Originally published in Planet Magazine No. 19 (September 1998).
i
the master sits, reads the signs
New York City, 1985. The Secret Chief’s real name was Henry Barton and his identity in the mundane world was one of obscure wealth and power. This was not untypical of the great chiefs of the planet, especially those who opted to live among men in crowded cities like New York as Henry Barton did. At best, their highly advanced astral forms made normal earthly atmosphere difficult and abrasive to their sensitive flesh and many preferred the high climate of the Tibetan mountains to the crowded landscapes of civilized man with their diseased air, polluted waterways, and paucity of blue positively charged orgone clouds that carried with them the psychically potent life force. New York was a concentrated hotbed of psychic gunk and many chiefs puzzled why Barton chose such a collapsed area in which to manifest his mission.
He lived in seclusion in a dark York Avenue penthouse and never set foot outside the building. All of his communications were effected through astral means and this required the solitude and inactive atmosphere of an empty and darkened room, the only light being the glow of the sun through the drawn venetian blinds and the glare of the street lamps at night. Barton communicated through dedicated channels that were indeed susceptible to psycho-static interference (and York Avenue provided this nuisance in great abundance) but his will was strong and he exerted great effort to separate the signals from the noise.
There he sat in his cracked brown leather armchair, an old relic from a 1950s television commercial, his white hairy chest illuminated by the flashing neon lights of the TDK cassette sign burning through the window. An unruly and very noisy construction company had built the sign almost overnight without the consent of the tenants’ committee (not that Barton was a member) and many were furious over the whole affair. It blocked off the windows of at least five apartments and made it impossible to have total darkness. The other retired businessmen, lawyers’ widows, doctors and their wives, and even a convalescent circus clown who all lived in the building went to work on an angry protest. They had long since given up trying to enlist the aid of the creepy old man in the penthouse who never came out and never received visitors besides his young butler. Henry’s protest was being carried out on an inner plane, but he could not, for obvious reasons, reveal that to them. His mind was working overtime and he laughed at the petty, liberal-hearted and, as far as Henry was concerned, totally hypocritical actions of the cranky middle-aged women, the iron-haired businessmen, and the aging acrobat with the trace of red around his lips.
Henry felt he had achieved more in one evening’s magical workings than all the riots at City Hall could conjure. He had succeeded in giving the entire hard-hat work crew that had labored on the project severe stomach cramps. It didn’t stop the sign from being completed, but it was a sufficient warning. The style of a secret chief, especially when he went on the offensive, had an element of chicanery about it. Sooner or later, and Henry had plenty of time, the sign would be wiped off the face of the Earth…forever. Not a trace of its sinister presence and energy would be left to light up even a toaster oven. Henry still wasn’t decided if he would take along with it the bulk of the shorter, squatter apartment building it was straddled upon. What a joy to see nothing but the smoldering crater bubbling in the city concrete, burst water pipes spraying, large gaping holes revealing the rotting subway tracks below the street. Such is the works of the Secret Chiefs. To hell with letters to congressmen and apartment lobby petitions on hallway clipboards. (Through the Force of My Will I Have Conquered the Universe!)
The walls of Henry’s room were lit red by the sign, but also tinted a soft shade of blue coming from hidden light fixtures installed in the moldings of the room’s ceiling. Henry sat in his chair, facing east, the direction of his astral transmissions and also, alas, the side of the room where the TDK sign burned through the drawn venetian blinds.
Moving along the south wall of the room, his shadow being cast onto various framed prints from the east, was Andre the secretary, his white coat dipped in alternating bands of red and blue as the neon sparked on and off. Andre’s brown hair and mellow body moved silently and came to rest besides the old man. He sat on a small black stool and held up his two gloved hands in a religious gesture of supplication. It was a secret sign that only Henry Barton knew how to decipher: it meant “May the Gods grant us what we wish.” Henry knew that Andre was referring to the ultimate demise of the paid advertisement.
“The messages are fainter tonight,” the old man spoke in a whispered hush. “I can barely hear them. I have contacts in city government who would gladly step on TDK’s toes to get that damned sign removed once and for all without having to resort to bloodshed. Just think, coded messages from the forces of nature being blocked by a cassette tape ad. Ironies are boundless, human greed hath no end. Isn’t that correct, Andre?”
“Certainly Mr. Barton. I can think of no greater irony on any level of existence. Not even in the Qliphoth.”
The secretary sat on the floor with his legs buckled under him, facing the old man and staring into his aged gray face. He noticed with sadness the sunken jowls, the fallen temples and burning eyes. The blue lights still glowed above his head. Here was the man who had taught Andre all he knew, revealed to him how to decode the silence, how to see the lines of magnetic and organic forces moving through the atmosphere at twilight, how to penetrate the constantly shifting world of appearances and see the sublime and occult foundations beneath the boiling tide. His gradually wasting body, in that light, was no alarming sight to Andre; he knew that Henry Barton, once freed from the confines of his own molting flesh, would become pure blue light darting upwards, until it came to the corona of scintillating white intelligence that would gobble it up whole and never spit it forth again. However, this was not something they would find themselves discussing with the retired clown on the third floor.
“There is one on Staten Island, another in Jersey City,” Henry Barton said. “Every day I catch wind of another, sitting among the ruins of abandoned supermarkets, waiting it out in basements amid test tubes full of earthen mixtures over Bunsen burners. I see a young boy discovering the forbidden books in his local library and just starting to put together the first clues; yet he is afraid to be caught by his parents reading such an un-Christian thing. Oh my friend, I had a beautiful dream last night that we were all able to get together, remove all our vestments, discard this putrid flesh, and dance in the love and warmth of the Great Light. It was a beautiful dream, but we were not yet ready. As long as we are tied to the notions of the physical body we cannot realize such a dream. The image would remain perverted, non-adhesive so to speak. The roles would become confused like actors upon a stage who have never seen the script of the play they are supposed to be performing. To connect with them now would be bad magic.”
Andre was barely hearing the old man’s words. He was thinking deeply about the beautiful young woman he had gone to bed with the night before, expressly against the old man’s demands for celibacy, and how the breaking of the magical oath had turned the woman into a large, snarling Alsatian hound. She leaped at Andre’s throat and tried to tear it out but the young, energetic man had managed to twist its neck painfully at which point it had turned back into the girl he had picked up in an East Side singles bar. The two lay side by side, exhausted and covered in blood from their struggle and in the morning the girl had remembered nothing.
This incident made Andre more committed to Barton than ever before. He knew that the act of magic had not been cast by the ego-centered personality and consciousness of Henry Barton but a line of force generated along the thought forms of his oath and his sense of obedience to the cause of the Secret Chiefs.
Now, Andre’s mind started to drift even farther, towards the events of the preceding week and back through time. Back… back… clickity clack. Distant train in the sad mist night.
The old man was mumbling. “I see these amber lights over Tibet high above an old monastery that is now a Communist artillery outpost. There is blood on the walls where Gwalampa Kulgon, my esteemed and awesome friend from the days of the Mystery Cult, was gunned down in cold blood and even colder steel. Such is the retribution against those who doubt. That is why I am still alive, because I never let my thoughts stray from that one goal…that one moment…lost in time…but there, as a focus, as a goal.”
Andre’s inner eye was entangled in tunnels of thought and memory, breaking through the surface to amber fields, rye, wheat, dust and tar, roads, crumbled maps showing locations, specific landmarks in the life of Andre DeCampagne.
A soft scream was heard.
Time moved…
ii
i remember the hovercrafts at dawn
Andre DeCampagne’s life began in Lawrence, Kansas. His father, a moderately successful farmer and dealer in used tractors, had given his only begotten son the name Andre after their French heritage, which, of course, was not the name he later used when studying under Henry Barton. Andre ran through fields of wheat, sniffed the clean open air, and touched salamanders by the ponds, while other boys from his private school ganged up on weaklings and pulled off as many salamander tails as they could catch.
Andre took long walks in the woods, discovered abandoned quarries where antiquated machines rusted into a deep metallic red on the stone floors. He pitched his camp amidst overgrown weeds and broken glass. There were threshing machines in remote fields, deserted silos, long forgotten farm houses with collapsed roofs and worm-eaten furniture. Andre pillaged and looted broken armchairs and dresser drawers with rusted handles. He always pretended that the red metal was some exotic treasure, booty from his campaigns into distant lands. He imagined himself a Knights Templar crusading in the Holy Land, Andre de Champagne.
He tossed himself down hills of fine-downed earth, rested on thin grass, lingering between the hickory trees and white marble statues that dotted the fields. He was alone, abandoned by a business-oriented father whose world left no room for idle fantasy. The son lived in a type of dream world that required solitude and homeless wanderings. The smell of the fields were sad, the yellow sun overhead reminded him of his neglect, his unrewarded outpourings. It was an idyllic childhood tinged with sadness, the sadness of the broken fields, the rotted homes, and a lack of direction. The sun was his only constant.
Billy Snyder appeared on a gray memory-clouded afternoon, standing in a corn field, the swaying stalks gracing his hips. Air force jets from a local military base flew over that field, so Andre’s earliest memories of Billy were punctuated by the blasting roar of the machines, a rank odor from burning fuel, sleek metal polluting the human air.
Billy Snyder knew about things that other people didn’t. At age fourteen he was deeply immersed in certain books he had found in his grandfather’s library, books that gave secrets.
“What kinds of secrets?” Andre asked while standing in the corn field.
Billy’s only answer accompanied a smile which told everything. “If I told you it wouldn’t be a secret,” he explained. “You can’t know unless you go through certain things first.”
“What kind of things?”
“Like what my grandfather did.”
The elder Snyder was a teacher at a local high school, a history teacher, but he did not acknowledge that his own father had been a Freemason, nor did he wish any of the old man’s books to be read by his son. He never had the courage to burn the library, even after he had fled the fraternity himself: there was still too much of an aura about them, perhaps old memories of his own childhood. He probably was haunted by the image of his old man raising his oaken cane and threatening to wreck havoc if anyone even laid a finger on his books. They remained covered with old mold in cardboard boxes between the damp brick walls of the big house. It was a full decade after the old man’s death that Billy Snyder broke open the masking tape on the box tops and discovered that there was more in the collection than stuffy old Victorian babble about stone cuttings.
Billy had read the books alone: he was convinced that if his father found out he had disturbed them, he would be sent away to a remote boarding school where no real knowledge would ever be taught to him. Grandpa’s books, on the other hand, contained real teachings and Billy soaked them up like a sponge.
One afternoon, Andre and Billy met in the field. “Come, there are some things I want to show you. I have a little secret room behind my bed.”
And it was true. Behind the bed frame in Billy’s attic bedroom was a sliding wall that led to a little chamber, a square room with heaven wooden floorboards, a tiny window in the shape of a triangle through which came a stream of steady sunlight, and a pentagram made out of dirty masking tape on the floor.
Billy placed Andre on his knees before a large red tablet placed against a green felt backdrop. Then they stripped to their underwear and lay down beside each other in the center of the large pentagram. A darkness seemed to sweep over the window as Billy began to intone in a low moan.
Andre: remembering long country roads, stirring dust as the cars sped by, a motorized tractor on the shoulder, a silo under the darkening clouds, a house under thrashing rain…that afternoon in the secret temple…a pentagram of crumbling masking tape beneath a wooden beam painted the color of the stars…
…Billy running through the corn fields…
The two of them went together to visit the old man who lived at the end of the highway and came back with an arm load of comic books and detective magazines. The weak and senile man inhabited a little wooden hut he claimed was the house his father built for his grandmother. It was piled to the rafters with old newspapers and pulp magazines, filing cabinets filled with junk, and a multitude of stray cats that hopped from one pile of garbage to the next. Andre thought the old man was Billy’s grandfather still alive but in hiding.
Andre took to wearing a little leather cap he had picked up at a shopping mall. He began to listen to rock music and took a small portable tape recorder out to an empty field where the drums would hit the sky-clouds and come down again. He tried to learn how to play the Pan pipes because he had heard a recording of Moroccan drumming that had used them. Nothing come if it because the pipes were old and the leather straps holding them together broke. He thrashed the little cylinders in the corn field hoping that they would sink back into the soil and grow a healthy crop of pipes.
Andre remembered the scene: suddenly, like a lightening flash illuminating a forgotten dream.
Billy knelt before Andre in the field of broken glass. Andre lifted his face to the sky and let out with a long moan that split the darkening clouds.
On Billy’s T-shirt was a small green circle. He intoned: BAAA-TAAA-EEE-VAAA-HEEE! the field darkened and beautiful music emerged from the recesses, the sound floating in the absence of winds.
The beginning of the end came when Billy joined the high school basketball team. He was so busy at practice he had no time for Andre or the little secret room behind the bed frame. Andre had begun to feel very lonely and uninspired. There was still so much that Andre did not know. He desired to unlock the key to that little red tablet in Billy’s room. There were planes of forced entry, theft, none of which came to any fruition. Andre was scared of getting caught and being sent off to a private school. Both Andre and Billy had a deathly fear of being distant from the corn field where they first met and where the Pan pipes lay buried under dirt and weeds.
Andre fell out of touch with Billy. He never knew if it had anything to do with Billy’s father…did he find out about the books, the hidden room with the pentagram and Enochian tablet? Billy didn’t show up at school anymore. The house was sold. The family moved. And once again Andre was alone.
iii
these rooms contain the echoes
During his first year at Harvard University, Andre was invited to become a member of an elite company that possessed knowledge that was rare and exotic. The invite came from a professor of European studies in the history division, an aging and uninspiring man with a shock of white hair and ashen-gray skin. He was tutoring Andre on the history of the Thirty Years War. Working from a book by Frances A. Yates called The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Andre obtained a thorough knowledge of the myths and legends surrounding Christian Rozencreutz, a Renaissance nobleman who obtained the knowledge of the mysteries from other adepts in Jerusalem and Damascus. He later took the knowledge back to Germany where it began the basis of the Rosicrucian movement, a fraternity that later flourished and revived ancient and hidden wisdom in the west.
“Is this knowledge still available?” Andre asked the professor. “Are the Rosicrucians still around?”
The professor, smoking on an odorous pipe of perique, let loose with a devious laugh. His eyes sparkled in the darkness of his private office. “There is an order of which I cannot speak,” he intoned. “But I could point you out to the Chiefs and get their approval for your admittance.”
Andre was hungry for knowledge. In the throes of his passion, in the central storm of his meditation, came a burning sexual fury that demanded satisfaction. It was a lusting of the body that strived to go beyond the body, to seek Truth and Enlightenment in the throes of tantric frenzy. In the tale of Rosencreutz, the adept had risen from the decay of his physical body one hundred years after his death. Andre felt this as a sexual thing, a physically present body without organs rising within his own flesh.
In reading the Rosicrucian manifestoes in the back of the Yates’ book, he sensed the form of Billy Snyder struggling to break through to the surface. It was something Andre felt physically, that the unlocking of the mysteries would somehow bring Billy back to life.
One night Andre took a cab that had been sent for him to Beacon Hill. The interior was completely black. It got to the address in less than five minutes from the train station, leaving Andre in front of an old stately house with a private verandah and lawn furniture on a neatly clipped sheet of low cut grass. The two front pillars of the porch were painted black and white respectively and the rest of the house was shingled brown. He was received at the front door by an elderly man with gray hair who pushed his left forefinger to his upper lip and urged the guest not to speak or drift about.
In the front hallway, shadows moved down the end of long corridors. Andre sat in the oaken window seat and listened to the murmuring, the low chants, and then the thud of a rod against the ground. The elderly gentleman came back and put a blindfold over Andre’s eyes. The initiate knew nothing of the old man’s purpose, nor did he know anything of the house itself, its layout or inhabitants.
A hand took his left wrist and guided him down an echoing corridor. All the time he could not hear the guide’s footfalls on the floorboards, nor did he get the impression that anyone was actually before him…just this warm, gentle hand pulling lightly at his forearm. He followed it and found himself passing through a doorway. Before his eyes, a bright light shined through the fabric of his hoodwink. It revealed no part of the room, it was light illuminating nothing but itself.
A voice spoke: “Inheritor of a Dying World, arise and enter the darkness.”
Andre later wrote in his magical diary: “It was an invitation to step forward into the darkness. The lamp before me glowed but did not touch the path. I knew not what rested before me, where my feet would fall, of what nature the path consisted. I merely knew the road was dark and my eyes were shielded from the light.”
The voice spoke again, cold and resonant. “Your soul wanders in Darkness and seeks the Light of the Hidden Knowledge. We of this Order do admit you into our Hall. But first you must pledge, acknowledge the Darkness in which you work, admit into your hearts the secrets and your oath of silence.
“Long have you dwelled in darkness. Follow the lamp of our Kerux, guided by his warm hand, and let us help you enter through to the Brilliant Ones.”
The lamp was dulled, the blindfold covered the room. The darkness was maddening. Thoughts spirals through Andre’s head, he did not knew which way was up or which was down, the silence pounded, pulling him into a deep trance.
“No longer shall you be known among men as Andre DeChampagne. Tonight you will leave the Hall of the Neophytes as Andre DeCamp.”
The blindfold was removed and Andre found himself surrounded by older men with iron gray beards, dressed in long flowing white silk robes with intricately embroidered and colored sashes and belts, their hands holding beautifully constructed wands, and lotus pedaled staffs. The light from above was infused with a dull glow.
That night Andre was reborn, the memories of the corn fields and the broken glass, the empty silos and buildings, the pillaged furniture and the hidden Temple of Billy Snyder, all merged in his mind…one fabulous image of amber tints, private adolescent solitude, and an identity that had been shed and left behind. In the Hall of the Neophytes he felt a rush of sadness, the breeze whispering through the threshing machines near the rock quarry, felt his first lover kneeling before him in the farmlands.
Andre DeCamp had been liberated from a lifetime of darkness.
Part 2
iv
on my journey i fell inwards
The day broke over Eagle Town, a small dusty community just south of where Andre grew up. The farmlands were there, so were the silos and deserted houses. More and more people were fleeing to the south, into Mexico, trying to escape before the ecological disasters that were destroying the land got any worse. In this small town Andre DeCamp went to look for Billy Snyder, following leads he had picked up in the Lawrence police files. The strongest lead that he had was Billy’s internment in the Eagle Town Community Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
There was something arousing suspicions about the whole affair. Billy was anything but a psychopath. He was a saint, a loving, gentle young man with a vast amount of compassion for living creatures and fellow humans. Nowhere did there exist records of the reasons for his internment.
“Snyder, William, Age 21. Removed from Lawrence City Jail and handed over to Eagle Town authorities, ACI. Further details available from Classified Files. See office of Aaron Jay Shingle, Law Enforcer, Sirius County.”
Sheriff Shingle was an immense bulk behind a desk, sitting uncomfortably on fat buttocks, belching and puffing his cheeks as hot air blew across his fat. “I don’t have nothing to say about ACI in Eagle Town,” he blurted to a confused Andre. “Classified. Those walls are not for looking through.”
Andre wandered about Eagle Town taking in the small roads, the tiny paths behind clapboard houses, fallen sheds and ill-cut lawns. There was a smell from his childhood in the air, a pleasant whiff of corn stalks, wheat sheaths, interrupted by the awful stink of oil slicks in the river, rusted metal, and the trailing gasoline from broken tractors. Off the roadside were the cars abandoned by the ones who have fled. There were busted televisions lying in the grass, twisted car fenders, shattered glass panes.
In the center of a rubbish pile, cascading heaps of left-over food wrapped in newspaper, was a dirty man, old with a long white filthy and matted beard. He scratched the top of his head and said quietly to whoever would be passing: “You go! I go! We all go on the Bardo!” His knobby fingers would point to the nuclear power plant towers on the horizon, tall sentinels glowing, streaking the sky a crimson red. Andre walked down the road taking in all these fractured scenes, the garbage and the broken humans. In the back of his mind he heard his father hawking a used tractor, he heard Billy invoke the Archangel of Air, he heard voices calling from the other side of the asylum wall.
v
these walls are not for looking through
Henry Barton’s operation started at midnight on June 12, 1985, in the humid and sultry oppression of the summer heat. For the first time in ages he had pulled up the metal slats of the venetian blinds and was staring directly at the light coming in from the outside world. The letters TDK burned like a maelstrom through his head.
Andre DeCamp stood swathed in his yellow rubber raincoat, the hood pulled up and an open umbrella over his head like a dark periscope. Motorcycle goggles covered his eyes. The gear was necessary: he knew from past experience how messy these things could be.
Barton started with his banishing pentagrams rituals and then advanced to the hexagram, all the time shouting and intoning god names and ancient words from lost languages. The room took on the feel of a chilled vortex, made icy by the burning of some collapsed star that started to shine in all its blackness near the center of the ceiling. Andre watched in awe as this black sun began to form and take on shape. He had seen this before, a long time ago in Billy Snyder’s private attic apartment.
“Hear me O Spirits of the Deep!” Barton was shouting in a rolling bass drone. “I command you, by the buried talismans, by the twelve stones of the Holy City of God, by the blackness at the depths of the pit where the slaves and subterranean workers dig their precious jewels, a sapphire, a ruby and a lapis lazuli.
“By the powers within these, the marvelous seeds of the stars, from the awesome empire of the gems beneath the earth, take on crystalline form and appear before me. Appear before me and become my subject to do my bidding! Hear me! Ol Sonuf Varosaji! Goho IAD Balta! I reign over you, saith the Lord of Justice! by the mighty power of the Seeds of the Stars! Release your power and do my bidding!”
The room darkened to a pitch and then cracks of lightning split the ceiling. Plaster rained upon Andre’s umbrella and sprinkled Barton’s hair. The water began to fall and the black sun let loose with all its terrible beauty.
“Come Thou Forth and Follow Me!” Barton shouted, his arms outstretched and reaching towards the crackling neon lights. “And make all Spirits subject unto Me! So that every spirit of the firmament and of the ether, upon the earth and under the earth, on dry land and in the water, of whirling air and of rushing fire and every spell and scourge of God may be obedient unto me! To Me! To Me!”
The rains howled and lashed at Andre’s umbrella, tearing it from his grasp. Suddenly there was a crack and the large window pane cracked into a crazy spider web pattern, a criss-crossing of white lattice. In the midst and stormy waves, Andre saw Barton’s head slump to the side.
The lights roared and flickered out. The room was pitch black, the window still illuminated by the neon of the sign, but the interior of the room was black as the tomb.
Andre took out his electric torch and pushed the plastic button. The flashlight beam lit up a shaft which terminated at the smashed and bleeding skull of Henry Barton. Andre raced forward and inspected the wound. It was clear that the Chief had been killed by a bullet that had come careening through the window.
Andre dove for the floor and threw himself behind the safety of the sofa couch. He groped his way along feeling for the furniture as the hideous invoked star burned overhead and sucked into its heart all light and shadow. As adept Andre was in ceremonial magic, he knew no way of banishing such an entity. He felt it up there, sucking at his very essence like an astral vampire.
He lay for a half hour, panting and breathing heavily as the pellets of rain fell on his rubber coat. Every now and then scintillating points of light would spiral from Barton’s head and make for a point in the ceiling where they would vanish into an invisible hole.
“This is a fine state of affairs,” Andre bemused. He felt more plaster falling from the ceiling. “We should have signed that petition in the lobby.”
Then the front door started to open and light appeared in the crack. A shadowy figure wedged its way into the room and Andre saw the silhouette of a rifle neck sticking up towards an oval-shaped head.
Swinging his torch towards the intruder and pressing the plastic button, Andre cast the shaft of electric light directly onto the killer’s face. To his surprise, he saw a crusty, strong-boned countenance, angry looking and screwed up with determination. The eyes were watery, like pools of stagnant water and conveyed nothing of the emotions beneath. The hair was slicked back, the nose looked like it had been through surgery, and the cheeks were sullen, but there was no doubt about it: Billy Snyder was standing before him holding a high-powered rifle and reacting to the sudden burst of light by firing from a hand gun concealed in his other hand.
The bullet caught Andre in the fleshy part of his thigh and thrust him towards the floor. His flashlight fell from between his fingers and the shaft of light came to rest on the approaching black leather boots as they walked menacingly towards him.
vi
his mind was part of the pillage
Billy Snyder had been one of Sheriff Shingle’s nice boys, always willing to please, to live up the standards and expectations of his master. Shingle, a bloated three-hundred-pound mass of quivering flab slabs, had within him an iron will that imposed itself in a black way upon the small community of brothers that centered on the Eagle Town courthouse and county hall. One could always spot a Sheriff’s boy by the glossy eyes, the pools of stagnant water focused on nothing, reflecting only the dull luminosity of the overcast sky.
Andre DeCamp had no way of knowing that brainwashing experiments were being conducted in the underground chambers of the courthouse, far less that Billy had anything to do with it, but he knew that Shingle was a black magician, intent on subjugating the human race to his own will to power.
Little was known about Shingle’s private life outside of a couple of mistresses and illegitimate sons sprinkled about the county like harvest seed. But it was clear and obvious that he was involved in something more powerful than the fraternal orders of moose and elks and deer and raccoons. Underground tunnels went from the courthouse to the sewer culverts, where strange altars sported chains and whips. Iron rings in the walls…crude graffiti depicting anatomical exaggeration…mocking words in chalk:
UNDER HIS WILL…THERE SHALL WE DWELL!!
In a flash, Andre knew the score about Billy, where he had gone, what had occurred to him there, what his mission was now. There was a secret order of assassins working out of the Sirius County Townships and the Magi of the world were being stalked and eliminated to make way for a reign of redneck terror that would engulf the continent and swallow mankind into its jaws. Now Henry Barton had been eliminated and his psychic powers had failed to warn him in advance. Perhaps it had been the sign, or the interference of the Black Sun which still burned above the apartment chamber.
Billy moved forward and picked up the torch which lay slantwise on the carpeting. He shined it in Andre’s face and then lifted it towards his own, illuminating his features from below and making a grotesque pattern of cobweb-like shadows about his chin, nose and eyes.
“Hello, Andre.” he said in a familiar soft voice.
“Hell, Billy.” Andre replied. “I’ve been looking for you for a long time.”
“Why did you have to join him?” Billy asked sternly. “He’s evil. He was going to form an alliance and move against Sirius.”
Andre grabbed at his wounded leg and felt a throbbing ache up and down his spine. Something was starting to creep along the vertebrae and eat its way towards his brain. “I don’t have much time, Billy,” he gasped. “The serpents are on the move.”
Billy smiled and lifted the gun to Andre’s face level. Andre was looking straight down the barrel and thought it resembled a quivering sphincter. He laughed to think of that analogy…what would the firing of the bullet be equivalent to? What a horrible way to die.
“He gave the workers stomach cramps,” Billy snorted. “What an adolescent trick. We knew we had to close down this cheeseball operation before the Tibetan Enclave. We’re so tired of this mindless failure to recognize A.J.’s brilliance.”
“Yes, Billy. I sided with the losing team.”
“More than that, you left Sirius. You should have stayed. We had our cornfield. The pipes are still in the dirt.”
“But you’ve changed, Billy. I can see it in your eyes. You’re no longer you. You’re Him.”
Billy’s smile contradicted his blank eyes. “I always have been Him. Perhaps my grandfather was just nuts, I should have taken up the industrial arts, become an arc welder. This knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
“It unbalanced your mind, Billy.”
“Nonsense. I’m on the side of White now. Remember how we used to think that White Magic was for goody-goodies. I do believe now it’s for the White Race. Let the other gooks have their hocus pocus. We have fire power.” He jiggled the rifle butt. “We’re on the move. Seig Heil.”
“Goodbye, Billy.” Andre closed his eyes, his descending lids squeezing two tears onto his cheeks.
“Goodbye, Andre.”
…the corn stalk, air jets, they loved books together…
Billy pulled the trigger and took Andre’s face off. The flash illuminated the room and in a split second the monster dwelling at the ceiling was visible, ugly and seething, dripping pus and ooze along the edges of the wall molding down towards the carpet , which was now stained with mildew and fungus.
Billy held up the torch and looked at the Black Sun straight in the face. It was the face of Father Shingle, ugly and covered with warts, a bloated neck bobbing and rippling like sheets in the wind. The eyes were filled with fire and brimstone, the mouth opened and revealing a split serpent’s tongue. One of the tongues lashed forth and stretched out a full ten feet across the room to come to flickering halt before Billy’s face. The forked end quivered and spoke in a raspy voice, like Shingle’s own but through a muted filter.
“Mission accomplished,” it said. Then it drove straight into Billy’s cranium.
The room fell into a calm and the Shingle beast vanished into the ceiling, leaving behind slime trails and dripping pus. Three desiccated bodies lay in the center of the floor, lit only by the flashing TDK sign which still burnt outside the shattered window.
Then, as a grotesque finale to the debacle, the glass splintered and spread its shards around the room, sprinkling them like pollen over spring fields. Each piece was lighted with scintillating white, then faded to black upon hitting the floor.
vii
his pants are baggy, his nose is red
The door to the old man’s penthouse dribbled black smoke into the hallway, carrying with it the acrid stench of burning flesh. The retired vaudevillian moved silently along the rose-colored wallpaper. Accustomed to big grotesque theatrical movements, bobbing on bulbous shoes, announcing his arrival with bicycle horns and whistle rings, the clown found it difficult to keep an invisible pace.
His name was Silly Sammy Shazammy and in the past few years he had reduced his business to children’s parties, billing himself as the Silliest Clown in Town. Beneath the thick crusted make-up no child could guess he was in his sixties, a tired old man. But he knew his career was coming to an end. The kids didn’t laugh at his balloon folding act anymore. They put the red crowns on their heads and walked away with blank stares. When the balloons popped they cried because their ears hurt, not that they were deprived of a treasured toy. Further, his son had died in an automobile wreck several months before, and his ex-wife had vanished, no doubt with a new husband. He lived alone in a York Avenue apartment surrounded by fading theatrical posters and scrapbooks filled with junk and trivial nothings. On the night of Henry Barton’s magical working, Silly Sammy had been contemplating suicide.
When he heard the shattering glass and the rifle blasts, he had pulled on a faded crimson nightgown and dragged himself up the staircase to the penthouse floor. If there was danger he wanted to be near. Perhaps he could even be killed.
A gruesome blur shape moved along the ceiling, leaving behind a trail of stains, scorches and traces of purple slime. The shape slid over Silly Sammy’s head, then protruded from the surface of the ceiling like a grease globule dripping from the underside of a barbecue rack. On the end of it was an amorphic human face.
Silly Sammy doubted his sanity. He lifted up his palms as if to supplicate the monstrous demon within the globule.
“Clown,” the face spoke. “Shame of the white race.”
“Please,” was all Silly Sammy could muster. “Please.”
The globule receded into the ceiling and the shape continued to move over the surface like a spreading ink stain. Silly Sammy fell to his knees and become convulsed in wretched sobs. He was so insignificant that even the devil himself has no use for him.
When the fire department and the police squad cars arrived at the York Avenue apartment of Henry Barton, they discovered two mutilated bodies, another with a fatal head wound from a gunshot, a trashed apartment, buckets of unidentifiable slime trails, burned wallpaper, melted glass, shattered metal and a gibbering old man with faint trace of white about his pasty lips who talked of ugly demons and black pits of despair.
Within days detectives had pieced together a story of black magic, homosexuality, mental illness and secret societies. The clown had been dismissed as a deranged innocent, Henry Barton as an eccentric Satan worshipper and the two Kansas boys as drug-addicted gay victims of Barton’s mad religious practices. The story received minor coverage in the press, sparked two debates on syndicated TV talk shows, fired sermons from fundamentalists, and was quickly filed away with the cases of Long Island teens who killed their mothers and sacrificed canines in midnight cemeteries. No one heard the babble of Silly Sammy in his hospital room as he talked of how the real murderer had escaped across the ceiling and his eyes were filled with the whirling fire of little swastikas. No one traced Billy Snyder’s history in Eagle Town or discovered his connection to an anonymous and minor law enforcer and his cult of flagellants. No one knew of the empty fields where Billy and Andre once sang together to the kings of the Aether and planted little Pan pipes in the dark, nurturing soil.
The pipes that little Andre once wished would sprout and grow into a lustful secret grove where he and his loved one could play their anarchist antics and have done with the kingdoms of the Earth and all their horrors.
Story copyright © 1998 Richard Behrens
Artwork “The Judge” copyright © 1998 by GAK
