Authors: Phil Rickman
22
Worm in the apple
‘Y
OU MEAN THE
Security Service?’ Merrily said. ‘On his back again?’
The laburnums were aglow under a sky now an ominous sage-green, Radnorshire rain clouds sailing in. But it was still warm, no breeze.
‘Good God, no,’ Athena White said. ‘Peter Rector was no more than a curling file in the bottom drawer by then. I’m talking about the vermin with swastika tattoos in their armpits and shrivelled paperback copies of
A Negative Sun
in their back pockets.’
‘What were they doing?’
‘They were turning up on his courses. Didn’t have far to come either, some of them. This was the era of young people fleeing into the countryside to set up smallholdings. The Welsh Border being one of the cheapest areas of southern Britain to buy into and reinvent yourself. Get a cottage and an acre of scrub for a few thousand. Live off the land. Self-sufficiency, small is beautiful.’
‘Was it?’
‘Hardly ever. It was usually damp and gloomy, and everything died. And amidst all the silly little hippies you’d find a more sinister survivalist element with primitive weaponry. And these deranged followers of the Aryan left-hand path.’
‘I didn’t… actually know about that,’ Merrily said.
Warily.
‘You’ll find them on the Internet to this day. Probably the one named after Peter Rector’s book. OSIS – the Order of the Sun in Shadow. Its central premise was that mankind evolves only by acts of extreme violence. Its targets were the usual Jews and gypsies, sundry foreigners and those it describes as
The Detritus –
people deemed to be a drain on society, whether unwilling, unfit or too old to work. I’d qualify as a prime example. Accept voluntary euthanasia or we’ll have to kill you.’
Maybe it was an effect of the colours of the sky but Miss White’s cheeks looked drained and sunken. She’d always been the old woman in the poem who dressed in purple, living on her wits and her witchery. Merrily glimpsed cracks in the protective layers, felt her inner rage and the terror of its containment in an old lady’s body.
‘They were actually here? On the ground?’
‘Out there.’ Miss White pointed past the bell tower to the misting horizon. ‘Living in their remote farm-workers’ cottages in the wilderness. Or up in Shropshire and Montgomeryshire. Perhaps in emulation of Hitler and Himmler in their rural retreats, looking down over mountains and forestry, drawing inspiration from the haunted hills and the legends. Dismal little fantasists.’
‘How many of them?’
‘Mere handful, I expect, but two hate-driven individuals on the Internet can be a virtual army. It’s what kind of influence they have. The power of their steaming rhetoric.’
‘What did they want from Rector?’
‘Some of them clearly wanted him to be their leader. He still had cachet. The more obvious ones who appeared up at Capel – identifiable by the kind of questions they asked at the end of his seminars – were given their money back and unceremoniously dispatched down the mountain.’
Merrily sat back, shaking her head.
‘Athena, either I’m not getting this or there’s something you’re not telling me. If they were on his courses, presumably they’d
realize he wasn’t preaching Nazism. What was he doing up there that might lead them to suspect that he wasn’t a lost cause?’
They leaned into their separate corners of the bench, the Zimmer between them.
‘All right,’ Miss White said. ‘How much do you know about what’s become known – rather disparagingly, I suppose – as chaos magic?’
Not much, actually, but she could bluff for a while.
‘Free-range sorcery?’ Merrily said. ‘Pick ’n’ mix?’
‘For a person of the cloth,’ Miss White said, ‘you can be a frightfully crass little woman.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Although, I will admit to finding some of it – or at least the way it’s handled – to be superficial, haphazard, disrespectful and dangerous.’
‘Let me work this out. It’s a practice that rejects what you might call the confining disciplines of the past by following, in the most liberal sense, Aleister Crowley’s maxim,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law
. Cabala and Catholicism, druidry and freemasonry, witchcraft, yoga, dianetics… if it works, toss it in the pot?’
‘You’re halfway there. Halfway to Peter Rector’s discipline, anyway. And discipline is the operative word. Performed correctly, what we’re talking about is the
most
disciplined form of magic. Bringing elements of different traditions together successfully requires a very sure touch.’
‘I can imagine. What I
can’t
imagine is why?’
‘It’s product based. A means to an end. The means tailored to the desired result. For example – during the war, a magical defence system was set up by Dion Fortune and a few others, based in Glastonbury. It had one central aim, which was to keep Hitler off British soil. A psychic wall erected around us. But
within
that central premise, different operations were mounted to challenge specific developments in the war. Now I’m not
saying too many different occult methods
were
used to this end, but it was a project to which the principles of what we now call chaos magic might well have been applied. You identify
exactly
the result you’re after and you decide which combination will best achieve it. Yes?’
‘Has a weird logic,’ Merrily said.
‘However, it also gets carried away with the need to break rules. From the heretical merging of religion and magic comes a general breach of taboos. The energy of the perverse. You see where I’m going with this? Perhaps you don’t.’
‘Not sure.’
‘You don’t. All right… the Order of the Sun in Shadow write on their websites of the necessity of breaking human taboos, pushing the mind and body beyond accepted limits of behaviour. Performing acts regarded by society as hideous, in order to align themselves with perceived dark cosmic forces. The sublime shock of breaking civilization’s constraints releasing them into the next evolutionary stage.’
‘Satanism, in other words.’
‘Satanism only exists in the theology of your fundamentalist friends.’
‘I don’t have any fundamentalist friends. Let me get this right. I think what you’re saying is that the practices of modern extreme right-wing magical groups is developed from the same source as chaos magic, as practised by Peter Rector. Did he ever follow the other path?’
‘I think I’d have to say not intentionally. But he nevertheless pointed the way, and would never recover from the guilt.’
Miss White supported herself on the Zimmer, her small, pointed chin on her arms.
‘I suppose what was worrying Peter the night he phoned me was the possibility of a worm in the apple. Someone studying or helping at the centre undercover, as it were. A disaffected follower of what he’d perceived to be the Rector philosophy. Perhaps using techniques he was learning there to expand the parameters of his
own negative theology. Poisoning the pond, essentially. Peter couldn’t prove it, but was increasingly conscious of things going wrong. Arguments. Dissent. A clouding of the atmosphere. When something’s functioning on a rarified level, it doesn’t take much to tip it the other way, and even if the problem’s expunged the equilibrium is never quite restored.’
‘What was he doing up there that was harmed?’
‘Not for me to say.’ Miss White wiped a dismissive hand through a ball of frantic midges. ‘The ironic thing is that Peter Rector’s writing had shown these people how to present it in a far more… honourable light. In their terms. Thus, for example, the so-called Detritus are seen as acceptable victims for blood sacrifice or ritual execution. Performing a human sacrifice is viewed not only as ethnic or social cleansing but as a form of initiation.’
‘But surely it never—’
‘Never happens? How do we
know
that it never happens? All right, evidence of a human sacrifice would lead to a police hunt on a frightful scale. But if some denizen of cardboard city, some anonymous doorway-sleeper – some
detritus
– were to disappear… who
would
know?’
No answer to that.
‘They also dislike Christians. Your turn-the-other-cheek primitive socialism, your creepy humility, your abhorrence of violence, the delusion that love conquers all. If you’re ever unfortunate enough to encounter someone following this path, you’ll see a person who, endeavouring to reach a new level of humanity, has effectively jettisoned all the finer qualities of this one.’
‘OK, I get the point.’
‘I’m not sure you do. It vaguely parallels the way a psychopathic serial murderer is often shown to have begun with small animals. By the time he progresses to human beings, the act of killing has become almost routine, and he’s looking to raise the bar. He’ll kill with abandon, increasingly at random,
believing himself invulnerable. But if there’s magical ritual involved, the impulse will be fuelled by what
you
would call psychic energy so that the act is done in such a state of higher consciousness that—’
‘Please…’ Merrily put her hands up. ‘I’m getting it.’
There was a silence.
‘He had a breakdown,’ Miss White said.
‘Rector?’
‘When I say breakdown, you couldn’t begin to understand the profundity of it. I mean a
severe
psychic breakdown. Periods of days without sleep… vivid hallucinations causing bouts of inner self-mutilation. At its core, a conviction that he’d been the tool of the demonic. Crying out in the night for a cleansing death. If he hadn’t been among the right people he
would
have been dead, or spending the rest of his days in the psychiatric system.’
‘And this was… when?’
‘Around nineteen eighty, maybe a year or two earlier, I don’t keep a diary. No one spoke about it. The Centre puttered along in his absence. Frenzied activity behind the scenes to hold him together, to dispel what was seen as a psychic attack.’
‘By whom?’
‘Names would mean nothing to you, but he had enemies, as you can imagine, people who felt he was betraying them. When he returned, still shaky, he wound it all up very quickly, sold the property to some adventure holiday company, left the country for a while. Came back a year later. With a sense of mission.’
‘To Cusop?’
‘To Cusop. To throw himself into what he considered his last redemptive project.’
Merrily waited, felt the first spots of lukewarm rain.
‘And you really can’t say what that is.’
‘No. It was his magical baby, and he believed it was working. Spectacularly.’
‘His Cusop group – these were the people who’d helped him through his breakdown?’
‘Mainly.’
‘And nobody else knew he was here.’
‘He didn’t drive. Banked via the Internet. Changed his appearance. Walked the hills and along the brook and the Wye, but rarely went into Hay where he might just have been recognized.’
‘But everyone knows now.’
‘Yes.’
‘And they’ll know about you, Athena.’
Miss White smiled sadly into the midges.
‘I wonder if he even thought of that. He hadn’t seen me in years. I wouldn’t let him. I was off the map. Out of the picture. Just a voice on the phone. I realize he’d have an image of me as I was. Quite a bit younger than he was. Invulnerable.’
Merrily saw Aphrodite in a miniskirt. Pert, sharp, outrageously clever, consciously mysterious. Even now, that kittenish voice on the phone…
‘Are you… also inheriting whatever it is? His project?’
‘Not your business, Watkins.’
‘He’s not left you everything for old time’s sake, has he?’
No reply.
‘You don’t want it, do you?’
‘How do you know
what
I want?’
‘You’re afraid, I think,’ Merrily said.
‘I shall never…’ Miss White turning on her so quickly that her dyed black hair danced like a nest of snakes. ‘I shall
never
be as frightened as you are. In a state of constant terror that your whole life might be a sham. Clutching at delusions of pathetic poltergeists because if
they
don’t exist how can something as huge as God be more than a fabrication?’
‘
Miss White!’
Merrily turned, grateful. A woman in an overall had appeared on the terrace behind them. Looked like Mrs Cardelow, proprietor of The Glades. Athena White ignored her. Mrs Cardelow cupped her hands either side of her mouth.
‘It’s going to rain! Do you need any help?’
Miss White rose up gripping her Zimmer. Held up one hand, displaying a contemptuous middle finger. The woman may have shrugged. She went back into the house.
‘I still don’t really know what you are,’ Merrily said. ‘I don’t know if your peculiar abilities, given the presumed, clandestine nature of your former occupation, amount to nothing more than advanced psychological, manipulative… tricks.’
‘And you never will,’ Miss White said.
She was calm again. The rain was falling in slow, deliberate blobs. The Radnorshire hills had vanished. Merrily didn’t move.
‘I thought it was his profligate imagination,’ Miss White said. ‘Succumbing at last to the pressure. I thought he was deluded, still bent on his rack of self-recrimination. Now I think he might have been right. I think there has been death. Killing.’
‘Where?’
‘Not far away.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That isn’t much help, Athena.’
‘I don’t
know
, you silly bitch. I don’t know where or by whom, but I think someone died before the Centre was closed down, and I think he felt responsible for that. And I do not dismiss the possibility that Peter Rector was murdered the other night. Executed. They like to claim certain places, you see. As portals where the energies they’re seeking can be drawn down. Or up. Places of sacrifice.’
‘Do you know who they are?’
‘The Order of the Sun in Shadow? I knew who they
were
. The leaders, anyway. They weren’t difficult to trace. Virtually advertising for members at one stage. That’s why I can’t see them as involved. But you see it’s a virus. Its adherents are encouraged to seek recruits. Having broken their own barriers, they’re instructed to find others over whom they have dominion, until they too transcend the abhorrent. And so it goes on and on, like some noxious chain letter.’