by Bill Bennett
And then Great-Aunt Luna. On the top of the Chalk Mountains. The Chalk Witch. Luna initiated her as a white witch in a magical cave deep within one of the remote rocky enclaves. And with that initiation, Lily stepped up into the ranks of Cygnet, a secret organisation of white witches, headed by her mom.
Cygnet were a bunch of white witches fighting the bad guys, the black witches, who grandly called themselves the Golden Order of Baphomet. Two of them had tracked Lily down to the cave where she’d been initiated, where they had somehow turned themselves into giant scorpions and had killed Luna. In fact, Luna had allowed them to kill her; she had sacrificed her life to let Lily escape.
Lily had managed to flee the cave, but one of the scorpions had come after her and grabbed her with one of its disgusting pincers, infecting her with its poison. It was about to kill her when Skyhawk leapt up impossibly high and plunged his knife deep into its bony skull, stopping it dead. And then they’d sped off on Luna’s trail bike before those three vicious biker witches drove up.
As part of her initiation, Luna had given Lily possession of Cygnet’s great book, The Book of Light. It was their bible, the source of their very being. In it were writings that dated back to the start of the organisation more than three hundred years earlier, detailing the fundamental tenets of their philosophies and beliefs. Their various ceremonies and rituals, codes of conduct and manifestos on ethics and morality. But perhaps most importantly, The Book of Light contained secret spells – attack and defence spells, which Cygnet witches had used with great effect over the centuries.
Lily, racing away from the cave in fear of her life, had left The Book of Light in a secret chamber. But was it safe? The thought had been gnawing away at her. There was a hidden passageway that led to the chamber, nearly impossible to find if you didn’t know it was there, and she hoped like crazy that those witches hadn’t found it. Because if they had, they would now have possession of their precious book. And if that happened, well, heaven help Cygnet.
Once she was better, she would have to go back to the cave and check, and if it was still there, as she hoped, she would get the book out and keep it with her, and make sure it never got into the hands of a black witch.
She could feel her heart beating faster, as though it was trying hard to filter out all that noxious witch’s poison coursing through her bloodstream. She felt hot and giddy, like she was going to fall off the back of the bike. She leaned forward and asked Skyhawk to stop.
He pulled up by a dry creek bed lined with desert brush and cacti. Shadows were lengthening across the plain. The air was cooling. The sun was starting to set, crimson-hazed, bloating as it neared the horizon. The Needle was still about an hour away, even with Skyhawk driving fast.
He helped her sit on a rock and examined her wound. And she examined him. Long shiny dark hair to his shoulders, slim and lean, dressed in park ranger’s clothes, fine features, delicate hands – soiled, but the hands of an artist. She remembered how he moved – how he held himself. With grace and dignity. Yet he had a large hunting knife in a chamois leather sheath on his belt. Several beautiful feathers hung from the sheath. She recalled how he’d thrust that knife down hard into the vile creature’s shell-covered head, between its stalked eyes. There was no doubt Skyhawk was a fighter, if he had to be. And after her initiation, so was she. She would do whatever it took to get her mom back. Whatever it took.
Skyhawk, examining her wound, seemed concerned. ‘It’s bad poison,’ he said. ‘A spirit poison. Not a regular poison.’
‘But I’ll be okay …’ Lily said, making it more of a statement of fact rather than the question she wanted to ask. By making it a fact, she hoped it would be true. She couldn’t get sick, not now, not when she had to help her mom. But if it was spirit poison, bad spirit poison, then how would you counter that? What was the antidote to a witch’s poison administered by a giant scorpion?
‘If anyone can heal you,’ Skyhawk said, ‘it’ll be Ma. She knows these things.’
His words chilled her. It must be worse than she thought. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘What can she do?’
‘Ma’s old-school. But I don’t know if she’s ever seen anything like this before, so we have to move fast. Get you to her quickly, because the poison’s starting to work its way through your body. Are you okay to keep going?’
Lily nodded. He helped her back on the bike and they wheeled away, leaving a huge plume of dust trailing behind them in the dying light.
As she held on, Skyhawk dodging rocks and desert shrubs, she wondered how long it would take for her to be right again. Because every day, every hour, was now crucial. She looked up at a rising moon – a thick crescent of pearl ascending the darkening sky. Her mom was going to be sacrificed to Satan on the new moon, to pay back a debt incurred by Lily’s fore-bear Jennett Maguire. Ever since, Satan had been after the soul of the eldest female in the Maguire family bloodline.
Lily had become initiated as a white witch to help find her mom. Her Uncle Freddie had told her that once initiated, she would develop powers that would enable her to communicate with Angela. If she could do that, then she could find out where her mom was. And then it would be a matter of figuring out how to get her back and going to do it, no matter what it took.
Lily had received some kind of premonition during the initiation ceremony when she found herself floating out of her body out of the cave, high across woods, speeding across the country, to a weed-infested abandoned mine site where it seemed her mother was calling out to her from down one of the old shafts. But where was that mine? And was it to be trusted, this out-of-body experience that she’d had? Or was it just some fanciful dream that would only lead to frustration and wasted time should she try and pursue what she’d envisioned? In this heightened world of witches and spirits, how did she know what was real and what wasn’t?
Lily needed all her strength, her full faculties and the help of any powers of witchcraft that might lay nascent within her to sift through it all and rescue her mother from these horrendous creatures – these Baphomet witches. They had developed their skills of witchcraft to masterful levels of unspeakable evil. Lily knew that the police could not possibly help. Their weapons and procedures would be no match for black magic. No, it was up to her to rescue her mom. Now that she was an initiated witch, she was the only one that had any hope of finding her, of bringing her safely back home.
But she had no time to waste. And while ever she was dealing with this poison, the clock was ticking down to that night, coming soon, when these witches would extract her mother’s soul.
The track wound up the gigantic column of rock and Lily held on tight, hoping she wouldn’t lose her grip and fall hundreds of feet to her death. The sun had set and the bike’s headlight cut the dusk like a flashing white sabre.
Lily had been told by a professor, a friend of Freddie’s and an expert in witchcraft and demonology, that the Baphomet black witches would conduct a large and elaborate ceremony on the night they extracted her mom’s soul – a night they called Unholy. It was the night of a very unusual celestial event, something which happened very rarely. This was probably where her mom was right now, thought Lily – wherever they were going to conduct this obscene ritualist killing.
The bike began to slow as they approached the top of the Needle. In the fast-fading light, Lily glimpsed Skyhawk’s village up ahead – a cluster of traditional Native American mud-brick houses dominated by a large white church facing a bare dirt square. In the middle of the square was an old tree, bent and crippled from a ceaseless pitiless wind. Lily glanced at the tree as she passed and she sensed within its scrawny branches the shapely arms of a beautiful deity, a spirit ageless and wondrous, reaching out to embrace and welcome her into this other world on top of a stark column of rock.
Skyhawk rode slowly into the square, dropping the bike’s engine down to a low rumble. People began to come out of their houses, curious about who had arrived, and seeing him they laughed and called out
, and waved.
‘Who you got there, Sky?’ asked an elderly man by his front gate. ‘Bringin’ the young woman home to meet your ma?’
‘Everything okay, Skyhawk?’ an old woman called from her doorway, wrapping a shawl around her shoulders and looking at Lily, concerned, as the bike passed by.
Skyhawk waved but didn’t answer as he deftly navigated his way around the square and down along several narrow winding lanes until he finally stopped outside the door of a small flat-roofed mudbrick house hundreds of years old that backed onto the edge of the precipitous cliff. A woman, hearing the bike, came to the door and when she saw it was him, beamed.
‘My mom’s called Maddy,’ Skyhawk said as he pulled up outside, kicked out the metal strut that would keep the bike upright on a lean, and began to help Lily off the back.
‘Maddy?’ she asked, rejecting his help, determined to get off the bike by herself.
‘Short for Madonna,’ Skyhawk said. ‘That’s what the villagers call her. She’s helped so many of them throughout the years.’ He stepped back as Lily got off the bike, and then grabbed her as she nearly fell over with dizziness.
‘I’m okay,’ she said, her words slurring slightly. She pushed him away.
‘Miss, how about I give you a hand?’ Maddy took Lily firmly by the arm and with a don’t argue with me smile she guided her into the house.
‘Mom, this is Lily,’ Skyhawk said, as his mother led her into a dark warm room where a fire glowed in a hearth in the corner and a stew simmered in a blackened pot on a blackened stove against a blackened wall. The room was filled with the aroma of fresh herbs and mesquite.
‘Hi,’ Lily said, smiling weakly. ‘Sorry to barge in on you like this.’
‘I see precious little of my son these days,’ Maddy said. ‘Thank you for bringing him back to me.’
Lily managed a smile as Skyhawk took her over to a table by the fire and gently placed her down on a chair.
She figured the woman was in her early fifties. She had greying hair and a calmness distilled from a life of struggle in a wild lonely place. She wore loose denim jeans pulled in at the waist and a sun-faded khaki drill shirt patched in several places. Around her neck hung several traditional necklaces made from turquoise and spiny oyster, and on her wrists were hand-carved silver bracelets of red coral and shiny abalone.
Her face was lined from the sun and the wind, and from a mother’s ceaseless worry. Her eyes held an aged sadness tinged with wisdom and compassion, her mouth was fixed in an almost smile that had, over time, become a pleasing feature. She looked like a woman you would respect and trust with your life.
‘What happened?’ Maddy asked her son, her eyes fixed on Lily, watching her every move to determine her symptoms.
Skyhawk hesitated. ‘Bad spirits’ was all he said.
Maddy nodded, as if nothing more needed to be said and as if this was a normal occurrence in their world up top of this jab of rock.
‘Now,’ she said to Lily, ‘let me take a little look-see at what’s going on here.’
She took a pair of cracked black-plastic framed spectacles from the top pocket of her shirt and examined Lily’s wounds, trying to hide her growing concern.
‘Very bad spirits,’ she said, looking up at Skyhawk. She took off her glasses and folded them absently. ‘Demon poison. I have not seen this kind before. It must be got out, and fast, because it is working its way to her heart.’
Maddy walked over to some unpainted wooden shelves screwed to the wall, put on her glasses again, and looked at several dozen small glass-stoppered bottles. They contained strange things, dead things – dried bark and shrivelled moss and insect shells and birds’ beaks, wild-cat claws and the tongues of lizards and desiccated fish gills and snake-skins of various hues and sizes. These were the things she used to heal and to fight ailments from other realms.
She clicked her tongue and considered each ingredient carefully, then she grabbed several bottles and took them over to the stove. She pulled down a large pot hanging from a hook, then turned to her son and said, ‘Leave us. I need to work.’
CHAPTER 2
With a quick and focused spell, Kritta turned her familiar into a savage pit bull, and then watched as the dog tore off like a torpedo released, bounding over rocks and hurtling through desert brush, honing in on a huge column of rock way off in the distance, rising out of plains made copper and gold by a setting sun. Somewhere out on those plains or on top of that rock was her target, her prey – a young girl who had to be killed. And swiftly. Because Kritta Kredlich was disobeying orders, and for a young woman afraid of nothing, this for the first time terrified her.
She was a priestess in the Golden Order of Baphomet – an ancient and clandestine organisation of black witches that had zero tolerance for any of its operatives not following instructions. And those that transgressed were dealt with in ways that were brutal and horrific.
For years the Golden Order had been searching for Angela Maguire, the young girl’s mother. Kritta had found the two of them at a farmers’ market in Northern California. She later abducted the mother, but the girl had proven to be more difficult to catch. Baphomet wanted them both, preferably alive so they could extract their souls on the night of Unholy, acquitting a three-hundred-year-old debt to Satan and ending the family bloodline once and for all. But if the girl couldn’t be brought to the mine alive, then dead was okay too.
Kritta’s instructions, from the Grand Master himself, were to get The Book of Light to the Deep Sink Mine as fast as possible. It was a massive asset for the Golden Order, this book, and its safe and quick passage to the mine was a greater priority at the moment than the girl. They would get the girl later.
Kritta saw it differently. The girl was so close. And she was weak from poison. It would be easy and quick. With the help of her two familiars, it was feasible she could do the kill and get The Book of Light to the mine without the Grand Master even realising she’d disobeyed his order.
And then she would be feted and honoured for having killed the Maguire girl. And perhaps even elevated to the status of adept within the ranks of Baphomet, skipping the intermediary level of high priestess. Kritta wanted to climb the ladder fast. She wanted more status, more power, which would allow her to do bigger things. Only then would she have a chance to really contribute to the Golden Order’s stated aim, which was to bring America and the whole western world to its knees in quivering fear, so that they could then shift mass consciousness over to the dark and ultimately take control.
Kritta had started in the Golden Order at a young age. Her mother was a Baphomet witch and had joined the order after killing Kritta’s father, who in a drunken rage had hit her mother one too many times. Her mother had stabbed him in the heart with a kitchen knife. Perhaps a criminal psychiatrist could pinpoint that as the moment when seven-year-old Kritta, watching in horror from a shadowed doorway, had developed her penchant for blades. It had taken the police several years to find the various body parts of her father, and then to gather the evidence that would convict her mom and put her away, but during that time her mother took solace in the black arts and eventually found her way into the lower ranks of the Golden Order.
Kritta, as a youngster, had accompanied her mom to some of their ceremonies, where they grandiosely paid homage to Satan – a beast with two heads, a boar and a goat, and the embodiment of the masculine and feminine of what they called the Two Evil. Kritta, even at her young age, relished their mission statement: that you must live to satiate your wildest desires without fear of recrimination, punishment, or guilt. There were no boundaries, no moral codes. This allowed, and in fact encouraged, unfettered lust in all its various forms and permutations, violence, murder, revenge, cruelty and hate in every manifestation imaginable, including any ‘ism’ you could think of – racism, ageism, sexism, even cannibalism – you name it.
Love, compassion, empathy, humility, respect and understanding were anathema to Baphomet. These traits were seen as
a cowering and simpering form of weakness. Hate gave you strength, power, control. Hate emboldened you, made you invincible and unstoppable.
Kritta had grown up with hate. She hated her father, for reasons she was later to understand fully, and in state care without a mother, she hated her life and those that sought each day to turn her into something she wasn’t and could never be. Within Baphomet she saw a way to channel that hate into a life with purpose, where her growing tendency to viciousness and sadism would be applauded and even rewarded. Within Baphomet she found acceptance.
Kritta had become vicious for a reason – she was small. More than small, she was tiny. Four foot ten, and that was in her biker boots. Where she grew up, in the projects of New Orleans, if you were small you either got beaten up, or you got mean. Kritta got mean. And mean meant coming at your attackers with anything at hand. For Kritta, that usually meant a blade. What made her really mean though, and scary to her opponents, was that she was utterly fearless. She never gave a thought to her own safety. When she slipped into her red haze, which came over her surprisingly fast, nothing else mattered other than dishing out hurt. As much hurt as possible. And strangely, that gave her pleasure. In a world where all possibilities of joy had been savagely ripped from her life, seeing others suffer made her happy.
That’s why she’d done so well, so fast, within the Golden Order. With her innate obsessive nature she’d quickly skilled herself up to reach the level of priestess. Once she set her mind to a goal, she was unstoppable until she’d achieved that goal, and achieved it with distinction. The same with the tasks she was given. If the Grand Master of the Northern Quadrant, her big boss, asked her to kill a Baphomet witch who’d broken the Golden Order’s strict vow of secrecy, she would not only kill him, or her, but she would do so with operatic ferocity. Kritta was nothing if not theatrical in the deportment of her work.
