by Mike Wild
One of Kostabi's own companies had featured in their next incident, the Abraxas Case. He owned an interest in a venture capital company called Abraxas Enterprises, and a research facility of theirs had suffered an attack from animal rights extremists. It hadn't seemed like a case for the Caballistics at first, but then the animals kept at Abraxas were not what anyone expected, least of all the now deceased extremists. Mary, Mungo and Midge were three demi-humans - humans who had been forcibly bound to demons in order to extract their secret knowledge of the past and future - and as a result of the attack, one demi-human had been killed and two were on the loose. Mungo had turned out to be a necrophage - or corpse-eater - which Brand and Verse had tracked to a graveyard before destroying it. Mary, on the other hand - an inferaphim - had sought refuge in an abattoir, where she had met her end at the hands of Hannah Chapter and Jenny Simmons.
Their next case had been less straightforward, and had involved Victor Drako, the film producer whose evil Kostabi knew had only hours earlier been felt once more - which only went to show you couldn't keep a bad man down. He smiled. It had been quite a creepshow, involving disappearances at Drako's Ludgate Film Studios, empty since his death in 1979. Drako's spirit lived on and he was using the cursed ground on which the studios were built to create a personal hell, feeding off the souls of victims to perpetuate his nightmare realm. The Caballistics had found themselves the "stars" of their own all too real horror movies: Hannah as a prostitute in the murder-plagued Rue Morgue, Brand the alien-invaded rocket scientist Barnabas Quinterman, Ness a murderer in the world of Dr Caligari, and Simmons and Verse rival warriors in the orgiastic Empire of Crimson. The curtains had been drawn on Drako, of course, when Brand laid both he and his terrors to rest by destroying the ritual locus that connected him to the real world.
There were other cases: the rock star who had raped and killed during satanic rituals in order to increase his record sales, the cellar golem, the Children of Cromm Cruach. Kostabi knew that the Caballistics casebook could only grow. They were, in fact, having a pretty good crack at the forces of hell.
But ah yes - there lay the dichotomy. Bearing in mind his own somewhat supernaturally suspect past, and present, for that matter, it had been asked of Kostabi why he should be providing the financing for Caballistics, Inc. The reasons for him investing his money in a force to fight evil were not exactly clear to anyone but himself, but what was clear, was that he never did anything in the absence of an agenda - even if the agenda was going to take years to reveal itself.
Howard Slater had once again been the only aide to come close to the truth, speculating that what Kostabi was actually doing was setting up the six poor bastards as some kind of occult lightning conductor, there to draw the attention of certain forces to them and away from their true target: Kostabi himself. But Kostabi couldn't possibly pass comment on that. The very thought made him smile.
So maybe it was just weirdly coincidental that lightning looked about to strike Caballistics, Inc once again.
Kostabi leaned forward in his chair and ordered the music muted and sound from the monitor banks restored. He had always been able to filter the pertinent facts out of any less relevant hubbub, and that was exactly what he was doing now.
Something up on the banks of screens had caught his eye - or rather, a number of scattered images had drawn his attention. Reports from regional news programmes all over the British Isles.
Kostabi ordered the entire bank switched to UK transmissions. Now this was interesting...
"...witness accounts of an as yet unidentified spike of energy travelling north across the whole of the county of Cornwall..."
"...a phenomenon believed to have rendered a significant part of the Nottinghamshire grid off line for the remainder of the day..."
"...where officials at the Museum of Science and Technology are comparing the Manchester event with a high-magnitude electro-magnetic-pulse..."
"...no one has yet claimed responsibility and any link to terrorism is unestablished. Anthony Worral-Wilson, BBC News, North Yorkshire."
"Rewind," Kostabi said. The images he had seen over the past few seconds played again - a mix of professional and amateur footage of great scythe-like curtains of brilliant white light slicing through countryside and cities alike. He frowned. Hadn't Brand mentioned such a phenomenon to him when he'd called before the Croydon job?
These things reminded him of something. But if he was right, he was going to need a little more than local news imagery to assess them properly.
Thankfully, his interests in the Japanese television company gave him access to its satellite, or more particularly the software Drax Industries had hidden aboard it on his behalf. Kostabi, of course, nevertheless thought of the satellite as his own.
"Establish link with Siddhi," he ordered.
Siddhi, named from the Buddhist state of higher consciousness, was an image capture program built to monitor less... natural phenomena on the Earth's surface. It could have been argued that what Kostabi was asking it to look at now was, in fact, natural, but from the way the network was behaving he suspected not.
Kostabi rubbed a hand over his chin and studied the complex web of glowing lines that covered the British Isles like a silver filigree. Every now and then, seemingly at random, one of them pulsed brightly, setting off a chain reaction that lit up its neighbours. The reaction spread. Far too strong, Kostabi thought. They shouldn't be doing this.
But they were. And as he watched, Kostabi felt that he was beginning to discern a pattern in the pulses. A pattern that drew his gaze to a single point of the network.
He instructed Siddhi to zoom, enhance. He also requested a topographical and geophysical scan of the area.
"My, my," he said.
The whispering about Kostabi began anew... and the shadows to play.
"Adrienne," he said.
The voice of Adrienne Celeste, Kostabi's office PA, responded immediately in his ear.
"Yes, Ethan?"
"Get me Dr Brand on the dog n' bone, love," he said almost casually. "Please inform the good doctor that it's urgent."
SIX
"Downtime at last," Hannah Chapter sighed. "Cool."
It had been a hell of a morning and it was good to chill back at the ranch, even if the ranch was a crumbling old heap of a priory somewhere in the depths of dark and stormy Sussex.
She wasn't moaning. The priory was comfortable enough. She had her own space, got fed, and most of her extracurricular yearnings were affordable thanks to the triple-their-usual-rate employment package with which Ethan Kostabi had wooed Verse and herself. But at the end of the day the place was an old priory and, as such, it could not make the grade physically, psychologically or any kind of -ally as a building she could truly slob out in. It was just - she shivered - too religious.
Not that she had any beef against religion, per se. Well... maybe a few slices. Truth was, she just didn't understand its appeal.
Hannah folded her legs beneath herself, slid on her spare specs and flopped back in her armchair. She reopened the book she was currently reading: Jack Yeovil's Midnight Munchies of the Blood Parasites, sequel to Orgy of the same. She downed a mouthful from her Jack and Black, straight up, and bit the head off a Cheese n' Chive Pringle.
Actually, most of the religious vibe the priory exuded was far from what could be described as traditional. It had been a long time since the fella most people thought of traditionally as God had been revered within its chambers. Quite the opposite, in fact. There was a good deal of dark history here, and the past gnawed relentlessly at the stonework, like rats in the walls.
It was typical of Ethan Kostabi to choose as the headquarters for an occult investigation business a building that had a notorious occult pedigree of its own. Maybe he had done it on purpose. Maybe it was meant to keep them on their toes.
Exham Priory sat in its own expansive grounds in the middle of rural nowhere, a sprawling, multi-winged monstrosity with stone gargoyles and
bell-tower that Hannah had described when she'd first set eyes on the place as looking like it belonged to Lara Croft. It didn't. Until its acquisition by Ethan Kostabi as the HQ for Caballistics, Inc, it had, in fact, been part of the estate of no less a personage than "The Great Beast" himself. Also known as the King of Depravity and Bearer of the Unholy Tetragrammaton, Malcolm Critchley had been the closest thing on the planet to the devil incarnate, a satanist of immense influence and power, who at one time numbered among his fellow conspirators and coven members two peers of the realm, a foreign crowned head of state and enough members of parliament to fill a commons select committee. His perverse and perverting empire had come to an abrupt and bloody end on a night in 1934, during a raid on one of his sacrificial rites by Alex Nestor and officers from the local constabulary, some of whom had resigned from the force after what they saw that night. In terms of their hell-mongering, Critchley's people put Aleister Crowley's Astrum Argentum well and truly in the shade.
Three bullets into the chest from Nestor's gun had finished Critchley off, only two of which were strictly necessary. But Nestor had planted one straight through the bastard's heart, just to be sure. The trouble with Critchley was that no one was certain that he had a heart, not a human one anyway, and a part of him survived. Undefeated, his spirit had lingered in the basement of Exham Priory for years following his body's death, only finally being exorcised after an encounter with Jenny Simmons's demonic alter ego - the biggest mistake of his satanic afterlife. Critchley had lured Jenny into the basement with the intention of possessing the girl for his own ends but was unaware of the former possession that had infused her with timeless evil. When Baarish-Shammon had revealed herself to him, the "Great Beast" found himself truly terrified for the first time in his unholy existence, and then dragged kicking and screaming to the hell where he belonged, the pact he had made with his master satisfied at last.
Car doors slammed and Hannah put down Yeovil's latest masterpiece to peer out through the lounge window. It was pissing down outside, and through the smeared glass panes she could just make out Jonathan Brand and the thing that persisted in passing itself off as his fiancée hurrying up the drive from the Rover that, with her Mini Cooper, formed the Caballistics car pool. Though the doc sheltered beneath an umbrella he ignored Simmons, who ran after him resembling a drowned rat. The Croydon call had, no doubt, resulted in another domestic between the two. Hannah tutted. Had to be expected when you were living with your actual bitch from hell.
The door to the priory slammed and two sets of feet stomped straight up the main stairs. The door to Brand's room slammed. Hannah didn't have to hear it to know his whisky bottle was already glugging out four shaking fingers of the golden stuff.
She took a slow sip of her own Jack and Black and, nibbling mischievously on another Pringle, tried to tune in to the raised voices from above.
"Guess Darren and Samantha are home," Lawrence Verse said. He was aware like the rest of Jenny Simmons's true nature. He had even been instrumental in trying to exorcise her permanently, but, like the rest, had found that was no easy thing to do.
"Bewitched, bewitched..." Mikey Ness vocalised badly. "Let's frag the bleedin' bitch..."
Hannah studied her fellow employees, engaged in their own downtime pursuits. Verse was, as he always was, hunkered in an armchair blowing the crap out of everything that moved in some first-person shooter, while Ness gobbed on a Glock and polished it, then continued to lovingly tend more of his personal arsenal. Ravne had disappeared into his west wing cellars, doubtless to pleasure himself with some "tantric stimulation", but he'd show like the bad penny he was. Actually, it was unusual for them to gather like this but, after a few friends had dropped by, they hadn't that much choice. Exham was undergoing repairs following a series of attacks by Sonderkommando Thule and The Hidden Inquisition among others, not forgetting that to-do with the gargoyles that had ventilated a sodding great chunk of the upstairs. These were their own gargoyles, mind - the ones off the roof - instilled with temporary demi-life by some maniac wielding a substitutiary locomotion spell. Hannah sighed. Sometimes she wondered if someone hadn't hung "Kick Me" signs on all of their asses because defending themselves and this place was like painting the Forth Bridge... it just never seemed to end.
"Well now, look at this," a voice purred. "The Caballistics play happy families. How sweet."
Heads turned. Jenny Simmons had descended from upstairs, where it appeared she had been readying herself for an early night. It was strange when you considered that she was ninety-nine-point-nine per cent hellspawn that she still maintained some of the habits of the retiring researcher she had once been. Most of the time, anyway. Whilst Jenny's wardrobe had always tended towards the Jane Marple Collection, Baarish-Shammon had given it something of a recent turbo-boost, certainly in terms of the rock-chick clothing she wore out on the job. And speaking of being on the job, it appeared she had applied a similar makeover to her nightwear too. Baarish-Shammon had dumped Jenny's old-fashioned quilted dressing gown and stood before them dressed - if dressed was the word - in a negligee that left nothing to the imagination.
At that moment Solomon Ravne returned from his cellar. He stopped, steepled his fingers and let out a long and satisfied sigh. Hannah meanwhile, adjusted her glasses, treated Jenny's figure to a studied and appraising once over, and pursed her lips in surprised appreciation.
Mikey Ness simply sighted Baarish-Shammon along the barrel of his gun. "Forget it, darlin'," he advised Hannah. "Seen the film, aintcha?"
"Film?" Hannah asked without shifting her gaze.
"Nightie of the Demon."
"Jacques Tourneer, 1957," interjected Lawrence Verse, too busy maiming things to quite catch the joke. "Its star, Dana Andrews, also appeared in Crack In-"
"The World, 1965," finished Jonathan Brand frostily. "And thatsh enough." He was framed in the doorway behind Jenny. From their room he had fetched her more familiar gown, and draped it over her shoulders, restoring her modesty. Jenny gave Brand a sweet smile that mutated midway into a hate-filled hiss. The scientist held her gaze defiantly, though his hands wandered a bit. Brand was obviously pissed because he added, "She's shtill my fiancée, after all."
"Oh, give it a rest, Brainiac," Hannah Chapter said wearily. "How many times do you have to hear the news? Jenny Simmons is dead. A hail of automatic fire passing through your vital organs tends to produce that result. That thing you're holding onto has about as much interest in you as I do in emulating Annabel Chong."
Jenny Simmons blew Hannah a kiss and blatantly flicked a tongue between her lips. Chapter gave her the finger, which simply made Jenny raise her eyebrows further.
"My partner is correct, Dr Brand," Lawrence Verse chirped in. "As a student of supernature, you should be the first person able to recognise the reality of your situation."
"So speaks the man who's just paid one thousand of his Earth pounds for a magic jockstrap on Doom Dungeon Online," Chapter interjected. "What does MMORPG stand for anyway? Mindless Morons..."
"No, it's Massively-multi-player-"
"I know that."
"Oh. Anyway, it was Bollywaggle's Codpiece of Confidence," Verse said. "It grants a six-point boost to armour class... as well as keeping your knackers intact." He grinned to himself. "And I've just resold it for two thousand of my 'Earth pounds'."
"Christ, the world's gone mad."
"Just noticed?"
Brand ignored the banter and hardened his jaw, refusing to avert his eyes from Jenny's. He had already relived the nightmare of her shooting once today and had no need to be reminded of it. "She's in there still," he said with unwavering conviction. "Sh... somewhere. I know it."
"Yeah, well," said Mikey Ness, "you're welcome to probe her as much as ya like, doc. Me... I ain't going nowhere near that satanic slut."
Brand span to face him, fire in his eyes, but Ness stood his ground. The bigger and certainly the more lethal of the two men, the Glaswegian could, if necessary, have laid o
ut the academic with a hard stare. But he knew that it wouldn't come to that. Brand was the kind of bloke who internalised his anger then kicked the living shite out of rooms on occasion, not other people. That said, the sheer intensity of what lay behind the doc's eyes troubled Mikey Ness. He had seen it in the eyes of men at war all over the world - men sickened by the atrocities they were forced to witness, infuriated by its injustice - men who invariably broke ranks and who equally invariably ended up dead. This much was clear to the Scot; if Brand didn't find an outlet for that boiling anger soon, he was gonna blow big-time.
But not today. Brand fronted Ness for a second longer and then turned abruptly to march back up the stairs. "Later, kids," Jenny Simmons purred, and followed him up to their rooms.
"Demoness from hell or nay," Ness observed, "if ah were in her cloven shoes I'd leave Brand alone right now."
Chapter snorted. "Brainiac? Oh come on, what the hell could Brainiac do to that bitch?"
"Wee lassie, I've an idea that one day soon the answer to that is gonna shock the crap outta ye."
Hannah shrugged and started to pick up her book once more. As she did, the skies outside weighed suddenly heavy, as if in the moment before a snowstorm, but far more so. She stood and went to the window.
A brilliant light flared beyond the trees, sped through their branches towards her.
Shit, it looked like another-
"Down!" she said.
The glass in the window imploded and diamond-shaped panes whipped through the air like tiny doors to the Phantom Zone. They embedded themselves into the far wall, but no one saw this because the room had already turned a disturbingly familiar blinding white. Hannah and the others slammed their eyes shut and clamped their hands over ears but neither move did much to alleviate the agony of the intense light. It was worse, much worse than what they had all encountered earlier that morning. Electrical sockets sparked, light bulbs exploded, and finally Verse's PlayStation 3 blew itself into the air. The priest, who had spent the last half hour desperately battling to reach a save point in his game, roared in exasperation. Ness just roared. The Scotsman was flat against the wall by the blown-in window, weapons drawn, as if he expected the light to be followed up by some white-suited SWAT team from God. Only Ravne seemed unaffected by the phenomenon. Almost as if in a dream, he stood immobile in the centre of the room, untouched by the onslaught and studying it with a strange detachment. It was only when Hannah squinted that she could make out the small bearded man was rapidly mouthing some protective mantra.