Pantheon 00 - Age of Godpunk (22 page)

And then everything, for Guy, got markedly worse.

1977

H
E NEVER EVEN
saw them coming.

They pounced one night as he was shambling drunkenly home from the pub. They swept him up from behind, shoved a hessian sack over his head, bound his wrists behind his back, and bundled him into the boot of a car. One moment he was tootling along through the streets of Chelsea, minding his own business. The next, he was a captive, in a confined space, being driven who knew where.

The car bumped and juddered along for what felt like hours. What with the sack and the exhaust fumes, Guy was half-suffocated, not to mention completely terrified. The jolting seemed neverending. Where were they taking him? Who were they?

A horrendous thought struck him. They were Irish Republican terrorists. Of course.

Lately there had been a spate of high-profile kidnappings by IRA units: Lord and Lady Donoughmere, the Dutch businessman Tiede Herrema, and the German industrialist Thomas Niedermayer, to name but four. All those abductions had taken place in Ireland, but there was no reason why the kidnappers shouldn’t have expanded their sphere of operations to mainland Britain. The IRA were all over the country at present.

Guy racked his brains to think why they might have chosen him. The only answer he could come up with was Alastor Wylie. He was Wylie’s stepson, and could be used for leverage on Wylie. Technically, at least. Someone evidently did not know how the relationship between him and Wylie stood. There was no love lost there.

Then again, Guy was still his mother’s son. The pressure could be put on her husband through her. She would not want to see Guy hurt or killed, even if Wylie couldn’t care less about him. Wylie would have to take her wishes into account when considering any ransom demands, which would probably be for political prisoners to be freed from jail. For her sake, he would be obliged to negotiate for Guy’s life.

To the best of Guy’s knowledge, the IRA had so far released all their kidnap victims unharmed. Wait. No, not all. Nothing had been heard of Neidermayer since he was taken outside his house in Belfast back in ’73. Nobody knew where he was, and it was widely assumed that after all this time he must be dead.

A renewed surge of fear made Guy’s stomach churn. He fought not to throw up. If he did, he would be stuck with his head in a bag full of his own puke for the foreseeable future.

He mastered his nausea, and was quite proud of himself for doing so.

Then the sound of the car’s tyres changed, going from the thrum of tarmac to the crunch of loose stones. A gravel driveway? Or an unmade road leading to a remote farmhouse or perhaps to a disused quarry?

A few more twists and turns, then the car braked to a halt. The engine died. The boot lid opened. Chilly night air rushed in. Guy was manhandled roughly out. He discerned people moving around him, three, maybe four of them.

“Listen,” he said. “Please listen. I don’t know who you are, but if you are who I think you are, you’ve got the wrong man. I mean, the right man, but for the wrong reasons. If you’re trying to get to Wylie, believe me, I’m not the one you want.”

Someone laughed, coarsely.

“I mean it,” Guy went on. “Wylie and me, we’re not related, not as such, and we don’t get on. I hate the man. Honestly, he’s everything I detest. I’m more on your side than I’d ever be on his. I know him. I know what he is. I don’t want anything to do with him.”

“Come on, sunshine.” Hands seized his upper arms, and he was steered along. “This way. Got somewhere nice and cosy waiting for you.”

The accent wasn’t Irish. It sounded Londoner, if anything. That was some small comfort. This was no IRA plot, at least.

“Steps ahead,” said the man. “Mind yourself.”

Guy shuffled up a short slight of stone stairs. He passed through an entranceway. The acoustics of their footfalls altered, taking on an indoor echo.

More walking. He heard a door being unlocked.

“Another set of stairs. Steep. Try not to trip.”

It was a descent this time. Smells of mould and mildew permeated through the sack. A cellar, most likely.

At the bottom, the hands let go. Guy deciding to give ingratiation one last try.

“Just tell me who you are,” he said. “Maybe we’ve got more in common than you think. Never mind who my stepfather is. I’m just an ordinary bloke. Power to the people, yeah?”

“That might have worked for Patty Hearst, mate,” said the kidnapper, “but you’re barking up the wrong tree here.” His colleagues sniggered. “Now, make yourself comfortable. It’s going to be a while before we come back for you. Don’t even think about taking that bag off your head. And if you need to piss... Well, I’d try and hold it, if I were you.”

With that, they left him.

The door slammed.

A key turned.

Guy was alone.

I
T WAS A
long night. Some of it Guy spent whimpering in misery. Some of it he spent in futile prayer. Mostly he just sat in a corner of the cellar, his mind running through all the ways this situation might play out. The majority of the scenarios ended with Wylie handing over a small fortune in ransom money or else persuading someone in government to grant the kidnappers whatever boon they asked for. A few of the scenarios, however, reached a less pleasant conclusion: Wylie refusing to help in any way, Guy’s cold body being found in a field or, worse still, never found at all. Perhaps parts of him would be sent through the post – a finger, an ear – like in the gangster films. God, please not. Not that.

It must have been morning when his kidnappers finally returned. By now, Guy urgently needed to urinate. Last night’s pints had worked their way through his system and his bladder was groaning.

He communicated his need, and grudgingly a bucket was fetched. His wrists were untied. He knelt and relieved himself with gratitude.

He was given food. A roll and butter, a cup of milky tea. He was told he could lift the sack just far enough to expose his mouth. He ate and drank.

“Thank you,” he said, making it as heartfelt as he could.

“Got to keep body and soul together,” said the kidnapper, seemingly the one only of them designated to speak to him. “For now, at any rate.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll find out. Tonight.”

T
HEY HAD LEFT
his hands unbound, so he began tentatively exploring his surroundings. Remembering the admonition against removing the sack, he groped his way around with arms outstretched like a child playing blind man’s bluff.

Yes, a cellar. A pretty big one. Brick walls. A number of large, empty wine racks. Several items of – ow, his shins! – discarded furniture and bric-a-brac.

His fingers accrued a fur of dust and cobweb.

Vaguely he had hoped to find a window, a trapdoor, some kind of aperture to the outside world, something he could force his way out through. No such luck.

He sat again. He wondered if his mother and Wylie had been informed he was missing yet. Probably the ransom note had already been delivered, the individual letters clipped from newspaper headlines and glued to a sheet of foolscap, as was traditional. Or it could just have been an anonymous phone call – telephone box, handkerchief over the receiver to disguise the speaker’s voice. “We have your stepson, Mr Wylie. Now listen very carefully...”

Wylie would play ball. Guy’s mother would see to that. She would never forgive her husband if he let her son die.

Then again, what did her opinion matter to Alastor Wylie? Guy still could not shake the conviction that Wylie was truly the Devil. His mother, by that token, was just a puppet in Wylie’s overall scheme, a mere pawn. Wylie didn’t love her, he was simply using her in order to get to her son. In which case, it would hardly matter to him if, grief-stricken and angered, she turned on him and rejected him. Indeed, if Guy was dead, Beatrice Wylie would no longer serve a purpose, as far as her husband was concerned. He would no doubt devise some way of getting rid of her – divorce or, worse, an arranged fatality of some sort, a car crash, a skiing accident, a mishap in the shower.

And yet, if Wylie wanted Guy so badly, if, as Satan, he was so keen to sink his hooks into him, surely he would never allow the kidnappers to get away with murdering him. No, he would use his infernal powers to rescue him, perhaps sending in lesser demons disguised as SAS soldiers or antiterrorist police to retrieve him. That, yes, would work in Wylie’s favour. A grateful Guy, glad to be alive, would be indebted to him. Enough – or so Wylie might hope – to pledge him his undying loyalty.

In fact, what if Wylie had orchestrated this entire operation? What if he was the mastermind behind it? What if it was the next phase in his long-drawn-out siege on Guy Lucas’s soul?

That cast everything in a whole new light. All at once, Guy was the hero of the piece rather than the hapless victim.

He felt a flush of bravery. It was all about him now – his fortitude, his resolve, his obstinacy. Wylie would not get what he desired. No way. Guy would rather die.

H
OURS LATER, MANY
hours, he had no idea how many, the cellar door reopened.

“Right, my lad. Up you get. It’s time.”

“Time?” said Guy. “Time for what?”

“You’ll see. You’re a lucky fellow, you know.”

“Yeah, I really feel it.”

“Privileged, even,” the kidnapper said. “Not a lot of people have been granted the honour of taking part in what you’re about to take part in.”

“Which is what?”

“Patience, mate. Just for a few minutes more.”

Guy was led up out of the cellar. He was taken back through the hall, or whatever it was, the spacious echoing place. Back outdoors and down the stone steps – the front steps to a sizeable house, he reckoned, a mansion.

There was gravel underfoot, then lawn. No light was coming through the coarse weave of the sack. It must be night-time once more. He grass hissed softly when trodden on, as though wet with dew.

The ground sloped upwards and became tussocky and uneven. He stumbled once or twice, but his captors supported him, keeping him upright. An owl hooted. A fox howled.

And then Guy heard something else. Faint. Distant. A rising and falling sound, somewhat like the drone of bees.

It grew closer, clearer, and he realised it was voices.

Voices chanting.

In English?

No, another tongue. Latin, if he didn’t miss his guess. It wasn’t so much the individual words as the shapes of them, familiar to him from his Classics lessons at Scarsworth Hall. All the
–um
and
–us
endings. The internal rhythms.

Men and women, intoning in a dead language.

Guy was suddenly very afraid. Far more afraid than at any other time during his ordeal so far. The fear went deep, beyond the terror of pain and suffering, down to a more visceral level, a spiritual level even.

Someone whisked the sack off his head.

For all that it was dark, he was dazzled. The moon was full, bright and high, and to his unadapted eyes it blazed like the sun. Squinting, he caught glimpses of the scene it illuminated, silvery impressions.

The skeletal remains of a chapel. Roofless. Broken rafters reaching to the sky. Tumbledown walls. The hollow arches where windows had once stood.

Within the chapel, people. Perhaps twenty of them. All clad in identical, ankle-length robes. Faces hidden inside hoods.

Candles by the dozen, black ones, flickering. A brazier throwing up flames and spirals of ember.

An altar. The chapel’s original altar. Covered in a black cloth.

On the cloth, arcane symbols. Principally, a pentagram inside a circle.

Behind the altar, a huge crucifix, inverted.

In front of the crucifix, a man. Robed and hooded like the others. In his hand, a dagger.

Guy looked to his left and right. The men holding him were robed and hooded too. Moonlight etched a feature here and there – the tip of a nose, a grimly smiling mouth.

He tried to wrench his arms out of their grasp, intending to run, but they gripped him all the more tightly. They forced him onward across the grass, covering the final hundred yards to the chapel. Guy writhed. Guy yelled. To no avail.

His protests drew the attention of the people inside the ruined chapel. They broke off from their chanting and fell expectantly silent.

Guy was dragged through the entrance where stout oak doors would once have hung. He was beside himself with terror. He could hear himself trying to plead with the men holding him. He could hear how his own sentences made no sense. They were more or less gibberish.

The celebrants bowed as Guy passed. Their hands were folded inside their sleeves, monk-fashion. They were eerily reverent.

He was weak-kneed by the time he reached the altar. His heart was thundering.

He knew what this was.

Oh, God. He knew only too well, from his researches, his reading.

It was what Clive Milward had attempted so cackhandedly at school. But here, it was being performed by people who were clearly experienced and well versed in the lore.