Stones of Power- Hellstone & Maelstrom

by Jenna Grey

  She stood in the doorway of her bedroom, staring at the shambles, horrified. The bed covers had been thrown everywhere, drawers pulled out, her wardrobe open and her clothes were dangling from their hangers.

  “Bastards. There was no need for this. What the hell did they think they’d find here?” Finn snapped.

  Then Polly saw the sigil. She felt her legs go from under her. It was only Finn’s arms around her waist that kept her upright.

  “What the fuck is that?” Finn asked.

  Bert walked over and stared down at it, his face grave. Finn led Polly a little nearer but still kept his distance. Could he feel the same tingling vibes coming from it that she was feeling? It was a kind of prickling sting, as if she’d touched stinging nettles, or like a mild electric shock.

  “Can you feel it?” Finn asked. Polly just nodded, rubbing her arms. The hairs were standing up, and she could see the energy prickling over them.

  “What is it?” Polly asked, trying to focus; the prickling sensation was growing stronger the longer she stared down at it.

  “At first glance, I’d say it’s a kind of promissory note,” Bert said, kneeling down, not without difficulty and examining it more closely. “I believe that this is the contract that sealed Polly’s fate. It’s a kind of promise to the old gods that Polly would be sacrificed to them at the right time, in return for a favour. That favour being the release of Hel from her torment.”

  Polly just stared at it, the power making her teeth itch, wishing she could make it stop. Why was she feeling it now when she hadn’t felt it all those years? Because she had only just let those feelings in. Now she couldn’t ignore them.

  “But my uncle told me that pact had been made years ago when I was just a toddler. I think I was three at the time. I don’t understand.”

  Bert gave a heavy sigh, allowing Finn to help him up.

  “Yes, my dear, it was just about the time your uncle murdered your grandfather, and Winchard came to me and asked me to find the Hellstone for him. I think that they imagined I would do it and they would find the Hellstone imminently. I daresay the sigil’s been there all of that time. It’s possible, if not probable, that you uncle placed a concealment spell on it, and the spell was only lifted when he died.”

  Polly almost gave way to tears again, but she managed to keep them at bay. She could hardly comprehend such treachery.

  “They were really going to send a three-year-old child to Hell? I wish that bastard wasn’t dead so that I could kill him all over again,” Finn raged. Polly could see, though, that underneath the rage was real fear. No matter how afraid he was, it was nothing to match the terror she felt. The thought of her, as a tiny child, being flung into that place, alone and not understanding any of it, was too terrible to think about. That bitch Hel was going to pay for even contemplating it.

  “I wish he was too. I’d make him suffer,” Polly said, and she meant it.

  Bert looked her hard in the eyes and said:

  “Be careful what you wish for, sweetheart.”

  Polly walked to the wardrobe and pulled out her suitcase.

  “I’ll help you pack up your things,” Finn said. “Don’t let this upset you. You’re quite safe with us.” Polly couldn’t help but wonder how true that was.

  “I’ll go and take a look around your uncle’s study to see if I can find anything of any use while we’re here,” Bert said. “Finn’s right, try not to let this upset you too much, my dear. This really doesn’t change anything – in fact, it might give us some clue as to how to break the contract. Finn, take some snaps of it with your phone, will you? I’ll have a closer look at this thing when I’ve got some research books to hand and see if there are any loopholes.”

  Polly took enough clothes and bits and pieces to fill a suitcase, photographs and some of the things her grandmother had given her. She supposed she could come back at any time; the house sale would take a while to go through. She went down to the library to find a few of her favourite books: Edith Nesbitt and some of C. S. Lewis’ non-fiction works. She had always loved the library, Polly and her grandmother would spend hours in there finding hidden gems and exchanging them, reading to one another. Liam had told her that her grandmother was still watching over her, taking care of her. Polly couldn’t help but wonder what she thought about all of this.

  “What am I going to do with all of these books? I’ll have to sell them I suppose,” she said. Finn was browsing through some of the occult books he’d found, his expression showing a little more interest than Polly would have liked. Polly glanced at the book he’d been looking through. Daemonum valde terribilis. Terrible demons. It wasn’t a book that Polly had ever found any interest in.

  “I’m not sure I want anything from this place – it all feels tainted somehow. Let’s see how your dad’s doing.”

  Gaunt’s study was lined with more bookshelves, mellow with age and old dust. There were lots of knick-knacks around the place: strange curios, instruments and occult miscellany. Some of the items she’d rather not spend too much time looking at; they were pregnant with corruption. There were some specimens in jars, preserved in alcohol, animals mostly, but with strange defects: too many limbs, too many heads, twisted and deformed. She felt her stomach roll, and she looked away quickly, but wherever she turned there were just more objects that turned her stomach to jelly.

  “Please, don’t touch anything either of you,” Bert cautioned. “We don’t know what half of these things are; all I can tell you is that there is powerful magic at work here and I don’t want to take any chances.”

  “Is it all right to look at some of the books?” Finn asked. “We aren’t going to find out what we need if we don’t at least touch something.”

  Bert considered it for a moment.

  “Yes, but don’t read out loud from any of them. Be very, very cautious.”

  As if Polly needed to be told that.

  There were some books lying open on the table, and Polly glanced at one of them, knowing already what she would find. The first was a grimoire, containing all kinds of dark spells. She closed the book quickly, aware of how the spells within could invade your consciousness without your being aware of it. There were other books that were even worse, torture manuals, complete with graphic pictures of ways to inflict hideous suffering on people. Images of men and women, naked and dangling upside down assaulted her. There were pictures of people being sawn in half between their legs, having stakes forced into their anuses and water poured down their throats through funnels. Some of these books she had never seen before: books of magic and treatises, some of them gruesome beyond belief. There were necromonicon, spell books, all of them dark, all of them terrible. Her uncle was pure filth.

  “There’s nothing here about the Hellstone as far as I can see. He must have hidden anything connected with it,” Bert said. “Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we? I think that I should be able to locate anything he’s squirrelled away. Just give me a few minutes.”

  Bert rubbed his hands together, closed his eyes and focused. Polly had never really understood how Bert’s ability to locate lost objects worked, but it did. Somehow he could locate missing items, a magical finding service that defied logic. It was what had brought Polly to him in the first place. He’d told her it was a mixture of natural talent and a little magic, but whatever, it was remarkable. It was only a few moments before he opened his eyes and smiled at them, moving towards one of the bookcases.

  “Not very original, but I daresay the police wouldn’t have been looking for hidden passages,” he said. He fumbled around on the bookcase for a few moments and then gave a satisfied ‘Ah,’ as he found the hidden switch. Polly’s heart was hurrying in her chest, although she wasn’t sure if it was with fear or excitement. In all the years she’d lived here she’d had no idea that there were hidden passages. As Bert touched the switch, the whole front swung open to reveal a narrow, disgustingly filthy passage behind. Had her uncle known this was here? She had no idea.


  “There were stories my grandmother told me about this place,” Polly said, peering inside. “She said that back in the old days it was used by a coven of witches, but they had to stay hidden because they were being persecuted back then. She told me about hidden passages, but I thought they were just stories.”

  “Look.” Bert tipped his head down to a small ledge at the side. There were some flashlights there, quite a few of them, some candles and matches.

  “It looks as if your uncle knew about this place. Of course, it was ideal for his purposes, somewhere he could go to perform his obscene rituals with no chance of being disturbed.

  Polly frowned.

  “If my uncle knew about this place, why did he go to that warehouse to perform the ritual, why not do it here, where it was completely safe?” Polly asked.

  “Oh, it could be any number of reasons. Magic has great subtleties; it could have been that he needed a certain alignment of the natural forces that run beneath the earth for that particular ritual, or simply that it wasn’t big enough. Let’s see what there is to see – I’m sure we’re going to find something here that will be useful to us.”

  Polly picked up one flashlight and tucked another one into her belt. One thing was certain; she didn’t want to get caught down here without a light.

  “Stay close, you two. Polly go in the middle, dear – we really have no idea what’s down here.”

  Polly wasn’t sure she liked being patronised, but then she remembered the awful sights she’d seen recently and decided she really didn’t mind being in the middle. They moved forwards cautiously, following the passage until they came out into a larger cellar-like room. It stank of mould and decay, but there was something else, another smell that ran strongly over the top of it.

  “That smell,” she said. “It’s not what I think it is, is it?” Of course, she knew it was exactly that.

  “Stay back, Polly, just for a moment. Let me look first,” Bert said, as he approached the corner of the room where there was a sharp bend leading into another passage or room. He moved forwards, and Polly saw his face drain of colour. “You don’t need to see this, sweetheart, but this is most certainly what the police have been looking for.”

  Polly couldn’t leave it at that. She had to see. She put her arm up and covered her mouth with her cardigan sleeve, moving forwards cautiously and taking in the smallest of breaths, just to give her enough air to stay conscious. The stench was overpowering now. The sight she saw as she turned the corner made her retch, and it took all of her control not to throw up.

  A pile of bodies lay tossed against the wall, naked dregs of humanity, just tangles of arms and legs, twisted torsos, dried blood and rotting flesh. Sunken eyes stared at her from parchment covered skulls, lips peeled back over shrunken gums in an awful grin. This was the stuff nightmares were made of, and she knew that when she closed her eyes, they would come back to haunt her for the rest of her life. A sound bubbled from her throat, pure terror forcing its way out. For a moment she thought she was going to pass out, the world spinning around her. The miasma that permeated the air seemed to fill her lungs, forcing the breath from them, choking her.

  “Here, put this over your face,” Bert said, offering her a large handkerchief. She took it gratefully, holding it over her nose; it was better. The world came back into focus.

  “This is too fucking much,” Finn said. He peeled off his tee shirt and tied it around his face.

  “You two go back out. I can search the rest of the place. You don’t need to put yourselves through this,” Bert said.

  “No, I need to see,” Polly repliedddddddddddddddddd. “I need to remember what we’re fighting for.”

  She forced herself to look back at the bodies, steeling herself. Some of them were quite fresh, perhaps only days old, some long rotting and so decayed that there was little left of them; desiccated skin peeled from bones and scalps sloughed from skulls. She stared, transfixed by the sight, totally lost in the horror of it. Polly realised, finally, that she recognised one of them – the boy she had seen in the missing poster; his features were distorted, and she barely recognised him, but yes, it was him.

  “This has been going on for some time,” Bert said. “There are at least a dozen bodies here.”

  Polly barely heard him, she still couldn’t take in what she was seeing, her mind recoiling; the tableau of rotting flesh in front of her filled her field of vision, and she couldn’t take in more than tiny snapshots of it. Then Polly realised with utter horror what she was seeing – some of them were babies and children; she could see small limbs, tiny hands and fingers. She was too numb to cry.

  “What are we going to do?” Finn asked, his voice barely a whisper. “Do we tell the police?” He looked away, staring down at the cracked flagstones, his face almost the same colour as the corpses.

  Bert had paled, but his face had set into an unreadable mask. Polly had only ever seen the best side of Bert, the kind old man, who seemed totally at peace with the world. What she saw now was something far different; this was the magician, the master of the arcane, who probably had the power to destroy the world if he chose to.

  “What good would that do?” Bert said. “I’m quite sure that Gaunt will have only taken those that wouldn’t be missed, perhaps bought the babies from women that were glad to get rid of them for a few pounds. If we bring the police in, it will only add more misery. I’ll get my friends to come in and give them a decent burial; they’ll be respectful, give them back some of their dignity.”

  All Polly wanted to do was to get away from this dreadful sight and smell. Up until a few days ago, the only dead body she’d seen was her grandmother’s, and she had died a relatively peaceful death. Since then she’d seen far more than she’d ever bargained for. Finn came beside her and slipped his hand into hers, his warm living hand, and she felt him squeeze her fingers, ever so gently; it was a gesture of reassurance that didn’t reassure. She suddenly realised that she was desperately cold and was shivering so violently that her teeth were cracking against one another. Finn slipped his jacket around her shoulders and snuggled her in.

  “At least it looks as if they died quickly,” Finn said. “They probably wouldn’t have known much about it. Their throats were cut cleanly. They would have been dead in seconds.”

  “Thanks, Finn, that makes me feel so much better,” Polly said. “I can’t believe that this was all going on. I used to make sandwiches for their little gatherings, lay out tea and coffee for them. How could I have not seen that this was happening?”

  Bert took her by the top of her arms and held her a little too tightly, staring hard into her eyes.

  “Polly, you must stop trying to take any of the blame for this. You could never have known. Now, at least, you can stop feeling guilty for ending this wretched coven.”

  Polly let that sink in.

  “I wish I’d made it last longer,” she said. “Those bastards deserve to rot in Hell.”

  Finn had moved a little way off from them and was bending close to the ground, looking at something he’d found there. Polly went across to see what it was: more remains, but only bones this time – these were old.

  “It looks as if the witches that used this place in the old days were into some pretty dark shit as well,” Finn said, gently moving some of the bones with his boot.

  “They’re all so small,” Polly said, looking down at a tiny skull. “They look like newborn babies.”

  “It would seem so. These probably date back to the time when the house was first built, perhaps the 16th and 17th centuries. Newborns, offered to their Dark Lord.”

  “I feel like burning the house to the ground,” Polly said. “I want to leave here and never set foot in it again.”

  “I’m inclined to agree with you,” Bert said. “The evil that’s been done here will permeate the place for the rest of its existence. I pity any soul that moves in here. I think we should remove anything that you want to take, sell the rest of the cont
ents that can be sold, and then arrange for an unfortunate accident to take place. It can be easily arranged.”

  Polly thought about it for a moment – this had been her gran’s home, and she had been happy here most of the time. Did she really want to see it burnt to the ground? She looked back at the pile of bodies and said:

  “Yes, I think that sounds like a plan.”

  “Let’s move back along the passage a bit,” Bert said. “There’s a doorway there, and I’d like to see what’s inside.”

  Finn had already disappeared back along the passage, and Polly practically ran to catch up with him.

  The doorway that Bert had spotted was a narrow opening that Polly hadn’t even noticed, probably because she’d been so terrified that she’d shut out everything but the few steps in front of her and the blessed comfort of the flashlight beam lighting her way. Bert went in first, and she felt a hand in the small of her back urging her gently through it, with Finn following up the rear. Polly found herself in a narrow passage, so tight that her shoulders almost touched the sides. Bert was having some trouble getting through.

  After a few seconds, they came out into a larger room; it had a feeling of great age to it, a brick built chamber, with moss and slime covered walls. The structure looked worryingly precarious in places, as if it could topple in on them at any moment. At least the smell here was only of mould and decay – better than the miasma of death they had left behind.

  As Bert moved aside, Polly gave a little gasp. At the far end of the room was an altar, covered with a black velvet cloth and laid out with all the trappings of worship: candles, dried flowers, libation bowls and a sacrificial dagger. Overseeing it was a life-sized statue of the goddess Hel, looking so much like the real thing that Polly’s heart cramped, and she felt dizzy. It was a beautiful sculpture, painted realistically, so that it looked more like a waxwork; a sky blue robe made from the finest silk was draped over the form – an obscene parody of a Madonna. The goddess stared with sightless eyes at the stone table set just in front of the altar; it was a purpose-built sacrificial stone, complete with restraining straps and channels to carry the blood away. Polly had been far too close to suffering the same fate herself, for her not to feel the full horror of it.