This referred to Mr. Shemus de la Plume, Naval Intelligence's ace handwriting forger.
And so, within thirty-six hours, the Washington Post had come into possession of a diary, allegedly written by John Disk, the man who had killed Bonny Benedict. The diary only looked cryptic at first glance. With a little study, anybody with at least two inches of forehead could figure out, from the abbreviations and clumsy codes used, that Disk had been an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.
This was quite a shock to both Disk and the CIA, who had never had any connection with each other.
Actually, Disk had been raised in the True Holy Roman Catholic Church, a bizarre fascistoid splinter group which had broken with the Vatican during the reign of Pope Stephen of Dublin.
When Disk reached his adolescence in the early 1970s, however, strange things began to happen to him. At first he thought it was demons-he had seen The Exorcist and believed every bit of it-but his priest told him it was all because he kept Lourding himself.
Disk went to Confession every time he gave in to the temptation to Lourde-off, which was five times a week after he reached seventeen, and the priest kept telling him to use Self-Control and take cold showers. The priest also said that all the demons were in hell and Johnny should stop worrying about them.
The only people who believed in demonic possession, the priest said, were the benighted fanatics in the Orthodox Holy Roman Catholic Church.
Everybody in the True Holy Roman Catholic Church despised and hated the members of the Orthodox Holy Roman Catholic Church, which was another splinter group that had broken away from the Vatican during the reign of Pope Stephen. The members of the Orthodox Holy Roman Catholic Church hated them back, you can be sure. In fact, in the typical manner of splinter groups, they each hated the other more than they hated the common enemy, the heretics in the Vatican.
John Disk finally decided that what was wrong with him was not caused by demons and-since he was able to cut down on his Lourding-off to only twice a week after he passed twenty-it wasn't entirely caused by Sin, either.
He was being poisoned.
The reason he had cycles of agitation and elation, followed by cycles of anxiety and growing fear that everything was somehow unreal, was because he was eating an Impure diet.
The reason there were wars and rumors of wars, and revolutions and depressions, and pornography and lewd, sinful women in immodest clothing on every street was because all the food was full of toxic, mind-destroying chemicals.
The people responsible for this were the Triangular Commission, the Power Elite, the Elders of Zion, the Bavarian Illuminati, and the American Medical Association.
He had learned this by reading books on Organic Diet from bookstores run by the John Birch Society, the Natural Hygienists, the Purity of Ecology Party, and various other groups who were inclined to go through cycles of agitation, elation, anxiety, feelings of unreality, etc., and had realized this was caused by Impurity of Essence in their food.
John Disk read a great deal of this literature and changed his mind about twenty times before he finally decided which school of "correct nutrition" was really correct.
He decided Purity of Ecology was the group that really knew what the hell was going on. He believed every word in Unsafe Wherever You Go by POE's founder, Furbish Lousewart.
By the age of twenty-three, Disk was a typical POE member. When not putting in his thirty hours a week working in their printing plant-where he received lodging and an Organic Diet in lieu of pay-he was out on the streets selling their newspaper, Doom, or giving away their four-page mini-pamphlets, which had titles like Poison in Every Pot; Science: Satan's Plot Against God and Man; and Jimmy Carter, Servant of the Jesuit-Zionist Conspiracy.
POE hated President Carter because he had defeated Furbish Lousewart in the 1980 election. But, with the typical logic of splinter groups, they did not hate Carter nearly as much as they hated Eve Hubbard, of the Libertarian Immortalist Party, who also got more votes than Lousewart, even though she came in third.
The POE people hated the Libertarian Immortalists for another reason, which was that the LIP platform was blasphemous and unpatriotic.
Hubbard's slogan was "No more death and taxes."
She planned to end taxes by running the government like a profit-sharing corporation, terminating all interference in the internal affairs of other countries (thus allowing the military budget to be cut every year, instead of growing every year), and paying each citizen a dividend on the profits the Unistat Corporation earned through investing in space colonization to tap into the vast energy and resources of Free Space.
Hubbard planned to end death by investing the profits from space in longevity research, which the majority of scientists in the field were now convinced could lead to doubling or tripling the human life span in the first generation, and could lead to indefinite expansion thereafter.
The POE people realized that these proposals were scientific and rational.
They therefore regarded them as Satanic.
After three years in POE, John Disk still had cycles of agitation and unreality; but the leaders of the cult assured him that it took at least that long for the poisons in his previous diet to leave his system totally. If he stayed on the correct POE diet, they insisted, he would become as serene as they were.
Still, things were getting to be more unreal more of the time. Disk looked in the mirror one morning, combing his hair, and seemed to see a middle-aged man looking out at him. It was only a flash, a single crack in the fabric of time, but it was unnerving. When the face turned back to his own-young, black-haired, pale-he wondered for a wild moment if he were truly a young man who had had a vision of himself twenty years older or a middle-aged man who was now having a hallucination of himself twenty years younger.
But that was only a short fugue, for in a moment he recognized that the face in the mirror was not his twenty-years-later, but rather a face that had adorned the cover of Time magazine a few months ago. It was the face of Dr. Francis Dashwood, president of Orgasm Research Inc., Commie pervert Satanist sinner who spent most of his time observing things that John would like to do but was afraid to do because of twenty years of conditioning by the True Holy Roman Catholic Church.
Which was bad enough, certainly, but not as bad as what was to come: voices at first so faint as to be barely perceptible, but slowly and insidiously growing louder, voices which were female and kept saying You are George Dorn and Imagine you can see my Brownmillers through my sweater and The interpenetration of the universes has begun, but mostly saying over and over You are George Dorn.
And there were occasions, only a second in external time but stretching to infinity in a multiple of new dimensions he found or created within, when the Sages would gather him into their Maybe realm ("In addition to a Yes and a No, the universe contains a Maybe" was the password to pass the Lurker at the Threshold) and there would be Jesus saying "Is it not written, Ye are Gods?" and Emperor Norton saying "I just made myself Emperor of Unistat, Protector of Mexico, and King of the Jews," and Fed Xing saying "There are many universes and mind-states" and Beethoven singing the evolutionary scenario in eight cycles and Great Chtulhu's Starry Wisdom Band and Glorious Lucifer Son of the Morning who had never fallen because the message of the scriptures was written backward in a mirror and then Linda Lovelace would come in and start doing disgusting immoral things and he would be back, the splinter of eternity contracting the Euclidean 3-D, standing on a street handing out Poison in Every Pot and wondering if he was losing his mind.