by Mike Wild
Best to git it over with.
With a roar, Ness ran forward, grabbed Erik and Yvonne in the crook of each arm and in a storm of glass launched the three of them straight through the attic window.
He stared at the upwardly rushing ground a mere five storeys below.
Fookin' Karras Ritual.
It had better work, was all, or it were him who was the dead man.
An' if that was the case he'd make sure that he haunted Ravne until-
WHOOOOF! BOLLOCKS! SHITE, THAT HUR...!
Ness? Ness - can you hear me? he heard Ravne's voice saying. Something about him and the others being safe, the exorcism and the buffer field he'd invoked having succeeded. Next to him, Ness was half aware of the birthday-suited but other than that human bodies of Erik and Yvonne splayed across each other on the grass, unconscious. The sight'd make a good cover for Hello! magazine, he thought. But at least it wasn't Halo!
Brill. Two more innocents saved.
Vaguely he wondered why he hadn't stayed locked up where everything was padded. And vaguely, also, of whether Solomon Ravne had had the foresight to create a buffer field for his own arse.
Because if he hadn't, that was precisely where the lamp of Ali Baba was going...
FOUR
CROYDON - GATEWAY TO ANOTHER WORLD! A claim that might sound a tad unconvincing to tourists swayed by London's more traditional attractions. Hardly likely to drag them away from Tussaud's, the V&A, or that latest West End musical, Jack The Rapper. So felt Dr Jonathan Brand, one-time archivist of HM Government's occult investigations office Department Q, now reluctantly resident boffin for its private sector successor, Caballistics, Inc.
Actually, it was just as well that the claim be unconvincing. The fact that sometime around three that morning some cretin had rendered it true was one snippet of information the general public was best left entirely ignorant of. If people wanted their neat and tidy perception of reality to stay unshaken, anyway. And their sanity left intact.
"Here," Jenny Simmons said, pointing at a gate in a corrugated iron wall. "Turn here." She was referring to a tattered A to Z book scrawled on a certain page with a single "X". The book and its already-marked page had been delivered to the two of them earlier by a soldier sent by the man they knew only as the Brigadier.
Cloak-and-dagger stuff. Typical bloody MoD.
Brand did as instructed but did not acknowledge his passenger. The atmosphere inside the car was cold, even hostile. As it pulled slowly through the half-opened gate in the rippling and rusting folds of metal, the pair remained silent. Only a tramp huddled beneath a fading fly-poster for the greatest hits of rock legend Ethan Kostabi spoke, and then softly into a mic concealed inside his lapel. A Doberman chained next to the tramp - a dog that looked in remarkably good health for its apparent lot - followed the car with its eyes and gave a low, dangerous growl.
Brand and Simmons found themselves in a scrapyard that seemed to go on forever. Brand drove through it cautiously, tyres scrunching on gravel and glass, cutlery, the amputated limbs of broken dolls. Here and there puddles stagnated, shining with rainbow colour, slick with oil. The world's detritus was everywhere. Discarded fridges, oilcloth, potties and chairs. There were even rusty street signs from places long since gone - Hobb's End, Florizel Street, and Totters' Lane. The deeper the car negotiated its way through the junk pile canyons, the more Brand felt he'd arrived at the very edge of civilisation, where the seams were seen to fray. The entire place seemed built of rotting memories, as if it were where yesterday came to die.
Its atmosphere depressed Brand deeply. It made him feel lonelier than ever.
The scientist braked the car. He held onto the wheel with both hands for a second, his head hung low, and then flipped open the glove compartment. Rummaging amongst crucifixes, guns and assorted ammo, including a few silver bullets, he pulled out a half-bottle of whiskey and took a belt.
Sour-mouthed, he glanced over at Jenny Simmons, finding no comfort in her presence. Far from it, in fact - if anything, she made his mood worse. That he should feel this way while sharing a car with the girl who also happened to be his fiancée was the painful and peculiar truth behind their current relationship.
The fact was, this woman was not Jenny Simmons. Not in anything but the strictest physical sense, anyway. She wasn't even a woman, not by normal human measures of gender. The real Jenny, his beloved Jenny, his Jen, was, to all intents and purposes, dead and gone. The thing that sat next to him now was simply a puppeteer in control of her body, and its soul was that of a demon older than Ur; a denizen of the deepest stratum of hell that had escaped into our world and displayed no desire to return whence it came.
Tragically, Brand wasn't even privy to the full circumstance in which his beloved had been taken, aware only that possession had occurred while on her first assignment with Caballistics, Inc. Yes, her very first! Dear God, what a bloody ass he had been to take a girl so inexperienced out into the field.
Forgive me, Jen. I am so sorry.
They had met, the two of them, on the day Brand had visited Jenny's campus, he was conducting the set of usual parapsychological tests on its students. Jen was just one of a number of volunteers he had assessed, and while her score had not exactly set the Carnacki-Hodgson Scale on fire, her being in the room had definitely kindled something in him. Maybe it was just that he was an old fuddy-duddy in tweed trousers and she was a young fuddy-duddy in a tweed skirt that drew them together but, whatever it was, they were inseparable after that day. After she graduated, Brand hired Jenny as his assistant at Department Q, and though the job consisted of little more than maintaining the few archives of the wartime operation that remained, Jenny had become as passionate about the subject as he. Not long after, they had become engaged.
Then she had changed.
He should have known something wasn't right. When Jenny had returned from that assignment she had been so different. His staid, tweed-wearing Jenny had become shades and jeans-wearing Jenny. Wallflower Jenny had become kick-arse Jenny. And lights-out, missionary Jenny... well, she'd been something else entirely.
Maybe that was what nauseated Brand most of all - maybe that was why he hadn't seen. Jen forgive him, for a while he had revelled in the impostor.
But even back then - had he known - Brand would have said that things were better than they were now. Then, Jenny had still been with him in some form, her self leashed inside the prison of flesh her body had become but let out occasionally by the demoness to breathe. In some way he wouldn't have cared that she was using her body only as a means of disguise, because Jenny was there - and as long as she was he could have continued to hope that he'd get her back.
Then that, too, had changed.
Three days before Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights. Brand remembered the day she had been shot all too well, the day he had finally learned the truth. The assault by agents of Kether - the Israeli intelligence service's occult operations division - searching for Solomon Ravne for crimes Brand had not fully understood. The pain when he had been clubbed to the floor. And the horrible dak dak dak of automatic gunfire as Jenny rushed to help him when she had been told emphatically to stay still.
Why didn't you stay still, Jenny? Those men were professionals, there for just one reason! They would not have hurt you unless they were provoked. Christ, Jen - WHY DIDN'T YOU STAY STILL?
But she hadn't. Three bullets had finished her mortal self. The demoness had appeared then, in fire and brimstone, and she had puppeteered Jen to this day with the infernal strings of hell.
Brand took another belt. The truth was, there was a greater tragedy than even that. The truth was, sometimes he believed Jen was still in there somewhere. And he knew how pathetic that made him.
"That stuff'll rot your guts," "Jenny" said.
"Fine, have some yourself," Brand shot back. He looked at her with revulsion and screwed the cap, replaced the bottle in the dash. He wanted more, wanted it all, but knew that he was going
to have to wait until later. He was meant to be working, after all.
There was a rap on the car window. A seriously armed soldier loomed at him expectantly. The man was doubtless a mate of the vagrant outside the gate but this far into the junkyard maze, out of the public gaze, he had no need to veil his true nature.
But he and Jenny did, Brand thought. Time for him to act sober. Time for her to act human.
Brand and Simmons exited the car, flashing IDs.
"Doctor, miss. The Brigadier's expecting you." If the soldier noticed Brand's scruffy appearance and three-day growth of stubble, or smelled the scotch on his breath, he said nothing. "Through here, please."
Brand nodded and the pair were escorted to yet another area of the scrapyard, and beyond to the doors of a lock-up situated beneath the arch of a railway bridge. Trains were rattling constantly overhead, but it was certain that no one on board knew what lay beneath the tracks on which they rode. Nevertheless, the soldier waited until it was momentarily clear before swiping his ID card. They entered.
Gloom, mustiness and endlessly stacked shelves. Brand knew of this place though he had never been inside before. It was a government repository of the strange and unusual, most of its valuables D-noticed, X-classified or supernaturally unstable. Brand was aware of a similar facility that stored such material in the US, but while they weren't exactly talking Lost Ark here he preferred the more eclectic contents of the UK version. Right in front of him he could see a sarsen stone taken from Ringstone Round, two jaunting bracelets, the eighth Dagger of Meggido, a chameleon circuit - or was it? - and a rather aged owl that answered to the name Ozymandius. Brand himself had left a selection of items to this place's care and was familiar with others. One corner was filled with magnetic tape from Department 7, the long-defunct Edinburgh-based paranormal investigations unit. The tape was no doubt filled with data certain individuals did not wish released about the organisation known as Omega. In another there was an incongruous water tower currently undergoing a sweep for mediaeval magic residue.
Brand found his attention, though, drawn to the freshly screened section of the warehouse guarded by two of the Brigadier's men. It, no doubt, was the reason they were here.
"Dr Brand, Miss Simmons," a voice said. It belonged to a lean, uniformed, moustached man who held out a hand, which Brand shook. The MoD hired Caballistics, Inc on occasion and the two of them had last met battling demons on the London Underground, the day Jenny had become possessed. "A problem, Brigadier?"
"One that's right up your street, doctor." The military man got straight to the point, as usual, and led Brand and Simmons to the screen. "Your organisation is familiar, I understand, with the name Victor Drako?"
Drako? Brand thought, surprised. Of course he knew the name. The horror film producer who had been in league with the devil had been despatched by his very own hands.
"Victor Drako is dead, Brigadier."
"I am aware of that, doctor. His contributions to the cinema, however, live on. Particularly in the field of special effects."
The Brigadier nodded to the two guards and they pulled the screen aside. Brand and Jenny raised simultaneous eyebrows. Where there should simply have been another section of warehouse, they were looking instead at a full-blown dimension breach. This puncture in normality resembled a large and slowly revolving ball of lightning whose surface roiled with grey, flashing clouds and whose heart was filled with a whispering of sibilant shadows. The whispering, Brand knew, came from whatever it was that waited beyond the breach.
"Our problem, doctor." The Brigadier poked the breach with his swagger stick. "I have a bloody recce team lost in there somewhere."
Brand lowered the Brigadier's stick. "Careful, Brigadier. What you're looking at is a Bachman-Koontz Event Horizon. It isn't so much a portal as an infernal gravity well. If you don't commit to it fully, you're likely to lose that hand."
"What happened here?" Jenny Simmons asked.
"Ah," the Brigadier said. "Little embarrassing actually. Nightwatchman. Bored. Activated one of our stored items. Projector, don't you know."
"You're telling us he decided to screen one of Victor Drako's films?"
"Just so. Altar of Agony, to be precise."
"Never heard of it," Brand confessed, thinking that a little strange. He knew all Drako's films from Abyss of the Damned to Empire of Blood to the Polanski version of Caligari... but Altar of Agony was a new one on him. Moreover, Brand knew Hannah Chapter had actually written a treatise on the films - Mixed-Up Flicks For Mixed-Up Chicks - and there was no mention of it there either. He wondered how Hannah would react when she found a rewrite seemed to be in order.
"Very few people have heard of it, doctor," the Brigadier explained. "Altar of Agony was subject to immediate impoundment after its classification screening at the British Board of Film Censors."
"It was that bad?"
"It caused the same dimension breach we have on our hands now. Drako's Revenge, they called it. His revenge for having an earlier film classified AA instead of X."
"AA. Ouch. Victor considered himself the King of Horror; that'd be tantamount to telling Clive Barker his Books of Blood were suitable for pre-school readership."
"A pathetic, petty reason for revenge, though," Jenny observed.
"He was that kind of man," Brand answered. "I guess the print contained warp invocations?"
The Brigadier nodded. "Subliminal. Hidden in the soundtrack. Twenty minutes into the first reel the entire bloody board disappeared God knew where. They reappeared three days later when the breach expired, but by then every one of them was worthy of an X certificate of their own."
"Your nightwatchman knew this and he still took out the film?"
The Brigadier frowned. "That's the thing. Theoretically, it was safe because the soundtrack had been cleansed. But clearly at some point in the morning it was reactivated. I believe there may be some connection to an as yet unidentified energy surge at-"
"2.48am," Brand provided. "We experienced it at Exham Priory, too. A considerable portion of the country also, apparently."
"Damn thing must have been supernaturally turbocharged. So what do you suggest we do, doctor?"
"Switch the projector off?"
"Ah. Yes. Of course. But wouldn't that mean-"
"That's what you pay us for, brigadier." Brand turned to the breach, studied it. "The projector will be generating the B-K horizon evenly around itself, which means it'll be at the centre of the phenomenon. Shouldn't be too hard to find."
"We'll need four of your men," Simmons told the Brigadier, and Brand stared suspiciously at her. She stared back. "It isn't going to be Narnia in there, lover boy."
"Shakespeare, Sinclair!" the Brigadier snapped. "Halliwell, Rutherford!"
The four men stepped forward and took up posts in front of the breach, readying weapons. Brand and Simmons joined them. "Shouldn't be too long, Brigadier," Brand said casually. "Meantime, get the tea on, eh, old chap?"
The Brigadier nodded and smiled. He liked it when Brand called him old chap. It... took him back.
Brand, Simmons and the Brigadier's men stepped into the breach and found themselves standing at the edge of a precipice overlooking a vast lava-riddled cavern, illuminated by geysers of fire from the hot rock. Down amongst this rawness of the Earth countless creatures swarmed, each and every one of them a minor demon. The noise from the scrambling and clamouring of this ocean of creatures was deafening, but over it, coming from somewhere unseen, could be heard a booming sound that was recognisable as a giant war drum.
Jenny surveyed the expanse and said softly, "Hi honey, I'm home..."
Brand, too, knew exactly where he was. In time past Q Department had worked with Watchers and he knew all about certain subterranean mouths. This was the British equivalent of one of those.
This was a hellhole.
"We need to find that projector and seal this thing quickly," Jenny said.
Brand looked at her in surprise. "You wa
nt to leave? I'd heard that Friends Reunited was very popular."
"I have my own agenda, lover, and trust me when I say these," she spat the word, "drones are not a part of it."
"Then we find ourselves in rare agreement," the academic said. "What is it you suggest we do?"
They stared down into the abyss. The projector was clearly visible at its centre, as were the bloody remains of the Brigadier's recce team, splattered all over nearby rocks. There was no way to reach the machine without entering the demon horde.
"I suggest," Jenny said, "that we ask if we can go down there and get it."
"You have to be insane."
"No," Jenny went on. "You have to be satanic." To Brand's surprise, she transformed right there, shedding her human appearance and releasing her demon form. The Brigadier's men stepped back in shock, raising their weapons at the sight of this floating, flaming horror with its carbon skin and its great gash of a mouth, its razored talons and its empty, burning eyes. Brand warned them off quickly, spouting some excuse about a classified project, in fear of their lives. What the bloody hell was she doing, revealing herself to them?
Jenny stood at the very edge of the precipice and addressed the demons. They reacted hungrily to her apparently suicidal request. But then the demoness told them exactly who she was.
[HEAR ME!] she said in deadly tones. [IN AKKAD AND ELAM THEY CALLED ME BAARISH-SHAMMON, AND WHEN THEY THREW THEIR CHILDREN ALIVE INTO THE FIREPITS IT WAS MY NAME ON THEIR LIPS. IN ANCIENT EGYPT, IN THE REIGN OF THE HERETIC PHAROAH NEPHREN-KA, THEY CALLED ME SHE WHO STALKS BY NIGHT, AND THEY DRESSED MY STATUES IN THE FLAYED SKINS OF SLAVES TO KEEP ME FROM THEIR DOORS. IN KADATH IN THE COLD WASTE, THEY KNOW AND FEAR ME. MY TRUE NAME IS WRITTEN ON THE WALLS OF THE TOMBS OF HIDDEN IREM WHERE THE HUMAN EYE HAS YET TO READ IT. IN CARCHEMISH AND ASHUR, IN KIRAN AND IN FORGOTTEN SARNATH, IN LUXOR AND IB. ON THE SHORES OF HALI. IN THE DEEPEST ABYSS-CITIES OF SHEOL. IN ALL OF THESE PLACES, I WAS 'FEAR'. I WAS 'DESPAIR'. I WAS ALL THIS, AND STILL SO MUCH MORE...]
The demoness paused for a moment and, allowing her voice to drop an octave, she added by way of ultimatum-