Terra Umbra - Empire of Shadows


( 1 ) The light of the world

( i ) 

Darkness first.
Darkness and hunger.
The hunger that drove the beast down from the mountain, down from the snowline into the world below.

It had been a long winter, a hard season that wouldn’t quit and a few nights shy of the vernal equinox in the year of Our Lord twelve hundred and eight the hunger finally became too great to be denied and leaving the safety of its den the beast picked its way through the maze of broken rock and lightless scree at the top of the gorge and slid thin as a sigh into the world of men. It was more like an impulse than anything else, a silent undulation of form and fur, alert to the shifting patterns of the night, the living embodiment of desire. It didn’t know it was a beast or why or how it had come into being. It was a beast after all and incapable of reflection. It only knew it was hungry.

Emitting a growl so low it was almost a purr the beast stiffened, hackles rising as it caught a subtle olfactory tremor in the wind. The scent lay faint on the frozen air, the feel of it vibrating from the empty notches between the hills. Coming out of its crouch, the grey shadow flowed without hesitation towards the distant sound of running water and the unmistakable hum of life, towards a place where the high pastures gave way to fallow fields and barren vineyards, where other wild things feared to tread, and shepherds allowed their fat tailed flocks to roam as they pleased by night.

The first kill was a mercy.
Severing the lamb’s jugular, the beast drank deep, husking out the secret contents of its blood dewed fleece, devouring the soft parts of its prey first, its terrified, quivering genitalia and living entrails, rejoicing in the sweet, thick nectar at its core.

The second kill was a grace. The third a gift. The fourth and fifth a blessing. But the beast wasn’t keeping track. There were so many of them, these mewing, newborn things. The grey shadow fell upon them in an ecstasy of rage, ripping and ravening, joyously tearing lambs and ewes alike into stupid, senseless pieces, sparing nothing in the fields it visited that night or the next .
On the third night there were more men. Men with sticks and lanterns, and crossing the headwaters of the Ers, the grey shadow slunk away into the skunkwood and wild myrtle, into the deepest, darkest part of the forest where it could go safely to earth. The master of the sheepfold at Caussou, where the first predations were noted, alerted his bayle who tasked his chatelaine to take word to the seigneur that a wolf was stalking the meadows of the Ariege and a hunting party would need to be raised.

Raimond Drut, the lord of the Ariege and master of all he surveyed was ensconced at his Pamiers estate at the time. He was no longer a young man and now his illustrious whiskers and curling shoulder-length locks were streaked with grey the seigneur found himself increasingly disinclined towards affairs of state and the intrigues that haunted the drafty halls and turrets of his feudal seat, the rambling gothic citadel of Foix, the material embodiment of his family’s temporal power which had clung since time out of mind to the great white rock above the rapids where the churning waters of the Ariege receive the icy springs of the Arget. He had taken to blaming this disinclination on the long winter nights and incipient bronchial catarrh, exaggerating his cough for the benefit of those few retainers and members of the clan grown familiar enough to dare question his motives. If the truth be told, it was the sharp tongue of his spouse, the Countess Phillipa that drove Raimond from his great hall and made the rustic fastness of the ancient manorial farmhouse at Belpech seem so oddly appealing, now that the first breath of spring had come to the flatlands, and the bluebells broken in a silent wave through the woods.
 
He had married the Aragonese noblewoman as part of a peace treaty with the house of Montcade and while the feasting had lasted for over a week Raimond had never been sure whether Phillipa had ever really loved him. At first she had seemed to care enough to tolerate him, to make allowances for his ways, but after the arrival of their second daughter, Caecilie, she had grown distant and moody, taking refuge in her faith and her own increasingly quixotic interpretation of the scriptures. The seigneur’s closest friend and confidante, old Roiax, the former captain of the guard, who had lost an eye in a skirmish with the Raimond‘s first cousin Count Ermengol of Urgell, had done his best to counsel his baffled master. Fixing Raimond with his lopsided, owlish gaze the old warrior had tried in vain to tutor him in the ways of aristocrats and the manner by whence a civilized gentleman of substance should comport himself towards a spouse. Be nicer to her, he chided. Treat her better. Try to listen to her. That sort of thing. But the Countess would go to her duenna and cry, and there were days when Raimond suspected her and the whole court of plotting against him. This spring, as was his want, he had donned his battered, broad brimmed hat and leather doublet and resorted to the only course of action left to him. Gathering his men at arms Count Raimond coughed pointedly into his grubby kerchief and announced it was high time they repaired to the light and space of Belpech, to extort a fresh tithe from the locals, and inspect their fiefdom’s western guard towers.

No attack had ever made on the valley but there was a slight danger that roaming armies made up of those whom the northern barons had defeated and driven from their lands might wander into Raimond’s domain foraging for food and towns to loot although there was seldom any news to report from his territory’s western flanks. It was the very isolation of his Belpech estate with its crumbling crimson tiles and octagonal, sarascen tower that the lord of the valley cherished most. Tacitly withdrawing from the responsibilities of office, and turning a deaf ear to the drumbeat of distant wars, he devoted himself instead to affairs of hill and stream, to his threadbare memories and the comfort of his cups, to the sweet red Pamiers wine, the pulse of the tum-tum and the plaintive jangling of the darbourka.

It was hunger of a different order that drove Raimond Drut from the sanctuary of his baronial manor and out into the high, wild woods beyond the fields he knew, hunger for the good, gone days of his youth, for the thrill of the hunt and the quick blood of the kill. Under different circumstances, he might have dispatched his men at arms to safely take care of the matter, but something in the breathless words of the chatelaine, who came hotfoot from Caussou, must have sparked his interest, for it is recorded that it was the lord of the valley himself astride his great black stallion Rhodiamant, who rode out with his most trusted sergeant, old Roiax, at his side that spring to face the beast.

They rode out with the hounds at the break of day, their steeds clad in the bright livery of their house, the red and gold blazon of Foix, and the crimson cows of Bern. Their traps freshly greased, packed in an ornately woven, willow basket that Roiax wore with the shoulder-straps loosened so that the base of the basket rested against the cantle of his saddle. They rode with the sun slanting in their eyes, the forests of Montbel marching away, trunk upon trunk, into the lonely, blue grey foothills to their left and to the right the fallow, patchwork fields of Mirepoix and Lavelanet strewn out like prayer mats in the morning mist. Before them the horns of Soularac and the Pic de Saint Barthelemy climbed above the clouds, high and white and lonely, forming a natural bowl that cupped and held the dark hump of Montsegur whose summit rose like a island from a curling sea of frozen fog, its ramparts seemingly the outermost bastion of some other elder kingdom remote and imperiously aloof from the waking world.

Raimond knew little of the mountain then, only what he had heard as a child, but it was enough for him to instinctively give its sheer, densely wooded flanks a wide berth even at this hour of day. There was something oddly symmetrical about it’s contours and whether or not its crags had really been hewn by giants from the raw bedrock of creation according to some obscure principle of ante-human sorcery, it was evident that Montsegur was no mere hill or hummock, nor was it a mountain like any other. It was, according to those who knew, a ‘pog’ which in the old language meant something in between. Not just any pog but ‘the pog’ which conveyed perhaps something of its singular nature. No-one knew what forgotten hands, what vanished race, had raised the abandoned keep that clung like a mirage to it’s crest or for what purpose it had been designed. The ancient fortifications from whence Montsegur drew its name ( the ‘secure’ or ‘safe mountain’ ) had been there since before the first scratchings of recorded history or the invention of written words yet in the morning light its white walls shone as if newly created by some God who had yet to puzzle out a use for them.
 
It was mid-afternoon before the hounds picked up the beast’s scent on the outskirts of Bellesta where an old ram had been slain the night before. The animal’s carcass had been pulled apart and the pieces scattered across the snow. Raimond’s blooded, black stallion, Rohdiamant, dropped a sudden shoulder and wheeled on his hind legs as old Roiax blew the fresh fall from a single paw mark that lay crystalline and perfect beneath the morning powder, a print far bigger than any the lord of the valley could remember seeing before. Crossing to the south bank of the Ers the seigneur and his sergeant set their first trap just below the mouth of the Pas de l’Ours where they knew the beast must have crossed the night before. Digging a shallow hole in the frozen loam Roiax delicately primed the trap’s spring-loaded jaws before covering it with lattice of twigs, sifting dirt over them and then sprinkling humus and wood debris over the dirt.

By sundown they had laid all four of their traps before stabling their horses and taking dinner at a tiny farmstead at the base of the Gorge de la Frau. They sat in silence before the spitting hearth, feasting on a rich stew of beans marinaded in goose fat and Raimond’s thoughts turned once more to the days of his youth when he had stalked a different prey, when he had courted and famously won the heart of Etienette de Penautier, the youngest and fiercest daughter of the House of Caberet, known to her countless ill-fated suitors and the troubadours who celebrated her exploits as ‘Loba the she-wolf of Caberet’. She had been the loveliest woman in the Languedoc, and the name of her castle had become synonymous with the and minstrels, mummers and acrobats who had flocked to her domain to seek the she-wolf’s patronage but Raimond thought of her now as she had been in that brief, rapturous summer when she had been his and his alone. Few men cannot count some days of perfect happiness but Raimond did not know if there were any who could count their happiness in years. His had lasted but a single season and now when he recalled the few short nights he had spent in the arms of that young enchantress, in the balmy heights of Monte Lupo, they seemed to be a solitary island of tranquility amidst the storms of his later life, the demands of class and clan that had driven him into a loveless marriage and the chilly arms of the Countess Phillipa.
 

”You think we can catch her ?” old Roiax asked at length.
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t” muttered his master, gazing into the embers.
“You think she’s made another kill by now ?”
“We’ll see in the morning.” Raimond nodded. “We’ll see…”

That night as the Count slumbered on the cot beside the hearth and his sergeant dozed in the stables the beast came down from the heights and picking up their tracks at the mouth of the Pas de L’Ours it tasted the air, separating out the chemical signature of humans, horses and hounds, untangling the delicate skein of pheromones. Within fifteen minutes, the beast had found all four of the traps and giving them a wide berth it took a calf at a place named Pelail, not half a league from where Raimond Drut lay moaning in his sleep for his long lost love with her porcelain skin and open thighs. The beast fed ‘til its belly could hold no more for although it did not understand how much trouble it was in, it knew enough not to return to a kill. Then a rent appeared in the leaden cloud. A waxing, gibbous moon swam momentarily into view above the dark outline of the pog, and raising its muzzle the beast howled and howled again into the freezing night.
 
The hounds caught the fresh scent and the riders took off up the col at first light, following the pack. The snow lay thick in the pass and their horses trod the drifts in high, rhythmic footfalls, swinging their steaming muzzles over the frozen reefs, and peering down through the dark, leafless thickets that choked the mountain’s flanks. It was very cold in the pass and at first they could find no further tracks in the fresh fall. A league or so to the south they forded a burn so black against the snow it might have a crack in the world and on the far bank they picked up the beast’s trail once more where it had paused to drink before zig-zagging away down the mountainside towards the Col de Sept Freres and the sheepfolds of Prades and Comus. At the edge of the woods the trail turned and doubled back along the edge of the pasture. Thumbing the brim of his hat, Raimond tried to mentally reconstruct what had happened earlier. And again he thought of Loba and the children he might have had. Then he rode out down the pasture and then up and back again, finding no trace at first of what the beast had been running after. On the second pass a flock of crows rose shrieking and wheeling from the verge of the forest and Roiax’s gelding took fright. As it reared the ragged girth-strap gave way on his saddle and the one eyed retainer somersaulted backwards, sitting down hard in the hoarfrost and watching his mount bolt away from him.
 
“Are you well, old friend ?”
“Yessir. Well and good, my liege.” Roiax rose, dusting off his bruised haunches, his one eye focused on the red ruins of a two year old heifer that lay on its side amidst the tangled roots of an ancient oak. The scent of death was still thick in the air and again Raimond’s stallion wanted no part of it, arching its neck, and rolling its eyes. Patting Rhodiamant’s neck the graying seigneur spoke gently, but firmly to his steed before climbing down. Tying the reins to a branch, he walked around the fresh kill, studying it. The beast had eaten the creature’s liver, dragging its offal out over the snow before shearing away several pounds of flesh from its haunches. The dead animal was not quite stiff, not quite cold and where it lay the heat of its cooling body had melted the snow in a great shadowy halo. Raymond walked back to his horse and slid his crossbow from its scabbard as Roiax retrieved the remains of his fallen saddle.
 
“Can it be fixed ?”
“Billets must have rotted. It can be fixed soon enough…”
“When was the last time you looked at it ?”
“This old saddle was never much, my liege.”
“That old saddle is the only saddle you had” muttered Raimond, checking the mechanism on his bow. The action was stiff with the cold. Roiax cursed under his breath, watching as his master slid a bolt into the breach and mounted up. There was no point in letting the trail grow cold, not when they were so very close. Riding with the bow across his lap Raimond Drut followed the pack down along the edge of the woods, livery flickering red and gold between the trunks until he was lost from view, the clamor of the wolfhounds fading into the eerie silence of the glen as his loyal servant hurried about his task as if struck by a sudden presentiment, knowing every passing minute made the gap between himself and his master more irremediable.
 
The lord of the Ariege followed the beast all afternoon without seeing it. Once he chased it up out of a bed of scrub myrtle where the beast had been asleep in the sun. Or thought he chased it up. Raimond stooped and placed his hand against the crushed leaves to see if they were warm but whether they were warm from the beast or the sun he was in no way sure. Twice he lost his quarry’s tracks in the snowmelt and twice the hounds picked it up again. On the far side of the Col des Sept Freres, he saw smoke and came across three shepherds in battered felt hats, and ragged woolen mantles, taking their dinner. They seemed terrified by the very sight of him, bowing and scraping before Raimond’s champing horse, as he tried in vain to question them. The serfs had heard tell of their lord and master often enough in song and story, indeed paid tithe to him, yet the fact of his physical presence seemed beyond their ability to readily comprehend. Averting their eyes, they groveled helplessly in the slush, tongues paralyzed by fear, each hoping the other might answer for them.
 
Measuring the remaining light with his right hand at arm’s length, Raimond turned west towards Prades and Caussou, the scene of the beast’s first depredations. He took a winding, downward trail through the woods and as he crossed the narrow sward at the base of the dolmen, just below the col de Chioulla, the beast rose up to meet him.
 
Rhodiamant halted and backed and stamped as the largest wolf Raimond had ever seen broke cover, bursting soundlessly from the green gloom where it had lain in wait. It was a lot bigger than he had gathered from the prints, bigger than a mastiff and burlier even than the terrified wolfhounds, almost the size of the half grown heifer it had brought down that afternoon, yet monstrous as the beast’s size and aspect may have been, its eyes were more so. It was the epitome of all things wild, as if the forest had taken flesh, as if the very land Raimond had loved and sought to tame had turned against him, and at its heart, and very core, there lay a void that could never be filled, a hunger that blazed with an intensity fiercer than life.
 
The instant seemed to expand upon itself, Raimond’s heart slamming in his chest as he brought up the bow. Then the stallion spooked and reared, spoiling his aim. The wolf’s great nostrils flared rhythmically as it narrowed the gap, scenting its prey’s weakness as if it could already taste Count Raimond’s blood and the adrenaline that surged in his veins. The beast was close enough that Raimond could smell it too – a deep intoxicating musk of sweat and savagery that only served to further panic his skittish horse, mitigating against all efforts to rein it in.
 
Once upon a time, Raimond Drut had been at grace with the world. He had slept in the arms of his she-wolf, secure in an unspoken half imagined pact with nature and the elemental spirits of his land. His pagan soul recognized in other creatures a kindred spark, a splinter of the same primal light that infused all things for good or bad. He was still only a human being with all the frailties and vanities that went with it, a hunter and a warrior, a philanderer, and a rake. But for his sins, Raimond was at least kind to animals, unusually so for his day. He spoke to his horses and falcons as he addressed his own kin, and during the long winter nights in his feudal demesne, he had penned any number of treatises on land stewardship, one of which, a manual on the raising and care of hounds, was to remain the standard text on the subject for over three centuries. Whilst the prospect of such posthumous fame would have been cold comfort to him now, it was the hounds that saved him at the last…
 
Coming between their beloved master and his sleek grey nemesis the wolfhounds bowled into the beast, bringing it down, three of the dogs going down with it, rolling together in a lashing, snarling ball of teeth and fur.
The beast for its part fought in complete silence.
 
One of the hounds yelped, nursing a wounded foreleg as it circled, disengaging from the melee while the beast seized a second by its lower jaw, throwing it to the ground and straddling it before snatching its grip from the stricken animal’s jaw to its throat, biting again for better purchase, sinking its teeth into the loose folds of skin and the muscled neck below. Left to its own devices the beast would have killed the dog there and then but realizing its peril it abruptly abandoned its hold, spinning on its haunches to face the Count as he steadied the crossbow with his forearm. The beast’s implacable, yellow eyes bored into him, ignoring the circling hounds, coat bristling grayish dun in the slanting rays, the setting sun at its back, flaring in Raimond’s pupils.
 
Go on, he said to himself. If you think you can.
 
And the beast leaped. So quick he could scarce pull the trigger. It was as if time and motion were suspended for all eternity, between day and night, rising moon, and setting sun, Raimond’s body arching backwards, one stirrup tearing free as he parted company with his saddle, crossbow spinning from his hands. Then the sun disappeared behind the treetops, and night came rushing in, the lord of the valley hitting the ground with sufficient force to shatter the spine of any lesser man, the beast on top of him. While the beast’s weight was not much more than his own its strength and momentum were far greater driving him into the frozen loam.
 
Managing to get his right elbow up under the creature’s jaws, Count Raimond fumbled numbly with his left hand for the hilt of his dagger, hearing his doublet tearing and the links in his mail shirt giving way with sharp, metallic, snapping sounds as they grappled in the dirt like lovers. Despite straining with his every muscle Raimond felt his right forearm being bent slowly back as the ghastly, gaping fangs, and the dripping shaft of the crossbow bolt that projected from the ruined, red socket of the beast’s left eye pressed ever closer to his terrified face, a viscous streamer of blood and cerebro-spinal fluid sliding from its clotted feathers. Drawing back his left arm, he felt with the tip of his knife for a place in the body of the beast, thrusting blindly upwards. The beast’s hide seemed unnaturally tough, but a frantic heave drove the blade home. Champing its jaws the creature uttered a silent grunt. Raimond thrust again but at first his assailant did not seem to feel the bite. Only gradually did it weaken…
 
Doubling his legs and driving them into the belly of the beast Raimond rolled free. For a while he lay on his back, panting like a dog as he tried to catch his breath. The first stars were dusting the blue vault of the sky and he could see the silvery incandescence of the moon already rising from behind the cromlech. Gathering his strength, Raimond forced himself upright only to sit back down wishing he were ten years younger. The beast said nothing. Eventually he rose again and retrieving his sword from the saddle he walked over to where the beast crouched. It flattened its ears as he approached, slobber swinging in white strings from its jaw as it shook its head, trying in vain to dislodge the bolt that had passed clear through its cranium and the soft tissues within, the barb protruding from the back of its skull just below the cerebellum. Raimond crouched beside the dying animal and reaching out, spoke gently as he stroked its head, but the beast only cringed and trembled.
 
It’s no use fighting it, he said.
 
Clasping the hilt of his sword with both hands, Raimond Drut cut off the beast’s head. It took two blows. Then, wiping the sticky stuff from his whiskers the lord of the Ariege filled his lungs with clean, cold air and placing his horn to his lips blew a deep resounding blast that echoed from col to col so that old Roiax and ,indeed, the whole wide world this side of the mountains might know he lived and the beast was dead.

( ii )

Day and night are different worlds.
 Two worlds occupying the exact same geographic space as different in character as death is different from life or the heavens above from the abyss below, yet the only real difference between them is time. The time of the earth’s turning. The moon was out now and its light made the way through the woods seem strange and unfamiliar as if Raimond had miswandered on his homeward path and now found himself in a land he only dimly recognized, a kingdom of ghosts and shadows, whose boundaries stretched as far as eyes could see, or his thoughts readily contain into an future of old age, error, and ruin.
 
At least its all downhill from here he told himself.
As if that made the going easier.
 
The tired wolfhounds lagged behind so Raimond clasped the beast’s head closer for company as he rode as if to draw the strength he needed from his trophy to propel himself forward into the well of uncertainty ahead. As he came down from the mountains and the last of the beast’s lifeblood cooled steadily against his dimly aching thighs, the foliage grew more abundant, the branches curving above his head like the eaves of a vast, dark cathedral consecrated to some unknown religion whose gods had names no tongue could shape nor throat pronounce. All about him the lord of the valley could hear the small, furtive sounds of its invisible parishioners, the scuttlings and slitherings, coughs, barks, and hoots of the night animals going about their secret business.
 
Moonlight fell in shards from the spreading canopy of new, green leaves strewing the shadowy basilica’s downward slanting knave with tiny flecks of light like the glowing glyphs and ciphers of an alien alphabet that crawled everywhere across lichen encrusted rocks and the rough, dark bark of the trees. At first their swirling letters and incoherent numbers seemed to lighten the way, but in practice, the fractured beams served only to deepen the gloom and further confuse his addled senses. He felt so tired it was all he could do just to stay upright in the saddle. Closing his eyes he loosened his grip on Rhodiamant’s reins, allowing the stallion to choose his own way.
 
For a while there was only darkness. Sweet darkness. The rhythmic undulation of the saddle and Rhodiamant’s plodding hooves. In his mind’s eye, Raimond imagined there was another figure beside him, guiding him through the night, her pale hand gently leading his tired mount by the bridle reins. He imagined he saw his lost love now as she had been on that night when she had first lead him by a hidden path through the tangled thickets of Monte Lupo to a place known only to initiates, to those elect few who had passed through all four degrees and their attendant trials and mysteries. Although Raimond was nobly born he had only arrived at this blessing, this great grace, this secret of secrets in precious, hard won stages, adjudicated by the statutes of the Court of Love, and the codes of chivalry, for there was in those days a service of love just as there was a service of vassalage . There were four trials, four stations in that journey, four phases to his devotion - first that of humble aspirant or fegnedor, then supplicant or precador before he could even be openly acknowledged as Loba’s recognized suitor, her entendedor, but it was only when he was about to be was raised at last, God be praised, to the exalted realm of drut, or accepted love, that his betrothed finally took him by the hand and lead him through that narrow, spiraling path to the innermost thicket where the White Lady waited for them.

She had lain in her bower of figs and wild vines since the fogs of timeless time and the forest had grown up around her yet the passage of untold centuries had neither blackened nor tarnished the smooth, hard stone from whence she had been wrought and instead the White Lady had only blanched with age until her full, fecund breasts, pregnant torso, and ancient, empty eyes shone like a piece of the moon that had fallen to earth.

Raimond stiffened as if turned to stone himself, Loba’s warm arms all around him, tugging at his doublet, her voice a hot, eager whisper in his ear, telling her virgin warrior how in Roman times the young men had ejaculated over the Great Mother’s image in order to learn the secrets of magic and the true workings of their world.
 
“Have you worlds within you ?”
 
She giggled, her tiny, blessed fingers slipping a layer closer to his expectant skin.
“Do you want dominion ?”

He caught his breath, feeling a quickening within.

“ But first… “
She paused and the young Count moaned softly, not wanting her to draw away.
“First her suitors had to vow never to enter a Christian church again for they belonged to the White Lady now, bound body and soul, regardless of who or what they might become in later life...”
Raimond shivered, nodding wordlessly.
“Forever and ever…”
He closed his eyes as she pressed against him.
“World without end.”
He felt as if his soul were melting and clutched after it in vain. Amen. Amen. So long ago was that halcyon night it might have been part of some other life entirely yet for a instant the two worlds seemed to merge and the only difference between them was time. The time of an eyelid rising and falling…
 
Raimond opened his eyes to find the stallion had come to a halt at the end of the aisle of trees. Before him a high, white wall shone in the moonlight and catching sight of an arched gateway set into the crumbling masonry he climbed stiffly down, trying without success to get his bearings. The night was cold, the sky so clear and the moon so strong, he feared he might become enmeshed in its beams forever unless he found shelter from its gaze. Whether dead, alive, or simply dreaming, he was still the lord of the valley and it was his right to demand admittance and take sanctuary where and when he pleased. Hanging the beast’s head on a nail beside the door, he pounded on its wizened timbers. Only when the beam was drawn and he saw the white habits and pale, startled faces of the nuns did he realize he had come to the door of a convent.
 
The tolling bell roused the abbess from her dreams. The dreams were always worse this time of month as if emboldened by the moonlight and Mater Ermingarda woke with a start, lips forming a silent prayer. She lay in her narrow wooden cot blinking into the dark, trying to puzzle out whether it was really the bell that woke her or the vision that possessed her sleep, the image of a knight on a coal black charger that bore relentlessly down on her across the years, a warrior clad in the shining armor of the sun and a mantle of shadows. Then she realized the convent’s bell was ringing the Tocsin, the swift double beat of the warning signal.
 
He is come. He is come. The one foretold in the dreams. The man without a face…

She shuddered. Suppressing the childish notion, Ermingarda swung herself from her cot, tidying away her tangled tresses, and reaching for her wimple and neatly folded cassock. A moment later there was a soft knock on the cell door and she heard the voice of one of the novices stammering out what she had already guessed. A man had come to the convent gate, one who could not be refused.

He is come. He is come.
The dark one has come…
 
Scooping up her rosary, the abbess followed the younger woman through the dimly lit cloisters, drawing strength from the murmured litany that came from the chapel, the endless reading of the chapters which, according to the order’s rules, were to continue uninterrupted by fire or flood with the sister who started at eight in the evening relieved only at dawn and so on down through the years in unbroken relay until time and tide were done and the order and its works one with the dust of the stars and the void between.

Love would be like this, she told herself, coming unbidden at some strange hour. Like a thief in the night…
 
Mater Ermingarda had taken the cloth on the outermost cusp of womanhood, and although she had never known a man, she knew about their ways. She knew about love and about the moon. As a child she had wondered why the moon always came at night to perch in the tree outside her window, watching over her as if to mark her out for some special destiny, some nebulous purpose that retreated year after year before her. And love might be like that too, she imagined. As constant as the moon, yet as icy and as unattainable…
 
It had been all too many moons since her father’s retainers immured her in the isolated convent that became her prison, yet despite the slow passage of one sequestered season into the next, and the juices that ripened only to sour again inside her, she had not yet given up on love, on the absurd thought that the man she saw in her sleep might one day find her and bear her home to her true kingdom, a hope that never quite dried up despite her best efforts to scourge it from her thoughts with nettles, willow switch, and barbed celice, to drown her dreams in prayer.
 
But I’m still dreaming now, she told herself. I must be…
 
Ermingarda paused, eyes widening at the sight of Raimond’s silhouette waiting on the threshold. The moon was at his back and in its radiance he looked more like a beast than a man, a creature from out the forest deep risen up on its hind legs to come a courting, and whether the abbess shivered from the cold night wind or the sight of him was impossible to say. The novice raised her lantern and in its faltering glow she saw that beneath his broad brimmed hat, and dark, curling whiskers, Raimond was a man after all.

Love would be like the stubble on his cheek she thought.
The rub and scratch against her skin…
 
She blushed, averting her eyes, knuckles whitening as she crushed the rosary beads into the palm of her hand.
“My lord…”
Then seeing the beast’s blood on Raimond’s thighs the abbess bade her pious sisters to bring him at once to her cell while she made herself busy fetching wine and vitals from the kitchen along with hot water and thread so that his wounds might be sewn. Banking up the fire, she bolted the door to make certain they would be left well alone.
 
Love would be like a dog rose in the moonlight.
Like a dream made flesh.
A dream that always returns…
 
“Is it day yet ?”
“Set you down, my liege. Rest you.”
“But I see the dawn coming. It’s so bright. Surely it must be dawn ?”
“Not yet, my lord.”
“Where am I then ? Am I not dead ?.”
“Not yet.” She smiled sadly and Raimond sighed, knowing it was true.
“God…” His heart turned .“ I wish I could rest. Like any other man. I’d give my life for a quiet corner of the earth to lay my head …”
Stretching out on the cot, he watched dazedly as a somber, sanguine light crept across the floor of the cell, seeping over the worn flags and threadbare prayer mat, lapping at the simple stone washstand and the leather flail that hung beside it. Raising his eyes to the narrow cruciform window set high in the wall he saw the rim of the moon darkened by a scarlet penumbra, the shadow of the world spreading like a stain across its face, its reflected rays filling creation as if the earth had been bathed and baptized anew in the blood of the fallen beast.
 
“God help us..
“ Soft now. The beast is dead.”
“ You don’t understand…”
“ I understand enough to know you are not a man like any other. Nor could you be. The blood of kings runs in your veins…” A strand of flaxen hair escaped Ermingarda’s wimple as she bent closer, pale features haloed, and transformed by the glow.
“You are my Lord…”
“ But you’re just a child…”
He shivered, coming to the edge of something too difficult to readily comprehend. Feeling a pang of fear, he perceived in the lines of her face an answer to the riddle that had brought him here, to the hunger that had driven him from his domain, and for an instant he almost understood what it was that the White Lady wanted from him, what the Goddess required of her mortal servants. A carnal fever gripped him and he felt the hot giddy rush of blood in his temples. The blood of kings. The blood of Christ. The blood of beasts and men. The blood of angels. Blood. Just blood. The blood of all the world, for only blood had the power to transcend time and give form to the void, to hold back the darkness that threatened moment by moment to devour it.
 
“My love…”
 
He freed her locks, golden hair falling over his upturned face, blinding him with its light, the feel of her supple body twisting in his arms, driving him to blinder madness still. She had never given herself to a man before, but in the end she gave him all she was, crying out as he entered her, thrusting helplessly into the void between her legs.
 
Love is like this, she thought. Like the first and final senseless moments of being. A cry as long and thin as a vein. Love is like dying…
 
Then Raimond shot his seed into the emptiness and fell upon her, spent. Holding him close in the dark, Ermingarda ran her fingers through her warrior’s graying hair, mouthing a wordless keening lullaby, a song as old as her race. The Count did not stir until first light when the sound of Roiax’s horn came drifting over the treetops, calling him back to the world. He did not remember his dreams, only that he had dreamed, nor did he leave any keepsake to mark his passing, only the wolf’s head that hung on the nail beside the convent door and the new life that grew within her belly.
 
When her condition could no longer be hidden, she was forced to leave the convent and return to her family estate in Telho, where in the fullness of time she begat twins. Mater Ermingarda had known only a single night of love yet she would dearly pay for the dreams that drove her to temptation, for it is recorded that while the midwives did all they could to stem the bleeding the Lord saw fit to forgive the pious woman and recall her to His side, weakened as she was by her journey north and public shaming.
 
The bastards were strong and heavy for their age, born with the dark hair and fierce good looks of their illustrious sire and the pale, cold eyes of the mother whose embrace they would never know. The boy was called Loup, after his father’s exploit on the night of their conception and the girl was named Na Esclarmonda. - the light of the world.
 
To be continued...

 
 
Terra Umbra - Empire of Shadows
 
A chronology

1155- Birth of Esclarmonde de Foix - daughter of Roger Bernard I and Cecilia Trencavel
1160 - Birth of her younger brother Raimond Drut - son and successor to Roger Bernard I
1167 - Council of Saint Felix de Caraman - the first official gathering of the heads of the Cathar church presided over by the enigmatic figure of Papa Nicetas who is said to have traveled ‘all the way from Lombardy’ for the occasion and brought with him the ‘Book of the Seven Seals’ also refered to as the ‘lost Gospel of Saint John’ or simply the ‘Book of Nicetas’ a mythic Grande Grimoire that some believe will not be opened until Judgement Day.
The first four Cathar bishoprics are set up in Toulouse, Carcassonne, Agen and
Albi. While a guest at her father’s castle Nicetas meets the gaze of the
Young Esclarmonde de Foix ( then 12 years old ) exchanging the ’secret sign’ that marks her out for her future destiny as head of the emergent Cathar church
1175 - Esclarmonde de Foix marries Jourdain II of Isle Jourdain, Vicomte de Gimoez - ‘a brutal soldier who laughed at the new mysticism and took the innocent girl in order that she might be the obedient instrument of his pleasures after the hunt’
1184 - Birth of Raymond Trencavel, future viscount of Beziers, Carcassonne, Albi and Razes
1187 - Raimond Drut woos the hand of Loba the she-wolf and passes through the four stages of initiation ( Fegnedor, Precador, Entendedor and Drut ) according to the laws of chivalry adjudicated by the ‘Court of Love’ at Puivert
1188 - Death of Roger Bernard I - Raymond Drut succeeds his father as the Comte de Foix
1189 - Raimond Drut marries the Countess Phillipa de Montcade
1198 - Election of Pope Innocent III - later to launch Albigesian crusade
1202 - Death of Jourdain II. Now widowed Esclarmonde de Foix follows her calling. Taking the cloth and embarking on a thirty year apostolacy she leagues the barons of the Pyrenees against the authority of the patriarchal Roman pontiff and the local tyranny of the abbeys.
1203 - Raimond Drut makes a pact with Arnaud, viscount of Castelbon to join
posessions. Raimond’s cousin Count Ermengol VIII of Urgell and Bernard de Villemur, bishop of Urgell see this as a potential threat and declare war.
In the enssuing skirmish Raimond's loyal first lieutenant Roiax loses an eye and the young Count learns some hard lessons. Overcome and captured Raimond and Arnaud de Castelbon are imprisoned from February to September. King Pedro II of Aragon intervenes, wishing to spare them in order to aid him in his fight to conquer the Languedoc for Greater Catalonia
1204 - Birth of Pierre Roger de Mirepoix a cousin of Raymond de Pereille who claimed direct descendancy from Belisenna the moon goddess and would later become a key figure in the defence of Montsegur
Raimond Drut attends a ceremony in Fanjeaux in which Esclarmonde de Foix receives the consolamentum and is confirmed as the high priestess of the Cathar church.
1205 - While hunting a wolf in the high pastures of the Ariege Raimond Drut spends the night at a remote convent and later the abbess Na Ermingarda begats illegitimate twins - Esclarmonde and Loup de Foix.
Ensconced at the family’s Pamiers estate Esclarmonde de Foix experiences a
presentiment of a coming apocalypse and advises Raymond de Pereille to fortify
Montsegur
Loba the lovelorn she-wolf tries to seduce Raymond Trencavel when the young prince of Carcassonne visits the Court of love at Puivert only to vow revenge when he too spurns her affections
Rumors begin to circulate that the AntiChrist is born and the End Times of
prophecy are at hand.
1206 - The Spaniard Dominic de Guzman sees a fireball fall from the sky and
proclaiming it to be a miracle founds a monastery at Prouille. The fig tree he plants there, of the same genus as Buddha’s sacred Bo tree, grows to this day.
1208 - Murder of the Papal envoy Pierre de Castelnau
March 10 - His Holiness Pope Innocent III issues a call to arms summoning all
Christian nations to launch a Crusade against the south
The infant son of Raimond II of Carcassonne becomes a ward of Raimond Drut
1209 - Onset of the Albigensian Crusade and the military campaign that will wipe Occitania from the map.
July 22 - Sack of Beziers
Aug 15 - Fall of Carcassonne. Loba betrays Raymond Trencavel to the Crusaders - an event pinpointed by some modern historians as the ‘death of the age of chivalry’
Sept - Attack on Lastours fails
Nov - Death of Raymond Trencavel
Raimond Drut granted the fiefdoms of Querigut and Usson by King Pedro II
1210 - Simon de Montfort orders the torture and mutilation of the citizens of Bram
The fall of the ‘Court of Love’
Puivert, Minerve, Coustassa and Termes are occupied by the Crusaders
1211 - Fall of Lastours and Lavaur
Siege of Toulouse
Battle of Castelnaudary
1212 - de Montfort conquers Quercy, Agenais and Comminges
Citizens of Toulouse appeal to King Pedro II to come to their aid
1213 - Battle of Muret
King Pedro II ignores the council of Raimond Drut and perishes in the resulting
massacre. Triumph of de Montfort.
1215 - The Lateran council is attended by both Raimond Drut and the aging Esclarmonde de Foix who is ordered to ‘return to her spinning’ by the Papal legates
Raymond VI loses his lands and titles to de Montfort
Order of the Black Friars founded in Toulouse by Dominic de Guzman. The black robed Dominicans are to become the principal architects and administrators of the Inquisition, the system of terror that served as the prototype for the modern police state.
Bernard d’Alion cuts deal with de Montfort and his son Amaury
1216 - Beginning of war of liberation
Beaucaire liberated
Death of Pope Innocent III, election of Honorius III
Order of Black Friars confirmed
1217 - Toulouse liberated by Raymond VI
De Montfort besieges the city again
1218 - Death of Simon de Montfort who has his head knocked off by a mangonel duringthe renewed siege of Toulouse. His son Amaury succeeds him.
1222 - Death of Dominic de Guzman
Death of Raymond VI , succession of Raymond VII
Monks of Mercus abbey claim Esclarmonde the bastard daughter of Raimond
Drut has been seen dancing naked in the woods, speaking to owls and charming wolves and toads with her lyre
1223 - Death of Phillippe August the king of France
27 March - Death of Raimond Drut the Comte de Foix
Coronation of Louis VIII
1224 - Dominic de Guzman canonized as Saint Dominic
Raimond Drut’s bastard daughter however is proclaimed by some to be the saint  of saints of another ‘unknown religion’. The living avatar of ’certain dethroned pagan divinities’ incarnated into this world to stand in direct physical opposition to the forces of the Holy Roman Church. Her older sister Caecilie is forced to marry Bernard of Comminges to protect herself from the coming storm.
Esclarmonde however has other plans.
1225 - The resurgent Cathar church calls a general assembly at Pieusse.
A new Cathar bishopric is established in Razes
Death of King Louis VIII who calls for a new Crusade on his deathbed.
Blanche de Castille is established as regent.
1226 - Saurimonde the ‘inspired prophetess’ of the Mazamet district goes ‘naked as the Days in which the world was born’ as her soul is said to have been as ’bright as  the sun she invoked’ and rumors spread that Esclarmonde the bastard has called the Old Gods down from the mountains to do her bidding, even that she has conceived a child by a visitor from another world.
1227 - The Cathar Church and the Old Religion continue to gather strength in the South
Death of Pope Honorius III leads to the immediate election of Pope Gregory VIII
1229 - Treaty of Meaux is ratified in Paris, leading to the de facto annexation of Occitania to the French crown and clearing the way for decisive military action
1232 - Guilhabert De Castries requests that Montsegur become the centre of the Cathar church and the treasures of their faith are placed there for safekeeping, including the folkloric ’Book of the Seven Seals’ and allegedly the Grail itself
Widespread revolt is planned against the kings of France and the Roman Church
1234 - Pierre Roger de Mirepoix arrives at Montsegur having been dispossessed of his own lands by the Treaty of Paris. He marries Raymond de Pereilla’s daughter Phillipa and is effectively placed in charge of the castle garrison
1235 - The first uprisings take place against the Inquisition in Toulouse, Albi and
Narbonne
The black Dominicans are expelled from Toulouse
1236 - The Holy Roman Church comes back strong. The Inquisitors return to Toulouse
Esclarmonde the bastard is forced to marry Bernard d’Alion to secure a vital treaty and safeguard the supply lines to Montsegur
1240- Raymond Trencavel II seeks to avenge his father’s death and reclaim his rightful lands and titles. He liberates Limoux, Alet and Montreal but fails to recapture Carcassonne
Fall of Peyrepertuse
Bailing on her loveless marriage to Bernard Esclarmonde dons man’s armor to
fight alongside her brother Loup who has become the head of the resistance in the mountains
1241 - Louis IX orders Raymond VII to ‘destroy Montsegur’
Reluctant siege. The defenders, dubbed the ‘children of Belisenna’ by the
commander of the castle garrison Pierre Roger de Mirepoix prevail.
At Hautpoul the paffait Guilhelm d’Airons miraculously heals the wounds of the
Catharists with his outstretched hands
The unexpected death of Pope Gregory IX is followed by the election and equally sudden death of his successor Pope Celestin IV.
The Holy See is Vacant
The Holy Roman Empire is in tatters
Chaos rules
1242 - Raymond VII openly revolts against Louis IX
Pierre Roger de Mirepoix orders the assassination of inquisitor Guillaume
Arnaud and his fellow judges who are murdered in Avignonet by knights from
Montsegur. De Mirepoix demands that Arnaud’s skull be brought back to the pog to serve as a ceremonial cup
The Catholic clergy dub the citadel the ’Synagogue of Satan’.
1243 - Raymond VII submits once more
Council of Beziers elects to destroy Montsegur at all costs
Siege of Montsegur begins. Raimond de Pereilha, Esclarmonde d’Alion and the
castle’s five hundred inhabitants including the garrison of 150 men at arms under
de Mirepoix and some15 knights and their squires make a last stand against
overwhelming odds - an army of 6000 gathered from across Europe and placed
under the command of Hugues des Arcis, Seneschal of Carcassonne and Pierre
Amiel, the archbishop of Narbonne. The siege continues throughout the winter
and there are battles fought every day.
The election of Pope Innocent IV helps stabilize the church’s hold over Europe
Bernard d’Alion transfers 150 ‘livres melgorien’ into the coffers of the Spanish
mercenary Corbario whose crack Aragonese militia take up position in Usson
No-one is sure if they are there to try and raise the siege or get revenge on his
wayward spouse
1244 - January - Brilliant young inventor Bertrand de la Vacalarie breaks through the  Crusader lines and succeeds in building a siege engine within the castle walls, effectively prolonging the siege for another two months
Tuesday March 1 - Basque mercenaries lead by shepherds from the village of
Camon scale the sheer side of the pog under the cover of darkness and penetrate the Ers tower, forcing the posterns and bringing the keep within range of ballista fire. Only a promise to surrender on the following morning prevents a general massacre
Wednesday March 2 - Ceasefire negotiations begin with Pierre Roger de
Mirepoix’s brother in law Raimond d’Aniort acting as an intermediary between
the head of the castle garrison and the seneschal of Carcassonne Hugues des Arcis
The defenders are granted relatively lenient terms. They are given a fifteen day
truce in which to prepare themselves, the men at arms are granted an amnesty and the convictions against the knights who took part in the Avignonet massacre
waived. During the ceasefire the castle’s treasures, including the ’Book of the
Seven Seals’ are allegedly smuggled to safety
March 15 - Some sort of religious ceremony takes place within the castle walls
possibly marking either the spring equinox or the Cathar feast day of Bema
March 16: 225 Perfecti burnt alive - among them are the priest Bertrand Marty
and Raymond de Pereille’s wife and daughter
1245 - Cathar church dismantled; last leaders flee to Lombardy
1249 - Death of Raymond VII of Toulouse, succeeded by Alphonse de Poitiers, brother of Louis IX
1253 - Fall of Queribus and Puilaurens
1258 - Bernard d’Alion is publicly burned in the town square in Perpignan
1262 - Death of Pierre Roger de Mirepoix
1270 - Death of Alphonse de Poitiers and Jeanne de Toulouse without issue.
County of Toulouse passes to the French crown
Occitania technically ceases to exist
1318 - Bishop-inquisitor Jacques Fournier conducts the first of his hearings at Montaillou His inquisition register will serve as the primary source for many latterday historians such as Rahn and Ladurie
1321 - The last known Languedoc Perfectus, Guillaume Belibaste is burned alive at Villerouge- Termenes. The chain of so-called ‘direct initiation’ is broken
1329 - Last mass burning of Cathars takes place in Carcassonne

As you may have heard today will be the day when the Large Hadron Collider - the most powerful atom-smasher ever built will be test fired and particle physics finally comes of age. The most powerful atom-smasher ever built will produce collisions of protons traveling at nearly the speed of light in the circular tunnel, giving off showers of particles that will provide more clues as to how everything in the universe is made by re-creating the conditions of the "big bang," the explosion that theoretically created the cosmos.

                                           

The collider is designed to push the proton beam close to the speed of light, moving around the 17-mile tunnel at 11,000 times a second at full power. When the LHC is running at full throttle it will imbue each of the particles travelling around its 27 km circumference with approx. 7 teraelectronvolts ( TeV ) which may not be much in everyday terms, barely matching the kinetic energy of a mosquito but it can do extraordinary things to the fabric of the universe. Leading physicists such as Stephen Hawking say the atom-smashing experiment will be absolutely safe although some skeptics fear the proton collisions could unleash microscopic black holes that might literally swallow the entire planet starting with Switzerland as a hors-d'oevre.

If it is 8.41 am Greenwich Mean Time or later and you are still alive and reading this 'blog then it would tend to indicate that Dr.Hawking is correct...

The experiment could reveal more about "dark matter," antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time as well as possibly finding evidence evidence of the hypothetical particle — the Higgs boson — which is sometimes called the "God particle" as it is believed to give mass to all other particles yet if a pair of Russian mathematicians are right any advances in our understanding of 'dark matter' could be overshadowed by a truly extraordinary event. According to Irina Aref'eva and Igor Volovich, the LHC might just turn out to be the 21st century's first academically acknowledged time machine. It is a highly speculative claim, that's for sure but if Aref'eva and Volovich are correct, the LHC's debut at CERN, the European particle physics centre near Geneva in Switzerland, could provide a landmark in history. That's because travelling into the past is only possible - if it is possible at all - as far back as the creation of the first time machine which means 2008 could become Year Zero: a must-see for the discerning chrononaut .

Taref'eva and Volovich are sensible and well respected mathematicians based at the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, so they are not actually suggesting that visitors from the future or indeed the past are imminent. What they are saying is that since causality - the idea that effect must follow cause - is one of the fundamental principles of physics, the notion that it may be tested at the LHC is worth pushing as far as possible. Their work has yet to be recognized by a peer reviewed journal but that hasn't stopped other physicists from taking a keen interest.

                                                    

According to general relativity everything in the universe is played out on a stage that has three dimensions of space and one of time. The strange thing about this 'space-time' is that it gets warped by the mass and energy of the universe's contents. This is what apparently lies at the roots of gravitational attraction. The mass of the Earth, for instance, distorts the surrounding space, causing everything in its vicinity to feel a pull towards it. It's harder to visualize the distortion of time but it does happen to a tiny extent in the presence of any matter or energy. What's more a large enough concentration of mass or energy can distort time so much that it loops back on itself like a rubber sheet rolled up to make a cylinder. These loops are known to physicists as 'closed timelike curves' and they ought at least in theory to allow us to revisit some past moment in time.

                                         

Each particle travelling through the Large Hadron Collider at CERN creates a kind of shock wave in space-time, a gravitational ripple that distorts the space-time around it. When two such waves are heading towards each other the outcome could be spectacular and under the right conditions the colliding gravitational waves are capable of literally ripping a hole in the fabric of the universe – what was initially dubbed a 'wormhole' by Kip Thorne and his colleagues at the California Institute of technology who first got their heads around the math back in 1988. ( Physical review Letters, vol 61, p1446 )

These 'wormholes' make it theoretically possible to travel in time by closing the loop, rather like taking a tunnel under a hill instead of going over it – the same technology by which mankind hopes to some day reach the stars and any of the potentially habitable worlds that surround them – a matter not so much of scientific curiosity as deep rooted genetic imperative, being the only chance our species has of physically surviving beyond the lifespan of our planet. A wormhole to the stars or to another time period or quantum world would open up a pipeline to survival by placing our ailing civilization within striking distance of all the natural resources it needs to replenish the atmosphere and scrape through the existential bottleneck at which our species currently finds itself. Even the generally more circumspect Dr.Hawking has been forced to backtrack on some of his earlier statements and admit to at least the theoretical possibility of time travel ( ie: sending organized bundles of particles through time ) although in his introduction to 'The Science of Star Trek' the good doctor claims you would need a Faraday cage, a superconductor and more energy than you can shake a stick it to make it remotely feasible...

                                        

Few contemporary journalists or researchers are aware that the project, organized by the 20 member nations of the European Organization for Nuclear Research — known by its French initials CERN — has only been made possible thanks to the cornerstone work of French physicist Jules Gabriel Violle ( 1841 - 1923 ) one of the founders of the Institut d'optique théorique et appliquée and the École supérieure d'optique who improved and invented a number of devices for measuring radiation and the behavior of sub-atomic particles. Monsieur Violle patented the first calorimeter, the protype for the large barrel calorimeter used by the CERN project, apparently by decoding the secret symbolic language of gothic art and architecture and literally back-engineering the technology of the ancients, the hermetic alchemical science and sorcery that the industrious physicist dubbed 'the art of light'.

Violle outlined his theories in two books - 'The Mystery Of the Cathedrals' and 'The Houses of the Philosophers' which he authored under the pseudonym 'Fulcanelli' - a play on the names of 'Helios' and 'Vulcan' - the weaponsmith of the Gods. A third and final volume entitled 'Finis Gloria Mundi' concerning the cataclysmic possibilities of reversing the Earth's magnetic fields was later withdrawn from publication after the physicist realized the awesome destructive potential of his work. Although he is supposed to have died of natural causes in 1923 there are some irregularities in his death certificate which was in fact signed by his own son rather than the local coroner and there are those who believe the master alchemist is not only still alive, having achieved immortality through the completion of the 'great work' and effectively assumed the identity of his own offspring but is still at the helm of the shadowy HELIOS CORPORATION responsible for installing the large barrel calorimeter at CERN. ( pictured below along with the installation team )

                   

                              


Jacques Bergier, co-author of the best-selling 'The dawn of Magic' ( 1963 ) claims to have met 'Fulcanelli' in June 1937 while working with the nuclear physisist Andre Hellbronner and as a result of his testimony the American Office for Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, made a search for the elusive alchemist after the end of the war in 1945, anxious to prevent the alleged immortal from defecting to the east.

'Fulcanelli's disciple, the publisher Eugene Canseliet claimed to have last seen his master in 1954, some 31 years after his supposed death. According to Canseliet 'Fulcanelli' was continuing his work from a laboratory outside Madrid that seemingly existed in a fold in space time. The immortal alchemist was not only said to be aging backwards but somewhere along the way had changed gender, adopting the appearance of a young woman Canseliet nonetheless insisted was his ageless master...

Since Canseliet's death in 1982 the myth complex surrounding the mysterious inventor has served as an inspiration for a growing body of novels, comic books and movies including Dario Argento's 'INFERNO' ( 1980 ) Michelle Soavi's 'LA CHIESA' ( 1989 ) and Guillermo del Toro's 'CHRONOS' ( 1993 )

Be he alive or dead however there is no denying the master alchemist's seemingly far fetched theories are about to hit pay dirt !

For those who care BBC Radio 4 ( 92.4-94.6 MHz; 198kHz ) will be carrying live coverage of the test firing from 6.00 - 9.45 am GMT and returning for comment and analysis from 3.45 pm onwards should the world as we know it still be here. The full English language text of Fulcanelli's masterwork is available for free download from: - http://www.everythingisundercontrol.org/nagtloper/

                                                                 

Wherever he may be the Shadow Theatre congratulates Frere Chevalier Heliopolis Jules Louis Gabriel Violle aka: 'Fulcanelli' on the completion of his great work and his unravelling of the mystery of the 'first stone' of creation.

                   


Omnia ab uno et in unum omnia !!!

                       
  
THIS IS RICHARD STANLEY, THE LAST FREE MAN IN WEST LONDON, SIGNING OFF....

                   

1. The homecoming
 
                                                 

I came to a halt at the top of the bluff overlooking the river.
Four and a half miles and twenty five years later. As the crow flies…
I took a deep breath, the sound of music drifting across the treetops, swelling and fading with the ebb and flow of the wind.
'Cry Cry Cry' then 'Folsom Prison Blues.'
I listened, singing along under my breath, trying to work out if I was listening to the real deal or the movie soundtrack. Then I caught the unmistakable opening riff of 'A Man Comes Along' from the American Sessions and that was alright. Shouldering my pack I started down the bluff, grinning like a Jack o'lantern.

"There's a man goin' around takin' names, and He decides who to free and who to blame…"

Iit looked as if all that greenhouse weather we'd been getting recently had been good to the valley too. The bracken seemed greener and fuller, the trees more abundant but then perhaps it had always been that way. It had been so damn long after all…

"Everyone won't be treated all the same. There'll be a golden ladder reachin' down…"

Johny's voice lulled as I took a sharp left off the path, putting the bunkhouse behind me, catching another beat beneath the rhythm. At first I thought it was the pulse of blood in my ears but there was no mistaking it now. Hearing the deep thud of approaching rotor blades, I decided to get a move on.  It was just after nine o 'clock and although the sky was still bright enough there was no way it could be conventional civilian air traffic. Not at that hour…

                       

"Its Alpha and Omega's kingdom come..."

                       

The RAF Sea King had been called in from Chivenor in an operation apparently co-ordinated by the BMR ( Brecon Mountain Rescue ) and the Longtown Mountain Rescue Team in Monmouth. As I scrambled down the bluff it circled lower, hovering like a day-glo dragonfly above the falls. Several members of the BMR were already on the ground, slowly and ritualisticly securing an inert figure sprawled on a ledge above the splashpool to a flimsy aluminium stretcher. At first I thought they'd come for Grant but then I noticed him standing beside Mr. Horn on the flat rock we used as a stage area, still apparently in one piece, poncho fluttering in the downdraft.

                        

Ever since getting out of the laughing academy Grant has been pouring most of his energy into a series of increasingly ambitious sculptures, his most recent being a take on the 'White Lady' herself, a larger than life Goddess who dominates the cavernous studio space in Bermondsey where she took shape, finally reaching something like completion just before the solstice. Mr. Horn, habitually underemployed, had been passing the time by shooting a haphazard record of her gestation and had somehow managed to get a signal on his mobile just long enough to reach me on the evening of July the 17th to announce he had decided to take Grant back to the valley in order to get some additional footage to open out the short. This had seemed like a pretty bad idea to me, for any number of reasons. First of all it was raining...

As it happens Grant had gotten into trouble almost at once. Thanks to years of confusion and deliberate obfustication on my behalf neither one quite knew the route and Grant had had ended up slipping during an ill advised attempt to cross the Hepste via a narrow path behind the cataract, falling on his own stills camera in the process and bearing out the notion that it was somehow bad luck to bring cameras into the Zone, let alone Grant or worst of all a combination of the two. The 'chopper however was for some other pilgrim who hadn't gotten off quite so lightly although quite how they had managed to fall off a rock that flat remained a mystery to me.

Swinging my legs into the abyss I sought purchase with the pointy toes of my Durango originals, finding the face subtly changed in my absence but still familiar enough to make the downward climb a doddle. It's the quickest way to reach the valley floor albeit not one for the faint hearted. I descended slowly, working my way crabwise from one handhold to another, dimly hearing the Sea King's engines changing pitch as the automatic winch took up the slack . Just then the dude with the clipboard supervising the BMR guys on the ground glanced up and caught sight of Grant and Mr. Horn gazing quietly down from the rock.  Gesturing franticly at his head he began to shout something, words lost in the roar of the rotors.
"What ?"
"I think he's said something about our hats…"
"What ?!!?"
"HATS !!! I THINK HE WANTS US TO TAKE 'EM OFF !"
"WHAT ?"
"HATS !!! OFF !!!"
The BMR guy nodded fiercely and Mr. Horn complied, figuring the patient must have died and the gesture was required as a sign of respect whereas Grant insisted he'd heard the dude hollerin' somethin' about it being an RAF helicopter and assumed he was supposed to salute the flag on the tail fin. The bullet headed Mountain Rescuer stared , eyebrow twitching for a moment as if trying to figure out whether they were making fun of him or not.  . Then deciding to let it go he hurried away , disappearing into the cauldron of spray whipped up by the rotors.
"The hell was that about ?"
Mr. Horn grunted,  noticing me behind him."I think I've just figured out how Tarkovsky did that shot in 'Mirror'…you know, the one with the gust of wind that comes out of nowhere…" He nodded towards the retreating 'chopper.
"It's really loud…"
"What ?"
"LOUD ! I mean it comes at the end of a dialogue scene…"
"So ?"
The Sea King rounded a curve in the ravine, climbing from sight, engines fading into thunder of the falls.
"I mean you know how Tarkovsky hated ADR…"
"Yeah. And Werner Herzog didn't use a model boat either but I'd say its definitely worth checking out…" He watched as the turbulence in the treetops subsided. Then he put his hat back on. " I mean how would you know if that scene's in synch or not ? You don't even speak Russian.."
I nodded, turning to Grant. "How 'bout you ? You got an opinion on any of this ?"
"I think I've broken my ribs…"
"You don't know for sure ?"
"I fell on my camera…"
"Is the camera okay ?"
"Yeah.It's got a really hard lens" He grimaced, rubbing ruefully at his chest.
" What are the symptoms ? Have you gotten a second opinion ?"
"Well, there's no real bruising but it hurts like fuck."
"Could be some sort of quantum thing. If there's no bruising and no-one has actually observed your ribs to be broken then it could still go either way. I mean you could be dying…but right now the chances are equally likely that there's nothing wrong with you at all…"
Grant thought this through, looking a little nonplussed . In fact he still seemed confused by the fact I was standing there to begin with.
"Have a bicky." I tossed him the packet of hobnobs.
"Got anything else in that bag ?" Mr.Horn orbited closer.
"Only essentials…" I loosened the straps to come up with a tiny horned mannequin: - "I got Moag. A copy of the 'Dunwich Horror' and a bag of nightlights."
"Any more food ?"
"Just the biscuits. Had to keep it light to make time.." I cast about myself for a dry place to put the mannequin, eyes lighting on a strange metal contraption fastened to a length of cable resting beside the tent. "What is that ? Some kind of torture implement ?"
"It's a camera mount."
 
                               

"Looks more like a 21st century solution to witch pricking. Still it makes a groovy l'il chair for Moag…" I perched the mannequin on the camera mount which did indeed resemble a tiny throne. "Get anything good with it ?"
Mr.Horn grumbled something about the light, the vicissitudes of global warming and the lousy state of the nation in general. To be honest the mount's design seemed a li'l cumbersome and it occurred to me he might've been better off with some sort of rectangular arrangement with a cable running through casters on the upper bar and the camera clipped to the lower one instead but now seemed scarcely the time for it. Crouching beside the soggy woodpile I tried to gather the drier pieces of tinder into a volatile configuration.
"I mean it seemed sunnier in the old days.. or are we just getting old ?"
"It was sunny enough in France. You should've been there…"
" Well this place is turning into a fuckin' swamp. This country's finished…"
"Sounds like I got here just in time." I spun the flint of my lighter, wishing there was more kindling.
"In time for what ?"
"It's getting' dark. You know what this place is like when it gets dark…"
The tinder produced a streamer of grey smoke. I leaned closer to blow on it but it had already gone out.
"Have you got any newspaper ?"
He shook his head. "What was that book again ?"
"Hand's off. that's'The Dunwich Horror' – recommended reading…" I worked the flint. This time the tiny flame found purchase and I fed it one twig at a time. " It's a cheap edition so it doesn't matter if it gets a li'l clammy. Help give the text some texture…"
"I'll get the coffee going," Mr Horn started into the gloom, washing out the billy and refilling it from the stream. I stayed with the fire, feeding in the larger sticks, willing it to take hold. When I looked up I saw Grant silently leafing through the Lovecraft anthology, a chocolate biscuit in one hand.
"You ever read that ?"
"I've got it..."
"Back home ? Really ?"
"No. With me." He reached into his knapsack, coming up with an almost identical paperback. "I was planning on reading it down here…"
"Damn ! That take the fuckin' biscuit !"
"What ?" Mr.Horn crouched, propping the billy over the sorry excuse for a fire.
"We've got two copies of the same goddam book ! No food, no fire, no decent drugs but two copies of 'The Dunwich Horror' ! It's gotta be some sort of sign !"
"Yeah…probably not a good one…"
I paused, quite certain I heard something.

And there it was again...
A musical tinkle of laughter.

"What ?"
"Sounded like a chick. Bunch of chicks even …"
Mr.Horn drew himself up to his full height, scanning the darkness. " Shame no-one thought to bring a flashlight…"
" A flashlight's the last thing you need. Probably have the opposite effect. I mean that's where we always went wrong efore. With the 'Blue Water' shoot, for instance…"
I banked up the larger logs, hoping to dry out enough wood to keep us in business.
"So where does Lovecraft fit in to all this ?"
" Lovecraft rated Machen very highly indeed.'Dunwich Horror' takes off on the premise of 'The Great God Pan' and incorporates elements from Machen's mythos. I was just goin' on instinct…" Tearing open the polythene bag I began to stuff my pockets with fistfuls of nightlights. " We've still got an hour or so before moonrise. I suggest you familiarize yourselves with the material…" I thrust the book into his hands before starting towards the falls, Behind us a great silvery glow was slowly spreading across the eastern rim of the valley. Somewhere beyond the hills the moon was already working her magic.
"Damn…but I've missed this place…"

         

I got as close as I could to the cataract without actually getting my boots wet. Then hunkering down I dipped my hands into the river, splashing clear cold water over my face and hair, letting its current calm me, half hearing Grant's voice coming from the ring of firelight, faltering as he struggled to make out the typeface.

"Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras – dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies – may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition – but they were there before ! They are transcripts, types – the archetypes are in us, and eternal…"

Kneeling at the very edge of the void I began to kindle the footlights, slipping the candles into the natural depressions in the limestone that shielded them from the wind, a flickering semi-circle widening slowly behind me. I don't know where the notion of the nightlights had come from, maybe that line in Jim Morrisson's 'American Prayer' about "looking for death at the end of a candle." All I know is that it evolved out of one of the first trips to the valley and being a good idea stuck. I worked my way backwards, sometimes on my knees, sometimes on all fours, setting candles adrift in the rock pools that dotted the undulating limestone surface and suspending others in overhanging trees, trying to recall those long forgotten 'landing protocols'.

                              

"How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all ? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury ? O, least of all ! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body – or without body, they would have been the same. That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual – that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy – are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence…"

                            

I started off trying to lay out a pentagram but it mutated along the way into something more like that weird graven octagon we'd found last month near the summit of Mount Bugarach. The end result was pleasing enough, the leaping wicks setting off a dozen other dancing shadows and reflections, a labyrinth of light that was an elegant death trap, serving to blind the unwary to the abysses and precipitous torrents that coursed between the beacons. Once misstep in that maze and you'd be lost forever...

I stood gazing out over the footlights, trying to order my thoughts. At first I thought Grant had fallen silent but then I heard a familiar litany of glottal intonations, their jumbled consonants almost lost in the surge of the falls.

"Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah-e'yayayayaaaa…ngh'aaaaa…Y'bthnk…h'ehye-n'grkdl'lh…"
I smiled, realizing he was only attempting the italicized phrases that appeared in bolder print. Inclining my head I started back towards the fire, picking my way from one pool of light to another. There was a trick to crossing the stage floor just like there was always a trick to everything here. It entailed keeping your eyes downcast so as to block the direct glare of the flames with the brim of your hat but heaven help the fool who tried to set foot on that floor without appropriate headgear.

"Ygnaiii… Yog-Sothoth…"

The fire had subsided to a ring of embers that emitted so little light it took a beat to make out Mr.Horn's outline huddled in the deepening gloom.
"Where's Grant ?"
" He crashed. 'Bout half an hour ago.." He gestured towards the tent. " Said something about his chest hurting."
"I thought he was reading…I heard his voice…"
"He was. Then it got too dark to know exactly what he was reading so he stopped."
"Probably for the best…" The candle light slanted oddly through the smoke and I narrowed my eyes, trying to work out if I could see something moving in the blackness beyond. "We don't want any repeat performances…"
" No reruns. Not here…" Mr.Horn's voice tailed off as he fumbled for his tobacco pouch:- "But I was hoping to see some original material …"
I nodded, noticing the first faint glimmer of moonlight in the trees at the top of the ridge. "Time we took our seats then, wouldn't you say ? "

                     

2. Wood Green Empire

                      

Night and day are not so much different countries as different worlds, never more so than in the valley. Terrain crossed in minutes that afternoon now presented almost insurpassable obstacles. Great jagged slabs of dripping limestone reared up out of nowhere and black chasms yawned momentarily at our feet as we crawled, slid and clambered over that mossy jumble of cyclopean rocks, working our way slowly higher, towards the top of the ridge, towards the moon and whatever waited there.

I glanced up to see Mr.Horns outline stooped above me like a figure from a particularly grim faerytale , pockets stuffed with nightlights, kindling them as he went. His features, lit from below, seemed oddly transformed, grown stony and troll-like as the hill's alleged inhabitants. What the hell were we doing here, I asked myself ? Grown men with lives and families scrambling over the rocks in the dark like children ? And looking for what ? It may have been one thing when we were still teenagers under the influence of whatever psychedelic had been the order of the day but surely we knew better by now ? What in did we expect to find in this place except damp socks, wet scree and slugs. And more slugs. Bigger and fatter than I'd seen 'em before, swollen and emboldened by the unseasonal damp, etching slimy silver trails across the rain slick rocks as they inched blindly from the threatening light.

The going grew easier as I neared the top of the rise. The rocks really did resemble steps even though they were in all likelihood natural formations and in the moonlight I glimpsed the vague outlines of time worn oghams. At closer inspection some of those markings revealed themselves as little more than lichen and oddly geometric slug tracings but others were less readily defined.

The logs I had banked up must have finally dried out enough for the fire to take hold, a brightening tongue of plasma rising from the forest floor, licking at the fluid night, giving the darkness form. I stopped, disorientated by the abrupt change in perspective, staring out over a kingdom of shadows, the guttering candles in our wake gleaming like campfires on the shores of another world.
"Damn.." I shook my head, trying to get my bearings. "This place…"
Then the words caught and I took a sharp breath. There was something else moving down there, outlined for an instant by the firelight, something that didn't make the blindest bit of sense. The slopes below teemed with furtive movement yet that motion seemed as inherently inhuman as a brood of monitor lizards encircling their prey or a nest of maggots silently battening on carrion. Only they weren't maggots. They were what Anton saw back in '85 and what Grant ran into the night he lost the plot.

I sat down, giggling helplessly.
Front row center. Best goddam seat in the house.

I don't know how long I sat staring down into the well of the night, back where it all began, but it was every bit as wild and unlikely as it had ever been in the years gone by, on drugs or otherwise. After a while I managed to stop giggling long enough to skin up.

Everywhere the shadows teemed with incalculable, buzzing motion. Every rock, branch and hollow seemed to serve as only another perch, another nest, another bower from which flitting, insect eyes followed my slow mammalian movements with an inquisitive yet impartial sentience. Their whirring, hopping forms made no real effort to flee my direct gaze as they might have done in the past, as by all account they were supposed to do but this time however I was not alone. This time I had at my beck and call a professional video camera with night viewing capabilities ! But where was Mr.Horn ?

"Immo ?"

Could he see this ? It was so busy down there, so blatant, so obvious he had to be able to see it too but where in hell was he ? If we could get even a moment of this on tape…

"Hey !"

He had been only a few feet ahead while we were climbing and I assumed he was just behind me watching from the shadows. A light flickered from the crest of the hill and I started towards it.

"Mr.Horn ?"

But it wasn't a nightlight and it wasn't Mr. Horn..

"Damn ! That's out of order…"

A silvery luminescence was rising from a semi-circle of lichen encrusted stones at the top of the ridge. I took a half step closer, trying to convince myself it was reflected moonlight but how could such a thing be possible ? It seemed to be streaming upwards, from out of the earth.

                 

Rim lit by that coruscating glow the stones looked almost like an altar… or a door ? I rubbed my eyes but the illusion persisted. Not only that but the light was getting brighter with every step I took.

"That's so out of order…"

Not knowing what else to do I took off my hat, cautiously raising one hand in a sign of greeting and at that moment something within the stones seemed to silently pop, sending up a burst of pale sparks and incandescent vapour.

"That's impossible…"

But the beauty of it was it didn't care if it was possible or not. It was happening anyway.

"Mr. Horn ! GODAMMIT …"

My rational mind kicked in, telling me Mr.Horn must have brought down some flares or fireworks and was hiding somewhere even now, trying not to laugh, getting a kick out of scaring the bejesus out of me. Sensing a flurry of renewed activity on the valley floor I turned to see him still standing beside the campfire, feeding another log onto the coals. I blinked, trying to figure out how he could have gotten all the way down to the river so quickly ? Had I somehow skipped a beat while I was sitting in that ancient armchair, lost time being one of the classic hallmarks of this sort of malarchy ? Had Mr.Horn really missed the whole show, gotten bored or simply buggered off ? Or had he ever really been there to begin with ? Had I only imagined he'd been climbing beside me earlier ? Admittedly he'd been kind of taciturn during the ascent but he was the silent type and had seemed real enough to pass muster at the time. And where in hell was he getting that firewood from ? Half an hour ago there was hardly enough dry tinder to heat a decent cup of water. Now the flames were licking high enough to all but kindle the overhanging branches, sending great shards of jagged orange light leaping out across the flat rock at the top of the falls. Judging by the colour of the sparks and the intensity of the conflagration he had to be using some form of accelerant which made a kind of sense but even if he'd been messing with chemicals again or had bought up a jobload of old fireworks how could he possibly be letting them off above and below me at the same time ? Granted, a man of his ingenuity might have been able to figure out some sort of routine but the dank weather mitigated against the idea of running current off a concealed car battery and I didn't think he had the funding to go fully remote. Besides, getting the sort of basic ingredients you need to cook those pyro's nowadays has gotten hard. Even simple accelerants such as potassium nitrate are no longer available over the counter in the UK and have to be smuggled piecemeal from the continent. But why would anyone, even someone like Mr.Horn, bother ? Just to pull off a lame fuckin' stunt like this ? Unless it wasn't a stunt. Unless whatever the hell it was was actually happening…

I glanced back at the light streaming up out of the rocks behind me.
Maybe it was a door after all ?

"Ahhh for fucksake …"

There was a throb of distant music and I caught the faint yet unmistakable peal of child-like laughter. Then the clouds parted high above and for the first and only time that night I saw the face of the swollen July moon blazing crazily down at me.

                        

What kind of music was that anyhow ?
And were those drums at all ?
Or rotors ?

I turned, raising one hand to the talisman at my throat, seeing flashlights weaving on the valley floor. The hell were they doing here ? I thought the others knew better than to bring electric light into this place ?

I felt a stab of indignation, crouching and averting my eyes as the probing beams raked past, too many beams to be able to put down to Grant or Mr.Horn. Had someone seen those lights we'd laid out earlier and come to investigate or worse still alerted the goddam BMR ? The thud of engines was louder now or was it just my breath ? Then I caught the flash of what looked like mountain bikes through the trees and heard the crackle of a two way radio. It seemed absurd to kick up this kind of fuss over something so trivial but this was the 21st century after all where anything was possible. Again there came that childish laughter followed by a string of raucous cries and creeping towards the edge of the bluff I tried to make some sort of sense out of what I saw. Those hooded, stunted figures that swarmed about our campfire sure as hell didn't look like they belonged to the BMR unless they'd gone plainclothes and taken to wearing baseball caps and baggy tracksuits for the evening. They looked more like children or young teenagers but whoever they were they were seriously angry about something, kicking vehemently at the fire, strewing sparking embers everywhere. I heard a metallic clang followed by a guffaw of ribald amusement as someone used Mr.Horn's billy for a football and for a moment I wondered what had happened to Horn himself and whether he was still down their in their midst or had fled to safety in the darkness ? He had seemed to be there a moment earlier. And what could possibly have pissed those kids off quite so badly ? Were they drunk ? On drugs ? Just naturally insane ? Could those BMR guys really be crazy enough to return under the cover of darkness to avenge some imagined insult or had the Welsh equivalent of the Chainsaw family moved in to the 'hood in our absence and were even now making sport with whatever campers they could find ? They were certainly making merry with our belongings. I suppose they weren't worth a damn anyhow, not in material terms but while I despaired of my poor Moag mannequin and those scattered books there was worse mischief in the offing..

I saw the tent shredded apart and a pale, kicking figure disgorged like a grub from within. I couldn't tell if it were Grant or not but he was going to end up with more than a few cracked ribs judging by the way those kids were laying into him. His cries grew high and feminine as they grew intermittent but no matter who it was down there, noone deserved that treatment. At first I watched without a word as if a hand were holding my mouth. I had sat out one murder that day but this was too much. By half...

Slipping the SS dagger from my boot I found voice. Drawing myself to my full height I shrieked down at them but the kids only jeered and shrieked right back, making no effort this time to hide their faces. Then with a yell of laughter they scattered into the bracken, flashlights weaving between the trunks as I started at them but there were more than just a few feet of very rough ground between us and no ready way of closing it.

I slid to a halt on the brink of the cliff, visual purple shot to shit by those beams.
I needed to be pretty goddam limber to pull a routine like this, more limber than I felt just now. Kindling a nightlight I tried to work my way back down that wet jumble of boulders at least a li'l more slowly but the breeze coming up off the river fought the flame every inch of the way, forcing me to shield and nurture the spark with the brim of my hat whilst simultaneously blocking the direct flare of its wick from my eyes so that I might have some chance of not breaking an ankle which forced me in turn to keep my knife firmly in my boot where it probably belonged. Only my boots kept skidding and the only way to go was down. Worst of all the wind kept loughing and changing tack, requiring me to keep my hat brim moving and the rest of my body moving with it, the sputtering wick casting a perfect pool of gliding light across the underside of the overarching canopy of leaves in the midst of which I saw my own madly dancing shadow effortlessly contained. It was all so out of order I began to giggle and then the giggling got out of hand and I couldn't stop. I skidded, caught myself and slipped again, my shadow leaping from rock to rock, down and down into the very maw of the ravine.

I was losing altitude fast and doing alright but I sure wouldn't want to try doing this at home. But maybe this was my home ? I mean if any place had a right to kill me this was it. This one had my name on it from the top. Mayhap my heart belonged in Montsegur but this obscure corner of the Welsh backwoods had a most reasonable prior claim on my corpse. It wanted me to stay and to some extent I wanted to belong. Its chasms called me to rest my sleepy head and bury my bones, to allow its bugs and slugs and weevils to eat me, its grubs to fatten on my marrow and make me part of 'em, part of this place, part of the hill, forever and ever, world without end. Or worm without end. Whichever first. Leg before wicket. Amen.

God knows what any of it really looked like from the outside but then I don't believe in God. Not in that sense.
I do however believe in Cuban heels.

3. Hollow... Loosen…

I hit the ground laughing. It was one of the stupidest fuckin' things I'd ever done but I reached the bottom of the gorge in record time, candle clenched in my fist still miraculously ablaze, body upright, bones unbroken. Granted I was a li'l off course. The wind was rising steadily and there was more rain behind it, the other candles winking out one by one causing me to lose my bearings but then I caught sight of the campfire a hundred yards to my right and waded towards it, not enitirely sure if I was actually on the bank or floundering in the shallows. When you're that damp and crazy to begin with it can be hard to tell. After what happened back in Montsegur I'd learned to be cautious when it came to getting too close to the goddam water. Certainly that campsite seemed dark as a grave. Oddly peaceful too after the unholy chaos I'd witnessed earlier. But where were those goddam kids anyhow ? I crouched... and froze.

I mean I'd seen some shit that night but this went the extra mile…

As I brought up my knife hand I noticed what looked like long emerald blades of fine green grass trailing from my bare forearm as if growing out of it.
"The fuck… '
I brushed at the clinging blades and for a queasy moment they actually resisted.
"…are you doing ?!!?"
My hand pulled free, the gossamer threads curling away. I caught my breath, half convinced it had been a trick of the light after all. Then as I lowered my hand again those strands of  grass coiled right back out of nowhere,  seeking purchase.
"I'll be…"
 It was alive and trying to hold onto me in the only way it knew.
"Damned…"
I was so preoccupied by this unsettling discovery I scarely saw the man shaped outline that loomed in my path. Then it cleared it's throat and I realized I was no longer alone in that well of shadows.
"Hey !"
Mr. Horn stared silently back for the longest moment, each of us trying to work out whether the other was really human.
"Okay ?" He ventured.
"Goddam grass was tryin' to grow into me…"
He nodded , doing his best to take this on board.
"Where in hell were you anyhow ?"
He shuffled uneasily from one foot to another, trying to piece together the sequence of events: " I thought you were just behind me on the way up. Then I saw the lights in the valley and figured you must have gone back down to the campfire…"
"You mean you were up there all along ?" I nodded dazedly towards the ridge and that eerie effulgence that radiated upwards from its crest. The storm was closing fast now and the moon was only a distant, fleeting memory lost behind an inky wall of cloud.. "But I saw you… or I saw someone like you I guess… stoking up the fire…doin' a really good job too..just before those fuckin' kids turned up…"
" I just got here now. It was harder going down. Than up, I mean…"
" But the kids ! You must have seen 'em, right ? Those li'l fuckers with the flashlights ? They were all over this place… like a plague…" I noticed my pack still resting beside the neatly banked firewood that had seemingly never caught fire to begin with. I had seen blood running in streams in that non-existent light as those ugly, stunted children brayed with laughter but could find no trace of it now on the moist green grass. The campsite seemed a picture of tranquillity where only the liveliest awfulness had reigned before.
"I thought that was you running about with the flashlights…"
" I don't have a flashlight !"
" I know. It did seem out of character. Like there was more than one of you down here to begin with…"
I giggled, noticing Moag watching quietly from his crazy metal throne. I figured he'd come through okay. His credit was good in this place. Besides he's an inanimate object which gives him a certain edge; - " and Grant ?"

" He crashed. Three…I dunno… maybe four hours ago now" Mr Horn gestured towards the tent. " Said something about his chest hurting."
I followed his eyeline. The tent was still there and I had every reason to assume Grant was still inside. Either dead or asleep. It didn't seem to matter any more.
" Didn't you see any of it ? The kids ? The helicopter ? The fuckin' lights…"
"The helicopter was real. This afternoon. I managed to get some of that on camera. Not much. But some…"
" No. Just now, I mean… didn't you hear it ?"
He shook his head.
"Damn. I must be really goin' crazy. Thought it was all goin' to hell down here. That my number was up for sure…"
Mr. Horn thought it slowly through: -"I did see something strange though. On my way back down to the camp…something I don't understand. Even though I'm not on drugs…I mean I'm not tripping or anything…"
"I know. "
"But I saw what looked like these two mechanical arms, digging their way out of the ground with these… kind of jointed, machine fingers…moving…as if they were choosing or selecting something…" He demonstrated with his own hands, thrusting them stiffly out as if they were Waldo arms: -"then moving again as if making another selection…like shuffling cards…"
"Weird."
" You didn't see anything like that, right ?"
I shook my head. " But I'd like to know where you thought you saw 'em…"
There was only one remaining nightlight left now about halfway up the valley wall and Mr. Horn cast about himself in the deepening gloom, eventually indicating an area at the base of the scree. "Seemed so clear for a while… digging … choosing … choosing again…"
"That's the exact spot where Carl digs his way out of the grave at the end of the 'Blue Water' video. Back when he still had that weird steel glove like Freddy Kruger… clawin' his way back up from hell.." I knelt, gingerly touching the moist earth, half expecting to still find it warm. "Probably that same embryonic sequence that inspired a lot of the 'Hardware' imagery now you mention it…"
Mr.Horn shivered but whether it was from the cold or the damp or the thought of what he had seen I couldn't tell. "This fucking place…"
"I know." I stood, wiping my hands on my jeans;- "It wanted to hold on to me. Hold on to all of us. And those children…whatever the hell they were… I didn't make that up. They were real too. I mean, it never actually happened but on some level you know it fuckin' happened… still happenin'…Look !" I glanced up, stabbing my finger at the shadowy figures that watched even now from the slope above.
"What the…"
"There ! Do you see 'em ?!?"
He nodded, narrowing his eyes, trying to focus on the pale, oddly childlike forms caught for an instant in the guttering halo of the failing candle, the last honest to God point of light for seven miles or more as the crow flies.. The wind blew stronger causing the flame to leap momentarily higher, those hunched figues gaining resolution, crowding closer.
Then the wind loughed and their outlines came apart, becoming something meaningless, disintegrating into shadows, into billowing foliage, into nothing.
"It's like…grass…blowing in the wind…but…"
"Yeah ? Look again !" The taper flickered, brightening for an instant, briefly illuminating the barren scree. "There's no fuckin' grass there ! Not now…look… nothin' but bare fuckin' rock !"
Mr. Horn blinked. But it was true.
Then the night wind rallied, the shadows changing tack and those trembling, swathing strands curled back into existence, becoming or trying to become people again.
"What is that ?"
" You tell me ! Don't suppose you've got a flashlight by any chance ?"
Mr. Horn shook his head, staring ashen faced as the watchers wove themselves together, one emerald strand coiling about another, tightening and thickening before our eyes.
"Why does no-one around here ever have a flashlight when we fuckin' need one ?"
He shrugged; - "I dunno… what we're looking at… what in hell that is…"
"I don't think it knows either. One moment its grass, then children, then whatever the hell it wants to be. It was trying to grow into me but I think I caught it just in time, trying to get under my skin or into my veins somehow. Like somethin' out of 'Invasion of the fuckin' Body Snatchers'…" I raised my hands, wishing it were bright enough to be absolutely sure. " Probably runnin' this whole goddam country by now. Maybe that's why everything's so fucked up…" I brought the palms of my hands together as if in prayer, just to make certain they were still warm, to make sure I was still human after all, my gaze returning to that weird, coruscating light that flickered silently upwards from beneath the spine of the hill. "And while we're at do you feel like venturing an opinion on where that light's coming from ? Can't be reflected moonlight 'cause the moon's long gone. At first I thought you were lettin' off flares or pyro pots up there. But you weren't, were you ?"
He shook his head again, getting the drift: "As a matter of fact I had a bunch of stuff on order but it didn't turn up in time. . It hard to get the right ingredients these days…"
"So, Mr. Lighting cameraman, tell me, where's the fuckin' light source ?"
" Looks like its coming up somehow… out of the hill…"
"Out of the earth… Pity we couldn't get so much as a single soddin' frame on tape, wouldn't you say ?"
"It's too dark. Not enough light to even register…"
"Not now." The candle sizzled ominously as if the light were being sucked out of the air the outlines of the watchers gaining focus with every breath, seemingly more solid than ourselves now.
"Shit ! What are those things ?"
"Djinn ? Spirits of dust and fire ? Elementals ? Nature spirits ? At least they've probably got more in common with wood lice than with you or me. Or Tinkerbelle for that matter…"
"And if you had gotten one on tape ? What then ?"
"I would've posted it on YouTube ! At least folk wouldn't have had to take our word for it then. They could've seen for themselves…"
"They'd just think you were using some sort of weird ass animation package…"
"I know.But it would've been a start. You believe in faeries right ?"
Mr. Horn pursed his lips. The pale figures were all around us now, gliding silently across the scree, the faltering taper no longer enough to keep them at bay.
"Well, you'd better. 'Cause you're lookin at 'em !"
All that remained of the old, warm world, all that we knew or understood was confined to that rapidly tightening circle of light. Outside the circle lay everything that was strange and frightening and the darkness seemed to reach higher and higher and further away to the end of the world itself.

" Go on…"

The tiny tongue of plasma clung precariously to existence for a moment longer.
Then it sputtered and went out .

"Make a wish !"

There was musical tinkle of child like laughter.

                                      

4. Their ways...

" All through July I came upon traces of evil rumours affecting this most gracious corner of the earth. Of course no first hand evidence was available. There was never any first hand evidence in these cases. But A knew B who had heard from C that her second cousin's little girl had been set upon and beaten by a pack of Welsh savages…Yet all the while the story grew more more monstrous and incredible: visitor's children had not only been beaten, they had been tortured; a little boy had been found impaled on a stake in a lonely field near Manavon; another child had been lured to destruction over the cliffs at Castell Coch… I was telling my landlord about these beastly children and wondering who they could be when he broke into Welsh, something like "the battle that is for age unto ages; and the People take delight in it.""
– Arthur Machen 'Out of the Earth'

                                            

"Morning ?"

Grant emerged cautiously from the tent, to see me still sitting beside the cold ashes, a book in my lap.
"Been up all night ?"
I nodded.
" Reading mostly. Got through 'Dunwich Horror' and then went back to Machen…"
" Quiet one, then ?".
"Quiet enough."
"I thought I heard voices…" He staggered down to the riverbank, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, a little surprised to find the billy lying so far away from the fire. " You haven't seen anyone else up here ?"
"No-one you'd want to meet." I turned the page, picking up where I had left off.

"…I recollected: a matter of our little boy straying away more than once, and getting lost among the sand dunes and coming back screaming, evidently frightened horribly, and babbling about 'funny children'. We took no notice; did not trouble, I think, to look whether there were any children wandering about the dunes or not. We are accustomed to his small imaginations…"

Grant rubbed at his teeth with one finger and then stood once more, gazing out at the brightening skyline.The clouds swirling over the treetops were starting to break up, showing the first patches of blue.

                                 


"Hence the explanation of what puzzled you at first; the rumours, how did they arise ?

They arose from nursery gossip, from scraps and odds and ends of half-articulate children's talk of horrors that they didn't understand, of words that shamed their nurses and their mother. These little people of the earth rise up and rejoice in these times of ours. For they are glad, as the Welshman said, when they know that men follow in their ways…"

                            

For a moment there was only silence and the soughing of the wind in the trees.
"You got the time on you ?"
"Probably time we woke up Mr.Horn and struck camp…"  I gathered my leather jacket, slipping the paperback horror anthology into its pocket beside the bag of husked out nightlights I'd retrieved earlier.
"Just hold on…Hold on one minute…"
"What ?"
"There's something on your jacket…"
"What sort of something ?" I glanced down at myself, thinking for a moment he meant the adhesive back stage pass still clinging to my sleeve.
" I dunno. I thought maybe it belonged to you. You want me to get it off ?"
" I suppose you'd better. It might be poisonous…"
I stood still for a moment as he dusted at my lapel. "Damn…its stubborn."
"Don't hurt it."
"The hell is that thing ?"

We stared down at the dislodged critter as it wriggled in the dirt. It looked a bit like a cross between a woodlouse and a scorpion only they don't have scorpions in Wales. It was pale white and had more eyes and legs than I could get an easy fix on. Then it righted itself and vanished into the rocks.

"Whatever it was sure seemed to like you. Didn't want to let go…"
"Nice to be wanted, I guess. I mean I 'd love to stick around and all but we're on a schedule here." I checked my watch. It was exactly 24 hours since I'd placed that call to Rob and if I was going to get those tapes up to Hitchin' then it was high time we hauled ass and patched ourselves back into the mixing board of human experience. Four and a half miles to the road.

Downhill all the way…

                                  

Epitaph

At the mouth of the valley, where the Melte River flows out into the Vale of Neath stands the remains of an abandonned Nissan hut, decorated with images of various terrifying struggles between man and fish. The shed once housed an organization known as 'Nomad's Deep Sea Angling Club'...


            

Not only is it a considerable distance from anything that could be remotely described as the sea but stands perhaps as an obscure metatextual reminder of those oddly persistent links between the 'walkin' man' and the 'one that got away'.

                  

A few hundred yards beyond the hut is a tiny well tended churchyard containing the last resting place of Richard Stanley.

                  

The presence of several sons of the Rowlands clan in the neighbouring plots hints provide a clue to the broader narrative. My celebrated ancestor Sir Henry Morton Stanley was born out of wedlock in Denbigh, Wales in 1841 where he was chistened John Rowlands after his presumed father. His mother Elizabeth Parry surrendered him to the not so tender loving care of Saint Asaph's workhouse from whence he fled as a young teenager, working his way to the States as a cabin boy and a bare knuckle boxer before enlisting in the American Civil War on the side of confideracy. He survived Shiloh and a Yankee internment camp before switching sides, desserting and returning to the old country to seek out his birth mother who promptly rejected him all over again. Vowing to have nothing more to do with Wales he cobbled together the pseudonym Henry Morton Stanley from the names of his first employers and returned to America to re-enlist.

Several members of the family that had rejected him as a child later adopted the nomme de plume to emphasize their blood ties with the famous explorer and despite the fact that the very mention of his birth place was an anathema to the great man his name proved to be a popular one back in the 'hood . When directly asked by Francis Galton in front of a crowd of three thousand people at Brighton on 18 august 1872 to confirm whether or not he was really a Welshman Stanley somehow managed to slide around the issue with a typically long winded answer concerning the multitude of ethnicities making up the modern 'British Empire'…

                  

It was a peaceful enough corner of the Empire and I might have stopped off to skin up on my own grave if I hadn't been running against the clock but noticing how long our shadows had become I thought it best to shake a leg.

Jenna Parry, the 17th victim of the Bridgend suicide 'cluster,' who had been found hanged in the woods last febuary was a direct descendant of Elizabeth Parry and hence a not so distant blood relative. As for the 'Rees' part - well, my current flatmate's ex-husband is named 'Rees' but that's probably just a meaningless coincidence....

                                             

This is Richard Stanley, the last free man in River City, signing off...

Owing to the limitations of the MySpace medium I have been forced to post this dispatch in two installments. I apologize in advance to those of you whose p.c's force you to scroll from left to right in order to follow the text but sadly I have yet found a way of licking this problem. For those of you who'd prefer to avoid the eyestrain a cleaned up version of the earlier postings are available at: -
www.everythingisundercontrol.org/nagtloper/

This dispatch was further delayed by the death of my uncle David Elton-Miller
who passed peacefully at home on the night of the full moon - July 18 2008.
Dave was a former Special Air Services officer who saw action in Kenya during the Mau-Mau and innovated the use of the boot knife and ankle holster as part of the standard issue SAS kit after finding himself trapped in a tree by his parachute straps and being unable to reach the rifle stowed in his pack when enemy soldiers passed directly beneath him. After being demobbed he settled in Devonshire where he ran a pottery works in Lustly Cleave for several years and became an acknowledged expert in the local iron age remains and faery lore.

Dave's maxim and most celebrated utterance was: - " The criteria of intelligence is the adaptability to circumstantial environment.". He was the only uncle I had and I shall miss him dearly - R.S. Junly 25 2008



CEREMONIES

"I am going to write here many of the old secrets and some new ones; but there are some I shall not put down at all . I must not write down the real names of the days and months which I found out a year ago, nor the way to make the Akklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great beautiful Circles, nor the Mao Games, nor the way to do them, for peculiar reasons...Then there are the Ceremonies, which are all of them important, but some are more delightful than others – there are the White ceremonies, and the Green ceremonies and the Scarlet ceremonies. The Scarlet Ceremonies are the best, but there is only one place where they can be performed properly, though there is a very nice imitation which I have seen done in other places. Besides these, I have the dances, and the Comedy, and I have done the Comedy sometimes when the others were looking, and they didn't understand anything about it. I was very little when I first knew about these things…"
Arthur Machen – 'The White People'

1. Breathing in

At the time of the murder I was halfway through a telephone conversation with Rob at 'Transcend Media', trying to work out a mutually acceptable time to drop off the tapes from the Shepherd's Bush gig. The show had run like clockwork with Carl riding high, batting out two whole sets that comprised a sort of potted history of the 'Fields of the Nephilim' reaching all the way back to 'Preacher Man' –the very first single I had ever been involved with and evoking a flurry of memories. The Empire was a pleasingly old school venue somewhat more in keeping with the proceedings than the cloying atmosphere of the dying Astoria where the band had resurfaced last summer after a prolonged sabbatical. Some things improve with age and so it was with Carl who had emerged like a black butterfly from his fin-de-siecle chrysalis to finally become the man Himself, the living breathing embodiment of the larger than life hieratic figure he had at first only pretended to be.



The shifting line up had lead to the footage from the Astoria and Helldone gigs being shelved as the band found its feet but the sets were smoother and fuller now. The audience too had changed and while some cadres were sorely missed the ranks had if anything swollen since the previous season with new faces who brought with them strange new customs to supplant the ceremonies of old. The human pyramids that had first appeared in the nineties were still de rigeur but the shoal of inflatable fish passed eagerly across the heaving mosh pit were a new addition , taking the place of the fistfuls of flour that settled in our hat brims back in the nineties.



Something to do with Carl's outstretched hands, I was told, although at face value the connection between Nemo and the Nephilim would seem a bit of a reach. The proverbial 'one that got away.' Still, a cult is defined by its rituals and it is the task of an anthropologist to observe and document those rites without bias or subjective judgement, especially when those traditions are still growing, still alive and healthily evolving before our eyes and lenses. Scrambled into action at short notice the Shadow Theatre irregulars performed admirably providing enough cover to work around the fish if necessary. Along with last year's highlights and a few other li'l surprises I'm hoping we'll finally get the green light to go that extra mile into making the long awaited DVD into somethin' more than just your regular common or garden concert video.
 

Since the advent of digital technology the post-production personnel seem to absorb more of the budget than all of the other departments put together. As a matter of fact I was just on the 'phone to Rob, trying to rough together a plan when someone decided to stick a knife in the chick who had been yelling something on the far side of the square. The street was filled with the usual listless punters and hawkers crying their wares, this being Portobello road – the home of the Shadow Theatre's UK headquarters – and I have a well developed habit of screening out the constant throb of background sound, vaguely timing myself to its rythyms and enjoying its vitality without picking up on its specifics or getting emotionally involved unless strictly necessary.

The chick had been putting out a stream of alcohol laced abuse in a strident, somewhat hectoring West Indian accent and now her voice rose an octave or two. Cupping the receiver a li'l closer to my ear I raised my own voice to compensate. I'd been planning to hop a train to Hitchin, knock back a pint or two with Carl and discuss the way forward but other, more urgent business had come up as it is want to do on Fridays, a pressing personal matter that for all the best will in the world simply refused to take a back seat. It was after all Friday – July 18th 2008 – and a full moon – which probably went a long way towards explaining those weird vibes at street level. I always get a li'l restless this time of month as long term readers will be aware and in the end I'd been forced to make a painful executive decision and postpone my parley with the preacher man 'til monday by which time the moon would be safely on the wane and my therian characteristics less to the fore. Of course I should've told Rob up front that having to make occasional allowance for the moon comes with the territory when hiring werewolf labor but I doubt he would've understood. Besides there was no way anyone was gonna be lookin' at those digi-masters over the weekend and there was Shadow Theatre business afoot…

The screams grew louder, a series of shrill, anguished cries that tapered off into an unhealthy rattle.There didn't seem to be any point in mentioning what was going on outside to Rob and what I'd been hearing didn't really settle in until a beat or two after I'd already hung up. Crossing to the window I saw a bemused ring of onlookers gathering on the far side of the square, their eyes turned towards what I took to be the source of the disturbance. They seemed frozen, impassive as mannequins or figures on a stage awaiting a cue, seemingly oblivious to the posse of kids who steamed through and past them like a school of bike bound barracuda, hands collectively rising to tug at hoods and caps as they disappeaed beneath the railway bridge to lose themselves the trackless headwaters of the Goldborne Road. The woman who had been making a fuss had stopped now and the vendors resumed their business, the pulse of life returning as the various onlookers began to drift sheepishly away. I lit a last smoke, double checking my kit before making tracks, deciding to throw in a copy of H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Dunwich Horror' for good measure as well as an extra pair of dry socks and a travel worn paperback edition of Arthur Machen's early tales. It was lookin' a li'l grey out there and I figured the extra socks might come in handy. With Blighty floundering through another greenhouse summer and the home counties sliding inch by inch into the swamp its all a man can do at times to keep his head and his feet dry, let alone hope to find peak viewing conditions for a July moon and it was July already – or so I was told…

By the time I hit the street the first coppers had begun to arrive, a pair of red faced foot soldiers in Kevlar vests huffing and puffing as they jogged nervously across the square, looking for the action that had already happened ten minutes ago. Two more rozzers were interviewing the lady who runs the restaurant/gallery space downstairs who was just telling them that she hadn't seen a thing. I could have chimed in to say it had been kids less than half my age but instead I nodded sympathetically and headed for the tube. I could have said at least one of 'em was white, another mixed race or Asian but I doubt it would have helped, nor had I actually seen which one had done the deed, only that a deed had been done.
At any rate I was going to have to to step lightly if I was going to make my connection. The 11.45 to Cardiff waits for no man…

2. The Secret Glory of Arthur Machen

Mankind in its arrogance knows little of the earth. Even as we plumb the dying oceans and the nearer reaches of space a rambler in the Welsh valleys might still feel a chill as the shadows lengthen and the airy silence presses in, a silence that is not a silence at all but an intricate symphony of subliminal sound, the white noise of things growing and dying. This quickening of the heart, one part terror, one part exhilaration in the face of nature at its most sublime is panic in its primal sense, what our forefathers knew as the proximity of the pagan deity Pan, the hieratic embodiment of the earth's fecundity, misunderstood and maligned by the people of the Book as the horned essence of evil itself.


The poet and mystic Arthur Machen came of age in those remote backwoods. Born in 1863 he spent his formative years at Llandewi Rectory in Gwent where one solitary summer afternoon he took an unfamiliar path through the hills and encountered something that touched his soul and chafed against his Christian upbringing, something that he struggled for the rest of his life to put into words.

Adrift in London he found employment as a journalist and translator, honing his craft by laboriously translaring the torrid prose of Casanova's 'Memoirs' before taking on a commission to compile a definitive catalogue of occult literature. This daunting part-work marked the beginning of his true education and his earliest surviving tales such as 'The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita' indicate a precocious fascination with all things esoteric.



His first novella, 'The Great God Pan' appeared in 1894 to reviews of unparalleled hostility, deemed '…the most acutely and intentionally disagreeable yet seen in English' by the Westminster Gazette and summed up by the Manchester Guardian as '…an incoherent nightmare of sex.' Machen's debut concerns a working class waif named Mary and her wealthy benefactor who grooms her to become a guinea pig in a grotesque experiment in early brain surgery. Under the scalpel she experiences a vision of the vast and formless deity of Nature only to awaken as a drooling idiot. She is found to be pregnant and before dying gives birth to a daughter who matures into a beautiful, voraciously seductive avatar of Chaos, a pagan antichrist who proceeds to cut a vengeful apocalyptic swathe through stuffy fin-de siecle London.

Following through with 'The Novel of the White Powder' and its companion piece 'The Novel of the Black Seal' Machen introduced one of his most cherished themes, the survival of the folkloric 'little people', the children of Danu who are supposed to have disappeared into the Welsh hills but live on in a kind of transdimensional 'otherworld' from which they continue to exert an obscure and baleful influence over human affairs. The sudden decline of his young wife, Amy, recently diagnosed with cancer, spurred the creation of 'The White People', one of Machen's finest stories and an acknowledged masterpiece of supernatural fiction, an unsettling first person narrative depicting a child on the cusp of puberty and her fatal communion with the inhabitants of faeryland.

Machen's tale would inspire countless writers from H.P. Lovecraft to Stephen King but the genre he helped create held no further interest for him. A real life 'horror of the soul' took hold of him and working in a grief stricken frenzy he completed his first novel, 'The Hill of Dreams', deconstructing his opiate laced prose and returning to the half remembered landscapes of his youth to create a thinly veiled account of his own pursuit of the mysteries. The opening passage concerning an amorous tryst with an elemental woodland spirit is described with the lucidity of first hand experience, a conviction that places his work in a wholly different class from his imitators.

Eschewing the sensationalism of 'yellow' fiction Machen won critical respect but set himself on the road to ruin by alienating his readership. Turning to the occult for solace he was initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn on the 21st of November 1899, taking the name Frater Avallaunius and might have abandoned literature entirely had it not been for the Great War and the controversy sparked by the appearance of his hastily penned potboiler 'The Bowmen'. The tale of the ghostly archers of Agincourt coming to the aid of the retreating tommies was retold by a nurse on the Western front to cheer her wounded charges and repeated orally from one soldier to the next until it found its way back to the British papers as a statement of fact. In an echo of modern UFO hysteria Machen's attempts to set the record straight lead to public accusations that he was involved in a convoluted conspiracy to cover up the 'real truth'.

The 'affair of the angels' puzzled Machen but above all gave him hope, a renewed belief in the power of faith that he saw increasingly embodied in the symbolic quest for the Holy Grail, the lost link between man and nature and the balm to both his and the world's pain. His various discourses on Anglo-Saxon Grail lore, collected in 1925 under the title 'The Secret of the Sangraal' give only a partial insight into the obsessive research that consumed his remaining years. 'The Great Return' (1915) concerns the miraculous reappearance of the sacred relic in an isolated Welsh village while his final masterpiece 'The Secret Glory' (1922) is a sustained attempt to reposition the quest in a contemporary post-war context. In Paradise Lost (1:780) when the peasant stumbles across the elves at their midnight revels Milton describes how 'at once with joy and fear his heart rebounds' and it is in the reconciliation of these two conflicting yet paradoxically complementary emotions that Arthur Machen principally concerned himself, his collected fiction charting the stations of an inner journey from the fear and inhibitions of his Anglican childhood to the joy and wonder of his final acceptance of nature and the yearnings of his own pagan soul.

Machen lived out his impoverished, declining years in Amersham where the locals in the King's Arms still remember his inexhaustible supply of baffling anecdotes. He died quite peacefully in 1947 at the age of 84.

                                                        

…'As he awoke there was a glinting that might have been the flash of sunlight and the branches rustled and murmured. He held out his hands and cried to his visitant to return; he entreated the dark eyes that had shone over him, and the scarlet lips that had kissed him. And then panic fear rushed into his heart and he ran blindly, dashing through the wood.'

                                     

3.Breathing Out

London passes.
The river passes.
The city passes.
Then come open spaces, trees and more trees and the first green fields.
What remains of old England spread out beneath the lowering, lustureless skies.
They wont let you smoke on the trains anymore but at least the trains are faster now when they run at all. They put so many chemicals in the filter tips these days you'd have to be crazy to smoke 'em anyhow and skinning up in a public compartment was never really an option. So I reread part of 'The Dunwich Horror' instead, at least the parts that concerned me before returning to my meditations on Machen, musing on how strange it was that he had produced almost all of his best work in one year - 'The White People', 'The Hill of Dreams' and a lengthy non-fiction work entitled 'Hieroglyphs', a sort of esoteric 'theory of everything' akin to Poe's 'Eureka' that the author himself placed great personal store in yet failed to find publication in his lifetime and which continues to leave even his most ardent fans cold to this day - I895, I think it was – the same year his wife passed away. And after that…nothing. Nothing for almost twenty years, until the Great War and the affair of 'The Bowmen'.

At first the voices around me are the clipped tones of white collar workers beating their retreat to the clotted home counties, quietly discussing the credit crunch and their prissy all too English sexual hang ups. Then as you reach the Severn estuary and places west the office workers drain away, the voices of the other passengers changing as they slip a rung or two down the economic ladder, the tone growing more raucous, the humor more ribald, the dress sense palpably shabbier, the hair-do's more ill-advised until with a whiff of cheap aftershave and greasy chip oil the all but incoherent p.a system announces that you have come at last to the land of the Red Dragon, the blighted, rain streaked kingdom of Wales.

Arthur Machen was born in Caerleon although you'd be hard pressed to know that as no plaque exists to mark his passing, let alone a statue or street name despite the fact he is beyond question one of the greatest authors of the uncanny to have ever lived and breathed on this not so fair green earth. In fact 'The White People' may well be the single scariest story ever written – at least according to H.P.Lovecraft who wheels out the superlatives in his ground breaking essay 'Supernatural Horror in Literature.' Unlike H.P.L. however Machen had a highly developed social conscience evident in the grotesque fate of his working class Mary at the hands of the patrician surgeons in the 'Great God Pan' or the snippy treatment of the young village girl ( 'who was quite poor' ) by the courtiers in 'The White People' yet for some reason the powers that be still find it far easier to idolize Dylan Thomas and Richard Llewelynn as stalwart scions of Welsh culture than risk giving serious consideration to something so palpably destabilizing, so inherently edgy, let alone pause long enough to figure out what the man was really on about…

The land of the Red Dragon has always struggled against the red cross of Saint George and the stifling double whammy of English cultural and economic imperialism and the years since the industrial revolution have not been kind to the green hills and winding valleys of Machen's youth. The land has been raped, mortgaged, strip mined, remorgaged and raped again, turning some of the most beautiful country on God's Earth into a post industrial wasteland that in turn inspired a slew of dystopian cinematic futures.

                                            

West of Cardiff the Llanwern steelworks give way to the refininery towers, slag heaps and reprocessing plants of Port Talbot and the BP petrochemical plant at Baglin Bay. The view from the end of the M.4 by night is said to have inspired the opening images of Ridley Scott's 'Blade Runner' and Terry Gilliam claims to have come up with the idea for 'Brazil' after hearing the eponymous song on his car radio while driving through Baglin Bay and being struck by the stark contrast between the swooning, romantic ballad and the grim, grey vista that surrounded him. Not having a fraction of the budget available to either picture I settled on simply going on location to Port Talbot rather than trying to recreate it, the scrap heaps and refinery towers forming the heavily filtered skyline of 'Hardware's anonymous 21st century metropolis. Even the locals have gotten in on the joke, christening a local nightclub 'The Zone' after Tarkovsky's 'Stalker' . In fact I have fond memories of the venue having photographed the witchy all-girl and sadly now defunct metal band 'RockBitch' there some years ago but that, as they say, is another story…

                                            
 
The cumulative effect of this despolation on the mass psyche of the zone's inhabitants has yet to be fully understood but it can be no mere coincidence that the area sports the highest suicide rates in the United Kingdom. On 19 febuary 2008 Jenna Parry was found hanging in the woods near the village of Cefn Cribbwr, some five miles from Bridgend, the last stop on the line before you reach Port Talbot itself. The 16 year old was the 17th teenager to top themselves within 13 months. Not only was this latest 'suicide cluster' remarkable for the comparative youth of the victims but , at least among a number of the dead, there were established relationships , familial, social and virtual that caused authorities to suspect the existence of some form of 'Suicide Club' operating through the conduit of the social networking sites, specifically Bebo and MySpace. ( *see 'Bridgend deaths: Police warn of Bebo Suicide Cult ' The Independent – 27 January – 2008 ) The local authorities finally wised up to just how bad the state of malaise had become and in a vain attempt to boost morale poured funds into planting rows of trees, artfully landscaping the verges of the freeway so that you can no longer kick back, turn up the Vangelis music on the stereo and get the full benefit from the last few miles of the M.4 as once was our want although if you pull off at the Baglin Bay exit at just before 3.00 am, the usual hour for dumping the forges the effect is still impressive enough even now. There is a ragged gypsy encampment that has sprung up in the exclusion zone around the B.P plant where the M.4 finally peters out in a welter of concrete roundabouts and the trainlines curve inland to Neath where I disembarked, stocking up on a pint of water, a packet of chocolate biscuits and a very large bag of nightlights before asking directions to the local bus station. I was perhaps a li'l undersupplied for the rough territory I was headed for but I was on the tightest of tight schedules and had to limit myself to the bare essentials – a couple of books and a waterproof military sleeping bag.

More wary daytrippers venturing into those hills, especially at that hour are prone to equipping themselves with tents or flashlights which is of course why they never see anything like Machen's woodland elementals to begin with. Some say the faeries left not with the coming of Christianity but the coming of electric light and there may be some truth to this. They didn't leave of course but people simply lost the ability to see them. To notice them mayhap you have to be able to see without looking, kinda like viewing those holographic 'Magic Eye' images that were briefly all the rage in the early nineties. It involves detaching the vision from the object by focusing beyond it and allowing the mind to rest. On a moonless night the aim when walking in the dark is not to franticly look for the path but to defocus the eyes and wait for the shape of things to emerge. Rest long enough and the rocks, trees and hedges will slowly reveal themselves. The modern world is filled with noise, artificial light and activities which stimulate the senses rather than allowing them to rest – the very opposite required for seeing. On a mission such as the one I found myself on this night a flashlight would have not only been unnecessary, it would have been out of the question. Bad sportsmanship to say the least…

I rode a rickety local bus as far as the tiny and rather nondescript village of Gllyneath where I shouldered my pack and struck out on foot. towards the great black hump of Craig-y-Ddinas...
                                                     

Some believe the last of the Tuatha Danaan, the 'children of Danu', the mythic first folk who were supposed to have raised the standing stones before the coming of the Celts or the Mylesians vanished into a door in this great prehistoric rock. The surrounding hills are certainly hollow enough, honeycombed with abandoned mine shafts some of which open onto natural galleries in what is widely known by the spelunking community to be Britain's largest and least explored limestone districts. Over the years a plethora of subterranean mythology has accrued about the area ranging from the usual anecdotes concerning buried treasures guarded by sleeping knights and laborers in the pits hearing phantom miners, commonly known as'tappers', hammering and chiselling in hidden galleries to more contemporary shaggy dog stories concerning hidden UFO bases and the clandestine use of the shafts for storing nuclear or other more exotic forms of waste.

                            

A narrow track on the left hand side of the rock winds steeply upwards, threading its way past the mouths of the first set of shafts before curving down towards the junction of the Melte and Hepste rivers and the overgrown ruins of the gunpowder factory that predictably blew itself up more than a century ago now. It seems somehow curiously apposite that the only commercial activity the valley has ever been put to was the production of high explosives. The stubby walls of the gunpowder works are the last sign of human habitation before you reach the bunkhouse above the Clynwynn Falls – a good five miles as the crow flies. No great distance for a determined rambler you might imagine but the river winds and winds again and the mossy cliffs fall away more steeply on either side of the faltering path, the valley below lost in an undulating green canopy, beech and oak and hazel and ash and yew intertwining until you can no longer tell the one from another, the wild woods rising rampart upon rampart into the distances beyond. Unless you know this place like the back of your hand it might take you a full day or more to cover that kind of ground.

For a moment I wished I could break out the chocolate biscuits or throw myself down in the wet grass, to revel in the moment like Tarkovsky's stalker returned once more to his beloved 'Zone', to at least roll a smoke but business was business and I was running late. Consulting my pocket watch I took a second deeper breath before propelling myself down the path towards the woods.

                            

3. A brief history of the Shadow Theatre

"...And I went on, and at last I found a certain wood which is too secret to be described, and nobody knows of the passage into it, which I found out in a very curious manner, by seeing some little animal run into the wood through it. So I went after the animal by a very narrow dark way, under thorns and bushes, and it was almost dark when I came to a kind of ope place in the middle. And there I saw the most wonderful sight I have ever seen, but it was only for a minute, as I ran away directly, and crept out of the wood by the passage I had come by, and ran and ran as fast as ever I could, because I was afraid, what I had seen was so wonderful and so strange and beautiful. But I wanted to get home and think about it..." - Arthur Machen 'The White People'

I first set eyes on the valley in the summer of '86. I was fresh out of Africa and had no idea what I was getting into, no convenient peg on which to hang the experience…

Greg Copeland, the cameraman who shot the first Nephilim videos had just met the Welsh lass who was to become his first wife and on one particularly sunny she bundled him and his slacker friends, namely yours truly and my buddy Anton Beebe ( grandson of the man who directed the original 'Flash Gordon' serial ) into her car for a guided tour of places west. We played 'Rust never Sleeps' by Neil Young – just the A-side- again and again on the tape deck until it got old and when no-one could stand it anymore Judith dropped Anton and myself at a local viewspot before spiriting Greg off to have her way with him. I was perhaps ill prepared for what became two days and two nights in the wilderness, equipped with little more than a sketchbook and a cigarette lighter.

                  

But none of that mattered. Not at first…besides the sun still shone in those days and summers were long and warm and bright – at least that's how I remember 'em…

I sat down on the edge of the great red veined rock beside the falls, breathing in, letting the sound of the river fill me, calm me. It was a kind of meditation I guess. They didn't have any decent ( and by 'decent' I mean psychedelic ) drugs back in sunny South Africa or if they did I never figured out how to get my hands on 'em. Nonetheless I'd had a few 'turns' as a younger teenager, occasionally triggered by running, climbing or otherwise hyperventilating , a sort of naturally occurring altered state of consciousness albeit nothing quite as blatently shamanic as what happened to me that afternoon.

                            

I remember the sound of the river most of all and the deeper, subtler rythms within it , like the rush of blood in my capillaries, the thunder of the falls melding with the beat of my heart, my body seemingly melting into the rock until I could no longer tell one from another. The stone was soft and warm like flesh, the churning beat of the falls becoming the throb of tom toms, a spiralling voodoo symphony that seemed to be coming from some other world entirely. I rememember convincincing myself that the world was a box, the sky its lid and that strange, insistent drum solo was emanating from the crack between the two. Then with a gasp I fell forward out of my body into the crack…

I remember another sound beneath the rush of white noise. A sound like a scream, thin and high at first but gaining volume, deepening into a roar. For a moment I thought I might be dead, that I must have fallen from the cliff.  I breathed in, pulling back into my body, the light fading, the trees becoming trees once more. I slapped my hand against the rock to make it real again, a pulsing, revving shriek filling my world. I opened my eyes as a stealth jetfighter went hotrodding overhead, probably an American Raven barrelling over from Lakenheath, banking slightly as it followed the curve of the river, a rippling sonic boom catching up an instant later as it climbed away into the setting sun. Then I heard Anton yelling too. He had been lying quietly on a ridge overlooking the falls, watching the same golden afterglow and must have been roused from his revery as sharply. I started towards the sound of his voice, scampering barefoot over the rocks. As I approached the top of the ridge I noticed what looked like steps and above them a row of seats hewn from solid stone. Anton was huddled in one of the throne like chairs, staring into the gathering gloom. He had stopped yelling now but still looked pretty phased, gazing past me, attention focussed on the glen below.
"The hell is this place ?"
"It's the Shadow Theatre."

                       

He said it with such certainty I didn't doubt him although I had no idea what he actually meant. Following his eyeline I saw the valley below formed a natural amphitheatre with the flat rock at the top of the falls providing a kind of stage. Then as if on cue two figures appeared in the clearing beneath us like characters in a play. I blinked, realizing it was Greg and Judith, feeling somewhat relieved they had come back to pick us up after all. Waving to get their attention I started down the hill only to bring myself up short as I caught the sound of their voices. They seemed to be having some sort of argument and realizing they hadn't seen me I decided to hang back and let them get it out of their system – but their voices only grew louder. I couldn't make out the individual words over the rush of white noise, only anger. There was a rattle of stones.At first I thought she'd slipped and Greg was bending to help her back to her feet. Then I saw his arm rising and falling, something glinting in his hand. Was that a rock ? A knife even ?
I stood frozen in my tracks, still trying to work out what I was seeing, not knowing if I should try to step in or turn tail. Greg seemed to be beating her against the rocky ground,  a frenzied strength to his asault that I could barely square with the Greg I knew. Then he lifted her in his arms and her body seemed to come apart, shredding into a mass of brightly coloured scarves and I realized it wasn't a woman at all but some sort of macabre rag doll.
"Fucksake…"
Greg paused, looking up at me as if he had known I was watching all along and I realized it wasn't Greg at all but someone taller and stronger who had been expertly mimicking his body language. I felt a sudden chill, the short hairs rising on the back of my neck.
"Who are those people ?"
" The Shadow Theatre ? Didn't I tell you.." 'Greg' did a backward summersault, flick flacking away into the gathered gloom and Anton giggled : " They're incredible. I've been watching them all afternoon…"
I settled myself into one of the stone chairs, relieved at having an explanation to hang on to even if it were no explanation at all. I reached for my tobacco trying to decide whether we were audience members or victims but the seat was comfortable enough at least.
"What else did you see ?"
"I saw you. Just now. On the edge of the cliff.…"
"No. That was real. That happened. Or at least I think it happened …"
"You were dancing on the edge of the cliff and then a plane flew over and flew into the crack…"
"You saw that ?"
"  The Raven 111 ?…"
"No. The crack. I mean the aeroplane was real…"
"It was all right there. Like the door in the hill…"
" What door ?"
"That door.." He nodded towards the eerie effulgence that radiated silently from the jumble of rocks behind us. At first I had thought the light was some weird reflected afterglow from the setting sun but then I began to grow less certain.
"They're really going for it down there! Partying down …"
Something flickered overhead and we heard what sounded like the pop of fireworks from the valley floor as the evening show got under way, a phalanx of what appeared to be armoured war machines advancing from the gloom.
"How do they fuckin' do that ?"
"I don't know. But they're really good at it…"
" They're amazing ! Just watch…"
"I don't want to just watch. I want to join 'em ! You think they'd let me audition ?"
"I thought you already had. I saw you down there. To be honest I thought you'd arranged this whole thing …"
I settled back in my chair, front row, centre, firing up a reefer as a strange and terrible saga of future warfare unfolded before us. " I don't know who those guys are or what we're lookin' at but I was made for that show… "

Later I had to come to terms with the fact that we had apparently 'hallucinated' the entire show although what triggered those 'hallucinations' remained a mystery . I told myself it was something to do with the valley's acoustics, the hiss of white noise, the convoluted manner in which the steep gorge twists and turns causing the light from the sun or moon to enter from unexpected, potentially disorientating angles, the shifting leaves and sparkling water setting up countless complex and oddly suggestive 'diffusion patterns', phosphorescence released by decaying fungi, energy stored and then spontaneously released by the crystalline rock formations or the magnetic field of the river somehow effecting our brainwaves. Subterranean waters. Sun spots. I don't know. Anything to try and get around the idea that there really were 'little people' living in that hollow hill playing tricks on our minds. Besides weird things just happened around Anton. He was prone to 'black outs', naturally occurring trance states that he could slip in and out of without warning, trembling and falling silent, eyes glazing as if he wasn't realy there at all only to return to fuller consciousness a moment later with some typically ridiculous observation. Maybe I was just spending too much time around him and had started seeing whatever the hell it was he'd been seeing all along, each of us serving to reinforce the others misperceptions to produce a textbook 'shared hallucination'.


                                                


So I came back and next time I brought reinforcements…

Mr Horn, my long standing ally and cameraman was next, then Kate my equally long suffering first girlfriend and a couple of old army buddies at least one of whom was already a member of the International Magic Circle, a juggler and practising stage magician in his own right. We figured that if whatever it was that lived down there was going to confuse us then we were just going to confuse it right back and answer it trick for trick. Perhaps on some level I was still auditioning, trying out for a company that didn't exist or at least didn't advertise in 'Spotlight' or 'Stage and Screen'. Whatever the hell we were doing we were learning fast, picking up on what we saw and imitating it, adding dots, details and curlicues of our own.The sheer cliffs that had guarded the valley since time out of mind ensured our privacy, providing us with the perfect psychedelic adventure playground which we duly made our own. Undisturbed by the outside world we acted out all the dramas, illusions and fancies the natural amphitheatre seemed to demand.

       

I had studied stage magic myself while still in high school and based some of what we did on the work of the obscure conjuror Charles Nightingale who had toured Bitain and Ireland between the wars under the stage name 'Coleman Collins',playing opposite his partner, the chanteuse Rosa Forte and such vanished luminaries as Francis LeRoy the 'devil in evening dress', Bosco the Great Northern Wizard and Mr. Peet and his Wanderin' Boys. Their grande farewell performance at the Wood Green Empire on August 27 1924 was so gaudy no-one came out alive, not even the audience although some believe Collins faked his death by substituting another body for his own in a spectacular 'coup de theatre' before escaping to a new life in America. The details of those all but forgotten 'crimes against reality' are scarcely relevant now other than the fact they provided a jumping off spot for my own work in the mid eighties and early nineties. Some say the test of a true magician is that he does not use his powers in ordinary life. Uncle Cole however was adamant that "the test of a true magician is that he has no ordinary life"- an epithet I took to heart....

Its difficult to describe what I thought I was doing at the time other than to say it was at best a kind of dance – a duet with death or the unknown or whatever the hell it was down there. It would make a move so I'd make a move back and if we were on the money it'd come back with what we referred to simpy as a 'response'. The responses came in all kind of shapes and sizes, improving on our efforts, gently mocking us, constantly forcing us to raise the stakes. At best it was a form of wordless communication, what the 80's UFO brigade might might have referred to as 'landing protocols'. Normally the 'faery folk' or whatever the hell you want to call 'em take flight at the first sign of outsiders so I figured it was our job to draw them out instead, to confuse 'em and hold their attention, to appeal to their natural sense of mischief. Of course you should never assume any audience is friendly, let alone an audience of invisible woodland elementals…

                   
 
In the summer of 1987 we ferried in a team of dancers and crack lighting technicians to shoot the promotional material for the single 'Blue Water' , devising an elaborate cable car rig to literally fly the generators and heavier equipment over the treetops and down to the valley floor. Perhaps it was a step too far and it is a matter of record that we were rewarded for our hubris by running into one of the biggest hurricanes the United ( ? ) Kingdom had ever seen. Global warming hadn't yet been established as a fact of British life so like so many other things we ended up blaming it on the little people, deciding that perhaps we had been a just a li'l out of line in trying to involve genuine 'elementals' in what was still only a music video when you got right down to the nitty gritty.

                                         

A midsummer night's dream ? The Nephilim in faeryland...

                  

Secrets of the Shadow Theatre



                   
Above left: The end of the rope for Carl's 'preacherman' persona
And right: Self and Carl back in the day. Could this be the origin of that gag about the 'one that got away' ?

Beating a hasty retreat we did our best to reconstruct the valley floor using some of the leaves and broken branches blown down by the hurricane, finishing off the promo in the relative safety of a desserted warehouse. While the end result is amusing enough it remains only a shadow of the epic originally envisaged.




After that I grew wary of taking cameras or electric lights into the valley and there are few images to attest to what followed. We did our best work there, five or six shows in a good year and all of it perforce went unrecorded.
                                          

Above and below: Rare images of an exploding life size wolf effigy smoking a Cuban cigar and wearing a nice white suit from Cordings that we blew up one solstice dawn to commemorate the assassination of the Chechen premier - the so-called 'wolf of Grozny'. It was one of the first pyrotechnic effigies I built and extremely dangerous ! A piece of shrapnel flew out of it just after taking the initial photo and hit the rock behind us, ricocheting right out of the valley...

                                    

In 1989 the valley was put on the market by the farmer who owned all the land north of the Hepste River. One hundred thousand pounds sterling would have made it our own forever but that kind of money was utterly beyond my reach at that time. I had barely enough to feed myself and more often than not ended up couch surfing or sleeping under tables in unsuspecting production offices. I tried in vain to put together a consortium of 'interested parties', taking prospective backers on guided tours of the Zone, including on one particularly memorable moon an Iranian stockbroker connected to the west London property Mafiosi who had recently bought Fulham Broadway and a young surgeon turned speed dealer who had just come off a double shift at the Royal Free Hospital…

The broker ended up reclining laconically in one of the stone seats at the top of the bluff, gazing at the pale, moonlit figures moving in the glade below muttering all the usual phrases to himself about it being the 'most amazing thing' he'd ever seen whilst the terrified surgeon ended up with his back against the cliff wall, threatening to kill anyone who came near him. You could never really tell how the valley might effect people although the broad rule of thumb tended to be that folk who were too fixed in their views or clung too closely to the notion of the universe being essentially mechanistic and hence explicable by science tended to have the harder time of it. Accordingly we left the surgeon to his own devices and he seemed perfectly okay in the morning although I never saw him again after we dropped him off back in the city. I think his name was Peter…

I never did get that deal together any more than I could come up with a viable commercial logic to underpin the purchase to begin with. Accordingly the valley became part of the Craig –y-Ddinas Forest Park and a few years ago was officially declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site having been found to apparently be one of 'Britain's last unspoiled landscapes' to quote the free guidebook that came with my copy of the Saturday 'Guardian' which was frankly one of the worst things that could possibly have happened to the place. If I had taken over the land I'd have stocked it with wolves but now that it's officially up there with Snowdonia and the Lake District its been targeted by the sort of unscrupulous entrepreneurs who turn a fast buck by taking 'problem children', executives on weekend bonding exercises and other 'gifted' individuals through its winding gorges, usually in matching crash helmets, wetsuits and safety harnesses that make them look like walking talking sex toys or strings of living, long chained DNA threading their way laboriously upriver. And of course, the valley being what it is, the daytrippers began to die in droves. At first I kept the newspaper clippings but then I stopped bothering.

"…Jason and three other teenagers jumped into the river for a dip. The others got out but Jason was swept away. He was found 100 yards away by an outdoor-pursuits leader who pulled him ashore but he was already dead. Police and health and safety officials are investigating. Bryn Davies, the principal of the college, said the course which can last up to 12 weeks was designed to 'instill self belief and motivation' for youngsters aged 16 to 18 who are not sure what career they want to follow. Jason had started the course on Monday…" – The Independent – Saturday – Sept 10 2001

And after that little sign posts began to appear and itsy-bitsy fences designed to prevent folk from plunging headlong off cliffs or plummeting to their deaths in the falls and rapidly Britain's last, great unspoiled landscape stopped being quite so unspoiled and the little people, if they existed, drew back even further into the hills.                                                    
                                                                         

I have never had any fear of the so-called 'supernatural' any more than I fear the darkness. I have simply never perceived it as a threat to me. Its people that are the problem. Human-bloody-beings every time ! Even as a child I felt more at ease in the dark, knowing I could hide there where the adults couldn't find me, that I was safe in the woods on my own where nothing could hurt me. The moment you take someone with you it changes everything. I learned not to take cynics, die hard sceptics or folks who were too set in their views but there were plenty of so-called 'neo-pagans' who claimed to make obeisance to the gods and goddesses of the woods and fields who melted into lumps of quivering jello when they got up close and personal with wild nature and felt themselves gripped by that same sudden inexplicable terror Machen describes so eloquently. Panic in its original sense. The feeling you get when you're swimming just off the reef and spot the outline of a shark or a dorsal fin briefly cutting the water. The sun is as bright and the water as warm as it was moments earlier but the sudden revelation of ones true position in the scheme of things tends to take the pleasure out of the experience and send even the stoutest soul lunging for the safety of the beach. Accordingly you can never really tell who's going to spin out or turn on you when the going gets weird so to hedge my bets I never took anyone the same way twice. Sometimes I went as far as blindfolding folk from the moment we turned off the freeway or spinnin' 'em around once we'd gotten into the woods. And even now, even in the 21st century once its past a certain hour and the shadows start to deepen between the trunks you can still count on a degree of privacy…

After 'Blue Water' and the freak flashfloods that almost killed us during the shooting of 'Hardware's opening sequence near Efoud in the Sahara desert Carl became understandably wary of going on location with me and in the mid-nineties Anton was diagnosed with a potentially life threatening disease of the thyroid gland that went some ways towards explaining his black outs which had grown more frequent and severe in the interim. Although he has since been successfully treated he no longer sees 'littlle people' or if he does he no longer speaks about it.

In 1994 I turned Paul Carlin, the editor of 'Dust Devil' and 'Voice of the Mon' onto the place and he insisted on bringing his younger brother Grant with him on the return visit.It was a full moon and ideal viewing conditions with at least three physical phenomena plainly identifiable to all of us shaking up the proceedings. On the way up to the valley a bolt of lightning struck an abandoned shed which began to burn, emitting a bright plume of orange flame. The bolt made an ear splitting crack, the grass was very green and the sun was shining and the rain falling all at once. Later a cold, heavy wall of mist rolled in, filling the gorge and the moonbeams streaming through the trees turned the whole valley into a shifting maze of light and shadow....

                                                              

At some point in the early hours of the morning one of the trees seemed to stop touching the ground entirely and fell crashing into the gorge, ripping and wrending as it tumbled, bringing down other trees and boulders with it. I was in the shadow theatre in my usual seat and fortunately Paul and Grant were at a safe distance but we all froze in terror for an instant, the ground trembling beneath us as the debris impacted with the rock that served as our stage area, knowing we might easily have been crushed like bugs had our timing been just a li'l different.

I was doing a lot of work with fireworks at the time, probably working out residual issues from the Afghan engagement and responded by launching another volley of rockets which yielded a last 'response'. Just before dawn a long, sparky stream of light appeared in the brightening sky that looked for all the world like return fire. It must have been a meteorite or some other form of space junk burning up on re-entry but whatever it was went on falling and sparking and burning long enough for all three of us to look up from our various vigils and independently note its passing. There seemed something melancholy about it, as if it were the valley's way of saying goodbye…

                      

Grant was quiet the next morning, scarcely uttering a word on the way back up to London and a few days later I heard he'd run into some difficulty after trying to ride his bicycle through a church door. Apparently there was a sign on the door reading 'Goods entrance only' and believing it meant 'Gods entance only'  he rode into it full tilt, expecting to pass through into some other dimension. Instead the impact buckled the frame of his bicycle and caused Paul and his wife to hit the panic button.The word was that he'd been…well…a li'l funny ever since his trip to the valley. Apart from anything else he now seemed to believe he could walk through walls…

Various shrinks screwed with Grant's head over the years, experimenting with various forms of medication to try and bring him back to something like 'normal' but as I had never met Grant before his 'breakdown' I have no clear idea what 'normal' was supposed to be. Along the way he started to produce drawings of his experience, initially as a kind of therapy, detailed charcoal images of the valley, complete and perfect to the last detail, the last rock and tree like data retrieved from the black box of his own private plane crash. God knows how many times he asked me to take him back to the place but I turned a deaf ear. The damage had been done however. Paul held me responsible for what happened and still refuses to speak to me. If ever evidence was needed that whatever the hell we'd found down there needed to be left alone this was it ! Rumours started to fly that I was playing fast n' loose with people's minds, indeed their souls according to those of a more religious bent. There had been a gradual hardening of the arteries in the pagan scene as the freaks codeified their woolly worship into rituals in what I came to see as a gradual drift towards the right during the late eighties and early to mid nineties. Slander and malicious gossip clung to my Cuban heels and I began to feel I was perhaps getting a little old for the game.

                                                         

To be continued...

LACHRYMAE – THE FINAL CHAPTER

                                 

Brethren, I have invited you here to this ancient, invisible theatre with the intention of not only unmasking the killer God responsible for these crimes against 'reality' but more cogently to provide an unambiguous solution to two or perhaps three long running esoteric enigmas…

I salute those who have stayed with the program from the top. For late joiners I include an index to conjure order out of the scrolling chaos and serve as an aid memoir for those hardy few who dare read further. I have very little keyboard time at present and less in the months to come. Until we meet again this strange saga is my gift to you.

Be warned the completed text contains 'spoilers' and may be hazardous to your belief systems.

                               

LACHRYMAE 1: The Trail of the Three Mothers

( 1 ) The Rain Queen
( 2 ) Out of Africa
( 3 ) The Art of Light
( 4 ) Our Lady of Darkness
( 5 ) Isis in New York
( 6 ) An audience with the Black Mother

LACHRYMAE 2: The Widow's Web

( 1 ) Gratia Lachrymarum
( 2 ) Mission Improbable
( 3 ) Kiss of the Tarantula
( 4 ) The Walls of Heaven
( 5 ) The Other Side of the Mountain
( 6 ) Dying Light

LACHRYMAE 3 : The Devil's Chessboard

( 1 ) Blue Apple Day
( 2 ) All Roads lead to Rennes
( 3 ) Terza Madre
( 4 ) Luxae Tenebris
( 5 ) The Immortal's Feast


                                                              


Chapter Six: She Who Must Be Obeyed


" Oh mother ! What is God ?" - 12th Century graffiti – Wildenborg Castle


                             

The Grotto of the Lombrives – Ussat les Bain – Approx 6.15 pm  (  the 'orbs' which first showed up in the pics I ran of the Devil's Bridge are commonly dismissed as a form of 'digital artefacting' but here they seem to have perspective as if they are somehow emerging from the grotto - and they sure pick their locations as if they somehow know when we're 'warm' or 'cold'... )

***********************************************************

" There it is ! Right there on the f*****g wall…"
"What ?"
" The f****g spider !"
I steadied the flashlight, its beam picking out a familiar eight legged outline scrawled on the cave wall above us. Mr.Horn took a half step closer, eyes roaming taking in the ancient graffiti, the signature of a mysterious vanished cult identical to the markings in the grotto at Tarantula Square. I'm not sure it meant as much to him as it did to me but I was grateful for his company nonetheless. Mr.Horn while an expert documentary cameraman is a man of notoriously few words and as ever his true thoughts remained a mystery to me, his face lost in the shadows.

The end of the century was in sight and we were deep in the bowels of the Lombrives, the largest limestone cave system in Europe whose galleries provided a sanctuary to beleagured Neanderthals and emergent cro-magnons alike, sacred to shamans, druids, medieval Christians and heretics in turn. Its myriad tunnels were part of a single conjoined labyrinth until a glacier sliced the system in half during the last ice age. While part of the system is open to the public with modern spelunkers having penetrated twelve miles or more into its depths some of the deeper capillaries remain unplumbed to this day.

                                   

Deep in the heart of mountain lies a subterranean lake beside whose lightless waters rises a glistening crystalline vault known as the 'Tomb of Pyrene' and identified in popular lore as the last resting place of the bride of Hercules from whom the mountains of northern Spain and southern France draw their name. Beyond the vast natural column named the 'pillar of Hercules' the passage's ribbed throat widens into a yawning honeycombed wombspace into which Westminster cathedral and Pinewood Studio's fabled 'Bond Stage' could fit with ease, its walls rising into a darkness that our meager lighting budget could never hope to dispel, the dank stone covered in an illegible tangle walls of dead languages, countless scrawled pentagrams and other less familiar geometric markings. Here amidst the dust of centuries I found the last piece of the puzzle that would complete the cycle begun all those years before in far away Montserrat, the final clue to the identity of the faceless goddess, the 'supernatural' force that had guided my steps and seemingly manipulated the day to day events of my life since the day I had first set foot in the Scala cinema and settled down to the all-day all-nighter that set the long, strange journey in motion..

My first encounter with Our Lady of Darkness had briefly jarred me out of the youthful cynicism I had mistaken for 'reason' but over the years I had somehow pushed the events to the very back of my mind, telling myself it had been little more than a ludicrous chain of 'coincidences' inspired by my overheated imagination and prolonged exposure to Dario's fractured ouvre. What happened at Montsegur in the summer of 1996 however had proved a whole lot harder to explain away. I tried to tell myself that it had simply been a freak storm that caught us unawares and that the voltage coursing through the walls of the keep had somewhere affected Kate's brainwaves and triggered the violent seizure that followed. Despite all I had seen my conscious mind refused to give in to the thought that she had been 'possessed' or that the citadel really was the 'castle of the Holy Grail' after all.

                                   

Returning to the Pyreneees I spent months at a time camped out with Mr.Horn on the holy mountain, locked off cameras covering every conceivable angle, hoping to capture the 'hand of God' and those fiery, plasmic fingers on film for all to see but we waited in vain.
Our search for the missing Grail historian proved just as fruitless. We followed SS Obersturmfuhrer Otto Wilhelm Rahn's trail back to Germany and pulled every file we could. We found a few survivors, a family, a teddybear, a handful of notes and in the end we had found a grave.

It is not my intention to recapitulate the Rahn affair in this posting other than to touch upon those aspects that shed some light, inadvertently or otherwise on the dark domain of Mater Tenebrarum and her siblings. A full account of the sinister saga that lead rom the ruins of Montsegur to the ritual chambers of the SS Order Castle in Padeborn and on to the Arctic Circle and an abandoned U-boat pen deep beneath the volcanic crags of the Canary Islands would require a longer and darker night than currently available.

                                                             



East of the sun and west of the moon...



A disc containing some of the interview material generated during the ongoing quest was included as a freebie in last year's 'DUSTDEVIL' box kit under the working title 'THE SECRET GLORY'. Sadly the disc's murky, low-res visuals were further muddled by a soundtrack that wandered wildly out of synch as a result of a half-assed PAL –NTSC transfer, adding one more layer of confusion to an already opaque narrative. Normally I would have gone apeshit and demanded the disc be withdrawn but Subversive Cinema had done such a good job with the main feature it seemed churlish to kick up a fuss, especially as their backs were against the wall like every other retailer in the trade. Subsequent events have rendered that weak document wholly obsolete and while 'THE SECRET GLORY' may stand as a bare bones introduction to the enigma it does not reveal the true import of Rahn's work and the bizarre myth complex that surrounds him.

                                                 
Otto

The fact that Otto Rahn existed at all stretches credulity. He seems to have stepped alive from the pages of a thirties pulp complete with black coat, fedora and those pale green, oddly otherworldy eyes. Born and raised in the Black Forest not far from the ruins of Wildenborg where Wolfram von Eschenbach first committed 'PARSIFAL' to parchment in the 12th century Otto was a lonely, troubled child. Bullied at school he sought refuge from his peers and dysfunctional family in the myths of an immutable, vanished past, in the works of his compatriots and role models, the Brothers Grimm and the legends of the knights and troubadors of old. Otto's neice insists he was possessed of what she calls the 'seventh sight' and regardless of whether his alleged telepathic abilities were real of imagined there seems little doubt that he deliberately cultivated an aura of mystery about himself from the very beginning, a suspicion underpinned by his early thwarted ambitions towards a career in the film industry, two surviving unproduced screenplays and the macabre theatricality of the promotional stills for his first book 'Crusade Against the Grail' ( 1933 )

Inspired by rogue archeologist Heinrich Schliemann's sensational 'discovery' of Troy the ambitious young philologist set about deconstructing 'PARSIFAL' in the same manner that Schliemann had approached Homer's 'Illiad', intending to prove the 12th century Grail romance was anchored in actual historic events.
   
                                                                                                

While still in his early twenties Rahn was taken under the wing of the mysterious Countess de Pujol Murat, a leading figure in a secret society known as the 'Polaires' who drew their name from Stella Polaris or Arktos, true north symbolized by the swastika which is said to represent the seasonal positions of Ursa Minor around the Pole Star. To what extent their lodge maintained ties with other societies of its day such as the Thule Geselschaft whose leadership were to eventually found the National Socialist German Worker's Party that brought Hitler to power is hard to tell at this distance in time. While Rahn openly wore the Sieg Rune of the Thule on the sweater knitted for him by his mother the Polaires themselves seem to have been more closely affiliated to their British counterparts rather than the racist and increasingly anti-semitic German lodges of their day. They would later suffer persecution under the Nazis who suspected the secret societies of either actively aiding and abetting the Jews or acting as unwitting pawns in a hypothetical 'zionist-Masonic' conspiracy. While the European Polaires were all but wiped out and their records subsequently destroyed in the war the British movement went from strength to strength, growing out of and eventually breaking away from Conan Doyle's Spiritualist Association of Great Britain ( SAGB ) under the auspices of charismatic Welsh platform medium Grace Cooke and her ambitious huband, Ivan.

                                                                      

                                            Conan and Grace
 
Grace seems to have attempted to wrest control of the SAGB after the demise  of its founder and mentor by audaciously channeling his talkative shade in closed sittings with Sir Arthur's bereaved family.

When the Doyle clan began to smell a rat Grace and Ivan split to the Pyrenees where they spent the better part of the following year as guests of the Countess de Pujol Murat at approximately the same time as Rahn's own sojourn in the south.
                                                        
Grace Cooke in later years

The only way to ever know for sure whether Rahn was either a Mason or a card carrying envoy of the Thule Society would be to access the surviving British order's records and to this effect I took to posing as a clairvoyant at the Spiritualist Association's mouldering West London headquarters, a routine ably abetted by one of the founder members of this virtual tribe, fellow MySpacer and one time television psychic Andre Phillipe. The White Eagles maintain close ties with the SAGB, recruiting heavily from their hapless membership and accordingly it took me little more than 48 hours to insinuate myself into a gathering of their west London chapter in a lavishly converted chapel not much more than a block or two from Harrods.

                                                                 

The White Eagle's spotless unisex lab smocks and custom of 'scrubbing down' before and after ceremonies brought the works of David Cronenberg to mind as much as it recalled the witch cults of Argento's 'SUSPIRIA' and 'INFERNO'. Certainly it looked as if Cronenberg's resident production designer Carol Spier might have been responsible for the décor, the sparsely furnished interior dominated by a huge swooping Luftwaffe style eagle that had taken the place of the banished cross. Grace's grand daughter, the order's dynastic high priestess held court over her devoted following swathed in turquoise robes adorned with the distinctive silver star of the Polaires. Despite the exotic, crypto-fascist bling the essence of her address seemed to be pretty much the same vacuous, feelgood love thy neighbour gobbledygook spouted by preachers the world over so after half an hour or so I politely excused myself, taking the opportunity to avail myself of the small private library and adjoining reading room on the floor below. Browsing through the order's bound memos and archived copies of their bi-monthly periodical 'Stella Polaris' it became apparent that any reference to the war years had been assiduously removed. Noticing the high priestesses robed husband, Colm Haywood, watching me with naked suspicion from the reading room doorway I decided to brazen it out and broach my concerns directly. Colm blanched as I mentioned Otto's name, then recovering his saintly demeanor he greeted me with a fraternal third degree handshake, assuming that to know as much as I did to connect him with Rahn in the first place meant I had to be 'one of them' and confirming that the Polaires were in all likelihood just another franchise of the all-seeing eye. Hastening to set my mind at rest the high priest explained that earlier editions of the newsletter had been removed for safekeeping to the organization's lavish and closely guarded headquarters in Glastonbury. Then urging me to get in touch by e-mail should I wish to view the redacted material he politely showed me the door. I could tell my questions had rattled the high priest or grand wizard or whatever he liked to call himself and it came as little surprise when subsequent attempts to contact him at the address provided drew a blank. The Rahn affair was toxic spiritual waste and the last thing anyone needed was for some smart ass to forge a direct, clearly established paper trail linking Hitler's Reich to the burgeoning New Age movement.

                                                          

It is impossible to gauge the extent of Rahn's immersion and complicity in the clandestine groups that funded and tacitly guided his early work. Regardless of whether he was a true Nazi, a Masonic fifth columnist or even a closet Zionist there can be little doubt that the Polaires not only supported and encouraged his research but deliberately steered his attention towards the heretic fortress of Montsegur which the young philologist was to subsequently identify with the 'Grail Castle' of song and story. The 'Cathar' castles that dot the Corbieres and the Ariege are the earliest known examples of gothic architecture to be found in Europe and Montsegur, the highest of the citaedels and hence last to fall was said to be the very oldest of them, foundations dating to an earlier epoch lost to us now in the mists of anterior history.



The convoluted 'fourth dimensional' geometric charts drawn by Danielle/Arianne who had thoughtfully taken to leaving his work pinned to trees and roadside fences in the Rennes area drew my attention to the similarity between the floorplan of the keep and the constellation of Arcturus, almost the star system's mirror image, inverted as if viewed through an ancient camera obscura. I only wish I had the smarts of the computer power to be able to calculate what those stars might have looked like a thousand years ago when the foundations of the keep were first hewn from the raw stone.

The castle's alignment to the sun and the subsequent lightshow in the north tower that marks the dawn of every successive solstice has lead historians and New Age gurus alike to lazily identify the keep's builders with the heliocentric Celts . In point of fact the building has little or nothing in common with the megaliths of Stonehenge, Avebury or Newgrange. It's construction is without precedent and we have no clue as to its origins, purpose or how it eventually came to be destroyed.

There is every reason to doubt the construction served any conventional defensive purpose. As Jugen Prochnow puts it in Michael Mann's 'The Keep' ( 1983 ) - the whole place is 'constructed backwards' as if to keep something in rather than keep something out. The so-called 'arrow slits' slant inwards and downwards in such a way as to make it impossible to actually fire an arrow through them with any degree of accuracy and no attempt has been made by conventional archeologists to explain the north facing slit which communicates not with the outside world but the interior of the keep itself.

A fingertip search of the courtyard conducted in August 2007 revealed a single area of worked stone, a rough ledge at the base of  the north facing slit. No effort has been made by the original architects to otherwise flatten the mountaintop to provide a convenient floor space let alone seats or shelves yet climbing up onto the ledge I found at once that the narrow shelf was the acoustical focus of the keep, my voice carrying loudly and clearly throughout the edifice.

It is my considered opinion that the mysterious, almost vaginal slit in the north tower is alligned to the position of the moon at the spring equinox ( the anniversary of the fall of the castle - March 15 1244 ) just as the east facing slits are designed to harness and concentrate the first, faint light of the solstice dawn.
This apparent allignment to both the moon and the stars dispells the notion of any simple heliocentric culture having been at work, hinting at a far more complex understanding of the physical universe. In fact what the castle resembles more than anything else is a vast pinhole camera...






Graphic representation of a pinhole camera


Rays of light travel from the object, through the picture plane, and to the viewer's eye. This is the basis for graphical perspective.





The history of the motion picture apparatus has long been intertwined with the 'dark art' of sorcery.  The gimmick that ate the medium. A  cheap conjuror's trick that eventually took over the auditorium and forced out the human performers.
Stage magician George Melies was the first to grasp the camera's capacity to lie after licensing the first projector from the Lumiere brothers who drew inspiration from Roget's famous pamphlet on fusion frequency which was in turn derived
from the zoetrope or moving picture wheel, a toy of the devil shunned for centuries by the Catholic church who like the modern day Taliban deemed its capacity to mimic the 'illusion of life' inherently heretical...

                                                                              

The magic lantern enters the history books with Giovanbattista Della Porta's experiments in light and shadow using a device described as a 'thaumaturgic' in the' Magiae Naturalis' probably the same early form of motion picture projector as the Lucernae Magicae seu Thaumaturgae described by the Jesuit monk Kircher in the second edition of his 'Arsmagna Lucis et Umbrae'.

                                                                   

Above: Rogue Jesuit Athanasius Kircher
Below: The frontispiece of the 'Arsmagna Lucis et Umbrae'

                                                                   

"The third key is beneath the soles of your shoes" - A plate from the 'Arsmagna' betrays not only the origins of the cinematic apparatus but a funky taste in chessboard floors - a form of esoteric shorthand that should be instantly apparent by now even to the untrained eye

                                                                    

Kircher's work in fluenced the creation of the henakitoscope (1832), the zoetrope (1860), the kinemetoscope (1861), the kineograph (1861), and the praxinoscope (1877) and finally Thomas Alva Edison's kinetoscope (1899). Edison had a pet name for the tar papered studio in West Orange, NJ where all his prototypical films were made. He called it the 'Black Maria' - a term richly if inadvertently redolent of the image to whom Inago de Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, dedicated his life in 1522, the Black Madonna of Montserrat..."

Kircher wrote his treatise in 1646 but it is generally conceded that the device was in use long before its closely guarded secret appeared in print...
              

                 Benvenuto Cellini

The famous Italian goldsmith, Cellini, recorded in detail his meeting with a notorious Sicilian magus during his visit to Rome in 1540. While discussing the 'magical arts' with the sorceror Cellini remarked that he would like to see someone invoke demons and the older man calmly offered to produce a horde of them for his benefit. The ruins of the Colosseum were chosen by the magus as a suitable spot for such a demonstration and Cellini  arranged to meet him there the following evening, bringing along one of his friends to act as as  a credible witness. Within the silence of the vast amphitheatre the necromancer drew circles in the dust and kindled a fire upon which he tossed various substances that produced a dense column of perfumed smoke. He then began a lengthy incantation while there appeared about the circle a vast array of devils which according to Cellini completely filled the Collosseum.  The sorceror called the demons by name while Cellini's friend shook with fear, pointing out four gigantic devils in full armour who seemed to be riding across the walls of the ancient auditorium. In an effort to reassure the trembling onlookers the magus told them the demons were in fact only smoke and shadows. Indeed they gradually diminished in number, their outlines fading from view as the smoke cleared...

                                                                

While some sceptics dismiss Cellini's account as pure fiction it seems more probable the author is simply exagerating an actual experience as was his custom throughout the autobiography. From the given account it seems the Sicillian warlock was using a mechanical device,  possibly operated by hidden accomplices to achieve the ghostly illusion.  This sort of skullduggery dates back to ancient times when concave metal mirrors were used in pagan temples to project brilliant lights and even images upon various surfaces including smoke, a theory supported by British historian and archeologist Sir David Brewster. The smoke from the fire may have caught occasional images but the mighty background of the Colosseum itself is the only sure solution to the mystifying effect otherwise the sorceror would surely have chosen some other, more convenient venue. The name of the thaumaturge mentioned in Cellini's account has sadly not come down to us but his Sicillian origins bring to mind the order of the 'Faithful in Love' described by Dante that allegedly traced its roots all the weay back to 12th century 'Cathar' prophet Nicetas himself.

In his thought provoking novel 'FLICKER' ( 1992 ) Theodore Roszak speculates on how the 'moving picture wheel' may owe its ancestry to the flick books of the gnostics, apparently designed to demonstrate to the initiate how life as we know it is itself merely an illusion created by a constant subatomic flicker, a friction between positive and negative charges, between existence and non-existence,  between spirit and matter,  light and darkness...

                                                   

There seems little doubt that the Albigensians of the 12th and 13th century were an oddly civilized folk for their day with fragmentary records referring to a 'Jewish school of medicine' in Toulouse and a 'school of magic' in Salamanca. They had a form of proto-democracy in the form of elected 'magistrates' or 'capitouls' who acted as a check on the power of the church and the aristocracy  and while not essentially matriarchal as some have claimed were at least unusually egalitarian in their gender politics. Some say they were Luciferians like the Yezzidis, others that they were the last of the true Christians but in the end it doesn't matter who they really were or why they fought or why they died. To quote Conan the barbarian - " all that matters is few stood against many" and as I learned the facts of their history I couldn't help but feel a growing affininity with the castle's stubborn defenders just as I had been drawn to the plight of the beleagured Kafirs of the Hindu Kush. At first I knew little more than what I had gleaned from the script of 'La Chiesa' but there was something about the high, wooded valleys and dim blue mountaintops that reminded me of Afghanistan and stirred feelings I couldn't adequately explain. In South Africa the Afrikaners called black people 'kafirs' (the word used by the Arab slavers for those who did not believe in Islam and hence could be bought or sold like cattle. It was a 'fight word', an insult like 'nigger' and I felt a natural, intuitive abhorrence for the apartheid system that alienated me from my family and birth place from the very top...

                                                                             

In Afghanistan I was moved by the plight of the 'kafirs', the pagan tribal folk of 'Kafiristan' - the land of the heathens and was opposed to both communist atheism and militant Islam. The word 'cathar' was used an an insult by the Teutonic knights and crusaders who took Occitania by force. It too is a 'fight word', not a belief system. It is in fact the same word by another spelling. A heretic. An unbeliever. Someone who does not bear allegiance to the one God, be it Mohammed or Jehovah.

                      

The basic principals of the dualist heresy should be well known by now to long term readers of this blog. In short the difference of opinion that sparked the third and last crusade springs from the simple notion that infinite goodness cannot create evil. Since there is evil in the world it follows that some other principal must be at work. The conventional monotheisms put this down to God's plan but while pain might enoble man as William Peter Blatty rightly points out 'does pain enoble a caterpillar ?" Children and animals are innocent. Why should they suffer and die ? The creator of this world ( God / Yaweh / Jehovah/ Allah/ what you will ) either doesn't exist or is quite evidently insane and does not necessarily love us nor mean the best for us. Although this force has the power to torture our physical bodies and even kill us when necessary it has no power over our immortal souls which the 'Cathars' believed were created by the true, good God and were apparently eternal. Needless to say this idea held great appeal in the middle ages when life was by all accounts nasty, brutish and short. In order to hide the evil in this world the 'Cathar' holy men or 'parfaits' believed an illusory veil had been drawn over our eyes.
Each of us however is supposed to have a divine counterpart, unfallen akin to a 'guardian angel' or Socrate's 'daemon' who is trying to help us awaken. This other personality is the authentic waking self. The one we have now is asleep and minor. We are in fact asleep and in the hands of a dangerous black magician disguised as the True Good God. The bleakness, the evil and pain in this world causes us to fall asleep into delusion early in life. Like Keanu Reeves we really do have superpowers but can't remember how to use 'em. The act of awakening, of slowly becoming aware of these powers is not so much an act of learning as an act of 'anamnesis', of remembering which implies there must be something to remember and that our actual lives extend beyond our apparent births and deaths.

Yet this malign force which deliberately manipulates and misleads us ( Known as 'Rex Mundi' or 'the king of the Earth' to the 'Cathari' ) cannot be infallible otherwise you wouldn't be reading this blog in the first place. The all seeing eye is not all powerful but tries to decieve the children of the kingdom into believing so. And if the designer of the prison programme is fallible then it can be beaten. That is the true meaning of the first law of magic 'As above, so below...'Gods' are only enlightened 'mortals' hence mortals might through the piecing together of seemingly dissociated information symbolically encoded in our minds over successive generations regain the key to their secret.

                                                              

Christ ( like the prophet Elijah ) is said to have 'entered alive into the Kingdom of Heaven'. Possibly other ascended masters are rumored to have existed over the centuries. Maybe we can make it to the next level but it ain't easy as Gilgamesh found out. We are nothing more than an energy wave, a frequency after all . Maybe it's possible to change channels?. The last time anyone seems to have pulled this off was when Fulcanelli, the master alchemist is supposed to have transcended the fabric of space time at some point just before or during the Second World War having apparently unpicked the 'art of light' encoded in the gothic architecture of the great cathedrals and mansions of Europe. According to his principle disciple, the publisher Eugene Canseliet, Fulcanelli had been aging backwards for some years and seemingly changed gender before disappearing. Far fetched I know but I have not been able to satisfactorily dismiss the possibility. All I know is he isn't really hiding beneath the floorboards as Leigh McClosky discovered in 'INFERNO'.

The trouble with these so-called 'ascended masters' is there never seems to be one around when you need them. While prepared to keep an open mind on the subject my attempts to track them down and better still obtain an interview have thus far proven, well... a li'l disappointing.

When I first heard of Otto Rahn I was told by Marius Mounie, the former mayor that the celebrated Nazi Grail historian was alive and still visited the castle regularly which jived with the notion that he had found the Holy Grail and attained some form of immortality after all. A cursory search of the records in his home town however revealed a surviving family, a death certificate and a grave in short order. Only a DNA test could tell for sure whether it was really Otto in the grave but the brutal logic of Occam's razor would tend to indicate that the man is dead and not still swanning about the Pyrenees on some fourth dimensional etheric sabatical.

It was a typically grey day in Darmstadt. I stood at the foot of  Otto's grave thinking it through. In the end I left him twelve red roses and the blackbird feather from the cave I'd been wearing in the brim of my hat before turning away and getting on with my life.

                                                                  

Time and the limitations of the medium prevent a full discussion of the life of the Count Rakoczy also know as the Count St. Germain, a flamboyant Transylvanian diplomat, freemason and alchemical dabbler who was said to have invented a patent diamond making process in addition to having obtained the Great Work and hence the secret of immortality. He wore diamond buttons on his frock coat and once presented Princess Catherine of Russia with an artificial gemstone the size of an ostrich egg but history does record that he died in his late sixties in Schleswig, Germany. He was interred in 1779 in the local graveyard at Eckenforde and while I'm familiar with the usual argument that he somehow faked his own death and survives to this day the inscription on his headstone seems unequivocal:- "He who called himself the Comte de Saint-germain and welldone of whom there is no other information, has been buried in this church."

And so to 'Fulcanelli' - the author of 'The Mystery of the Cathedrals' and the last on this  short, distressing list of  ascended adepts and modern masters...
                                                   


The work of Patrick Riviere among others dovetails with my own making it abundantly clear that the master alchemist was none other than the eminent  French physicist  Jules Violle, a member of the Academy of Sciences and inventor of the calorimeter. While undoubtedly a genius he would appear nonetheless to be a dead genius having apparently passed in his home town, the tiny village of Fixin on September 12, 1923, at the age of 83.

Of course there are a few irregularities surounding his demise. His son , Henri, signed the death certificate rather than the local coroner and I am fully aware of his pupil Eugene Canseliet's long standing claim of having met the master years later in Seville where he is meant to live and work to this day, an ageless alchemical hermaphrodite operating out of a ghostly manor that cannot be found on any earthly map, existing seemingly in a fold in space- time.

The thorny matter of immortality aside the unmasking of the master alchemist raises more than a few cogent questions. The name 'Violle' immediately brings to mind the name 'Varelli' given to Fulcanelli's surrogate in Argento's 'INFERNO.' ( 1980 ) While the spelling may differ the names essentially sound the same in keeping with the rules of Fulcanelli's beloved 'phonetic cabbalah' yet it goes without saying il mastro denies any conscious knowledge of this apparent 'coincidence'.

A split second after Leigh Mc Closky tears up the floorboards of his sister's apartment in the last reel of 'INFERNO' a cat leaps abruptly through the open window and then disappears into the newly opened hole in the floor while the Keith Emmerson score goes ga-ga on the soundtrack, signifying not only that we have found the alchemist's , and hence the Black Mother's hiding place but oddly recalling a similar moment in Poes' 'THE BLACK CAT' which Argento was to later adept for television, a matter detailed at some length in the first installment of this running saga. Quick witted readers may also recall that this was the title given to Daria Niccolodi's illegitimate attempt to complete the trilogy with director Luigi Cozzi at the helm - 'THE BLACK CAT' aka 'DEI PROFUNDIIS' .( 1990 )

"What secret could possibly lurk between these soundly put together walls ?"
What secret indeed ?




In so-called 'real' life Jules Violle could be commonly found in his favourite drinking hole - the Parisian 'Cabaret du Chat- Noir' or 'Black Cat Club' which he warmly describes in the second volume of his trilogy 'The Houses of the Philosophers' ( 1929 ) : - " Many of us remember the celebrated Chat-Noir ... but how many knew of the esoteric and political centre that was concealed there, of the international masonry that was hidden behind the signboard of the artistic cabaret. On the one hand, the talent of fervent, idealistic youth made up of carefree, blind aesthetes in search of glory and incapable of suspicion; on the other hand, the confidence of a mysterious science mixed with obscure diplomacy - a dual faced picture deliberately exhibited in a  medieval frame..."



The 'Caberet du chat Noir' was the home of the notorious anarcho-esoteric theatre company - 'Le Theatre d' Ombres' better known to us now as ' The Shadow Theatre' and whose first production at the Black Cat Club was a little confection  entitled  'The Temptation of Saint Anthony' - a cracking show by all accounts and yet another 'coincidence' in the endless spiral of maddening synchronicity. Perhaps as Kazanian the aleurophobic book seller in 'INFERNO' so baldly and simply states:- " The only true mystery is that our very lives are governed  by dead people..."
                                                      ..


Some believe that Fulcanelli like the true Christ, the Cathar parfaits, Lovecraft's 'old ones' or the 'secret masters of the world' are really still alive after all on some other unreachable channel, influencing our affairs with seemingly magical powers, communicating with us in dreams, backward masking, lattices of 'coincidence' Glitches in the matrix. Call 'em what you will...

                                          
Text and sub-text : - Bas relief from Notre Dame de Paris - The two books representing the exoteric surface and its esoteric content are obvious enough to the casual observer but what are we to make of the tricky way he's holding that sceptre and the extended fingers on his left hand ?

Fulcanelli said: "For an initiate to become an adept he must climb an 'analogic' ladder of correspondences." Or as Agent Cooper puts it in 'TWIN PEAKS': "When two things happen at once you should always pay strict attention" – although strangely it is our nature to disregard these moments or discard them just as we forget our dreams. In this way the 'matrix' defends itself. Consensus reality seamlessly rebuilds itself anew and we willingly fall asleep into delusion, willing jailors in our own living prison cells.

The earth is a bridge. We stand on a causeway between worlds are judged according to which power we give allegiance to. We cannot understand what the creator's plans are for us or what will happen once we cross the bridge...

           

Some day this war's gonna end…

                                                                                         
                          
The 'Cathars' were typically stigmatized as 'devil worshippers' by Pope Innocent III who called a crusade against them in the 12th century. It was a war of extermination that claimed some eight million lives. By the time the dust settled the kingdom of Occitania had been wiped from the map and it's language, Romans, a form of Anglo-Saxon similar to English that came to be known to later historians as 'Occitan', passed into oblivion along with the tarnished ideals of chivalry. I suspect the kings of France were motivated more by greed than anything else, by the desire to possess the fertile lands and the notoriously beautiful daughters of the south. A psychological band-aid to help boost morale after the shock of losing Jerusalem to the Moors just as the US had to wage war on Iraq to make up for the trauma of 9/11.
The powers that were had to poison a couple of Popes to get their way and lacking the mechanization of the Nazi's it took them more than a generation to achieve their aims.

The last stand of the Cathars took place at Montsegur, literally the safe or 'secure' mountain. The siege lasted two years and there were battles and skirmishes fought every day.

                                                           

Many of the great heroes of chivalry fought and died there. 'Men such as Lantar, Belissen and Caraman' according to Magre and the mesmerisingly beautiful Esclarmonde d'Alion – also known as 'Esclarmonde the Bastard' , swordsmistress of the south who fought beside her twin brother Loup. Through two winters the defenders of Montsegur held out against the Pope, against the Spanish inquisition, the Teutonic knights, the kings of France and Simon de Montfort - founder of the British bicameral parliamentary system, effectively against the world.

The castle fell to treachery just before the spring equinox in the second year of the siege when shepherds from the neighboring village of Camon showed the Teutonic knights who were accustomed to the icy Alpine conditions the secret path up the sheer side of the mountain by which the defenders smuggled in their supplies and on 16 march the last of the Albigensians, some 225 surviving men, women and children were dragged down the mountain in chains to perish on the Camp de Cremat.

                                                              

The events of the last crusade were suppressed by successive chroniclers who all too readily took their lead from the inquisitors. The castle's history as, above all, a symbol of resistance made it impossible for the conquering orthodoxy to Christianize or take into the Holy Roman faith as they did at Montserrat and countless other pagan sites such as Montserrat, Lourdes or Fatima.

Ashamed of their ancestor's genocidal history it is hardly surprising that the French film industry has thus far avoided the subject matter and the outside world has little interest in what it considers to be a quirk of 'French history'.  When the 'Cathars' do surface in films they are usually portrayed in the inquisition's terms – as fanatics or devil worshippers...





Otto Rahn's account 'Crusade Against the Grail' was the first to be published outside France and no mention of Occitania and its vanished tongue was made in the English language until 1940. Despite the title surprisingly little reference to the Grail itself is made in Otto's opus. Like the Moors the 'Cathari' admitted to the existence of Christ but their evident disdain for the material world is at odds with the Catholic veneration of earthly relics such as the folkloric Cup of the Last Supper. Besides, as aforementioned, nobody seems to know what a Grail let alone who the damn thing belongs to. Theories range from the sacred bloodline or 'Sangraal' described in Baigent, Lincoln and Leigh's fanciful bestseller 'THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL' , Bran's cauldron, the lost Gospel of Saint John, the 'Book of Nicetas', a graven tablet or a 'hard, dark stone' symbollic of Christ's suffering according to Wolfram von Eschenbach's 'PARSIFAL'.

Rahn identifies the Grail with the 'Crown of Lucifer' that fell from the peacock angel's brow when he was cast out of heaven. The diadem fell to Earth in the Hindu Kush where it was carved by master Afghan craftsmen into the cup used by Salem to consecrate the temple Abraham built in Ur of the Chaldees and eventually borne back to Europe after those pesky Romans looted the Holy of Holies. According to Otto the servants of Lucifer still seek their master's lost diadem so that he might regain his rightful place in the kingdom of heaven. Searching from one lifetime to the next, down through the ages…

Legend has it that the Cathars counted the Grail amongst their treasures but just before the forces of darkness entered the castle a dove descended from on high and split the mountain with its beak. Eslclarmonde hid the cup within the solid rock before turning into a dove herself and ascending into the kingdom of heaven. Others believe the treasure was smuggled out by a small group who escaped by ropes down the sheer side of the mountain the night before the castle fell and were hunted like animals by troops acting under the Seneschal of Toulouse who had drafted in packs of bloodhounds expressly for this purpose. One band under Esclarmonde d'Alion was cornered in a cave on the banks of the icy Ariege and buried alive by their pursuers who did not dare to follow them into the labyrinthine tunnels in which they had taken refuge. Instead the crusaders sealed the cavern and pitched camp, standing guard until all signs of life from within the mountain had ceased. Then they struck camp, saddled their horses and rode away leaving behind them a rampart of stones that remained untouched for seven centuries…



Despite the emphasis placed on the Grail's essentially spiritual nature, a reminder that it is our sacred duty to strive towards perfection there is a disturbing literalness to Rahn's quest – a pragmatic, methodical, typically German approach to the mystery.

                                                                                                

After his attempts to buy land in Montsegur itself were thwarted he moved to the nearby valley of Ussat, concentrating his efforts on the ruins of Lordat and the caverns of the Lombrives. A news item from a 1933 edition of the local newpaper 'La Depeche' headed 'Gold Rush in the Pyrenees' puts it succinctly: - " …an international secret society known as the 'Polaires' are digging up the foundations of the ruined castle of Lordat under the command of a shadowy German individual named Rams…"
An amused letter from Otto himself appeared in the subsequent issue.
"My dear sir – you are entirely mistaken ! My named is Rahn, not 'Rams'…"

                                                               

In order to continue his increasingly obsessive investigations Otto negotiated the purchase of a small hotel near the mouth of the largest cave and equppied it with a dark room in order to process the hundreds of photographs taken during the course of his work which included extensive analysis of the graffiti found on the walls of the subterranean galleries that honeycomb the escarpments above the Ariege. Stories of this period are far too numerous to innumerate, Rahn's establishment, 'Des Maronniers' providing the focus for a convoluted web of local legends. It's patrons were said to include the emissaries of countless obscure lodges and vanished secret societies, fancy women from Toulouse and Paris, English psychics, Basque, Occitan and Catalan nationalists, Italian fascists and German fifth columnists including Karl Wolf who was later to become personal adjutant to SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler, the historian Isabelle Sandy, Dr.Laffont and the mysterious Mr.Baby. Staff included the seven foot tall Somali barman, Habdu, who was later to become Otto's bodyguard and closest friend, saving the young philologist's life when Rahn was swept away by the rising floodwaters in the grotto of Fontanet, identified by its phreatic source as Wolfram von Eschenbach's cave of the 'wild fountain'. Typically Rahn makes no mention of any of these individuals in his published works stating in 'THE COURT OF LUCIFER' that his sole companion during his time in France was his cat. To find the real Rahn we are forced to read between the lines…

                                                                                        

In 1934 working closely with Antonin Gadal, the minister of tourism for southern France, Otto excavated the caverns of Ornolac, Fontanet and the Lombrives and amidst the blackened bones he is said to have found an ancient vessel  forged from meteoric iron, a relic that never tarnished yet somehow secreted a  substance akin to human blood,  a  cup dubbed by Gadal the 'graal pyrenean'. At first like most folk I found the story hard to believe until I saw  the bleedin stones . for myself.

The 'Pyrenean Grail' was just one of many artifacts removed by Otto and his cronies including dozens of meteorites, the largest of which now forms the altar in the temple at the European Rosicrucian movement's headquarters in Amsterdam. The Q'aaba in Mecca is said to have been made of the same hard, dark extraterrestrial iron identified with the black stone of the alchemists, the negrido, lapis excoelus, a hyperdense alien alloy that never rusts but secretes a blood like ferrous solution 99% pure iron. It is easy too see how a superstitious mind ( mine included ! ) would be affected by the sight of that blood, seemingly springing from nowhere.
It is iron oxide after all that gives the Ganges its sanguine tint at source that identifies it as the life blood of the goddess and for whatever reason, placebo effect, call it what you will it does seem to possess a healing virtue.

My first guinea pig was Andy Collins, one of the production assistants on the German leg of the 'SECRET GLORY' who burned his hand on one of the distress flares used during our descent into the lightless cavities beneath the Wewelsburg. The wound closed and healed over in days without leaving a trace. The second beneficiary of this apparent virtue was Beltane Fire
Society founder Mark Oxbrow's then girlfriend, Liz, who was struck on the head by a bottle during the yearly bash on Carlton Hill. While Mark ran to fetch help. By the time he got back the paramedics were no longer necessary.

In 2001 my mother was diagnosed with a particularly nasty form of lymphoma that lead to the growth of tumours behind her eyes that slowly pushed them from their sockets and ultimately threatened the optic nerves themselves. My mother is an author and illustrator by trade but an artist to the core. Knowing that further attempts surgery would possibly destroy her eye sight I resorted to the only cure I knew. I told her to lie down and rest while I put meteor blood in her eyes. She was so knocked out on medication that she didn't really know what was happening and later told me that she had dreamed there were angels standing around her bed healing her eyes, a particularly strange admission as my mother is a staunch, die hard atheist who then, as now, had little time for 'THE SECRET GLORY' or the whole Rahn fandango, believing like most people that the Holy rail should stay in the Monty Python movie where it belongs - which tends to rule out 'placebo effect' as a logical explanation. Call it 'coincidence' then but needless to say she made a dramatic recovery and some six years later the cancer is still in remission…

Wolfram von Eschenbach puts it more baldly, simply stating that whoever has the stones or comes into contact with them "will have eternal life and will be healed…"

                                                                                         

View from Otto's room - Ussat

Sadly it didn't work out that way for ol' Otto. He was murdered by the nazi's in 1939 and the secret of the Cathars was thought to have died with him. Some believe the SS sealed the cup into a mineshaft at the base of a glacier near the abandoned Obersalzburg complex or that it was shipped to a secret U-boat base in Antarctica at the end of the war while others say it never left France at all and remained in the hands of wily old Gadal, the director of tourism.



Gadal lived on in Ussat 'til his death in the sixties and after the war became the head of the European Rosicrucian movement, reforming it along his own strnge 'neo-cathar' lines. My previous research suggests the meteoric vessel remains in their hands and is probably used in their initiation rituals which continue to take place in the Bethlehem Grotto in Ussat. There is evidence the chalice was publicly exhibited at one point in the museum in Tarascon, the home of former president Mitterand and now a bastion of neo-nationalists and the French hard right. The former curator of the museum had initially refused to be interviewed for fear he could be implicated in the 'Solar Temple' murders. The now disbanded ' Solar Temple ' was an obscure right wing sect that counted Princess Grace of Monaco among its members. The sect all but disbanded over a decade ago after a series of still unexplained mass murders in Quebec, France and the tiny town of Sion in Switzerland, the bodies of Temple members ( all of them respectable local bankers, politicians and town functionaries ) were found ( after synchronised fire bomb explosions in Canada and France ! ) arranged twelve to a group like the spokes of a wheel, heads pointing inwards, hands tied behind them, gunshot wounds in the backs of their heads. All told some 74 people died in Switzerland alone and at least a further 16 in Quebec.

                                       

About all you can be sure of is it wasn't suicide! Otto's journal mentions a similar arrangement of Cathar remains from a 12th century grave. There were twelve knights at the round table, the thirteenth chair being vacant, the Siege Perilous. Twelve disciples at the last supper, twelve houses of the zodiac, twelve little pips around the borders of the Cathar cross, twelve departments in the SS, twelve seats at Himmler's round table, twelve empty plinths in the circular Vallhalla room or Hall of the Dead beneath the Wewelsberg, twelve men to a workgroup at the local Niederghagen concentration camp ( worked systematically to death under the principal of extermination through labour ) and twelve standing stones surrounding Gadal's grave on the banks of the Ariege.
             
   

Despite my best efforts to co-erce or cojole the secret of the 'Pyrenean Grail's current whereabouts from the former curator I failed to ever get within striking distance of the relic itself although I believe it is still somewhere in the valley of Ussat and probably in the hands of a secret society who use it in their initiation rituals. After seven years I knew we were still only beginning to understand what the story was really about. I knew the stones had been prized since time out of mind and that men might kill or die for them yet without having yet conducted a full spectrograph had few clues as to their density or the true nature of the other mysterious properties attributed to them. Chemical density is determined within the first few seconds of the 'big bang.' On Earth the heaviest element in the existing periodic table is Uranium which can be artificially enriched to form Plutonium and of course there's really only one thing that Plutonium is good for…



The mystery of the cathedrals ?

                                                              

In deep space far heavier stable elements are known to exist, some of them dense enough to bend light or literally fold space-time, each one containing the latent energy of the original light, the 'big bang', still trapped within it and awaiting some future redemption like the souls of the 'Cathars' imprisoned in their 'tunics of flesh.' The 'Cathars' accepted Christ only as a prophet and awaited the coming of a true messiah who would incarnate not as a human being but as pure light, a light that would liberate us all from the 'sin of matter', cleanse the Earth, break the cycle of incarnation and bring us back to God.

The 'Graal Pyrenean' is identified by some as the Emerald Cup, not because of its shade but because of what it holds within it, indetectable to mortal eyes, what the deranged Nazi Ariosophist Miguel Serrano described as 'the green ray' or the 'condensed light of the black sun.' There is some evidence to suggest that several artifacts from Rahn's initial excavations were shipped to the United States just before the war where they later came to the attention of one of Alberty Einstein's associates, a young physicist named Dr.Herbert Fleishmann who had a particular interest in the fields of superconductivity and supercooling. The military applications of his work remain classified along with the details of the first and second SS Polar expeditions in which Rahn seems to have played a role. Murky 16mm footage exists depicting some sort of radar apparatus reminiscent of the transmitters found today at the United States installation at Gaakon, Alaska and some believe that research continues in secret at the American airbase in Thule, Greenland, a former Nazi installation that came over to Allied administration after the war under 'Operation Paperclip'.

                                            

But it's all speculation and without tangible evidence will remain so. Like Fulcanelli's incomplete trilogy, the 'overture to the invisible', the notorious 'verbum dismissum' of the alchemists, Rahn's work remains incomplete. He speaks of three stones after all...

             

In the final pages of 'THE COURT OF LUCIFER' written in 1936 – a good three years before his lonely demise – Otto describes three completed manuscripts resting before him on his writing desk. On the first pile, the notes that comprised the substance of 'CRUSADE AGAINST THE GRAIL' rests one of the black stones he brought back from Montsegur, on the second – the text of 'THE COURT OF LUCIFER' rests a fragment of the Delphi oracle frieze and on the third, what he promised would be his final and greatest work rests a 'lump of amber, golden yellow' – reminiscent of Masonry's three degrees and the whitened final substance of the alchemical 'great work'. The third book of Rahn, begun at the Arctic Circle under the working title 'ORPHEUS' or 'A JOURNEY TO HELL AND BEYOND' is of course missing, either seized by the Nazi's when he fled the SS or ( as Ingeborg would have us believe ) burned by his mother at the end of the war.

Rahn's sensational earlier work lead to him being feted by the Nazi elite and for a few years his research had been lavishly funded by the Race and Settlement department. Then something went disasterously wrong. In 1939 he was accused of being both a Jew and a homosexual and placed before a military tribunal. The department responsible for commissioning him was disbanded and Rahn went on the run. The last people to see him alive were two children playing in the snow outside a farmhouse on the slopes of the Kufstein in southern Germany. According to the oldest of the children, Peter Meier, a tall man dressed in black appeared from the treeline and paused to ask the time. It was late in the day and fearing for the stranger their parents later went to look for him but even though the snow was more than a metre deep found to their surprise he had left no footprints. The following spring a body was discovered only a few hundred feet from the back of the house. Otto had apparently walked up the stream to avoid leaving tracks before sitting down under on of the trees to swallow a cocktail of pills. According to the report filed by the police in Zoll however the pills didn't kill him. He froze to death.

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An obituary appeared on May 18 in the 'Berliner Ausgabe" filed by Rahn's former associate, Karl Wolff: -"In a sudden storm in the mountains in March or January SS Obersturmfuhrer Otto Rahn tragically lost his life. We mourn the loss of our comrade, a good and decent SS man and writer of noted historical, scholarly works – signed SS Chief of Staff Obergruppenfuhrer Wolff."

Of course we only have Wolff's word it happened that way and taking the SS's word at face value was never a good idea to begin with. There's plenty wrong with the official account not the least of it the fact that although Otto seems to have been on the run no-one seems to have bothered looking for him. The body lay in the snow for months yet his family confirm that no-one ever asked after him or called to investigate his abrupt disappearance which is a little unusual in a police state such as Germany had then become. Of course the good folk at the SS Order castle acted as if they had known where Rahn was all along which they probably did …

Himmler's adjutant, Rahn's obituarist, Karl Wolff later became the Nazi ambassador to the Vatican and survived the war. He was granted immunity for his crimes by agreeing to testify against his former comrades at Nuremberg and later became well known as one of the principal interviewees and narrators of the BBC series 'THE WORLD AT WAR' as well as playing an active role in discrediting the 'Hitler diaries' for Stern Magazine and helping bring Klaus Barbie to justice in Paraguay. I was mercifully born too late to have attended Nuremberg but I did get to sit in on the famous libel trial at River City's high court a few ago that resulted in the subsequent downfall of British pseudo-historian and holocaust denier David Irving.

Irving had consistently attacked the credibility of the experts introduced to counter his claims that a deliberate policy of mass extermination had never been practiced at Auschwitz or by implication the other camps so when the prosecuting attorney introduced Karl Wolff's testimony he couldn't help quipping : " Someone like you would probably consider the Reichsfuher's personal adjutant to be a credible witness, would you not ?"
Ignoring the polite murmur of laughter from the audience Irving screwed up his eyes and remarked; - "Well, it's a bit of a curate's egg, really.."

And the funny thing is I know what he means.
Only it ain't funny…

                                         


In the course of my own research I collated, translated and compiled literally hundreds of pages of testimony, documents and journal entries that charted Rahn's quest for the roots of an authentic European 'Ur- religion', a body of invaluable folkloric data from a pre-war Europe now lost to us . His work has informed my own and opened my eyes to much of what I had inadvertently stumbled across. While the body of this material has now been transferred to disc and could be downloaded at the touch of a key Margaret Thatcher and Marie Denarnaud may have had a point. There are some things you just 'can't tell the public'.

Regardless of its merit Rahn's magnum opus was required reading at a certain level of promotion within the SS and inadvertently or otherwise contributed to the ideological underpinnings of the holocaust. The figure of six million Hebrew martyrs so hotly disputed by Irving and his dodgy ilke sadly obscures the wider picture. Let's get this straight, o my brothers, seventy two million people lost their lives in WW2 in mainland Europe alone and with those sort of figures you don't crap around with fate.



Opus Dei Headquarters - Torreciudad, Spain - Summer 2007
Like Heinrich Himmler who took time off from hobnobbing with Franco to make obeissance to 'La Morenita' the founder of Opus Dei, the recently canonized Cardinal Escriva drew inspiration from the magic mountain and Savanarolla's 'Knights of Heaven. In practise they amount to a sort of Catholic equivalent of the Taliban and to make matters worse they're rich, relentless and in government right here in Europe.  It's like the Spanish Civil War never even happened...

Sometimes the underground stream ducks out of sight. Sometimes the trail seems to go cold and so-called 'real' life takes pririority. Its just the way of things. There be no other...

The only way you could ever prove whether or not it was really Otto's body in that grave in Darmstadt would be to exhume his remains and effectively conduct an independent autopsy, something well beyond my limited means. The only way to learn the truth about what happened to him at the Pole, Dr.Fleischmann and the continuing experiments at Thule would be to somehow track down the missing manuscript or access the redacted files which seems equally improbable.

We kept going until we ran out of funds and film stock and when we were done with 'THE SECRET GLORY' we split the artifacts we had recovered from the caves and Rahn's effects equally between myself, Mr.Horn and the other Shadow Theatre irregulars who had given freely of their time and energy along the way. We divided the stones as fairly as possible before reluctantly winding down the operation and going our separate ways. The four horsemen were abroad in the land and there were wars and rumors of wars…



Secret Glory - Crew Photo - Self and Mr.Horn on the road to the Grail Castle - autumn 1998

                                            

I hadn't broken bread with Dario in some years and for a while I think I actively avoided him. I acted partly out of guilt over having left him in the lurch at Raleigh Studios and unfinished business with his daughter I suspect the real reason I kept my head down was that I simply didn't know what to say. I mean what is there to say about 'THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA' other than 'no comment' ?

   

Asia kept in touch for a while and I received postcards from distant cities on all four sides of the earth bearing cryptic, scrawled messages from cities . As my career idled hers hit the fast track with roles in 'La Reine Margot' and 'XXX' thrusting her into the fickle limelight she claimed to abhor. In the hothouse glare her talent blossomed just as the fortunes of all who loved and worked with her invariably seemed to flicker and wane as if the creative energy had been juiced right out of them. While they seemed made for eachother in theory her attempts to collaborate with her father seemed to consistently misfire.

While I had tried to defend 'TRAUMA' and love 'STENDAHL SYNDROME' despite its flaws 'PHANTOM' was in a class of its own and for once I had no desire to watch the film a second time. Sitting through it was like being forced to watch my parents making love or more to the point contemplating their naked, tangled corpses. The experience left me defeated, demoralized and diminuished as if a part of my childhood had not so much died as been tarred and feathered, set on fire and then drowned in its own vomit. The continuing theme of rebellion against the dominating patriarchy, now explicitly identified with the paedophillic director of the opera house and the bland phantom's efforts to groom the young ingénue to stardom, only made it clearer than ever that Asia would have to escape her father's loving clutches if she were ever to fulfill her own potential but to be fair on il maestro he wasn't the only director to be overwhelmed and ultimately defeated by Asia's presence, hampering her budding career with a string of high profile disasters.



Michael Radford, recently feted by the Academy for 'Il Postino' fell head over heels for her hungry eyes and crafted the execrable 'B-MONKEY' accordingly. They say that love is blind but that's scarcely an excuse. Abel Ferrara fell just as hard and his erratic career took an abrupt nose dive halfway through 'NEW ROSE HOTEL' from whence it never fully recovered. And as for George Romero and 'LAND OF THE DEAD' ? What can I say ? But it hurt. It hurt bad. You know it did….

                                                  

Asia had worked with some of the best directors in the business, legendary figures one and all and by now it must have been obvious even to her that she could do a better job with both hands tied behind her back. Betrayed by a string of would-be mentors and surrogate father figures she did the only thing she could and assuming responsibility for her own career took hold of the reigns to direct herself in 'SCARLET DIVA' – a ghastly autobiographical glimpse behind the mirror that comes across more like a cry for help than an actual for real attempt at a motion picture. Nonetheless it still packed a hell of a lot more anger and toxic energy than anything her old man had done in years.

                                                                     

Asia seemed to have not only inherited il maestro's pathological tendency to air his psychological linen in public but had gone one step further by casting her mother, Daria Nicoldi, as her abusive, alcoholic mother and recruiting her friends to largely play themselves, happily tearing down the remaining barriers between the movies and so-called 'real life', the two blurring irrevocably into a single skuzzy, softcore gestalt.
Interesting, I thought. Not exactly a movie I wanted to take home with me but definitely interesting.

                                                    

Unsurprisingly the public failed to identify with 'SCARLET DIVA's central theme, just how damn hard it is to be Asia Argento, and the film subsequently vanished without a trace, performing just well enough on DVD to bankroll her second, more tightly focused opus.

                                         
.
While 'The heart is deceitful in all things marks a quantum improvement over Miss Argento's earlier work as a director I couldn't help but wonder if Asia wasn't the only person on the planet not to have realized that author J.T.Leroy was really just a woman wearing a funny hat rather than a bi-sexual rent boy or bonafide hermaphrodite. Although this second purgative offering failed to register any more strongly on the box office radar than its predecessor it was clear the maestro's  heir apparent was learning fast and it seemed only a matter of time before she gathered the courage to steal her father's rain making magic while he slept and finally came into her own.
 
        

I didn't run into Dario again until the premier of his subsequent feature at Gerardmer in the icy winter of 2001.

                                                                                 

While hardly vintage stuff 'SLEEPLESS' seemed a step in the right direction, a retreat from 'PHANTOM's abyss to the familiar territory of the 'giallo', the genre the master had made his own yet the familiarity of the material only served as a reminder of the trailblazing frissons of his youth offering a scratch mix of 'Deep Red', 'Opera' and the 'animal trilogy' that began it all en lieu of any real personality of its own as if we were watching a slickly rendered homage to his own work, ersatz Argento rather than the real deal, like Geoff Love or Hugo Montenegro covering a Morricone original. And if il maestro was running on auto-pilot then so was his star. The presence of Max von Sydow in the rehashed Karl Malden role raised my initial expectations but the great man was too far down the pike from 'THE SEVENTH SEAL' to be able to make any real difference to the formulaic material , sleepwalking through his turn as an Italian ( !?! ) cop every bit as unlikely as Asia's doomed Inspector Manni in 'STENDAHL SYNDROME' whilst grappling with some of the clunkiest English language dialogue in il maestro's ouvre and running the very real risk of being upstaged by smart ass talking parrot with whom the visibly uncomfortable lead finds himself closeted for much of the flick's running time, the latest and surely most ludicrous addition to the long line of Argento's crime busting birds, friendly flies, cursed cats and other unlikely animal protagonists.
The neo-Goblin score was a distinct improvement over Morricone's recent contributions to the canon but il maestro's inexplicable obsession with dwarfs and the desperate slapstick that added the final height related insult to 'Phantom's aesthetic injury spilled over to infect even the normally dependable Claudio Simonetti who hit an all time low with an insufferable 'funny midget' theme that seemed to have strayed in from 'LIVING IN OBLIVION's darkest nightmares. Asia's absence came as a breath of fresh air although she somehow managed to cast a deadening hand on the project even at a distance by penning the stilted nursery rhyme that the leads are forced to repeat over and over as if in the hope it might somehow improve in the telling. According to Alan Jones this worked a lot better in Italian but I remain to be convinced…

It had been seven years since that night at Raleigh Studios and at first I thought he wouldn't even recognize me. I had been at the height of my fifteen minutes of pseudo-fame the last time we had met with an office off Sunset, p.a to run my social calendar , limmo service the whole bit. Now I was an itinerant former dogman at odds with the intelligence community and up to my eyeballs in a smoky fug of post 9-11 paranoia but il maestro's gaunt, beleagured face lit up as our gaze met. The insouciance he'd shown at the National Film Theatre was gone, stripped away by the savaging 'Phantom' had received and while to some extent 'SLEEPLESS' marked a return to form the he was as keenly aware of its shortcomings as his sternest critic and grateful for a friendly face in a crowd he feared had come to bury him regardless. A director is a general in charge of an army of traitors like any showman. An audience will love you, laugh with you and wait outside your stage door when you're hot and on a roll but no audience is ever truly friendly. Not for long. Bore 'em or disappoint 'em - even once and they'll turn on you and tear you to pieces regardless of who you are or might once have been.

It was all the master could do to say a few short words by way of an introduction before making a bee-line for the exit, not wanting to stick around to see what happened and with no intention of staying for the traditional Q and A. Those days of easy interaction with the fans were gone for good it seemed or until the stars came round again to their right place and time. It was the winter of 2001. 'Donnie Darko' was plainly the film of the festival. My mentor was no longer the daemon he once was, no longer the undisputed master of the macabre but whatever I was I wasn't even a film maker anymore but that didn't matter to him now any more than it had when we first met. All that really counted was that we were both still alive, still smoking and still friends despite it all.

Circling around the back of the cinema complex to avoid the festival organizers we struck out across the surface of the frozen lake, giggling like school children as the world faded behind us, the far shore lost in the icy mist as if we had passed alive into Fulci's 'beyond.' I had brought a li'l smoke for old times sake and for a while it really was just like old times, all the better perhaps because neither of us honestly gave a damn about what anyone thought any more.

When the cold began to seep into us we ducked into another preview theatre at random and found ourselves by chance in the front row of a sparsely attended screening of what turned out to be a Ernest Dickerson's 'BONES'.

We'd missed the first ten minutes but rapidly surmised that we were not only watching an uncredited remake of the 1979 blaxploitation thriller 'J.D's REVENGE' and a homage, intentionally or otherwise to our own material with the nods extending to Snoop Dog returning from hell complete with black hat, coat and glowing eyes.

                                                  

The spectacle of Snoop trying to make like a certain demi-goth from Stevenage seemed somehow even more absurd than Ali G. trying to make like Snoop and before long we were both in hysterics. "What have you done to these kids ?" muttered Dario. "It's not my fault. You started it…"
But it wasn't our fault at all. At least not directly. As the end roller duly made clear. Our mutual friend Adam Simon who had given Dario his translation of the Sefir Yetzirah, the Book of creation had been responsible for the screenplay if not specifically for Snoop's costume and the sight of his name brought us full circle to that night in Malibu, one more tiny link in the invisible lattice of coincidence, an ironic reminder of the forces that had really been in charge all along, that directed our actions through dreams, through pulses in secret rivers, through signs in heaven and changes on earth, heraldries painted on darkness and hieroglyphs graven on the tablets of our brains. They wheeled in mazes. We merely spelled the steps and tried to read the signals. They conspired together and on the mirrors of darkness our eyes had traced the plots our waking minds could scarcely contain. Theirs were the symbols. Ours the images that struggled to convey them…

                                                                                         

Then the munchies kicked in and retreating to the far corner of a late night bistro I watched Dario put away two courses while I got him up to speed with what had happened in the Pyrenees, slipping the bleeding stones from my pocket as proof I hadn't been hallucinating all along. Then casting one eye over the dessert menu il maestro began for the first time to discuss the Third Mother. He had just gotten back from a sojourn in Haiti and like myself was increasingly convince that the ecstatic faith of the magic island was a living example of what had once been a pan-European phenomena, an ur-religion rooted in the Goddess worship of ancient Rome and the so-called 'Tarantula Cults' of the dark ages, a white Voodoo that survives hidden by successive masks down through the ages…
                                                           
                                                                                        

She had been waiting for her time to come round for some many years, haunting our dreams but from the very first time I heard the icy tinkle of those tiny silver keys and glimpsed her pale bowed face in my mind's eye there had been something hauntingly familiar about her high forehead and long, dark hair. There was even then only one clear choice, only one vessel, one conduit, one player who could truly embody the role…

                                                                         

We both knew how much was at stake, Dario most of all and he had put off the inevitable for as long as possible but we were running out of time and he had to finish it, to complete the circle while there was still a chance. He knew what was at stake and tried to distract himself developing a script entitled 'DARK GLASSES' and then abandoning it along with a rough sketch for a Venetian giallo, marking time with 'THE CARD PLAYER' while the last few pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

                                                                                  

And in the meantime the lunatic soap opera we take to be 'real life' roared on.
The second Gulf War broke out just as I was sitting down to breakfast with Alejandro Jodorowkski in a dingy hotel dining room in Brussels. When I pointed out that this had happened before the last time we met Jodo' blanked on me, unable to recall the events in question. He was quite adamant we had never met before, nor had he ever seen or heard of my work or served on any festival jury such as the one I described. In any case he insisted he was a poet, not a film-maker and claimed to have no further interest in motion pictures which he considered a passing fad rather than a medium suitable for bona fide adult artists. I nodded along, keeping one eye on the television screen in the corner of the room, content that at least this time the great man didn't seem to have any problem with my smoking which passed unnoticed.
Jodo' had come to Brussels to perform his much touted 'magical cabaret' for the last time and anxious adherents had come from all across Europe to get the benefit. Sadly events in got in the way just as they had precluded any chance of esoteric discourse when we had first met back in 1990. Canceling his show at the eleventh hour Jodo' announced to a packed house that magic had no place in wartime and that instead he would read them an epic composition he had recently penned as an 'act of revolutionary poetry'. The screed was in French so I didn't stick around and later I heard Jodo' cut his impromptu reading short and bottled it when the crowd turned ugly. Perhaps I should have reminded him that a magician and a poet is still a showman and a general like any other but I doubt he would have heard me. Not that I had an audience myself mind you but then I didn't need one. For now the magic was reward enough…

                                          

My mother had expressed a growing desire to see all the places I had told her about during her convalescence and when she was strong enough took her to meet the black Madonna. Again I rode the cable car through the curling eternal mists and joined the queue of pilgrims winding in single file through the basilica to touch the globe in La Morenita's extended hand and if I wished for anything this time it was merely for the right thing to happen, for my eyes to penetrate the toxic 21st century haze and my ears to hear her whisper once more, for my heart to know her mysteries ever more keenly so that I might at last find the words and images to express the inexpressible.

And that night I climbed the mountain and gazed by starlight once more upon the faces of those antehuman Gods. And I waited for a sign perhaps. And waited again. But the Gods were silent.
>
We made an early start and headed north across the Pyranees by way of Andora and the valley of Ussat to Montsegur and Madame Couquet's auberge where the first fire of the season already smouldered on the hearth.
Madame greeted us with open arms, looking somehow younger than when I saw her last. The old inn was the closest I had come to a real home over the years and despite the language barrier she struck up an instant rapport with my mother that was to become a lasting, almost intuitive bond. Strange and oddly reassuring as it was to see these two matriarchs together at the long table the homecoming was not complete without a third mother, a third replica of the Madonna of Montserrat that I had purchased the day before in Spain and presented now to Madame Couquet to watch over the auberge.
"Merci. It's very nice. But we already have one."
 "What ?"
"She says she's already got one…"
"Thanks mom. I can…What d'you mean she's already got one ?"
"Ouie …ouie…" Madame nodded, trying to explain in her heavily accented Southern French. " Notre Dame la Lumiere !"
"You mean a replica like the one I got in New York ?"
" No. A real one."

And it was true...

                                                            

The third mother had been there all along, hidden in plain sight in the tiny church opposite the auberge. To be fair the chapel was locked six out of seven days and Sunday mornings in Montsegur had invariably found me either still in bed or camped out on the mountain. The last thing any of us had thought to do over the years in course of getting with the whole Cathar deal was to go to mass.
And there she was. Beautiful, cryptic, proud, staring out from the dust of three hundred years since monks from Montserrat had first brought Her from the far side of the mountains to symbolize their spiritual kinship with the hardy villagers of Montsegur, explicitly drawing together and linking the initiatory mountains in a way that Otto had scarcely guessed at. He had spent enough time at Montserrat to familiarize himself with the Benedictine library reading room and drew on its medieval texts in his research but in his haste to denigrate the Catholic faith responsible for the extermination of his beloved Cathari he blinded himself to the common pagan roots that bound these ancient sites together, roots that were deeper and older than Christianity and its heretical antithesis.

"My ancestors were witches and I am a heretic…" wrote Otto and in his natural revulsion for the inquisition and championing of the lost ideals of the troubadours he missed what had been right under his nose all along. He derided the faith of Madame Couquet's father, the town priest who had given him lodging and never set foot inside the church to catch sight of that all important icon, the Black Mother who had been venerated in those mountains by one name or another since time out of mind.

If he did see the image in the church he made no mention of it, nor did he remark on the crude yet unmistakable outline of the arachnid daubed on the wall of the cavern where he first unearthed those bleeding stones that would help speed him towards his early grave. You can see that telltale graffiti for yourselves, large as life in the montage that opens the Subversive DVD release of 'The Secret Glory' where it simply flits by without comment or context. Yet it is there.
Perhaps in his haste to identify Montsegur with the mythical 'Grail Castle' he overlooked the fundamental contradiction of a heretical faith that viewed the material world as being inherently flawed having a material treasure to begin with. It was not in the nature of the Cathari to venerate relics in the manner of the Catholic church and the sight of the blood of Christ liquefying from the living rock tends to lose much of its superstitious charge if the attendant culture doesn't accept the existence or theological relevance of a flesh and blood messiah to begin with.

As with the consistent conflation of the ancient Celts, the Druids, Beaker folk and megalith builders of Stonehenge and Avebury into a single mythic culture by the modern New age movement it was all too easy before the advent of reliable carbon dating and other techniques common to modern archeology to misidentify the shrapnel of a dozen time periods as the residue of a single 'old religion' and it transpires that the caves of the Lombrives have been continuously inhabited since the end of the last ice age. It is my considered contention that Otto Wilhelm Rahn and Antonin Gadal did not find the 'holy grail' or the mythical 'treasure of the Cathars' but the relics of a far older cult that had held those caverns sacred long years before Christ and his cup, the Cathari or Abraham and the prophets. Before the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Black Madonna, before Kybele or Cybele or Sybil she was known as Kubaba the goddess of the caves who was worshipped in grottoes and on mountaintops since the dim red dawn of creation and known to her adherents as the Great Mother - Magna Mater or Meter Orie the 'mountain mother' and by who's name we know the black stones that have been associated with her worship since the fogs of timeless time. Meteorites – quite literally the 'stones of the Mountain Mother'.

                                                     

The stones that fell from heaven were venerated not because of their extraterrestrial origins which primitive man could barely have guessed at but because of their alleged physical properties - the power to heal grave illness, protect against one's enemies and grant the gift of prophecy are so closely intertwined with the veneration of the Black Mother that the two are effectively one and the same. The ideograms for the 'mountain mother ' in the Hittite alphabet range from a lozenge or cube, a double headed axe, a dove, a cup, a door or a gate – all images of the goddess in Neolithic Europe. The very name Kubaba may betoken a cave or empty vessel, a wombspace or possibly derive from kube or kuba, recalling at once the black meteoric cube of the Ka'bah that was brought into Islam after Mohammed routed its original idolatrous worshippers out of Mecca.

          

It is said that in pagan times the seven priestesses of the Ka'bah circled the black stone naked as when the world was yet young. Today that practice is still recalled in the tawaf, the sevenfold counterclockwise circuit of the shrine performed by all pilgrims to take the Hadj. The ancient rituals roots almost certainly descend from the Sumerian goddess Inanna and her Babylonian equivalent Ishtar who was supposed to have passed through the seven doors of death or 'seven gateways' on her journey to the underworld, each successive gate keeper demanding she remove a garment as tribute until she finally stood naked before her elder sister Ereshkigal, 'Queen of the Great Earth', goddess of the underworld, a dance of death clearly echoed in the later Christian myth of Salome and the 'seven veils.'

  

 Erishkigal is also known by the epithet 'Allatu' ( literally 'the goddess' ) which is beyond question an earlier form of Al'Lat or Alilat identified by Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. as the divinity worshipped in Mecca before the coming of the prophet, Mohammed and the substitution and subsequent veneration of her partriarchal counterpart, Allah – essentially the goddess Al'Lat with a soft 't' )

Al'lat has been identified with the three fold moon goddess codeified by Robert Graves into the archetypes of virgin, hag and whore whereas in the introduction to the Penguin edition of the Koran translator N.J. Dawood states that the three mothers Al'Lat, Al'Uzza and Manat represent 'the Sun, venus and Fortune trespectively' and the writer Alby Stone suggests that in early Mesopotamian art the only heavenly bodies to be depicted regularly were a trinity of the Sun, the Moon and Venus, tracing the roots of the names 'Al'uzza' and 'Manat' to an even more archaic source betokening 'strength' and 'destiny' respectively.

                                          

If the three 'daughters of Allah' are personifications of natural phenomena then Al'Lat / Allatu / Ereshkigal is suely the earth while the other two may well have stood for fire and water as in the Book of Creation, the sefir yetzirah or for that matter the 'banat', the three daughters of Baal, the Canaanite supreme being. Islamic oral tradition ( al-Hadith: 'the Talk' ) has it that Mohammed's original vision initially endorsed the notion that the three mothers were goddesses but he apparently later disowned this as a false teaching inspired by Satan. ( Mircea Eliade 'A History of Religious Ideas', vol.3, p.68 )

At Petra the nabateans venerated a four sided stone named after Allat ( Arthur Cotterell/ Dictionary of World Mythology, p 24 ) whose son Dusura is just another take on Tammuz / Dumuzi /Du'uzi the green man who dies only to be reborn every spring after six months in the underworld. The Sumerians called him 'Dumu-zi'abzu' – 'faithful son of the abyssal waters' and believed that as in the later myth of Orpheus and Persephone the goddess Ishtar / Inanna was forced to descend to the underworld to retrieve him. Her actions provoked the wrath of the Gods and she was sentenced by the seven Anunnaki, the judges of the underworld the hellacious counterparts of the Sebettu, the seven sages venerated by the Babylonians and associated with the seven major cities that dominated their civilization.

                                                                      

The three most sacred sites in Islam are mecca, Medina and the Dome of the Rock on Temple mount, Jerusalem which is identified in Judaism as the 'Eben Shettiyah' – the 'stone of foundation' around which God built the world. Deep beneath the rock is a partly flooded cavity known to Muslims as 'Bir-el-Arweh' or the 'Well of Souls' and Jewish lore maintains how when David dug the foundations of the first temple he found the 'Eben Shettiyah' – the block that holds back the Abyss. When he tried to move the stone the waters of the underworld burst forth mirroring a parallel tradition in Islam which holds that when Mohammed cast down the idol that once stood in the sacred complex at Mecca he unblocked an ancient well beneath the Ka'bah. The idol was said to resemble the body of a 'black woman' , a deity named 'Hubal' – almost certainly another mask of Kubaba or Cybele who was known to be venerated at that time in Phrygia. In fact a  Phrygian statue of Cybele graven from a single meteoric 'aerolite' ( Cumont 'Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism' 1911 pp.46-7 )  was apparently presented to Rome by King Attalus in 204 BC. The ecstatic rites of Cybele's worship whilst initially a little alien to the Roman temperament seem to have caught on with the populace who venerated her in the Phyrgianum, the vast temple that once stood on the site of the present day Vatican. The high priest who presided over those frenzied rituals was known as 'Papus' or father, the direct ancestor of the present day Pope – the head of the patriarchal Holy Roman Church. As her worship spread throughout the Empire icons made in her image proliferated, painted black not because of the skin of the Egyptians, the dark alluvial soil of the Nile or some obscure Arabic root word but because the template on which she is based, the original statue that held sway over Rome was made of a black stone. Behind the masks of Christianity and Islam the Goddess, the Grail and the bleeding stones were one all along.

The original idol may still exist somewhere deep beneath the walls of the Vatican although it is said to have been lost in the fifth century. To some extent the Vatican's interest in Montserrat is indicative of the continuing power of the goddess cult within the edifice of the Church itself and the extraordinary degree of theological doublethink deployed to maintain the existing partriarchal order and keep the wool pulled over the public's eyes as to what force they truly serve.

.

Commonly asked Questions: -
Q: Is the Pope Catholic ?
A: Do you believe in Santa Claus ?
                                                       
  

The last time I saw il Maestro was just before the death of the last Pope back in 2005. Rome was languishing in the grip of a greenhouse spring, the skies opening over the eternal city as if heaven itself were sinking and all the angels franticly bailing out water and somehow stay afloat. The Trevi fountain was not much good for postcards anymore, the Sistine chapel was closed for the duration and the Colliseum where Cellini had once met that mysteriou Sicillian sorceror was now a shallow lake.

We snuck into Dario's office early one morning with the collusion of his brother Claudio, giving Mr.Horn the time to light the suite in faux 'Suspiria' primary colors while I manned the camera and Simon Boswell took care of sound. We were already rolling by the time Dario opened the door and Miss Moor who was hidden behind him reached out to place a gloved hand on his shoulder.
It was only the lightest of touches but when he turned and saw her veiled figure hovering over his shoulder he gasped and I'm proud to say we actually got a spontaneous jump out of him on camera. Maybe he thought it was Asia or someone or something else behind that treble veil of crepe but for a moment, for little more than a second he looked actually scared. Then Miss Moor laughed and il maestro caught sight of our lens, regaining his composure as he realized he was on the Shadow Theatre equivalent of candid camera.
But for a beat we actually had him !
Later he picked us up from our suite at the Hotel Astrid, the location for 'The Bird With The Crystal Plumage' and treated us to a lavish multi-course banquet at his favourite lbistro. He was officially preparing 'TERZA MADRE – THE THIRD MOTHER' or 'THE MOTHER OF TEARS' , the third and final part of the trilogy and it was our job to look in and haunt him just a little, to download recent war stories and offer whatever support and encouragement he might have needed.

To this day I do not feel any would-be reviewer has truly understood the man or his work. His ouvre exists outside the traditional conventions of the genre and have to be approached on their own terms. His critics and supporters rely all too often on the blunt tools of traditional pyschoanalysis searching for underlying traumas and hinting time and again at their inherent misogyny yet the glory of Dario's canon is that these pathological impulses were never repressed to begin with. Say what you will of the man but he was and always will be one of the most painfully, at times embarrassingly honest film-makers to have lived and breathed. His psychological dirty linen was openly displayed from the very off, his fears and desires foregrounded for all to see while something very  strange and very different lurked in the background, barely hidden in the wallpaper, literally between the walls and beneath the soles of our shoes requiring audiences and critics to abandon conventional logic and adopt an altogether more Jungian approach. Tragically when he finally found a degree of critical recognition in the latter part of his career it only served to encourage his weaker works while continuing to misunderstand what really made him tick, derriding 'INFERNO' and allowing 'FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET' to slip into obscurity. Wile 'PHANTOM OF THE OPERA' remains widely available 'FOUR FLIES' was never digitally remastered and remains effectively unavailable on either VHS or DVD - and I don't count the existing fuzzy pirates ! If you can't see the look in Mimsy Farmer's eyes as the windscreen explodes in the second last shot in the film then you're missing the whole point of the damn movie and in every video I've ever come across her face is reduced to little more than a grey blue blur.

I don't think even Dario himself knows what's really hidden beneath the peeling art deco wallpaper of his unconsciopus or quite how those things came together the way they did in his dreams but like it or not the man enlarged my mind. While some fans obviously get off on the unhealthier aspects of his material the violence, misogyny, incest, anorexia and foreground body horror was never the point, only the window dressing, the aesthetic superstructure, a magician's trick deliberately misdirecting us from what was really going on. I was a cynic and an atheist when I first set foot in the Scala cinema all those years ago and without me even realizing Dario had offered me a way out of the darkness, a key to help me make sense of the world that had been handed down to me. My ex-girlfriend Kate had once lobbed a copy of 'THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE AT ME' claiming that it was 'Exactly the kind of shit' she 'didn't need' in her life but I had found more spiritual truth in those lurid, weird-ass, garlic flavored horrorshows than in all the grimoires and holy books I'd ever forced myself to try and read.
For better or worse they made me what I am today and when all is said and done I think I've made a pretty decent fist of my life and the limited opportunities  available to me. No matter what happen now or what becomes of us Dario has always been a constant friend, a true ally and the best goddam surrogate father a prodigal son could have hoped to find.
 
                                                                    

We had all hoped back in the eighties that Mario Bava's son Lamberto might mature to inherit Dario's mantle and after it became apparent he lacked his vision and tenacity we looked to Michele Soavi to carry the tradition forward into the new century but again our hopes were dashed whenthe budding young director took early retirement to care for his own ailing son. If 'Mother of Tears' was to be not only  Argento's swansong but the death knell for the Italian Gothic as a continuing cinematic tradition then it made sense for him to take this last chance to make peace with his shattered family and repair the web of time where it had been broken,  to bow out with Daria and Asia at his side. I think we both knew that what he was intending amounted to a kind of career suicide, a grande finale destined to bring the house down. It was a story only he could tell although I told him everything I could in the hope that he might find something he could use, that some small part of my experience could shed a little light on the Three Mother's dark domain.

I had only a day earlier been in a tiny Umbrian hamlet named Narni, ostensibly scouting locations for 'Imago Mortis' an unproduced screenplay taking off on  one of the central conceits from 'Four Flies'  ( 'thanatography' - ie: the use of dead people to take pictures, not conventional photographs but three dimensional 'thanatographs' ) but effectively still pursuing the ellusive trail of the Three Mothers. Recent repair work on a damaged aqueduct had revealed an ancient Dominican torture chamber walled up beneath the village streets, its sadistic apparatus and terrifying frescoes hermetically preserved since the dark days of the inquisition and there on the inner surfaces of the cell doors I found the graffiti left by the prisoners, the unfortunate heretics who had lived out their final days in that lightlless hellhole, geometric markings already familiar to me from the walls of the Lombrives including that inevitable telltale arachnid, the sign of the ellusive Tarantula Cult that had guided me slowly but inevitably back to the very centre of the web, to Rome and the gates of the Vatican itself.

Our conversation that night concerned what lay beneath that square and the current whereabouts of the original meteoric icon, surely indestructable by torch or the ravages of time itself, the Roman Sibyl that had presided over our dreams ansd seemingly guided our actions from the very off.  I had written a lengthy treatment based on the theme from which I draw the title of this blog, 'LACHRYMAE', concerning the murder of an American actress during a freak thunderstorm in Saint Peter's Square. a subsequent investigation by the dead girl's twin sister and a hard boiled but hopelessly conflicted Roman copper uncover not only a pagan sect operating within the walls of the eternal city but ultimately the existence of the Mother of Tears herself yet on rereading the final draft  realized the document said more about myself than it did about my master and accordingly it remained in the filing cabinet where it belonged. Il Maestro had started this thing and now it was up to him to end it the way it had begun. Where our thoughts dovetailed will be readily apparent to viewers of this latest, typically troubling and predictably problematic work  yet for now I will say no more of 'TERZA MADRE - THE MOTHER OF TEARS' nor will I divulge its further secrets, partly out of respect for its auteur but most of all out of the sincere desire that you, the audience, should be allowed to come to it on its own terms and interpret it as you will with fresh eyes and open minds. If you have taken the trouble to plough through this convoluted, self-censoring blog then you already know more of the back story than pretty much any other human beings on this planet.



                                                    What lies beneath....



                                                      Isis unveiled



Images courtesy of Dario Argento and 'La Terza Madre - The Mother of Tears' ( 2007 )





We talked late into the night and il Maestro spoke with eloquence and passion, evidently grateful for the chance to unburden himself and at length, tiring of the subject he turned to more personal matters, to the wider world beyond our work in the genre, to the long unseen radiical anti-authoritarian  documentaries of his youth. I had managed to use what limited visibility I had in the genre to place a sampling of my own non-fiction work before the public eye and Dario couldn't help but wish a little wistfully he could do the same, that he could somehow escape the genre he had made his own and return to his roots, to the shaggy anarchic idealism that motivated his early experiments in cinema only to lie dormant after the crushing box-office reception of his sole attempt at political satire, his atypical and all but forgotten black comedy 'THE FIVE DAYS OF MILAN.' Although of scant interest to his countless fans I do not doubt that it is this early documentary work that il maestro ultimately recalls most fondly and considers his most purely personal work. I can only hope that some day he realizes his dream to remaster the material and place it before the wider public.
  
                                                                                       

He was looking stronger and healthier, filling a little now that he had finally gotten his appetite back and if not entirely at peace with the world had at least come to terms with his position in it. He was sleeping regularly and deeply and had finally given up smoking but had he given up on the strange, murderous passions that had made him my maestro to begin with ? Even if he had I could see from the way he bantered with Miss. Moor, forcing her to close her eyes while he fed her strips of tripe ( 'a Roman delicacy' ) for hors deuves that he hadn't yet given up on women and no matter how settled he was feeling as an artist , love and its attendant miseries were doubtless still waiting somewhere in the rainstreaked darkness to mug him all over again and those fearful muses to season his heart with fresh and deeper pains so that he might once more be accomplished in the furnace and see and convey  those things that ought not to be seen by any 'sane' or 'rational' being, sights that are abominable and secrets unutterable. Elder truths. Fearful truths. sad truths. Grand truths. Thus is the task of the three mothers accomplished – to plague Man's heart until they have unfolded the capacities of his spirit.

                                                         

Epilog – The Key to the treasure

That this blog got out of hand is self evident. I set out to write a celebration of il Maestro's work and the ways it had changed, enlightened and deformed my life. It mushroomed into an esoteric exegesis and while some mysteries have been clarified and put to bed others linger like smoke in the air, refusing to be quite so readily dispelled.

                                                

Loose ends and unanswered questions -  Nbr 22 in a series
The puzzle box found on the altar in Saint Anthony's hermitage, Gallamus Gorge.
Crack the code and you too could qualify for a career in the Shadow Theatre Irregulars. Either that or become an Adept and make it to the next level under your own steam. The hours suck and there's no retirement scheme but it sure beats the hell out of Sudoku !


No sooner had I put up the first installment of this metatextual footnote to il Maestro's oeuvre than a new and stranger series of events caused in part by its posting turned everything I thought I knew about the Rahn affair on its head, forcing a major rethink of the subject matter and engulfing several of this saga's long term readers in the process.
Since embarking on this shaggy dog story I have returned twice to Montsegur and found myself back on Rahn's trail with a vengeance, a process only marginally slowed by my own contribution to the mythos of the dark Goddess finally going into pre-production.
After what I can only describe as some of the strangest events of my life myself and Miss Scarlett, a fellow MySpacer who ended up falling between the lines and getting sucked into the events she was reading about found ourselves back in the sleepy hamlet of Rennes les Chateau.



The Rennes Plateau - Summer 2007 - The Visigoth  tower viewed from the valley of the River of Colors - Approx. 4. 55 pm

Since my last visit the one restaurant in town, the 'Blue Apple' had been mysteriously burned to the ground and the shadowy 'Association' had taken control of the domain and forced Marcel to give up the cherished keys to the church. Celia took it all in her stride having bigger fish to fry. She had married Marcel and was pusuing her claim to the throne of Sarawak with some success. For the first time she had begun to consider moving away from the plateau and dreamed of an airy long house somewhere in the tropics where she might live out her days surrounded by her beloved Dayaks. Dagobert the mountain dog had sadly passed while Grace had moved to Paris and was a mother herself now, her son, Leandro, apparently named after the Telly Savalas character from 'Lisa and the Devil'. Given his heritage I suspect he has a long and interesting life before him. The right wing mayor is sadly still very much in charge of the town although his attempts to enforce some kind of order have thankfully made little headway against the demented status quo. Amateur treasure hunters still chip away at the church's leaky foundations and Danielle is still wearing a dress and mass produces ever more detailed and complex treasure maps, having developed a winning passion for cutting and pasting the covers of Italian horror DVD's and leaving them hanging from surrounding trees and fences as helpful clues to the initiated and warnings to the unwary.

                                           

Images from the Zone - August 2007

Danielle's work has been getting more and more detailed over the years but the appearance of the Italian horror material is a recent development.  I suppose its reassuring to know that at least one other person out there seems to have figured out that the real problem with Rennes is that the town is built over one of Fulci's 'seven dreaded gateways.'



The cover of the French edition of Fulci's 'ZOMBI 2' ( It. 1979 ) aka 'ZOMBIE' ( US ) aka 'ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS' ( UK ) - ' THE HELL OF THE ZOMBIES ' had been customised with appropriate Veves making one wonder if Danielle hasn't been spending a li'l time in Haiti lately like certain others I could mention ? The lad's done his homework alright...
>


The exqusite choice of titles indicates that not  does  Danielle have a thorough working knowledge of the genre but considerable insight into the deep history of the area. The copy of Fulci's 'Beatrice Cenci' under its French release title 'The Passion of Beatrice' is a 'metatextual' gag par excellence...

Beatrice of course accompanied Dante during his journey to Hell where among other sinners he encounters his own mento , Guido Cavalcanti, who had been responsible for initiating the young poet into a heretical secret society known as the  'Brotherhood of the Faithful in Love' which traced its linneage back to the Nicetas himself, widely seen as the founding father of the so-called 'cathar' faith. .

Dante studied the lost tongue of the vanquished nation ( Romans ) and  seems to have coined the term 'Lingua Occitania'  in his treatise  'De Vulgai Eloquentia' in 1305 from whence we draw our name for what is now the southern most province of  modern France - the Languedoc. In its original usage ' Oc ' was simply 'Yes' in Romans, the equivalent of 'Oui' or 'Si' and the origin of  the modern Anglo-Saxon use of  'okay' as an affirmative particle...



All of which connects on more levels that I have time to explain.        'Coincidence' perhaps but I stumbled across the shrine to 'Beatrice Cenci' on the same day that we had gotten back from Ussat and a closer inspection of the natural stone pentagram in the Bethlehem Grotto closely associated with the continuing Rahn enigma. The outrlines of a face are still faintly visible beneath the dust on the cave wall, allegedly the 'face of Beatrice' and needless to say the shallow octagonal depression is runored to be a 'gateway' of sorts...

       .   

The Bethlehem Grotto is so-named because of a natural shaft in the rock that causes a beam of light to fall on the ancient stone altar before the pentagram om just one day of the year - the 25th December. Members of Gadal's neo-cathar Rosicrucian movement undergo a three year period of study, meditation, indoctrination, fasting and general reprogramming before undergoing their final initiation in the pentagram, possibly in the presence of the 'Pyrenean Grail' which I believe may be in the movement's hands. Since the making of 'The Secret Glory' the grotto has been haphazardly fenced off by the neo-Cathars, destroying much of the site's natural beauty. Behind locked steel gates excavations continue in secret, yielding a steady trickle of fascinating, often contradictory artefacts.

>

" I was looking for divinity yet I find myself at the gates of Hell. Still I may continue to walk, to fall, even in flames. If there exists a way towards Heaven then it crosses Hell. At least it does for me. Well then... I dare ! "
- SS Obersturmfuhrer Otto Wilhelm Rahn

                                         

I labored for some years to pitch a TV sitcom based on the Rennes area and its inhabitants - a format I felt richly suited to the 'cat-in-the-hatty' material - an esoteric hybrid of two British war horses 'CROSSROADS' and ''ALLO, 'ALLO'  set largely in the foyer of the titular 'SEVEN DOORS HOTEL' which happens to be built over... well, you can guess that part ! A recurring character based on Danielle figured heavily in the treatment alongside a motley assortment of thinly disguised Rennes survivors. While the thought of slamming out a couple of low rent seasons tickled my funny bone the concept failed to raise any smiles from the powers that be and subsequently remained on the drawing board.

It's never been easy to actively profit from the mystery as Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh found out when they lost their shirts trying to sue Dan Brown in London's high court over alleged 'similarities' between the 'Da Vinci Code' and their one time 'groundbreaking' bestseller 'The Holy blood and the Holy Grail' effectively admitting that the whole Sangraal / Sacred bloodline was more or less fictional if not wholly their creation to begin with. Henry Lincoln wisely stayed clear of the legal fallout and still lives in the region of Rennes les Bains where he ekes a stipend conducting esoteric guided tours for lazy conspiracy theorists who can't be bothered to come up with a hypothesis of their own.
Regaining undisputed sway over the Domaine certainly doesn't seem to have done Claire Corbu or Antoine much good. I finally succeeded in getting them around the dinner table but being Ascension Day all the shops were shut and I was forced to turn to our old friend the Sufi Sheik for help with the ingredients. The Sheik's conviction that he could halt the growth of the cancer cells in his body by injecting kettamine into what he believed to be the tumours would seem to have been borne out and he is still happily alive and kicking albeit just a li'l confused about his current identity having hacked apart the Mettarie door with his Templar Sword so many times during a recent spate of violent 'past life related episodes' that the local handymen now refuse to take his calls leaving security at the house on the hill a little wanting. A deep frozen experimental Manta Ray scavenged from the former neurochemist's freezer however provided an adequate main course, fleshed out with local fruit and veg, a cheese selection and the Black forest gateau we'd saved for the occasion complete with the requisite chocolate sprinkles. All in all it slipped down nicely, despite the uneasy, conflicted allegiances of the assembled guests.

Relieved of his formal duties in the graveyard Marcel had not only found the time to completely redraw his graphic account of the plateau's history, this time boldly filling in the missing details but had even found a new publisher willing to take on the poisoned chalice. As aforementioned no one has ever really succeeded in making a dime from the Rennes mystery without losing their lives or their sanity, apart from Dan Brown anyhow but considering the enigma's track record I wouldn't rate his chances in the long run. Celia has recently completed a book of her own, her long awaited autobiography 'Muda Dayang' that I think will come as a true revelation to long term mystery watchers.

                                                 

After twenty years of foreplay it came as something of a disappointment when Celia and Marcel finally dropped the other shoe and simply told us what was really going on. Doubtless their account will be hotly disputed and inevitably overlooked in favor of countless more fanciful, more inherently dramatic theories. It's an old story and a simple one. There are a million other stories just like it drifting through the zone but I think you will find on further investigation it fits the known facts too snugly to be anything other than the truth.

And it goes like this -

The coded documents found by Antoine and Marcel's granddad in the hollow altar column were written in the 1780's by one of Sauniere's shifty predecessors – the Abbe Antoine Bigou. Among his duties as local priest Bigou acted as chaplain and confessor to the noble Blanchefort family who had counted at least one former Templar Grand Master among its illustrious forebears. They were amongst the richest landowners in the area and fearing they would lose everything at the time of the French Revolution conspired with Bigou to hide their heirlooms and undeclared collateral in the family vault and the catacombs beneath the church itself where they assumed it would survive the attentions of the rapacious albeit superstitious Catholic serfs who had forced the noble line into what they had initially assumed to be temporary exile.
With Boudet's help Sauniere succeeded in partly decoding Bigou's cipher only to find that subterranean waters rising from the cavity beneath the plateau had caused subsidence in the ancient vaults that communicates with the chapel via that narrow stone staircase I first glimpsed all those years ago.

                                                           

                                       The door to the church - Rennes les Chateau

Realizing it would be harder work than he thought Sauniere was forced to recruit Marie Denarnaud's help and with her aid they succeeded in retrieving and frittering away a good part of the Blanchefort family's lost fortune.
A continuing suspicion lingers in the area that some part of the hoard still remains hidden in the increasingly unstable foundations and having gained full and unfettered access to the site in the early nineties Celia and Marcel had set about the laborious task of pumping out the flooded vaults only to eventually reach the conclusion that there was nothing left to find. They had since lost control of the Domaine to the 'Association' who were now saddled with a rickety old building with rising damp.

                                                            

"That's it, huh ?"
"Looks that way…"
Miss Scarlett shook her head as we bade our hosts farewell and headed for our waiting hire car. " It's just… I dunno… a little disappointing,  I guess. Too Scooby Doo.."
"So what were you expecting ? Like a space time portal to beyond infinity would have been great but hardly likely. Ditto the Ark of the covenant. And that bloodline thing. Human greed is something I can believe in…"
"What about those bodies they found in the flowerbed ? Who killed them ?" "Collateral damage. I dunno. What does it matter anyhow ? It obviously wasn't aliens or little people…"
 "And that flashlight…"
"What flashlight ?" 
It was just after three in the morning and the plateau was dark and still, the outline of the Tour Magdala rising before us in the starlight, the windows of the Villa Bethany blind and silent.
"That flashlight you mentioned in the last blog. Y'know…the one you found in the cave…"
"What about it ?" I froze, sensing a stirring in the shadows at the base of the tower.
"You ever get around to measuring those bite marks ?"
"There's something moving down there ! "
" I know…"
 A scuffling, sliding sound came from out of the dark followed by the unmistakable sound of trickling pebbles.
"The hell is that ?"
"Sounds like more than one…"
We stood squinting into the blackness.
"Probably just some deranged treasure hunter having a go at the foundations or Danielle hanging out more Fulci titles to scare the tourists…"
"It's not human."
" Oh, c'mon..."
" But it's not. Listen..."
There was a crackle of snapping twigs as one of the prowling shapes cut across the dry brush towards us.
" This place has no cryptozoological history whatsoever. It's not supposed to have a monster…"
 "Maybe we should head before we find out…"
"It's cool. I've got just the thing. It's never going to be expecting this !"
Slipping the Arctic floodlamp I had purchased in Akuriri for the previous season's fact finding excursion to northern Iceland I flipped it onto full flood, bathing the base of the Tour Magdala in sudden violent wattage. But it didn't seem to surprise whatever was out there or even slow it down.
" The ***k ? "
I narrowed my eyes, deciding that it probably wasn't human after all.
" Let's just go, okay ? "
Brandishing the floodlamp defensively I started back across the parking lot to the car.

Big bugger. Some of 'em striations have gotta be at least three inches….

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ TRANSMISSION ENDS

                                                        



>
>

Hallow'een night. What's left of it. Still exploding in gaudy shreds and tatters about my ears. Been too much going on to even begin to explain but at least it's moving so I can't complain. Wish there were six of me or more hours in the day. Which is a way of apologizing if I have been perhaps a li'l scarce lately but it was ever the way and there are times in this life for words and times only for action.
My time is coming and I gotta get my bags packed and start paddling if I'm gonna catch that wave. I'm headed west to the land beyond beyond where the fire winds blow, the black smoke turns the light all Hardware red and Hallow'een orange and the setting sun bleeds into ten million swimming pools a man can hide in. With luck and the grace of God  ( or whatever it is ) the next time you hear from me I should be safely at large in California and back in the game as promised.

And I also promised a Hallow'een story.
And I will not disappoint you.
Hope you're sitting comfortably…

                                               

THE TRAIL OF THE THREE MOTHERS



( 1 ) The Devil's Chessboard

                                            

Once upon a time in the Pyrenees there lived an old widow who's daughter, Marie, is said to have met the Devil himself and struck a bargain with the Prince of Darkness.

Marie, like her mother, had the dark eyes and high colour of her heretic ancestors but despite her beauty she chose to remain by her mother's side, ignoring her countless suitors and remaining chaste and pure as her biblical namesake. By day she tended the land and the diminishing herd of goats and by night when she could afford to burn a candle she would pour over the old books left by her deceased father in the hope of mastering the secrets of reading and writing so that she might better her position in the world and satisfy her natural curiosity about the world outside her village.
Now times were hard, this being the latter part of the 19th century and Marie's mother was forced to take in a lodger to help make ends meet. Being a God fearing sort the widow was at pains to find a tenant who's ways were as frugal and virtuous as her own, sifting through any number of candidates and finding each one wanting.

                                            Sauniere

On June 1 1885 a tall man dressed in black, a broad brimmed hat on his head and a battered valise in one hand dismounted from a passing coach and started on foot up the hill. Berenger Sauniere was a man of the cloth, a young priest who's outspoken anti-Republican sermons had caused him no end of trouble in his previous parish and had lead to his punative posting to the rural backwater of Rennes les Chateau, a constituency of fewer than forty houses. He was just the kind of man Marie's mother had been looking for and before long he found himself securely ensconced in the widow's austere homestead. Deciding to make the best of his reduced circumstances Sauniere set about winning over the hearts and minds of his congregation who found his words carried an unusual humour and emotion as if the young firebrand really cared about what he was saying and not just going through the motions like so many priests before him.

                                            

The village church had fallen into disrepair and Sauniere set about its immediate restoration, having become aware of a small fund set aside for this purpose by the town mayor. It was barely sufficient to stabilize the dilapidated building and much of the initial work was carried out by Sauniere himself and volunteers from his congregation. One of these volunteers, a venerable gentleman with a drooping silver moustache who's name, Captier, in our tongue means simply 'Keeper' had been bellringer and sacristan since time out of mind and took a personal interest in the matter, fussily tidying up after the workmen had left and the young priest had repaired to his lodgings for the simple evening meal prepared by Marie and her mother. Finding the altar had been shifted off true Master Captier stayed on after ringing the Angelus one evening to set matters right and in the course of his solitary labour found to his surprise that the ancient column had in fact been hollow all along. There was a glass tube hidden within the cavity containing a number of jumbled, nonsensical documents apparently drafted by one of Sauniere's predecessors. The bellringer duly handed them over to the younger priest and at first thought nothing of it but something about the parchments seemed to capture Sauniere's imagination. Marie couldn't help watching over his shoulder as he struggled to decipher them and she saw the light burning beneath his door at all hours of the night.

                            

The actual parchments are lost to us now and indeed might never have existed but there are many who believe Berenger Sauniere found the key he was searching for. What is certain is that he consulted his peers on the matter - Antoine Gelis, the aging priest of Coustassa, a neighbouring village set on a hilltop overlooking the coiling River Aude and the Reverend Boudet who hailed from Rennes les Bains, a crumbling spa town on the far side of the plateau where the Romans had once come to take  the waters in search of a cure for leprosy.

       

Rennes les Bains - late summer - 2007

                                                

l'Abbe Henri Boudet - priest of Rennes les Bains

Boudet fancied himself as a poet and an amateur archaeologist. He was also the author of an extremely strange ( some would say impenetrable ) book entitled 'LaVraie Langue Celtique' ( 'The True Celtic Tongue' ) which purports to be an academic work cataloguing of the standing strones and sundry prehistoric sites in the area but written in a spiralling, allusive manner concealing any number of codes and punning, word games, not dissimilar to the parchments themselves. Whether it was Boudet who helped find the key or whether Sauniere was simply 'inspired' is impossible to know nor can we be certain the solution handed down to us is anything like the truth.

                            

It is said the vital clue was found in the ancient rules of chess and that by making a series of knight's moves, starting from a fixed point on the parchment the following can be deciphered:- "SHEPHERDESS NO TEMPTATION PEACE 187 POUSSIN TENIERS HOLD THE KEY BY THIS CROSS AND HORSE OF GOD I COMPLETE OR CONJURE THE GUARDIAN OF THE DAEMON AT NOON – BLUE APPLES…"

                             

A second parchment contains the scrambled phrase: - 'TO DAGOBERT II AND TO ZION BELONGS THIS TREASURE AND HE IS THERE - DEAD

Leaving all other esoteric speculation aside for a moment it behooves me to remind the constant reader that the Sicambrians, the ancestors of the Frankish Merovingians worshipped the mother Goddess, CYBELE, as DIANA OF THE NINE FIRES or as ARDUINA - the Goddess of the Ardennes. The huge DIANA / ARDUINA idol which once towered over Carignan in north eastern France, between the black virgin sites of Orval, Avioth and Mezieres and Stenay where the Merovingian king and saint Dagobert II was murdered in 679 points to a link between the two cults.

                                                         

Dagobert II and his trepanned skull
Whatever you do never, ever bet the devil your head !

                               

One of Dagobert's most important acts when he accepted the throne after his Irish exile and education in Tara was to continue the ancient tradition of Gaul, the worship of the black virgin. The black virgin is really ISIS, reborn as NOTRE DAME DE LUMIERE - Our Lady of Light.

                                                          

The black virgin of Mauriac dates from 507 when Theodechilde, daughter of Clovis, first Christian king of the Franks, found haloed by light in a forest clearing a statuette guarded by a lioness and her cubs. Clovis met his queen, Clotilde, at Ferrieres, the first Christian village in Gaul, where the cult of the black virgin had its origin in AD 44. Not long after the destruction of the church and town by Attila ( AD 461 ) the Merovingian dynasty lavishly restored and augmented the cult and its last reigning members made it their place of residence. ( Irrelevant admittedly but I can't help mentioning that the Merovingian dynasty traced its own origin not to the union of Christ and Mary Magdalene as some contemporary authors would have it but to the somewhat more Lovecraftian legend of its original matriarch having been raped by a tendrelled sea monster named Merovee. Just thought you'd like to know )

Whether this made any more sense to Sauniere than it does to you and me is a moot point but he seems to have set to work with renewed vigour. Recruiting the help of the aging bellringer he shifted the altar aside and prised loose the stone it rested on to reveal a further inscription, a pre-Christian bas relief showing a faceless knight and a woman with long hair and severere countenance gazing into a shining, ceremonial mirror. Later Master Captier claimed to have seen bones and shiny things glinting in the hollow beneath the stones but he had no chance to examine them before the priest hastly dismissed him and locked the church doors to ensure his privacy. Later when questioned on the matter by the town mayor Sauniere dismissed the rumours concerning the so-called 'treasure', insisting that the 'shiny things' had been worthless 'Lourdes medallions'.
Instead he dug franticly deeper. Working alone with pick and spade Sauniere excavated a narrow flight of stone steps that lead steeply downwards into a partly flooded natural cavity beneath the plateau. In the flickering light of his guttering oil lamp he glimpsed what looked like ancient tombs carved with coiling serpents and other less familiar creatures, eight legged like spiders or octopi. One of the sarcophagi was larger than the others, its slab sealed with curious glyphs and unfamiliar geometric markings. Using his pick as a lever the priest summoned his nerve to push the slab aside, blanching at the foul air that came from within, the dust of centuries…

           

Speculation was rife in the parish about Sauniere's labours and he knew he had to hurry, that it was only a matter of time before the mayor tried to intervene and in his haste he grew careless. He did not hear Marie's footfalls or sense her hooded eyes watching from the shadows, following his every move and inwardly noting every tiny, incongruous detail as she had from the day the handsome preacher first arrived in her isolated world. Whether she confronted him with what she knew as he emerged from the vault, realizing she finally had a power over him or whether ( as some of the locals believe ) she was forced to come to Sauniere's rescue after he either slipped or became endangered by rising floodwaters caused by the subterranean river's phreatic source is hard to say just as it is impossible to know at this distance in time when they first became lovers. Certainly he had no choice but to either silence her forever or make her his partner and co-conspirator in all that followed. Pledging herself to the man she loved Marie vowed to keep his secret no come Hell or high water…

                                                                    
 
It was decided Sauniere should leave town for a while until the gossip died down and taking leave of his baffled congregation he set out for Carcasonne and then Paris where it is claimed he consulted with various high ranking individuals in certain fin de siecle occult lodges in addition to purchasing a number of reproductions of paintings by Poussin and Teniers as well as more traditional images of Saint Anthony and the Magdalene. It has never been established exactly what Berenger Sauniere found beneath the church or how he came into his sudden wealth but on his return to his diocese he began to spend considerable amounts of money, far more than he could have dreamed of on the stipend accorded to him as a priest, enough to make him a multi-millionaire by our standards.
                          
                                                                                                                            

His first priority was to seal the entrance to the cavity as firmly as possible and to build a high wall around the property with impregnable steel gates. Having made the area safe he set to work in earnest redecorating the church in a flamboyant, wildly off kilter manner as if driven by Poe's 'Imp of the Perverse' to not only hide his crime but to simultaneously draw attention to its hiding. The chapel floor was redesigned to resemble a chessboard...

                                                    

At one end a statue of Christ peers mutely down and at the other squats the grotesque life sized effigy of a shrieking daemon, commonly identified as Asmodeus, the guardian of Solomon's temple who fought the arch-mage after he lost his seal and was wounded in one knee before being cast out into the wasteland. Esoterically he is the guardian and teacher of all occult knowledge. Above the daemon which serves as a font are the words: 'BY THIS SIGN YOU WILL CONQUER HIM' and a bas relief depicting five angels who appear to be making the sign of the cross but it isn't hard even for an untrained eye to notice they are really forming a pentagram. On the wall beside them and directly above the confessional is a three dimensional tableau of the sermon on the mount, traditional enough save that the mount is depicted as hollow and the cave beneath it filled with sacks of gold that have no place in the biblical episode they are supposed to illustrate.

                                                           

A second cave appears on a bas relief on the altar itself, lovingly hand painted by Sauniere himself. An image of the Magdalene or what might just as well be young Marie kneeling in a grotto before a grinning skull, the silhouette of what Sauniere claimed was Jerusalem visible on the distant horizon. Time forbids a fuller listing of the décor's oddities and inherent contradictions which include any number of images of Saint Anthony, a personage known for his temptations both daemonic and sexual. Two of the scariest cherubs imaginable adorn the wooden doors above which appears the maxim:
'TERRIBILIS LOCUS ISTE' – 'Terrible is this place' Genesis 28:17 – being the words Jacob spoke on awakening from his dream of the ladder. Beside this phrase appears another statue of the Magdalene, again bearing an uncanny resemblance to Sauniere's nubile 'housekeeper' and the legend:- 'MEA DOMUS ORATIONIS VOCATIBUR' – 'My house is called the house of prayer' - innocent enough unless you trace it to source where it continues: - ' And you have turned it into a den of thieves…'

Not that the increasingly disorientated parishioners needed to be given any further clues as to the diabolic origins of Sauniere's newfound largesse. The secretive priest and his young neophyte had been spotted working alone at night in the graveyard, digging up and moving some marker stones while obliterating the inscriptions on others, seemingly leaving signs to draw attention to themselves while deliberately hiding other already existing clues, a seemingly pathological activity all too familiar to long term affictionados of the esoteric. Graverobbing and necromancy were the least of the accusations made against Sauniere, initially behind his back and later more openly when the enraged mayor demanded an official investigation from his superiors in Carcasonne.

                                             


The increasingly physical relationship between Sauniere and Marie had become an open secret and she publicly disported herself wearing jewellery and expensive, daringly cut gowns that would have put her mother to shame had not the good widow passed suddenly that spring just after the priest's return. The causes are obscure but she at least died in her own bed with her beloved daughter at her side and Sauniere himself in attendance to hear her confession. Nor was she the only one to have lost her life that season under less than certain circumstances..

Sauniere had severed all ties with his fellow priests, Henri Boudet and Antoine Gelis who was said to have become irrationally frightened of something he either couldn't comprehend or dared not explain to his friends and family. By the spring of 1893 he had become so paranoid that he refused to leave his rectory and barred the door to all comers save his niece and nephew who brought his food and tended to the laundery. Despite his precautions someone managed to get to him. There was a fierce struggle and Gelis was bludgeoned with a poker before being finished off with an axe while apparently trying to crawl to the window to scream for help. When the local authorities finally dared to enter the house they found the elderly priest's mutilated remains layed out in a strange, reputedly ritualistic manner. If Berenger Sauniere was in any ways implicated in these events then he showed no sign of attempting to flee the scene of his crimes. If anything he appeared to be digging in, commissioning a magnificent new residence facing the church where he intended to live with Marie as man and wife.

                               

Sauniere ( right ) and Marie ( left ) in the gardens of the Villa Bethania

No expense was spared in furnishing the weird art deco mansion that he named the Villa Bethania, its interiors decorated by gold leaf, swirling mosaics and distinctly psychedelic velvet wallpaper. The Villa's windows and those of the greenhouse that abutted it were fashioned from a deep, lustrous stained glass that caught the Meridional sunshine and filled the fallen priest's domain with every incandescent shade of red and deep pools of midnight blue that seemed to remain cool even in summertime..
But this was only the beginning of his grand design.



Blueprints of the Villa Bethania showing the underlying pentagonal structure of Sauniere's design

As the parallel investigations by the civil and clerical authorities gathered pace Sauniere contrived to enclose his house, the church, graveyard and a good part of the plateau with a gothic belvedere surmounted by a strange high tower he christened the 'Tour Magdala' and which was to serve as the repository for his burdgeoning library. The tower commanded an extraordinary 360 degree view of the plateau and surrounding valleys and foothills, its narrow windows, patterned after the 'arrow slits' in the abandoned heretic castles faced to the west and at the far end of the belvedere, inclined towards the rising sun he raised a second tower, a tower of glass whose myriad panes were of the same strange hue as the others already installed in the villa itself. As much work seemed to be going on beneath the ground as above it and the walled garden became a veritable paradise with any number of rare, exotic species nurtured by an elaborate system of subterranean aqueducts, its orchards bearing strange fruit such as the locals had never seen before.



    The Belvedere -   5.18 pm  October 8 1992 - Tour de Verre

Shortly after the turn of the century the incoming bishop of Carcasonne, Lord Bishop De Beausejour, finally succeeded in having Sauniere removed from his position and barred from holding mass in the village church. Engaging the best lawyers he could afford the rogue preacher blithely ignored his incipient excommunication and continued to hold services in his greenhouse where he had a statue of Saint Michael erected amidst the prehistoric ferns and orchids. Retreating into their private world Marie and her lover entertained lavishly and received many important guests from Paris and Rome in grand style, plying them with rum imported from Martinique, the lights blazing all night in the Tour Magdala which had been equipped with scientific novelties, telescopes, microscopes and purportedly a curious 'magic lantern' akin to an early motion picture projector with which Sauniere hoped to illustrate his hellfire 'sermons'. Among their guests were said to be several members of the Hapsburg dynasty, the legendary chanteuse Emma Calve and two popular authors of the period, Maurice le Blanc and Jules Verne who frequently holidayed in the area and whose novels contain tantalising allusions to the miasma of myths and rumours that had already begun to accrue about the priest's beleagured domain.

                                  

Two of the Verne titles in question - 'Clovis Dardentor' concerns a byzantine conspiracy surrounding a lost treasure, none other than the gold of Clovis.
The story is set on a ship under the command of  the heroic Captain Bugarach - seemingly a reference to the farm where Verne spent his holidays - 'Les Capitains'
on the slopes of the nearbye Mount Bugarach, a dormant volcano in the vicinity of Rennes les Bains. As far as I know neither title has ever been translated into English. The continuing seismic activity would tend to indicate the volcano is far from extinct and tectonic forces have been held to blame for some of the freaky electro-magnetic activity including ball lightning and other unidentified atmospheric phenomena. The bald mountain was central to local faery lore in days of old and in more recent times has been dubbed a 'window area' by a growing community of 'contactees' and concerned UFOlogists.



Mount Bugarach -  the view from Verne's farm -  October 31 1992

While Sauniere couldn't halt the continuing investigation into the mysterious source of his newfound wealth he was able to deploy sufficient legal muscle to slow the enquiries to a snail's pace and by the onset of the Great War in 1914 the situation remained unchanged, the church remained locked and the disgraced cleric and his lover remained firmly ensconced in the rambling hilltop estate, presiding over a  divided village.
An entire generation perished on the battlefields of western Europe and while there was scarcely a househol not touched by tragedy the locals were unable to turn to their minister or attend official services as Sauniere's legal action effectively blocked the appointment of any new priest to the stricken parish. Be it guilt over ill gotten gains or the sheer stultifying weight of the mounting bureaucracy that clogged his study but the consequences of the rebel cleric's secrecy exacted a heavy toll. He continued his obsessive construction work as if racing against time, spending the initial years of the war gathering rocks from the bed of the River of Colours and carrying them one basket load at a time up the steep slope of the plateau to construct a 'Lourdes grotto' outside the disused church, insisting that one day the village would become a place of pilgrimage.
                                                                                       
                                                                                         

At the centre of his handmade cavern he erected another image of the Magdalene this time resting on the hollow altar column in which the coded documents were said to have been found. In the base of the column he enscribed two simple but telling words:- ' PENITENCE…PENITENCE…'

In December 1916 while still apparently in good health Sauniere visited the local undertaker and commissioned a bespoke coffin to be made according to his measurements. He was a tall man with the broad shoulders and barrel chest of a southerner and he wanted to make certain the box would be an easy fit. Shortly there afterwards he suffered the symptoms of a massive stroke although there were some who for obvious reasons suspected poisoning.

A minister was hastily summoned from the neighbouring parish to hear the dying man's confession and administer the last rites and it is said he departed Sauniere's bedroom ashen faced at what he heard and according to popular account 'never smiled again'. Whether it is true that all the dogs began to howl in the village or that Marie really muttered "Thank God it's over…" as Sauniere breathed his last is hard to say. Certainly if she did utter those words she was hopelessly  misguided…

                                                                                               
     
The death certificate filed in Caracasonne records that on the 17th of January 1917, a date commemorated in the locality as 'Blue Apple Day', Berenger Sauniere, the former priest of Rennes les Chateau met his maker. The following morning his body was moved to the greenhouse where it was propped up in an old armchair and exhibited to a procession of anonymous mourners who were said to have come from as far afield as Paris to pay their respects. Legend has it that each one took a tassel from the hem of his gown as they passed by way of a keepsake.

It was snowing and the ground was frozen, making hard work for Master Captier's eldest son who had taken over his father's duties, maintaining the locked chapel and the tiny graveyard How many came to grieve and how many others gathered out of morbid curiosity is a moot point but those who had expected the secret of Sauniere's wealth to finally become public knowledge were in for an unpleasant surprise. When the contents of his will were divulged it became clear the rogue cleric had died a pauper, his only income being the meagre stipend accorded to him as village priest. The Villa Bethany, the Tour Magdala, the domain it commanded and the seemingly bottomless bank account that paid for its upkeep had either been signed over or perhaps had always been registered in the name of Sauniere's loyal 'house keeper' Marie Denarnaud who remained good to her promise and kept her lips stubbornly sealed.
   
                                                                    

Marie Denarnaud in her declining years ( left ) with unnamed companion.

Marie lived on in the big house without servants or family, feared and ostracized by the other villagers, trusting no-one, the garden growing wild, the greenhouses turning into a jungle as one year faded into another and a second war came and went. Set aside from the great events that convulsed Europe life continued much as it always did in Rennes until the collapse of the Vichy government in 1945 and the decision to reissue the Franc note in order to catch out those who had directly profited from the fascist regime. Unable or perhaps unwilling to explain the source of her cashflow Marie found herself impoverished overnight and there are stories, doubtless apocryphal, of the aging spinster raking bundles of useless currency together and burning them as if they were leaves in her back garden.

Looking ruin in the face Marie confided in a recently widowed businessman from Paris, Noel Corbu, that if he bought the Villa and the domain and promised to look after her until the end of her days she would tell him "a secret that will make you  bothj rich and immensely powerful". Noel wasn't a total sucker. He did his homework first before signing on the dotted line but in the end the mystery drew him in to its malignant embrace as surely as a black hole draws in light.

                                                               
 
Noel Corbu with Sauniere's hand painted altar piece          

After the elaborate negotiations were completed and the contracts finally exchanged Marie moved back into her former lodgings, leaving the domain to its new tenants, Noel and his young daughter, Claire who was little more than a child at the time. Any expectations on the businessman's behalf that he might be the one to finally penetrate the enigma were cruelly dispelled when on the anniversary Sauniere's demise Marie suffered identical symptoms, a sudden, violent stroke which left her paralyzed and more crucially incapable of speech. It is hard to imagine what her final days must have been like as Noel Corbu tried in vain to wrest, tempt, threaten or cajole the secret from her but at least she died in her mother's bed surrounded by those who cared for her well being even if it was for all the wrong reasons. Marie Denarnaud-Barthelemy, to give her full family name as it appears on the headstone, passed on January 29th 1953 without uttering so much as a single coherent syllable.

                                      

Some think sheer frustration alone drove Noel to drink or perhaps drove him…well, a little funny. Others believe he was always a little strange to begin with. Like attracts like and the house had found him after all, not the other way round. Not knowing where to dig or even what he was digging for he sank arbitrary shafts and started on the network of tunnels that honeycomb the plateau to this day, re-opened and reworked by every successive generation to have followed in his hapless steps. Of course he never found a dime but one more piece of the jigsaw did come to light on his shift. In March 1956 the skeletal remains of three men were found buried in the Villa's flowerbed. All three were aged between thirty and forty and had apparently suffered multiple gunshot wounds.The gendarmes were summoned and an inquest opened but no conclusions were handed down. The bodies were never identified and regardless of whether it was local score settling or as some have suggested a showdown with a trio of hired assassins it does tend to indicate not only Marie and Sauniere's skill in defending themselves but the lengths they were prepared to go to in order to guard their secret.

Noel Corbu was killed in a freak accident on May 20th 1968 when his car left the road while apparently trying to return home to the plateau where his daughter, Claire, awaited him. While speculation over the circumstances of the 'accident' continues it remains a matter of considerable delicacy and I am loathe to discuss the details further in so public a forum. Less than a month later, Abbe Boyer, Vicar General in the Carcasonne diocese and a motivating force behind the ongoing internal enquiry into the Rennes enigma was himself the victim of an identical accident when his car was apparently forced off the road by persons unknown near a spot on the Carcasonne- Andorra highway known locally as 'the Devil's Bridge'.

After that the trail appeared to go cold. At least for a while…

.


The Devil's Bridge - autumn 2007

                                              


( 2 ) All Roads Lead To Rennes.

                                                                                                                  
     
"When I drew nigh to the nameless city I knew it was accursed…" – H.P. Lovecraft

They say the devil makes work for idle hands and by the mid nineties mine were more idle than they should have been. The music video work dried up as the grungy eighties were consigned to the toxic waste drum of history along with midnight movies, long hair, leather and psychedelic drugs swept away by a rising tide of amphetamines, tracksuit tops and consumer friendly new Labour bling. River City was getting stale and when Channel four Television's religion department offered me a suitable mission I jumped at the chance without the slightest comprehension of where the chain of events would ultimately lead me.

Channel Four had recently broadcast a hit show entitled 'THE REAL JURASSIC PARK" concerning efforts to extract dinosaur DNA from amber and were looking at a potential follow up, 'THE REAL RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK' for a similar child friendly early evening slot. There is no point recapitulating the details of the Spielberg film here. In essence Lawrence Kasden's script, a homage to Saturday matinees of yesteryear, makes good use of two very separate strands of popular mythology: - the survival of an ancient, supernatural or religious relic into the modern day and the continuing web of rumours and dangerous fallacies surrounding the very real activities of the Ahnenerbe SS and the archeological work conducted by their Race and Settlement Department under the command of deranged Brigadefuhrer Karl Maria Wiligut-Weisthor.

There is no evidence to suggest Adolf Hitler had the slightest interest in occultism or that Weisthor or any other member of the Nazi regime ever actively pursued the ark of the Covenant or the equally fabulous 'Spear of Destiny' linked to the developing post war mythos by the fabrications of 'psuedo-historian' Trevor Ravenscroft. While these legends may have a symbolic value central to the Judeo-Christian myth they have little relevance to the aggressive brand of Aryan neo-paganism adhered to by Weisthor and his sinister comrades
.
                                                                   
 
The Ethiopian Jews claim to this day to have the Ark under lock and key in Axum but in truth there is almost no archeological evidence to suggest that the Temple of Solomon itself existed outside popular folklore, let alone its contents. Even if the Ark, the carrying case supposed to hold the ten commandments, the literal word of God brought down by Moses from Mount Sinai ) or something like it had existed its wooden frame would surely have turned to dust over the long millenia but bolstered by fool's courage and an open tab to cover my costs I gamely set out to pick up the trail.

The temple of Solomon is believed to have been destroyed in 70 AD by the Roman general Titus and its treasures borne back to the eternal city to swell the coffers of his father, the Emperor Vespasian. A triumphal arch in Rome records the arrival of the Ark along with the other relics, the sacred Menora and the Cup of Abraham, a chalice carved by master Afghan craftsmen to consecrate the temple the prophet built in Ur of the Chaldees and identified by some as the mythic Holy Grail of medieval chivalry.

Rome was itself looted in 410 AD by the Visigoths under their great king Alaric who in turn is said to have carried the treasure back to his capital, the lost city of Rhedae, whose ruins apparently lay beneath the streets of the tiny Pyrenean town of Rennes le Chateau, the confluence point of all great 20th century conspiracy theories.

Author Gerard de Sede has set the ball rolling with the publication of two almost identical accounts of the affair 'L'OR DE RENNES/THE GOLD OF RENNES' and ' LE TRESOR MAUDIT DE RENNES LE CHATEAU/ THE CURSED TREASURE OF RENNES LE CHATEAU' ( both 1967 ) which had in turn formed the basis of a hit BBC documentary 'THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL' ( 1982 ) and the accompanying international bestseller authored by its principal researchers – Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Taking off from the known facts of the case 'HOLY BLOOD' unpacks a bizarre and highly unlikely conspiracy theory predicated by the notion that Christ married Mary Magdalene and had issue, a sacred bloodline that survives to this day protected by a typically shadowy secret society known as the Priory of Sion, dedicated to the preservation of the 'Sang Real' or royal blood that the 'Sangraal' or Holy Grail was said to represent, a lineage notoriously said to include such luminaries as Leonardo da Vinci and the film-maker and artist Jean Cocteau.

                                                                                          

Jean Cocteau - hard at work on his famous 'Black Sun' mural in a chapel off Gerard Street, London W1

The documentary argues that Saunier uncovered proof of this bloodline and was paid to keep his silence by the Priory and its cohorts. It is well known that the three young researchers were deliberately mislead by a series of forged documents lodged in the Bibliotheque Nationale by Pierre Plantard, a right wing fantacist connected to an obscure society dedicated to the creation of a United States of Europe named the Ordre Alpha-Galates and who seems to have fabricated the paper trail in order to imply that he was the descendent of the son of God as well as rightful heir to the throne of France.
               
                                                                                             

Pierre Plantard de Sinclair

Whether Plantard had genuine delusions of grandeur or if it was simply a surrealist joke that got out of hand is hard to tell but something in the iconoclasm of the conceit seemed to strike a chord with the public.
'THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL' spawned a slew of sequels and spin offs, teasing out this slender premise to ever more ridiculous extremes including 'THE MESSIANIC LEGACY' , the original trio's official follow up and ' THE TOMB OF GOD' ( Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger - 1996 ) which by now argued that Saunier not only discovered proof of Christ's lineage but that the church concealed the literal body of Christ itself. ( presumably along with the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail )

  

Deranged surveyor Donald Wood took the whole thing to a different level with 'GENISIS' and its equally bizarre sequel 'GENESET' which introduced the rather more radical notion that Saunier had stumbled upon some sort of space time portal to another world, linking Rennes to the then current UFO craze and arguing that clues hidden in the natural proportions and 'sacred geometry'of the surrounding landscape indicated not only the intervention of extraterrestrial ( or fourth dimensional ) beings but that mankind itself was the product of alien ( essentially Lovecraftian ) Gods mucking about with recombinant DNA. Saucer cults flocked to the area from the late seventies onwards, setting up 24 hour 'sky watches' from the surrounding hills, laying out UFO friendly pictograms in the scrub and formulating elaborate 'landing protocols' in the hope that someone might stop by to pick them up. This however never happened and by the close of the century the number of reported 'sightings' had thinned to a trickle. The 'space time portal' idea stuck around however, recycled by Henry Lincoln's opportunistic and all but incomprehensible entry 'THE HOLY PLACE', the 'Rennes Pentagram' first documented by Woods providing the jumping off spot for any number of geomancers and sacred cartographers drawn by the admittedly freaky topography.



There is an enduring folkloric belief that if you zero the clock on your mileage before driving the points of the pentagram you will find it covers a grand total of 666km. Apparently at some point the Devil went metric. The prehistoric standing stones that dot the area and the natural geological formations do seem to be aligned with unaccountable precision ( something hinted at by Boudet in his original ur-text 'La Vraie Langue Celtique' or 'The Cromlechs of Rennes le Bains' ) but by the mid nineties the matter of Saunier and what lay beneath the church itself seemed to have been largely forgotten.
Hardly surprising since there were no bars, restaurants, hotels or other inducements to welcome outsiders and only one sign in the world, at the very base of the plateau itself that bears the village's name.

Although a short hop from Cannes and the beaches of the Cote d'Azur Rennes might as well be living in another world. If you slip a copy of 'DAMIEN: OMEN II' into your CD player as you pull out of the rental lot at Carcasonne airport you should, if you crank the volume a li'l, reach the outer edge of the pentagram by approximately track six. ( 'fallen temple') South of Carcasonne the trees press slowly closer, branches meeting over the narrowing blacktop as you follow the winding course of the Aude towards its headwaters.

                     

It is only when you pass that one signpost and start up the plateau itself that the rustic setting begins to take on a more sinister, otherworldly property. Just what exactly is the matter with Rennes is hard to finger immediately. It's narrow streets are as quiet as any other Merdianal backwater but that odd sensation of being watched never quite leaves you and there is perhaps something a little too furtive in the manner of the locals to quite set the visitor's mind at ease. By track ten on a good day you should be parked up beside the Tour Magdala and on a clear day in Rennes you can see, if not forever then as near as dammit, the smudgy blue foot hills rolling away and away on all sides which is why the visi-goths chose it as their capital in the first place. The more jarring details don't become apparent until you've paused long enough to catch your breath. The weird sun dial / clock on the tower above the parking lot that never seems to tell any recognizable earthly time, the big, white Pyrenean mountain dog that looks more like a wolf loitering in the shade of the gothic belvedere, the pentagrams on the manhole covers and the only store in town is of course a bookshop rather than a grocers whose sign reads 'Over 666 titles in stock'. By the time you catch sight of the church and those famous words 'TERRIBLE IS THIS PLACE' above it's door it is difficult for even the most unobservant pilgrim not to conclude that there is something, well… a li'l wrong with Rennes.
                                             

At that time, being the early nineties, Noel Corbu's successor, Henri Buthion, had only recently disappeared leaving the Villa Bethany in disarray. Buthion's attempts to continue the obsessive tunnelling begun by his predecessor and his later recourse to dynamite to try and break through to the vaults below had destabilized the presbytery and cracked the chapel's starry dome. The domain lay abandoned, gardens and greenhouses neglected and overgrown and in the noontide silence of Saunier's garden I reflected on Poe's words from 'THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER' : - " I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all."

                            

Villa Bethania -  6.15 pm October 7 1992 - The Greenhouse

Although I had come to the Pyrenees with the intention of channelling the spirit of Indiana Jones it was another cinematic tradition that obtained. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Argento's 'Three Mothers' trilogy or indeed the works of his mentor , would have been struck at once by the odd familiarity of Saunier's art-deco diabolism, the fading velvet wallpaper that would have been right at home in the 'Markos Tanz Akadamie' and the primary coloured shards of glass that still clung to the frames of those dilapidated greenhouses, filling the sepulchral chambers with deep, lustrous reds, blues and ambers. The plethora of Catholic icons, tortured, sorrowful virgins and stricken, guilt ridden Magdalenes all but absorbed into the creeping foliage put me in mind of Argento's mentor, the great Mario Bava .

                                                                                     

The artist, the wallpaper and his selected works

    



' I VAMPIRI / THE DEVIL'S COMMANDMENT' ( 1956 ) is the first identifiable Italian horror film and the source from which all others flow. The original director, Riccardo Freda, was a former member of the Italian Board of Film Censors who decided to emulate the commercially successful American imports by producing a horror film of his own. When he lost interest in the project the young Bava who had been recruited to work on the special effects took over the project and made it his own. Bava's dad had apparently manufactured lifelike mannikens for window displays and the director's continuing necrophilic tendency to objectify his leads as if they were living dolls contributes a uniquely creepy frisson to his more powerful works. After salvaging a second Mexican bound Lovecraft pastiche 'CALTIKI - THE IMMORTAL MONSTER' ( 1959 ) begun by his mentor, Riccardo Freda, the young Bava embarked on an extraordinary solo career with 'BLACK SUNDAY' ( 1960 ) was loosely inspired by Gogol's 'VIY' while 'THE EVIL EYE' ( 1962 ) is arguably the first identifiable giallo, a genre Bava continued to hone in 'BLOOD AND BLACK LACE' ( 1964 ) in which a masked assassin cuts a cathartic swathe through an array of manniken like fashion models setting the template for modern 'stalk and slash' in the process. Boris Karloff turns in one of his best performances n 'BLACK SABBATH' ( 1963 ) but apparently caught the cold that killed him in the process of completing the final shot subsequently shorn from American release prints. Christopher Lee got nasty in 'WHAT ?' aka 'THE WHIP AND THE BODY' aka 'THE WHIP AND THE FLESH' ( 1963 ) while 'KILL, BABY… KILL !' ( 1966 ) aka 'CURSE OF THE DEAD' ( UK ) aka 'CURSE OF THE LIVING DEAD' ( US ) aka 'THE DEAD EYES OF DR.DRACULA' ( Germany ) may well be the genre's masterpiece. The plot ( concerning a cursed aristocratic family at the centre of a series of supernaturally motivated murders ) merely serves as an excuse to crank up the dry ice, stirring the frozen archetypes into a vortice of winding alleyways and Kafkaesque dreamscapes exemplified in a sequence where the protagonist literally pursues himself through a series of identical chambers, slowly but surely gaining ground only to find he has typically gained nothing at all.

                            

The irrationally terrifying ghost from 'Kill Baby, Kill ! ' Quite possibly the scariest screen ghost of all time.
                                         
                                                        

If there was one title that reminded me most of Rennes and its demented denizens it was Bava's 1972 funeral fest LISA AND THE DEVIL aka 'THE DEVIL AND THE DEAD' that had caught me unaware one Hallow'een under the influence of a particularly good crop of magic mushrooms and simply knocked me for six. To say it tickled my funny bone would be putting it mildly. I couldn't get up off the floor and every time I tried another off kilter moment or effortless non-sequeter would knock me straight back on my ass again. Elke Sommer plays a dazed blonde who strays from a tour group viewing a fresco showing the devil carrying away the dead to meander through a string of encounters with a ghostly aristocratic family and their daemonic servant, Leandro, played by Telly Savalas complete with lollipop, kid gloves and a fetching range of quasi-Masonic accessories.

                                                                             

"Neither glue nor splintered heads can stop the funeral..." Telly Savalas improvises to a captive audience in 'LISA AND THE DEVIL' ( 1972 )

The entire film seems unstuck in time and place with names, identities and relationships fluctuating alarmingly but as all are apparently dead or damned to begin with this seems quite in keeping with the nightmare logic of the plot. Pure essence of Rennes. How else could I put it ? You'd have to be there…

. At times it appears the cast are simply making it up as they go along and one can only imagine the director's imperfect grasp of English allowed some of the weirdest dialogue in cinema history including mangled chunks of Jim Morrison and even the Rice Crispies jingle to find its way into the script. Apparently Bava's dad made mannikens for shop windows and here the director's  tendency to portray human beings as living dolls reaches it's lunatic apogee in one of the most overblown acts of sustained necrophilia ever inflincted on the viewing public.Bracing stuff. Too bracing for the producers who cut the film by nearly half it's length and shot additional scenes involving  a bewildered exorcist played by Robert Alda who strives to make sense of the diabolic shambles released in some territories as 'HOUSE OF EXORCISM' and credited to fictional director 'Micky Lion'. The original while admittedly an acquired taste remains unsurpassed in all it's baffling glory

A special mention to Alida Valli whose deranged matriarch in 'Lisa and the Devil' (1972) is played as blind in some scenes whilst plainly sighted in others...

                                                                   

Although at times quite evidently off his trolley Bava's work innovated many of the stylistic conventions 'borrowed' by American franchises such as 'Friday the Thirteenth' and 'Scream' as well as defining the genre in which his successors, Dario Argento and the late, lamented Lucio Fulci were to distinguish themselves. Daria Nicolodi starred in Bava's last completed work as a director 'SHOCK' ( 1977 ) aka 'SHOCK TRANSFER SUSPENCE HYPNOS' and his final credit was as special effects creator of il maestro's 'INFERNO' ( 1980 )

                                                                   

Dario returned the favour by producing Mario Bava's son Lamberto's early work , 'DEMONS' ( 1985 ) and its trashy, throw-away sequel in which a horror film invades the life of the audience members before bringing about some form of daemonic apocalypse.

                                           

To some extent Lucio Fulci's notorious gothic trilogy 'THE GATES OF HELL' aka 'CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD' ( 1980 ) 'THE BEYOND' ( 1981 ) aka 'SEVEN DOORS OF DEATH' ( US ) aka 'THE SEVEN DOORS OF HELL' aka 'EIBON. GHOST TOWN OF THE LIVING DEAD' ( Germany ) and 'HOUSE BY THE CEMETARY' ( 1981 ) could be seen as an excremental Freudian reposte to Argento's essentially Jungian work, a maggot ridden return of the repressed replete in the latter entry with a grotesque flesh eating thing in the basement named 'Freudstein' who speaks in a sublimely creepy child like whimper.
           
                  
                                           
Apart from the by now habitual setting of a 'large house with many rooms' and the inevitable flooded basement Fulci's works display a Bavaesque disregard for conventional logic and share a common mythology courtesy of screenwriter Dardano Sachetti who also contributed to the Amityville cycle.
The lunatic events in 'THE BEYOND' from the swarm of face eating spiders in the library to the blind girl ravaged by her own seeing eye dog are justified by the simple, catch all expedient that 'this house, this whole town is built over one of the seven dreaded gateways of evil !" Which brings us neatly back to Rennes…

By the end of the 20th century years of speculation had left the natives riven, brother divided against brother, any fragile sense of community that might have existed overwhelmed by an influx of treasure hunters, occultists, cranks and conspirators. As the various 'revelations' and increasingly far fetched theories as to what lay beneath the church tended to be mutually exclusive it followed that Rennes itself remained something of a black spot in consensus reality where no two people seemed to agree as to what the hell was really happening.

                                                                  
Mitterand goes walkabout  

                 

The elect visit the Tour Magdala



President Mitterand had visited the church in person a few years previously before returning to Paris to enable a law that made the use of metal detectors and ultra-sound equipment illegal in the area, thus forestalling an alleged bid by the Vatican to conduct a scan of the plateau as well as slowing the efforts of the various human moles and Indiana Jones wannabes who continued to tunnel incessantly through the crumbling bedrock.

                                                                                                  

The modern pyramid commissioned by Mitterand outside the Louvre

The basic 'Rennes story', the essential facts and the level you received them on were by the early nineties very much determined by who you spoke to first or were seen with in public. Such was the degree of mistrust and creeping paranoia in the hamlet that after generations of internecine rivalry an unspoken protocol dictated that the moment a newcomer was spotted conniving with another resident or percieved to be aligned with whatever group or society they represented all other doors were closed to them making it hard to penetrate more than one layer of the onion at a time without inordinate subterfuge and a deep knowledge of local politics. Hence it was to my good fortune as a 'Rennes virgin' blissfully unaware of all this gothic game playing that the very first individual I spoke to on arrival in the village turned out to be the best possible person I could have chosen when it came to unpacking the zone's multifold mysteries over the months and years that followed.

Celia Brooke was a striking looking redhead with soaring cheekbones and patient, long suffering blue green eyes as deep and kind as the rock pools in the River of Colours itself.
At that time the church was still closed to the public, in desperate need of repair and Celia was helping out in the small museum connected to the disused rectory. I sought her out, taking her to be the curator and was pleasantly surprised to find that she was not only English but seemed to take an immediate shine to me. I don't know why she trusted me the way she did rather than instantly dismissing me as another treasure hunter and the all round esoteric opportunist that I was. Maybe she was just bored that day and grateful for the chance to shoot the breeze with someone from the outside world. She was certainly a big fish in a very small pond but what a weird and 'wonder full' pond it was !
>
Celia was the grand daughter of H.H. The Dayang Muda of Sarawak, Gladys Brooke who had been evicted from the family's island fiefdom by the Japanese and cast adrift in post-war London society. Before becoming guardian of Saunier's domain Celia had rehearsed her role as gate keeper, first as a hat check girl in London's Groucho Club, then as first secretary to the Rolling Stones fan club, acting as Mick Jagger's official signature and autographing thousands of photographs on his behalf, a legal wrinkle that had continued to keep her in pocket for many years. Celia had flirted with various belief systems and their attendant gurus over the years and had sojourned in Afghanistan and Gilgit in the early seventies before marrying the grandson of Sufi master musician Hazrat Inayat Khan and moving to the south where they had purchased a tract of land on a hilltop overlooking the Rennes plateau following a vision described to them by aging Nazi seer Joseph Geibel who had insisted the young heir to the throne of Sarawak would one day 'find treasure there'. Sadly Celia's marriage had gone south too although she continued to live alone on the hilltop with her daughter Grace in 'La Metairie Blanche', the extraordinary white house she had constructed over the years with her own hands and the help of the locals.

Walking in the woods near 'La Metairie' in the mid eighties Celia had found an ancient gold coin washed free by the spring rains. Following the run off she dug slowly back into the mulch to unearth a hoard of Carolingian coins just as Geibel had foretold, thus becoming one of the only people to have ever found actual treasure in Rennes. By the early nineties most of the hoard had been smuggled out of the country but at least three of the coins can be seen in the local museum to this very day.

Celia had begun to spend more time in the village and had started helping out in the abandoned domain where the verger and official grave digger, Marcel Captier, had taken her under his protective wing. Marcel was of course the grandson of Saunier's bell ringer, the man who had uncovered the 'Rennes documents' in the first place and wore on a steel ring on his belt the 'sixty-eight keys to Rennes le Chateau' which he would deliberately rattle from time to time as he showed me around the dilapidated estate as if to remind me of the dreadful responsibilities incumbent in his dynastic role of 'keeper'. The pressure weighed all too heavily on his remaining family and by the early nineties had driven a wedge between him and his brother, Antoine, who had married Claire Corbu and contested him for control of the domain.

                                                     The Tour Magdala

"Twenty two steps", muttered Marcel, tapping the tip of his shoe numinously against the topmost flight as we emerged onto the roof of the Tour Magdala, his eyes taking in the familiar panorama, the vista of surrounding hilltops that defined the limits of his strange, intensely private world. Everything in Rennes seemed to be precisely patterned, aligned and innumerated according to some ellusive, diabolic logic which like a bad acid trip kept threatening to make some kind of sense without ever quite dropping the other shoe.
A flight of steps exists on the hillside several hundred metres beneath the Tour Magdala and with recourse to a laser or theodolite a straight line can be drawn through the tower's westward facing window ( modelled on the 'arrow slits' found in the ruined 12th century castles that dot the area ) using the second set of steps as they were the sites at the tip of a gun barrel. If the line is continued across the valley below it clearly indicates the mouth of a cave on the far side of the River of Colours, one grotto amongst many in an area honeycombed with similar limestone formations.

Knowledge is power and as any secret society worth it's salt knows you can't just give away a halfway decent secret but you can't hold it back forever otherwise the rubes get bored and drift away. Instead to maintain ones precarious position in the invisible hierarchy the secret needs to trailed every so often, just enough to keep the average sucker/ initiate hooked, a practise the denizens of Rennes had perfected to a fine art. A kind of esoteric flirting, stonewalling and gliding around direct questions while casually dropping hints of a larger truth but giving away only enough trivia to keep their mark's coming back for more. It is the job of an impartial investigator to weigh the evidence accordingly and decide for themselves who if anyone really holds the key.

I met Jean Pierre Montes, a self proclaimed expert in 'secret societies' who spoke at length about the Priory of Sion and looking me in the eye when he saw I was in danger of nodding off tossed in the immortal remark; " Hah ! If you could only learn who held the patent on the calorimeter then you would know the true identity of Fulcanelli, the master alchemist !" Not that he had mentioned the 'F' word previously either. It just popped in from nowhere to make certain he kept my attention and I remember trying very hard not to crack up laughing there and then. Harder still to keep a straight face with the grizzled Jean de Rigney, who lived alone in his old wooden farmhouse at the source of the 'Salz', the saline river that emerged from the ancient salt mines in the woods east of Sougraigne.
De Rigney believed that there was an underground UFO base beneath his property and had made countless recordings of the aliens by connecting microphones to his floorboards and was keen to play us his weird tapes filled with hissing, sputtering semi-human voices right out of 'The Whisperer in Darkness'. I rationalized it as a variant on common or garden electronic voice phenomena ( E.V.P. ) and tried not to think about it but it was all too easy to imagine Lovecraft's Old Ones winging their way over those domed, densely wooded hills. Later I took samples of river water from the stream behind the farm house which we found to be mildly radioactive, possibly a factor in the legendary curative properties of the springs at Rennes le Bains.
>
I met Elizabeth van Buren, great great grand daughter of the eighth American president who had recently printed a commentary entitled 'Finis Gloria Mundi' which she claimed was an esoteric unveiling of Fulcanelli's third 'lost' manuscript 'The Overture to the Invisible' and who seemed to honestly believe that the immortal Count Sainte Germaine and several other players in the mystery were in fact good ol' fashioned vampires after all. She had issues with extraterrestrials too, this being all the rage back then and had decoded all the heavenly constellations hidden in the local ordinance survey map, what she called the 'Rennes Zodiac'. Elizabeth had recently been found weeping and crawling on all fours in the bottom of a neighbouring garden having apparently saved the world by driving a metal stake into the 'Achille's heel of the Great Bear', an emotionally cathartic act of earth acupuncture . There were rumours she had suffered a nervous breakdown but rather than bow out quietly she had come back strong, deciding that she was in fact the reincarnation of Joan of Arc and showing up on the anniversary of Sauniere's death ( known locally as 'Blue Apple Day' for reasons I will return to later ) dressed in full armour to demand admittance to the church and the vaults below. Celia had managed to get her sword away from her and finessed the situation admirably, showing good humour in the face of the yearly influx of shadowy adherents congregate in the chapel to mark this weirdest of weird anniversaries.



At least Elizabeth had the breeding and deep pockets to give her fancies full flight and somehow stay at large, buying and restoring the Visi-Goth tower at the base of the plateau and planting thousands of roses in designs that could only be seen from the air as a signal to her space brothers. Most of the flowers died within weeks in the thin soil despite Celia's efforts to water them although other weeds had taken route in the towers shadow that helped put proceedings in their proper perspective. A sign on the road into the valley proclaimed 'F***K' in bold, block capitals and a few feet further back from the trail I came across a vast waist high field of marijuana plants in the midst of which stood a single pole bearing a box marked 'aide humanitaire'.- a highly egalitarian 'take as much as you need and leave what you see fit' deal that suited me to a tee. I suspect this had something to do with a local wildman named Danielle who lived in wheeless bus partly buried in the hillside along with his sun struck girlfriend and about a hundred badly diseased cats. Danielle looked just like Charlie Manson only shorter and spoke like Charlie too but in French which leant an additional opacity to his crypto-astrological banter. His main source of revenue was drawing treasure maps which he mass produced in their hundreds and sold at the roadside to curious tourists in between decorating the trees with the countless tiny swastikas he made from broken mirrors, bones and barbie-doll legs.

                                                 

Granted it helps to get a certain perspective on proceedings and getting out into the boonies did just that. It was only when I surveyed the area by horse or took those long walks with Marcel and his huge white Pyrenean mountain dog, Dagobert, that I began to notice the extent of the underlying earthworks, the outlines of ancient roads, houses and crumbling dry stone walls reminiscent of Zimbabwe ruins and possibly as old if not older, running for mile upon mile beneath the scrub, the remains of Rhedae, the capital of the Visi-Goths presumably although it appeared distinctly Lovecraftian at first glance.
Marcel professed disinterest in the treasure and deflected direct discussion of the church by insisting that the real problem with Rennes was that the area was infested with 'little people' who played tricks with people's minds, pointing out the limestone geomorphology and the labyrinthine tunnels both natural and manmade that honeycombed the plateau. He was possessed of considerable artistic talent and insisted that one day he would draw a comic book version that would explain everything. Until then the world would just have to be patient. To some extent he seemed like the sanest man in the village and between him and Celia he quietly did everything that needed doing. He picked up after the tourists, emptied the bins in the parking lot, cleaned the public toilets, changed the flowers on the altar, dug the graves, kept the treasure hunters from digging them back up again and stopped the Vatican from getting into the church and conducting their long mooted ultra-sound scan of the cavity. ( " It was horrible, horrible…" muttered Celia under her breath. " Those little Italian men in their little white gloves crawling all over everything…" ) All in a day's work in Rennes.

The barrage of data was by now becoming so formidable I had taken to carrying a dictaphone and noting down everything I saw or heard in the manner of a forensic pathologist, hoping to sift through the material at a later date when I had the insight to be able to separate the essential from the trivial.
The following are transcripts from surviving tapes:-

TRANSCRIPTS FROM THE ZONE – October 13 1992

R.S.: " Hey sister, it's approximately 9.34 am. Tailing Celia and Marcel on a road beneath the plateau. Just turned left off the dirt track and are doubling back towards the River of Colours, the Rousseau de Coleur from which the village draws its water supply, so named because of the red mud. Area looks as if it has been terraced with extreme care. Now passing a rock marked with a circle, a cross and a triangle in white. No apparent explanation. Heading towards the second flight of steps built by Reverend Sauniere…"

Prolonged silence…. Unintelligible whispering….

R.S.:"10.32 local time. Now in the largest chamber of the cave immediately opposite the tower. It's obvious that the view across the river is identical to the view portrayed on the hand painted altar piece portraying the Magdalene kneeling in the grotto and it is now apparent the buildings portrayed on the skyline are not Jerusalem after all but the Tour Magdala from the reverse angle. Have managed to penetrate about fifteen metres into the cave. There is a second tunnel forking to the left seven metres from the start of the crawl. The passage seems to have been artificially filled with red earth and it is only thanks to recent erosion I have been able to penetrate this far. At the end of the crawl there is evidence someone has been trying to dig further using an empty tin …"

                                          

" The second cave was a lot deeper. Wormed my way at least twenty metres before it widened out enough for me to be able to stand. Again there were signs of recent human activity and I managed to retrieve an abandoned flashlight bearing the name 'RAY JOLLY' and what looks like a partially erased telephone number. Flashlight still has some juice in it and is marked by three deep striations that look like… well… I dunno… kinda like teeth marks…must have been a big mother, whatever it was…"

Odd hissing feedback - unpleasantly similar to the de Rigney tape

R.S: " I mean it's not like this place is supposed to have a monster in the first place. No hounds, beasts, black dogs or ABC's ( Alien Big Cats ) but it's got every other goddam mystery so why not ? It's not like you can drop your flashlight and not notice it and these gashes are pretty... pronounced.....

Feedback returns, obscuring words.

R.S: " ...measure the teeth marks so we can figure out just what sort of critter we're dealin' with here...

                                                                                    

The Church - 3. 28 pm October 1992

R.S.:" Now facing the bas relief on the altar. It does seem to portray the same cave I entered earlier. A series or triangular and oblong markings surround the hand pinted image… Rosy cross imagery remains curiously persistent…same deal with the ol' skull and bones. Then of course there is the matter of the blue oranges…"
CELIA: " Blue apples".
R.S.: " Sorry. Blue apples. As in the second Rennes document_ This apparently relates to the blue fruit like objects that appear in the borders of the designs in the stained glass windows although they look more like grapes to me. Which relates to the theory that on, is it the winter solstice ?
CELIA: The seventeenth of January...
 
                                

Blue Apple Day - Approx. 12.00 am 17 Jan 1993 - The Church

Once a year on the anniversary of Sauniere's death the morning sun shines through the chapel windows in such a manner as to create an almost three dimensional holograph . Unfortunately it looks too much like a Monet painting to make any real sense like everything else in this burg but it's mighty pretty whatever the hell it is. Intriguingly the date seems to run right the mystery. The winter solstice is also marked by the curious sun dial on the wall of the tower overlooking the parking lot . Sauniere is supposed to have ordered his coffin on the tenth while still in good health but on the 17th inexplicably passed away…"

Feedback momentarily obscures words.

"…lettering on the left hand side of the door appears very old, older than the 19th century. On the left hand side the letters are clear but on the right they have been inexplicably erased. In fact they appear to have been chiselled out…"

Feedback  reaches crescendo. Then fades.

R.S.:" On the right hand side the words above the door are paraphrased:- ' This is the house of God. Be aware that you are in the temple of God. In this House the treasure is within you' Sauniere plainly understood that the key to the treasure is the treasure.
Which brings us back to Asmodeus…"

Loud recurrence of feedback. Words again indistinguishable.

                                                    

TRANSCRIPTS FROM THE ZONE - Cont.

The Church - Approx. 3.30 pm - October 13 1993



R.S: "It appears as if the statue of the devil is spreading five fingers on his knee. In the neighbourhood of Rennes les Bains is a rock known locally as the 'Bread Rock' ( Pere du Pain ) in which are five hollows called the 'Devil's Hand'. Just below the formation known as the 'Trembling Rocks' is a stone seat cut into a boulder resting in a kind of natural amphitheatre named the 'Devil's Armchair' ( Fauteuil du Diable ) that Marcel referred to as the 'Centre of the Circle' and in point of fact the fingers of the devil's other hand do form a circle as if he were holding something, a missing staff or trident… Hang on… the lights just went out…"

I waited for a moment beside the font for Celia to return, giving the chapel a last once over before locking up and heading for the car, still just as baffled and thoroughly amused as ever. On a whim I found myself drawn back to a certain area, let's say for the sake of this blog, it might have been the interior of the confessional and to my growing surprise found a loose board that came away all too easily in my hands. Barely a cosmetic gesture but the premises was barred to the public at the time and I had momentarily found myself in what you might call a 'security gap'.

I felt a breath of stale, dank air against my face and as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I quite plainly made out the curve of a narrow flight of stone steps leading steeply downwards to connect with what could only be the vault beneath the church.
I hesitated, hearing Celia' s voice as she chatted to a friend outside the presbytery, Dagobert barking in the distance.
To get any closer I would have to clamber through the missing panel and although I might make it down the steps I knew I'd be caught in the act before I had time to extricate myself and it seemed wrong to violate Celia and Marcel's trust so blatantly. I might find out what they were hiding but I'd screw up our friendship in the process and that mattered more to me.
So I put the board back in place, silently vowing to settle the mystery's hash at a later date. At least now I knew where the entrance was even if I didn't know what the chamber held, nor would I find out what lay at the base of those steps for another fifteen years, not until the summer of 2007, just after posting the first instalment of this blog when the mystery finally unravelled and the last pieces of the gaudy, gothic jigsaw fell into place.

Despite the presence of a black Madonna in the neighbouring hamlet of Limoux nothing I had seen readily connected to the earlier events in Montserrat so I might have been forgiven for not realizing the two seemingly separate stories would somehow turn out to be part of the same enigma, a unified conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories.
On the strength of what I had seen and heard I didn't honestly believe there was anything supernatural going on in Rennes at all. The real story seemed to be in the character of its participants and not in any hypothetical 'sacred treasure'. It had been two long years since I had walked into that botannica on the lower East Side and in the interim I had gone a long way towards convincing myself the whole thing was just a ludicrous chain of 'coincidence', that nothing inexplicable had truly occurred. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence and caving in to faith just isn't my bag. The mind is a monkey and back then mine was too busy swinging through the multi-dimensional jungle jim of the Rennes pentagram to see the wood for the trees.

For starters there was that business with the 22 steps that Marcel had been at such pains to point out during our initial tour which I now realized corresponded not only with the steps of Jacob's Ladder but the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, taking my investigation quite literally to the next level…

                                                    

( 3 ) Terza Madre – The Third Mother



"Three Mothers: Aleph Mem Shin…"
" But that's… that's impossible…" Dario, shook his head, one of those rare goofy smiles lighting up his face as he tried to take it in, taking it pretty well under the circumstances, all told.
"A great, mystical secret covered and sealed with six rings…And from them emanated air, water and fire… And from th