“Look,” says Cassie. She points, her eyes and mouth wide.
Mo presumes the chapel was added by the current owners of Nether Stowe House in order to make it easier to host private VIP wedding ceremonies. But this evening it’s being put to a use that the owners are hardly likely to approve of. The altar is the central prop in a communion service the like of which Mo has never imagined. Behind it stands the Reverend Raymond Schiller, surrounded by his handmaids; before the altar forms a queue of seminaked politicians. The air is rich and heavy with the fumes of an incense that throbs with lust and the sickly sweet floral scent of opium. Two of the handmaids swing thuribles as they chant prayers in a language that Mo recognizes as a dialect of Old Enochian, invocations and invitations to a God who was already ancient and feared before the rise of Egypt. As each of the communicants approaches, Schiller utters a brief prayer and seats the communicant on the altar, then directs one of the handmaids forward to meet him; they strip off their robes as they mount the new initiate, bucking and moaning beneath their open thighs.
Mo tries to look away, but there is an erotic compulsion here that has her itching to throw caution to the wind and join in the bacchanalia. But then Cassie—whose expression is one of wide-eyed horror rather than heavy-lidded lust—pinches her arm. “Look at the altar!” A dark fluid stains the front of the tablecloth, darker than wine and dripping from beneath the lovers locked in communion. The moaning takes on a keening note as the current handmaid kneels over her victim and pulls herself away from him. His penis pulses, fat and segmented and maggot-white as he continues to keen and the blood drips from between his thighs. The other handmaids come and carry him down to the pews before the altar, legs twitching in the grip of what might be a protracted orgasm, or the clonic spasms of a hanged man. Meanwhile the handmaid who initiated him kneels, gasping, beside the altar, her face purple, blood trickling down her thighs.
“Let’s go, now,” Mo whispers, the spell slipping away in a cold wash of terror as she focuses on the Minister for Magic’s newly installed host, its cyclostomic mouth squeezing rhythmically as it draws his penis fully into its digestive tract and begins to suck blood from the dorsal vein.
“YesYes!” Cassie turns away from the open doorway and Mo leads her aside gratefully. The occupants of the chapel are so focused on their ritual that they appear not to have noticed their audience. Mo takes a grip on Cassie’s arm and pulls her shroud of invisibility tight around them both, then leads her back towards the lounge area on shaky legs. “It’s them,” Cassie whispers, horrified, “the monsters that hunted my people. They must have followed my father hither—”
“No,” Mo reassures her, “they were already on their way. But we—”
She stops dead. While they spied on the occupants of the chapel, the guests remaining in the lounge have relaxed into orgiastic excess, sucking and kissing and squeezing and in some cases enthusiastically fucking. The sweet, floral scent of the incense is chokingly thick in the lounge. The air is heavy with sighs and moans and happy chuckles at first—but as Mo and Cassie reach the threshold of the room, a sudden silence descends as all around them the youthful initiates of Schiller’s Middle Temple collapse in stuporous piles. Someone has cut the master puppeteer’s strings, and as Mo watches the guests raise their heads and start to look around, seeking the source of disruption.
*
From behind the altar in the chapel, the being calling itself Raymond Schiller—for there is increasingly less of Schiller and more of the Other inside him, with every new Inner Temple communion rite—makes eye contact across the room with Jeremy Michaels, who is watching the initiation of his cabinet peers from the sidelines. “The mother of the Middle Temple has been cut off,” he rasps, the human tongue no longer coming easily to his mouth and throat. “Something is wrong. Fix it.”
The Prime Minister stands and marches stiff-legged towards the exit, led by the will of his recently grafted New Flesh. If he is slightly glassy eyed, the partygoers upstairs will merely think he’s been hitting the Bolly. As he walks, he smiles experimentally, then runs through a series of facial expressions before settling back to his usual assumed superiority.
Meanwhile, Schiller addresses his handmaids: “Gina, activate the perimeter ward, the Middle Temple appears to be under attack and we may be next. Anneka, do we have intruders here too? Find them!” Anneka Overholt nods; eyes glowing pale green, she stalks towards the downstairs lounge, mouth silently forming words in an ancient tongue. A handful of new initiates stumble after her. Behind the altar, Bernadette McGuigan pulls out her mobile phone to contact the site security office.
At the top of the stairs, Michaels finds two police officers standing guard. “There’s been some sort of incident,” he tells them in clipped tones, then holds up a hand. “No, no, not here—there’s been a break-in at Dr. Schiller’s business premises at Heathrow. Armed robbers. Would you send someone to deal with it? Our host is quite annoyed.”
By the time he is halfway down the staircase back to the chapel, one of the officers is already reporting to the inspector in charge of the PM’s security detachment; by the time he resumes his seat at the ceremony, the inspector is briefing the desk officer in the airport station at West Drayton.
And the jaws of a trap begin to close.
*
I’m standing in an office full of computers and filing cabinets, swearing under my breath as I try to figure out where to start, when my phone vibrates. Not now, I think. Chris has holed up in the supervisor’s office in the corner and is working the phone to the Transport Police, and a bunch of corporate crime folks from the National Crime Agency are apparently on their way in the next hour, but I’m increasingly worried that we’ve blown it. Knocking out Schiller’s host-mother will have blown all of his communicants’ little minds, and he’s bound to notice and come running. So why isn’t he running, come to think of it? It’s been over five minutes since I locked down the fish tank and the remaining warm bodies among the defenders—the ones the OCCULUS crew put on the floor in warded restraints, instead of shooting—all went sleepy-bye at once. It’s a real mess out there: six dead bodies, two injured and unconscious, four more unconscious. In fact, we’re about three live victims short of lighting up the local hospital’s major incident plan, and if this doesn’t make headlines tomorrow I will be very much surprised. So who—
Oh, it’s the SA. Of course. So I answer the bloody phone.
“Sir?”