In bed at Cheyne Walk, Laura wanted to hear about Juan. You know what he thinks about the words the Darkness dictates? I said to her once. Juan believed that the utterances were all in the mind of the scribes. Or, in any case, that what the Darkness said could not be interpreted on this plane. Laura turned over in bed, and her unbuttoned shirt revealed a tattooed breast; she tattooed herself, if she could, or else she asked a friend of hers whom I hardly knew, a fox breeder who read viscera as a system of divination, and who hated me because she wanted to be Laura’s only lover.

He’s right, she told me, and the smoke from her cigarette took on the smell of danger, because what we were saying meant shaking the very foundations of the Order: we were questioning the Book. She went on holding forth, fuelled by the alcohol, while I put on an album so we couldn’t be heard from outside. The Book contains fragments that are worthless, she was saying. There are passages of text that were supposedly dictated by the Darkness, but that are identical to fragments of grimoires in the Order’s library. Or that even copy modern texts more or less faithfully, texts from occultists in this century. There are excerpts from The Lesser Key of Solomon! “Ars Paulina” is there in its entirety. It’s clumsy. But doesn’t Florence know? I asked. And Laura would repeat: Florence is one of the scribes, at least when she wants to be. She’s a great woman, but it’s not the first time she’s been wrong, and if she admits any of it is fake, she has to also admit that the method to preserve consciousness dictated by the Darkness could be false too. And she can’t admit that, because she would lose her power.

When Laura said those things, I felt anguish. My throat closed off, my chest hurt. All a lie. The possibility of living forever, or at least a very long life, a lie. She kissed me on the lips, and as her teeth collided with mine, she’d say, I could be wrong, baby.

A cult that doesn’t offer everlasting benefits, or ones that last an unusually long time, does not construct a faith. And belief is nonnegotiable. Florence believed. She had to, not just to preserve her own power, but because she had destroyed her son in the process. Hermes is the god of writing, but he is also the god of falsehoods, I thought, but I didn’t say that to Laura: instead, I started untangling her hair, which was about to turn into the kind of dreadlocks Brixton’s West Indians wore.