Omega

by Stewart Farrar

  ‘I know, I've read Margaret Murray too.' He chuckled. 'I was totting up, a week or two back, sitting angry and frustrated in Beehive – apart from my own family, there are just two Garter Knights still alive so far as we know and one of them is senile.… Perhaps if I do ever get my job back, I'll recruit some rather more interesting new blood into it. After all, since Disestablishment stopped me being Head of the Church, I can be far more elastic in matters of religion. If anything, I have an obligation to be ecumenical… Wasn't there a controversy in your Craft, oh, about forty years ago, over whether there was such a thing as a King of the Witches?'

  'Quite a heated one.'

  'Wouldn't it be ironical if people started calling me that?'

  24

  'What are we going to do with Bill Lazenby?' John asked, after he and Karen had been riding for some minutes in silence.

  'He tried to desert, John. That can't be forgiven.'

  'Of course not. He's got to be punished, as an example. But he can't be re-absorbed afterwards. He'd be unwilling and resentful and a weak link… Oh, I know resentment can be harnessed and channelled, as a source of power -but not continuously in an operation like ours. We'd have to waste too much attention on him.'

  'Of course.'

  'And we can't just banish him because then he would escape. Join a white group somewhere – and we can't have that because he knows too much.'

  'A great deal too much.'

  'So we have to punish him and afterwards… Karen, there can't be an afterwards for him.' 'In other words, he's got to be executed.' John sighed. 'Yes.'

  'I'm glad you recognize it, darling… Come on, race you!'

  She spurred her horse and was away but John was soon beside her, for riding was one acomplishment in which he equalled and even excelled her, and in his more analytical moods he sometimes wondered if she gave him opportunities to prove it as a calculated sop to his self-respect. She was his superior in magical power, in ruthlessness and in charisma – he had long accepted that – but she still needed him so she took care to nourish his pride.

  He was still captivated by her, more so than ever (Joy was a ghost from the golden past, too painful to dwell on), but he could look at her reasonably objectively. Could admire, at this moment, as she galloped with streaming hair towards Stonehenge, the brazen effectiveness of her barbarian-chieftainess image which indeed he had helped her to create, for he had a good eye for theatrical effect. Always side-saddle and black-booted, from the waist down she was fashion-plate Edwardian, but she had topped it with a startlingly flamboyant, close-fitting blouse of scarlet brocade, covered in bad weather by a scarlet cloak. A sheath-knife hung from a silver belt. For ten or fifteen kilometres around, this extraordinary figure, with its long black hair unbound in-fair weather or foul, had become the symbol of the awe in which the Angels of Lucifer were held. Once she had become known, she had only to make an appearance and people hurried to do as they were told.

  At Beltane, the Angels of Lucifer had lit a huge bonfire, on high ground near their village, which was visible through the night from border to border of their territory; their subjects within those borders had looked towards it uneasily, and drawn their curtains. May Day itself had dawned fine and warm and Karen had astonished them with an action which, in some way that none of them could explain, increased their superstitious fear of her still further. She had ridden the bounds of her realm, erect and regal, with John beside her and an escort behind. Skirt, boots, belted knife, and side-saddle were as always, but from the waist upwards she was naked except for a large silver inverted pentagram that flashed between her breasts. Her nipples were painted as scarlet as her lips. The total effect, which other women might have made absurd, she made terrifying.

  Since Beltane, rain or shine (she seemed impervious to either) she had always ridden abroad like that. She was an intensified symbol of the Angel's power and men quailed before it. But she insisted on being its unique focus. When Jenny, the ex-Banwell nurse, riding with her one morning, had presumed to strip off her own shirt in imitation of her leader, Karen had merely looked at her in commanding silence. Jenny had flushed and replaced her shirt. Since then, no one had dared.

  Today, jumping from the saddle as she arrived at the Henge a length behind John, she was the laughing warrior queen. The escort stayed respectfully beyond the encircling earthwork while John and Karen walked together among the huge sarsen trilithons, recovering their breath after the hard ride.

  'I like your idea, John,' she said after a while. 'What did you call it? – "testing our heavy artillery"… Yes.'

  'It almost frightens me,' John admitted. 'There's so much power here. Have we the strength to handle it?'

  'Strength? After all we've achieved?'

  'Even after that.'

  The sun had disappeared behind a heavy bank of cloud and the lowering greyness reinforced John's doubts. His question had been almost rhetorical, for until then Stonehenge had merely challenged him, not troubled him. But suddenly, in retrospect, it was no longer rhetorical. John shuddered.

  Karen walked over to the Altar Stone at the focus of the bluestone horseshoe. She fingered it for a moment and then lay face upwards upon it throwing back her hair. She smiled serenely up at the sky. 'I dare anything that the Henge can do.'

  'Don't try to frighten me with melodramatics,' John said, covering his unease with casualness. 'In spite of popular belief, that was not a sacrificial altar. The evidence is that it once stood upright.'

  'A fallen phallus. All the more appropriate as an execution altar.'

  'You mean Bill Lazenby?' John was no longer casual. 'God, Karen – we've never done that before.' ‘We have killed before.' 'But ritual human sacrifice…'

  'Bill has to die – you've said so yourself. Why not make his death serve a purpose? That would be a real test of our "heavy artillery".'

  He looked down at her, fascinated and half-repelled, knowing that in their own terms she was right and almost despising himself for his reluctance. There were no half-measures possible, along the course to which they were committed. Yet still…

  As he gazed, the sun broke through, bathing Karen and the Altar Stone in unexpected light. It was surely a sign, an endorsement of her intent. But could she draw the others along with her?… Most of them, yes, without hesitation, but one or two might baulk. His own support, he knew, would swing the balance; together they could command the Angels of Lucifer, as they had done from the start. If he failed her now, what breaches would he open?

  'Very well, Karen. Tomorrow at dawn? New moon's the day after tomorrow, so it'll still be in the waning phase.'

  'Tomorrow at dawn,' Karen said.

  The eastern horizon was clear, with only the thinnest gauze of morning mist hugging it, so there would be no difficulty about timing the sacrifice. The Angels of Lucifer, their bodies glistening with the belladonna 'flying ointment', insulatory and hallucinatory, which Stanley Friell had prepared for them, danced in a wild ring widdershins between the outer ring and the horseshoe, keening and yelping; they had been at it for half an hour, enraptured and tireless, a dynamo of power that built and built, a charge awaiting detonation by the sacrifice, and ready to detonate in turn the vastly greater power locked in the ancient stones.

  Inside the great horseshoes of trilithons were only Karen, John and Sonia the Maiden, grouped around the victim spreadeagled on the Altar Stone. There had been no need to bind him, for Stanley had prescribed for him too, with a dose that paralysed his limbs but left him conscious and wide-eyed. The Maiden stood behind him, stroking his head and shoulders, crooning to him, whispering flattery to him, telling him what a fine man he was, what a worthy sacrifice, filling his field of view with a last inverted vision of the living. John faced East across the Altar Stone, awaiting the first glimpse of the sun, ready to give the command to Karen as she stood opposite him, ceremonially astride with the knife held high.

  A sliver of golden fire flickered on the horizon, and John cried: 'Now!'
/>
  As the blood pulsed on to the Altar Stone, Karen led them to join the ring of dancers, the red knife still in her hand, laughing in exultation as the earth shook beneath them and the towering megaliths groaned.

  'The epicentre was in the area of Salisbury Plain,' Professor Arklow told Harley. 'A strange phenomenon. It could be felt as a slight physical sensation in the Cardiff and Manchester Beehives – and, as you know, here in London -but not apparently in the more distant Beehives. And yet I've had no reports of actual damage. Have you, Sir Reginald?'

  ‘Not so far, Professor. All the Beehives reported at once, of course – that's an established drill whenever the seismo-graphic duty officers report a sizeable tremor. All negative, except that as you say Cardiff and Manchester felt it. But agents on Surface within reach of radio points in the area have been reporting all morning, as well. They all say the same; considerable public alarm, naturally, but only trivial damage… What's your prognosis? Are we in for more?'

  That's what I mean by a strange phenomenon,' the professor said. 'After the past few months, we pride ourselves on having become more skilled than ever on reading the signs. A tremor of that magnitude should have given us warning. It did not. I've even been back over the last few days' recordings to see if we'd missed anything but there was nothing. The tremor did not fit into any normal pattern nor has it been followed by any normal aftermath. It just happened, Sir Reginald. And to be frank with you, as a scientist I find that most disturbing. I keep asking myself: "Why?" – and finding no answers… What's so unusual about Salisbury Plain?'

  I have a very good idea, Harley smiled to himself. But if I told you, my dear professor, you would not believe me.

  Moira sat bolt upright in bed, jerked awake by a vertiginous awareness of evil. Her movement woke Dan, who sat up beside her, looked puzzled and grasped her hand.

  'Did you feel it?' she asked as the wave subsided.

  'I felt something. Something very nasty. From over there.' He pointed south-east and Moira nodded. Although Dan was less psychically sensitive than herself, she knew from long experience that he had a better sense of direction. 'Savernake Forest?'

  'Could be.' He was already out of bed and pulling on clothes. 'Hadn't we better call Tricia? If it's Karen and John, we need all the facts we can get.'

  'If it's them and strong enough to wake us up,' Moira said grimly, 'we need the Elders.'

  Within a quarter of an hour they were all gathered in the kitchen, the warmest place in that early dawn; the High Priestesses and High Priests of all fourteen covens, Tricia Hayes their best clairvoyant and old Sally who had heard them moving about and had got up to stoke the fire and make them a hot drink. Dan and Moira had not had to rouse them all; Tricia herself and several of the others had also been wakened by the psychic shock-wave and were already getting dressed.

  'Well, Tricia?' Moira asked. 'What can you tell us?'

  'Blood,' Tricia said. 'That's what I got first. And tall stones – megaliths. Then I pulled myself together and tried to be calm – it wasn't easy, I'd been overwhelmed at first… It's the Angels of Lucifer.'

  No one asked 'Are you sure?' because they knew Tricia. If she was not sure, she said so.

  'Megaliths,' Dan said. 'Stonehenge and Avebury are both on their doorstep.'

  'It's not Avebury,' Jean Thomas insisted, a little unexpectedly because she was seldom emphatic about her own. clairvoyance. 'We know Avebury inside out and we love it. If it had been Avebury, we'd have picked it up. Wouldn't we, Fred?'

  "Yes, I think we would… Could it be Stonehenge, Tricia?'

  'I've never been there, oddly enough,' Tricia told him. 'Let me try…' She closed her eyes and everybody kept quiet, waiting. 'I suppose it must be. Nothing else could be that big… A road with a tunnel under it…'

  That's Stonehenge,' several people said.

  'I'm going to stop now, if you don't mind,' Tricia said. 'I'm not getting anything new and that awfulness hurts'

  'Leave it, then, love,' Dan told her. 'Sally, anything hot for Tricia yet? She's shivering.'

  'Coming up right now.'

  'Do you realize what this means?' Greg asked. 'They're using the Henge as an amplifier. Animal sacrifice, if Tricia's right about the blood…'

  'Not animal,' Tricia interrupted. "Human. At least, I think so. If it had been animal, the blood wouldn't have… swamped me like that.'

  They stared at each other, appalled; for a moment no one felt like speaking.

  ‘I think Greg's right,' Sam Warner said finally, in a determinedly level voice. 'I reckon Liz and I have put in more study on stone circles than anyone here, although I'm sure most of you know at least something about them. They are focal points of power, even most detached psychical researchers accept that by now. We're certainly convinced of it… We all know the Angels of Lucifer are powerful. They're completely ruthless and they know what they're at. Well, if they're using human sacrifice to raise power and using Stonehenge as an amplifier – no wonder they woke us up 1'

  'Any suggestions, Sam?' Dan asked.

  'Yes. We all know that sooner or later we're going to have to fight the Angels of Lucifer head on. That's what we set up the Psychic Assault Group for and it's been shaping up well. So why shouldn't the PAG use an amplifier, too? The power's the same – it's there for the godly to use, as well as the ungodly… So is there a stone circle anywhere near here?'

  'Geraint will know/ Moira said. 'And if he doesn't, hell find out. He's got plenty of archaeological books in his school library.'

  Geraint did know, because he had helped to excavate it; a small but well-preserved megalithic circle a few kilometres away in the rising mountains west of Dyfnant Forest. It had lain for centuries buried under an ancient landslide, till gradual weathering of the topsoil had, in 1998, revealed a tell-tale pattern on an Ordnance Survey aerial photograph. The local archaeologists had moved in, Geraint among them, and in two years of volunteer labour had dug out the site. Now the circle stood clear and stark, looking a thousand years younger than its counterparts elsewhere because of its long burial.

  Geraint wanted to take the Psychic Assault Group – the PAG as it had come to be called – to the circle himself but Tonia would not hear of it. He was still recovering from a bullet-wound in the right leg and was firmly confined to camp.

  The wound was the result of the only shooting battle that had so far taken place in Camp Cerridwen itself. It had been quick and decisive and Geraint had been the only casualty apart from the two dead attackers. That the attack had failed was thanks to Gareth Underwood. Since his brief visit, Geraint or Tonia had been listening meticulously at 0745 hours every day on the designated frequency but none of the arranged code phrases had come through for several weeks. Then one morning Tonia had heard 'Jerusalem artichoke gammon' repeated twice. That had puzzled them. 'Globe artichoke' meant 'expect psychic attack' and 'Jerusalem artichoke' meant 'expect physical attack' – but there was no 'gammon' on their list. Obviously Gareth was trying to tell them something extra.

  It was Greg who had hit on the answer. 'Gammon – ham – he's saying they're going to have a crack at your ham radio!'

  They had posted concealed marksmen all round the radio cabin, day and night. Just before dawn on the third night they had seen two armed strangers moving silently towards the cabin. They had let them come far enough to have them surrounded, and Peter O'Malley, in charge of the night's guard, had called on them to halt. They must have been very determined raiders, for they had tried to rush the cabin, one of them firing as he ran, the other pulling the pin from a hand-grenade. In the dim light, Peter had managed to wing the grenade-thrower so that it dropped at the man's feet. The other man had tried to kick it clear, but too late, and the explosion had killed them both. Geraint, jumping from bed, had been hit by a shot through the wood of the door.

  'Quite a compliment,' he had joked shakily as Eileen bandaged him up. 'Our little news network must be bothering them.'

  The raiders were in civili
an clothes, carrying Army issue weapons but wearing no identity discs. Father Byrne and the Rev. Phillips from the village had conducted an ecumenical funeral service at their burial. Earlier raids on New Dyfnant and the Madness had produced many unidentified but probably Christian bodies, so the priest and the minister had worked out an agreed procedure. The minister, reared in an atmosphere where Popery was anathema, had been suspicious at first but growing respect and liking for the gentle old priest had dissolved his doubts.

  The attack on the radio cabin had not been repeated but the armed watch had been maintained.

  The PAG had been the product of Dan's tidy mind but it was psychically sound and had been quickly agreed upon. Each coven had nominated its most psychically powerful member, which was not necessarily the same thing as the most psychically experienced. These formed the PAG, under Moira and Dan's leadership (Moira and Dan's coven being handed over to their senior couple while the PAG was in action). The idea was that when a psychic attack was to be mounted, the PAG would be its spearhead, raising the power as a group and directing it at its target. At the same time, each coven would be meeting and concentrating on feeding power to its own representative on the PAG. A simple two-tier pyramid of dynamism, with Moira and Dan at its tip.

  Putting the theory into practice had involved some trial-and-error. First, each coven had chosen its own 'delegate', and practised feeding power into him or her within the coven's own Circle, while the delegate tried to direct the total to a single objective such as the telekinetic moving of a compass-needle, or a specific work of healing, according to the delegate's known talents. As a result, two of the delegates had proved unable to carry such a charge and had shown signs of distress, so had had to be replaced by others perhaps less talented but more robust. Again, by the original plan the PAG should have totalled fifteen – Moira, Dan and one delegate from each of the other thirteen covens. But three of the covens had found that their most effective delegate was in fact a duo (two married couples and a pair of identical twin sisters) who were used to working powerfully together but were no more than average apart. So the final total had become eighteen.