The Hot Chick & Other Weird Tales

by Charles Christian

  Ella blanches at my explanation, quite an achievement given she already has the whiter-shade-of-pale complexion beloved of Goths.

  ‘And, talking of the creature from the pit, where is it now?’ I ask.

  Ella turns back to the CCTV monitors and begins flicking between cameras and screens. I have to hand it to Lux, his security is thorough: floodlights, motion detectors, infrared, heat sensors and night vision. ‘It’s on the move,’ she says. ‘It must have picked up your scent - that’s how it hunts - and it’s coming this way.’

  I swing the vault door shut and spin the locking mechanism to fix the enormous dead bolts in place. In any other circumstances I’d be confident we’re safe, but this door is only built to fend off assaults from a human predator.

  ‘Think,’ I say. ‘Lux must have a back-up or fail-safe system. How would he stop the creature if you are not around?’

  ‘I know he has a gun. It’s special, magical or something. He keeps it locked away in that cabinet.’ Ella pointed at a firearms cabinet on the back wall. Two enormous padlocks hold it closed, but the Ruger quickly deals with them.

  I open the cabinet and am immediately assailed by the pungent odour of olive oil, balsam and spices. Inside is a Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle, its entire body slick in an oily grease. I lift the gun out and I sniff the oil on my finger tips. ‘It’s Chrism!’

  The girl stares at me blankly. ‘Chrism or jism?’ she asks.

  ‘Chrism, with a C or holy oil,’ I reply. ‘The Eastern Orthodox Church uses it to consecrate sacred objects. Lux had this gun blessed by a priest. I wonder what other secrets it holds?’

  I eject a cartridge from the magazine. The casing is brass, but the bullet - the slug at the business end - is silver. I look a little closer. It is solid silver and it’s been engraved. The wording is in Cyrillic and while my Russian is a little rusty these days, I can translate the text. It’s Saint Matthew, chapter 11, verse 21 again. I check the magazine. Each and every one of the 30 rounds it contains are the same: solid silver and engraved with the curse.

  ‘It’s coming!’ Ella shouts, pointing to the monitors. I look at the screen. The creature’s entered the hallway and is staring at the vault door. It raises up its black taloned front limbs, grabs the outside of the door and begins repeatedly pulling and hurling itself against the doorway. The room shakes, concrete flakes away from the jambs and lintel, as the very steel of the door begins to distort under the beast’s assault. Part of my brain says this is impossible but then, I think, if it is a supernatural beast, its unstoppable.

  I gesture to Ella and together we haul a desk around against one of the walls and clamber behind it. It might not offer much protection, but it will provide a stable firing platform. I train the AK-47 on the fast-crumbling doorway and then reload the Ruger and place it on the desk between us. ‘We save two bullets. One for you, one for me. Deal.’

  ‘Deal,’ says Ella.

  The onslaught continues until, to the sound of twisting, buckling steel, the doorway collapses and the beast comes bursting into the control room. My first shot hits the left eye. The second takes out the right eyeball, while my third shot embeds a bullet deep into the creature’s scaly throat. Maddened by the pain, it rears up to its full height, its wattle-like crest scraping the ceiling, while simultaneously exposing its unprotected underbelly to my gunfire. I switch to fully automatic and empty the contents of the magazine into the creature. As the smoke from the shooting disperses, I can see the beast slump to the floor – dead. I look at the body and for all the world it does look like a dragon. But from this world or the underworld? With its leathery, bat-like wings it could be a wyvern or a griffin out of legend or a pterosaur, or some other flying dinosaur from prehistory.

  Any further speculation is pointless as almost immediately the beast begins to decompose, its scaly skin flaking away to dust as a liquor, the colour of stale pus, spews out its body and starts to soak into the ground.

  I drop the Kalashnikov to the floor and pick up my Ruger. ‘Time to go,’ I say.

  ‘No, it’s not,’ Ella replies. ‘We have visitors.’

  I glance over her shoulder to the CCTV monitors. The one covering the compound gate shows the slab-like bulk of a black Hummer H2 SUV. It’s one of Lux’s vehicles. There is no mistaking his distinctive KILLA2 registration plates. Three heavies have got out of the Hummer and are looking at the Porsche.

  The front gate slides open. ‘They have their own remote,’ explains Ella, as we watch them enter the compound and hurry towards the control building.

  I stand in the lee of the shattered doorway, flick on the laser sights and bring down the first goon with a shot clean through the temple. Following close behind him is a stocky-framed woman who looks like a Russian weight lifter on steroids. Before she’s even down the short staircase into the hallway, I’ve pumped three shots into her squat, fat body, throwing her back on top of the third guy. She collapses into him, knocking him to the floor, and as he struggles to get from beneath her body, I fire my two remaining bullets straight through the woman and into him.

  ‘And now it really is time to go,’ I say.

  Ella shakes her head. ‘Not yet, I’m going nowhere looking like this,’ she says, tugging at her ripped dress and letting it fall to the floor. When it comes to underwear, Ella clearly favours going commando as she stands before me, naked. Naked except for her nipple piercings, a pair of black leather Doc Martens and the tattoo of a serpent. The tattoo depicts a serpent’s head poised with jaws open, as if it was about to bite into an apple, above the areola of her left breast, before snaking down across her pale stomach and disappearing, intriguingly, into the smoothness between her thighs.

  ‘Relax,’ she says. ‘The view may be enticing, but I’ve more important things on my mind at the moment than getting friendly with you.’ And with that she turns her back on me, squats down to rummage in a holdall for fresh clothes and pulls out a floor-length grey dress. ‘Show’s over,’ she says, as she shimmies her way into the dress. ‘Now we can go.’

  Apparently unconcerned by the charnel house carnage surrounding her, she picks her way across the three dead bodies and the dark stain, which is all that remains to show the creature ever existed, and out into the new day.

  Dawn is just breaking as we walk through the still open gate. ‘You choose,’ I say, pointing at the abandoned Hummer and the Porsche that Retro will never drive again.

  ‘The Hummer’s got the coolest plates, but the Porsche is more ecologically sound,’ she replies.

  We both laugh and get into the Porsche. The Cayenne also has the advantage of being faster and I want to be well away from the compound before Lux and his business partners come calling.

  We roar out of the place, down the highway and into the rising sun.

  As I drive, I glance over at Ella. She is curled up in her seat, a seeming picture of coiled innocence although I notice she is watching me through half-open eyes.

  At the back of my mind there’s a nagging doubt telling me something is not right. I go over that night’s events in my thoughts, mentally replaying each incident for clues. Then it comes to me. ‘The tattoo on your back! It’s gone.’ I can picture it now, it hadn’t been there when she’d turned her back on me to find a change of clothes. I guess I’d been too distracted by the tattoo across the front of her body to fully take it in, but I now recall: the Latin calligraphy had totally vanished.

  ‘Well done,’ she says, clapping her hands together slowly and giving me a look that has nothing to do with little Ella and is all Azraella, Angel of Death. ‘I was wondering when you’d catch on. You were so close when you talked about the Gatekeeper and the Gate. You just placed the characters in the wrong roles. I was never the Gate. The Beast and the Chorazin tattoo together made the Gate but they could not exist without each other. Destroy one and the other would disappear.’

  ‘But what was the Gate shutting out? What was its purpose?’ I ask.

  ‘It wasn’t there
to shut anything out. It was designed to shut something in. Me. To keep me a prisoner and prevent me from becoming the vessel that will bring the Antichrist into the world. But thanks to you,’ as she speaks, she leans across and pats my knee in a patronising way, ‘that is no longer a problem.’

  I glance down and, for the first time, notice how much Azraella’s black painted finger nails look like talons.

  ‘By the way,’ adds Azraella, ‘the tattoo is not the only thing that is no longer in this car. I think you’ll find you left your revolver back at Lux’s compound. That’s going to take some explaining if the police ever come calling. Five corpses and a couple of guns with your fingerprints all over them. Within an hour there’ll be no trace left of the Beast, so you are going to have come up with a really compelling story.’

  A smile crosses my face and I laugh out loud.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ asks Azraella.

  ‘This reminds me of the final scene in an Agatha Christie novel. You know, where the great detective, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marples, gathers the suspects together in the drawing room before explaining all the loose ends in the story. You’ll be telling me next how Lux fits into the picture. Let me guess, all that stuff about you being forced to work here is bollocks? Lux is the patsy in this tale, isn’t he?

  ‘He’s been set up by his Russian mates who’ve presumably cooked up some half-baked religious, nationalistic, fascist world domination end-of-days scenario? And Lux? He’s the John the Baptist to your Salome and is going to find his head being served up on a silver platter?’

  Now it is Azraella’s turn to smile. ‘And I suppose you also want to know what your fate will be?’

  ‘Frankly, Azraella, I don’t give a damn,’ I reply.

  The expression on Azraella’s face switches to a look of puzzlement. ‘What!’ she exclaims. ‘Why?’

  I don’t reply, I just pull the trigger. The trigger of the little Beretta I pocketed what now seems hours ago.

  I’ve heard people describe a Beretta .25 as a ladies’ gun. I even heard people say the best way to hurt someone with a Beretta .25 is to hope you hit them when you throw it at them. Maybe, but at close quarters - at a distance of three feet across the width of the Porsche - the Beretta is lethal. As I empty the pistol’s eight rounds into her, Azraella’s expression changes from puzzlement to incredulity.

  She never saw it coming. I’d been driving for some miles with one hand on the wheel and had slipped my other hand into my jacket to turn the pistol on her. I didn’t even pull it from my pocket but instead just fired through the cloth.

  Azraella’s expression remains unchanged as eight bright crimson flowers begin to bloom and spread across her grey dress. Blood that is also pouring from her mouth and nostrils as she slumps down against the passenger door on her side of the vehicle.

  Her face is still wearing the same expression as I drive the Cayenne down a side road and into a recently harvested corn field. I park the car close by a stack of baled straw, pull several bales down on top of the vehicle and wedge a couple more inside. Retro is beyond caring what I do to the leather upholstery. Then I wedge open the petrol cap, set light to the Porsche, toss the Beretta into the flames, leaving Azraella to join her friends in hell.

  I’d spotted a sign post half a mile back pointing towards Audley End railway station, so I set out walking towards it. It’s a fine autumn morning and less than 50 minutes later I’m sitting on a train heading into London Liverpool Street, sipping the halfway decent mocha I bought at the station shop.

  Taking Tea with the General

  In an Ancient City, in an Ancient Country

  In a room at the top of an Ancient Tower

  Behind a Great, Green, Verdigris-encrusted Bronze Door

  An Old Man sits alone at table

  Hiding from the World and his Enemies

  ...translated from De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludwig Prinn

  HALLOWEEN MAY HAVE been and gone but that doesn’t stop two witches and a zombie from boarding the east-bound District Line train at Earls Court station. I shrug my shoulders and go back to my notes. Either they are on their way to a fancy dress party or else returning from a cosplay convention at Olympia.

  Four stops later the trio get off the train at Victoria, leaving me alone with my thoughts. This evening the ride home on the London Underground seems longer and slower than usual. Perhaps it’s because I’ve just spent a fruitless day at The Public Records Office in Kew.

  Sometimes you can learn more in minutes from the marginalia of an old manuscript than you can from several hours of intensive online research. But not today. Today the trail is cold and getting colder.

  The train’s doors open and I step onto the platform of the Temple tube station. A young woman is running down the platform, hoping to catch my train before it departs. Her face seems somehow familiar yet at the same time I’m certain I’ve never met her before. As she hurries past, her arm brushes against me and the magazine she is carrying spins from her grip and falls to the floor.

  I pick it up and turn to hand it back to her but by then she is already on the carriage, its doors have closed and the train is pulling out of the station, heading east towards Blackfriars, Tower Hill, Whitechapel and beyond. C’est la vie and, still clutching the magazine, I leave the station and walk to my apartment, which is just a few minutes away.

  It is only later in the evening, after brooding on the apparent failure of my current mission over one too many glasses of Chardonnay, that I remember the magazine. It is a copy of Time Out, the London listings magazine and, having nothing better to do, I while away a few minutes idly flicking through it pages. But then I spot a name I recognise amongst the list of contributors. It is a writer I’ve encountered before, an amateur dabbler in the occult and arcane.

  Out of curiosity, I turn to his article. It is called The Strange High House, which makes me laugh out loud. The old fraud, he couldn’t even dream up an original name, he’s pinched the title from an old HP Lovecraft short story. Never mind, I read on...

  If you leave London’s Leicester Square underground station and walk in a southerly direction down Charing Cross Road towards Trafalgar Square, on your left hand side – just after Wyndhams Theatre – you will find a small pedestrianised lane called Cecil Court.

  Since the late 19th century, Cecil Court has been the haunt of specialist and antiquarian bookshops. The first Foyles bookshop was located here and you can still find the lane referred to as Booksellers Row. Or, as Graham Green once remarked “Thank God! Cecil Court remains Cecil Court.”

  In addition to the bookshops, you will also discover shops selling rare maps and atlases, curios, antiques, stamps, ancient coins and theatrical ephemera. As recently as the 1980s there was still a shop where you could buy such esoterica as genuine Egyptian mummies.

  More recently, Cecil Court is said to have been the inspiration for Diagon Alley in J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books. And, going back in time, it also provided a home for Mozart and his family when they were visiting London in 1764. Other long term residents of the flats above the shops have included the actor Sir John Gielgud and the poet T S Eliot.

  However, what most visitors fail to notice is leading off from Cecil Court is a tiny alley called Bellarmine Place. It is easy to miss as its entrance is almost completely obscured by an antiquarian prints shop called The Witch Ball.

  Bellarmine Place is reputedly the narrowest alleyway in London, measuring just 15 inches wide in places. If you squeeze your way down it, you will find that Bellarmine Place opens out into a yard containing just one shop – a very old shop, part of a tall, narrow building, almost a tower, with an Elizabethan or Jacobean frontage.

  Called Bartmanns, once you push open its great, green, verdigris-encrusted bronze front-door, you find yourself inside one of the strangest shops you’ll ever see in London, the City’s only remaining purveyor of witch bottles. In fact it is probably the only surviving emporium of its kind anywhere in Western Europe.

/>   Witch bottles? Yes, those ugly stoneware flasks with the bearded-man’s face on the front that people still keep discovering buried beneath the foundations, fireplaces and floorboards of old houses. Those flasks that, when opened up, are found to contain rusty nails, strands of human hair, toe-nail clippings and even urine.

  Back in the 18th century, Bartmanns was so well known that other shops in Cecil Court tried to cash-in on its popularity. This explains why an antiquarian print shop, otherwise unconnected to Bartmanns, is called The Witch Ball.

  Of course times have moved on over the past three centuries for Bartmanns and their witch bottles but their purpose remains exactly the same as it always has been, namely to protect a home and its occupants against witchcraft, curses, spells, evil spirits and bad luck.

  Although Bartmanns will still sell you a traditional witch bottle and let you fill it with whatever you want (you can find a selection of recipes on Wicca, New Age and Magick sites on the internet) the shop’s current proprietor Karl Bartmann (a direct descendant of the original founder back in the Elizabethan era) says most modern witch bottles nowadays contain a mixture of pins and needles, red wine and rosemary.

  The pins and needles are to trap evil, the red wine is to drown evil and the rosemary is to cast out evil and send it on its way.

  And it’s not just the contents that have changed. While Bartmanns still manufacture their own stoneware witch bottles, firing them onsite in a small kiln in the basement, they have diversified into other designs. These include pottery jars that look from the outside to be just conventional domestic flour containers, jam-jars, marmalade and mustard pots.

  Karl Bartmann says the attraction of these new-style containers is they can be hidden in plain sight on a kitchen shelf, or else in a cupboard or larder, thereby removing the need and inconvenience of having to pull up floorboards to bury them down among a building’s foundations or in any of the other traditional hiding places for witch bottles.