The Sword of Moses (69 page)

Fighting the burning torrent inside her, she slowly bent down and put the Kahr on the floor.  

——————— ◆ ———————

Boleskine House

Foyers

Loch Ness IV2

Scotland

The United Kingdom

“Walk,” Malchus ordered, pointing Ava towards the room’s doorway.

One thing immediately clear to her was that with a gun trained on her at this pointblank distance, she had no realistic choice except to comply with his orders. He was experienced, armed, fit, and alert. She would have to be in a desperate position to risk attacking him without a weapon.

And she was not in one yet.

As she stepped away from the cellar door, Malchus picked up her gun and slipped it into his pocket.

Keeping his pistol trained at her head, he indicated for her to move out into the hallway.

He followed right behind her and stopped at the first door on the left, which he unlocked with a key from his pocket.

“Inside,” he ordered curtly, keeping the gun on her at all times.

She stepped past him into the room and paused for a moment, stunned at the bizarre sight.

So this was where Crowley had made his oratory.

Hanging above the large stone fireplace, dominating the room, was the framed Elizabethan portrait she had spied through the window.

Now she could see the whole face, with its black skullcap and sharply pointed white goatee beard, she immediately recognized the figure. She did not need to read the nameplate fixed to the bottom of the frame to know it was the most notorious English magician of the troubled Elizabethan age—Dr John Dee.

She could also now see that the glow illuminating the room was coming from four great copper candelabra—each supporting three large guttering black candles. They were positioned along each of the room’s four walls, slightly off-centre. Thinking back to the aerial map of the house and area she had printed off at Euston, she realized they marked out the four cardinal points—north, east, south, and west in an imaginary circle.

But in front of her stood something she had never expected to see.

It was a bizarre but perfectly square table—a cube, as high as it was wide, draped in a lustrous red silk cloth.

She recognized it immediately from its uniquely odd features and the drawings of it she had seen in the Enlightenment Gallery at the British Museum. But she was having difficulty believing it.

Because it was not supposed to exist.

But here it was.

Right in front of her.

She was looking at Dr John Dee’s four-hundred-year-old Table of Practice—the occult altar he had designed for communicating with the angel and spirit worlds.

The floor beneath it was also covered in a matching red silk cloth, and on it, under each leg, were four grey wax seals, each lightly shot through with pink streaks and covered in intricate sigils and glyphs.

Eyeing the surface of the Table, she recognized what looked like Dr Dee’s black Mirror of Tezcatlipoca, along with several piles of papers.

The most intriguing was an old manuscript—its quarto-sized vellum sheets buckled and rigid with age, their brown surface covered with medieval Hebrew and Aramaic writing.

Reading it upside down, she realized with a jolt that it was the original London manuscript of
The Sword of Moses
. She could not imagine how it came to be in Northern Scotland and not in an acid-free box on a shelf in the underground stacks at the British Library.

Beside it was a sheaf of computer-typed pages. The top one was titled:

THE SWORD OF MOSES

COD GAS 178

The writing underneath was in English, and evidently a translation of the London manuscript.

Next to the translation was a smaller sheaf of papers with a torn and ragged left margin—the leaves covered with small but meticulous writing in fine pencil.

With a flash of sadness, she recognized the handwriting from the pages she had seen earlier that day in the Bodleian. It was the last piece of research Professor Stone had ever undertaken—copying and translating what he thought was the Oxford version of
The Sword of Moses
for Malchus.

Faced once again with the lacerated lives Malchus left in the monomaniacal pursuit of his goals, she felt a fresh flush of rage at the human wreckage that invariably trailed in his wake.

Brushing aside the unpleasant thoughts, she turned her attention to the other side of the room, where there was a large square of oiled black canvas on the floor.

On top of it was one of the oddest chairs she had ever seen. It was L-shaped, with a short narrow seat and a high back. From the blackened wood, pitting, scores, and scratches, it was clearly several centuries old.

She had never seen anything quite like it.

Taking in its detail, her heart beat faster as she spotted three pairs of bulky black handcuffs on the floor beside it. They also looked antique—forged iron, she assumed.

Whatever the chair was, it had an unpleasantly sinister air.

She shivered slightly. The temperature in the room was the same as in the hall, but for some reason it felt distinctly colder.

“Sit,” he ordered, motioning her towards the age-worn chair.

With a sense of foreboding, but aware she had no other realistic options, she moved across to the chair and sat down on the hard narrow seat.

“Cuff your ankles to the chair legs,” he commanded, indicating the chunky black handcuffs on the floor.

She could sense the situation going from bad to worse, and every fibre in her screamed to get off the chair and out of the room.

But she had no choice. Malchus was out of range for her to attack him, and she did not fancy her chances without a weapon.

If she did what he asked, she may well end up getting hurt. But she definitely would if she made a break for it.

So it was simple maths. For so long as she was alive, there was hope of finding a way out. But if she gave him cause to pull the trigger, then it would all be over.

With every atom of her being screaming at her that it was a bad idea, she reached down and picked up the cold metal fetters.

She comforted herself with the thought that maybe the chair was not too heavy, and she could move it. Perhaps if she got the opportunity to stand up and lift it, the ankle cuffs might slide off its legs onto the floor, leaving her free to move.

Slowly, as if in a daze, she cuffed each of her ankles to the chair. To her surprise, the locks closed effortlessly despite their age and crude design. Malchus had plainly maintained them well.

“Now put the other cuff on your right wrist,” he ordered, walking towards her.

She did as he asked and watched as he approached her from across the room, before moving behind the chair where she could no longer see him.

Without warning, she felt an indescribable wrenching pain as he pulled her arms behind the high back of the chair, and snapped the open handcuff shut around her left wrist.

It had been a lightning fast movement, and she had no time to react.

She was now pinned to the heavy piece of furniture by her legs and arms, leaving her no ability to move any of her limbs.

Her throat went dry.

“You were looking at my table,” he observed, moving back around to where she could see him. “You know what it is, don’t you?”

“A toy,” she replied contemptuously. “A pitiful feeble-minded delusion. Dee’s original objects are in London.”

Malchus shook his head solemnly. “You are gravely mistaken. The seals are faultlessly faithful to the originals, and the British Museum’s cherished cabinet now only holds a worthless piece of obsidian in place of the great Mirror of Tezcatlipoca.”

Ava stared at him with loathing. “What makes you think the mirror in the museum’s cabinet was Dee’s original? It could’ve been switched many times over the centuries. And sometimes we display replicas—especially of valuable artefacts.”

Malchus’s eyes narrowed. “
Non es digna ut intres sub tectum meum
,”
¹⁶
he spat at her, parodying the words of the mass. “The mirror speaks to those with a true heart. I have spent many nights with it, and I can vouch for its authenticity better than any museum curator.”

Ava glared at him, pleased to have put him on the defensive.

“But you should be much more concerned about my chair,” he changed the subject, smiling nastily. “You are honoured to sit on it.”

“If you say so,” Ava stared at him, not sure what he was implying.

“You see,” he continued, “there aren’t many garrotting chairs left, now it’s no longer an official method of state execution.”

Before she had processed the words, something in her subconscious that had been urging her to get off the chair finally broke through, sending an impulse to her legs.

Driving upwards, she held on to the seat firmly with her thighs and upper arms, lifting it and twisting it so the cuffs would slide off the legs to the floor.

But to her horror, the seat did not move an inch. She had barely registered that it was bolted to the ground before her head exploded with a searing pain as Malchus brought the metal butt of the pistol down hard onto the side of her skull.

Collapsing back onto the chair, a torrent of pain cascaded down through her head and shoulders.

As her focus slowly returned, she saw that Malchus was stepping over her. An instant later, she felt him sitting down onto her thighs, astride her. His hairless head was only inches from hers, and she could feel his breath on her face.

The expression in his cold eyes had changed, and was now one of uncontrolled animal lust.

Overwhelmed by panic, and fuelled by a cocktail of adrenaline and fight-or-flight chemicals, she bellowed with a mixture of terror and rage as she fought to stand up, to throw Malchus off her. At the same time, she hurled her upper body forwards, smashing him in the chest with her shoulder in the hope of toppling him.

As she twisted, the cuffs on her wrists behind the chair bit into her flesh viciously. But despite her superhuman effort, he remained on top of her.

With a gasp of rage, she realized she was completely at his mercy.

To her revulsion, he raised his hands and began to caress her face, staring all the while into her eyes, his excitement mounting.

Her insides were writhing at his repellent touch. She turned her face away, staring at the wall.

“In medieval times,” he spoke softly, “the Inquisition popularized the garrotting chair, especially for whores and adulteresses. The Spanish and South Americans inherited their affection for it. The last public execution on a garrotting chair was in Spain, in 1974—so you should consider your imminent and beautiful death part of a noble tradition.”

He took one of his hands off her face, and slowly pulled from his pocket a length of red silk, exactly matching the material under and on the Table of Practice.

Instinctively, she threw her head forward to smash him in the nose with the crown of her skull. But he moved out of the way with ease, and her head thumped ineffectually into his hard chest.

He grunted, and the next thing she felt was a searing blow across the side of her face, delivered with such force her head snapped viciously to the side.

She did not stop to register the pain.

She began to buck and struggle for all she was worth. But however much she tried, he remained astride her, smiling smugly at her attempts to dislodge him.

She stared with mounting terror as he raised the piece of silk and began wrapping it slowly in a loop round her throat and the back of the chair.

Still straddling her lap, he began stroking her face again with his left hand, while he pulled the smooth silk tight about her neck with his right, twisting it around the back of the chair.

As he pulled the material, she could feel it begin to bite into the soft flesh of her neck

Panicking now, she knew that if he kept pulling the garrotte, she probably had no more than thirty seconds before the pressure on her carotid arteries would block the blood flowing to her brain and she would slip into oxygen-starved unconsciousness. After that, if he continued, brain death and total system shutdown would follow. If he squeezed hard enough in the right place, he would also crush her windpipe and larynx, although she would feel nothing by then.

She thrashed more wildly. But he was heavy, and may as well have her pinned down onto the chair with an iron girder. However hard she tried, he was still there, his sadistic reptilian eyes drinking in the sight of her desperate struggle for life.

She could not tell if they were tears of pain or desperation beginning to prick the back of her eyes, but she could feel her vision beginning to blur.

As the pressure around her neck increased, she tried to shout out. But no sound came from her throat, just a hoarse rasp.

She was gasping deeply for breath, trying to hyper-oxygenate her blood, struggling to get as much of the life-giving element to her brain as she could.

She had no idea how long it had been. Five seconds? Fifteen seconds? It was impossible to tell.

As her carotid arteries were compressed still further, her vision began to swim, and she felt overcome with light-headedness.

Despite her panic, she still refused to look Malchus in the eye. He may have control of her physical body, but that was all. There would be no other satisfaction for him.

Choking, she stopped struggling. It was pointless. She knew now that she not going to be able to get him off her, so her priority was to preserve what little strength she had, to stay conscious for as long as possible. To live for every second she could.

She had heard that dying people saw their lives flash before their eyes. She was having no such vision, and wondered if perhaps that meant she was not dying. On the other hand, she speculated groggily, how could anyone know what happened in the moments before actual brain death?

As the dizziness increased, she felt her physical strength ebbing away fast.

To her surprise, the weight on her thighs suddenly lifted, and Malchus moved round to stand behind her.

Was it over?

She tried to suck in air, but Malchus was still holding the garrotte tightly. Summoning the small reserve of strength she had left, she twisted her head slightly so she could see him out of the corner of her eye. The movement caused an explosion of white light in her head, but she was beyond caring.