Sarah England - Baba Lenka - Pure Occult Horror

“Took her own life?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know? Was it in the books?”

“In Lenka’s diary, yes.”

“You said you didn’t want us to go to the funeral but we were tricked? What happened?”

She was beginning to get tired, her eyelids were fluttering, and I reached for her hand and held it firmly, as if I could squeeze strength into her.

“Yes, I used to get a birthday card every year from distant cousins Jakub and Vanda in Munich. You may remember me mentioning them from time to time? Well, I’d always assumed my mother told them which children’s home I lived in before she died, so there would be someone to watch out for her child. Anyway, those cards came every year. They even sent a wedding card and one when you were born, too. So, when Baba Lenka was on her deathbed, they wrote to say she’d probably be gone before I got there, but a solicitor had informed them that the farmhouse had been left to me if I could be found. And I’m afraid your dad and I took the bait. We weren’t as well-informed as my mother had been, and we were stony broke. We thought if we took a loan for the flights and put the farmhouse on the market, it would make us some money. It looked like a godsend, to be honest.”

“Why didn’t it? What do you mean by ‘bait’?”

She took a long, deep breath. “Jakub and Vanda are Watchers, Eva – the ancients. They were never in Munich—”

“Watchers? The same ones who brought up my grandmother, Marika?”

“Yes. I pretended I didn’t know who they were at the funeral, but I did. They are the ones who guard and transfer the legacy. As soon as I realised what the old crone was telling me that day at the farmhouse, on the morning of the funeral, I knew we’d been tricked into taking this diabolical blood heritage.”

“And now they’re looking for me?”

“Yes.”

“Are the Watchers one and the same as der Order der schwarzen Sonne?”

“Not exactly. The Watchers are demonic guardians, sent to keep an eye on their gatekeepers – Lenka, and now you. The Order uses us because we have a direct channel from the Dark Lord to the human realm. Now this is where it’s your turn to take a deep breath. Try to accept what I’m telling you. I know it’s hard. But the people in the Order do not have a conscience or a moral compass. They bow down to the one they call Sakla, or Satan, and nothing is off-limits – in fact, the more abominable the act carried out in his name, the better.

I’m not sure if you understand the full magnitude of this. The thing is, Eva, you don’t just have one or two demonic entities attached to you, you have a direct route to Satan and access to his entire legion The goal is to extinguish the human spirit, to provoke war and chaos, hatred and division, to keep us all suppressed in ignorance, poverty and fear. Lenka did a sterling job for them during the World Wars. Look how much death and terror there was, and how much money the Order made as a result!”

“And we brought this into the world – with dark arts?”

“Essentially, yes—”

Even as the enormity and horror of what she was saying sank in, I still clung to one last vestige of hope. “But I haven’t been contacted by the Watchers or the Order–”

“You will be now you’re sixteen. They will know where you are. Eva, have you—?”

A horrible thought suddenly crossed my mind… No, my mum would not do to me what Clara did to Lenka ! Nevertheless, the question flew out. “Is this legacy really mine? Or yours? Because I don’t understand – I mean, you’re so ill!”

Her eyes were closed now and she struggled to open them again. The hand holding mine felt as feather light and feeble as a dying bird. “Yours, love. And I’m sorry about that, So, so sorry. But once you showed me the poppet, I knew everything had been about getting you to Rabenwald. The farmhouse was, is, worthless. Not only is it falling down, but it was also built on a mass grave. No one would touch it. Lenka was involved with some terrible people, officers who committed mass exterminations. Her house was built over the top of thousands of corpses in order to help cover up the extent of the massacre. You were meant to be there that day, and you were meant to receive the poppet. I realised too late. I told your dad I didn’t understand what those old women were saying and what was going on, but I did. There was nothing I could do by then, though, except instil in you not to take anything or pick anything up, to scare you into doing as I said so we could get away as fast as possible.”

I struggled to digest it all, but the clock was ticking, and here was my mother, after all these years. “But what happened to you? I need to understand… Dad said you read the books.”

“Yes, it was after I burned the poppet…” Her voice trailed away and her eyes began to close again.

I squeezed her hand to wake her up. “Mum, I have to know. I’m sorry but I have to know about the books.”

“Yes, yes you do. There was a grimoire. It was written in Sumerian thousands of years ago. Some of these ancient grimoires were smuggled out to Turkey and later filtered into Europe. This one had been translated into various languages with Russian and German scribbled over the top. The other books were line-by-line instructions to Lenka from the Order, along with a diary she kept.”

“Did the grimoire explain the initiation rite – the rape of the dead sorceress and the cannibalism?”

“You learned this from dreams?”

“Yes.”

She blanched, two tiny spots of fuchsia high on her cheeks. Her eyes seemed sunken, the bones of her face angular, her fingers pinching through my sleeve. “Oh, love, I am so sorry – you see, this is what we carry!”

I squeezed her hand and blinked back another wash of tears.

“Baroness Jelinski experimented with what she called the darker half of creation – the shadow force, the nonhuman or demonic, as I was trying to explain – and she brought them in. I read the parts translated into German—”

“How come you know German?”

She held up her hand. “I was taught it as my first language up to the age of six, but, Eva, I made sure I learned my mother tongue. It felt natural, and, like you, my dreams were informed dreams.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“Anyway, you asked about the books. I became interested, that’s all. But the more I read, the more the world as it had been, spiraled away and became lost to me. The grimoire described how Sakla – or Satan, who is titled in different ways depending on which texts you read – rules a shadow force. These shadows hail from a realm of absolute blackness, yet they walk among us, feeding off ignorance, anger, hostility and jealousy, to name a few. Their energy is fed just as much by ignorance as violence – all that is grey, dark and without light, in fact. Some call them demons, some call them archons, and others will say evil spirits. And it is these who possess the people who bow down to Satan.” She paused, and then added, “Never call a demon forth by name, Eva. And never call on Satan, because whatever riches you are given in this world, will be paid for in eternity. And that’s a long, long time.”

“But if they feed off us, how come they want us to be killed in wars?”

“Not just killed, not all of us. What they want is to stop humans knowing who they are and where they came from. They want us to be obsessed with sex and money, envy and hatred. They want us kept in the dark but yes, war and chaos is an absolute feast!”

“And Lenka helped bring about wars?”

“Yes.”

“Mum!” The truth hit me. “I think she was tricked. I mean, I know she was… and then it was too late—”

She nodded. “Which is why you must have the knowledge. Your dad was adamant you shouldn’t know what she did, but the thing is, Eva – the truth sets us free. And you have to understand that once you make the connection with them, your life will no longer be your own. They will make it unbearable.”