The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook Read Online Free Page B

of destiny divides in full view, and you know that nothing is ever going to be quite
     the same again. Even as I framed the query, “You know Seabrook?” her earnest gaze told me that I might well be having one
     of those strange moments. “And, what’s cyberpsycho?”
    “There were some books I was s’pose to get, but they got lost,” she answered cryptically. “He’s all over the gamers’ Web sites,
     but his work is like, a little hard to find?” She went on to educate me that another subspecies of the cyberreality had woven
     Gothic sadomasochism together with various schools of dark mysticism. The fantasy scenarios of this virtual cult, including
     some based on the work of writers I’d mentioned to her earlier, even incorporated bits of Seabrook.
    I simply abandoned my intended come-on altogether; began to tell her the story of William Seabrook that I had thus far reconstructed.
     I gave her a synopsis of how the path of the branching worlds in fiction led back indisputably to Seabrook, weirdly paralleling
     developments in physics, which would ultimately confirm the literary notion. I observed how it was therefore ironic that some
     of the most fascinating and frustrating things about Seabrook were the temporal inconsistencies in his record.
    She watched me and listened intently as I went on and on for over an hour. Regarding his boyhood through postadolescence,
     if indeed that phase ever ended, his account was virtually the only source.
    “Seabrook was raised in Maryland’s spooky Pennsylvania Dutch country. One day his
fey
and maybe slightly demented grandmother, with possible assistance from a delightful little bottle, led the sad little boy
     into a clearing in a new wood he’d never seen before. There he saw beautiful bright-plumaged roosters, as tall as houses.
     He described their legs as like the pillars of cathedral aisles. Willie’s only happy escape was into that ‘other dreamworld’
     until his grandfather smashed Grandmother Piny’s laudanum bottle. But it was too late to stop the hypnotic effects of her
     drugged mind on young William.
    “His earliest boyhood pleasures had included gazing at pictures of women in chains. One day Piny had shown him a throne on
     which sat a girl, robed in green, with her ankles bound by shining metal circlets joined by a gleaming chain. Willie remembered
     pressing his hands against her ankles until his own hands held and drew the chains tighter. From that time on, he had two
     ambitions—to be a writer like his grandfather, the editor of the
American Sentinel
—and to chain women. Growing up, he moved from lassoing little girls to spending his earnings on complicated gold and silver
     chains with which he fastened women to pillars and ceilings. Most of the women seemed to enjoy it, even went to dances with
     him, tightly chained.”
    Seabrook did not believe that he had ever ingested laudanum while in his “fairy godmother’s” care at age five. He was convinced
     that the visions were a form of telepathic communion presented by that numinous figure’s drugged mind. In his autobiography,
     he had chronicled his obsession with his girl-mother Myra and his guilty, ambivalent feelings for Charlie, his ill-fated younger
     brother. During the family’s exile to the Midwestern plains, in tow of his Lutheran minister father, his escape was by way
     of dreams of visiting fabled Samarkand or Timbuktu.
    ————————
    H E’D BEEN INVOLVED WITH “BLACK MAGIC” since “early manhood,” Seabrook would write later. What that life-stage designation might have connoted in his times was
     unclear. He had held a bachelor’s degree by nineteen, and completed his master’s a year later. Speculating that his dark fascinations
     may have been “in the blood,” he cited family lore holding his ancestor Peter Boehler, an old Moravian missionary and mentor
     to John Wesley, to have been deeply involved in the black arts.
    The bondage motif to which