Masks of the Illuminati (20 page)

Could a man be turned into a camel?
The question which had seemed merely absurd two years earlier was now horrible to contemplate, without ceasing to be ridiculous. The evil “wee people” whose contact has the power to disrupt totally the normal functioning of the human brain, abolishing space and time as we know them … the Creature so many had seen in Loch Ness … a bat-winged monstrosity that tittered in a human-like voice … Sir John found himself re-reading Verey’s letter several times, with growing apprehension and disquiet. “The mind has both a rational and an irrational aspect,” Jones had said, long ago, and Sir John had seen enough of the reasonless denizens of Chapel Perilous to fear their power, to know that they could on occasion cross over into the material universe and disrupt its normal laws entirely.

Sir Walter Scott had written of these creatures in his famous
Letters on Witchcraft
, and Sir John found himself recalling, over and over, a phrase from Scott about “the crew that never rests.” Finally, he went to the library to look up the actual passage. Scott explained that “glamour” originally meant illusion, as every etymologist knows, and went on to discuss the abrupt way in which the glamour cast by these creatures could turn into sudden loathsome horror—as had perhaps happened to the poor Ferguson lad. Scott wrote:

Sir John remembered his own first contact with the “crew that never rests.” Midway between dream and astral vision: the huge, incomprehensible machinery, the incessant muttering of nonsense phrases…. “Mulligan Milligan Hooligan Halligan” and all the rest. Cabala referred to them as the qliphothic entities—souls of those who had died insane; orthodox Christian theology simply called them demons; in Tibet they were known as
Tulpas
, and usually appeared in solid black garb like the mysterious “Orientar” who had gone about Inverness asking questions about the Verey household; to the American Indians, they were allies or avatars of Coyote, the prankster-god, or of the mysterious “people from the stars”; there seemed to be no part of the Earth in which they did not appear in horrified tales of malign humor, regarded as myth only by those who had never personally encountered them.

Sir John remembered suddenly that the very word “panic” is derived from the name of the Great God Pan; and that the ancients believed that any close encounter with Him or His cohort of satyrs and nymphs—the crew that never rests—was more likely to lead to madness than to ecstasy, or that the ecstasy could easily turn to madness.

The traditional old ballad “Thomas the Rhymer” came back to him, seeming not quaint at all but stealthily sinister:

He remembered that William Blake, the poet, had soberly told friends of seeing a faery procession in his own garden once; that Sir Walter Scott seriously reported on a man he described as “a scholar and a gentleman” who insisted he had observed faery rings—circles of mushrooms where the weird folk were said to dance—and had seen
imprints of small feet
within them; that the folklorist Rev. S. Baring-Gould had sworn to an encounter, in 1838, in which “legions of dwarfs about two feet high” had circled his carriage and ran laughing alongside it for some distance, then vanished “into thin air” in the traditional manner; that as recently as 1907 Lady Archibald Campbell had reported a case of a man and wife, in Ireland, who had captured a “faery” and held it prisoner two weeks before it escaped.

Thinking,
Do I dare, still, to consider all these cases as “hallucination”?
and remembering the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, of similar reports from all ages and places: the Bigfoot of Canada, the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, the huge winged creatures of a thousand folk traditions—the vast dark company of unearthly beings (or the incredible
variety of forms
in which “the crew that never rests” can manifest to human consciousness, when the membrane between the visible and invisible worlds becomes temporarily ripped and They come prancing and dancing and slithering and tittering from their reality into ours)—remembering too his own experience when the most terrible of Them, the bisexual
Baphomet, the Hideous God, had broken through to contact with him: Was that thunderous crash and that cracked mirror only a “coincidence,” or was it the tearing of the membrane, the opening of the door between the worlds?

Remembering, too, the great blind spot of the eighteenth century, the much-vaunted Age of Reason, when science, unable to explain meteorites, had dogmatically declared that there were no meteorites; and when meteorites continued to fall and were reported by farmers and Bishops and tradesmen and housewives and philosophers and mayors and thousands of independent witnesses, including even dissident scientists, the French Academy and the Royal Scientific Society blandly dismissed each report as hoax or hallucination; thinking,
just as today the continuing activities of the crew that never rests, reported weekly from someplace or other in the daily press and investigated with painstaking care by the Society for Psychic Research, are also dismissed as hoaxes or hallucinations
. Belief in Verey’s letter was impossible to resist: though the dwarf and the alleged “Oriental” in black and even the bat-winged Thing that tittered were all glamours, phantasms, illusions, yet the force, the malign intelligence, behind these phenomena was something humanity had confronted from before the dawn of history and could not, ever, escape.

Since his first researches into medieval magick, Sir John had vacillated between real belief, pretended-belief, real skepticism and pretended-skepticism. Now he no longer could resist simple uncomplicated belief. The Great God Pan was still alive, two thousand years after Christianity had correctly recognized and denounced Him as the devil; and his kith and kin were active all about us, even if they remained as invisible to educated opinion as meteorites to the intelligentsia of Voltaire’s age.

ACTION	SOUND
EXTERIOR. LOCH NESS, TWILIGHT. TRACKING SHOT.
Panorama of storm-tossed waters. The camera seems to be hunting purposefully over wave after wave after wave.	Voodoo drums .
Something moves in the water.
Quick Fade .
Cut to:
CLOSE-UP
TV Narrator [same actor as previous TV sequence] sits at desk grimly staring into Camera, which pans back slowly during this speech to MEDIUM SHOT.	Narrator: “These reports of mysterious dwarf-like humanoids are found in folklore and legend allover the world, and continue to the present. What Does It All Mean? Science Cannot Answer, but we have in our studio a man who has given many years to the study of this subject …”
Pan to:
JOHN LEEK, an earnest, bespectacled, balding Writer in his mid-forties.	Narrator [voice-over]: “Mr. John Leek, author of This Planet Is Haunted, Men in Black and 3000 Years of UFO’s . Mr. Leek, do you believe in these … um … Humanoids?”
CAMERA moves to CLOSE-UP on Leek	Leek: “It’s not a question of belief. It is cold fact that these creatures have been described in virtually identical details by nearly every society in history.”
Pan to Narrator .	Narrator: “And you believe they are extraterrestrials?”
Medium shot: Narrator and Leek	Leek: “Extraterrestrials, extradimensionals, time-travelers … They could be any number of things.”
Narrator: “But they are basically the same as the UFO-Nauts reported by modern Contactees?”
Leek: “Oh, no doubt about That. With the Age of Science, They’ve just changed their Game. For instance, they pretend to travel in mechanical craft now, to fit the extraterrestrial idea—but as all the skeptics point out, the craft make movements that would tear any mechanical ship apart. They are basically manipulating our minds, not our physical reality.”
Close-Up: Narrator.	Narrator: “But do you have any concrete evidence that these are the same creatures reported in earlier folklore?”
Close-Up: Leek.	Leek: “Well, here’s a drawing of one of the Enochian Intelligences, invoked by the Enochian Keys of Dr. John Dee. The drawing was made by Aleister Crowley, after invoking the Being. Is it not identical with the UFOnauts reported by thousands of Contactees in recent years?”
Medium shot: Narrator and Leek.	Narrator: “And you really believe Our minds are subject to seeing or hearing whatever They want us to see or hear?”
CLOSE-UP: Leek .	Leek: “That’s right. They are our Manipulators. Our reality is whatever They want it to be.”
CLOSE-UP: Narrator .	Narrator: “Well, that’s certainly an interesting theory, Mr. Leek. We’ll have another view, from Dr. Carl Sagan, after this brief message from our sponsor.”