Mr. Crowley

A good conman can fool an audience. A great conman can fool a nation. A master of the art can fool even himself. As he sat alone, staring into the fireplace embers at Netherwood boarding house, Edward Alexander Crowley was haunted by a disturbing thought. He no longer knew which category he belonged to.

Hidden in among the secrets he kept from the rest of the world, and there were quite a few, was one that he had never shared with anyone in all 72 of his years: the person that the world knew as Aleister Crowley didn't exist. That person, or more accurately persona, had begun life as a prank. Maybe "rebellion" would have been a better word. Edward's parents had been wealthy, and devout members of the Plymouth Brethren. The rules of "polite society" as they had called it, were dwarfed only in comparison to the rules of their god. Everything was a flaw that needed to be rooted out, corrected or reshaped. Nothing was ever good enough.

Edward had realized at an early age that the disapproval of his parents, their friends, and even god was unavoidable. No matter what he did, it was always lurking. Hiding in an extra portion at dinner, a laugh just a hair too loud, a book read for just a little too long. He had realized that if disapproval couldn't be avoided, by necessity it must be enjoyed.

He had relished the horror in his mothers' letters when news of him joining the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn had reached her. Dripping with vitriol and disgust, she had informed him that he was never to come home. "Beast". "Animal". "Child of Satan". Words that would have stung, and frequently did, in his early life now felt like badges of honor. He had earned them this time. Edward didn't find the Golden Dawn to be any less ridiculous than his parents' faith, of course. The rites and costumes were more elaborate, the sacred texts were written in blood (though he had private doubts about the veracity of that claim), but it was still just a congregation of dour old men burning incense and offering prayers to something that wasn't there.

However, as cons sometimes do, Aliester Crowley gained momentum on his own. Life was fragile back then even for the privileged. War, disease, and simple misfortune could thin the ranks of the English aristocracy as easily as the peasants. Among that aristocracy a certain population was motivated by grief, curiosity or both to seek him out. One of their own who could soothe their hearts, and even satisfy their hunger for knowledge of the other side. That alone would have been motivation enough to keep up the charade, but arriving in tandem with his newfound celebrity came something he hadn't expected: sex appeal. That, Edward reminisced, had truly been the determining factor. Aleister Crowley was going to stick around.

He had been happy to play the role, at least in the beginning. Collecting valuable books of early Shinto esotericism, entering opium-induced trances to "contact higher planes", writing (and practicing) treatises on orgy-magic. The blurring of the lines between religious practice and hedonism was not an accident. However, after a couple decades of champagne and pentagrams something alien began to creep into Edward's life. Something he had yet to encounter, and was ill equipped to deal with. Ennui. He had seen every corner of the world that he cared to. He had experienced every kind of intoxicant known to western man, and a few besides. Even sex, that eternal human need, had begun to feel routine. "Is this all there is, truly?" He could remember the question sitting on his shoulder like a buzzard for years. Most of the thirties, in fact. Fortunately though, there were few people on earth better equipped than he to answer it.

For the first time, Edward began to lose himself in the character of Aleister. The rituals, the grimoires, the trances, ceased to be a performance and became a search for something real. Anything beyond the banality of mortal existence. His efforts remained fruitless.

That is, of course, until he met her.

Roddie. A painter. A witch. The old masters had long been stripped of their mystery. Countless artists had discovered or rewritten the secrets necessary to conjure flesh and light from canvas and oil paint. What Roddie had achieved was something different. Her figures whispered. They conspired. Her landscapes shifted and warped, manipulated by impossible winds. Edward (or Aleister) was uncomfortably aware from the moment they met that for all the books he had read and all the incense he had burned, somehow, she knew something he didn't.

Courting her was easy enough for a man of his wealth and reputation. So was convincing her to participate in his rituals. They had locked themselves in her studio. "What if I'm fooling myself?" He had wondered as the door closed behind him. "What if there really isn't anything there?" As Edward now sat and reflected in front of the fireplace embers, he still wasn't sure. Or at least, he didn't want to be.

The ritual had lasted a week. They hadn't been trying to summon anything, nothing so ambitious as that. It was meant to be a kind of beacon. A light to attract the attention of anything that existed beyond the veil of the mortal realm. Through a haze of opiates and strange herbs, Aleister read and Roddie painted. Each of them positioned at opposite points of an immense glyph painted on the floor. For days nothing had happened. It felt so similar to all of the pageantry Edward had become so used to that he began to doubt himself. He began to waver.

On the seventh day, something changed. Aleister had tried to write about it many times, to capture the experience that had flashed before him and then disappeared forever in that tiny studio. He never could. Writing about it felt like running in a dream. Like trying to catch the wind in your hands. Roddie had been singing, or maybe she was screaming. His memory blurred the two. The old words had roared from his throat like blood from a wound, unstoppable, moved by a will other than his own. All at once, in the center of the glyph there had been...something. When he thought about it, and he tried not to anymore, he often remembered it as a light. However, he knew that wasn't right. It had been like a shadow, too. Somehow wider than an ocean and smaller than a grain of sand, it had gazed into him. It roiled and flickered as it hovered there in the center of the glyph, like some terrible, inexorable flame. Impossibly vast and impossibly hot, it threatened to melt the very flesh from Aleister's bones. It dared him to cry out, to make any motion at all and it would turn the very earth he stood on to ash and glass. As it looked at him and it had looked at him, he was certain of it, Aleister had known with a certainty afforded few other people in the history of humankind what an ant feels like when caught in the gaze of a man. What it feels like to be observed by something infinitely more intelligent, infinitely more powerful than himself. It had almost driven him mad.

Roddie never fully recovered from the experience. She had moved to Vermont immediately afterwards. A guesthouse on some wealthy relative's property. As far as Edward was aware, she was still there; muttering to herself and painting the same terrible image over and over. He had only gone to visit her once.

So where did he belong? Was he nothing more than a petty conman, selling the occult to disenfranchised aristocrats? Had he mastered his con so thoroughly that he managed to convinced himself that what he saw was real? Or, had he simply addled his brain with decades of opium and gin? He hoped so. The alternative was too awful to consider. There was one thing, however, that he couldn't shake from his memory. One fear that burned incessantly in the center of his brain like a sore. In Roddie's paintings, those hellish images that dominated every corner of her guesthouse, there was something written over and over. A sentence that wove through the background of each canvas like some evil mantra. A sentence that rang now like a terrible clamor of bells in Edward's mind.

"Look for me in fire."

Had she heard it too?

Edward grunted as he lifted himself from his armchair. His bones ached and he wanted a drink. There was a bottle of whiskey, or maybe just poitín dyed brown with tea (you could never be certain in a place like Netherwood) stashed away in one of the kitchen cabinets. Whatever it was, it would have to do. He gave a hiss of displeasure as the liquid met his tongue: his suspicions had been correct. He grunted as he willed his tired legs to take him back to the armchair. He'd throw on a fresh log and let the heat and the liquor lull him to sleep. Tonight was no night to seek rest unaided, he thought uneasily. He sensed something as he approached the door to the common room, a kind of whisper. A scent of smoke and something else. For a moment he froze, fear gripping at his neck, but he shook his head, chastising himself. Foolish old man. It was probably just steam escaping an uncured branch.

Aleister took his final sip of liquor, and stepped into the common room.