walked until his throat was dry and his breathing shallow. Then, after a while, he was crawling. It was only a spiritual exercise.
The sand was hot against his cheek.
The Sahara was a vast white page, and Musa’s body one tiny, bent black letter written on it. Seen from above, seen from very far away.
Summon, Bind, Banish
Nick Mamatas
Alick, in Egypt, with his wife, Rose. Nineteen aught-four. White-kneed tourists. Rose, several days into their trip, starts acting oddly, imperiously. She has always wanted to travel, but Alick’s Egypt is not the one she cares for. She prefers the Sphinx from the outside, tea under tents, tourist guides who haggle on her behalf for dates and carpeting. She wanted to take a trip on a barge down the Nile, but there weren’t any. At night, she spreads for Alick, or sometimes takes to her belly, and lets him slam and grind till dawn. Mother was wrong. There is no need to think of the Empire, or the men in novels. There’s Alick’s wheezing in her ear, the thick musk of an animal inside the man, and waves of pleasure that stretch a moment into an aeon. But she doesn’t sleep well because the Egypt morning is too hot.
A ritual Alick performs fails. The ambience of Great Pyramid cannot help but inspire, but the shuffling travelers and their boorish gawking profanes the sacred. The sylphs he promised to show his wife—“This time, it will work, Rose. I can feel it,” Alick had said, his voice gravel—do not appear. But Rose enters a trance and stays there, smiling slightly and not sweating even under the brassy noon sky for the rest of the trip.
“They’re waiting for you!” she says. And under her direction Alick sits in the cramped room of his pension and experiences the presence of Aiwaz, the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat, Crowley’s Holy Guardian Angel, and the transmitter of Liber AL vel Legis, sub figura CCXX, The Book of the Law, as delivered by XCIII=418 to DCLXVI.
Alick doesn’t turn around. He never turns around over the course of those three days of hysterical dictation. But he feels Aiwaz, and has an idea of how the spirit manifests. A young man, slightly older than Alick, but dark, strong, and active. As ancient in aspect and confident in tone as Alick wishes he was. The voice, he’s sure, is coming from the corner of the room, over his left shoulder. He writes for an hour a day, for three days.
See, people, here’s the thing about Crowley. He was racist and sexist and sure hated the Jews. Real controversial stuff, sure, but you know what, he was actually in the dead center of polite opinion when it came to the Negroes and the swarthies and money-grubbing kikes and all those other lovely stereotypes. Crowley and the Queen could have had tea and, with pinkies raised, tittered over some joke about big black Zulu penises. Except. Except Crowley loved the penis. His sphincter squeaked like an old shoe as he performed the most sacred of his magickal rituals. That’s where it all comes from, really. The Book of the Law, Aiwaz, the whole deal with the HGA, it’s buggery. That dark voice over the left shoulder is a spirit, all right, but it’s the spirit of Herbert Charles Pollitt, who’d growl and bare his teeth and sink them into the back of Crowley’s neck after bending the wizard over and penetrating him.
You ever get that feeling? The feeling of a presence, generally at night, alone, in a home that’s quiet except for the lurch and hum of an old fridge, or the clock radio mistuned to be half on your favorite radio station and half in the null region of frizzy static. It’s not all in your head, by definition, as you willed your anxieties and neuroses three feet back and to the left. And that’s a good thing. Because the last thing you want is for it to be in your skull with you. The last thing you want is for me to be in your skull with you. Crowley pushed it out, out into the world.
Alick in Berlin, fuming at being passed over for a position in British Intelligence. He may be a beast, a fornicator, a bugger, and ol’ 666 himself, but he had been a Cambridge man, bloody hell, and that used to mean something. He didn’t betray Great Britain, it was Great Britain that betrayed him. Rose did as well, the fat old