Throughout the living areas, even in the huge modern kitchen, she met the same almost institutional theme of the abstract paintings and the bizarre figurines.
Going through an alcove, she came into an office that was filled with a battery of hi-tech equipment. She saw a rack of computer hardware with a laser printer and monitor, and in the centre of the room what looked like a light-box built into a metal stand the size of a coffee table. Four swivel chairs were arranged around it. A chart lay on top, pressed between two sheets of glass; and suspended directly above it, on a fine thread attached to a hook in the ceiling, was a quartz-crystal weight, the point of which was only inches above the glass.
It was a pendulum, she realized. This must be where Conor’s mother did her dowsing.
Feeling a little guilty at snooping, she continued her tour of inspection. Opening a door at the far end of the house, she discovered what she presumed to be the master bedroom, dominated by a king-size two-poster.
Two framed photographs sat on a table by the window. One was a graduation shot of Conor in his cap and gown. The other was a black and white wedding photo showing a younger Tabitha Donoghue beside a shy-looking man in a tuxedo.
Monty was disappointed to find no obvious likeness to Conor. By inheriting his mother’s looks, she decided, Conor had definitely got the cream of his parents’ gene pool – assuming this was Mr Molloy. Then she shuddered as she looked again and pictured this poor man plunging through the window of an eleventh-floor office and landing at Conor’s feet.
Jesus!
Leaving the office, she saw a narrow passageway with a closed door at the end. Telling herself that all their lives were at stake and she had put herself in the hands of strangers, she decided she owed it to herself and her father to do whatever felt right, and she opened the door.
It was pitch dark and she was greeted by the musty smell of a room that is seldom used. She groped on the wall and found a switch. A weak red light came on, from inside a paper globe, and she was surprised by what it revealed.
The room’s old-fashioned crimson velvet drapes were drawn shut, and a threadbare Persian carpet covered the floor. In the centre was a circular table with six antique chairs. Several artefacts lay on the table, including an ancient clothbound book, a small glass pyramid and an assortment of rock crystals.
Two sofas faced each other from opposite walls, and a collection of more chairs suggested the room was prepared for a group meeting. She noticed the elaborate hi-fi system, and a row of bookshelves.
There was an unsettling, expectant atmosphere, and Monty felt she should not be there, but she wanted to scan the bookshelves before leaving. A vast range of occult and New Age subjects seemed to be covered. Past-life regression, channelling, the power of crystals, black magick grimoires, chakras, herbal remedies, psychic awareness, healing development …
She yawned, feeling a wave of tiredness, aware that apart from fitful dozes on the aeroplane, she’d had no real sleep.
As she turned to leave the room, a sharp pain struck without any warning. It felt as if she had been lanced through the temples with a white-hot rod.
She gasped in shock and doubled up. It worsened, disorienting her. She swayed, stumbled forwards, bashed into a chair and fell headlong with it on to the floor. The pain became even worse as if the rod had been twisted. She lay entangled in the chair legs, clenching her eyes shut. ‘Conor!’ she whispered. ‘Conor, help me, please help me!’
A wave of nausea swept through her. She opened her eyes but the room just blurred and tilted at crazy angles. When she tried to stand, it pitched her sideways, unbalancing her.
The pain shot inside the skin of her forehead, into the bridge of her nose and, simultaneously, down the back of her scalp, into the base of her neck. It felt as if the roots of a tree were growing inside her skull, pushing in every direction, forcing their way out through her eardrums, through her eye sockets, through her gullet. Blinding, deafening, choking her.
Panic gripped her. She couldn’t breathe, despite trying desperately to suck in air. ‘Cnnr. Plsh. Hllp.’ The roots were drawing up petrol now, consuming it greedily instead of water, filling her head with a foul-smelling vapour that burned every nerve ending. Then it ignited and the whole inside of her skull exploded into a raging inferno.
‘Conor, Conor, Conor, Conor, Conor!’ She screamed internally, the pain unbearable. Even so, dimly, she heard a banging sound coming from somewhere. The window. It became louder, frantic. Then she heard voices, laughter. Fighting the pain and the heaving floor, she crawled over, parted the drapes and looked up.
Dr Crowe was standing outside, peering in, his face pressed against the pane. He was telling her to open the window and join him.
In blind panic she tried to scrabble away from him. But an immense force was pulling her towards him, dragging her nearer to the window; nearer; nearer.
Her resistance was fading. She realized now that when she got to the window the pain would stop. Dr Crowe was promising her that. He was there in the darkness beyond the glazing, and had come all the way from England to help her.
‘Miss Bannerman, I can stop the pain for you!’
There was a kindness and gentleness in his face that she had never noticed before. Warmth flooded into her body, and the pain began to ease. She stared at him gratefully.
‘Trust me, Monty, I can stop the pain. Tell me that you trust me, you have to get away from this house; they want to kill you, to sacrifice you. You have to escape. You are in grave danger here.’
She could see in his eyes that he was telling the truth. And she wondered now how she could ever have doubted him. He knew the truth, he was the truth.
Then the pain came back, worse, far worse. A cry of agony ripped free from her gullet. Her head was filled with starving ants that were eating her brain; she pressed her fingers into her ears to stop them. But they were attacking her optic nerves now, munching, antennae quivering, biting into the backs of her eyes.
She tried to scream but her throat was blocked with crawling ants. Thank God Dr Crowe was still standing there, so kind, so full of sympathy, her only hope.
‘Listen to me, Monty. Do as I say.’
She nodded frantically.
‘Your father will die unless you can save him. He is feeling the same pain as you; only you can release him from this pain. Are you ready?’
Yes, yes. She was ready.
‘Get on to the table, Monty.’
Crying with pain, she heaved herself slowly, one leg at a time, on to the chair, then up on to the table; she felt it rocking beneath her weight, and the globe lightshade bumped her face, swaying on its flex.
‘Now stand!’ Crowe commanded.
Slowly she straightened one knee, then the next. The pain was shooting down into her body and the ants were deep inside her eyeballs now; she only had a few moments of vision left.
‘Stand! Support yourself with the flex, let it take your weight.’
She steadied herself with one hand, the sole of her left foot flat on the table. Then she pushed, swayed, tottered and was somehow upright, clinging to the flex. The table rocked precariously, almost threw her off, but under Dr Crowe’s calming influence she retained her balance.
‘Good girl, you are doing so well, I’m very proud of you. We are all very proud of you, we love you very much.’
The pain eased, just a fraction. Dr Crowe was making it better, and she knew that as it eased for her it was easing for her father.
‘Now, Monty.’ He smiled. ‘Now take the flex and wind it three times around your neck.’
She stared at Dr Crowe’s face through the gap in the velvet drapes with complete and utter trust, and did what he said.
107
Israel. 31 July, 1985
The helicopter lifted clear of the high plateau’s rocky terrain, hovered, then dipped its nose and clattered out over the basin of the Dead Sea into the vermilion ball of the sinking sun.
At the same time two figures i
n black jellabas scurried like insects out of a crack in the rock, hastily rolled up the two fluorescent strips that had formed the landing mark and, looking furtively around, retreated back into the rock.
An hour later, at the bottom of the crevasse that cut half a mile down and outwards into the bowels of the mountain, the four sentinels of the Holy Tomb of Satan waited silently around the rim of a natural pool the size of a small lagoon. It was reputed to be three miles deep, and the slate grey surface was unruffled by the cascading water that fell, with the din of thunder, two hundred feet sheer into the shallows of its northernmost point.
Between the waterfall and the rock wall behind it, Theutus stood rigid on the Stone of Purification, drenched in spray, his eyes closed, repeating the cleansing incantations he had long ago learned by heart.
When he had finished, the sentinels stepped forward in their black, cowled jellabas, wordlessly dried his naked body with pure linen towels, and led him through a cavity, along a passageway, into a tiny hollow that formed a chamber lit by a single tallow candle.
The chamber was bare except for a row of seven silver aspergilla suspended from hooks by their chains, and a raised slab on the floor, seven feet long and two wide. Fashioned from pure malachite, it had been burnished weekly for centuries into a dull green sheen. Theutus knew from his studies that this was the Altar of Anointment, the second stage of the purification. It was the third stage that he was anxious about, and now it was nearly time. He had been preparing for it for thirty years.
He positioned himself on his back on the altar, closed his eyes and began repeating to himself the Anointment Keys; the sentinels, their silence never breaking, began the Anointment of the Vials of the Seven Planets.
One took the first aspergillum, a silver, perforated ball, stolen like the other six many years back from the Vatican, and desecrated with menstrual blood, semen, urine and faeces. It contained a saffron perfume appropriated to the sun, mixed together with the pulped brain of an eagle.
Swinging the aspergillum from side to side, the sentinel walked one complete circuit around Theutus, sprinkling droplets of the perfume on to his naked flesh. When he had finished, the second sentinel repeated the procedure, then the third, and the fourth.
The next aspergillum contained a perfume made from the seeds of white poppies and appropriated to the moon; mixed together with menstrual blood. The third contained a perfume of black poppy seeds appropriated to Saturn, mixed with the brain of a cat and blood drawn from a bat. The fourth was to Jupiter; the fifth was appropriated to Mars, the sixth to Venus and the seventh to Mercury.
The same ritual was repeated with each of the aspergilla. Then with a touch of their hands the sentinels gave the signal to rise. Two in front and two behind the anointed one, they proceeded along a labyrinth of passages lit only by the occasional candle, and finally through the Grand Arch into the temple of the Eternal Flame of Satan.
Theutus found himself in awe of the sacred chamber which he now entered for the first time in his life. Its five sides, naturally formed out of the polished rock faces, rose majestically like the walls of a Gothic cathedral up to the summit of the plateau above. Each wall had been elaborately and beautifully carved with Cabbalistic numbers and symbols; but there was no vaulted cathedral roof above their heads, just a small pentagram of rapidly darkening sky.
Forty-two Assessors stood, backs pressed against the walls, completely encircling the room. Silent as statues, they were dressed in pure white linen robes, and their identities were concealed behind the gold face mask of the beast of their choice.
The flames of an intense natural gas fire leapt from a hollow in the floor, the centre of a series of intricately carved concentric circles. The fire had been lit, according to legend, by Satan Himself as His final act of defiance when He was defeated by God. Only Satan could extinguish it, and on the day He did so, He would rise through the ashes to wreak vengeance on God. And in the centre of the fire lay a massive granite crucible. The impurities in the molten gold that filled it to the brim were bubbling to the surface like volcanic lava.
Between the spot where Theutus stood and the fire was an anvil, and a stone slab displaying the heavy tools of a blacksmith and the delicate ones of a goldsmith. Of the many rituals which Theutus had learned in the past thirty years, the work of the foundryman and of the goldsmith had been among the first. Having been instructed that it was necessary for a great magician to cast his own vessels, and to fashion his adornments by his own hand, he had mastered both skills.
But today he had come without his jewellery and without his crown. He came naked into the temple, bringing nothing of the old world with him that might carry a taint that could diminish his powers. Here, in front of his peers, from the crucible’s smelted gold, he would forge new vessels – a new crown, new rings and a new pendant.
The gold had come from the vessels and adornments of the outgoing Ipsissimus, the previous elected figurehead of the forty-two Assessors – an 87-year-old banker who lay slowly dying of bone cancer in a private clinic in Switzerland.
It was the same gold that had been smelted down from each preceding Ipsissimus for nearly two thousand years, the same gold that had once formed the chalices and plates used by the great Impostor Jesus Christ and his evil followers. Those chalices had been recovered from the Cave of Qumran where they had been concealed after the crucifixion.
From his early twenties, Theutus had ceased to believe in the existence of the biblical God who had made his childhood such hell; and he did not believe in Satan as a deity either. He considered today’s procedure to be mere mumbo-jumbo, but that did not diminish its value for him. God and Satan had both existed once, of that he had little doubt, but they had been mortal humans, as real as himself, no more and no less.
They had been simply magicians, shamans, alchemists, who happened to have understood how to harness the energies of the universe to their own ends. The power they’d had was within the reach of all mortals, but access to that power was a secret shared only between the forty-two Assessors and their predecessors. It was the power of mind over matter. The ability to project, coerce, influence by sheer willpower, employing the forces of charisma, telepathy, astral projection.
It was a power that went back thousands of years. It was the power to create wealth, political dominance, control. The power to succeed totally in every conceivable worldly way. It was the greatest power known to man.
Theutus knew the individual identity of none of the forty-two silent Assessors here. He knew only that they had selected him with more care, more secrecy and more ritual than the processes by which the Vatican appointed a new Pope.
He was aware that they were all men of immense standing on the world’s stage. One was a cardinal from the Vatican. One, an eminent scientist. One, a United States senator. One, a British cabinet minister. Each had been selected from covens all over the world for their psychic abilities, their business influence, their political influence – and their impeccable outward respectability.
Mental control ruled. All verbal communication was forbidden. All had been summoned solely by telepathy. They communicated in silence, they would depart in silence. They shared one common bond.
Power.
Give me a firm place on which to stand and I will move the world.
And they had elected him to be their leader; their new Ipsissimus; their Magister of Magisters. The invitation had come out of the blue. Yet not a total surprise. They had been watching him for forty years. He had been aware of what was coming, he had received the signs. Now he had to prove himself able.
If he succeeded, this same group would assemble only once more, ever: for the final initiation ceremony in the Cave of Demons. That meeting would take place eighteen days after the death of the outgoing Ipsissimus. There would not be another such assembly, Theutus knew, until he, too, was on his deathbed. That might be here in the bowels of this table mountain in twenty, thirty, forty years’ time. By then many of those here woul
d be dead also, replaced by younger blood that was just as carefully chosen to share the same knowledge, the same secret.
He had come a long way, Theutus reflected, since the day he had purchased that first rabbit from a pet shop in High Barnet. But he still had far to go. Tonight was the twelfth Ordeal and he had yet to pass it. And beyond that, to come, was the thirteenth Ordeal, with its infamous trek to the Cave of Demons. There had been others who had come this far in the past, and failed; there were rumours of terrible humiliation and agonizing death. To allow any such fears to distract him now would be to court disaster beyond imagination.
Mind over matter.
They were watching, waiting.
Mind over matter. The supreme concentration. He had walked barefoot over blazing coals. But that had been easy. He had spent ten minutes underwater holding his breath, his arms and legs weighted with stones; but that, too, had been easy.
None of the rituals were hard once you understood the secret of control. Mind over matter. Most humans used less than twenty per cent of their brains. The secret lay in the other eighty per cent, and none but those assembled here would ever find the key to unlock it.
The heat seared his flesh from a distance of ten paces, and the foul sulphurous fumes invaded his lungs. He stared up at the sky far above. It was darkening and the first stars were coming out.
Stars rule man, but a wise man rules the stars.
The rim of the full moon was appearing over the lodestone high above him. When he could see the moon in its entirety he would begin.
Closing his eyes, he cleared his mind and began to speak the only words he was permitted: ‘Hail Zoroaster!’ Then he raised his head to the sky. ‘Hail Alnath! Allothaim, Achaomazon.’ He continued to hail, in turn, each of the twenty-eight mansions of the moon.
Then, bracing himself, Theutus stepped forward until he was inches from the rim of the fire and declared aloud: ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, which is, which was, and which is to come, the Almighty. I am the First and the Last, who am living and was dead, and behold I live for ever and ever; and I have the keys of death and hell.’