GENERISIS
presents THE GOLDEN DAWN
Episode
13 - MASKELYNE!
Upon
the remnant of that awful night I choose not to dwell; the circumstances
perhaps even more perilous and more unpleasant than those of but a few weeks
ago for my unfamiliarity with English law and its suspicion of the lot of us,
and the distance of family as well. Someone was finally dispatched to Deptford
to retrieve the police, in the interval was a great tumult of shrieking and
bustling... black robes thrown off and collected in heaps, faces wiped, stomachs
purged... that the occasion might seem weird only conventionally, the truth not
so beyond belief as it appeared. We were detained in Salisbury for the night,
released individually throughout the following afternoon. Today, with such
improvements in trans-Atlantic communication as both Vartanian and his rival,
Edison, may take credit for, my prior detention would have surely been
detected, with the probable consequence of trouble so deep not even all of
Father's money would have sufficed to dig me out.
Needless
to say, I made no remark upon the bounding skull, nor the strange dagger left
at the scene, save to point it out to the police with a trembling, ignorant
finger, leaving them to make sense of its presence - if they could.
But
owing to the infamy of circumstances... and the unexpected prominence of the
victim, justice would not easily be finished with we of the Golden Dawn. Two
days after, summoned to Scotland Yard and there again subjected to the most
humiliating interrogations, Crowley, Bennett and I departed in a state of
unusual sobriety.
"I
have been seen far too much of the police and courts of late," my landlord
complained. "Were I a more superstitious man instead of a scientific
sorcerer, I would draw some occult connection from your presence, Arse."
"That's
absurd! You all but shanghaied me to Blythe Road and, as for that falling rock,
I'm as blameless as are you!"
"Still,"
Crowley allowed, "you have an uncanny aptitude for drawing death nearer
rather than further. Notice how cabdrivers suddenly appear to be avoiding this
place... is this also another component of your glamour, Altius?"
By
this time I was quite distraught. "I've told the both of you, I've nothing
to do with this..."
"In
Ceylon," Bennett suggested, "those to whom bad things happen are as
suspect as those who cause them. A higher agency seems to have chosen you as
its spoon to stir things round..."
"Well
Cameron, let it never be said that I abandoned a Frater in his need, even one
who chooses to name himself after a French arse." And Crowley threw his
formidable arm over my shoulder, a gesture of possession I found even more
discomfiting that the questions of the police. "It will cost me in repute,
but I shall get to the base of this matter where Scotland Yard cannot... though
I am forced to solicit help from an enemy."
"An
enemy?" I exclaimed. "Is it Yeats... or the Coroner?"
"Worse!"
Crowley answered with a grimace. "It is a common magician, a
vaudevillian... but also a servant of hostile intelligences and authority on
Salisbury Plain. I speak of Maskeleyne!"
That
family, as my landlord explained on the short ride to infamous Egyptian Hall,
had a long and... to Crowley... sinister history as agents of espionage for the
royal family. "Since the sinking of the Spanish Armada," he fumed,
"...since the Highland Clearings, even, the Crown has been abetted by
Maskeleyne spies. This Nevil's thrown in with Wells, Bernard Shaw... that
lot... all of them circling round that dying madman, Ruskin, like gnats
orbiting a rotten peach! We enter at our own risk!"
Under
the banner proclaiming Egyptian Hall to be England's House of Mystery, a
strange American vision awaited, yet another trio of cockney minstrels in
blackface cavorting with banjo, squeezebox and flute, singing...
|
"Wheel about and turn
about; And do just so! |
|
Ebry time I wheel about; I jump
Jim Crow! |
I dropped a shilling in their
hat, more as a talisman against such evils Crowley had forewarned me against
than for the worth of such entertainment, and we three entered to be greeted by
a carnival dwarf, who ushered us into an office of magical (as opposed to
magickal) curiosities. Here Nevil Maskelyne himself reclined, feet up on a
divan, savouring the entreaties of his foeman, Crowley, brought literally hat
in hand to the door of despair. Magician and magickian glowered at each other
for the moment, then the former slapped his thigh with a rolled up newspaper.
Four inches of text had been devoted to the crime... we witnesses had all been
named... but the identity of the victim still remained held back by the
Salisbury police as had the means of death, although such had already began to
circulate among those with both the means and cause to know.
"One
of the sarsens... on the outer ring," Maskeleyne sighed. "It's been
twenty two years since I published my last paper on Stonehenge and you, if I
recollect, are one of those fantastics who hold those stones, smaller than the
trilithons but still twenty long tons, if an ounce, to have derived from
Arabia... was it? Crowley... or perhaps, this time, Atlantis?"
"Why
I hold nothing of the sort!" Crowley declared. "Any imbecile who has
read his Revelations know Stonehenge to be a creature of the Tuatha de
Danaan... the tribe of Dan who migrated to Ireland in their speckled ships.
That is why King James so adamantly identified the Dawn's Men with his Beast,
it's all political, you see?"
"Well
Ireland's nearer the truth than Atlantis, and while I have also read the
Bible... thank you... I made stern geological inspections and conclude that
these stones were definitely brought down from the highlands."
"I've
bought property there myself," Crowley ventured, "on the lake, a wee
bit south of the town of Inverness."
"Really?
Well if it's solitude you desire, as you might for... well, at any rate, the
stones! They speak a language without ambiguity, if we but knew how to interpret
it. And now another has fallen! At the risk of unkindness, this fall seems more
a tragedy than the death of... who was the gentleman?"
"Masefield,
of the Academy," I told him.
"Masefield?
The Royal Electrician? I stand corrected..." the magician said, "the
loss of such man is incalculable; a blow to England... nay, to the advancement
of the world itself!... in ways that you cannot even begin to comprehend!
Whatever stands between us Aleister, let us forget... if only for the present.
How may I help you?"
"Well!"
Crowley began, "according to young Cameron here, the thing just fell over
plop!... on top of him. I'm no petrologist but it seems odd..."
"Odd?
It's not without precedent but... the last such incident fell on the third of
January, 1797 when an entire trilithon collapsed... those are the two bigger
rocks with a third rock on top. Mister Blake, as you know, used a trilithon as
model in his etchings from Jerusalem, about the time that you Americans cut
loose. Now another... and as we are troubled in Africa and India... even
Ireland..."
And,
incredibly, Crowley and the commercial magician drew closer, almost seeming to
sniff at one another like a pair of mastiffs matched in the prize pit before
the former suggested... "So! the toppling of one of Stonehenge's sarsens
may, in some way, presage the falling out of yet another rotted molar of
Empire?"
"This,"
Maskelyne declared, in my direction, "is one reason why we have not been
on the best of terms... one of the lesser, really. Have you read the Times? An
American rightly calls South Africa the Texas of the Antipodes, whose fate
hangs in balance since those French soldiers were cut up in Senegal... most
Irish support us save in the Nationalist papers but where is the voice of that
silent majority? I am a partisan, yes, and proud of it - a patriot, whereas
Crowley is... well, what he is! Nonetheless I beg to disappoint you in that the
1797 collapse was not occult, there had been a great storm, then a thaw which
undermined the foundation.
"But
could not this Saracen stone..." I appealed.
"Sarsen...
yes?"
"...somehow
have been felled by a human hand?"
"Such
would be an infamous act," the magician declared, "but not wholly
impossible. One has only to dig deep enough on one side, devise a means by which
the victim is enticed into his place... then, at the proper instance, the
sarsen could be pushed over with a thumb or, more probably, prevented from so
falling by a counterweight - a pebble in the fulcrum perhaps no larger than a
man's fist.
"Or
skull?" I suggested.
"If
you will," said Maskelyne, with a curious frown. "Such could be
pulled away from great distance with a rope, causing the sarsen's fall
and," Maskelyne added, slapping his palm against his desk, "the end
of Masefield. Of course this requires a vast, well-funded conspiracy, but such
exist... don't they Svareff, or have you returned to calling yourself Prince
Chia of Persia now? Yes, young fellow," and the impresario nodded my way,
"Aleister is a conspiracy of the many embedded in the flesh of one. But
who else are we thinking of, gentlemen... the Crown? Jesuits?"
"I
believe Jesus himself who told John that there were many rooms in his hotel.
Or, perhaps, Mister Cook..."
"Such
wit!" Maskelyne sighed. "If he hadn't such mystic pretensions,
Crowley could become the playwright Mr. Yeats only desires to be. And
you!" he pointed towards Bennett, "would fare much then better were
you to learn to stand on your own, as real men ought, divesting your soul of
parasitic influences. In any instance, the three of you might care to know...
just to show that I am not entirely a Philistine... that I intend to stage Lord
Lytton's masterpiece over the Christmas holidays."
"You
intent to enact Pompeii?" Bennett queried. "Having to represent such
vulcanology shall be an expensive sort of spectacle.
"It
would," Maskelyne allowed, "but I am speaking of 'The Coming Race'.
It is, after all, what the Germans call zeitgeist, the spook of ages, isn't it?
Lytton's portraiture of feral childhood is wholly ahead of its time... but time
always catches up to the worst of predictions, have you noticed? Yes, I am
preparing illusions for the perfect ennui of the Vril-ya and the explosive
return of the Nameless One to the upper world... even cinematic effects
prepared by a former employee who has returned to Paris to take over the
Theatre Houdin... may I interest you in subscriptions?"
"Absolutely!"
my landlord declared. Draw up tickets for six... no, twelve!... and Bennett
will come round to pay you Tuesday.
The
magician and magickian embraced as brothers rather than the mortal enemies they
seemed... but at the flat on Chancery Lane, with cognac served and a fire
blazing, I was given to understand how Crowley's opinion stood unchanged.
"Maskelyne!
Queen's spy... from a long, long line of spies. Do you know the real story
behind Stonehenge?"
"No,"
I replied, "but I suspect you do..."
"You
humor me," Crowley grunted. "Well, in Arthurian times there occurred a
battle between Britons and the invading Saxons wherein the latter prevailed by
intervention of Gaelic and Pictish tribes... that is Germany, Ireland and
Scotland combining to slaughter the lion..."
"How
tragic!" I began, as there came an intemperate chiming from the doorbell.
"Bennett!
To some..." the magickian continued, "tragedy for the one is heroism
to the other. Well a corruption of the line set in, as always happens; empires
rise, fall and rise again but the blood remains eternal. Maskeleyne may depict
the vril-ya but without the nuclear compassion that binds a society together he
shall only echo the paradox of Lytton's darker sentiments as in Kenelm
Chillingly. Oh that is ripe... especially wherein the young lord toasts his
tenants, '...when I drink to your good healths, you must feel that, in reality,
I wish you an early deliverance from the ills to which flesh is exposed.'
Maskelyne stands ignorant of great geopolitical eruptions beyond the scope of
even Professor Haushofer..."
Bennett
returned bearing an invitation placard; he passed Crowley to present it to me
and Frater Perdurabo took immediate offense.
"I
have a premonition... young Jewely Arse is again to be poked by the
insufferable Willie Yeats..."
"Close
enough," Bennett informed. The message is from Miss Farr."
"Congratulations,
Arthur," my landlord declared. "Mr. Cameron has been invited to join
a Society... not an occult one, nor exclusive - by any means! - but at least
some predecessors are notorious. Did you know Florence has an imaginary friend
to whom she speaks now and again - no white rabbit nor fairy, but a great green
dragon with teeth like rapiers. Sometimes I think she means to summon it
against we poor males who hold the higher degrees for ourselves. Mount her and
I'll give you a shilling. For Maud Gonne, however, fifty guineas..."
"You
do not object to my going? It's not to Bedford Park but to the flat of a Mr.
Stoker."
"That's
Henry Irving's man..." Bennett reminded Crowley.
"And
I really do resent your making such puns about my Hermetic name," I added.
"Isn't that supposed to be a sacred thing?"
"Sacred...
and precise," replied Frater Perdurabo sternly. "Magic entertains the
mob but magick is not for dilettantes... you should have anticipated that your
mystic initials would spell out a rump. I shall make any pun I wish... and you
will be reminded that every act has its consequences. As for the Isis
Uranians... do as thou wilt... must the world grow weary of my repeating
this?"
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