From his hiding-place a few yards away, amid the ruins, Andreas Hunt surveyed the scene and didn’t know what to think, what to believe. Was he supposed to believe his eyes? But they were telling him lies, surely. For had he not seen a girl apparently stripped, beaten and fucked by some invisible force? Had he not heard her cries, seen first the weals and then the blood appear on her smooth, tanned back and softly curving backside?
And the slow, mocking trail of semen, trickling coldly and defiantly down Mara’s bruised and defeated thighs.
He knew he ought to go to her, to help her, but there was a feeling of something so unspeakably evil in the air about him that Hunt found himself trembling and rooted to the spot. A choking, stifling presence that felt as though it were sucking all the oxygen out of the air. Hunt tried to step forward and go to the girl, but something prevented him: it was like a hand clenched tightly about his throat, squeezing out his breath and making him gasp for air. An icy hand, the hand of death . . .
He turned and ran away, not daring to look behind him.
9: Discovery
It was Saturday morning, and the public library was thronged with borrowers and guilty fine-payers. Posters on the noticeboard advertised Children’s Book Week, the local Bee-Keepers’s Association, a Harvest Supper and – last but not least – a Psychic Fair. Hunt shivered and turned away. He’d had enough of the paranormal to last him a lifetime – no, several reincarnations.
And the girl . . . he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Every time he stopped to think, the image of her tortured face floated into his mind’s eye with a painful insistence. He didn’t want to think about her. He tried his damnedest not to. But still he found himself alternately fascinated and repelled by the uncannily clear recollection of what he had seen amid the Abbey ruins.
He recalled the smooth curves of her back and buttocks, caressed by the gleaming black tresses which fell in long, sensuous waves across her luscious flesh. He remembered the tremendous excitement he had felt as, disbelieving yet bewitched, he had watched some ferocious unseen force apparently tear the clothes from the girl’s body, exposing it in all its juicy perfection. The sight of her fall, firm breasts, pendulous as bunches of ripe grapes as she knelt and supported herself on her hands. How he had wanted to reach out and caress them, massage them with sweet oils until she moaned with ecstasy, and then – only then – lie beneath her and take those hard, tempting nipples into his mouth and suck on them as he weighed the glorious fullness of her breasts in his greedy hands.
And then, inexplicably, she had begun to twist and turn as though under some invisible torturer’s lash. Why, he had even seen the marks the cruel thongs made as they seared her delicate skin. But how could it be? He could only watch and wonder.
He had winced with her as the lash broke the skin and the blood began to trickle down her back and thighs. And yet his prick had stood erect in homage to the supreme eroticism of the scene, almost bursting with excitement as Hunt realised that whoever – or whatever – it was that was torturing the girl was also preparing to fuck her. He watched as she parted her thighs and then thrust backwards, as though to receive the big hard prick he himself longed to bury deep inside her.
When, at last, she had reached her climax and fell back on to the damp dewy grass, Hunt had felt aroused, yet terrified. His emotions were in tumult. He had wanted to rush forward and ask her if she was all right, look after her, hold her tight. And he had also wanted to rush forward, throw her down on to the earth and thrust himself into her up to the hilt, oblivious to her pain and protestations.
And, in the event, he had been unable to do either because of the bizarre atmosphere of foreboding which had overtaken him. The sensation of an icy hand about his throat was still vivid in his mind. He could still conjure up the awfulness, the choking and gagging, the breathlessness, the terrible premonition of evil.
He had run away, and he wasn’t proud of it. The guilt stung his conscience, and the feeling of failure hurt his pride. Andreas Hunt didn’t run away from confrontations. In fact he regularly sought them out. Yet Andreas Hunt, ace investigative reporter, had run away three times in less than a week, and there was a danger that it might get to be a habit.
What’s more, he still hadn’t had a decent lead on Cheviot, and his editor was pulling him back to London tomorrow. It was hardly surprising he wasn’t too chuffed: a week at the seaside on expenses, and all Hunt had come up with so far was a collection of garbled nonsense that would have him on the psychotherapist’s couch if he wasn’t careful about shooting his mouth off.
So he’d decided to come to the library to do a final bit of research on Sir Anthony. Maybe if he could find out something about the companies Cheviot was a director of, he might be able to dig up some dirt from a different angle. He wasn’t giving up that easily. He asked the reference librarian to direct him to the stacks where the business directories were kept.
And then he caught sight of the girl.
Mara went back to the flat, made herself some strong black coffee and ran herself a hot bath to soak away some of the pain. The sight of the blood swirling away like fantastical feathers made her feel dizzy and nauseous. Her head was spinning with confusion and – with a suddenness that surprised her – she burst into uncontrollable sobs. How did she know that someone, something, somewhere, was profoundly gratified by her tears, drank them in like the sweetest nectar, and smiled with evil satisfaction?
She soothed her wounds with cold cream, collapsed into bed and slept through most of the next day, exhausted by her ordeal at the Abbey, and desperate to escape the hideous memory of it. But even in her dreams she found herself forced to relive the events in all their terrible clarity, feeling every stroke of the lash upon her martyred flesh, every painful thrust of the pitiless prick in the virgin cunt which belonged to that frail, yet luscious, body which was and yet was not hers. She tossed and turned under the satin sheet, and awoke in the morning sore and bathed in sweat.
But the strangest moment of all came when she caught sight of her nakedness in the mirror on her dressing-table. Where, the previous night, there had been massive bruises, red welts and weeping flesh, all was now silken-smooth and flawless. She turned her back to the mirror and looked over her shoulder at her reflection. Nothing. Not a mark. Nothing at all to show what she had suffered. Had it then been some bizarre hallucination? She knew that it had not.
For the bath towels still bore the clear traces of blood from her wounds: wounds which somehow – impossibly – had disappeared overnight, leaving no sign that they had ever been there.
Mara sighed and sank on to the sofa, clutching a cushion to her as though it might contain answers to the insoluble questions which thundered through her brain. There were no logical answers, that was clear. The wounds had been there and the evidence that they had existed was still all around her: the stained towels, the cotton wool and the antiseptic. And she could still remember the pain, as vividly as if the cruel thongs were still stinging her fragile flesh. But now all that existed was a vague stiffness in her limbs – something that could have been explained away by a restless night’s sleep.
Only Mara knew that the truth was far stranger, far more macabre. Someone or something had gained access to her mind, and was manipulating her psychic powers for its own ends. Ends which she could not even begin to guess at. Not for the life of her. And she realised, with a shiver of fear, that her life might indeed be at stake.
She had to do something. Otherwise, she was going to go mad. Mara slipped on her coat and headed off towards the Abbey. Better to go back there now than to live in fear of the place for the rest of her days. If this thing was out to get her, she was going to need all her strength to fight it.
It was an unusually warm day, and the wind had died down to a light breeze. The Abbey looked picturesque and innocent in the midday sun: golden light caressing the stones which had shown themselves so powerful and so treacherous only the day before. Tourists were milling around the
ruins: happy smiling people with cameras and noisy children running about in the sunshine. Mara felt like a sleepwalker in a nightmare landscape, completely alienated from the comfortable normality around her, dry-mouthed and afraid.
She found the place: an innocent section of the ruined wall of the Abbey church, almost apologetic and irrelevant, carved with the graffiti of decades of ignorant tourists. Surely there could be nothing sinister here?
Mara stretched out a fingertip and, trembling and holding her breath, touched the weathered stone. It felt comfortably warm under the noonday sun, but nothing more. Relieved, she smoothed her palm over the stone and concentrated hard on the faint vibrations she could feel rising up from the heart of the stones.
All stones felt alive to Mara, for all stones are ancient, and all have a story to tell. Over the years, Mara had discovered that she could ‘read’ many stones, tuning in to their vibrations and briefly glimpsing the most important events in their history as pictures in her mind’s eye. But nothing to compare with the experience she had undergone the previous day.
At first, little came out of the stone, save a confused murmuring of voices, then Mara glimpsed one brief image in her mind – the picture of nuns in procession, peacefully and reverentially chanting their plainsong . . . and then nothing more. The stones were silent again, and would not give up their secrets. But the stones could not lie. If this was all that she was getting from them, then this was all that was stored within them. Which meant that the incredible visions she had seen had come, not from the stones, but from some external force which wished her to believe that they came from the stones.
She opened her eyes and stepped back from the stones. Children were still laughing and running about. Japanese tourists posed for photographs and a fat middle-aged American couple were oohing and aahing over the incredibleness of it all.
And then she caught sight of it. It hadn’t been there before, she was sure of it. She had already searched the grass at that point. Just a tiny glint among the long grass gave it away: the glint of something sharp and bright. She bent down and parted the grass to reveal it. It was a small silver dagger with a blade of pure crystal, wickedly sharp and glinting with defiant flashes of light in the sunshine. So beautiful, so perfect, so bright: and yet there was something malevolent about the dagger that made Mara want to drop it and leave it where it lay.
She could not. She turned it over and over in her hands and felt a power within it, a pulsating life-force at once compelling and terrifying. An indefinable eroticism that made her mouth go dry and her heart beat faster, to the rhythm of her ever-eager cunt.
But something else also made her heart race. There was dried blood on the tip of the dagger, and Mara knew with unswerving certainty where that blood had come from. It was her own, shed as the hungry blade had slashed the clothes from her back and its wicked tip had grazed her fragile flesh.
The crystal-bladed dagger lay on the desk in front of her: a beautiful object, clearly very old and very valuable. Its silver hilt was carved with strange symbols which Mara did not recognise, but which she sensed instinctively had some magical significance. Certainly they were very ancient in origin – perhaps Sumerian, Phoenician or Egyptian. Oh yes, it was a real find. Any collector would be delighted to have it, especially a collector specialising in the occult. So why did it give her the creeps? Why did she sense that it was inherently evil? And why did she not have the will to get rid of it?
Maybe if she could find out something about the history of the Abbey, she would be able to get closer to finding out who – or what – was persecuting her, and why. Why it had such a keen interest in manipulating her through her sexuality. And maybe she would find out something which would bring her nearer to an understanding of the inscription on the crystal dagger, and to the identity of the person who had hidden it in the grass at the Abbey.
The public library had an extensive local history collection, and the librarian proved helpful:
‘Which period are you particularly interested in?’
‘I’m not quite sure . . . the thirteenth or fourteenth century, I should think. Do you have anything on that period?’
‘As a matter of fact, we have some rather interesting original documents dating from that period. They’re all in Latin, of course, but our Mr Fletcher is something of a dab hand at medieval Latin, and so we’ve had most of them translated into English.’
‘Could I see them, do you think?’
‘Well, yes. But I do feel I must warn you that some of the writings are . . . well . . . a little earthy. We keep them under lock and key, as we feel that in the wrong hands . . . But of course, yours is a specifically academic interest, isn’t it, Ms . . .?’
‘Fleming, Dr Mara Fleming’, she lied. ‘I can assure you they’ll be read with purely academic interest.’ She felt quite amused that anything from the Middle Ages could be considered indecent today, and wondered what on earth all the fuss was about.
Apparently satisfied, the librarian led Mara into a room at the back of the reference library, where the local collections were kept. It was a gem of a room: straight out of the 1930s. Dusty, with high ceilings and a yellowish light from a greasy 60-watt bulb with no shade, lots of mahogany panelling and row upon row of tall bookcases.
The librarian unlocked a glass-fronted cabinet and took out a sheaf of typewritten pages:
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said. ‘Let me know when you’ve finished and I’ll lock them away again.’
The door closed and Mara settled down to read through the papers. Most of them were the tedious transcriptions of account-books or the annual agricultural records of the manors held by the Abbey. Surely these weren’t the ‘earthy’ documents the librarian had been so worried about!
Mara turned to the next sheet and knew immediately that she had happened upon something much, much more interesting. A diary. Fragments of a diary which – according to the spidery notes scrawled at the bottom of the first page – had been written by a young novice, Sister Honoria. It had been found and partially burned by the Abbess at some time during the thirteenth century. The first few fragments spoke of the daily round of Abbey life. But then Mara came upon a more substantial piece of text:
‘I know not whether I am blessed or cursed, for last night I was initiated into a new world of which formerly I knew nothing. I had been instructed by Mother Prioress to take hot water to the guest house for the young merchant who is lodged therein. Alas for my immortal soul, for I lingered too long on the stairs and saw far more . . .’
Here the passage ended, with a note to the effect that the rest of that entry had been destroyed by fire. But Mara’s breath quickened as she recognised the tale told by the girl whose body she had dwelt within the previous day.
‘More, there must be more . . .,’ whispered Mara, quickly turning the page.
‘And he chastised me for my terrible sin, flayed my cowering nakedness until I bled and cried out for mercy, And yet mercy he showed me not, for assuredly I deserved none. And I now know that the pain and humiliation which fell to me were indeed my just punishment, for even the searing pain of the discipline awoke the basest lusts in me. Lusts which even now rage within me and – in spite of prayer and fasting – refuse to be stilled.
‘I could not see the face of he who punished me, only feel the bite of the discipline as it cut into my flesh. And oh, the shameful warmth of the lust which crept into my loins. But he who flayed me saw this in me and sought a just punishment; and, seizing my mortified flesh, he thrust his carnal lance deep into my shameful womanhood, causing me not only the horrible pain of retribution, but the glorious ecstasy of redemption through atonement.
‘And when the punishment was done, and he stayed his hand against me, I turned to thank him for his godly offices and saw that my chastiser was the dark stranger who came here lately from a religious house in the East: the one they call the Master . . .’
Mara’s mouth was dry with excitement, the hairs erect o
n the back of her neck. She sensed that this dark stranger, this ‘Master’, might be the key to her own persecution. She skipped the next few pages, which dealt only with trivialities, and then read on:
‘Tonight the Master commanded me to meet him in the Abbey church, where he stripped me and bade me lie upon the icy floor. He chastised me with his fleshly lance, running me through time and time again until I begged for mercy and cried out as he brought me to a vision of ecstasy. His eyes have the power to burn the soul: I cannot look into them without fear and amazement, for it seems to me that those eyes contain all the secrets of life and death. He spoke strange words over me: words that I could not understand; and I felt myself floating . . . I seemed to be looking down upon my body and I believed that I understood all things. And he embraced me and it was as though not only his manhood but also his spirit entered me, and I felt pain and ecstasy and I became his utterly.
‘The Master showed me a strange dagger, with a silver hilt and a blade of a beautiful carved crystal. He told me that, if I will offer myself up to its power, it will grant me immortality. But I am afraid and also I am uneasy that this cannot surely be the work of God. And if the Master, my confessor, does not derive his power from God, then from whence does it come? Weariness overcomes me and I can write no more. God grant me the strength to resist all evil, God protect me from the darkness, God forgive me my transgressions, God grant I lose not my immortal soul . . .’
The diary came to an end at this point. For a long time, Mara sat and gazed at it, wondering, guessing, frustrated by the inability to know what became of the girl. Were her fears justified? Did she escape the corrupt influence of this man she called The Master? Or did she meet an untimely death at his hands?
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