by Bill Bennett
Something caught her eye on the wind. Bright white, flying high, heading her way. Two of them. Side by side. Identical. She pulled out her binoculars. Two white doves, so perfect they looked like they were made from fine bone china. Kritta slowly lowered the glasses. A chill ran through her body. The irony was terrifying. Doves. The Twins come in peace. Of course they do . . .
The Hag shuffled up beside her, grabbed the binoculars, took a look. She stared at the incoming doves for longer than seemed necessary, as though she weren’t so much looking at the birds as compiling her thoughts, forming a game plan. Then without saying a word she handed the glasses back to Kritta and walked off. She quietly slipped into the room where she’d slept the night, grabbed her backpack, and took out her travelling dress.
It’s time to get out of here, she thought.
The doves alighted delicately onto the railing of the ranch house’s front porch, their wings in perfect unison as if they were one bird. Kritta walked up, and watched in amazement as they turned into two young men, each in identical white Kenzo suits. They coolly glanced across at Kritta, and Bess and Andi too as they walked up, then they turned away, as if the mere effort of looking at them was beneath them.
They walked inside, through the abandoned house, their shiny Prada shoes scuffing dust. They looked distastefully at the busted-up furniture caked in layers of dirt, at the litter on the floor, at threadbare curtains flapping in a dry wind against broken windows.
Kritta, Bess and Andi watched them – Kritta with thinly disguised contempt. She wasn’t scared of them. Seeing them in the flesh, she was disgusted by their vanity, their arrogance and preciousness.
The Twins turned to her in perfect synchronisation, their displeasure apparent. ‘You expect us to stay here?’
‘Hey, I didn’t ask you to come. If you don’t like it, take it up with your travel agent,’ Kritta snapped back. She immediately regretted mouthing off. She’d heard stories of how the Twins had taken their brutal killings to the level of performance art, often over the smallest provocation.
They stared at her. There was nothing behind their eyes. No hate, no joy, no empathy, no evil. Nothing. And then one corner of their mouths curled into the tiniest of smirks.
‘Where is the Hag?’ they both asked.
‘The Hag’s gone,’ Kritta said. Chicken-shit witch, she thought, leaving her alone to handle the Twins. It was an act of supreme cowardice that deserved savage payback, should she live through these next few days. ‘She’s gone and travelled somewhere. Could be anywhere.’
Kritta knew the Twins couldn’t travel. That meant they couldn’t chase her. But the Hag would have to return. You can’t travel forever. And when she does return, she’ll have the Twins waiting for her, for sure.
The Twins looked at each other. They each raised an eyebrow, then looked back at Kritta.
‘We’ll deal with this later. Where is the Maguire girl?’
‘Up there in a cave,’ Kritta nodded to the peak. They didn’t need to know that the girl had the protection of a powerful entity. Let the dandies discover that for themselves.
The Twins appraised her with tilted heads and eyes that looked her up and down with contempt, taking in everything about her – her scuffed elevated boots, her leathers with a piece cut out revealing the snake bite, her tiny wiry frame, her synthetic knife pouches, her scarred and hateful face.
‘There’s a car coming,’ Andi said quietly.
And as one, the Twins snapped their heads around to take a look. Way down below, a car was making its way up the track, a dust plume billowing behind, the sound of its engine barely audible on the wind.
The guard fumbled with his keys to open the gates into the mine. The Fallen Priest waited impatiently. He was like a kid at the entrance to Disneyland. This was his place. His playground. He felt at home here. The foul energies of the place delighted him. And for the woman who was tied up in the rear luggage compartment, it would be her sacrificial homecoming, the place where she would relinquish her soul to His Dark Lord and Shadow Lady.
The Deep Sink Mine was one of the few places on earth that connected directly through to the Palace of Fires. It wasn’t a physical connection, though, it was a corridor of dark energy. Hell wasn’t a fiery pit in the centre of the earth, just as heaven wasn’t a cotton-puff paradise up in the clouds. Hell was a vibrational vortex that sucked everything out of you. It existed outside of time and space, in the murky astrals in the fourth dimension.
On this earthly plane there were places that filled you with love and took you closer to God. And there were places that reeked of pure evil and allowed Satan into your heart.
The Deep Sink Mine was such a place.
A new settler discovered the mine in the mid 1820s. He’d chased a small wayward lamb through some dark woods, and saw it disappear into the ground. It had actually dropped down into a massive sinkhole that had subsided deep into the earth. The farmer jumped down and tried to find the lamb, but it had been swallowed up by one of the many seemingly bottomless crevasses.
While he never found the lamb, the farmer did discover a huge pocket of coal. A mine was soon established, and for years the local settlers used the coal for heating and cooking. During that time, though, the district suffered from a series of misfortunes – crops failed, rains never came, there was an insect plague and hundreds of people suddenly became ill and died.
The death rate climbed alarmingly from pneumonia, tuberculosis, dysentery and several other maladies the medicos simply couldn’t put a name to. Those were just the physical ailments. There were many more who went insane – those that lost their minds and killed themselves, or took a shotgun to their families in their wild-eyed desperation. One man chopped off both his feet with an axe, then sat on his porch drinking whisky while he watched the pools of blood crawl out across the boards, until he bled to death.
Many left the area rather than stay in such an accursed place, and no one at the time connected all the bad luck with the baby lamb.
But later they would.
In the mid 1800s, a public company was floated to mine the coal deposits commercially. Called The Deep Sink Mining Company, the plan was to use the sinkhole as the basis for the main shaft, then tunnel off in horizontal branches from that central vertical stem.
The company had east coast money behind it and at its height it employed nearly five hundred men – until the explosion. The explosion killed everyone underground and destroyed most of the buildings up top. It was a national disaster, made the front page of all the newspapers, and The Deep Sink Mining Company folded, owing huge debts.
The mine then lay unused for two generations, enough time for people to forget the disasters. Then another mining company decided to try again. It told its investors that safety and working procedures had improved since the big explosion, and they now had systems in place that would prevent any such occurrence from ever happening again.
They rebuilt the shafts, brought in modern machinery, and were soon turning a handsome profit. But then people in the district started seeing ghostly images of a baby lamb – the original lamb that went down the sinkhole and never came out. They saw it in the woods, they saw it by the mouth of the main shaft, and some miners swore they saw the lamb deep down in the tunnels. When that happened they all stopped work immediately and made for the top. They believed it was a forewarning of another calamity.
Then late one September afternoon, when the mine was operating at full capacity, the main shaft collapsed inexplicably and all the miners were buried alive. Engineers and experts at the time put it down to the shifting nature of the geology in the area, but others began to talk of a curse. The beer talk in the various bars across the county was that anyone who went down into that mine and saw the baby lamb would end up in the fiery pits of hell, shaking hands with the Big D himself.
Despite this, the lure of mineral wealth was too great, and in the early part of the twentieth century there was yet another attempt to resurrect
the mine. It too ended in tragedy, but in a strange kind of way. The miners working underground started to cough up blood.
The men had thorough medical examinations, but they all appeared to be fit and healthy. The doctors could find no reason why they were coughing and sneezing copious quantities of blood. The one thing they had in common was that they all swore they’d seen the ghostly image of the baby lamb underground. The union finally stepped in and halted production citing health and safety issues, and the company went bust.
By this time, the Curse of the Baby Lamb had settled over the mine like a shroud of fetid coal dust, and it stopped any further activity. The buildings fell into disrepair, the shafts were shuttered up, and eventually the mine was bought for a song by a private landholder who lived in England. He sat in the House of Lords and rarely came to the US. He was an elite Baphomet witch. He immediately erected a high wire fence around the entire site, locked it down, and kept it off limits to everyone except select members of the Golden Order.
This was the place the Fallen Priest was now waiting outside. The guard, a reedy man with psoriasis-blotched skin, opened the gates and waved him through, although he didn’t make eye contact. The priest smiled. Yes, don’t look at me. Pretend I don’t exist. It’s safer that way.
He drove into the compound, and immediately felt the foul energies coming up from below. He shivered with delight. He loved it here, so close to the Palace of Fires. So close to the vortex of pure evil. He looked over to the Black Mountain – the huge deposit of black coal with a flat top that would be the site of the extraction on Unholy. Not long now, he thought. But first he had to get the woman down the Deep Sink, and complete his preparation. As he drove over to the main shaft, he saw a baby lamb with red eyes waiting for him outside. It opened its mouth and bleated. BAAAAAA.
The Fallen Priest smiled.
Marley crunched down a gear, her Honda Civic groaning as it tried to find enough power to climb a steep section of the winding track that threaded up to the Chalk Mountains. Before leaving Santa Fe, she’d scoured Google Earth and had found a small dwelling near the top of the highest mountain. She figured this was where the great-aunt lived, and where they’d find Lily, so that’s where they were now heading.
Olivier tapped a cigarette out of his pack of Gauloises, lit up, rolled down his side window and exhaled pungent smoke out into a shredding wind.
‘He is not yet Baphomet, that boy,’ he said, ‘but soon he could be. I hope he comes to his senses.’ He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, swaying as the car climbed slowly up the rocky track.
‘What’s Cygnet?’ Marley asked. ‘You mentioned it with the doctor. I’ve never heard of it.’
‘It is very secret. Just rumour, things that we hear at Interpol. But if it is true, then it is an organisation of white witches that are the sworn enemy of Baphomet.’
‘A cygnet is a baby swan, right?’
‘Yes. The man who was killed in Paris, the professor, we believe he was an operative of Cygnet. He had the tattoo of a small swan on his back. This dog attack, I believe it was the work of the Golden Order, and that he was executed. He was a world expert on witchcraft, and he had discovered something that he was going to reveal at a seminar.’
‘But he was attacked by dogs.’
‘He was attacked by witches, Marls. The dogs were witches.’
Marley laughed. ‘We’re moving into woo-woo land now, Olivier.’
He shrugged, as if he didn’t care whether she believed him or not. ‘What if there is such an organisation as this Cygnet, and this woman and her doctor brother are white witches? It could explain many things.’
Marley immediately thought of Angela Lennox’s website, Light on Light Meditation – how it was a front for some other highly secretive activity. Could it be this Cygnet? A slow dread crept over her. Angela Maguire and her daughter could be in greater danger than she thought.
Olivier finished his cigarette, threw the butt out and rolled up the window, rested his head on the glass and was soon asleep. Jet lag, Marley figured. She swung the car around endless switchbacks that led up to the peaks. She wondered why she was here in this desolate country with this crumpled Frenchman, chewing up her vacation time when she could be in Maui lying on a banana chair by a pool sucking down piñas, or walking along a lazy beach in Cancun letting waves swirl around her feet.
It was witches.
Witches frightened her.
And Marley was challenged by fear.
These Baphomet witches were a breed of criminal unlike any other. Marley didn’t believe in magic, or supernatural powers. She didn’t believe these witches were anything other than flesh-and-blood criminals who used witchcraft as a guise to carry out their real-world acts of violence and terror. They were no different to a highly sophisticated terrorist organisation, or a secretive criminal network such as the Mafia.
And if it were true that they’d infiltrated every layer of society, and were pulling strings from high places, then the world was fast becoming a very scary place. Without even realising, she sped up and whipped the car around bend after bend as she headed up to the white conical mountains.
About three-quarters of the way up, she spotted an abandoned ranch house standing on a high spur of rock looking down over the plains below. As she drove up, she noticed tire tracks in the dirt out front. A car’s been here recently, she thought.
Olivier woke with a start, disoriented at first. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he said, sitting up and looking out at the decrepit house.
‘I don’t know,’ Marley said, as she pulled up by the front stairs. She felt strangely uneasy. Something was not quite right, but she didn’t know what. She’d learned over the years to trust her instincts in situations like this. Several times these instincts had saved her life.
The house looked empty. The high-country wind had sandblasted the paint from its timbered walls, stripping them back to bare boards. Iron guttering hung from the roof. Almost all of the dust-encrusted windows had been busted, and the splintered front door hung off its hinges.
She got out and walked slowly over to the stairs. Olivier stepped up beside her. He noticed the tire marks in the dirt, then he looked around at the surroundings. He nodded, appreciatively. ‘It is a good lookout position, this place,’ he said. ‘Maybe there is someone inside?’
‘Maybe.’ Marley’s hand automatically brushed the service revolver in her hip holster as she walked up the stairs. She always did that when she was nervous.
She stepped onto the porch.
Her boot suddenly broke through a rotted timber and she dropped down to her knee. She stifled a scream of shock, of pain. The broken floorboards had ripped her jeans, and blood was flowing from cuts down her leg.
Olivier ran over and carefully pulled her out. ‘Are you okay, Marls?’ he asked. ‘Have you had your shots?’
‘Yeah. I’m okay.’
Her heart was pounding. The cuts stung, but it was the surprise of the fall more than anything that had spooked her. She took out her sidearm, not knowing why, just needing the comfort of a weapon in her hand. She stepped carefully through into the building, watching each footfall. Olivier followed. He too took out his service automatic.
It was dark inside and the wind moaned, flurrying dust on the bare timber floorboards. Somewhere, loose guttering banged in the wind. Marley silently picked her way through the rooms, her leg throbbing in pain. She didn’t know what she would find, what she was even looking for, yet she sensed there was something here, something bad.
‘Police,’ she yelled out. ‘Come out. Come out now.’
It was standard procedure to declare your presence, even though she didn’t know if there was anyone inside. She quickly pushed away any thought that she had no jurisdiction in the state, and no power as a law enforcement officer. If it came to a shoot-out and she wounded or killed someone, then she’d be in big trouble.
Olivier kept her back, more as a matter of routine than because he felt ther
e was a genuine threat. But he trusted Marley’s innate instincts because she knew this country far better than he. She knew what menace lay in the mundane.
They slowly stalked their way through to the back porch, and finding nothing, they relaxed. They both holstered their weapons. Olivier automatically pulled out his pack of cigarettes, tapped it hard to eject a smoke.
‘No smoking right now,’ Marley said, irritated.
He looked at her, his mouth curling in a smile, then he shrugged and put the pack away. ‘No one has been here for a long time,’ he said.
Marley nodded. She’d seen no marks in the dust on the floors, nothing whatsoever to indicate that anyone had used the house as a hide-out. But still she felt there was something odd about the place.
Then she heard scratching.
From inside.
Like claws on wood.
She looked to Olivier and nodded. He nodded back. They quickly drew their weapons again and walked back into the darkness. They moved silently, like shadow on shadow, their eyes scanning, their guns rotating with their line of sight, their reflexes tight and taut.
Scratching again, closer this time.
They turned, following the sound, and walked swiftly into a side room. There was a window at the back, light blasting in from outside, a thin lace curtain blowing ghost-like in a bone-dry wind. And standing beneath the window, like stone statues, were two large wolves. They had sleek silver-grey coats, and were identical in every way. Their eyes flared and they growled, revealing huge jaws of mottled gums and yellow teeth.
Marley and Olivier stopped and stared. Marley felt her heart thudding in her chest. The wolves reminded her of the Twins she’d seen at the airport, with their silk grey suits and their overpowering sense of threat. Was it a coincidence? She suddenly felt very uneasy.