The Heart of a Pig

Part VII: "The Kelub Sheirim"

The Kelub Sheirim

We were silent for a while. What was there to say? That the pervert got what was coming to him? No one could argue with that conclusion, but poetic justice was not the point of Ted’s story. At least not how Chris was telling it. There was more to come. Whatever joy I’d taken from the pedophile’s just desserts was about to be wiped out.

“Chris, you need to get me another fucking beer.”

That got a laugh. Chris shook his head, the smile fixed on his face, and I let myself believe we were two middle-aged guys swapping war stories. Chris trudged to the kitchen with the beer steins and I walked over to the cat skyscraper to avoid staring at the dark hallway while he was gone. I chose the friendliest looking of Chris’s brood, a small grey and white tabby that must have been the runt of the litter. Her pupils were hyper-dilated even by house-cat standards, and she was so still as I reached out to pet her that a cliched horror-movie reveal flashed in my mind: the cat—all of the cats—were dead, poisoned by Chris and preserved by the taxidermist’s art. It was ridiculous, but I copped a glance to make sure he wasn’t sneaking up on me. The cat was beautiful. She didn’t purr when I pet her but she didn’t scratch me either, and the feel of her warm flesh beneath the downy fur calmed me. I heard the fridge door open and close and the satisfying snap and hiss of beer caps opening. Chris set down the beers on the coffee table and went for a piss. I also needed to go but I wasn’t ready to walk that dark hallway. If I had to, I’d use the restaurant bathroom downstairs. I went back to the couch. When Chris returned, he didn’t wait for a cue.

“It must have been ages since Ted had talked about the abuse,” he said, “because his smooth billionaire’s face was as sweaty and blotched as a peasant’s on a hot day. Which was weird because it was freezing in there by that point. I felt so disoriented, by the plane trip and the creeping cold and Ted’s crazy fucking story, that I believed everything he told me. He said that after the babysitter killed himself, Ted made regular trips to the astral plane. He went to meet with the daemon Peabody, who tutored him on astral travel and a hell of a lot more. The stuff he told me. I can’t even…”

His eyes teared up. I hate to admit it, but the thought of Chris crying frightened me more than the presence I detected in the back room. I fixed on him what I hoped was a manly, stoic stare. I had nothing else to offer.

“By the time he was a teenager, Ted could travel anywhere in the world while his body rested at home. During that time, Peabody taught him that your astral body or spirit can do more than just float around the ceiling. By mastering and harnessing his will, Ted learned to use his spirit to influence this world. He could plant ideas in people’s heads, cause them to dream or change their opinions, even cast what we think of as spells or curses. Ted told me that the life of the spirit, the reality he encountered on the astral plane, he said that’s the real life. Peabody taught him that the human body is a prison. It clouds the will and the reason with its disgusting appetites and desires. Master the body and you master the world—that was good old Peabody’s motto. He showed Ted a future when people would discard their bodies and live as gods, freed from any physical or moral restraints. All of Ted’s wacko Silicon Valley philosophy, all the psychobabble about uploading your consciousness to the cloud where you’ll live forever in the metaverse, he got all that from Peabody. What else is Ted’s life work in the tech field but a nudging of humanity in that direction?”

Ted’s speech must not have had its intended effect because he began to berate Chris. He called Chris a coward, a sheep too afraid to make the evolutionary leap into pure consciousness. “You don’t want to give up mommy’s teet!” he screamed.

“He sounded like a fucking Bond villain taunting his captive before initiating the doomsday sequence,” Chris said. “Then he suddenly got all self-conscious and quiet. He asked me if I’d heard the rumours. Before I could answer he said the rumours were true, that he’d been diagnosed with late-stage cancer. He had less than a year before his body “betrayed” him. What could I say? That’s when he picked up the satchel. You want to know what’s in here? Five minutes earlier I would have said yes. Now I wanted him to toss the fucking thing in the ocean. Ted didn’t care what I wanted. He told me to join him in the library. I was in no position to refuse. I’ve heard the stories. How Ted’s business rivals and less-than-loyal minions have a bad habit of meeting their deaths in plane crashes and suicides. These were powerful men and women—I’m a nobody.”

Chris followed Ted to a library that on any other occasion would have made his mouth water, walls lined with oak and cherry book shelves stacked with priceless books and artefacts, the bookseller’s ultimate wank fantasy. The books might as well have been Reader’s Digest Annotated Classics for all the interest they held for Chris. His mind was racing out of control. Was Ted going to have him killed? He spied three exits, but where could he run? He was on a private island ringed by shark-infested reefs, with armed mercenaries patrolling the beaches and airstrip.

“That’s when it hit me,” Chris said. “How I’d been fooling myself all these years, pretending that I was a simple merchant. Like I was selling toy trains or hockey cards to eccentric collectors with too much money to spend, harmlessly enabling rich hobbyists. I’d had second thoughts, plenty of times, but thoughts are like numbers on the ticker tape rattling through your brain: you only notice the numbers you’re invested in at that moment. On some level, deep in my conscience, I knew I was no better than an arms dealer selling weapons to the highest bidder. I made books of power available to powerful men, who used those books to gain more power. When my conscience did jab at me I’d tell myself, One more job. One more job, then I’ll get out of the business. Traipsing around the world eating at the tables of rich men, while the Imp of the Perverse gnawed my powers of self-preservation—one more job, thinking it was my choice. But the final job chose me.”

“Come on, Chris,” I said. “You don’t believe that.”

“No, you come on. Don’t be naïve. Not about me. Not about this!” He gestured at the book piles. “What do you think these books are about? What do you think our clients do with them. They’re radioactive—you’re crazy if think you can handle them without contaminating your hands.”

I didn’t appreciate Chris implicating me in his Road to Damascus conversion. If my clients wanted to work out their outsized ambitions and daddy issues with the aid of lurid occult texts, who was I to judge them? I let the insult pass. The truth is, I didn’t want to distract Chris at this crucial point in the story. Chris might not have wanted to know what was in the satchel, but I did.

“Ted took me to this huge antique table and advised me to sit down. The cold had followed us into the library. I could feel it gushing into the room like cold sea water through a hull breach. Ted put the satchel on the table and undid the first strap. His hands were shaking, and his face—I mean, if you caught a guy masturbating to animal porn that’s how he’d look. Absolutely depraved, drool collecting at the corners of his mouth. He opened the bag and removed several manuscript pages. They were old but not ancient. Maybe early Victorian. I didn’t recognize the script. It was more like hieroglyphics or pictograms. Little people and animals bent into obscene shapes. Lots of squiggles that reminded me of maggots. And oh, Jesus, his face—Ted’s face. It wasn’t human anymore. You’ve seen those Tibetan demon masks, with the black bulging eyes and flaring nostrils. That was Ted. He opened his mouth and I thought, He’s going to eat the world.”

I have no reason to disbelieve what Chris told me next—no reason but reason itself. I can’t believe Chris but I do believe him. The evidence, such as it is, falls in his favour.

“Ted held up the pages,” Chris continued. “Did I want to guess what they were? Go on, he said, indulge me.I rattled off the names of a few obscure occult texts, which made him laugh. Then he told me: I hold in my hand twelve pages of the Kelub Sheirim.”

My first response was to laugh. Chris expected that. The Kelub Sheirim! The Great White Whale of alchemists, Western occultists, conspiracy theorists and heavy metal aficionados, a mythical grimoire cited but never quoted, glimpsed but never procured—twelve pages of the grandaddy of all forbidden lost books, in Ted’s hands. Chris waited as my mind raced up the same greased pole of improbability without reaching the summit. No one owned a copy or even a fragment of the Kelub Sheirim because the Kelub Sheirim did not and could not exist.

Like everything about the Kelub Sheirim, it’s origin story is too poetically blasphemous to be true. Even the title—a phonetic mangling of the Aramaic words “basket” or “cage” and “he-goat”—could have been dreamed up by Pentecostal preachers to scare parents of teenagers. Penned by the notorious Spanish monk Father Rodrigo the Mystic in the 17th century, the Kelub Sheirim is the Rosetta Stone for occultists, necromancers, and practitioners of black magic.

The story goes that Father Rodrigo suffered a brain injury while working in the monastery’s garden. After a long coma, he surprised his fellow monks by awakening one morning in perfect health. He came back from his long sleep with the most amazing story. He said that during his coma he’d died and been sent to Hell for sins so vile he’d held them back from his confessor. While he was in Hell, Father Rodrigo, being an educated man, was put to work as a court stenographer for a demon who passed judgment on souls rejected at the gates of Heaven. Rodrigo wrote these court records in a kind of demonic shorthand that blended pictograms, hieroglyphs and ciphers. The shorthand, he said, was necessary because the language of demons could not be put to paper—the paper would burn to ash before a single word was written down. In the demonic and angelic realms, Rodrigo insisted, language is absolutely pure, without connotation or inflexion—it is the very structure and hierarchy of reality encoded in speech. With this language of power, God spoke the universe into existence. The shorthand was an approximation of that language.

Rodrigo died three weeks later, but he lived long enough to transcribe several pages of the demonic tongue for his brother monks. This manuscript the monks named the Kelub Sheirim, for they believed that the words would give the monks the power to command demons. War broke out before the monks could put the manuscript to use, and they had to flee the monastery.

The next chapters in the Kelub Sheirim saga read like the film treatment for an Indiana Jones prequel. Some versions say that the monks, fearing that the Kelub Sheirim would fall into the wrong hands, tried to burn the manuscript but that it was impervious to fire. In others, each monk was entrusted with single page, which they were instructed to bury or toss down a well when they had resettled. The version preferred by occultists is that Father Rodrigo’s assistant cribbed his own version and smuggled it out of the monastery. It’s that version of the Kelub Sheirim, written in a simplified script, that every occultist dreams of finding in a monastery archive or Middle Eastern bazaar. Even a fragment, it’s said, would give the occultist an “in” with the dark powers. A fragment of a single page supposedly passed through the hands of Aleister Crowley; he was so traumatized by the experience that he briefly considered converting back to the fundamentalist Christian faith of his childhood. The Canadian occultist Titus Blackwood is said to have procured two complete pages; many speculate that his eventual descent into insanity is linked to the find.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Chris said before I could speak, “because I thought the same thing. Poor old Ted had his lost his marbles. Or the cancer had reached his brain. He was too smart to fall for a forgery, but that didn’t make the manuscript pages an actual sample of the Kelub Sheirim. Ted had anticipated my reaction. He was ready for it.”

Ted slipped the pages back in the satchel. “Come with me,” he commanded. “Come with me and I’ll show you how to cage a demon.”

The concluding installation of The Heart of a Pig, “Secret Chambers,” will appear this weekend. To read Part I, click here; to read Part II, here; Part III is here, Part IV is here, Part V here and Part VI here. Keep the comments coming, and if you like the story, please take a moment to share the joy on your social media channels.