Last Days (48 page)

Don’t you see?’

‘Insane. You are insane, Max.’

Max gazed at the nearest dawn-light simulator on the floor. Spoke as much for his own benefit as Kyle’s. An unpleasant intensity came into his one good eye. ‘She has been profligate and careless in her new form. As Chet’s body matured around her, she believed herself invulnerable. Protected by wealth, fame, power, her new cult of celebrity, her 425

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mystical origins. But she was not protected. She became ill from her excesses. Her sadistic sexual revenge against beautiful men and women had consequences. Her affectation for blood sports . . .’ He turned quickly to Kyle, and grinned as if with triumph. ‘And so Sister Katherine was forced to seek another transformation. Her third coming has been brought forward. Did you know that Chet Regal and his last wife adopted a boy and called him Avaritia Luxuria?’

‘Don’t you bring these things into my life, Max.’

‘I think they’re already in it, dear boy.’

Kyle stood up. And wobbled. Reached out a hand to seize the arm of his chair.

‘We’re not done yet, Kyle. Can’t you see? She’s been incarnating. For a long time. Inside the infant boy that became the man Chet Regal. She was not even his genetic mother, but Chet Regal’s life bears all of her hallmarks. Her greed.

Her sadism. The cruelty. And a pathological lust for power.

This should be proof enough.’

‘He’s aping her then. This is not possible.’

‘I wish it were that simple, Kyle. And what of the re

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awoken legacy of murder inside the vessel she stole from a two-year-old child.’ Max pointed at the screen. ‘Every recent murder and abduction has been part of a grotesque revenge.

A continuance of what began in the seventies.’

‘Max, please—’

‘On her behalf, her old friends were able to pick off the more vulnerable stragglers in the period close to the Night of Ascent. Even after they fled the mine, those victims’ lives and their sleep were still being ravaged by the taint. You can be sure of that. The mark was on them. The scent. Their unfortunate connection to “the presences” was insoluble. It’s 426

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why the poor wretches could not function. Why they obliterated their minds and their reason with intoxicants. But the addicts, the broken and the damaged were easy to find. Don’t you see? They were the truly haunted.’ Max sighed. ‘We were all used. From London to France to the United States. We were contaminated by what she called down to us. By what needed to be called upon again, by the only one who knew how. Katherine.’

‘But you and Isis, Gabriel, Heron, why weren’t you killed in the seventies?’

‘Among the weakest connections to the European version of the group, the Gathering, with the slightest contamination, were Isis, Heron and I. We all left the Gathering after the first appearances of what we referred to as “presences”.’

‘But Gabriel—’

‘Gabriel barely lasted a year in France. He missed whatever event preceded the schism. I believe our vestigial associations were too slight in the seventies, when so many more available victims were still around. But Katherine still hoped to eventually complete her vengeance and to run down all those who once forsook her. Those of us still left alive after 1975. To use us as sacrifices during her most recent calling of the Blood Friends.’

‘Martha? Bridgette Clover?’

‘Martha Lake and Bridgette Clover remained perpetually on the run until after the Night of Ascent. Young, wily, always partying in bright lights, surrounded by entourages. They evaded the hunt. But not for ever.’

Max touched the bulging dressing on the side of his head.

‘We are the meat and drink of her vengeance. But our deaths also serve a dual purpose. As she intends to occupy a child 427

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again, the old friends will try to occupy us. Katherine has promised to bring them back to life as she did so many years ago. And she has called them. It is she that has the connection. I suspect it has never been an easy alliance. She has had to offer them a great deal. An unstable and diabolical pact at best, I would guess, but through it she has an ability to speak with them, to bargain, as Lorche once did. And I doubt she has ever been free of the Blood Friends within the guise that is Chet Regal. Their very presence has contributed greatly to her monstrousness in this life, twice. And her old friends want to try and return again, through us, to the light they despise but hunger for.’

‘I can’t . . .’

‘Those in the seventies Temple, who withstood the course of her relentless inhumanity and remained until the very end, were promised as vessels for her old friends. Were to have no more purpose other than to serve as eventual hosts to what once was. The Blood Friends, as they have been called since the siege of St Mayenne. The angels whom Lorche served became known by the same name as the sect they consumed. They who took Lorche and his followers back with them, to twist with rage and despair and pain in another place for over four centuries, perhaps still believing in their own greatness, and their elected state in that terrible plane, as Katherine has always done on earth under
their
influence.’

Kyle began walking, off-balance, towards the door of the study. ‘No. Max. Please. No more.’

Max followed Kyle, a vibration of excitement in his voice.

His little eyes bulged with a mad glee. ‘The Blood Friends had a foothold in Katherine from the beginning. She was perfect. They sensed her. In that Clarendon Road house.

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They were conjured in the right place and in the right conditions.’

Kyle paused. He didn’t know what to do, or where to go.

He sat down upon the cold floor. ‘The murders at the mine.

On the Night of Ascent. Why, if
they
needed hosts?’

Max groaned as he moved, but managed to crouch beside Kyle. His voice became hoarse, breathless. His words more determined. ‘The adult members of the Last Days had no real worth as vessels for the Blood Friends. But still Katherine offered those adepts who had deserted her, as well as those faithful and those imprisoned, as potential hosts to the Blood Friends. If not as vessels, then as sacrifices to her old friends to assuage her hateful spite. Their hot living blood was bartered in an exchange for the skills of the Blood Friends.

Through the succour of these old appetites she had enlisted to her cause, she wished in return for a second life inside a child. Amongst those still remaining at the mine on the Night of Ascent, rebirth was denied all but Katherine and two of the Blood Friends, who are currently incarcerated at Bethlem Royal Hospital within those deranged vessels that were once children.

‘By the Night of Ascent I believe Katherine knew she’d never get the Blood Friends to take root inside the adults.

Their efforts to occupy adults are largely fruitless. So when they cannot return, they feed to remain as long as they can on this side, as they fed during the siege at St Mayenne, on the apostates Lorche had slaughtered to make his “angels”

corporeal, and on the unholy communion as blessed by the swine. And so the Blood Friends fed again at the Blue Oak Mine on the Night of Ascent.

‘It was hopeless to use the adults as vessels. She knew 429

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by that night in 1975 because she’d already tried. Think of what Martha Lake told you, about those who were taken out at night and who either never came back, or who tried to run. I believe the early transformations at the mine were errors, and the insane results were killed and buried in the desert. Urania, Hannah, Adonis, Ariel, Priscilla. Katherine experimented with them and the Blood Friends. They were either left terrified, insane, or temporarily filled with the consciousness of the Blood Friends, out in that desert. I believe it was only a dress rehearsal for the Night of Ascent. After the debacle in France, she had to prove to herself that the whisperings of her old friends were truthful and that a transfer was possible. In the adults it must have been a momentary occupation, but proof enough. She then had her experiments, her guinea pigs, killed by Moloch and Baal. Had them bury the evidence. She kept up her side of the bargain with those she had made such a pact with, but I believe she secretly knew a permanent transference could only be truly affected with an immature and more receptive vessel, like a dog, a pig, or a child.’

‘No. You’re making me feel sick, Max.’

‘The murders on the Night of Ascent were planned. That night was a trap. The other members of the Last Days may have been promised as unwitting vessels for the Blood Friends, her masters, but Katherine really used them as sacrifices to prolong the Blood Friends’ visit and influence, through which she could take up position within the infant.

Much blood was needed to facilitate her transference by what should never have been called down.’

Max gazed at the screen. ‘Despicable. Four of her most devoted Seven, who died beside her in the temple, she had 430

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long offered to her invisible allies. She’d tricked them into believing they could live again, inside the children. Children as vessels for four of her chosen, her devoted Seven. That was her ploy, to get them to agree to their execution by the hand of Brother Belial so they also could live again within the children.’

‘It doesn’t add up. Why treat children so terribly if they were to be hosts?’

‘Because a dehumanized condition was more conducive for the entry of a thing as vile as a Blood Friend. Because it was the Blood Friends she had really promised those children to, not her devoted Seven. Only her own intended vessel was groomed separately, at the mansion. Kept clean. Personal tuition. The other four children lived with dogs in a shack.

I don’t know which was worse.’

‘The Seven were her most loyal. They murdered for her.’

‘Now you begin to truly understand her nature. And Brother Belial was her confederate. She betrayed those of The Seven who died kneeling beside her in the temple more hideously than those who died by the fence trying to escape.

Because she suspected her closest Seven of ambition and they perished for it, as their predecessors did in France. They became nothing more than a blood sacrifice to oil and anoint the ritual in which she would reincarnate. Their usefulness had expired. Their murderous deeds under her tutelage needed to be erased in a blood frenzy she dutifully delivered to her old friends. Belial cut throats on Katherine’s orders.

And a great deal of blood was taken by the dirty, poison -

ous mouths of the Blood Friends after Belial opened those arteries. It’s why the police couldn’t find enough blood at the crime scene.’

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‘But two of the children have dogs inside them. What the fuck, Max?

‘I can only speculate. But I believe that in the terrible confusion of the coming of the Blood Friends, in the maelstrom, the psychic storm when souls were bared and throats were opened, two of the dogs became involved. As did two of the Blood Friends, who entered the two infants who could only grow into aberrations, because they were already monstrous at the moment of their rebirth. Such rites are not an exact science. Matters of diabolism never have been, and always demand a high price. There must have been a terrible scrabble amongst the host of Blood Friends to occupy the available adults and the children, during their brief access to that isolated commune.’

Kyle made to stand up. ‘I’ve heard enough.’

Max seized Kyle’s arm. ‘The ones who ran for the wire on the Night of Ascent, they were betrayed and sacrificed also.

They realized their fate too late. Their lives were to end in a hideous exchange with the Blood Friends who sought to effect a transition: from a terrible age back to youth, from eternal damnation to blessed mortality. When it did not work, their blood was still spilled as succour to those old friends’

appetites. Before that fence they could not climb, the adepts died frantic with terror. The Blood Friends ate with a horrible rage and thirst at the foot of that boundary. Remember, blood also maintains the brief corporeality of the Blood Friends, as it did during the siege of St Mayenne.

‘Can you not see? It takes an immense effort for them to manifest on our side of things. If they cannot gulp at life’s blood, as you have seen by evading them in your motel room, they are unable to remain and soon disappear. But they leave 432

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impressions. And the police never found the murder weapon that delivered the coup de grace by the perimeter. Because there wasn’t one.’ Max’s fingers dug into Kyle’s bicep. ‘And now they come for us. Last night, Kyle, they came for me.

Again. Me. I can’t keep them back any longer. Kyle! Wait!’

Kyle was back on his feet in a heartbeat. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘That thing that calls itself Chet Regal is empowered by Katherine’s old friends, the Blood Friends. You cannot deny it. They serve each other’s wishes. You know of whom I speak. You have seen them. In Holland Park. Your motel rooms! They leave tracks. The footprints at the mine! The walls! It was they that came on the Night of Ascent. And they are with us again!’

Kyle reached the brandy decanter. Swept it up and drank from the neck. Gasped. ‘For one person to occupy another?

It’s just not possible.’

‘It takes a long time. It needs assistance, from
friends
, old friends, who have the expertise. You have seen the casualties.

The brain-damaged. The irreparable neurological trauma.

And the inclusion of less robust consciences inside the minds of the children. In the maelstrom. In the ritual. Can you not see it? In that terrible storm that descended. But it was no storm. It was an aperture. An opening. Wits were lost inside it. In the horrible confusion and slaughter, with the dogs and the children . . . Think of Lorche, Kyle. Think! His second sight. The Bishop he installed inside a pig. We think Lorche also intended to exchange, body and mind, with one of the children in St Mayenne in 1566. One of the children he kept isolated so he could live again. The other children were to serve as hosts for those spirits he served. Lorche’s angels that 433