Masks of the Illuminati (29 page)

“There is a postcard for him in today’s post,” he heard himself saying. “They are indeed very advanced in the techniques of terrorism. My God, Jones, he only left Inverness on the midnight train and arrived here this morning. But the postcard must have been mailed yesterday to arrive today. It is as if they predicted his movements exactly.”

Yod Hé Vau Hé:
the Holy Unspeakable Name was now complete, as was the sequence: wands, cups, swords, pentacles. And time itself had been twisted, to make this possible.

“Never accept a miracle at face value,” Jones said in his ear, a squeaky voice carried by electricity. “Check for the postmark.”

But Sir John was already turning the card over again, seeing, hardly daring to believe: There was no postmark. Thinking: Time has not turned sideways yet.

“Well?” Jones prodded.

Vekam, Adonai
…. The name itself is the thing itself….

“There is no postmark. It wasn’t mailed yesterday; it wasn’t mailed at all. They merely slipped it into my post-box after the postman deposited the regular mail, I suppose….” Terror mounting, thinking: They are always
ahead
of us.

“Do you see now why I want to move the king? They have had the advantage on us all along. Now is the time for us to turn the tables on them by beginning some strategic moves of our own.” Jones paused. “We must assume Babcock Manor is under malign surveillance. Our only advantage is that you know the turf better than they do; you are fighting on your home territory. Think of a method of getting yourself and Verey out of there without being observed. Can you devise such a plan?”

Sir John smiled grimly. “I was a boy here,” he said. “I can think of at least five plans that wouldn’t occur to anyone who hadn’t grown up on these lands.”

“Good. There is one more thing you must consider.
Do not go near the railroad
.”

“Yes,” said Sir John. “They would, of course, have the station watched, in case I did get Verey out without being seen.” The instruments used against de Molay: the thumbscrew, the rack, the iron boot….
Vekam, Adonai
….

“Excellent. You are beginning to think strategically. The next point should be obvious. Do you have a friend who owns an automobile?”

“Viscount Greystoke,” Sir John said at once. “And our best plan of escape is through the woods to the Greystoke estate.”

“Very good. If I remember correctly, you do not drive automobiles. Will Greystoke loan you his chauffeur, as well as his automobile?”

“If I tell him it’s an emergency, he will.”

Sir John found himself incongruously remembering his Initiation:
Where are you going—The East.—What are you seeking?—The Light
.

Jones was silent a moment, thinking. “You can reach London by early evening, with any luck. Of course, you must not come to my house, since that will be the first place they will be seeking the two of you. Go to 201 Paul Street. A friend of mine, Kenneth Campbell, will receive you. You will find him perfectly trustworthy and rather formidable. I will join you and Verey there.”

“Two hundred one Paul Street,” Sir John repeated. “I believe I know the neighborhood. Is it not off Tottenham Court Road?”

“You have it. Not the most distinguished or respectable part of London, but an excellent place to castle our king for a while. I hope all three of us can join Mr. Campbell there by six or seven. Be careful, Sir John: remember that a man with Verey’s hunched back is a rather conspicuous figure.”

Sir John was beginning to feel exhilarated by the time he explained the plan to Verey. He had to remind himself that three people had died horribly already—three crushing tragedies for poor Verey—to keep himself from regarding the day ahead as a splendid adventure.

Encounters with death and danger are only
adventures
to the survivors, Sir John realized uncomfortably; and it was still far from certain who would survive this horrible affair; but nevertheless, he was still young, damn it all—he was planning to outfox a sinister enemy—it
was
exciting.

A look at the clergyman’s ashy face reminded him that he was not in a Conan Doyle or Rider Haggard novel but in real life, where the dead are really dead and those who loved them really grieve and do not just sob once into a handkerchief before the novelist rushes on to the next thrill.

When Sir John outlined the escape strategy, Verey agreed almost absently. It was shocking to see how much of the arrogance had been drained from the old man, how docile he was in accepting direction.

Sir John’s plan involved the fact that the wine cellar led into a short tunnel which connected with a deserted outbuilding where an earlier Babcock, generations back, had mounted a private winepress, long since fallen into disuse.

“They may be watching this house with binoculars or even with a high-power telescope,” he explained. “But nobody can see that old winepress cottage unless he practically falls over it. The whole area around it is now very heavily wooded.”

The clergyman nodded gloomily. He did not speak in his normal style, in fact, until they were actually in the wine cellar. “You do be keeping a great amount of spirits,” he said suspiciously, “for a Christian and sober man.”

Sir John was leading the way with a candelabra. “Family stock,” he said apologetically. “Most of the bottles are fifty or a hundred years old, or older. I hardly ever open one, except for special guests.”

“Aye,” said the hunchbacked figure in the gloom. “That’s the way it always starts. Opening a bottle occasionally, for special guests. Every wretch I have ever seen ruined by drink started that way.”

Because of the darkness, Sir John allowed himself a smile. It was comforting, in a way, to see that some of the old man’s character remained intact even after the tragedies he had endured. For a while there, Verey had seemed almost an automaton.

Then Sir John began to realize how huge the wine cellar really was, to the eyes of a Scottish Presbyterian. He hadn’t been down here since childhood, when he had explored the tunnel regularly in hopes of finding pirate treasure, or the caverns of the trolls. As they passed row after row of cob webbed bottles, Sir John began to see the Babcocks as he imagined Verey was seeing them: a family of alcoholic debauchees.

Finally, they found the tunnel. Now it was really dark and the candelabrum shed only a few feet of light in any
direction. Sir John began to wish he had brought two candelabras, so that Verey could light his own way. As it was, they necessarily huddled together and walked very slowly.

A confederate in the household:
Sir John remembered, suddenly, his suspicions about Verey’s brother Bertrán, back when there was only the mystery of the strangled cat to explain. Could there be a confederate of Crowley’s M.M.M. here in his own household? What might be waiting in this Stygian blackness only a few feet ahead of them?

Then he smiled again in the darkness. The servants had all been with the Babcocks for a long time: they were simple, solid souls he had trusted since childhood. This damnable mystery had begun to infect his mind with the germs of paranoia. My God, suspecting Wildeblood or Dorn or old Mrs. Maple of involvement with black magicians was as ridiculous as suspecting the Royal Family or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

There seemed to be a buzzing sound in the air of the tunnel, reminding Sir John of the insectoid hum of his dreamvisions of Chapel Perilous and Verey’s weird recording: thinking,
could bees or wasps have built a hive down here?
, recalling also the buzzing sound attributed to the voices of the faery by folklorists, holding on to his courage by act of Will, yet irrelevantly remembering also that the bee was for some inexplicable reason the emblem of the Bavarian Illuminati, the most atheistic and revolutionary of all Masonic offshoots. He would get a grip on himself, damn it to hell; he would not keep wandering into such unwholesome thoughts. But he was remembering an ancient Cabalistic riddle: Why does the Bible begin with B
(beth)
instead of A
(aleph)?
Answer: because A is the letter of
Arar
, cursing, and B the letter of
Berakah
, blessing. But why was the bee the symbol of the Illuminati? And what was that insectoid buzzing and who were
those people in honeysuits in that early dream of Chapel Perilous?

Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure
…. He was
not
that pitiful fieldmouse trapped in the hands of a being incomprehensible to himself. He was a Knight of the Rose Croix on God’s business and “no demon hath power over him whose armor is righteousness.”

Remembering, too, Uncle Bentley explaining that fear of the dark is one of the oldest primate emotions, dating back to the brutal ages when our mute gnomic furry ancestors were subject to clawed attack by many kinds of nocturnal carnivores, and hardly a child in the world does not have some remnant of that primordial fear, which comes back even to the adult in times of strain; and if it was grotesque to suspect the family servants, there was yet the disquieting thought of the workmen who had been all over Babcock Manor when the electricity was installed and the whole house refurbished. One of them could have been an agent of the M.M.M. who had set a trap somewhere, in a dark place like this….

“Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure,” Sir John reminded himself again. Where are you going? The East. What do you seek? The Light.

According to the Welsh, the crew that never rests lived in tunnels like this, under the earth….

With great relief, Sir John finally saw the door at the end of the tunnel. This really was a beastly horrible business, to have made a fearful ordeal out of the journey through the tunnel, which had always been an adventure to him as a boy.

Well, Jones had told him, “A real initiation never ends.” This walk through the dark legend-haunted underworld—the N or Hades stage of the I.N.R.I, process—had been another part of his initiation, another lesson in the courage which the occultist must acquire if he were not to become prey to obsession and possession by every type of
demonic entity, real and imaginary. He remembered an American Negro hymn he had once heard:

Understanding suddenly why
nun
, the fish, was the letter corresponding to this experience of Hades, lord of the underworld; thinking, We do, indeed, begin as fish swimming in the amniotic waters of the womb, and the unconscious always thinks of death, symbolically, as a return to the womb; realizing even why the next stage in I.N.R.I, is
Resh
, the human head itself, corresponding to the dead-and-risen sun gods, Osiris and Apollo. “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”: within the head, in the cells of the brain itself. Knowing at last in the guts: A true initiation never ends: we go through the same archetypal processes, over and over, understanding them more deeply each time. Isis, Apophis, Osiris! IAO … the Virgin, the halls of Death, Godhood … The Light shined in the darkness, and the darkness knew it not….

With a grunt of male-mammal triumph, Sir John cast open the door to the winepress cottage.
“Man is not subject to the angels, nor to Death entirely, save by failure of his Will,”
said a Golden Dawn manual, and Sir John believed it and felt brave.

The cottage was even dirtier and more heavily cob-webbed than Sir John remembered, but the winepress still looked as sturdy and indestructible as ever. Reverend Verey stared at it in some astonishment.

“Good Lord, man,” he asked, “what is this?”

He was pointing an angry finger at the Coat of Arms on the winepress: a dark blue garter with a gold buckle,
twenty-six gold garters pendant from the collar above it, motto:
Honi soit qui mal y pense
.

“It’s the Order of Saint George,” Sir John explained, blushing nervously. “It was given to great-grandfather by the King, for some service to the Crown.” Thinking: the nightmare is real, there is no masquerade: the name itself is the thing itself.

“Aye, I know that nobody but the King can confer the Order of the Garter,” Verey said impatiently. “But why did your great-grandfather impress it on a winepress? That indicates disrespect for the Crown and a libertine humor, I’d say.”

Sir John blushed more deeply. “Great-grandfather was a bit odd,” he said. “There are scandalous legends about him, I’m sorry to admit. He was involved with Sir Francis Dashwood and the Hellfire Club, some say. Every family has at least
one
rascal,” he added pointedly, “as
you
must know.”

“Aye,” said Verey. “I mean no disrespect for your family. But I can see how occult leanings can be in your blood, Sir John, even if you turn them in more Christian directions than your great-grandfather did.”

It was not the most tactful apology, and Sir John found himself thinking of his blood as tainted in a most unwholesome manner. “The Order of Saint George is the highest knightly order in Great Britain,” he said, defending the Babcock genes as if somehow the accusation had arisen that lycanthropy or witchcraft might be a family trait.

Verey said, “Aye, a most exalted honor for any family to receive from the Crown. But is it not more commonly known as the Order of the Garter?”

Sir John found himself blushing again.

The hunchbacked clergyman must still be in shock, he thought; this was a most inane line of conversation. Still he was stammering as he explained, lamely, “I study much medieval history. Often, I slip into the old words
and terms instead of the more modern ones. The name Order of the Gar Gar Garter was not in common use until the reign of Edward VI, although the Order goes back, as you undoubtedly know, to Edward III in 1344 and was originally called the Order of Saint George as I just said.” For some reason, he still felt as if he were in a nightmare.

“Honi soit qui mal y pense,”
the clergyman read from the Coat of Arms. “A strange motto for a noble order.”

“Well you must know the story … about the Countess of Salisbury …” Sir John almost had the sensation that the hunchback was cross-examining him on a witness stand. “She dropped her gar gar garter at a dance, you know, and the King picked it up, when somebody laughed at her, and put it on his own lay lay leg, you know, and said that. Said
Honi soit qui mal y pense.”