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I still remember the moment I knew I’d found success. I was boiling a mixture of chemicals – nothing very fancy, I’ll give you the details later if you want ‘em, but you should wait till it’s been perfected – in  a retort, had boiled it almost dry, till there was only a sticky dark-red tar at the bottom of the flask. I opened the retort for an instant to prod it with a glass rod to see if it were ready, and the dark red vapour inside began to leak out. As soon as the first of it entered my nostrils something seemed to burn through my brain; I had a vision of a vast empty plain and a red sky, and strange shapes seemed to go flapping past only just out of sight.

I hesitated a lot before trying it on myself. I admit that I was in a blue funk. Finally I decided to try and get it over with. The apparatus was ready: an oxygen cylinder from which the oxygen was made to percolate through my sticky mixture and then to me via an oxygen mask. I lay back on my bed, and regulated the valve, and as the vapour hit my senses everything gave a spin and a half and went dark.

What I’m going to tell you now, you will understand, is difficult for me to express. For at the next moment I was like a disembodied spirit; literally without a body, and therefore I had left my eyes and ears and skin behind. I could not, therefore, “see” or “taste” or “touch” or “hear” or “smell”; when I use any of these words, what I mean is that I am trying to put the way I sensed what was going on around me into terms you, who have never experienced this, and I, who am not at this moment experiencing this, can understand.

I was, if I can put it that way, standing on a vast plain of smooth undulating rock. Overhead was a sky that was black, but starless and moonless. There was no sense of it being night; it seemed perfectly clear to me that the sky was always that way. And from the horizon all around, a sullen red glow climbed into the sky, almost to the zenith, as if gigantic fires burned uncontrolled just below the horizon. It was a bleaker place than any of us can, from my words, imagine.

Far away, I saw a structure on the smooth rock. It was the only feature there on that dreadful plain, and as I went closer to it I saw it was a great dome held up by squat pillars. And in the space under the dome, I felt rather than saw a great coming and going of hundreds of forms, flying, crawling, swimming, slithering, and oozing to their places.

It was the great Parliament of Demons.

On a great throne of skulls under the centre of the dome sat Beelzebub himself, with his three horns and seven eyes; ranged around him were the other denizens of his world. There was Adramelech made all of fire; there was goat-headed, flame-eyed Azazel; there was lion-headed Ipos, and there was Lilith, winged and lovely with her alabaster skin and clad only in her flowing black hair, and her son, Ahirman, terrible and wonderful to gaze upon, and many more besides. And ranged around them, in their thousands upon thousands, were the lesser demons, beings of field and forest and ocean and environs never known to man. And even as I gazed upon them, I grew aware that above us all there was a Presence, a Presence so vast and so powerful and so evil that to even acknowledge Its existence would drive reason from my mind like a bat flapping away from the light. One might not gaze on that Presence and hope to keep oneself intact.

So I kept my attention fixed on what was happening in front of Beelzebub, where, in a round cleared space under the Dome, they brought out a figure for sacrifice. And when I saw that figure, my heart seemed to stop.

You know I am not married, and that as far as romance is concerned I have kept myself under check. Quite frankly, and with apologies to you, it’s not that I never cared for women as anything but undifferentiated human beings – it was just that none of them came even close to matching my image of the Perfect Woman for whom I was waiting.

And then – in that instant, before the massed circle of demons, naked and bound for the knife of sacrifice to the Presence above – I saw her. She was the consummation of all my desires, the light of a million days, the woman I had spent my life awaiting, had I only known it. And here she was, in the midst of the demons, readied for sacrifice.

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