Sound

by Catherine Fearns

  ‘Here, you can hold it.’

  Helen held the book, buckling slightly at first under its weight, her hands shaking. She carefully placed one palm underneath and then opened it. It looked as if there were over five hundred pages, all in old French, and the print was small, uneven gothic.

  ‘Was this all handwritten?’ asked Helen, still mesmerised by the text.

  ‘Yes. Of course, the printing press had been invented by then, but a blasphemous book like this could never have been printed. The authorities would have burned the writer at the stake.’

  ‘Can I ask how you came by this book?’

  ‘It has been here far longer than I have. But if you look at the inside front cover, you will see an interesting stamp.’

  Helen carefully turned back to the inside front cover, and saw a faded red ink stamp.

  ‘My goodness!’ exclaimed Helen.

  ‘Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn,’ read out Mikko. ‘Why does that sound familiar?’

  ‘It was an occult organisation set up by Freemasons in the nineteenth century in England. Very influential on modern magic. So they owned the book, at least at one time. They were a big underground organisation. I wonder how many followers of Adramelech there were? Or are?’

  ‘So listen,’ said Mikko to the woman. ‘Apparently you can sell this to us for two thousand pounds?’

  ‘You are in luck. Usually something like this would not be for sale. But unfortunately there’s been a rent increase around here and we need to sell some stock in order to stay open. I’ll be sorry to see it go.’

  ‘We’ll take great care of it, I promise’, said Mikko, handing her an envelope of cash, to Helen’s consternation.

  ‘Mikko, are you sure? It’s so expensive!’

  He just winked at her.

  Outside the shop, the sky was dark grey, rain was falling heavily and the wind had whipped up. Helen wasn’t sure if the shop was the silliest or the scariest place she had ever been, but she felt exhilarated to be in possession of the book. Mikko tucked the precious purchase, which the shop assistant had wrapped in a piece of cloth, inside his leather jacket. Helen turned to face him and moved in close.

  ‘Thank you, Mikko. I don’t have that sort of money, and I really think this book could be very important for Darren.‘

  ‘I didn’t buy it for Darren, I bought it for you, baby.’

  ‘You bought me a demonic bible wrapped in the skin of a virgin who was tortured to death. It’s the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.’

  They kissed, the huge book pressed between them.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Now we have to read it.’

  Twenty-Seven

  Darren’s morning was taken up with the Shepherd case. As the first day of the trial drew closer, requests for documents and evidence were coming in thick and fast, both from the CPS and the defence lawyers. It was routine, easy work, and it left most of his faculties free. DCI McGregor wasn’t making much of an effort to integrate Darren further into the Aigburth shooting, but Darren wasn’t complaining because he was so distracted by Vanessa Scott and the Napier estate. He was convinced there was something going on at the council office – if he could just find a way in. As lunchtime approached, he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. His desk on the third floor looked out towards Wapping and the Liver Birds. Mercifully the Lumina building was just outside his field of view, but the site of Lumina II, the site of Matt’s death, was unavoidable. No doubt his colleagues had discussed moving his desk so he wouldn’t have to look at it, but there was no point, since reminders of Forrest Group were everywhere. The view of the River Mersey was increasingly crowded, nowadays, by ultra-modern buildings shooting up; there was scaffolding and cranes everywhere, many of them displaying the Forrest Group logos. Soon, he thought, the docks and warehouses of old Liverpool would be completely dwarfed by skyscrapers.

  And then Darren suddenly remembered something that Val Killy had said, about Las Vegas. Shawn Forrest is turning this city into Las Vegas with all these bloody skyscrapers, soon we won’t even recognise the place. Las Vegas meant casinos. That was it, Forrest must be planning to build a casino. It was perfect – a huge cash business, right next to the Aintree Racecourse, to attract international as well as local clientele. To build a casino, you’d need a gambling licence before you even began. And whether or not bribery and corruption were involved, all gambling licences and applications had to be listed on the national Gambling Commission register.

  Darren immediately went to the Gambling Commission website, and his heart sank when he saw there were thousands of applications listed in the UK. He typed in ‘Forrest.’ Nothing. Wishful thinking. Then he tried searching by date; there had been almost two hundred and fifty applications that year, eighty-five of them in the north-west of England. The only way to tackle this was to go through systematically, and see if there was anything that fit. For every application, he checked the address, company name and then searched its listing on Companies House for the names of the company directors. He was sure Forrest wouldn’t be named as a director himself, and he wasn’t expecting any clues from the company names either. Forrest would be careful this time. His fraudulent logistics company, which had been a front for a people trafficking operation, had been called Grannus. A clever trick, Forrest had no doubt thought, naming his company after a Celtic God and a Swiss chalet that he never imagined Darren would visit. He wouldn’t underestimate Darren again. And in any case, thought Darren, despite making the connection he still hadn’t been able to put Forrest away. He needed to be smarter this time.

  By four o’clock that afternoon Darren was about half-way through what he knew, deep down, could easily be a total wild goose chase. He had found nothing. Neither had he eaten or drunk anything, and he had a splitting headache. But at least this monotonous activity had given a purpose to his day. He was up to the letter S, and he envisaged that once he got home his tedious trawl through the Gambling Commission website would see him through until bedtime, when he would drink a large shot of whisky and then wait for the dreams to come. A few more entries, he told himself, before packing up for the day… And then he came upon something that looked interesting. Star Casinos Ltd. A central Liverpool address; almost certainly an office building that was a headquarters, rather than a gambling outlet itself. The Companies House website showed that Star Casinos had only been incorporated three months ago. And then something made him stop still. The Board of Directors consisted of three names, one of which he knew. Vanessa Scott.

  Darren slammed down his laptop and left the office, almost at a run. It was nearly five pm, and if he was lucky with traffic he could make it to the council offices before she left for the day. Twenty minutes later he’d parked up and jogged across South Road, dodging traffic and bicycles. There were trickles of employees leaving Wordsworth House, checking phones, retrieving car keys or bus passes. Vanessa Scott was rooting in her handbag as she exited the double doors, and almost bumped into him.

  ‘Oh, Detective Inspector… Swift, wasn’t it? How can I help?’

  ‘Yes. Have you heard of a company called Star Casinos?’

  She crumpled slightly.

  ‘I think we need to talk a little more about this anonymous benefactor for the Napier Estate. Don’t you? Shall we go back inside?’

  She looked around her warily. ‘Can we go somewhere else and talk?’

  ‘To be honest, Mrs Scott, I don’t have time right now. Just give me the name of the benefactor. At the moment, there’s no evidence of wrongdoing on your part. You were misled. Just give me the name. It will be much better for you if you cooperate.’

  He knew he was lying. There was plenty of evidence of wrongdoing on her part. But he needed this name. He needed it, for his own sanity.

  ‘Was it Shawn Forrest?’

  She looked at him for a few seconds, then looked down and walked away quickly, her heels clicking towards the employee car park as she beepe
d her car door open. This tacit acknowledgement was all he needed.

  Twenty-Eight

  Helen stayed up all night, hunched over the desk in their Oxford hotel room. Mikko had started reading with her, but he had long since got bored and fallen asleep. Under the desk lamp, Helen speed-read as best she could, determined to get through the more than five hundred pages by morning, making notes in pencil on the hotel headed paper as she went along. She could read modern French pretty well, but the seventeenth century idioms were difficult, and sometimes the handwriting was hard to decipher. Every time she had to consult the French dictionary it slowed her down, but she didn’t want to misinterpret anything.

  Knowing what she already knew, this was a literary journey of horror. The Ars Adramelechum was written in the tradition of seventeenth-century grimoires. A grimoire was a spellbook, a set of instructions for conjuring angels, spirits, and demons. Not all were intended for malign purposes. Indeed, grimoires sometimes acted as medical dictionaries for traditional folk healers. But this one was definitely not intended as a healer’s handbook.

  Helen was reading one of only two original copies of the Ars Adramelechum that had been written, supposedly in the 1670s, by a Swiss priest called Jerome Hugonnet. Both copies had been written out by hand, and bound in human skin according to the orders of Adramelech. Helen knew from her internet research that a scholar named William Lovett had translated the book into English in the late nineteenth century, and all copies of that version had supposedly mysteriously disappeared. Though Justine had told her that Shawn Forrest had one of them.

  Helen had wondered whether the whole thing was a hoax. In the Victorian era there had been a resurgence of interest in grimoires and in the occult in general, and there had also been a gothic fashion for writing ‘found texts’ – invented mysterious books. The language of the excerpts she had read on the internet was so hokey and laboured that it seemed possible that William Lovett had made it all up. Indeed, perhaps William Lovett was an invented character, too, and had not gone mad and died in a mysterious fire at all, but was the nom de plume of an anonymous author.

  In any case, this was still a book within a book, because Jerome Hugonnet’s work was a supposed translation of an ancient Aramaic text, dating from long before Biblical times.

  Jerome Hugonnet had been a Catholic priest hounded from his Swiss parish during the Protestant Reformation. He had travelled to the Middle East where he had spent several years in the wilderness. On reaching Damascus, he discovered an ancient Samarian or Phoenician text, of unknown authorship but written in Aramaic. He spent several years studying and translating it, before taking it back to his village in Switzerland, where a demonic cult was possibly born. And where footballer Thomas Kuper grew up.

  The extracts Helen had found online were now fleshed out by the rest of the text, so that the bombastic verses and snippets of terror now formed themselves into a more coherent narrative. The work began essentially as a history book. It told the story of the Sepharvites, an ancient people of whom little was known, although Helen remembered from her Old Testament study that they were said to have been driven from their city of Sepharvaim when it was conquered by the King of Assyria. Many were resettled in Samaria, but others were scattered across the desert, and the book told of the moment when Adramelech appeared to them in the desert, with a voice like thunder, and showed them the fire from beyond hell. With this knowledge, he promised them that if they professed loyalty to him they would be his army on earth, and would rule earth, heaven and hell together when the time came for his return, after eight thousand years. These Sepharvites were seemingly hypnotised by the power of the flames, and chose him as their master.

  There followed a series of unpleasant descriptions of suffering, as Lord Adramelech required his followers to profess their loyalty by performing increasingly gruesome tasks. First, recording his pronouncements and binding the book in the skin of a live virgin; and then killing their own children, by casting them into the flames. Mothers were made to watch.

  After the main narrative, there were some highly tedious prayers, and then a series of precise instructions for conjuring Lord Adramelech, the real purpose of a grimoire. She wondered if Shawn Forrest had really done any of this.

  Helen found much of the story absurdly derivative, to the extent of being almost a Bible parody. The Sepharvites themselves had been mentioned in the Book of Kings. The appearance of Adramelech in the desert flames was a clear borrowing from Moses’ Burning Bush, while the casting of children into the fire was essentially the story of Moloch. The descriptions of Adramelech corroborated, rather conveniently, that of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal. The illustrations in de Plancy’s nineteenth century book were the main source for modern culture’s imagery of demons and, sure enough, Adramelech was depicted with the torso of a man, the legs and head of a mule, and a peacock’s tail. This form had been bestowed upon the demon by Satan, and was something of a humiliating look, Helen thought.

  Given that de Plancy’s dictionary was at the height of its popularity around the time William Lovett wrote his translation of the Ars Adramelechum, it did rather corroborate her suspicion that he had made the whole thing up.

  Some of it was rather fun as well. Helen liked the description of Adramelech as keeper of his master Satan’s wardrobe, plotting his revenge, scheming to be more powerful than both God and Satan. This was certainly a unique concept, as far as she knew.

  She looked behind her at Mikko, asleep, and smiled as she thought of his idea about a three-way battle. He always had a way of dumbing down his natural intelligence into something facile, and yet still couldn’t help getting to the crux of the matter.

  The book was riven with apocalyptic prophecy. Again, there was nothing new about this. The Bible, and indeed almost every religious text or occult book she could think of, was filled with prophecies. But she couldn’t deny that there were some parallels here with recent events, especially in Liverpool. For a start, the ability to kill someone with fire simply by conjuring Adramelech – that would certainly explain the mysterious fires of the summer.

  The book described a time of fire, when the earth would heat up, when fires would rage, when man would kill man; that sounded not only like a parallel with contemporary climate change, but also with the Liverpool fires that summer. The book claimed that during this time the mouthpiece of Adramelech, his leader on earth, would be chosen. ‘After the lightning then the thunder; after the fire then the noise.’

  When the time came for the earth to become the Kingdom of Adramelech, he would reveal himself through deafening roars, and terrifying moans. This was to remind his people of the eight thousand years of pain he had suffered at the hands of Satan, flung beyond hell into the void. ‘A whisper shall become a roar, and a roar shall become a scream that pierces the ears.’

  There was no denying the parallels and coincidences. The birds, for example. The book was filled with birds; in honour of their infernal peacock lord, flocks of birds would act as omens for the coming of the time of Lord Adramelech. Helen remembered the strange, giant flocks of birds that had descended on Liverpool during the summer fires. Many people had noticed it, and reported it. Again, this all had echoes in the Bible; for example the reference in Revelation to Babylon being ‘a haunt for every unclean and detestable bird.’ But one sentence made her shudder: ‘And it is foretold that our Lord Adramelech shall choose the city of birds as his entry and his dwelling on the Earth.’

  Where could the ‘city of birds’ be but Liverpool, the city whose emblem was the Liver bird? It all sounded a bit like the Great Tribulation, that Biblical period of vengeance preceding the Second Coming and the end of the world. The last time Helen had seen Deaconess Margaret, she had been convinced they were living in the time of the Tribulation.

  There were other coincidences, too. When Helen considered the dates, and did a quick internet search for some archaeological evidence as to when the city of Sepharvaim was built, the eight t
housand years number seemed about right. And then the infinity symbol. Grimoires loved numbers – numerology was an important aspect of the occult – and Adramelech’s number was eight. An infinity symbol was simply a figure eight laid on its side. Well, if Forrest had read the book, she supposed, it might have given him the idea. And then there were the strange noises. Liverpool was full of them at the moment. ‘After the fire then the noise…’

  Of course, it could all be explained. And was all probably nonsense. Millenarians had always managed to retrofit their theories and calculations into the scriptures. And had invariably been proved wrong.

  There was just something about the book that made it feel… real. Perhaps it was the creepy coolness of the human skin binding. Or the long list of coincidences that simply didn’t make sense otherwise. Or the language. There was a fine line between bombast and parody, between profundity and absurdity, and this book was just on the right side. She was exhausted. And perhaps, she told herself, guilty of the same pareidolia which, Darren had told her, had afflicted that acoustics professor.

  As the first light of dawn was breaking through the curtains, she closed the final page of the book, turned off the desk lamp, and crept into bed next to Mikko, who turned over sleepily.

  ‘Did you find what you were looking for, my beautiful demon hunter?’

  ‘Yes, perhaps I did. If Shawn Forrest believes in this book, I think I know how we might be able to stop him.’

  On The Mouthpiece

  Thou shalt know it in your hearts when the time of Adramelech is upon you. When the flames have died down; when the sounds from Beyond Hell have infected every human soul.