112

Four our Ordinances and Rites: We have two very long and faire Galleries in the Temple of the Rosie Cross; In one of these we place patterns and samples of all manners of the more rare and excellent inventions; In the other we place the Statues of all principal Inventours.

—John Heydon, The English Physitians Guide: Or A Holy Guide, London, Ferns, 1662, The Preface

I had stayed in the periscope too long. It must have been ten, ten-thirty. If something was going to happen, it would happen in the nave, before the Pendulum. I had to go down there and find a hiding place, an observation post. If I arrived too late, after They entered (from where?), They would notice me.

Go downstairs. Move... For hours I had waited for this, but now that it was possible, even wise, to do it, I felt somehow paralyzed. I would have to cross the rooms at night, using my flashlight only when necessary. The barest hint of a nocturnal glow filtered through the big windows. I had imagined a museum made ghostly by the moon’s rays; I was wrong. The glass cases reflected vague glints from outside; that was all. If I didn’t move carefully, I could go sprawling on the floor, could knock over something with a shatter of glass, a clang of metal. Now and then I turned on the flashlight, turned it off. Proceeding, I felt as if I were at the Crazy Horse. The sudden beam revealed a nakedness, not of flesh, but of screws, clamps, rivets.

What if I were suddenly to reveal a living presence, the figure of an envoy of the Masters echoing, mirroring my progress? Who would be the first to shout? I listened. In vain. Gliding, I made no noise. Neither did he.

That afternoon I had studied carefully the sequence of the rooms, in order to be able to find the great staircase even in the darkness. But instead I was wandering, groping. I had lost my bearings.

Perhaps I was going in circles, crossing some of the rooms for the second time; perhaps I would never get out of this place; perhaps this groping among meaningless machines was the rite.

The truth was, I didn’t want to go down. I wanted to postpone the rendezvous.

I had emerged from the periscope after a long and merciless examination of conscience, I had reviewed our error of the last years and tried to understand why, without any reasonable reason, I was now here hunting for Belbo, who was here for reasons even less reasonable. But the moment I set foot outside the periscope, everything changed. As I advanced, I advanced with another man’s head. I became Belbo. Like Belbo, now at the end of his long journey toward enlightenment, I knew that every earthly object, even the most squalid, must be read as the hieroglyph of something else, and that there is nothing, no object, as real as the Plan. How clever I was! A flash of light, a glance, was all it took, and I understood. I would not let myself be deceived.

...Froment’s Motor: a vertical structure on a rhomboid base. It enclosed, like an anatomical figure exhibiting its ribs and viscera, a series of reels, batteries, circuit breakers—what the hell did the textbooks call them?—and the thing was driven by a transmission belt fed by a toothed wheel... What could it have been used for? Answer: for measuring the telluric currents, of course.

Accumulators. What did they accumulate? I imagined the Thirty-six Invisibles as stubborn secretaries (keepers of the secret) tapping all night on their clavier-scribes to produce from this machine a sound, a spark, all of them intent on a dialog from coast to coast, from abyss to surface, from Machu Picchu to Avalon, come in, come in, hello hello hello, Pamersiel Pa-mersiel, we’ve caught a tremor, current Mu 36, the one the Brahmans worshiped as the breath of God, now I’ll plug in the tap, the valve, aU micro-macrocosmic circuits operational, all the mandrake roots shuddering beneath the crust of the globe, you hear the song of the Universal Sympathetic, over and out.

My God, armies slaughtered one another across the plains of Europe, popes hurled anathemas, emperors met, hemophiliac and incestuous, in the hunting lodge of the Palatine gardens, all to supply a cover, a sumptuous facade for the work of these wireless operators who in the House of Solomon were listening for pale echoes from the Umbilicus Mundi.

And as they operated these pseudothermic hexatetragrammatic electrocapillatories—that’s how Garamond would have put it— every now and then someone would invent, say, a vaccine or an electric bulb, a triumph in the wonderful adventure of metals, but the real task was quite different: here they are, assembled at midnight, to spin this static-electricity machine of Ducretet, a transparent wheel that looks like a bandoleer, and, inside it, two little vibrating balls supported by arched sticks, and when they touch, sparks fly, and Dr. Frankenstein hopes to give life to his golem, but no, the signal has another purpose: Dig, dig, old mole...

A sewing machine (what else? One of those engraving-advertisements, along with pills for developing one’s bust, and the great eagle flying over the mountains with the restorative cordial in its talons, Robur le Conquerant, R. C.), but when you turn it on, it turns a wheel, and the wheel turns a coil, and the coil... What does the coil do? Who is listening to the coil? The label says, “Currents induced from the terrestrial field.” Shameless! There to be read even by children on their afternoon visits! Mankind believed it was going in a different direction, believed everything was possible, believed in the supremacy of experiment, of mechanics. The Masters of the World have deceived us for centuries. Enfolded, swaddled, seduced by the Plan, we wrote poems in praise of the locomotive.

I passed by. I imagined myself dwindling, an ant-sized, dazed pedestrian in the streets of a mechanical city, metallic skyscrapers on every side. Cylinders, batteries, Leyden jars one above the other, merry-go-round centrifuges, tourniquet elec-trique a attraction et repulsion, a talisman to stimulate the sympathetic currents, colonnade etincelante formee de rieuf tubes, electroaimant, a guillotine, and in the center—it looked like a printing press—hooks hung from chains, the kind you might see in a stable. A press in which you could crush a hand, a head. A glass bell with a pneumatic pump, two-cylinder, a kind of alembic, with a cup underneath and, to the right, a copper sphere. In it Saint-Germain concocted his dyes for the landgrave of Hesse.

A pipe rack with two rows of little hourglasses, ten to a row, their necks elongated like the neck of a Modigliani woman, some unspecified material inside, and the upper bulge of each expanded to a different size, like balloons about to take off. This, an apparatus for the production of the Rebis, where anyone could see it.

Then the glassworks section. I had retraced my steps. Little green bottles: a sadist host offering me poisons in quintessence. Iron machines for making bottles, opened and closed by two cranks. What if, instead of a bottle, someone put a wrist in there? Whack! And it would be the same with those great pincers, those immense scissors, those curved scalpels that could be inserted into sphincters or ears, into the uterus to extract the still-living fetus, which would be ground with honey and pepper to sate the appetite of Astarte... The room I was now crossing had broad cases, and buttons to set in motion corkscrews that would advance inexorably toward the victim’s eye, the Pit and the Pendulum. We were close to carfeature now, to the ridiculous contraptions of Rube Goldberg, the torture racks on which Big Pete bound Mickey Mouse, the engrenage exterieur a trois pignons, triumph of Renaissance mechanics, Branca, Ramelli, Zonca. I knew these gears, I had put them in the wonderful adventure of metals, but they had been added here later, in the last century, and were ready to restrain the unruly after the conquest of the world; the Templars had learned from the Assassins how to shut up Noffo Dei when the time of his capture came; the swastika of Sebotten-dorf would twist, in the direction of the sun, the twitching limbs of the enemies of the Masters of the World. All ready, these instruments awaited a sign, everything in full view, the Plan was public, but nobody could have guessed it, the creaking mechanical maws would sing their hymn of conquest, great orgy of mouths, all teeth that locked and meshed exactly, mouths singing in tick-tock spasms.

Finally I came to the emetteur a etincelles soufflees designed for the EifFel Tower, for the emission of time signals between France, Tunisia, and Russia, the Templars of Provins, the Pau-licians, the Assassins of Fez. (Fez isn’t in Tunisia, and the Assassins, anyway, were in Persia, but you can’t split hairs when you live in the coils of Transcendent Time.) I had seen it before, this immense machine, taller than I, its walls perforated by a series of portholes, air ducts. The sign said it was a radio apparatus, but I knew better, I had passed it that same afternoon. The Beaubourg!

For all to see. And, for that matter, what was the real purpose of that enormous box in the center of Lutetia (Lutetia, the air duct in a subterranean sea of mud), where once there was the Belly of Paris, with those prehensile proboscises of vents, that insanity of pipes, conduits, that Ear of Dionysius open to the sky to capture sounds, messages, signals, and send them to the very center of the globe, and then to return them, vomiting out information from hell? First the Conservatoire, a laboratory, then the Tower, a probe, and finally the Beaubourg, a global transmitter and receiver. Had they set up that huge suction cup just to entertain a handful of hairy, smelly students, who went there to listen to the latest record with a Japanese headset? For all to see. The Beaubourg, gate to the underground kingdom of Agarttha, the monument of the Resurgentes Equites Synarchici. And the rest—two, three, four billion of them—were unaware of this, or forced themselves to look the other way. Idiots and hylics. While the pneumatics headed straight for their goal, through six centuries.

* * *

Unexpectedly, I found the staircase. I went down, with increasing caution. Midnight was approaching. I had to hide in my observation post before They arrived.

It was about eleven. I crossed the Lavoisier hall without turning on the flashlight, remembering the hallucinations of that afternoon. I crossed the corridor with the model trains.

There were already people in the nave: dim lights moving, the sound of shuffling, of objects being dragged.

Would I have time to make it to the sentry box? I slipped along the cases with the model trains and was soon close to the statue of Gramme, in the transept. On a wooden pedestal, cubic in form (the cubic stone of Yesod!), it stood as if to guard the entrance to the choir. My Statue of Liberty was almost directly behind it.

The front panel of the pedestal had been lowered, a kind of gangplank allowing people to enter the nave from some concealed passage. In fact, an individual emerged from there with a lantern—a gas lantern, with colored glass, which illuminated his face in red patches. I pressed myself into a corner, and he didn’t see me. A second man joined him from the choir. “Vite,” he said. “Hurry. In an hour they’ll be here.”

So this was the vanguard, preparing something for the rite. If there weren’t too many of them, I could still reach Liberty before They arrived—God knows from where, and in what numbers—by the same route. For a long while I crouched low, following the glints of the lanterns in the church, the regular alternation of the lights between greater and lesser intensity. I calculated how far they moved away from Liberty and how much of it remained in shadow. Then, at a certain moment, I risked it, squeezed past the leftside of Gramme, atightfit, painful, even sucking in my stomach. Luckily, I was thin as a rail. Lia...I made a dash, slipped into the sentry box, where I sank to the floor and curled up in a fetal position. My heart raced; my teeth chattered.

I had to relax. I breathed through my nose rhythmically, my breaths gradually deeper and deeper. This is how, under torture, you can make yourself lose consciousness and escape the pain. And, in fact, I sank slowly into the embrace of the Subterranean World.

113

Our cause is a secret within a secret, a secret that only another secret can explain; it is a secret about a secret that is veiled by a secret.

 —Ja ‘far as-Sadiq, sixth Imam

Slowly, I regained consciousness, heard sounds; the light, now stronger, made me blink. My feet were numb. When I tried to get up, making no noise, I felt I was standing on a bed of spiny sea urchins. The Little Mermaid. Silently I stood on tiptoe, then bent my knees, and the pain lessened. Peering out cautiously, left and right, I saw that the sentry box was still pretty much in the shadows. Only then did I take in the scene.

The nave was illuminated on all sides. There were now dozens and dozens of lanterns, carried by new arrivals, who were entering from the passage behind me. They moved by on my left, into the choir, or lined up in the nave. My God, I said to myself, a Night on Bald Mountain, Walt Disney version.

They didn’t raise their voices; they whispered, together creating a noise like a crowd scene in a play: rhubarb rhubarb.

To the left, the lanterns were set on the floor in a semicircle, completing, with a flattened arc, the eastern curve of the choir, and touching, at the southernmost point, the statue of Pascal. A burning brazier had been placed there, and on it someone was throwing herbs, essences. The smoke reached me in the box, parched my throat, gave me a feeling of dazed excitement.

In the center of the choir, in the flickering of the lanterns, something stirred, a slender shadow.

The Pendulum! The Pendulum no longer swayed in its familiar place in the center of the transept. A larger version of it had been hung from the keystone in the center of the choir. The sphere was larger; the wire much thicker, like a hawser, I thought, or a cable of braided metal strands. The Pendulum, now enormous, must have appeared this way in the Pantheon. It was like beholding the moon through a telescope.

They had re-created the pendulum that the Templars first experimented with, half a millennium before Foucault. To allow it to sway freely, they had removed some ribs and supporting beams, turning the amphitheater of the choir into a crude symmetrical antistrophe marked out by the lanterns.

I asked myself how the Pendulum could maintain its constant oscillation, since the magnetic regulator could not be beneath it now, in the floor. Then I understood. At the edge of the choir, near the diesel engines, stood an individual ready to dart like a cat to follow the plane of oscillation. He gave the sphere a little push each time it came toward him, a precise light tap of the hand or the fingertips.

He was in tails, like Mandrake. Later, seeing his companions, I realized that he was indeed a magician, a prestidigitator from Le Petit Cirque of Madame Olcott; he was a professional, able to gauge pressures and distances, possessing a steady wrist skilled in working within the infinitesimal margins necessary in legerdemain. Perhaps through the thin soles of his gleaming shoes he could sense the vibrations of the currents, and move his hands according to the logic of both the sphere and the earth that governed it.

His companions—now I could see them as well. They moved among the automobiles in the nave, they scurried past the drai-siennes and the motorcycles, almost tumbling in the shadows. Some carried a stool and a table covered with red cloth in the vast ambulatory in the rear, and some placed other lanterns. Tiny, nocturnal, twittering, they were like rachitic children, and as one went past me I saw mongoloid features and a bald head. Madame Olcott’s Freaks Mignons, the horrible little monsters I had seen on the poster in the Librairie Sloane.

The circus was there in full force: the staff, guards, chores ographers of the rite. I saw Alex and Denys, les Geants d’Ava-lon, sheathed in armor of studded leather. They were giants indeed, blond, leaning against the great bulk of the Obeissante, their arms folded as they waited.

I didn’t have time to ask myself more questions. Someone had entered with solemnity, a hand extended to impose silence. I recognized Bramanti only because he was wearing the scarlet tunic, the white cape, and the miter I had seen on him that evening in Piedmont. He approached the brazier, threw something on it, a flame shot up, then thick, white smoke rose and slowly spread through the room. As in Rio, I thought, at the alchemistic party. And I didn’t have an agogo. I held my handkerchief to my nose and mouth, as a filter. Even so, I seemed to see two Bramantis, and the Pendulum swayed before me in several directions at once, like a merry-go-round.

Bramanti began chanting: “Alef bet gimel dalet he vav zain het tet yod kaf lamed mem nun samek ayin pe sade qof resh shin tau!”

The crowd responded, praying: “Pamersiel, Padiel, Camuel, Aseliel, Barmiel, Gediel, Asyriel, Maseriel, Dorchtiel, Usiel, Cabariel, Raysiel, Symiel, Armadiel...”

Bramanti made a sign, and someone stepped from the crowd and knelt at his feet. For just an instant I saw the face. It was Riccardo, the man with the scar, the painter.

Bramanti questioned him, and Riccardo answered, reciting from memory the formulas of the ritual.

“Who are you?”

“I am an adept, not yet admitted to the higher mysteries of the Tres. I have prepared myself in silence and meditation upon the mystery of the Baphomet, in the knowledge that the Great Work revolves around six intact seals, and only at the end will we know the secret of the seventh.”

“How were you received?”

“Through the perpendicular of the Pendulum.”

“Who received you?”

“A Mystical Envoy.”

“Would you recognize him?”

“No, for he was masked. I know only the knight of the rank higher than mine, and he knows only the naometer of the rank higher than his, and each knows only one other. And so I wish it to be.”

“Quid facit Sator Arepo?”

“Tenet Opera Rotas.”

“Quid facit Satan Adama?”

“Tabat Amata Natas. Mandabas Data Amata, Nata Sata.”

“Have you brought the woman?”

“Yes, she is here. I have delivered her to the person, as I was ordered. She is ready.”

“Go, but remain ready.”

The dialog proceeded in bad French, on both sides. Then Bramanti said: “Brothers, we are gathered here in the name of the One Order, the Unknown Order, to which Order, until yesterday, you did not know that you belonged, and yet you have always belonged to it! Let us swear. Anathema on all profaners of the Secret. Anathema on all sycophants of the occult. Anathema on all those who have made a spectacle of the Rites and Mysteries!”

“Anathema!”

“Anathema on the Invisible College, on the bastard children of Hiram and the Widow, on the operative and speculative masters of the lie of the Orient and the Occident, Ancient, Accepted, or Revised, on Mizraim and Memphis, on the Philalethes and the Nine Sisters, on the Strict Observance and on the Ordo Tem-pli Orientis, on the Illuminati of Bavaria and of Avignon, on the Kadosh Knights, on the Elus Cohen, on the Perfect Friendship, on the Knights of the Black Eagle and of the Holy City, on the Rosicrucians of Anglia, on the cabalists of the Rose + Cross of Gold, on the Golden Dawn, on the Catholic Rosy Cross of the Temple and of the Grail, on the Stella Matutina, on the Astrum Argentinum and Thelema, on Vril and Thule, on every ancient and mystical usurper of the name of the Great White Fraternity, on the Guardians of the Temple, on every college and priory of Zion and of Gaul!”

“Anathema!”

“Whoever out of ingenuity, submission, conversion, calculation, or bad faith has been initiated into any lodge, college, priory, chapter, or order that illicitly refers to obedience to the Unknown Superiors or to the Masters of the World, must this night abjure that initiation and implore total restoration in spirit and body to the one and true observance, the Tres, Templi Re-surgentes Equites Synarchici, the triune and trinosophic mystical and most secret order of the Synarchic Knights of Templar Rebirth!”

“Sub umbra alarum tuarum!”

“Now enter the dignitaries of the thirty-six highest and most secret degrees.”

As Bramanti called the elect, they appeared in liturgical vestments, wearing the insigne of the Golden Fleece on their chest.

“Knight of the Baphomet, Knight of the Six Intact Seals, Knight of the Seventh Seal, Knight of the Tetragrammaton, Knight Executioner of Florian and Dei, Knight of the Atha-nor... Venerable Naometer of the Turns Babel, Venerable Naometer of the Great Pyramid, Venerable Naometer of the Cathedrals, Venerable Naometer of the Temple of Solomon, Venerable Naometer of the Hortus Palatinus, Venerable Naometer of the Temple of Heliopolis...”

As Bramanti recited the titles, those named entered in groups, so I was unable to assign to each his individual dignity, but among the first twelve I saw De Gubernatis, the old man from the Librairie Sloane, Professor Camestres, and others I had met that evening in Piedmont. And I saw Signer Garamond, I believe as Knight of the Tetragrammaton, composed and hieratic, very much absorbed in his new role, with hands that trembled as they touched the Fleece on his chest. Meanwhile, Bramanti went on: “Mystical Legate of Karnak, Mystical Legate of Bavaria, Mystical Legate of the Barbelognostics, Mystical Legate of Camelot, Mystical Legate of Montsegur, Mystical Legate of the Hidden Imam... Supreme Patriarch of Tomar, Supreme Patriarch of Kilwinning, Supreme Patriarch of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, Supreme Patriarch of Marienbad, Supreme Patriarch of the Invisible Okhrana, Supreme Patriarch in partibus of the Rock of Alamut...”

The patriarch of the Invisible Okhrana was Salon, still gray-faced but, without his smock, now resplendent in a yellow tunic edged in red. He was followed by Pierre, the psychopomp of the Eglise Luciferienne, who wore on his chest, instead of the Golden Fleece, a dagger in a gilded sheath. Meanwhile, Bra-manti went on: “Sublime Hierogam of the Chemical Wedding, Sublime Rodostauric Psychopomp, Sublime Referendarium of the Most Arcane Arcana, Sublime Steganograph of the Hieroglyphic Monad, Sublime Astral Connector Utriusque Cosmi, Sublime Keeper of the Tomb of Rosencreutz... Imponderable Archon of the Currents, Imponderable Archon of the Hollow Earth, Imponderable Archon of the Mystic Pole, Imponderable Archon of the Labyrinths, Imponderable Archon of the Pendulum of Pendula...” Bramanti paused, and it seemed to me that he uttered the last formula with reluctance: “And the Imponderable Archon of Imponderable Archons, the Servant of Servants, Most Humble Secretary of the Egyptian Oedipus, Lowest Messenger of the Masters of the World and Porter of Agarttha, Last Thurifer of the Pendulum, Claude-Louis, Comte de Saint-Germain, Prince Rackoczi, Comte de Saint-Martin, and Marchese di Aglie, Monsieur de Surmont, Mr. Welldone, Marchese di Monferrato, of Aymar, and of Belmar, Count Sol-tikoff, Knight Schoening, Count of Tzarogy!”

As the others of the elect took their places in the ambulatory facing the Pendulum, and the faithful stood in the nave, Aglie entered, pale and drawn, wearing a blue pinstripe suit. He led by the hand, as if escorting a soul along the path of Hades, Lorenza Pellegrini, also pale, and dazed, as if drugged; she was dressed only in a white, semitransparent tunic, and her hair fell loose over her shoulders. I saw her in profile as she went by, as pure and languid as a Pre-Raphaelite adulteress. Too diaphanous not to stir, once again, my desire.

Aglie led Lorenza to the brazier, near the statue of Pascal; he caressed her vacant face and made a sign to the Geants d’Avalon, who came and stood on either side of her, supporting her. Then he went and sat at the table, facing the faithful, and I could see him very well as he drew his snuffbox from his vest and stroked it in silence before speaking.

“Brothers, knights. You are here because in these past few days the Mystic Legates have informed you of the news, and therefore you all know the reason for our meeting. We should have met on the night of June 23, 1945. Some of you were not even born then—at least not in your present form. We are here because after six hundred years of the most painful error we have found one who knows. How he came to know—and to know more than we—is a disturbing mystery. But I trust that among us there is one... You could not fail to be here, could you, mystical friend already too curious on one occasion?... I trust, as I said, that in our presence there is one who can shed light on this matter. Ardenti!”

Colonel Ardenti—yes, it was he, raven-haired as before, though now doddering—made his way among the others and stepped forward before what seemed to be turning into a tribunal, but he was kept at a distance by the Pendulum, which marked a space that could not be crossed.

“We have not seen each other for some time, brother.” Aglie was smiling. “I knew that you would be unable to resist coming. Well? You have been informed what the prisoner said, and he says he learned it from you. So you knew and you kept silent.”

“Count,” Ardenti said, “the prisoner is lying. It is humiliating for me to say this—but honor above all. The story I confided to him is not the story the Mystic Legates told me. The interpretation of the message—it’s true, I came into possession of a message, but I didn’t hide that from you, years ago, in Milan—the interpretation is different....I wouldn’t have been capable of reading it as the prisoner has read it, and so, at that time, I sought help. And, I must say, I received no encouragement, only distrust, defiance, and threats....” Perhaps he was going to say more, but as he stared at Aglie, he stared also at the Pendulum, which was acting on him like a spell. As if hypnotized, he sank to his knees and said only, “Forgive me, because I do not know.’’

“You are forgiven, because you know you do not know,” Aglie said. “And so, brothers, the prisoner has knowledge that none of us has. He knows even who we are; in fact, we learned who we are through him. We must proceed: it will soon be dawn. While you remain here in meditation, I will withdraw once more, to wrest the revelation from him.”

“Ah non, monsieur le comte!” Pierre stepped into the hemi-cycle, his pupils dilated. “For two days you have talked with him, tete-a-tete, and he has seen nothing, said nothing, heard nothing, like the three monkeys. What more do you wish to demand, this night? No, no. Let it be here. Here, before all of us!”

“Calm yourself, my dear Pierre. I have had brought here, this night, a woman I consider the most exquisite incarnation of the Sophia, the mystic bond between the world of error and the Superior Ogdoad. Do not ask me how or why, but in her presence the man will speak. Tell them who you are, Sophia.”

And Lorenza, like a somnambulist, as if it were an effort to utter the words, said: “I am...the saint and the prostitute.”

“Ah, that is to laugh,” Pierre said. “We have here the crème de l’initiation and we call in a pute. No; the man must be brought immediately before the Pendule!”

“Let’s not be childish,” Aglie said. “Give me an hour. What makes you think he would speak here, before the Pendulum?”

“He will speak as he is undone. Le sacrifice humain!” Pierre shouted to the nave. And the nave, in a loud voice, repeated: “Le sacrifice humain!”

Salon stepped forward. “Count, our brother is not childish. He is right. We are not the police....”

“You of all people say this,” Aglie quipped.

“We are not the police,” Salon said, “and it is not fitting for us to proceed with ordinary methods of inquiry. On the other hand, I do not believe that sacrifices to the forces of the underground will be efficacious either. If they had wanted to give us a sign, they would have done so long ago. Another one knows, besides the prisoner, but he has disappeared. This evening, we have the possibility of confronting the prisoner with those who knew...” He smiled, staring at Aglie, his eyes narrowing beneath their bushy brows. “And to make them also confront us...”

“What do you mean, Salon?” Aglie asked, in a voice that showed uncertainty.

“If Monsieur le Comte permits, I will explain,” a woman said. It was Madame Olcott: I recognized her from the poster. Livid, in an olive garment, her hair, black with oil, tied at the nape. The hoarse voice of a man. In the Librairie Sloane I had recognized that face, and now I remembered: she was the Dru-idess who had run toward us in the clearing that night in Piedmont. “Alex, Denys, bring the prisoner here.”

She spoke in an imperious tone. The murmuring in the nave expressed approval. The two giants obeyed, trusting Lorenza to two Freaks Mignons. Aglie’s hands gripped the arms of his throne; he had been outvoted.

Madame Olcott signaled to her little monsters, and between the statue of Pascal and the Obeissante three armchairs were placed. On them three individuals were seated. The three were dark-skinned, small of stature, nervous, with large white eyes. “The Fox triplets. You know them well, Count. Theo, Leo, Geo, ready yourselves.”

At that moment the giants of Avalon reappeared, holding Ja-copo Belbo by the arms, though he barely came up to their shoulders. My poor friend was ashen, with several days’ growth of beard; his hands were bound behind his back and his shirt was open. Entering the smoky arena, he blinked. He didn’t seem surprised by the collection of hierophants he saw before him; after the past few days, he was probably prepared for anything.

He was surprised, though, to see the Pendulum in its new position. The giants dragged him to face Agile’s seat. The only | sound was the swish of the Pendulum as it grazed his back.

Briefly, Belbo turned, and he saw Lorenza. Overwhelmed, he i started to call her, and tried to free himself. But Lorenza, though she stared at him dully, seemed not to recognize him.

From the far end of the nave, near the ticket desk and the bookstall, a roll of drums was heard, and the shrill notes of some flutes. Suddenly, the doors of four automobiles opened, and four creatures emerged. I had seen them before, too, on the poster for Le Petit Cirque.

Wearing fezlike felt hats and ample black cloaks buttoned to the neck, Les Derviches Hurleurs stepped from the automobiles like the dead rising from the grave, and they squatted at the edge of the magic circle. In the background a flute now played sweet music, and the four gently put their hands on the floor and bowed their heads.

From the fuselage of Breguet’s plane, a fifth Derviche leaned out like a muezzin from a minaret and began to chant in an unknown tongue, moaning and lamenting as the drums began again, increasing in intensity.

Crouched behind the Brothers Fox, Madame Olcott whispered words of encouragement to them. The three were slumped in their chairs, their hands clutching the arms, their eyes closed. They began to sweat, and all the muscles of their faces twitched.

Madame Olcott addressed the assembly of dignitaries. “My excellent little brothers will now bring into our midst three people who knew.” She paused, then said: “Edward Kelley, Heinrich Khunrath, and...” Another pause. “Comte de Saint-Germain.”

For the first time, I saw Aglie make a wrong move. Out of control, he sprang from his seat, flung himself toward the woman, narrowly avoiding the trajectory of the Pendulum, as he cried: “Viper, liar, you know that cannot be....” Then, to the nave: “It’s an imposture! A lie! Stop her!”

But no one moved except Pierre, who went up and sat on the throne. “Proceed, madame,” he said.

Aglie, recovering his sangfroid, stood aside, mingling with the others. “Very well,” he challenged. “Let’s see, then.”

Madame Olcott moved her arm as if signaling the start of a race. The music grew shrill, dissonant; the drumbeats lost their steady rhythm; the dancers, who had already begun swaying back and forth, right and left, as they squatted, got up now, threw off their cloaks, and held out their arms wide, rigid, as if they were about to take flight. A moment of immobility, and they began to spin in place, using the left foot as a pivot, faces upraised, concentrated, vacant, and their pleated tunics belled out as they pirouetted, making them look like flowers caught in a hurricane.

Meanwhile, the mediums, breathing hoarsely, seemed to knot up, their faces distorted, as if they were straining, unsuccessfully, to defecate. The light of the brazier dimmed. Madame Olcott’s acolytes turned off the lanterns on the floor, and now the church was illuminated only by the glow from the nave.

And the miracle began to take place. From Theo Fox’s lips a whitish foam trickled, a foam that seemed to thicken. A similar substance issued from the lips of his brothers.

“Come, brothers,” Madame Olcott murmured, coaxed, “come, come. That’s right, yes....”

The dancers sang brokenly, hysterically, they shook and bobbed their heads, they shouted, men made convulsive noises, like death rattles.

The stuff emitted by the mediums took on body, grew more substantial; it was like a lava of albumin, which slowly expanded and descended, slid over their shoulders, their chests, their legs with the sinuous movement of a reptile. I could not tell now if it came from the pores of their skin or their mouths, ears, and eyes. The crowd pressed forward, pushing closer and closer to the mediums and the dancers. I lost all fear: confident that I would not be noticed among them, I stepped from the sentry box, exposing myself still more to the fumes that spread and curled beneath the vaults.

Around the mediums, a milky luminescence. The foam began to detach itself from them, to assume ameboid shape. From the mass that came from one of the mediums, a tip broke free, turned, and moved up along his body, like an animal that intended to strike him with its beak. At the end of it, two mobile knobs formed, like the horns of a giant snail...

The dancers, eyes closed, mouths frothing, did not cease their spinning, and they began to revolve, as much as the space allowed, around the Pendulum, miraculously doing this without crossing its trajectory. Whirling faster and faster, they flung off their fezes, let their long black hair stream out, and it seemed their heads were flying from their necks. They shouted, like the dancers that evening in Rio: Houu houu houuuuu...

The white forms acquired definition: one of them grew vaguely human in appearance, another went from phallus to ampule to alembic, and the third was clearly taking on the aspect of a bird, an owl with great eyeglasses and erect ears, the hooked beak of an old schoolmistress, a teacher of natural sciences.

Madame Olcott questioned the first form: “Kelley, is that you?’’

From the form a voice came. It was definitely not Theo Fox speaking. The voice, distant, said in halting English: “Now... I do reveale a...a mighty Secret, if ye marke it well...”

“Yes, yes,” Madame Olcott insisted.

The voice went on: “This very place is call’d by many names... Earth... Earth is the lowest element of all... When thrice ye have turned this Wheele about... thus my greate Secret I have revealed....”

Theo Fox made a gesture with his hand, as if to beg mercy. “No, hold on to it,” Madame Olcott said to him. Then she addressed the owl shape: “I recognize you, Khunrath. What have you to tell us?”

The owl spoke: “Hallelu... ‘aah... Hallelu... ‘aah... Hallelu...’aah... Was...”

“Was?”

“Was helfen Fackeln Licht... oder Briln...so die Leut... nicht sehen... wollen...”

“We do wish,” Madame Olcott said. “Tell us what you know.”

“Symbolon kosmou... ta antra... kai tan enkosmion dun-ameon erithento... oi theologoi...”

Leo Fox was also exhausted. The owl’s voice weakened, Leo’s head slumped, the effort to sustain the shape was too great. But the implacable Madame Olcott told him to persevere and addressed the last shape, which now had also taken on anthropomorphic features. “Saint-Germain, Saint-Germain, is that you? What do you know?”

The shape began to hum a tune. Madame Olcott called for silence. The musicians stopped, and the dancers no longer howled, but they continued spinning, though with increasing fatigue.

The shape was singing: “Gentle love, this hour befriends me...”

“It’s you; I recognize you,” Madame Olcott said invitingly. “Speak, tell us where, what...”

The shape said: “II etait nuit....La tete couverte du voile de lin... j’arrive, je trouve un autel de fer, j’y place le rameau mysterieux... Oh, je crus descendre dans un abime... des galeries composees de quartiers de pierre noire... mon voyage souterrain...”

“He’s a fraud, a fraud!” Aglie cried. “Brothers, you all know these words. They’re from the Tres Sainte Trinosophie, I wrote it myself; anyone can read it for sixty francs!” He ran to Geo Fox and began shaking him by the arm.

“Stop, you imposter!” Madame Olcott screamed. “You’ll kill him!”

 “And what if I do?” Aglife shouted, pulling the medium off the chair.

Geo tried to support himself by clinging to the form he had secreted, but it fell with him and dissolved on the floor. Geo slumped in the sticky matter that he continued to vomit, until he stiffened, lifeless.

“Stop, madman,” Madame Olcott screamed, seizing Aglie. And then, to the other brothers: “Stand fast, my little ones. They must speak still. Khunrath, Khunrath, tell him you are real!”

Leo Fox, to survive, was trying to reabsorb the owl. Madame Olcott went around behind him and pressed her fingers to his temples, to bend him to her will. The owl, realizing it was about to disappear, turned toward its creator: “Phy, Phy Diabolos,” it muttered, trying to peck his eyes. Leo gave a gurgle, as if his jugular had been severed, and sank to his knees. The owl disappeared in a revolting muck (“Phiii, phiii,” it went), and into it, choking, the medium also fell, and was still. Madame Olcott, furious, turned to Theo, who was doing his best to hold on: “Speak, Kelley! You hear me?”

But Kelley did not speak. He was trying to detach himself from the medium, who now yelled as if his bowels were being torn. The medium struggled to take back what he had produced, clawing the air. “Kelley, earless Kelley, don’t cheat again,” Madame Olcott cried. Kelley, unable to separate himself from the medium, was now trying to smother him, turning into a kind of chewing gum, from which the last Fox brother was unable to extricate himself. Theo, too, sank to his knees, choking, entangled in the parasite blob that was devouring him; he rolled and writhed as if enveloped in flame. The thing that had been Kelley covered him like a shroud, then melted, liquefied, leaving Theo on the floor, the drained, gutted mummy of a child embalmed by Salon. At that same moment, the four dancers stopped as one, flailed their arms—drowning men, sinking like stones-then crouched, whined like puppies, and covered their heads with their hands.

Aglie had returned to the ambulatory. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the little handkerchief that adorned his breast pocket, took two deep breaths, and put a white pill in his mouth. Then he called for silence.

“Brother knights. You have seen the cheap tricks this woman inflicts on us. Let us regain our composure and return to my proposal. Give me one hour with the prisoner in private.”

Madame Olcott, oblivious, bent over her mediums, was stricken with an almost human grief. But Pierre, who had followed everything and was still seated on the throne, resumed control of the situation. “Non,” he said. “There is only one means: le sacrifice humain! Give to me the prisoner.”

Galvanized by his energy, the giants of Avalon grabbed Belbo, who had watched the scene in a daze, and thrust him before Pierre, who, with the agility of an acrobat, jumped up, put the chair on the table, and pushed both giants to the center of the choir. He grabbed the wire of the Pendulum as it went by and stopped the sphere, staggering under the recoil. It took barely an instant. As if the thing had been prearranged—and perhaps, during the confusion, some signals had been exchanged—the giants climbed up on the table and hoisted Belbo onto the chair. One giant wrapped the wire of the Pendulum twice around Bel-bo’s neck, and the other held the sphere, then set it at the edge of the table.

Bramanti rushed to this makeshift gallows, flashing with majesty in his scarlet cloak, and chanted: “Exorcizo igitur te per Pentagrammaton, et in nomine Tetragrammaton, per Alfa et Omega qui sunt in spiritu Azoth. Saddai, Adonai, Jotchavah, Eieazereie! Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Anael. Fluat Udor per spiritum Eloim! Maneat Terra per Adam lot-Cavah! Per Samael Zebaoth et in nomine Eloim Gibor, veni Adramelech! Vade retro Lilith!”

Belbo stood straight on the chair, the wire around his neck. The giants no longer had to restrain him. If he took one step in any direction, he would fall from that shaky perch, and the noose, tightening, would strangle him.

“Fools!” Aglie shouted. “How will we put it back on its axis now?” He was concerned for the safety of the Pendulum.

Bramanti smiled. “Do not worry, Count. We are not mixing your dyes here. This is the Pendulum, as They conceived it. It will know where to go. And to convince a Force to act, there is nothing better than a human sacrifice.”

Until that moment, Belbo had trembled. But now I saw him relax. He looked at the audience, I will not say with confidence, but with curiosity. I believe that, hearing the argument between the two adversaries, seeing before him the contorted bodies of the mediums, the dervishes still jerking and moaning to the side, the rumpled vestments of the dignitaries, Belbo recovered his most genuine gift: his sense of the ridiculous.

I believe that at that moment he decided not to allow himself to be frightened anymore. Perhaps his elevated position gave him a sense of superiority, as if he were watching, from a stage, that gathering of lunatics locked in a Grand Guignol feud, and at the sides, almost to the entrance, the little monsters, now uninterested in the action, nudging each other and giggling, like Annibale Cantalamessa and Pio Bo.

He only turned an anxious eye toward Lorenza, as the giants again grasped her arms. Jolted, she came to her senses. She began crying.

Perhaps Belbo was reluctant to let her witness his emotion, or perhaps he decided instead that this was the only way he could show his contempt for that crowd, but he held himself erect, head high, chest bared, hands bound behind his back, like a man who had never known fear.

Calmed by Belbo’s calm, resigned to the interruption of the Pendulum, but still eager to know the secret after a lifetime’s search (or many lifetimes), and also in order to regain control over his followers, Aglie addressed him again: “Come, Belbo, make up your mind. As you can see, you are in a situation that, to say the least, is awkward. Stop this playacting.”

Belbo didn’t answer. He looked away, as if politely to avoid overhearing a conversation he had chanced upon.

Aglie insisted, conciliatory, paternal: “I understand your irritation, your reserve. How it must revolt you to confide an intimate and precious secret to a rabble that has just offered such an unedifying spectacle! Very well, you may confide your secret to me alone, whispering it in my ear. Now I will have you taken down, and I know you will tell me a word, a single word.”

Belbo said: “You think so?”

Then Aglie changed his tone. I saw him imperious as never before, sacerdotal, hieratic. He spoke as if he had on one of the Egyptian vestments worn by his colleagues. But the note was false; he seemed to be parodying those whom he had always treated with indulgent commiseration. At the same time, he spoke with the full assumption of his authority. For some purpose of his own—because this couldn’t have been unintentional—he was introducing an element of melodrama. If he was acting, he acted well: Belbo seemed unaware of any deception, listening to Aglie as if he had expected nothing else from him.

“Now you will speak,” Aglie said. “You will speak, and you will join this great game. If you remain silent, you are lost. If you speak, you will share in the victory. For truly I say this to you: this night you and I and all of us are in Hod, the Sefirah of splendor, majesty, and glory; Hod, which governs ritual and ceremonial magic; Hod, the moment when the curtain of eternity is parted. I have dreamed of this moment for centuries. You will speak, and you will join the only ones who will be entitled, after your revelation, to declare themselves Masters of the World. Humble yourself, and you will be exalted. You will speak because I order you to speak, and my words efficiunt quod figurant!”

And Belbo, now invincible, said, “Ma gavte la nata...”

Aglie, even if he was expecting a refusal, blanched at the insult.

“What did he say?” Pierre asked, hysterical.

“He will not speak,” Aglie roughly translated. He lifted his arms in a gesture of surrender, of obedience, and said to Bra-manti: “ He is yours.’’

And Pierre said, transported: “Assez, assez, le sacrifice hu-main, le sacrifice humain!”

“Yes, let him die. We’ll find the answer anyway,” cried Madame Olcott, equally carried away, as she now returned to the scene, rushing toward Belbo.

At the same time, Lorenza moved. She freed herself from the giants’ grasp and stood before Belbo, at the foot of the gallows, her arms opened wide, as if to stop an invading army. In tears, she exclaimed: “Are you all crazy? You can’t do this!”

Aglie, who was withdrawing, stood rooted to the spot for a moment, then ran to her, to restrain her.

What happened next took only seconds. Madame Olcott’s knot of hair came undone; all rancor and flames, like a Medusa, she bared her talons, scratched at Aglie’s face, shoved him aside with the force of the momentum of her leap. Aglie fell back, stumbled over a leg of the brazier, spun around like a dervish, and banged his head against a machine; he sank to the ground, his face covered with blood. Pierre, meanwhile, flung himself on Lorenza, drawing the dagger from the sheath on his chest as he moved, but he blocked my view, so I didn’t see what happened. Then I saw Lorenza slumped at Belbo’s feet, her face waxen, and Pierre, holding up the red blade, shouted: “Enfin, le sacrifice humain!” Turning toward the nave, he said in a loud voice: “I’a Cthulhu! I’a S’ha-t’n!”

In a body, the horde in the nave moved forward: some fell and were swept aside; others, pushing, threatened to topple Cug-not’s car. I heard—I must have heard it, I can’t have imagined such a grotesque detail—the voice of Garamond saying: “Gentlemen, please! Manners!...” Bramanti, in ecstasy, was kneeling by Lorenza’s body, declaiming: “Asar, Asar! Who is clutching me by the throat? Who is pinning me to the ground? Who is stabbing my heart? I am unworthy to cross the threshold of the house of Maat!”

* * *

Perhaps no one intended it, perhaps the sacrifice of Lorenza was to have sufficed, but the acolytes were now pressing inside the magic circle, which was made accessible by the immobility of the Pendulum, and someone—Ardenti, I think—was hurled by the others against the table, which literally disappeared from beneath Belbo’s feet. It skidded away, and, thanks to the same push, the Pendulum began a rapid, violent swing, taking its victim with it. The wire, pulled by the weight of the sphere, tightened around the neck of my poor friend, yanked him into the air, and he swung above and with the Pendulum, swung toward the eastern extremity of the choir, then returned, I hoped without life, in my direction.

Trampling one another, the crowd drew back, retreated to the edges of the semicircle, to allow room for the wonder. The man in charge of the oscillation, intoxicated by the rebirth of the Pendulum, supplied pushes directly on the hanged man’s body. The axis of motion made a diagonal from my eyes to one of the windows, no doubt the window with the colorless spot through which, in a few hours, the first ray of the rising sun would fall. Therefore, I did not see Belbo swing in front of me, but this, I believe, was the pattern he drew in space...

His head seemed a second sphere, trapped in the loops of the wire that stretched from the center of the keystone; and when the metal sphere tilted to the right, Belbo’s head tilted to the left, and vice versa. For most of the long swing, the two spheres tended in opposite directions, one on either side of the wire, so what cleaved the air was no longer a single line, but a kind of triangular structure. And, while Belbo’s head followed the pull of the wire, his body—at first in its final spasms, then with the disarticulated agility of a wooden marionette, arm here, leg there—described other arcs in the void, arcs independent of the head, the wire, and the sphere beneath. I had the thought that if someone were to photograph the scene using Muybridge’s system—fixing on the plate every moment as a succession of positions, recording the two extreme points the head reached in each period, the two rest points of the sphere, the points of intersection of the wire with time, independent of both head and sphere, and the intermediary points marked by the plane of oscillation of the trunk and legs—Belbo hanged from the Pendulum would have drawn, in space, the tree of the Sefirot, summing up in his final moment the vicissitude of all universes, fixing forever in his motion the ten stages of the mortal exhalation and defecation of the divine in the world.

Then, as the Mandrake in tails continued to encourage that funereal swing, Belbo’s body, through a grisly addition and cancellation of vectors, a migration of energies, suddenly became immobile, and the wire and the sphere moved, but only from his body down; the rest—which connected Belbo with the vault-now remained perpendicular. Thus Belbo had escaped the error of the world and its movements, had now become, himself, the point of suspension, the Fixed Pin, the Place from which the vault of the world is hung, while beneath his feet the wire and the sphere went on swinging, from pole to pole, without peace, the earth slipping away under them, showing always a new continent. The sphere could not point out, nor would it ever know, the location of the World’s Navel.

As the pack of Diabolicals, dazed for a moment in the face of this portent, began to yowl again, I told myself that the story was now finished. If Hod is the Sefirah of glory, Belbo had had glory. A single fearless act had reconciled him with the Absolute.

114

The ideal pendulum consists of a very thin wire, which will not hinder flexion and torsion, of length L, with the weight attached to its bary-center. For a sphere, the barycenter is the center; for the human body, it is a point 0.65 of the height, measured from the feet. If the hanged man is 1.70m tall, his barycenter is located 1.10m from his feet, and the length L includes this distance. In other words, if the distance from the man’s head to neck is 0.60m, the barycenter is 1.70 - 1.10 = 0.60m from his head, and 0.60 - 0.30 = 0.30m from his neck.

As for a double pendulum, one with two weights attached to the same wire...If you shift A, A oscillates; then after a while it stops and B will oscillate. If the paired weights are different or if their lengths are different, the energy passes from one to the other, but the periods of these oscillations will not be equal... This eccentricity of movement also occurs if, instead of beginning to make A oscillate freely by setting it in motion, you apply a force to the system already in motion. That is to say, if the wind blows in gusts onjhe hanged man in asynchronous fashion, after a while, the hanged man will become motionless and his gallows will oscillate as if its fulcrum were the hanged man.

—From a private letter of Mario Salvador!, Columbia University, 1984

Having nothing more to learn in that place, I took advantage of the melee to reach the statue of Gramme.

The pedestal was still open. I entered, went down a narrow ladder, and found myself on a small landing illuminated by a light bulb, where a spiral stone staircase began. At the end of this, I came to a dim passage with a higher, vaulted ceiling. At first I didn’t realize where I was, and couldn’t identify the source of the rippling sound I heard. Then my eyes adjusted: I was in a sewer, with a handrail that kept me from falling into the water but not from inhaling an awesome stink, half chemical, half organic. At least something in our story was true: the sewers of Paris, of Colbert, Fantomas, Caus.

I followed the biggest conduit, deciding against the darker ones that branched off, and hoped that some sign would tell me where to end my subterranean flight. In any case, I was escaping, far from the Conservatoire, and compared to that kingdom of darkness the Paris sewers were relief, freedom, clean air, light.

I carried with me a single image, the hieroglyph traced in the choir by Belbo’s corpse. What was that symbol? To what other symbol did it correspond? I couldn’t figure it out. I know now it was a law of physics, but this knowledge only makes the phenomenon more symbolic. Here, now, in Belbo’s country house, among his many notes, I found a letter from someone who, replying to a question of his, told him how a pendulum works, and how it would behave if a second weight were hung elsewhere along the length of its wire. So Belbo—God knows for how long—had been thinking of the Pendulum as both a Sinai and a Calvary. He hadn’t died as the victim of a Plan of recent manufacture; he had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.

Somehow, losing, Belbo had won. Or does he who devotes himself to this single way of winning then lose all? He loses all if he does not understand that the victory is a different victory. But on that Saturday evening I hadn’t yet discovered this.

I went along the tunnel, mindless, like Postel, perhaps lost in the same darkness, and suddenly I saw the sign. A brighter lamp, attached to the wall, showed me another ladder, temporary, leading to a wooden trapdoor. I tried it, and I found myself in a basement filled with empty bottles, then a corridor with two toilets, a little man on one door, a little woman on the other. I was in the world of the living.

I stopped, breathless. Only then did I remember Lorenza. Now I was crying. But she was slipping away, leaving my bloodstream, as if she had never existed. I couldn’t even see her face. In that world of the dead, she was the most dead.

At the end of the corridor I came to another stairway, a door. I entered a smoky, evil-smelling place, a tavern, a bistro, an Oriental bar, black waiters, sweating customers, greasy skewers, and mugs of beer. I appeared, like an ordinary customer who had gone to urinate and returned. Nobody noticed me. Perhaps the man at the cash desk, seeing me arrive from the back, gave me an almost imperceptible signal, narrowing his eyes as if to say: Yes, I understand, go ahead, I haven’t seen a thing.

115

If the eye could see the demons that people the universe, existence would be impossible.

—Talmud, Berakhot, 6

Leaving the bar, I find myself among the lights of Porte Saint-Martin. The bar is Arab, and the shops around it, still open, are Arab, too. A composite odor of couscous and falafel, and crowd. Clumps of young people, thin, many with sleeping bags. I ask a boy what is going on. The march, he says. Tomorrow there will be a big march against the Savary law. Marchers are arriving by the busload. A Turk—a Druze, an Ismaili in disguise—invites me in bad French to go into some kind of club. Never. Flee Alamut. You do not know who is in the service of whom. Trust no one.

I cross the intersection. Now I hear only the sound of my footsteps. The advantage of a big city: move on a few meters, and you find solitude again.

Suddenly, after a few blocks, on my left, the Conservatoire, pale in the night. From the outside, perfect peace, a monument sleeping the sleep of the just. I continue southward, toward the Seine. I have a destination, but I’m not sure what it is. I want to ask someone what has happened.

Belbo dead? The sky is serene. I encounter a group of students. They are silent, influenced by the genius loci. On the left, the hulk of Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs.

I continue along rue Saint-Martin, I cross rue aux Ours, broad, a boulevard, almost; I’m afraid of losing my way, but what way? Where am I going? I don’t know. I look around, and on my right, at the comer, I see two display windows of Editions Ros-icruciennes. They’re dark, but in the light of the street lamp and with the help of my flashlight I manage to make out their contents. Books, objects, Histoire desjuifs, Comte de St.-Germain, alchemy, monde cache, les maisons secretes de la Rose-Croix, the message of the builders of the cathedrals, the Cathars, The New Atlantis, Egyptian medicine, the temple of Karnak, the Bhagavad-Gita, reincarnation, Rosicrucian crosses and candelabra, busts of Iris and Osiris, incense in boxes and tablets, tarots. A dagger, a tin letter opener with a round hilt bearing the seal of the Rosicrucians. What are they doing, making fun of me?

I pass the facade of the Beaubourg. During the day the place is a village fair; now the plaza is almost deserted. A few silent groups, sleeping, a few lights from the brasseries opposite. It’s all true. Giant air ducts that absorb energy from the earth. Perhaps the crowds that come during the day serve to supply them with vibrations; perhaps the hermetic machine is fed on fresh meat.

The church of Saint-Merri. Opposite, the Librairie la Vouivre, three-quarters occultist. I must not give in to hysteria. I take rue des Lombards, to avoid an army of Scandinavian girls coming out of a bistro laughing. Shut up; Lorenza is dead.

But is she? What if I am the one who is dead? Rue des Lombards intersects, at right angles, rue Nicolas-Flamel, and at the end of that you can see, white, the Tour Saint-Jacques. At the corner, the Librairie Arcane 22, tarots and pendulums. Nicolas Flamel the alchemist, an alchemistic bookshop, and then the Tour Saint-Jacques, with those great white lions at the base, a useless late-Gothic tower near the Seine, after which an esoteric review was named. Pascal conducted experiments there on the weight of air, and even today, at a height of fifty-two meters, the tower has a station for meteorological research. Maybe They began with the Tour Saint-Jacques, before erecting the Eiffel Tower. There are special locations. And no one notices.

I go back toward Saint-Merri. More girls’ laughter. I don’t want to see people. I skirt the church. Along rue du Cloitre-Saint-Merri, a transept door, old, of rough wood. At the foot of the street, a square extends, the end of the Beaubourg area, here brilliantly lit. In the open space, machines by Tinguely, and other multicolored artifacts that float on the surface of a pool, a small artificial lake, their cogged wheels clanking insinuatingly. In the background I see again the scaffolding of Dalmine pipes, the Beaubourg with its gaping mouths—like an abandoned 71-tanic near a wall devoured by ivy, a shipwreck in a crater of the moon. Where the cathedrals failed, the great transatlantic ducts whisper, in contact with the Black Virgins. They are discovered only by one who knows how to circumnavigate Saint-Merri. And so I must go on; I have a clue, I must expose Their plot in the very center of the Ville Lumiere, the plot of the Dark Ones.

I find myself at the facade of Saint-Merri. Something impels me to train my flashlight on the portal. Flamboyant Gothic, arches in accolade.

And suddenly, finding what I didn’t expect to find, on the archivolt of the portal I see it.

The Baphomet. Where two curves join. At the summit of the first, a dove of the Holy Spirit with a glory of stone rays, but on the second, besieged by praying angels, there he is, the Baphomet, with his awful wings. On the facade of a church. Shameless.

Why here? Because we aren’t far from the Temple. Where is the Temple, or what’s left of it? I retrace my steps, north, and find myself at the corner of rue de Montmorency. At number 51, the house of Nicolas Flamel. Between the Baphomet and the Temple. The shrewd spagyric knew well with whom he was dealing. Poubelles full of foul rubbish opposite a house of undefined period, Taverne Nicolas Flamel. The house is old, restored for the tourists, for Diabolicals of the lowest order, hylics. Next door, an American shop with an Apple poster: “Secouez-vous les puces.” Microsoft-Hermes. Directory, temurah.

Now I’m in rue du Temple, I walk along it and come to the corner of rue de Bretagne, and the Square du Temple, a garden blanched as a cemetery, the necropolis of the martyred knights.

Rue de Bretagne to rue Vieille du Temple. Rue Vieille du Temple, after rue Barbette, has novelty shops: electric bulbs in odd shapes, Jike ducks or ivy leaves. Too blatantly modern. They don’t fool me.

Rue des Francs-Bourgeois: I’m in the Marais, I know, and soon the old kosher butcher shops will appear. What do the Jews have to do with the Templars, now that we gave their place in the Plan to the Assassins of Alamut? Why am I here? Is it an answer I am looking for? Perhaps I’m only trying to get away from the Conservatoire. Unless I do have a destination, a place I’m going to. But it can’t be here. I rack my brain to remember where it is, as Belbo hunted in a dream for a lost address.

An obscene group approaches. Laughing nastily, they march in open order, forcing me to step off the sidewalk. For a moment I fear they are agents of the Old Man of the Mountain, that they have come for me. Not so; they vanish into the night, but they speak a foreign language, a sibilant Shiite, Talmudic, Coptic, like a serpent of the desert.

Androgynous figures loom, in long cloaks. Rosicrucian cloaks. They pass, turn into rue de Sevigne. It is late, very late. I fled the Conservatoire to find again the city of all, but now I realize that the city of all is a catacomb with special paths for the initiated.

A drunk. But he may be pretending. Trust no one, no one. I pass a still-open bar; the waiters, in aprons down to their ankles, are putting chairs on tables. I manage to enter just in time. I order a beer, drain it, ask for another. “A healthy thirst, eh?” one of them says. But without cordiality, suspicious. Of course I’m thirsty; I’ve had nothing to drink since five yesterday afternoon. A man can be thirsty without having spent the night under a pendulum. Fools. I pay and leave before they can commit my features to memory.

I’m at the corner of Place des Vosges. I walk along the arcades. What was that old movie in which the solitary footsteps of Mathias, the mad killer, echoed at night in Place des Vosges? I stop. Do I hear footsteps behind me? But I wouldn’t, of course; the killer has stopped, too. These arcades—all they need is a few glass cases, and they could be rooms in the Conservatoire.

Low sixteenth-century ceilings, round-headed arches, galleries selling prints, antiques, furniture. Place des Vosges, with its old doorways, cracked and worn and leprous. The people here haven’t moved for hundreds of years. Men with yellow cloaks. A square inhabited exclusively by taxidermists. They appear only at night. They know the movable slab, the manhole through which you penetrate the Mundus Subterraneus. In full view.

The Union de Recouvrement des Cotisation de Securite so-ciale et D’allocations familiales de la Patellerie, number 75, apartment 1. A new door—rich people must live there—but right next to it is an old door, peeling, like a door on Via Sincero Renato. Then, at number 3, a door recently restored. Hylics alternating with pneumatics. The Masters and their slaves. Then planks nailed across what must have been an arch. It’s obvious; there was an occultist bookshop here and now it’s gone. A whole block has been emptied. Evacuated overnight. Like Aglie. They know someone knows; they are beginning to cover their tracks.

At the corner of rue de Birague, I see the line of arcades, infinite, without a living soul. I want darkness, not these yellow street lamps. I could cry out, but no one would hear me. Behind all the closed windows, through which not a thread of light escapes, the taxidermists in their yellow smocks will snicker.

But no; between the arcades and the garden in the center are parked cars, and an occasional shadow passes. A big Belgian shepherd crosses my path. A black dog alone in the night. Where is Faust? Did he send the faithful Wagner out for a piss?

Wagner. That’s the word that was churning in my mind without surfacing. Dr. Wagner: he’s the one I need. He will be able to tell me that I’m raving, that I’ve given flesh to ghosts, that none of it’s true, Belbo’s alive, and the Tres don’t exist. What a relief it would be to learn that I’m sick.

I abandon the square, almost running. I’m followed by a car. But maybe it’s only looking for a parking place. I trip on a plastic garbage bag. The car parks. It didn’t want me. I’m on rue Saint-Antoine. I look for a taxi. As if invoked, one passes.

I say to the driver: “Sept, Avenue Elisee-Reclus.”

116

Je voudrais etre la tour, pendre a la Tour Eiffel.

—Blaise Cendrars

I didn’t know where 7, Avenue Elisee-Reclus was, and I didn’t dare ask the driver, because anyone who takes a taxi at that hour either is heading for his own home or is a murderer at the very least. The man was grumbling that the center of the city was still full of those damn students, buses parked everywhere, it was a scandal,’if he was in charge, they’d all be lined up against a wall, and the best thing was to go the long way round. He practically circled Paris, leaving me finally at number 7 of a lonely street. There was no Dr. Wagner at that address. Was it seventeen, then? Or twenty-seven? I walked, looked at two or three houses, then came to my senses. Even if I found the house, was I thinking of dragging Dr. Wagner out of bed at this time of night to tell him my story? I had ended up here for the same reason that I had roamed from Porte Saint-Martin to Place des Vosges: I was fleeing. I didn’t need a psychoanalyst, I needed a strait-jacket. Or the cure of sleep. Or Lia. To have her hold my head, press it between her breast and armpit, and whisper soothingly to me.

Was it Dr. Wagner I wanted or Avenue Elisee-Reclus? Because—now I remembered—I had come across that name in the course of my reading for the Plan. Elisee Reclus was someone in the last century who wrote a book about the earth, the underground, volcanoes; under the pretext of academic geography he stuck his nose into the Mundus Subterraneus. One of Them, in other words. I ran from Them, yet kept finding Them around me. Little by little, in the space of a few hundred years, They had occupied all of Paris. And the rest of the world.

I should go back to the hotel. Would I find another taxi? This was probably an out-of-the-way suburb. I headed in the direction where the night sky was brighter, more open. The Seine?

When I reached the corner, I saw it.

On my left. I should have known it would be there, in ambush, because in this city the street names wrote unmistakable messages; they gave you warnings. It was my own fault that I hadn’t been paying attention.

There it was, foul metal spider, the symbol and instrument of their power. I should have run, but I felt drawn to that web, craning my neck, then looking downward, because from where I stood the thing could not be encompassed in one glance. I was swallowed by it, slashed by its thousand edges, bombarded by metal curtains that fell on every side. With the slightest move it could have crushed me with one of those Meccano paws.

La Tour. I was at the one place in the city where you don’t see it in the distance, in profile, benevolent above the ocean of roofs, light-hearted as a Dufy painting. It was on top of me, it sailed at me. I could glimpse the tip, but I moved inward, between its legs, and saw its haunches, underside, genitalia, sensed the vertiginous intestine that climbed to join the esophagus of that polytechnical giraffe’s neck. Perforated, it yet had the power to douse the light around it, and as I moved, it offered me, from different perspectives, different cavernous niches that framed sudden zooms into darkness.

To its right, in the northeast, still low on the horizon, a sickle moon. At times, the Tower framed it; and to me it looked like an optical illusion, the fluorescence of one of those skewed screens the Tower’s structure formed; but if I walked on a little, the screens assumed new forms, the moon vanished, tangled in the metal ribs; the spider crushed it, digested it, and it went into another dimension.

Tesseract. Four-dimensional cube. Through an arch I saw a flashing light—no, two, one red, one white—surely a plane looking for Roissy or Orly. The next moment—I had moved, or the plane, or the Tower—the lights hid behind a rib; I waited for them to reappear in the next frame, but they were gone for good. The Tower had a hundred windows, all mobile, and each gave onto a different segment of space-time. Its ribs didn’t form Euclidean curves, they ripped the very fabric of the cosmos, they overturned realities, they leafed through pages of parallel worlds.

Who was it who said that this spire of Notre Dame de la Brocante served “a suspendre Paris au plafond de 1’univers”? On the contrary, it suspended the universe from its spire. It was thus the substitute for the Pendulum.

What had they called it? Lone suppository, hollow obelisk, Magnificat of wire, apotheosis of the battery, aerial altar of an idolatrous cult, bee in the heart of the rose of the winds, piteous ruin, hideous night-colored colossus, misshapen emblem of useless strength, absurd wonder, meaningless pyramid, guitar, inkwell, telescope, prolix as a cabinet minister’s speech, ancient god, modern beast...It was all this and more. And, had I had the sixth sense of the Masters of the World, now that I stood within its bundle of vocal cords encrusted with rivet polyps, I would have heard the Tower hoarsely whisper the music of the spheres as it sucked waves from the heart of our hollow planet and transmitted them to all the menhirs of the world. Rhizome of junctures, cervical arthrosis, prothesis of protheses. The horror of it! To dash my brains out, from where I was, They would have to launch me toward the peak. Surely I was coming out of a journey through the center of the earth, I was dizzy, antigrav-itational, in the antipodes.

No, we had not been daydreaming: here was the looming proof of the Plan. But soon the Tower would realize that I was the spy, the enemy, the grain of sand in the gear system it served, soon it would imperceptibly dilate a diamond window in that lace of lead and swallow me, grab me in a fold of its hyperspace, and put me Elsewhere.

If I remained a little longer under its tracery, its great talons would clench, curve like claws, draw me in, and then the animal would slyly assume its former position. Criminal, sinister pencil sharpener!

Another plane: this one came from nowhere; the Tower itself had generated it between two of its plucked-mastodon vertebrae.

I looked up. The Tower was endless, like the Plan for which it had been born. If I could remain there without being devoured, I would be able to follow the shifts, the slow revolutions, the infinitesimal decompositions and recompositions in the chill of the currents. Perhaps the Masters of the World knew how to interpret it as a geomantic design, perhaps in its metamorphoses they knew how to read their instructions, their unconfessable mandates. The Tower spun above my head, screwdriver of the Mystic Pole. Or else it was immobile, like a magnetized pin, and it made the heavenly vault rotate. The vertigo was the same. How well the Tower defends itself! I said silently. From the distance it winks affectionately, but should you approach, should you attempt to penetrate its mystery, it will kill you, it will freeze your bones, simply by revealing the meaningless horror of which it is made. Now I know that Belbo is dead, and the Plan is real, because the Tower is real. If I don’t get away now, fleeing once again, I won’t be able to tell anyone. I must sound the alarm.

A noise. Stop, return to reality. A taxi bearing down. With a leap I managed to tear myself from the magic girdle, I waved my arms, and was almost run OjVer, because the driver braked only at the last moment, stopping as if with great reluctance. During the ride he explained mat he, too, when he passed beneath it at night, found the Tower frightening, so he speeded up. “Why?” I asked him.

“Parce que... parce que ca fait peur, c’est tout.”

At my hotel, I had to ring and ring before the sleepy night porter came. I said to myself: You have to sleep now. The rest, tomorrow. I took some pills, enough to poison myself. Then I don’t remember.

117

Madness has an enormous pavilion Where it receives folk from every region, Especially if they have gold in profusion.

—Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff, 1494, 46

I woke at two in the afternoon, dazed, catatonic. I remembered everything clearly, but didn’t know if what I remembered was true. My first thought was to run downstairs and buy the newspapers; then I told myself that even if a company of spahis had stormed the Conservatoire immediately after the event, the news wouldn’t have had time to appear in the morning papers.

Besides, Paris had other things on its mind that day. The desk clerk informed me as soon as I went down to look for some coffee. The city was in an uproar. Many Me’tro stations were closed; in some places the police were using force to disperse the crowds; the students were too numerous, they were going too far.

I found Dr. Wagner’s number in the telephone book. I tried calling, but his office was obviously closed on Sunday. Anyway, I had to go and check at the Conservatoire. It was open on Sunday afternoons.

In the Latin Quarter groups of people were shouting and waving flags. On the He de la Cite I saw a police barricade. Shots could be heard in the distance. This is how it must have been in ‘68. At Sainte-Chapelle there must have been a confrontation, I caught a whiff of tear gas. I heard people charging, I didn’t know if they were students or policemen; everybody around me was running. Some of us took refuge inside a fence behind a cordon of police, while there was some scuffling in the street. The shame of it: here I was with the aging bourgeoisie, waiting for the revolution to subside.

Then the way was clear, and I took back streets around the old Halles, until I was again in rue Saint-Martin. The Conservatoire was open, with its white forecourt, the plague on the facade: “Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, established by decree of the Convention on 19 Vendemiaire, Year III...in the former priory of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, founded in the eleventh century.” Everything normal, with a little Sunday crowd ignoring the students’ kermesse.

I went inside—Sundays free—and everything was as it had been at five o’clock yesterday afternoon. The guards, the visitors, the Pendulum in its usual place...I looked for signs of what had happened, but if it had happened, someone had done a thorough cleaning. If it had happened.

I don’t recall how I spent the rest of the afternoon. Nor do I recall what I saw, wandering the streets, forced every now and then to turn into an alley to avoid a scuffle. I called Milan, just to see, dialed Belbo’s number, then Lorenza’s. Then Garamond Press, which would of course be closed.

As I sit here tonight, all this happened yesterday. But between the day before yesterday and this night an eternity has passed.

Toward evening I realized that I hadn’t eaten anything. I wanted quiet, and a little comfort. Near the Forum des Halles I entered a restaurant that promised fish. There was too much fish. My table was directly opposite an aquarium. A universe sufficiently surreal to plunge me again into paranoia. Nothing is accidental. That fish seems an asthmatic Hesychast that is losing its faith and accusing God of having lessened the meaning of the cosmos. Sabaoth, Sabaoth, how can you be so wicked as to make me believe you don’t exist? The flesh is covering the world like gangrene... That other fish looks like Minnie; she bats her long lashes and purses her lips into a heart shape. Minnie Mouse is Mickey’s fiancee. I eat a salade folle with a haddock tender as a baby’s flesh. With honey and pepper. The Paulicians are here. That one glides among the coral like Breguet’s airplane, a leisurely lepidopteral fluttering of wings; a hundred to one he saw his homunculus abandoned at the bottom of an athanor, now with a hole in it, thrown into the garbage opposite Flamel’s house. And now a Templar fish, all armored in black, looking for Noffo Dei. He grazes the asthmatic Hesychast, who navigates pensively, frowning, toward the Unspeakable. I look away. Across the street I glimpse the sign of another restaurant, Chez R... Rosie Cross? Reuchlin? Rosispergius? Rachkov-skyragotgkyzarogi? Signatures, signatures...

Let’s see. The only way to discomfit the Devil is to make him believe you don’t believe in him. There’s no mystery in your nighttime flight across Paris, in your vision of the Tower. To come out of the Conservatoire after what you saw, or believe you saw, and to experience the city as a nightmare—that is normal. But what did I see in the Conservatoire?

I absolutely had to talk to Dr. Wagner. I don’t know why, but I had to. Talking was the panacea. The therapy of the word.

How did I pass the time till this morning? I went into a movie theater where they were showing Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai. When the scene with the mirrors came, it was too much for me, and I left. But maybe that’s not true, maybe I imagined the whole thing.

This morning I called Dr. Wagner at nine. The name Garamond enabled me to get past the secretary; the doctor seemed to remember me, and, impressed by the urgency in my voice, he said to come at once, at nine-thirty, before his regular appointments. He seemed cordial, sympathetic.

Did I dream the visit to Dr. Wagner, too? The secretary asked for my vital statistics, prepared a card, had me pay in advance. Luckily I had my return ticket.

An office of modest size, with no couch. Windows overlooking the Seine. To the left, the shadow of the Tower. Dr. Wagner received me with professional affability. I was not his publisher now, I was his patient. With a wide gesture he had me sit opposite him, at his desk, like a government clerk called on the carpet. “Et alors?” He said this, and gave his rotating chair a push, turning his back to me. He sat with his head bowed and hands clasped. There was nothing left but for me to speak.

I spoke, and it was like a dam bursting; everything came out, from beginning to end: what I thought two years ago, what I thought last year, what •! thought Belbo had thought, and Dio-tallevi. Above all, what had happened on Saint John’s Eve.

Wagner did not interrupt once, did not nod or show disap-       . proval. For all the response he made, he could have been fast asleep. But that must have been his technique. I talked and talked. The therapy of the word.

Then I waited for the word, his word, that would save me.

Wagner stood up very, very slowly. Without turning to me, he came around his desk and went to the window. He looked out, his hands folded behind his back, absorbed in thought.

In silence, for ten, fifteen minutes.

Then, still with his back to me, in a colorless voice, calm, reassuring: “Monsieur, vous etes fou.”

He did not move, and neither did I. After another five minutes, I realized that he wasn’t going to add anything. That was it. End of session.

I left without saying good-bye. The secretary gave me a bright smile, and I found myself once more in Avenue Elise”e-Reclus.

It was eleven. I picked up my things at the hotel and rushed to the airport. I had to wait two hours. In the meantime, I called Garamond Press, collect, because I didn’t have a cent left. Gud-run answered. She seemed more obtuse than usual, I had to shout three times for her to say Si, oui, yes, that she would accept the call.

She was crying: Diotallevi had died Saturday night at midnight.

“And nobody, not one of his friends was at the funeral this morning. The shame of it! Not even Signer Garamond! They say he’s out of the country. There was only me, Grazia, Luciano, and a gentleman all in black, with a beard, side curls, and a big hat: he looked like an undertaker. God knows where he came from. But where were you, Casaubon? And where was Belbo? What’s going on?”

I muttered something in the way of an explanation and hung up. My flight was called, and I boarded the plane.