Chapter Forty-four
Aleister/Part 1
Past
September. 1908
Sapporo, Hokkaido. Japan.
It was a quiet night in the city, everything was enveloped in the faint haze of the early evening. Everything seemed normal under the cold starry sky, the few lights of the city threw faint flashes on the streets, through which barely a few people were walking. The cold of that day had been intense, foreshadowing that perhaps winter would arrive sooner than expected.
In the most discreet corner of the city, an old and modest wooden bar resisted the passage of time. Inside, the dim light of kerosene lamps danced on worn wooden tables and chairs worn from years of shared stories and nightly games. The warmth inside was enough for a few shopkeepers and nearby residents to congregate. Tobacco smoke, games and laughter drifted into the ears of the owner, interested in reading a newspaper with the day's news.
Shadows played on the walls, while the clock of the Sapporo Tower resounded in the distance, marking the hours with solemnity. Among the tables, figures sheltered from the cold of the night under layers of traditional coats. Their silhouettes, barely discernible, leaned over the tables, immersed in whispered conversations and the clinking of glasses of sake and other local spirits.
The door of the rustic bar opened with a clink that barely echoed in the atmosphere that enveloped the place. A man, dressed in western clothes and a thick bearskin coat, crossed the threshold, attracting curious and discreet glances from the motley group of customers. His presence seemed to challenge the very essence of the establishment. Not because he was a foreigner necessarily, that part of town was quite normal to see some Russians and other foreigners arriving from the continent. The war was already a thing of the past and the world had continued to turn.
With confident steps, the stranger made his way to the bar, where the bartender, with the astuteness of a connoisseur, greeted him with a mixture of interrogation and courtesy. The stranger's request for something native unleashed the expertise of the barkeep, who offered him a glass of hot local sake, whose ethereal aroma wafted through the story-laden atmosphere. His Japanese was almost perfect, but he didn't sound like a local. Perhaps someone who lived or had learned to speak it further south?
"I probably need the bottle, I like it," the man said, after tasting the drink.
He looked in his thirties, had slightly messy dark brown hair, hazel eyes with a questioning gaze and had a beard that looked several days old. He was almost six feet tall and rather thin.
On a nearby table, the gloom hid the weary strokes of a drunken man, his eyes lost in the pages of a notebook that, at first glance, appeared to be more than a simple diary of drunken experiences. The arrival of the stranger did not go unnoticed by him, his distrustful glances resting briefly on the newcomer before he resumed his business.
He was a man who might have been about the same age as the stranger. With fine features, dark hair and glasses, he wore a warm haori and was dressed in traditional clothes.
However, the real plot was being woven in silence. The newly arrived man had taken the glass and bottle and, guided by intrigue, slipped into the seat at the table next to that of the drunken lonely chronicler. The stranger, seemingly oblivious to the stranger, continued his scribbling in a notebook that, to those watching, could be the map of an unsolved enigma or the notebook of a university mathematics professor. Diagrams and equations appeared before his strokes in that notebook with leather covers and other loose leaves.
"What a night," said the stranger.
The man stopped and looked first at him and then around to make sure he was talking to him and not someone else. The drunk nodded nervously and went back to his business.
The stranger said nothing for a few moments and continued to drink in silence, as the sake warmed his body. After looking tired he turned his eyes back to the drunkard.
"Are you a journalist?"
The drunk looked at him, for a few seconds. "No," he replied in a somewhat muffled voice. "I'm a professor in Tokyo."
The stranger frowned in amusement. "You are far from your work."
"I just came from a trip, I haven't been in Tokyo for a few months."
"Oh, I see. I funnily enough came from Tokyo, all the way here."
The drunk had stopped writing and looked at him with inquisitive eyes. "Where are you headed?"
"Possibly Korea, or maybe Siberia, I'm interested in visiting those parts. I'm not from around here. I'm traveling in many countries."
"Are you a businessman?"
"Not exactly. You can think of me as someone traveling the world. Before I came to Japan I was in southern China and, before that, India."
"Where are you from? If you'll excuse the question."
"I'm British."
"Oh! English, I see. Where did you learn Japanese?"
"In the south, a bit in Kyoto and then Tokyo. I've only been traveling for a few weeks, but I'm good at learning languages. I already knew some Japanese before too. It's my second time in Japan, I was in Kanagawa about eight years ago."
"Well, you speak it very well."
The foreigner took the almost full bottle and showed it to him. "What do you say? Will you help me put it down?"
The drunk looked at him a little worried. "It's already paid for, I'm not going to trick you into leaving and then you'll have to pay for it. "
The drunk nodded sheepishly. "Come on," said the stranger, changing tables and sitting down across from the man, "don't be so shy. Nothing like getting to know other people's stories on my travels."
The inebriated man ducked his head in greeting. "My name is Satou Nobuyama."
"Well, Mr. Nobuyama, it's a pleasure. I am Aleister, Aleister Crowley."
The dialogue began cautiously, like chapters slowly opening revealing hidden secrets. Aleister, with a subtle touch of diplomacy, broke the ice with stories of his travels that captured the attention of the drunken scholar. Glassy eyes met the stranger's penetrating gaze, and in that instant, an unspoken pact sealed their connection.
Aleister was a strange man from what he told him. Mystic, mountaineer, traveler, explorer. The man seemed to have visited half the world in his short years. Yet there was something that, for some reason, also aroused a feeling of wariness in Satou Nobuyama. Although that could be because he had gone to the bar that day without his traveling companions.
"Are you, in a manner of speaking, on a journey of self-discovery?"
Aleister thought about it, as he filled Nobuyama's sake cup. "I'm not sure I'd call it that way but maybe?Who knows... I've been one of the first to climb K2 and although that fills me with pride I feel I could do a lot more."
"I see."
"And what about you? What are you writing so hard there?"
Nobuyama looked back at his notebook and the loose sheets of paper. "Oh! Bunk things of no importance apparently," he said and closed it almost without paying attention to it and put it in a bag hanging from the chair. "Mathematics, number stuff. Things I don't understand myself sometimes."
Aleister smiled. "Well, that's where we're the same, I often write things I don't even understand myself."
"What do you mean?"
"Would you believe me if I told you that I sometimes write revealed books?"
"Like a shaman?"
"Something like that. Maybe you're a shaman too, with your mathematics."
Nobuyama took the cup and stared at it. "I think that's the first time I've been told something like that about my profession."
"Well shamans are a bridge between the earthly and that which is beyond. You could be seen as a bridge between us, the common people, and what underlies the world of mathematics. From what I learned, mathematics is a language, but it can also have internal dialects and forms of interpretation. Am I wrong?"
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Satou Nobuyama hurriedly gulped and stood thoughtfully. "That's right, absolutely right." Then he looked at him questioningly. "You said you're going to Russia?"
"Yes I plan to go through Siberia and maybe Mongolia first and from there make the whole trip home overland."
Nobuyama approached the table and motioned for him to come closer. As Aleister got closer he could tell that the man must surely have been drinking for a long time by the smell he was giving off.
"I don't recommend that you go to Russia these days."
"Why?"
"I just told you I haven't been in Tokyo for months. Well that's because I just came from Siberia too. Rumors are coming in of a lot of trouble in the west."
"I see. Yes, I heard something too. What part of Siberia were you in?"
"Tunguska. What a miracle we got out in time."
"What do you mean?"
"Haven't you seen the news?"
Aleister looked at him somewhat confused.
"The lights, Mr. Crowley, the lights."
"Oh! Yes, I read something. You could actually see some light in the north during the first days of July. And I was in the south. Were you there?"
"No, fortunately not, but close enough. In fact my traveling companions are anthropologists who had been studying the northern tribes a bit, I was a guest on the expedition and, just as we were returning on the Trans-Siberian, that's when on the morning of June 30 that explosion occurred. If we had been delayed a few weeks longer we would probably have seen it more closely."
"Do you know what it was?"
"I don't know, but the sound was horrible. I've seen it before."
"What do you mean?"
"You won't believe me if I tell you."
"Years ago I had a vision that something like that would happen. It was one image among many, but I remembered it when I saw from the train that blinding light to the north."
"A vision you say?"
Nobuyama nodded, pouring himself a cup, which he drank in one gulp. "It was years ago, when I was still a child. Just as you say about the revealed books, it's something similar to what happened to me, it's the closest I've ever been to something supernatural in my whole life."
"How is that possible?"
Satou Nobuyama smiled. He took the bag and rummaged around inside. He pulled out a small leather wallet with buckles, which reminded Aleister of a slightly larger eyeglass case, and then revealed the contents. There was a cloth wrapped around something. He pulled it out carefully and showed him what appeared to be two pieces of dark crystalline rock. At first Aleister thought it might be obsidian, but it didn't look like it.
Satou Nobuyama took a fragment and passed it on.
"What is it?" asked Aleister, receiving it and examining it more closely.
"As of today I don't know. It looks like some kind of impure quartz or other type of mineral, but the few who have seen it have not been able to tell me what it is."
"What does it have to do with the vision?"
"Well, the visions came to me when I just happened to have both stones in my hands."
"Can I try?" asked Aleister amused.
"Sure!" Nobuyama said and passed him the second stone.
Aleister examined it for a minute and then held one in each hand, but nothing happened. "Maybe you got lucky."
"Maybe." Satou Nobuyama looked at him nervously and got up from the table. "Excuse me for a second."
"What's wrong?"
"Too much to drink, I'm going to the bathroom."
"I'll be here, don't worry."
Aleister put the stones down on the cloth and drank from the cup again. Then he looked at the stones again.
The position he had left them in was with the smoothest face as a base. He frowned and picked them up again. But then he tried to put them together. Just as he thought it had originally been a single stone that had broken.
That's when it happened.
No one could see it except Aleister. Those two rocks glowed with a ghostly light in his hands and Aleister received something like an electric shock that ran through his whole body and kept him static in the chair where he had been sitting.
Then came the visions. Confused images in a whirlwind that invaded every neuron of his being. Wars, plagues, betrayals, impossible images that seemed to be taken from some of his most nightmarish opium hallucinations. But not only that, he also saw people he did not know talking to him, as if it were a revived version of his future. He saw how he succeeded in certain purposes, only to fall into decrepitude. But he also saw something else. Hope in that clonic storm of visions.
Then nothingness. As suddenly as it had begun, everything ended and he was left with an empty stare.
He didn't know how much time passed, but he only knew that Satou Nobuyama came back after a while and asked him what was wrong.
He had stammered out a reply, but the words did not come out right. Nobuyama thought it might be due to alcohol. Perhaps Aleister, like Nobuyama himself, did not have the stamina for the local sake.
Nobuyama had seen the time and had talked to him a few minutes more but, seeing that Aleister appeared to be drunk, had judged it best to leave given the time and that he too had had too much to drink.
"I think this man is drunker than I am," Nobuyama had said, approaching the barkeeper.
"Don't worry, if he's a foreigner he's almost certainly staying at the hotel two blocks down. If it's there, I'll ask the squad to find out. I don't want a stranger to get lost here at this hour. Especially this one who seems to be one of those with money."
Satou Nobuyama said goodbye to Aleister, who was still staring blankly, and left.
Aleister didn't know how he had left the bar and walked to the hotel, but he knew he had done it in a state as if he had been given a zombie drug by some bokor. He had climbed the stairs and collapsed on the western bed in his room.
He was feverish for two days where he was staying and on the third day he recovered and went to the bar, hoping to find Satou Nobuyama. He looked around and found out where he was staying and went there. But he did not find him. A day ago he had already left with his companions for Tokyo.
Aleister regretted it, but by then it mattered little.
The truth was that Satou Nobuyama had taken the stones out of his hands to put them back into storage. But there was something he did not notice. In Aleister's hand there was a small shard. No bigger than a couple of centimeters, but Nobuyama never noticed it. Aleister with an almost mechanical movement had hidden it and then put it in his coat.
Now that piece of stone was carefully packed with zeal in a piece of cloth and kept with his belongings.
That small piece of stone, almost miniscule, he kept it. It was not meant for him. It was destined to go to someone else many years in the future.
In fact that person had not even been born yet.
Aleister, nor Nobuyama, could not know it, but that night they met, a particle beam came from the sun. It passed through the atmosphere and the surface of the earth to reach that bar, like an invisible messenger at the speed of light.
***
November 20th. 1947
Hastings, Sussex. United Kingdom.
Aleister coughed in his study, as he finished writing a note for a mailing.
Years of excess had taken their toll on his health. He had gained a few pounds in the last decade but, in the last two years, he had returned to his former thinness and most of his clothes were a bit baggy. A goatee and sparse white hair on both sides of his head, along with deep-set eyes and pronounced cheekbones, were all that could be seen of the venturesome face he had had in years past.
But, even so, Aleister Crowley was still the same as ever. In recent years he had remained quiet, apart from the occasional espionage mission in Churchill's service. Pneumonia and other health problems had forced him to retire to a quieter place. But that in a way did not bother him.
The town was peaceful and he had the calm to think about all that was yet to come. At 72 years old, he had already completed his masterpiece. Just in time, before the grim reaper came to claim his bones. She was going to be left wanting.
Aleister closed the small package and then wrote an address. He let the pen rest and sighed.
"Lam, are you there?"
"Always."
That feminine, somewhat mischievous-sounding voice had come from the air. And then, as if it were some phantasmagoric manifestation, long blood-red hair began to appear in the air. It was followed by strands and then more hair that seemed to float as if it were underwater. It had almost taken on a spherical shape when suddenly the form dissolved and out of it appeared a woman with pointed ears. She was naked but, just as mysteriously as she had appeared, a light red silk-like cloth covered her body. Then a slightly darker shade appeared on the bottom of the dress.
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Her skin was pale and her bare fingers and toes were tipped with sharp looking red nails. Her eyes, red as well, seemed to emit an amber glow from time to time, as if she were an erupting volcano. But she was definitely beautiful.
She floated several inches off the ground and her hair moved as if the laws of gravity had decided to make an exception for her.
"Are you ready?" the woman asked and floated through the air, until she was close to the old man's face.
"It's all planned, let them believe that it will be my ashes that will reach New Jersey."
"You've changed in this time it seems to me," Lam floated amusedly above him and then contorted her body again until their eyes met.
"I'm still the same idiot, Scarlet. I hope the new me can at least do better than this crock that held me back for so many years."
"We'll have to stay hidden for a long time."
"It's for the greater good. The sacrifices are well worth it."
Aleister put one box inside the other for the parcel and wrote a return address to New Jersey, in the United States Kingdom.
Finally he rested his pen and sighed, dropping into the chair. Lam floated over to him and ran a hand over his left cheek where he had an old scar.
"Let this be the last will of this body," Aleister said, wearily.
"Let's get everything ready for the ritual. We have only a few days."
Aleister nodded and rose heavily, leaning on the staff. Followed by the beautiful scarlet woman, he left the study. On the table lay the package that was to be sent in a few days to New Jersey.
But the address that really mattered was the one on the other box inside.
That one had a different address. It had a California address and it was addressed to a different person.