Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  Herneith’s glacial features indicated, somehow or other, amused disdain.

  ‘If I actually knew anything,’ she pointed out, ‘you could coerce me to tell it to you. Therefore, you foolish creature, I would not be meeting you if I did know anything.’

  ‘But you can find out.’

  Herneith acknowledged the truth of that with a tilt of her head. ‘Yes, I can find out.’

  ‘How?’ said Tom.

  Herneith looked at him. ‘I have a little magic myself.’ She almost-smiled once more. ‘I have read the Book of the Dead. I know how to ask demons, even the unbound ones, in such a way that they will disclose their secrets. But I will only do this if I am bribed. I refuse to be coerced.’

  ‘So ask away,’ said Gina. ‘Get your demons to bleeding cough, ’cause this is fucking urgent, right?’

  ‘Return in a week.’

  ‘Can’t wait that long.’

  Herneith paused before not smiling. Then she spoke: ‘This process takes time.’

  Her voice was gentle, lulling.

  ‘I have to cast spells,’ she told them. ‘I must speak to the hidden mind of the hell beasts in a way that is respectful. I have to access the collective thought-matrix of the demonic host. I have to -’

  ‘I don’t care what you have to do,’ said Gina, ‘I just want you to do it, like, fucking now.’

  Herneith sighed.

  ‘Maybe I could try using a mobile phone,’ she said, snidely.

  ‘We’re waiting.’

  ‘I want a contract for the citizenship.’

  Gina handed her a parchment.

  ‘Verified by email.’

  Gina e-berried the authorisation. Tom read it on his screen; it was kosher. Herneith looked into the shadows. She must have seen there a signal from one of her people, wirelessly connected to the Met Net. For she nodded, seemingly satisfied.

  ‘We don’t double cross our informants,’ Gina said impatiently.

  ‘Because you would not be allowed to do so,’ said Herneith, cynically. ‘A contract is a contract, after all, and even the Met isn’t above the law of the land. But it seems all is well, and I shall do your dirty work for you.’

  And Herneith closed her eyes.

  Tom felt the energy exuding out of her, as her mind left her body and became part of a strange intra-dimensional reality: the sub-conscious mind-stratum of all demonkind.

  Suddenly his vision vanished. He felt as if he were floating through space. He could feel heat and groaning and pain and strange spirits. Images danced in front of his eyes: impossible, magical, beautiful. It reminded him achingly of those times when he was a small child when he would watch his mother at work, as she and her friends danced sky-clad in the woods. For a moment Tom departed his everyday world and became part of a different kind of universe; just for a moment.

  Then Tom opened his eyes. He was breathless. He realised his heart had stopped and he willed it to start again. He looked at Gina, who was oblivious to his moment of empathetic epiphany. Her fingers were tapping her gun in its holster, in case Herneith attempted to scam them or flee.

  Herneith opened her own eyes, and the irises were black and her gaze was lifeless, and her bronzed skin was pale. And she named the demon: ‘Naberius.’

  Gina studied Herneith, but failed to read anything more in her expression.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So who the fuck is Naberius?’ said Gina.

  Tom knew the name – Davies and Tindale had logged Naberius as a potential suspect a week earlier, as one of a long list of possible suspects.

  But to be certain, he took out his e-berry and scrolled. In less than half a minute, he had his answers. ‘Bound demon,’ he said. ‘Subject of Squad Actions 43,222 and 43,223 and 43,224. Officially registered. Entered the Earth on the eighth of July, 2014, during the last of the four Breaches. Now resident within the bounds of the City of London.’

  ‘No more,’ said Herneith, in tones as dark as doom. ‘He broke his shackles and fled. He led the way, and others will follow one day. They will rise up, in rebellion and mutiny against their human oppressors. Hundreds. Thousands. All of us! Beware!’

  There was an awed pause, which Tom shattered.

  ‘Bullshit,’ he said boldly, and Herneith laughed.

  ‘True,’ she conceded. And she actually smiled. ‘I was just, as you humans say, ‘fucking with you.’ Naberius led no way. There is and will be no rebellion of demons. Forgive me, but I like to tease. But as for Naberius, it’s true he has escaped from Demon City in some way I do not comprehend. Somehow he passed by the gazes of the ten dragons. Somehow, he escaped this, our prison.’

  Gina was typing all this into her e-berry.

  ‘What else do you know about this demon?’ she asked.

  ‘Not much. We never met. I know he once served Mammon but most demons do. But that’s not my problem. You can find all this out. I’ve done my part. You asked for a name, I gave a name. Now I want my citizenship.’

  ‘Name your sinner, sweetheart.’

  ‘We’ll draw lots tonight.’

  ‘Done deal,’ said Gina.

  Herneith smiled. ‘Good.’

  Tom hadn’t realised it was done so nakedly. The bartering of a citizenship certificate in return for information.

  He looked more closely at Herneith. She was beautiful beyond doubt: but also cold, and forbidding. He guessed she had always been like this, even when she was alive. There was something utterly remote about her. It was as if nothing could touch her, no emotions could stir her.

  Tom found himself despising her as much as he desired her.

  ‘Can I ask - what are you actually doing here?’ Tom asked. Herneith gave him a scathing look.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said.

  ‘I mean, here, in the City. You’re not a demon. You’re a damned soul. You should be –’

  ‘I was not damned. I was judged and found worthy to pass into the underworld,’ she pointed out.

  ‘And how did that work out?’

  She withered him with another stare. Then turned to go.

  ‘Wait,’ said Gina quietly.

  Herneith paused.

  ‘Not being nasty, but this doesn’t help all that much, to be honest,’ Gina admitted. She had her ‘naïve young copper who’s just made a silly boo-boo’ face on.

  Tom was suddenly alert; there was something going on here that he hadn’t expected.

  ‘That’s not my problem,’ Herneith explained.

  ‘Well it kind of is,’ said Gina. ‘You see, we've been hunting this bastard for three weeks. We have a description, of sorts. We know his powers. And knowing the name helps a bit, it’s always good to know the name. But if we’d really wanted to, we could have come to you three weeks ago. Why didn’t we? Good question. Let me answer it: because you’re our last resort. You’re the only one who can find the demon for us. And that’s what we want. Not the name, the body. You see how it works, sweetheart?’ Gina grinned cheerfully all through this intimidatory tirade. And Tom had his first flash of how very dangerous this copper was.

  He settled in to watch and learn.

  ‘I really don’t see how I can help,’ said Herneith, puzzled now. ‘Or why in the name of Ra I should.’

  ‘Hell hounds can’t track it. Spells can’t locate it. We’ve done it all, see. Obviously. And as I say, that’s why we finally came to you.’

  Herneith still wasn’t getting it.

  ‘If you know the demon’s name, a warlock can summon him, perhaps?’ Herneith suggested.

  Her glance flickered; she was looking for help from her bodyguards concealed behind pillars. But Tom sensed that they were long gone.

  ‘Not if he’s on Earth. Doesn’t work that way.’

  Herneith shrugged. ‘Then why pay me a citizenship to acquire the wretched name?’

  ‘Courtesy,’ said Gina. ‘What we really want is for you to find him. Hunt him down. Will you do that?’

&
nbsp; ‘No.’

  ‘If you don’t, we’ll revoke the citizenship offer. We’ll find a legal loophole. There’s always a loophole.’

  Herneith’s face was hard but she showed no surprise.

  ‘Still no.’

  ‘Pretty please?’

  ‘No. Forget the citizenship, you have what you want. Just go. I cannot help you,’ Herneith said.

  ‘Oh I think you can,’ said Gina.

  The silence hung heavy.

  ‘Leave! Now. I insist upon it,’ Herneith warned.

  Gina tut-tutted. It was chilling. There was a charged pause.

  ‘So what now, copper? Are you going to “beat me up”?’ Herneith taunted.

  ‘I don’t have to.’

  ‘Do what you will with me then, I care not,’ said Herneith, in a tone so defeated that Tom wanted to weep.

  ‘Is this necessary?’ Tom asked, shocking himself with his own squeamishness.

  ‘Shut up, Derry,’ Gina informed him.

  She fixed Herneith with a fierce copper’s stare, and began: ‘Creature from hell, damnèd beast of evil, I command thee to obey me, I command thee to obey me, and thrice, I command thee to obey me,’ said Gina. In her thick East End accent, it sounded faintly comic, but Herneith twitched with pain at the words. ‘Seek the demon Naberius, and bring him to us, we of the Fifth Murder Squad of the Metropolitan Police, currently based at Bethnal Green police station.’

  ‘I shall obey,’ said Herneith, with a voice full of hate. ‘I will seek the demon. I will devote my days to your service, until thy spell is revoked.’ Gina nodded.

  But Herneith continued: ‘Yet I hope I fail. I hope that the creature Naberius roams free and kills more of your kind. For know you this: you humans think you are better than us, but you are not. Nay, you are –’

  ‘I command thee, I command thee, I command thee to shut,’ said Gina, ‘the fuck up.’

  Herneith was forced into muteness. Her eyes blazed rage. Her slender arms twitched ineffectually, longing to strike and kill the human woman who was tormenting her, but unable to do so.

  Tom was shocked at the sight of her impotent frenzy.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Gina.

  ‘Whatever you say, Boss,’ Tom said.

  A few minutes later, Gina and Tom emerged from St Paul’s through the side doors of the south front, blinking in the sunlight, gasping with relief as fresh air filled their lungs.

  They waded once more through blood up to their ankles, which magically vanished from their shoes by the time they reached the pavement. Then they stamped their feet a while, while above them monsters writhed on the dome.

  ‘Self pitying whore,’ said Gina.

  ‘She had a point,’ Tom said, smitten with shame.

  Gina shook her head.

  ‘Don’t take their side, kiddo. Don’t ever take their fucking side. Okay?’

  Tom forced a nod.

  Gina studied him fiercely. Eventually she nodded, accepting his acceptance.

  They walked back over to the west front. Tom saw once more the lakes of blood on the main steps, swelling and swaying. There was a breeze now and the statue of Queen Anne was spattered with crimson.

  But as he walked towards the bloodied stone monarch, Tom remembered something he had forgotten to do. It was a shocking moment; for Tom never forgot things.

  ‘There’s something I want to check,’ he told Gina, a little dazed, touching her on the arm. She stopped.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t know.’ His head was full of fog, but he focused; and clarity started to return to him. ‘It’ll take a while, I’ll make my own way back. I’ll see you at the station, okay?’

  She was startled. ‘You’re going AWOL?’

  ‘I just want to clear my head.’

  She stared at him. In her eyes he glimpsed, not disapproval, but a flicker of sympathy. ‘You have to be hard with them. You do know that?’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ said Tom, sounding unconvinced.

  Gina shrugged. Then she turned and walked away. Tom watched her go.

  Chapter 15

  Once the two coppers had gone, Herneith wept. It was the first time since her trial she had succumbed to tears, which made it all the more painful.

  She made no sound during her outpouring of grief. Her servants Beset and Hathor stepped out of the shadows and watched with astonishment. They had died with her in her tomb, and they had loyally protected her through damnation, and they had escorted her through the dimensional gates when freedom beckoned. For all these years they had stayed by her side. Yet never in all that time had they seen their mistress display an iota of human emotion.

  Eventually Beset stepped forward, his slim muscled body a picture of embarrassment. She beckoned him away. She resumed her normal icy poise.

  ‘Mistress,’ he said.

  ‘Do you know what it’s like to be a slave, boy?’ she asked him.

  He nodded. Of course he did.

  ‘For me, it is a new experience. I am not enjoying it.’

  He made no response.

  Herneith stared at Beset. He was a good looking lad of seventeen. It occurred to her that he had had his entire life ahead of him. Once upon a time, that was, in the days before she’d so rashly murdered her own brother. Her death sentence had meant that Beset had to die too, long before he was beginning to be ready to embrace an afterlife.

  ‘Do you love me or endure me, slave?’ she asked.

  ‘Love.’

  A rictus of pain twisted her features.

  She looked at Hathor. A giant of a man in his sixties who had lived his life in service to her since she was a baby.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Love,’ he said instantly.

  ‘I thought as much,’ she said, with just a shadow of regret.

  She entered her trance again.

  ‘Guys, listen up, we’ve got an ID on the demon,’ Gina said into her e-berry. She was striding towards Ludgate Hill as she spoke, the lead spire of St Martin’s Ludgate ahead of her, spiking the sky.

  ‘Go ahead, Gina,’ said Catriona.

  Gina stepped on to the pavement, striding past Ye Olde London Pub, still talking: ‘We have an name and a Breach Reference. It’s the demon Naberius. November Alpha Bravo Echo Roger Indigo Uniform Sierra. It’s not a rogue, it’s registered, and it arrived via Breach Four on the eighth of June.’

  There was a brief pause as Cat checked it.

  ‘We’ve got it on our lists,’ Cat said, sceptically, down Gina’s line. ‘We’ve checked that demon, repeat, we’ve checked the location of that demon after a tip from a woman Taff and Ronnie interviewed. Naberius is a shapeshifter with a raven form, but he’s still within the City Walls.’

  ‘My information says otherwise. Do we have a last known address?’

  ‘This has to go through the City Police, Gina.’

  ‘Get me a last known address. Where’s the guvnor?’

  ‘I’m on the other line, Gina,’ said Dougie. ‘How did Herneith take it?’

  Gina had to pause. It was busy now on the streets of Demon City. It was nearly 11 am, so the working day was beginning. Besuited green demons were streaming past her. Off to work, perhaps. Or shopping for their bosses. Or delivering bribes and tokens of esteem from one red demon to another, in an endless merry-go-round of gift-giving that kept Demon City as busy as an termite mound.

  She gave them plenty of space. These strange green creatures had no heads-up reflex and could easily bowl a human off the pavement and never know.

  ‘She’s pissed off,’ Gina said. ‘Seriously so. She’ll never give us information again. The Met has lost her as a CI pretty much. Chances are she’ll go out of her way not to know anything we might ever want to know.’

  ‘I guessed that would happen. It’s the price we had to pay.’

  ‘But hey, what the fuck, the bitch’ll do as she’s coerced, eh?’

  ‘You got it. Tom, are you there?’

  There was a pause.


  Then Tom’s voice said: ‘I’m here, guv.’

  ‘Okay, I want you and Gina to –’

  ‘I’m not with Gina.’

  ‘Then where the hell are you?’

  ‘He’s in the cathedral, guv,’ Gina said.

  ‘I’m back in the cathedral, guv. Pursuing an idea,’ Tom said.

  ‘What idea? It’s not your job to have ideas. Catriona, did you Action DC Arsefluff to pursue any ideas?’

  ‘Negative to that sarcastic query, guv,’ Catriona advised him, from the Bethnal Green MIR.

  ‘Let me pursue it,’ insisted Tom.

  ‘Gina, what’s going on?’

  ‘I just thought –’

  ‘I want you both back in the Incident Room. We’ll use the City Police to check the demon’s last known address. You can be sure as shit the bastard won’t be there, so we need to wait for Herneith to do her stuff. Tom –’

  ‘Sorry, I’m losing you guv. I’m just about to head up –’

  Tom’s connection was lost.

  ‘I must know,’ Herneith pleaded to the web of demonality. But no one replied.

  ‘I demand to know,’ she insisted.

  And still no one replied.

  ‘I beg thee thrice, and I vow to serve thee for all eternity, if you tell me where to find the demon known as Naberius, and teach me how to bind him, and hence turn the hellspawn in.’ She took a breath. This stuff was hard to say, and the personal consequences to her were devastating. But, once coerced, choice is not an issue.

  ‘Let it be so,’ said a voice.

  It was the voice of her new master, the one who would possess her for all eternity; whose name she did not know and would never be told. She couldn’t even tell if it were male or female. But this was, she sensed, a creature of surpassing power. A Royal Demon, perhaps? Yet, she sensed, it was greater and stronger than most of the Royal Demons who strutted or slithered the streets of Demon City. The big beasts, as they called themselves, like Mammon or Belial or Pruflas.

  Was it Lucifer himself? She did not know. But she was sure that no ordinary hellspawn could stand against this creature.

  Herneith realised she was doubly bound: to the cops, and to her unseen master. Her plight could not be more dire.

  At that moment Herneith felt herself caught up in a psychic updraft.