On his way back to the flat, Nick wondered how much she really knew about Underwood. She might be an outsider, but she was obviously a fixture at The Sleeping Prince and some locals might occasionally confide in her. One thing was certain — he wouldn’t get many better chances.
When he got back to the flat, he found — as he’d expected — that it had been broken into and trashed. His stolen key stood in the lock. What little furniture there was had been smashed, while his tools, drugs-stash and phone had been taken. He could have done with hanging onto the phone, but it wasn’t a disaster — by prior arrangement, Knox had only called it from an unlisted number, to it wouldn’t be traceable back to the police. Thankfully, the wallet and cash he’d hidden on the underside of the wardrobe had not been found. He stood in the wreckage, thinking. This was more or less ‘Phase One’ of the operation complete. Time to start ‘Phase Two’.
That evening he showered, locked up the apartment early and headed off the estate on foot, making sure to pass the bench where the Cobweb Man and his cronies hung out. As before, they were gathered to while away another pointless evening. So far there were six of them, including Cobweb. As Nick hobbled past, someone made a comment and they laughed loudly.
On the edge of the district, he found a pay-phone.
“It’s me,” he said, when Knox answered.
“Go ahead.”
“Strike the contact number. The phone’s gone west. I’ve also had my fucking face kicked in, but I reckon I’m getting somewhere.”
“Good. You alright?”
“Fine. But listen...something is going down. I’m not sure what, but I can sense it. There hasn’t been much gathering of the clans, as I can see, but you never know in a place like this. There doesn’t seem to be anyone normal here at all, apart from a couple of beleaguered bar-staff. Check out any references you can to the ‘Dead Names’. I don’t know who they are, but I suspect we’re talking people who’ve died in police custody. It’ll probably be the motive for this year’s disturbance, or at least the excuse when their apologists start coming on telly. I’ll call you the first inkling I get that it’s about to kick off.”
“Just watch yourself, Nick.”
Nick hung up and crossed the road to a service-station, where he bought two plastic buckets from the forecourt shop and, much to the shop clerk’s consternation, filled them with petrol.
He was back on the estate and walking up to the Cobweb Man’s gang before they’d noticed him. The first they knew was when a bucket of petrol sloshed over their heads. They rounded furiously, shouting and swearing, only to get the second one full in their faces. Curses became coughs and gasps. All six were sodden, t-shirts, hair, jeans, trainers. They looked up, eyes blazing, only to see Nick holding a cigarette-lighter, a long tongue of flame flickering from it. Rage turned instantly to shock, then terror. They froze, eyes wide in their dripping faces.
“I want my stuff back,” he said quietly. “I want it back now, or you’re burnt meat.”
“Look...“ Cobweb stammered. “Just take it easy. What’s your fucking problem?”
“Now.” Nick repeated calmly. “No shit. No arguments. My tools, my draw, everything.”
Cobweb glanced nervously at his compatriots.
“My my,” a different voice said, “you really can kick arse.”
Nick looked slowly round and saw another man leaning against a street-light. His complexion was ice-pale, his hair, which he wore in matted dread-locks, a dirty blonde colour. His eyes were grey, a distinctive jagged scar running beneath the left one. His clothes were garish in the extreme: a designer running-suit of shiny red material, and an ankle-length raincoat, which might or might not be concealing a weapon. Nick suspected the former, because though he hadn’t met this person before, he’d seen his evil visage many times — on police bulletins all over the country.
Mickey Speranza might not be Public Enemy Number One in the old sense, but he was very much wanted. Aside from his Manson-type connections with an oddball community up in west London, where child-abuse was alleged and heavy drugs-use reported, he was also suspected of at least four armed robberies and two shooting incidents. He was ‘Category A’; his file on the PNC carried every conceivable warning.
Nick was under no illusion about how dangerous this guy was, but pretended otherwise. “Who are you?”
Speranza grinned. “The only person who can get you what you want. So put that lighter out...right now.”
“Try anything, and I torch these bastards!” Nick warned him.
“No-one’s going to try anything. I just want to talk.”
The others were watching Nick intently, some shaking, some with teeth clenched. Suddenly, crazily, he wanted to put the flame to them anyway. To see these small-time terrorists melt like so many candles. It was a mad notion, but it was a nice one. He had no idea where it came from, but for a bizarre moment he genuinely was going to drop the lighter into the fuel.
“Don’t get any stupid ideas, Mr. Waldron,” Speranza said carefully. “These are associates of mine. They were only doing what I told them.”
Nick stepped back and closed up the lighter. “I guessed they were puppets. Okay, what can I do for you?”
Speranza beckoned him down an entry. Nick followed cautiously. At the end there was a steel door, now open. Blackness lay beyond it.
“In here,” Speranza said.
Nick held back. “You must be joking.”
Speranza glanced over Nick’s shoulder. Nick turned and saw the passage behind blocked by a squat, hunched figure in a cowl and cloak. Its breadth was immense — it filled the entry from wall to wall. For a second he was paralysed. Was it his imagination, or was there a fish-like odour in the air?
“I really don’t want to have to keep forcing you to do things,” Speranza said.
“What’s this about?” Nick stammered, now shuffling after him down a steep, wet stair. He couldn’t believe what he’d just seen.
“Just a little chat.” Despite the sensation that a perilous drop lay just to the side of them, Speranza moved freely and easily as if the darkness was his home. “You’re not from this part of the country are you, Mr. Waldron. Yet you’re here. And that can’t be coincidence.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
A flickering light was visible below.
“You’re also a man of violence,” Speranza added. “You’ve just proved that. Your prison credentials check out too...two pigs Section-Eighteened in Birmingham. Nice.”
Nick could only thank God, and DCI Knox, that the cover story had held. The real Todd Waldron had been released from Blakenhurst six months ago and was now back on his home patch in Wolverhampton.
Speranza was still talking. “As I say, none of this is coincidence.”
They entered a cavernous chamber with lit candles dotted all over its floor but deep shadows in its corners. Despite the June temperatures outside, their breath smoked in the dank atmosphere.
“Of course, the final choice is yours, Waldron. You can go on making a few bob committing two-bit crimes. Or you can be part of something a lot bigger.”
“What’s this place?” Nick asked.
It was the size of an underground car park, but it was clearly derelict. Their voices echoed. Water dripped everywhere.
“You might call this my church,” Speranza said. “A place where dreams are made. Or nightmares, depending on your view.”
The vast room had been covered with bizarre, red-brown handwriting. It was all over the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Every scrap of space had been invaded by loops and whirls of apparently meaningless script, all tangled together in a senseless mass. Some parts spiralled into wild, psychedelic patterns or deranged imagery: staring eyes, severed limbs, the plucked wings of flies, crawling foetuses. And here and there, in the midst of the madness, was that familiar horned-head symbol.
But the real shock came when Nick suddenly realised that the scrawl had been made in body substances — blood or
excrement, or maybe both.
“Jesus Christ!” he exhaled.
“Does this upset you?” Speranza asked.
“What’s it all for?”
“Discord.
Nick gazed at him. “What?”
“Look around you...it is pain, confusion. The food of Chaos.”
“I don’t understand.”
Speranza walked past him. “Look down here, Waldron.”
There was an aperture in the far wall, like the entrance to a broken lift. A rusted grille was folded back on it. He approached, and peered down a brick shaft into a blackness so foul it was almost mesmerising.
“Can you smash the rule of law?” Speranza wondered.
Nick wanted to pull away, to tear his eyes from that cancerous hole, but he couldn’t. His hair prickled as he realised that something was moving down there, throbbing, pulsing — like a huge, disgusting heart.
“Can you kill when there is no purpose to kill?” Speranza asked him. “Can you maim and torture, burn and desecrate?”
Something was now ascending the shaft, rising slowly towards the surface — like a giant squid emerging from the murky depths.
Still Speranza’s insane rambling went on. “Can you degrade the innocent? Defile the holy?”
Nick was frozen. A scream that was not his own filled his chest.
“Can you mock the old and sick, Waldron? Can you stamp on the graves of saints? Can you spunk and piss into the mouths and cunts of virgins...”
“Christ’s sake!” Nick threw himself back, clattering to the ground in a heap.
Minutes seemed to pass as he lay half-insensible. When he finally looked up, Speranza was grinning by candlelight. “The time of Infusion is near, Waldron. Very near. It was no coincidence you came to us. You...and so many like you.”
And only then did Nick notice the various groups of people watching from the shadows; countless numbers of them standing in rigid silence. He didn’t need to see them properly to know who they were: the disturbed, the lost, the despised. They’d found themselves a place after all. And a voice. A voice that soon would be heard again.
He glanced back at Speranza. “When?”
Speranza’s grin broadened. “When do you think?”
Nick didn’t need to be told, not he — a member of Un-Crime, and thus a student of lore. Would it not be at the traditional time of strength and celebration, when all bad weeds are pulled, when all powers reach their zenith?
Would it not be 23rd June...better known as Midsummer Eve?
****
“You look a little peaky,” Valda said, when he met her in the pub that night.
“Yeah,” he replied. He laughed. “Hah...yeah, I’ll bet.”
He’d spent the last hour sleeping, and when he’d come round he’d tried to write the incident off as a hallucination brought on by drugs. The more he thought about it, the more likely that seemed; possibly a hallucinogen in the candle-wax. Something simple like drugs or looting would be at the centre of all this. Money was reason enough to manufacture a riot. The Midsummer Eve lark would be the cover-story to get as many freaks and crazies involved as possible. Whatever the reason, it still gave him a couple of days’ breathing space.
“It’s nothing,” he added.
Valda eyed him critically. “Glad you didn’t bother dressing up. That would have been superficial.”
Nick glanced down and realised that he was still in the scruffy denims and stained white t-shirt he’d been wearing all along. “Oh shit, sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She shouldered her bag and headed out of the pub. She was now in tight jeans and a loose cheese-cloth top, which looked a little hippyish but did a lot for her fulsome figure. Her hair shimmered in fiery waves. Only now did it occur to him how lucky he’d been to secure a date with her at all.
“I’ll nip off and get changed,” he said. “It’ll not take long.”
“Forget it.” She turned down the first alley they came to. “There’s no dress-code where we’re going.” At the end of the alley, a flight of unlit steps led upwards.
“Where’s that?”
“My flat.” She started up. “You don’t need to worry. I’ve got plenty of stuff in. By the way...can you smell petrol?”
“Yeah,” he said, following her. “Wonder where it’s coming from?”
Valda’s apartment was directly over the pub. Like so many others, its windows were grilled, its door and walls spattered with paint. But inside it was a different story; clean and neatly ordered, with plump comfortable furniture and a variety of potted plants. Surrealist pictures adorned the walls; the air was scented with pot-pourri.
She showed Nick to an over-stuffed sofa, then breezed through into the kitchen. He glanced left to where several DIY shelves were stacked with what looked like reference books, big thick hard-backs. He selected one and began to flip through it.
“Now this is interesting,” he called.
“What’s that?”
“Ancient Mysteries of the Western World.”
Beneath the printed title, a West Indian devil-mask was portrayed. It had been carved from red clay, with a long tongue and flaring nostrils.
Valda reappeared, closing the kitchen door behind her. She held two bottles of Bud, both opened. “Part of my course,” she said. “Rubbish, most of it. Occult gibberish. Only bought it for research. Beer okay?”
“Great.”
He continued to glance through the tome, even as she sat beside him. The first section dealt with the Americas, the second with Europe, the fourth with the Middle East, the fifth with Africa. All manner of subject matter was covered, from arcane lore to UFOs to monster sightings. The reference to monsters set him thinking again about the events of earlier. Nothing bothered Nick more than the unexplainable. He sipped his Bud and turned another page.
“Did you come here to read?” Valda wondered. “Or to take me to bed?”
He looked at her, surprised. A look she returned boldly, her hair tousled, her lips glinting.
“Well?” she asked.
“Seeing as you put it that way...”
She leaned forward and pressed her mouth to his, all but swallowing his tongue. He was stunned by her force and passion, but responded by tearing off his jacket. They tangled wildly, falling onto the sofa. Valda unbuttoned her jeans and began to wriggle them down. Nick ran a hand over her smooth thigh as he kissed her, shoving the book out of the way. It fell to the carpet, bouncing open on a page of photographic illustrations — one of which caught his eye.
He immediately pulled back from her and stared at the page. “That’s where it’s from!”
“What?” She sounded bewildered. “Where what’s from?”
He climbed off her and picked up the book. “That symbol! That’s it!”
The black-and-white image showed a mass of hieroglyphics on some ancient Middle-Eastern obelisk, and in the centre the carved shape of the horned-head.
“That’s the one,” Nick said.
Valda sat up and glanced at it. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s all over the place...surely you’ve noticed?”
She shrugged. “Can’t say I have.”
He tapped the picture with his finger. “The thing is, I knew I recognised it. And I do. It’s carved on one of the monoliths in a stone-circle in Cornwall. It’s on the coastal moors near Tintagel Head.”
She peered at the picture. “This symbol represents Bael-or, the god of the Philistines. He stood for storms and darkness.”
“Chaos,” Nick said slowly.
“Why the interest?” she asked.
“Bael-or. Not the same as Baal, by any chance?”
“That was the name given to him by the Egyptians. It’s the one scholars generally use in the West.”
Nick felt a creeping numbness down his spine. “They still have a party in his honour.”
“Who does?”
“Down in Cornwall again. I was involved in an invest… I mean,
I heard about a police enquiry into the druids who gather there. Most of them are acid-heads and that, not too serious about it. But there’s a big bonfire and piss-up at the stone-circle. The ‘Baal-fire’, they call it. They roll burning cart-wheels into the sea, to simulate human sacrifices. One year, someone really did get murdered. And that was the other thing — you said the ground here once ran red with blood?”
She nodded.
Nick paled. “They said that about that place in Cornwall. The ground there was once red with the blood of human offerings. Jesus Christ!” He stood up. “I thought it was going to be Midsummer Eve, but it isn’t! The Baal-fire’s held on the summer solstice...21st June. Jesus H. Christ, Valda...that’s tonight!”
He grabbed for his jacket and scrambled to the door, only to find it locked.
“You’re leaving now?” she asked, astounded.
“I’ve got to,” he said. “Look, I’m sorry Valda. I’ll explain later. Have you got a key?”
She shook her head with disbelief, but began a slow search around the room. Nick watched her on tenterhooks. “You must have a key. What about a phone? Have you got a phone?”
“No!” She stopped searching to zip up her jeans.
“Well what about the key? Christ, I can’t be stuck in here now!”
She turned and stared at him — very intently. And then, quite unexpectedly, she smiled. “You keep invoking the Nazarene, but it won’t do you any good. Not if you haven’t got faith.”
Her voice had changed. It was deeper, throatier. Emerald flames suddenly burned in her eyes. Her lips curved into a vampiric grin. “You poor unfortunate. You think we didn’t know you were coming? We who comprise all knowledge of the Old Ones, of the Herd, of the Dead Names who will live again: Peor, Othan, A-Ciliz, Nyarlathotep, our slumbering lord Bael-or!”
Nick heard glass shattering somewhere on the estate, and a woman start to scream. Hideous laughter roared down one of the alleys.
“You bitch,” he said quietly. “You tried to keep me here!”
“Just how keen on doing your duty are you, Sergeant Brooker?” she asked. “You don’t have to go out and risk your life. You could stay here instead, and fuck my brains out.”
Dead Souls Page 27