Jake Arnott - The House of Rumour

‘Besides, they’ve got a whole bunch of captured Nazi scientists out in New Mexico,’ he explained to me. ‘They’ve got all that German rocket technology. They sure as hell don’t need me any more.’

With time on his hands, Jack became morose and indolent. He started drinking quite heavily, his drug use now habitual as much as ritual. He retained a taste for reckless experimentation: denied outer space, he was determined to journey inward to test himself with the dangers of his own psyche. He looked for the extremes in magic. The Order had always warned against this; indeed, Crowley himself had written to Jack, urging caution against rituals that risked invoking evil or causing harm. But Jack liked high odds and he loved the forbidden. And I encouraged him. I felt a connection with his darker energies. It was what had attracted me to him in the first place.

I tried to muster my own occult forces. I had got to know a new arrival at number 1003, Astrid Nagengast, who had just come over from Germany. She was a formidable woman, a senior member of the OTO. A friend of Aleister Crowley, she had even known Theodor Reuss, the founder of the Order. She worked as a fortune-teller and as some sort of voice coach. I studied the Tarot with her and we talked about other forms of clairvoyance and ways of channelling the unseen. She insisted that the most important thing was the power of the will: the principle of Thelema, a central tenet of the Order. Astrid had been through hard times: she had been part of a resistance movement during the war. She was convinced that supernatural powers had helped her survive under the Nazis. Though I wasn’t sure how much I believed this, there was something very inspiring about Astrid and I realised, as Larry had so bluntly pointed out, that I had to do something about my feelings for Jack.

One night we met at the pergola in the grounds of number 1003 that was sometimes used for ceremonies and the Gnostic Mass. Betty had gone to bed; the sky was heavy with stars. We talked of the new Tarot pack that Crowley had been creating with a woman artist in London. The Strength card was now designated as Lust. The image of a female form wrestling with a lion.

‘The Scarlet Woman,’ said Jack, ‘who rides the Beast.’

I pulled his face towards mine by his thick mane of hair.

‘Strength is vigour,’ I whispered. ‘The rapture of vigour.’

He kissed me, his breath scented with smoke and liquor. Sweet tokay and reefer. His locks slipped through my fingers, chrismed with brilliantine.

‘Knowledge and delight,’ he murmured. ‘And bright glory. Wine and strange drugs, divine drunkenness and ecstasy.’

Soon we were naked. He bade me kneel and then crouched behind, his hot mouth against my neck, murmuring obscene incantations. As he covered me I bowed down on the tiled floor in supplication. I arched my back as he pushed against me. There was pain, my whole body rising up against his onslaught. Then the siege was broken and a sudden rush of pleasure overwhelmed me. We rutted with a bestial frenzy, consummating the love of Baphomet, the eleventh degree of sex magic that Betty had denied him. I felt a sense of sinful transcendence, convinced that this manner of ritual sacrifice would give me power over him.

Afterwards we lay on our backs, looking down on the heavens.

‘I remember being a star,’ he whispered to the night air. ‘A moving, burning ember going deathward to the womb.’

‘Let’s go away, Jack,’ I said. ‘Just me and you.’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Up into space.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘So am I, Mary-Lou. Or I once was. I once thought I would live to see the time when we make it up there.’

He pointed up at the cosmos.

‘Maybe you will.’

‘No,’ he declared flatly. ‘I won’t live long enough.’

‘Jack—’

‘And in the meantime I’m supposed to be a normal honest citizen.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Betty—’

‘What about Betty?’

‘She wants a baby,’ he told me.

‘And you?’

‘Hell, no,’ he muttered. ‘I want to conjure a demon or create a homunculus. I don’t want a real child. Maybe a moonchild.’

‘A moonchild?’

Jack started to explain about how one could create a magical child, born on an astral plane, mightier than all the kings of the earth. He began to mutter oaths and curses. I knew that I should try to understand what he meant. That this might be a clue to possessing him. But it all seemed so absurd and as he rambled on I fell asleep.

The next morning there was still a furtive charge between us but I felt it wane as the hours passed. Whatever charm of the night I held, Jack was still in thrall to Betty by day. She seemed a little bored, though, and there was some spark of an idea in my head that I might use that somehow, that maybe I should not simply concentrate on getting Jack away from Betty. Perhaps I should find a way of drawing Betty away from him.

I started to practise with the Tarot deck. I learnt the Major Arcana. I asked Astrid about the Justice card, hoping it could mean redress, particularly for what I saw as the unfairness in my situation with Jack.

‘The most misunderstood card in the whole pack. Justice does not belong to us. When I think of who was spared and who was lost,’ she said, referring to her time under the Nazis. ‘And these trials. So many will still get away with it. No, this card does not mean a human notion of justice. Oh no, this is the natural kind. Nature is a harsh judge but precise when she finds her balance. Exact, you might say. So you be careful when you go looking for justice.’

But I was impatient. I began to find ways of palming the deck to turn up the cards that I wanted. One evening I did a reading for Jack and I fixed the spread so I could offer him a provocative interpretation. It was a three-card divination (though in this case more of a three-card trick). The Two of Swords was the centre card between Strength and the Ten of Cups. The Two of Swords shows a blindfolded woman holding crossed swords, like Justice without her scales, indicating a difficult choice to be decided on instinct rather than logic. Strength, of course, referred to our lustful night, the Beast and his Scarlet Woman. The Ten of Cups depicts a couple embracing as their children dance — family life and faithfulness, that bliss of domesticity that I knew he dreaded.

This was a sort of spell aimed at Jack. I wondered what I might use against Betty. I had tried curses and blessings and all kinds of charms, but nothing had seemed to make any particular sense or had any effect. I decided to concentrate on willing a kind of animus that might work in my favour, a spirit that might tempt Betty away from Jack. One night I asked for a sign or a portent. The next day L. Ron Hubbard turned up.

He had just got out of the navy and he was looking for somewhere to stay. Hubbard was a veteran pulp writer, well known in the fantasy and science fiction world. That’s how he got to hear about our little commune in Pasadena. I never much liked him. We had met at Robert Heinlein’s house before the war, the very same night I first saw Jack Parsons. Hubbard’s presence was such a contrast to Jack’s subtle charisma. I remembered then a domineering manner, an incessant craving for attention. A sly wariness in his eyes, a cunning twist about his mouth; he seemed alert to any opportunity. It was his gloating nature I found repulsive; there was something almost reptilian about him. With men he was merely arrogant, with women he was predatory.

His prose style was as brash and arrogant as he was but it was hard not to respect his sheer output and his power of invention. Ron was a verbal illusionist, a writer who had become convinced by his own fantasies and now seemed ready to try to fool others. He would constantly push the credulity of his audience as if searching for those who might believe in him unconditionally.