Agent of Equilibrium

by N. J. Mercer

  Johnny gave a single nod of acknowledgement. “Well, let’s stop talking and get going then!” he said, deciding not to bring the subject up again … not on this assignment anyway. They left the house and Sascha locked up. Johnny couldn’t help noticing that his friend had not bothered tidying away the old biscuits and half-full coffee mugs that were lying around; he expected the scientific genius was attempting to grow new strains of mould or fungus for study on his return, or so he hoped.

  A little hand waved at the approaching pair from the motorhome’s large side window. Johnny opened the squeaky passenger door, and greetings followed as Sascha and Baccharus were reunited. Luggage was loaded quickly on to the vehicle before it became soaked by the persistent rain, and the party set off into the night. Johnny drove, Sascha sat in the front passenger seat, and Baccharus hovered about the living section of the vehicle, occupying himself by nosily searching through Sascha’s rucksack of gadgets, familiarising himself with the items he thought might be useful.

  “So, where are we going?” asked Sascha.

  “Just north,” replied Johnny, “if we get closer to the source of the aberrant energy waves it may be easier to discover their precise location, or at least some clues, besides, I have a feeling that if we don’t find whatever we’re looking for, it will find us.”

  Sascha turned in his seat and asked Baccharus to bring his rucksack over. Rummaging through it, he pulled out a small black plastic device that looked like a mobile phone and fixed it to the dashboard.

  “What’s that?” asked the familiar, eyeing the item suspiciously.

  “Something I hope will help us,” replied Sascha. “It’s a portable version of my Presarium detector; the graphical display will indicate when we are near any significant source of psychic energy, aberrant or otherwise. It may give us a lead regarding where we need to go or warn us if there is trouble brewing – psychic trouble, that is.”

  Johnny glanced at the device, intrigued. He was aware of Sascha’s Presarium detectors although he had never seen one that was so compact. A question sprang to his mind. “The anomalous psychic energy up north has been there for a while, Sascha. The Council of Seven only became concerned enough to send us after they detected powerful, short-lived Presarium bursts from it. I was wondering if your detector picked up any of these?”

  Sacha frowned. “I’m sure it must have. If they lasted milliseconds then there’s every chance I didn’t notice them. Give me a few minutes, I’ll scroll through the device’s memory to see if it registered anything significant.” Sascha picked up the Presarium detector and started fiddling with some buttons. It bleeped and flashed, and the screen flicked through various graphs and charts. “Baccharus, can you get us a few drinks?” he requested while endeavouring to find the energy peaks. The cherub hovered back to the fridge.

  While his friends were occupied, Johnny thought about his recent dream; he wondered where the valley was, if it even existed, and who the people in it calling for help were.

  “Earth expires, the children broken,

  Chaos fires once more awoken,”

  They had cried out to him.

  “Here you go, Johnny.” Baccharus held out an ice-cold bottle of cola for his keeper, another was offered to Sascha, who took it without taking his eyes away from the device.

  It was another minute before Sascha announced his findings. “Bingo! I’ve found about twenty energy surges over the past week. There could have been more, but they are so short-lived I think that even my detector missed them.”

  “So what do you make of them?” asked Johnny.

  Sascha thought for a few moments. “Well, they’re bigger than anything I have ever seen, their peaks are well off the scale of my meter. Obviously produced by a powerful source, the nature of which I don’t have a clue about … they could even be extraterrestrial.”

  The friends were all silenced by this suggestion as their imaginations ran wild with possibilities, none of which were particularly appealing, and each chose wisely to keep his ideas to himself.

  Johnny accelerated hard as they left the city and hit the motorway. He drove for a further hour before Sascha relieved him of driving duty; it was how they rotated their night journeys: one man drove for an hour, one man rested, and then they changed places.

  Chapter 5

  Having persuaded Peter Pike to join him, Martin walked back home from the Cavendish Arms. He moved quickly through the cold night to his apartment block. Sodium lighting illuminated the exterior of the modern, angular building; it bathed him and the surrounding car park in an orange glow.

  A swipe from his electronic key fob opened the polished steel and glass front door. He only lived on the second floor but decided to take the lift up rather than the stairs. Martin was tired and it wasn’t just because of the walk, months of stress and insomnia were taking their toll. As much as he wanted to, he could not retire for the night just yet, he had another meeting. It was with someone whom he had found only after weeks of persistent searching. Martin had realised a long time ago that if he was to confront the evil from the old house, he would need help; somebody other than Peter Pike. Pike was a good man, able enough, but Martin had not revealed everything to him; he could not. His old friend was far too rooted in a conventional view of reality to understand what he was truly up against. Martin needed the aid of one who was experienced in matters of the occult, someone who understood the true nature of the threat before them. When he initially set out to find this help, it had been without any real hope of success. He had scoured websites associated with the mystical and paranormal for days; he had referred to journals on the subject and contacted groups that he never believed actually existed until he found them: organisations like ghost hunting clubs and witch’s covens. As he explored this strange new world, it became apparent to him that there were more people involved in it than he could possibly have imagined, and to his surprise there was (mostly) nothing odd about them. They were normal folk, touched at some point in their lives by the mysterious and the unexplainable, and their response was to set out and discover more of what lay beyond their daily experience of life.

  As he searched for help, there emerged a name, mentioned by several different sources, somebody with the potential to aid him: Boyd Tennant. Tennant was a psychic investigator, described by those who knew him as thorough, open-minded and successful (Martin wasn’t sure exactly how success was measured in this line of work). With a background in security and the military, Tennant could also handle himself, which was going to be important – hostility was likely, and he needed someone who would not shirk from it.

  To find Boyd, Martin had befriended a helpful, middle-aged man with a ponytail called Jan from a local paranormal society who turned out to be the nearest thing to a guide for him through this new world he was exploring. Jan was acquainted with Boyd through their mutual interest in investigating the unexplained and agreed to contact him for Martin. Despite this help, Boyd Tennant proved to be rather secretive and difficult to get hold of; he reputedly only spoke to somebody about his work when he was convinced that they were as serious about it as he was. It did not help that his services had no fee, which meant that Martin was unable to lure him with the prospect of a big payday; it also led him to wonder exactly where this man’s income came from. After weeks of frustrating messaging and persuasion, all carried out through Jan, Boyd eventually agreed to accept a phone call directly from Martin, and a fortnight ago they had spoken for the first time. They had made contact on a few more occasions since then, always by telephone. Over the course of their conversations, Martin had explained everything he knew about what went on in the house and his own past involvement with it. In the beginning, he had been a little cagey about revealing the bizarre activities and strange events he had witnessed; gradually, as his confidence in Boyd increased, he went on to explain all he had seen quite openly. To his relief, Boyd did not turn him away as a lunatic, no matter how strange the tale. “Tell me more,” the psychic inve
stigator often urged Martin over the course of their conversations, cajoling more details out of him so he could build up an understanding of what was going on in the isolated building.

  Martin had been trying for some time to arrange a meeting in person; Boyd was a busy man, or at least gave the impression of being one, add to this Martin’s preoccupation with finding Rachel, and the opportunity for a face-to-face encounter had not arisen – until tonight. Having only ever spoken to him on the phone, Martin wondered about the appearance of the other man. Normally, he would not have bothered himself with such irrelevancies; however, the nature of their conversations and the frankly bizarre subject matter often made him consider what type of person was willing to acknowledge the perversities that he described. All he had to go on was the voice, which was gravelly with the hint of an accent, the origins of which he was unsure of, he had never been particularly good at recognising accents, he guessed there was a touch of Scouse or possibly some Irish there. From the throaty voice he imagined an old withered figure, although he knew this could not be true because it was contrary to the exploits he had heard this man to be responsible for. The stories Jan had told him about Boyd could only have involved someone of notable physical vigour.

  Martin sat nervously by the phone with an eye on the clock, waiting for the pre-arranged time to call, a quarter past midnight – a late hour to speak. He could not have arranged anything earlier because of his meeting at the pub; besides, he had heard Boyd Tennant didn’t sleep very much. Three more minutes to go according to the clock on his wall; he could wait no longer and dialled the number Jan had passed on to him. After two rings, a coarse voice answered:

  “Hello.”

  “Hello?” Martin ventured nervously; he was still unsure about how to interact with this man he had never met.

  “Is that Martin?”

  “Yes, it’s Martin here, Boyd – are you ready to come over then?”

  “Ready whenever you are … it’s not past your bedtime is it?”

  Martin laughed dryly. Was it a serious question or had he just heard a deadpan joke?

  “I’ll be awake. Flat twenty-four, Halford House, Harper Street, G L four. Is that all right?” he said.

  “That’s fine; I’ll be there in under an hour.”

  “Great, see you soon then, bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Martin hung up and walked to the kitchen to make a coffee before Boyd arrived. He wanted it strong enough to clear the alcohol and tiredness from his head, not so potent that it would keep him awake all night, that wouldn’t be necessary – not tonight anyway.

  Chapter 6

  Boyd lifted the smouldering cigarette from the ashtray by the phone and took a couple of quick drags – finally he would meet Martin. This last contact was by far the briefest in a series of telephone conversations that had been going on for the past two weeks. During the course of these exchanges, he had listened carefully to everything the other man had said and recognised with great concern that unearthly powers were at work in the old mansion house.

  Boyd was an acolyte of the Earthly Eye and Servant of the Grimoires, the archaic treatise on which his quasi-religious global organisation ‘the Order of the Earthly Eye’ was founded; the Grimoires were the source of his knowledge regarding the true nature of reality. It was through training from the Aged Masters (the high priests of his Order) and by knowledge of the holy texts that he could confirm that the vile rites and rituals described by Martin over the telephone were the observances of the Disciples of Disorder. Martin had also been honest enough to tell him that, for a short time, he had been a follower of this most ancient and wicked way and a prospective Disciple. He had described meetings in the basement where powerful beings were worshipped and revered, demonic deities such as Chrobos, Azzubelarian and Orbok. Boyd prided himself on being a tough man, but even he had shuddered at the mention of each damnable appellation. Martin spoke of them so naively that Boyd could only conclude that the Disciples had kept the full truth of these fearful entities from him. Maybe they had doubted his commitment, he thought. These were the names of alien beings that had struck fear into the hearts of man’s earliest ancestors and were now mostly forgotten. By forgetting these ancient evil life-forms through the course of time, mankind had indeed brought great misfortune upon itself because a millennium was but a blink of an eye to the immortals, and they would never forget their insatiable hunger for worlds. Except for a vigilant few, such as those who followed the Grimoires, mankind had indeed dropped its guard.

  It had taken a few conversations before Boyd sensed that Martin trusted him enough to really open up about the events he had witnessed, events that had upset his sensibilities so profoundly. On one occasion, Martin gave an account of underground passages where strange figures lurked in the shadows, where alien smells and sounds offended the nose and ears. He had described all this as if he were speaking of earthly deviations; Boyd knew otherwise, indeed, they were deviations that Martin described – they were not of this world though. Boyd’s past encounters with Disorder and his familiarity with the ancient texts allowed him to interpret correctly the evil Martin had seen, and it heralded the worst, for it appeared that the enemy had already swollen its human ranks with demons summoned from the worlds where Disorder ruled. It was a bad situation, already there had been deaths – Martin had told him so. He had mentioned someone called Louise as an example, someone whom he cared for. It was the tall man who Martin blamed for the murder; he called him Mr Kreb, the one who walked with the beast at his side. That’s not a man, thought Boyd Tennant, recognising the so-called Mr Kreb and the beast as summoned entities.

  Through Martin’s recollections of events in the house, Boyd had also been made aware of a dangerous and more immediate enemy. Chrobos, Azzubelarian and Orbok, awesome in their own right, were not actually present on Earth; there was another – at the very centre of the abominable developments taking place in the old house. “The man at the top of it all,” was how Martin had put it to him. “The boss, the man who dragged everyone in like he had a power over them.” These were all ways of describing the leader of the Disciples, and Martin, despite turning against the heinous religion, still spoke of the leader with awe. Boyd knew this was not merely a charismatic manipulator of the type so often found at the heart of religious cults, the one who Martin described was the Warlock, and Boyd doubted whether he was even entirely human. There was always a Warlock to rouse the Disciples of Disorder. The Warlock was a being with genuine power – the only power, psychic control over matter. The Warlock could be identified through the account Martin had given of his psychic ability or ‘magic’ as he had put it. Over time the Warlock changed – the magic never did, it was still exactly as it had been documented in the Grimoires, ages ago.

  Boyd had dealt with the Disciples before; this time there was something different about them, they were more focused, more determined, and it made him uncharacteristically apprehensive. He took comfort in his faith by whispering a few memorised lines from the holy chapters of the third Grimoire thus invoking a ward of protection against the machinations of Disorder. Then he muttered a prayer of thanks to the holy books, for without the knowledge contained within them he would be like Martin: able to recognise that evil was truly present … unable to truly know it. The whole affair perturbed him greatly, especially the demons summoned from hellish worlds to aid their fellow Disciples on Earth.

  Boyd inhaled again from his cigarette and shook his head in barely subdued frustration because he might have resolved the matter by now. After the first few conversations, he had wanted to make an immediate move to find the old building and eradicate the psychic vermin within it; Martin had not let him. He had stubbornly withheld certain details, refusing to tell him the names of any of the Disciples and the location of their base, only letting slip once that it was somewhere in the Highlands. Martin even knew the human name of the Warlock; he had kept that to himself also. There was a reason for this apparent irrationality; i
t was to protect the innocent victims wrapped up in this mess, one of whom he personally wanted to remove from the grip of the Disciples. “There’s a girl there who needs my help,” he had said.

  “A girl?” Boyd had asked over the phone.

  “A fifteen-year-old, I’ve known her since she was a kid. The Disciples need her and her sisters for something; I don’t know what but I have to get her out of there.”

  “Don’t be a fool! Don’t go in there yourself!” Boyd had urged; Martin had refused to listen. He told him that he would never again entrust the girl’s well-being to a stranger, and only after he had removed her from danger would he be willing to share information about the location of the cult and the names of its members.

  “Let me help you save her,” Boyd had pleaded. He wasn’t able to persuade the other man to change his mind. Jan must have painted quite a gung ho picture of him; it seemed that Martin’s impression of Boyd was of someone who would go storming in and probably get the girl hurt in the process – Boyd had to concede that the ‘storming in’ part wasn’t entirely unfair. He had tried to prise more information from Martin by appealing to his sense of wider responsibility and explaining the supernatural danger the world was being exposed to, danger he had witnessed so many times before; the man would not budge. Unlike Boyd, his first priority was not to stop the Disciples of Disorder; it was to remove the girl from danger. Boyd also feared for the girl, she had a central role in the aims of the cult; like Martin, he did not know what … he imagined the worst though.

  With cigarette in hand, Boyd wandered to the kitchen. There wasn’t enough time to finish the limp corned beef sandwich on the table so he brewed a quick coffee instead and continued to ponder the situation as he did so. Time was short; Martin had told him that events in the house would be climaxing in three nights. If only they had been able to meet sooner … Boyd had been preoccupied with finally apprehending a psychic pervert of modest ability whom he had been trailing for almost a month. The rogue may have been caught; however, it meant that in the meantime it had been difficult for Martin to get hold of him. When Martin was finally able to bring the danger from the house to his attention, Boyd regretted that he had been so distracted all this time. Tonight though, it seemed everything would change. Martin had told him earlier that he had a plan for the girl and was now ready for Boyd’s full involvement; tonight he would pass on all the vital information he was withholding, he would tell him everything. On a more personal level, Boyd looked forward to meeting Martin, to not be corrupted by the Disciples of Disorder after the degree of exposure he was subjected to showed strong moral resolve; he considered the possibility of recruiting him into the Order afterwards.