I was making love to Connie Halban when her husband Paul came back unexpectedly from a business trip. When he saw us he began crying. It was the most awful thing I’d ever stood witness to. I was reminded of Ixion, tied to a turning wheel in Hades as punishment for making love to Zeus’s wife, Hera. I’ll never touch another married woman. It simply isn’t worth the torture and guilt.
And so he was able to avoid all the texts that dealt solely with physical love in its seemingly endless permutations. He made no value judgments; he understood early on that everyone sought True Love in often inarticulate ways they often did not, themselves, understand; but his was an idealized, traditional concept of what True Love was, and his search for the grail need not be sidetracked or slowed by excursions into those special places.
He read Waley’s translation of The Chin P-ing Mei and everything even remotely pertinent by Freud; he sought out La Fleur Lascivie Orientale and the even rarer English translation of Contes Licencieux de Constantinople et de I’Asie Mineure; he dipped into the memoirs of Clara Bow, Charles II, Charlie Chaplin, Isadora Duncan, Marie Duplessis, Lola Montez and George Sand; he read novelists—Moravia, Gorky, Maupassant, Roth, Cheever and Brossard—but found they knew even less than he.
He absorbed the thoughts of the aphorists, and believed every utterance; Balzac: “True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.”; Moliere: “Reason is not what directs love.”; Terence: “It is possible that a man can be so-changed by love as hardly to be recognized as the same person.”; Voltaire: “Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.”; La Rochefoucauld: “When we are in love, we often doubt what we most believe.”
Yet even nodding his agreement with every contradictory image and representation of love—seen as Nature, God, a bird on the wing, sex, vanity—he knew they had perceived only the barest edge of what True Love was. Not Kierkegaard or Bacon or Goethe or Nietzsche, for all their insight, for all their wisdom, had any better idea of what True Love looked like than the commonest day-laborer.
The Song of Solomon spurred him on, but did not indicate the proper route to discovery.
He found the main path on that night in February of 1968. But once found, he was too frightened to set foot upon it.
Surgat, a subordinate spirit to Sargatanas who, in the Descending Hierarchy from Lucifer to Lucifuge Rofacale, opens all locks, came when Chris Caperton summoned him. He was too insignificant a demon to refuse, no matter how ineptly couched the invocation. But he was less than cooperative.
Chris used Siri’s blood to draw the pentagram of Solomon on the floor. He didn’t think about what he was doing … that he was dipping his finger in the blood of the woman who lay covered with a sheet on the sofa … that he had to do it repeatedly because it was getting thick … that he had been warned all ten sides of the five-pointed star enclosed in a circle must be without break … he just did it. He did not cry. He just did it.
Then he set candles at the five points and lighted them. Every apartment in Saigon in those days had a supply of candles.
Then he stood in the exact center of the runes and lines and read from the dictation he had taken. Siri had assured him if he stayed within the pentagram he would be safe, that Surgat only opened locks and was not really powerful enough to cause him trouble … if he kept his wits about him.
The words were contained in the Grimorium Verum and Siri had said they need not be spoken precisely, nor need Chris worry about having done the special cleansing necessary when summoning the more powerful Field Marshals of Lucifer’s Infernal Legions.
He read the words. “I conjure thee, Surgat, by the great living God, the Sovereign Creator of all things, to appear under a comely human form, without noise and without terror, to answer truly unto all questions that I shall ask thee. Hereunto I conjure thee by the virtue of these Holy and Sacred Names. O Surmy † Delmusan † Atalsloym † Charusihoa † Melany † Liamintho † Colehon † Paron † Madoin † Merloy † Bulerator † Donmeo † Hone † Peloym † Ibasil † Meon…” And on and on, eighteen more names, concluding with, “Come, therefore, quickly and peaceably, by the Names Adonai, Elohim, Tetragrammaton! Come!”
From across the Saigon River he could hear the sound of the city’s rockets, flattening Charlie’s supposed emplacements. But in the little apartment on Nguyen Cong Tru Street everything began to shimmer and wash down like the aurora borealis.
It was an apartment no longer. He stood on the polished wood floor, inside the pentagram of Solomon, but the polished wood floor came to an end at the edges of Siri’s dried blood. Beyond lay a fallen temple. Great gray stones, enormous and bearing the marks of claws that had ripped them loose from mountains, tumbled and thrown carelessly, rose up around Chris. And out of the shadows something came toward him.
It slouched and dragged its arms behind as it came out of the darkness. When the flickering illumination from the candles struck it, Chris felt sick to his stomach. He clutched the paper with Siri’s words as if it would save him.
Surgat came and stood with the point of one goat-hoof almost touching Siri’s blood. Chris could smell where it had been and what it had been doing when he had interrupted its dining. He felt faint and could not breathe deeply because of the smell Surgat had carried from its mess hall.
The head of the demon changed. Toad to goat to worm to spider to dog to ape to man to a thing that had no name.
“Open the lock of the casket,” Chris yelled. He had to yell: the sound of wind was overpowering, deafening, insane.
Surgat kicked the bahut. Chris had left it, as Siri had instructed, outside the pentagram. Surgat kicked it again. No mark was put on the coffer, but where the demon’s foot had rested in the dust of the fallen temple’s floor, a cloven footprint burned and smoked.
“Open the lock!”
Surgat leaned forward and shrieked. Words poured forth. They made no sense to Chris. They were from a throat that was not human. If a hyena had been given the ability to speak with the tongue of a man, it would have sounded less guttural, less deranged, less terrifying.
Siri had said the demon would be troublesome, but would finally do as bidden. It had no choice. It was not that important or powerful a spirit. When Chris remembered that assurance, and perceived just how staggering was the sight before him, he trembled at the thought of one of Surgat’s masters. “Open it, you goddam ugly sonofabitch! Open it right now!”
Surgat vomited maggots that hit an invisible plane at the edge of the pentagram. And babbled more words. And reached out a lobster-claw that stopped just outside the invisible plane. It wanted something.
Then Chris remembered the hair from Siri’s head. It will want the hair of a fox, she had said. Forget that. It will try to get a hair from your head. Whatever you do, don’t let it have one. All of you is contained in each hair; you can be reconstructed from a hair; then it has you. Give it mine.
He extended her long, thick strand of hair.
Surgat screamed, would not take it. Chris extended it through the invisible plane. Surgat pointed to Chris’s head and pulled long strips of bleeding flesh from its body and threw them against the fallen stones where they plopped with the sickening sound of meat against concrete. Chris did not move. The hair hung down outside the invisible plane.
Surgat screamed and capered and tore at itself.
“Take it, you disgusting sonofabitch!” Chris yelled. “Take it and be damned, she died to give it to you, puking garbage dump! Take it or get nothing! Nothing’s worth this, not even that thing she looked for all her life! So take it, you crummy piece of shit! Take it or go back where you came from and let me alone!”
The words Surgat spoke became very clear, then. The voice modulated, became almost refined. It spoke in a language Chris had never heard. He could not have known that it was a tongue unspoken for a thousand years before the birth of Christ: Surgat spo
ke in Chaldean.
And having spoken, having acknowledged obedience at the threat of being dismissed without the proper license to depart, the threat of being trapped here in this halfway place of fallen stones, and the wrath of Asmoday or Beelzebuth, the lock-picking demon ran its tentacle forward and took Siri’s hair. The hair burst into flame, the flame shot up toward the shadowed ceiling of the fallen temple, Surgat turned the flame on the casket … and the flame washed over the wood … and the casket opened.
Quickly, Chris read the final words on the paper he held. “O Spirit Surgat, because thou hast diligently answered my demands, I do hereby license thee to depart, without injury to man or beast. Depart, I say, and be thou willing and ready to come, whensoever duly exorcised and conjured by the Sacred Rites of Magic. I conjure thee to withdraw peaceably and quietly, and may the peace of God continue for ever between me and thee. Amen.”
And Surgat looked across the pentagram’s protective plane and said, in perfectly understandable English, “I do not go empty-handed.”
Then the demon slouched away into the shadows, the aurora borealis effect began again, rippling and sliding and flowing down till he was in his own apartment again. Even then he waited an hour before leaving the charmed circle.
To discover that as Siri had promised, everything had its price. Surgat had not gone empty-handed.
The body of his lover was gone. He could not look at what had been left in its place.
He began to cry, hoping it had been an exchange; hoping that what lay on the sofa was not Siri.
The bahut contained more items than its outside dimensions would have indicated. It held grimoires and many notebooks filled with Siri’s handwriting. It held talismans and runic symbols in stone and silver and wood. It held vials of powders and hair and bird-claws and bits of matter, each vial labeled clearly. It held conjurations and phials and philtres and maps and directions and exorcising spells. It held the key to finding True Love.
But it also held Siri’s observations of what had happened to her when she had summoned the entity she called “the supreme hideousness, the most evil of the ten Sephiroths, the vile Adrammelech.” He read the ledgers until his eyes burned, and when his fingers left the pages, the paper was smudged with his sweat. He began to tremble, there in the room where the smell of Surgat’s dining table lingered, and knew he could not summon the strength to summon this most powerful of dark beings.
He read every word on every page Siri had written; and he vowed silently that he would pick up her quest where she had fallen. But he could not go to her informant. His assistance had cost her too much, and she had been unable to go on. The price was too high.
But there were clues to the trail of the artifact that was True Love. And he took the bahut and left the apartment on Nguyen Cong Tru Street, and never returned. He had money to continue the search, and he would do it without help from things that dragged long, rubbery arms through the dust of fallen temples.
All he had to do was wait for the end of the war.
By 1975 Christopher Caperton had traced it to New Orleans. He was thirty-five years old; he had been married and divorced because in a moment of weariness he had thought she might suffice in place of True Love; and he wrote this in his journal: It is the vanity of searching for embodiments. Fleches d’amour. Incarnations which are never satisfactory, which never answer all longings and questions.
Once, when he had thought he might die of a jungle fever contracted while running down a false clue in Paramaribo, he heard himself cursing Siri’s memory. If she had not told him it actually existed, he might have settled for something less, never knowing for certain that there was more. But he did know, and in his tantrum of fever he cursed her to Hell.
When he recovered, he was more than ashamed of himself. Considering who she had been, where she had gone, and the owners of her spirit, he might have called down a sentence on her that she did not deserve. One never knew the total cost, nor at what point the obligation was considered voided.
After he had been rotated home in 1970 he spent a few months tying up all previous relationships—family, friends, business associates, acquaintances—and set out on the trail that had grown cold since 1946.
Without dipping into capital he was able to underwrite his expenses handsomely. Even though the gnomes of Zurich had done away with unnumbered, secret accounts, he had made his money in a way that caused no concern among the assessors, customhouse officials, tithe-seekers and running-dogs of the IRS desiring duty, levy, tribute, tallage, liver and lights. He moved freely under a variety of passports and a number of names. He came to think of himself as a nameless, stateless person, someone out of a Graham Greene suspense novel.
There were clues, beginning with one of the appraisers who had worked on the Ford bequests. He was quite old by the time Chris located him in a retirement trailer camp in Sun City, but he remembered the item clearly. No, he had never seen it; it was crated with specific instructions that it should not, under even the most extreme circumstances, be opened. If he was lying, he did it well. Chris was paying a high enough premium for the information that it didn’t matter either way. But the trail picked up with the old appraiser’s recollection that whatever the crate had contained, it had been bequeathed to a contemporary of Henry Ford’s, a man with whom he had been friends and then fallen out, fifty years before.
Chris managed to locate the bills of lading and traced the crate to Madison, Indiana. The recipient of the crate had been deceased for fifteen years. The contents of the crate had been sold at auction …
And so it went. From place to place. From clue to clue. And each clue indicated that having been in touch with the artifact, the owner had known great joy or great sorrow; but all were dead. The Holy Grail always lay just ahead, always just out of Chris’s reach. Yet he could never bring himself to take the easy way out: to summon up the horror Siri had called Adrammelech. He knew if he finally gave in, that even if he found True Love he would never be able to savor it.
In January of 1975 Christopher Caperton followed a clue from Trinidad to New Orleans. His source had assured him that the artifact had passed into the hands of a houngan, a priest of the con-jur, a disciple of the voodoo of Doctor Cat, a pioneer of mail order Voodoo in 1914.
On Perdido Street, in a back room lit only by votive candles in rubyglass jars, Chris met “Prince Basile Thibodeux,” whose title at birth had been merely Willie Link Dunbar. Prince Basile swore he had known and loved the real and true Marie Laveau. As the old black man looked no more than sixty—though he claimed to be ninety-two—such a claim was, either way, highly dubious. Absolute proof exists that Marie Laveau, the first of the many Marie Laveau’s, died on June 24th, 1881, at the approximate age of eighty-five. Two years before Willie Link “Thibodeux” had been born, if he was ninety-two; and thirty-four, if he was lying.
Christopher Caperton did not care what lies Prince Basile told to sell his worthless hoodoo goods in the drugstore of Love Oils, Goofer Dust, Devil’s Shoe Strings and War Water, as long as he told him a straight story about the artifact.
When he walked into the little back room, washed in bloody shadows from the candles, he was prepared to pay a premium price for the information he sought, or to assure Prince Basile that there were two men living on Prytania Street who would, for only a fraction of that premium price, inflict great bodily sorrow on a sixty or ninety-two-year-old black man, and he would worry about the black goat dancing on his grave at a later time. But Prince Basile took one look at him and fear filled the withered face.
“Doan put dat gris-gris on me, mistuh,” he pleaded. “Jus’ whatever you want, that’s be what you gone get. Ah’m at y’service.”
And Chris walked out of the little back room on Perdido Street with the information—that he knew to be absolutely reliable because no one that terrified could he without dying in the act—that Willie Link Dunbar had worked on a smuggling operation from the Islands to the Keys in 1971 and he had seen the artif
act. He swore before Damballa that he could not remember what it looked like … but it had been as lovely as anything he knew. His face, when he said it, was a strange mix of terror at the sight of Chris and joy at the last scintilla of memory of what he had seen.
And he told Chris the name of the smuggler who had taken the item from the boat.
And when Chris asked him why he was so frightened of just another white man, Prince Basile said, “You been kissin’ the Old Ones. I kilt a hunnerd crows and cocks I couldn’t save mah soul if you was t’touch me, mistuh. I be jus’ playin’ at whut I does, but you… you knows the fire.”
Chris shuddered. And that was only from a minor, weak servant of Adrammelech. He left hurriedly.
He stood in the darkness of the alley off Perdido Street and thought about it, about True Love, whatever it was. He had wanted it for so long, had sought it in so many women, had glimpsed hints of its totality so many times, that he only now paused to examine what he had become. Even if he got it, would he be worthy of it? Wasn’t the one who found the Holy Grail supposed to be pure in every way, perfect in every way, without flaw or blemish or self-doubt? Knights on white chargers, saints, defenders of the faith; those were the candidates for the honor. Prince Charming always won Snow White, not Porky Pig.
Without flaw. No, not without flaw. He had come too far for perfection. He had had to experience too much.
Yet he knew he was closer to True Love than anyone had ever been. Not even those who had possessed it had known what to do with it. He knew he had it within himself to become one with True Love, as no one before him ever could. No one. Not one of the perhaps thousand owners of it before and since it found its way to the Palace of Minos, no matter how fine or great or deserving they had been.