Unholy

by Bill Bennett

  It wasn’t catching the animals that thrilled him, it was skinning them. Skinning them alive. To him it was akin to the opera that he would come to love later in life. It was the theatre of death. He would take his catches to a forgotten woodshack hidden deep in the forest and there he would practise his craft, because it was a craft, skinning a creature so perfectly that it was bare and hairless, featherless, furless. Skinless. These skins he would then treat and save as trophies.

  His father would later find all these skins in the woodshack and confront his son. And soon after he would die from shotgun wounds sustained while out on a duck shoot. The coroner would classify the death as accidental – he’d apparently slipped and his gun had discharged into his chest at point blank range, but Wolfgang’s mother suspected otherwise.

  Wolfgang chose not to skin his father.

  Out of respect.

  But his move up to human prey was inevitable.

  He was always careful. Super careful. He was surgical in his methodology and random in his choices. Purposefully random. Overtime workers walking home late at night from the train. Old men, young girls. Cleaners in office blocks, working the night shifts. Footballers waiting for a ride home after training. He was always careful to avoid surveillance cameras, always he worked in shadows. All of his victims he skinned. Alive. Until they were alive no more.

  He had graduated from LMU winning the university medallion for most outstanding academic achievement for the year, making him the top graduate from all the university’s faculties. The win brought him a lucrative offer from one of the big four accounting firms, where he quickly took up a senior position and a corner office looking out over one of Munich’s most famous beer gardens. Despite his offputting appearance and his gothic wardrobe, his superiors soon realised he had remarkable skills and advanced him to head up their forensic division – hunting those trying to hide their fraudulent activities through offshore shell companies and complicated trusts and tax havens.

  Dr Wolfgang Schmitt loved to hunt. Being a forensic accountant was just perfect. He could work alone, he had respect, and in a few short years he had become one of the firm’s senior partners. Which brought him consider able wealth and time to do what he really loved, which was to service Baphomet.

  It was a short flight from Munich to Budapest. It took much longer for the Mercedes taxi to wind its way out of the city’s drab semi-industrial suburbs into more lush verdant country side, threaded here and there by swiftly flowing streams, sparkling in the late morning sunlight. The car made its way through small stone villages and past horse-tilled farmland, the rich fresh loam looking like curled chocolate, until it reached the base of a small mountain. Climbing effortlessly up a series of gentle switchbacks, the taxi finally arrived at the top and the entrance to a grand estate. An ancient lichen-covered stone wall surrounded the grounds, high enough so that no one could see inside. The car pulled up in front of large metal gates and Dr Schmitt hopped out, paid the driver and allowed a guard to let him in.

  A boy in a golf cart was waiting for him inside the gates but Schmitt waved him away, much to the boy’s relief. He had arrived a little early, it was a beautiful day, and a walk through the immaculately kept gardens would do him good. Schmitt had been here only once before – a couple of years ago when Baphomet had decided to elevate him to the position of chief huntsman. For some within the Golden Order he’d become known simply as the huntsman, which is how he preferred to be addressed, but no name instilled more fear than Dr Skinless.

  It was a fifteen-minute walk up to the schloss, a magnificent Baroque-styled castle built in the late 1700s, home to a parade of Prussian counts and princes and other forms of royalty, and later the Nazis took up residence for a while too.

  Dr Schmitt only had a basic understanding of witchcraft. He had no great powers and he had no desire to acquire them either. His value to the Golden Order didn’t lie in his knowledge of spellcraft and wizardry, it lay in his uncanny ability to find someone, anyone, and kill them mercilessly. He had taken his childhood interest in tracking and combined it with his forensic accountancy skills to become a huntsman without peer. Some within Baphomet said there wasn’t a person on this planet that Dr Skinless couldn’t find. And if he found you, you faced the most horrific death imaginable.

  A doorman showed him in and he waited in a room that would have put the antechamber to the Palace of Versailles to shame. He didn’t have to wait long until a handsome young man in a dark-blue suit suddenly appeared and respectfully ushered him into the Great Hall. The hall lived up to its name, with exquisite eighteenth-century murals on its high-domed ceilings, paintings in thick gilt frames lining all the walls and a series of two-hundred-year-old handmade Venetian crystal chandeliers providing light down a hand-carved maple table that stretched near the full length of the room. At the far end of the table sat the Centrum.

  The Centrum was a small, thin, nondescript-looking man nearing seventy, wearing a navy-blue pinstriped suit with a pink handkerchief in his upper breast pocket that matched his Hermès silk tie. He had grey hair and a narrow black moustache. He wore wire-framed spectacles, which he took off and wiped, then put back on again so as to look more closely at the man standing before him.

  The Centrum represented the four quadrants of Baphomet – East, West, North and South. If ever there was a disagreement and the four quadrants couldn’t decide, he had the casting vote. As such, he was the most powerful man in the Golden Order, given that the Fallen Priest was not a man. The Centrum ran the vast organisation day to day, and was only answerable to the Two Evil.

  ‘Sit, please,’ the Centrum said.

  Dr Skinless sat.

  And waited while the man appraised him.

  Finally, the Centrum spoke. ‘Take off your mask.’

  Dr Skinless hesitated, then peeled back his mask to reveal a head that was full of pulsing grey matter and blood vessels and nerve endings and all those unsightly things that fill the space of one’s skull.

  The Centrum was unmoved.

  ‘Now take off your clothes.’

  Dr Skinless cocked his head, but knew better than to question the Centrum. He stood and, piece by piece, took off his cape, his suit jacket, his shirt, his undershirt, his shoes, his trousers, his underpants, then he bent down and took off his socks. He straightened and stood completely naked before the small man at the far end of the table, with every organ, every bone, all of his internal physiology on full display.

  The Centrum stared, in thrall, then threw back his head and laughed. Like a horse snorting. He laughed and he laughed until tears flowed. The sound reverberated around the great hall. Finally he stopped. He stared at the body in fascination. And then he said, ‘You are beautiful. Magnificent even. Now, I have someone you must find. And kill. In your customary manner. An old woman.’

  CHAPTER 14

  The vulture watched from the high branches of the tree as the boy and the girl waited for the two cops to climb up into the village and walk off. The couple then quickly scrambled down the path – and the vulture took to the air, to keep them in sight. He’d been following them ever since they left the cave.

  The shock, the grief, the ferocity of his anger still consumed him. His twin brother Mikheil gone – killed by that boy now walking down to the parking lot. Mikheil, his other half, literally and spiritually and in every other way. It was as though with the killing of his brother his own soul had been cleaved in two and wrenched from his body.

  He had lost power, he knew that. He and Mikheil had always been much greater than the sum of their twin parts. They had been fuelled from a source that was bigger than each of them combined and that’s what had given them the extraordinary powers to change themselves at will into any animal or creature they chose. With Mikheil’s death Grigor immediately had felt his powers diminish. It had been an effort to shift into the various forms he’d needed to escape – a Gila monster, a porcupine, then a boa constrictor and finally this vile form he now took, that of
a vulture. He hated being a vulture. Such an ugly creature. It offended all his Eastern European high-fashion sensibilities. But a vulture was the first thing that had come into his mind as he’d been falling to his death – dropped into a canyon by a demon eagle, a familiar of a low-level witch sent by the Golden Order to get the girl.

  He circled the parking lot and watched as the boy and the girl hopped into a silver SUV and drove off. He began to follow, at a low height. In the dark, no one would notice him, especially if he hung back. He would have to be careful, though. A vulture was an unusual bird. You didn’t see them often, especially not in urban areas. And when you did see a vulture it usually meant there was something dead nearby. He liked that. He liked the metaphor. Because soon there would be something dead nearby. The boy. And the girl too. But especially the boy, because he was the one that had killed his brother.

  He would have to ration his energy carefully. His tank was almost dry. He felt he only had one shift left in him – back to his human form. In his current form as a vulture it would be difficult to kill, but not if he transformed back to being a Twin – the remaining Twin.

  The Twins, he and his brother, had been among the most respected assassins in Baphomet. Graduating top of their year from the Academy of Darken Angels, they’d quickly forged a fearsome reputation with a string of high-level hits that had even Budapest applauding their bravura. Grigor felt a stab of pain in the vulture’s heart – there would be no more of those moments of shared joy with his brother. The pain turned immediately to rage. He looked down at the vehicle up ahead, its headlights fingering the darkness in front. That boy down there had taken his brother, his twin brother, from him. And as such he had killed off a part of himself, too.

  He would wait for the right time and then he would strike. He would probably only have one chance, he felt that intuitively, and so he wouldn’t rush it. He would follow them discreetly, he would only shift back into his human form when he knew absolutely it was time to kill and then he would exact his revenge with full fury. On the both of them.

  CHAPTER 15

  Lily looked across at Skyhawk, a wayward shaft of faint moonlight catching the regal outline of his jaw and his nose, and a quick reflection off his dive-in-and-never-be-seen-again eyes. He really was a beautiful boy.

  ‘What happened back there, to me? To us?’ she asked, as the desert brush raced past outside in the glow of the SUV’s headlights.

  He threw her a quick glance and smiled. ‘The poison took hold, along with the magic, and you nearly left us. But you came back. Thankfully.’

  ‘What did you do to me?’

  ‘I reached out to you. Soul to soul. And we danced.’

  ‘We danced?’

  ‘Yes, our souls danced. And your soul must have liked my moves because you came home with me.’

  Lily laughed. ‘I did? Well, wasn’t I easy?’

  ‘Believe me,’ Skyhawk said, ‘you were not easy.’

  She laughed again. Thought about it. ‘I remember feeling a … a closeness to you, like a real closeness. But that’s all I can remember.’ She shook her head. ‘None of this makes any sense,’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t have to,’ Skyhawk said, his eyes turning back to the road ahead, smiling. ‘All that matters is that you’re here and we’re going to find your mom.’

  Lily shuddered at the memory of the abandoned mine and that horrible presence of evil, that terrifying green glow, and the lamb. Especially the lamb. She felt a sudden cold chill rush through her body. The lamb had been demonic. Truly a creature from hell.

  She suddenly felt exhausted. Like she’d been blindsided by fatigue, ramming her with full force. All she wanted to do was sleep – but she had to keep awake, to use this precious time to figure out a way to save her mom. She looked out the side window at the moon, a thumbnail of silver clinging to an icy bed of stars. In a few days it would be a New Moon – which would be the night of Unholy. The night her mom would be sacrificed to … She didn’t even want to think about it, it disgusted her so much. But it meant they had no time to spare. Hardly any time at all to find her mom and work out a way to rescue her.

  But how?

  What was down that mine? Were there witches down there, guarding her mother? Were they using black magic and spells to keep her entombed? And where did the lamb fit in? Was it just some grotesque mascot? An obscene pet or plaything for the witches down that shaft? Was it a demonic corruption of the Lamb of God? Did the creature have its own supernatural powers? There was no doubt in Lily’s mind that it was the essence of true evil. But could it harness that evil into a malevolent force that could maim or kill? There was only one way to find out. To go down there.

  But how could she possibly protect herself? She was only an initiate after all. Her powers at the moment consisted simply of being able to feel energy – foul energy that manifested as a swarm of stinging bees that sent painful electrical bursts through her hand up her arm and into her body. That was the sum total of her so-called powers at this stage of her development. No doubt as she got older and she learned more and practised, she’d develop more powers – some cool powers, she hoped – but right now her supernatural armoury cupboard was bare.

  The wand! She remembered the wand that Luna had given her on initiation. She felt inside her jeans pockets. She’d managed to take it with her in the flight from the cave and keep it safe during the trip to the Needle. Then earlier that evening as she was getting dressed in Skyhawk’s clothes, she’d remembered it and brought it with her.

  She took it out and held it, felt its magnificent heritage. Yellowing bone with a red crystal embedded in one end, it reeked of tradition, history, but also of mortal combat and death – like a rub-worn duelling pistol or a battle-scarred sword. Lily recalled Luna telling her that the wand had been in the family for hundreds of years. It had won wars and slayed attackers and kept enemies at bay. But as Luna had explained, the wand was useless unless you knew how to use it and, like piloting a jetliner, you could sit in the cockpit and not have a clue how to fly the damn thing. You had to learn the underlying spells and craft of magic to activate its powers.

  Tied to the end of the wand that contained the embedded red crystal was a small leather pouch. Lily didn’t remember tying it there – perhaps Skyhawk’s mom had taken it off her wrist, which is where she last remembered it being, and while she was sleeping she had tied it to the wand. Inside the pouch was something else Lily didn’t yet know how to use, but it was probably even more powerful than the wand – the legendary Cygnet charm.

  As Luna had explained to her when she found it in the suitcase that contained The Book of Light, Lily’s original fore-bear in Ireland and the founder of Cygnet, Jennett Maguire, had made up the Cygnet charm to protect herself from Satan. The charm was a small amulet consisting of a tiny white feather, embalmed in a dollop of amber. The feather had been plucked from the crown of a magical baby swan – a cygnet – which lived in a pond on Jennett’s farm.

  The Cygnet charm was meant to be worn around the neck hung from a gold chain, but if the wearer lacked advanced powers and didn’t know how to use it, or if they tried to use the charm for the wrong purpose, then the energy flow from the charm could send the wearer insane. It could blow their circuitry, fry their brain, as Luna had put it. So Lily had two witch tools she couldn’t use. She couldn’t wait for the time to come when she would have the power and skill to put them to work – but would that come through time, as she grew older? Or would she have to be trained? And if so, who would train her? And would The Book of Light be her training manual? Even more reason for her to make sure that it remained in Cygnet hands.

  She stuck the wand down the back of her jeans, the way gangsters hid their handguns on TV, and she put the pouch containing the Cygnet charm in the front pocket. Then she settled back to sleep and dreamt of being a warrior witch like the Goddess Artemis, slaying Baphomet witches with her wand as she made her way down into the mine to rescue her mother.

 
She woke up startled. In her dream she’d been in an epic battle in the mine and, amid the carnage and blood letting, the lamb had appeared. It clip-clopped through smoke and mist, oblivious to the destruction around it. Then the creature walked right up to her, stopped and opened up its salmon-pink mouth, full of corn-stub teeth, about to cry, its eyes fixed on her, red and demonic – and that’s what woke her, her heart thudding in her chest.

  Lily looked around, not knowing where she was. Desert flashing past. Warmth from an AC. The burr of diesel engine. Leather and wood and subdued red instrument lights. She was in a car, yes, her Uncle Freddie’s Mercedes, driving away from Skyhawk’s ancestral home, him at the wheel, looking steadfastly ahead at the road. She looked over at him. Such a beautiful profile. His long hair melting into darkness. But she really knew nothing about this boy who was becoming a part of her life. At least, this part of her life.

  ‘Who are you?’ she found herself asking. ‘I don’t know anything about you. Like, do you have a girlfriend?’ As soon as she said that, she stiffened, mortified. How could she have asked such a thing? Was she so dog-tired that she’d begun to babble?

  Skyhawk laughed. ‘No, I don’t have a girlfriend. I’m always too busy.’

  ‘Busy? Doing what? You’re a ranger, right? You walk around parks?’ That didn’t come out right either, she thought, cringing at her lack of tact.

  Again he laughed. ‘Yeah, I guess so. I walk around parks. I do a bit more than that too, but yeah, that’s a good way of putting it.’