The Death Bringer

AUTHOURS NOTE - This is a work in progress so please bear that in mind when reading/rating/reviewing.

1

The phone rang and cut through the blissful peace that had been my sleep. I never used to have a phone in my room but it seemed lately that I’d been getting more and more calls out of hours.

This meant getting out of bed, walking from my bedroom across a cold floor to either the phone in my father’s room or the one downstairs in the lobby. I’d soon gotten fed up with that, hence the new phone next to my bed.

Of course, the butler could have answered it, but even he needed to sleep.

“Yeah?” I asked still half asleep.

“We’ve got another one,” came a deep male voice.

Now I was fully awake and sat up. “Shit,” I muttered under my breath, not expecting my midnight caller to hear me.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Is it as bad as the others Stewart?” I asked, Stewart being the name of the guy on the other end. Well, technically it was Detective Inspector Stewart of Scotland Yard Special Branch, but I wasn’t police so I did as he did and we addressed each other by our surnames. I used his name not because I wanted to be sure I was talking to the right guy, though that was important for a whole host of reasons, but that I suddenly needed a modicum of human contact.

“Yeah.” His tone was neutral. He was one of the few people I knew who could keep all emotion from his voice.

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

I absently wiped at my eyes, trying to rub the tiredness out of me. It didn’t work. “Where?” I asked while reaching for the notepad and pen that had sat next to the phone. They were there for the same reason the phone was.

“This one is the underpass at the IMAX cinema, Waterloo.”

“I know the place,” I replied. I should have, it was right next door to where I went to University.

“How soon can you be here?”

I glanced at the clock on the wall opposite my bed and suddenly wished I hadn’t. It was 2 am and I’d only had an hours’ worth of sleep as I’d been studying for my end of year exams. “Where’s my dad?” He was usually the first point of call for these people and this sort of thing. If they had called me, it was likely he was already busy and they needed someone urgently.

“He’s here.”

A slight frown creased my brow. If they had my dad there, why need me? I didn’t ask that question because Stewart was notorious at not giving anyone details of any kind over the phone.

At least not when there was a crime involved. He preferred everyone to make their own assumptions and conclusions. It apparently gave him the idea that you were free of outside bias then, or something like that. “I can be there in thirty,” I said as I slid my legs out from the pale blue cotton sheets, feeling a surprisingly cold bite of air.

“Make it twenty,” came the reply before the phone went dead. Stewart never said goodbye when he talked on the phone.

I placed the phone back on the cradle and threw the covers off me properly. Despite it being the height of the summer and the middle of London, it was a surprisingly cool night, the sort we would get every now and then and the cotton of my t-shirt and pants couldn’t quite keep out the chill from my open window.

“Lights,” I said aloud to the room. One of my dad’s favourite gadgets kicked in and the illumination rose to not quite an eye blinding level, but it still forced me to blink rapidly and repeatedly.

The room was large and coloured in soft blue pastels. Bed covers, carpet, walls and drapes all blue in one shade or another. Even the lights were frosted blue and the furniture was white with blue inlays and decorations. Apart from the bed, it was the same furniture I’d had since I was twelve and all still in near perfect condition. I’d been taught to look after my things.

The carpet was new a month ago though so it had that wonderful soft and long feel on my bare feet as I eyed the door to the en-suite bathroom wondering if I had time for a shower. I probably didn’t. I hadn’t made up my mind to have a shower or not when there was a soft knock at the door.

“Come in Marcs.”

The door opened inward and Marcs, the butler, entered the room and angled straight for my walk in wardrobe. He was tall, six three and thin with greying hair and a weathered look to him. He didn’t have that classic butler look, but then again who does when they’re in their dressing gown at 2 am? “Go for your shower miss, ill get you something appropriate to wear.”

I smiled and headed for the bathroom. “What would I do without you?” I asked honestly.

After a refreshing shower, cold to wake me up properly, I threw on some makeup, just the basics as id never been much for lots of makeup. I didn’t really need foundation because I had soft pale skin that never seemed to shine in a bad way. My lips were accentuated with a touch of pale lipstick and some eye shadow hid the sins of too little sleep over the past month. I’d been described as classically beautiful by several of my friends and I knew quite a few of the guys in my class at university thought I was ‘quite the catch’. I never really saw it. I still had that slightly rounded, soft and innocent little girl face. I needed to carry I’d to say I was old enough to enter the student bar. I looked like a 14 year old.

“Anything else I can do for you miss?” asked Marcs from the wardrobe as I slipped into the dress he had pulled out for me. He had stepped back in there to give me some privacy. Very decent of him. Very proper and very British. He might not look like a butler, but he certainly acted the part.

The dress was a simple number, cerulean blue that picked up the colour of my eyes. Black tights and blue pumps completed the look. Well, almost.

I’d added a shoulder holster for my Glock 9mm for a right-handed draw and a silver knife was strapped to my thigh under the loose pleats of the skirt and on top of the tights. It paid to have a little protection in this business. A tailored jacket that matched the dress hid the gun from sight, and a nice little pocket under the right arm held an extra ammo clip. Hollow tipped silver bullets were loaded into the gun as standard, but the one under my arm contained normal lead tipped bullets. Some of the things I deal with react to the silver, some don’t, those that don’t normally have a problem with the lead.

Humans had a problem with both.

“I’m set thanks,” I replied, giving myself a quick look in the six foot high mirror near my bed.

The dress hugged my trim swimmers body up top before flaring out into some loose pleats at waist height, reaching mid thigh, like most of my summer dresses, and was short sleeved. The black tights showed off shapely legs and the pumps helped that image while still being comfortable and easy to walk in.

I quickly ran my hand through my thick waist length thick oak brown hair and tied it with a blue ribbon that also matched the dress. For a moment I thought I was over dressed for a crime scene. But then again, I was likely to be the only woman there and my friends had joked that I needed to make an effort. ‘Keep the side up’ or whatever that meant.

I grabbed the keys to my car from the night stand and shot out the door. I was going to be pushing it to get to Waterloo and the scene of the crime in twelve minutes.

2

I was late by five minutes. I’d crossed the Thames from the Strand and parked opposite Waterloo International, right outside one of the buildings of my university. My lateness was made worse by the fact that the uniformed officer guarding the taped off entrance to the pedestrian crossing had inspected my ID badge and still not let me through.

Okay, so the badge only licensed me as a trainee exterminator and gave me no official standing with the police so I could hardly blame him for not letting me in. But I did.

“Look,” I said trying to be reasonable, “Detective Inspector Stewart is expecting me.”

“No, you look miss,” he replied sternly. He was talking to me like I was a child even through my ID said I was twenty. Well, nineteen. But I was twenty next month. “This is a crime scene. We do not need civilians running around messing with the evidence.”

He had said civilians like he had wanted to say something else. ‘Little girls’ maybe?

“Just call DI Stewart and we can all this sorted out,” I said still trying to be reasonable. But hey, I had my fathers temper. Even my mothers inherited patience couldn’t last.

I sighed. My father certainly wouldn’t have put up with this. I pulled out my mobile phone from my pocket. The uniform didn’t even flinch and probably didn’t even know that I was carrying a concealed weapon. If I’d wanted to, I could have gunned him down before he even knew what was happening.

I hit the speed dial and after a second I heard the ring of a phone further down the underpass and round the corner.

“Yeah?” came the reply from the phone.

“I’m here and can’t get by the uniform,” I said giving the uniform a stern look. I don’t imagine it had any effect. You imagine being stared down by someone who looked like a kid, and to many even still was at nineteen.

Suddenly, from around the corner came DI Stewart.

He looked imposing as hell to most people. He stood six foot three tall with broad shoulders that showed well defined muscles even through the dark tan suit. “Let her through,” he said, his voice still devoid of emotion but seemingly carrying a tone that said he was pissed at something or someone.

“Sir,” replied the uniform without a second objection, lifting the waist high tape up for me so I could bend under it. I had to bend quite a bit for, although I may have the face of a fourteen year old, I was quite tall at five ten.

After retrieving my ID, I walked the last few feet separating myself and Stewart. The closer I got, the taller he seemed till I had to look up at him. “So?” he asked.

“Traffic lights,” I said simply.

He raised an eyebrow over his chiselled face that was handsome, in a plain way, strong cheeks and a sharp chin, clean shaven, slightly tanned from having spent a lot of time outside, and framed by hair that was cut military short. I knew he had spent some time in the army when he was younger, before joining the force, and he had never really lost that military edge and discipline. It was something that, along with his intelligence and natural flair for police work, meant he had risen through the ranks very fast. I knew from bits of story my father had told me that Stewart had been in line for one of the top jobs in the Metropolitan police force, but had suddenly be shunted sideways to Scotland Yard’s special branch. I didn’t know why and my father had never told me.

“It’s not like I can run the red like you,” I added as we started to walk down the badly lit concrete tunnel that led to the IMAX cinema. You see, the IMAX at Waterloo sat in the middle of a major roundabout. The cinema itself was quite a tall, round building made of an outer glass wall, inside of which was a second wall, behind which was the cinema proper. It was very nineties. The entrance sat below ground level hence the only way to get to it was through the underpass. I knew that one of the underpasses was painted blue and had all these little lights embedded in it.

That one was almost like walking through a star field. This one was pained orange and none of the lights were working lending it a dark and dangerous air.

“It’s a homeless guy isn’t it?” I asked as we passed from the tunnel and into the walkway that ran around the bottom of the cinema. This area too was painted orange and was open to the air above. Small flowerbeds held a climbing plant that had covered some of the walls, reaching overhead and growing over these wires that ran from the surrounding wall to the cinema.

“Did the uniform tell you?” Stewart asked.

I shook my head as I answered. “No. I just go to Uni right next door to here and I know a lot of homeless people use these underpasses to sleep in.”

“You can see for yourself in a moment,” he said still not giving anything away.

“Thanks,” I said with a touch of sarcasm.

We were walking round the curve of the cinema now and suddenly I saw it.
A body was pinned against the wall, held up about three foot from the ground and surrounded by a pentagram.

“Shit,” I said as I walked closer. When I had seen my first murder victim a couple of years ago I’d almost freaked. I had certainly thrown up, thankfully not on any evidence and ending up being escorted from the crime scene to calm down. I’d let myself off as I had only been sixteen and there aren’t many sixteen year olds that come face to face with death and stay ‘ok’. For me, it had brought back too many memories of my dead mother.

I was used to dead people now.

After all, I’d been helping my dad out part time for the last seven years, the last two of which had involved me seeing crime scenes for the first time.

“So?”

I walked a little away from Stewart till I could get a good look at the scene, moving round a ladder that had been put up to allow access to the body.

A middle aged Caucasian male hung from the wall at least four feet from the ground and quite obviously dead. His skin, mostly visible because the clothes hung off him in tatters, was covered in dirt, the sort that was ground in and made me think ‘definitely homeless’ and the sort of pale that you could only really get after death. His eyes were open to the night sky, staring straight at the IMAX cinema opposite. They were totally devoid of that brightness that eyes have but they were still bloodshot.

“Do eyes stay bloodshot after you die?” I asked out loud.

“I’m not sure. Why?”

I pointed at his eyes. “I think he might have been crying before he died.”

I moved closer still, looking straight up at the body between the rungs of the ladder. “Can I go up?”

“Of course,” replied Stewart who had closed in so that he stood at the foot of the ladder on the other side.

Wishing I’d worn better shoes than the pumps that matched my dress, I took a couple of steps up the ladder to bring my face level with that of the body. Two blurred trails could be seen leading from the corners of the eyes down to the chin. “He was crying.”

“Maybe he knew what was going to happen to him?”

“Maybe,” I replied. “I’d be scared too if someone hung me on a wall in the middle of a pentagram.”

“I was wondering when you would mention that.”
This voice came from someone other than Stewart, and I knew its tone all too well. Stewarts second in command of special branch was Dan Bentley. I didn’t need to look down to know he would be looking up at me with those honey brown eyes. He was what I might call a good-natured ass. Whenever I was near he seemed to take it as a personal mission to try to annoy the hell out of me. He’d gotten close a couple of times, but I was used to the jokes by now and, to tell the truth, his antics kept my mind from the fact that whenever I saw him I was invariably standing a few feet from a crime scene of some sort.

The Pentagram in question was unremarkable except for one small detail. It was formed from the vines on the wall.

“What can you tell me about Pentagrams?” Stewart asked, his little pencil making a couple of notes on the pad.

“You know all this,” I said with a little frown. “My father has told you…”

“Tell me again,” Stewart said, cutting me off mid sentence.

My frown felt the need to turn into a scowl, but I fought it down.

“Pentagrams have a history dating back to at least 3500 BC, though there is some evidence to suggest they may go back to 7000BC.”

“7000 BC?” asked Bentley. “I never knew they went back that far.”

“There are fragments of what could be pentagrams on Babylonian pottery that carbon dates to about that time.”

“Is there anything to suggest this pentagram has anything in common with those from 9000 years ago?” asked Stewart. His tone was neutral, but I had a feeling he was a little cranky. Then again, it was something like 2:30 am and I knew how he felt.

“The Pentagram is upside down,” I said deciding to ignore Stewart.

“How can you tell and what’s the significance of it being upside down?”

I scowled. “If you’d let me finish a sentence you might find out.”

Stewart’s eyes flashed up at me, a hint of annoyance in them.

“I thought you, of all people Detective Stewart, would know that my daughter is too much like me to allow you to be as abrupt with her.”

I twitched as I looked past Bentley to my father, the source of this new, deep and resonant voice.

He was as imposing as ever dressed in a deep burgundy suit, white shirt and burgundy bowtie. His hair was as black as the night sky and his eyes, like mine, were a blue that reminded you of the ocean. We looked so alike except for out hair colours. As usual, he stood ramrod straight at six foot four and carried an ornately carved swagger stick under one arm.

“Master Williams,” said Stewart, his voice now containing an edge of respect he never seemed to use with anyone else except a close group of fellow police officers.

“Please continue,” my father said with a slight inclination of his head to me.

Yes father.” I took a slight breath and pointed to the pentagram, making sure Stewart could get a good look. The mood and attitudes of everyone seemed to have changed now my father was standing around. They all seemed irritable, kind of like they were in front of the scrutinising eye of a strict headmaster. . “The pentagram is a stylised star shape made up of five interconnecting triangles surrounding a polygon. There are several different interpretations of the design, but these can be condensed down into two basic schools. The first is a representation of the human senses. Each sense is represented by a point, sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. This is a representation of a Wiccan pentagram where the five points represent the five element, fire, air, earth and water.”

“That’s only four,” said Bentley as he looked from the pentagram to me.

“The fifth one is the key in this case,” I said. I was starting to feel a little like a schoolteacher as I recited, almost exactly, the content of my Universities website on the subject. “The fifth element is the spirit or ether. In a normal Wiccan pentagram, the point representing this is on top, representing the dominance of the spirit over the other facets of the body and the world. Here it isn’t.”

“What does that mean?”

I pointed to the two triangles at the very top of the pentagram. “Those two points represent earth and fire,” I said. “By having them on the top, it means whomever did this considers it a trial of some kind.”

“Explain.”

“Its like a wheel. When you are initiated into the beliefs and practices of the Wicca you start at Air, which is the equivalent of inspiration or the start of the journey. You then move on to water, which means you travel back from inspiration to maturity and into the world, flowing into the underworld, which is earth. You then pass through the cleansing fire before ascending back to the dominance of the spirit. If you drawn the pentagram upside down you are basically signposting the fact you believe that the worldly elements are dominant over your spirit.”

“So what?” asked Bentley. “We’re looking for a Wicca who is either pissed off over something or depressed as hell?”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Did I say that?”
“In a way, daughter, you did.”

I flinched inwardly, and possibly outwardly at the rebuke from my father.

“You were using the Wiccan beliefs as a template from which to work from, a reasonably logical idea in this instance. But by referring to the Wicca, you have implanted on our friends here that the Wiccan beliefs are the only ones at work here.”

“There are other’s who use the same layout for the pentagram as the Wicca?” Stewart asked, his little pencil flying over his notebook so fast I momentarily wondered how he would ever be able to read his notes later.

“Of course,” my father replied, his voice sounding even more like a schoolteacher than mine ever had. “Satanists, to name just of the more well known groups, have been known to use an upturned pentagram as well as an inverted cross. But there are literally hundreds of cults and groups who use the pentagram in this method.”

“Can you give us a list of these groups?” asked Bentley

“There should be one back at the station,” replied Stewart as he looked up from his notepad to the pentagram and body. “What about it being made from the vines?”

I turned to look back at the vines in more detail. “They’re not held up by wire,” I said. “All these vines are normally held up by wires.”

“So what are they held by?” asked Bentley.
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. I knew what he was thinking. After all, it was basically why my father and I were here. “You think magick?” I asked.

“How can you tell?”

I reached one hand up from the ladder to brush back a wisp of hair that had come free and was distracting my view of Stewart. “A sensitive would have to touch the vines to be absolutely sure.”

“No,” said my father with the first sign of emotion I had heard in his voice that week.

“They need to know,” I replied.

“Then I will touch it,” he said.

“Get off the ladder Bentley,” I said not taking me eyes from my father.

“Do not disobey me in this.”

“Why am I here if not to help?” I asked. “Why am I here?”

“I am planning on going away for a couple of months and Detective Stewart needed to know if you were ready to fill in for me.”

A sudden turmoil ran though me. My father had told these people he was going away before he told me. He hadn’t asked if I could go with him, or even if I minded him going.

“Your going away?” I asked, my voice a little strangled.

My father looked momentarily uncomfortable, standing in the dark looking up at me, his only child, his daughter. The one he hadn’t condescended to tell he was going away. “I thought I’d told you,” he said trying to placate me.

As soon as Bentley’s foot left the ladder, my eyes narrowed and my hand reached out to the vines.

I didn’t really felt the soft, smooth touch of the leaves. All I could feel was the power. It crawled up my arm and over my defences sending the world black.

3

Coming soon... I hope!