by Lazlo Ferran
Passing up the hill and through the town, by midday we reached the Chapel.
Inside were gathered all the Royalty from every Kingdom on our borders, each accompanied by two of our Royal Guards, just for their safety of course. Only the King of Uran, my probable enemy, had not been invited.
The Chapel bells which head pealed the traditional Wedding Day call to Chapel, since the early hours halted and the square in front of the white stucco Chapel was silent. I looked up at the blue sky, with just a few scudding clouds and then at the thousands of smiling faces among a sea of colours, reds of all shades, blues, greens and gold and silver.
“God. I never thought this day would come,” said Shakira. “I am so happy.”
I took her hand as we descended from the carriage.
The trumpets blared a fanfare as we entered the Chapel and walked down the aisle to the Priest and the altar.
Soon he pronounced us man and wife and the cheers rang out throughout the Realm.
“I am so happy, I am filled with joy,” said Shakira as we kissed and held each other tightly.
“Me too.” I said.
We went in procession back to the Palace, all our Royal guests following and a mighty party started, one which lasted for weeks.
And in the Royal Chambers, Shakira and I lay on the bed together.
“I am going to get completely new sheets and maybe even a new bed in here, before long,” she said.
“What’s wrong with this one?”
“It’s my bedroom now.”
We made love as we have never made love, that night. It was slow and gentle, as my hand moved up and down her lovely body, a woman’s body, held to a beautiful, pallid glow by the candles all around the room. And when I entered her, it was a warm, trusting moment pure pleasure for both of us.
“My King,” she said.
“My Queen,” I said.
* * *
Ordo Lupus and the Temple Gate
Lazlo Ferran
PRINTING HISTORY
Second Edition
Copyright © 2010 by Lazlo Ferran
All Rights Reserved
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Ash, Derek, Ellen, Gary, Janet and Lorna.
Cover design by Gary Kuyper.
Author’s note: This following tale was originally ghost written by myself, Lazlo Ferran, for an article in The Times newspaper and taken from tapes held secretly in a vault for years. The tapes were recorded during an interview with the anonymous man at the centre of the tale. The final chapter and epilogue are taken from various sources – for reasons that will become apparent later. Written out here in full for the first time, the situations and places in it are real, although I have tried to avoid using real names of people wherever possible. Codes at the beginning of each chapter, if deciphered, will reveal steps on the path, to the wisdom of Ordo Lupus.
Chapter One
“I feel so alone. Even though there’s a whole city’s congregation in the Cathedral, 158 feet below me, none of them know I am here or the battle that is about to take place above them. I crouch down behind the sarcophagus, right next to the builder’s hoist, my hand near the knot that ties the rope to the massive oak roof-brace. And I wait. I am recording all this on the mini cassette recorder I have brought with me.
How did I get here?
Obviously the little wolf-angel statues had led me to this place and moment in time, and you could say that it started in childhood with the incident in Highgate Cemetary, but really, the hinge-point, or the point at which my life became unhinged, was the murder of Annie.”
I felt as if we were under water. The air around us rippled and shifted like the surface of a clear sea, seen from underneath. Suddenly a dark slit seemed to open and something horrific came through it.
“Annie!” I screamed and threw her behind me, against the wall, crushing her there. A long, scaly arm whipped around me and took hold of her arm. It pulled her with a strength far greater than my own and though, in desperation, I pulled against it, the arm and the hideous black body that towered over me, topped with something like a giant snake's head, pulled Annie into the slit.
With one last scream of, “Daddy!” she was gone and the slit closed up. I ran at it, clawing at the air but there was nothing there.
“Please God, no!” I cried at the top of my lungs, the tears starting to fall. I did not understand at all what had happened, but the simple fact that Annie was gone was the only thing that mattered. I fell to my knees and wept for a few minutes, before the will to search and do something, gained strength inside me. I walked around sobbing, looking into every doorway, around every corner and eying every car suspiciously, before finally somebody saw the state I was in and spoke to me.
I couldn’t speak for the sobbing and I started to hyperventilate, desperate for help, but unable to get my emotions under control.
Hearing my confused mix of French and English, the middle-aged man spoke in English. “Wait here Monsieur. I will get help! I will only be a minute.” He ran to the end of the street and called out something in French. Several voices answered and he ran back. “Just a few minutes Monsieur.” The normally pretty, tree-lined street of Nevers, looked like a scene from Thérèse Raquin. Murder had taken place and all was black and rotten.
The Gendarmes arrived and one of them recognised me from the earlier accident. I explained as best I could what had happened, at first believing that truth was best, but when their faces looked back at me with indulgent sympathy, I simply said that something or somebody had grabbed my daughter. A search was launched and before long I was in the police station with Rose holding my hand, the whole of Nevers ringing to the sound of sirens. Of course I was distraught, as was Rose, and at first she exerted enormous self-control to appear calm, but as each hour passed and nothing happened, she began to grow angry.
“You should have taken her on the main road. What were you thinking!”
Her angry words became a torrent and I felt an anger rising in me too. I had not told her what I had actually seen but finally I could take it no more. “It was a snake,” I said quietly.
“What?”
I took a very deep breath before continuing. I felt a mad laugh forming in my mouth as I talked – as it dawned on me that my wife would not believe me. “I don’t know if the Gendarmes told you but Annie was almost hit by a car earlier. I pulled her out of the way just in time. It was that ‘evil presence’ again. That is why I took the side street. Then suddenly the air around us seemed to distort and there was a kind of slit in it. Out of this something came, maybe five metres tall – like a snake with – with ermm wings. It had arms too and it reached for Annie and – and took her!” I burst into tears again as I finished.
To my surprise Rose put her arm around me. “Oh Darling.” She seemed to believe me and the relief was a release for me. I clutched at her and sobbed into her soft and sweet-smelling pink cardigan.
A uniformed Gendarmes brought us each a cup of coffee and turned to leave us. We heard a chorus of loud voices starting up behind him and I stepped over to find out what was happening. The man who had given us the coffee stepped in front of me, blocking my path. “S’il vous plaît Monsieur. Asseyez-vous et attendez-nous.”
“This is bad Rose. I know it!” I could see from the look of panic in her eyes that she agreed.
“Monsieur. It is very bad news. I am sorry.” A well dressed officer in plain clothes was addressing us but we hardly heard his voice. He said something to the effect that a girl had been found viciously killed and they believed it was our daughter. They would need us to identify the body as soon as we could.
We held hands as we looked at the little body. Even her face had been mutilated but we recognised our little girl. Rose couldn’t look but I had the unbearable urge to lift the sheet and look at the body. The Coroner’s assistant grabbed my hand to stop me but I gave him such a challenging look he pulled his hand away. The sight was enough not only to make me weep for Annie’s
soul but for my own too. The indescribable horror of it all left us feeling numb, and over the next few weeks which stretched like forlorn eternities, we simply sat around the house staring into space, going through the most basic routines to get through the day. We never looked at each other. Edward had gone to stay with my mother in London, but even the burden of this guilt added to our sorrows. Mourning was so difficult because neither of us understood what had happened. However, it was only at THe end of those two heart-broken weeks that I discovered exactly what it was that Rose didn’t understand.
The Gendarmes’ report had made the case that Annie had been murdered by a perverted psychopath and although I had been helpful with my evidence, I’d had to avoid a description, by saying I had not seen the killers face, in order that they conduct any enquiry at all. We had even made the national newspapers and we often read them, not so much out of a wish to find any new evidence but because it seemed to keep Annie alive in some way. We hated each other for doing it though, and when we spoke it was usually hateful or at best polite.
I was surprised then when Rose looked up from another article one evening and said, “You did the right thing.”
“What?”
“Keeping quiet about that wretched snake thing.”
“Oh. Well they wouldn’t have believed me.”
“No. But I need to know now, darling. I cannot wait any longer. What did happen?”
“What do you mean?”
“I have listened to your story for too long now. You are sick and we both know it. I have protected you but now I need to know. You have to give me that much. I will keep quiet. Trust me.”
“No! I mean – no I am not sick. That is really what I saw. You know, about my special, erm, talent!. I have a special sense for evil and you have seen this happening.”
“Oh you and your ‘special sight’! Just stop it! I don’t want to hear about it any more. It’s just luck or coincidence or whatever. It doesn’t explain what happened to our little girl.”
“You didn’t see the body. You didn’t see Annie. She looked like she had been squeezed by something!”
“It could have been anything. Who knows what a perverted psychopath might do to a body.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Whatever it is I need the truth.” She screamed the word ‘truth’ with a vehemence I had never heard before in her, and with that she was weeping. I had nothing left I could add so I walked over to comfort her but she pushed me away.
We began to drift apart from this time on. Edward helped to bind us together but we were never close after this. The last time we visited England together was to visit my parents and my grandfather’s grave. We had missed the funeral because my parents hadn’t told us. I assumed at the time it had to be because they thought we had too many other things on our minds. Now I really wanted to see his grave.
Antonia’s fiancé was a curious addition to the family for me, and we had to spend some time getting to know him, before finally visiting grandfather’s grave.
My parents looked nervously at each other when I asked where he was buried.
“Yes. We could take you there but you will be disappointed son.” There was that frailty about my father as he spoke to me.
“Oh, why? Did you keep the money for yourself and give him a cardboard box?” I said laughing.
“No.” My father smiled weakly. “But it will not be as you expect. It’s a lovely spot though.”
I felt a little angry now and confused. I had liked the old man a lot and knowing there was a rift between him and my father, I began to suspect the worst.
“It’s not what you’re probably thinking son. There was a supplementary part to the Will – something we couldn’t show you. Your grandfather requested just an urn and stone tablet.”
“You mean you burned him? But he always said he never wanted to be cremated.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“But I don’t understand. What are you trying to tell me?” My father was sometimes infuriatingly incapable of giving a straight answer, especially when he was uncomfortable with something.
“Best we take you there,” he said. My Mother nodded and smiled. I think she would have hugged me had not Rose been there.
The tablet was small, flat and of polished black granite, and lay under the shade of a hazelnut tree on the edge of the old graveyard. It had my grandfather’s name and then said simply. ‘My spirit away to my family home, my body too. If you feel sad looking at me, then smile again for I look not at you.’
My anger left me immediately. I understood somehow, that my grandfather was not here, and I also understood that there was a secret, which I would learn eventually.
To satisfy Rose I attended sessions with a therapist for two years with no progress. Either I was not insane or else he could not find what was wrong with me. I never told him that I was sure I wasn’t mad or even damaged. I began to look more closely at my grandfather’s book and my own research so far into the occult powers in Southern Europe. At least the book offered me the glimmer of a possibility that I might understand what had happened to Annie.
It was the description of flying snakes at the end of the book which had caught my attention. I was desperate, and my memory of the creature’s appearance could fit the description in the book. Understanding this became a passion for me, gradually overwhelming all other daily thoughts.
What I couldn’t initially understand was the description in the book of all these ‘snake like’ things as Wargs. In my experience – in the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and many other classical works Wargs were described as moving on four legs and looking like very large dogs – in other words, wolf-like. I researched the etymology of the word ‘Warg’ and finally found an entry that offered an explanation.
“The Old English word ‘wearg’.
Mary Gerstein, in an article, has attempted to equate the Germanic word ‘warg’ with ‘werwolf, but many experts now reject this. Warg and Wearg can be traced back to a root that may have meant ‘strangler’.”
As soon as I saw the word ‘strangler’, I thought of ‘constrictor’ and the family of snakes called ‘constrictors’. Perhaps an eyewitness in Medieval Europe had described the serpents as constrictors or stranglers and the writer, not having seen what they were writing of, described them as Wargs. But then this didn’t make sense either. The only thing that did make sense was that the writer knew the true meaning of the word warg and that the text was copied from a much older text, perhaps from as far back as the Dark Ages. The writer’s name was Edgar de Boulon and I had tried many times to find out more about him with no success. I didn’t even know if he knew my family or not although my grandfather had claimed he had.
The headline on page three of Le Monde newspaper instantly caught my eye. “Young woman’s mangled body found in back street of Lyon”. I read on. “The young woman, dressed in evening attire and now identified as Seline Godin was found on the night of Friday 11 July in the Rue Calas, a quiet street in Lyon. Police would like to speak to anybody in that vicinity around 11.40 pm. An intense police search is under way to catch the killer and although there is little evidence to go on the body is described as being crushed, ‘as if by a giant fist’.”
Spluttering into my coffee, I swung my legs off the table and reread the article slowly. When I finished, I picked up the telephone and dialed our home number.
“Darling. Have you seen the article in Le Monde today?”
“No. What article?”
“I am coming home. Wait there!”
I slammed the phone down, grabbed the car-keys, and paper, and drove home as fast as I could.
“God, you look a mess!” She leaned close to me. “And you stink. Look at this.” She pulled at my shirt front. “You lost a button.”
I showed her the newspaper.
“Um hm. Yes it is interesting. You know what I think?” she said after quickly scanning the article.
“What?”
“Well I hardly like to say, really?”
”Go on?”
“Well it could be the same murderer. Perhaps he is back.” She looked nervously at me for my reaction. Obviously I knew she was thinking of a human murderer, but I didn’t care. For now it was enough to have caught her interest.
The newspaper was dated Friday 14 July 1975 and Edward had become engaged to a nice girl in London some years ago. Rose – or the dragon, as I now called her, and I, had drifted apart and I had spent more and more time at the office, often staying late to read my occult books and getting very drunk, mainly on Ouzo, for which I had a taste. We were moving towards divorce and we both knew it. Since the day Annie had died, our marriage had been a train heading for the buffers. Nothing we could do or say seemed to make things any better. My one slim hope of redemption, and thus of saving the marriage had been somehow to prove that I really had seen that night what I had described to her, but the very pursuit of this truth seemed to her further proof of my madness.
I didn’t stay, and back at the office, I rifled through piles of documents looking for just one particular one with a telephone number on it. In the years between the death of Annie and now, I had joined several occult societies. We had been through the 60s and it was much easier to show an interest in such things. One such society I had joined – the Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem, a revival of the Knights Hospitallers, had only in 1963 gained general acceptance as a serious society, and through their newsletter I had started up a correspondence with a Henry de Silva.