Hell on Earth

by Mike Wild

  Weak from loss of blood, her vision darkening, Hannah felt her body going limp.

  But she was not dead. Dully, she realised there were no more blades. Somehow, she'd survived.

  She was suddenly out of the well, free-falling into a cavernous darkness.

  Oh come on, she thought. She had to admit, she hadn't expected this. She had imagined that the well come to its end at the base of the tor, not some way above it, and as the rush of expansive air brought her round, she found herself rapidly number crunching. By her estimation of length of fall and the depth of the tor, she had maybe four or five seconds before she impacted with its true bottom - and that assumed there was nothing else waiting to splatter her in the way.

  No way to control her descent here. Unless she learned to fly, she was about to die. There was nothing she could do about it.

  Hannah fell and time seemed to slow. Pockets of air caressed and buffeted her body. They felt gentle and strangely no longer cold. There was a stillness to everything, inside which soft echoes of something could be heard below. Shit, Hannah thought. This really is it. What the hell is a Verse going to do without a Chapter?

  She closed her eyes.

  Hit bottom.

  And found herself plummeting below the surface of a liquid hell.

  "Guyyaaah!" Hannah screamed involuntarily. It was a mistake because her mouth filled up with a thick, cold and lumpy soup. Hannah vomited into the liquid in which she had sunk, scrambled desperately for the surface, and broke through still retching. She had never felt so diseased, so tainted. Jesus, this was...

  There was a strange phosphorescence coming from all about her and Hannah revolved slowly, saw she was floating in a lake of human remains, some of it recognisable as severed arms, legs, torsos, splintered skeletal segments, but most of it just a putrefied solution of human flesh and gore, new and old. A decapitated head bobbed on its slowly undulating surface, its mouth and eyes wide with shock. Perry.

  Oh no, no, no, Hannah thought. This was a sea of the sacrificed... the dead of the ages.

  And there was something in the midst of it all. A vast, looming shape, like an island, cloaked in shadow.

  Was this Helen's saviour?

  Hannah heard a voice in her head. It seemed to be coming from the shape.

  SINS... it said.

  It made her heart lock with terror.

  Oh God, she had to get out of here. She had to get out of here now.

  Hannah flailed desperately to reach the shore of the nightmare waters, a dark line she could see several feet away. But as she half-swam, half-waded out of the glutinous miasma she could already feel the voice's influence insinuating itself into her mind from every conceivable angle. It was as if she were in the hands of some phrenologist-cum-psychic-surgeon, their combined fingers massaging themselves straight through her skull, into the soft and pliable tissue of her brain. Resist as she tried, the fingers were in simply too many places at once, each of them as cold as ice and seemingly intent on leeching a part of her away.

  SHOW ME YOUR SINS...

  "No!" Hannah cried, but at the same time she could feel her deepest thoughts being probed. She felt a flare of fire in her neck, searing it like a hot knife, and fought to repress the pain only to feel it being overridden by an utter numbness of being.

  Soul-eater, she thought. Helen Earth's saviour was some kind of soul-eater. And it was trying to take her self. It was trying to take her life away.

  She had to fight it.

  She thought back to her ordeal in Louisiana. Remember how strong it made you. How it made you you!

  She knew immediately this was far stronger than Louisiana. It was stronger than anything she had known.

  I am Hannah Chapter, she thought. I am one of a kind. I am Hannah Chapter! Hannah Chapt-

  She flailed to get herself to the shores of the sordid sea, but could already feel her essence ebbing and knew in truth that it was already too late.

  Please don't take me away. I will not let you, you bastard! No! No! Jesus Christ Almighty you will not take me-

  Hannah's hands touched the shore just as she felt the last of her vitality go. She felt her facial muscles sink into themselves and her eyes retreat in their sockets, knowing her pupils dilated now not with sensation but growing senselessness. An image of Helen Earth's acolyth servants gathering on the shore about her hovered dully in her mind. Hey Helen, Heil be back. No, Miss Chapter, you won't.

  She laughed coldly. It wasn't fair. Not after all she'd been through...

  The person once known as Hannah Chapter dropped to her knees, her fight seemingly done. Her body held that position for a moment and then slumped down onto its side with a soft thud. Her eyes - white now - stared blankly into the darkness, her mouth gaped slackly, and dribble leaked slowly to the cavern floor.

  THIRTEEN

  "Yes, yes - thank you, Sir Rufus. Yes, I'll most certainly do that. Goodbye."

  Jonathan Brand put the phone on the cradle, gave a heavy sigh and rubbed at his chin with a bandaged hand, stubble snagging on the wrap. He stared at the Department Q files that cluttered the room - source of the number he'd just dialled. But so much for Folkes - as unhelpful as the others. It was the eighth call he had made and he was a little weary of being given the run-around.

  Boswell? 'Fraid not, me dear fellow. But I'll tell you who might know - Templar at MI5.

  It does ring a bell, yes, but not very loudly, I'm afraid. What about Harold Pelham from MI19; he might have some idea.

  I'm sorry, Mr Pelham hasn't been himself of late. He's had to take sick leave. But I'll be sure to update him when he returns. What was the name of the place again?

  And so it had gone on. Even his much banked-on telephone call to the so-called horse's mouth had come to nothing. Sir Alex Nestor, one-time head of Department Q, was out of the country.

  Now wasn't that bloody convenient.

  The Old Boys Network had closed ranks, no doubt about it. With "Jenny" gone to follow-up Ravne's artefact lead - having had a good nose around his rooms first, he'd noticed - he was on his own. A good few pieces away from finishing the yellowed jigsaw whose picture would, hopefully, enlighten him as to exactly what Department Q and their old mates Sonderkommando Thule had been trading blows about back in '44.

  In a way, he was grateful. The researches kept him busy. Kept him from thinking about Jen. And they were a damn fine excuse to get the creative juices flowing.

  Pouring his third double whisky of the session, the bottle almost sliding from his bandaged hand, Brand turned back to his laptop, watching for the umpteenth time the footage that Verse had mailed as part of his and Ness's recon update. The pair had sounded rather occupied at Jardine's farm, but he knew it was nothing they couldn't handle, and so had paid it no further attention.

  The dead dogs causing this unseemly ruckus had, however, piqued his interest - they and the other feral corpses that had apparently resurrected out of their final resting places on the moor.

  They were, in fact, the first piece he needed.

  Coincidentally enough, the RAF Mosquito's footage was at the point where Boswell's cemetery was disgorging its human dead into the town... the event that had convinced its priest and, to some extent, Annabeth Jardine that they had both been witnessing Judgement Day.

  Brand could see how their circumstances had led to the conclusion. But there was one basic flaw. By virtue of the fact that sixty-plus years later everyone was still here, it really couldn't have been Judgement Day at all, could it? Whatever was responsible for these phenomena might have wished to suggest it was, but that day was yet to come. No, there was another explanation for that night's events, and it began with soil.

  The fact was, it wasn't the dead who had risen; it was the bodies of the dead, a very important distinction. He'd downloaded a selection of soil analyses of the area and discovered in each case a unique chemical structure that imbued this soil with an unusually preservative quality. In other words, Boswell's dead didn't decomp
ose, at least not for a long, long time. And in the absence of decomposition, the integrity of the cerebellum - of the brainstem itself - would not be degraded too. And these were the tools needed for motive control.

  Being dead, of course, there wouldn't have been much that the people or dogs could do with them - which was why there had to have been some outside stimulation.

  Puppeteering, in fact.

  The Voice.

  Brand didn't know whether it was by accident or design, but the dead had simply been puppeteered alongside the living.

  This was the question that had vexed him this past half-bottle: why was it the living had burned?

  And why did the Voice demand SHOW ME YOUR SINS?

  Brand studied the screen again, the footage now of the glowing figure over the monastery ruins, a thing of fire more intense than the conflagration in the town. The image flared blindingly as the plane entered its mass and then briefly displayed a glimpse of the dark countryside beyond. There, the footage ended and Brand stared at the blanked screen. The answer was here, he was certain. It was here. But once again the tortured flailing of the townsfolk has stuck in his mind's eye. He gulped on his whisky. There were so many flames.

  Oh God, he thought suddenly. That was it.

  There were too many flames.

  Gulping again, he replayed the final seconds of footage: the flight over the middle part of town, the waving from a desperate Annabeth Jardine, and again, the entry into the figure and beyond.

  Why hadn't the plane incinerated?

  At the very least, at that temperature the film in the camera should have combusted.

  But the plane wasn't even smoking when it came out the other side.

  The only thing that had burned was the pilot.

  Brand backtracked again, this time for a proper view of the whole town. He viewed it in slow motion. There: it was obvious if you were looking for it. Down on the ground that night it might have appeared that all hell had broken loose but a good number of those people were not burning at all. At least, not with natural fire.

  What he was looking at was spirit fire.

  Brand zoomed the image then flicked from victim to victim, high-definition enhancement allowing a degree of detail not discernible on the original stock. Yes, there were two distinct patterns of flame. He realised what unbeknownst to him had been recently and painfully revealed to Hannah Chapter deep beneath the monastery.

  Victims were suffering spontaneous combustion. There was no doubting that horror. But the rest of these poor people were being soul-stripped.

  It made sense now. The figure and the fire and that strange demand to SHOW ME YOUR SINS. He had encountered demons capable of soul-stripping before, and it was an unstable process to say the least. To psychokinetically hammer a human mind into such a traumatised state of guilt or remorse that subconsciously it became willing to relinquish the bonds between body and psyche. When performed correctly a demon would gain a pure soul to be used for whatever perverted purpose it wished. Get it wrong, to encounter individuals not susceptible to such manipulation, or who railed against it, and the resultant psychophysical backlash not only corrupted the soul, but also initiated a bioelectrical brainstorm sufficient to trigger SHC.

  Very few survived the process either way. They were resistants. And Brand knew about resistants because he had once had cause to discover he was one himself.

  Unconsciously, he rubbed the back of his neck.

  Brand refilled his glass, took a slug, scowling as he felt a dull ache in his kidneys. He turned back to the footage, watching now the mesmerising spirit fire that for a while wreathed the bodies of the soul-stripped as their essence was leeched from their flesh. It was almost beautiful - some kind of Kirlian symphony performed by the people of the town - but there was no beauty in the last agonised contortion of their faces as their souls were then torn away by every thread.

  Torn away to dance through the real flames then coalesce into that great, glowing figure looming malevolently over the town.

  Now that Brand knew what it was composed of, he knew also what it was. The apparition itself was not the thing responsible for that hellish night, it was merely a projection of it - a soul shield. A barrier, in other words, that was comprised of pure human essence and used by its owner to mask its own despicable presence from the attention of God.

  And that could mean only one thing.

  The shadow that Siddhi had scanned in the cave, the thing that breathed: it was an infernal.

  But of what order? Brand thought.

  He zoomed in on the glowing figure, studied its shape. Most soul shields reflected the wielder's image - in a sense, its idealised form - but this one appeared still to be in a state of creation, as yet only vague. But there were those hints of wings...

  He thought back to that ley line pulse at Exham Priory, to Jenny speaking in that strange tongue. Adramelecanmaelarmenauzabaraqel...

  Wait a minute... This thing couldn't be. It didn't make sense. For one thing, he'd never known phenomena such as this manifested by such a creature, or on such a scale - it was too powerful. For another, why all these trappings of Judgement Day when the very concept was the antithesis of its self? And also why draw the population of Boswell down into the caves when its natural instinct would be kill them where they stood?

  Most importantly of all, why draw on the energy of the ley lines?

  Brand took another drink, stared at the screen, his frustration bubbling slightly into anger. He tapped a key and stared into the eyes of Annabeth Jardine, frozen in the act of waving for help. A resistant, he thought. She had lived through the ultimate nightmare, then died needlessly.

  Damn Magister. And damn Department Q. What in hell had brought them here? And why in Hades had they done what they did?

  Brand stood, stared at the stacks of Department Q files and kicked out, demolishing the tower and sending one of their old Bakelite telephones that he'd used as a paperweight crashing to the floor. It rang once on impact and he snorted. Once upon a time he'd have considered this sacrilegious but he no longer cared. Because he felt betrayed.

  Once he'd gained sufficient security clearance to know of their existence, Brand had spent a good deal of his adult life idolising these people, the romantic adventurers of World War II. Given the choice, he would have swapped his life as was for the risk of death by their side, battling the supernatural forces of evil. Werewolves, golems, vampires, Sonderkommando Thule themselves. Every one of them was so much more black-and-white back then. He had even chronicled their exciting adventures - adventures that might even be inspiring a new generation of worshippers if only the Official Secrets Act allowed him to publish.

  What a mistake that would have been. Because he wouldn't have been telling the whole truth at all.

  The things he had learned in recent months. That alongside the heroism, there lay much darker secrets. How, for example, Alex Nestor had had his spell-mumblers divert a Luftwaffe raid from London to Coventry in order to save himself - and had then shared a joke in his London club despite fourteen hundred innocent men, women and children being killed as a result. How Jack Strummer - in fact Detective Sergeant Jack "Bulldog" Strummer, once Black and Tans and Special Branch - employed every dirty trick in the book as he fought beside colleagues he thought "a bunch of darkies, kikes, degenerates, nonces and Oxbridge Bolsheviks." Or how Randolph Rochester, that latter-day Biggles, his face near destroyed in what was described as some "occult beastliness" in the Somme, had lost most of his rational mind as well, no chocks-away scarf flapping heroically behind him because it was too sodden with blood. Farralay, Bey, George and Harriet, Cecilia Bird - they were all so much darker than they seemed. But then, what did that matter, hmm? After all, these were the days when disputes were settled with fists and fusillades, the days when the good guys always won.

  All for one and one for all, eh? Brand thought. Apparently not for Michael Magister, who had gone on to murder three of their number.

  Mic
hael Magister, the darkest of them all. An immensely powerful psychokinetic, still alive and, despite his circumstances, causing problems to this day. It was only recently, in fact, that he had awoken ancient forces in the Highlands by his manipulation of energies in the-

  Earth, Brand thought suddenly. Gods, how could he have been so blind?

  He'd been trying to force them into his jigsaw, but as far as he knew there hadn't been any ley line pulses back in 1944, they were only occurring now. That couldn't be coincidence.

  Brand returned to the laptop, brought up all of the data Kostabi had gathered. The billionaire, all of them, had assumed that the thing beneath Scratch Tor had been feeding off the pulses; but what if, instead, it was being fed them?

  He punched up the ley line network, studied the energy dispersal patterns of the pulses. He had been clever, Brand had to admit: routing and re-routing the energies until their true origin was almost impossible to backtrack. But there it was right in front of him on the map.

  Michael Magister's current location.

  Brand slugged at his whisky and picked up the phone. He dialled a restricted number. "This is Boothroyd's Child," he said, giving his personal password.

  "Dr Brand. How can I help?"

  "Hello, major. I need to know something. Have there been any problems with our friend?"

  "Problems? No. A minor blip on the TK counter but nothing to worry about."

  A minor blip, Brand thought. Oh God.

  "There is, however, a message."

  "Message?" Brand said slowly, and swallowed.

  "Yes, doctor," the major replied. The officer sounded calm but Brand's heart skipped a beat as it was repeated.

  "Mr Magister is expecting you."

  FOURTEEN

  There was no smoke without fire. A hackneyed old adage, perhaps, but one that happened also to be true, nowhere more so than in Whitby.

  It was a town of diverse faces. Ice creams and amusement arcades, fish n' chip shops, and beaches: this was its tourist face. Captain Cook, whale hunting, trawlers and jet: this was its historic face. And the abbey balancing on the cliff, that stark and sombre ruin: this was its religious face.