Unholy

by Bill Bennett

  ‘I want him locked up!’ Marley said.

  ‘No,’ Olivier said. ‘He is more use to us if we take him with us, wouldn’t you agree, doctor?’

  Freddie smiled and shrugged. ‘I’ll go, but only if we use my driver. He’ll get us there fast and I trust him.’

  ‘Who is your driver?’

  The front door of the shack opened, revealing Joe, as if he’d been outside waiting all this time for his cue. He stood in the doorway, wearing his cheap sunglasses and baggy tan suit, his hands folded in front, staring straight ahead, deadpan.

  ‘I’m Joe,’ said Joe.

  CHAPTER 17

  Awake at 3.45 a.m. Fifteen minutes to clean her teeth, go to the bathroom, have a freezing cold shower to wake up, get dressed, then by the light of a lamp they would head out into the woods to a wind-protected clearing where the Hag would begin the day’s lessons.

  Often they would be naked, warmed by a fire in the middle of the clearing, the stars still visible, beating down on them from on high. To Belt, the Hag naked was enough to make her gag. Sagging flesh, pubic hair like a nest of tangled grey wire, breasts that folded over her chest like floppy pancakes. And wrinkles. Her whole body was fish-belly white and wrinkled, as though she’d just stepped out of a jar of formaldehyde. Belt’s own body however was lean and strong; a thing of real beauty and power.

  The Hag’s lessons made the cold and the hardship all worth it. The venerable old witch had brought her own Book of Shadows with her, which detailed all the spells, ceremonies, background information and historical annotations that she’d accumulated over more than seventy years of learning and practising and perfecting her dark craft. Many of the spells and notes on black magic technique were hundreds of years old, gathered when she was young, before the war, from adepts and elites that had lived as recluses and hermits in the remote decaying castles and deep woods of Eastern Europe. As far as Belt knew, when the old crones died they took all their knowledge with them, so the Hag now was the only witch that had those spells and techniques – some of them incredibly powerful, if the witch was at a level sufficiently advanced to use them. Belt was not at that level yet, though.

  Every Baphomet witch had a Book of Shadows. You started your book when you first became initiated. In it you wrote down those spells and techniques and bits of craft that appealed especially to you, that in a sense would define you as a witch. The Golden Order in Budapest had the master book, their Bible, called The Great Book of Shadows, or simply The Great Book, which was housed in the Schwarz Schloss in Budapest – Baphomet Headquarters. That book not only had the most comprehensive collection of spells and witchcraft in existence, it also held manifestos on the core philosophies and beliefs of the Golden Order.

  It was scholarly, it was profound, and on a philosophical and intellectual level it would stand equal to any of the great masterworks of religious teaching, such as the King James Bible, the Vedas and the Bhagavad-gita, the Koran, the original Buddhist Pali scriptures and others. It’s just that its core tenets weren’t about love, and compassion, and God in whatever form that particular culture required, it was about the Rule of No Rule, the unfettered satiation of the senses, accountability to no one other than one’s basest self, the celebration of lust and desire in all its forms and glory, and of course the servile worship of the Mother – Father beast – Satan.

  This vast and sprawling tome, however, compiled over many hundreds of years, didn’t contain some of the spells and techniques that the Hag had in her more humble personal Book of Shadows. And this was what Belt wanted to learn – these lost and forgotten witchcraft skills that no one else had, skills that had elevated the Hag in her younger years to the status of myth and legend, and that would ultimately give Belt an edge over every other living witch.

  ‘What is magic?’ the Hag asked Belt as they sat around their early morning fire. Their shadows flittered among the trees and underbrush that surrounded them in the clearing. Behind the fire was a large square-topped rock, like a table or altar, which hadn’t been there yesterday.

  ‘You might ask,’ the Hag continued, ‘how did that rock get here? It is too big and heavy for me to carry, no? I am but a poor frail woman now. How can I lift such a thing? It is not possible, surely.’

  She looked to Belt to respond.

  Belt didn’t give out her words easily. She’d learned early in life that it was safer to shut up and listen, and dole out your own thoughts only when absolutely necessary. She shook her head.

  ‘But I moved it,’ the Hag said. ‘I moved it, some would say by magic – but I do not call it that. I call it a reconstitution of reality. Big words, no?’

  Belt nodded.

  ‘Magic is for those silly movies and for children’s fairy stories. We witches do not believe in magic, not true witches. There are many that play at being witches. They are fools. They belittle what it is to be a witch. They prance around in their circles wearing their stupid costumes and they wave their pathetic wands and they say hocus pocus or some such rubbish and it’s all a game. They talk about Magick with a big M and a K, as if that is going to make it somehow potent. It’s a joke. There is no such thing as magic. Magic is for children, like your Santa at Christmas. Real magic, though, does exist. Real magic is when the rules of nature are bent. Not broken, but bent. And we true witches know how to bend these rules.’

  Belt listened. She was warm by the fire. Soon the sun would rise. Already she could hear birdsong. She loved being in the wild. She just hated the isolation and wished she had the internet.

  ‘How did I get this rock here?’ the Hag asked once again. ‘I walked it here. I found it in the forest, and I became one with the rock, then I walked back and I put it here.’

  The Hag waited for a response from Belt. Belt stared back at her, expressionless. Finally, she asked, ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘To understand real magic, you have to understand that nothing exists. Everything is not what it seems. That rock to you seems like it’s a heavy rock, no? Made out of quartz and basalt and Hades knows what. But what is that quartz made up of? Atoms. And what are atoms made up of? Particles. And what are the particles made up of? Smaller particles. Everything vibrating at very high frequencies, no? That is what life is – it’s frequency. Nothing more. So we have all these tiny particles racing around, vibrating at these very high frequencies – but what are they racing around in?’

  She looked to Belt for an answer.

  The Hag answered for her. ‘Space. No? They are racing around in space. Everything we see around us is only space, filled with particles that are vibrating at very high frequencies. We are the same. We are the same as that rock. They say our bodies are largely water – but what is water? Water is space, filled with particles. Think of a place where they play football –’

  ‘A stadium,’ Belt offered.

  ‘Yes, a stadium. Matter is like a stadium, and there is a player in the centre and he is throwing footballs around at very high speeds. That is what matter is like.’

  Belt noticed the sky in the east was beginning to lighten. Everything the Hag was saying was interesting, but she wanted to find out how she moved the rock.

  ‘How did I move it?’ the Hag asked, as if reading her mind. ‘First I went into my cosmic mind. You think there is only one mind, but there are three minds. There is the brain mind, which is the logic mind, then there’s the feeling mind, which is in the heart, then there’s the cosmic mind, which is in the space between the spaces. So I went into my cosmic mind, the space between the spaces, and I merged my particle space with the rock’s particle space, and then I literally came back here, chose the spot where I wanted the rock to be, and I stepped back into my cosmic mind again, then back into my body. Some people would say this is magic. It is not magic, it is science. It is life. It is nature. All I did was bend the rules of nature.’

  ‘But how?’ Belt asked.

  ‘There is a very simply mantra. It is not a spell, it is a mantra. It is one of the
most common in the far east, used by sadhus and mystics and everyday people too. I use it often. It can be very powerful. It can raise your frequency, your vibration, to the level of everything around you – and you can shift into your cosmic mind and become one with whatever you choose to be. You want to be that bird in the tree, you can become that bird. You want to become the tree, that is possible too. But it takes practice. The mantra is SO HUM. Just say that over and over, SO HUM, and allow it to work its way into your cells in your body, and you too will be able to do real magic.’

  ‘So hum? That’s it?’ Belt asked. ‘What does it even mean?’

  ‘It means I am that.’

  ‘I am what?’

  ‘I am that that is that,’ the Hag replied.

  Belt stared at her. ‘So all I need to do is say “I am that that is that” and I can turn into a rock?’

  The Hag did not answer. She looked at Belt for a long moment and then shook her head in disgust. ‘Perhaps I have made a mistake to bring you here. I thought you were smart. I thought you were ready. You ask me a question like that and I see you are not smart and you are not ready.’

  She began to get to her feet.

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ Belt quickly said, respectfully. ‘Please tell me how I can use this.’

  The Hag hesitated to see if Belt was sincere, and seeing that she was, she sat down by the fire again. ‘There are four steps to know to use this mantra. Attention, Focus, Direct, Command. First you need to put your attention on what it is you want to do, then you have to focus all your energy on doing that, then you have to direct your energy to do that thing, then you have to command that it be done.’

  ‘Attention, Focus, Direct, Command,’ Belt repeated. And thought, that’s easy-peasy.

  The Hag rasped. It might have been an attempt at a laugh. ‘It is not easy-peasy, child. Otherwise everyone would do this thing. Only those with special gifts, like you, and me, can even hope to do this. We call it lifting. Lifting your vibration high enough so that you use your cosmic mind to become one with all things.’

  ‘So apart from landscaping, how else can I use this … lifting?’ Belt asked.

  The Hag chose to ignore her sarcasm. ‘In defence and attack. In defence if someone walked in here now and wanted to harm you, you could merge with that tree over there, or with that bird in the branches. To kill you they would have to kill the bird or chop down the tree. And in attack you could fell that tree onto that person, or you could have that bird take out his eyes. But, to raise your vibrations to that excited state where this is possible, it takes time. Even for me it takes several minutes. And you don’t yet have the technique. It is something you will need to practise. But when you finally master it, you will understand the beauty of true magic. Real magic. All you do is bend the rules of nature.’

  Belt smiled. ‘That sounds cool. I’m onto it!’

  Every afternoon Belt hiked up into the mountains. She needed time by herself to think about everything the Hag had taught her in the mornings – but she also needed to be active. She needed to breathe in the crisp clean air, she needed to see the beauty around her, she needed to use her body to climb, which allowed her mind to soar. Her feeling mind. She also needed to get away from the old Hag for a time each day. The decrepit witch was always bad-tempered; she always found fault in everything she did.

  Belt had found a cave partway up one of the mountains overlooking their shack and she went there most days. She was always wary of bears, though – the floor of the cave was littered with bones and decaying carcasses, kills that the bears had brought there to devour. This was where she had collected many of the bones that now hung from the poles around their shack.

  The smell inside the cave was putrid, but what attracted Belt to the dark vaulted space was its high ceiling. It was like a vast dome, populated by hundreds of bats that chattered and fluttered and flew away and back again.

  Belt liked to climb the steep walls of the cave and make her way hand by hand, foothold by foothold, up high until she was among the bats, hanging vertically from the ceiling like one of them. For Belt it was a challenge to see how long she could last up there – how long her strength would hold, how long her brain mind could keep her from falling.

  Occasionally a bat would bite her arms or tear through her clothing and bite her – one even bit her cheek one time – but it never bothered Belt. She began to see herself as one of them, clinging effortlessly to the roof of the cave, and she even began to mimic their chatter. After a while they accepted her, and stopped attacking her. Perhaps she wasn’t a spider after all, she thought. Perhaps she was a bat. Maybe even a vampire bat. That would be super-cool. And she laughed.

  It was coming on dark by the time she got back to the shack and as she was about to step up onto the porch she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. She turned and saw bouncing headlights piercing the growing dimness, following the track down by the lake, heading their way. The Hag came to the door and peered out, fearful.

  ‘The shield is not yet finished,’ the old woman said, referring to the circle of bones clacking in the wind, hanging from poles around the shack. They were still not anointed. ‘Get inside. Then answer the door if they come here. I will hide.’ She scuttled back inside and Belt followed.

  There was nowhere to hide inside the small dwelling, so the Hag sat on her wire-framed bed and began to chant her mantra – but the sound of the vehicle pulling up outside distracted her. There was a loud knock on the door and Belt looked at the Hag. She nodded, nervously, gesturing that she should answer. Then she hid under the bed, her spindly blotched legs sticking partway out.

  Belt walked over and slowly opened the door. Standing there was a beaming woman, in her mid-thirties Belt guessed; thick black-framed glasses, hair pulled back with sparkly clips, overweight but dressed in tight jeans, a mauve sweater underneath a well-worn dusty blue hiker’s rain jacket. Beside her was a younger man in his early twenties, with goatee and beanie, rings in his ears, tatts visible on his neck, mud-covered boots with the laces undone, cargo pants, a grey moth-eaten sweater covered by a green leather jacket festooned with pins advocating wilderness protection, indigenous rights and the need to fight climate change. He had a large professional-looking camera slung over a shoulder and carried another, which he quickly raised and, before Belt could stop him, took her photo.

  ‘Hi, I’m Molly Bright,’ the woman said too brightly, ‘and this is Quince. We’re from the Mountford Bugle, the local rag –’

  ‘What is this?’ Belt said. Then to the photographer, ‘I want you to delete that photograph.’

  ‘We’re here to ask you some questions,’ Molly jumped in. ‘I know you and your … is it your mother, or perhaps your grandmother?’

  Belt didn’t respond. To the photographer, cold metal in her voice, she said, ‘Buddy, I’m warning you. Delete that photo.’

  Molly blithely continued right on. ‘… are new to the area, and we’re running a story tomorrow. You know, around these parts new arrivals are news.’ She laughed thinly, like ice cracking. ‘Anyway, we’ve had some reports from the locals that you might be practising some form of witchcraft here, which is kind of neat, and has sure got some of the folks here chattering, and we wondered if we could come in and perhaps ask you to make a comment. I mean …’ She turned and gestured to the ring of poles surrounding the shack, bones hanging from each of them. ‘… this is highly unusual, you’d have to agree.’

  ‘And I snuck in early this morning,’ said Quince. ‘I do like bird and wildlife photography, and I got some cool shots of the two of you too in your little hideaway in the woods, doing your rituals. Have to do some photoshopping though to make it decent. We’re a family newspaper.’ He chuckled. He held his gaze at Belt longer than was comfortable.

  The Hag suddenly appeared at Belt’s side. Quince quickly took a shot of her and Belt standing together at the doorway, then reviewed the shot on the back screen of the camera. The Hag smiled, revealing broken decayi
ng teeth and mottled gums.

  ‘By all means come in,’ she said, feigning geniality. ‘Always happy to speak to the press. We have our little quirks, yes, that’s true, and I’m sure it would make for an interesting story.’

  Belt threw the Hag a glance, but she was already opening the door wide to invite them in.

  She pulled up some chairs and they sat around their small table, a cast-iron pot-bellied stove in the corner providing heat, a small hissing pressure lantern pumping out a pulsing light.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ the Hag offered brightly. ‘I’m sure you do. Newspaper folk always like a drink. Or two.’ She got up and walked over to some shelves by the stove. ‘I have a little bottle of something nice here somewhere … warm us up a little.’

  ‘We won’t say no, will we, Quince?’ Molly said, as she pulled out a reporter’s notebook.

  ‘The sun’s over the yardarm so it’s fine with me,’ Quince said, taking photos of Belt by the lamplight.

  Belt stared back at him, her eyes like icepicks. She’d wait her time, she thought. He can take all the pictures he wants. But he won’t leave this shack with them. No. He may not even leave the shack at all.

  Molly took out her phone and switched on a recorder app. ‘You mind if I tape this?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course,’ the Hag said, as she grabbed a bottle of whisky from one of the shelves. Belt looked amazed. How had she conjured that? There’d been no whisky there before. The Hag kept her back to the table as she poured the drinks, then brought the glasses over, handing them around.

  ‘I like my whisky. This is single malt, from Scotland. Lagavulin.’ She held up her glass in a toast. They all did the same. ‘To the fourth estate,’ she said, and they clinked glasses and drank.

  ‘Now, what do you want to know?’ the Hag hissed. ‘You want to know if we are witches? Well, yes we are. But what is a witch? That is a more important question. A witch is merely someone who celebrates and worships nature.’