by Knox, Tom
And so the great and noble ritual of Abra-Melin would be consummated, properly and authentically, for maybe the first time in centuries. And Rothley would be inviolable.
He exulted as he stuffed the grey dishrag in the girl’s tender red mouth, silencing her pathetic whimpers. He had done it. He was enacting and completing the great ritual, he had done something Crowley couldn’t, something no one had done for a very long time.
Maybe he should tell the girl why she was going to die? Perhaps she deserved to know her role.
Leaning close to her little white ear, Rothley told her in a gentle whisper how tomorrow morning she was going to be taken to a special public place, and burned alive.
Zara Parkinson wept.
49
The Clayzone, Cornwall
‘Christ,’ said DS Curtis, staring out of the window at the whitened landscape. ‘It’s like the moon.’
Karen replied tersely. ‘This is a profitable industry. Brings jobs to Cornwall.’
‘But all this white shit – on the roads and the cars.’
DI Sally Pascoe spoke up, from the back seat. ‘It’s China clay, kaolin, it gets everywhere, even inside the houses, people inhale it – but it’s safe.’
Karen let Sally talk on; her mind was very much distracted.
Where was the girl? Zara Parkinson? So far they had made zero progress. They had finally exhausted the entire list of Crowley residences, extant and demolished, fictional and alleged – and found nothing. So their only route to the girl was tracing Rothley; and Rothley was after Herzog.
Which meant Rothley might just come here. To the laboratory in Rescorla. To find Herzog at home.
Karen got out of the car, put her binoculars to her eyes, and gazed down into the white-and-green valley. Either side of the great scoop of the dale were some of the biggest mountains of kaolin spoil in the clay district. At the far end of the valley was a lurid turquoise-green lake: coloured thus by minerals leaching into the groundwater.
This part of the kaolin district had been worked out decades ago. The English China Clay Company were already beginning the process of grassing over the mighty white Himalayas of kaolin tailings. Nonetheless the place still looked moonlike, as Curtis had said, or maybe like a landscape on a different, nastier planet: remote, swept by cold winds, bitterly sterile.
‘So that’s it,’ said Sally.
‘Sorry?’
‘So that building there, that’s Herzog’s lab.’
‘Yep. He has several properties all over the UK. But this place is a laboratory where he does research on stem-cell technology, or so he says.’
‘Why here?’
‘Cornwall is EU Objective One,’ Karen said. ‘High-tech start-ups get subsidies.’
‘He doesn’t need the money?’
‘But he wants it. Billionaires love money.’
Karen lifted her binoculars again. The laboratory was situated bang in the middle of the vast disused claypit: a jumble of modern one-storey buildings. Steel containers stood outside them. Some cars were parked on the surrounding tarmac.
‘It makes sense. The clayzone is remote. No one comes here, yet you’re just ten minutes’ drive from the A30. An hour from the motorway. And just twenty minutes from Newquay Airport. You can leave here after breakfast and be in London for coffee at eleven. Yet here you are, hidden away on the moon.’
‘Maybe it is just a stem-cell lab.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ said Karen. ‘Yet maybe it isn’t. He’s not going to ask Kerrier Council if he can build a lab to manufacture mind-bending parasites, is he?’
Sally shuddered. ‘What if …’ She gazed down at the apparently innocent buildings. ‘What if he is doing all that shit down there? I mean, imagine, imagine … the horrible stuff.’
‘Karen!’
It was a shout from DS Curtis. Karen ran back to the car, and leaned in. Her hopes rose: had they found Zara?
Her detective sergeant was holding up the radio receiver. ‘Herzog crossed into UK air space thirty minutes ago, seeking permission to land at Newquay. He’s coming here, DCI. He’ll be here in less than two hours.’
Karen got back in the car and shut the door. So, if Herzog was coming it was very likely Rothley would show up, too.
Frowning, and thinking, she said, ‘Let’s wait and try to catch him doing what he does. Pull back a few yards. Make sure we’re totally invisible.’ She thought some more. ‘Sally, call the armed-response team again – at St Austell. And the hazardous chemical people. Get everyone. Get them up here.’
‘Why?’
‘Rothley. I just have a hunch. Rothley.’
50
Cornwall
‘It’s just forty minutes,’ Herzog explained, as they descended the wheeled steps and walked towards a big, black, newish SUV, waiting in the desolate car park of Newquay Airport. Ryan stumbled, Helen assisted him.
Ryan measured his sight, looking into the distance: the sea was visible over the green damp fields, a mile north. A pale January sun was failing to warm the freezing wind. But there was a darkness on the horizon, like an eclipse, and it wasn’t bad weather.
Five hours’ flying had brought them from sunburned desert to wintry western England. For most of it he had been delirious, stretched out on an extended seat, praying and sweating. Dying, like Albert.
Now one of those rarer hours of lucidity had returned. But the blindness was definitely worse. It was as if he was gazing through shrinking binoculars: the rings of darkness had tightened and soon he would be totally blind. In an hour or two he would be dead.
The passport officials at the tiny airfield hurried them through, just as the Luxor Airport staff had similarly hurried them through, seeing Ryan’s condition. Everyone in Newquay appeared to know Herzog well: they bought entirely his story that he had rescued Helen and Ryan from the troubles in Egypt. Ryan was, allegedly, suffering from CS-gas poisoning: ‘the terrible Egyptian police, you saw the riots in Cairo …’
Two of Herzog’s men assisted him into the car. Ryan thought, in his darkening, despairing hours, this was all pointless: he was probably going to die.
Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it; let a cloud dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.
The car began its journey south through dark woods of wet pines and more vivid green fields. Or maybe the forests weren’t so dark, and Ryan’s blindness was colouring everything. He stared, desperately, out of the window. Helen clutched his hand.
Little granite cottages shivered next to little granite pubs. The old chimneys of mineheads pointed accusingly at God.
‘Moqqatam,’ said Helen.
Herzog turned. ‘What?’
‘The Zabaleen, in Moqqatam, they are your lab rats, yes? You have been testing all your stuff on them.’
For a few seconds Herzog seemed atypically thrown. He said nothing as the car burned along the damp black roads, but frowned blackly. At last he spoke. ‘You may as well know. Maybe you even deserve to know. Yes.’ He shrugged, staring ahead. ‘When I first became interested in parasites, I had no idea of the possibilities relating to monotheism. I was just interested in mind control, parasites that alter human behaviour. One such is Taenia solium – it causes bizarre behavioural changes that are just as subtle as those attributed to toxo: seizures, headaches, depression, but also psychoses.’ He gazed out of the car at a drizzly field. ‘Also restlessness, delusions of persecution, visions of divine fire and holy voices. Some versions of Taenia solium can give you hallucinations that are so bad and realistic you want to kill yourself. You see the worst things your mind can imagine.’
Helen insisted, ‘Moqqatam.’
‘I’m coming to that.’ The car accelerated onto a dual carriageway. ‘If you ever get the chance, Google the name Kevin Keogh. He was a nice ordinary salaryman, in Arizona, but he became subtly infected with Taenia solium. He went totally crazy, jumped to his death and—’
‘Moqqatam!’
‘Isn’t it ob
vious? All this evidence made me think. What if you could weaponize mind-altering parasites? Put them in aerosols you could broadcast from a crop-sprayer. Hell, put them in a fucking warhead. Israel’s ultimate defence. The Armageddon Bomb. So we started our initial experiments, in Israel, on animals. But we really needed human guinea pigs.’
‘The Zabaleen.’
‘Why not? Sassoon told me about them. They sounded ideal. Because those poor rag-picking schlubs are despised by everyone: even the beggars of Cairo’s cemeteries look down on the Zarraba, the pig people. The Zabaleen also needed a clinic in their City of Trash, and so we built them that clinic. And we also gave them real medicine: vaccinations, surgery, amputations.’
‘But not just that!’
‘What made the Zabaleen optimal for our purposes was that they do get a lot of strange diseases, from sorting through all that venomous trash.’
‘So no one would notice if you experimented on them as well?’
Herzog seemed to smile. Ryan could not really tell. He was losing the ability to focus his eyes.
‘The Zabaleen are therefore perfect cover. We look like charitable clinicians, yet in ten per cent of cases we give the Zabs a new and experimental injection, ostensibly for their hepatitis or their HIV. But really we’re testing synthesized or weaponized parasites. Then we sit back and see what happens. Usually it’s quite bad. But who cares? No one cares. Who would notice if another wretched Zabaleen went mad, or killed a priest, or turned out to be hosting a strange new screw worm? The Zabaleen get parasites and psychoses all the time, only my clinic assists them.’
Helen’s voice was angry. ‘This is just Nazi science. It is no better than Mengele.’
‘No, it’s better. So we turn a few into golems, sure. But we’re not trying to wipe out the Zabaleen. We just want to make sure the Jews are not wiped out ever again. Look –’ Herzog pointed – ‘we are nearly here.’
‘But the Zabaleen burned down your clinic, we heard on the boat.’
‘We had a few problems. They got violent. Maybe they suspected something. Anyway, we did our practical in-the-field experiments there, and we do our more intense research here, in Cornwall. We’re going to move the lab but at the moment this is the place where we analyse results, process the data, manufacture the first weaponized parasites. And now we are on to the God Parasite, trying to defeat the worst parasite of all.’
‘I could tell the world about this.’
‘Really? Yes, you could. I suppose. If this was Hollywood. But then I could get someone to infect you with espundia.’ The car turned onto a narrower road. ‘That’s an interesting organism. Eats away the flesh of the face, basically turns you into a living skull.’
Helen ignored this. ‘You’re moving the lab, why?’
Herzog gazed out of the window. The white spoil heaps dominated everything, it was an extra terrestrial landscape. Ryan could see whiteness ringed with black. And yet beyond it, something golden. Peace, at last; peace and reconciliation. He yearned for the quietness.
Herzog’s voice was a comforting drone. ‘Nearly there now. Yes, we’re moving the lab. And it’s not the first time. The Israeli government became hostile to my more interesting ideas vis-à-vis religion, and the abolition thereof. So, we decided to come to Britain, somewhere discreet, with access to English-speaking scientists. But now we’re going to move the lab to an even more friendly regime. Singapore perhaps. We’re working on it.’
Ryan spoke, for the first time in an hour. ‘Cats. We know they are fundamental, a crucial link. How?’
The Israeli stared at Ryan. ‘I was right to hire you.’ He sat forward. ‘Yes, there is a second Egyptian parasite which we have isolated. It also comes from Akhmim. We call it the Bastet Parasite.’
‘The god of cats.’
‘Because cats are the vector, as with toxoplasmosis. It’s rare but you can catch it from cats, and the Egyptians were the first to suffer from it. We think it explains the association of cats with evil, magic and the Devil throughout history, because, you see, some cats really do pass on a parasite which makes the human hosts believe they have charismatic powers, and in a sense, as I said, the hosts do. It seems that human hosts of Bastet can unwittingly hypnotize people, or bewitch them, convince others they are sorcerers, with special powers.’
The car turned onto an empty car park in the very middle of the spoil heaps. Several glass-and-black-steel buildings broke the monotony of white clayspoil and grey sky. Ryan was lifted from the car. He was in the last minutes of lucidity; he knew the cycle now, the symptoms. Death approached, smiling.
And still Herzog talked, as Ryan was laid on another stretcher, and wheeled towards the lab.
‘The Egyptians must have reacted, subliminally, to the Bastet Parasite: that’s probably why they revered cats so much, worshipped them for thousands of years. They sensed that cats had some strange potency to transmit to humankind. And this is why all occult and all hermetic magic is thought to derive from Egypt, because Egypt is the origin of the domestic cat. Neat, no? Of course, we’re not sure of the neurochemistry but then, we’re not quite sure why feline toxoplasmosis makes women more attractive to men.’
Herzog was still talking. Always talking. Supremely confident; boastful. ‘Indeed, I sometimes wonder how many wizards and holy men through history have simply been the unwitting victims, or lucky hosts, of the Bastet Parasite? We know of at least one example: an Englishman, Aleister Crowley, a Satanist who experimented with cat magic.’
They were heading into the laboratory, which was almost deserted. Chemicals in sturdy metal barrels with lurid haz-chem signs sat on large steel shelves. Glassware and machines lined the long walls, endless gleaming machines. Ryan lifted his head, and squeezed Helen’s hand.
Helen was insistent. ‘So why are you moving?’
‘Bastet. Bastet is, indirectly, the reason we are moving. We had a worker here, brilliant kid, Luke Rothley, one of the best neurobiologists. I recruited him in Tel Aviv: he came asking for a job. I told him we were setting up a new lab, because things were getting uncomfortable in Israel. He agreed to work here in Britain – but it was an error, my error. He couldn’t resist trying the Bastet Parasite, taking a snoot of the Crowley cocaine. The poor guy went psycho, wanted to kill me. He hated the fact we were going to kill off God, and then he stole much of our data, most of our more promising samples, all the mind-bending parasites about to be weaponized, and he is still out there, doing his absurd spells with his real science. The police will catch him, but it’s a warning. A siren.’ Herzog opened the door. ‘This is the main lab complex. OK, OK. Enough talking: these are my lab guys, my technicians. We need to get started. Hello?’
Ryan looked up at Helen; she was staring around, frowning. Something was wrong: something was even more wrong.
‘Samuel.’
What? Who was this?
‘Samuel Herzog. Hello.’
Ryan lifted himself on an elbow and squinted. A man had come from behind the door. He was in black clothes, tall, fair, athletic, holding a gun in one hand and a syringe in the other.
And next to him was a blonde girl, maybe eight years old, dressed entirely in white. Like a Victorian ghost.
The needle had already gone straight into Herzog’s neck.
Someone cried, ‘Rothley?’
Ryan’s sight was almost gone now: but he could see Rothley. Pulling out the steel needle. The girl just stood there. Barefoot in her white clothes, staring mutely into space.
The effect of the sudden injection on Herzog was quite extraordinary. His eyes were glazing over: the whites were occluding the pupils; he was hunchbacked. He lifted his dull eyes and gazed at Rothley.
The young man spoke. ‘Ampulex compressa. Ten millilitres. You of all people, Herzog, know what that means. Let’s go to the safe room. Come with us, Zara.’
Rothley led the shuffling older man down some shallow steps; the girl followed like a loyal spaniel. Herzog seemed to have partly lost control of his l
imbs. Rothley was like a stern but caring parent, leading his children. The three of them turned a corner and disappeared through a mighty steel door.
It was all done so smoothly, so shimmeringly, so magically, that for a moment everyone was silent.
Then one of the white-coated lab guys spoke up. ‘It’s on CCTV.’
Another assistant was weeping. ‘Ampulex compressa? Really? I can’t watch.’
Helen grabbed this assistant by the shoulder. ‘You have to help. My friend—’
The woman shook her head. She was still crying.
‘You mean he’s infected? Herzog has the parasiticide. He keeps it locked away.’
Ryan lay back. So he was going to die.
And he didn’t care.
But Helen did. ‘You have to get Herzog out of that safe room. Get the cure!’
‘We can’t!’ The second technician gestured, helplessly. ‘It’s lockable only from the inside: we can’t get him out. Look for yourself. Rothley has him trapped.’
The big lab-entrance door swung open behind them. Police with guns came running in, hurling questions. Police? Ryan wondered if he was hallucinating. If he was, it was fine.
Because he was going to die. Rhiannon was waiting. Everything was as it should be.
Helen slapped him. Hard. ‘Wake up! Ryan!’
The slap stung. Ryan felt a final, feeble surge of life force. He needed to fight. For a second the darkness cleared a little: he gazed around. The police were yelling questions, shouting about the girl, this girl, Zara, but it seemed they were as helpless as everyone else. The two men and the girl were locked in the steel cell down the stairs.
And so everyone turned: and watched the TV monitor. On the screen, Samuel Herzog was sitting on a metal bench behind Rothley, staring inanely into space. The girl stood at the back of the room, quite dumb. A mute little angel in white.
