Chapter 14
Phil was in the kitchen when I went down for coffee. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “I’m just here to fix the ice maker.”
“Ha.” I told him about the previous night’s ladybugs. His eyebrows shot up.
“I’ll take a look,” he promised. “I haven’t seen any yet today.”
“Thank goodness for small favors.”
“None in the ice maker either.”
“Oh good.”
I sat down on the couch with my coffee. Phil did not immediately flee my presence, which was probably more than I deserved, given that I had so far threatened his life, brandished rose petals at him, and showed him ghostly hands in the shrubbery.
Opening my laptop, the first thing I saw was MAD WIZARD OF BOONE ARRESTED! I blinked a few times, and then decided that hell, I wasn’t going to get anything else accomplished today, I might as well read about my infamous ancestor.
Finding information took longer than one might think. Outside of the coverage of his trial, where he did not exactly endear himself to the court, he seemed to have stayed out of the newspapers. But chasing Elgar Mills led me down another rabbit hole of frankly extraordinary proportions, and I have never been able to resist a good internet rabbit hole.
“The problem with the world,” I informed Phil an hour later, “is that there’s just so much of it.”
“Is that from a Snapple bottle?”
“No.”
He considered this at length, then said, “You should write Snapple bottles.”
“It probably pays better.” I waved at my laptop. “Look at this. I’m trying to find one d… darn sorcerer, and he leads to twenty others and a book on the history of Thelema in the United States.”
“The what what?”
“Thelema. It’s a religion, or a ritual magic system, or something like that. Aleister Crowley invented it.”
Phil looked over my shoulder. “Oh, him. He was on a bunch of album covers in the nineties, wasn’t he?”
“Also that, yes.”
My great-grandfather, Elgar Mills, had not been an associate of Crowley’s, so far as I could tell. Instead he’d hung out in the forties, briefly, with a man named Jack Parsons, who was an associate of Crowley’s. Also a rocket scientist and also completely batshit. (I don’t like to step on anyone’s religion, but when you start mixing cocaine, free love, amphetamines, statutory rape, mescaline, and ritual black magic, you have crossed out of the religious-tolerance zone and into the perhaps-you-should-be-kept-away-from-other-people zone.) There was a lot written about Parsons and all of it was bizarre. Most of what I could find about Elgar that wasn’t newspaper clippings about his trial lay in footnotes in books about Parsons. Fortunately large sections were available online.
Very… large… sections.
I’m a good researcher, in all modesty, but this was a lot to get through. While Phil probably didn’t care much about my great-grandad, I kept reading bits aloud to him anyway. I’m not sure if I wanted someone else to witness the train wreck with me, or if, like the hand in the photograph, I wanted to make sure someone else saw it too. “Says here that Parsons wanted to fertilize a magic baby and have it born via immaculate conception, so it could be the new Thelemic messiah and bring about the Age of Horus.”
“Is that like the Age of Aquarius?”
“I think it’s the same principle.” The authors of this particular book selection assumed that of course the reader knew what the Age of Horus was and also presumably why someone would want to bring it about. Parsons had consulted Elgar about this project, according to the footnotes, but it said that Elgar had been “dismissive of his plans” and “warned him against his stated goal of shattering the boundaries of space and time.”
“Seems fair,” said Phil. “I’d probably warn someone against shattering the boundaries of space and time too. You figure they’re there for a reason, right?”
“What, like a big ‘Do Not Enter’ sign on the edges of reality?”
“Something like that.”
“Phil?”
“Yeah?”
“What exactly are the boundaries of space and time?”
“No idea.”
I kept reading. Then L. Ron Hubbard got involved and I had to go get another cup of coffee to fortify myself. By the time I picked up the thread again, Parsons was chasing his ex-wife over a failed yacht sale, was accused of espionage, and had decided that he, personally, was the Antichrist.
“That does seem like a lot,” said Phil, when I relayed this last bit to him.
“Doesn’t it, though?”
“And you say your grandad knew this guy?”
“Apparently Parsons liked him briefly.” I flipped to the longest section about Elgar I’d found, where Parsons expressed his admiration for my great-grandfather’s “innate skill at geomancy” and “proclaimed him the finest divinatory mind he had ever encountered.” Elgar, the author informed us, did not return this regard, telling Parsons that he “risked awakening that which does not look kindly upon man’s dominion.” In return, Parsons called him a meddling old woman, which was apparently meant as a grave insult, and (the authors did not state, but heavily implied) went off on another mescaline binge.
Phil had stopped even pretending to work on the ice maker and was gazing off into the distance. “And you say this guy was from Pasadena?”
“Yup.”
“My aunt lives in Pasadena.”
I tried to think of something relevant to say. “I’m sure there’s fewer sex cultists now?”
“I’m not,” he said gloomily, and went back to work on the ice maker.
I tried to locate more information on Elgar that wasn’t tied to Parsons, but it wasn’t easy. Nobody’d written a book about him. I couldn’t blame them, I suppose—what’s the Mad Sorcerer of Boone compared to the Pasadena Antichrist?
Finally I found a blog that was devoted to Parsons and claimed to have reproduced the letters sent to him by Elgar and everybody else. (The letters from Crowley were particularly delightful. You ever wanted to read self-proclaimed Antichrists being catty at each other, this was the place.)
Elgar wrote in a distinctly nineteenth-century style, heavy on the adverbs and random capital letters. There were scans of the letters themselves on the blog, which had the cramped, heavily slanted handwriting that was the bane of entomologists when it appeared on labels. Fortunately the blogger had provided transcripts, which was above and beyond the call of duty.
Most of it was the sort of posturing that I usually associate with letters in academic journals, where the scholar stamps on their hill and bellows their credentials at the moon. Finally, about four paragraphs in, Elgar got around to his point.
Regarding your Stated Goal of conceiving a Magickal Childe, I must advise against it in the strongest terms, as one who knows What of he Speaks. In your quest to quicken new Life, you risk awakening that which does not look kindly upon Man’s dominion. Is it achievable? In a word, Yes. But this Childe you seek to create merely by throwing your Substance into the Void and hoping for the Best may not bewhat you Imagine yourself to be Creating. The Seed you Sow may fall on strange ground indeed. The Sleep of Reason may well breed Monsters, but the Sleep of the Sorcerer breeds Monsters made of the Flesh of Men, and such a Thing made of Man’s Substance is made to Rebel.
Be guided by the hard-won Wisdom of a Man who has made the great Experiment to his Sorrow. You will find that this proposed Childe will not Answer to your Hand, nor is there any Guarantee given that the Childe will take after you and not the Other part of Its Ancestry. All Golems and Homunculi must inevitably turn against their Masters, as all Children must rebel against their Parents. The greater your initial Success, the more Terrible your eventual Enemy will be.
I say again, leave off this foolish Quest and follow Other Avenues of Magick, equally fruitful, which leave less to Chance and Fate.
Y’r Obedient Servant,
Elgar Mills
Parsons, the blogger informed us, deadpan, did not take this well. Whatever letter he sent in reply was lost, but Elgar’s reply to that reply was exceedingly terse and had even more capitals.
To the One Proclaiming Himself as the Aspect of the Risen Horus,
Some Doors are Thrown Open at your Peril and do not Close as you may Wish. It is my Devout Hope that you will Come to your Senses in this Matter, but if Not, I find that I have No Time for those who would abandon Scholarship for Hubris and who consider their Great Mistakes to be Novel and Groundbreaking merely because they are the ones Making Them.
E.M.
I scrolled through a few more letters. Robert Heinlein showed up briefly. God, this story had everybody. Maybe it was no wonder that Gran Mae had been so obsessed with normalcy. If your dad was regularly corresponding with the Mescaline Antichrist of Pasadena, Leave It to Beaver probably seemed like a bastion of middle-class sanity. She probably couldn’t wait to get out of the house, marry a respectable man, and live in a house with a white picket fence. Maybe Old Elgar had been right about children rebelling against their parents, at least in that regard.
Although Gran Mae had never had anything bad to say about “Father” at all. Quite the opposite. Then again, she’d also left off the Mad Wizard of Boone bits. I’d always been under the impression that “Father” was an old Southern gentleman, the sort who wear white suits and talk about carpetbaggers.
“Anything interesting?” asked Phil, emerging from the bowels of the ice maker.
“Old-timey sorcerers get really pissy about their hypothetical magical children.”
“What, like the PTA?”
I had a sudden vision of Aleister Crowley at a PTA meeting and began giggling uncontrollably. There might have been some hysteria to it. (I don’t know why, it’s not as if I was under any stress or anything.)
Phil grinned at me. Dammit, I did like Phil. He was a good guy. He’d taken everything in stride, even when I was brandishing rose petals and imaginary weapons at him, and he was funny too. And he took care of Mom. And his T-shirt showed off pretty good biceps too.
No. Down, girl.I was absolutely not going to entertain thoughts like this about my mother’s handyman.
The ice maker suddenly growled to life and dropped about five pounds worth of crushed ice on the kitchen floor. Phil cursed and snatched up a bucket. “Oh no,” I said, and grabbed a towel to help him clean up.
“You don’t have to…” he said as I got down on my hands and knees next to him, chasing ice across the linoleum.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“It’s my mess.”
“Against refrigerators, the gods themselves contend in vain, or something like that.”
The ice maker spat out another half dozen ice cubes on Phil’s head. He yelped. I tried not to laugh and did not entirely succeed.
“So what happened to your great-grandfather?” he asked as we mopped up the last of the ice.
“Good question.” I dumped the wet towel into the sink and went to look up obituaries.
For once, there wasn’t much to work with. One of the genealogy sites listed him dying in 1958, but the scholarship on those sites is, ah… I’ll be tactful and call it scattershot. He hadn’t had an obituary, and if he had a grave, it wasn’t listed. (That struck me as odd. Southerners do love their graveyards.)
Finally I turned up a newspaper clipping from 1958, though it was in less than ideal shape. The printing had been poor, the paper thin, and words ran together into inky blobs. It said that Elgar Mills, notorious (something) had been found dead at his home (something something) following a long illness. An individual who (something something, a whole line was lost) as she was a minor, no (something) and she was remanded to custody of the state.
It seemed like an ignominious end for the Mad Sorcerer of Boone. I tried a few other searches, but nothing else came up. Apparently once he broke with Parsons, he ceased to be of interest. Well, he outlived Parsons, anyway. That probably made him happy.
I wondered about the minor who was remanded to custody of the state. Gran Mae? If my back-of-the-envelope math was correct, she’d have been about sixteen at the time. Then again, as weirdly obsessed as Elgar had apparently been with creating children, maybe he’d had others. Gran Mae might have had dozens of half-siblings.
She’d never mentioned any of them, though. Then again, she certainly hadn’t mentioned free love or mescaline either. Gran Mae would not have considered those things classy at all.
I sighed and shut the laptop. A nice morning’s diversion, but it hadn’t gotten me any closer to figuring out Mom and the notes, and whatever I was going to do about those.
Maybe I could talk to Gail again. She hadn’t been terribly forthcoming last time, but she was obviously Mom’s friend. And I could ask her about the notes. If she wasn’t worried once she heard about those, then she wasn’t the friend that I thought she was.
I even had a good excuse. I took the plate that she’d sent along with the cookies and headed off to return it, leaving Phil to his heroic struggle against the ice maker.
“I’ve got a question for you,” I said, coming up the steps to where Gail sat on the screened-in porch.
“Come on in,” she said cheerfully. “If I don’t know the answer, I can probably point you to someone who does.”
“Thanks.” I opened the porch door and settled in. Hermes stood up when I entered, but rapidly sank back down into a horizontal position rather like a meat loaf with a beak.
“I thought vultures perched,” I said, looking over at him.
“When he’s relaxed, he loafs.” Gail accepted the returned plate. Southern etiquette demands that you never return an empty plate, but I don’t cook, so was hopefully squeaking by on the “went to school elsewhere, forgot her manners, what can you do?” technicality. Anyway, she didn’t seem to mind.
Gail leaned forward. “So what’s your question?”
I plowed ahead. “I’m worried about Mom,” I admitted. “I found these notes she wrote to herself—”
“Don’t poke your nose in,” she snapped, cutting me off immediately.
“You didn’t see them. They’re really upsetting. She thinks—I think she thinks she’s being watched and she sounds paranoid—”
“Damn good sense being paranoid sometimes.” She folded her arms, her eyes bright and hard as gemstone chips. “I know Edie. I don’t know you, but I do know that if you start telling her she’s going crazy, you’re going to upset her. She needs support right now, not somebody picking away at her.”
“But if there’s something wrong—”
“There isn’t a damn thing wrong with her that’s not wrong with most of us. Maybe a bit less.”
I lost my temper. She hadn’t seen the notes. She clearly knew something was going on with Mom. “Why won’t you tell me what’s going on?” I yelled.
“Because I can’t!” Gail yelled right back. “Don’t you think I would if I could?”
We stared at each other. From the trees, I heard raspy hissing sounds. Alarm calls from the black vulture flock? Did they not like humans yelling? I certainly didn’t like yelling. I had a raging headache again. It felt like someone was driving a railroad spike into my left eye.
“Why can’t you?” I asked dully, pressing my fingers against my eyebrow where the pain was centered. “Do you think I won’t believe you?”
“I’m too old to care if anyone believes me or not.”
“Well, what then?”
“I don’t know!” Gail folded her arms and glared at me. Hermes humped himself up and made a small, pathetic coughing sound.
“Oh.” I ground the heel of my hand into my forehead, trying to find the source of the pain. “Have you got an aspirin?”
“Yeah.” She went inside, leaving me with Hermes. He had clearly revised his opinion of me downward, and kept watching me as if I might murder an innocent vulture at any time.
She came back with a mug full of water and two aspirin. The mug said NC BOTANICAL GARDEN across it. I did not like being mad at people who supported botanical gardens. I swallowed the pills and drank down the water. Maybe I was dehydrated. I slumped back in the chair. There was a bumblebee on the flowers just outside the screen. I could hear it buzzing. I watched it moving from flower to flower, collecting pollen in little orange clumps on its legs. It was soothing to watch.
“What are you really afraid of?” asked Gail.
Her voice was gentle, given that we’d been yelling at each other moments earlier. I kept watching the bee. “I’m afraid that Mom will need some kind of care,” I admitted. “I’m not good at taking care of people, and I can’t afford much of anything. I’m afraid she’ll be miserable and I don’t know how to fix it.”
Gail sighed, a long, drawn-out breath. “Well,” she said, “your motives are pure, anyway. I think I can tell you that you don’t need to be worried about that. She’s not losing her mind.”
“She isn’t?”
“No. She’s got perfectly good reasons to be scared. Hell, I’m scared too.”
I finally looked away from the bee, baffled. Gail was scared? What on earth could Gail be scared of? I’d been thinking Mom was having delusions, but what if there was another explanation? Oh please, God, let there be another explanation.
“I won’t tell anyone,” I said. It sounded pathetic, even to me. “I mean, if you’re scared of…” I trailed off, not sure how to end the sentence. Scared of what? A cult? The mob?
A cult sounded a lot more plausible than the mob. It would explain the note about saying your prayers. And anyway, the mob doesn’t need to stalk little old ladies in Southern towns. We have the United Daughters of the Confederacy for that.
It was a flippant thought, but it struck me hard. Could this be some kind of white supremacist thing? Was that why Mom had told Maria it wasn’t safe? Why she hung up an obvious Confederate painting? Was she afraid of some kind of racist group? Christ knows, we’ve got plenty of them, and they got really violent over the Confederate statues. Mom had protested to get the one removed. Could the two be related somehow?
“Is it white supremacists?” I asked, leaning closer. “Like… the League of the South and those people? Are they threatening Mom?”
Gail burst out laughing. “God, I wish! A garden-variety racist would be positively restful. You wave your shotgun at them and call their employer and they go away crying about free speech. No, it’s nothing that straightforward or that… tangible.”
“Tangible?” I snorted. “What, is the house haunted?”
Gail was silent.
“Oh come on.” I set the mug down. “You can’t be serious.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Would that be so impossible?”
“Haunted? How? It’s what, thirty years old? And don’t tell me that it’s built on an ancient Indian burial ground, because that happens to be my specialty and it isn’t.”
“No, I’m pretty sure this is white-people foolishness, through and through. But I don’t know what it is, all right? It might be a haunting but there’s something else all tangled up in it, and I can’t tell you what it is because I don’t know. I know a lot about plants, a couple of things about vultures, and a little bit about uncanny things. Everything I know is telling me that something very bad is going on at your mother’s house. That’s all.”
I swallowed. Did I believe her?
No, of course not. Ghosts aren’t real, dammit!
(You saw that hand.)
It was a trick of the light.
(It was not a trick of the light.)
Fine, then it was a doll part or something like that.
(Dolls don’t have dirt under their fingernails.)
Hell, maybe it wasn’t a ghost. Maybe it was something much stranger than that. I’d just spent an hour reading about ritual magic-with-a-k and Thelemic children.
Hey, maybe Gran Mae was the Antichrist. That’d make as much sense as anything else, right? Elgar said he’d already made the experiment. Maybe he got Gran Mae, and we just got lucky that she was so busy loathing Gail and growing roses that she didn’t bring about the end of days.
The Antichrist in Ecru. I made a noise that might have been mistaken for a laugh, and Hermes moved a little bit farther away.
“You’re a scientist,” said Gail, watching me. “I realize that makes this hard for you. I’m telling you, what’s happening isn’t something you’re going to be able to put under a microscope. I’m hoping it’ll go away on its own.”
“Does anything ever go away on its own?” I asked.
“More often than you’d think,” she said. “In this case, I truly can’t be sure. I don’t know everything.”
“I’m starting to think I don’t know anything,” I muttered.
She smiled. “That’s a good place to start.”