Better the Devil

by Mike Wild

  There were two rippers in the corridor between them and the door to the wing, and Hannah and Verse blasted them as they ran, hoping that the sheer weight of lead they pumped into them would keep them down. They gained, for the moment, some space between themselves and the other rippers as they reached the door.

  It refused to move in its frame.

  "Locked," Verse said. Rattling the handle, he tried to physically force the thing, but there was no give at all. The reason became obvious when a small pentagram-like shape flared briefly around the handle. "And warded. Dammit, Ravne."

  Hannah cast a quick glance back from where she was firing round after round into the rapidly fogging corridor. "Can you neutralise it?"

  Verse scrunched his lips. "Maybe, but it's going to take a minute or two. He tossed his shotgun and ammo to Brand. "Buy me time," he said.

  "But I-" Brand said. Nonetheless, he nervously hefted the weapon and immediately fired, as Hannah was doing, into the fog. He struggled to reload and Hannah quickly showed him how. "It's a shotgun, Brand," she instructed, "which means short or low medium range. Wait until you see the whites of their eyes."

  "But they don't have any eyes."

  "Jeezus, Brainiac," she snapped impatiently, "just apply some bloody common se-"

  Hannah never finished the comment as the rippers came at them, and even if she had she wouldn't have been heard over the panicked discharging of shotgun shells. Like Brand, she gave the rippers everything she had, blowing each newcomer back whence it came, if only for a short time, before the wave of death resurged and went for them again. Blowing off assorted ripper parts and, in one case, between them, a ripper head, they pumped so much lead into the air they generated their own fog, turning the air blue and leaving their noses stinging with the stench of sulphur and cordite.

  "Verse?" Hannah shouted through the noxious cloud.

  "Another ten seconds," the priest said. He was drawing shapes on the lock - looking like some burglar mime - applying counter-symbology to Ravne's ward with his fingertip.

  "I don't think we have ten seconds," Hannah said tightly as she continued to fire. And then from Brand's weapon she heard the sound she had known was inevitable, but had nevertheless dreaded. It was a hollow klik-klik.

  "I think I'm out," Brand said.

  Hannah swiftly ejected the clips from her own guns, counted the bullets - four - before slamming the clips back in, and cursed. "Verse!"

  The priest tutted, deep in concentration and apparently oblivious to the war going on behind him. "Our Mr. Ravne values his privacy,"

  "Big guy, we're almost running on empty here."

  "Dammit!" Verse shouted suddenly. He shook his finger in the air to cool it, the end smoking and charred. "I don't know what the hell Ravne is using but-"

  He stood and turned, drawing the last weapon available to him, his crucifix blade, from his pocket. "I'm sorry, girl, I tried," he said to Hannah, then lifted his gaze to the relentless enemy and snarled. "Now, where were we?"

  "About to die," Brand said unnecessarily. As he stared at the rippers regrouping after their final firestorm, already poised to attack once more, he too drew something from his pocket, but this time it was his whiskey-filled hipflask.

  It was halfway to his mouth when he froze.

  As did Chapter and Verse.

  The three looked at each other.

  Ravne was MIA somewhere in London, presumed dead.

  Gustav and Gretchen hadn't been seen in months, and were suspected ditto.

  But there had been an unmistakable click just now.

  Someone or something on the other side of the door had just unlocked the entrance to the west wing.

  As the rippers began another approach, Hannah slammed her back up against the wall to the door's side, her guns held steady and at the ready. "Ravne?" she called through the wood, then again. There was no answer. You've had your chance, Hannah thought... this was no time to play knock, knock. She looked at Verse and with the practiced ease that came of their long partnership mouthed one, two, three.

  Verse nodded at her and she gently pushed down the handle until the bolt released. Go, Hannah mouthed, and the big man booted the door open. As he did, Hannah swung before him into the frame, outstretched arms sweeping ahead in classic field stance - identify target, hold or fire. But there was no target. Nothing. Perfectly synchronised, the two of them moved in, Hannah skipping, pivoting and aiming to the right, while Verse ducked, stayed crouched low and aimed to the left. They held the pose for half a second, what they liked to think of as their Charlie's Angels manoeuvre.

  But yet again, nothing.

  "What the hell?" Hannah queried.

  "Interesting," Verse observed.

  "No time to worry right now," Brand said. He pointed down the corridor to where the rippers were advancing unopposed. Even worse, more were joining them from behind.

  "Worse than Resident Evil," Verse announced. Brand wasn't sure whether the comment was meant to be positive or negative.

  "Move, move, move!" Hannah ordered. Quite unceremoniously she grabbed Brand by the shoulder and pulled him through the door, waited for Verse to reverse in after him, then slammed the door solidly into its frame once more and flicked the lock.

  Brand adjusted his skewed collar and de-cricked his neck. "Think I knew that," he muttered. At Hannah's questioning glance he drew two inverted commas in the air. "To move, move, move?"

  "Yeah, sorry, Brainiac, but needs must." It was her turn to offer a questioning glance. Brand remained right behind the door, ear against it, listening to the screeching from the other side while running his hands cautiously over the wood. Hannah stuck her hands on her hips and cocked her head. "So you wanna tell me why you're still standing there, numbnuts?"

  Brand turned, waving his hand. "My fingers are tingling. If I'm right, now that the door is locked again, the ward has reactivated. Against the rippers I doubt it'll last for ever, but it should buy us some time."

  Hannah stared, frowning. "So there's a warded door between us and them. Wonderful. So what about the windows? Now that they know we're in the west wing, surely they're gonna last about as long as the oth-"

  "No, maybe a bit longer," Brand interrupted. "Remember the Kether assault? The night Jenny was shot?"

  "Ravne, too, come to that," Verse cut in.

  Brand nodded. "Yes, but I tend not to remember Ravne. The thing is, I remember seeing a stamped requisition request some weeks later that had been returned by Adrienne Celeste. Our Mr. Ravne had carelessly left it out in the open, or maybe he simply wanted to emphasise once more how special his relationship with our mutual boss, Kostabi is. At any rate, he'd had armoured glass installed. I think he turned the entire west wing into a kind of extended panic room. Not that Ravne ever panics, of course."

  "Just make sure he looks after his own goddamn ass," Hannah said. "Armoured glass?" she added after a second, incredulous. "Jeezus, I'm gonna put in a request for a Jacuzzi."

  "Can I have an HD plasma screen?" Verse asked. He thought and raised a finger. "Wait, how about a-"

  The door shook in its frame - no, resonated deeply - producing a strange thooming sound, and just for a moment the wood actually glowed. As it did, all of the door's metal components - screws, hinges, handle, key and keyhole - turned simultaneously white hot. The resonance came again after a second, and then again. It seemed the rippers were already breaking through the ward.

  Thoom. Thoom.

  "Oh, bloody brilliant, Doctor Strange," Hannah commented. "That took how long? Thirty seconds?"

  "They're too powerful. But we probably have a little while yet," Brand responded. "I think we need to find those cellars. Lights would help." He raised his hand, but Verse gripped and stopped it dead before it reached a nearby switch.

  "Not a very good idea," the big man said. "The windows might be armoured, but we don't want to put on a shadowplay for the rippers still outside in the grounds, do we?"

  "Good point," Brand said. He c
oughed and smiled sheepishly. "Let's look for the steps in the dark, shall we?"

  Verse nodded. Thoom. Thoom-thoom.

  Necessary as it was, finding the cellar steps in darkness was not going to be easy. And hopes that the unknown west wing would be symmetrical with the east - the location of the cellar steps where they were in their own part of the house - were gradually dashed as they came across one unexpected variation on room or corridor after another, sometimes simply meeting blind alleys that only elsewhere went somewhere. It should have been expected - places such as the priory, owned and redesigned by so many over the years - expanded and receded and expanded once more through the vicissitudes of finance and fashion, eventually losing their own internal plot and becoming like jigsaws with no edges. And it seemed that Ravne had put his own stamp on the wing, too. Shadowed shapes and angles loomed at them that seemed to have no natural place here at all. The sense of unease they generated was not helped by the ever-increasing pace of the resonance from the door that sounded throughout the wing. Thoom-thoom-thoom.

  Help, though, once again came unexpectedly. As the three of them continued to search, a door slowly - and so quietly it was almost missed beneath another rapid series of thooms - creaked ajar to their left, then another beyond that. They looked at each other. Mysterious benefactor again? If so, he, she or it remained unseen. Cautiously, Brand and the others stepped through and followed their trail - three more doors in all - until they found themselves in front of one that led down into a deeper darkness.

  "I'll be damned," Hannah said.

  "The cellars," Verse confirmed. "But I don't like this at all. Could be a trap? I mean, who the hell is-?"

  "Don't think we have much choice," Brand said. "Listen."

  Hannah and Verse did as he said. A moment before there had been a single loud THOOM and now there was only silence. Silence, that was, if they didn't count the approaching shrieking. They looked down at the floor. It was beginning to roll with a thin layer of fog.

  "Move, move, move?" Brand queried.

  Hannah and Verse nodded.

  The three of them raced down the steps into the cellars, Brand noting as they did a shadowy shape that slid into cover beneath them. He frowned, but had no time to investigate, the top of the cellar steps already darkening with angular figures. Nor did he have time to ponder the mass of wired and tubed machinery that loomed at him out of the dark. What the hell was that it was attached to, some kind of bath? Mysterious figures and mysterious machines, he thought. This was something he was definitely going to have to look into when - make that if - he had the time.

  Bemused, he saw that their shadowy helper had emerged slightly from cover and was pointing to a particular spot on the cellar wall.

  "Here," Brand said, running over and slewing away stacked, metal panelling. It had been hiding an old and long unused door.

  "How in hell did you know th-" Hannah began, but stopped and shook her head. "Let's just get the hell out of here, shall we?"

  She forced the door, stiff with age, and they passed through, down a flight of steps and into an arched stone tunnel thick with rats and slime. They could smell fresh air coming from its end. Their way out. But as they raced towards it, Brand paused, catching something in the corner of his eye. He turned.

  The academic froze. There he was. Their mysterious benefactor - the opener of doors and identifier of escape routes - standing in the middle of the passageway about ten metres back, simply staring at him. He was a strangely thin man, though not skeletal, garbed in a Breton cap, a horizontally striped T-shirt and a pair of ill-fitting, off-yellow trousers that were either dyed or completely stained with piss. He did not appear to be wearing any shoes, and his complexion indicated he rarely ventured outside. But, Brand thought puzzled, if that was the case, wouldn't that make Exham Priory home?

  That face. It wasn't right, somehow. It was as drawn and as sallow as ageing tripe, appearing feverish on the cheeks, neck and around the ears, but otherwise as sunken and as dry as papyrus. Rheumy eyes gazed steadily at Brand from dark and shadowed sockets, while his mouth, when he clenched his teeth, revealed a rictus grin like Jack Nicholson's Joker, lying dead on the streets of Gotham.

  There was nothing threatening about the clenching of teeth, though. The stranger was merely adjusting the position of a pipe he had between them. Thick curls of smoke rose from it as the figure continued to regard him contemplatively.

  The smell, Brand thought. Now that he thought of it, it had been there throughout the west wing, infused and... not new.

  This stranger's tobacco.

  The academic took a step forward and asked, "Who... are you?" But it was a mistake; he knew immediately. The stranger took a step back that matched Brand's own. "Please," he added, "I just wanted to..."

  The stranger snapped him a look, and this time the clenching of teeth revealed the beginnings of a snarl. Come no closer, it said. For some reason Brand got the impression that the stranger wanted nothing to do with people, that he didn't trust them at all.

  "Say thank you," he finished.

  The stranger studied him for a second longer, then nodded his acknowledgement. To Brand's surprise he thrust a small slip of paper into his hand then turned away and began to walk back along the passageway towards the cellar. Brand glanced down at the paper, but as he did he saw the now familiar roiling blanket of fog starting to rise around his ankles.

  A hand clapped Brand on the shoulder, making him jump. "You're standing around again, Brainiac. Want me to write 'BUTCHER ME' on your back? Stick a big neon arrow on your head?"

  "There was a man," Brand said. He pointed. "There... do you see?"

  Hannah looked at Brand suspiciously, then squinted along the dark passageway. But in the last couple of seconds, the blanket of fog had become a bank once more, obscuring anything towards the far end. Something vague did seem to be vanishing into the fog's folds, but it could have been a trick of the light, and Hannah paid it little heed, her attention drawn by the vague shapes that flowed around it - parting to let it by? - then continuing to move in their direction.

  "He was there," Brand insisted. "A cap, a striped T-shirt, a pipe."

  "Can of Spinach? Thin, geeky-looking dame with him? Another guy chomping hamburgers?"

  "What?"

  "Never mind. Get a grip, Brainiac. They've found us, don't you see? We have to go. Now."

  Brand nodded, but for a second continued to stare back inside. Then he stuffed the slip of paper in his pocket and followed Hannah - at first half running, then speeding up - towards the passageway's exit. It was no more than three seconds later that the spot where they had been standing was swarming with rippers.

  "They're right behind us!" Hannah shouted as she burst out into the open. The passageway had emerged up through a heavy iron grate onto a small flight of steps somewhere out towards the edge of the priory's grounds, behind a concealing bush.

  "Shit," Lawrence Verse said emphatically. He leaned down and virtually plucked a half-stumbling and slightly confused-looking Brand out onto the steps before slamming down the metal grate behind him. Gasping, he hefted a nearby rock and positioned that atop the grate. "How many?"

  "Hard to say through their murk. Four, maybe five." She looked around quickly, trying to orientate herself. "So where the hell are we?"

  "Out near the northern perimeter," Verse said.

  Hannah nodded, glancing south at the dark and sprawling shape of the priory in the distance. "Flaxton Hall straight on, Maggoty Lane to the right, Andrew's Wood to the left. First two, too exposed. I think it's time for Ness's part of the plan, and head into the trees. The two of us should be able to get Brainiac through it alive."

  "I'm not entirely incompetent," Brand protested.

  "Yeah? Mister Tingly Fingers?"

  They moved off in single file, Verse in the lead, Brand following, Hannah bringing up the rear. Their backs bent low, half-crouching, they followed the line of the tall hedge that made a natural perimeter wall,
keeping as close to it as possible, in its shadow. Other shadows - ripper shadows - moved slowly across the nearby lawn, turning full circles at much the same speed they moved, their dark eyes searching out their targets like some infernal radar network. One or two of them came a little too close for comfort during their search pattern, and the three fugitives froze, hearts thudding dully, breath caught in their throats, until they moved on.

  They were maybe fifty metres from Andrew's Wood, now. Their escape route seemed to have worked. All that separated them from cover was an old wooden cattle gate and beyond it a rough track, and then they would be past the woodline, in the trees.

  They might have made it.

  That was when Exham Priory blew sky high.

  Chapter Seven

  "OHHOOOHHHH... YEEEEAAAAHHHH!" Mikey Ness bellowed, triumphantly elated as the bell tower and a sizeable portion of the roof of Exham Priory's north wing abruptly ceased to exist, leaving his victory-punching Glaswegian form silhouetted by a billowing cloud of orange that all but obliterated the newly expanded night sky.

  That had been a fookin' corker, even if he did say so himself. A demo job worthy of his time in Afghanistan or Iraq... better, even. Those chinless bastards at the MoD should never ha' locked him away 'cause here was the evidence - or rather, lack of it - that the Nessy Monster hadnae lost his magic touch.

  The Scotsman emerged fully from his observation point behind the low projecting window and scrabbled to the edge of the obliterated part of the roof, eager to see the results of his handiwork and oblivious to the still immediate aftermath of the explosion. Chunks of brick and stone, and lengths of wooden beam that had been blasted skyward had just reached apogee, and rained back down onto the priory, crashing and slamming onto the surviving parts of its angular roof, some punching themselves through to the rooms below, others embedding themselves in the tilework and yet others being deflected by the various slopes, and sent bouncing through the air in all directions as if they were projectiles in some godly game of pinball. Shortly after these came a shower of splintered furniture and assorted belongings from the rooms nearest the bell tower, those that had borne the brunt of the explosion, and from what he could see Ness hoped that both Verse and Chapter's contents insurance was up to date. An old Sega Mega Drive and then a Jaguar console, part of the excommunicated priest's prized collection of retro games machines, impacted and shattered metres away from where he crouched, followed by the plink-plunk-plonk of the constituent parts of a set of rosary beads that Ness knew Verse had had presented to him by no less a person than Pope John Paul himself. As far as Chapter's bits and pieces went, Ness batted away a pair of fluffy handcuffs that came whirling towards his head like heavenly bolas, then actually cringed as he managed to read the singed cover title of a book whose disjointed pages then swirled chaotically in the air around him like an invitation to Hogwarts. The book was that Naked Ninja Nuns one, the early and out of print Jack Yeovil she'd spent weeks on the internet searching out, and then paid through the nose for. Shite, she was gonna be pissed, no' a pretty sight on someone who as far as he was concerned already had a face like a witch doctor's rattle.