Smoke and Mirrors

—Michael Moorcock, in conversation, Notting Hill, 1976

There was the Eternal Champion, and then there was the Companion to Champions. Moonglum was Elric’s companion, always cheerful, the perfect foil to the pale prince, who was prey to moods and depressions.

There was a multiverse out there, glittering and magic. There were the agents of balance, the Gods of Chaos, and the Lords of Order. There were the older races, tall, pale, and elfin, and the young kingdoms, filled with people like him. Stupid, boring, normal people.

Sometimes he hoped that Elric could find peace away from the black sword. But it didn’t work that way. There had to be the both of them—the white prince and the black sword.

Once the sword was unsheathed, it lusted for blood, needed to be plunged into quivering flesh. Then it would drain the soul from the victim, feed his or her energy into Elric’s feeble frame.

Richard was becoming obsessed with sex; he had even had a dream in which he was ha**ng s*x with a girl. Just before waking, he dreamed what it must be like to have an orgasm—it was an intense and magical feeling of love, centered on your heart; that was what it was, in his dream.

A feeling of deep, transcendent, spiritual bliss.

Nothing he experienced ever matched up to that dream.

Nothing even came close.

The Karl Glogauer in Behold the Man was not the Karl Glogauer of Breakfast in the Ruins, Richard decided; still, it gave him an odd, blasphemous pride to read Breakfast in the Ruins in the school chapel in the choir stalls. As long as he was discreet no one seemed to care.

He was the boy with the book. Always and forever.

His head swam with religions: the weekend was now given to the intricate patterns and language of Judaism; each weekday morning to the wood-scented, stained-glass solemnities of the Church of England; and the nights belonged to his own religion, the one he made up for himself, a strange, multicolored pantheon in which the Lords of Chaos (Arioch, Xiombarg, and the rest) rubbed shoulders with the Phantom Stranger from the DC Comics and Sam the trickster-Buddha from Zelazny’s Lord of Light, and vampires and talking cats and ogres, and all the things from the Lang colored Fairy books: in which all mythologies existed simultaneously in a magnificent anarchy of belief.

Richard had, however, finally given up (with, it must be admitted, a little regret) his belief in Narnia. From the age of six—for half his life—he had believed devoutly in all things Narnian; until, last year, rereading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader for perhaps the hundredth time, it had occurred to him that the transformation of the unpleasant Eustace Scrub into a dragon and his subsequent conversion to belief in Aslan the lion was terribly similar to the conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus; if his blindness were a dragon . . .

This having occurred to him, Richard found correspondences everywhere, too many to be simple coincidence.

Richard put away the Narnia books, convinced, sadly, that they were allegory; that an author (whom he had trusted) had been attempting to slip something past him. He had had the same disgust with the Professor Challenger stories, when the bull-necked old professor became a convert to Spiritualism; it was not that Richard had any problems with believing in ghosts—Richard believed, with no problems or contradictions, in everything—but Conan Doyle was preaching, and it showed through the words. Richard was young, and innocent in his fashion, and believed that authors should be trusted, and that there should be nothing hidden beneath the surface of a story.

At least the Elric stories were honest. There was nothing going on beneath the surface there: Elric was the etiolated prince of a dead race, burning with self-pity, clutching Stormbringer, his dark-bladed broadsword—a blade which sang for lives, which ate human souls, and which gave their strength to the doomed and weakened albino.

Richard read and reread the Elric stories, and he felt pleasure each time Stormbringer plunged into an enemy’s chest, somehow felt a sympathetic satisfaction as Elric drew his strength from the soul-sword, like a he**in addict in a paperback thriller with a fresh supply of smack.

Richard was convinced that one day the people from Mayflower Books would come after him for their 25 pence. He never dared buy any more books through the mail.

J.B.C. MacBride had a secret.

“You mustn’t tell anyone.”

“Okay.”

Richard had no problem with the idea of keeping secrets. In later years he realized that he was a walking repository of old secrets, secrets that his original confidants had probably long forgotten.

They were walking, with their arms over each other’s shoulders, up to the woods at the back of the school.

Richard had, unasked, been gifted with another secret in these woods: it is here that three of Richard’s school friends have meetings with girls from the village and where, he has been told, they display to each other their genitalia.

“I can’t tell you who told me any of this.”

“Okay,” said Richard.

“I mean, it’s true. And it’s a deadly secret.”

“Fine.”

MacBride had been spending a lot of time recently with Mr. Aliquid, the school chaplain.

“Well, everybody has two angels. God gives them one and Satan gives them one. So when you get hypnotized, Satan’s angel takes control. And that’s how Ouija boards work. It’s Satan’s angel. And you can implore your God’s angel to talk through you. But real enlightenment only occurs when you can talk to your angel. He tells you secrets.”

This was the first time that it had occurred to Grey that the Church of England might have its own esoterica, its own hidden cabala.

The other boy blinked owlishly. “You mustn’t tell anyone that. I’d get into trouble if they knew I’d told you.”

“Fine.”

There was a pause.

“Have you ever wanked off a grown-up?” asked MacBride.

“No.” Richard’s own secret was that he had not yet begun to masturbate. All of his friends masturbated, continually, alone and in pairs or groups. He was a year younger than them and couldn’t understand what the fuss was about; the whole idea made him uncomfortable.

“Spunk everywhere. It’s thick and oozy. They try to get you to put their cocks in your mouth when they shoot off.”

“Eugh.”

“It’s not that bad.” There was a pause. “You know, Mr. Aliquid thinks you’re very clever. If you wanted to join his private religious discussion group, he might say yes.”

The private discussion group met at Mr. Aliquid’s small bachelor house across the road from the school in the evenings, twice a week after prep.