The Devil's Moon by Peter Guttridge Page B

deal with them sometime but maybe that was why she was throwing herself into work. Specifically, she was avoiding dealing with the fact that her father, the government adviser William Simpson, had been implicated in the Milldean Massacre and involved with the gangster Charlie Laker. The gangster who had tried to have Kate raped and beaten as a warning to her father.
    She wondered what Laker had threatened her mother with. She was guessing that something like that – or perhaps the fact that her father seemed to be getting drawn deeper and deeper into a criminal morass – had prompted her mother to leave her father after so many years.
    Her mother was now ensconced in the flat in Kemp Town for which Kate had been paying her parents a peppercorn rent. It was one of the reasons Kate was still living with Sarah Gilchrist. Live with her mother? No, thanks very much.
    Kate came out on Brighton Place, opposite Brighton’s old jail house, and turned into the Druid’s Head.
    As usual it was full of Goths: black-garbed, white-faced, tattooed, pierced men and women in clumpy boots. Given how she felt, she would fit right in. She ordered a cranberry juice and took it over to an empty sofa just inside the door.
    She liked this pub. Its name was cheesy – invented sometime in the past few decades – but a pub had been on this site for centuries. It had thick flint walls and a high ceiling. Angst was the music of choice but sometimes that was OK.
    She opened her laptop and looked at her notes.
    She’d found an odd link between a black magician called Aleister Crowley and the Church of Scientology, whose UK headquarters were just up the road in East Grinstead.
    She didn’t intend to go into them for her programme – her bosses would have a fit if she tried investigating such a wealthy, powerful and touchy organization. Even the threat of a massive lawsuit would probably close the station down.
    Nevertheless, Aleister Crowley had been an influence on L. Ron Hubbard, the science-fiction writer who had founded Scientology. In a lecture in 1952 Hubbard had called Crowley ‘my very good friend’. There were similarities between their teachings. Crowley had said that the sole object of all ‘true’ magical training was to become ‘free of all limitations’. Hubbard, in a clip from a 1952 lecture she’d listened to online, said: ‘Our whole activity tends to make an individual completely independent of any limitation.’
    In 1945, before he founded Scientology, Hubbard had been involved with Crowley’s Church of Thelema, although how he’d been involved was debatable. A man called Wilfred Smith had founded a lodge of Crowley’s church – the Ordo Templi Orientis – in Pasadena.
    Another man called Jack Parsons had taken over as boss of that lodge at the start of the 1940s. He was a rocket engineer – he’d founded Cal Tech so was a man of some stature. But he was a believer in Crowley’s mystical mumbo-jumbo.
    At the time Hubbard was a Captain in the US Navy stationed nearby. He moved in with Parsons in Pasadena. There was a letter still in existence from Parsons to Crowley saying something about Hubbard being quite knowledgeable about esoteric matters and in perfect accord with their own principles. Through a magic ceremony Parsons aimed to create a moonchild – mightier than all the kings of the earth – whose birth Crowley had prophesied in The Book of The Law and in a novel of the same name.
    To create this child Parsons and Hubbard did eleven days of rituals and early in 1946 found a girl prepared to become the mother of this moonchild. The three days of rituals at the start of March involved Parsons as High Priest having sex with the girl whilst Hubbard looked on and acted as scryer, describing what was happening on the astral plane.
    Hubbard told a different story and Kate had no means of knowing whether to believe or disbelieve him.