by Bill Bennett
Which made him feel alive.
It had been many years since the Hag had travelled. It required such focus, such concentration and energy, and at her age it took several days to recover and have the full use of her powers again. It used to be fun when she was younger – the exhilaration, the speed and spin and whir, the sensation of being transported through time and space. And then the excitement of ending up in some new place sometime in the past or present or future. But she’d done it too many times now and at her age, travel was purely functional.
A flight to the west coast on a regular airline would be easier, but every day now was crucial. They had to get this girl quickly. The Grand Master was right – there was only so much she could do from her condo in Florida. He’d also made it very clear that if she failed, then her time with Baphomet would be over. Viciously, savagely, over.
The New York disturbance was now organised, so there was no need for her to stay back and coordinate that task any longer. She’d done all she could. It was now up to the Baphomites on the ground to action it at the right time. And Belt could look after her cats in her absence. There was no reason for her to stay, and every reason for her to go, and go fast, which meant travel.
She was also curious to meet this inquisitor. The girl intrigued her. From what she knew of her, she was an ambitious little fiend, capable of vicious derangement, yet with a lot of natural talent. She’d impressed the upper echelons in Budapest with her ruthlessness, and there was no doubt she was capable of clean emotionless violence, that was clear to everyone. It was also apparent that she was working hard to acquire more powers – even tracking down adepts and paying to have one-on-one classes with them to learn more, faster.
When she reached the rank of inquisitor she’d demanded not one, but two familiars, which was highly unusual and impertinent – you had to be at least a priestess to be allowed a familiar, and even then you were only permitted one. The Hag had forsaken familiars years ago. She’d found them too needy, and they increased a witch’s vulnerability. If a familiar was injured or killed, then it energetically impaired the witch-host. But that didn’t seem to bother the demented little girlie, and it was a mark of the Golden Order’s belief in her potential that her outrageous demand was finally granted.
The Hag was not a fan. For a start she hated short people, especially short people dressed in black. They reminded her of rats. And she hated rats even more than she hated children. As well, she resented that her fate was now intertwined with this aggressive brat that had only been in Baphomet a few years.
The Hag liked working alone and hated being dependent on anyone, especially someone young and arrogant who believed the best way to fix a problem was with a blade. Cutting off someone’s arm and watching them bleed to death was colourful and it attracted attention from Budapest, but it was nonsensical and immature and unnecessarily barbaric. There were times to make a statement, and times to be discreet. It seemed this girl was oblivious of that.
For the Hag, being a witch within Baphomet was about the use of ancient spells learned from the Book of Shadows. It was about the elegance and dignity of rituals and ceremonies, and the respect for what’s gone before. It wasn’t rock’n’roll hack’n’slash.
She didn’t trust this Kritta woman. That’s what it came down to. She didn’t trust her to find this girl in the limited time they had available. That’s why she had to go and do it herself.
She picked up her phone, called the little rat-girl. She waited until it almost skipped to voicemail before Kritta answered, the sound of dogs barking in the background.
‘Where are you?’ the Hag hissed.
‘We’re on our way back,’ Kritta said.
‘I asked you where you are, not where you’re going!’ the old widow rasped. ‘Don’t mess with me, girl, you will find me unpleasant.’
A pause, before Kritta answered, ‘We’re in Flagstaff, in a vet shop. My familiar got hurt when that boy attacked us.’
It was a worrying development. Who was this troublesome kid who was acting guardian to the girl? The Hag kept a close watch on the white witches within the feeble ranks of Cygnet, but this boy was new to her. What connection did he have with the girl? And what role did the woman’s brother have in their plans?
Baphomet regarded Dr Maguire as an oddity, an eccentric, rich do-gooder who dabbled at the fringes of Cygnet but who posed no real threat. Now that this new boy was taking the daughter to him, they would have to reassess this doctor. Perhaps he was more involved in Cygnet than they thought.
The Hag sat down at her computer and pulled up a map, looking at Flagstaff. ‘Now listen to me and don’t say another word,’ she said to Kritta. ‘Go to the eastern end of the Grand Canyon National Park and wait for me there by the kiosk, okay? Do you understand me, girl?’
‘Why? What’s happening?’
The Hag could now hear genuine fear in the inquisitor’s voice. She smiled to herself. The rat-girl must be thinking that she’s coming out to kill her. Good. Let her squirm. Keep her terrified.
‘Go there and wait for me,’ the Hag repeated. ‘And if you’re not there when I arrive, I will spell you to death in the most horrible way you could possibly imagine. Are we clear?’
Kritta’s voice came back high and strained. ‘Yes, Hag. Eastern end. By the kiosk. I’ll wait for you.’
The Hag slammed down the phone.
She pulled herself up out of the chair, and hobbled into her bedroom, which had a view out over a private golf course. She opened her wardrobe and took out her travelling dress – a hand-stitched, rough, raw silk outfit that opened out into a huge billowing tent as she spun. The dress had been given to her by an old mystic in a desert caravanserai outside of Konya in the far-flung reaches of Turkey. It was three hundred years old, so the seer said, handed down from a secret clan of whirling dervishes who’d been using the same technique for thousands of years to raise themselves to a higher level of consciousness.
Witches had adapted the technique for their own particular purposes, to heighten their vibrational energies until they could merge with time and space, and go anywhere within any dimension they so chose. It was a difficult skill to master, and it required thousands of hours of study and practice and meditation, so only adepts of the highest order were capable of travelling.
Not every witch needed a three-hundred-year-old skirt from a whirling dervish to travel. This was an exotic vanity of the Hag’s, a colourful flourish that she’d relished in her younger years. Some adepts didn’t even need to spin to raise their vibrational energies – they could do it simply with an instant meditation. And some who were lazy or infirm took the easy way and used brews, but that was a less reliable method, because the efficacy of the brew determined the quality of your travel. Also, you didn’t want to get stuck someplace and not be able to find the right ingredients to make a brew to get you home again.
Davinda Vaduva put on the dress. She tucked her phone, her credit cards and some cash into an inside pocket stitched especially for travel. Then she put a change of clothes and some sensible shoes into a small backpack, which she shouldered. That’s all she would need.
She then stood very still, focused, closed her eyes and began to chant; an ancient chant that was mesmerising in its banal tonality. She extended her sagging arms, shoulder height like wings, and then she began to spin like a top, her feet quickly finding a half-remembered rhythm, spinning her faster and faster, her skirt flying out in a colourful whirl, her arms now tucked in at the elbows as she gathered speed, chanting louder and louder, the old woman moving so fast now she was a blur.
And then she was gone.
Kritta looked around the parking lot. Her gaze settled on a two-year-old white Toyota four-wheel drive. A nondescript vehicle, but one that could take them anywhere.
‘We have to meet the Hag at the Grand Canyon,’ she said to Bess, walking over to the Toyota.
‘What for?’ Bess said following, suddenly anxious.
‘I don�
�t know, but we need to change wheels. The cops will be looking for us on bikes.’ Kritta looked around, made sure no one was watching, then she pulled out a knife, slid it down the window frame, and unlocked the vehicle in one swift motion.
‘Come on,’ she said to Bess.
She opened the door, climbed in and sat behind the wheel. Bess ran around and sat beside her. Kritta looked at the ignition switch. She frowned. Could she do this? She closed her eyes, concentrated, and intoned a spell.
‘What are you doing?’ Bess asked.
‘Shut up. I’m concentrating.’ Kritta opened her eyes. Nothing had happened. ‘I’m trying to start the car with a spell, you idiot. Now let me do this.’
Kritta had spent a lot of time studying mechanical spells, and had even worked with an adept to give her some tips. Starting a motor vehicle was one of the first spells she’d learned, figuring that it would no doubt come in handy. Now she needed it to work.
She tried again, carefully intoning every word just as she’d been taught. The rhythm and vibration of the words in a spell were just as important, if not more so, than the words themselves.
Still nothing happened. The car didn’t start.
Kritta slammed her two hands into the steering wheel in frustration. She glared at the ignition. She hated defeat. She felt like taking out a knife and stabbing the goddamn thing.
Kritta closed her eyes, visualised clearly the car starting, then slowly sang the spell this time, subtly changing the intonation of the words.
The car sprung to life. Kritta whooped. She threw the gearshift into drive, and began to make her way out of the parking lot.
The group of German tourists from Heidelberg were looking at a mountain goat traversing a dangerously narrow path with a thousand foot drop, and so they didn’t notice the arrival of one of the world’s most infamous witches in a swirl of dust behind some straggly trees nearby.
The Hag steadied herself, feeling weak and spent from the travel. She hoisted her backpack up onto her shoulder and walked off towards a nearby kiosk. In the public restrooms she changed out of her whirling dervish dress and into something less conspicuous – tan slacks, a beige blouse and blue cashmere cardigan, with a string of pearls for good measure.
Barely able to stand from pure exhaustion, she propped herself up at the washbasins and tidied her hair, washed her face, then went outside to sit on a bench and wait. Sometime later, much later, she was bathed in the glaring wash of headlights as a vehicle pulled up. She didn’t turn. She waited until the engine died, the lights went off, heard the crunch of boots on gravel, and a tiny shadow appeared at her shoulder. Still she didn’t turn. All she said was, ‘You’re late, you little rat.’
The Fallen Priest crested a hill and before him lay an ocean of rubber. Four acres or more. The rubber dump, they called it, full of tires – car tires, truck tires, monstrous tires off tractors or earthmovers; all busted up and ripped, awaiting another life somewhere else. Some were stacked two and three storeys high. Most, though, had spilled over and were lying in heaps around the huge yard. If someone were to throw a match in there, the priest thought, the rubber would burn for a year and black smoke would choke the skies of several states.
In the centre of this mountain of tires was a small demountable aluminium shack. The priest drove up and parked out front, then went around and opened up the tailgate, stared at the soiled sacks under which lay his prized captive. He grabbed one of the sacks and yanked it away, revealing Angela lying lifeless on the metal floor of the trunk like a crumpled doll.
The priest pulled her out by her feet, lifted her up and over his shoulder like a bag of wheat, then he walked her over to the demountable. He kicked open the door and carried her inside. He looked around the bone-cold empty room. A blackened pot-bellied stove sat squat in a corner. In front of it was a cracked and broken recliner rocker. The walls were bare, except for a picture hanging lopsided off the back wall – a grimy photo of the president, with duct tape over his smiling face.
The Fallen Priest hauled Angela over to the centre of the room, scuffed back an old rug to reveal a trapdoor with an indented handle, which he pulled up. Musty fetid air gushed up from below. He carried his trussed bundle down a set of rough wooden stairs and across to a chair by a small formica-topped table. He sat her down and turned on a light – a single bulb dangling from a cord above. He then grabbed some plastic binds from a nearby shelf and secured her hands and feet to the chair.
Her head lolled to one side.
The priest looked around the dank room, which smelt of earth and fear and things rotting. It was a hole dug out of the ground, maybe twenty feet square and seven feet high, with its only entrance being the trapdoor above. Half the space was taken up with faded cardboard boxes full of old invoices and receipts. Water dripped from the ceiling, panelled with decaying boards. The floor was puddled clay.
The priest checked for anything that could be used as a weapon, or to aid an escape. Even though she appeared to be completely under the spell of the potion, he didn’t trust this woman. She had powers like no other.
He reached into his coat and pulled out a tiny obsidian urn, which he placed on the table in front of the woman. Inside the urn was a small amount of salt, sea salt, but a very special kind of sea salt. It was called Satan’s Sweat, and this is what he would use to turn her. To disengage her soul in preparation for Unholy.
Centuries ago he’d travelled all the way to the seething, brooding coast of Normandy in France to obtain this salt. He’d waited for the lowest tide of the year before venturing forth to a monastery on a rock off the coast. It was their holy monument to Saint Michael the Archangel, a ghastly foul place, and only accessible on the lowest of tides.
The closer he got to this sanctified rock, the more nauseous he became. His limbs shook, his eyes stung, he found it difficult to breath. It was one of the few places on earth where their putrid holiness really affected him. That ugly edifice they called the Notre Dame in Paris afflicted him similarly, as did anything along their stupid Saint Michael’s ley line in southern England. These places, he and his kind avoided.
But he couldn’t avoid Mont-Saint-Michel, not if he wanted the salt that settled on the tidal flats around the abbey. This is what he’d come for, this is what he would need to carry out his work in the decades and centuries to come. He’d prepared himself with a very powerful deflection spell before stepping out onto the mouth of the river that first morning. With several rough hessian bags slung over his shoulder, he began to collect the crystalline nuggets of grey salt. But the repellent power of the abbey and the spirit of Archangel Michael made what should have been a simple task overwhelmingly difficult.
Even with the protection of the spell, which had been developed by Satan’s emissaries down through the ages to handle the onslaught of holy power, the Fallen Priest soon became weak and sick. He shuffled along the flats trying to stay as far away as possible from the repugnant rock and its church. By the time the tide turned and the sea began to flood back into the river mouth, he could barely stand, he was so sick from the mount’s holy power.
It took him almost six months to gather the strength to return, and then over the next several years he accumulated more of the grey soggy salt – enough for him to use in his shadow work for centuries to come.
It was called Satan’s Sweat because it had been forced to the surface by the energies of Saint Michael and his god’s army that guarded the rock. The Fallen Priest only knew that the grey crystals contained potent dark qualities that could be found nowhere else. For the Collector of Souls, Satan’s Sweat had become an essential part of his toolkit.
The priest pulled a small ivory box from his coat. He placed the box carefully on the table beside the miniature black urn, and opened its lid to reveal a tiny silver spoon cradled in crimson velvet. On its handle was the emblem of Baphomet – two twirling goat’s horns. He took the top off the urn, dipped the spoon inside, and pulled out a small amount of the coarse, grey Sa
tan’s Sweat.
With a steady hand, he took the spoon over to the woman, opened her mouth and tipped the salt onto her tongue. Then he closed her mouth. He held her jaw shut for several minutes, then he wiped the spoon clean with a black satin cloth, put it back carefully into the ivory box, put the top back on the urn, and put them both back in his coat. Then he looked at the woman and waited for the Sweat to work its wonders.
It would take a couple of minutes to counter the effects of the Sleep Eternal, but soon she would be ready. Satan’s Sweat created delirium. It sent some people insane. It was the most powerful hallucinogenic on the planet, and combined with advanced spellcraft, it worked its way into a person’s subtle body where it sought to dislodge the soul from its attachment to its hierarchy – that layered consortium of angelic structures particular to each human being. The hierarchy clung to the soul tenaciously, more so with those that were highly evolved spiritually, such as this Maguire woman.
Dislodgement was a preliminary and necessary stage before extraction. It was kind of like wiggling a tooth loose before pulling it out. The extraction itself would happen on Unholy, a ceremony that would be attended by hundreds of elite witches from around the country, and even some from other quadrants around the world, so he could not afford to have anything go wrong.
Her eyelids fluttered.
Slowly, very slowly, she opened her eyes.
He stood before her.
She immediately recoiled, which pleased him. That meant she knew him. Knew of him. Knew of his power. This would be easier then he thought.
‘Where’s my daughter?’ she said feebly.
He smiled. Then he began to intone a quiet chant, the words ancient, speaking of all things evil. He moved his hands as he chanted, like a symphonic conductor. His fingers made strange shapes, their shadows flitted across her face. His gestures seemed to be manifestations of the malevolence within the words.
Angela shook her head, trying to thwart this attack on her very being. His chanting got louder, echoing off the cold earth walls around them, his finger-shapes now stabbing the air, their shadows slashing across her nose, her eyes, her mouth.