The Devil in Amber (23 page)

‘It was ours all along,’ laughed Mons. ‘But the ritual is clear. One of those annoying little codicils that were meant to stop us from raising the Beast. Only one all unknowing could restore the final piece.’

My mind raced back to Hubbard the Cupboard, scrabbling between the bells in that clapboard church what felt like months ago. He’d told me then and there that he was a patsy. Suddenly my mouth was bone dry. ‘You…you planted the handkerchief on Hubbard? You meant me to find it?’

Reynolds nodded gleefully. ‘Oh yes! I must say you’ve more than lived up to the reputation I sought so hard to debase for young Percy there.’

Flarge looked suitably miserable and shook his fist at his former boss. ‘Gad! You utter swine! How could you?’

Reynolds gave an idle flick of the hand. ‘You were useful, Percy, that’s all. You added–what’s the word?–
verisimilitude
. Box had to believe he was a wanted man so that he wouldn’t suspect for a moment that, all along, we were leading him here.’

Mons took up the tale. ‘We made it a fascinating journey, as full of surprise and co-incidence as any tall tale. There were even surprises for us! Like discovering that the smuggling operation I’d been
running across the Atlantic was rather more important than I thought.’

I felt dazed and nauseous. It was all I could do to stay upright. ‘Sal Volatile found the girl, didn’t he?’ I murmured. ‘Hidden away on that rotten old ship of yours. But he kept it a secret. Kept it until—’

‘Until Daley tortured the truth out of him,’ said Mons, evenly. ‘But he’d only got as far as naming the convent of St Bede before he…expired. I must say, it was a most hair-raising time for us. All our plans tottered on the brink of collapse. For without the Perfect Victim, the Prayer was useless.’

I looked over at poor Aggie, naked and insensate on the cold stone of that profane altar. ‘And I brought her to you, didn’t I?’ I whispered, utterly demolished.

‘Practically gift-wrapped,’ tittered Reynolds. ‘With a little help from Professor Reiss-Mueller. Poor sap. He thought he could leapfrog the competition. But it doesn’t work like that. One must play by the rules.’

Pandora straightened up, clearly enjoying the pantomime boldness of her luxuriant gown. ‘We’ve wound you up like a little clockwork mouse, dear brother. And now you’ve come home.’

My sister stepped forward and, after rifling my coat pockets, took the last fragment of the Prayer and handed it with great ceremony to Olympus Mons. He smoothed out the ancient silk, placed it on the frame alongside the rest of the heathen text and, sweeping back his hair, advanced towards the altar where Aggie lay on cold stone.

‘It begins at last!’ he cried. ‘The Devil is loose!’

A
mber-shirt thugs swooped on Flarge, Delilah and myself, rapidly binding us at the wrists and pushing us down onto our rumps, Pandora supervising.

‘Don’t want you to miss the show, Lucy,’ she said, cheerily, tying off the knots before slipping back into the throng.

‘Damn you,’ I hissed.

‘Too late for that,’ she cried gaily, smoothing some strange and noxious brown unguent onto her chest and calves.

A shattered cross had been rammed, upside down, into the stone of the altar and close by stinking candles fizzled and flared. From their stench I reckoned them to be made from corrupted human fat.

Mons’s acolytes, all of them naked save for the amber-shirts who guarded us, began to sway and rock on their heels as the filthy incense took hold, a low murmur bubbling in their upturned throats. Pandora thrashed about amongst the throng, grunting horribly, her hands held aloft in gleeful ecstasy, her bare feet scuffing over a carpet of broken Communion wafers–real this time–that
had evidently been looted from some church. I saw, to my disgust, that several of the masked lunatics were busily urinating on the Host.

We could only gaze on in absolute horror as the obscene ritual was enacted before us: the most finished piece of blackguardism since Caligula ran amok. Poor Agnes lay sprawled on her belly, rump in the air, whilst Mons pushed back his cape, revealing the strongly muscled contours of his body and intoned his hideous inversion of the Mass, kissing her all over at the points where a congregation would normally have muttered the responses.

As the animalistic grunting and snuffling increased to shattering volume and Mons’s hissed repudiation of Christ and the Virgin topped even that, I became aware of a piercing cry that turned my blood to ice-water.

‘Oh God,’ whispered Flarge. ‘Not that!’

‘What is it?’ I cried.

I could feel Flarge sagging right by me as his head sank onto his chest. ‘It’s all in the rituals they told me of. The slaughter of the innocent.’

I jerked my head around. A slim naked youth of perhaps fifteen years, his head disguised by a wolf-mask, was dragged forward by two of the amber-shirts. Evidently the news that he was to be sacrificed to his Nibs had been only recently relayed. He was jabbering in terror, trying desperately to convince his captors that they must choose another. But the burly guards merely scooped him up and, with awful strength, held him upside down by his shins. His hair, ringing wet with cold sweat, flopped towards the dusty floor and the wolf-mask fell with a sharp clatter, revealing a flushed face red and contorted with fear.

‘For God’s sake, Mons!’ I yelled. ‘Think what you’re doing!’

Pandora was at my side in an instant and I felt her hand crack across my cheek. ‘Silence!’ she shrieked. The Dark One must feed! He must
feed
!’

The amber-shirts staggered slightly under the youth’s weight but still they held him firm, like a trussed chicken. Despite the terrible rapture that seemed to be consuming Mons, he spared a moment to glance aside and wink at me. I whimpered with sheer impotent fury, calling upon all the saints to help me.

For answer, Mons produced a tiny silver blade, like a fruit knife, and slipped it quickly across the youth’s throat. The boy made no sound at all and the commotion in the chamber suddenly ceased. The heavy wet bubbling of arterial blood from his throat was the only noise to be heard, splashing horribly to the floor of the chamber in a great, frothing rush.

Mons stooped to catch the blood in a chalice, then, lifting it to his lips, he drank deep.

‘Oh my Christ,’ groaned Flarge.

Mouth befouled with the boy’s blood, Mons suddenly flung the remainder in a wide arc over the curve of Agnes’s smooth backside. At this, the girl began to stir and turned her face towards us three bound together. I prayed for her to remain insensible but she seemed to take in the full dread of her situation all at once and let out an awful scream.

Two more animal-masked followers leapt forward and, grasping her by the wrists, swung her over onto her back. From the blond braids of one and the flabby little body of the other, I knew them to be the amber-shirt elite who had stood with Mons on his Manhattan platform.

The ‘congregation’ responded to Aggie’s scream and the grunting, squealing and frenzied dancing took up again, a pounding drumbeat sounded from close by.

I turned away in disgust at the dark rime of blood that clung to Mons’s black moustaches. The dead body of the sacrificed youth was dropped to the rocky floor and then, with a whoop of bacchanalian delight, Mons gestured towards the corpse, inviting his acolytes to rub the foul substance onto their naked torsos.

Pandora rushed to the altar and dipped her hands into the ghastly wound on the youth’s throat that gaped like an empty sleeve. She smeared blood carelessly over her breasts and face and then reached out for Mons as though seeking praise–but he pushed her aside with some violence. Appallingly, I could see that beneath his black robe, Mons had become as priapic as a goat. Pandora fell back, looking, I have to say, a little put out.

‘Choose me!’ she yelled. ‘Why can’t it be me?’

Mons glared at her, apoplectic with rage. ‘Get back! Get back, you worthless drudge!’

Pandora wrang her bloodstained hands. ‘I know she’s the Perfect Victim, but, please, after the ritual’s done. You know how I feel—’

Mons’s face was growing black with fury. ‘You bother me with such trivia now? At the very moment of my greatest glory? You loathsome sow, do you think I could ever, ever even spare you a solitary thought?’

Pandora looked as though she’d been cracked across the chops.

Mons shook his head and laughed. ‘You were only chosen to join my side after your luckless brother was selected to be the one. He Who Comes All Unknowing. You pathetic parasite! Now get back amongst the rest of my worthless slaves and keep your mouth shut.’

Pandora literally staggered where she stood.

‘Oh, crumbs,’ I cried. ‘Boyfriend trouble again, sis? Just like old times.’

Expecting the usual scowl, I was shocked to see the utter blankness in Pandora’s face. She looked completely undone and her skin showed waxy and deathly pale beneath the streams of blood and stinking unguents that covered it.

Now Mons returned his attention to poor Aggie. He moved slowly, almost reverently towards her, his hands gory with haemoglobin, his cock twitching in anticipation of the diabolical coupling to come.

But it was not to be. I was suddenly aware of a muttering voice
from close by. At first I assumed that some hellish ritual was to accompany the dread moment, but to my astonishment I saw that Pandora had moved to one side, bending over the Jerusalem Prayer on its frame, her lips moving quickly as she declaimed the ancient and forbidden text.

Mons span round, appalled. ‘What are you doing? It’s too early! Too early, you senseless fool!’

He threw aside the little knife he’d used on the poor boy, sending it clattering down the steps of the altar as Pandora’s voice raced on, chattering through the ritual with almost supernatural speed. Mons dashed towards her, his fist raised to strike, but then stopped dead and whipped about as all the flaming torches and the beastly candles in the chamber suddenly…winked…out.

My scalp prickled and I felt as though a great weight were pressing on my chest.

‘Bloody ’ell,’ gasped Delilah. ‘What’s going hon?’

‘Yes,’ whispered Flarge. ‘I feel it too.’

A freezing draught crept through the darkness, colder than the snowy journey to the mountain, colder than anything I had ever known.

‘My God,’ I hissed. ‘Something’s coming!’

‘
He
is coming,’ croaked Flarge, his voice tiny and broken in that dreadful, dark place.

And then I felt once again that curious blanket of silence, as though we were all spinning in the total vacuum of space. In the sepulchral blackness, there was suddenly a form of light, a dreary, ghastly light like something rotten and long buried that has been unwisely disturbed. In this greenish phosphorescence, I became aware that all of Mons’s acolytes were silently creeping closer to the altar. Despite their ambitions, they were as terrified as us. In the shadows, though, something else was approaching. At first I took it to be more of the naked, animal-masked throng, but even in that weird luminescence I could see that the flesh was somehow
wrong.
What I took to be several people was in fact one great lumpen thing, its pale and spindly body thrashing about as it slobbered and crawled its way towards us. It was covered all over with eyes, tiny black orbs like those on a spider, yet somewhere in that mass of disgusting tissue there was the semblance of a human mouth. And to my unutterable horror, it was
singing.

It was some kind of bastardized plainsong, rather like a gramophone record of monks chanting that has somehow gone awry. And between gasps of this foul cacophony, the thing began to giggle.

As I looked, a second creature shuffled and crawled towards us, extruding itself from the darkness like an obscene sausage skin. This one had a vast maw that sparkled with filth and spit and waves of corruption seemed to spill from it. It was a thing of the grave, a thing of utter and profound darkness, and I shuddered to my very soul in its presence.

Something moved behind me and I yelled in terror–but it was only Flarge. ‘Shh!’ he hissed. ‘If you value your life, Box, silence! We haven’t much time!’

I thrilled with shock as I saw that the enterprising chap had managed to grasp the sacrificial knife–abandoned by Mons–between his heels and was dragging it towards him.

Delilah and I, with our backs towards him, could be of little aid but I was grateful for any distraction from the grisly apparitions. In seconds, Flarge’s straining hands had grabbed the knife and we had it between our hands, sawing desperately at the ropes that bound us.

“Ow we gonna get out hof ’ere?’ hissed Delilah.

‘We can’t escape,’ said Flarge flatly. ‘But there is a chance, a
chance
, we might be saved.’ To my surprise, he waved the little old book he’d retrieved from Daley’s pocket on the train. ‘It’s a dangerous business, this. None more dangerous. So there are safeguards. In
here
.’

I felt him jerk away and realized he was suddenly free. He looked wildly about but the entire wretched coven had eyes only for the filthy, squealing beasts that were undulating towards them.

With the book in one hand, Flarge got into a crouching position and grasped a small, powdery rock. In seconds, he had made a circuit of me and Delilah and I realized that he was scrawling as though with chalk on the rough floor of the cave. But it was a five-pointed star that he drew, not a circle as I’d expected. Flicking through the brittle pages of the book, he muttered under his breath and then frantically scrabbled some words and symbols that it was impossible to make out in the queer light.

‘If only there were more time,’ cried Flarge, hoarsely. ‘It’s a bad job!
Hod, Malchut, Kether, Binah, Cerburah
! A bad job. But the best I can do. You see, your sister’s intervention means the invocation hasn’t been properly performed. Like the cad Reynolds said, there are rules–and that might give us hope.’

He froze and I too turned to see that all of us, Mons, Pandora, the acolytes, were completely surrounded by legions of the unspeakable creatures, rolling and slobbering over one another like maggots in a fisherman’s basket. The stench was so overwhelming that I gagged.

But it was not this that arrested us. For over the altar, forming in the very air, was the strange, hazy smoke that I had seen out on the
Stiffkey
and again on the Norfolk marsh. Just as before, twin points of red light suddenly blazed into life but this time the apparition rapidly assumed a terrible solidity.

The thing was gigantic. The wreaths of smoke wound round and round each other like the bindings on a mummy until massive furry haunches, greasy and bestial, emerged from the murk. As though for dramatic effect, the flaming torches and candles relumed and an awed gasp rippled through the assembly.

The great muscular legs of the creature terminated in hooves, black and smeared with filth that was even now creeping upwards in concert with the pall of strange smoke. This too began to solidify and a great human torso rose up above the legs, the skin oily with sweat, yet the stomach was covered all over in lurid green scales like those on a fish.

Now, with great rapidity, the rest of the monstrous beast took shape. Mammoth female breasts, firm, ripe and
blue
, rose from the torso, the swollen nipples dripping with black milk. At last the head was revealed, resolving itself around those pitiless red eyes in the shape of a sheep’s head, vast shining horns projecting from the furrowed brow, patches of bare bone showing through amongst the long, lank human hair that spewed from its scalp.

‘Oh, God!’ gasped Flarge. ‘He’s free! Banebdjed! The Witch Lord! He comes to conjoin with the Lamb in mockery of God!’

The creature–this devil, whatever it was–began to turn its head. It was such an uncanny sight that my guts turned absolutely to water. The furious eyes blazed within its withered, skull-like face, a face covered in matted hair, fur and feathers. Immense leathery wings projected from the shoulders.