The books.
I always returned to the books. I can see the shelves even now, the large shelf
at one end of the main hall on the ground floor, the one with two rows of bound
National Geographic magazines and an assortment of books presented to my
grandparents by authors or publishers, the little shelf in the bedroom just off
the hall, with its assortment of Reader’s Digests, paperback thrillers, travel
guides from the 60s and 70s and old Penguin orange-and-creams. The shelf with
Tamil classics and Indian literature in translation next to my grandmother’s
side of the bed in my grandparents’ bedroom on the first floor, the shelf of
paperback thrillers in the bedroom that used to be my father’s and, finally,
the rows of shelves in the large hall on the first floor, dominating the entire
space, more books than many libraries and bookstores possess, books in hardback
and paperback, with or without dust jackets, in every size and colour, books
that dealt with subjects more uncanny and cosmic than any of the others.
It wasn’t
until my grandparents died and my father ceased to have dealings with me that I
realised I did care a little for the people in the house. It wasn’t until the
house was razed to the ground and replaced with a soaring apartment block that
I realized I had cared for the house itself. Still, in my long years of
estrangement from my paternal family, it was the books that I thought about and
missed the most. Sometimes, reading a reference to another book in one of the
volumes that I had purchased in an attempt to build my own library, I would remember
that my family library had included a copy of that very volume. Oh, if I only
had access to that library of wonders once again, how many blissful hours I could
spend each day, rapt on the trail of deliciously obscure, deliriously outré
lore!
As it was,
I had to make do with the few battered old volumes, the tattered paperbacks,
the countless profaned, popularized versions of the ageless secrets that I
could find, anything that contained some hint of the mysteries I was reaching
for. Why had my father turned me away, why had he turned his back on me and on
the books in that house? Even as a grown man in my thirties I would sometimes
weep to think of this cruel rejection, to think of what I had lost.
Many a
time, I remembered how my grandfather would sit at his long desk, piled high
with books and papers, poring over some recondite tome. Sometimes, he would
call me to sit beside him and look at a new acquisition. This was how I was
first introduced to many rare and coveted volumes, both scholarly and hermetic.
How their names echo in my memory now, mocking me with the knowledge of the
riches I have lost! Even when I secure some hard-won treasure such as an
uncorrupted volume by Eliphas Levi, a complete transcript of Ned Kelley’s
channelings, or a facsimile of the Chhaya rituals, I know that it is nothing,
nothing at all, compared to the library that should have been mine by
birthright.
As I grew
from guileless boyhood into first adolescence, the books in my grandfather’s
upstairs library became more than just a grown-up treasure I was thrilled to be
allowed to share in; they became an obsession. When I spent summer vacations in
my grandparent’s house, I was given my father’s old bedroom. At night, I would
toss and turn, lost in delicious nightmares in which I summoned strange beings
and paid terrible tributes to them. I could hear the books calling me; soft,
insinuating voices chorused in my ears, following wherever I went. Sometimes, I
would heed the call and pull a certain scroll from a shelf, take a certain
volume down from its resting place, and spend long moonlit hours poring over
it.
Just once,
I tore a page from an especially compelling volume, took it back with me after
summer vacation, looking forward to learning more from it over the next few
months. When I finally lay down in my own bed, waited for my parents to fall
asleep and then spread it open, peering at it in the light from a lamp post
outside my bedroom window, the suggestive sigils and anagrammatised phrases
that had enchanted me were replaced with a banal zodiacal diagram and its
quotidian exposition. That was the last summer I went to the old house; my
grandfather died that winter and my father, already estranged from my mother, announced
that he was selling the old house to a builder.
Many years
later, I learned of site-specific, one of a kind grimoires and books of power,
created to be read only a particular place, at a particular time. My
grandfather had owned one of these, clearly. As I delved further and further
into what shards of the true lore I could find, I realised that something very
terrible had happened here. Only a very few families at any time possess these
kinds of books and the knowledge of how to unlock their secrets. One of the
reasons most rituals found in works like the Simon Necronomicon, or the Lesser
Key, do not seem to work is that the manuscripts have been read in the wrong
locations, under the wrong conditions. These, too, are site-specific tomes and
when perused out of their intended context, they beguile and dupe the reader
with junk data.
But my
father had already sold the old house to a developer. It was all gone, the
house, the library, my grandfather’s old seat at the end of the hall where I
could have sat in moonlight and learned of the immemorial secrets entrusted to
my bloodline.
For years,
I simply nursed this knowledge within, the way someone fearful of doctors and
perhaps just a little fond of pain will nurse a festering sore, draining the
more obnoxious effluvia, but unwilling to treat the sickened tissue in any
truly effective way. By day I worked at my pointless series of jobs as a
content writer or online editor, and in my free time I scoured second-hand
bookstores and online auctions looking for books that contained echoes of the
true lore, the fragile thread of real hermetic secrets concealed within the
promiscuous quilt of occult literature. I caught glimpses of what I had lost. A
reference in an otherwise dull volume on South Indian goddess cults mentioned an
offshoot of the Chhaya cultus which had moved to the south, where an Iyer
family in Madras was initiated into its secrets. Another reference, this time
in an obscure work by a theosophist associated with Annie Besant, alluded to a
‘book of shadow’ held in trust by a ‘Brahminical clan of the South’. A stray
line in an essay by Paul Brunton suggested that, during a visit to Madras, he
may once have been shown a book that could only be read in moonlight.
Finally, in
a passage found by Colin Wilson in a manuscript from Q’n-Yan and quoted in the
final volume of his Occult trilogy, ‘Back To The Occult’, I read these words:
‘In the summer months, when the moon is high, in the Priest’s Abode, you will
find the Key to bring back the Ones Who Wait. But only one of the Blood may
read the pages and see what is truly therein. And the Blood is the Spirit’. The
manuscript was dated to 1920, surprisingly modern, but also just a few years
after my grandfather’s house – or rather, his father’s, at the time, had been
built.
I had
recently concluded a major project and was due for a holiday, so I decided to
visit Madras, or Chennai as it was now called, after a gap of more than a
decade. The city seemed much the same as it always had – maybe a few new
high-rises, but not really that many, compared to Bangalore. It was May, and a
fierce, humid summer exerted its tyrannical power over the city. I checked into
a hotel just down the road from where my ancestral house had stood. In the
noonday heat, I went for long, restless strolls in the nearby park, where my grandfather
had taken a vigorous daily walk until the day he died. I spent long hours
observing the apartment complex that stood on my lost land. I calculated which
flat stood in the place where my grandfather’s old desk had been and then found
out about its inhabitants. A young couple and their child. Perfect. I lurked
around the children’s playground across the road from the apartments, in the
guise of a seller of groundnuts. Finally, on a sultry evening, when all the
other children had gone home and the child from what I had come to think of as
‘my’ apartment had stayed behind to finish a solitary game of hopscotch, I
seized my moment. I grabbed the child, locked him into a compartment built into
my cart and headed to an alley near the park, where I gagged and bound him, put
him in a large kit bag and then took him back to my hotel room.
I had
decided to wait for about 24 hours before contacting the child’s parents. As
the hours wore by, I realized that sharing my room with a frightened, wailing
child was not conducive to peace of mind. Finally, I seized the child by his
shoulders and stared into his eyes. He became quiet and stared back at me. A
smile crossed his lips.
##
A man
slinks through the night, wearing a long, bulky coat, a bundle in his arms. He
sneaks into an apartment building, past a slumbering guard, through the foyer,
up the stairs. He walks to a particular door, rings the bell. A distraught man
answers. ‘I have your child, let me in,’ the stealthy man says, pushing his way
in. Inside, a woman waits, her face streaked with tears. He throws something at
the feet of the unhappy couple. It is the limp, lifeless body of their child.
As they stare at the body in shock, he locks the door and then, moving with the
weightless speed of the wind, breaks the necks of the father and then the
mother.
He pulls a
chair up to a window. He switches off the lights and cocks his head to one
side, taking in the angle of the moonlight. He takes a large, heavy hammer out
of his coat and smashes the wall to one side of the window until he has
extended the window by about a foot in that direction. The hot, still air of
the summer night has become even more oppressive than usual; the sea breeze
fails and no sound is carried to the other apartments.
He sits
down at the chair, drags an incidental table between him and the window. He
takes an old, yellowed sheet of paper out of an inside pocket, spreads it out
on the table. He looks at it intently, and his pupils dilate until his eyes are
completely black. On the paper, a swirl of black, snake-like lines appears and
starts to move, probing. It moves faster and faster, until the paper vanishes
and only the lines are left. He picks them up and brings them up to his head,
where they fit around his temples like a wreath. The dark lines fade into his
flesh. He stands up and walks over to the lifeless child. A blue glow emanates
from his fingers as he makes ritual gestures over the body. He proceeds to the
bodies of the two adults and repeats the procedure. By the time he is done with
the mother, the child has woken up. Its eyes, too, are black pools. It walks up
to the man and bows deeply. The parents, or rather, whatever it is that now
animates their bodies, follow suit. The black-eyed trio kneels before
The man in
the long coat stands framed in moonlight, the small, transfigured family
kneeling before him. He lets the tip of his tongue slide out of his mouth; it
is an elongated, prehensile tongue. It flicks through the air and he tastes
deep of the flavours of massed humanity.
