Alchemist (86 page)

She rang the bell and a few moments later a shadow moved behind the frosted glass. The door opened a few inches then stopped. Tired eyes, raw and bloodshot, stared from a sallow black face. There was a hint of recognition, but no welcome.

‘Hello, Mrs Smith,' Monty said, alarmed by her appearance. ‘I – how's Win –'

‘Will you come in, please?' There was an urgency in the request and Monty responded to it by stepping into the tiny hallway immediately. Mrs Smith, supported by crutches, gestured her through into the living room.

When the older woman next spoke her soft voice had a tremble. ‘You didn't hear, then, Miss Bannerman? My husband died on Monday.'

For Monty the news came as a shock, and she had to school herself to utter the right words. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. ‘I'm so sorry.'

There was an awkward silence, broken by the new widow. ‘The funeral was yesterday. Just family. They cremated him. Strange, because he always wanted to be buried, not that. But the doctor who was with him in his last hours said he made it very clear he'd changed his mind. The nurse said so too.'

Cremated
, Monty thought. Of course, don't want to risk an exhumation and forensic examination. No doubt that was Crowe's doing, she decided bitterly. ‘There was no postmortem?'

‘No, nothing like that.' Mrs Smith reached over to her mantelpiece and produced a white envelope as she spoke. ‘But
there is something Winston said for
you
to have. I didn't know how I was going to get it to you.'

Monty took it with a frown. ‘Thank you.'

There was an object inside, something thin, hard and flat; Monty wondered whether to open it in front of the bereaved woman or whether that would be distressing for her. She decided to wait until she was outside. She could see that Mrs Smith was making an unnatural effort to hold herself together simply because she had a visitor, and she knew she should go so that the poor woman did not have that extra strain.

Wordlessly, she put an arm around Mrs Smith's shoulder and wordlessly Mrs Smith acknowledged the gesture, both of them heading back to the front door where they parted solemnly.

When she was back in her hired car, Monty opened the mysterious envelope and removed a folded sheet of plain white paper.

Taped to it was a white plastic smart-card with a band of computer striping, identical in appearance to the one she had herself been issued by Bendix Schere. A short, undated note in shaky handwriting said:

Dear Ms Bannerman
.

The pin no. is 0626
.

The card will let you more places than your own. Anywhere in the building you wish to go. Even Room 101!

All you got to do is look confident and nobody won't question you. My friend Roger is there Monday to Friday. 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. He will show you all you want to see. You can trust him. I am sorry I never had the courage myself
.

Winston Smith
.

She dabbed away tears with the back of her hand and looked at the card, thinking hard.

Anywhere in the building you wish to go
…

The pain struck as suddenly and savagely as it had before. Monty tore her hands from the steering wheel and clamped them to her head, pressing the sides of her skull, trying to crush all sensation. A horn blared behind her; blared again, longer, angry. Jammed in the Park Lane traffic, she jerked on the handbrake. This time it felt as though a huge insect was trapped inside her brain, swirling round, buzzing, trying to rip its way out with claws and mandible. Her vision blurred. Feeling a giddy wave of nausea, she had to open the door of the Rover and lean out, retching.

Gold cross
.

Gold cross
.

Tabitha had warned her that this could happen when Crowe tuned back into her, trying to locate her.

Gold cross
.

Needed to visualize it at the base of her skull and in her solar plexus. She was close to her destination. Just had to fight the pain off until she could get there, Marble Arch was right ahead now, going to make it. Got to! The horn blared again.

Go to hell
.

She closed her eyes, concentrated, two intersecting lines of gold; felt them there; felt the light radiating. The pain in her head was subsiding; she opened her eyes.

‘You all right, lady? D'you need an ambulance?' A man was looking down at her; leather jacket, thick jumper.

A short distance behind him Monty could make out a white car. It had a box on the roof. A man in uniform was getting out. He was walking towards them, fast, urgent strides. A police officer. The sight of him panicked and galvanized her.

‘No, I'm fine.' She slammed her door, rammed the car into gear and lurched forward; her head was clearing of its own accord, the buzzing had stopped. She looked anxiously in the mirror and could see the police car in the next lane, about three cars back.

Coming into Marble Arch, the traffic was thick but moving. She forced her way into the next lane, but the police car made no attempt to do the same. Then to her relief she saw it turn off. A couple of minutes later as she drove down Bayswater, she saw the stark grey edifice of the Royal Lancaster Hotel rising twenty storeys into the falling dusk.

She pulled up on the forecourt. Telling the doorman she would only be a couple of minutes, she hurried inside and up to the reception desk. Yes, the young woman told her, Mrs Robert Frost had checked in; she was in suite number 1111.

Monty went to a booth, picked up a house phone and asked to be put through to the suite. A moment later she heard Tabitha Donoghue's edgy voice. ‘Where the hell are you, Montana?'

‘I'm here, in the hotel. I'm coming up.'

‘I don't know what's going on. Some kind of a sick joke … they put us on the
eleventh
floor!'

‘Is that significant? I'm sorry – I – I don't understand –'

‘My husband – Conor's father – don't you see? He fell from the eleventh floor. They've done this deliberately. I warned Conor; these people are too powerful for us. Whatever you do, don't come up here, Monty; it's too dangerous and I can't protect you.'

Monty knew a case of hysterics when she heard one. ‘I'm on my way,' she insisted.

She raced across the foyer to the lifts. As she stepped out on the eleventh floor, she hurried down the corridor. 1103 … 1105 … 1107 … 1109 … 1111.

She rapped to gain entry and was greeted by a white-faced Tabitha Donoghue wearing a blue towelling bathrobe.

Monty pushed past her into a plush hall and saw Tabitha kneel and carefully straighten a line of what Monty assumed to be salt, on the floor.

‘Where's Conor? Is he here?'

‘No. But he phoned an hour ago from the hotel at the airport. He said he's going to have to work through the night. He asked how you got on – the newspaperman?'

‘They've killed him.'

Tabitha looked despairing now. ‘Yes, they'll kill everyone.
It's too strong here, Montana.' She was wringing her hands. ‘We're too close to the source; it's beyond my powers to contain it.'

‘You're just going to have to try.'

‘It's not possible, Montana. Not without … months.'

‘Months?' Monty repeated.

‘Months – of working through rituals; we'd have to assemble a whole coven. We don't have enough energy with just the three of us. And I'm too out of practice.'

Monty dug her hands into her mackintosh pockets. ‘Mrs Donoghue, we're dealing with a bunch of sick perverts and right now we just have to keep our nerve. I'm going down to park my car and sneak my bags up. Then I suggest we camp here for the night and wait for Conor. OK?'

She took the lift back down to the lobby, went out to the Rover, and pulled out into the crawling traffic, looking for the nearest car park. In Washington, Tabitha had seemed so calm and strong. Her present condition frightened Monty and she didn't want to leave her on her own for long.

She waited in line at the traffic lights just beyond the end of the hotel. When they turned green, she turned right along the rear façade of the Royal Lancaster, merging with the dense Bayswater Road traffic, stopping and starting.

Then, suddenly, with no warning, not even the flicker of a shadow, there was an ear-splitting bang on her roof. The car lurched sickeningly, the top pressing down on her head.

Startled, Monty saw that the front windscreen had sprung from its twisted frame and was sticking out over the bonnet like a jaw.

For a moment she wondered if a tree had fallen on to the car. Then her mouth flew open in a silent scream as she saw the female hand dangling in front of her eyes; each manicured finger displayed.

She scrabbled to open the door. It would not move. She tried harder, striking it with her shoulder, but still it would not move. A wide band of blood had started to slide down the window. Breathing in short, hard bursts, she scrambled across the passenger seat and got out of the door on that side.

Other people were getting out of their cars all around her, as if responding to a cue. Someone was pointing. A child was screaming.

At first Monty could only watch the shocked faces of everyone else, unable to find the courage to turn and follow their gaze. The whole of London seemed to have come to a halt. Then she did turn round, and every ounce of warmth drained from her flesh.

A half-naked body lay spread-eagled across the crumpled roof of her Rover, inadequately covered by a blue towelling dressing gown that had fallen obscenely open, exposing the wearer's backside and grotesquely twisted legs.

High above her, Monty could see the spidery cracks and a jagged hole in the wall of glass on the eleventh floor of Tabitha Donoghue's hotel. A new kind of fear, more intense and more chilling than anything she had ever experienced, slipped quietly inside her, like a ghost.

‘Don't move her!' a woman called out. ‘Nobody move her!'

A man in a herringbone coat jostled past Monty, blocking her view. ‘I'm a doctor,' she heard him say. Then after a few moments he spoke again, more quietly. ‘There's no pulse. Looks like the impact has snapped her neck.'

Monty backed away; everything was blurred. Had to get away, she thought. Before the police came; they would want her to go to the station and Levine might be waiting there.

She ran, handbag swinging from her arm, along the Bays-water pavement, her surroundings almost invisible to her. She reached Marble Arch panting hard, took the underpass, and ran on, up a teeming Oxford Street and all the way to Tottenham Court Road.

Something was drawing her along, pulling her to Great Russell Street and the gold and black gates of the British
Museum. She needed the British Library that lay within its colonnaded façade and she
had
to get there before it closed for the day.

‘Hmmmn.' The librarian in the reading room dug his hands into his blazer pockets and jiggled some change in response to Monty's breathless request. ‘What area of the occult?'

‘Satanism.'

The word was absorbed without any visible reaction, and Monty was directed to a stack of bookshelves.

A quarter of an hour later, she had eight books which she lugged across the reading room and piled on an empty desk. The musty smell of old leather rose up to her as she opened the top volume:
An Illustrated History of Magik
. Its thick pages showed engravings of strange symbols, mummified corpses, creatures that were half human, half beast, and the eerie mask of a human skull wearing a bearskin wig:
I scare you, you scare me, I scare me, we scare ourselves
. She turned through these pages then stopped at a passage headed ‘Working Spells'.

From earliest times, magic appeared to be a more economical means of destroying an enemy than combat
… She read on through a range of spells and magical weapons; through chapters headed, ‘Ritual Murders', ‘Blood and Sacrifice', ‘The Cabbala', ‘Alchemy and Alchemists'.

Here she stopped and began reading the text:
According to the alchemists, the world is not completely separate from its Creator, since it possesses a ‘living soul', the
‘Anima mundi'
which is linked to Him ‘in the same manner as a woman to a man'. This ‘spirit of the world' is a remnant of the ancient notion of the Mother Goddess and the cult of Isis in Egypt
.

Monty frowned.
Alchemy
. Was it possible that the chief executive of a modern international pharmaceutical giant was really dabbling in the ancient practice of alchemy?

Over the page in a chapter headed ‘The Devil Incarnate', a hideous black and white photograph caught her eye, making her shudder. It was a goat's head mask, with curled horns and a flowing beard, atop a human form in a white robe. The caption beneath said it all.

Magicians, particularly in the West, like to call up the devil, especially where they are concerned with ‘black' magic or sorcery. Those who practise ‘black' magic like to believe that the earthly form assumed by the devil is that of the goat
.

But it was the next photograph that really leapt out at Monty. It was a mask in the form of a frog's head, complete with glistening skin, a smug, sinister smile and an expression of pure evil in a pair of hideously bulging eyes. The man whose head it concealed was wearing a white, richly embroidered robe. Seated in an ornate chair, he was holding a strange, curved object in his hands. The photograph was captioned:

The Baphomet – Goat of Mendez – is not considered the only symbol of the devil by occult practitioners. Some cults represent him in the carnation of other beasts, as the illustration here shows, of Daniel Judd (better known as
Theutus
), Grand Magister of the New International Satanic Brotherhood
.

As Monty looked back at the photograph she trembled – the eyes of the frog seemed to be focusing on her, coming out from the page towards her. Almost involuntarily, she shut the book to get away from them, and reached for the next volume on her pile:
From the Crusades to the Internet: The Black Agenda, A History of Modern Satanism
. She began reading the Introduction.