The Anglesey Murders Box Set

by Conrad Jones

  As the realisation hit me, the sick tableau vanished, and I was back in the cellar. Fabienne was on me and I could feel every nerve ending in my body tingling. I knew that letting her back into my mind would spell my death, I couldn’t stop her. Her body tensed and she howled like a dog in pain. This time it was a high-pitched whine that cut through my brain. I heard a growling – the deep, ripping growl of an animal savaging its prey. I felt her pulling away from me, struggle was no longer against me. Her howling became more intense and the growling grew deeper and more guttural. I felt her letting go of my mind and my body. I reached up and moved from under her, tossing her aside. She screamed in pain and frustration as the Staffie savaged her.

  Evie Jones had attached her teeth into her neck below her left ear. The Staffie was twisting and turning her body trying to maintain her grip. Fabienne stood up and ripped the Staffie from her throat. Arterial spray exploded from the wound. Evie Jones bounced off the wall at the far end of the room, but she was up in a flash and she launched herself back towards Fabienne.

  I dived across the concrete for the gun. I heard Evie Jones howl as I turned and watched Fabienne take her true form. She was no longer the helpless victim; she was an enraged animal. Her jaw opened wide, her lips curled and exposed her teeth, still stained with my blood. Her eyes were as black as the night and evil oozed from them. She snarled at Evie Jones and the Staffie stopped in her tracks, growling and barking, but obviously scared of the monster Fabienne had become. For a second there was a flash in my mind. She was desperately disappointed. I’d caused her kind no end of problems and she’d set the trap to lure me in and kill me. I was weak and I let her into my mind and surrendered to her.

  Only Evie Jones stopped her from taking me. I grabbed the gun, but she moved like lightening. She was on me in a second. As I turned the gun towards her, she struck me in the chest and launched me across the cellar. I hit the wall and cracked my skull hard against the plaster. I squeezed the trigger and the blast hit her square in the face. A plume of red mist splattered the ceiling. Pain flashed through my brain and I crumpled to the floor as unconsciousness enveloped me.

  CHAPTER 27

  Aftermath

  Where are we now? I can’t tell you for obvious reasons, but we are safe. When I woke up, Fabienne – or whoever she really is – was gone. The Staffie was licking my wounds and the sun was coming up. She was gone, but the bodies of the men she used to trap me were still there and they were stinking. Sticky bloodstains congealed on the concrete around them. All the evidence of her being there was gone apart from a blood trail which ran from the cellar, up the staircase and into the hallway. Why didn’t she kill me? I don’t know. Maybe she was too badly injured. Maybe Evie Jones attacked again. I’ve asked the Staffie a thousand times what happened when she knocked me out, but she just looks at me and sticks her tongue out. I’ll never know.

  As my senses cleared, I gathered my tattered clothes and retrieved my bag. I found the key to the door at the top of the stairs, but all it contained was a water meter. The back of the door was scratched and there was a fingernail in the wood. They’d imprisoned some poor soul in there. We scoured the farmhouse; each and every room we searched was empty. There was another cellar beneath the barn, but that was empty, too. I couldn’t find anything of use. The Mercedes was gone, and the outhouses held no clues. I thought about calling the police and waiting there for them, but the more I digested the situation the less the idea appealed. What was there to gain?

  What would I tell them?

  Hello officer, I’ve broken into this farm, shot another four men dead and had sex with Fabienne Wilder before shooting her in the face with a Remington. By the way, her body has disappeared, but there’s plenty of blood on the stairs and carpet to back up what I’m saying.

  The whole thing was madness. I decided that leaving the bodies and bloodstains there could only make my case worse. I placed my bag of pipe bombs onto the electric hob in the kitchen and switched the ring on. Evie and I were safely into the treeline when they exploded, and according to the pictures in the Mail, the place burned to the ground before a single fire engine attended. I know one thing for sure: they’re still looking for me. They’ll regroup and begin their insidious recruitment again. I can only tell the world about them and hope that someone listens.

  The four men in the cellar were reported missing by their families. At first, their disappearances were treated as isolated until I linked them to the Niners on the Internet. I didn’t explain how I knew; I just made enough noise for the Press to hear it, and they picked it up and ran with it. The police searched their homes, and lo and behold, their laptops contained thousands of pornographic images of abuse. No one alluded that their evaporation was my fault, which suited me. Fabienne Wilder was already dead, so nobody was looking for her.

  Two months on and the weather has changed. Winter is upon us again. The wind roars around the caravan at night like an angry beast trying to break in. Things are very different now, though. I received a message which was posted on a book review site. Attached to it was a jpeg file. The photograph was the scan of an unborn baby. The message attached read,

  ‘This is our child, your unborn son. I pray to Lucifer that his heart is as black as yours, Conrad. I may rear him to be one of us; or I may slaughter him as a gift to my dark lord. Either way, your son is a child for the devil, love Fabienne.’

  I’m jumping at shadows. Every creak and groan makes me turn around fearing the worst. This book is about monsters and it’s they who hunt me. I have to pinch myself to see if I’m awake. I wish it was all just a dream, but it’s not. It was real, and although I’ve written many books, I couldn’t have imagined this story in my most creative moments. This is a shocking tale; it may disturb you and make you question my grip on reality, and your own, too. You’ll tell your friends it can’t be real, but as I listen to the wind gusting against the windows and watch the lightning flashing against the blackness of the sky, I can still hear her screams in my mind.

  I’m scared of the dark and scared of my own shadow. The Staffie is healthy and she eats lambs’ liver every day because I never know if it will be our last. She gets tummy tickles at every opportunity because if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be here. The Press has the identities of the men at the farm, but I have their contacts. I have their mobile phones. I’m working my way through them one by one and the body count is rising. Constance is still missing, but I won’t stop looking for her until I know that she’s either dead or safe. I’ll never stop looking for her.

  Eventually, one of them will lead me to Fabienne Wilder. If she is carrying a child, then I’ll send them both to her demonic master. Until then, we’ll travel and hide, and then we move on and start over. If you believe a single word that I’ve written, google them and read their websites. They’re there and they’re in the millions and they’re hunting me.

  The difference now is I’m hunting them, too.

  Dark Angel

  A Child for the Devil

  BOOK II

  By Conrad Jones

  ISBN : 9781698017532

  COPYRIGHT@CONRADJONES2019

  PROLOGUE

  I’d like to say that I slept like a baby, but I didn’t. My dreams were tortured by the haunting sound of an infant crying. I searched everywhere that I could in the dream, but I couldn’t find her. I knew she was a girl. I don’t know how I knew it, instincts; I guess. One minute her crying was close to me, the next it was miles away, just a whisper of distress on an icy wind which whistled through the derelict structure. It had been a hotel once. It was built to mimic a castle, with towers and turrets, battlements and arrow slits. Though its shape was imposing against the seascape, it was painted white, like a vision from a fairy tale. Once a place full of laughter, wedding feasts and christening parties but now in my dreams, it was a burnt-out shell perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking a stormy sea. The white fascia had turned to mottled green, blistered and peeling. Smoke-burns snaked from t
he empty windows like eyelashes above blackened sockets. They seemed to offer a view into an infinite black abyss. Nettles and thorny weeds pushed their way up through the crumbling floors. When I looked towards the ceilings, I could see an angry sky through the gaping holes in the roof. The slates and rafters had collapsed, leaving the timbers hanging dangerously. Lightning forked earthwards, momentarily illuminating the heavy black clouds like a massive camera flash. The ear-splitting thunder threatened to shake the decaying building to the ground. Echoes of the past reverberated from the crumbling walls, ghostly laughter mixed with sounds from the past; tears of joy and tears of sadness.

  As I walked through the remnants of the bar, I glimpsed the ghostly hotel owner sitting alone on a stool crying into his whisky. His head lolled onto his right shoulder; his broken neck no longer capable of supporting its weight. His eyes bulged almost ready to pop and his tongue hung from the corner of his mouth like a fat black slug. He didn’t seem to notice that the wooden bar was nothing, but a charcoaled frame, the optics long gone, the staff moved on to different jobs years ago. Next to him was the rope with which he eventually hung himself to escape the pain of losing his philandering wife and the insurmountable debts that she’d left behind. Although it was a dream, I shouted at him, nonetheless. I needed help to find the girl. No matter how loud I shouted, my pleas for help went unheard. I felt the desperation of the years gone by, dragging me down like a weight around my waist slowing me down as I ran in search of the source of the tortured cries of the infant. I knew the child was a stranger to me and yet something told me that there was a connection somewhere. I had to find her. Every door was locked, and every window barred. When a corridor opened in front of me, I ran as fast as the weight would allow me, but I never made any progress. It was like running on a giant treadmill through mud. The desperate sobbing was ripping my heart out. I had to find her. My nightmare was interspersed with gravelly laughter from behind me. It was evil laughter whispering in my ear, a ghostly echo like an itch that you can’t scratch. I knew it was Fabienne Wilder who plagued my dreams but every time I turned around; she was gone; the laughter replaced by the soul-destroying sobbing of a baby in distress and a lingering stench of decomposition. It was the same dream every time I closed my eyes. I couldn’t stop the landlord slipping the noose around his neck and I couldn’t find the child. My frantic search left me exhausted when I awoke. It seemed that there truly was no rest for the wicked and wicked was what I’d become.

  ***

  It had been a year since I escaped the clutches of the Order of Nine Angels and I was no closer to finding Fabienne Wilder, their human goddess, Baphomet. If you still don’t know who they are or are unsure if my tale is true, I’ve put their history at the back of the book. Or google them if you dare. Despite everything that the police and the Internet giants have tried to do, they still have websites and Facebook pages and as one closes down, another springs up to replace it. They’re more prevalent now than ever. The more I searched for them, the more I got to know how they function and the more I understood her too. She is the evil which drives them. She is their tangible link to the insidious evil that they worship. Because she is real, a tangible God, they believe that their efforts are not in vain. They can touch her, hear her sermons and see her depravity with their own eyes and that gives them faith in the sinister way.

  Unlike the traditional faiths, they have a tangible focus on this planet. She walks among them, encouraging them to live their lives with no boundaries. The laws we respect, our civilised values and moral framework are considered ‘mundane’ to them. Most of her followers are involved primarily for the unbridled sex which their religion allows, but once they’re drawn in by the promise of pleasure with no limitations, they soon realise that Satanism is not a game. She takes over their hearts and minds and there is no way out. She holds the threat of them being exposed hanging over them permanently and demands more and more until they either submit completely or break. The weak ones are deemed as a threat to the Order and tend to disappear. She is far more powerful than traditional religious icons because she is alive. Because she is alive, it’s easier for them to believe. Jesus is long dead and yet Christians the world over worship him. Could you imagine the power he would hold if he walked the earth? Well, she does walk among us and her followers revel in her existence. They believe that she is the devil incarnate. Baphomet, the Dark Goddess.

  My dilemma was that the police were searching hard for me, and the evil cult the Order of Nine Angels searching harder still. They were holding a girl alleged to be my daughter hostage; a daughter who I’d never met. She was supposedly the product of a relationship that I’d almost forgotten about. Although it was serious at the time, it ended in tears and I’d shut it out of my mind. I’d met Pamela on a course at work and she blew my mind when she walked into the room. I thought she was the one, but I couldn’t convince her that she felt the same. In the end, I gave up trying and we parted on reasonably good terms. Finding out that she was pregnant months after we had split up, her mother took the decision that it would be better to pretend that her new boyfriend was the father. She was obviously so heartbroken that she’d fallen into bed with him a week after the split, so at first wasn’t sure if Constance was mine or not. Or that’s what she told the newspapers when she went fishing for a lucrative exclusive. My notoriety had shaken a lot of old ‘friends’ from the woodwork. Each one brought a nugget of information from my dull past, most of it bullshit but the Press pay well for lies and exaggeration. With the new boyfriend out of the picture and the recession biting single mothers hard, Constance’s mother, Pamela jumped on the bandwagon with a story that in terms of impact, blew the rest out of the water.

  ‘Murder Spree Crime Author is the Father of My Daughter’.

  The silly cow had no idea that the Niners were looking for anyone related to me so that they could force me out of hiding. I’d painstakingly wiped out my Internet footprints so that they couldn’t target anyone that I cared about. It had been a difficult process cutting all ties with my family and friends, but their safety was paramount, and I knew that the police would be tapping their calls to try to track me down. Pamela had no idea how widespread this insidious religion had spread or how powerful they were. Her daughter Constance was snatched within a week of the headlines being published. I didn’t know if she was telling the truth about her being mine or not, but either way I couldn’t leave a young girl in the clutches of paedophile Satanists. I had to find her.

  I had a head start on them this time around. Months before, I’d tracked some of the Niners to a remote farmhouse aptly named, Brunt Boggart, old English for ‘burnt witch’. The farm was built on the site of the ancient execution of a local woman who was accused of being a witch and her legacy was documented throughout history. Every building ever built there mysteriously burned down and the families were plagued with sickness, death and misfortune. It seemed that the Niners searched out such places to hold their ceremonies. To cut a long story short, I interrupted one of their gatherings and three of them were sent to meet their dark lord, despatched with my twelve-gauge shotgun. The mobile phones which I’d taken from the dead Niners proved to be very useful tools in my search for the kidnappers. I knew that it could be weeks before they realised that their sicko friends were killed in the fire at Brunt Boggart. The bodies of the Niners that I’d shot were in the cellar and the building had collapsed on top of them. The emergency services would have no idea that the farm had a cellar as it wasn’t marked on the structural plan. The damage was severe, so nobody looked for it. It would be months later when developers cleared the site that the cellar and the charred remains of three men were found.

  During that time, I had free rein of their phones. I’d sent a series of texts from the dead men and eventually tracked down one of the Niners who were holding the girl.

  ‘Fabienne W wants me to bring ‘presents’ for the daughter.’

  It was vague enough to confuse anyone who had no kn
owledge of the hostage but clear enough to provoke an answer from her captors. Sure enough, a reply came back from a number stored under the name Andrew. I asked where he wanted them dropped off and he replied that I should bring them ‘to the mill’. The farm at Brunt Boggart had been chosen for its remoteness. I guessed that somewhere close by in that green-belt area, I would find a mill. Google Earth helped me to pinpoint an abandoned sawmill a mile away from the farm. After studying it on Google and watching from a distance for a few hours, I knew that they were there.

  The mill was a single storey structure with a vaulted loft space constructed of timber and breeze-block walls with a corrugated iron roof. A window above its double doors was protected by a mesh grill. There were two cars parked on a gravel path which didn’t move all the time that I watched. Another vehicle arrived and a bald man in his fifties stepped out of the mill and shook hands with the driver who handed over a carrier bag with a logo resembling a fish printed on it. They chatted for a moment then the bald man went back inside, and the vehicle left. I assumed it was a delivery of fish and chips to keep the captors and the hostage from starving to death. I knew that it would only take five minutes for me to cross the field between us. Rapeseed was growing waist high and its intense yellow flowers were almost dazzling to the eye; its scent sweet. I ducked low and headed towards the side of the mill where there were no windows.

  There was a path around the mill, made from tons of compacted waste sawdust. Waist-high grasses leaned over from either side, threatening to swamp it forever. I headed for the rear of the building hoping that the images on Google were recent. They were and I thought I’d seen a way in but until I saw it up close, I wouldn’t be sure. A conveyor belt protruded from the rear elevation, its cogs and wheels red with rust. The hatch above it was padlocked but below it was a flywheel, half in the building and half out. The axle was fitted to the rear wall, its belt twisted and warped by time and the elements. The mill had once supplied wooden beams to the coal industry, which were used to support the miles of tunnels deep beneath my feet. When the pits were closed, the mill went bust with them and it had never been sold on. There was a gap between the flywheel and the wall which I’d guessed was big enough for me to squeeze through. It was a tight fit, but I was inside the mill in seconds.