that before—although I saw him that way many times in later years. He was like a man possessed. He spoke with great excitement, like a patient with a high fever,
verstehen sie?
He said that he had received a mandate from Higher Powers, through Wagner’s music, and would devote his whole life to a mission ordinary human beings could not understand.

ANNOUNCER
: A mission that ordinary human beings could not understand—he used those exact words?

KUBIZEK
: How could I forget? He was an unimpressive fellow then—I had never heard him use such highflown language before.

ANNOUNCER
: And did you ever receive subsequent information that confirmed the importance of
Rienzi
in Hitler’s life?

KUBIZEK
: Absolutely. It was in 1938. Adolf visited the home of Wagner’s widow, and I was with him. He told her all about that experience in 1906. He was very emphatic. He wanted to make sure that Frau Wagner understood how important it was to him. He even went so far as
to say to her—I remember his words because there were tears in his eyes—“In that hour National Socialism began.”

PART TWO

Not even in that modern evasion, the plea of insanity, can we find any hope. Nothing is clearer than that these wretched victims of Satan were in full possession of their faculties to the last moment.

—Rev. Charles Verey,
Clouds Without Water

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. After summer is winter; and after winter, summer. They ruled once where man rules now; where man rules now, they shall rule again. Not in the spaces we know, but
between
them, They wait serene and primal, undimensioned and by us unseen.

—
The Necronomicon

I defy you, Jesus, I, the priestess of this rite whose body is now both altar and offering, to strike me with lightning if your power is greater than my Lord and Master’s.

—Leon Katz,
Dracula: Sabbat

This is, indeed, a great wall.

—Richard M. Nixon, at the Great Wall of China