The Western Lands (24 page)

"Something jogged my arm, Mother."

"No one is blaming you, dear. Mrs. Randolph called to say she knew it was an accident and she knew you loved Greg. I told her you were under sedation."

"Good, but it was as if, just as I pulled the trigger, making absolutely sure the pellets wouldn't hit Greg . . .
something moved my arm.
  
. . ."

"Of course, darling. We are all controlled by the Powers. Not one, but many, and often in conflict. It is part of some Power Plan."

"And Greg was on about how he
adored
tornado green, and I looked up and saw this lion soaring through the air over the garage and I knew it was a real lion from the circus that was performing for a week at Forest Park Highlands. Greg couldn't see it because his back was turned and I was already running for the house to get my shotgun. I don't know why he didn't follow me. Just as I got to the door of the terrace I saw the lion land in some rose bushes. The thorns must have enraged him because he came up with a roar and hit Mrs. Worldly, who was about to walk down from the terrace to the garden, and she hit the terrace and I swear broke in pieces like an icicle, and a little blood seeped out, highly concentrated, like red acid. Look there . . . it can't be washed out, it's eaten into the stone. That's what she was . . . ice and acid. And I can see Greg running out toward the pool in a stupid panic. When I got back down with the gun, the lion had him down near the pool and I circled and aimed just behind the lion's left shoulder. Then, suddenly, as I pulled the trigger I see Greg's face in my sights, completely inhuman with fear.  . . ."

"Let the dead bury the dead," murmured Mrs. Bradshinkle.

"But Mother, how the fuck is that possible?"

"Don't be coarse. It's just a figure of speech."

"This lion sailing in with his claws out against the green sky. Like a bit of ancient Egyptian kitsch, my dear. All he needed was luminous wings."

"I bruise easy but I heal quick," trills the parrot.

He shoots it a glance of annoyance. "Vulgar bird." As with many extremely beautiful people, his annoyance carries no weight. His presence is insubstantial, too perfect to be carnate. He seems always on the point of dissolving into a portrait.

"Mother, I want you to meet Kim Neferti Carsons, Great Pharaoh of the Two Outhouses, he who breathes in right and truth, surest gun west of the Peco"

Kim takes her hand in both of his.  . . .

"The Gods plan well."

They stroll down beyond the fish pool. A wooded hill ends abruptly in a sheer limestone cliff, five hundred feet above the lake. They are on a promontory at someplace eight hundred feet high, so that until you reach the rim there is an illusion of rolling hills.

"What happened to St. Louis?"

"I never heard of it."

"How do you get down to the lake?"

"Oh, there is a cave system . . . leads down to grottoes."

The promontory is six hundred yards across where it joins the mainland, tapering to a scant three hundred feet at the outer tip, where the garden is located in a little scoop of land. The house is the prow of a great ship anchored in the rocks and trees of the mainland.

The cave system penetrates the mainland for miles. No one knows how far back the tunnels go. Some narrow into dead ends, others open into huge caverns with underground rivers and lakes. There is a deadly stasis of impregnable grandeur, forming a dense medium, difficult to breathe. One suffocates in fairy lands forlorn, magic casements, ruined palaces.

They sit down by a marble pool where humanoid newts live.

"We had to bring them out of the more remote caverns because of cave-ins. Some died on the trip out through dry tunnels. We carried all the water we could but it was not always enough. Now only three remain. . . ."

The newts are a shimmering mother-of-pearl color, with huge limpid gray eyes reflecting the last remote, crumbling cavern where they had taken refuge millennia ago, to escape the teeming predators of water, land and air. When they first came to this cavern, there was light from a fissure in the rock. But the fissure slowly closed. Blind for thousands of years, their eyes now serve as breathing mechanisms, the irises contracting and expanding to pass water through the lungs.

They are so sad it hurts to see them, an age-old ache of hopeless blind alleys.

"Life is very dangerous and few survive it. . . . I am but a humble messenger. Ancient Egypt is the only period in history when the gates to Immortality were open, the Gates of Anubis. But the gates were occupied and monopolized by unfortunate elements . . . rather low vampires.

"It is arranged that you will meet the man who will break that monopoly: Hassan i Sabbah . . . HIS."

9

June 6, 1985. Friday. I am in Iran someplace, looking at a map to see if the secret place of Djunbara, where Hassan i Sabbah took refuge from his enemies, is on the map. It was somewhere north of the capital. It was not supposed to be on the map, but it was quite clearly marked.

Now I see a cleft in a block of limestone, and through the cleft I can see an old man of great strength, a stone man, his arms and legs of smooth marble.

The Stone Man gave HIS a base of power to shut out his enemies and regroup his shattered forces.

Danger is a biologic necessity for men, like sleep and dreams. If you face death, for that time, for the period of direct confrontation, you are immortal. For the Western middle classes, danger is a rarity and erupts only with a sudden, random shock. And yet we are all in danger at all times, since our death exists: Mektoub, it is written, waiting to present the aspect of surprised recognition.

Is there a technique for confronting death without immediate physical danger? Can one reach the Western Lands without physical death? These are the questions that Hassan i Sabbah asked.

Don Juan says that every man carries his own death with him at all times. The impeccable warrior contacts and confronts his death at all times, and is immortal. So the training at Alamout was directed toward putting the student in contact with
his death.
Once contact has been made, the physical assassination is a foregone conclusion. His assassins did not even try to escape, though capture meant torture. By the act of assassination they had transcended the body and physical death. The operative has killed
his death.

To modern political operatives, this is romantic hogwash. You gonna throw away an agent you spent years training? Yes, because he was trained for one target, for one kill. The modern operative, then, is doing something very different from the messengers of HIS. Modern agents are protecting and expanding political aggregates. HIS was training individuals for space conditions, for existence without the physical body. This is the logical evolutionary step. The physical body is not designed for space conditions in present form. Too heavy, since it is encumbered with a skeleton to maintain upright position in a gravity field.

Political structures are increasingly incompatible with space conditions. They are inexorably cutting our lifelines to space, by imposing a uniformity of environment that precludes evolutionary mutations.

The punctuational theory of evolution is that mutations appear quite quickly when the equilibrium is punctuated. Fish transferred from one environment to a totally new and different context showed a number of biologic alterations in a few generations. But when more fish were brought in, uniformity was reestablished. Alterations occur in response to drastic alteration in equilibrium in small, isolated groups. All isolated groups are inexorably assimilated into an overall uniformity of environment.

I am the cat who walks alone, and to me all supermarkets are alike. Yes, and the people in them, from Helsinki to San Diego, from Seoul to Sydney.

What did Hassan i Sabbah find out in Egypt? He found out that the Western Lands exist, and how to find them. This was the Garden he showed his followers. And he found out how to act as Ka for his disciples.

At death the Ren, the Sekem and the Khu desert the body, soon to be a sinking ship. The Ka is stuck with his boy. He is a front-line officer taking the same chances as his men, day after day, not just once like Jesus. If his boy dies in the Land of the Dead, he dies too. Forever. So your Ka is your only guide through the Land of the Dead to the Western Lands, the most dangerous of all roads since you are facing Death itself. Don't believe the Christian God or Allah or any of that second-rate lot, in their sleazy heavens of pearls and gold with their
houris
,
gods for slaves and servants, with lying promises . . . the Slave Gods.

I saw HIS many times in parks and squares and teahouses. He met a number of people, but always for a purpose. He was assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, a piece here and a piece there, like Iris reconstituting Osiris, who was cut in fourteen pieces and scattered all over Egypt. As I recall, she had a hard time finding his prick.

Cairo and Alexandria were the cultural centers of the world. Scholars came from China, India and Europe to study there. The official religion was Islam, but there were Jews and Coptic Christians and a variety of Moslem sects.

HIS had contacts among the academic elite. They did not know what he was planning. He was planning to take over the Western Lands by assassinating the demon guards, through their human representatives. Already he was drawing up lists.

Demons must possess human hosts to operate. Beneficent beings can live in woods and water and clouds. When they do manifest themselves through human operatives, they do so at the fervent and heartfelt invitation of the host. Demons, like house dicks, need no invitation. Once in, one literally plays Hell getting them out. They have the same desperate need of a host as the addict has need of opium . . . nice, warm cover . . . keeps out the cold.

Cut off a demon's host connection and you flush him out in the open. But demons keep themselves hid good. He may be a shopkeeper, a postal clerk . . . concierges he digs special, janitors and maintenance people. How do you know the ones who need killing, like the demon needs them? A competent operative . can smell them out. Or one can cast a wide net.

TV program on a vaccine for hepatitis-B given to gay volunteers. Interview shots:

"How many sexual contacts have you had in the last six months?"

"Six months? [giggle] Well, I can't exactly remember, but—"

There sit the fiends
. . . .

(Overheard in London while passing a Boy Scout troop: "That's where those fiends join in. They're fucking the Boy Scouts.")

And they don't look very fiendish. The more familiar something becomes, the less it will incite fear and hostility. When "gay" becomes a household word and one mama leans over the fence and confides to another: "My son is gay," the closer we are to a whole parade of parents of gays carrying banners:

           MY SON IS GAY

           AND THAT'S OKAY.

           I'M PROUD OF MY GAY SON.

But, and it's a big But, a certain percentage of individuals, varying with environment and context, act in the opposite direction: the more gays come out into the open, the more hysterical and frenzied and often violent they become. These are the demon-occupied hosts. By their
brutes
you shall know them.

Sticker on his heap: 
KILL A QUEER FOR CHRIST.

Already HIS was drawing up lists. Many of the operative demons at that time were to be found among the orthodox Moslems. Demons are always found among the orthodox, those who will never round on a demon and say: "What are
you
doing here? Get your ass out of mine, chop chop."

However, we have not as yet made the first step to locate the Western Lands and to gain access. Do the Western Lands still exist? Conquerers usually attempt to destroy the old gods. Had the conquerors been Christian, this would have been unnecessary. The Egyptians take to Christianity like vultures to carrion. Both believe in the resurrection of the body. That's what mummies are all about.

But Islam is another crock of shit altogether. However, the Western Lands cannot have disappeared without leaving a blueprint behind.

We set out to find that blueprint. Myself and my two guards, HIS and his lover and bodyguard, who is, like Jesus Christ, a carpenter, and four other Ismailians, silent as shadows.

We go first to Memphis, where a house awaits us at the end of a long, crooked street in the merchant quarter. There are high walls topped with spikes around the garden. Apparently two big snarling dogs come with the house.

Hassan's face darkens at sight of them, and he says a few words to the guards in a dialect unknown to me. The guards unsheath short swords and dispatch the dogs with a few expert slashes. Barely have the dogs been buried, when a beautiful white cat appears.

We visit the temples and statues . . . ignorant caretakers looking for baksheesh. The statues are awesome, some fifty feet high, vast arms in polished granite, with fists six feet across the knuckles, larger than life and so more immortal in stone.

One thing does not change here: the river and the mud and the
fellaheen,
with mud in their souls and in their dull, blunted yellowish eyes.
The
fellaheen
are the food of Osiris, the mud his excrement, the river a vast urinàl where all the Gods void their urine, and from this stinking mud rose the God Kings and the Gods who conferred the gift of Immortality on the chosen few, the priests and scribes, the viziers and princes so rewarded, to build the Western Lands as their slaves built the pyramids and tombs and temples.

To harken is good. To obey is best of all.