He says, "My father and I both have some sort of heart disorder, a heart murmur. I was really sick when I was a kid. I had pneumonia four or five times and was always in the hospital, always underweight, scrawny, primed for a beating."

Phones ring in the other offices. Four lanes of traffic go by outside.

"When I was writing the book [his autobiography]," Manson says, "I hadn't really gotten to the conclusion of how similar I was to my grandfather. Until I got to the end of the book, that hadn't dawned on me. That as a kid, I'm looking at him as a monster because he's got women's clothing and dildos and all these things, and by the end of my story I've become far worse than my grandfather ever was.

"I don't think I've told anyone this," Manson says, "but what I found out over the last year is that my father and my grandfather never got along. My father came back from the Vietnam War and was kind of tossed out on the street and told he had to pay rent. There's something really dark about that I never liked. And my father told me last year that he'd found out that that's not his real father. Which was the strangest thing I'd ever heard, because it started to make sense that maybe he was treated poorly and had this weird relationship. It's really weird to think that he wasn't really my grandfather."

He says, "I suspect that there's so much death imagery because as a kid being afraid of death-because I was always sick and always had sick relatives-there was always a fear of death for a long time. There was a fear of the Devil. A fear of the end of the world. The Rapture-which is a Christian myth that I discovered doesn't even exist in the Bible. All of that I just ended up becoming. I ended up becoming what I was afraid of. That was my way of dealing with it."

In the attic, Manson deals his fifth card: the Hanged Man

"The fifth card is more of your recent past," he says. "It also is meant to mean some sort of change has taken place, in this case it could mean the fact that I've become extremely more focused and maybe in some ways have neglected friendships and relationships."

He says, "I was born in 69, and that year's become such a focus for a lot of things, especially this record, Holy Wood. Because 69 was the end of so many things. Everything in culture just changed so much, and I think it was real important that I was born then, too. Just the end of the sixties. The fact that Huxley and Kennedy died on the same day. To me, that opened up some kind of schism or gateway to what was going to happen. It all started to show parallels for me. Altamonte was like Woodstock 99. The house I live in, the Stones lived there when they wrote 'Let It Bleed. I found Cocksucker Blues, an obscure film that they made, and it shows them in my living room writing 'Gimme Shelter. And 'Gimme Shelter' was the song that was emblematic of the whole Altamonte tragedy. And then the Manson murders were something I've always obsessed over, since I was a child. That to me had the same media coverage as Columbine.

"The thing that always bothered me was," he says, "this is the exact same thing. Nixon came out and said Manson was guilty during the trial, because Nixon was being blamed for everything that was wrong about the culture. Then the same thing happened with Clinton saying, 'Why are these kids acting so violent? It must be Marilyn Manson. It must be this movie. It must be this game. Then he turns the cheek and sends some bombs overseas to kill a bunch of people. And he's wondering why kids have bombs and they're killing people…"

Manson brings out watercolor paintings he's done, bright and dark colorful Rorshsach-test portraits of McGowen. Paintings he does with-not so much the paints as the murky rinse water he uses to clean his brushes. One shows the grinning heads of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold impaled on the raised fingers of a peace sign.

"It turns out that they weren't fans," he says. "One Denver reporter did enough research to prove they disliked me because I was too commercial. They were into more underground stuff. It pissed me off that the media took one thing, and it just kept snowballing. And it was because I'm an easy target. I look guilty. And I was on tour at the time."

He says, "People always ask me, 'What would you have said to them if you could talk to them? and my answer is, 'Nothing. I would've listened. That's the problem. Nobody listened to what they were saying. If you'd listened, you'd have known what was going on."

He says, "Strangely, although music is something to listen to, I think music listens back because there's no judgments. A kid can find something he identifies with. Or an adult. Here's a place you can go to where there's no judgments. There's not someone telling you what to believe in."

Manson deals his sixth card: the Star

"This card is the future," he says. "The Star. This means great success."

He says, "For a long time, I never saw myself getting to this point. I never looked beyond this because I thought I was either going to destroy myself or someone was going to kill me in the process. So in some ways I have beaten the dream. And it is scary. It is like starting over, but that's good because that's what I needed. There's been a lot of little rebirths along the way, but now I feel like I've born over into where I started out, but with a different interpretation. I've gone back in time in a way, but now I have more ammunition, more knowledge to face the world."

He says, "The natural thing for me to do is to be involved in movies, but it really has to be on my terms. I think I feel more suited as a director than an actor, although I like to act. I'm talking to Jodorowsky, the guy who did El Topo and The Holy Mountain. He's a Spanish director who worked with Dalí. He wrote a script called Able Cain and it's a fantastic thing. He's had it for about fifteen years, and he hasn't wanted to do it, but he contacted me because I was the only person he wanted to work with. And the character is very different from what people know of me, and that's the only reason I'm interested because most people who approach me, they want me to do different versions of myself. It's not really a challenge of any sort."

In the spring of 2001, Manson plans to publish his first novel, called Holy Wood, a narrative that will cover his first three records. In the attic, he sits on the floor, leaning into the blue light from his laptop and reads the first chapter out loud, a magical, surreal, poetic story, crammed with detail and cut loose from traditional boring fiction. Fascinating, but for now, top secret.

He deals his seventh card: the High Priestess

"This one," he says, "I'm not sure about."

People who come to interview Manson, his publicist asks that they not publish the fact that he stands whenever a woman enters or leaves the room. After his father was disabled with a back injury, Manson bought his parents a home in California and supports them. When checking into hotels, he uses the name "Patrick Bateman," the serial-killing character from Bret Ellis's novel American Psycho.

He deals his eighth card: the World

"The World," he says, "placed appropriately here represents the environmental or outside things that can prevent you."

He says, "I had a great, interesting experience in Dublin. Because it's very Catholic, I did this performance on the European tour. I had this cross made of TVs that burst into flames, and I came out-I basically was just nude except for leather underwear. I'd painted myself all charred. I came onstage, the cross was on fire, and I saw people in the front row turn around and face the other direction. It was unbelievable. It was the greatest compliment in a performance. They were so offended-and it's unbelievable to me that someone could be that offended-that they turned around and looked the other way. Hundreds of people."