Unholy

by Bill Bennett

  ‘I’m Grand Master of the North. You must be –’ he asked Kritta. Before she could answer he said, ‘the Kredlich girl. Yes, the Hag has told me all about you. You’ve done well.’ He turned to Kevin. ‘And you, sir, are?’

  Kevin could feel a panic attack coming on. He felt his chest tighten, his skin go clammy, his mouth go dry. He tried to answer but the words didn’t come. The man before him was so intimidating. He had a charisma, a power, that Kevin found overwhelming.

  ‘He’s my son,’ said Kevin’s father, walking up confidently. ‘I’m Lindsay Johnstone. Dr Lindsay Johnstone,’ he added, offering his hand. The Grand Master looked him up and down, got his measure, didn’t like much of what he saw, then they shook hands.

  ‘I’m the person who first spotted the woman and her daughter,’ Kevin’s father said, proudly.

  ‘Well, for that, all of us in the Golden Order can be forever grateful, Dr Johnstone,’ he said, in such a manner that Kevin’s father didn’t know whether he was being sincere or sarcastic. The Grand Master turned away from him back to Kritta, a small gesture but one that Kevin could see that his father felt was a humiliating rebuttal.

  ‘So Miss Kredlich, I believe you have delivered us this fabled Book of Light? Where is it?’

  Chappy Waterstone strode ahead of Kritta as they walked back to where Kritta had parked. She had to scrabble to keep up with him. It was clear that he was a natural and imposing leader. There was talk that his powers of witchcraft were unparalleled, certainly in the north, and that as Grand Master he dealt ruthlessly with any foes of Baphomet, including those within its own ranks that transgressed its rules. For that reason, he was regarded within the lower ranks with a mixture of fascination and fear.

  ‘How long have you been with the Golden Order?’ he asked Kritta as they picked their way around the rusted machinery and broken piles of rock that littered the path leading back to the administration building.

  ‘Four years, Grand Master,’ she replied crisply. ‘Three years as an initiate, then last year I was made a priestess.’

  ‘You’ve risen fast. So you’ve met the Fallen Priest?’

  ‘No, Grand Master,’ Kritta said. ‘We just got in a short while ago.’

  ‘I’ve not had a great deal to do with him myself. He must be down the mine, working on the woman. He has a fearsome reputation, there’s no doubt. It’s probably best you haven’t met him. If he takes a disliking to you, you don’t stay around very long.’ Chappy Waterstone chuckled. ‘Personally, I think he has too much power. He’s a lone wolf, so to speak – he operates outside of the Inner Sanctum. Everyone in Baphomet should have to play by the same rules. He makes his own rules and sometimes that’s not helpful to the bigger picture.’

  Kritta took him around to the back of Kevin’s Mustang and opened up the trunk. Chappy Waterstone stepped up, looked down into the trunk and stared at the battered suitcase.

  ‘It’s in that?’ he asked, trying to keep his excitement in check.

  She nodded. The book’s energies, pure and clean and white, were already starting to make her feel nauseous again. She looked across at the Grand Master and he appeared to be battling some kind of vibrational attack, as if the energy radiating out was trying to repel him, push him away. With effort, and with what looked to Kritta to be a lot of discomfort, he reached in, grabbed the suitcase’s handle, and went to haul it out. But it was too heavy. He couldn’t shift it an inch.

  ‘Goddamn!’ Chappy Waterstone said and stepped back, looking at the suitcase in disbelief. ‘It really packs a punch.’

  ‘Andi! Bess!’ Kritta yelled out. The two familiars rushed over, and with Kevin’s help too, and his father looking on, they all managed to get the suitcase out of the trunk and onto the ground at the rear of the car.

  The Grand Master closed his eyes, mumbled some words, flourished his hands over the case and the locks sprung open. They all leaned in and looked down at The Book of Light.

  The Grand Master gently touched the gold-embossed symbol of a cygnet on the cracked leather cover. He then opened the book and carefully turned several pages, mesmerised by the texts detailing ancient secrets and spells, all laid down meticulously over the centuries by generations of white witches.

  But then he withdrew his hand, stepped back and looked at the book with a sudden realisation.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Kritta asked.

  ‘Damn it,’ is all he said.

  ‘What’s wrong, Hallowed One?’ Dr Johnstone asked.

  ‘I should have guessed,’ the Grand Master said. ‘They’ve put very old and highly complex scramble spells on many of these entries. Stops us getting access to their most secret stuff. Particularly their attack and defence spells, it looks like.’ He stared at the book.

  ‘So, what? The book is useless to us?’ Kritta asked.

  ‘Largely, certainly at the moment. A scramble spell is different from a lock spell. A lock spell simply locks something, like that suitcase. I used an unlock spell to open it. I made it look easy, but it required an advanced skill level to do that. Scramble spells of this magnitude are a whole other ballgame. They’re a form of magical encryption, if you will, and there’s only one man I know who works at a vibrational level high enough to unscramble those entries and give us full access to this book – and that man resides in the Palace of Fires.’

  There was a silence among them all, as if the mere words Palace of Fires had sent a chill through each of their hearts.

  Kritta broke the moment. ‘Grand Master, we searched all the buildings, came up with nothing. We suspect she’s gone down into the mine, to try and find her mom.’

  The Grand Master slowly smiled. It wasn’t the charming smile that he’d deployed earlier, this was a smile to freeze the blood in your veins, to prickle your skin and raise the tiny hairs on your arms.

  ‘Well, then, I’ll have to go see,’ he said. ‘Won’t I?’

  CHAPTER 35

  Lily held the phone up and looked at the collapsed wall of rock, dimly lit by the arc of fading light.

  ‘Skyhawk?’ she yelled. Her voice bounced back dully off the walls. She put her ear to the rocks, trying to hear any sound that would tell her he was still alive. ‘Skyhawk?’ she yelled louder, her voice trembling.

  Again, no reply.

  Was he buried under the avalanche? Lily’s last image was of him looking back at her, massive chunks of coal raining down, black dust swirling, clouding her view. Perhaps he’d gotten out and was now running back to get help. But the witches that had just arrived would have surely heard the collapse. Maybe they came to investigate and perhaps they’d captured him.

  Lily choked back a sudden wave of emotion. The reality was that he’d probably been crushed under that rockfall. Or worse, he’d been buried alive. He might be in a pocket of rocks and have a small amount of oxygen left. He might be only six or eight feet away and she’d never know.

  ‘Skyhawk?’ she yelled again, trying to keep her voice strong. ‘Are you there? Can you hear me? If you can’t speak, just knock. Knock two rocks together or something.’

  She waited, but the silence was complete and utter.

  She held up the phone and looked around within the dwindling arc of its dying light. The tunnel was big enough for a small truck to drive through. The walls were scarred with the markings of the drill bits that had wrenched out coal decades earlier.

  Ahead of her was the continuation of the tunnel – a black oesophagus that bent around a corner and disappeared. She could see no further. Perhaps it led back to the main shaft. The phone was nearly out of battery. She had to find her way back out before it went completely flat. The thought of being trapped so far underground with no light, in complete darkness, sent a shudder of fear rippling through her.

  If Skyhawk was trapped, how could she possibly save him? The best thing would be to try and get to the surface as quickly as possible, and then find help. But what help? And from where? There was no help nearby. She’d have to find her way out
of the mine, walk back to a town somewhere, call the cops. That could take a couple of days, even if she could get out and back to the surface.

  And then what about her mom? Tonight was the night of Unholy – the night they were going to extract her soul in a sacrificial offering to Satan. How could she do both – rescue her mom and help Skyhawk? She refused to think about it. She knew that she had to set very clear goals for herself, and the first was to get out of where she was right now. If she couldn’t find her way back to the main shaft and the surface, if she discovered that she was trapped underground, then all her other concerns about her mom and Skyhawk were meaningless. She would die down here.

  She set off, carefully watching her footing. She walked around the bend and saw up ahead a dark formless shape on the ground in the middle of the tunnel. She slowed, her heart hammering.

  Was it Mom on the ground? Was she dead?

  ‘Mom?’ Lily moved in closer, tentatively. ‘Mom, is that you?’

  The black shape moved. Was she injured? Lily couldn’t see with the faint glimmer from the phone. She had to get closer. As she approached she saw that it couldn’t possibly be her mom, because it was huge, and moving in a way that was not human.

  She wanted to turn and run but there was no point going back. It was blocked. The only possible way out was ahead of her. And her mom could be up ahead too. She had to get past this horrific thing, whatever it was, that was crawling towards her.

  She moved in closer, slowly, holding her phone out in front. Like the Goddess Artemis holding up her torch. And as she moved forward she saw by the dimming light of the phone that it was a massive cluster of spiders. Thousands of tiny seething baby tarantulas.

  She jerked back and dropped the phone. The light went out. Suddenly it was completely dark, so dark Lily felt she was drowning in an ocean of black tar.

  The spiders scattered. She could hear them – their tiny legs scuttling over the tunnel floor, some coming towards her. She felt them crawling over her feet, trying to climb up inside her jeans.

  She flayed them away, and reached down to grope the ground trying to find the phone. She accidently grabbed a handful of little tarantulas and some began to crawl up her arm. She screamed, and frantically flicked them off.

  But they were now scurrying up her legs, and some had dropped from the ceiling and were crawling on her neck down her back. She danced around, thrashing and kicking, trying to get them off her.

  She felt the phone with her foot.

  She reached down, picked it up and quickly switched it on. In the cell’s weak pool of light she could see thousands of spiders crawling all over the tunnel floor.

  If there were so many baby spiders, she thought, there had to be a mother. And it’s probably gigantic.

  She ran, crunching and squashing the scrabbling creatures as she raced down the tunnel. Spiders jumped at her from the walls and they hit her in the face, trying to grab hold by clawing at her nose and eyes. She shook her head and brushed them off but some dropped from the roof onto her hair and ears. She screamed again and one jumped into her mouth.

  She gagged in horror, spat it out and ran. She ran and stumbled and fell and picked herself up and ran some more and glanced off rock walls and kept on running until she couldn’t feel anymore spiders underfoot, until she’d rid herself, her body, her hair, of every last one of them, until she’d run so far that she had to stop to catch her breath.

  She bent over, gasping for air, feeling dry coal dust on the back of her throat, filling her lungs with it, her breathing starting to return to normal, and then slowly she stood and she looked around.

  Blackness. Everywhere she looked. It enveloped her like a soft burial shroud.

  What was she doing? she wondered. What was the point of running? She was trapped. Trapped in an underground mine, with no way of ever getting out. She would die down here. And no one would ever know. The thought gripped her around her chest with fingers of ironclad certainty. Her mother would be killed – sacrificed to Satan in some obscene grotesque ceremony on top of a hideous pile of black rock, and there was now nothing she could do about it. It was over.

  Really, she’d never had a chance in the first place. How delusional had she been, to even think for one moment that she could have rescued her mother from these monsters? And through this stupid stupid delusion she had also killed Skyhawk. There was no way he could have survived that rockfall. She now had two deaths on her conscience – Luna and Skyhawk. All because of her. And she could probably add her mother to that list too.

  She slumped to the floor of the cave. Drew her knees up to her chest, clasped them with her arms. She started to hyperventilate.

  So this is how she would die, she thought. Invisibly. Ignominiously. And slowly. She’d either die of starvation, or through dehydration, or maybe through lack of oxygen if the mine is really totally sealed off. Or there might be some deadly creature living down here, like a snake or something, that might end her life sooner. That would be a godsend, she thought – to not have to suffer a slow agonising death through lack of food or water – or air. How long could she last for – ten days? Two weeks? Longer? Even if a miracle happened and the cops came and they arrested everyone up top, no one would know to look for her down here. This was where she would die. In a godforsaken hellhole in the dark. Alone. Totally alone.

  She caught herself thinking this way. What was she doing? Had she given up? So easily? Thinking that her death down here was inevitable? That this was her fate?

  Fuck that.

  She stood.

  She wasn’t going to lie on the floor and roll up and die.

  No way!

  What would her mom think of her giving up like that? Without a fight. Her mom would fight till her last breath. So would she. She was an initiated Cygnet witch. What would the Goddess Artemis think of her giving up? Did she ever give up? No – Artemis was a fighter. So was she.

  There had to be a way out of here. There just had to be.

  She began walking.

  Okay, she thought, it seems impossible but if you set your intention on something with enough focus and belief, you can make the impossible possible. There was still time to find a way out of the cave, make her way to the mountain and save her mother. There was still time. And it was possible. But she had to focus and she had to believe with all her heart.

  She walked blindly along the tunnel, bumped into a wall, realised there was a corner, walked around – and then she stopped.

  Because before her was a large chamber, lit by thousands upon thousands of phosphorescent glow-worms that clung to the walls, each one crawling, as though the cave was a living breathing thing, like a luminescent lung. They gave off a dull grey light and Lily could see that the chamber was littered with abandoned equipment: a rusted drill, a coal cart filled with spider webs, and a wooden gurney with metal wheels that had once been on tracks. There was coal on the gurney, lumps of coal, but as Lily approached she realised it wasn’t coal at all, but the irregular shape of a woman’s figure.

  She walked up slowly, aware that her body had almost shut down – her breathing, her heart, her capacity to put one foot in front of the other. As she got closer and the phone began to flicker its last splutter of light, she looked down on the inert body of her mother.

  Lily stepped back, not sure what to do. Her mom’s eyes were closed yet she didn’t look dead. She had a pale greyish pallor and Lily could see that her chest rose and fell almost imperceptibly with her breathing. She put her hand gently on her mother’s cheek. It felt like ice.

  ‘Mom?’ Lily said, tears starting to flow uncontrollably. She took her mother’s hand. It was limp, cold and dead to her touch. And yet she had a slight pulse and when Lily opened her mom’s eyelids and shone the feeble light into her pupils, they contracted.

  Lily took her by the shoulders and shook her, crying. ‘Mom? MOM, wake up!’ It was like shaking a rag doll. She was lifeless. And it was useless. There was nothing Lily could do to wake her fr
om her unnatural sleep.

  She laid her back down gently.

  Stared at her face.

  It was serene, yet troubled. Disturbed.

  Lily suddenly felt heat.

  A pulsing throbbing heat.

  Something in her pocket.

  And then she remembered. The leather pouch containing the Cygnet charm. When she’d bought her change of clothes she’d taken the pouch off her wrist and put it in a pocket in the front of her jeans. She pulled it out, undid the golden cord and took out the pendant. She held it up. It radiated a soft light, the tiny white feather glowing fiercely. Lily slipped it over her head so that the feather nestled in next to her chest. She remembered what Luna had told her – the potent energy from the charm might kill her, might fry her brain or simply blow her internal energetic circuitry – but what choice did she have? In all likelihood she was going to die down here in this putrid mine shaft anyway. It was worth a try. She didn’t know how, but perhaps somehow it could help. She leant back over her mother, feeling the pendant hanging from her neck beginning to pulse.

  And then she heard a dry mirthless laugh behind her.

  ‘How nice of you to come, little girl.’

  She spun around. A priest stood in the glow-worm dark, an old priest in black robes with a silver cross hanging from his neck. He radiated his own ghastly green aura of light, and when he smiled, the cold chamber suddenly felt like an icebox.

  Lily’s phone finally died.

  The light went out.

  The priest’s laugh was full of menace and glee, triumph and madness, dust and storm. It was the most terrifying sound Lily had ever heard. He pointed two bony fingers at her and made an utterance in a language she didn’t understand.