Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  ‘But did you love him?’

  That was the trick question. ‘Love, no,’ Sean conceded.

  ‘Did he read you bed-time stories?’

  Sean started to cry. Then he stopped crying. His face resumed its angry expression. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘No. But I want to know.’

  ‘Fantasy. Sword and sorcery. You know the sort of thing. Fritz Leiber and the Grey Mouser stories. Conan. Thomas Covenant. Not so much of the Tolkiens, too bloody densely written I always thought, but I loved the films when I saw them. Dad took me to -’

  Sean trailed off: too many memories.

  ‘I don’t read that stuff myself,’ Dougie said gently. ‘I’m more a Dickens man. And Dan Brown, when the mood takes me. But you certainly know your stuff, Sean, when it comes to the old sword and sorcery, eh?’ Dougie smiled, approvingly.

  He left a huge pause for Sean to fill.

  After quite some time, Sean filled it. Continuing his thought as if there hadn’t been a gap at all.

  ‘We used to laugh at the irony of it all. When, you know. All the stuff that happened, happened. Demons from Hell. Sword fights in the streets - dead people, resurrecting. These were our bedside stories coming true, that’s what dad used to say.’

  Another silence grew.

  ‘Tell me more about your dad,’ said Dougie, gently. ‘Just anything. Tell me.’

  Sean shook his head.

  ‘Anything. Any little thing may help us find him. Tell me Sean, please, you’re an extraordinary person to have survived such an upbringing, tell me.’ Dougie’s voice was soft and soothing; he could hypnotise a susceptible person in minutes by this means. It was illegal in a formal interview situation, but this was just a chat with a friendly witness, so the gloves were off.

  ‘How can it help you?’

  ‘It might gives us clues about his psychology, his behaviour patterns. What he knows, who he knows, these are all things that the demon who possessed him will know too. So anything you tell us can help us. However odd. However random. Any hint, at all. Anything, Sean.’

  ‘I’ve said it all,’ Sean protested. ‘Dad was a builder. Self-employed. Always off on jobs. Travelled the country, Aunt Martha used to mind me.’

  Dougie had met her. She wasn’t Sean’s actual aunt; she was a former madam who was paid by Gogarty to baby-sit his kid. A brassy mumsy type with a salty sense of humour. Dougie had liked her hugely.

  ‘I was one of those kids, I lived in a world of my own. But I never wanted for anything, you know?’ Sean said. ‘Me and dad used to play model trains together. Your forensic people took my track apart and never put it together again properly. My mum died – overdose –’

  ‘Why? Why exactly did she kill herself?’

  ‘How should I know? I was eleven. How should I know!’

  ‘Did she leave a note? A letter to you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Your mother’s sister Violeta says she must have done. Left a note, I mean. She was the kind of person who would have done. So maybe your father found the note and destroyed it.’

  Sean considered that. A note from his dead mother than he had never seen or known about. It opened up a chasm that a man’s soul could easily fall into.

  ‘You think he drove her to it? To commit suicide?’ Dougie asked.

  Sean looked startled.

  ‘No. Of course not. They always got on well. No quarrels, nothing,’ Sean said.

  ‘You were only eleven. If there were tensions, you wouldn’t necessarily have been aware of them.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re saying I’m wrong to think they always got on well?’

  ‘You weren’t to know. What went on. Marriages are, let’s face it, strange things.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘I’m just –’

  Sean’s voice remained quiet, his words half-murmured, but there was a hint of mockery in his words now: ‘Trying to stir things up, are you? Make me feel bad? Hmm? You bloody coppers, you - What do you actually want from me?’

  ‘Just to ask you these questions.’

  ‘You want to know how I am? How I’m bearing up? Hmm? Am I coping with my stress and my post-traumatic stress syndrome and my Stockhausen’s syndrome and my every other fucking thing that’s wrong with me syndrome? Is that it? You just came to see me out of the goodness of your heart, to see if poor old Sean was happy?’

  Sean was clearly very angry; but his tone was flat and devoid of emotion and he displayed no body language whatever. The words came out of him as if he were a ventriloquist’s doll. Dougie wondered if he’d always been like that.

  Dougie hesitated before his next reply, then bowled it: ‘Yes,’ he said calmly, and untruthfully.

  ‘You’re a fucking liar,’ Sean said, as if he were telling Dougie he was a very tall man. ‘You don’t care about me, do you? You don’t care if I live or die. You just want a clue to lead you to the monster who happened to be my father.’

  Sean had raised his voice a little by now, but it didn’t come over as shouting, it was more like very loud muttering. And his body remained eerily still.

  ‘And do you have any such clues, Sean?’

  Dougie’s own voice was soft as silk. He waited for Sean to spill.

  ‘How would I? I knew nothing about him. He was a stranger. He murdered –’ Sean choked off the prospect of tears, abruptly, and carried on: ‘ – all those people, even when I was a kid he was doing it, the first one died when I was two, the dinner lady, I read it in the papers.’

  That was Denise Laverty, killed – so it was believed - by Gogarty when he was in Bradford in 1984. There were now ninety-seven murders provisionally attributed to Gogarty before he moved to London. There was as yet no direct evidence to speak of in any of the cases. But circumstantially, they were compelling, and the press had had a field day reporting on the Gogarty Trail of Death.

  ‘And when I went to big school, that first week, another one died, a teenage girl she was, when he was supposed to be away in Leeds. And when I was in sixth form, six died then, that’s what I read, and when I had my first job, on the till in haberdashery in Selfridge’s in Oxford Street, one died in my first week.’

  ‘That’s supposition,’ pointed out Dougie. ‘We don’t know for certain he was guilty of those particular murders.’

  ‘But you think he was.’

  ‘But I think he was,’ Dougie conceded.

  ‘All that time I was kidding myself that I was a grown up finally, that I knew what was what. And actually I knew fuck all! I - He’d still be killing now if you hadn’t – it was all lies, all my life -’

  ‘Did your father ever talk about the hell kind?’ said Dougie.

  Sean was silenced. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘He approved of them,’ Dougie suggested.

  ‘No. Yes. He felt sorry for them. He once –’ Sean bit off his words.

  ‘Once what?’

  Sean was silent.

  ‘Tell me, Sean,’ said Dougie.

  ‘He thought they were misunderstood, that’s what he thought. Not all of them – he hated Mammon and Belial and the rest. But the ordinary demons, the green ones, the lesser reds. They got a bum rap, he said. Especially the little ones, the kids, they got the worst of it. Hated not just by humans but by their own families too. He used to get irate about that. Demon children who got beaten up, abandoned, or thrown in the river. He even tried to –’

  Dougie waited. Eventually Sean continued. ‘He talked about adopting. You can do that, you know. Parent a lost hell beast. Foster them. They think it helps them, gives them a sense of identity. Of -’ Sean’s eyes were glassy. ‘ – belonging.’

  ‘Did he do anything about it?’

  Sean thought a moment. Then he nodded.

  ‘He took me once. To a home. Where they kept child hell bastards. He wanted to see for himself what these places were like. Can you believe that? A foster home for demons
!’

  ‘Where?’ said Dougie.

  ‘South London. I think. Can’t remember the street. Somewhere in South London. Woman’s name was – forgotten it. No I haven’t. Yes I have. Sorry, that’s not much -’

  ‘That’s enough. That’s all we need. Demon-fosterer. South London. Female. Thank you, Sean.’

  Dougie felt a surge of triumph.

  Chapter 14

  Tom and Gina took a few steps into the cathedral; then the door slammed shut behind them, cutting off the sunlight and turning daytime into darkest night.

  All around them was gloom; the air was thick with pungent smoky incense. Tom felt as if he was drowning in tainted air and only the ecstasy buzz kept him moving forward.

  Tom had visited St Paul’s as a child, and he’d been struck then by its cheerful airy brightness. For him it was the emblem of Enlightenment rationality. But now the clerestory windows in the nave had been blacked out and only the long arrays of candles in the aisles and the nave lit the Stygian blackness. They could hear huge beasts flapping in the air above them, occasionally swooping down to the floor and creating a breeze with their wing beats, before flying back up to hover below the vault.

  Once there, grazing and bumping against the roof of St Paul’s, their ominous shapes were faintly lit by beams of rainbow light trickling through the stained glass windows of the apse, fighting a path through densest shadow.

  Tom blinked to get his night vision, and eventually realised that the huge shadow directly in front of him was not a shadow at all. It was the outline of a vast and coal-black serpent that filled almost the whole width of the nave.

  Gina shone a torch. They saw that the creature’s coils encompassed even the statue of Wellington on the far side of the Cathedral. A British hero atop his plucky horse: his body and Copenhagen’s withers brutally clenched by the serpent’s winding tail.

  Tom and Gina walked closer to the slumbering monster. Tom was a pace behind, close enough to smell Gina’s jasmine-scented hair product; the only hint of sensory pleasure in this noxious basilica, filled with a stormy ocean of rank aromas, the foulest of which was the suppurating stench of black hellebore.

  They walked, led by the wide beam of Gina’s police-issue torch. Tom had forgotten to bring one, and he cursed himself for lack of forethought. So he switched on the torch on his e-berry and held it before him; its thin beam chasing away some of the despair that was oppressing him.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he whispered to Gina as they inched their way deeper into the cathedral. His memory tactlessly reminded him that the hellebore they were breathing was a baneful incense, toxic in high doses; and in lower doses renowned as a purgative and an emmenagogue.

  Thus, if the anti-incense pills they’d taken that morning didn’t work, they would both shit themselves; and Gina would endure a torrential discharge of her menses.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Gina whispered back.

  They walked on.

  Above and around and scurrying at their feet in the choking darkness were tiny and impossible creatures that Tom could only half glimpse in Gina’s torch’s beam and his e-berry’s narrow tunnel of light.

  As an experiment, Tom tried blinking and looking at the beasts a second time. Invariably, at a second glance, the shape and nature of the creatures changed. Tom wondered how much of what he saw here was real, and how much illusion.

  They squeezed their careful way through the gap between mouldy wall and black moist monster in the southern aisle. As they did so they found themselves wading through something that might have been blood; or something far worse.

  Meanwhile wings continued to flutter and beat above. Cawing and roaring sounds were a ceaseless cacophony. Tiny creatures scurried underfoot. The smoky air felt malign.

  They made their way past the wrecked remnants of a once-grand statue of Nelson with headless lions at its feet, and emerged into the Crossing of the Cathedral. From here, they could see the staid mosaics of Thornhill on the soaring cupola above: the plasterwork ripped and torn and the calm designs angrily daubed with demonic sigils. The light from the stained glass windows in the apse seeped through more generously here and lit the choir stalls, warming the wood.

  As Gina’s torch darted around, Tom could see that Grinling Gibbons’ exquisite woodcarvings of cherubs and trumpeting angels in the choir stalls had been eaten away by angry teeth.

  High above them the vault of the cathedral shone with luminescent slime trails. Beneath the stains, Tom could still see glimpses of the roundels depicting the creation of the beasts and of the birds and of the fish: Neo-Byzantine mosaics of coloured glass that glittered out their stories in this darkened Hell.

  Tom looked at Gina, and realised that he was terrified.

  They moved to the centre of the Crossing, their progress eased by the faint shafts of sunlight through the transept windows at each end. On the floor, a plaque to honour Sir Christopher Wren, bearing the words Si monumentum requiris circumspice: ‘If you seek his memorial, look around.’

  ‘Where’s the snout?’ Tom asked, wearily.

  Almost on cue – perhaps she had been lurking in wait for them? - a black-haired Egyptian princess stepped out from behind an Ionic pillar, and approached them carrying a lit taper in her hands.

  This princess walked with the elegant languor of the long dead. Her bronzed bare arms were gold-bangled; her face impassive. As she got closer, the light from the flames danced goldenly upon her bronzed features. Her robes were dazzlingly bright, restored to the colours they had borne when this girl had died. Tom could see the scars around her flared nostrils where her brain had been scooped out of her skull prior to her mummification.

  Tom could see faint shadows behind pillars. Her bodyguards and maidservants no doubt. But none dared venture too close.

  The princess, Herneith, looked at him, then looked away. Her gaze settled on Gina, as if giving her permission to speak.

  ‘Herneith, this is Tom,’ Gina said.

  Tom reached out and took the princess’s small hand, and shook it, despite her evident reluctance. Her skin was chill. ‘We can talk freely here,’ said Herneith. ‘My servants are discreet. And the other creatures – well. They do not care, they do not listen.’

  Her words echoed in the cavernous space. Wings still fluttered; claws scratched; things hissed.

  ‘Belial?’ asked Gina.

  ‘He’s elsewhere,’ she said flatly, her face expressionless. ‘On Sunday he holds court in the High Altar, under the baldacchino. That’s his office. Deals are done then. Sex is bought, sex is sold. You know the kind of thing.’ She fixed Tom with a glare. He nodded: he did indeed know the kind of thing.

  ‘But most days,’ she continued, in the same cool tones, ‘he’s at one of the palaces. He likes to watch his people rutting, in the hope he might one day get a hard-on himself.’ She sneered when she said this. It made her face look ugly. But then the impassive look returned.

  Belial, Tom knew, was her master - the demon of lust, greed and gluttony. He ran the sex rackets in London, pimping out the most beautiful of the Resurrected in the licensed brothels at the former royal palaces of Buckingham and St James’s, and the former Episcopal Palace of Lambeth.

  ‘What can you tell us?’ prompted Gina.

  Tom’s throat was dry; he realised he couldn’t swallow. He wished he had some gum. To his chagrin, he realised he couldn’t take his eyes off Herneith. The swell of her breasts, the slimness of her waist, the perfect beauty of her face, the composure of her bearing; all these captivated him.

  He’d read her Scotland Yard Covert Human Intelligence Source file - the dossier and log kept on all informants. So he knew she’d been a Princess in the First Dynasty and had murdered her brother, for reasons too complex for even Tom to fathom. Then, after being tried and executed, she was nevertheless gifted with the honourable treatment due to one of her exalted rank.

  Hence her mummified body had been touched with a priest’s adze, so that she would be able to breathe and spe
ak in the afterlife; and papyri texts had been left on the walls of her tomb with spells and detailed instructions to guide her safely in her new existence. She had been executed by her own people for her terrible crime; but had then been given a route map and provisions to guide her through the next plane of her existence. And like all of her kind she had welcomed death, and had been entirely prepared for it.

  But when Herneith had passed over, her nightmare began; for all she had been told about the underworld proved to be lies. Instead of a glorious after-life of slaves and power as she had been promised, she found herself in the ghastly bleakness of the Hell Dimension. And there, for thousands of years, she had dwelled, and had been less than nothing.

  And now she was a copper’s nark. Which, in Tom’s book, was even less than less than nothing.

  ‘What can you offer?’ Herneith said to Gina, exuding arrogance with every syllable.

  Gina shrugged: conveying that she was entirely uncowed by this bitch’s hauteur.

  ‘Freedom from aggro. A bit of a quid pro quo. You know the score, darling.’

  Only DI Gina Henderson, Tom marvelled, would call a long dead mummified Egyptian princess ‘darling’.

  ‘I want a hundred citizenships.’

  Gina rolled her eyes, looked ready to storm off.

  ‘I can only offer the one,’ she snapped, eventually.

  ‘Is this your pitiful attempt to barter?’ Herneith sneered.

  ‘Nope. Take it or fucking leave it, girl. One’s all you’re getting. Even that’s more than my guvnor wanted to offer.’ Gina offered up her fiercest East Ender glare. It was ‘fuck you’ in a glance.

  Tom remembered Dougie’s words on the subject, after Fillide and Roy Hall had left the briefing. Seventeen expletives in a twenty-word sentence, a record even by his standards.

  ‘Then, a deal.’ Herneith paused. ‘Is this about the demon who has been killing humans?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘You want to know its name.’

  ‘We do. Nice guessing, hon. But, you know, hurry the fuck up, eh?’ Gina said.