by Grey Durose
Yasin got up from his hard wooden seat and cautiously approached the crone. She didn't move but he could tell she was watching him carefully from the corner of her eye. He leant in, placing a hand on her shoulder. Through the thick cloth of her gown he could feel the bones protruding from beneath paper-thin, fleshless skin. He pushed his face closer to her improbably large ear, until he could feel the hairs tickling his lips.
'The Nameless One is coming.' he whispered, softly.
The old woman gasped involuntarily, any third party observing the exchange might have thought it was merely shock at what she had been told but it wasn't. Yasin slid the tip of the slender blade in his other hand through the skin at the back of the mother's neck and between two of her vertebrae. The knife severed her spinal cord and killed her almost instantly.
'But you will never see It.' Yasin whispered.
He lowered the old woman's head to the desk and wiped the blade clean on her clothes, before secreting it again. He knew he would have to move quickly now and walked straight to the office door. Outside, the maid was already waiting, with a tea tray sitting on the small, circular table.
'Quickly, the Mother is not well.' Yasin urged her.
The maid rose, startled by the idea that her mistress might die while in her care. She pushed past Yasin before he could get out of her way and rushed around the desk to check on the slumped form of the mother. As she moved across the room, Yasin matched her footsteps, as if imitating her, so that when she leant over the old woman's body Yasin was right behind her and ready to deliver the killer strike. The blade jabbed up between her spine and the back of her skull, her body juddered and she fell forwards on to her mistress.
Yasin put his knife away again and moved quickly towards the exit of the Mother's quarters. He checked both ways as he left and snatched up his bag before heading for the stairs. At each floor, he stopped, setting discrete explosives next to the structural vulnerabilities of the building. He spread gasoline near the doors of the dormitories, then packed up his bag and continued to the reception desk, where the guard was busy catching up on some reading.
Yasin approached him casually, as if he was merely intent on letting him know he was leaving. A swift swish of his blade, and the guard's throat was opened up, blood rushed from the wound and out on to the yellowing, dry pages of an old paperback. The guard fell forwards from his seat and landed heavily on the tiled floor.
Yasin returned to the foot of the stairs and splashed them with the remainder of the fuel. He pulled out a book of matches and tore one off, pinching the head of the match between the striking strip and the cover, he struck the match and allowed it to fizz in to life. He tossed it on to the waiting drizzle of fuel and turned his back on the house for the last time.
As he strode across the flagstones, the light through the glass was brought to life by the rippling orange of the fast growing flames on the staircase. Yasin opened the car door and slung his bag in before jumping in and pulling away. He drove briskly back down the drive but not at a pace which might alert the guard who would be waiting for him at the gates.
When he arrived at the gates, the guard came out to greet him and make sure he had no stowaways in the car. Yasin hopped out to meet him and, as they came together, he depressed the button on the remote detonator. There was a massive explosion, it tore through the building in a cascade of flame and debris. The sound of the explosion reached them a moment after the series of flashes which first drew the guard's eye. As the waves of noise washed over them, Yasin raised his knife hand and calmly slipped the blade in and out of the side of the guard's throat. The guard's knees lost all their strength and he dropped to the floor. Yasin could tell that the guard was trying to say something, probably some curse, but all that came out were gurgles and bloody drool.
The gates finished opening and Yasin drove off. Many people had died by his hand tonight and he couldn't help feeling some satisfaction in that knowledge. It was, after all, what he'd been trained to do.
He drove for two hours until he found himself at the safe house, it was just a little bolt-hole maintained by the Masters. There was a gas burner, a bare light bulb overhead, a shower, toilet and a mattress on the floor with a blanket. It was all he needed. The cult had given him far more but every night he'd spent with them he had reminded himself of his true purpose and what his Master had told him when he was a boy: soft mattress, soft heart.
He was packed up and ready to get back on the road by dawn, no one else was around and he took the opportunity to change cars. Whoever he'd stolen from would be more than satisfied by the exchange and unlikely to report it. The roads quickly disintegrated in to dust as he headed north; the closer he got to the border, the harder the going would be. Many years of war with Iran had made the borderlands of the country a treacherous place and the people were naturally suspicious of strangers, as well as the authorities. He wouldn't need a guide to get across the border, though, he was going home, he knew the people, he knew the culture, and he knew the right bribe for every man.
Pride welled up inside him, it was shameful, but he had been ‘the one’, the man who saw the watch to its end, and he'd done it perfectly. He couldn't wait to tell his Master, to see the faces of the other apprentices, to let them know that he'd done something that would be remembered forever.
Chapter Five
George stopped at the cellar door, his hand resting on the handle and his heart pounding. He took a moment to collect himself, utilising the breathing techniques he employed on stage; fear was the enemy, especially when performing a water trick. After a few moments, George felt his heart slow and his breathing become shallower again. He was ready.
Opening the door, he could immediately sense the residue of Henry's activities. A whiff of sulphur still hung in the air but more than that, the hairs on George's forearms stood up as goose bumps spread across his body and a shiver shot up his spine. Whatever Henry had done was not some everyday magic, it was powerful, more powerful than George had thought Henry capable of, but beyond the sheer power, it was dark like a spiritual tar was clinging to the atoms in the air.
The stairs plunged downward ahead of George and the cellar loomed dark and threatening below. He reached for the light switch with his left hand but there was no response from the bulb. A few steps down the cracked stone stairs was an alcove and in it was the old torch; stored there for just such an emergency. He grasped it and pushed the switch, the torch flickered with a dim orange glow and then went out again. George sighed and slapped the torch hard against his other palm, resuscitating it.
The stairs curved round and opened out on to the tiled cellar floor. Both the walls and floor were old grey stone, the ceiling was high and lined with bare beams of treated oak. The air down here was colder than the rest of the house and slightly damp, it carried a musty odour of its own, even though George had done his best to keep out moisture, to better preserve the contents of the rooms. It was still light outside and the cellar had narrow leaded windows on both sides but, passing the torch along the tops of the wall, George noticed that all the windows had been blocked off. Not loosely, it was a thorough job and was preventing every ray of light from entering.
George flicked the torch to where the bulb normally shone, but now only its metal base and a few shards of glass were dangling from the socket, forming a sharp edged nest for an old-fashioned filament.
George trained the beam on the boxes of supplies that lined the North wall. Some of them were open and the floor nearby was strewn with candles of various colours, Henry had not been in a careful mood. Further along, there were more signs of his former companion's fevered searching. Generally, Henry had been kept away from the few rituals performed here and he wasn't familiar with George's system of storage; more of a memory game than a system.
Moving deeper in to the cellar, the boxes were now to George's left, to his right was a kind of workshop. It was sometimes necessary to forge his own weaponry or a specific item required for some arc
ane spell and this was the place where he did his crafting. Beyond the crafting area was a low arch and behind that was a compact storage area where Giovanni had stuffed a rag tag collection of weaponry and left them to rust. Ahead, stood the base of the sturdy stone wall that ran up through the house and supported the unusual weight of the library far above, it was a full foot in thickness, of solid stones. Here, it acted more as a partition wall, beyond which, George suspected lay the scene of the crime.
The doorway through to the ritual area was to the far right of the partition wall and as George moved through the workshop he noted broken bottles, powdered metal and molten wax were lying on the bench tops, further evidence of some sort of ritual preparations. A new smell was beginning to attract George's attention now, mixed in with the eggy smell of sulphur and the natural musty dampness of the stone cellar, was a faint whiff of death.
'What now, Henry? How far did you go?' George muttered under his breath.
He passed through the doorway and held his breath as the torch revealed the alarming scene before him. Again, the light bulb was smashed and the windows blocked. Dark candles, not black but a deep shade of purple, had been carefully placed on the floor, forming an unfamiliar pattern and settled in pools of their own melted wax. The walls, floor and ceiling had all been daubed in black paint, making the room seem all the darker.
The floor was marked with multi-coloured chalk. George had seen the shape before, he'd never had cause to use it but knew it was a very ancient symbol used to ward off, or protect from, very old and very powerful beings. It was an eight pointed shape but irregular in nature and eight feet across; the candles had been placed at each of the points. In the middle, the shape was repeated in reverse and again inside that and so on until the eighth repetition, the smallest of which was barely intact and showed signs of having been redrawn a number of times by shaking, unskilled hands, working with ill-suited materials.
Beyond the chalk symbol, was a stone table, the altar. Atop this were the usual sort of paraphernalia associated with most rituals, burnt incense, stumps of candles, a knife, a bell and a brass bowl, but in the middle of the table was something else, a dark pile of ash with other objects mixed in. George moved around the room to get a closer look at the pile. As he approached, the smell of death got stronger and, gradually, the reason for this became clearer.
What had appeared to be a simple pile of ash revealed itself to be the partially burned body of a medium-sized animal. George could make out its shape now, bits of bone and charred flesh and even a tuft of orange-looking fur, though most of it had been singed away. The teeth were still intact and from these George could tell it had once been a cat.
There was a glint as he passed the torch over the remains and George was forced to reach in to the pile to pluck out the shining object. Turning the object over in his fingers, the ash gradually dropped away revealing a round metal disc. There was something engraved on it. George pulled out a handkerchief, spat on it and began to rub away the remaining ash and charring. After some vigorous cleaning, George could feel the letters much more clearly under his fingertips. He put away his handkerchief and picked up the torch again. The inscription said, 'Mr Alistair', and on the reverse the name and address of a neighbour. George had always warned Henry about aggravating the neighbours and abducting and sacrificing their household pets was definitely on the 'don't' list.
As it happened, Mr Alistair had been a particular favourite of George's. He wasn't normally given to acknowledging the local pets and the size of the grounds around the house meant he didn't normally have to. Mr Alistair was the rare exception, a plump ginger tom with one ragged ear, a friendly cat, if a little selective about the company he kept. He'd taken to visiting George on the few occasions he decided to relax on the patio. At first, George had tried to shoo him away - the usual hisses and clapping hands that worked with most cats - but Mr Alistair wouldn't take no for an answer, instead coming up to him and affectionately rubbing up against George’s legs. One morning, George had been disturbed by a crash in the kitchen. Rushing in to see what was going on, George had found Mr Alistair standing there in the middle of the floor, tail erect and eating from a dirty saucepan Henry had left on the cooker the previous night. George had looked around for the point of access but the only open window was a full metre above the window sill and barely large enough for a cat of Mr Alistair’s size to squeeze through. That day, Mr Alistair had won George's respect and after that they became firm friends.
All the maths George had observed in the study had been about calculating the various angles and orientations of the chalked symbol on the floor, spectra of light and multiple dimensions. In truth, it went deeper than that and well beyond George's ken. How Henry had stumbled across the necessary information to even begin to work on it must have been partly down to mining George's own mind and partly due to his work in seeking out and purging sources of information online. George found himself wishing he'd paid closer attention.
The failure of Henry’s summoning attempt was not so puzzling. The summoning of any specific creature or person required the use of their name and although 'The Nameless One' was a long used description of the beast, it could not be considered its name. The summoning, however, may have served another purpose, drawing the beast's attention to Henry and weakening the barriers between them for a brief time, just enough for it to reach through from its dwelling and pull Henry in.
This had clearly been a fatal mistake for Henry but George knew it also had potentially dangerous connotations for the rest of humanity. The Nameless One had been remembered, however fragmentarily, over thousands of years. Nothing is recalled for that long unless it has great significance. Over millennia, George and his predecessors had combated incursions by countless creatures and the plots of a plethora of cults and individuals. During those years, perhaps only ten threatened the whole of humanity and only these tales were remembered in anything approaching their entirety. Almost nothing was remembered beyond four thousand years ago and little enough from the two thousand after that.
George went to wash his hands, the blackened remains of Mr Alistair were clinging grimly to his fingers, staining them black and grey with ash and a sticky, tar-like, substance. Standing over the sink in the bathroom, George looked up from his hands and saw himself in the mirror. Looking back at him was a man in his mid-thirties, dark blond hair, grey-blue eyes, slightly above average height and of a healthy weight, a dash of stubble lined his jaw. George wondered for a moment what he might have looked like if his Master had never found him.
George was only three when Master Giovanni had adopted him. He was an orphan of the London blitz. His parents were killed when a German bomb had brought their house down on them. Unable to get to better shelter before the bombs began to fall, the family had instead decided to hide under the old dining table. He thought he could remember its legs, shining with a mahogany varnish, as his father flashed a torch around in the blackness, but perhaps he didn't, he had been very young.
The first time Giovanni had seen George he was squeezing out from amongst the rubble in to the light, covered with dirt from head to toe. Giovanni had told him the story many times, so many times that George could see it in his mind as if it were his own memory but, in truth, he could remember next to nothing of his life before Master Giovanni and perhaps that was for the best. Here he was, apparently in his mid-thirties, his mind was already weary and the enchantments he'd worn since childhood meant he could expect decades more. Time enough to find an apprentice of his own, or rather; for his apprentice to find him.
George climbed the stairs back to the library, the evidence had taken him so far, and yet, now he was at a dead end. He spent the rest of the day poring over books and tomes, scrolls and inventories, trying to find something that might give him some greater understanding of what danger he faced.
Some of the oldest records made mention of great terrors from ages in the history and prehistory of man when civilisations fell in thral
l to terrible Gods and tyrants. Some of these references George could cross-reference with the oral history handed down to him and sometimes a comment would be made, at the end of the record, of an unnamed hero who travelled to the place and banished the dark God in an annoyingly non-specific way, that left him craving detail.
Fortunately, when one of his predecessors was involved he would usually have a fuller explanation ready to hand. A pattern did begin to emerge, though, as George went through all the stories, legends and tales; he started to notice that although some named the being responsible - in fact, most did - some did not. There were three legends in the records where, curiously, a great tyrant rose among men, subjected them to terrible cruelty, and yet the culprit remained unnamed.
Often the records were transcriptions, or a retelling of an oral tradition passed down among the initiated for centuries, but one of them was an eye witness account, written down within a lifetime of the events. The event in question took place approximately six thousand years ago in the ancient civilisation of Sumer. It was often referred to as the cradle of civilisation because it was the first culture known to live en-masse in cities and was the place where both writing and large scale agriculture where first practised, or so it was thought. The Sumerians were still ignorant of paper making processes and so scribed their story on a series of clay tablets. George's understanding of their language and of the early cuneiform script they used was not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination.
The story was quite simple and the gist was easy enough for George to grasp. The setting was the city of Eridu, thought to be the oldest great city of man. The tablets suggested that for many decades the city had been in the grip of a tyrant God who had demanded the complete submission of the people of the city and its surrounding lands, and that they should provide him with human sacrifice on a daily basis. Cities were still small settlements, by modern standards, and the local population could not withstand such a drain. In service of their dark master they had set forth across the land seeking their victims from among their neighbours. The tyrant was eventually banished, when a stranger arrived among them and used a magical staff to paralyse the beast while a detachment of disloyal guards dismembered their lord and placed his remains in enchanted jars.