The Babylon Rite

by Tom Knox

  ‘Yes. A whole community who willingly killed themselves, hundreds of them. They literally drank poisoned Kool-Aid, at the behest of some ghastly tyrant. And so they all died. Awful.’

  Ibsen recalled the famous images: the bodies sprawled on the damp Guyanan grass afterwards, women and men and children, side by side by side, as if they were sleeping peacefully, as if they had just lain down in orderly rows to kip, and yet they were dead. So, yes, Jenny was right: suicide could be induced en masse. In an intense religious setting. But what did that actually mean to this particular case? With individuals? He shook his head. ‘I dunno, sweetheart. These victims in London – they’re not teens copying some doomy, wrist-slitting guitarist, but they’re not desperate god-botherers in the jungle, either. And they’re not all in one place at one time. They are smart, rich, young, very well-educated Londoners, with everything to live for, and no reason to die.’

  Jenny stepped over a snaking root of ivy. ‘Well. Exactly. I think it’s a cult with something else too, some other element.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hypnosis for a start. Some kind of sexualized hypnosis. This explains your victims’ profiles. Psychologists know that the most easy people to hypnotize tend to be the most intelligent.’

  The crows barked in the skeletonized trees.

  ‘So you’re saying you can hypnotize people into killing themselves?’

  ‘Why not? If you combine hypnosis with sex and religion, some kind of death cult, a sophisticated sex-and-death cult, then you have the beginnings of an explanation, a sort of upper-class Jonestown – isn’t that possible? You did say these people were all going to sex and swingers’ clubs, right?’

  ‘Yes.’ He mused. ‘Yes. That is true. So there maybe is a particular sex club where they got into some stranger, darker, ritualized stuff? Some cultic trance.’

  The idea was good.

  Jenny tugged him down the darker of two paths; Ibsen pondered as he walked.

  This theory was certainly plausible. In which case they needed to look for more links between the victims. They hadn’t found a common denominator of this sort, yet – a specific sex club they all went to – but something like this had to exist. Somewhere, out there, was maybe a ghastly dungeon in a rich man’s home, a drawing room decorated with skulls. It was absurd yet it made a ghoulish and awful sense.

  A rotting angel stared at them from the enormous tomb of Julius Beer. A great monument to someone entirely forgotten.

  Jenny said, ‘I also think these suicides are, in some way, autoerotic. The pain itself is the pleasure. The pain is the cause of the pleasure.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Think of it this way. We get lots of people in Casualty who are cutters, self-harmers. They cut themselves on the arm, they slice their fingers, gouge themselves. Usually women. Why do they do it? Because they are depressed, exhibitionist, self-haters, masochistic, blah-de-blah, but also because, on a purely mechanical level, they enjoy the pain. They are addicted to the pleasurable release from self-inflicted pain, the endorphins.’

  Another crow heckled the dead from somewhere in the birches and oaks, then flapped further into the chaos of ivy green. The large portals of the dynastic tombs gawped at Ibsen. Like open mouths. Shocked.

  She squeezed his hand. ‘Moreover, some psychologists believe that we can actually be physically aroused by death itself. We find it erotically pleasurable to die. Relatedly, the French call an orgasm le petit mort, the little death. Shelley called the climax the death which lovers love.’

  Ibsen murmured, ‘Hanged men are said to orgasm. Hmm. At the moment of asphyxiation.’ He shook his head, ‘It’s prison folklore. I’ve often wondered if there was any truth in it … but I don’t know …’

  They were right at the end of the path, heading back towards daylight: the trees and shrubs and menacing tombs were yielding to street noise. Ibsen felt an urgent need to jog, to get the heck out of here.

  ‘This also fits with the idea that you are dealing with a cult, or a secret religion,’ Jenny added. ‘Because many religions in the past have played upon the eros–pain nexus.’

  ‘Once more in English?’

  ‘Think of the Catholics, think of Saint Theresa ecstatically pierced by arrows. Or some Shia Muslims, flaying themselves – that could be sexual. Or even the Nazis. The skulls of the SS. They certainly sexualized and fetishized pain and death, the smart black uniforms, the totenkopf.’

  ‘Christ! You’re saying we’re dealing with some kinky Nazi-Catholic-Muslim sex cult. In central London?’

  ‘I’m just giving you ideas!’ She smiled, and looked at her watch. ‘Anyway. Time’s up. Emergency C-sections won’t wait, not even for handsome detectives.’

  ‘But—’

  She was already kissing him, and already walking to the cemetery gate. He followed, still asking questions; she waved her hand impatiently.

  ‘I’m just guessing, Mark! But I’ve got to go. Bye, sweetheart – don’t forget to get some milk!’

  She waved goodbye, and was gone. Running down Highgate Hill. Sweet and young and happy. His lovely and intelligent wife. Ibsen gazed at the dark blue of her anorak until she was entirely lost to view.

  Then he made his slow way past the venerable redbrick Georgian houses to Highgate Tube, which was so confusingly far from Highgate Village.

  His phone trilled. He took the call. Larkham.

  ‘Antonio Ritter!’

  ‘What?’

  Detective Sergeant Larkham repeated, rushing his words in his excitement,

  ‘Tony Ritter. The man with the tatts. S’his name, sir. He lives at the address, near the Barbican, we’ve seen him going in. American. Half Puerto Rican. In and out of prison. FBI record. Smart. Links to the Camorra.’

  ‘I’m on my way. Text me the details. Meet you there. Now.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Ibsen snapped shut the call. Even as he felt the excitement rise, he felt the doubts. A simple career criminal? That didn’t quite fit. What was a gangster doing in the middle of this? But his wife’s ideas were all too chillingly believable. Some kind of suicide cult.

  This meant there could be – there must be – many more victims out there. Waiting to die. At any moment.

  24

  Temple Bruer, Lincoln Heath

  ‘“Temple Bruer grew up in the middle of the vast Lincoln Heath, which spread out south of the city. The heath would have always been sparsely populated, and in the Templars’ time would have been especially desolate and forbidding.”’

  ‘Unlike now,’ said Adam, ‘when it is so amazingly inviting. Jesus, this road is useless.’

  Nina put her father’s book down and gazed across the flatness. Everything was flat, monotonous, and bleak. The morning snow had turned to heavy sleet – which thrashed the windscreen, almost defeating the wipers’ effortful thump.

  ‘Could that be it?’

  Adam followed her gesturing hand. As far as he could tell, she was pointing at rain-smeared glass, blank grey sky, and endless fields of grey grass. And nothing else.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There. That building. Over there.’

  Adam slowed the car, entirely blocking the narrow country lane. It didn’t seem to matter. Theirs was probably the only vehicle for miles. He hoped it was the only vehicle for miles: therefore, no one was pursuing them. And now he saw.

  ‘Ah … Yes.’

  He could just make out the low darkness of some buildings, half-concealed behind a copse of stark trees. He drove on very, very slowly. The mud churned; pebbles rattled against the chassis; the wheels slid and groaned.

  ‘A sign. Adam.’

  He gazed up; she was right. A tiny and splintered wooden sign, virtually hidden by blackthorns, showed the way.

  Temple Bruer. Ancient Monument. 1¾ miles.

  Adam wrenched the car left and they patrolled the little side-lane. He could see patches of snow left in the ragged fields, and hazel and holly trees, sheared by the easterlies. ‘So
… We know your dad spent a whole day here … it must be important. Right?’

  ‘He goes on about the loneliness.’ Nina scanned the lines quickly. ‘Apparently, in the eighteenth century this was the one part of the London-to-York route which stagecoach owners couldn’t insure. Too many highwaymen. Too many legends of witches and ghosts.’

  Her face was looking his way: white and uncertain in the gloom of the car. Then she turned, and scanned the rainy horizon. Adam could make out a tower now. Barns and a kind of farmhouse – and a squat grey tower.

  ‘Listen to this. “The Reverend Dr G Oliver, vicar of the nearby village of Scopwick, undertook the first historical survey of the surviving tower of Temple Bruer preceptory.”’

  ‘And?’

  ‘“Oliver reported finding charred bones and bodies encased in walls, evidence of murder and infanticide. He proposed that these remains had belonged to victims of severe Templar law enforcement.”’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Quite serious. My dad actually quotes Oliver’s survey. Verbatim. “Some of these vaults were appropriated to uses that it is revolting to allude to. In one of them a niche or cell was discovered, which had been carefully walled up; and within it the skeleton of a man, who appears to have died in a sitting posture, for his head and arms were found hanging between the legs. Another skeleton of an aged man was found in these dungeons; his body seems to have been thrown down without order or decency, for he lay doubled up. And in the fore part of his skull were two holes which had evidently been produced by violence.”’

  ‘Christ.’

  They were just a hundred yards away now; and the sense of remoteness was deepening. Just a few miles from a main road, yet they were lost in England’s deep and darkening winter.

  ‘Wait.’ Nina turned a page. ‘There’s more. “In a second corner of these vaults, many indications of burning exist: cinders mixed with human skulls and bones. This horrible cavern has also been closed up with masonry.”’ She read on, silently, then half-closed the book, ‘Look, you can park here. By the tree.’

  She was right. The road, which was now little better than a mudded track, opened out into a kind of farmyard which surrounded the ancient Templar tower. A light was already on inside the farmhouse. They climbed warily from the car. The sleet had abated, yet the very air was soaked.

  ‘Are we just allowed to park here? Is this private property?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, shivering, and pulling up the hood of her anorak. ‘Dad’s guide always indicates when a site is private, doesn’t say that here. I guess the farm must date from the Templar times, but the buildings have changed? Ach. Imagine living in a house with this … thing in your back garden. Staring at the vaults where they walled up people. Children entombed alive. Spookfest.’

  The same thought had occurred to Adam. The cold surly horror of staring at this tower every morning, knowing what the vicar, back in 1841, had discovered. Horrible.

  The tower was guarded by a pitiful little railing, barely a foot high. They walked up the stoop of grey and weathered stone steps, and pressed the only door. It swung open on smooth hinges.

  The interior was incisively cold, but not as cold as the heath. The light was pitiful; sad winter light filtered by an arched, eight-hundred-year-old leaded window. The interior of the tower was just a single large, tall, cold and echoey stone room.

  ‘No light switches?’

  ‘Nope.’ Nina consulted the book, using the torch from her mobile phone to read.

  He recalled her using the same flashlight when they had broken into her father’s apartment. He shuddered at the memory of the intruder: they needed to hurry. Someone could be driving down the lane right now, parking next to their car, walking to the tower.

  ‘He says there are apotropaic signs everywhere. Apotropaic graffiti.’

  ‘What the hell are they?’

  ‘Ritual protection symbols, used since ancient times by all cultures to ward off evil. “Some of the apotropaic graffiti in the tower of Temple Bruer dates from the fourteenth century, indicating that the place had a sinister reputation from the time of the Templars’ demise. The carvings were continuously inflicted on the fabric for many centuries thereafter. Clearly, the local peasantry must have felt a certain desperation to rid this place of its devilish connotations. Perhaps they knew of the tormented skeletons concealed within.”’ Nina paused, then concluded. ‘This bit … is odd. This is not like my dad. To say this bit here.’ She quoted, ‘“Even today the place retains a definite ambience, which might lead the most materialist of scholars to feel a frisson of doubt. Certainly, this is no place to linger.”’

  ‘Too true. Look. Down here.’ Adam, using his own mobile phone light, picked out some scratched graffiti on a wall. ‘Suffer the child that comes unto me.’

  Nina examined it. ‘That’s new, there’s no weathering. Local teenagers probably. This stuff, over here, is the old stuff.’

  Carved ferociously into the next slant of wall was a series of ancient symbols. Runic and bizarre; deeply cut triangles and inverted letters. Adam stared: the cuts in the stone were severe, yet weathered: chamfered by time.

  ‘Here’s the wee cat.’ She had moved away in the murk. ‘Dad said there was a cat, a gargoyle of a cat. It’s just here. And this must be the tomb, the stone effigy, in the corner.’

  He was hardly listening, transfixed by the graffiti. The backwards R? The inverted A? And now he realized he could hear … howling.

  Fierce howling.

  ‘Nina?’

  The howling echoed around the stone chamber. It was unearthly, and bloodfreezing. A choir of suffering and lamenting, from somewhere just outside. Who – or what – was producing that direful noise? Adam felt a rush of juvenile, even infantile, dread: he didn’t want to open the door.

  He opened the door. They stared out. The deathly, late-afternoon light was just good enough for them to see.

  Foxhounds.

  A man was striding down the farmyard, a riding crop in his hand; he was repetitively slapping the whip against high leather boots; and before him was a river of canine tongues and ears and tails. It was a hunting pack, being exercised; the dogs were barking and yawling, raising that horrible, humanlike whimpering. The steam rose from the torrent of dogs as they lashed into the cold, snowmelty fields, yearning to kill.

  The huntsman turned, for a second, as he reached the gate and looked directly at Nina and Adam. His face was an oval of blur in the winter gloom, his expression indiscernible, and odd. What did he want? Did he know something? Adam could feel the sordid clench of fear, a dragging attachment. The terror of going to Alicia’s flat, after she died. Seeing all of her things; the stuff she left behind.

  ‘London. Come on! There’s no point hanging about in this horrible place. The next stop is the Temple Church in London. We can stay with my sister. You drive. You’re quicker than me. Please.’

  Once inside the car, Nina flung the book on the back seat. ‘Let’s just get out of here!’

  The ignition kicked, Adam flicked on the lights and they reversed at speed, as if they were fleeing the darkness heading their way, trying to escape night itself.

  They approached the whirring traffic of the main road, where car lights shone mistily through the fogs of rain. The desolation of the Heath seemed almost welcoming now, after the creeping dreads of Temple Bruer.

  ‘Evil!’ Nina said, with great emphasis. ‘It’s evil.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I think that’s what Dad found, Adam. Evil. Something evil. That’s what he discovered about the Templars, an evil secret, and someone paid him to do it. That’s why he had all that money.’

  Adam said nothing, because a further thought had just occurred to him. Whoever was the dark villain in this piece, the man with the tattoos, the murderer, the man guarding or seeking the secret that gets you killed – that same person might be the one who had stolen Archie McLintock’s notebooks.

  Which meant that even
though Nina had stopped alerting the world via the internet, anyone who had the notebooks would still know their route: because they were following the exact same route Archie McLintock took and noted, eighteen months previously, through the Templar sites of Western Europe. Every move that he and Nina made was therefore pitifully predictable.

  The cold rain angrily lashed the window. Adam changed gear, and accelerated past a vegetable lorry, speeding through the darkness on the A456 to London. Racing across the drizzly and dismal heathland road, with all its legends of witches, and highwaymen, and ghosts.

  25

  Outskirts of Chiclayo, north Peru

  ‘So tell me more. Please.’

  Steve Venturi was on the phone. Jessica was in the cab of the TUMP Chevy; Larry was driving them the last few miles into Chiclayo.

  The signal dropped for a few moments, then Venturi’s languidly intellectual, southern Californian drawl returned. ‘Well, I’ve written it up – and emailed a PDF. Do you want to hear the summary?’

  ‘Yes. Yes please.’

  ‘OK. “Described below are three possible cases of foot amputation in skeletal remains associated with the Moche culture of north Peru. The three skeletons belonged to young male and female adults, and date from the eighth-century AD … ”’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Wait, Jess. Here’s the lox in the bagel. “Each case exhibits non-functional tibio-talar joints with proliferative bone occupying the normal joint space. The robusticity of the tibiae and fibulae suggest renewed weight-bearing and mobility following recovery. There is no evidence of pathology in any of the skeletons which might imply a surgical need for amputation. The osteological evidence is therefore consistent with details shown in Moche ceramic depictions of footless individuals.”’

  Jessica kept the phone pressed tightly to her ear. They were stuck in the seething and seedy traffic of peripheral Chiclayo. Blood-red graffiti, on a low whitewashed wall behind Larry, shouted Ni Democracia! Ni Dictadura! ‘Let me get this right, Steve. That means, in plain English, they cut off their own feet while they were alive, when they were perfectly healthy.’