by Bill Bennett
They stopped in the shadow of one of the outlying buildings, a large galvanised iron structure with panels missing from its walls, and watched as the witches began to assemble, in preparation for their walk to the base of the mountain. Up top they could see a fire being lit and flaming torches too.
‘Can you see the girl or her mother?’ Olivier asked, scanning the crowd, trying to peer into distant shadows.
Marley shook her head. ‘No. They must have them hidden away. Let’s hope they’re still alive.’
‘They’ll be alive. They want their souls, after all. Knowing Baphomet, they’ll probably make a grand entrance with them both. Make a show of it. It makes me sick, what they are going to do,’ Olivier said.
‘What are we going to do?’ Marley asked. ‘We can’t call in back-up, there’s no phone coverage here. And there’s too many of them for us to handle ourselves – and let’s not forget they have magic, or whatever, and we just have two handguns with no extra ammo.’
‘A bullet is better than a spell any day,’ Olivier said grimly. ‘Give me a gun, fuck a wand.’
Marley smiled. ‘But you know what I’m saying. We can’t make a mass arrest. They outnumber us a hundred to one, maybe more. And if it got into a firefight we don’t know what they might throw at us – magic or no magic. They could be armed to the teeth for all we know.’
‘So what are you proposing we do, Marls? Just sit here and eat popcorn and watch the show and clap at the finale?’
‘What are you proposing we do, smart-ass? I don’t want to do nothing, of course I don’t, but the way I see it we’re very limited in our options if we want to stop this disgusting exercise. I’m not being chicken-shit, that’s just the reality of it.’
‘Your reality and my reality are two different things, Marls,’ Olivier said. ‘My reality is that we follow them up to the top of the mountain, they will surely bring the mother and girl up there because that is where it will all happen, and then we wait for our moment. I don’t know what moment that will be exactly, but perhaps we can create a diversion and snatch them away. It is a thought.’
He looked at her. She said nothing.
‘The alternative is we sit here in what you call banana chairs,’ Olivier said, ‘and watch the celestial show in the heavens. So what do you want to do?’
‘Don’t forget we have zero jurisdiction here. Zip. Nil. Nought. If we kill someone in the line of duty, we’ll be treated in a court of law like civilians. We’ll fry.’
Olivier shrugged. ‘Then you have made your decision.’ He turned and began to walk away from her, towards the mountain.
‘Come here, you son of a bitch,’ she said and grabbed him by the shoulder, swung him around. ‘I’m the one brought you in on this. Don’t forget that. This is my case. Technically, I’m in charge here. So don’t give me any of your French arrogant bullshit.’ She paused. He blinked. ‘Okay, we’ll go up top,’ she said, ‘but you act under my instructions, do what I say, and take my lead, are you clear on that?’
Olivier smiled, completely unruffled by her anger. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You’re the boss.’
CHAPTER 40
The doors of the mine shaft blew open as if by the devil’s own breath, and out stepped four Baphomet adepts, each wearing dark-blue hooded robes knot-tied at the waist with purple rope, to signify their rank. They carried the bodies of the mother and daughter on old splintered planks covered in black cloths embroidered with Baphomet’s insignia, a pair of twirling goat horns.
Leading them up the mountain was the Fallen Priest, now dressed in his ceremonial yellow silk robes, a blood-red cord tied at his waist. He held aloft a tall carved silver staff, crowned with the bleached white skull of a goat, replete with a huge set of horns.
He chanted as he led the bearers up the circular path, and the chant was repeated from above and around him as they climbed. The track was lined with adept witches, their heads bowed and hidden by dark hoods, each holding with both hands a large thick dripping candle. Their chant was from a time long forgotten, in a tongue long lost. It imbued the night air with a foreboding, as though any horror or obscenity against the laws of nature was not only possible, but inevitable.
As the four robed bearers took the two women slowly and magisterially up the black mountain, the witches they passed left their stations and respectfully joined in behind, continuing their chant in a double-lined procession. By the time they’d reached the top, there were more than two hundred adepts following the bearers.
Waiting for them on the levelled peak were fifty master witches dressed in purple robes, tied at the waist with black rope, as befitting their higher rank. They each saluted the arriving procession with a large shining silver athame held high, and with their other hand they thrashed the ground with a whipping scourge made of bog-wood and knotted horse hair.
They stood in a large circle, lit by flaming torches, unaware that Olivier and Marley had followed them up, and were hiding in the dark outside the arc of the torchlight, just on the edge of the clearing, clinging to the side of the mountain. They could see everything, but no one could see them.
In the middle of the circle was a massive altar, which was covered in a shining silver cloth embroidered with medieval symbols of the sun and the moon and the planets of the night sky. On each corner were four huge weeping candles.
On the altar were large silver chalices of water and red wine, plates of figs, bowls of sea salt, two large incense burners, several leafy branches from which hung ripe red apples, platters of pecan nuts in their shells and a large ivory wand inset with sparkling rubies.
In the centre, in pride of place in a gold-framed stand, was a ceremonial knife, delicate filigree runes carved into its long sharp blade which ended in a thin stiletto needle.
Leaning against the altar was a traditional witch’s broom. It had a crooked ash wooden handle and its brush was a bundle of birch twigs bound with red cord. On either side were two large burnished copper cauldrons containing glowing coals. Smouldering on top were clumps of green leaves that billowed smoke, so that the whole circle was shrouded in a shifting diaphanous veil.
The Grand Master stood in front of the altar, hooded in his gold-and-black robes. Around his neck he wore a glittering crimson stole made of silk, embroidered with animal sigils denoting his commanding status. In his hand he held a large shining silver sword, gems embedded in its hilt.
As the procession arrived, he stepped forward and cut the air with the sword to ritually open the energetic circle and allow the robed witches in. He stepped back and watched as the bearers entered, and laid the two bodies before him on a low table covered in black velvet.
The bearers fell back, and the procession of adepts formed an outer ring around the inner ring of masters. The Grand Master came back to the altar. The Fallen Priest, his face shadowed by his hood, stood behind him.
Marley watched and her body shuddered involuntarily. It wasn’t from cold, but from abject horror. There was something innately evil and bestial about what she was witnessing. The ritualistic dignity of it terrified her – the ancient nature of it. As though evil, true evil, was as old as the stars above, as primitive as the first person to kill another, as immutable and all pervading as a force of nature. It was inescapable. It always was, is and would be. And these people before her were worshipping that evil and deifying it. They were calling it up, bringing it out into the night, they were making it real.
The witches turned and faced the rising new moon, their chant reaching a crescendo, and then on a raised circular motion with his sword, the Grand Master suddenly silenced them all. As one, they turned and faced the altar, and the two bodies that were laid before them.
The Grand Master slowly lowered his sword and pointed it at Lily. In a deep resonant voice he called out, ‘Hail Dark Lords of the Watchtowers of the Fires, the Lords of Death, Guardians of the Portals, Darksome Ones of the Shadow Worlds. I invoke thee to open the spirit of this closed soul, and with fore boding bring
it out of the shadows and into the night.’
Lily gasped. Her eyes sprung wide and she stared up into the night sky. Her breathing was fast, her gaze vacant and disconnected.
The Grand Master then turned his sword to Lily’s mother and repeated the words. Angela too rasped a reflexive breath. Her eyes blazed open. Her chest heaved.
The Fallen Priest smiled, his cruel lipless mouth all that could be seen under the shadow of his hood.
The Grand Master then turned to the assembled witches, raised his sword and shouted out, ‘Let us adore the Lord and Lady, the King and Queen of Dark Hosts.’
The witches looked to the shadowed orb that was the new moon, raised their athames and said in unison, ‘Whom Nature has not formed, Whom the Light cannot claim, Lord of the Dark and Lady of the Dark, Unholy art Thou.’
The Grand Master cried out, ‘Unholy art Thou. By the sign of the Blessed Goat, let us make Adam in our image, Eve in our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air, and every living creeping thing that liveth and crawleth over the earth and under the earth, in the sea and on the sea, let them rule in the Dark!’
The witches called out, ‘By the sign of the Blessed Goat!’
‘Thou, before Whom the life of beings is but a shadow which changeth, a vapour which passeth, a cloud that shifteth,’ the Grand Master called to the heavens. ‘Thou, who mounts the cold moon, and who walks among the chill winds of the night; Thou, who giveth and taketh the life of all beings in the flux of Thine Eternal Darkness; we praise thee Lord and King, Lady and Queen of the Darkest Nights.’
‘We praise thee Lord and King, Lady and Queen,’ the circle of witches intoned.
‘Oh Dread Lord and King, Dread Lady and Queen,’ the Grand Master continued, ‘I have heard Thy Speak and was afraid. I have seen Thy Will and was afraid. I have tasted Thy Wrath and was afraid. Thou liveth in the body of the creature of the sun and the earth, the soil and the wind, the earth and the fire. Let this creature now be witness to the humble offering we make to Thee and to Thee.’
‘Dread Lord and King, Dread Lady and Queen!’ the witches shouted, their double-edged blades glinting in the dancing firelight, the smoke swirling around them, the black moon rising higher into the star-flecked darkness above.
The Fallen Priest looked at the mother and daughter, now awake, but still inert. Soon it would be his task to extract their souls.
It would be difficult. He would only have a short period of time in which to do the extraction – at the moment the supermoon hit the closest point of its elliptical orbit and was largest in the night sky, coinciding with the burst of the celestial storm. That’s when the cosmic energies would be at their most dynamic, when all the heavenly bodies would be in full alignment. He estimated he had about two minutes at the most.
The girl would be relatively easy. She was young and untrained. Her soul would prise out effortlessly. But the woman would be a challenge. Despite all his efforts she had so far clung to her soul ferociously. With the effect of celestial energy he hoped that she would finally relinquish her hold, but he suspected it would be a struggle, a tussle, and he didn’t want to have any embarrassments in front of the assembled High Order, grappling with a recalcitrant soul.
He looked over at the needle-bladed athame on the altar, throbbing with reflected fire from the flaming torches. The Soul Cutter, they called it. He’d not used this particular instrument before and that concerned him too, working with an unfamiliar extractor.
The hilt was large enough for him to grip with both hands so he could thrust down hard. The needle point looked strong – it wouldn’t break off in the skull like some had in the past. And the blade itself was nicely thin and sharp so as to penetrate deep into the third eye, into the centre of the forehead.
He just had to make sure that the first thrust into the woman’s skull was strong and clean and true.
CHAPTER 41
Out in the night, yellow eyes saw fire.
Out in the woods, hot breath billowed mist.
Up in the stars, the ancients watched.
And knew.
They felt no chill, these creatures.
Leaping rocks, fording streams.
Cutting through the forests.
And leaving nothing to show that they’d ever been.
Silent as thought they moved.
Swift as a shooting star.
An eye-blink and they were gone.
CHAPTER 42
It lay on her chest beside her heart and it worked its way deep into a place where it lit a small flame, and that flame took hold within her very being, and it woke her to all things possible, to what could be done and what must be done.
It stirred within her a belief, a conviction, a surety. There was no doubt, no fear.
Lily was alert now, the Cygnet charm glowing against her heart. A tiny white feather: something so small, so delicate, so innocent and pure, was bringing her back to life with an urgent and ferocious potency.
Was it the charm that placed in her mind the idea of using a spell from The Book of Light? Lily thought back to the hidden chamber in the initiation cave, to sitting with Luna by the waterfall and flipping through the pages of the book. There’d been certain sections that she hadn’t been able to decipher, because they’d been encrypted with some kind of spell, but there were plenty of other pages that contained hundreds of lesser spells that were obviously not so important militarily, but were still potent nonetheless.
Was it the charm as well that allowed her to recall in vivid detail the contents of these page? Or was it her photo-brain? She recalled scribbled words in minuscule hand-scrawled script, in Hebrew, Latin, French and English. She could see it all so clearly – the sketches, the recitals and the spells. She’d looked through The Book of Light only that once, and only briefly, yet with the power of the Cygnet charm and the imagery from her photo-brain, it was all there in her memory, ready to put to use.
Lily just needed to find the right spell. And wait for the right moment.
CHAPTER 43
In the end, it had been so simple, as these things often are. Freddie had tried dozens of variations of the release spell, with different emphasis on various words. The success of any spell was not only dependent on saying the correct words, but also on saying them with the correct intonation and rhythm. Finally, he must have got it right because suddenly the cocoon vanished, leaving him dangling upside down in the crumpled and crushed vehicle, held tight by his seatbelt.
Joe too had been released and was out first, seemingly unaffected by the crash.
‘Careful with me, big fella,’ Freddie said, wincing with pain as Joe helped him out through the smashed side window. ‘I feel like I’ve been hit by a freight train.’
He stood, unsteadily, and looked up, way up the vertical cliff face to the track off which the car had careened.
‘Come on,’ Freddie said. ‘We don’t have much time.’
In the dark, and with their aching limbs and bruising, it was a long and difficult climb back up, but with Joe’s help Freddie at last made it. He hauled himself up onto the slippery track and, gasping for breath, he looked across to the mountain ridgeline, its silhouette barely visible. The new moon, a shadowed outline, was already well into the night sky. It seemed unnaturally close to the earth and larger than Freddie had ever seen it. He estimated they had perhaps forty-five minutes before it reached its zenith.
He wasn’t sure how far away they were from the mine, but it was at least a couple of miles. Walking in the dark would probably take them at least an hour, maybe longer, and running wasn’t an option. He’d probably fall and break a leg.
The only way he could get there in time was to travel, but that required heightening his energy field, which meant he’d have very little left for magic and fighting once he got there.
‘Joe,’ he said quietly. ‘We’ll meet at the mine.’
Joe merely smiled, and nodded. ‘Sure thing, doc.’
&
nbsp; Freddie made an elaborate gesture with his right hand, and invoked an ancient spell, and Joe turned into his familiar form – a huge grizzly bear. The creature raised itself up onto its two hind legs, raised its massive head back and roared, then it loped off, heading to the mine.
Freddie looked up to the dark black orb that hung huge above him. He crossed his arms over his chest and began to chant a mantra, a hypnotic series of words that he repeated again and again. His eyes began to unfocus and he fell into a trance. He began to walk to the edge of the cliff, building the chant in intensity. The words resounded off the rock walls, their echo filling the night.
He kept walking to the edge, his eyes closed. The chant was no longer words spoken. It was a whirling, thrumming sound, creating a vibrational energy that shook every cell in Freddie’s body. He was like a jet plane with the thrusters down full, about to take off.
He stepped off the edge of the cliff into the dark void. And he vanished.
CHAPTER 44
‘Turn me, babe, and I’ll go up and take a look,’ Andi said. ‘I’ll report back.’ Andi didn’t often call Kritta, her host, ‘babe’, but they’d had a few beers and were loosey goosey.
‘How come she always gets to have all the fun?’ Bess growled.
‘She’s not having any fun,’ Kritta shot back. ‘The both of you – we stay here, wait for instructions, keep our heads down. Understood?’
Kritta knew her position in Baphomet was at the very best tenuous. Yes, she’d delivered them The Book of Light, which was sitting in the middle of a basketball court a couple of buildings over, but she’d also failed to deliver the girl, and she’d disobeyed the Grand Master’s instructions to come straight to the mine. After Unholy was over, she expected to be punished in some way – perhaps just a scolding, a reprimand, but perhaps something more final too.