The Qliphoth

excerpt

Why don’t you just look at what’s here?” His tone was gentle,
almost wheedling. Larry was a parfait gentil rogue.
I glanced at the square black chest, neatly chamfered and bolted, with reinforced
corners and a three-digit combination lock. A black box. A mystery
cube. So what?
“I bet you don’t know the right number for the lock . . .”
“The combination is—four-one-eight!” Larry winked melodramatically
and tapped the heap of papers. I fiddled with the little brass wheels.
The trunk was padded with blue velvet, like a saxophone case. Larry
removed trays and slid back compartments. With a flourish he produced a flat
black disc, about six inches across, polished to mirror-image lustre, a slightly
smaller transparent sphere, and a small brass skull.
Then he lifted out a dented metal box, also painted black, about the size of a
small portable TV. As he swung it round, I could see that it was indeed some
kind of monitor—perhaps an oscilloscope, or a very early television system, for
the dusty cathode tube was only a few inches wide. I grasped it by the brass
handles screwed to the top. It was incredibly heavy.
The paintwork on the metal casing was scorched and pitted, with a curious
radial symmetry in the halo of discoloration. A three-core cable with frayed
ends was wound tightly around the base, obscuring some calibrated dials and
controls on the front panel. I thought of the war surplus electronic gear I’d
hoarded as a kid, which Pauline had just thrown out, as no hypothetical child
of hers was going to toy with military/ industrial junk.
I peered at the slots and sockets at the side, squinted at the stylised
eye-in-triangle motif embossed on the back plate—and the hand-painted lettering:
AETHERIC VISUALISER MK I.
Then I studied the dials, marked off in decimal units with engraved lettering.
Vibrationary Rate: Wave Function: Field Strength. The toggle switches were
unlabelled. A blue button was mounted beneath them. Idly I pressed it, like a
five-year old pressing buttons in the Science Museum.The box gave a dead click.
“Probably full of clockwork and plastic explosive”, murmured Larry
serenely. “You can slide off the back plate and look at the gizzards if you like.”
I stared at bulbous dirt-furred housings and faint lettering: Do not attempt to
dismantle any component in this AV unit. For full operational function this AV unit
must be connected to an Astral Transformer Device- by qualified personnel only.
I waved away the proffered joint, trying to pin down my uncertainties.
“This is all to do with Scientology, right? It’s some kind of vintage E meter, to
erase the engrams of your childhood traumas.” A few Scientologists came …

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562839

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978186508

The Qliphoth

excerpt

Then I could place the face, from all the album covers. The long, slightly
twisted beak, the deepset eyes, the narrow receding chin, petulant lips, protuberant
teeth. The whole slightly spoiled Modigliani effect, framed by flowing
black locks. On Alimony Slim and the Blues Bandits Live at Klooks Kleek ‘64
he was mere Roderick ‘Raving Rick’ Simmons, a slick impersonator of
Clapton’s B B King persona. A year later he’s sharp-suited Simon Roderick,
lead guitarist with the Original Sins, whose single Sleazy Louise charted at
number forty-nine for three whole weeks. By ‘66 he’d written most of the
material on that incredibly rare album Orgone Pirates by The Vinyl Conspiracy,
where he’s credited as S. R. Wolf. Then, in ‘67 he becomes The Guitar
Hero of Hrothgar’s Feast, and their historic free concert on Wimbledon
Common, where Pauline, with her tanned arms and breasts—no—
“You’re Wolfbane,” I shouted. “You wrote ‘Druid Whore’ and ‘Masters of
the Henge’ and ‘Slag Dragons’ and ‘Dreams of Liquid Bronze’ and ‘Leyline to
My Heart’! Which faction of the pigsuckers busted you?”
He kept an immense stadium-size distance, eyes averted in a sidelong
glance at the frosted glass swing doors to the corridor. He was listening to the
distant rattle of the canteen as if it was scattered cheering. Then he grabbed a
daffodil from the vase on the end table and held it as his microphone.
“What’s the matter with you people? You just don’t know how to enjoy
yourselves. I’m the high-flying metal love machine, I drop smoke bombs of
love, flames of fucking peace everywhere, all right? I am so sexually talented,
they had to lock up their daughters before they locked me up. But I’m not
going to make you jealous. When we storm the girls’ dormitory, I’m gonna
take you all with me. Because that’s what freedom’s all about, isn’t it? Warriors
of the love feast, yeah?”
His voice roared like a projectile over my head. His hot metal vibrations
must have penetrated the plaster, the bricks, the crumbling Oakhill turrets,
out into the sleepy hills and valleys towards the rainswept grey sea.
I’m a fool not to have been quicker in recognising this important aperture
in the surface of events. There could be a mighty confluence of energies. A
great rising upon the planes . . .
Inevitably, Beddowes emerged. He demanded to know the name of this
noisy miscreant. Whose class was he in, why wasn’t he in a lesson?—the usual
Beddowes robotics. Then Eamon was praying for an exorcist, an exorcist,
while Wolfbane was goading Beddowes with a recital of all his stage names,
refusing to explain what all those cardboard boxes were doing out there.
And then the bogey boys came and broke it all up, stomping on the occupational
therapy guitar as they did so. And they marched Wolfbane off for a session
with Jago.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562839

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978186508

The Qliphoth

excerpt

“ As my informant was an educated European, I felt his report deserved
investigation and vowed to make this lamaserie my next port of call. My European
acquaintance recommended a reliable Sherpa, and within days we had
made the precipitous journey to this remote region. My Sherpa presented me
to the abbot of this lamaserie as a ‘Philang’ or white man, engaged in mountain
exploration, and for a few days we were allowed to share the spartan regime of
the monks.
“One bitter day the senior teacher, already deep in trance and rigid as a coffin,
was carried out of the lamaserie gates by four yellow-hatted novices, followed
by a contingent of musicians and disciples. Huge thigh-bone trumpets
droned over the clash of gongs and cymbals. Despite flurries of powdery snow,
the teacher wore only the thinnest of robes. His lean hairless features were
blank as his gaze.
“On an icy granite ledge a hundred yards below the college we stopped in front
of a curious stone structure, topped with a squat cone, the whole edifice about the
height of aman, but partially obscured by snowdrifts. The lintels were carved with
demonic masks of spirits from the Bardo, or world beyond death.
“Two lamas sat on either side of the low entrance, mesmerised by the hum
of their prayer wheels. The aperture emitted a flickering violet light—like that
of the Van De Graaf Generator which listeners may see at the Science
Museum in South Kensington.
“The crouching novices, eyes averted, slid the prone form of the teacher
into this curious conical structure. The abbot raised a brass ‘dorje’, a kind of
mace symbolic of the thunderbolt. They began to seal the opening with stones
and small boulders.
“Despite the cold I was overcome with curiousity and elbowed my way
through the throng of monks. A burly monastic guard tripped me with a flying
tackle, then threw his filthy robe over my face. That rancid stench, amid the
purity of the snows, made me retch.
“‘No Philang may enter,’ whispered my Sherpa, helping me to my feet, ‘for
a man disturbed in this rite of Chod may lose his spirit and return empty as a
dancing corpse—if he returns . . .’ I was forced to withdraw to a tent hidden
behind an outcrop further down the slope.
“Time passed. I may have fallen into a light sleep. The stray snowflakes
drifting past the flap of my tent became a blizzard, which howled mournfully
through my reverie, echoing with a strange metallic clangour across the crevices
and ravines. Listeners may find it hard to credit, but mingled with the
rumble of thunder I heard the immense slurring murmur of non-human
voices, vast and slow as glaciers . . .”

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562839

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978186508

The Qliphoth

excerpt

“There will be a compulsory whole-school detention for
all fifth-year teachers at this point in time, three-thirty!” Yea, verily his eyebrows
thicken and the hairs in his nostrils quiver with righteousness. I’ve told
Jago to change his medication, that the whole case is clearly one of possession
by some low-grade entity—perhaps an infestation from a former pupil—but
Jago never listens to me when I try and warn him.
“No time now for your melodramatic arias,” he fusses, “I say you have a little
rococo fantasia about your Mister Beddowes, molto precioso, very predictable
. . . Just take your own medications. Like a man!”
The smug Italianate fool left me with the beef-faced musclebound orderlies,
who grinned and shook their phials of vile sedative under my nose.
“Time for your dose, Fuckbeard the Freaker!” Those piggy youths went
through their mocking pantomime of a routine. They can’t comprehend anyone
over thirty, who was young in the Summers of Love and Fire, from
sixty-six to sixty-nine, those Magick Numbers of Eros. I have ingested stronger
medicines than any of their bromides. But there were two of them, as
usual, twin meatmen in white, so after the ritual struggle the dose went down,
as it always does, in gasps and saliva.
So I’m never quite awake. But I’m never totally asleep. I write in dreams and
drabs of dozing. Even now, out here in the walled garden under the Tree, I appear
to be enjoying a cosy snooze in this bean-coloured potty-type plastic chair,
an indestructible hygenic Throne. But my hand creeps silently and smoothly
across the page. Despite this stifling heat and the gusts of warm wind.
The sky is overheating. It is opaque, but swarming with semi-visible insects.
Now you see ’em, now you don’t. I am a repository of such secret knowledge.
That is why I’ve been deposited here, to eat pap and woolly drugs, until smiling
nurses try to get us squatting in their magic circle on our infantile plastic
chairs. Yes, here they come again, beckoning me to join The Group, to make
utterances about Relationships. I sham brain-death, the minders turn
away—no group today, Mr. Beardsley?
Now my inmates, I mean messmates, file inside. Such docility. From the
old lags like Beddowes, Cedric the Uneasy, Eamonn the Papist. And the new
talent, like that Raving Rod, or Tanya the Mad Crumpet, recently imported
from other institutions. But they’ve all been housetrained. I got ’em all sussed.
Off they go, shepherded by Jago. Away to playgroup in the dayroom. I can see
them, through the smeared glass. Beddowes is furtively wiping chocolate
stains from his lapels. Jago scratches his pate, bored already, but he has to make
notes. For the record.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562839

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0978186508