Free Satan Wants Me by Robert Irwin Page A

especially Charles Gray being sleek and unctuous as the Satanist Mocata and the scene where Christopher Lee (playing the Duke de Richelieu) faces out the forces of Evil from within the pentacle, but I could feel Sally sitting beside me hating it. Actually it was not so much the film she hated as my attitude to it. I could see she was in a mood and when we got back to my room I put Donovan on the record player. I was hoping to change the vibes, but I did not have much luck there.
    ‘I think that you see yourself as some sort of trainee Duke de Richelieu,’ she said. ‘Or what’s the name of that hero in the comic books you keep reading?’
    ‘Dr Strange.’
    ‘Dr Strange, that’s him. You dream about becoming some high-powered white magician ready to do battle against the forces of evil. Whereas the truth is that, in signing up with the Black Book Lodge, you are aligning yourself with precisely those forces of evil.’
    ‘You have got to listen to yourself Sally. Your voice is all jagged. You are sounding hysterical. The Lodge has nothing to do with forces of evil.’
    ‘They’re everything to do with darkness. Peter, why are you playing with me? They are fucking Satanists. Look at me and tell me that they are not.’
    I pulled her close to me and began to fondle her.
    ‘Come off it Sally. The Black Book Lodge people are nothing like the people in the Dennis Wheatley novels. In the Wheatley books, people like Mocata and Canon Copely actually worship the Devil. The Lodge’s members, on the other hand, simply believe in developing powers that are innate in man. They – we do not worship anything. There is no commitment of belief, either asked for or given.’
    ‘If you do not believe in it, then you can easily give it up.’
    I noticed that her hand was straying up my leg.
    ‘I do not believe in it. I am simply going into it in a spirit of scientific enquiry. I find it interesting from a sociological point of view. One of these days I might even get an article out of it – “Internal Group Dynamics in a North London Lodge of Occultists”, or something along those lines.’
    ‘You are not being straight, Peter, with yourself, or with me. No way have you joined the Lodge in a spirit of sociological enquiry or anything like that. I don’t know what it is, but you are after something hidden, something not for humans, something you will never find. Show me your palm.’
    She was all over me. One of her hands held up my right palm for inspection, while the other was playing over my leg.
    ‘Your palm is changing,’ she said. ‘It is different from when I last looked at it a few months ago. The life-line is threatened.’
    ‘That’s not possible.’
    ‘Oh yeah, it’s possible.’
    Her hand was playing over my groin. Donovan was singing “Three Kingfishers” to a sitar and tabla accompaniment. I was listening with my eyes closed to the music which seemed to suggest the rippling of flesh and the infinite play of possibilities in life.
    ‘Isn’t what we have enough?’ she whispered.
    I said nothing, just nodded. I was entering a fantasy about Krishna playing his flute before the gopini milkmaids.
    ‘Let’s go to bed.’
    She was testing me and it was pleasant to be so tested. It felt like I had a great lump of iron between my legs. I liked to think about surrendering to her desire. But …
    ‘I can’t. There isn’t time. I have got to get ready to go out to the Lodge and be formally robed as a Probationer for Adepthood.’
    There was a hiss of ‘Bastard!’ and she was out of the door so fast that I never even saw her leave. I put Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ on the record player, sensing that its rich melancholy would be the right accompaniment to my own and I set to writing this all up in the diary.
    I arrived early at the Lodge to have my diary picked over by Felton. He started in on me, even before he had looked at the most recent entries.
    ‘Peter, it occurs to me that you may