‘Stuart even reckoned one of the group was a journalist.’ She looked at Cath and held her gaze.
‘What happened when you were initiated?’ Cath said.
‘They did it inside the warehouse, turned it into our place, a sort of makeshift temple. All the fittings were removable. Curtains, shrouds, altar, and there was a block. Like a big piece of stone. That was where they did the sacrifices. There was water and herbs, too, but I don’t know what they were. I can remember the smells though.’ She paused, lowered her gaze. ‘The altar was covered with a white cloth with black edging. They put a big cup on it, a chalice. That’s what they collected the blood in.’ She closed her eyes tightly, as if the effort of reliving the memory was causing her physical pain.
‘The altar cloth was covered in symbols, pentagrams, upturned crosses - that kind of thing. And there was writing on it but I couldn’t understand it. It looked foreign.’
Cath sat silently, her eyes never leaving the younger woman.
‘We were all dressed in white robes, nothing underneath. The High Priest wore a gold chain around his neck but it was really thick, like a padlock chain, and it had a gold circle on it with a smaller pentagram inside. He used to read the services from a big book on the altar. He was the only one allowed to touch it. He read the service in Latin.’
‘How can you be sure it was Latin?’ Cath asked.
‘I told you, I was brought up a Catholic,’ said Shanine. ‘I’ve had Latin rammed down my throat since I was three.’ She took a drag on her cigarette.
‘Sometimes they’d say the Lord’s Prayer backwards.’
Cath swallowed hard.
The image of the graffiti in the crypt at Croydon Cemetery flashed into her mind.
‘What happened during your initiation?’ the journalist persisted.
‘I was washed, then anointed with oil. Another woman did it, a woman in her mid-twenties, then she rubbed oil on my boobs and here,’ she motioned to her thighs. ‘She held my arms above my head while the High Priest had sex with me.
The others just watched. Even Stuart was watching.’ She lowered her eyes again, as if ashamed. ‘I had sex with another man later that night, too, with everyone watching. They said he was Satan and that I was one of his brides now.’
‘Did you get a good look at his face?’
‘No. He was wearing a mask. Like a goat’s head.’
‘Oh Christ,’ murmured Cath.
‘He was the one who cut me. Here.’
She held out her right hand and Cath saw a deep scar which ran from the bottom
of her index finger to the base of her thumb.
‘The blood was collected in the chalice along with the blood from the animal they killed’ Shanine continued. ‘A cat, I think. I had to drink some of it. I thought I was going to be sick but they’d given me drugs before and after the ceremony - I hardly knew what was happening. From then on I was a Priestess. I took part in ceremonies all the time. I had sex with men and women. I helped initiate other people into the group.’
‘Did you bring people to them?’
‘No. That was done by Stuart and his friends. I helped once the new members were there though.’ She paused, the knot of muscles at the side of her jaw pulsing. ‘I found out three months later that I was pregnant. I knew it was Stuart’s because I’d had only oral sex with the other men during that period, but they said I couldn’t
tell him. They let me go full term. They wanted the baby.’
‘What for?’
‘Sacrifice.’
There was a long silence.
Tears trickled down Shanine’s cheeks.
‘They killed it a week after it was born’ she said, sniffing, but not attempting to wipe away the tears. ‘They did it in front of me. They even made me cut her. When the High priest was making the incisions he made me hold the knife as well and when they were finished they said the baby had been offered to Satan.’
‘Did you try to stop them?’
Shanine could only shake her head, tears now pouring down her cheeks.
‘They said it was either the baby or me,’ she sobbed, finally. ‘I said I didn’t want it to happen but they said I had to let her go or Satan would be angry, and they told me if I told anyone they would kill me. No matter where I went, how far I ran. They said they would always know. That someone would always bring me back to them.’ She looked imploringly at Cath who felt helpless to comfort her.
‘Was yours the only baby killed?’
Shanine shook her head, her eyes now tightly closed as if she could shut out the visions in her mind, too.
‘They used young children. Three or four years old,’ she said, her voice cracking. ‘They got them from people, I don’t know who. Not group members.
They paid them. Poor people. People who couldn’t afford to feed themselves, let alone their kids. They killed them or they abused them and they warned the kids that if they said anything they’d kill their parents. Those kids were terrified. They drugged them, too, so they wouldn’t struggle while they were abusing them.’
Cath listened intently, her mouth slightly open, her eyes wide.
She wanted to cry.
She could almost feel the pain Shanine felt.
So much pain.
‘Stuart told me he never knew they’d kill children,’ Shanine continued. ‘He said he was leaving the group. So they killed him. They murdered him and made it look like suicide.’
Cath sat forward. ‘How did they do it?’ she asked urgently.
‘They worked a Death Hex on him, they forced him to kill himself. They were powerful.’
‘I don’t understand. How could they make him commit suicide?’
‘They used something of his.’
‘A lock of hair or something?’
Shanine managed a thin smile. ‘No. It doesn’t work like that’ she said. ‘They didn’t need his hair or his finger or anything he wore. The Death Hex works without all that. All they needed was a photograph of him.’
Cath felt the colour draining from her cheeks, her flesh rising in goosebumps.
‘They stole a photograph of him’ Shanine continued. ‘Three days later, he was dead.’
Cath, her hand shaking, reached frantically for the phone.
Eighty-three
The nurse had entered the room twice during the night. That much Talbot could remember.
Each time she’d found him sitting in the same position, holding his mother’s hand, leaning forward slightly gazing at her face as if expecting his presence to drag her into consciousness.
The nurse had fiddled with the drips and the machinery and then left him in silence again.
In the dark.
He hated the night and the stillness.
There was only the ever-present sound of the oscilloscope to accompany his own breathing.
More than once he had pressed the first two fingers of his right hand hard into her wrist, searching for a pulse, terrified that she might have slipped away from him.
Each time he’d found the almost imperceptible rhythm of her weakened heart pumping blood so pathetically around her body.
He remembered that.
What he didn’t remember was when he’d fallen asleep.
It had crept up on him like a hunter in the gloom, stalking him, then claiming him, drawing him into the blackness that surrounded him.
He woke with a start, found his head on the bed close to his mother’s chest.
He still gripped her hand.
Even in sleep he hadn’t released it, perhaps thinking that to cling onto her would retain his hold on her life.
As he stirred he looked intently at her. At the slow rise and fall of her chest.
Behind him, the oscilloscope still continued its high-pitched signals.
Talbot exhaled deeply and rubbed both hands across his face.