Better the Devil

by Mike Wild

  In amongst all this detritus, though, were the remains that really interested him, his targets, and he whooped again as one of the rippers, just returned from its own unexpected ascent, jerked spasmodically before dying on the rooftop lightning rod that had impaled its mutilated and smoking form. The thing returned from whence it came. Another of the infernal bastards was plastered in bits against the bricks of the complementary window to that behind which he'd sought cover, and it too vanished after a moment. A third, clumsily skittering just a few metres away on the tiles, was making a final, desperate try for him, its blades slashing weakly before it, but the fact that its body was effectively crisped and no longer had any limbs to speak of, only stumps, rendered its attempts to fulfil its Accord given purpose slightly pathetic. Ness grinned, hacked up a mouthful, then gobbed on the creature and booted off its head.

  Motherfoo-

  Bu' hang on a wee mo' here. Four. He was sure there had been four.

  Where was it? Where was the oth-

  Right there. The sassenach son of a satanic bitch had been blown clean off the roof, stunned but apparently undamaged, and was picking itself up on the lawn below. Och, Christ. For the moment it might have had its back to him, but any second it'd be turning, and in his exposed position...

  For the first time during the fireworks Ness actually ducked and covered. The reason for this unexpected and uncharacteristic involuntary response on his part was the sudden deafening and off-key KA-CLAANG! that originated behind and above him. Wha' the hell? The Scotsman whirled, mouth silently forming an O and an F as he saw the source.

  It was the bell from the bell tower. The explosion from the booby trap that he'd set beneath it had, when it had detonated, obviously channelled itself up inside the metal dome and acted like a booster rocket, launching the bell higher than anything else in its blast area, as if towards orbit. But naturally orbit had not been achieved, and what went up had come down, and hard. The industrial-sized bell, miraculously surviving mostly intact after its unofficial attempt to revive the British Rocket Group, did not survive re-entry, however, and split asunder on impact with the hard rib of the roof's apex, a jagged line like a lightning flash serrating its metal whole as the entire roof shook beneath it. Then its component sections peeled slowly apart like the two halves of the shell of a walnut. The half of the bell that still contained the clapper clanged away down the opposite side of the priory roof, still pealing, but off-key and fading, while the remaining overgrown spoon of ten-centimetre thick metal tipped and began to crash end over end inexorably towards Ness, smashing or tearing away roof slates, gouging holes, and gathering more of its weighty momentum all the way.

  "Freakin' jumpin' Jesus," the Scotsman said matter-of-factly, and threw himself neatly out of its path. He rolled, crouched cat-like, then pivoted to watch the slab bounce - almost languorously, it appeared - once, twice, three times, before reaching the lip of the roof and launching itself away into the ether.

  Ness followed its trajectory, calculating its path of descent, his heartbeat accelerating as he began to realise where it would probably land. Och, surely no'. What were the odds and surely he couldnae be that lucky.

  The fractured remains of the bell turned end over end, heading infinitely slowly towards the almost fully recovered ripper, whose back, importantly, remained turned towards the incoming heavenly threat.

  Could he?

  It looked like he could.

  Ness reverted to full Glasgow Rangers mode. "Go onnnn, my BEAUTY!"

  Sensing a disturbance in the air - or perhaps simply hearing Ness's rather obvious bellow - the ripper snapped its head around and raised what passed for arms to defend itself, but there was little it could have done and it was already far too late. The heavy chunk of metal smashed into it at chest height, driving the thing straight into the ground and pinning it there, where that part of its form that hadn't been thoroughly mushed by the impact twitched violently and momentarily before finally lying still beneath its ready-made and rather odd-looking tombstone.

  "Yyyyyeeeeeessssss!"

  Despite his victory cry, it took a second for the sheer stroke of luck to sink in. He flopped back onto his backside and laughed. "Fook me," Mikey Ness said in amazement.

  "Rather poke pins in your eyes," Jenny Simmons responded. The demon in woman's clothing emerged from her own cover behind the window and gave the Scotsman a slow handclap, blatantly designed to provoke. "Brilliant strategy. I especially liked the professional precision with which you blew our bell to bollocks. Apart from the fact it was a one-of-a-kind with major historical value," she added, her voice growing in volume, "you could have taken my sodding head off!"

  Ness picked himself up and dusted himself down, snarling rawly. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his arm, licking at the salt. Yer bloody ungrateful bitch, he thought. Done nothin' but moan since we got separated from the others. Nothin' at all. What possible use was a hellfire entity that had to hide inside its murdered host because if she didnae she'd become a bleedin' homin' beacon? This Simmons slut was the equivalent of havin' a honkin' great pustulatin' yellow zit on the end of yer nose - people couldnae help but look - an' right now all he wanted to do was take her aforementioned head between his big, sweaty palms and slowly squeeze and pop it.

  Simmons's current disability was, after all, why their salvation had all been left to him, and why they had barely escaped alive. After they'd been forced up the stairs by the rippers' pincer movement - he having fully expected another sarcastic comment from the Yank bint about heading the right way for the tunnels, which he was sure he'd a got if she hadnae been so preoccupied - the fact was that there was nowhere left for them to go. Sure, they coulda played hide n' seek in the bedrooms for a while - and had - but the relentless way that the rippers had of slicing away their hiding places and everything within grew a little tiresome and annoying after a while, especially when Simmons's next planned hiding place also happened to contain his secret stash of exotic magazines.

  There was no way the rippers were gettin' their nasty little blades on his Dark Matter tipped .44 Magnums or his Cavorite .357s.

  It had become time to find some way to go on the offensive. The problem was that their situation vis-a-vis ammo echoed that of the others downstairs, they were running on empty. He would have loved to pump some of his stash into the ripper bastard, but the cannons to which the aforementioned exotica belonged currently lay in a scattering of their requisite parts on his bedside table, where two nights previously he had been in the process of oiling and cleaning them. During his tours of duty with the SAS, along with his demolition skills, Ness had been renowned for his ability to fieldstrip and reassemble any kind of weapon in seconds, but right then they didn't have seconds. Their combat inventory, for that moment, consisted of the combat knife he had sheathed on his belt - next to useless against their pursuers - and the acidic edge of Jennifer Simmons's cutting tongue.

  He had contemplated leaving her behind to buy himself a couple of seconds grace - maybe just the one if he indulged himself and stayed to watch her be sliced apart in mid tonguelash - but he somehow doubted she'd be willing. They'd had no choice but to go onward and upward. Improvise. So it was that the two of them found themselves heading into a part of the priory that neither of them - and from the aged but still intact padlock, any of the others, including Ravne - had investigated or explored since moving in. Wrenching away the padlock on the door and entering the attics was like stepping through a time warp back to the nineteen-thirties, the entire dust-ridden and dimly-lit space crowded with a variety of objects and ephemera that had presumably once belonged to Malcolm Critchley and the followers of his sect based in the old building. Ness imagined that Brand would probably come in his pants at the sight of some of the stuff, but he didnae have the time to treat it with the same reverence that the academic no doubt would have done. In fact, he didnae have time to treat it with any reverence at all.

  What exactly did an arch-Satanist keep in his
attic? In his frantic search for weapons, artefacts - anything that might give them some advantage against the already audibly pursuing rippers - Ness remembered throwing aside volumes stuffed with arcane rituals and scrawled diagrams, a bottle containing what he was sure was the screaming head of a baby, the desiccated and semi-bandaged corpse of a woman - a neat knife hole over her heart - tattooed with various ritual symbols, and a mirror whose reflection was not of the room they were in. This latter he considered shattering, in the vague hope that it might offer an escape route to somewhere, until Simmons pointed out the small dark shape rocking in the centre of the reflection and they decided that it really might be more trouble than it was worth.

  At the bottom of a chest he came across an elephant gun and two cartridges in a cardboard box. Next to it was a framed sepia photograph of Malcolm Critchley standing over the bloodied dead body of an Old One. The picture was useless, the elephant gun not. Rapidly checking the barrels for blockage, then loading, Ness used both to blow away the first two of the rippers to reach the top of the stairs.

  The boom drowned out the splat, deafening him for a second.

  And that was all the time it bought.

  More rippers appeared and began to crowd over the splattered remains of their comrades.

  "Here!" Simmons shouted. Battering aside a stack of boxes that emptied out various robes, ritual knives and amulets, she had discovered a small hatchway at the opposite side of the attic and was quickly wrenching away boards that had been nailed over it. "I think this might lead to the roof. We need to get out and make a break for the grounds from there, climb down and take our chances, more rippers or not."

  Ness had to agree; they were cornered where they were. He lent his muscle to stripping away the wood, and the two of them squeezed through the open hatch. Ness pulled it shut behind them, but not before rocking an old bookcase off its centre of gravity, tipping it so that it fell and formed a barricade as their escape route slammed shut.

  They had reckoned without the maze-like quality of the old place, though. The hatchway didn't lead to the roof, but to the final wind of steps up to the bell tower that formed the right-hand frontage of the priory, overlooking its pair of welcoming stone gargoyles. There was a solidly locked door blocking their way down so they had no choice but to ascend yet further. The unexpected destination turned out to be fortuitous, however, providing the still rapidly calculating Ness at last with the counter-attacking tools he needed.

  Because the bell tower must, at some point, also have been used as a watch tower by Critchley's people, in their pre-security camera days, to give forewarning of any unwanted local constabulary dropping by during their ritual happy hour, as it had been - and remained - fitted with a small gas lamp and a telephone extension. Hardly weapons of mass destruction on the surface, but when you considered that the gas lamp was fed from a small pipe from the mains, and the telephone was an old Bakelite dialler...

  Ness had wasted no time, worked fast. He had snatched up the receiver and jiggled its rests to make sure it still worked, then unsheathed his combat knife and stripped away a section of the braided cord covering on the telephone's lead, exposing the old wiring beneath. This he nicked slightly, until the wire began to fray. That done, he turned his attention to the small gas pipe, first squeezing it between thumb and forefinger to confirm that, as he'd hoped, the metal it was made from was lead, then slowly working the tip of the knife into it until he felt it slide through, creating a small hole through which gas began to hiss. It was only as he rocked the knife gently but firmly to widen the hole that Simmons had asked him what the hell he was doing.

  Ness had simply smiled and clambered onto the sill of one of the bell tower's ledges, then leapt from it onto the nearby roof. "Buggerin' off rapid style," he called unhelpfully as his boots thudded heavily on the slates, then began to catwalk away, arms outstretched for balance, heading for a small projecting window that served an attic room of a different wing. "An' if ah was youse, ah'd ge' yer satanic skates on an' do exactly the same."

  Jennifer Simmons had still had no clue what he was up to, but she had known the bell tower stank strongly of the leaking gas, and so followed. As she did, Ness booted in the glass of the window and stuck his head into the dark space beyond. He wasn't looking for an escape route - if they returned inside, the whole game of hide n' seek'd jus' start all over again an' he'd had enough of tha' - but for a companion piece to the phone he'd just rigged. That he'd be able to find one quickly had been the only gamble in his plan, but the gods'd been smiling 'cause there had been one right there on the bedside table of a stained, dust-shrouded bed presumably last lain in by one of Critchley's bloodied followers after a busy night raping then slaughtering innocents. Ness had grabbed the phone from the table and pulled, rudely extending its lead by ripping away a runnel in the dried plaster of the wall, then positioned himself with it out on the roof, in the brick lee of the projecting window, where he had both cover and, when he craned his neck, a vantage point of the bell tower.

  As Simmons had plonked herself down beside him, the same questioning look on her face, he'd been ready. And also rather pleased that his whole series of makeshift manoeuvres had been timed almost to the second.

  Blades slicing, the rippers had emerged from the broken away hatch and up the bell tower. They had begun to slowly revolve in that eerie way of theirs, searching out their prey.

  Meanwhile, Ness had calmly picked up this telephone's receiver, placed a finger in the "one" hole, and dialled.

  One tiny electrical spark was all it took. One telephone extension in the priory registering the activity of another.

  Ca-click.

  Ka-Boom.

  As he'd said: "OHHOOOHHHH... YEEEEAAAAHHHH!"

  Except now, o' course, his moment had been spoiled by Little Miss Possessed Pants and her "you could have taken my sodding head off". There she was, standing hand, on hips, lookin' every millimetre the bitch she-

  Ness curtailed his own thoughts, suddenly puzzled. Whilst he was on the subject o' heads, exactly when did the daft cow get time to put on that purple headscarf? Jesus, considerin' the dowdy wallflower she once was, these days anyone'd think she was a magazine fashion mod-

  His thoughts were curtailed again, only this time because something plopped on his own head, which he quickly snatched off. Not a headscarf, after all. And this time, red.

  He coulda pissed himself laughing out loud. The last of the explosion's debris to come back down - the lightest of it all - was now brightening the devastated priory's rooftop with little multi-coloured flags of unusual shape... the contents of Hannah Chapter's knicker drawer. 'Course, it coulda bin Lawrence Verse's knicker drawer, but unless the priest was currently into some weird kinda penance thing by wearin' extra huggy skimpies, he doubted it. Just to be sure, he crumpled the pair in his hand and rammed them up against his nostrils, inhaling deeply. Snatch n' sniff, he thought. An' yeah, they were Chapter's all reet.

  They were smokin'.

  As Ness quaked, Jenny Simmons snatched the undergarments away from him, then discarded the ones from her own head with a quick flick of disgust, tempted to transform into Baarish-Shammon just for the satisfaction of incinerating them in mid-air. But they were not out of danger yet, and she saw nothing remotely amusing about their current circumstances. But then, of course, she had seen what the still sighing dirty Scottish bastard had not.

  This shoot her or shag her thing that he seemed, in his own mind, to have going on with the whiney-voiced American might soon become a redundant inner conflict.

  She told him so, and how, either way, Hannah Chapter was going to be very, very pissed.

  "Och, so ah nosebag 'er keks, where's the harm in tha'?" he shrugged. "As for that book, t'ain't natural. Ya'd never catch me readin' 'boot Bare Butch Bondage Bagpipers, now, would ye?"

  "Might not catch you..." Jenny said. "But that isn't what I mean. Take a look, MacGyver. Take a look."

  The Scotsman frowned and spidered h
is way to the edge of the roof, where she was pointing. From the high vantage point he could see the northern perimeter of the grounds, where, illuminated by the dwindling light from the explosion, Chapter, Brand and Verse had been spotted and cornered by the rippers who patrolled the open. Chapter and Brand were backing up against the unyielding hedge as the rippers moved in, ready to pounce, and in Verse, whose bulky shape lay still on the ground, it actually looked as if they already had a man down.

  Ness ground his bottom lip with his teeth. This was some serious shite. All of his training had hammered into him the basic tenet that a soldier didn't leave one - let alone three - of his own behind, but right now he could see no way of keeping his skin intact and getting them out of the mess they were in, even if he begrudgingly acknowledged his responsibility for it. Christ!