Lucifer's Abbey

by Smith, Michael James

  Outside of course was the sort of evidence you didn't leave unless you were in a desperate hurry. Bodies tended to cause a lot of investigation. They had moved off from here in a great hurry, leaving a body and that meant surely that getting Juliet away was more important to them than leaving a corpse.

  There was another way to see it though. Perhaps they hoped that by leaving the Curator he would be blamed for the missing Juliet and would somehow lead the investigation away from themselves.

  On impulse I got up and went back to the man's body. His head had been badly treated by the shotgun at such close range. One eye was gone and part of his forehead. The half of his face below the missing eye was full of glass shards. It would take more than black magic to put him together again.

  I looked at his gloved hands. The ring had been on his right hand. I eased the glove off and as I had suspected, it was gone. Someone had removed it and replaced the glove. The mark of the ring was there though and that also told me something. He'd been wearing it a long time; he'd been involved for years.

  They'd lost a major player.

  Leon and Pete Selway appeared from around the house. Leon came over and I lifted the hand and showed him, he nodded, understanding at once.

  “They got into the house through the French windows.” he told me. “Tried to break down the door to the side apartment.” He lifted his eyes to meet my mine. “She isn't there Mike”

  I could feel the cold, it felt like it had got inside my chest and was trying to freeze my insides. I'd known she wasn't there - that's why I hadn't gone charging in to find her. “She was in that damned Lexus Leon!”

  We traipsed back into the kitchen and Pete started to make more coffee. “I can't get through Inspector. I'll have to drive into Moretonhampstead and knock on doors.”

  We sat at Juliet's marvellous four metre long table. It must have weighed a quarter of a tonne. It had been in the family for a couple of hundred years or something. I'd spent happy hours with them here and some difficult ones after Tim's passing too. The knowledge of an affair of long ago weighing heavily upon her now that he was gone - but not mentioned. I think at the time it had been both our intentions to talk of it at some time but life had moved on. I was promoted and she threw herself into her work.

  I got up and walked around. We hadn't touched the shotgun, forensics would go nuts if we mired their part of this and we had been careful not to despite the rush to try to find Juliet.

  I saw her mobile phone on the window and grabbed it. It told me she had texted me twice. I read the messages and passed the phone to Leon and Ann, whilst they read them I got my own phone out. The battery was dead.

  I'm always doing that, forgetting to charge the damned thing. I felt mortified. She had called for help, even identifying the source of her alarm but I'd not got the messages. I took the phone back from Ann and looked at the time she had sent them. We would have been too late to help anyway but it didn't make me feel any better, I felt like I'd let her down when she needed me most. Even the phone, which rarely worked from this location, had worked this time. I just hadn't been able to take advantage of that stroke of good fortune. It wasn't turning out to be my finest hour.

  Henry was watching me. “We are finished here Mike. We should go back to Torquay and find this man at once. That's her best hope. Time is everything now.”

  “I'll stay Boss,” Pete Selway said. “You lot go and send me some help when you get to Newton Abbot.” It was a kind offer and a professional one too. Not many people would want to hang around alone in the middle of nowhere at the scene of a murder in the midst of a blizzard. He was that sort of solid individual.

  He slid the keys of his Land Rover to Henry. “You drive, let him think - that's his forte.” He nodded in my direction before turning to me. “It's standard Police business now Inspector, we are back on solid ground and you'll be on your own patch. I wouldn't want to be in this bloke’s shoes! You’re definitely the last bloody copper I'd want after me in Torquay.”

  Juliet's car keys had been on the window ledge beside her phone; I picked them up and put them on the table in from of Pete. “If there's as much as a hint of trouble here you’re gone at once.” I said. Then I squeezed his shoulder in thanks for a fine effort and the kind words and made my way outside.

  I could have heaved my mobile phone half the way to Exeter I was so angry with it. The truth of the matter was that I’d grown too old for my job and should have retired long ago. I wasn't up to it anymore. Driving away without Juliet was a complete nightmare for me, I felt absolutely gutted.

  Ann Taylor sat in the front with Leon and we negotiated our way down the slippery track with some difficulty. The snow still beat relentlessly around us and I wasn't really conscious of the effort Leon put in to getting us safely to Torquay.

  I was planning what needed to be done upon our arrival and I was determined to do my job properly. We had some catching up to do but we also had a good team at the Station and the back-up of all the County resources at middle moor that would wade in to take up the investigation in Moretonhamstead, collect Pete Selway and get him home, and very quickly, their forensics experts would be all over Juliet's. By early morning with or without a blizzard they would be reporting back to me.

  The Station did not disappoint me. The activity went from docile middle of the night stuff to professional Police Station inside of just a few minutes. We get the occasional murder enquiry in Torquay, mostly drug related crime and you don't have to be Agatha Christie to investigate them. We had all the resources headed our way very quickly.

  Hainsley-Sihl lived I discovered not to my surprise, in one of the roads across Ilsham valley from Kents Cavern. I'd known that instinctively when I stood alone outside of the Caverns the day before. But the confirmation of that helped to assure me that I was not going to come unstuck when we knocked at his door.

  He was my man. I was convinced of it and the check on the Satan number plate was all I really needed to get the Chief Constable firmly on to my side. The Lexus was registered to him. With her weight thrown fully behind me we were organising a search team including a helicopter and dogs before an hour had past.

  All over Torbay sleep was disturbed and men and women began to make journeys through the snow to the Station. It wouldn't be easy for many of them, Torquay like Rome is built on seven hills and there's hardly a flat road in the place. Many of them would have to walk in. Nobody would fail to report for duty, not even in the worst snow conditions in fifty years.

  Leon and Ann had grabbed her desk and spent most of their time updating other officers. They didn't need to be motivated. This stuff was why they joined the Force in the first place. At my specific request they made no mention of black magic or Devil worshippers. We were hunting a kidnapper and probably a man who had murdered a young girl. That was all they needed. Most of them were the same officers who'd spent Boxing Day and the days immediately thereafter searching for clues in the foulest of weather and conducting a totally blank door to door search. This was their chance to get their own back; they wouldn't waste it.

  We were well under way with our plans when Pete Selway turned up accompanied by officers from Midddlemoor. Nothing had happened to cause him any concerns and he refused to go home to bed although he'd earned the right to. It wasn't a night to go home to bed.

  It was close to six am by the time we were all ready. There was that moment before the off when I had to address everyone. I made short of it. This is a real villain.” I said to them. “He is wanted by Interpol and the British Police and probably a serial murderer. No one gets to walk away - anyone within a hundred yards gets their collar felt and we deal with any fallout later.”

  I didn't mention my own private relationship with Juliet, though several of them knew that she was a friend. They would have shared that information I knew.

  I reminded them not to touch anything that the 'Scenes of Crime' Squad would later be examining and asked them to concentrate on ensuring that no-one c
rossed our cordon. “Interpol,” I indicated Henry, “want these people too, let’s show them what we can do. I want them all.” I said. “Period!”

  They were all dressed in heavy weather clothing and wanting to get out of the heated building. For a moment looking at them I realised this would be the last time I saw them that way, eager and willing to face the cold weather and the hard slog of duty. They'd go home later, tired, cold and wet and have a row or a cuddle with the missus and tell the kids to shut up but come back the next day ready to do it all over again.

  For me it was nearly over, I knew that I would miss these moments. I was proud of them. I had no regrets about having been one of them.

  They broke up and started to exit the building to go to their transport and I walked over and sat down with Leon and Ann. He was sending a text message on his mobile phone and smiled across at me. “My niece, she is fifteen today and I want her to get my message as soon as she wakes up.” It was typical of him that he had remembered that in the havoc of the morning.

  “What we do today will make her safer, that's a good feeling Mike.”

  We would remember those words in very difficult circumstances before too long had past.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE GHOSTS OF TORRE ABBEY

  Cherie Leclerc heard footsteps approaching the cave which had been converted into her cell. She had been reading the newspaper and had read and reread the article which concerned her Uncle Leon. The knowledge that he was here close to her in the local town had brought her new hope that she could somehow get away from her captors or that he would be able to find her. She was amazed he had been able to locate her so quickly.

  As the footsteps approached she steeled herself to be confronted by the albino man from the night before. Her fear of him and the thing that lived inside of him made her feel a cold dread. She got up and stood with her back to the stone cell wall. There was nowhere to run and the only weapon she had with which to defend herself - the scissors she had stolen - would not protect her from the hideous thing he could create. Harold's words about the man Bartholomew in the other cell came back to her. The man had been visited by the same ghastly entity that had driven her from her refuge in the crevice and his mind had been broken leaving him insane.

  There was more than one person coming, she could hear several sets of feet on the stone. They passed her, the man she feared, the woman from the kidnap and someone she had never seen before without even looking in and went to the cell opposite where she heard them open the door.

  “He's dead.” The unknown man said. It wasn't the albino's authoritarian voice. But now that voice did speak.

  “Who gave him a knife? It was the woman who answered. “It must have been Harold at breakfast, how stupid can you get?”

  There were some noises that sounded like they were moving furniture or perhaps the man's body onto the bed. “Get someone to help you take it to the caves and clean this up ready for tonight. We'll have the woman by then and she will have to go in here until the ceremony.” His voice was completely devoid of any feeling for the man whose corpse he was talking about.

  Again, there were footsteps and then he was there staring through the grill at her. Cherie couldn’t stand to look into his strange coloured eyes and stood staring at her feet to avoid them. She felt his gaze on her and then after a few seconds realised that he was doing something to her. The shock was total; her arms were being forced back against the stone as though he had his huge hands around her biceps. She was pinned before she even understood what was happening.

  That awful sense of another presence being all over her skin which she had felt when the creature was climbing down the rock towards her was again all over her. It was different this time, it wasn't full of lust and sadistic pleasure it was full of some malign strength. She felt her hands being forced upwards and outwards until she was pressed to the cave wall as though she had been fixed to a cross. To her horror she felt her body sliding upwards until her feet were a foot from the floor.

  “Look at me child.” he said. The voice was inside of her head as well as in her ears. She turned her head to the side and screwed her eyes shut as hard as she could. Whatever he wanted he wasn't going to get it without a fight. Her terror was beyond her ability to rationalise but she knew she had to resist that awful will. If she gave in there was no telling what he would force upon her. More than anything else left in the world she did not want to look into those eyes.

  “Shall I leave you there so that Harold can take his reward?” She heard the woman laughing. “Harold has not been performing his duties very well today has he? First he lets a fifteen year old girl outsmart him and then he lets a suicidal imbecile in his care cut his own throat. Whatever am I going to do about Harold?” The voice was chilling as the sentence finished; the woman sniggered stupidly beside him.

  Cherie was aware that her heart was racing uncontrollably. Her breathing was being affected by the force that was pressing her to the rock. It had been increasing as he spoke. She felt as though the loss of her own self-control was making her entire body react. Somehow the evil this man represented had got inside of her blood and it was making her head swim and her senses reel.

  “Tonight I will teach you not to interfere with my brethren. You can look forward to that. Everyone will want what Harold's not going to get now - but we mustn't be unkind to Harold because he's a traitor, we will let Harold watch before we let his blood.” He paused and there was silence. Cherie felt her hair rise until it was standing on end. He was amusing himself by terrifying her.

  There was a cold change in his voice; it was full of deep menace when he spoke again. “There's someone else who wants to teach you what it's like to be struck with a shoe. He's got a little surprise of his own for you.” Now both he and the woman laughed.

  “Look at me!” The voice was a harsh command. Her head was forced around and her chin up, her eyes came open despite the internal fear that tried to force her to keep them closed. “Tonight you will cross the abyss. The abomination you were worshipping when you hung that thing that way on the wall cannot help you. Tonight you will be the Thirteenth and your crossing the Great Divide will make me the most powerful Adept there has been on Earth for a thousand years.”

  Cherie fell to the floor. Released without warning she crashed down into a heap and gasped for breath. Her whole body was shaking uncontrollably and she started to vomit. Slumping to the floor completely prone she felt as though she was in the middle of an earthquake. The floor itself seemed to be moving beneath her in waves. She passed out.

  When she came around she felt like she had been through hell itself. Her nerves were shredded and she was full of fear. She climbed upon the bed, turned and faced the wall and tried not to think. She was still shaking. She lay sobbing for a long time until her mental exhaustion took her into a deep sleep.

  When her eyes opened she found that in her sleep she had turned and the first thing her eyes focussed upon was the crucifix on the opposite wall. Half awake and half asleep she thought that it was of full of soft white light. Her mind crossed the small space and was drawn into the light.

  The light illuminated a circle of tall stones; each had been erected beneath a full grown oak tree. Without the circle many people stood heads bowed in prayer.

  Within the circle a girl knelt and the full moon reflected from her long blonde hair.

  Her head was adorned by a silver hair band around which the stems of Primroses had been bound. In her hands she clutched a silver plate upon which many wild daffodils lay mixed with mistletoe, in the centre of them an oddly shaped cross of silver lay.

  Cherie rose above them and she watched as a small hole was made in the ground and one by one the men around the girl came to her side, they wore long robes and their heads were covered by hoods. Around the waist of each a length of ivy had been tied. One after the other placed a hand upon her head for a few seconds and bowed their heads to pray.

  When they were done she placed
the plate upon the grass and lifted the strange cross from the daffodils and placed it within the hole, she laid the mistletoe upon it and covered them with the soil which had been removed. She pressed it firmly down and placed the daffodils upon the small mound, then she stood, said a short prayer and walked away alone though the circle of oak trees.

  Cherie rose further in the air above that place and turning she could see a curved bay stretching away into the distance and across the water a ship approached. The sails were emblazoned with that same strange cross and beneath them men in armour stood ready to disembark.

  A group of Monks stood amongst them and in their midst a chest reposed. Cherie could feel the light confined therein and closed her eyes and prayed. Time passed.