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Caleb Strange Special user Manchester UK 676 Posts |
I wrote this story about ten years ago, at a time when I was beginning to find my Bizarre ‘voice’. I have performed it, off and on, ever since. The magic in the routine is technically VERY simple - a basic packet ‘printing’ effect. But the hypnotic rhythm of the routine’s language, the interaction of its characters, and its moody period details, all come together to make something very atmospheric and, I hope, compelling. Enough chat. Here is:
Where doctors drowse and professors whisper. You are seated at a table with your guests, and you say: In the British Museum, it is said, there are some books printed on pages of human skin. But you will not find these volumes in the famous, domed Reading Room, nor even in the North library, where the learned and good pour over their pages of pornographia. But beyond these places, and behind a door that seems forever locked, in the Select Manuscript Reading Room. It is a storehouse of evil, where vetted and trusted scholars deliberately ponder the quaint and the curious, in dreadful works and tomes of best-forgotten lore. Every evil and despicable thing, every ignorance and perversion has its memory recorded somewhere there, in countless spell books and grimoires, and maledictories, odious and grim. In this festering subconscious of the English-speaking races, a loathsome and necessary place, like a scab on a suppurating wound that we might pick at, or nervously worry. Now the foolish imagine this room to be wondrously strange and mysterious – a focus, if you will, of enchantment and crepuscular power. A glamorous, romantic underworld of calf-bound aisles and mahogany desks, where Doctors drowse and Professors whisper. But those that have worked there tell me that the air is thick with decay, and the odour of rotting paper. The books of the place, the magic of the place, are both crumbling and leprous. And although, on its green shelves, one might find codices of terror and small quartos rank with such unimaginable horror that the sane mind might turn at its touch, those that know the place best speak only of its numbing drabness: of how they are struck most by the shabbiness of evil, and the littleness of the pit. There are monsters and hells and horrors and demons and all those other nameless things, but the ones we must fear most are to be found, every one, in the human heart. My tale is set in this Select Manuscript Room, at a time when the bloody horrors of the human heart were clotting the age with the rumours of war. Let us imagine it is 1938, late December, and a dreary Sunday afternoon. The sky is bland and menacing, heavy with snow, and the offices of London are dark and empty. There are few people on the streets, as the lamps begin to burn and splutter – a handful of old women at the coal-yard with their prams and baskets, and an old blind soldier scrabbling on the wastes for lath. Silence is laid like a heavy book on the city. Our hero, a phlegmatic and bookish Englishman, we will call him Dunniston, has been called through the gloom to the British Museum, where he works. He has been instructed to clear the desk of the late Professor Karswell, who, in life, had been foolish enough to cross the infamous Master Magician Aleister Crowley. Ugly rumours are crawling like slugs, and beginning to leave their slime. Crowley is a man much feared, and nobody at the Museum has risked touching the Professor’s papers. Only Dunniston, Dunniston the librarian, dares to brave the wrath of the man who calls himself ’The Great Beast of the Book of Revelations’ – for Dunniston has met Crowley, and dislikes him intensely. For him, Crowley is a tiresome self-publicist, and a poor scholar, whose reputed power and awful magic lie exclusively in the cowering consent of others. So, as the light struggles darkly downwards over empty chairs, Dunniston, our unlikely hero, makes his way alone to the Select Manuscript Reading Room. Unaware that a terrible truth is lurking there, and ticking in the darkness, like a bomb. He takes up the story himself, in his diary: ‘I found Karswell’s portfolio of papers untouched and gathering dust. There was little of obvious interest – some quires of scribbling paper, which I’d seen him use for transcripts, and a small bundle of fragments and notes. As instructed, and with a barbarous disregard that troubled me very much, I swept the man’s work, and what remained of his life, into the waste paper basket, like so many ashes. I was just leaving when I spotted that ***ed fool Crowley sitting in the shadows, glowering at me. The moment he’d snared my attention, he began to mutter blankly, in that dull irritating voice of his that I suppose he believes is menacing and heavy with occult power. (You have been toying with a stack of blank ‘index’ cards from the library – you remove five of them, then place the remainder onto the table.) “Library cards,” Crowley said. “The blank ones used for the ordering of books. Five.” He counted them out onto his desk. (In the character of Crowley, you have counted out your five blank library cards onto the table.) “And on this card I write a word of great power: the central formula of the Cabbala itself, the glyph of creation and reality, which we call existence.” (You write the word ‘AUGM’ on one of these cards, and turn it, unseen, writing-side down.) I reached for this card. (In the character of Dunniston, you reach over, but Crowley interrupts you:) “You must not look! You will be blinded by the pitiless glare of its power.” (Ignoring the Great Beast, you turn over the AUGM card, and read what it says. Then you place it, writing-side up, on the remaining stack of undealt library cards.) “I am not blind,” I said. “You are lucky,” muttered Crowley, “and foolish. See the magic of the Beast, Dunniston, and tremble.” He passed the cards through his fist... then again. Nothing happened. This seemed to annoy him. (You pick up the four dealt blank cards from the table, and, as Crowley, pass the cards through your fist twice - yet, to your irritation, they remain stubbornly blank.) “Here, hold them,” he said. “Securely. I will pass the word over the cards, and it shall extend its meaning into their nothing...” (You place the four cards into a spectator’s hand, and close his/her fingers over them. Then, turning his/her fist over, you take the AUGM card and wave it over the spectator’s knuckles. Then, as you replace the AUGM card onto the stack, now in your hand, the spectator deals the four ‘blank’ cards onto the table. And to everyone’s surprise, they are now printed with Crowley’s weird, unnerving Cabbalistic designs.) “Ha ha!” said Crowley. “I triumph.”’ (You place the stack of remaining cards back onto the table, AUGM side upwards.) Let us review our story. On blank-stock library cards, and in Dunniston’s own hands – Dunniston the rationalist, remember, the giber of belief – Crowley, the Great Beast, has somehow printed his cabbalistic designs. Now, Dunniston knows that this was some species of trick, some sleight of hand done by the tin-god Crowley. And he is not afraid, however much the Great Beast paces behind him, gibbering of retribution and his sorcerous power. And yet, in spite of this, still, it really does seem as if something awful is about to happen, and push Dunniston to the side of everything he holds most dear. He gets up and moves to the high windows. For a long time, he stares out through the frosty glass. Something terrible is about to happen. He thinks perhaps it might be the heavy threat of snow oppressing him. But he is wrong. Later, in his diary, he would write: ‘And still the snow did not come. The sky was locked and immobile, the clouds rivetted, like bulkheads. They seemed ominous and laden. I had the queerest notion they were full of black iron, black iron that might, at any moment, rain down on London and destroy it. I felt Crowley’s fat hand on my shoulder – his fury blotched and purple on his face. “I am the wickedest man alive,” he spat. “Dunniston, I said...” But I was wound in the mind’s wanderings, as limbless soldiers in bandage cloths are wound. “Dunniston, you are not listening to me. Think on and be careful.” Crowley’s eyes narrowed. “I am the Magus, the Superman before thee. In the year 1917, in the awful Temple of Intiation, the Secrets of the New Aeon were revealed to me – to me. Such torments, such hells, you cannot imagine.” Still I ignored him, waiting for the snow or the black iron to fall. “Horror, librarian, horror. Where were you in 1917?” Then it happened, easily, carelessly even, the thing that would blast forever the trenches of my cherished rationalistic beliefs. I felt it in my stomach first, no, my... solar plexus. Yes, there, a red-hot pain, concentrated and of the will. Then suddenly, it was done, and I was calm. “In 1917?” I asked. I lifted the card, the back of which Crowley thought to be blank – the card that, just a moment before, I knew my focused fury had somehow magically printed. (You lift the AUGM card from the stack on the table.) “In 1917, Crowley, I was there...” I said sadly. (You turn over the AUGM card, and on its back is now printed ‘Passchendaele - 3rd Battle of Ypres’. You drop the card bitterly to the table, and say:) ‘And the snow fell like poppies from the sky.’
-- QCiC --
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Bill Palmer Eternal Order Only Jonathan Townsend has more than 24312 Posts |
Weird. Good job!
Well thought out. It makes my skin very Crowley.
"The Swatter"
Founder of CODBAMMC My Chickasaw name is "Throws Money at Cups." www.cupsandballsmuseum.com |
Moonlit Knight Regular user U.S. 113 Posts |
Wonderful job! Reason, development, focus as well as some incredible imagery - it was all there! If it plays, when you perform it, as well as it reads and this is the style of presentations you generally give - then your character seems well defined. Well done! Bravo!
"Join the dance... Follow on! With a twist of the world we go."
- Genesis "Dancing With The Moonlit Knight" |
jbohn Regular user Minneapoils, MN 102 Posts |
Caleb,
Again, a wonderful story! I am always delighted and surprised with the ideas you come up with. Great use of a rather "garden-variety" effect in a novel and compelling way. Jeremiah |
WR Special user Utah 945 Posts |
I LOVE IT!
WR
"Tell Em WR sent Ya."
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Caleb Strange Special user Manchester UK 676 Posts |
Many thanks for everybody's kind words - I really do appreciate them.
Over the next day or so, I'll try to grasp the nettle and draw out some theory from this routine - what I think is good and not so good about it, and what it may have taught me. Regards, Caleb Strange.
-- QCiC --
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Chrystal Inner circle Canada/France 1552 Posts |
Hi Caleb,
You are a master at story telling and I always enjoy reading your post. Thank You for sharing this with all of us. Chrystal |
Caleb Strange Special user Manchester UK 676 Posts |
Chrystal,
Many thanks for your kind words. I appreciate them very much. I've just got back from a holiday, hence the current absence of self-criticism in this thread. However, I hope to dissect this routine in the next few days. Regards, Caleb Strange.
-- QCiC --
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