Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  ‘How?’

  Dougie had no idea.

  ‘Could Maggie Osborne help?’ Gina asked.

  Maggie was the Assistant Commissioner in charge of warlock liaison at New Scotland Yard.

  ‘She’s too devious. A greasy-poler. I need – I don’t know what I need. But I’ll find a way,’ said Dougie. ‘We can’t do this by ourselves.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No we can’t.’

  ‘I agree. We can’t.’

  Dougie realised he was repeating himself.

  He also realised that Gina was one very sexy bitch, and she was sitting next to him on the sofa, not drunk but mellowed by her small glass of wine; and flushed, and definitely up for it.

  Definitely.

  There was a near-palpable moment. A moment when something almost happened between them. When they almost reached out for each other in an embrace that would inevitably become a kiss.

  A moment when -

  But the moment passed. Dougie didn’t know why. It just passed.

  At 11.45pm they got the call from Catriona.

  ‘We’ve found the foster mother,’ she said. ‘She lives in Walworth. And good news, we think Gogarty is living there too.’

  Chapter 18

  Tom had been granted a privileged bird’s eye view of Demon City during his brief flight from the dome of St Paul’s to Ludgate Circus, prior to his crash landing upon the hard pavement below.

  He’d seen St Paul’s aflame, the conflagration that Hitler had failed to achieve. He’d seen basking creatures on the dome topple off in their hundreds with scales scorched and bleeding. He’d seen the clouds of demon birds in the sky seared with a bright deadly light. And he’d seen the dazzling vista of the City of Demons at night: bright, busy, sinister.

  Tom flew in his own idiosyncratic fashion, not in the time-hallowed way in which his mother and her friends and his aunties all flew. There was no bonfire involved, there no chanting, there was no orgy. He was not naked. He consumed no hallucinogens or aphrodisiacs. He was not orgasmic in flight, fucking the night air with his body. He merely flew.

  He flew with arms outstretched, head held high, squeezing the air with his mind so that it supported him. And from below, the green and red and black and devoid-of-colour demons of the City saw him as one of their own. Just another flying hell creature, amidst the weaving flocks that cluttered the evening sky.

  For Tom, these were the most extraordinary moments of his life: aloft above the burning dome, caught in the updraft of its mystic fires, with shrieking demons flapping out of his way. He soared high and savoured it. Then he swept down low, shooting groundwards with unerring aim, with the firm intention of hitting the ground running then continuing to run till he had got the fuck out of there.

  But a moment of self-doubt had assailed him while he was still twenty feet from the pavement.

  In consequence the magic deserted him and he tumbled through a sky that no longer supported him, but instead beat his body with bony fists of air. The ground hit hard, and he bounced, many times, and when he woke up he was in hospital.

  It was bad, he knew that. He couldn’t open his eyes. His head throbbed. He was deaf, surrounded by an aching void of silence. His body ached appallingly, from his face to his toes and every part along the way. He remembered his head cracking on the pavement. He was astonished he wasn’t dead.

  He blinked, and blinked again, and finally his eyes unglued and opened. But his vision was still blurred. He was seeing double and not well. Even so, he could tell that both his arms were splinted and his hands were bandaged. He wasn’t sure if he did or didn’t have legs; he hoped for the best there. He turned his head to one side and regretted it; pain jolted him like a slap. But he could see there was a drip attached to his right arm which, he guessed, was pumping him full of morphine.

  Tom raised his right arm and touched his face with his unbandaged finger tips, and felt the eerie sheen of polymer. A biomask, he guessed, over his face, to compress the facial wounds he had sustained at the beaks of the demonic birds. He could imagine what he looked like beneath the mask.

  Terror swept over him in tides. He realised he was having a full-blown panic attack.

  He continued to touch his face. One eye was bandaged, so he was clearly seeing double from his one good eye. He remembered the bird demon carrying his eyeball away; yeah, that memory stung. And the double-world he could see from his only eye was shimmering and changing shape. His throat was dry, dry as a desert, and that made it hard to swallow. His heart was pounding fast.

  He listened intently to the sound of his blood flowing; it was like hearing a cataract. He realised there was something terribly wrong with him. His vision was getting worse. His heart started to flutter, and then stopped entirely. He decided he was having a heart attack of some kind.

  A few moments later his resumed beating, but arrhtythmically. He tried to move his hands and he couldn’t. He could feel his head exploding and he listened to his arteries and they still thundered like waterfalls inside him. He was sure now that he was suffering some kind of stroke. That and the heart attacks would mean the end of him. He’d either die or end up brain damaged.

  A nurse came over.

  ‘Hello Tom.’

  He tried to speak, to explain to this person his state of medical crisis, but he couldn’t utter any words. His tongue was thick and he couldn’t use it to speak. And he couldn’t in any case think of the words he wanted to say. He knew there was a word to describe an inability to think of words, and he could not think what that word might be. He could however feel the haemorrhages in his brain as if they were hard splashes of water upon his skin. But from the nurse’s placid expression, he deduced he wasn’t displaying any visible signs of these major cerebro-vascular insults; probably because his face was covered in a mask, and his arms were bandaged and immobile.

  He tried to tell the nurse to look out for the VFs on the monitor, so that she would call for help. But he couldn’t speak because of the mini-strokes and heart attacks that were causing the VFs.

  Vicious circle.

  Once he hit asystole or the VFs escalated to crisis pitch, the machine would trigger an alarm and the crash cart would be wheeled out. But by that point, he concluded, he’d be brain dead.

  ‘Don’t try to speak. You’ve been badly injured.’

  Tom was woozy. But he was still alert enough to realise the drugs in his system were killing him, by stifling his magical powers of healing.

  ‘You had a fall, Tom. Did you fall out of a window?’

  Tom tried to gather all his strength into his hands, to grab and shake her, but he could not.

  ‘Your colleagues are on their way to see you.’

  Tom tried to speak but could not. He settled for looking sad and helpless. He could manage that without moving a single part of his body. With great effort, he closed his one undamaged eye and pretended to sleep.

  And then he slept.

  When he woke up, some time later, he was relieved to find he was still alive. The nurse had gone; he was alone except for the four other patients in the high dependency ward, who had their own problems. But his heart was still pounding fast, and he was sure he would suffer a full scale cerebral haemorrhage sooner rather than later. But at least he could, for the moment, move his hands again. So he grabbed the IV tube and ripped the saline drip out of his arm.

  In a few minutes his body would hurt like fuck. But he needed to use some healing spells upon himself or he was done for. He tried to remember everything his mother had taught him. Before she became useless and always angry and pickled in booze.

  Tom was by now aphasic in English, but still coherent in Old Tongue. So he began to chant.

  Skip back twenty-one years. To the moment of Tom’s birth.

  Tom opened his eyes and saw five long haired women with beaming smiles and horn-rimmed spectacles and floral dresses staring at him, and he heard the angry groaning of the woman whose body had just surrendered him. And he
thought, I am alive.

  He tried to speak but couldn’t. That took him another six months.

  By the time he was three years old, Tom was reading the novels of Charles Dickens and Dostoevsky and Herman Melville and Ursula Le Guin and Robert Jordan and Anne McCaffrey. He still had them all by heart.

  Tom’s mother was naked. His grandmother Alexandra was naked too. His aunt Harriet was naked. His mother’s friends Mrs Connor and Mrs Latimer and Mrs Glackin and Mrs Davenport were all naked, and the latter three were still wearing their trademark horn-rimmed glasses.

  Tom was happy being naked, and happier still that all the grown ups were being so silly. He was five years old. This was fun.

  Tom giggled as the six white-skinned women with their wobbling breasts and hairy armpits and even hairier front parts threw the dead rabbits on to the bonfire. He smelled burning flesh. He saw the sparks billow.

  The women started to chant. The words were strange, the language was foreign. They drank liquid from vodka bottles, but Tom knew it wasn’t vodka. They used a broomstick in ways that Tom thought was hilarious; but when he laughed his mother frowned and warned him this was a sacred pagan ritual and if he wasn’t grown up enough to enjoy it, he should go to bed.

  One by one the women lifted up into the air, first a few inches, then many feet above the ground. Arms held out, gasping raggedly, dripping moisture on to the earth from their front cracks, breathing in the fumes of burning animal flesh from the bonfire; lit by the silver light of the full moon.

  Tom frowned with concentration. He repeated the chanting in his head, until he knew he had it memorised.

  The following night he chanted the chants out loud in front of a mirror. Just to be sure they were embedded in his eidetic memory. For even then, as a mischievous five year old, he had a feeling that one day those words might just come in handy.

  And indeed they had.

  Tom’s dead grandmother opened her eyes and said, ‘Hello Tom.’

  That was two years after the flying incident. Tom was seven years old when his grandmother died and came back a zombie.

  He was nine when she died the second time. There was a party that night, to honour her final passing. Aunt Harriet came from London for the wake. And all the witches of East Grinstead were there, eleven of them in all, including Mrs Connor and Mrs Glackin and Mrs Davenport and of course Tom’s mum. And they all got totally bladdered, especially Mum. Tom spent the night in bed, listening to the sound of laughter and electronic folk music and bitter arguments between dear friends who could not drink together without quarrelling.

  ‘Wake up Mum. Wake up.’

  ‘She’s away with the faeries,’ said Aunt Harriet, regretfully. Then she smiled: a thick gash in her wrinkled old face.

  Harriet was his mum’s older sister: forty or fifty years older, some said. She and Tom’s mum Arabella had different fathers, but no one had ever told Tom who they were. So he’d never known what it was to have a granddad, or even a dad.

  ‘That’s the phrase we use,’ Aunt Harriet explained. ‘Don’t take it literally. There are no actual faeries, Tom. That’s just a myth.’

  ‘Is she drunk?’ asked Tom. He was ten years old by now, and about to take his GCSEs, which he would pass with flying colours with twenty-three A Stars.

  But when he’d come home from school that afternoon, he found his mother unconscious in bed and unwakeable.

  ‘No,’ said Aunt Harriet. ‘Drugged. It’s a drug we take, to enhance our witch powers. Sometimes, well. It’s easy to overdose. No harm done. She’ll sleep a while, then she’ll wake, and she’ll be right as rain.’

  His mother slept until Tom was eighteen. It was like not having a mother at all.

  ‘All right lad?’ said Taff.

  Tom blinked. His one good eye opened easily. His double vision was gone. The shimmering and blurring of his vision had gone. His heart was no longer pounding fast. His head was no longer exploding. His arms were still bandaged, and he could feel a residual pain beneath the morphine wash, but the strokes and heart attacks had stopped. And he was alive.

  Surmise: his magic had worked.

  Alternative surmise: he was in Hell and the devil was the evil twin brother of Taff Davies.

  Tom smiled at the delicious wit and irony of his own silent joke. He was back to his old self, for better or worse.

  ‘Untie,’ said Tom, ‘the bloody straps.’

  Taff untied the straps that pinned Tom to the bed, preventing him from once again ripping out his drip.

  ‘What’s the score here then, lad? The doctors are well pissed off with you.’

  ‘I took myself off the morphine.’

  ‘I know that. But why?’

  ‘I was dying. I needed to heal myself.’

  Taff mulled on that.

  ‘You’re a dark horse, butty, you really are.’

  ‘My mother –’

  But Taff was nodding.

  ‘I read the briefing on my e-berry. Well well well. No wonder you’re so bloody odd. Your mother is a witch.’

  ‘It’s illegal. Witchery. I –’

  ‘Your secret’s safe with me, boyo. And, of course, with the two million Londoners who saw the YouTube footage of you flying off the dome of St Paul’s.’

  Tom groaned. ‘Someone filmed it?’

  ‘Even fucking demons have smart phones now. It’s the curse of our age.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘No worries. It’s covered. We put out a press release. We’ve explained that a harmless flying demon escaped from St Paul’s, disguised as a human being with bad skin and sticky-up hair. Classic Metropolitan Police cover-up, we’re good at this you know, we’ve got centuries of experience. No one believes what you see on YouTube anyway. I mean, that thing with the kid who -’

  ‘What happened?’ Tom interrupted. ‘At St Paul’s?’

  Taff shrugged.

  ‘We don’t know. Herneith was removed by the fire brigade. She looked like a charcoal briquette off yesterday’s barbecue, apparently. But word is, she’s recovering. Tough old bird. But something very evil surely got the wrong side of her.’

  ‘I know the truth,’ said Tom, intensely. ‘About Gogarty. He’s a –’

  ‘He’s a warlock, aye we know.’

  Tom blinked.

  Taff gave him an old lag smile. ‘Yeah, that’s right it’s old news now. I just came from the MIR, we’re on to the new paradigm with a vengeance. And we’ve got him pinned down. Dawn raid’ll take him down tomorrow.’

  ‘When you catch him, you have to –’

  ‘Aye, we know. Behead him. Burn the heart. Mutter some curses. Then he’ll die.’ Taff glanced at his watch.’It’s eleven o’clock now. we’ve been on this for a solid two and a quarter hours already. We don’t hang around on Five Squad, you know.’

  Tom felt faintly disappointed to be so far behind the curve.

  ‘Dougie figured it out?’

  ‘Oh aye. That’s why he’s the guvnor. He’s known for a while apparently, or suspected at least. That, you know, there are bad apples even in Warlock Land. Makes sense, when you think about it.’

  ‘I was one step behind him all the time.’

  ‘Nearer than I was.’

  Tom thought about it. He tracked back everything Dougie had ever said to him, about Gogarty, about the Ripper, about the demonic elements of the case. He reviewed them in the light of his current knowledge that Dougie had suspected for years there were rogue warlocks out there, killing innocent human beings.

  In a few moments, Tom had recalibrated all his memories to fit these new realities. And his respect and admiration for Dougie Randall smashed through the roof.

  ‘The warlock has to die,’ said Tom. ‘It has to end now. Or – well. It just has to.’

  ‘It will, lad.’

  ‘I flew,’ said Tom, marvelling. ‘I thought I was going to die and instead I flew like a – well, not like a bird. I just flew.’

  Taff blinked a little. ‘You mean – I ass
umed – I thought you’d done this kind of thing before?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. I just – took a chance on it. Well okay, I thought there was some chance the incantation would work. But only a faint chance, to be honest. Not everyone born of a witch is a witch, you see. And knowing the spells isn’t enough. And to be honest, I always thought – well.’

  ‘You’re telling me you jumped off the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral on the offchance you might be able to fly?’ said Taff, reaching a new personal best for astonishment.

  ‘It was the only way to escape.’

  Taff nodded, acknowledging the courage of Tom’s act.

  There were a few silent moments between them. The fat middle-aged detective, and the young upstart in his hospital bed.

  Then Tom’s hands started to tremble. ‘Those creatures,’ he said; memories flocking in his mind now.

  ‘Rest lad. Rest.’

  Tom nodded. Taff fiddled with his morphine drip. Tom closed his one good eye. After a few seconds, he fell deep asleep.

  Taff watched him for a little while.

  Chapter 19

  ‘Have you got the warrant?’ Gina asked.

  It was the day after the day when Herneith had screamed and St Paul’s had burned, and Tom had flown from the dome then crashed to the ground.

  It was Tuesday the eighth of August, 2023. The day that Gogarty would die.

  Dougie, Gina, and the four members of the Five Squad Outside Enquiry Team - Taff, Ronnie, Seamus and Fillide - were gathered at dawn outside a house in Jedburgh Street, Walworth, near the Ghetto of the Damned.

  ‘Sealed in blood,’ said Dougie.

  ‘You’re kidding?’ Gina said.

  ‘I’m kidding,’ Dougie conceded. ‘It’s parchment though. Robot calligraphy. Bright red seal. Makes it all kosher. If you know what I mean.’

  They were in the battlebus, two blocks from the scene of the imminent tug. Multiple holos of the cordoned-off area encircled them in their seats at the back of the bus. Dougie was tense.