by Bill Bennett
Lily could see its teet: broken yellowing stubs of bone. Its eyes, gleaming red, fixed on them demonically. Its tongue lolled out obscenely, covered in a greenish coating of mossy fur. She felt a weakening in her legs. Her mouth went dry. She was aware that her body had broken out into a cold prickling sweat. Try as she might, she could not stop the fear from surging through her.
Skyhawk handed her his phone and pulled out his knife. ‘Get in there,’ he said quietly, nodding to the large tunnel with the desecrated entrance. Skyhawk’s eyes were trained on the lamb as it clip-clopped up the shaft towards them. It stopped and stood in front of them. Lily edged back into the tunnel, the tunnel where she thought her mom might be. Skyhawk moved forward and approached the lamb with his knife raised.
And then the lamb screeched, angry and loud, as if shouting at Skyhawk to keep back. Its eyes glowed like burning coals, its red mouth was opened wide, bone-coloured teeth bared, its green tongue splayed out as the sound reverberated around the shaft.
There was a wrenching sound like the earth tearing, a monstrous shriek as if from the bowels of the mine itself, then the massive wood beams above Lily’s head began to splinter and split like matchsticks. Rocks began to fall from above. A few at first, then a sudden downpour. Lily stumbled back into the tunnel, shielding her head with her arms. And then the entrance to the tunnel started to collapse in an avalanche of coal and rocks and broken beams. Lily was blinded by a blanket of thick dust that whorled around her.
She tried to see Skyhawk amid the cascade of rock and rubble raining down between them, but he was somewhere in the main shaft. And then he was gone from view as the cave-in continued to thunder down, dumping even more coal and rock and earth until finally, after what seemed like several minutes but was probably only thirty seconds, it came to a stop.
There was a quiet; a deathly stillness in the dark except for the swirling dust that wrapped around Lily like a funereal shroud. She stepped back, coughing, the black dust pricking her throat. She was in the tunnel alone, still holding the phone that Skyhawk had handed her. Its light was dimming fast, like a dying glow worm. Had he been caught under that massive pile of falling rock? Was he alive? How could he have possibly survived?
She stared at the wall of broken rocks that had entombed her, that had cleaved Skyhawk away from her. She felt totally, utterly, helpless.
CHAPTER 32
He came for her. As she knew he would. Quicker than she’d expected. But really, she should have known he wouldn’t be tardy. That he would make a singular effort to come as swiftly as possible. Because after all, he had a job to do.
She’d never met him before. Never seen any photographs of him. But she knew who he was. He could be no one else. Staring out through the window clouded with moisture from her breath and her sweat, and from smoke from the stove, as he stepped out of his rental he looked like a comic book figure, so tall and spindly, all in black, with his mask and his cape and cane. He looked grotesque, but perhaps it was just distortions in the glass, like looking at an elongated figure in one of those warped mirrors in a circus fun parlour.
He knocked on the door. She didn’t expect him to knock. What did she expect? That he’d kick the door down? That he’d blow it off its hinges with his breath, like a huffing puffing big bad wolf? He was polite, this man, this sadist, this monster.
She opened the door. They stared at each other. The Killer and the To-Be-Killed. She invited him in. She was polite too. She could afford to be, given the circumstances. The circumstances being that she could not escape him. The inevitability of it all. He stepped inside. He was carrying a briefcase. He put it on the table. Waited till she asked him if he cared to sit.
‘Please take a seat,’ she offered.
He thanked her.
He sat.
His long legs splayed out either side of the sagging rope chair, like tapered black tentacles.
‘Would you like something to drink?’
He stared at her a long moment. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked in a deep rich voice. She hadn’t expected this either, for him to have an opera singer’s voice. It didn’t seem right, given his predilections. She’d expected his voice to be high-pitched, thin, like a perpetual scream.
‘Yes, I know who you are,’ the Hag said, walking over to the shelves beside the pot-bellied stove, pulling down two cups.
‘Then you know why I am here,’ Dr Skinless said. He was calm, unemotional, but mildly curious. His dark eyes, partly visible through his hideous mask, were steady, unblinking. His spider hands lay flat on the table, hidden by black gloves.
‘I know,’ said the Hag, and came back to the table with two cups of a steaming brew. She handed him one, took the other for herself.
‘Do you mind?’ the doctor said, and swapped the cups. ‘Not that I do not believe your hospitality is not pure in its intent.’ Then he added, apologetically, ‘And I am sorry for the triple negative.’
‘I could be offended by your lack of trust, doctor,’ the Hag said, feigning hurt. ‘But under the circumstances I understand. That’s why I gave myself the poisoned cup, expecting you to do this.’
The doctor’s eyes sharpened. Trying to ascertain her truth, or otherwise. Then they crinkled, in mirth. He laughed and pushed his cup away. ‘Thank you, madam. You win. This round.’
The Hag wheezed, in her decrepitude it was her substitute for a laugh, then she took a long drink from her cup. The doctor reached for his briefcase, clicked open the two locks, opened the lid. The Hag peered inside. Laid out in meticulous order was a set of skinning implements – scalpels, knives, long-bladed scissors and pins and butterfly clips, all shiny and silver and sharp. Very sharp. In the dim light they gleamed. Like they were grinning with evil teeth.
He then pulled from his jacket pocket his phone and from another pocket a mini table-top tripod. He fixed one to the other and set it up facing the Hag.
‘I am sorry that I have to record this. There is nothing more intimate than a person’s last moments. It should be a private affair, shared only by your family and loved ones, however I am required by my masters to make this public – certainly within the ranks of the Golden Order, to de-incentivise anyone else from doing what you did. You do know what you did, don’t you, madam?’
The old woman nodded. Her eyes were shut and she was rocking from side to side, uttering a mantra under her breath, a repetition of words, singsong, hypnotic.
‘I won’t insult you by asking you to redeem yourself,’ Dr Skinless said. ‘To beg forgiveness. We both know it would be a falsehood.’ He began to take out his skinning implements one by one, laying them in a neat row on the table. ‘You did what you did to save your life, because at your basest level you are a coward. I am sorry to confront you with the truth of your character. No one likes to be told that they are a coward. But you, madam, lack the moral standing to be a member of the Golden Order. You have broken sacred vows and you know the consequences. You ran, you hid here, but you knew that they would send someone to rectify the situation. To balance the books, as we accountants would say.’ He took out a long stiletto blade, considered its lethal edge admiringly. ‘I have to admit, though, I am impressed with the courage with which you now face your inevitable reckoning. It is a shame you did not employ such courage earlier. I like the cold, but I would rather not be here. They don’t sell bratwurst and their beer is disgusting.’
He looked up at her. She was no longer there. She was there, but not there. She was uttering words – it sounded like SO HUM. Even though he was not a sensitive, even he, the dullard forensic accountant, could feel that she had somehow elevated her vibration to such a level that her corporeal form was now only a shell, an empty vessel, and what she actually was, what she truly was, had left the building.
He felt a jolt. A forced intrusion. An energetic rape of sorts. As if some entity had, without his permission, penetrated his body. As though his very soul had been violated. ‘I am sick of your blathering, you skinny-dick fool,’ h
e heard himself say, in a voice and tone not dissimilar to the Hag’s. He had enough of himself left, still present, to be aware of this, and to be in awe.
He saw himself take the long stiletto knife, hold it up admiringly as he’d done before – and then the last thing he remembered was taking both hands around the knife’s handle and thrusting it savagely through his right eye, deep into his brain.
The Hag returned to her body. She watched the famed Dr Skinless slump to the floor, the last few inches of knife sticking out of his eye. She took no satisfaction in what she’d done. It only made her more weary, more sad. She was sick and tired of the tedium of violence. It was unnecessary. But she hadn’t wanted to die in pain. And she hadn’t wanted him to win the battle between them.
Soon the poison would take effect. Soon she would leave this earthly plane peacefully, gently, and she would take her final journey back home to meet her ancestors and guides. Her legacy and all she knew, all she wished for, was now in the hands of a talented young witch who was born to realise greatness.
She closed her eyes. She settled back on her chair. She heard her breath leave her body, enter her body, leave her body. For her entire life she had taken this simple function for granted. Now she valued every breath, every heartbeat. Because soon it would all slow and then it would stop.
She could look back on a life lived lustfully, with full vigour and largely without regret, and even though she hadn’t reached the heights she’d dreamed of when she was young, she’d done enough. And really, when you look back on a life, isn’t that enough? To have done enough?
CHAPTER 33
He could be dead – because he was aware of a soft light surrounding him like gigantic fluffy white tumbleweeds. He was aware of pain, but it was somewhere and everywhere and nowhere. He was aware of stillness, death stillness. Perhaps he was dead. Perhaps this was what death was, suspended in some amorphous luminescent void awash in a bath of shifting pain.
Freddie had learnt it by rote, early on, hoping he would never have to use it. It was the emergency number on your speed dial, it was the get-out-of-jail-free card, it was that red handle in the glass box on the train, the one you pulled just before a crash.
He’d only had a few seconds. That’s all. As the car plummeted down the side of the mountain, Freddie had found the spell in some barely used recess of his memory. He tried to invoke it as best he could, while the car crashed and rolled down the precipice, but he knew that any slight deviation from the wordage or intonation would render it ineffective.
The cocoon spell was for moments like this, when all hell breaks loose and you need an immediate and all-encompassing protection of white-light.
It had happened so fast – the eagle’s attack, the car pitching over the side of the cliff, lurching and crashing and bouncing off rocks as it plummeted down. Freddie felt like he was being put through the spin cycle of a giant Maytag with no water, no suds, just the hard empty ceramic bowl.
In amongst this, he invoked the spell.
It must have worked because the car kept crashing down the mountainside but he no longer felt the violence of it all. He was aware of everything happening around him, yet he felt disconnected from it, like being under anaesthetic and seeing the scalpel open your belly.
And then the car came to a stop on its roof. He and Joe were hanging upside down by their seatbelts. And then there was the heat and flames from the gas tank exploding. Yet they were shielded from it, they were inside the white-light cocoon. Freddie was fascinated. He wondered if he was actually dead, seeing the inferno outside. But they were safe, protected by the spell. The energetic white-light cocoon.
How long had it been? He couldn’t be sure.
He was wedged in tight. He couldn’t crane his head around to see if Joe was still alive. He just knew that he was hanging there, beside him. He didn’t make a sound and when Freddie called out to him there was no reply.
He had to get out. He had to get to the mine and find Lily before Angela was killed. But to do that he had to get out of the protective white-light bubble. Which meant he needed to invoke the release spell.
And for the life of him, he couldn’t remember it.
CHAPTER 34
Kritta strode into the administration building, gleaming knife in hand, Kevin Johnstone behind her, Andi and Bess following, the guard at the gate the last to walk in, a huge red weal in the centre of his forehead. He looked sheepish, embarrassed that he’d been duped by a young kid who was now somewhere in the building, or roaming the grounds outside.
Kritta went from room to room, office to conference room to boardroom, until at last she came to the canteen and kitchen at the rear of the building. She saw what Skyhawk had seen – the opened packet noodles on the bench, the saucepan on the stove, footprints in the dust on the floor. She followed the prints down a dark corridor to the stationery closet at the very end. She walked up to it, her entourage at her heel, and looked at the padlocked bolt on the door. She turned to the guard. ‘You got a key for this?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘The kid took ’em.’
Kevin stepped forward. ‘Allow me.’
He stood back, then rammed his shoulder into the door. There was a sound of wood wrenching at hinges. He stepped back again then barrelled into it, harder this time. He felt the door give a little more. He rubbed his shoulder. It hurt.
‘Let me,’ said Andi, trying to push him out of the way. Andi was bigger than Kevin, and stronger. But KJ had more pride.
‘Get lost,’ he said, shoving her back. Then he raised his leg, musclebound from years of training as a champion quarterback, and with one almighty kick he took the door completely off its hinges. It slammed back into the closet, onto the floor, revealing Kevin’s father huddled in a corner, bound and gagged, his eyes wide with fear.
Father looked at son.
Son looked at father.
‘So it’s true,’ Kevin said.
They searched the rest of the building, then went outside and checked all of the other buildings in the complex one by one. Kritta led the way, her two familiars in tow. Kevin hung back to talk to his father, standing outside the admin building, watching as the guard went back to attend the gates again. Traffic was starting to bank up – vehicles full of Baphomet’s finest, at least the finest from the north, arriving for the ceremony of a lifetime later that night.
‘So all that astronomy stuff was bullshit,’ Kevin said. ‘You were out becoming a witch. When did it start?’
‘When your mother left. I was angry. So angry. I had to do something. To reclaim myself. Reclaim my dignity. I felt like shit. Like there was nothing to live for.’
‘Thanks,’ said Kevin sourly.
‘I was in a bad way. I felt like writing myself a script and … But I wouldn’t have done that to you.’
Kevin laughed, bitterly. ‘What crap. Since when have you ever done anything because of me?’
‘You have no idea, Kevin.’ He paused, and then said reluctantly, ‘I love you, son.’
‘Well, you’ve done a really great job of hiding it.’
They stood there, the afternoon bleak, clouds tumbling overhead, the wind with teeth of ice.
‘So you, that girl –’ his father asked.
‘Kritta? She’s cool. She’s teaching me stuff.’
‘What? Baphomet stuff?’
‘She did this ceremony on me. Novitiated me or something. It’s okay, Dad. I’m now officially part of the Golden Order of Baphomet. You can tell me secrets and you won’t have to kill me.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ his father said and smiled grimly.
The wind got icier.
‘So are you like, high up, or whatever?’ Kevin asked.
His father shook his head. ‘No. I’m a covenate, one step up from initiate. We got word a while back to look out for a mother and daughter, possibly farmers. The Lennoxes fitted the age bracket, description, so I reported them. My superiors then sent out your lady friend and her companion
s to check them out, and here we are …’ He hesitated, then looked squarely at his son. ‘I’m glad it’s worked out this way, Kevin. That I don’t have to sneak around and hide this secret life from you anymore.’
‘Dad, you gotta understand,’ Kevin said. ‘I’m going to kick your ass. Whenever I’ve done something, you’ve always made a big deal about how you’ve always done it better. Not this time. You think when all this is over we’re going to bond and go off hand in hand, father and son, to Baphomet meetings or ceremonies or whatever, and you’re going to show me what to do and how to do it, and you’re going to be my mentor or teacher or some shit like that? Well, let me tell you, that’s not gonna happen. Like I said, I’m going to kick your ass so hard your pearly whites are going to rattle.’
He walked off to join Kritta as she came out of the last of the buildings, shaking her head, looking around.
‘No luck?’ he asked, walking up.
‘No. The only place she could be is down there …’ She looked over to the main mine shaft. ‘And if she is, then good luck to her.’ She began to laugh in a high-pitched squeal, like a pig getting stuck.
They both turned at the sound of a car approaching the gates. A shiny-new black Lincoln Navigator was pulling up. Kritta noticed it was a rental. The guard came out of his shack, saw who was driving and quickly opened up the gates – deferentially, it seemed to Kritta – then he stood back and almost saluted as the car drove by, continuing past the admin building down towards them. It pulled up alongside.
Chappy Waterstone hopped out. Kritta was taken aback by how elegant he looked. Tall and silver haired, he was dressed in tailored cream silk slacks and a wool – linen smoky blue sports jacket over a darker blue shirt. He sported a solid gold Rolex and wore Italian loafers. She imagined that his toenails were perfectly trimmed too. The man himself was immaculately groomed, with a smile that could warm the coldest heart. He used that smile as he walked over to them.