Spring, as they say, has sprung.
That’s why, to change subjects slightly from my usual fare, I’ve decided to recount something here that I heard a long time ago from a trusted, if rather eccentric source.
I don’t know if anyone out there is even reading these disconnected bits of information that I’ve attempted to collect and collate in these pages, and I guess after all it really doesn’t matter all that much—if the Internet truly is eternal, as some like to believe (I certainly don’t), then perhaps it is enough to record the information for the sake of posterity.
Maybe someone in the future will make use of it.
Anyhow, the point I’m trying to make is that I’ve come across some extremely unusual tidbits of information during the course of a fairly long and eventful career exploring and investigating the bizarre and outré. Someday I’ll have to write more about this career; although, since I loathe autobiography, I suppose that’s another ambition of mine that will probably remain unrealized.
I keep wandering from my purpose.
What I’m trying to say is that it is often very difficult for me to correlate the reality and the interconnectedness of the things I have learned; sometimes, they seem to contradict each other, or operate at baffling cross-purposes, despite the manifest evidence I have encountered to prove the independent veracity of these different parallel and irreconcilable facts.
Perhaps there is something to be said for those notions of “multiverses” or “parallel realities,” and all that stuff about a “Mandela Effect.”
Perhaps.
But my Traditionalist leanings tend to militate against that interpretation. I do, however, believe in the multiple states of the being, a metaphysical explanation of the world that is ably explicated by René Guénon in his book of that name, and I believe that much of the strangeness and seeming irreconcilability of this confounding world can be explained thereby.
Enough. I’m procrastinating, so there’s nothing for it but to dive into the story I wish to recount.
Some background is in order. In a previous life, I used to live in South Florida. This is a part of the world that ought to seem rank with the malodor of modernity; indeed, it does, as I should know, for I lived there and came to know the place well. Country clubs, strip malls, golf courses as far as the eye can see, meddling homeowners’ associations, senior citizens, seedy strip clubs, and a noxious and toxic mélange of shysters and Ponzi schemers—that, in a nutshell, is South Florida in all its squalid and subtropical glory.
It is the Kali-Yuga laid bare for all to see; its ugliness and soul-scarring horror unmasked and manifested, as indeed it ought to be in these latter days of our present Manvantara.
But, as is the nature of things, it was also in this cesspool of modernity that I was first exposed to what the theurges or Chaldeans of old called ὁ ἀληθέστερος ἥλιος—“the truer sun” that illuminates the hidden side of reality, or what Arthur Machen was pleased to call “The Great God Pan.”
It was here that I met a very unusual individual, whom I later learned was an apostate or excommunicated member of the College of Seth. I never really understood what caused his break with that organization; a misunderstanding of some kind, I gather, that included a physical altercation in Miami. I think he was also involved with some high-profile matter years ago that drew unwanted attention to the College, or at least one of its local front organizations.
The man himself told me this had to do with the Δήρροι, the “Derroes,” which he claims were nesting and multiplying like rats beneath Miami, and that he had routed them and chased them from their dens one fine night and overthrown the idols he had discovered of their unmentionable god. Anyhow, that was his story, and there had apparently been some unpleasantness involving the local police…though all charges were eventually dropped and the whole affair was buried and largely kept from the notice of the inept local media.
Either way, the man was a friend, and he introduced me to some very influential people in the College of Seth, for which I am eternally grateful; much if not all of the information I have recorded in these pages is the fruit of these contacts, and so I am indebted to this man.
When I knew him, he was a tow-truck driver operating out of Boynton Beach, but he liked to tell me this was something of a front; he liked to cruise the streets of South Florida at night, his “beat” as he called it, searching for “intimations of the uncanny.” He often told me that every seedy news story in South Florida—from financial fraud, to inexplicable “suicides,” to mysterious disappearances, to the innumerable and often grotesque rapes and murders—could be attributed to the votaries of what the College often called “The Inhabitant,” and that these all conduced in some fashion to the great conspiracy of evil that lay back of all history. Traditionalists would term that the Counter-Tradition and the Counter-Initiation, but the materialist Collegians eschew such terminology.
In any case, my friend told me—with a straight face—that South Florida had more Rmoahals and members of the Elder Race per capita than anywhere else on earth. He said they liked to disguise themselves amidst the heavily botoxed and face-lifted geriatrics of the country clubs and gated communities, and that every pompously named “retirement community”—typically some Latinate or Italianate confection like “Olympia” or “Toscana” or “Saturnia Estates”—along US 441 was basically a seething nest of the things.
Who am I to doubt him?
That is the story of my friend. The point I’m trying to make is that this man (whose name I am deliberately withholding) made a profound impact on me; and though he was eccentric and his beliefs were decidedly not of the mainstream, I believe him in all things, utterly and without question, for I have had reason to verify for myself—and in ways too terrible to relate here—the veracity of nearly everything he told me.
I haven’t seen him in many years. The truth is, I’m not even sure he’s still alive; his chosen path in life was a dangerous one, and he made many powerful enemies. I hope he’s alive, though, and I hope he finally married that beautiful secretary of his. She had two kids and a deadbeat ex, and she was obviously in love with my friend…though he pretended not to notice.
So much for the background. Now for the story I wanted to recount:
One day, years ago, my friend told me a bewildering tale, and I hardly know what to make of it, even these many years later. He believed it entirely, and as I said, I believe my friend implicitly. Still, it is a strange story, and it is difficult to reconcile it with other things that I know to be true.
I still have the recording of the story, because I prevailed on my friend at the time to let me record the history of some of his cases; you see, as I neglected to mention, he was something of a troubleshooter in South Florida, and was known in certain underground circles as a man who could get things done. He made most of his living undertaking work for clients that was very much, shall we say…off the books.
My friend told me that he knew a man, a private investigator who used to work in Miami in the late seventies and early eighties. The PI’s name was Dickie Savidge, and my friend said that he was something of a character—kind of a cross between Jim Garner as James Rockford and Burt Reynolds in “Smokey and the Bandit.” He liked to wear a cowboy hat, aviator shades, and a leather jacket with tassels—even, or perhaps especially, in the South Florida heat. A real character, as I said, and somewhat notorious in local circles.
Dickie Savidge overdosed on cocaine during the bad years in Miami in the middle or later eighties; I guess that’s beside the point, but I suppose it shows that Savidge was a somewhat seedy individual himself. Anyway, my friend tells me that Savidge was up in New York City in 1980 or ’81, chasing down a lead on some petty insurance scam or other in Coral Gables.
It turns out Dickie Savidge’s lead was a fairly obscure porn star who called herself “Funky Stardust;” her “real name,” as I’ve since learned, was Donna Sykes, but no amount of digging on my part could ascertain any further information, so I don’t even know whether that name is indeed “real” or not. If she had a birthplace, birthdate, or friends or family of any kind, I’ll be damned if I could find any of them; moreover, she seemed to drop out of sight in the early eighties, and her trail goes cold…ice cold.
Anyhow, apparently Funky was a big fan of the obscure disco queen Roberta Kelly, whose Zodiacs album (1977) includes a track entitled “Funky Stardust.” Not terribly relevant, I suppose, but I guess it does in part explain her unusual nom de scène.
Dickie contacted Funky as part of his case (apparently the insurance scam had something to do with a fly-by-night producer of low-budget pornography and exploitation films, and Funky had the inside scoop), and since he was in New York City chasing a number of leads, she invited him to dine with her in a restaurant on the top floor of one of the Twin Towers.1 Apparently she made enough money in her sordid trade to dine with style.
And that’s where things get strange.
Funky Stardust didn’t in the least want to talk to Dickie about insurance scams. Instead, and for inscrutable reasons of her own, she unfolds to him a panoramic story of the future, and tells the private eye point-blank that this is where she is from—that she is not, in fact, human at all, and that she is really a time traveler from the distant future.
It gets better, much better…or crazier, depending on how you look at it. Funky related a story that involved chilling prophecies, time-traveling Nazis, and humans from the future.
But I think I’ll save that for the next installment…
Windows on the World, evidently.