by Mark Hobson
“I have no idea what you are talking about.” He tried to rise, but a pair of strong hands pushed down on his shoulders, keeping him there.
“Your father, oh, that was a necessary evil, but it worked. Your distress and grief was palpable, and it was the opening I required.”
Pieter wasn’t sure he was hearing right. His father? What did his death have to do with… the thought evaporated like mist as a horrible realization started to dawn on him.
“Yes, a tragedy, mmm, but nobody will miss a drunken old man like that, apart from yourself of course. He was a waste of humanity, a drain on the world, and on you. In time you’ll come to thank us for what we did.”
Pieter wanted to throw up. He also wanted to grip her by the neck and squeeze the life out of her.
“It was an accident, he drowned,” Pieter whispered hoarsely.
“Perhaps you need to hear the truth.” Lotte pointed across to one of the robed figures – one of her followers, Pieter now realized – and beckoned them forward. “Tell him.”
He turned his head and watched as one of those making up the circle stepped forward and removed their carved demon mask. His heart sank as he looked across at the familiar face.
Famke, now bright-eyed, her features fully alert and showing none of the haggard and washed out signs of someone dependent on alcohol, now with her hair clean and shining. Pretty and elegant Famke. Not Famke the drunk.
Christ, how could they have fooled him so easily, so totally?
He had known her for years, had seen her sink to the same level of human misery as his dad. Watched her drink herself into oblivion, smelt the booze on her breath, on her clothes, seen her lying in her own vomit. But all a ruse. All an act, tricking his dad and using him and destroying him, all just a deception to set Pieter up.
“Go on Famke,” urged Lotte, “explain to Pieter here how easy it was.”
Famke turned her gaze onto Pieter and now her eyes blazed with madness, a crazy zeal that seemed to leap from her body in waves, and her lip curled up in an ugly snarl.
“That idiot, that smelly old man, that pitiful, weeping, pathetic cretin! He gave me the perfect opportunity to do what I needed to do. ‘Let’s go fishing’ he said. ‘We can take the boat out, catch something for supper. It will be romantic’. Ha! I even tried to stop him, to talk him out of it, I don’t know why, but I did. But you know what your father was like, once he got an idea in his head there was no changing his mind. So I gave in, let him have it his way, on the condition that he be careful and not fall in.”
Bart, standing beside his sister, tittered quietly.
“So out we went, right into the middle of the river, two old drunks in charge of a leaky old boat at midnight. All I had to do was keep the drinks flowing, and your father, oh how he kept on drinking and drinking into the night. I was literally pouring it down his scrawny neck. And we sang, it was an hilarious sight, there we were staggering about on the deck, singing our hearts out and dancing away like two rock-a-billy old farts. Your father showing off as usual, jigging about near the side, and, oh dear, there was silly old me stumbling and tripping into him, and there he was flapping his arms about in a panic, but still laughing his head off, so I gave him another little push and dearie me, over the side he went.”
There was a total stillness in the room now, everybody hypnotized by Famke’s words, and Pieter squeezed his eyes tight, his lips trembling with emotion.
“There was such a splash, I felt sure somebody on shore would have heard, especially when he popped up like a floaty old turd and started screaming his little head off. He was crying, shouting for me to help, so I joined in, bawling away just like him, ‘help me Famke!’ I copied him, ‘help me, I’m drowning!!’ You should have seen the look on his face when he heard me. But the best part, Oh you’ll laugh when you hear this, the best bit was when he managed to splash his way back to the boat and grabbed a hold of the side, scrabbling away to get a good grip, so what did sweet little Famke do? It was just too tempting, I couldn’t help myself I’m afraid, with those little wiggly piggly fingers right in front of my feet, and I – oh, this was so naughty of me – I trod on them, and they went pop under my shoes, and he yelped like a pup and so I scrunched on his fingers even harder, until he slipped back and under the surface, floating down into the dark with his mouth open and filling with dirty, smelly water.”
Famke paused for dramatic effect, looking directly at Pieter who had opened his eyes again.
“I watched him go down,” she whispered, with a ridiculous tear in her eye, “his white splotchy face looking right back at me, until he was gone.”
She sighed heavily, then shrugged her shoulders.
Bart gave a girly little snicker again.
Then quietness that was so taut Pieter could feel the vibrating of the very air.
“Why?” he asked in a hushed voice. He gazed at Famke, and turned back to Lotte, searching for her eyes through the goat-skull’s sockets. “Why? What are you hoping to achieve? You’re all stark raving mad, but why are you doing all of this?”
“Power.” Lotte’s voice rang hollow around the room. “To gain the ultimate knowledge. To seek a path to a lower plane of existence. Death to bring a new form of life.”
She moved about, walking back and forth, but with her gaze always on him.
“We don’t pursue sacrifice for joy or fun. We gain no pleasure in the shedding of blood. A means to an end, that is why we do the terrible things we do. It’s been tried before. Aleister Crowley, the Grand Master of The Golden Dawn, he tried in Paris in 1914, but he failed. Then it was tried again during the war and also in Finland during the 1970’s, but again this met with failure. But we,” she swept her arm across the circle of people, “we have finally achieved what others were unable to. We have opened the way to enlightenment. We have raised life from death.”
She stepped around the man seated in the chair, who was quivering with terror, and approached Pieter until she was face to face with him, her eyes looking through her mask and seeking his.
“We have raised the dead Pieter. From this very place. We have accomplished the impossible.”
Through gritted teeth Pieter hissed back, “I’ll fucking kill you. You crazy, deranged psycho!” He spat at the goat-skull.
Lotte ignored him and turned away. “This place. Do you know what it was once used for? No, you probably don’t even know where you are. Well, let me enlighten you. The building above us, above the catacombs here, it was originally one of the old city gates and part of the defensive wall surrounding Amsterdam during the fifteenth century. The Sea Dike which kept the flood waters back went right by this location. Merchants would come and go, and pay their taxes and weigh their goods here, to keep Amsterdam thriving as one of the world’s biggest sea ports. Later, it was used by the Surgeon Guild as an anatomic theatre where they performed public dissections. Lecturers and medical students would come to watch corpses being cut open, and afterwards the bodies would be stored down here in the crypt. Hundreds of them, lining the walls in this secret catacomb. There they are Pieter, look at them. But thanks to our achievements they no longer remain at rest. Can you imagine that? Life from Death? To gain the ultimate knowledge we desire we must raise life from death!”
She tilted her head, smiling through the jaw bone.
“Your father doesn’t need to stay dead forever.”
Pieter moved as if to lunge forward and jump on her, but a pair of strong arms hauled him back and one of the men at his side brought up his wicked-looking scythe and pointed the sharp tip at Pieter’s throat.
“Hold him there,” Lotte ordered them. “He will witness for himself how we can realize this marvellous feat.”
She clicked her fingers and someone stepped forward. From within the folds of their dark robe they produced a small hypodermic needle. Pieter thought at first that it was meant for him, some kind of drug to either subdue him or knock him out, but instead the masked figure bent forward near the naked m
an sitting in the chair and injected something directly into his penis. Pieter cringed, wondering what the hell was happening, and the man panicked, his breath coming through the sack in quick and short bursts.
After a moment he settled. Still conscious, but calm.
Lotte in the meantime had drifted across to stand before her brother. She turned and unfastened the rope around her waist, and then shrugged out of her robe to reveal her full nakedness to the gathering. Bart, a big leering grin on his face, feasted his gaze over her naked flesh and reached out to cup one of her breasts in his huge hand. She gently slapped his hand away. “Not now,” she told him mildly. “Later.”
Watching this, Pieter felt revulsion flip his stomach over, leaving him queasy. He averted his gaze, but now saw that the man seated at the centre of the circle of people was now fully aroused. Whatever they had injected him with it had sexually stimulated him thus, in spite of the terror he must be feeling.
With a sense of the inevitable he now found it impossible not to watch, no matter how repulsive he found the whole episode. It was like being witness to a terrible road accident or an act of frightful violence: even though your natural compassion told you it was wrong to look, you did so anyway.
Lotte looked over, her eyes flashing through her mask. “This should have been you having the honour of sharing your life force Pieter. Instead I had to visit you in your dreams.”
She moved across to the man tied to the chair, and turned to face away from him, so those gathered could bear full witness. Parting her legs, she lowered herself onto him, a quiet sigh escaping her lips. The man grunted in response.
Lotte glided up and down, her rhythm initially slow and smooth but after a few moments her pace increased and her breathing became louder, together with her gentle moans. Throughout, she maintained eye contact with Pieter. Then she was squirming on the man and her tempo became fast and frantic, and the man was thrusting into her.
“Come on,” Lotte was grunting, “come on,” and she was breathing hard through her nostrils, becoming more like the animal she was portraying, the goat-skull tilting back as she peaked, and the man cried out in simultaneous ecstasy.
Lotte remained there, her chest rising and falling as she gradually recovered from her exertion, the man still again. Then, when she was finished, she pushed herself to her feet. Walking back over to Bart, she ran her hand across his stomach, and once again his beady eyes were transfixed by her body. Then he leaned down to listen as she whispered instructions to him through the muzzle of the skull.
Bart dutifully moved across to the seated man and, grabbing the top of the hessian sacking, he pulled it free and tossed the material aside.
Underneath, the bald-headed man was weeping and trembling and he could not bring himself to glance up, so complete was his shame.
“I’m sorry Inspector,” officer Joos murmured, his drugged voice sounding all slurred. “They jumped me on my way home from work. They came out of nowhere.”
Pieter felt such sorrow in his helplessness he could think of nothing to say.
“Bart, shut him up!”
Her brother made a small signal with his hand and the two henchmen holding the scythes moved towards Joos, their weapons held high, bringing a cry of terror from the policeman’s lips.
“No!” shouted Pieter. “Don’t! Leave him alone, it’s me you want!”
Bart, who was enjoying the whole spectacle, shouted back, “It’s not you she wants, it’s what you have in your balls that’s important!”
“Lotte, please!”
It was no good. The two masked figures – he assumed they were men from their gait and build – unleashed their pent up excitement and launched themselves at Joos, attacking him in a crazy blood-lust of violence, hacking and slashing. Joos screamed in agony, and he thrashed his body in a futile attempt to escape his bonds, and as they cut and chopped his cries of pain became pleads as he begged them to stop, and the sound of his death-cries echoed and bounced off the walls and ceiling. He whimpered as fountains of red sprayed and drenched the two robed men, and then he was twitching and fell quiet, until the only noise was the sickening ripping of flesh as the butchery went on. Finally they stopped, but only from sheer exhaustion, and they stood looking at their handiwork and panting for breath.
Lotte again made the sign of an inverted cross and moved away into the shadows of one of the alcoves.
Pieter stared down at the floor in abject defeat.
The circle of robed figures started to quietly chant, their incantation almost sounding like a hum of electric energy, and they slowly swayed from side to side. The temperature in the room seemed to suddenly drop, until the air was chilled. Pieter could feel goose bumps on his arms, and the hairs at the base of his scalp became brittle like minute icicles.
There was a rattle of something moving, a dragging of feet and a crunching like someone walking over autumn twigs, and Pieter lifted his head and turned towards the sound, seeing Lotte reappear from the shadows. She was holding something to her body, something brown and thin, held together with shredded and tattered cloth. Pieter saw the legs and the rib bones, the thin and rotten arms that she held out, the human skull lolling back against her breasts with its jaw grinning as though in pleasure.
She stepped into the circle of chanting followers holding the human skeleton to her body, and she swayed in ecstasy, crying in pleasure through the goat-skull she still wore, moving the dead and lifeless body in a mad parody of life, dancing a macabre dance of death.
CHAPTER 19
FLORIS de KOK (ADOLF)
It was 9pm and Floris de Kok was still working down in his private office on the basement level. On the floor beside his small desk he had stacked the large box files containing the paperwork from the Finland case. On the room’s only spare chair, which he’d wheeled across, was a thick pile of cardboard slipcases, which he wanted close to hand as he worked his way through the details of the murders and subsequent trial perpetrated by the occultist, Gerdi, and her cult members during the 1970’s and 80’s.
At the moment he was reading through the list of known assets and properties and business interests connected to her and her family members.
In truth there wasn’t much.
The Finnish police had very little information about Gerdi at all. They did not have her exact date of birth – although it was guessed at being sometime around about 1930 – nor did they have any real knowledge about where she was born. They knew she was from Holland, and there was mention of a convent somewhere near the border with Germany, but whether she had been born there or ended up being raised as an orphan there was not clear.
At the time of her arrest it was clear that she was a woman of means. She held 25% shares in two large companies: Metsä Electro Energies and O P Group Medical, as well as business interests in heavy construction projects. Her husband – name unknown – was chairman of FCone Software, an early computer industries working group. Upon her conviction and subsequent death her shares had passed to her children, principally her daughter. The trail went quiet after this, but the next known facts stated that around about 2002, the family estate, a large house on the outskirts of Helsinki, was signed over to her grandchildren, even though they were both minors: a boy aged twelve and a girl aged five.
However, they did not stay here for long. As soon as the boy turned eighteen the property was sold, and he and his sister, together with their mother, moved to Amsterdam.
Things became hazy at this point once again.
It was thought that with their substantial wealth, the family purchased more property throughout the city. Two particular properties caught Floris’s attention:
A business premises in the Red Light District which five years ago was granted a licence to sell alcohol. The bar was leased under the name of a male individual – Bartholomew Janssen.
And here, in this file, was another property owned by the same individual: Schreierstoren, better known as Weeping Tower. The location of yester
day’s shootout!
Floris sat up straight in his chair. The lease ran out last year and the building had since remained empty, but surely this was too much of a coincidence?
There was nothing else about this Bartholomew Janssen so he went back to the file index to see if there was anything in there about his younger sister who, from his quick mental calculation, would be in her early twenties by now. Yet he found nothing, he didn’t even have a first name for her.
Instead, feeling a frisson of excitement start to pass through him, which in turn set his arm off trembling, Floris booted up his computer and immediately found the police database containing public records on building ownership/leases and the District Probate Registry. Technically, as a civilian employee, he shouldn’t be doing this, but what the hell?
When the system was up he typed in BARTHOLOMEW JANSSEN. The same two entries came up: The Newcastle Bar and Schreierstoren Tower. But there was a link to another individual.
CHARLOTTE JANSSEN.
With it, two property leases.
One for a flat in De Gooyer, which was listed as her place of residency.
And another for…
He leaned close to the computer monitor, wondering if he’d read it right.
“Bingo.”
Adolf ran for the stairs.
CHAPTER 20
THE WAAG
You see? You see? Life from death!” sang Lotte, as she danced around the room with the lifeless corpse.
Pieter could virtually smell the sweat of insanity oozing out of her pores, but he was transfixed by the sickening spectacle. The robed figures continued to chant and sway and some of them lifted their masked faces to the ceiling as though in the throes of ecstasy. Their arms came up, beseeching the heavens. It was bizarre and frantic and horribly deranged, unlike anything in his past experience.
