Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  Her spirit travelled far. Out of her body, out of the bounds of Demon City. Into the realms of the human part of the city. Above streets and parks, through houses, past the souls of squabbling humans and the anxious spirits of free demons and Resurrected who dwelled in the world beyond the City’s bounds.

  For more than an hour she roamed. And for all that time, Herneith felt as if she had the powers of a god, as the Master who she served let her roam freely and all-seeingly.

  Finally she could detect the spirit of Naberius. And a spell made itself known to her and she chanted it, and it enwrapped Naberius, mystically enchaining him in his current location, so the bastard cops could capture him.

  Then another and even stranger presence touched her and she felt fear.

  Skip back sixty-two minutes thirty-one seconds. To the moment just before Herneith found Naberius.

  Gina was out of sight by now, so Tom walked back to the cathedral, his mind swirling with ideas and desires.

  This time he chose not to shirk the challenge of the main steps of the west front. He stared at the whirling cataracts of blood that cascaded down the steps. And he took the plunge, literally. He waded in, up to his calves. Then up to his knees. Then up to his waist, half his body lost in glutinous blood, breaking the clots with each stride. He felt his throat become stiff with inhaled crimson air.

  He forced his limbs to move. He splashed and trod his way up to the top step. Then he stepped clear of it, and the blood melted off him, and he was clean again.

  He walked in through the brass door entrance of the west front, beneath a chipped statue of a cherub, and once more entered the dark and gloomy nave. Bat-like creatures, once again, flapped above him. The air choked him with its smoke. And as his night vision returned, he could see that the vast serpent still filled the nave.

  Puzzlement nagged at him. He’d planned earlier to do this, pursuing what he’d thought was a brilliant hypothesis that would enable him to crack the entire Gogarty case. A classic Tom Derry stunt that would establish him as a key player in Dougie Randall’s Five Squad.

  But for some reason he’d totally changed his mind after his conversation with Gina on the drive in to the City. Her scorn had made him doubt his own opinions. His notion that warlocks could be evil had suddenly seemed absurd. Which meant that his plan to climb the cathedral dome in search of warlock-related clues was, well, foolish. And futile. And idiotic.

  And yet -

  Now he came to think about it more clearly, his warlock hypothesis felt entirely rational after all. Gina’s doubts seemed preposterous, and glib.

  Tom felt deeply uncomfortable with his own indecision. That wasn’t like him. It just wasn’t his way.

  So maybe -

  Maybe what? The thought eluded him.

  Instead, a fresh idea occurred to Tom, with bracing clarity: maybe he should abandon this plan after all. Head back to the Incident Room! Forget this wild goose chase, and do some proper coppering. And then -

  No!

  He focused. He banished uncertainty. He chose his course. He walked on.

  He crossed the dimly illuminated black and white tiles of the nave, past the arse of the sleeping beast, proceeding swiftly now. He clambered past the sleeping serpent, through the gap between beast and wall in the southern aisle. He reached the Crossing.

  Then instead of heading to the cathedral’s centre, he turned towards the stone entrance to the staircase. He walked through the doorway, and up the stairs, into the belly of the cathedral.

  As he walked, his e-berry beeped. He held it to his ear, trudging carefully up the first tier of the broad modern staircase. He listened to Gina and Dougie discuss the case, and after a few moments he joined in the conversation. But Tom felt remote, disengaged; his nausea had returned, and so had his demon fever. His lungs ached with the tang of black hellebore.

  After a few moments of chat, Dougie discovered that Tom wasn’t with Gina and got snarky, and ordered Tom to come back to the Incident Room.

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

  He switched his e-berry off. He continued his ascent. One weary step at a time. He trudged past the door that led to the Whispering Gallery. He was aware that on the other side of the wall beside him was the inner load-bearing dome; Wren’s great structural sleight of hand.

  Tom eventually emerged on to the gallery that wrapped around the exterior lantern. He took a deep breath. He paced his way along the railed ledge; and looked outwards, at the world beyond the dome.

  The Square Mile of a nation that was Demon City and its encircling doughnut-with-a-hole city-state of Outer London were spread out before him. He could see as far as Crystal Palace to the south. He could see the Lucifer Tower and the Mammon Tower, and the rest of the cluttered skyline of this twenty-first century global financial centre that stood amidst the old eccentric churches and grand civic buildings and narrow alleyways of the historic City.

  From his vantage point, the Stone Gallery of St Paul’s Cathedral, he could see the towers of the Barbican Barracks. He could see the ancient crumbling London Wall, and the modern street that bore that name too. He could see the Bank of London in Threadneedle Street and its dozen of so companion skyscrapers, where demons and finance wizards worked night and day to enrich the capital.

  Out further, beyond the City bounds, he could glimpse the riverside frontage of the Greenwich Royal Naval Hospital and the eerie O2, and the lumbering towers of Canary Wharf. It was blue hour, and the magic of that special time cast its spell on him: the sun had sunk over the horizon, announcing the fall of night, yet the sky was still the rich azure hue of day.

  To the west, the London Eye was already lit. A circle of moving dazzling brightness, it led the eye on its journey towards to the Gothic magnificence of Pugin and Barry’s Houses of Parliament.

  For a few moments Tom savoured this unique view of London and its embedded Demon City.

  Then he took out his e-berry and studied the same scene in diagram form. His self-confidence had returned. It was simple: he had formed a hypothesis; now he would test it empirically. That was the way in which knowledge –

  He blinked. He decided to pack up and go home. He wondered what the fuck he was –

  He focused again.

  He set his e-berry to ‘Holo Projection’ and the diagrams on the screen became 3D and danced their way off his screen and into the air. The holo was a full 3D map of the Demon City of London, bounded by its ten dragons; connected to the screen by luminescent tendrils.

  He broke the holo off and fingerflicked it in order to stretch it, and then stretched it more. He bounced it upwards with his palm, so it was balanced in air in front of the slope of Wren’s great lantern, its key geographical features highlighted in red. Then he searched his e-berry files for the diagram of the floor plan of St Paul’s, and holo’d that too. This holo he also broke off, then laid flat upon the ground, so he could stand above and inside it.

  Next Tom stared at the floor plan of the great cathedral, and clicked on his e-berry controls; and a hidden pattern of spheres became manifest upon the floor plan in flashing blue.

  St Paul’s Cathedral is built, as all tourists know, around a semi-sphere – the great dome above the Crossing.

  In addition the transepts of the cathedral both have domes as their ceilings. And so does the nave, and so do the aisles. All in all, there are ten domes upon the main axis of the Cathedral, including the main dome.

  Tom knew – and had known since he was six years old, when he first began researching this subject - that these ten domes were part of the hidden occult structure of Wren’s cathedral. They corresponded to the ten spheres of the Kabbalist Tree of Life, the ancient occult symbol of reality itself. The spheres were: Keter, Hochma, Binah, Hesed, Giburah, Tiferet, Netzach, Hode, Yesode and Mahlkoot.

  Each of these ten occult spheres was methodically and precisely embedded in the very structure of St Paul’s as part of an occult architectu
ral pattern as rich in meaning as a hieroglyph.

  Thus if you entered the cathedral through the west front and into the vestibule, you would be standing in the sphere known as Malkuth, or Kingdom.

  And if you walked down the aisle, you would be travelling along the path of the Tree of Life.

  When you reached the Crossing, you would have the Pillar of Mercy on your left and the Pillar of Serenit on your right.

  And, continuing onwards, the primal triad would be evoked by the three domes of the choir...

  This Cathedral built by Wren is no mere building. It is a glorious endeavour by Man to speak to his God. Each aspect of its design is a message to the Deity written in the language of the occult.

  All this is commonly known, by those who study such things. Wren’s great cathedral is no cold and abstract rational creation: it is a magic box brimming with hidden secrets. And for the last two weeks, in his every waking hour when he wasn’t working with Five Squad, Tom had been studying these secrets assiduously. He had memorised every detail of the cathedral’s architecture, and cross-referenced it with the mystic writings of the Kabbalists. He was sure that the Tree of Life design did not apply just to the floor plan; he believed that you could chart its outlines in the exterior of the Cathedral too.

  Furthermore the Cathedral itself exists as one element in a grand design for the rebuilding of London led by Wren during the seventeenth century. And these diagrams too Tom conjured up out of his e-berry and set dancing in the air.

  There before Tom, as eerily real as the writings on the palace wall witnessed by the Biblical King Balthazar, was a map of London with St Paul’s at its centre. And all the distances on the map were marked in cubits (the length of a human forearm from middle finger to elbow) rather than kilometres, or miles.

  Tom could see from this holo map – there, the two flashing lights, just there! – that it was precisely two thousand cubits from the eastern end of St Paul’s to the old Temple Bar, where the now-living stone dragon stood, beside the Royal Courts of Justice.

  This figure of 2,000 cubits was derived from the Old Testament Book of Numbers. It was the distance that it was decreed should be measured in each direction from the centre of the rebuilt Jerusalem – the ‘new Jerusalem’ - to determine its city bounds. Two thousand cubits was also the distance from Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives.

  Working to this same principle, the rebuilders of London in the aftermath of the Great Fire of 1666 – including and especially Wren, the pre-eminent figure in that vast enterprise - ensured it was exactly 2,000 cubits from St Paul’s to the City’s boundary.

  Tom’s floating map also revealed that a journey of 2,000 cubits from St Paul’s in the other direction would take you to St Dunstan-in-the-East, an ancient and oft-rebuilt church with a needle spire designed by – no surprise this - Sir Christopher Wren.

  Tom continued to fingerflick his holo map of the City, enlarging details and moving them from here to there to create a full visualisation of the New Jerusalem built by Wren and his peers. St Paul’s blipped bright yellow on his floating holo image; so did the old Temple Bar; and so did St Dunstan-in-the- East. Three dots linked by a mystic number, with St Paul’s Cathedral in the centre of power. From St Dunstan-in-the-East, it was a further 2,000 cubits to the well used by the medieval abbey of St Mary Grace’s. In later years this became Marine Close, a residential square built in the 17th century by Gaius Gabriel Cibber. And 2,000 cubits exactly from this spot stood Christ Church Spitalfields, the church built by Wren’s disciple Nicholas Hawksmoor.

  It was again no coincidence that Hawksmoor’s other great church St Mary Woolnoth stood 2,000 cubits from Christ Church Spitalfields. And St-George’s-in-the-East, also built by Hawksmoor, was 2,000 cubits from London Wall.

  All these men – Wren and Hawksmoor and Cibber - were friends and colleagues and, most importantly, fellow members of one of the oldest occult societies still prevalent in our modern age: the Brotherhood of Masons.

  It was Wren’s protégé Hawksmoor – working with Gaius Cibber - who designed the most sacred totem of rebirthed London, the slim obelisk known as Monument. A tower with a sculpted flame, built to commemorate the Great Fire of London. The blaze that had enabled the birth of a new London, built according to the principles of Kabbalist lore.

  Guided by faith and the principles of builder-magic evolved over centuries, these men had fashioned a city that adhered to the principles of Masonic lore, numerology and occult geometry.

  Tom had even read blogs by conspiracy theorists who thought that it was a Mason who had deliberately started the Great Fire to facilitate this great Kabbalist reconstruction. A wildly paranoid theory, given credence by the date of the fire: 1666. A year of mystic potency for it contained The Number of the Beast.

  Tom knew too that the golden globe representing the flames of the Great Fire on Hawksmoor and Cibber’s Monument was positioned so that at summer solstice the sun would strike it and light it up; turning it into a blazing second sun.

  These Mason architects created a new London around the Tree of Life and other sacred geometrical shapes. Pyramids and pentacles were created out of the arrangement of buildings, or carved into bricks in places not visible to the naked eye. The effect of all this was to make to make entire financial district of London into what contemporary dimensional theorists call a ‘hyper-sigil’. A magic sign created out of the fabric of the city itself.

  Tom’s mission today was to see the City’s Sigil structure for himself, using modern technology to directly observe its invisible patterns.

  Occult Spheres as depicted in Magic City by Barnaby Hopkinson (Grove Press, 2017), extrapolated from Sigular patterns observable in the infra-red spectrum

  In his shoulder bag, Tom had a pair of lightweight military-issue night vision goggles which he had bought off the internet - maxing out all of his credit cards, but it was worth it. He put them on.

  The world became darker and stranger. He was seeing in the deeper reaches of the infra-red spectrum, and the lights of the city burned like fires.

  But - as Barnaby Hopkinson had famously revealed back in 2017 - with these goggles he could see more than electric lights. He could see patterns carved in space, invisible to the naked eye, which corresponded to the occult links between the Masonic symbols embedded in the architecture of London.

  He adjusted the controls to dim the electrically generated illumination in his field of view, and to boost the auras and pathways.

  The City came alive before him.

  A complex web of burning lights and spiders’ web pathways and pillars of flame was revealed. Here was the hidden city! Through these military-calibre goggles with their expanded-spectrum lenses the Sigils were made gloriously manifest to Tom.

  And so he stood, and marvelled, from his vantage point on the Stone Gallery, a few paces in front of the great lantern of Wren’s Cathedral. Si Monumentum Requires Circumspice.

  It was magnificent!

  He saw a bridge of light spanning the city: a boulevard of gold and silver that ran through the axis of the cathedral to Temple Bar at one side and St Dunstan’s and Marine Square in the other.

  Dazzling dotted lines connected all the Wren churches to each other and to the Hawksmoor churches. He could see the distant bright white column of Christ’s Church Spitalfields as easily as if it were Venus in a clear night sky.

  Each City Church had its own patterns of power shooting out in every direction, intersecting, overlapping, merging. The tip of the Monument was a blazing ball of red fire that billowed like flames from a dragon’s mouth.

  It was like being inside a meteor shower within the Aurora Borealis during a fireworks display.

  It was the greatest spectacle Tom had ever seen.

  It was also of course, bewildering. A mad fabric of lights and pillars and columns and fireballs.

  The principal aura-marks were easy enough to identify. The boulevard of gold and silver was the main axis of the ‘New Jerusalem’, a pat
hway that connected all those buildings placed exactly 2,000 cubits apart. And the flames from the Monument were vast and Tom didn’t need to check on a map to see where the bloody Monument was. But all else was chaos.

  It was time to go to work.

  Tom turned the infra-red off and blinked and peered at his holo map of the ‘real’ London. Spotting the landmarks and memorising them; and marking the outlines of the spheres of power as delineated by Professor Hopkinson, now Reader in Occult Studies at Leicester Metropolitan University.

  Hopkinson first discovered the ability of the night vision goggles to capture aura-ways while in active service with the London Overseas Regiment in Iraq. His book Magic City contained intricate diagrams of what he referred to as the interlocking Spheres of Life observable in the City of London. These, he argued, are the ‘true’ forms implicit in the City’s aura pathways; just as a triangle is implied by three dots.

  This is how you find the Hopkinson Spheres.

  First, you chart on a map the lines of power between occult symbols visible in the City via your night vision glasses.

  Then you take a virtual compass, and connect these lines with a series of drawn circles. Out of this the Spheres of Life will emerge on your map; perfectly hitting each of the aura-lines with their circumferences. These images of harmony and symmetry carved out of the air of London have become the definitive image of the times. You can even buy T-shirts bearing images of the Hopkinson Magic City; the Spheres writ in flashing lights embossed upon the cloth.

  Tom’s aim this evening was to find out whether those images of the Spheres were accurately observed. He knew that Hopkinson was one of the greatest mystic scholars of the age. But Tom was a detective, schooled in the fundamental principle of Detective ABC:

  Accept Nothing

  Believe Nobody

  Check Everything.

  And so he checked. He studied the lines of power, and photographed them, and cross referenced with his map of London. And he drew upon his e-berry screen an increasingly intricate portrait of the real patterns out there.