by steve higgs
I did my best to be gentle as I pushed Dr Parrish against a wall, but he cried out in pain anyway as he too turned to face the monster. In the dark, its glowing eyes were hideous and the blue glow from its mouth utterly fascinating. It stabbed at Big Ben with both front legs, Big Ben using the axe to defend himself. Sparks flew as the monster’s claws hit the head of the axe.
It stabbed again, Big Ben parrying the blow but there wasn’t much room to swing the axe in the tight corridor. I wanted to do something, but I had no weapon. That was until I spotted the house bricks on the floor. There were only two by the look of it, but I grabbed them, one in each hand. waited for my opening and threw the first as hard as I could.
It hit Big Ben in the back of his head.
I swore as he wobbled, his legs buckling beneath him and threw the second. This time I got the monster right in the face and it stumbled backward. Big Ben had gone down to one knee, so I snatched the axe from his hand but when I looked back up to face the monster, it was gone.
‘What did you hit me with?’ asked Big Ben.
‘Um, a house brick,’ I admitted unhappily.
‘Yeah. That’s what it felt like. Is it gone?’
‘For now, I think. We shouldn’t hang around though. I think it came for us because we were separated from the main group. We should get back to them.’ It took a while to find our way back through the maze of basement passages, the sound of voices eventually reaching my ears just before the glow of light from their lamps came into view. Nearest us was the gaggle of witches, hanging around at the back of the small crowd because they could offer no help to the efforts with the elevator.
‘Oh, what happened to Dr Parrish?’ asked Lily as she noticed our approach and saw him shuffling along while holding his gut.
Big Ben said, ‘Hey, babe. There was a minor incident with some knights in armour. I took care of it.’ I rolled my eyes and was glad Patience hadn’t been close enough to hear him setting up his next shag.
‘We need to get him to a hospital. Dr Parrish, can you stand?’ I asked, pushing him against a wall so it would keep him upright for a moment and give me a break.
He winced again as I slipped out from under his arm and allowed it to lower back to his side. ‘Stand, yes. Run around and fight off a monster, probably not.’
Lily got in the way. ‘I’m a paramedic,’ she said, peering at Dr Parrish’s face and starting to examine his wound.
‘Really?’ I asked.
She nodded, not taking her eyes from the patient. ‘Being an earth witch doesn’t pay much. We all have proper jobs. Hazel is a schoolteacher, Rosemary a lawyer.’
Gina appeared out of the gloom. ‘I found some more information on the monster. Further into that book there are some drawings. I believe they were created from eyewitness reports from when one of Lord Hale’s ancestors was killed but Professor Wiseman cross referenced it against another book we found, and it might be that we can identify the beast.’
‘Really?’ Dr Parrish was instantly excited at the prospect.
‘Yes!’ Frank popped up, seemingly from nowhere with a giant grin on his face. ‘There was something familiar about the circumstances of the curse. It has been bugging me since I got the invitation from Lord Hale and I curse myself that I didn’t use my own resource material at the shop; it just didn’t occur to me until ten minutes ago, but I have seen this before.’
‘You know what this means?’ Dr Parrish couldn’t keep the excitement from his voice, he was almost bubbling over with it.
‘Well, I don’t,’ said Tempest’s mum, Mary, as she came to see what all the fuss was about. ‘Michael thinks he can get the elevator working shortly. It’s just a case of… no, I forgot what he said already. He was talking about electronics, which to me sounds like just as much rubbish as you lot talk.’ I loved that she always said whatever she thought and never considered that she should hold back or consider other people’s feelings.
It was Narcissus who provided the answer. ‘We can summon and trap him,’ she murmured. Despite his injury, Dr Parrish raised his hand for Frank to give him a high five, then winced when he got it.
‘Trap him how?’ I asked, wondering if I was about to regret the question.
Frank stepped by me, heading back the way we had come and away from the elevator and its prospect of escape. ‘Back in the library, we have to find a way to complete the circle so we can use it.’ He started making a mental list. ‘We have to find a small amount of silver, some chalk to inscribe protective runes…’
‘I have silver,’ Narcissus admitted guiltily. ‘When you asked us to look for it earlier, it didn’t occur to me that my jewellery is silver.’
‘Mine too,’ said Lily, holding up half a dozen bangles. ‘Will you need string?’ she asked. ‘I always keep some with me so I can make a dream catcher if I need one. They’re such a versatile tool, don’t you think?’ Lily was a paramedic and looked like a normal person, but she really wasn’t.
Hazel stepped into our circle, ‘I have chalk.’ She was holding a long stick of it between the finger of her right hand like a writing implement. ‘I never go anywhere without chalk.’
Frank’s eyes were lighting up as his shopping list got ticked off. ‘We also need something sharp to make a cut and a cup or chalice of some kind to catch the blood we will use to invoke the cage.’
‘We can find those things in the library,’ suggested Dr Parrish with another wince. ‘Do you still have your pocket watch?’
Frank held it up in response.
Gina asked a question, ‘Can you banish it?’ When Frank and the others looked her way, she said, ‘Sorry, this isn’t my area. I have never studied demons.’
‘None of us have,’ added Professor Pope, speaking for the academics.
‘Which is why you need us,’ grinned Frank, looking very much in his element. So far as I could make out, talking utter rubbish was his element.
‘What else will we need?’ asked Professor Wiseman.
Dr Parrish blew out a breath. ‘We need the sigil of the demon.’
Gina started flicking pages of the book she held in an excited fashion. ‘That’s in this book, I think.’
‘And we need a sacrifice,’ Dr Parrish concluded solemnly.
‘Say what now?’ demanded Patience who apparently had been listening in. ‘You crazy white folk can get up to all kinds of weird stuff if you want to, but I got to draw the line at human sacrifice.’
‘Not human sacrifice, Patience,’ Frank said quickly. ‘It can be anything. Typically, a mouse or quite often a chicken because you can have it for dinner afterwards.’
Patience’s eyes bugged almost out of her head. ‘You got to be kidding me.’
‘No, really. Chickens are often used for sacrifice…’
She held up a hand to his face. ‘Stop. I’m not talking about the chicken getting used for sacrifice.’ She poked him in the chest. ‘I’m talking about you bringing up the subject of chicken for dinner in front of a hungry woman who didn’t get any. I need something to eat right now. I’m so hungry I’m gonna start gnawing on my handbag soon.’
‘Riiight,’ drawled Frank.
‘Anything else on the list?’ asked Gina.
‘Any chance we can get a women’s volleyball team, a Victoria sponge, and a tub of lube?’ asked Big Ben, sniggering to himself while everyone ignored him.
Or almost everyone, because Lily had a question for him. ‘What’s the Victoria sponge for?’
In the dark, he growled like a tiger. ‘Maybe I’ll show you.’ Then I heard a sharp intake of air as Patience hit him somewhere south of his belt.
‘Boy, how have you got any energy left to be messing with this skinny white girl?’ Muttering, she left him behind as she went to check on progress back at the elevator.
With nothing left to discuss, Frank, Dr Parrish, Lily and the witches, plus Gina and the other academics were all making their way to the library. ‘You’re really going to try to summon and trap Lord Hale’s Monster?’ I as
ked with disbelief dripping from every word.
At the head of the group, Frank paused and turned, the lamp he held distorting his features to make him look gruesome. ‘It’s actually a really simple process.’
‘Not without risk to the practitioner though,’ Dr Parrish reminded him.
‘Have you ever done this before?’ asked Gina, suddenly sounding worried.
‘I have been involved with summoning and trapping many, many demons as an honorary member of the Kent League of Demonologists,’ Frank boasted in return.
‘Yes, yes,’ she parried his response, ‘but have you ever been the one conducting the summoning?’ She turned her gaze to take in Dr Parrish as well. ‘Have either of you?’
Neither answered, making small, ‘Um,’ and ‘Err,’ noises instead and picking their fingernails absentmindedly.
There was no hiding the concern in her voice when Gina said, ‘I ask because my only knowledge of this practice comes from reading books, most of them written long ago before the practice died out. It died out, so far as I can perceive, because the practitioners kept getting themselves killed or dragged to hell, or, in several cases that I read, decapitated.’
Dr Parrish gulped. ‘Yes, well, we have all the tools we need and it’s not as if we are boozy students on a Saturday night with nothing better to do. We are going to get killed by the monster unless we stop it.’
‘It’s a guy in a suit,’ I pointed out.
‘Yeah,’ added Big Ben. ‘Just get him back here so I can cut off his arms,’ he said with a swish of the axe, ‘and then maybe we can go home.’
‘What I saw wasn’t a man in a suit,’ argued Lily, though she took the opportunity to move closer to Big Ben’s protective presence.
Dr Parrish shook his head. ‘I don’t think it was either. I saw Brian move about in the suit we made for him. I thought it was based on Lord Hale’s imagination, but I guess he was drawing on memory from books his father, grandfather and other family members had shown him. It wasn’t Brian that killed Ronald. It was the demon in that book.’ He jerked a thumb at the thick tome Gina held.
‘Yes, Quenti…’
‘Shhh, never say his name outside of a protective circle,’ snapped Frank as Lily, Narcissus, Dr Parrish and others all said much the same thing with equal insistence. More gently, Frank said, ‘Come on. We have work to do.’
Only when the group started on their way back toward the library did Gina notice the thing that was missing. ‘Wait a second. Where’s Lord Hale?’
‘He ran away,’ I told her.
‘He ran… wait, he’s eighty years old.’
Big Ben laughed. ‘Yes, and he outran the lot of us. Ducked down a passageway, set some mental killer robot knights on us and ran up some stairs to escape.’
Gina couldn’t look more confused now if she tried. She wasn’t the only one, but then Big Ben’s explanation of events hadn’t been brimming with well-considered detail. ‘Robot… what? Stairs?’
‘He locked a steel door at the top of the stairs, before you question if we could follow him and escape that way.’
Frank was frowning. ‘Why would he run anyway? Why would he leave us here?’
It was a great question.
Criminal Behaviour. Sunday, December 11th 0114hrs
As they made their way back to the junction and turned left to head back to the library, my feet twitched with indecision. I couldn’t decide where my priority should be. Escape ought to be number one on the list but I was beginning to feel that escape was going to prove harder yet than it already had been. Our incarceration was deliberate, that much I was certain of. What I couldn’t work out was what Lord Hale could gain by bringing us here just to lock us up.
Tempest’s dad was still on his hands and knees fiddling with the controls for the elevator; trying to get power to it I assumed. Just in front of his face, the panel containing the call buttons hung open, exposing wires both inside the panel and hanging out where they connected to the button.
He explained what he was doing when he saw me approach. Not that I understood much of what he said other than the bit about there always being a feed even when the power was off, so all he had to do was find it, expose it and reconnect it to the feed to the motor. Then he could get the elevator’s doors open. Apparently, it was already on our floor.
‘Can’t we just force the doors open?’ asked Big Ben, happily volunteering for the task, no doubt.
Tempest’s dad didn’t look up from what he was doing when he answered, ‘We could. But then all we have is a big box to get in and still no power to send it anywhere. What would be the point?’
Big Ben conceded with a grunt.
Letting him get on with the job, I joined Patience where she leaned against a wall looking bored a few feet away. ‘I think there’s a major bust here, if we can just figure out what is going on.’
‘A major bust?’ she echoed, suddenly interested. My good friend Patience wasn’t much of a cop. She didn’t have enough interest to ever be a detective. She would have been better suited to community work where she got to help abused women or offer help in some other way because it was a subject she had genuine passion for. Being a cop was better paid though so she stuck at it and had her eyes set on the prize of a proper pension when they finally kicked her out. Recently though, and largely with my help, she had performed several high-profile arrests, swooping in as I finished a case to arrest the criminals and take them into custody. It had earned her the attention of the chief constable for Kent, a large county with a lot of police in it. I heard she was in line for a major accolade when the next round of awards were announced. Of course, her boss, Chief Inspector Quinn, had claimed most of the praise, his own self-interest outweighing the need to do the right thing and acknowledge his subordinates’ efforts. This might be another chance to get attention for herself though and in an environment where Quinn couldn’t claim to have any involvement or influence.
Keeping my voice quiet, I whispered, ‘I think Lord Hale is up to something. Actually, I don’t think we have even met Lord Hale yet.’
‘Say what, girl. Who do you think that old man is then?’
‘Think about it. He’s eighty years old but he ran away from me faster than I could go to catch him. That’s not right. There’s something off about him, and I don’t just mean his behaviour since we found Kevin’s body. Did you notice he had a trace of make-up on his collar which looked like foundation?’
‘Well the makeup probably came from that ‘ho, Lily. She likes to throw herself at men. I tell you; I see her look at Big Ben again, I’m gonna…’
‘Patience,’ I hissed to drag her back to the present. ‘Whether it was Lord Hale or not. Whether he is actually eighty years old or not, he is up to something.’ Finally, I had her attention. ‘He stayed in role perfectly, pretending the monster was real.’
‘I thought the crazy folk decided it was real and were off to trap it?’ she questioned, now sounding confused again.
‘I think if we were actually facing a demon from hell that came with the express purpose of killing people, there would be a lot more of us dead by now.’ She didn’t look convinced, but I pressed on. ‘He stayed in role, right up until he couldn’t continue the ruse any longer. When I called him out on the clean floors and the lack of bat poop, he seemed genuinely mystified that we didn’t know we were playing an elaborate game.’
‘Right, yeah. So what?’
‘So he dropped the pretence but we were still trapped. He was content for us to be trapped as if his sole purpose was to keep us out of the way. He wants us trapped down here. All that changed when we found Kevin’s body. His body language changed like it was a big shock.’
Patience argued, ‘A dude died, and he couldn’t have killed him because he was with us. I think it was a shock.’
I had to give her that one. ‘You’re right. But what I mean is, he no longer seemed content to sit around and be trapped in the basement. The monster reappeared, which I don’
t think he was expecting and whether it was Brian, another one of the actors, or someone else inside the suit, Lord Hale was shocked when it killed Ronald.’
She nodded. ‘He was, wasn’t he? But again, so what? We were all shocked.’
I was having difficulty explaining my line of thinking, failing to get her head attuned to what I thought I was seeing. ‘Yes, we were, but his reaction was different. If we assume that he knew there was a way out via the stairs he subsequently used, then he deliberately kept that information from us. He skulked about at the back of the pack until no one was paying attention and then snuck away. He ran when we followed and then locked us down here. Whatever it is that he is doing, he needs us tucked out of the way so he can do it.’
Patience stared straight at me. ‘Let me get this straight. You think the old white dude is up to something in the house and that is why we are stuck down here, but you don’t think he is responsible for the two murders?’
‘Yes. I mean no. I mean exactly that,’ I was stammering and not making myself clear. ‘He’s guilty of something criminal but he isn’t the killer. I don’t think he faked his shock at Kevin’s death, and I think it was what propelled him to flee. Kevin dying changed something about his plan, forcing him to leave us behind and escape.’
Patience squeezed my hand. ‘You know that’s a bit thin, don’t you? Sounds like a lot of guesses and not much knowledge.’ Well, she had me there.
‘Got it!’ whooped Tempest’s dad, rocking back on his knees and jumping to his feet. ‘Ooh, goodness, I can’t do that anymore,’ he complained, rubbing his legs and his back as his energetic leap proved too much for his old bones. Making a show of being in pain, he nevertheless picked up the elevator controls which now had a glowing red light behind them and pressed the up button.
The doors swished open, the light inside harsh in the gloom our eyes were adjusted to, but it did a really good job of showing us the crumpled body on the elevator floor.
Closing the Circle. Sunday, December 11th 0131hrs
‘Oh wow,’ said Patience, capturing nicely what everyone else was thinking. Tempest’s mother crossed herself again.
