The Demon Club

by Scott Mariani

  But they weren’t going to get very far. While all eyes had been hungrily focused on the spectacle on the island, nobody had noticed the three of their Brothers who had quietly stepped back from the crowd, taken off their beaked masks, shrugged off their robes and pointed the semiautomatic weapons that had been concealed underneath.

  Ben Hope, Jaden Wolf and Jeff Dekker had joined the party.

  A lot of organising had taken place in the last twenty-four hours. As Ben and Wolf had sped away from the village of Hanbury in separate cars, Ben had got straight on the phone. While Grace’s fate had been at the mercy of Saunders’ killers, he’d been powerless to call for the help of his closest friends and allies. Now all that had changed. And his friends were only too happy to answer his call.

  Jeff and Tuesday had landed in the UK just hours later, while Jeff’s buddy Reaper Rigby had sped down from Wrexham to lend a helping hand. In addition to his sniper rifle, Reaper had brought with him another useful piece of kit that he kept stashed away for a rainy day: a military-grade RF scanner/jammer of the kind that Special Forces covert entry and counter-surveillance teams sometimes used to detect, locate and neutralise GPS locators, bugs and hidden cameras. The operation to get inside Karswell Hall was soon underway. They split into two teams: Tuesday and Reaper would infiltrate the grounds and take up position in the woods, while Ben, Wolf and Jeff would use Dudley’s Bentley to roll up with the rest of the delegates that night.

  So far, the plan was going smoothly. Reaper’s van had passed unnoticed by the gates of Karswell Hall earlier that evening, skirted the edge of the estate and parked in the same spot where Wolf had hidden his car the night of the spring equinox. Tuesday and Reaper scaled the same part of the wall that Wolf had, and made their way into the woods equipped with the rifle, the RF scanner and a spotter’s scope. Working carefully and methodically, they’d spent the next three hours detecting hidden eyes among the trees. In jammer mode, Reaper’s device was capable of blocking the signal from a CCTV camera from a distance of over a hundred metres in any direction. It enabled them to create a blind zone through which they could penetrate the woods to a well-covered observation point overlooking the lake, with the island in clear view. Range to target: 214 metres. Once they were set up and in position, Tuesday called Ben to say, ‘We’re in.’

  Then all they’d had to do was wait for Ben and the others to play their part. At 11.08, Tristan Dudley’s Bentley entered the gates of Karswell Hall in a line of other vehicles. Ben was behind the wheel with Jeff at his side and Wolf in the back. Jeff had plenty of time to listen to Ben’s detailed account of the whole story. By the end of it, he hated these people even more than Wolf did. Ben felt no hate. He was in that place that you find when you have worked through the rage and come out on the far side. A cold fire softly smouldering inside him. Still, quiet and implacable. The calm before the storm.

  As the car purred up to the security checkpoint Ben rolled down his window and offered Dudley’s access pass to the guard. The guard gave the pass the once-over, scanned the number into a computer system and then waved them through without a second glance.

  ‘Easy-peasy. Welcome to the club,’ Wolf muttered from the back seat as they sailed on through.

  Ben had followed the line of cars around to the rear of the house, and pulled up in the designated parking space that Dudley had told them about. The three of them sat watching as the Pandemonium Club members went inside and their various drivers and bodyguards headed towards the lodge house Dudley had also described. So far, so good, and no nasty surprises.

  When the coast was clear, Ben, Wolf and Jeff slipped out of the car. Wolf and Jeff were each carrying an MPX submachine gun from Dudley’s place. Ben was armed with one of the pistols, fitted with a silencer and tactical weapon light mounted in front of the trigger guard. The three of them hurried across to a side entrance into Karswell Hall. This was the moment when they’d discover the truth of Dudley’s claim that there were no CCTV cameras surveilling the house itself.

  As they pushed deeper into the house, it seemed as though Dudley had been right. They moved stealthily, keeping an eye out but meeting no resistance. Ben had been inside a lot of fine old homes in his life, but Karswell Hall wasn’t like any of them. The corridors and passageways were dark and dusty and smelled of damp and rats and other peculiar earthy, sickly-sweetish odours that he couldn’t identify. Strange paintings hung on the walls: cobwebbed portraits of odd-looking people with distorted faces and haunting eyes that seemed to peer into your soul and track you as you walked past. Weird, surreal abstracts that were creepily unsettling to the mind, as if some kind of madness lurked behind the fringe.

  Ben was getting an eerie, shivery feeling that couldn’t be explained by just the mildewy dankness in the air or his imagination of the things that had happened here since the days of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast 666. There was something horribly wrong with this place. He had never known anything quite like it before. It was like feeling the touch of evil brush against your skin, making you want to shudder in revulsion and push it away – except it was everywhere, like spores of some alien disease suspended in the very air that you were breathing. He had to fight the urge to turn around and run back outside to empty his lungs of the taint of it. He knew that if he were to leave now, he’d never want to come back.

  ‘Gives me the frigging creeps, this place does,’ Wolf muttered. Jeff just nodded, too spooked to say anything.

  They’d been pushing through the interior for nearly eight minutes when they came across the dressing rooms that Dudley had mentioned. A whole section of the building devoted to them, just the way he’d described it, like a small hotel-within-a-house, rows of close-set doors each marked with a tarnished brass number.

  Ben, Jeff and Wolf had already planned what they’d do when they found the changing rooms. Before too long the members would be summoned here to don their garb for the evening. And when they did, three unlucky winners would find someone there waiting for them.

  Wolf and Jeff each picked a room a few doors apart, and Ben chose one in the middle. The doors were locked, but the locks were simple and easy to defeat. Once they were open, the three men parted without a word, knowing that the next time they saw one another, they would each have killed an unarmed man. Quick, silent and brutal. All three of them were trained experts in that art. It didn’t mean they enjoyed it.

  Ben quietly shut himself inside. The dressing room was a small cubicle, about eight feet square, bare and utilitarian with a little side table, a wooden stool, a mirror, a bare-bulb light with a pull cord and a slim steel wall locker like the ones in military barracks. The lightbulb was dim and crusted with dead insects. Hardly the level of high-class luxury or cleanliness that Ben supposed the average VIP Pandemonium Club member would normally be used to. But then again, the typical five-star hotel or posh private club probably didn’t offer such men the kind of thrills they most craved, deep down in their sordid little hearts. Men who had already sold their souls in return for the dark and terrible pleasures that only their occult masters could give them. Men who were already dead inside.

  Now that he thought about it, maybe Ben didn’t really have too many scruples about ripping the life out of one of these animals. He turned off the light and sat on the stool in the darkness, waiting.

  He hadn’t had to wait for very long. A few minutes later he heard the sound of approaching footsteps and voices. Someone laughed. A key rattled in the door next to Ben’s, and he heard the door swing open. Like a game of Russian roulette, the man next door had drawn an empty chamber. A moment later, more footsteps came right up to Ben’s door, and there was the scrape of a key in the lock. Ben slipped off the stool and moved into the corner of the booth so that he’d be hidden behind the inward-opening door when the man came in.

  The door opened. The footsteps came inside. The light clicked on. The door began to close. The dressing room belonged to a pudgy little man in his early fifties, with a balding head and a
sack of a belly, still clutching the key to his dressing room. He was smiling to himself, but the smile quickly vanished as Ben appeared behind the door, closed it and then stepped forward and wrapped an arm around the man’s throat with his other hand clamped over his face.

  Three seconds later, the pudgy little man was slumping to the floor with a broken neck. Quick, silent and brutal. Ben wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it, that was for sure.

  He snatched up the fallen keys, found the one to the locker and stepped over the body to open it. Inside was a bird-beaked mask like the ones in Wolf’s video, a long black robe, and a fancy wooden cigar box containing a syringe and vials of some caramel-coloured liquid that looked like heroin or opium. Ben wanted to pump the whole lot into the guy’s veins, so that he could watch him die again.

  Then Ben had donned the robe. It was eight inches too short for him, but he’d doubted anyone would notice. Next he’d put on the mask and flipped the robe’s hood over his head. He’d turned and looked in the mirror and seen the bizarre black-clad figure standing there looking back at him.

  And he’d thought, Tonight, you all go down.

  Chapter 59

  In the midst of the erupting chaos by the lakeside, Jeff Dekker grabbed one of the fleeing robed figures and dumped him hard on the ground, knocking him senseless with a sharp kick to the head. ‘Not so fast, pal.’ Either side of him, Ben and Wolf were blocking the escape of the panicking crowd and rounding them up at gunpoint.

  What moments earlier had been a gathering of some of the nation’s most powerful and influential men, here to satisfy their bloodthirsty desire to watch the slaughter of an innocent woman, was now like a helpless flock of black sheep being herded by three well-trained German shepherds. The sight of the weapons was enough to cow most of them into instant obedience, making them put up their hands and cry for mercy. Others needed to be made an example of. Ben clubbed one of them over the head with the butt of his pistol while Wolf tripped up another who was trying to push past him and sent him tumbling to the ground. ‘Whoops. Mind your step there, Brother. Dear me, did we hurt ourselves?’

  Within moments, they had them all huddled in a cowering scrum of bodies. Someone shouted, ‘This is an outrage!’

  Ben replied, ‘Sue me.’

  He looked across the lake at the island, where the remnants of the dying flames were lighting up the trees and the statue of Thoth. The woman they’d been about to sacrifice was hanging limp from the altar and appeared to have fainted – or else she was drugged. He’d get to her as soon as he could. First things first. He looked back at the crowd and did a rough head count. He stopped at forty. None of them looked particularly bent or ancient or was carrying an ibis-headed cane. Which meant that Bartholomew Van Brakel, the Grand Master, was not among them. Ben felt a sour taste in his mouth.

  Jeff said, ‘Okay, ladies, let’s get those masks off so we can take a look at your pretty faces. Robes, too.’

  After some subdued grumblings of protest, the prisoners threw back their hoods and reluctantly stripped off their masks. As their faces became visible under the moonlight Ben’s disappointment worsened, because the man he knew as Saunders wasn’t among them either. That wasn’t good. Ben needed to get them all, and Saunders most of all. If Saunders went free, all this was for nothing. Neither Grace nor Wolf nor the Le Val team nor Ben himself would ever be safe.

  Jeff motioned his pistol towards the house. ‘Right then, you shower of sick pricks,’ he commanded them. ‘Quick march, on the double.’ Several among the crowd hesitated and seemed about to try to make a run for it, even though there was nowhere to go. Ben fired a shot into the ground at their feet, making them jump. The silenced pistol sounded like a handclap. The bullet threw up a spray of dirt. He said, ‘You want to run? Be my guest. See how far you get.’

  ‘I want them to run,’ Wolf snarled. ‘Oh, please run.’

  Nobody ran.

  ‘Now move it,’ Ben said.

  It was a large number of prisoners for three captors to handle, but these weren’t the kind of dangerous and desperate enemy warriors that Special Forces soldiers were used to dealing with. They were flabby, unfit, unhealthy men in their middle age and above, whose idea of exercise was a leisurely round of golf and whose main form of cardiac workout was watching innocent people get violently put to death just for fun. Ben, Wolf and Jeff started herding them back up the moonlit lawn towards the house. A moment later, three captors became five as Tuesday and Reaper came running from the trees and caught up with them. Tuesday was carrying the .338 Remington with its bipod legs folded. Reaper, clutching another of the pistols captured from Dudley’s place, was out of breath but his face was split wide open in a huge grin. ‘Fuck me, I haven’t had this much fun since we cleared out those militants in Kabul.’

  ‘Nice job, Tues,’ Jeff said.

  ‘Fish in a barrel,’ Tuesday replied.

  Ben scanned the house. He was expecting more trouble at any moment. The speed and surprise of the attack would have caught the armed security team unawares, but they’d bounce back quickly. ‘Eyes open, folks. We’re going to have company.’

  ‘Already met a couple of patrols in the woods,’ Reaper said. ‘The first two guys were checking cameras and we let’m go, ’coz it was too early to kick things off. The second pair was just half an hour ago. Got a little too close to our OP. Won’t do that again in a hurry.’ He tossed Ben a radio.

  Two down. That still left an unknown number of guards. Ben turned the radio on and could hear the sound of all hell breaking loose inside the house as the security team realised something was happening.

  Here it comes, he thought.

  They were sixty yards from the house when running figures spilled across the patio and down the steps, racing for the lawn. The flat reports of pistol shots popped through the night air. Whether they could be heard from the lodge house, Ben neither knew nor cared at this point. He and the others moved in closer to the crowd of prisoners and the shooting faltered and stopped, the security men not wanting to accidentally hit any of their lords and masters. Which didn’t make for fair tactics; but then sniping at someone from concealed cover with a precision rifle wasn’t exactly fair, just like stabbing a tethered woman to death with a dagger wasn’t exactly fair either. This was war.

  Ben levelled his pistol and squeezed off a round. A fifty-yard shot on a moving target, nailed clean. The running figure crumpled to the ground. He added a notch to the tally in his head. Three down. Jeff and Reaper shot two more, making five. One of the security guards was toting an AR-15 carbine whose range and accuracy could have posed a problem, until a bullet from Tuesday blew out his chest and he fell back against the stone balustrade that flanked the steps up to the mansion. Six. Another guy went to snatch up the fallen carbine but a well-aimed three-shot burst from Wolf cut him short before he could deploy the weapon. Seven. After a few more exchanges of gunfire the remaining protectors of Karswell Hall lost heart, dropped their arms and fled into the night.

  ‘Ha! Look at ’em go, the filthy cowards,’ Jeff jeered.

  ‘If they’d wanted to stop us they should have brought a regiment,’ Ben said.

  Tuesday asked, ‘You reckon they’ll call the cops?’

  Wolf looked at him. ‘And tell them what? That some rough big boys broke in and interrupted a perfectly civilised Satanic murder ritual?’

  Ben said, ‘Let’s keep moving.’

  They marched the huddled circle of prisoners the rest of the way across the lawn and up the steps to the house. Some of the Pandemonium Club initiates were blustering angrily, others weeping in self-pity, others too frightened to utter a sound. Through an open pair of French windows was a room that looked like a country club lounge, with comfortable seating and a bar. One glance told Ben that it wasn’t secure enough for his purposes.

  Leaving the others to hold the crowd at gunpoint he jogged on ahead and tried a couple of interior doors. A few steps down a passage he found a large banquet room. The wa
lls were thick, dark, sculpted wood panelling, the furniture was shunted to one side and draped, and a layer of dust covered the grand stone fireplace at one end. The moonlight shining in through the tall bow windows at the opposite end of the room showed that they were barred on the outside.

  In its heyday the banquet room might have hosted lavish dinners, as well as maybe a few drug-fuelled Satanic orgies, for Aleister Crowley and his well-connected band of followers. Whatever purpose it was put to these days by Van Brakel’s occultist gang, Ben could think of a better one. The double doors were heavy and solid. The bars on the windows had been put there to keep people out. But they were just as good for keeping people in.

  He ran back to the lounge, where the others were waiting. ‘This way.’

  It wasn’t long before they’d finished herding the captives inside the secure banquet room. Tuesday found a light switch and turned on bright overhead spotlamps that shone down on the huddled prisoners and made them blink and cringe like vampires caught by a shaft of sunlight.

  ‘Right ugly bunch of monkeys, aren’t they?’ Jeff said.

  Wolf pulled a face as though he could smell bile. ‘And they don’t look half so proud now the shoe’s on the other foot.’

  ‘I’ve seen him on TV.’ Tuesday pointed out a reedy grey-haired man in the corner who looked vaguely familiar to Ben, too. At this moment the guy wouldn’t have been too presentable for the cameras, because he’d wet himself with fear.

  ‘I reckon I’ve voted for that one there,’ Reaper said, waving his pistol at another. ‘Back when I used to bother voting for any of the bastards.’

  Ben said nothing. He was still feeling the full force of his dismay at having let both Saunders and Van Brakel slip through his fingers.

  ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ quavered the one Tuesday had seen on TV.