by Shaun Hutson
Cath reached her own desk and set down her briefcase. She sat down and was about to check her messages when she heard a familiar voice call her name.
Terry Nicholls stood in the doorway of his office.
‘Have you got a minute, Cath?’ he said, his face expressionless.
She smiled at the Editor and got to her feet.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked as he ushered her inside.
She saw the other occupant of the room immediately.
Cath frowned.
‘This is who you want’ Nicholls addressed the seated figure, gesturing in Cath’s direction.
As the journalist entered, the person in the swivel chair turned and looked into her eyes.
Cath looked back and met Shanine Connor’s haunted stare.
Cath saw the pale skin, the lank brown hair, the holdall which lay at the girl’s feet and she noticed the large bulge of Shanine’s belly.
‘Why don’t you tell Miss Reed why you’re here?’ Nicholls said, taking a seat behind his desk.
He motioned for Cath to take a seat, which she did, perching on the edge of the black leather sofa backed onto one wall.
She ran appraising eyes over Shanine, guessing she was in her early thirties.
It might have surprised Cath to know she was only in her early twenties. The ravages of sleeping rough had taken their toll over the past few days. There was a slightly acrid smell in the office, which Cath realised was coming from the visitor.
‘My name’s Shanine Connor,’ she said, falteringly.
‘I’m Catherine Reed.’
‘I know who you are. I’ve read your articles,’ said Shanine, fumbling in her jeans and pulling out the crumpled photo. ‘I took this from one of them.’ She held up the picture for inspection.
‘She’s been here nearly an hour,’ said Nicholls. ‘Security were going to throw her out. She kept insisting she had to see you. I brought her in with me.’
‘What can I do for you, Ms Connor?’ Cath asked, puzzled.
‘Like I said, I read your articles, you know, about the cemetery desecrations, the things that have been going on with those children. It’s terrible,’
Shanine said, lowering her gaze.
Cath looked at Nicholls, who shrugged. ‘What’s your reason for wanting to see me, Ms Connor?’
‘Shanine.’
‘Shanine,’ Cath repeated.
‘I came to tell you you’re right about what’s going on’ the younger woman told her. ‘You said it was satanism.’
‘I said that it was possible it could be satanism’ Cath corrected her.
‘It is.’
‘How can you be sure? Are you involved in it?’ Cath asked, excitedly.
Shanine looked unblinkingly at her. ‘I’m the High Priestess of a Coven’ she said, softly. ‘I’m a witch.’
Eighty-one
Cath sat motionless, her eyes trained on the scruffy, pregnant young woman before her.
Nicholls was the first to move.
He got to his feet and headed towards the office door. ‘I think I’ll leave you to it: I’ve heard Ms Connor’s story once,’ he said, smiling wanly.
As he passed Cath he bent and whispered in her ear: ‘Good luck. Enjoy yourself.’
And he was gone.
‘I know he doesn’t believe me,’ Shanine said as the office door closed behind the Editor. ‘He thinks I’m mad.’
‘Why should he?’
Shanine tried to smile but didn’t manage it.
‘Why don’t you tell me what you told him?’ Cath said.
‘You’ll probably think I’m mad as well.’
‘Try me.’
‘I don’t know where to start,’ the younger woman said, wearily.
Cath saw tears in her eyes.
‘Would you like a drink? A coffee or something?’ she asked.
Shanine shook her head. ‘I think I need something stronger,’ she said, again trying to force a smile, again failing.
‘Listen, Ms … Shanine. What you said, about being a High Priestess, a witch, it’s not that I don’t believe you, but walking in here and saying something like that,’ Cath shrugged, ‘it’s like a scene from a bad horror film.’
‘What do you want me to say? It’s the truth. I came here because I need help, because I wanted to get away from them. They’ll kill me if they find me. They were going to kill my baby, that’s why I ran away in the first place. They would have killed my baby.’
‘Who are they?’
‘The other members of the group’
‘The Coven?’
Shanine nodded.
‘How did you get involved with them in the first place?’ Cath asked.
‘My boyfriend’ the younger woman said, wearily. ‘He was in the Navy when I met him. He was twenty-two, I was seventeen. He was gorgeous.’ A slight smile flickered on her lips. ‘About six foot, blond and muscly. Really fit. We spent nearly all our time in bed.’ The smile faded slowly. 1 told him about my family. I was brought up Catholic but I got fed up with it. He said to me that I should come to a meeting with him, a meeting of his own church. I said yes.
And it was fine. There were about fifteen other people there, about five or six of Stuart’s friends from the Navy and some others’
‘Men and women?’
‘Yes. They just sat around and discussed their religion, saying how happy they were and how much they got from their faith. I just assumed they were talking about Christianity and I enjoyed it. It was really relaxed, you know, a happy atmosphere. The only strange thing was I never saw a Bible, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.’
‘Where did these meetings take place?’
‘In Manchester. The room was like an office but with no furniture, nothing on the walls either. It didn’t seem weird though. They had meetings every week and Stuart just said that as I’d enjoyed myself so much I should keep going.’
She lowered her eyes momentarily. ‘We were still sleeping together and I think I was in love with him by then. I just wanted to be with him.’
‘What about your family? Did you tell them?’
‘My mum left home when I was six, my dad was always out on the piss. I went to live with my gran when I was eight. I didn’t see my parents again after that.
My gran was good to me but it’s not like having your mum and dad there, is it?’
Cath saw the despair in the younger woman’s eyes and shook her head gently.
‘What happened with the group?’ she asked finally.
‘Well, the next week another person, a man, joined. He’d been invited by one of Stuart’s friends. All contacts were made face to face. I found out that the group was called The Open Church.’ She began picking at the skin at the side of one nail. ‘The meetings went on for about six weeks, then they started talking about weird things -the cult, ceremonies. They gave me books and pamphlets on it to read. I thought they were trying to show me the dangers of it.’ She smiled bitterly. ‘If only I’d known.’
Cath kept her gaze fixed on Shanine.
‘They asked me and this bloke if we wanted to find out more - they called it “going deeper”. They asked us if we wanted to stay. I said yes, but it was mainly so I could be close to Stuart. The only way I could keep his attention was to go further.’
‘What about the man who joined?’
‘He left,’ Shanine told her. ‘And, as soon as he did, they changed the meeting place. If anyone left, they always changed the meeting place. We must have moved six or seven times in the first ten weeks. Then they asked me if I wanted to come to a different kind of meeting. Stuart said it would be all right and I trusted him so I went. It was in a big place, a big building.’
‘What kind of building?’
‘Like one of those MFI places but it was empty.’
‘A warehouse?’
Shanine nodded.
Warehouse.
Cath sucked in a deep breath. She reached for her cigarettes and lit o
ne.
‘Can I have one of those?’ Shanine asked.
Cath lit a cigarette for the younger woman; she noticed that her fingers were trembling.
‘What happened in the warehouse?’ Cath asked.
‘We all had a drink - just wine, but I think mine must have been drugged. They started praying and I just seemed to fall asleep, but my eyes were open. I was out of it for about the first half-hour. I mean, I’ve done drugs before but this was something else. I was smashed. Then, when I came round they were all sitting in a circle around me. There was just one candle lit and they were all praying in some language I couldn’t understand. It sounded like Arabic or something. I felt calm though -1 think that must have been the drugs - but the rest of them were going ape. They started off excited but then they got really aggressive, shouting. And there was always one man who led them, every time.’
‘The same man?’
Shanine nodded, took a drag on the cigarette.
‘It was always the same man and he never took his eyes off me the whole time they were praying. Stuart told me they were praying I was the right person for the group because they wanted me in their church. They wanted me.’
A solitary tear trickled down her cheek.
‘That was the first time anyone had wanted me’ she said, softly. ‘I was flattered. I wanted to be there because they wanted me.’
She took a long drag, blowing the smoke out in a bluish-grey stream.
‘At the next meeting, they told me the truth,’ she said, flatly.
Cath sat forward in her seat, watching as Shanine wiped the now freely flowing tears away with one grubby hand. ‘The truth about what?’ she asked.
‘About the church, about who they were worshipping, who they expected me to serve.’ Cath looked on in fascination.
‘That was the thing, when they prayed, it was never to God, it was always to someone they called the Protector,’ Shanine continued. ‘They said I was to help them serve the Protector. I knew I’d gone too far then, that there was something wrong, but it was too late.’
‘What did they call themselves, Shanine?’
‘The Satanic Church, but they told me never to say that in front of others.’
She ground out the cigarette in a nearby ashtray. ‘After that they said I was ready.’
‘For what?’
‘Initiation.’
Eighty-two
Cath watched as the younger woman pulled another cigarette from the packet and pushed it between her thin lips.
The journalist again obliged with a light.
She watched intently as Shanine drew on the cigarette, brushing her hair from her eyes, shifting in her seat to try and ease the weight in her belly.
‘Who decided to initiate you,’ Cath continued.
‘The other members of the group,’ said Shanine, watching as Cath fumbled in her handbag and pulled out a microcassette recorder, which she set down close to the younger woman.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Cath asked, pressing the Record switch.
Shanine looked at the machine, its twin spools turning silently.
‘How many of the other members did you know by name?’ the journalist asked.
‘Apart from Stuart, none of them, but he told me that they were important people. He reckoned a couple of them were social workers. One was a businessman. There was a doctor, too. If any of the group were sick, they had to see him. We weren’t allowed to see outsiders.’ Shanine gave a hollow laugh.
‘Stuart even reckoned one of the group was a journalist.’ She looked at Cath and held her gaze.
‘What happened when you were initiated?’ Cath said.
‘They did it inside the warehouse, turned it into our place, a sort of makeshift temple. All the fittings were removable. Curtains, shrouds, altar, and there was a block. Like a big piece of stone. That was where they did the sacrifices. There was water and herbs, too, but I don’t know what they were. I can remember the smells though.’ She paused, lowered her gaze. ‘The altar was covered with a white cloth with black edging. They put a big cup on it, a chalice. That’s what they collected the blood in.’ She closed her eyes tightly, as if the effort of reliving the memory was causing her physical pain.
‘The altar cloth was covered in symbols, pentagrams, upturned crosses - that kind of thing. And there was writing on it but I couldn’t understand it. It looked foreign.’
Cath sat silently, her eyes never leaving the younger woman.
‘We were all dressed in white robes, nothing underneath. The High Priest wore a gold chain around his neck but it was really thick, like a padlock chain, and it had a gold circle on it with a smaller pentagram inside. He used to read the services from a big book on the altar. He was the only one allowed to touch it. He read the service in Latin.’
‘How can you be sure it was Latin?’ Cath asked.
‘I told you, I was brought up a Catholic,’ said Shanine. ‘I’ve had Latin rammed down my throat since I was three.’ She took a drag on her cigarette.
‘Sometimes they’d say the Lord’s Prayer backwards.’
Cath swallowed hard.
The image of the graffiti in the crypt at Croydon Cemetery flashed into her mind.
‘What happened during your initiation?’ the journalist persisted.
‘I was washed, then anointed with oil. Another woman did it, a woman in her mid-twenties, then she rubbed oil on my boobs and here,’ she motioned to her thighs. ‘She held my arms above my head while the High Priest had sex with me.
The others just watched. Even Stuart was watching.’ She lowered her eyes again, as if ashamed. ‘I had sex with another man later that night, too, with everyone watching. They said he was Satan and that I was one of his brides now.’
‘Did you get a good look at his face?’
‘No. He was wearing a mask. Like a goat’s head.’
‘Oh Christ,’ murmured Cath.
‘He was the one who cut me. Here.’
She held out her right hand and Cath saw a deep scar which ran from the bottom
of her index finger to the base of her thumb.
‘The blood was collected in the chalice along with the blood from the animal they killed’ Shanine continued. ‘A cat, I think. I had to drink some of it. I thought I was going to be sick but they’d given me drugs before and after the ceremony - I hardly knew what was happening. From then on I was a Priestess. I took part in ceremonies all the time. I had sex with men and women. I helped initiate other people into the group.’
‘Did you bring people to them?’
‘No. That was done by Stuart and his friends. I helped once the new members were there though.’ She paused, the knot of muscles at the side of her jaw pulsing. ‘I found out three months later that I was pregnant. I knew it was Stuart’s because I’d had only oral sex with the other men during that period, but they said I couldn’t
tell him. They let me go full term. They wanted the baby.’
‘What for?’
‘Sacrifice.’
There was a long silence.
Tears trickled down Shanine’s cheeks.
‘They killed it a week after it was born’ she said, sniffing, but not attempting to wipe away the tears. ‘They did it in front of me. They even made me cut her. When the High priest was making the incisions he made me hold the knife as well and when they were finished they said the baby had been offered to Satan.’
‘Did you try to stop them?’
Shanine could only shake her head, tears now pouring down her cheeks.
‘They said it was either the baby or me,’ she sobbed, finally. ‘I said I didn’t want it to happen but they said I had to let her go or Satan would be angry, and they told me if I told anyone they would kill me. No matter where I went, how far I ran. They said they would always know. That someone would always bring me back to them.’ She looked imploringly at Cath who felt helpless to comfort her.
‘Was yours the only baby killed?’
Shanine shook her head, her eyes now tightly closed as if she could shut out the visions in her mind, too.
‘They used young children. Three or four years old,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘They got them from people, I don’t know who. Not group members.
They paid them. Poor people. People who couldn’t afford to feed themselves, let alone their kids. They killed them or they abused them and they warned the kids that if they said anything they’d kill their parents. Those kids were terrified. They drugged them, too, so they wouldn’t struggle while they were abusing them.’
Cath listened intently, her mouth slightly open, her eyes wide.
She wanted to cry.
She could almost feel the pain Shanine felt.
So much pain.
‘Stuart told me he never knew they’d kill children,’ Shanine continued. ‘He said he was leaving the group. So they killed him. They murdered him and made it look like suicide.’
Cath sat forward. ‘How did they do it?’ she asked urgently.
‘They worked a Death Hex on him, they forced him to kill himself. They were powerful.’
‘I don’t understand. How could they make him commit suicide?’
‘They used something of his.’
‘A lock of hair or something?’
Shanine managed a thin smile. ‘No. It doesn’t work like that’ she said. ‘They didn’t need his hair or his finger or anything he wore. The Death Hex works without all that. All they needed was a photograph of him.’
Cath felt the colour draining from her cheeks, her flesh rising in goosebumps.
‘They stole a photograph of him’ Shanine continued. ‘Three days later, he was dead.’
Cath, her hand shaking, reached frantically for the phone.
Eighty-three
The nurse had entered the room twice during the night. That much Talbot could remember.
Each time she’d found him sitting in the same position, holding his mother’s hand, leaning forward slightly gazing at her face as if expecting his presence to drag her into consciousness.
The nurse had fiddled with the drips and the machinery and then left him in silence again.
In the dark.
He hated the night and the stillness.
