Jack of Ravens

16

14 January 1967 was a turning point for the counterculture. The Human Be-In attracted 30,000 people to the polo field in Golden Gate Park to hear the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and other bands on the brink of breaking through to the big time. Timothy Leary was in the audience along with the poet Allen Ginsberg and the Berkeley revolutionary Jerry Rubin. The Diggers handed out turkey sandwiches with LSD in the bread mix.

It was an unqualified success with waves of positivity rippling out across the country and the world. Church and the others experienced many strange things around the event, and soon after it was clear that something else had changed.

More people were found dead in the Haight with the same weeping sores and partial transformation that Church had witnessed on the youth in Golden Gate Park. The authorities refused to take any action despite mounting claims that there was some sort of plague loose in the quarter. Rumours began that it was sexually transmitted or in the batches of LSD and marijuana that flooded the streets. Some people turned to amphetamines and heroin, and violence, rape and overdoses increased accordingly. The Haight was awash with sightings of ‘monsters’. More rumours spread through the enclosed community; no one could separate fact from fiction.

Yet of the spider-people there was no sign. They had slipped into the background, subtly manipulating from positions of power. But when the Haight was flooded with heroin the day after all the soft-drug dealers were arrested, or when the police brutally beat up people for jaywalking, Church knew who was behind it somewhere up the chain of power.

Gabe’s new job as a freelance photographer for the local counterculture newspaper, the San Francisco Oracle, took him to the centre of what was happening in Haight-Ashbury. But Church found it also raised his own profile. Thanks to Gabe, people all over the quarter knew who Church was, and that he was doing ‘good works’, though the nature of those works was always left vague.

And then, as he got used once again to the full force of the Pendragon Spirit flooding his system, he realised he was aware of nodes in the city where the earth energy was particularly strong: in the Panhandle, and on the university campus. And then he became aware of the energy in Grace. If he allowed his consciousness to settle into a peaceful state, he could almost picture where she was in the city. Subtle connections began to come to light, and that was when he realised he could use the Spirit to his advantage.