by Tony Walker
As he read through, by the light of dirty electrical bulb, he read that Bael teaches all languages and tongues instantly. He can also cause earthquakes. Amon causes feuds, Barbatos helps the magician understand the language of birds. He looked at the little picture beside each one, and he couldn’t help but be reminded of the description his daughter had given him of the thing in the clock: like a bat, but he has man’s legs and a head like a horse.”
Somehow Max had put one of these demons in the clock. But why would Max put a demon in a clock then give it to him?
John heard movement in the house below. Someone was moving about. His heart suddenly hammered. He grabbed the book and walked to the door. Suddenly there was a crack and the sound of glass exploding. One of the skylights had burst, though there was no sign of anything hitting it from either inside or out. John felt a sliver of glass had cut his cheek, blood ran from it and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. There was nothing else in the room. If he was going to find the key to this mystery, it wasn’t here.
Expecting to run into something, some other demon, John made his way down the stairs to the landing of the first floor. John could see dirty, half-empty bedrooms behind half-open doors.
He descended the stairs and then there was an enormous bang behind followed by a loud cracking noise. John jumped down three steps at a time as the staircase collapsed under his feet; wood and brick fell away. John stumbled forward onto the relative safety of the ground floor and stood there breathing heavily.
The living room opened off onto the right; another parlour to the left. The windows were boarded up, but John guessed they looked into the sea. A ratty old armchair sat in the corner of the parlour beside a bookcase empty apart from half a pile of yellowed magazines.
The sound came again. Somebody was below. John thought of running out the door. He had the book, and he was sure that the demon in the clock was one of those mentioned in it. But by itself that wouldn’t help him. He needed something more. Something was here. Some key item.
There was moving and shuffling below. From the basement.
Like a lightning bolt, he knew the house. He’d never been here before as far as he remembered, but he knew his way around it.
He took some steps down, but on the top, he felt dizzy, then he remembered being about 11. It all came back. His mum and dad had left him in the care of Uncle Max for a night while they went away. John hadn’t remembered it ever happening until right now; as if the memory had been sealed off, unlocked only when he almost stood before the door to the basement. He knew about dissociation; he saw it so often in his patients when memories were too terrible to remember; the mind locked them away. John doubled over with nausea.
He remembered the basement. He remembered Max and his friends. In the basement, Max cut his hair and cut his fingernails.
Why the hell would he do that?
John stood by the front door, not going down yet. Whatever was downstairs was quiet, waiting for him. He flicked through the index of the book he held. He found a reference to fingernails.
On page ninety-seven he read “cut nail and hairs were offerings to the Roman goddess Proserpine.”
Proserpine was The Goddess of Death. It seemed witches and warlocks used the hair and nails of a victim to create a magic link or bond.
More memories flooded him. Max made him wear a white cotton shift, like a shroud. He felt sick, trembling at the memory. He remembered Max wore a black robe. He wore a mask like one of those old doctors from the plague with a huge beak. He didn’t understand.
But he had to go down. He had to search the house to find something to save his family. Movement again. He needed to arm himself.
He looked around the room. By the burned out ashes of the fire was an old iron poker. He grabbed it. It was the closet think to a weapon he could find.
John stepped down the stairs, book in one hand, poker in the other. The stairs creaked unnervingly under his tread as he descended. As he entered the basement, John felt a stronger wave of nausea flow over him. He felt himself back there as a boy, wearing that white cotton shift, while his uncle cut his fingernails and other men watched from the shadows.
In memory, he heard the chanting of the men in the corners from years ago when he’d been a helpless boy.
He tried the switch, but the light in the basement didn’t work. Someone was waiting in the dark for him. John used his phone as a torch. He swept the beam around the damp cellar. There was no one there. Then he stopped. On the wall opposite, John could see that the brickwork looked fresh - the pointing was more recent than that of the surrounding bricks.
He walked over, and touched the wall. The bricks were loose. They’d been put in place inexpertly. When he touched them, the bricks simply fell inwards. The bricks fell with dull thumps onto the wet clay of the room behind. John looked through and by the light of his phone, he saw a coffin. It was clearly new - as if it had just come from the showroom - brass handles and polished wood. And a realisation struck him. The bricks had not been cemented in place, not by accident, but so that whatever was in the coffin could get out.
Only the fact the bricks were still in place when he entered the cellar was a reassurance. It meant that what was in the coffin had not moved yet. But what then had been moving below?
Then the man who had been hiding, rushed him. John swung wildly with the poker and connected. There was a scream of pain. He hit him again and felt whoever it was raise their arms to protect themselves from the blows of the poker. The man tried to escape, struggling towards the stairs. John let him go, shining the light on the escaping man to see he looked like one of the men from the funeral: one of those who had been members of Max’s congregation at the weird Lodge in town and who’d come to the funeral tea. He had been some kind of guard here, guarding the coffin.
After getting his breath back from the exertion, John stepped through the hole towards the coffin. The room was floored with clay rather than the stone flags of the basement.
He could hardly breathe and his head was full of memories. Memories of him as a frightened boy; memories of his father shouting at Max and telling him he would never let him look after John again.
The memories threatened to tear him away from the present. He heard the men chanting. He heard the snip-snip of the scissors; he saw his uncle’s black beak mask above him.
John shook his head to clear it so he could focus. He leaned over the coffin and with a grunt, moved the lid sideways.
The dead face of his Uncle Max looked up at him, rouged and preserved by the embalmer’s art.
Round Max’s neck was some kind of medallion on its chain. It was engraved with lines and circles in an obscure pattern. Then he recognised it.
It was identical with the seal in the grandfather clock. John grabbed at it and the chain snapped. He half expected the corpse of Uncle Max to move but it didn’t. With the snatched tight in his hand medallion, John retreated. He climbed the stairs, staring at the seal. The fact that the seal was identical with the one in the clock must be significant.
In the hall, just by the front door, now hanging open because of the fleeing guard, John read more the Goetia book of demons. He knew he had little time before more of the weird cultists came now they knew he was here, defiling their saviour’s corpse. He found a drawing of the seal identical to the one he held.
The seal was, as he’d believed, one of the Demons of the Goetia. He read that the magician, in this case Uncle Max, would use it to command a demon to do his will. The demons had to be forced to help the magician, so the magician tortured the seal to hurt the demon. Very often they would burn the seals to cause the demons pain. This seal was that of Duke Jahal - who had thirty legions of devils under his command. He appeared with the head of a horse and the wings of a bat.
John read that Jahal’s particular talent allowed the magician to possess other mortals and take over their bodies. With Jahal’s help they could enter into another’s body and possess it and live in
it as if it was their own. This worked best if the victim was a blood relative of the magician who wanted to possess him.
But John had the seal. Now he knew what this seal was, maybe he could force the Demon Jahal to leave his wife and child alone.
John jumped in his car and started the engine, breaking the speed limit along the A66, thundering down the country roads from Penrith to Mungrisdale.
As he drove, he tried to think things through. It seemed Max gave John the clock to put the demon close to him.
John pulled up to a halt in the gravel parking space outside Thorgill Farm. He stepped out of the car, pulling on his coat. A cold wind blew out from the valley, the high hills. The house itself stood sullen and dark. John went up to the window and banged on it, shouting “Sarah! Sarah!”
He tried the door and it wouldn’t open. Then he lifted the seal and said, “Jahal, I command you open the door!”
Now when he tried the handle, it turned, and he shoved it open.
The first thing that John noticed was the ticking of the clock and, as he looked over at it, he saw the hands running backwards as they had before. His wife and daughter were somehow in that. John’s breath blew out in clouds in front of him. He saw the clock. In front of it, was the smoky image of a creature with a horse’s head and the flickering wings of a bat.
Something was aware of him.
“Let them go!“ John yelled.
There was a peal of wicked laughter, then a blast of terrible energy knocked John flying across the hall. He slammed into the wall. It seemed just having the seal wasn’t enough. John picked himself from where he had fallen against the wall. He had landed on a wooden side table and had knocked off the Tiffany Lamp which had shattered beneath him. His hand was cut and bleeding. The blood smeared on the tablecloth and onto the wall. It was running down his arm onto his fingers.
The broken light bulb sparked and fizzed in the dim light where it had fallen. The power was still connected and some infernal electricity pulsed through the house.
A voice came from nowhere. “Submit to me and let me enter into you. Let me open you for him who has commanded me to enter in.”
John gritted his teeth. He raised up the seal. “Jahal, let my family go.”
But the demon just laughed. “You aren’t hurting me Dr Eliot. Not like he hurt me.”
John’s cut hand was bleeding more than it should, it was dribbling onto the floor. The blood ran down his hand and was taken up by an unnatural wind. John’s ears filled with a hideous howling. As he watched blood and smoke formed a mist and the mist became a dark fog and the fog became a black shape.
The carpet by the broken lamp caught fire. If unchecked, it would burn the house down. John panicked. Jessica and Sarah were trapped in the clock. They would burn if the house burned.
The black shape thickened like smoke from burning oil. But the source of the smoke wasn’t oil, it was the blood dripping from John’s cut hand. He heard a voice, keening on the wind. He felt his dead uncle near him. The soul of Uncle Max was feeding from John’s blood. Using it to manifest. Max created the bond years ago with hair and blood as he prepared the way for his eventual death and reanimation in the body of a relative.
The face made of smoke spoke. Its words wreathed round John’s face, trying to find a way into him. John felt Max’s power force him to the ground. He tried to stand, but Max’s mind was stronger than a steel vice. Tendrils of the Max’s thoughts began to reach inside his skull as he lay on the floor. Max’s words found their way in through his ears and up through his nose and behind the orbits of his eyes.
Jahal stood watching, indifferent. Soon his job would be over and Jess and Sarah would be closed up in the clock forever. He couldn’t care less.
But Jahal had the power to hurt Max, but John knew he had to hurt Jahal to make him stop Max.
Max was in his mind. He felt the cold cruelty of the old man. John was terrified Max would win, and enter into him.
The carpet caught further and a lick of yellow fire spread over the floor. John needed to get his family out of the clock. The clock where Jahal locked them.
Then John gripped the demon’s seal that he held in his hand. He thrust his hand into the fire on the carpet. The flames burned his hand, but it burned the seal. The demon screamed in pain. This was hurting it. John’s hand burned; he shifted to dangle the seal in the heart of the fire. The demon roared.
“Jahal you are free to take revenge on Max who bound you.”
The demon stood up tall and seething in its anger. “I Jahal, Duke of Hell, am bound no longer,” it roared. “And I will have vengeance on those who have dared to hold me to this place.” Its voice echoed and roared; it cracked like a flow of lava and its rage radiated like a hate-filled fire.
Then with an enormous blast of psychic energy it the smoke form of Max away from John. Realising now that the demon was free, Max turned to face Jahal. He rapidly spoke words of power that caused the demon to shudder and fall on its knees. John rolled over out of the way, his head splitting with pain as the tendrils of Max’s will were withdrawn.
The demon roared again and stood up. The words that Max fired at it seemed to deflect away and Jahal conjured a huge whip of smoke and fire.
Jahal whipped Max and the fibres of the whip wrapped round the half solid form and pulled it towards him. John could see the Max’s manifested body burst into flame where the whip held it. It screamed as it burned, but still its mouth spoke. The words had the force of projectiles and seemed to be filled with a virulent poison because where they struck the demon, its flesh fell away and dropped in stinking gobbets to the floor. Jahal shrieked in pain, but pulled the whip closer. Though Max struck at the demon with his voice, and hurt the demon with every noxious syllable, still it dragged it to him. When it had him close enough, it bent down with its horse’s head and it bit into the smoking head. It bit off and consumed Uncle Max, and he screamed as he was consigned to the eternal fires.
As the demon feasted on the Demonologist, the grandfather clock exploded. Out of the shadow realm, where he had hidden them, Sarah and Jess rushed to John. He had his hand out of the fire, was lying on the floor as the flames caught the room around him. Sarah pulled him to his feet. His lungs were full of smoke and he coughed. Jess wailed with terror. Sarah dragged him. “We need to get out of here.”
Behind a wall of fire, Jahal ate the soul of Uncle Max.
They got to the door, pushed their way out into the night air. Standing there coughing, John saw his beloved house go up in flames, the mighty mountains behind just watching.
“My house!” John said.
“At least we’re safe. We’re all out of there,” Sarah said.
The house burned. John knew he should ring the fire service but he was afraid that if they saved the house something of Max or Jahal might remain.
Sarah pulled him close. “I never liked that house anyway,” she said.
14
A Grizedale Wedding
“If you run off with Gowan Fell, you’ll never be welcome back here,” her mother said, stony-faced. Rebecca looked at both her mother and her father who stood there at the door of the slate-roofed cottage at Grizedale, the only home she’d ever known
“But I love him,” she said.
Her mother twisted her face in a grimace. “You’re a foolish, eighteen-year-old girl. What do you know about love?”
“I know what my heart tells me, mother,” Rebecca said. Her father sighed and her mother glowered. Rebecca set her own face as if she didn’t care what they thought, turned and walked down the path that led to the forest. It was summer. She walked down the rows of her father’s sweet peas and blue lupins, the heat of the sun beating on her bonnet. She had her few possessions in a pack on her back. She stole a glance to see her mother turn and step back into the house. She could feel the older woman’s dark anger even from here. Her father stood at the door and looked like he would cry; he was always the soft one. Her mother had been the disci
plinarian. Rebecca walked on, pushing open the garden gate, which was stiff as if it didn’t want her to go either. Then she was walking along the grass verged path that led to the forest. Around them the fells rose - high and craggy across the lake to the west where the mountain called The Old Man stood like a brooding god above the water and softer, heavily wooded hills to the east. She hadn’t reached the forest when her father caught up with her. She heard him but didn’t look round, for she too was angry and stubborn. Then she felt his hand on her shoulder. She let it lie but kept walking until it fell away.
“Rebecca,” he said, coming after her, slightly out of breath.
She softened. She loved her father. Other fathers would have beaten such a wilful and disobedient daughter until they obeyed, but that was never father’s way. He would usually persuade, cajole, and make her laugh until she came round. Usually, but not now because love is the higher law. She’d read that in a story of knights and ladies. Fate set who your true love would be and then you had to be with him, come hell or high water.
“Rebecca,” her father said again, and she came to a stop and turned to face him. Her back was to the forest that closed in around the path like a secret.
Her father was in his mid-fifties, grey at the temples, his face tanned and lined by his lifetime of working outside. “Do you have to go, lass? Your mother thinks you’ll soon regret it and be back.”
“I have to go, father. You always taught me I should do what’s right - what my conscience tells me to do.” Her face was pained. She hated to upset him; her mother less so, but her father certainly. She took his hand.
He said, “But is it right? Have you thought of the shame it’ll bring upon us?”
She scowled. “I care not for shame, father. Shame is the way the priests and lords keep us in our place. Shame shall not stop me.”