The illuminatus! trilogy (68 page)

He approached the altar, refusing to look at the abominable design above it. Rust—now what could one say of brutes who let their altar get rusty? He scraped with his thumbnail. The altar was marble,
and marble doesn’t rust
. A decidedly unpleasant suspicion crossed his mind, and he tasted what his nail had lifted. Blood. Fairly fresh blood.

Not High Church at all.

Chips approached the vestry, and walked into a web.
“Damn,” he muttered, hacking at it with his flashlight—and something fell on his shoulder. He brushed it off quickly and turned the light to the floor. It started to run up his trouser leg and he brushed it off again, beginning to breathe heavily, and stepped on it hard. There was a satisfactory snapping sound and he stomped again to be sure. When he removed his shoe and turned the light down again, it was dead.

A damned huge ugly brute of a spider. Black gods, Saint Toads, rats, mysterious and heathenish capitalized Gates, that nasty-looking shoggoth character, and now spiders. A buggering tarantula it looked like, in fact. Next, Count Dracula, he thought grimly, testing the vestry door. It slid open smoothly and he stepped back out of visible range, waiting a moment.

They were either not home or cool enough to allow him the next move.

He stepped through the door and flashed his light around.

“Oh, God, no,” he said. “No. God,
no.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Chips,” said Saint Toad.

Did you ever take the underground from Charing Cross to one of the suburbs? You know, that long ride without stops when you’re totally in the dark and everything seems to be rushing by outside in the opposite direction? Relativity, the laboratory-smock people call it. In fact, it was even more like going up a chimney than going forward in a tunnel, but it was like both at the same time, if you follow me. Relativity. A bitter-looking old man went by, dressed in turn-of-the-century Yankee clothing, muttering something about “Carcosa.” An antique Pontiac car followed him, with four Italians in it looking confused—it was slow enough for me to spot the year, definitely 1936, and even to read the license plates, Rhode Island AW-1472. Then a black man, not a Negro or a wog, but a really truly black man, without a face and I’d hate to tell you what he had where the face should have been. All the while, there was this bleating or squealing that seemed to say “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” Another man, English-looking
but in early 19th-century clothing; he looked my way, surprised, and said, “I only walked around the horses!” I could sympathize: I only opened a bleeding door. A giant beetle, who looked at me more intelligently than any bug I ever saw before—he seemed to be going in a different direction, if there was direction in this place. A white-haired old man with startling blue eyes, who shouted “Roderick Usher!” as he flew by. Then a whole parade of pentagons and other mathematical shapes that seemed to be talking to each other in some language of the past or the future or wherever they called home. And by now it wasn’t so much like a tunnel or even a chimney but a kind of roller coaster with dips and loops but not the sort you find in a place like Brighton—I think I saw this kind of curve once, on a blackboard, when a class in non-Euclidean geometry had used the room before my own class in Eng Lit Pope to Swinb and Neo-Raph. Then I passed a shoggoth or it passed me, and let me say that their pictures simply do not do them justice: I am ready to go anywhere and confront any peril on H.M. Service but I pray to the Lord Harry I never have to get that close to one of those chaps again. Next came a jerk, or cusp is probably the word: I recognized something: Ingolstadt, the middle of the university. Then we were off again, but not for long, another cusp: Stone-henge. A bunch of hooded people, right out of a Yank movie about the KKK, were busy with some gruesome mummery right in the center of the stones, yelling ferociously about some ruddy goat with a thousand young, and the stars were all wrong overhead. Well, you pick up your education where you can—now I know, even if I can’t tell any bloody academic how I know, that Stonehenge is much older than we think. Whizz, bang, we’re off again, and now ships are floating by—everything from old Yankee clippers to modern luxury liners, all of them signaling the old S.O.S. semaphore desperately—and a bunch of airplanes following in their wake. I realized that part must be the Bermuda Triangle, and about then it dawned that the turn-of-the-century
Yank with the bitter face might be Ambrose Bierce. I still hadn’t the foggiest who all those other chaps were. Then along came a girl, a dog, a lion, a tin man and a scarecrow. A real puzzler, that: was I visiting real places or just places in people’s minds? Or was there a difference? When the mock turtle, the walrus, the carpenter and another little girl came along, my faith in the difference began to crumble. Or did some of those writer blokes know how to tap into this alternate world or fifth dimension or whatever it was? The shoggoth came by again (or was it his twin brother?) and shouted, or I should say, gibbered, “Yog Sothoth Neblod Zin,” and I could tell that was something perfectly filthy by the tone of his voice, I mean, after all, I can take a queer proposition without biffing the offender on the nose—one must be cosmopolitan, you know—but I would vastly prefer to have such offers coming out of human mouths, or at the very least out of mouths rather than orifices that shouldn’t properly be talking at all. But you would have to see a shoggoth yourself, God forbid, to appreciate what I mean. The next stop was quite a refrigerator, miles and miles of it, and that’s where the creature who kept up that howling of “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” hung his hat. Or its hat. I shan’t attempt to do him, or it, justice. That
Necronomicon
said about Yog Sothoth that “Kadath in the cold waste hath known him,” and now I realized that “known” was used there in the Biblical sense. I just hope he, or it, stays in the cold waste. You wouldn’t want to meet him, or it, on the Strand at midday, believe me. His habits were even worse than his ancestry, and why he couldn’t scrape off some of the seaweed and barnacles is beyond me; he was rather like Saint Toad in his notions of sartorial splendor and table etiquette, if you take my meaning. But I was off again, the curvature was getting sharper and the cusps more frequent. There was no mistaking the Heads where I arrived next: Easter Island. I had a moment to reflect on how those Heads resembled Tlaloc and the lloigor of Fernando Poo and then this
kink’s version of a Cook’s Tour moved on, and there I was at the last stop.

“Damn, blast and thunder!” I said, looking at Manolete turning his veronica and Concepcion lying there with her poor throat cut. “Now that absolutely does tear it.”

I decided not to toddle over to the Starry Wisdom Church this time around. There
is
a limit, after all.

Instead, I went out into Tequila y Mota Street and approached the church but kept my distance, trying to figure where BUGGER kept the Time Machine.

While I was reflecting on that, I heard the first pistol shot.

Then a volley.

The next thing I knew the whole population of Fernando Poo—Cubans descended from the prisoners shipped there when it was a penal colony in the 19th century, Spaniards from colonial days, blacks, wogs, and whatnot—were on Tequila y Mota street using up all the munitions they owned. It was the countercoup, of course—the Captain Puta crowd who unseated Tequila y Mota and prevented the nuclear war—but I didn’t know that at the time, so I dashed into the nearest doorway and tried to duck the flying bullets, which were coming, mind you, as thick as the darling buds in May. It was hairy. And one Spanish bloke— gay as a tree full of parrots from his trot and his carriage, goes by waving an old cutlass out of a book and shouting, “Better to die on our feet than to live on our knees!”—headed straightway into a group of Regular Army who had finally turned out to try to stop this business. He waded right into them, cutting heads like a pirate, until they shot him as full of holes as Auntie’s drawers. That’s your Spaniards: even the queers have balls.

Well, this wasn’t my show, so I backed up, opened the door and stepped into the building. I just had a moment to recognize
which
building I had picked, when Saint Toad gave me his bilious eye and said, “You again!”

The trip was less interesting this time (I had seen it before, after all) and I had time to think a bit and realize that old frog-face wasn’t using a Time Machine or any mechanical device at all. Then I was in front of a pyramid—they missed that stop last time—and I waited to arrive back in the Hotel Durrutti. To my surprise, when there was a final jerk in the dimensions or whatever they were, I found myself someplace else.

00005, in fact, was in an enormous marbled room deliberately designed to impress the bejesus out of any and all visitors. Pillars reached up to cyclopean heights, supporting a ceiling too high and murky to be visible, and every wall, of which there seemed to be five, was the same impenetrable ivory-grained marble. The eyes instinctively sought the gigantic throne, in the shape of an apple with a seat carved out of it, and made of a flawless gold which gleamed the more brightly in the dim lighting; and the old man who sat on the throne, his white beard reaching almost to the lap of his much whiter robe, commanded attention when he spoke: “If I may be trite,” he said in a resonant voice, “you are welcome, my son.”

This still wasn’t High Church, but it was a definite improvement over the digs where Saint Toad and his loathsome objets d’art festered. Still, 00005’s British common sense was disturbed. “I say,” he ventured, “you’re not some sort of mystic, are you? I must tell you that I don’t intend to convert to anything heathen.”

“Conversion, as you understand it,” the aged figure told him placidly, “consists of pounding one’s own words into a man’s ears until they start coming out of his mouth. Nothing is of less interest to me. You need have no fear on that ground.”

“I see.” 00005 pondered. “This wouldn’t be Shangri-La or some such place, would it?”

“This is Dallas, Texas, my son.” The old man’s eyes bore a slight twinkle although his demeanor otherwise remained grave. “We are below the sewers of Dealy Plaza, and I am the Dealy Lama.”

00005 shook his head. “I don’t mind having my leg pulled,” he began.

“I am the Dealy Lama,” the old man repeated, “and this is the headquarters of the Erisian Liberation Front.”

“A joke’s a joke,” Chips said, “but how did you manage that frog-faced creature back in the Starry Wisdom Church?”

“Tsathoggua? He is not managed by us. We saved you from him, in fact. Twice.”

“Tsathoggua?” Chips repeated. “I thought the swine’s name was Saint Toad.”

“To be sure, that is one of his names. When he first appeared, in Hyperborea, he was known as Tsathoggua, and that is how he is recorded in the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the
Necronomicon
and other classics. The Atlantean high priests, Klarkash Ton and Lhuv Kerapht, wrote the best descriptions of him, but their works have not survived, except in our own archives.”

“You
do
put on a good front,” 00005 said sincerely. “I suppose, fairly soon, you’ll get around to telling me that I have been brought here due to some karma or other?” He was actually wishing there were some place to sit down. No doubt, it added to the Lama’s dignity to sit while Chips had to stand, but it had been a hard night already and his feet hurt.

“Yes, I have many revelations for you,” the old man said.

“I was afraid of that. Isn’t there some place where I can bring my arse to anchor, as my uncle Sid would say, before I listen to your wisdom? I’m sure it’s going to be a long time in the telling.”

The old man ignored this. “This is the turning point in history,” he said. “All the forces of Evil, dispersed and often in conflict before, have been brought together under one sign, the eye in the pyramid. All the forces of Good have been gathered, also, under the sign of the apple.”

“I see,” 00005 nodded. “And you want to enlist me on the side of Good?”

“Not at all,” the old man cried, bouncing up and down in his seat with laughter. “I want to invite you to stay here with us while the damned fools fight it out aboveground.”

00005 frowned. “That isn’t a sporting attitude,” he said disapprovingly; but then he grinned. “Oh, I almost fell for it, didn’t I? You
are
pulling my leg!”

“I am telling you the truth,” the old man said vehemently. “How do you suppose I have lived to this advanced age? By running off to join in every idiotic barroom brawl, world war, or Armageddon that comes along? Let me remind you of the street where we picked you up; it is entirely typical of the proceedings during the Kali Yuga. Those imbeciles are using live ammunition, son. Do you want me to tell you the secret of longevity, lad—
my
secret? I have lived so outrageously long because,” he spoke with deliberate emphasis, “I don’t give a fuck for Good and Evil.”

“I should be ashamed to say so, if I were you,” Chips replied coolly. “If the whole world felt like you, we’d all be a sorry kettle of fish.”

“Very well,” the old man started to raise an arm. “I’ll send you back to Saint Toad.”

“Wait!” Chips stirred uneasily. “Couldn’t you send me to confront Evil in one of its, ah, more human forms?”

“Aha,” the old man sneered. “You want the lesser Evil, is it? Those false choices are passing away, even as we speak. If you want to confront Evil, you will have to confront it on its own terms, not in the form that suits your own mediocre concepts of a Last Judgment. Stay here with me, lad. Evil is much more nasty than you imagine.”

“Never,” Chips said firmly. “‘Ours not to reason why, Ours but to do or die!’ Any Englishman would tell you the same.”

“No doubt,” the old man snickered. “Your countrymen are as fat-headed as these Texans above us. Glorifying that idiotic Light Brigade the way these bumpkins brag about their defeat at the Alamo! As if
stepping in front of a steamroller were the most admirable thing a man could do with his time. Let me tell you a story, son.”

“You may if you wish,” 00005 said stiffly. “But no cynical parable will change my sense of Right and Duty.”