Hell on Earth

by Philip Palmer

  These creatures would, Donovan knew, have been given a scent of the golem. A piece of clothing, probably, from the copper at Limehouse who the golem had killed. They were desperate creatures, hungry for flesh, yanking on their leashes so that even the red giant Berith struggled to control them.

  The leashes were slipped and Berith roared his support, and the three hell hounds raised their snouts and paced around in circles in the square for a while.

  Then they raised their head and howled. Once. Twice. Thrice. A positive ID in respect of Prior House, where London Insurance now had their offices.

  ‘Kill!’ commanded Berith, and the creatures slithered wildly around on the ground in their anxiety to start slaying. Then they sprinted in unison towards the office block. The doors were locked; but within instants the hounds had smashed down the doors and were hurtling inside. Bricks fell to the ground in their wake. They had literally knocked down the wall in their frenzy.

  Then silence.

  Donovan was awaiting the order to join the assault, but it did not come. So he waited. He was used to that. Waiting was what soldiers were paid for after all; getting shot at was just the occupational hazard.

  Eventually the word came, via Army radio and murmured scuttlebutt, and it was bad. The hounds were dead. Aura scans confirmed it; all three were extirpated.

  No one had ever killed a hell hound in millions of years. Donovan was impressed.

  ‘All units from Whisky One,’ said Brigadier Wilson’s voice on his earpiece. ‘The enemy is on the fourth floor of Prior House, repeat fourth floor, count the windows up then engage the enemy, repeat, engage the enemy, open fire. Out.’

  Donovan put the machine gun stock to his shoulder and began to shoot at the fourth floor windows.

  The roar of gunfire filled the air as machine guns emptied silver bullets and mortars hurled their silver-shelled bombs and anointed howitzer shells whistled. The building turned into a haze of white and red scintillation as the shells exploded. Chunks of bricks from the neighbouring buildings fell to the ground. But when the smoke cleared, Prior House itself was still intact.

  Magic protective spell. It figured.

  Donovan squatted on his heels. More waiting.

  After fifteen minutes the Harriers joined the show, loosing Hellfire missiles at the building, with the same total lack of effect. There was an invisible barrier in place that repelled bullets, and caused the missiles to detonate prematurely. Three Chinooks hovered overhead, pissing holy water on the golem’s lair. The water hit the invisible magic sphere and boiled. Pillars of steam rose into the air. Then the steam reacted with the magic-tainted flames that were still dancing on the exterior of the protective sphere; and a chain reaction took place. Holy water and the flames from the missiles merged, and erupted as billowing flares of light.

  A frenzy of huge plumes of smoke rocketed into the air, almost taking out one of the Apaches, before turning into a red and green borealis display. Shortly afterwards there was a BOOM.

  More waiting.

  Sooner or later, Donovan reckoned, the soldiers would get their crack at going in hand to hand. Once the top brass realised that technology was getting them nowhere.

  Donovan de-cocked his rifle. Waited a bit more.

  From time to time, fusillades of mortars and rocket-propelled grenades bombarded the magic barrier. The shucks and whooshes became a steady rhythm. But it was all to no avail. The missiles were either detonating on the magic barrier, or bouncing off and exploding on the ground, turning the square into an cluttered ocean of debris.

  Donovan got up, and stretched. His head was above the testudo now and hence vulnerable, but he hoped the surveillance drones would give them good notice of any golem counter-attack.

  ‘Smoke?’

  Donovan took a cigarette from McCoy. A live soldier, but a good man nonetheless.

  ‘Never seen one this strong,’ McCoy offered.

  ‘We’ll take it down. Wait till the Grey-Beards get on the case.’

  Forty minutes later, the shooting had stopped. A Silver Shadow Rolls Royce pulled up just behind the square, in front of the new Carlton building. And a posse of Grey-Beards emerged in their dark suits, exuding authority.

  Donovan nodded at McCoy; what did he say!

  The Grey-Beards walked through into the Square, as far as the front line of testudos, wearing no helmets and no body armour. They stared appalled at the battle scene.

  They incanted.

  When the incantations had stopped, a loud hum filled the ears of all on the scene. A few minutes later four F11 bombers arrived in the sky and began to shit their loads of high-explosive bombs.

  About time, Donovan thought.

  The Grey-Beards donned mirrored sunglasses and watched. The bombs once more bounced off thin air and exploded on the pavement, gouging a huge trench around the Mitre Square buildings. The ground shook. The bullet and bomb proof testudos shattered in several places, and the troops behind them were badly shaken. But the barrier remained intact.

  Another fiasco.

  The Grey-Beards got back in their limousines and drove off. Discretion, valour, better part of.

  Fuck thought Donovan, let me at ’em!

  Meanwhile, news cameras were everywhere, capturing every beat and moment of this new assault.

  Another missile fusillade was tried, and failed. ‘This is getting old,’ said Donovan. Then he blinked. Someone was coming out.

  ‘Someone’s coming out,’ said Gina.

  Dougie and the team were in the incident room at Limehouse, watching the siege unfold on the television screen. It was frustrating; yet utterly enthralling.

  ‘ – major breakthrough, hostage negotiators have secured the release of hostage Sheila Whittaker. We have these images now.’

  The TV screen showed Sheila Whittaker in a green floral Monsoon dress stumbling out of the front entrance, hands on her head. Amplified voices were bellowing at her to get on her hands and knees. When she did so, soldiers sprinted forward and pinned her to the ground and cuffed her.

  Sheila was dragged to her feet.

  ‘ – this ordinary suburban housewife caught up in the bizarre drama of –’

  Zoom shots of Sheila’s face showed her panic and fear.

  Dougie started to get a bad feeling about this.

  The cameras followed Sheila’s journey through the glass testudos, which melted away to form a triumphal path for her. She staggered forward until she was greeted by Brigadier Wilson himself. Six foot two of proud soldier, back erect, head held high. He gestured at Sheila to kneel down, which she did, her arms still cuffed behind her back. A paramedic put a silver-foil cloak over her shoulders, for the shock. The TV commentators were brimming over with excitement and exuding random commentary:

  ‘ – no one expected this, I think that’s fair to say, except for those who expected something very much along these lines –’

  ‘ – no one knows why the golem has released his hostage, but there is speculation that –’

  ‘ – as an artist’s model, she was pictured nude and engaged in explicit acts of sexual -

  ‘ – tremendous victory for the London Army here, a bloodless –’

  Wilson drew his sword, and with a single fluid movement he struck the blade against Sheila’s neck, and her head flew off her shoulders.

  Blood pumped out of her torso as it sank to the ground. A soldier pushed a grenade inside the neck and walked away holding the pin. Nine seconds later the grenade exploded. There was a ‘pop’ sound; and Sheila Whittaker’s head and face and eyes and lips were blown to bits. There was enough skin and hair and brain tissue left however to ignite and burn on the ground, like a Molotov cocktail carelessly dropped.

  At this moment, with the cameras of the world’s press at the scene, Berith - the gigantic Demon General of the London Army - produced a long thick red penis from his sleek body and pissed upon the burning skull, till the flames were extinguished.

  ‘ – amazing sight o
f sight of, well, what we’ve just seen –’

  ‘ – her modelling days are, well, obviously they are now –’

  ‘ – we assume the Army must have known this was no innocent hostage, but a dangerous confederate of –’

  ‘ – this shocking but necessary ritual act of demonic micturition is, we assume, intended to protect innocent Londoners from –’

  Gina dimmed the sound.

  ‘They knew,’ said Shai.

  ‘Of course they knew.’

  ‘The Army knew.’

  ‘That Sheila was the dybbuk’s vessel, not the golem.’

  ‘Yeah, but how did they know?’

  ‘Did we tell them?’

  ‘Does it matter if –’

  ‘Too easy,’ interjected Dougie. As ever, the killjoy.

  The room was bullied into silence by his words.

  ‘How so?’ said Cat.

  ‘Don’t know. Just – it’s too easy. It’s a trick. A trap. It must be.’

  ‘Bollocks. Sheila was the vessel for the dybbuk and she’s dead. We saw it. The dybbuk is dead!’ ranted Gina.

  ‘Too fucking easy!’ Dougie insisted.

  ‘You’re right. Fucking dybbuk wouldn’t be that stupid,’ said Taff. ‘It must have left Sheila’s body, it’s stayed behind in the building, probably inside the golem.’

  ‘What’s with the demon piss?’ said Seamus, curiously.

  On the front line Donovan exulted. At last! Battle had commenced!

  There were now hosts of demons coming out of Prior House. Tiny demons the size of dragonflies emerged out of the fifth floor window, swarmed, then landed in a mass upon the pavement outside the office block; where they scuttled around, as furious as termites whose mound has disappeared.

  Then they began to grow. Within minutes they had become larger than any demon ever before seen. Even Mammon was a dwarf compared to these beasts.

  Some soared upwards, like trees seen in decades-long time lapse photography, until they were as tall as the second floor windows of the square. Others grew outwards, and became fat blobs of horror. Still others became aerial beasts the size of brontosauruses and flapped their wings and took to the air.

  Then the demons advanced, out through their protective magic bubble, into the centre of the square.

  Bring it on! thought Donovan; and began shooting.

  The massed platoons of CFLA and LOR warriors, shielded behind the testudo barriers, fired torrential hailstorms of silver bullets and holy grenades. The howitzers behind them roared, spitting shells of exploding incense. The mortars spat forth silver bombs, each fragmenting shard of which was toxic with magic.

  The air was filled by the urgent sounds of grenades and mortars exploding. And the quieter but even more insistent double taps of semi-automatic rifles shooting armour-piecing exploding bullets, precisely aimed and deadly.

  No demon host had ever withstood such an assault before. But the giant demons absorbed the hail of bullets and missiles without flinching. Their bodies sucked up the ordnance like quicksand swallowing rain, and then their bodies twitched as the bullets exploded in their hides. But they just laughed and continued towards their enemy.

  ‘Not possible,’ said Donovan, but no one was listening.

  Within ten minutes of the first appearance of the demons, the entire first rank of London Army warriors were dead. Donovan was among the first to perish. And this, his second death, was even worse than the first.

  Dougie watched all this on the TV set. This was new, he thought. And bad. Very bad indeed.

  Was this, he wondered, the beginning of the end of the world?

  Never before had the London Army been defeated in battle. Not once, not in the entire nine years since the Army was created by order of the warlock-controlled London Parliament.

  This wasn’t a siege. It was an ambush, pure and simple. And Dougie began to fear that the dybbuk - who, he surmised, was now possessing the body of the golem inside Prior House - would not lose.

  In Mitre Square, lightning crackled in the sky.

  And then crackled again; forked daggers whitened the blue day sky. One of the giant demons turned dazzlingly bright, as a lightning bolt struck him full on. He burned. And screamed.

  And his burning screaming body trembled, and turned into a tall pillar of ash. The ash remnants crumbled and the pillar collapsed. A silver wraith emerged from the ashes, screamed with horror; then was gone.

  The other giants milled around in horror, staring up at the sky at their new adversary. Another lightning bolt flashed; another pillar of ash appeared. Another giant demon died.

  The lightning stopped. The Grey-Beards were out of ammo. The monsters advanced.

  A smart missile kinked over the testudos, headed towards a giant demon swiftly, then hit it in the mouth and carried on burrowing. When the missile exploded in the creature’s gut the demon broke into a million fragments. A screaming silver wraith emerged and died.

  A mortar shell hit the eye of a demon and went through into the brain, where it stopped. The head exploded. It silver-wraithed.

  A row of resurrected soldiers ran forward and hacked at the beasts with silver swords, moving with dazzling speed like sunbeams in a mirrored room. Hacking and slashing. Three more beasts were down. Three more silver wraiths.

  So it continued.

  More troops arrived. More Apache helicopters. Rocket launched missiles were hurled. Hellfires scored direct hits. One by one the beasts were knocked down and killed.

  Finally another missile sped through the air towards the protective barrier around Prior House and hit it and went straight through.

  Once inside the building, the missile carried on its journey, levitating a few feet above the stairs like one of the later generation Daleks.

  It reached the fourth floor and there it exploded.

  The building erupted. Incense clouds billowed into the air as the anointed canisters inside the warhead shattered. The floors and walls melted. Brick turned to dust. The sound was like thunder cracking behind your eyes. Most of the soldiers in the square were killed by the backblast.

  Like an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, the dark clouds of toxic perfume rose above Mitre Square; until the sky was yellow with incense and the clouds were tainted with burning dust.

  ‘Result!’ said Gina.

  The silence echoed.

  ‘The golem dead? For sure. Nothing could survive that. Sheila dead, we saw that with our own eyes. Yes, agreed, good result,’ agreed Dougie, grimly.

  ‘You don’t sound happy.’

  Dougie wanted to weep; but he never had in such circumstances, and he never would.

  ‘Sweetheart, what is there,’ he said, nodding at the screen, the square awash with blood, the brutal excesses of military wrath on display, ‘to be happy about?’

  In Damnedville, inside the walls of the Ghetto of Walworth, Fillide watched. The Battle of Mitre Square was being shown on a huge wall-screen TV in a bar full of dead drunkards, with a piano playing in the corner. Fillide couldn’t believe how anxious she was about the outcome of this encounter. This wasn’t her war, after all. But she still yearned to know for certain if ‘we’ had won.

  After the lightning attacks and the demon-slaying was over, and Prior House had been reduced to rubble, all those watching in the Charlie Chaplin pub saw the heroic Brigadier Wilson address the cameras. His LA combat fatigues were stained with black demon bile.

  He bellowed at the Press Corps his message of victory: ‘Citizens of London know this: we have triumphed! Evil was defeated! We kicked their fucking demon arses then we ripped ’em a new one! That’s all I have to say. Job done.’

  The normally cynical pissheads in the bar clapped their fervent appreciation of his heroism.

  But Fillide pushed her way through the telly-watchers, and stood right up against the screen and peered into the Brigadier’s face as the camera lingered on him.

  She saw his mad stare. The flecks of spittle on his chin. The cruel smile o
n his usually unsmiling lips. And she realised that this wasn’t right. It couldn’t be that easy.

  That’s when the truth hit her.

  It wasn’t over yet.

  Chapter 21

  Veda couldn’t sleep.

  She was safe now, so everyone kept telling her. Sheila was dead, which meant the dybbuk was dead too. And Jacob had also been killed - which was good she knew, because he’d turned evil, and had become the dybbuk’s friend. He’d been blown up by a huge bomb in the East End. Hell Hounds had searched through the rubble and they had found his remains. Buckets-full of the dead golem had been taken away and incinerated. Veda wept when she was told that.

  Teams of Grey-Beards had searched for the faintest trace of warlock in the Mitre Square area. If the warlock’s spirit were alive but disembodied, they would have found it. But there was nothing there; no warlock-aura whatsoever. So she had been told by her two cop protectors, over and over again.

  That meant that all the bad stuff was over, finally.

  Except, of course, that Jacob her beloved brother was dead. And Alazu and Troy and Thea were dead, and Mithrai was missing, and her mum Sheila was dead too. And Veda was all alone.

  There were four armed police officers downstairs, including Sharon and Toby. The house was devil-trapped. There were many more cops outside. She was ‘safe as houses’ Veda had been told, though she knew of plenty of instances of houses falling to the ground.

  And still she couldn’t sleep.

  For this, she was grateful. Sleep was to be feared. To sleep was to enter Hell once again. If she slept, even if just for a moment -

  Skip back twelve hours.

  Veda was chained to the synagogue wall, in the stock room full of tins of paint. Jacob had been gone for several hours. She’d given up crying.

  Then the door opened, and she looked up in hope, expecting to see that Jacob had come to rescue her. Instead it was Sheila-dybbuk again. Smelling of booze and cheap perfume. She wove a drunken path through the boxes of the stock room to Veda. Smiling in that way that wasn’t a smile.