Lucifer's Abbey

by Smith, Michael James

  Juliet was fascinated despite her difficult situation. The man was unique! He was able to give the Impression that he existed outside of the boundaries of modern life. Again she wondered how old he was. There was an easy way to find out! “How old are you?” she asked.

  Before he could answer two men entered. They were carrying trays on which an assortment of cold foods was piled. He didn't speak to them and they did not speak either. The food was settled upon the table and they were withdrawing when he gave one of them instructions in a language she did not recognise. “He will bring you something that will remove the odour from your clothing.”

  “He took up the wine that had been served with the food and poured it into two glasses. She was amazed that he thought she was going to sit there and drink with him!

  “Its fine wine and neither of us are going anywhere in a rush. Please do me the favour of enjoying it; it will help to revive your spirits. It would be a shame to waste it.” He took up his own glass and drank deeply from it. “Yes it is good! A long time ago I lived in a Châteaux in the region from which it comes and I have never lost my affection for it.”

  He began to help himself from the cheeses and meats upon the table and indicated she do likewise. “Come now, you have asked how old I am and I shall enjoy telling you a story. Do be brave and eat, drink and enjoy it for most assuredly you have never heard the like of it and it is always a shame to waste a good story is it not?”

  There was a strange unnerving charm about him. His two halves of a face seemed to be two people looking out at one world. The evil in him was always there, she could sense it was never far from the surface. It was in his movements, in his unnerving pink albino eyes. But the other half of him had a strange old worldly appeal to it; his intelligence was supported by a vast reservoir of knowledge that underlay his thoughts and his words. It wasn't wisdom, it was long experience. How many times she wondered, had this dangerous man supped with someone before he slit their throat?

  The door opened and the servant re-entered the room and brought her a small dish with some crushed herbs in it. Outside the door behind him she saw several people moving boxes and carrying furniture.

  “You should rub a little of that onto your clothing. No modern chemical spray can do the job but those herbs are prepared with a recipe of great antiquity; the Franciscan Monks swore by it.”

  She took up the dish and sniffed at it. The herbs were wonderful! They made her feel as though a fresh wind had blown into the room. Her pleasure did not escape him “All around us the treasures of the past are being trampled underfoot. Lost now to the many are the arts of the herbalist.”

  She applied some of the mixture to her clothing in little dabs and the aroma felt like it was entering into her mind. She felt herself lifted spiritually just as he had said she would.

  “How old am I?” He paused and thought. “First I must explain something that the scientist in you will struggle with. Truth does not always fit the pattern we want it too.”

  She took up the wine and tasted it and he watched her before he continued in a quiet voice. “Time is not, as modern science wants you to believe, allied to space and indivisible from it. There are those who can swim against the tide, tread water in the flow. Do you understand me Professor?”

  “I think I follow your argument, yes.” Juliet decided to eat. She began to take some food. Whatever was going to happen to her was going to happen anyway, it might just as well happen on a full stomach and she realised that by some strange herbal magic the herbs had restored her appetite.

  “There are ways to learn how to do that. You would perhaps call them magic or dark arts or some other meaningless name but the fact is that it is science the same as you studied science yourself. It is learn-able if you have the books of knowledge to teach yourself with. First like a new swimmer you learn to tread water and then if you don't drown you learn to swim against the tide. Still with me?”

  Juliet was fascinated despite her unease. She could hear people outside, busy packing up the house she guessed, this man was moving out. But here within the room the soft flickering light from the candelabra and the chandelier seemed to have moved them both through time, she felt like they were isolated from it for a moment. “Yes I understand you clearly.”

  “A long time ago the division of power between Darkness and Light meant that the knowledge of how to tread water or swim up or down stream was split between two factions. Each faction retained the ability but the way they achieved the art became ever more different. The powers of the Light granted the knowledge to those they chose but not the control or understanding of the power. Their advocates are forced to meander throughout time without knowing of their place in the great scheme of things. The Dark powers that I serve are willing to bestow both the knowledge and the power to control it to those who can cross what you would recognise from your own studies as the 'abyss'.” He stopped and again he drank heavily from his wine glass.

  “The secrets of this knowledge became more and more guarded. Those who were granted the right to learn became steadily rarer until there was only one in many generations. You ask how old I am and I tell you that I was born in the year 1812 when Napoleon stood before the gates of Moscow. I have been treading water for a very long time.” He turned to her and his face was a complete mask. If he felt any emotion about the amazing statement he had just made she could not detect it but in his eyes there were the centuries of which he spoke.

  Juliet was unable to make any answer. She knew he was telling her the truth; she had witnessed in the most shocking way the abnormal powers he controlled. He was telling her something that was Impossible to believe but which she believed anyway. Not only was he utterly evil but he had been so for a very long time. Her fear of him increased - life would mean very little to someone who didn't know how to die.

  “My Mother was the daughter of a wealthy Austrian Count and my birth was a terrible shock to her. I was not the prettiest child in Vienna as you can imagine.” If that meant anything to him it did not show. “My grandparents wanted to have me drowned in the Danube but my Mother was not about to abandon me. She stole some of the family's heirlooms and fled with me to Paris where her beauty enabled her to become a leading Courtesan. Her boutique was a favourite of Napoleon's and when he returned from exile on Corsica she became for a time his woman and he confided to her a secret that few across a thousand years have ever known. A secret that had been unearthed in Egypt where it had been buried by Knights of the Order of St Lazarus. They were escaping from the Holy Land to prevent the great treasure they possessed falling into the hands of the Greek Orthodox Church who pursued them for the secrets they carried.”

  He stopped and poured wine for them both although Juliet had hardly touched hers. He drank thirstily from his own glass.

  “Napoleon was unaware that my mother had been forced upon her arrival in Paris to become for a short time the consort of the most powerful black magician of her time. She had under his tuition attained great power as an occult practitioner. Now she came in search of that secret to Torquay but the guardians of it here were too powerful for her to assault. There was a battle on another plane than this one, an astral battle of wills between Adepts, and having defeated her they drove her away and she took me to London where her health never recovered.”

  At this point the door opened and one of the men who had served their food told him that the first Lorries were leaving and the work had started to clear the upper floors. He waved him away obviously displeased that he had been interrupted during his narrative. Juliet said nothing. She was totally fascinated by his story and conscious that every minute she kept him talking Mike would be catching up. She felt sure that storm or no storm the text messages would have been sent some time ago.

  When the servant departed the room he went on. “She spent her last years making certain that I was empowered as a very young Neophyte and started on the path to attaining my full powers. I became the youngest ever Zelator at age el
even and was Adeptus Exemptus by my fifteenth birthday. When she finally died, I placed myself in the care of a leading member of the occult community in London and was enabled to study Theosophy and to become a Roman Catholic Priest. In that disguise I travelled through many countries and across several continents studying every aspect of the occult arts; seventy years of study and practice. Then I was in Jerusalem for almost forty years. I battled with other Adepts regularly during that period. Finally I learned that what I sought was no longer there and had not been there for hundreds of years. For another forty I was slowly retracing the steps of something that passed from there to here, back to where my Mother had believed the thing I sought was hidden. The never ending wars had allowed me to easily create new identities for myself. Ten years ago I took up some duties in Falmouth, as close as I wanted to be whilst I studied what remained of the powers that Torquay has concealed for so long. Although diminished they were still considerable, a sure sign that what I sought was here.” He stopped again but this time he did not drink. He was simply gathering his thoughts.

  Somehow the world seemed to have shrunk into the pool of light the candles cast around the two of them and Juliet was conscious that this most unusual man had something of an aura around him that she had never previously encountered. His unusual appearance and mannerisms were a part of it but there was something more; something that was decidedly unnerving to her. The shadows in the room seemed to be listening to him as intently as she was herself. It was as though the two of them were not in fact alone but rather were being observed by many other things. The shadows around her felt alive.

  “There are certain rites that only one who has been excommunicated from the Church can perform. I engineered my own excommunication to allow myself to move on.” Again he paused to drink wine. He obviously had an insatiable passion for it; he drank it in a manner in which she had never seen it consumed. Almost half a large glass at a time drunk with his hands clutched either side of the glass and his head thrown back.

  “Finally two years ago I purchased the cave system that lies beneath us here and took control of a number of Covens that have long antiquity. They are spread all over Europe and between them they have stored the knowledge of all the years of study and practice since the birth of Rome. Together for more than a hundred years we have pursued an object of unimaginable power. At this time the leaders of each of those Covens twelve of them are on their way to this place and tomorrow night we will open the way to the 'Abyss 'and I shall call across the 'Great Divide' one who has not set foot upon the Earth for two thousand years. A new 'Age 'will begin and I shall stand at its pinnacle commanding the most powerful weapon the World has ever seen.”

  Juliet wondered if she had just been in the presence of total madness. That he believed what she had just heard she had no doubt whatsoever. He was drinking deeply again and seemed oblivious of her presence. The shadows seemed to have thickened about them and suddenly she sensed that there was a change taking place. In seconds the room was chill.

  When he turned his head to look at her she knew her time of delaying him was over. His eyes were pure evil. His mind had passed on to other cares than herself. “You must go back to your cell now; you have been brought here to bear witness to the most important occult ceremony in two thousand years. In just a few hours you will meet Lucifer himself. Prepare yourself for that for there will only be two types of people in the new order. Those who follow and are rewarded and those who refuse and are cast down to the flames for all eternity.”

  The door opened and the blonde woman with the 'James Bond' villainous demeanour and two men entered. He had summoned them somehow but she had not seen any overt sign of how he had done so. She stood up dismissed without farewell, and walked after them out of the room. She felt as though the shadows watched her go.

  The hard faced woman led the way back to Juliet's cell without a word. She was physically smaller than Juliet and had she been alone it would not have taken much to overpower her, for a moment Juliet had visions of banging her head against the tunnel walls with considerable violence, but the two men who walked behind her were a different proposition. One was huge and overweight and the other tall and wiry and both looked like they'd been recruited from 'Mobsters Are Us'. There was nothing for it but to allow herself to be locked in again.

  For two hours afterwards there was a lot of coming and going through the tunnel and Juliet watched as some of the furniture and effects from within the house above were moved to somewhere that was out of sight along the corridor. It was whist she was spying on them doing this that she first saw Cherie Leclerc properly.

  The young face appeared at the grill that was just a few feet further on towards the room with the kitchen than Juliet's. The girl saw her at the same time and they immediately started to call to one another - an exchange of names and then a long conversation broken each time that someone passed by with more goods from upstairs.

  Juliet soon knew that the girl opposite was the victim of a kidnapping in Belgium and had already been a prisoner for two nights. It took the best part of an hour for them to completely update each other. For Juliet to learn that someone other than herself had witnessed Hainsley-Sihl’s 'familiar' was something of a relief, although of course she was sorry the girl had been subjected to such a horrifying experience. There was a part of her that wanted to be able to convince itself that somehow she had been tricked into imagining that dreadful experience. Now that small hope was gone. Her time alone with Hainsley-Sihl and his strange story and her Impression of him as a powerful Adept were reinforced by Cherie's experience.

  When Cherie told Juliet that she had persuaded Harold to give a message to her Uncle who was obviously now working with Mike Juliet could only hope that the girl's strategy worked and did not backfire on her. Sooner or later Harold was going to demand payment. She had recognised Harold as one of the men who had carried her from the car by Cherie's description and she knew that he was back in the house above.

  “I have stolen some scissors, a screwdriver and also a nail file” Cherie told her. “If he comes back in here I am going to attack him with the scissors.” The young face was in earnest and Juliet understood how sitting in the cell just waiting for Harold to return must have been an awful experience in itself.

  Juliet had to think hard before she answered. What option would Cherie have? Almost certainly her life too was going to be in jeopardy before many hours had past. They wouldn't let either of them go that was for certain. She couldn't tell her not to defend herself from being raped, that was unthinkable but Harold had been a big young man and sounded as though he was capable of real violence towards her. If she failed she would suffer terribly for attacking him.

  “You will have to wait until he is very close to you. If he sees the scissors he will be too strong for you.”

  She felt awful encouraging her to attack someone and thereby put herself at greater risk but the overriding consideration was that their situation was desperate and they would have to fight by whatever means they could find. Even the tiniest opportunity to fight back could not be ignored.

  “I was going to wait until he is on top of me. He won't be thinking of anything but his dirty mind then. Whatever happens he won't get what he wants; I'd rather stick the scissors into myself.”

  Juliet felt her heart go out to the girl. No one of her age should be faced with such a dreadful dilemma. “If we could get out of these cells there is a way out of here at that other end. He said there were a lot of tunnels under here. Perhaps we could hide until Mike and your Uncle can find us.”

  “I've been trying with the scissors. They go between the edge of the door and the door jamb and I can hold the bar of the bolt; I've tried to slide it back but it's too stiff, I can't get enough of a grip to make it move very far and I have to stop every time I hear someone coming.”

  Juliet examined what she could see of the bolt on Cherie's cell. She could see that it couldn't be slid back because it needed to be turned
a half turn first to prevent the handle on it being blocked by a fastening. If it could be turned it would slide right back. Quickly she explained what was stopping it to Cherie.

  She could just see the top of Cherie's dark haired head as she went to work on the bolt. She saw the two separated ends of the scissors poking out and understood that Cherie was trying to grip the bolt with the sharp edges and slide it backwards. She watched as the bolt began to turn and saw how close Cherie came to getting it into the right position for it to slide but every time the girl released the scissors to change from turning to sliding the weight of the handle made the bar return to its blocked position.

  Cherie peered out at her and she could see the disappointment on her face. “Don't give up! You’re doing really well! Try to keep it gripped after you've turned it and slide it back without releasing it.