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("The Book of the Mad Arab"). This is Adam Weishaupt's
Olaus Wormius's loathed and abominated Necronomicon
("The Book of the Names of the Dead"), the least
bowdlerized and most terrible Latin rendition of
the vile and venomous Al Azif (roughly,
"Songs You Hear Alone in the Desert
at Night")
of Abdul Alhazred, "the Mad Arab."
Why, why, I ask myself-as with shaking hands
I pour another glass of laudnum to hold off
the surreal and Dantescan fantasies that now
haunt my nights-why did I go to that eldritch city,
and why on the fearsome Walpurgis Night?
Pike that followed the evilly twisting path
of the ill-reputed Miskatonic River, I was
thinking of the $10,000 that Paul, with his
usual generosity, had offered me for this
and helped to distract me from unpleasant
mulling about the sinister speculations of
pollutants, including the toxic and radioactive,
do not fully account for the foulness of
Mistakatonic water or the awfully mutated creatures
that often crawl and slither out of it to attack
some lonely farm.
Then I noticed the eldritch bumper-stickers on
the Toyota Corolla in front of me:
Campus Crusade for Cthulhu;
Passing them all, I fearlessly walked through
the entrance door, under the grim inscription,
Abandon Hope. The Gallows Hilton, I found, had
a tasteful lobby, if you really groove on cobwebs,
underground streams, stalactites and lots and
lots of crooked candlesticks. The oil paintings
were elegantly done and featured such gentry as
Brigit Bishop, Bela Lugosi (in his Dracula cape),
Abigail Williams, the 23 Holy Martyrs
(i.e., the 23 witches hanged on Gallows Hill
in 1692), Uncle Aleister (of course) and
Frank Morgan as the Wizard of Oz, engraved
with the suitable Magick motto:
PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN.
We were toiling up the hill to the historic gallows
of 1692. The Campus Crusade were reciting foul
incantations from Alhazred. A bug-eyed octopus
led us in singing "Mr. Wong has the Biggest Tong
in Chinatown." Veronica Lake was threatening
Frederick March with a whip. "I'll send my car
to pick a you up," said Chico Marx.
We all came down the stairs into the Grand Ballroom.
The organizational charter had been finished.
Every local of the I. W. W: would be responsible for
its own finances and pension fund. If the Teamsters
or Mafia tried to horn in, the toad curse would be
put on them, too. An international legal team,
of libel suits against the worst anti-witch or
anti-magick fanatics among "the Christians and
Atheists who control the Organization of
American States."
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