Tag: black-magic

The Qliphoth

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
excerpt

Kraskolkyn pulls delicately at the creases of an expensive grey mohair suit,
but his tie is loose, his smart shirt is open, the hairy fruit of his paunch sports a
chunky gold chain. He’s adorned with gold—wristwatch, rings, tieclip, fountain
pen. Fancy leather luggage bulges on the back seat. Pauline would have
been appalled at this display of conspicuous affluence. That dongle on the
chain has a phallic shape. This is not a correct person.
“Never mind, it don’t matter . . . I get everyone out of the shit, know what I
mean? I put ’em in deep. Oh yeah! But I get ’em out again . . .” The laughter
bellows on and on. Lucas can’t find the correct verbal register for dealing with
this big Kraskolkyn.
His fellow-traveller is delving into a pocket and pulling out cigars. Lucas is
queasy about smoking, he’s only tried timid experiments with Wicked
Trevor’s hash behind the gym at Westway, but now he feels obliged to take
part in another kind of machismo, its camaraderie, matches, blue smoke,
coughs, expectorations.
Kraskolkyn slaps him on the back. “Crazy damn kids. Always on the run.
Give bastards the runaround . . . Just have a nice cigar . . . then you be OK.
Enjoy the sights.”
Lucas isn’t OK. All he can hear is this bullying laughter.
“You gonna love those sights, I tell you. Better than any nutty house, you
know? I put loadsa money inna sights, believe me kid, crazy peoples gonna love
it all over the Seaside.”
Mr. K chuckles, chews purposefully on his cigar, as if waiting for a confession;
and Lucas realises that he should have the willpower to keep silent. The
slopes are becoming thickly wooded. He doesn’t know this edge of the Moor,
nor can he relate it to the location of distant Oakhill—or the coastal resorts.
His rescuer (abductor?) is asking him if he wants to learn any good jokes.
Lucas moves his head ambiguously. Too late, a fruity narration is already underway:
a Ukrainian, a Serb, an Englishman and a Croat went to the toilet. In
the toilet, see, there was this big telly—
The car lurches over potholes, compounding his difficulties in following
Mr. K’s polyglot diction, so he can only nod weakly at the gaseous explosions
of mirth. His head starts to throb with the noise and tedious obscurity of it all.
They’ve just roared past the darkened ruins of a station. He thinks the
crooked signboard said Abbots Oakham—for Oakhill Hospital. There, there’s
no way back, not now, it’s too late, best to close down that area, keep his eyes
open.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562839

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

The Qliphoth

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

Lucas:
Grand Junction
The light filters through a drifting barrage of cloud, early evening mist blurs a
green froth of trees and Lucas doesn’t know anything any more. Now that he’s
walked out he feels uneasy about his paternal rescue mission. No one stops for
the lone hitcher. The B-road wanders everywhere and nowhere. All the signs
are overgrown.
He staggers into Abbotsburton railway station. At least he can dry out and
ponder. From the doorway of the deserted waiting-room, he studies the slant
of the rain. No way back to the motherland now. He gazes along a curve of single
track. Squat oaks crowd the edge of the trackbed. They bulge with
growths, puffs of whiteness.. The dankness of this landscape might dissolve
the sticky molecules of his identity.
The waiting room window is pointed, forming pseudo-gothic lancets with
small leaded panes. There’s a peculiar stained-glass armorial motif at the apex,
a stylised flash of green lightning bursting from blue-tinted clouds, with initials:
WGJR.
This must be the privately-owned ‘restored’ line, probably run by enthusiasts
in woolly hats and anoraks. Perhaps they’re hoping to reconnect
Abbotsburton with the local coastal resorts, miles away across the moorlands.
Yet their steam-age revival has apparently failed already. The cracked canopy
leaks, and this room is a sparsely furnished shed, offering a slatted wooden
bench, scarred with ancient rune-like graffiti. The faded adverts for
Brylcreem, Park Drive cigarettes and Philco Radio-Grams are the kind of
time-capsule memorabilia his father used to sell.
He is atomised, all his bits and pieces are in free fall. Best not to think too
hard about past, future, any time at all. Of course, he has left his bleeding
watch behind.
Lucas turns up the collar of his black bomber jacket and walks out to the far
end of the platform, where nettles split the asphalt. There’s no sign of a timetable
or platform staff. He scans the rusty rails. They curve in from the woods
and continue out into a steep cutting, between slopes of thick wet bushes.
On the far side of the track he can see a low windowless red-brick building,
overgrown with creepers. A derelict sub-station; or a wrecked trackside
memorial to some defunct moorland industry?

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562839

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

The Qliphoth

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
Version 1.0.0

excerpt

…wheeler-dealer in twentieth century wreckage, the magus who re-discovered
the Lore of the Brazen Head.
Even now I must pay for my faery-land humours, for Jago will be soon lumbering
over with his medical mafiosi, to wake up the sleeping beauties; to make
a special brain check on ugly old pseudo-Rabbinical Freakbeard.
For fuck’s sake, Wolfbane! I’d only just got Jago off my back. And then you
came across to peer over my shoulder, you burst into a sniggering fit, your
greaselocks whirling . . .
“Why waste your time inventing a new religion?” you shouted, so that the
whole Day Room could hear, even poor Eamonn, who looked up anxiously
from his week-old Catholic Herald, thinking more new sins for Eamonn,
omigod . . .
“The teachings channeled via the Order of the Brazen Head are not a religion.
They’re fragments of a system for magically transforming reality. I’m
well on the way to rediscovering it.” I was angry but remained in full control.
He obviously wasn’t accustomed to dealing with an authentic adept.
“Sounds like Harry Houdini to me. All these old blokes in robes climbing
into magic compartments. The disappearing cabinet gimmick. Mummy case,
magic casket, fakirs in igloos, it’s all the same. Ancient stuff. I’ve been doing it
for years. Watch me now. I can mash potato, I can do the twist . . .”
He did a little sing-song dance routine, not the head banging heroics everyone
associated with the Hrothgar videos, more like a twirly number from some
old Motown tour. He spun so fast he was a blur of hair.
“Why are you in here, Wolfbane? ”
“It was headline news,” he muttered, “and everybody in the business knew
about it.” He seemed offended that I didn’t know. “Anyway, I know all about
you now. You’ve abandoned your wife and child, right? Abandoned them, to
be lost in space, on the dead planet, to be eaten alive by robots. While you
bummed off to write letters to aliens. What kind of an alibi is that, I ask you? I
was a dragon-slayer. You were just a worm . . .”
He’d never suffered under PP, the All-Devourer, She Who Hath Gnawed
Out the Sweetness of My Entrails.
“When you see the finished Book of the Lore, Wolfbane, you’ll see I was
given no choice, I made the best decision in the circumstances, and when I’ve
finished my life’s work, you’ll see . . .”
“You’ll never finish it. That’s your bloody alibi, isn’t it? Just do it to death.”
He repeated it several times—do it to death—wrote it across the wall…

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562839

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

The Qliphoth

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

the shop poor Willy had replaced the pagan turmoil of Hrothgar’s Feast with
the blissed-out cooing of George Harrison. Larry grimaced at the music, took
a hit off the joint. As minutes passed he grew into an Easter Island statue, a pitted
mask smitten with sinister benevolence, relishing cosmic absurdities . . .
I wasn’t interested in more drugs. I was cultivating a new yearning—for
comforting fetishes like Turkish rugs or French etchings, or at least quality
post-war British stuff, the old Pye Black Box gramophones, Hornby Trains in
the original blue boxes, I was fed up with bankrupt stock and garage-sale
rejects. And I wanted something with class. Something safe, please. Nothing
too radical.
“It’s not weapons, is it, Larry?”
He passed the joint and began prising open the tea chest with a bent fork.
“Just weird shit. Specially for you.”
The chest contained thick folio-sized notebooks, bulging box files, a crumpled
set of plans or blueprints, and half a dozen books in uniform bindings,
ex-lib, half-calf and purple clo, gilt lttr, top edge gilt, gilt device on sp, approx 200 pp,
frnt brds sl warped and stained, torn frontis in Vol I, some neat inscr, otherwise v good,
ideal for a proper bookseller with a catalogue, not my Surprise Book Bins.
“They’ve been in storage for years . . .” Larry sniffed defensively. A yellowed
newspaper cutting fell out. ‘Fears of Red Atom Bombs’.
He told me he’d acquired this heap of forties memorabilia as payment for
some dope. I asked him which clients usually paid in waste paper.
Larry looked uneasy. He liked to keep the different strata of his life separate.
“A photographer that my gorgeous creature did some work for. A young
guy. But ugly, thank God. She says he snuffles while he’s setting up the poses.
Like a great rat . . .” He sucked the joint and giggled. “He’s heavily into cuisine
and wine. I guess he can’t perform vintage sex.”
Despite the dope I was getting impatient. I might raise something on tomes
with fancy bindings, but as for wartime diaries, old blueprints—I inquired as to
where the stuff originated.
“Some old attic, south of the river. Like Norwood, or Streatham Common.
ForGod’s sake, Nick, I only went there once. One of those high old houses with
stained glass in the porch window. A Victorian rose-window with cruciform
panels . . .” He exhaled slowly,seemingly bemused by the sudden emergence of
this elegant adjective.
“I suppose there aren’t any pieces from the windows in that trunk?” I was
seized with entrepreneurial glee at discovering yet another way of repackaging
splinters of the past, little sunset glints of nostalgia for an already uneasy seventies.
“Too late. His gaffer was tearing the place apart, converting it into a shop

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562839

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

The Qliphoth

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment
excerpt

verses the sun will go pop pop. But that’s in the multiplicity of sacred time.We
live in a single vulgar time, time for the butcher boy apprentices to come into
their own, swaggering out into the garden to escort me inside for tea. Soon
they will be shouting for Fuckbeard the Freaker.
I can’t complain about the name. I probably uttered it myself in one of my
ecstasies . . . These damned drugs have erased so much, so many cut-outs,
cut-ups, my golden memory chart is all such a tat album design, my head full of
flowers and stars and triangles and spheres and tits and bums and fiery swastikas.
Later I will carry on secreting all my secrets. Like a scared insect, I mean a
sacred insect . . .
And Lucas may make his annual visitation. Minded by PP, scowling in the
middle distance. I only want a flying visit, Icarus descending for a brief lesson
with Dedalus, nothing histrionic. Just a chat under the shelter of the Brain
Tree. To talk living eternities. I need help to implement the salvation, transformation
of the world. Why, Pol Pot, you bitch, you talking cactus in a pot,
why have you washed out my son’s brain, flooded it with your serums of
untruth? Why, why won’t he come?
I woke up this morning
Mr Blues all around my bed
Mr Blues he’s mean and evil
He done messed up my happy head
Rocking Rod was sprawled on a pile of cushions in the dayroom, strumming
his boogie on an old acoustic guitar, singing de blooze in a thin weaselly voice
with a Cockney Delta accent. I knew that voice. It had roots, long and tangled
as his hair, as his ratty moustache.
When he saw me, he leapt up, switched to a Stones riff, and began a
duck-walk around the ward. At the end of the room, a cluster of huge cardboard
boxes had been upended in a semicircle. The cartons displayed the logos
of great multinational drug companies—Wellcome, Bayer, Glaxo, Sandoz—as
if they were sponsoring this world tour. He stopped in front of the biggest box,
and made a jabbing bayonet thrust with his guitar. He whirled an arm to hit an
inaudible power chord and froze the pose.
“Get a load of that back line! Four five-hundred watt Marshalls.
Fanfuckingtastic, man! You can’t beat the old valve amps when it comes to
raunch, right?”

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562839

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

The Qliphoth

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

For I must concentrate—I am making a strong black record for eternity.
Lucas will know it, one day soon. It is my legacy.My uttermost Will. This time
I must get it right.
So I sleep with the black notebooks as my pillow. It isn’t easy to reconstruct
my Holy Lore. I need the resources of the British Museum Reading Room, the
Bodliean Library, whatever. But the Oakhill doctors think that mad people
prefer Readers Digest. I have rely on my hand copied archives; my dictations
and visions from the Inner Plane; or memories of memories. I’ve been starting
all over again for years.
For Poll Pottage dispersed the treasures of the Lore. So shall she burn by
aeonic fire and be crushed by thunderstones in the End-Times! That woman
has caused me so much extra work, it’s worn out my astral body. It’s not just
the scriptorial battle fatigue, an ague in my old claws. No, this channeling is
hard and bitter work.
But today the woodentops must have under-dosed me. I’m still functioning.
Herewith a taster, a private view, just one sample of my wares drafted from the
black notebooks, a typical Nicholas Oscar Beardsley production. My methods
are multifarious. Last night I got up to no good underneath my smelly blankets.
This sample of the Teachings happens to take the form of an unusual
radiophonic transmission from the dead.
I do this trick as follows: take one transistor radio—the British-made “Roberts
Rambler” is probably the best, because of its plywood chassis, good for natural
vibrations—and hide it under your pillow. Press your ear very close to the
speaker. Tune close to BBC World Service on long wave, but allow the signal
to drift on the edge of intelligibility. Keep the volume to the minimum of audibility.
Listen for the radio years.
Soon, beyond the urgent twaddle of world events, the stratospheric squeal of
lost souls, the muezzin wailing from their burning mosques, all the rest of the
global anthem, you will hear, filtered through hiss and static, a voice. It is
clipped, brisk, extremely British,military, dry as sherry, so very reassuring . . . it
is getting louder already . . .
“. . . in 1910, I made the acquaintance of a military attache, posted to Central
Asia in the service of one of the great European powers. Despite our inevitable
differences, we shared the comradeship of bearing arms, and a common
interest in arcane matters. I was intrigued by his knowledge of esoteric
Tibetan beliefs and practices, especially when he told me that at a ‘gompa’ or
spiritual college north of Lhasa there was a ‘gyud pas’ or ‘high teacher’ who
had the gift of astral disembodiment.

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562839

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

The Qliphoth

On By vequinoxIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

excerpt

Nicholas:
Special Withdrawal Unit
I have to get it all down. For the record, the Akashic Record of the Aeons, naturally.
Wherein all our phantasms are inscribed, squiggles of amoebic neon in
the starry darkness, every damned thing we’ve done radiating across eternity
like an old broadcast of Journey into Space on its way to the Pleiades.
And I have to set the angelic record quite straight. Writing very carefully.
Not my usual psychedelic scribble—letterforms in doodles of wild purple,
loopy loan-words on the run—but disciplined blocks of sensible words,
arranged thus, line after neat line in my black-and-red Notebook, made in
Taiwan but purchased for me at the hospital shop right here at Oakhill, sunniest
hotbed of sanity in all Devon, as Doctor Jago says, whenever he tries to jolly
us along.
It’s very civilised, “. . . considering, after all, Mr. Beardsley, it is a locked-up
ward, yes?” He allows me the privilege of unlocking my old word-hoard in its
frumpy box of smelly brocade, my little shop of curious relics. I’m permitted
this verb therapy, joining up my grown-up writing. Better this, certainly, than
farting in the day-room all day, like old Beddowes, or wandering about strumming
a cardboard cut-out guitar, which is the preferred pose of Rog, or Rod,
or Rob, or Ron—I haven’t yet made out his name, because our mass dosage of
Largactil makes everybody’s speech slurred.
In fairness to Beddowes, such drugs doth make great farters of us all, our
sulphurous bursts of bad air permeate the lower heavens . . . Perhaps it’s really
Beddowes’ high boredom quotient that’s against him. His preferred interpretation
of reality is that he’s Headmaster of a large inner-city comprehensive
school, that our day-room is his staff-room, and that we, fellow-clients of the
Special Withdrawal Unit, are his backsliding, incompetent staff.
“You’ve no control,” he wags a warning finger several times a day, “no control
at all of your juvenile criminal elementals. Young people committing
problems of evil, terrible state of things in the toilets, boys with knives, and
tinsel in their hair, hair everywhere . . . Look what you have permitted at the
end of the day, you with all your beards and long hair . . .” With me he always
permutates the same set phrases, beards and all. Even the stuffy acoustic of the
day-room can’t take the edge off his abrasive burr, but it goes nicely with his
jowly blue-shaven red face and bald scalp with plastered licks of thin hair.
He likes to grab some old copy of Plain Truth Magazine, and he rolls it up to …

https://draft2digital.com/book/3562839

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