Hunt tore away his gaze and staggered to his feet, upsetting the table and sending the crystal rolling across the carpeted ground. He felt dizzy, disorientated and very confused. Anger surged through him and he wanted to lash out, hurt someone, show that he was not a victim, not just the plaything of a force he could neither see nor understand. He knew it was irrational – how could he blame his weird hallucinations on some tin-pot astrologer? – but somehow he sensed that this woman was at the heart of all his troubles.
He lunged at Madame Zara, but she stepped back neatly, parrying his wild lunge and moving out of his reach. But Hunt kept on coming, furious, resentful, sure that this woman was playing games with him. Maybe she was in the pay of Cheviot? Maybe he’d been drugged somehow . . . he had to know. And she was going to tell him.
She was as far away as she could get now, and trapped – her back against the far canvas wall of the tent and nowhere else to run. And yet the woman’s eyes seemed calm, almost mockingly so. Hunt picked up the table and threw it out of the way, then approached the woman, irritated that she seemed not at all worried by him, not at all cowed before his anger.
Now he was gazing into her eyes, those cold, dark eyes with their irresistibly mesmeric quality. But this time he was strong enough to withstand them. He reached out and took hold of the veils covering her face. She made no attempt to stop him as he tore away the layers of flimsy fabric.
She stood revealed before him, and the blood froze to ice in his veins.
‘Viviane . . . but how . . .?’
But the red-haired woman – this woman who could not be Viviane and yet she surely was – simply threw back her head and laughed, and her sharp little teeth glinted like diamonds in the lamplight.
8: The Abbey
It was five a.m., and Mara walked slowly down the deserted side-street, relishing the peace and freshness of the early morning. Seagulls wheeled overhead in the perfect blue of a late summer sky, and the disturbing thoughts which had plagued her in the hours of darkness seemed to have no place in a world of sunshine and sparkling sea.
She paused to glance into a jeweller’s shop window, admiring the display of Victorian jet, then catching sight of herself in the glass, smiling as she surprised herself with her own beauty. She was an exceptionally good-looking woman, and the troubles of the last few weeks had done nothing to spoil that sensuous, full-lipped face. Her tanned skin glowed with health, and her low-cut T-shirt did ample justice to the two juicy amber fruits nestling within, their twin stalks pressing eagerly against the taut white fabric. An amulet swung temptingly between her breasts on its long silver chain. Her tiny waist flared out into smoothly curving hips and a pert backside, deliciously delineated by her skin-tight jeans.
Mara realised with a sudden start that she hadn’t had a man in weeks, not since that last time with Gareth and the twins. Her only companion had been her own subtle fingers, and she began to realise that it was no wonder she’d been having these weird sexual dreams and fantasies. Maybe she’d over-reacted. Maybe they really were only fantasies, the inventions of her own sex-starved mind, and not the premonitions or visions she had believed they were.
And yet they were so real. She could not clear her head of that vision of the past, the young girl who had faced such brutal violation and a horrible, slow death. The young girl who had worn Mara’s own face.
And the thing which worried her most of all was the fact that, mixed up with the horror and the disgust, the fear and the bewilderment, there was a grain of pleasure, the merest touch of sexual excitement. There was a tiny part of Mara which wanted to be that girl, to feel the bite of the lash upon her delicate skin, to feel the brutal hands and the urgent pricks entering her and toiling away inside her belly. Even now, as she tried to dismiss the image from her mind, Mara could feel a spreading warmth in her loins and her finger strayed momentarily to the swelling bud of her clitoris.
Pulling herself together, she took a last glance in the shop window and straightened her hair. Her nipples were standing proud and erect, and her heart was beating faster than usual. She took a deep breath, and headed on towards the Abbey stairs.
The stairs – a good two hundred of them – wound steeply up the cliffs towards the ruined Abbey of St Hilda. At this time of the morning, it stood alone and sentinel-like against the sky, dark and lonely and yet friendly. An ancient and holy place, its holiness probably pre-dating the Christianity which had made it a place of pilgrimage and sanctuary.
‘If I can’t find peace there, I’ll never find peace anywhere,’ Mara told herself, and began to climb the steps.
Delgado rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. Business was good. Even better than he could have expected. From that very first moment when he had caught sight of Winterbourne Hall, deserted and tumbledown and forgotten, he had known that it would be perfect for his purposes, and he had been right. His international masters were pleased with him. They trusted his judgement now, and he knew that any suggestions he made would be accepted without question.
Winterbourne was fast becoming the playground of the rich, the famous and the influential. A whorehouse for politicians and princes. A sweet-trolley for palates spoiled by too much of the rich and the exotic. A man could find anything he wanted at Winterbourne. If he couldn’t, it simply didn’t exist.
He ran his hand down the silky flank of Kushka, the pretty little Indian whore he had chosen for the night, and she purred with genuine satisfaction. All the whores at Winterbourne loved their work. They sucked cock with an almost religious fervour, begged their clients to bugger them, to bite their nipples till they bled, to fuck them to the point of unconsciousness. They played their allotted roles with every bit as much conviction as Oscar-winning actresses – no, more: for they weren’t acting. That was the great thing about Winterbourne girls. Their clients might be perverts – but so were they.
He signed to Kushka and she picked up the leather thong and knelt with her thighs on either side of his head.
‘Now,’ he commanded.
And she began to lash the swarthy skin of his naked backside with a genuine enthusiasm that gave Delgado such a huge hard-on that he almost came there and then.
Delgado sighed with pleasure. Life was good. Business was even better. Why, if things went on like this, they might have to think about expanding.
The Master’s restless spirit filled its prison like a poisonous gas, swelling and pressing against the walls, desperately seeking some means of escape, some way to sever the link with its helpless, useless body. And yet his hope of life lay within that body: the hope of a resurrection that would release him from the tenacious embrace of the crystal.
It was no ordinary crystal. Magic had created it. Magic protected and empowered it, endowing it with strength and resilience that no man-made implement could gouge or shatter. Only magic, its creator, could be its destroyer, and the Master’s powers, though returning to him slowly, could never be sufficient on their own to release him.
He needed help. He needed the woman, the psychic, the white witch. And he craved her sweet and juicy flesh, longed for the feel of his own flesh against hers, the glory of his own senses, of being master of his own body once again. He needed her help. And that made him angry. He wanted to play with her and lure her and use her and break her. Take what he needed and destroy the rest. Squeeze out her sap and then crush her pretty petals.
The Master needed no-one. She would pay dearly for her fleeting power over him.
He concentrated his spiritual energies and willed himself away from this place. He was going on a journey, a journey of the spirit. A journey of exploration into the mind and body of the woman called Mara Fleming.
Mara drew her jacket closer round her shoulders and stepped out across the grass towards the Abbey ruins. They looked perfectly at home here, in this wild and forlorn place, this place hanging between sea and earth and sky, not quite part of any element. It was as though the earth were striving to extend its yearning arms towa
rds Heaven, only to be held back by the cold embrace of mortality and the trivial mind of man.
The clifftop hung suspended between sea and sky, between life and death, between yesterday and today and tomorrow: and its timelessness struck Mara immediately, made her feel at her ease. This was a special place, a spiritual place. She could feel a tangible psychic presence here, and it wasn’t difficult to see what had drawn St Hilda here to build her abbey, more than a thousand years ago.
She crossed the grass, strangely lush even though the greenery everywhere else had been baked dry and brown by the late summer sun. Hillocks and gentle swellings betrayed the sleeping monuments beneath a soft green canopy: the works of man, gently obliterated by the forces of nature.
Most of the Abbey church was in ruins now, but the outline of the nave was clearly delineated by fragments of crumbling stone wall and austere tiled floor. And the towering east end of the church remained, defiant against wind and rain and time, the early sunlight pouring through the skeleton of the great east window, casting ghostly pools of forlorn light on the wreck of what was once an altar.
Mara tried to imagine what it must have been like to have been one of the nuns here, all those centuries ago when it seemed that civilisation was under siege and only the religious remained to bear the flickering lamp of knowledge and enlightenment. A time of shadows and fear, of magic and devils when all pleasure was forbidden and the only escape was through those forbidden pleasures . . .
Mara laid her hand upon the dark, smooth stones, not yet warmed by the morning sun. Their coldness soaked into her bones, but it was not coldness which drew her attention. It was the sounds of the stones as they spoke to her, whispering fountains of words and thoughts and pictures overflowing in her head. This was an ancient place, a place that had seen much of both good and evil.
Suddenly, she felt nauseous, dizzy, colder than the fresh morning air around her. She shook her head to clear it and looked around her. Everything seemed slightly out of focus. A wave of vertigo hit her again, harder this time, and she put out both hands to steady herself against the wall of the nave.
At once, the vertigo took hold of her and she felt as though an icy electricity was flooding into her through her hands, paralysing her and taking away her breath. It froze her blood in her veins, and she became an ice-crystal in a hailstorm, blown hither and thither and falling, falling, to land she knew not where.
Dizzy and sick, and unable to open her eyes, she clung to the wall because it was the only thing within reach, the only anchor in the hurricane – even though she knew in her heart that to do so was a mistake. The stones themselves were the source of this new terror, and in touching them she had plugged into a rich vein of psychic experience. And yet she had never experienced anything quite like this before, nothing as strong as this. She was afraid, more afraid than she had ever been in her entire life. It was as if her psychic powers were taking over her life, and she was merely their unwitting, unwilling pawn.
The dizziness began to subside, and Mara’s breath came back, at first in painful gulps and then more easily. Slowly and tremulously, she opened her eyes and could not believe what she saw.
It had grown suddenly dark, save for the glimmerings from many candles. Mara blinked and looked around her. She was still standing in the Abbey, but not in its ruined state. Nor was it restored to its Gothic grandeur of stained glass and towering stone. The building in which Mara stood was unrecognisable as the Abbey, and yet instinctively Mara knew that was what it was. She was standing in the Abbey church as it had been a thousand years before: a simple building of wood and stone, with a beaten earth floor and a small wooden altar at one end. The candles were held by a procession of a dozen nuns, dressed in rough habits and processing silently into the church.
With a sudden sickening lurch, Mara realised that she was not merely watching the nuns process past: she was one of them. She looked down and saw that she, too, was dressed in a rough brown woollen shift, a white wimple and knotted sash, a heavy wooden cross around her slender neck. She was a part of this silent procession. Was it a dream? Or could she somehow have been transported back in time to the earliest history of the Abbey? She closed her eyes, pinched herself, tried everything to bring herself out of the trance, but it was no trance. A drop of burning wax on the back of her hand shocked her into the reality of her situation: this was no dream.
The nuns were standing together now, singing. Mara was singing with them, instinctively knowing the words, the music, and not knowing how or why. The women’s faces gleamed ghostly and unreal in the half-light, shadows flickering and leaping in their eyes.
They were young women for the most part, doe-eyed and comely-faced. But there was sadness in their eyes, and fear too. Mara looked at them questioningly and immediately understood: they were praying for safety, for protection, for deliverance from the terror from across the wild sea.
It happened so quickly, with such brutality that Mara had no time to collect her thoughts or register what was happening to her. The shouts, the flames, the battle-axes slicing through the sturdy timbers of the church door. The sisters flinging themselves to the ground, hiding their terrified faces in their skirts. The Northmen were coming!
Mara whirled around, confused and terrified. She realised that she was shivering uncontrollably in her rough habit, her bare feet cold and vulnerable in their sandals. And she shivered with fear, for already she could see what was about to happen . . .
The Northmen had broken down the door of the church, and were thundering towards the huddled women with cries of triumph, their eyes wild and arms eagerly stretching out for their prey. They were laughing, laughing, as they tore the clothes from the women and feasted upon their untouched flesh, glorifying in the defilement, the ravishment of perfect innocence.
A tall, blond warrior with a straggling gingerish beard had taken out his hard prick and was even now between the trembling thighs of a doe-eyed novice who could not have been more than seventeen. As he toiled away inside her, she cried out lustily – whether in pain or pleasure, Mara could not tell.
Everywhere the same scene was being played out: women dragged to their knees, stripped bare so that their poor pale bodies trembled in the cold night air, nipples erect with cold and fear. Women flung to the ground, legs prised apart, men lying upon them, the thin high cries that could be distress or pleasure . . .
And in the middle of it stood Mara, frightened and confused and yet detached, waiting for the moment when she too would succumb to the deadly embrace of her tormentors.
A wild impulse took over her, and she tried to run away, to head for the door which led – if not to safety – at least to the chance of escape. She made it to within a few feet of the door, but a strong, calloused hand fastened on her arm and drew her inexorably back. She fell to her knees, sobbing now, afraid to look back at the other sisters – her sisters – for fear of what their fate might be.
‘Look at me.’
She could not. She stared in terror at the ground, hands clenching and unclenching and sweat trickling down into the small of her back.
‘I command you to look at me.’
The voice was authoritative and harsh. She dared not disobey, and lifted her eyes to peer into the man’s face. He was tall and muscular, about thirty-five or forty – a real giant of a man, a bear, with a mane of golden-brown hair and blond-fleeced arms and chest. And only one eye – the other a closed socket, slashed across by a massive scar running down his face from hairline to jaw. He was leering at her, spittle drooling out of the corner of his mouth, and as she watched he tugged down the front of his goatskin breeches and pulled out his cock.
It was a beautiful cock for such a devil of a man: smooth and long and sleek, hard as iron and thick as a woman’s wrist. Even in her fear Mara was dazzled by its beauty. His fine, hairy balls hung rounded and tempting as fruit on a tree.
‘Take it in your mouth.’
Mara was quick to obey, kneeling up and slipping the
glistening head into her mouth. He thrust suddenly, forcing the shaft down her throat, and she gagged, afraid that she might suffocate on such bounty. It tasted strong, and she sucked at it with growing pleasure, enjoying the sensation of burgeoning hardness. She longed to stroke those tense balls, run her fingers over his pubic curls, burrow into the hot cleft between his strong thighs, but her hands were tied behind her back and he held her fast. All she could do was suck, suck.
She ran her tongue around his glans, probing under the foreskin and teasing the little dew-spangled eye that threatened to open and pour forth its tears in abundance.
And with a roar of pleasure, he exploded in her mouth: a salty tide of frothing spunk that bubbled and fizzed as it shot down her throat; and she swallowed it with relish.
He pulled back, and she raised her eyes to see how well she had done, to receive his praise. And saw, instead, his mighty arms raised above his head, and the broadsword poised to strike her down.
And after that, all was blackness.
Not dead? Not murdered by a mad-eyed Viking with a greedy prick and a pitiless sword-arm? Mara blinked her eyes and opened them, half-expecting to find herself back on the grass, clinging to the stones of the ruined Abbey wall, half-fearing that she would look up to see the sword still poised to strike the life from her.
But no. She was still in the Abbey, but the Abbey was greatly changed once again. This was neither a ruin, nor the humble wooden church, put to fire and the sword by pitiless pagans. This was the Abbey in its medieval glory, a vibrant pageant of colour and incense.
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