by Mike Wild
The pain... Hannah couldn't describe it. It was like standing beneath a thousand electric pylons at once, their thrum a rusted fist closing about the brain. It was like drowning in a sea crammed with jellyfish, their stinging tentacles crushing every limb. It was like having the raw nerve in every tooth drilled simultaneously while eardrums split from the noise of that endless high-pitched whine. It was... gone.
Gone, Hannah thought after a moment's delay, it was gone. Once again, as quickly as it had come, the unexplained whiteout had passed, scything on across the countryside. She dropped to her knees and trembled with relief. But she and the others had no time to relax. As the audible remains of the phenomenon faded to nothing, they segued into a prolonged wail of agony from the upper floor.
"Will someone tell me," Mikey Ness pleaded with his hands held out in disbelief, "just wha' the fook is goin' on?"
"That sounds like our own Miss Simmons," Ravne ventured.
"Devil drawers?" Verse said incredulously. "Nah... couldn't be."
"Reckon it is," Hannah said. She looked at the others. "So who wants to see the bitch hurting?" she asked eagerly.
Chapter and Verse hit the stairs two at a time, closely followed by Ravne and Ness. The foursome flung themselves into Jenny Simmons's room to find Brand straddling his fiancée on the floor. Jenny had transformed from her human form into Baarish-Shammon, and the four of them were greeted by the unexpected sight of the demoness on her hands and knees with head flung back, actually growling as she suffered some unknown torment.
"Doggy fashion, eh doc?" Ness quipped. "Good on yer man. Didnae think yer had it in yer."
"Cut the crap and help me restrain her," Brand said. Jenny's fit seemed to have sobered him fast. "She transformed involuntarily... I think it was the light... I... can't hold her..."
Brand was having a problem, it had to be said, thought Ness. Although Baarish-Shammon had not entered full hellfire mode, her body flared with demonic energy and she was enveloped in roaring licks of blue - and sometimes white - flame. Her eyes and ugly gash of a mouth spewed forth energy that seemed somehow more tainted than usual. She was out of control, in one moment radiating heat, and the next bursts of intense cold that appeared briefly on her as patches of fizzing ice. Though most of Brand's body was protected by his clothes - Ness guessed there was a use for heavy corduroy and tweed, after all - by the way he kept losing his grip on the bucking woman, it was inevitable that bare flesh would come into contact with one of the more extreme temperature patches soon... and that was going to hurt.
The inevitable happened. Brand screamed as his palms and forearms met frozen patches on her side and bonded to them instantly, then tore away as she bucked once more beneath him. The sound of great flaps of the academic's frozen epidermis being stripped away was like listening to ripping cloth. There was no way he could maintain his grip now, and as he slipped around like a losing contestant on a barroom bronco his pants rucked, bringing his calves into contact with fire. There was a smell of singing flesh.
Ah shite, Ness thought. This maniac was gonna get hisself killed if this went on. Cursing his own stupidity for doing so, Ness booted Brand in the side and sent him rolling off his fiancée and onto the floor, his burned flesh raw and red, his eyes more so. Disregarding him, Ness pulled down his own sleeves until they covered his hands and leapt into Brand's place. He was no' bein' the hero, he told himself, but if someone didnae get a grip on this, Baarish-bloody-Shammon was gonna trash the place and everybody in it. The Nessy Monster was providin' damage limitation until the shite died down, was all - it was standard battle protocol. All he had to do was keep her under control.
Easier said than done. The two began a frantic and violent dance around the room - Ness warning the others to back off - and this lasted for some minutes before they took their dance elsewhere as their combined weight sent their bodies smashing through another door and out onto the landing. A few more minutes of tussling ensued before Ness and the demoness crashed to the floor, rolled and wrestled each other upright, but unfortunately in entirely the wrong place. Their struggle had led them to the lip of the landing and, before either of them could check themselves, momentum carried them over the edge of the stairwell and launched them into space.
Och, no, twice in one day, Ness thought.
The two of them crashed down onto the top of a bookcase on the ground floor, rocking the shelves and spilling a number of books. They landed slap bang in the pile, their ongoing flailing managing to freeze, burn or just plain tear huge swathes of pages out of rare tomes including Molitor's De Lamiis et Phitonicis, Del Rio's Disquisitionum Magicarum, and Brand's own History of the British Rocket Group.
The doc wasnae gonna be pleased about that.
There was one thing to be pleased about though, and that was the fact that the demoness seemed to at last be calming down. Ness had to half-ride, half-waltz with her through the hallway and the study and the lounge before she did so completely but finally she collapsed, done. Baarish-Shammon lay on her back on the carpet, spasming slightly, and as Ness watched, her features metamorphosed into human again. Ness smiled; he had never seen her so weak, so vulnerable. Dripping sweat and panting heavily, the Scotsman rested his hands on his knees. Then he planted a boot squarely on her throat and twisted it until she began to grab at it and buck again.
"Ya wanna tell me what tha' were all aboot, yer bloody harridan from Hell?"
Brand pushed him away. He and the rest of them had come downstairs. "Leave her. It wasn't her fault. I think she was more attuned to the light than we were, that's all. The light or something connected to it. Perhaps because she isn't truly human."
"She was in contact with some soulmate?" Verse asked.
"And the light was...?" Chapter queried.
Brand shook his head. "I haven't the faintest idea." He frowned and knelt down by his fiancée, raised a finger to hush them. "She's trying to say something."
"Och, bollocks to that. Brand, we could finish the bitch while she's in this state."
"Maybe," Brand said. "But then you wouldn't be able to hear this." He leaned back. "Listen!"
"Adramelecanmaelarmenauzabaraqel. Barbatosbat-arjalbylethcaim. Carniveandagon..."
"Sounds like Welsh," Verse said. "I hope it's not Welsh." Hannah looked at him and he shrugged defensively. "I've a thing about satanic sheep, okay?"
"Not Welsh," Brand said, but didn't elaborate.
Jenny Simmons continued speaking in the strange tongue. "Ezekeelgaaphananelharut. Iuvartjetrel-kokabellauviah. Meresinouzzasariel..." She roared in fury. Whatever was responsible for the invasion of her psyche, she didn't like it. She grabbed Brand suddenly and pulled him down. Her last words before she collapsed were unexpectedly in English.
"You have to find it!" she spat at him through clenched teeth. "Find the artefact... Find the eyes!"
Hannah Chapter stared down at the incapacitated she-demon. "Okaaaay... somebody want to explain that to me?"
The telephone rang. Brand moved to answer but his injured hands prevented him from picking up, so Ravne did the honours instead.
"Mr Ravne." The voice on the other end of the line was unmistakable.
"Ethan Kostabi," Ravne responded evenly. Their boss's name drew curious glances and he put the call on speakerphone. "And here we were thinking we had been granted some downtime."
"Please forgive the intrusion but I've received some rather disturbing telemetry that I thought you should know about."
"Wouldn't be anything to do with the big, white energy pulse that just nearly blew our socks off, would it?" Hannah Chapter said. "Not to mention also frying our resident hellspawn's brain?"
"Did it now?" Ethan Kostabi said with surprise. "Interesting." He related the data from Siddhi.
"Ley lines?" Jonathan Brand said. "Not possible. Their energy isn't sufficient to-"
"Apparently, it is," Kostabi interrupted. "The waveform has shown an exponential increase in its output for each recent manifestation of the
pulse and, what's more, appears to be nearing its peak. All the calculations indicate this waveform must collapse sometime in the next forty-eight hours, by which time whatever is drawing the ley pulses would, I imagine, have ingested all the power it needs."
"Needs for what?" Brand asked.
"That, doctor, is the question. My concern is, if this energy has caused so much chaos to date, how much and more specifically what kind of chaos will it be causing when it peaks?"
"Wait a mo'," Ness said. "Are yous sayin' that these pulses are being drawn to a particular spot... that summat is feeding offa them?"
"I believe so, Mr Ness. I shall download the waveform files together with additional data that I think you will find corroborates this."
"So where are we off to?" Chapter asked. "I mean, I presume you want us to find out what's going on here, right?"
"You'll be working once more with the Ministry of Defence," Kostabi confirmed, "who have already established a discreet cordon around the targeted area. "As to location, a small town on the North Yorkshire coast. Name of Boswell."
"Boswell," Verse repeated. "Never heard of the place."
"No, Mr Verse. That in itself is strange. Remarkably few people have."
Ravne told Kostabi that they would leave in the morning, and ended the call with a contemplative look. As he replaced the receiver, a few hundred miles to the north another hand did precisely the same.
But in this case the call had been considerably shorter, consisting as it had of just four words.
"They know. They're coming."
SEVEN
Its nose dipped stealthily to the roiling dark waves, powerful rotors thrumming, the Bell UH-1 Iroquois thundered in from the North Sea like a great bird returning from migration, searching out a nesting space in the cliff ahead.
The cliff loomed, dark and forbidding, dwarfing the large machine. The Iroquois flew just above the swirling maelstrom, and as spume splashed off the approaching rocks it mingled with an already heavy rain to plaster the cockpit windows with a blur of murky grey water. Wipers whined, all but inaudible over the roaring of the engines and the persistent electronic babble of the cockpit - not least the rapid blurting of a proximity alarm.
The Iroquois was seconds from impact, and there was nothing to see but a wall of unyielding rock. As if piloted by a blind man, the Iroquois headed straight for it.
Strapped tightly in his seat by an open hatch in the right side of the passenger's area, Lawrence Verse closed his eyes and prayed. Okay, up would be good, he thought. Oh yes, indeed, up would be very good right now. These last few seconds had convinced him the helicopter was not, in fact, in search of a nesting space in the cliff but intent on making its own. He accepted the fact that the Iroquois was faster, more manoeuvrable and better armoured than most choppers in which he had flown but as far as he was concerned all that meant right now was that it was going to make a bigger splat.
Verse rubbed the cross around his neck between finger and thumb. As if in answer to his prayer, his spirit surged. A dizzying swell of sensation flooded him, a vertiginous lightness of being.
Verse opened his eyes slightly, squinted at the crucifix suspiciously.
That was a first... the Big Guy had never been quite so responsive before.
He opened his eyes fully. Closed them again.
Jeeeeeezzuuuuus!
The helicopter was no longer thundering towards the cliff but up it, climbing vertically, engines whining mightily in protest. Verse felt himself slide back in his seat, stomach in his mouth, and watched his ankles rising from the floor of their own accord. He tried to lift his head from its rest but couldn't, G-force pinning it there. At the same time, some bastard seemed to have dumped an elephant on his chest. From what Verse could make out of the cockpit from this awkward angle, he saw that the pilot had activated a HUD that he hadn't been using a moment before. It showed the chopper's insane climb as a series of swiftly converging triangles and squares that reminded him of that old arcade game - Bomber? No. Space Ace? Nah - one that he remembered being piss-poor at playing, at any rate. He tried not to think about how much the still-blurting proximity alarm reminded him of the sound of Game Over.
But then it stopped. And the Iroquois hung in space, apparently stalled.
There was nothing but silence.
Verse thought: shiiiiit!
The sound of the rotors returned suddenly. The Iroquois plummeted as if slapped by a giant hand, and gravity scooped out Verse's stomach with a spoon. It took him a second to realise that the chopper had levelled out above the clifftop and the world was the right way up once more.
The pilot flicked switches, turned and grinned at Mikey Ness.
"Oh yeaahh!" the Glaswegian rumbled. He pulled himself up from where he'd been half-sitting and half-dangling out of the hatch opposite Verse and slapped a fifty pound note into the pilot's hand. "Earned it, kid. Ain't played chicken that good since Afghanistan."
Verse simply stared, his face green.
Uh-oh, Hannah Chapter thought, snapping herself out of her seat. "If you're gonna hurl, do it in here," she said.
Verse snatched the sick bag and held it clenched between white knuckles in his lap. Despite his size, he seemed to have shrunk and looked a lot like Mr Bean. "Bribed him to do that," he said to himself. "Bastard bribed him to do..."
"Aye," Ness grinned widely. "Ah just lurve the smell o' soiled keks in the mornin'."
Below the Iroquois, the cliff-top landscape was rolling by. It was typical scenery for this part of the world, fields and farmhouses, the odd prefab warehouse or small industrial unit, winding, almost traffic-free lanes. One of these veered away from the others, towards the coast, and came to an end by the barren slopes of a hill the maps named as Scratch Tor. At various points within a mile radius of the tor, Ministry of Defence vehicles commanded by the Brigadier lay camouflaged, waiting to move on their target when and if it was necessary. The target itself lay in the shadow of the tor, where huddled in the rocks of a tiny bay with a shingle beach lay the town of Boswell.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Hannah Chapter intoned. "Welcome to Ground Zero. All at MoD airways hope you enjoy your stay."
Nausea forgotten, Verse looked down. He had to admit, what he saw didn't look like much. Stuck on a rather inaccessible promontory, Boswell was the poor relation of its coastal cousins Whitby and Robin Hood's Bay, a place few people realised was even there. While its neighbours had enjoyed prosperity down the years with industries such as whaling and fishing, jet and, of course, tourism, Boswell had faced an uphill struggle to survive as a community at all. It wasn't the inhabitants' fault - the town's exposed position and its rocky aspect made it next to useless as a harbour for fishing-boats, it lacked any significant supplies of the otherwise locally abundant lignite and, as far as the tourists went... well, the tourists went somewhere else. Perhaps it was the look and the atmosphere of the place. The stone buildings that made up the town clung to the utmost edge of the coast - and each other - like clumps of scree trowelled from the earth by the tip of some muddy glacier intent on nudging them into the sea. The dark smudges of masonry were cold and uninviting structures perched on an assortment of precarious outcrops and linked only by cobbled pathways that were too narrow for cars. What cars there were, were parked on an oil-stained concrete slab above the town proper, and each was a semi-rusting heap that had seen far better days. A man slammed the door of one as the Iroquois flew over and trudged wearily down a flight of steps into town. He did not look up. He did not seem interested in their presence at all.
Cheerful soul, Verse thought. But he wondered if he would be any better had he lived here. Though he couldn't put a finger on why, the whole of the town seemed to exude depression, a grey pall that hung over it like some invisible cloud. Even the random splashes of colour one might normally spot brightening such a place - shop fronts, hoardings or advertisements, colourful clothing strung onto washing lines or, indeed, on the folk themselves - seemed to be curiousl
y absent. The community was suffused with a lack of vitality, Verse sensed, a nameless ennui that sapped the energy of everyone and everything it touched.
It was ironic, considering the energies that he knew to be pumping into the place. Or to be more accurate, channelling themselves into the ground somewhere near Scratch Tor. So what was it about this depressing little town that was drawing the attention of the Earth itself?
"Let's run through what we have," Chapter said, flipping open a laptop. Verse and Ness turned to listen. They were the only other members of the team present, because as time seemed to be of the essence Ravne had suggested he mount a separate investigation into Jenny Simmons's reference to the Eyes, a reference that had been meaningless to the demoness when she had come round. Brand, meanwhile - incapacitated by his freeze burns - had opted to conduct his own research and at the same time coordinate the team efforts from Exham Priory. As for Baarish-Shammon/Jenny herself, taking into account her somewhat adverse reaction to the ley line surge, it had been decided that, for the time being at least, she should also stay in the south. Loath as Hannah was to admit it, she suspected the demoness would nevertheless be needed sometime soon. She had a feeling about this one.
Hannah began to speak, and as she did the pilot treated the three to an aerial flyby of the town. "Boswell," she said. "Population six hundred and seven, mainly employed in local farming, service industries and plastic extrusion. Normal enough, and not, I think, our primary focus. But we have three local features of note - the parish church; a one-time monastery on top of Scratch Tor, and a vast but currently inaccessible cave system under it. I mention the church, by the way, because of its graveyard, rumoured to have periodically spat out its dead since mediaeval times."