The man still resisted Norrish, pulling back, stumbling, but there were no strengths to his protests, his moans doleful and low. The fight seemed to have gone out of him, and now even his head had dropped and he stared at the stones, his chin almost on his chest and his eyes rolling.
Norrish pulled him over to the stones, standing him as best he could against the tallest of them on the lee side of the weather in the hope of keeping the man from being too exposed. He took a moment to pull the zipper of the man’s jacket to the top and lift his hood over his head, pulling the toggled strings to tighten it around his face; the man simply stood like a child as Norrish did so. His eyes still rolled, darting left and right, up and round, down and about, their sockets dark. His lips were a frigid blue now, the colour of oceans under sullen skies or bodies on autopsy tables. The colour of hypothermia.
Norrish dropped his bag by the man’s feet and walked around the outside of the circle, looking down the hillsides as he went. The weather had closed in so much that the foot of the hill was no longer visible, only a dirty sheet of rain that was shot through with glimmers of silver where what light there was caught the falling, spinning water in its teeth. There were no people on the paths, which appeared as little more than spider-web lines running through the covering foliage. Helplessly, Norrish took his phone from pocket again and held it up; No Signal sat in the top corner of its screen, stolid and absolute. “Shit,” he said and put the useless thing back into his jacket. This was rapidly becoming a disaster.
There was another scouring, tearing flash of lightning and almost immediately after, another growl of thunder that echoed about him. The flash left afterglow images imprinted in Norrish’s eyes, swirling patterns of white and yellow that only slowly faded back to the rainswept reality in front of him. What had the hotel owner called this weather? “Hungering”, he’d said it was, a “hungering sky”. When Norrish had asked him what he meant, he’d laughed and said it was just a local phrase for when the clouds gathered around Lyfthelm and the top of the Swallows or one of the other hills in the area.
When Norrish looked up he couldn’t see separate clouds any more, only a dirty, bruised sky that wrapped itself around him like ancient muslin. The clouds must be surrounding the hill completely now, Norrish supposed, must have lowered themselves around the land like a mouth closing around and sucking on a knob of bone. Hungry sky, he thought, hungry and vast and unstoppable.
No. He was spooking himself, giving into to panic, and that was no use. He had to think, to act sensibly, like an adult. There was little point in trying to get off the hill now, the weather was too bad to risk the walk and the nearest outskirts of civilisation too far away. He had to make what shelter he could here and hope that either someone came or that this weather blew itself out soon. He went back to where he had left the man, thinking that at least he could give the man some tea; Norrish had some in his flask. There was another flash of lightning, creating momentary shadows that leapt around Norrish from the stones, and in the flashes retreating light he saw a bag lying in the centre of the circle.
It was a rucksack; actually, it was what he always thought of as a ‘tourist bag’, all straps and reflective panels and pockets and looking as though it was hardly used. It was lying on its side on the earth, open and with its contents spilled out across the ground. He walked over to it, and saw a lunch box, its lid still tightly sealed and the ghosts of thick cut sandwiches and an apple visible through its semi-opaque sides. Next to it, flapping desolately, was an ordnance survey map in a plastic cover and a single glove half buried in the mud, just its fingers and thumb visible, reaching to the sky. It was a woman’s glove, or maybe a child’s, small and delicate. A woman’s, Norrish thought, given the size of the bag. He crouched and looked inside the bag. It contained a sweater, also a woman’s, he saw, a scarf and a flask and a camera case but no camera. Everything was wet.
Norrish looked around; there was no sign of the bag’s owner. He walked swiftly around the inside of the circle looking for anything else, but there was nothing, just wind and rain and grass shifting and puddles forming as the ground became saturated. “Shit,” Norrish said again; there seemed no other word for it.
Now he had a halfway catatonic man and an apparently missing woman to deal with. There was another flash of lightning and now the thunder seemed like laughter, mocking him for the situation he had found himself in.
The man had gone.
Norrish’s bag was still on the ground, tucked against the base of the stone, but there was no sign of the man. Norrish ran back between the stones, looking back down the path they had arrived along; nothing. As fast as he dared, he ran around the outside of the circle, feet slipping on the wet earth, looking down each path for movement.
Nothing.
Nothing, and where the fuck had the man gone? How had his day gotten so bad so quickly, Norrish wondered? A long walk along trails he was confident he knew, then back to the hotel for a bath and a hot meal and to listen to more of its owner’s quaint local history, a perfect day, but no; somehow he had got caught in weather as savage as he had ever seen it trying to find people he didn't know. What the fuck had happened here? Really?
Back to the other bag, still abandoned in amongst the stones. He quickly went through it, finding that the flask was empty and that beneath the jumper and scarf there were spare socks and a small first aid kit but no phone. However, the woman was, she knew what she was doing, was no simple weekend walker even if she was a tourist. So where was she?
Another flash of lightning, another ragged giggle of thunder. Norrish shivered; despite his waterproof clothing, rain was finding its way further down his neck and back, and it was chilling him. The wind, coming from the direction of the lakes, carried with it not just rain but deeper breaths of coldness now, bitter against his exposed flesh. There was another flash of lightning and for a moment the world disappeared in a bleachwhite glare, fading back in slowly so that the puddles around Norrish appeared red for a minute, as though filled with blood.
The red colouring didn’t fade.
Blood was seeping up from the ground, filling the puddles all around him with rich, rusty threads of colour. Norrish shrieked, stepping back and tripping across the bag. He landed awkwardly, knocking against the abandoned glove with one flailing hand, tearing it loose from the mud. It came free and rolled, flapping over and over like an injured animal before coming to rest pointing away from him.
The torn stump of a wrist, bones gleaming whitely, poked from the glove’s cuff. The flesh around the bones was neatly sliced, the planes of meat puckering as they chilled and the rain played across them. Norrish shrieked again and struggled to his feet, staggering back from the bag and the glove and the hand. Fuck the man, fuck the woman, he thought, I am going, going now.
The earth beneath his feet heaved.
A long bulge rose up around the edge of the circle and rolled towards its centre like a wave, humping the earth with its sodden grass covering up and then dropping it in its wake with a sound like a sloppy kiss. It sent Norrish into a lope-armed sway, pitching him sideways so that he fell against one of the stones. His hand slapped its surface and it was warm, the water covering it slick and thick and somehow organic.
He pushed himself away, trying to move between the stones but the ground heaved again, reminding of some vast tongue probing a morsel of food. He tripped, falling to his knees, and the ground pushed back against him, lifting him.
Norrish scrabbled, trying to go forwards, but the surging earth sent him back towards the centre of the circle. Around him, the stones were tilting, clashing together, their sides dripping with liquid that looked more like saliva than rain. The noise of them grinding together made Norrish’s teeth ache, and he screamed again.
More lightning, and this time the flash was accompanied almost immediately by thunder that sounded like a vast anticipatory sigh. The air thickened, the clouds gathering all about Norrish as the ground bulged again. He pitched sideways, r
olling over onto his back as a giant throat opened above him and Hraec-Tungu lifted him towards the hungering sky.
I Is F or Ipos
Under The Bridge
Raven Dane
Simon Tunney slouched down the road, his foul mood too volcanic to be contained. Mumbling to himself about fucking berks and pillocks, he kicked an empty coke can skittering across the road towards a bin-raiding urban fox. It missed by such a long way, the animal didn’t even raise its mangy head. This did not improve Tunney’s sulk.
Being surrounded by that pitiful species, the human race was so hateful he yearned for the well overdue zombie apocalypse. He had already mapped out his survival strategy, one where he would wield some seriously kick ass fire power, lead the survivor resistance. There was nothing he didn’t know about zombies, whether walking dead or virus-ridden. The few who escaped the flesh-devouring hordes would need him, drawn to his natural leadership. Hopefully mainly hot women, falling at his feet in gratitude.
That night, Tunney had attended a science fiction quiz run by a local pub, The Red Lion, even its name was boring, predictable. Tunney had sat, a team of one, fuming with inarticulate rage at the inanity and lack of precision of the questions, hissing with contempt at the pathetic dearth of knowledge by the quiz goers. He wanted to point out their folly when with tedious inevitability they got the answers wrong but Tunney became tongue-tied and inarticulate in public, bottling up his rage ready to channel later.
The final straw came when the last answers were read out. He’d lost the quiz to a team of smug gits, university snots, by just one sodding mark. The bloody idiot of a quizmaster had overruled Tunney’s accurate and correct answer to question four, “what was the mineral sought by the Daleks in Death to the Daleks?” He had correctly answered “parrinium,” but the quizmaster had used the geek world’s urban legend answer of ‘perineum’ to the inevitable sniggering from the imbeciles in the pub. And of course, no amount of correcting the quiz master’s error would change the man’s feeble, sorry excuse for a mind, declaring the universal rule of pub quizzes that the quizmaster is always right and the final score must remain unchanged.
Overturning his bar stool and storming out, Tunney headed back to his basement bedsit, in a row of old terraces over which a motorway bridge loomed, blocking out much daylight. The bridge never bothered him, Tunney was returning to a different world where he was unchallenged overlord. As he stalked through damp, dirty back streets still fuming at the quiz injustice, his safety tactic kicked in. Muggers and drunks targeted victims. He would not walk like timid prey, his sparse, sandy hair became golden, flowing locks, his straggly excuse for a beard became manly, impressive. In Tunney’s mind he became his alter ego, a powerful Norse warrior. In reality, he was a nervous, socially awkward man in his early thirties, with stooping shoulders and a belly already running to beer and junk food paunch.
Tonight, the streets were clear beyond the can dodging fox, and he was soon back home to the focus of his existence, the internet where he was even more than a Viking warrior, Tunney was a powerful demi-god, his weapons the cold sharpness of his mind and his brilliance at conjuring barbed, cruel comments designed for maximum harm and stress to his unseen victims. His domain, the entire cyberverse.
Tunney did not bother with the main light as he opened his front door, the glow from his many computer screens bright enough to negotiate the debris of long devoured pizza deliveries, discarded underwear and untidy stacks of porn and anime magazines. He logged onto Yahoo, not to check emails, he didn’t have many and that mostly spam, but to see the latest news feed. His favourite stories were tragedies, dead celebrities, missing kids, disasters. Tunney’s bad mood evaporated immediately when he saw a little girl had gone missing from a housing estate in Liverpool, plenty of entertaining mileage in that.
Fully in his comfort zone, he spent the night hours joyfully winding up the concerned mugs posting on the Yahoo news forum, some asking for God’s help in finding the child alive and unharmed. He made vile comments about the missing girl’s family, horrible slurs about the kid herself, insulted Liverpool and its inhabitants. He poured acid tongued scorn on the God botherers and their beliefs. When things needed livening up, he chucked in some disgusting racist comments about Muslims. He wasn’t actually a racist, he was an equal opportunities hater.
Tunney whiled away the night hours searching for chat forums using a variety of alias names and different computer. He had lost count of how many had banned him, under his many guises, a master of re-routing his messages, bouncing them around the world to elude detection, a useful trick taught him by a hacker, the closest he’d had to friend. They had fallen out when the hacker messed about with Tunney’s favourite fan boy anime site, ‘for a lark.’ Tunney did not see the funny side, the saying ‘forgive and forget,’ did not exist for him. Grudges lodged deep in his soul, he allowed them to fester and grow becoming monstrous growths of hatred and spite.
That night, one forum site had a bevy of illiterate idiots extolling the latest book of an author, a female horror writer which in itself was ridiculous. How he had enjoyed putting scathing one star reviews on her books, served the silly tart right for straying away from her rightful place churning out romance slush. Tunney enjoyed rubbishing the latest book, adding spurious accusations of plagiarism and review rigging for good measure. Throw cyber mud and it would stick and spread for as long as the internet existed, a new form of immortality.
He was an author too, a great one, once people recognised the genius of his dark, alternative take on science fiction, an unstructured gonzo approach to writing that trashed all the outworn, boring rules of writing, spelling and structure. Tunney published it himself, soon realising after many rejections, the traditional publishing world was inhabited by clueless dinosaurs. So far it hadn’t sold many copies nor gained a single review that he hadn’t written himself, such indifference was far worse than a bad write up but it was only a matter of time before he got the cult following he deserved.
By dawn, his eyelids were sore and heavy from lack of sleep, a fully clothed Tunney flopped down onto his sofa and into a content, dreamless slumber. He slept through to late afternoon, had a brunch of heavily buttered toast while reading a magazine sent from one of the many horror and science fiction organisations he belonged to. Skipping past the published short stories, all would be complete rubbish, he spotted a full page, full colour advert for a new convention. YookayCon, a three day celebration of all that was first-rate in home grown genre film, TV and fiction with many big name guests including a luscious leading lady, Serena Brent, who Tunney had desired for many years. YookayCon was also in London, making it hard to find a viable excuse to himself not to go but in truth, the thought of spending time with a massed crowd of cosplay fans and autograph hunters was a nightmare.
Tunney had burnt his bridges at so many past conventions and many had banned him in perpetuity. Though shy and tongue-tied in public, his spite-laced tweets and blogs from the events had always kicked up a shit storm of controversy. Tunney looked up to one of his poster-covered walls, at the alluring, come on gaze of Serena as the beautiful alien Khalayla from the Endless Universe series. Total bilge but worth watching just for her. How could he let this opportunity to breath the same exhibition hall re-cycled air as his flame-haired goddess go?
Getting tickets under an alias was not a problem, disguising himself could be done easily enough but his inarticulate manner in crowded situations was a serious drawback when meeting the delectable Serena in the flesh. Despairing, Tunney’s mind reeled seeking a solution, he just had to get her attention, Serena was famous, she had top connections in the science fiction world, giving her a signed copy of his book was the break he needed.
Vexed to the extreme, Tunney went to his oracle, his font of all knowledge and Googled non-stop through what was left of the afternoon and into the night, so obsessed, he utilised an empty large coke bottle for his bodily needs.
By dawn he had found a dramatic
and desperate solution. He would summon an obscure, ancient demon called Ipos, one that seemed surprisingly benevolent.
According to the article on demonology Ipos was both a Count and a Prince among his peers. He could make the most shy person confident, witty, and bold. The demon made boring people interesting and the average-minded seem like intellectuals. Crazy as it seemed in the harsh light of dawn, Ipos was his only hope. Tunney decided he had nothing to lose.
***
The light from a circle of blue candles flickered from an under door draught, illuminating the train wreck of his bedsit in a surreal shadow play.
Tunney coughed, close to retching, so used to the rank odours of stale food and body odours. The fumes from scented candles plus sandalwood incense sticks burning in empty coffee jars combined to be overpowering and sickly sweet. The downside of living in an area of London with no New Age shops, the only blue candles he could find were from an interior design emporium and were heavily scented with artificial sweet peas. The candles had cost him a fortune too, hurting his already hard stretched benefits budget.
The internet entry for summoning the demon Ipos had insisted on a circle of blue candles as well as burning sandalwood and if that is what this mighty Prince of Hell wanted, that is what he was going to get. Tunney was not heavily into the occult, he did not wear black or festoon himself with skull symbols and satanic bling. That would take guts and he had none. As much as he revelled in his notorious internet presence, a colossus striding the web, he had spent a lifetime doing his best not to stand out, to blend into the urban landscape like graffiti and fast food debris.
The Demonologia Biblica Page 11