Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  The old Sunday Record building next to St Dunstan’s had also been infected. In places, so Tom had read, the wall was so soft you could touch it and leave a handprint.

  This whole street, once exemplifying London at its finest, was a study in dereliction and the loss of hope. Such was Demon City.

  Tom felt his spirits sink. He’d expected it to happen, but even so it was a shock. Tom, by nature, was rarely ‘blue’. For him, the glass was neither half full nor half empty, but always had a measurable level. But now a dark and ugly depression engulfed him like a pillow thrust over his face.

  He had Demon City Fever.

  It had happened before, when Tom had done his guided tour, at the age of twelve. He’d had to be taken home weeping. Some people were immune to the crippling psychological effects induced by the ambience of the demons’ city-state. Tom was not.

  Gina said nothing, but glanced at him. ‘Pills in my bag.’

  ‘I don’t need medication.’

  ‘Take ’em. Give me one.’

  Tom grabbed her bag off the back seat. He opened it and rummaged – awed at the amount of stuff inside. A spare revolver, clips of ammunition, perfume, lipstick, a purse, tissues, half a dozen out of date security passes, an allen key, a torch, a screwdriver, house keys, a bag of Pick ’n’ Mix, a warrant card. And a box of pills. He took two and swallowed one and handed the other to Gina. The pills contained a blend of dragon’s blood, the sap of a mystic palm tree, white cock’s blood, finely ground fool’s gold, and MDMA aka ecstasy. A potent cocktail that was the only known counter-agent to the Demon City anomie.

  ‘Feel better?’ Gina said.

  ‘Not that great actually.’

  ‘But better?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Tom said. He no longer wanted to commit suicide or wed a rotting corpse and live his days in bleak despair; it was a distinct improvement.

  Gina drove on.

  Shadows flashed intermittently across the road. From time to time, Tom heard scratching noises rattling the vehicle, as invisible beasts scraped their claws on the bonnet and roof when they bounded on and off. A respray, he concluded, was going to be essential.

  Gina parped her horn often, and continued to drive slowly. The road was fairly clear and Tom wondered why she was being so cautious. Then a three-headed dog walked into the road in front of them and Gina slammed on the brakes. Tom was jolted back sharply, but the anti-inertial webbing held him safe. The dog stopped in the middle of the street and glared threateningly. It was about twice the size of a lion, and its three bulldog-faces spurted creamy white saliva from their snarling mouths. It was uncannily repulsive.

  Gina parped the horn. The three-headed dog monster glared, then shat with exquisite care. It moved on, sniffing the air. Gina had to drive on to the pavement to avoid the demon dog’s steaming mound of excrement.

  ‘Hundreds of human beings work in this place,’ Gina said. ‘They run the pubs, the cafés, they have squads in body armour to collect the rubbish. Don’t know how they fucking bear it.’

  ‘You can get used to anything,’ said Tom, from bitter personal experience.

  Tom saw a blur through the windscreen, and ID’d it as a red winged demon. There was a thump as the demon landed heavily on the roof of their car, and for a moment Tom thought they would veer off the road. But Gina kept her calm, and sounded the horn again. And the creature flapped away, carving a dark scarlet shadow out of blue sky.

  ‘They can’t hurt you,’ Gina said. ‘Remember that. A hell creature cannot hurt a human being.’

  ‘I know. I know about hell bastards. I’ve read every single book there is about hell bastards,’ Tom said.

  Gina smiled. It was a patronising smile. Tom knew it well.

  Gina drove on. She slowed once more. The road ahead was blocked with snakes. Hissing and roaring and writhing, bodies snarled up to form a single entity spanning the street, like the rat-king created out of the interlocking tails of lab rats.

  ‘Shit,’ Gina said.

  ‘I’ve seen photos of this creature,’ said Tom. ‘It’s called a Laocoön. There’s a Michelangelo statue of it.’

  Gina sounded the horn. The snake-monster did not move. So Gina parked up the car on the pavement, and they got out. She put her METROPOLITAN POLICE – DO NOT TICKET OR TOW AWAY sticker up on the windscreen. Then she triple-locked the doors and lowered the window grilles.

  They walked on, towards the beast. On their left was Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub, one of the taverns rebuilt after the Great Fire. It proudly bore the date 1667 on its trademark wheel of cheese sign. Tom could see figures inside, drinking, their dark shadows silhouetted, tall and thin, with hands that ended in claws. The pavement outside the pub was awash with green vomit in which tiny white worms swam.

  Tom turned his attention to the squirming monstrosity of snakes ahead of him, blocking the entirety of Fleet Street.

  ‘How do we get past?’ he asked.

  Gina drew her hand gun and shot a hole in one of the snakes. It flailed and screamed with pain. She fired again. The Laocoön twitched wildly, then the entire mass of snakes scuttled as one, and ran up the side of a building with a speed that defied rationality. Tom saw the monster reach the roof of the half-timbered Cheshire Cheese. Then it vanished from view and the way was clear again.

  ‘Go back for the car?’

  ‘It’ll get worse,’ said Gina. ‘We’ll walk from here.’

  They continued onwards, walking slowly, eyes peeled. Occasionally demon pedestrians passed by. Some humaniform, in suits; others bestial, with chimaerical bodies. Mostly just green demons; for the timid, harmless, small-bodied greens were the soldier ants of the demon ecology, and were far more numerous than the red, Royal and incolorate demons.

  They walked on, as far as Ludgate Circus, with St Bride’s glorious white stone spire peeping up at them from its alleyway home.

  They headed across the main road at Ludgate Circus, evading cars that seemed to regard pedestrians as fair game. The road to their right led to the river, to Blackfriars Bridge, and the wedge-shaped Black Friar pub.

  On they walked to Ludgate Hill, feeling the steep incline beneath their feet. The lead spire of St Martin’s Within Ludgate was in their view. Behind it, Wren’s great cathedral itself, its twin towers like horns upon its giant black-hatted dome. An architectural behemoth calmly certain of its power to awe.

  Onwards still they walked. Past a drab-looking street that bore the splendid name of Pageantmaster Court. Across the cobbles, towards the main sweep of the circular street that is called St Paul’s Churchyard

  And there it loomed. The Cathedral of St Paul, foregrounded by a cast iron Victorian gas lamp, and a marble statue of St Anne.

  The dome was no longer visible from their current vantage point. But the double-colonnaded façade and paired towers and high triangular tympanum were enough to drown Tom’s eyes in majestic beauty. Tom’s gaze swept over the non-identical twin towers of the western façade. Each tower tipped with golden pineapples of stone. Above the towers he saw black clouds of hell bastards hanging in the air like a miasma above a dome that had become their nest.

  He saw too that the once white stones of the Cathedral front were damp with congealed blood, attracting swarms of mosquitoes. And a lake of crimson devil-blood had pooled upon the front steps, lapping without ever moving.

  Gina looked at the scene. ‘That’s just – weird,’ she said, eventually.

  The right hand tower was also blood-daubed, its clock permanently fixed at midnight. And a huge scaled beast was coiled around the summit of this tower, its black tail occasionally lashing out, drumming on the stone. This was Ammet, the Devourer, the judger of souls in the Egyptian Pantheon of demons. The brickwork below its ugly obsidian body was scarred from the relentless punishment its tail was meting out. From time to time it roared out a cry of wrath and condemnation.

  ‘Side door,’ said Gina.

  ‘You got it,’ said Tom.

  They walked to th
e river side of the Cathedral, past Godlimon Street. In the distance Tom could glimpse the Lucifer Tower and the Mammon Tower, peeking above the skyline.

  ‘Take another.’

  Tom took the box of pills from Gina and swallowed six fools’-gold-and-ecstasy tablets. He gulped them down fast.

  ‘Hey,’ said Gina, reproving, as she saw how much he’d taken.

  ‘Hey,’ said Tom, beaming, as the pills kicked in.

  Tom paused a moment by the stainless steel Information Centre, now black with decay, its runway curves buckled. From here he could look up and see the magnificent central dome of St Paul’s; upon which dire creatures basked and lolled, blackening the dome like dry gangrene. And on their bodies danced the slithering shadows of the aerial beasts that cavorted above.

  The tiny beasts that roosted upon the Cathedral’s sloping dome were constantly in motion, scurrying and fighting and sometimes falling off to splatter upon the ground below. It was like seeing a lover’s beautiful and naked body in the oozing decay of death, infested with worms yet never rotting away.

  ‘Some of these creatures I don’t recognise,’ Tom said.

  ‘Nor me,’ Gina conceded.

  ‘A lot of them aren’t in the grimoires, you see,’ Tom informed her. ‘And no one has ever really catalogued them. And those that try, go mad. Some of these beasties are not even in the legends. Maybe –’

  ‘Are we doing this?’

  ‘You bet.’

  Tom braced himself.

  With tight throats and heavy hearts, they walked up the steps to the brass door of the south front. There was blood on the steps here too, though it was only ankle deep.

  ‘It washes off,’ Gina said.

  ‘It better had.’

  They waded through ponds of blood, strode up to the top step, pushed open the side door of Grand Master Wren’s great cathedral, and stepped inside.

  Chapter 13

  ‘I’d like to ask you a few more questions, please,’ Dougie said to Gogarty’s son Sean, holding his warrant card out like a crucifix.

  It was the first time he’d seen Sean Gogarty in person. He could see the resemblance to the father in the eyes – large and staring, and rarely blinking. But otherwise, the two men couldn’t be more unalike. Sean was a thin man, with a full head of hair and a wispy beard, and he had no charisma whatsoever.

  ‘About my father?’ Sean asked weakly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve already –’

  ‘You spoke to some of my junior officers. I’m the head of the investigation team.’

  Dougie was flying solo on this one: playing a hunch. He hadn’t even told Gina and the team where he was going.

  ‘Let me come in please, Sean.’

  Sean stared helplessly at him. Finally he beckoned. Dougie stepped inside. It was a small ground floor flat in St John’s Wood Terrace, just down from the Almshouses. The interior was immaculate, with plasterwork motif wallpaper, a richly yellow Chesterfield sofa and a rosewood antique bureau.

  It was not, Dougie immediately thought, a place in which any real person could live. Rather, it was the home of a man with more money than judgement. For Sean was a rich man now, thanks to his father’s generous trust fund.

  Sean Gogarty lived alone; his wife had left him within hours of the Gogarty story breaking. Sean’s mother Harriet Gogarty had died some years before. The coroner’s court had recorded an open verdict though it was obviously a suicide.

  Sean’s living room carpet was Persian and patterned with ornate ruby and emerald designs. But it was charred, floor boards peeking through bare patches, with the main damage in the centre of the room beneath the bay windows. That’s where the Molotov cocktail had landed. The window in the bay, Dougie noticed, was a cheap replacement, not double glazed, and ill-fitting to boot. Sean had tried to move after that incident – the most recent of many mob attacks upon him. But no one would buy his property. It was tainted with evil by association.

  ‘They’ve already searched –’

  ‘The house is clean. We’ve dug up your communal garden. We’ve trawled your drains. You’re free to live here, it’s your flat, Mr Gogarty.’

  ‘Technically, my father’s. There’s no mortgage, you see. He was always good with money.’

  ‘It’s in your name. The trust fund.’

  ‘There’s talk of seizing my assets. Did you know that? Is that fair? I didn’t hurt anyone. Is it my fault I was born?’

  ‘I just want to ask a few more questions.’

  ‘What? What can I possibly tell you, that I haven’t already told those other bastards? I had a job you know, before you started prying into my affairs. Twenty-two years I was there. Soames and Co. And then they sacked me, because they said I was – without so much as a - Did you know that?’

  ‘I knew that, Sean,’ said Dougie gently. And somehow that consoled him.

  Sean’s mother had died when he was eleven years old. He’d spent his adolescence being raised by a cold-spirited single father who now turned out to be a man with multiple aliases who was also the vessel for and associate of a serial killing demon.

  Though by all accounts, Brian Gogarty had been a relatively good father. Attentive at least. He almost always turned up to watch his lad play in cricket matches, for Sean had been a class bowler in his time. Gogarty had also been an active member of the PTA at both Sean’s primary and secondary schools. Little Sean was always in school on time, wearing the right bits of uniform, and always had his dad’s written permissions to go on school trips. He could be relied upon to do his homework thoroughly and neatly, and no one ever reported signs of physical or sexual abuse. He was a shy boy, from the accounts Dougie had read, and didn’t make friends easily. But lots of lads are like that.

  He would have been shy and short on friends, Dougie guessed, even if his dad had been a normal non-possessed human being.

  Gogarty had been away a lot in the years when Sean was growing up. ‘On His Majesty’s Business’, Gogarty had always told his son. For years Sean thought that meant his father was being regularly sent to jail for minor offences, like speeding or being scruffy. When he was a bit older, Sean realised how daft he was being. Though he did continue to wonder (in his handwritten personal diary, which had been impounded by Five Squad and which Dougie had read) if his dad was a spy, or maybe working for MI5 on top secret cases.

  In fact, during these long and frequent absences, Gogarty was generally staying at one of his other houses and living one of his other lives. Dougie’s team had logged twelve Gogarty aliases in all by now, including the ones with criminal records - Darius Howard, Ronnie Rogers, Owen Jones, Thomas Peters, Mitchell Walker, Graham Ward and Vladimir Pyotr. Some of these were short term aliases, created for the purpose of generating a false criminal record, as part of his scam on Dougie. But other aliases – seven in all - were fully formed identities, entire lives lived.

  So when ‘Gogarty’ wasn’t being the dad with Sean in Clerkenwell, he was off being the dad with the children of Darius or Douglas, or one of his other alter egos. Or walking his dog in Victoria Park as Andrew Bishop; until, that is, he ate the fucking thing.

  Dougie had no idea how Gogarty had done it. The why he got, just about. But how he had juggled so many lives was a mystery beyond comprehension.

  ‘You’ve been spying on me, haven’t you?’ said Sean.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Hacking my emails. Intercepting my post. Following me. In case my dad gets in touch.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Are you allowed to do that?’

  ‘You’d be amazed,’ said Dougie, with a hint of weariness, ‘what we’re allowed to do.’

  ‘But what’s the point? He’ll never get in touch. It’s not as if he loves me.’

  ‘He might.’

  ‘It’s not as if he’s even my dad.’

  ‘Of course he is.’

  ‘No he’s not! I read the stuff in the papers. He’s not even human. He’s a fucking –
he can’t possibly be my –’

  ‘Sean, we’ve DNA-matched you. Brian Gogarty is your father.’

  ‘But – but - how can that be?’

  Dougie sighed. ‘Even though your father was possessed by a demon, he is still a human being. His sperm is still – human.’

  Sean looked stubborn; a hope snatched away from him.

  Dougie continued: ‘And the fact he was possessed by this entity means it wasn’t your father’s fault. All those murders, not his fault. He’s the victim in this.’

  ‘Then why is he still helping this monster? Why doesn’t he run away?’

  ‘Because –’ Dougie had no answer to that.

  Dougie looked around; enjoying the silence between himself and Sean Gogarty, rather than using it as a weapon. When he spoke again, Dougie’s tone was friendly.

  ‘You liked him, didn’t you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your father.’

  Sean considered it, as if it were a trick question that could be used to send him to jail. ‘Yes,’ he eventually said.

  ‘Why is that? Why did you like him?’ Dougie prompted. ‘I mean, from all accounts, he was a cold man. As well as being a serial killer. So why?’

  Sean shrugged, foolishly.

  ‘Don’t all sons like their fathers?’

  ‘No,’ said Dougie, bitterly.

  ‘I just took it for granted that - It was just the two of us, you see. Me and him. Two blokes together.’ Sean remembered it, him and his dad being two blokes together. ‘He taught me cricket. That’s why I was so good at it, he taught me well. He told me what to say to girls, and I learned the patter off by heart, and bloody hell, it worked! I’ve had my share – more than my share - of attractive women, you know.’ Sean was lost in thought again. Perhaps remembering those attractive women none of whom, not even his wife, had stayed with him. ‘I had my first pint of beer with my dad, in a pub in Holborn, and it was grand. Why wouldn’t I like him?’