by Neal Martin
When he felt ready, he turned around to take another look at his brother's wretched body. Under the lamp light, he took in the massive amount of scar tissue that had formed in raised lumps and lines all across Declan's torso, like a madly complicated subway map. In between the lines there were other forms of damage. Burn marks. Even pieces of missing flesh, leaving ghastly craters in the skin.
More hot tears fell from Edger's eyes and dripped down onto the cold flesh of his brother's decimated body. "What did they do to you, Declan?"
Edger rolled the body to the side so he could check his brother's back. The scar tissue was even worse there. So densely formed, it covered his whole back, leaving none of the original skin showing. Every part of his back, from the neck to the waist, was some form of thick scar tissue. Edger noticed the holes in the scarred flesh as well. When he looked closer, he saw teeth marks, like Declan had had lumps bitten out of him.
Boiling anger began to surge through Edger's body like hot lava. He quickly undid the belt on his brother's combat fatigues and pulled them down over his thighs.
More horrendous scar tissue, back and front.
His brother's entire body was a testament to the unimaginable torture he must have endured at the hands of men like McGinty, and the others in the photographs he had on the wall in the farmhouse. Sadistic men whose only motive was to cause as much pain and suffering to others—to children—as possible, in order to quench their own sick and twisted desires.
Edger threw his head back and let his boiling rage erupt from his mouth in a deep, guttural roar, a bloodcurdling sound that seemed to bounce of the night sky above him and carry on across the fields around him for miles. When he was done, he sank to both knees and cried over his brother's corpse, his tears fuelled by every ounce of guilt and shame he ever felt for abandoning his older brother when he most needed him. Tears that were now also mixed with rage, and most of all, the cold desire for revenge against the evil men who had taken without consent, and destroyed his older brother's body and soul.
Edger vowed to kill them all.
Every single one of them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Black was about to take another swig from the now half empty bottle of Glennfiddich when he heard the loud roar penetrate the thick stone walls of the cottage from outside. It sounded like the raging scream of some wild animal, although Black knew immediately it was Edger. Black's blood seemed to turn to ice in his veins when he heard it. He sat stock still, the bottle of whiskey half way to his lips, until the chilling sound dissipated, which seemed to take a long time indeed. Everything that Edger felt, everything that he intended to do, seemed to Black to be contained within that animalistic roar. No need for words. The almost unearthly sound said it all. It was a call to action. A baying for blood.
And God help anyone who stood in Edger's way.
Black certainly would not be standing in the man's way. Not after seeing the things he had uncovered on the laptop while Edger was outside burying his brother in the ground.
Some of the things Black had forced himself to look at on the laptop, he thought no man should ever have to witness. If Black's soul wasn't tainted by all that he had seen and done before, it was most certainly tainted now from watching the wicked actions of evil men captured on the videos contained within the laptop.
Going by the evidence on the computer, it would seem that Declan Edger was telling the truth when he told his younger brother about the horrible things done to him, and the horrible things being done to others. Black's mind was spinning from so much horror. He ended up closing the laptop and putting it on the floor next to his chair. He wouldn't open it again until Edger came back.
He turned his head to stare at the growing flames in the fireplace. After Edger went outside, Black lit the fire, using the bricks of dry turf stacked up next to fireplace. The room he sat in was now warm, so he had no need for his coat. He also had his suit jacket off and his shirt sleeves rolled up. The room would have been cosy if it hadn't of been for the vile video clips he had forced himself to watch on the laptop. Twenty-five years of being a cop and he had never seen anything like it.
He drank from the whiskey bottle and waited on Edger arriving back in.
An hour or so after Black heard the almighty roar coming from outside, Edger came back into the cottage. He was topless, his powerful torso slick with sweat and smeared with dirt. He barely acknowledged Black as he walked into the room and took the bottle of Glennfiddich out of Black's hands. He sat down and took a long swallow from the bottle, his face grim and haunted as he stared at the flames in the fireplace. "You lit the fire," he said to Black in a quiet voice. "Good."
Black regarded the other man in silence for a few moments, respecting the fact that Edger had just buried his dead brother with his own hands.
"You're bleeding," he said eventually, nodding his head at the blood running out from the red soaked gauze on Edger's shoulder. "You may have opened your stitches."
Edger just nodded without looking at his injured shoulder. "I'll sort it out."
"You alright, Edger?" Perhaps it was a dumb question, but he wasn't sure what else to say.
Edger said nothing for a while, as he stared into the fire and drank from the whiskey bottle.
Black lit a cigarette and waited.
Eventually Edger turned to him and said, "I'm going to kill them all."
Black didn't have to ask who he was talking about. He simply nodded. "Given everything I've just seen on that laptop there, I have to say I'm with you on that."
Edger focused on Black, probably for the first time since he arrived in from outside. "What's on it?" he asked, looking down at the laptop.
Black sighed and picked the computer up off the floor, handed it to Edger. "Here. See for yourself. There's video on there of your brother, as well as a lot of other…children. Prepare yourself."
For the next twenty minutes, Black sat and smoked, while Edger stared at the videos on the laptop, still drinking from the whiskey bottle. The ex-Legionnaire's face was impassive at first, until he recognised his brother in the first video that Black had already cued up for him. Black himself knew exactly what Edger was watching, as every second of the video had been irreparably burned into Black's mind. As Edger's face changed from sadness to revulsion, and then to anger, Black replayed the whole video clip in his mind, like he was watching it alongside Edger.
The video clip was grainy, like it had been transferred off a dated video camera. The first thing you saw was a small white room lined with plastic sheeting. In the centre of the room was a chair, and strapped to the chair with leather straps was a young boy, completely naked. It took Black a few moments upon seeing it to realise the boy was Declan Edger. As Edger watched the video, Black saw the recognition in his face immediately.
"Declan," Edger said, his face agonised as he feared what he was going to see.
The camera stayed on the boy's terrified and confused face for a few moments, then panned back to show the long, steel gurney that contained a multitude of cutting instruments—knives, scalpels, razors—as well as a whole host of other objects, like lengths of barbed wire, a blowtorch, pliers of all sizes, various hammers, and lots of other lethal instruments Black could barely take in, things that were there for only one purpose. To inflict pain and suffering on the person strapped to the chair.
Then a man entered the room, wearing blue surgical scrubs and a white plastic apron. The man in the scrubs walked slowly around the chair, obviously speaking to the young Declan Edger. As the video clip had no sound, you couldn't hear what was being said. But Black could imagine the man in the scrubs taunting the boy in the chair, telling him what he was going to do to him.
Then the man selected a straight razor from the tray of tools, held it in front of his face, and then turned to look up at the camera in the corner of the room. Black remembered pausing the video to look at the man's face, whom he recognised immediately. His name was Derrick Smalls. Back then, when the
video was taken, Smalls was a Detective Inspector in the now defunct RUC. Black knew the man. Had worked with him on occasion over the years. Now Smalls was the Deputy Chief Constable of the PSNI.
Black could see Edger looking hard at the man's face. "Who is he? Do you know him?" Edger asked.
Black informed Edger who the man in the video was.
Edger shook his head, clenched his jaw. "Fucking bastard."
He carried on watching.
Black continued replaying the video in his mind.
Smalls went to work on Declan Edger after that, seeming to take great pleasure in cutting the young boy with the straight razor, making long, deep cuts all over Declan Edger's body. It wasn't long before the boy was covered in blood, and screaming soundlessly on the video.
Black watched Edger shut his eyes before the video was even over, slamming the laptop shut and uttering an angry, frustrated growl. "Fucking sick cunts!" he screamed, grabbing the laptop again, about to toss it across the room.
"Wait!" Black said. "We need the laptop, Edger!"
Edger looked at Black and then tossed the computer in his direction. "I don't think I can watch anymore," he fumed, sitting in the chair like he was going to explode.
"That's okay. I've looked at most of what's on it." Black shook his head. "The rest you don't want to see. Your brother isn't the only one on there. There are other videos of kids much younger than him. I'm talking children, Edger. Young children. All been tortured and abused in ways…" He had to stop. The memories of what he had seen on the videos was turning his stomach sour, making him feel sick. "I've never seen anything like it in all my years as a police officer." He raised the laptop up. "What's on here belongs in a fucking horror film, not in real life."
Edger sat rubbing his face with his hands, obviously trying to calm himself down, every muscle on his topless body tensed. Soon he closed his eyes and seemed to force himself to take long, deep breaths. When he opened his eyes again he appeared calmer, but still angry. How could a man not be angry after seeing what he just saw?
"You say you watched the rest of the videos?" Edger asked him.
Black nodded. "Most of them, until I could stomach no more."
"Did you recognise anyone else?"
"Most of the other videos are recent. I recognised most of the torturers. All supposedly respectable members of Northern Irish society."
"How many?"
"A dozen or so that I counted. That's not to say there isn't more. There probably is."
"So where is it all happening? There must be a place where they…do all this."
Black opened the laptop again after lighting a cigarette. "Your brother left notes on here. I read through some of them. A lot of what he wrote doesn't make much sense." He paused. "Your brother was clearly disturbed."
Edger glared at him. "Can you fucking blame him?"
"No." He looked at the laptop again, at the digital notes written by Declan Edger. "From what I can gather here, this whole thing appears to be some kind of secret underground club, a place where sick cunts can indulge their every twisted desire, mostly on children it seems. Children that have been kidnapped like your brother was."
"How the fuck do they get away with it?"
"Most of the people doing this are powerful people. They run this country between them. They can do what they like."
"Not for long," Edger said. "I'll fucking see to that. Make a list. We'll take them out one by one."
Black looked at him. "I realise your blood is up, Edger. But let's consider this. You know how hard it would be, and how long it would take, to kill all these people? These aren't ordinary people. They live in houses like fortresses most of them. Many of them have their own security. And besides that, they're already onto you. They're hunting you at this very minute."
"So what, Black?" Edger retorted, his eyes narrowed in anger. "What do you suggest we do, just forget about it? Have them all arrested? Those videos would never even make it into evidence and you know it."
Black sat back and thought for a minute. "We could give what's on this laptop to the press. They can't deny anything when their faces go viral on the internet."
Edger thought, and then shook his head. "There's no guarantee that would work. If these guys are as powerful as you say they are, they would find a way around it. Or else they would run, go into hiding somewhere. I can't have that. I want them all dead, especially the ones who did my brother. Jail is too good for them anyway."
"So what do you suggest instead, Edger?"
Leaning forward, Edger picked his jacket up off the floor and fished his tobacco tin and lighter out of one of the pockets. As he proceed to roll a cigarette he said, "How does this cult, or whatever the fuck it is, work? Where is it, for a start?"
Black brought up some more of the documents created by Declan Edger, noticing as he did so that the battery in the laptop was getting low. As there was no source of power in the cottage, he would have to be quick to get the information they needed, otherwise they would have to wait to the following day to find somewhere to plug the laptop in. Declan Edger's notes, if you could call them that, were severely disjointed affairs, full of rambling sentences that didn't appear to make much sense. The numerous typos and spelling mistakes didn't make the notes any easier to decipher. Eventually though, Black found what he was looking for. It was a basic run down of how the cult operated.
"Okay," he began, looking at the notes on the laptop. "So the name, or probably codename, of the cult, is the Red Falcon Country Club. Members get in through invite only, then they are vetted and required to prove their worthiness to belong by…killing a person as part of some fucking occult ritual. Jesus Christ." Black shook his head before continuing. "They also have to pledge their allegiance to the cult leader, or else to some demon or other. I don't know. It's hard to understand what your brother is saying here. Hold on."
Black spent a few minutes trying to decipher the notes on the screen, which seemed to describe the whole ritual in detail. Long paragraphs were written in a whole other language Black couldn't understand, but he worked out those were the words the initiates had to speak during the ritual.
"Anyway, it all sounds fucked up to me. Grown men playing games. Such rituals are common in groups like this. The members think they get power from them or something. It's a high society thing." Black paused while he sorted through more of the notes. "Right, here we go. All members meet at a secret location twice a year. The dates of the meetings are never the same. They apparently meet to do some other ritual involving…Jesus."
"Jesus?" Edger asked.
Black shook his head and took a breath before answering. "No. Child sacrifice."
"Christ."
"The rest of the time, they can pay for the privilege of torturing people."
"What about location? Where does all this take place?"
"There's an address here for somewhere in Armagh. An estate, it seems. There's even a set of plans for the place."
"Owned by whom?"
"Someone called Gabriel Mason. I've never heard of him."
"The Angel Of Death," Edger said quietly.
"Yes," Black said. "That moniker is mentioned in here numerous times, mostly in connection with scientific experiments of some kind."
"Experiments? Like brainwashing?"
"Yes, but listen, Edger. There's a whole slew of other stuff in here talking about things you wouldn't even believe. Experiments on people. I'm not sure if half of its true or just…"
"Just what?"
"The ramblings of an insane mind."
Edger stared at Black for a moment, then drank what was left in the whiskey bottle, before standing up. Without saying anything, he walked out of the cottage, leaving Black to frown after him, wondering what he was doing. When Edger returned a few moments later he was carrying a very large military style canvas bag, which he dumped on the floor by Black's feet.
"Jesus Christ," Black said, looking down at the bag full of weapons. "Where
the hell did you get all that from?"
"My brother," Edger said, kneeling on the floor next to the bag. He proceeded to take all the weapons out of the bag and lay them on the floor next to him. Black counted two semi-automatic rifles, two smaller automatic rifles, six handguns, one hand grenade, numerous spare magazines and boxes of bullets, plus two double edged knives with strap on sheaths. At the bottom of the bag there was also a flak jacket, and what appeared to be another smaller bag, that turned out to contain two plastic explosive charges with timers, which Edger took out of the bag and examined, before laying them carefully on the floor.
Black sat dumbfounded for a moment, staring at the mini armoury spread out on the floor. "There's enough there to fight a small war."
"Lucky for us," Edger said, picking up one of the automatic rifles and wracking the slide before aiming it at the wall. "We're going to need it all."
Black took a long, deep breath and then reached into the pocket of his coat draped over the back of the chair he was sitting in. He took out his police ID. Opening the black wallet, he stared at the badge inside for a moment. "Twenty-five years," he said to himself. "And this is what it's come down to." Closing the wallet he tossed it into the fire, watching it burn for a few moments before looking at Edger. "So what's your plan?"
Edger lifted one of the Berettas of the floor, slid in a magazine, pulled the slide back and aimed it out in front of him. "Find out when the next big meeting is."
"And then?" Black asked, although he knew the answer already.
"And then we kill them all."
CHAPTER FORTY
Rankin was at home, in his spacious study, sitting on an expensive high backed leather chair behind a large antique writing desk. He was dressed in a grey tracksuit, having just come back from a late night run around the Malone Road and Stranmillis area. Running was something he had been doing for most of his adult life. It kept his stress levels down, he found. Except tonight when he got back, he didn't feel any less stressed.
