Tom Knox - The Babylon rite

The same thought had occurred to Adam. The cold surly horror of staring at this tower every morning, knowing what the vicar, back in 1841, had discovered. Horrible.

The tower was guarded by a pitiful little railing, barely a foot high. They walked up the stoop of grey and weathered stone steps, and pressed the only door. It swung open on smooth hinges.

The interior was incisively cold, but not as cold as the heath. The light was pitiful; sad winter light filtered by an arched, eight-hundred-year-old leaded window. The interior of the tower was just a single large, tall, cold and echoey stone room.

‘No light switches?’

‘Nope.’ Nina consulted the book, using the torch from her mobile phone to read.

He recalled her using the same flashlight when they had broken into her father’s apartment. He shuddered at the memory of the intruder: they needed to hurry. Someone could be driving down the lane right now, parking next to their car, walking to the tower.

‘He says there are apotropaic signs everywhere. Apotropaic graffiti.’

‘What the hell are they?’

‘Ritual protection symbols, used since ancient times by all cultures to ward off evil. “Some of the apotropaic graffiti in the tower of Temple Bruer dates from the fourteenth century, indicating that the place had a sinister reputation from the time of the Templars’ demise. The carvings were continuously inflicted on the fabric for many centuries thereafter. Clearly, the local peasantry must have felt a certain desperation to rid this place of its devilish connotations. Perhaps they knew of the tormented skeletons concealed within.”’ Nina paused, then concluded. ‘This bit… is odd. This is not like my dad. To say this bit here.’ She quoted, ‘“Even today the place retains a definite ambience, which might lead the most materialist of scholars to feel a frisson of doubt. Certainly, this is no place to linger.”’

‘Too true. Look. Down here.’ Adam, using his own mobile phone light, picked out some scratched graffiti on a wall. ‘Suffer the child that comes unto me.’

Nina examined it. ‘That’s new, there’s no weathering. Local teenagers probably. This stuff, over here, is the old stuff.’

Carved ferociously into the next slant of wall was a series of ancient symbols. Runic and bizarre; deeply cut triangles and inverted letters. Adam stared: the cuts in the stone were severe, yet weathered: chamfered by time.

‘Here’s the wee cat.’ She had moved away in the murk. ‘Dad said there was a cat, a gargoyle of a cat. It’s just here. And this must be the tomb, the stone effigy, in the corner.’

He was hardly listening, transfixed by the graffiti. The backwards R? The inverted A? And now he realized he could hear… howling.

Fierce howling.

‘Nina?’

The howling echoed around the stone chamber. It was unearthly, and bloodfreezing. A choir of suffering and lamenting, from somewhere just outside. Who — or what — was producing that direful noise? Adam felt a rush of juvenile, even infantile, dread: he didn’t want to open the door.

He opened the door. They stared out. The deathly, late-afternoon light was just good enough for them to see.

Foxhounds.

A man was striding down the farmyard, a riding crop in his hand; he was repetitively slapping the whip against high leather boots; and before him was a river of canine tongues and ears and tails. It was a hunting pack, being exercised; the dogs were barking and yawling, raising that horrible, humanlike whimpering. The steam rose from the torrent of dogs as they lashed into the cold, snowmelty fields, yearning to kill.

The huntsman turned, for a second, as he reached the gate and looked directly at Nina and Adam. His face was an oval of blur in the winter gloom, his expression indiscernible, and odd. What did he want? Did he know something? Adam could feel the sordid clench of fear, a dragging attachment. The terror of going to Alicia’s flat, after she died. Seeing all of her things; the stuff she left behind.

‘London. Come on! There’s no point hanging about in this horrible place. The next stop is the Temple Church in London. We can stay with my sister. You drive. You’re quicker than me. Please.’

Once inside the car, Nina flung the book on the back seat. ‘Let’s just get out of here!’

The ignition kicked, Adam flicked on the lights and they reversed at speed, as if they were fleeing the darkness heading their way, trying to escape night itself.

They approached the whirring traffic of the main road, where car lights shone mistily through the fogs of rain. The desolation of the Heath seemed almost welcoming now, after the creeping dreads of Temple Bruer.

‘Evil!’ Nina said, with great emphasis. ‘It’s evil.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I think that’s what Dad found, Adam. Evil. Something evil. That’s what he discovered about the Templars, an evil secret, and someone paid him to do it. That’s why he had all that money.’

Adam said nothing, because a further thought had just occurred to him. Whoever was the dark villain in this piece, the man with the tattoos, the murderer, the man guarding or seeking the secret that gets you killed — that same person might be the one who had stolen Archie McLintock’s notebooks.

Which meant that even though Nina had stopped alerting the world via the internet, anyone who had the notebooks would still know their route: because they were following the exact same route Archie McLintock took and noted, eighteen months previously, through the Templar sites of Western Europe. Every move that he and Nina made was therefore pitifully predictable.

The cold rain angrily lashed the window. Adam changed gear, and accelerated past a vegetable lorry, speeding through the darkness on the A456 to London. Racing across the drizzly and dismal heathland road, with all its legends of witches, and highwaymen, and ghosts.

Outskirts of Chiclayo, north Peru

‘So tell me more. Please.’

Steve Venturi was on the phone. Jessica was in the cab of the TUMP Chevy; Larry was driving them the last few miles into Chiclayo.

The signal dropped for a few moments, then Venturi’s languidly intellectual, southern Californian drawl returned. ‘Well, I’ve written it up — and emailed a PDF. Do you want to hear the summary?’

‘Yes. Yes please.’

‘OK. “Described below are three possible cases of foot amputation in skeletal remains associated with the Moche culture of north Peru. The three skeletons belonged to young male and female adults, and date from the eighth-century AD… ”’

‘But-’

‘Wait, Jess. Here’s the lox in the bagel. “Each case exhibits non-functional tibio-talar joints with proliferative bone occupying the normal joint space. The robusticity of the tibiae and fibulae suggest renewed weight-bearing and mobility following recovery. There is no evidence of pathology in any of the skeletons which might imply a surgical need for amputation. The osteological evidence is therefore consistent with details shown in Moche ceramic depictions of footless individuals.”’

Jessica kept the phone pressed tightly to her ear. They were stuck in the seething and seedy traffic of peripheral Chiclayo. Blood-red graffiti, on a low whitewashed wall behind Larry, shouted Ni Democracia! Ni Dictadura! ‘Let me get this right, Steve. That means, in plain English, they cut off their own feet while they were alive, when they were perfectly healthy.’

‘Yup.’

‘Because they wanted to! They just wanted to? What’s wrong with them? It’s like Jay said, this is just the sickest society ever. Who the heck are we digging up?’

Steve Venturi laughed, long and laconic. ‘The mad and terrible Moche. No?’