Stalking Tender Prey

by Constantine, Storm

  ‘How was she?’ Daniel still couldn’t believe the apparent dramatic change in his sister’s character.

  ‘Fine. A little vague. She didn’t mention anything.’

  Daniel shook his head. ‘Most bizarre. Have you seen Dad?’

  ‘No.’

  After breakfast, Daniel took Owen into his father’s study. ‘Research time,’ he said.

  Owen grimaced as they entered the dark, high ceilinged room. ‘Smells funny in here,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  Daniel sniffed. ‘I don’t know.’ He shivered. ‘I’ve never liked this room.’

  Owen watched him go over to the floor-to-ceiling bookcases on either side of the fireplace. ‘What are you looking for?’

  Daniel browsed through the titles. ‘Here. This section. Dad bought a lot of books up at random when we moved in, because his collection left too many spaces on the shelves. We picked up some stuff at an auction, loads of dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Here...’

  He handed Owen a fat plain covered volume that felt sticky to the touch, even though it was bound in cloth. ‘Dictionary of World Mythology,’ Owen read. ‘Volume ten? Wow. Got the rest?’

  ‘Most of them. I think the only ones that are missing are the index volumes, if we’re lucky.’

  Owen wandered over to Louis’ desk and sat down. He leafed through the book. ‘The text is tiny. This was certainly a labour of love!’

  ‘Look up Shemyaza,’ Daniel said, then spelled the name out.

  ‘I’ve heard that name before,’ Owen said, and told Daniel about his visit to the old church with Peverel Othman. ‘That place is dedicated to a St Shem. Pev said that was Shemyaza, I’m sure he did.’

  Daniel’s eyes were round. He hurried over to the desk. ‘Really! This is weird. Look it up, O, quickly.’

  Owen poured through the text. He frowned. ‘Oh.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘“See Semjaza”.’ Owen marked the text with a finger. ‘Here we are. He was the leader of a band of fallen angels, known as the Grigori.’

  Daniel interrupted him. ‘Yes, yes! I said that too. Remember? The name of the people who built the Garden in Eden. I’m sure that was one of the names!’

  Owen smiled. ‘Calm down. Let me finish.’ He peered at the page. ‘Originally, Shemyaza was a powerful seraph, who fell after being seduced by the wicked maiden, Ishtahar. He was punished for this and his soul now hangs between heaven and earth, head down, in the constellation of Orion.’

  ‘Why would a church be dedicated to a fallen angel?’ Daniel asked. ‘That seems a bit... strange.’

  ‘Dark doings in Little Moor,’ Owen said with a grin. ‘No wonder there’s not much of a religious community! The Murkasters built that church.’

  ‘And they were driven out!’ Daniel said excitedly. ‘O, I must be picking stuff up about this.’ He frowned. ‘But where do you fit in?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The Garden in Eden, the one I saw last night. It was connected with you. I saw Shemyaza, Semjaza, whatever he’s called, in the garden. He was hanging upside down. In a valley of fire. Everyone was there, and a woman was screaming, trying to get to him! Look up Grigori, O.’

  ‘Well, get me the book, then.’

  After a brief search, Daniel located the book. He had already found the entry by the time he’d reached the desk. ‘The Grigori were the tenth order of the bene-ha-Elohim — the Sons of God — known also as The Watchers, sent to earth to teach humanity, but they were seduced by the daughters of Cain, and spawned monsters upon them. It says also that the Grigori were giants, very tall. There are some names. Semjaza again, Kasdaye, Penemue, Azazel — oh, a load of them.’ He frowned. ‘What connection does the name Shemyaza have with the murder of a girl in Cresterfield and a church in Little Moor and...’ He grimaced. ‘...you?’

  ‘There might be no connection between the murder and the rest of it, Owen said. ‘You might have just been picking up stuff in Marlene’s that concerned us, not Cressida.’

  ‘But the bangle she gave me... the images. I saw everything.’

  Owen shrugged. ‘True. Are you prepared to get involved in a big psychic quest to unveil a murderer, then? If it’s connected with this stuff, it might involve some shady characters. Evil angels? Isn’t that black magic, or something? I’m not into that. Magic should be natural, earth-oriented stuff.’ He paused significantly. ‘Like the magic we do.’

  Daniel nodded. ‘Perhaps that’s another connection. Your magic at the High Place, O. So close to the church. What did Peverel Othman say about Shemyaza? Why did he want to look round the church the other night?’

  Owen paused for a moment, wondering whether he should tell Daniel. ‘Well, he’s looking into something, I think. Could be why he seemed keen to work with you. Remember? He did want to talk to you about your powers.’

  ‘So perhaps he should.’

  Owen shook his head. ‘No, there’s more to Peverel than meets the eye. I don’t trust him.’

  ‘Change of heart?’

  ‘He’s too interested in Lily and me.’

  ‘Well, there’s another connection, then. You are associated with my visions of the Garden, Othman’s interested in Shemyaza, and also interested in you.’

  ‘This is too weird. What are you trying to prove?’

  Daniel shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’ He put the book down. ‘There is something else I want to look up. Ninlil.’ He went back to the bookcase, selected another volume, pored through it. ‘I’m not sure if this helps.’

  ‘What does it say?’ Owen asked.

  ‘Ninlil is the name of a Sumerian goddess, sister/wife of Enlil.’ He risked a smile at Owen. ‘Well, perhaps there is some connection.’

  Owen’s face remained impassive. ‘What else does it say?’

  ‘She’s also referred to as Ninkharsag, Lady of Kharsag, the Serpent Lady.’ He looked up at Owen. ‘Kharsag was a settlement of the Anannage, the sons of Anu, also known as the Shining Ones, Sumerian deities. They equate with the angels of Biblical legends.’

  Owen shrugged. ‘Seems like you got your mythologies mixed up in your visions: a Sumerian goddess wandering around the Garden of Eden?’

  ‘Different mythologies might have different names for the same things,’ Daniel said. ‘We have to go to the High Place tonight. I want to do some more work on this. I want to know how all this connects to you.’

  Owen wriggled his shoulders. ‘I’m not sure I want to know. It makes me feel strange. Why go to the High Place anyway? Can’t we do it here?’

  ‘Come on, O. We have to find out. How long have you been conducting rituals in the woods? It’s a place of power. I just feel it’s the right place to go.’

  Louis woke up feeling extremely hung over. For a while, he couldn’t remember the events of the previous night, and it wasn’t until he tried to sit up in bed, bracing himself for the inevitable pain, that the memory came back. There was no pain. Louis sat on the edge of his bed, his head spinning. He felt weak, sick, but there was no pain. What had Othman done to him? He couldn’t bear to think about his own part in the proceedings. And Verity, hadn’t Verity been there too? How could he ever face her again? Tentatively, Louis got to his feet. He flexed his limbs experimentally. They felt fine. What would Barbara think? He could never tell her, of course, what had happened. How could he explain it to her? He thought about phoning her, then changed his mind. He needed a day to think, to hide.

  Owen didn’t go back to the cottage all day. Daniel did not comment upon this, but he guessed there was a rift between Lily and her brother. There was no mention of having to go to The White House with Lily that evening, as Owen normally would. Verity wandered in and out of the house in a daze, while Louis kept to his room. Daniel supposed his father was having a bad day, but as to why his sister seemed so peculiar, he could not guess. While he and Owen were in the study, she came into the room a couple of times, first to open all the windows, then, ten minutes later, to close them again.
On a third occasion, she came into the room and sprayed air freshener. On none of these occasions did she acknowledge or even appear to notice that the room was occupied.

  ‘Has she gone mad?’ Owen wondered.

  Daniel wasn’t sure. Perhaps he should talk to her — sometime.

  As the sun sank, they went to the High Place. On the lane to the woods, autumn truly held sway, sickly, ripe smells fermented by the day’s sun. The colours were riotous, unnaturally brilliant. Owen led the way onto the path. Once inside the shadow of the trees, he turned and embraced Daniel, the first physical contact they’d made all day. A polite distance had been maintained. Daniel stood very still in Owen’s arms, listening to the rubbing creak of the forest. He could hear a rustling at ground level as if the vegetation was crackling in the heat. ‘Are you afraid?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘No. Nothing’s changed here.’

  It seemed odd to be going to the High Place without Ray and the others. Daniel wondered how Owen had kept them at bay. He half expected them to be there waiting in the hollow, resentful and sneering. It would no longer bother him now. Daniel went to stand in the middle of the piny circle. ‘Can you hear it?’ He closed his eyes.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something like a heartbeat.’ Daniel felt very alert. This was the place where their seed had mingled in the earth. He squatted down, put his palms against the ground. It seemed hot, but that might simply be the effect of sun having fallen there all day.

  Gradually, the night descended, hung in the arms of the trees, squeezed the fragrant juices from the brazen leaves. A wind started up, set the branches whispering. Daniel sat in the centre of the circle, trying to concentrate. His mind was assailed with too many images: memories. Perhaps he was trying too hard. Owen was a pale shape on the edge of his awareness. ‘What do you see, Daniel?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Daniel opened his eyes. He’d been so sure this had been the place to come. ‘Perhaps we have to be together.’

  Owen smiled. Clearly he had no objection to that. ‘I want you,’ he said. ‘I want to be part of you. It’s like we can become greater than the sum of our parts, when we are together.’

  ‘We can,’ Daniel agreed. He looked around himself and exhaled slowly. ‘Well, here we are. Maybe we should have done this a long time ago.’

  Owen knelt behind him, and pulled Daniel’s T-shirt down past his shoulders, leaning forward to lick and nibble the flesh. Daniel felt a stab of light ignite within his mind. He fell back heavily against Owen, whose hands slithered down over his belly, crept beneath the waistband of his jeans. Awaken the serpent, Daniel thought. He pulled away from Owen’s arms and stood up, extending his own arms towards the sky. Then he began to undress himself. When he was ready, he turned to Owen. ‘Now,’ he said, pointing a rigid finger at his lover.

  Beneath Daniel’s steady scrutiny, Owen took off his clothes. He could sense Daniel’s power; it seemed almost female, dark and barely controlled. The High Place had affected him, directed his energy.

  Daniel came to Owen who was still sitting on the ground. ‘Don’t get up,’ Daniel said. Despite his obvious male attributes, he looked like a young girl, like Lily, ghost hair blowing around his shoulders. When he speared himself on Owen’s lap, it felt like entering a woman.

  Daniel was hungry for the visions, eager to soar the astral highways of his mind. At first, it seemed as if great wings lifted him up, but then something took hold of his etheric body, pushed him back into himself, and it was purely physical, only fragments of images flickering across his brain.

  Halfway down the hill, Peverel Othman lay down among the browning bracken, extending his senses towards the boys on the summit. He shivered, his eyes open wide. So many emanations poured off the High Place, both recent and more distant. He caught fleeting impressions of Owen’s group of friends, their shadowy shapes as they stabbed the earth. Then, further back. Something else. A quivering sensation of power, of flame. Othman sucked the impression into his brain, savoured it. Daniel must not pick this up. Not yet. It was simple to exude a blocking stream, which, invisibly, wrapped as a caul around Daniel’s senses. He was so young, untrained. He could not fight it. Under Othman’s influence, he abandoned the spiritual aspects of what he was doing and gave himself up to lust.

  As the night pressed down, and the beast-sounds of unfettered ecstasy filled the air above the High Place, Peverel Othman slunk away through the undergrowth. Soon, he thought. Soon.

  As Emma Manden had predicted, Peverel Othman did not come to visit Lily on Friday night. Lily didn’t see her brother all day, either. She sensed the growing estrangement between herself and Owen, but her thoughts were full of Othman. It was him she wanted now. In the evening, after getting home from her visit to Long Eden with Emma, Lily set about creating her usual Friday night mood, complete with favourite CDs and wine. Tonight, the mood would not come. She thought about what Emma had said. It was odd that she didn’t feel more shocked about it. Was this because she didn’t really believe she was the daughter of the Murkasters? There could be no other explanation, surely, for this complacent acceptance. Long Eden. Did she feel differently about the place now? She thought of its silent turrets, its great shadow on the drive. No, she felt no warmer towards the place. Still, she was curious about her father. Kashday. An unusual, foreign sounding name. She had never even seen a picture of him.

  At three o’clock in the morning, still awake, and hardly drunk, Lily felt very much alone. Owen’s absence seemed more profound. She knew, in her heart, he was with Daniel Cranton. She had lost him. A brief spurt of jealousy went through her, but left no trace of its passing. It was pushed out by a tide of panic that Othman would never come to her again, never touch her. Had he used her just for that single night? The thought was unbearable. Yet Emma had said he would come back, but not tonight.

  Lily fell asleep on the sofa, a CD of ambient music set on repeat, to take her through to morning. She dreamed of the gardens again, but neither Ninlil or Shemyaza appeared to her. Then she was underground, walking along a subterranean corridor, the walls lined with paintings of birds and men with wings. The dreams were fragmented, offering little information. She woke up with a headache, feeling as if she hadn’t slept at all.

  Owen made no appearance all day Saturday. Neither did Othman. Lily toyed with the idea of phoning Low Mede, and even on one occasion picked up the telephone, then changed her mind. It was a strange day. Too hot. Like summer, but more fetid somehow, more condensed. She drank a bottle of strawberry wine in the afternoon, lying out on the browning lawn behind the cottage, her head in the shadow of a sundial. She wondered if Owen had left her for good. Was that possible?

  Seven o’clock came and went. Then eight. No Owen. It was the first time Lily and her brother hadn’t visited The White House on a Saturday evening for years. At a quarter past eight, Lily found she had put on her sandals, dragged a brush through her hair and was out of the door, walking towards the pub on her own. Old people, as if drawn from their cottages and bungalows by the heat, stood along the hedgerows, gossiping together. They all nodded at Lily as she passed. She nodded back, distracted. My aunts, she thought. It was absurd.

  The garden at The White House was thronged with villagers. It seemed everyone was out that night. Lily took a half pint of cider out to one of the tables, close to the garden wall, where ivy ticked against the wood. She sat alone. Only a week before, she had sat in this garden with Owen, and the stranger had come to them. It seemed months ago. Since then, she had lost her brother and gained a lover. Perhaps that was an exaggeration. She sipped her cider. Barbara Eager came out, dressed in a sleeveless tunic and leggings, high-heeled sandals on her feet. She wafted from table to table, placing her manicured hands upon the shoulders of her customers, pausing to share a joke, a quick exchange of pleasantries. Lily hunched in the shadows beneath the ivy. She hoped she wouldn’t be noticed, but was weirdly relieved when Barbara spotted her and ambled over to her table.

  ‘Lily! Here alone?�
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  Lily pasted a smile across her face. She could feel her real face frowning and miserable beneath it. ‘Yes. It’s such a lovely night. Didn’t want to stay in.’

  ‘Where’s your brother?’

  Lily shrugged. ‘Oh, he had something to do tonight.’ She paused, then took a plunge. ‘Is Pev around?’

  Barbara’s hesitation in replying was almost imperceptible. ‘I haven’t seen him since dinner. Why?’

  Lily shrugged. ‘Just wondered.’ She forced a smile. ‘Looking for a drinking partner, I suppose.’ She dreaded Barbara would offer her own company.

  ‘You must know everyone here, Lily, surely!’ Barbara said. ‘You could sit with any of them!’ There was a certain stiffness to her tone.

  Lily realised she had offended the woman. ‘He said he might be here.’

  ‘Well, he isn’t.

  As Barbara walked away, she admonished herself for being so waspish. Jealousy was such a pointless, wasteful emotion. She hadn’t spoken to Othman since the previous night, when he’d dropped off her truck keys. He’d waved at her across the bar at lunchtime, and smiled from the dining room at dinner, but she sensed he’d been avoiding her. She was desperate to ask him what had happened with Louis. Was the prognosis good? She had telephoned Low Mede at least half a dozen times during the day, only to get Louis’ answering machine. Before dinner, she’d considered taking a walk down the lane to make sure Louis was all right, but a minor calamity in the kitchens had prevented her leaving The White House. She would have to pop round tomorrow.

  Lily watched Barbara walk back into the pub. She resented the way the woman had been with her. Perhaps Othman had hinted at having spent the night with Lily. She realised she didn’t know him at all, didn’t know whether he was the sort of man to do a thing like that. Despite Barbara’s remark that everyone in the garden knew Lily, not one of them came to join her, although she was conscious of their discrete scrutiny. Probably, everyone was wondering where Owen was. No doubt they’d all been making speculations concerning Daniel Cranton. A hot flush washed up Lily’s neck. She didn’t want to think about it. For a moment, she put her head down on her arms, which rested on the splintery table top. She needed to talk to someone. Perhaps she should call on Emma Manden.