Smoke and Mirrors

That fucking biography. Shortly after it came out, I was at a Hawkwind gig, stoned out of my brain, and these people kept coming up to me, and I thought I was dead. They kept saying, “You’re dead, you’re dead.” Later I realized that they were saying, “But we thought you were dead.”

—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 having sex 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 heroin 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.”