The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [95]
“Shall I keep you company?”
“I should be very glad to have you join me on my self-imposed penance to the gods of excess,” he pronounced, and went to trade his black City suit for something more appropriate to a stroll through the park.
In light-weight and light-grey suiting, whose gathered waist-band emphasised its elephantine wrinkles, he took up a straw hat and held the door for me.
Neither of us spoke much as we passed by the open windows along Pall Mall, but once we were among trees, he asked, “Have you learnt anything from the book you purloined?”
“It's left a very nasty taste in my mouth.”
“I see.”
“Anyone who capitalises that many English nouns should be shot.”
“The author's diction offends you?”
“The author's arrogance and assumptions offend me. His dedication to the idea that all happenstance is fate offends me. His imprecision offends me. His images are both pretentious and disturbing. The sense of underlying threat and purpose are …” I heard myself speaking in the erudite shorthand the Holmes brothers used, and I cut it short. “He scares me silly.”
“Tell me how,” Mycroft said, equally capable of brevity. I walked for a bit, ordering my thoughts, before I went on.
“The book concerns the spiritual development of a man—one assumes the writer, although it is in the third person—from a boy born under signs and portents, through his dark night of the soul, to his guided enlightenment. It has four sections with eight topics each-eight is a number significant in many traditions, although it could mean nothing, here—and a concluding section that acts as a coda. What begins as standard nuttiness darkens in the middle. The fourth section—Part the Fourth, he terms it—concerns his ‘Great Work,’ which appears to be a mix of alchemy and, well, human sacrifice. Only two of his thirty-two topic headings are repeated: ‘Sacrifice,’ which is divided into its submissive and its transformative aspects, and ‘Tool.’ I'm not certain, but thinking about it, I wonder if the Tool could be a knife forged from meteor metal.”
“A sacrificial knife,” he said.
One who did not know Mycroft Holmes would have heard the phrase as a simple intellectual conclusion: I could hear not only the distaste, but the pain underlying that: He, too, had Yolanda Adler before his eyes.
“He doesn't say it in so many words,” I told him. “And when he mentions primitives cutting out and eating the hearts of their enemies, it sounded as if he took that as metaphorical, not literal. Everything in Testimony is couched in these pseudo-mythic terms; the author is deliberately crafting a holy scripture.”
“Megalomaniacs I have known,” he mused. “I believe you are familiar with Aleister Crowley?”
“His name has come up a number of times in the past few days.”
“So I would imagine, if that text of yours is representative of this circle's interests.”
“Holmes thinks that Crowley's manifesto is in large part artifice, stemming from and feeding into an overweening egotism. If Crowley is God—or Satan, which for him amounts to the same thing—then how can his followers deny him his wishes, whether those be sex, or money, or just admiration of his poetry? If his desires are unreasonable, that's because he's a god; if he's a god, then his desires are reasonable.”
“A convenient doctrine,” Mycroft agreed.
“However, I should say that the author of Testimony may actually believe in his rigmarole. If Crowley is dangerous because shocking and scandalous behaviour is a way of convincing the gullible of his divinity, then this man would be dangerous because he actually believes he is divine.”
“May I assume that your presence here indicates an uncertainty as to the author's identity?”
“There are bits of evidence scattered throughout the thing, but I'm not sure how dependable even those are—he seems very willing to adopt a flexible chronology, even when it goes against good sense. For example, he claims a small meteorite fell into a pond outside the house as he was being born, and that his mother personally supervised its retrieval, but he then says the thing