Free The Mechanical Messiah by Robert Rankin Page A

and the mountain were not of this Earth. Those marvellous events did not occur on this planet. They all took place upon Venus. That ring is made of Venusian metal, handed by a Venusian God to a Venusian holy man named Moses.’
    Aleister Crowley’s eyes flashed fire and he shook from his smoking cap down to his carpet slippers.
    Cameron Bell displayed his gun once more.
    ‘I am leaving now,’ said the private detective. ‘Do not try to stop me.
     

 
     
     
10
     

    agic was to Alice Lovell not a matter for doubt.
    She greatly feared it and she had good cause.
    It had all begun some years before, when she was still a child, on a visit to her jolly Uncle Charles.
    Uncle Charles was a big merry fellow who smelled strongly of tweed and tobacco smoke and Sunlight soap and who liked nothing more than to dandle tots upon his knee and coo into their ears. As he and his wife had never been blessed with children of their own, he was greatly taken with Alice and showed her much affection.
    Uncle Charles was an author by noble trade and at that time lived modestly from the proceeds of his labours. But he was a restless man and sought ever to know more. To find some truth. The Truth. A truth that he believed might possibly be found through the study of mystery religions and occult teachings. As such he spent what spare time he had at the British Library, leafing through ponderous tomes in the hope that some truth or another might be printed on their pages.
    His researches, however, were coming to nothing and he had almost reached the point of giving up and settling for a life of writing, interspersed with the wearing of tweed, the smoking of tobacco, the bathing of himself with Sunlight soap and the dandling of tots upon his knee, when he chanced upon a paper flyer that some previous seeker after truth had placed in one of the ponderous tomes as a page marker.
    It advertised a book entitled
     
    THE LATHER OF LOVE
     
    produced by an author named only as
     
    Herr Döktor
     
    and went on to extol the esoteric virtues of this work with such high praise as to thoroughly intrigue Uncle Charles. Having discovered that this book was out of print, he took to scouring the stalls of the Charing Cross Road until he eventually turned up a copy. It was a grubby and battered item that at first glance, or indeed at second or third, would not have appeared to be of any apparent value. In fact the stallholder was using this book to prop up the uneven leg of his stall.
    But looks can oft—times be deceptive, particularly, it would appear, in the second-hand book trade. For Uncle Charles’s cries of, ‘Heaven be praised for at last I have found the thing that I seek,’ were followed by the stallholder naming a price for the book that all but had Uncle Charles swooning away on the thoroughfare.
    The seller of books made some attempts to explain a phenomenon known as ‘the Vance Principle’ and its application to commerce. But Uncle Charles merely flung the requisite number of five-pound notes in his direction and bore away his prize with a giddy head.
    The principles propounded in The Lather of Love were an extension and expansion of those propounded by all good parents to their children. Namely, that cleanliness is next to Godliness.
    The book explained that the way to Heaven could be found through the power of soap. And here again coincidence and curiosity pile upon coincidence and curiosity, for the book offered the same Great Truth that Aleister Crowley offered to Cameron Bell: that the Sun was not a star at all, but a lens that focused the brilliance of God onto the Earth. Mankind, it went on to explain, had fallen from the grace of God and could no longer experience God because Mankind was dirty and had taken to the wearing of clothes.
    It all began in the Garden of Eden, when our first parents ate the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and realised they were naked. When God expelled his errant children from Earthly paradise, they