Omega (21 page)

'Yes, she is,' Karen said
;

John went on: 'We came to ask what
you
are planning to do, in the present situation.'

'Keeping our cars packed ready for a camping holiday at a moment's notice,' Dan said.

'So are we, except that we're not waiting for notice. We're getting out the day after tomorrow, during the small hours. Our coven and Anna and Joe Fenton's. Nineteen of us altogether. We've got a place recce'd in Savernake Forest. Will you come with us ?'

There was a moment's s
ilence. The others look at John
with immediate interest but a w
arning bell seemed to ring
in Moira's mind.
|

'What about Jean and Fred Thomas?' she asked. 'They were your oldest members, before you all hived off. Aren't they taking theirs with you?'

'No, I'm afraid not,' John said. 'They think we're being premature.'

Dan, who for all his logicality could still surprise Moira with his sudden shafts of intuition, shook his head. 'There's more to it than that, John - isn't there? More than just being premature?'

John did not seem put out. 'Yes, Dan, there's more to it than that. Jean and Fred don't agree with our plan of campaign and their coven support them - all except one, Harry Earley. He's opted to come with us, so Jean's let him transfer.'

'What plan of campaign?'

'Dan, all of you
...
We have to face it - this is war. The powers that be are out to destroy the Craft. We can't let them.'

'Of course we can't,' Greg put in. 'Why d'you think we're getting ready to take to the woods, too? Self-bloody-preservation. Not just as people but as witches.'

'But
how
as witches?' John asked, with sudden vehemence. 'The other side are using every weapon they can lay their hands on. And so should we.'

'What you mean is,' old Sally said, 'that you're going to work black.'

Karen laughed. 'If you like to call it that. Yes.'

'What do
you
call it?'

'As Greg just said. Self-bloody-preservation. Which of us is pure white, anyway? Aren't we all various shades of grey?'

'Of course we are - we're human. But most of us are grey trying to get whiter; grey trying to get black is something else again.' Sally did not often make speeches but once she got the bit between her teeth she did not pull any punches. 'You know the law of the Craft as well as I do: "An' it harm none, do what you will." Set out to harm people - worst of all, to use psychic power to harm them -and you're on the long slippery slope. You're heading for self-destruction.'

'Even when the people you're fighting are evil?' John asked.

'Good God, John - you're a High Priest, and you're talking as if you were initiated yesterday! You've seen what happens to people who turn black. They get away with it for a while, then sooner or later they crash. And only the Lords of Karma know how many lives it takes 'em to climb out of what they've done to
themselves,
never mind other people.'

'In ordinary times, Sally, I'd agree with you all the way. But this is
war.
In war you shoot to kill - you have to. In peacetime it'd be murder. In war it's survival - not just yours, but the people you're protecting.'

Dan came back into the argument. 'We've got other weapons, John. If somebody's doing evil, we can work magically to bind him - and it
does
work, you know that.
Attacking
him magically's different.'

'Can you honestl
y say you never would?' John asked.

'Oh Christ, of course I can't - like Sally says, we're human, and I can get angry like the next bloke. Look, John - say you'd known who it was had killed Joy and you'd used all your powers to hit at him - d'you think I'd have blamed you? I'd probably have helped if you'd asked me and there was no other way of getting at him. Maybe we'd have been wrong but we're not saints yet. I know if anyone harmed Moira, I'd lash out first and ask questions afterwards. But that's personal - and if you get too pernickety about how you defend people you love, could be you're piling up other sorts of Karma instead. But unless I'm mistaking you, what you're proposing is calculated, wholesale,
impersonal
black magic against opponents of the Craft in general. And that's different.'

John had not yet said as much in words but Moira knew Dan was not mistaking him; still less was he mistaking

Karen. And it was Karen who answered.

'It is
not
different,' she said, and her dark eyes were burning with intensity.
'They're
being calculating, wholesale and impersonal, and in everything but magic they're stronger than we are. We must be the same - with the weapon's
we
are strong in. Otherwise we go under.'

'I don't believe it.'

Karen laughed. 'I expect there were some who said that in the Burning Time. And they'd be the first to die.'

'I'd rather die clean,' Dan said, too quickly and dramatically. Karen pounced on the opening he'd given her.

'And watch Moira die clean, too? And Diana, and Sally, and Rosemary?'

Dan darkened with anger and Moira stepped in. 'Let's cool the melodrama. John - Karen - I'm sorry, we can't go with you. We'll survive, but
that's
not our way.'

There was silence again. John looked round them all; they could see the pleading behind the hard bitterness in his eyes but everyone was with Moira. There was no pleading in Karen's eyes, only a hint of triumph. She stood up, with a kind of sensuous arrogance.

'Come on, John. We're wasting our time.'

She made for the hall and after a moment's hesitation John followed her. Moira and Dan went with them.

At the front door, John turned. 'Even if you can't join us - you won't let anyone know about it being Savemake Forest, will you?'

'Oh,
John
!' Moira said, her voice full of reproach.

John sighed. 'Blessed be, you two.'

'Blessed be. And
please
- think again ...'

But John shook his head and Karen smiled unashamedly in Moira's face. Then they were gone.

10

For about ten days Britain was suspended in what looked, on the surface at least, like an uneasy calm. Sporadic attacks on witches continued but at least they did not seem to be intensifying and no more major incidents or burned houses were reported, either on the media or on Moira's telephone. The Crusade was recruiting fast. Ben Stoddart and Quentin White had become national figures, and the organization had launched its own weekly paper,
The Hammer.
Street corner and door-to-door sales of the paper were obviously absorbing some of the energies which might have gone to smashing windows, but
The Hammer
was also providing a new focus around which the Crusaders could build both their public presence and their intelligence network. It was clear that any respite was only temporary while the Crusade absorbed the influx of recruits and consolidated itself. The paper was a clever mixture of religious, intellectual, and sensationalist appeal, and its main strength was that it went virtually unanswered. Press, radio and television were becoming more and more reluctant to give any prominence to liberal viewpoints.
The Times
and the
Guardian
still retained some semblance of balance but as
Dan sourly remarked: 'When it comes to building up mass hysteria, it's the populars that matter. Get
them
in action and you can let the posh dailies do the fig-leaf job. They're just preaching to the converted and bloody few of them at that. It's the "don't knows" who swing the balance - and "don't knows" don't read long sentences.'

'But how have the Government got the media doing as they're told so quickly?' Moira wondered. 'It's not natural - this is still England. They can't twist everybody's arm at once.'

'It must be
something
to do with the earthquakes,' Dan said. 'The establishment knows more than we do, that's obvious. And they're blackmailing the top brass of the media with it.'

If Dan had known more about Beehive than the vague rumours that were circulating, he could have answered Moira's question; and answered it precisely if he could have eavesdropped on the excellent lunch to which Harley was at that very moment entertaining the editor of the
Daily Mirror
in Beehive's Ministerial Mess. The
Mirror
had not, in Harley's view, been quite as understanding of the Government's attitude lately as he might have wished. Over the
truite Jurassienne
Harley was making it clear that for the editor ('and your charming wife, of course, my dear fellow') a safe berth underground once Beehive Red was ordered would be dependent upon such understanding.

The editor was a very experienced journalist but physically unheroic, and he loved his wife; and after all (he told himself) only a
minor
shift of emphasis was being asked for.
...
The
Mirror
toed the line.

Of all this, Dan and Moira knew nothing. But they were in fact better informed than most of the public of the situation up and down the country because they were coming to be, informally and unexpectedly, a link in a growing
Wiccan telephone net
work. They really owed this, in
directly, to Moira's parents who were now over twelve thousand kilometres away. Although Dan and Moira had not yet been publicly prominent in the witchcraft movement and had only been running their own small coven for three years, her parents had been very active and well-known; and so, since she was a child, everyone had also known Moira. Her father and mother had retired to New Zealand the year before to live with Moira's only brother (for which Moira, in the last weeks, had come
to.be

grateful), and she seemed to have inherited their wide circle of contacts. Now, as these realized that she and Dan were still unmolested and contactable, they were coming more and more to use them as an information-exchange centre.

'I shall miss it when we take off,' Moira said. 'It's comforting to get
some
news at least - even if the news itself isn't very comforting. If you see what I mean.'

Dan did, and told her: 'We mustn't make any notes but let's try to remember as much as we can about
all these people - where they we
re when we last heard and so on. If things break down, it might be very useful to have all that tucked inside our heads.'

Moira agreed, and from then on whichever of them took a call repeated all the details to the other while it was still fresh.

But Moira's was not the only network. Karen Morley, too, had her friends and she was a capable organizer.

Dr Stanley Friell, of the Banwell Emergency Unit, was a chemist not a physician. He had been attached to the Unit very early, as soon as its importance was realized, for although he was not yet thirty he was one of the most ingenious brains in his field. It was he who achieved the only success the Unit had been able to record so far - the discovery that the Dust, a complex and baffling assembly of organic molecules at least two of which were hitherto unknown, owed their disastrous interaction once they were absorbed into the human bloodstream to an alkaline catalyst which always accompanied them. Without this catalyst, they were harmless and the bloodstream broke them down almost at once. A simple gauze filter soaked in a mild acid - vinegar being ideal - neutralized the catalyst; so a breathing mask which anyone could make at home gave complete protection against the Dust. This information - and, indeed, the very existence of the Dust - had not yet been revealed to the public.

Dr Friell was indifferen
t to the public, for he was an e
litist to the marrow of his bones. His passion, on which he had written one or two brilliant if esoteric monographs, was the history of occult chemistry up to and including the Middle Ages. He had .made up, and tried out on himself, every known recipe for the hallucinogenic 'flying ointment' of the old witches; had experimented with the 'sacred mushroom'
amanita muscaria
and others less well documented; and had clarified several uncertainties about the drugs and poisons believed to have been used by sorcery's blacker brethren. He had an iron constitution and a will to match, so he emerged unscathed and unaddicted from his carefully controlled trials of the drugs and hallucinogens, and the poisons he tested only on laboratory rats.

At first, his interest had been purely pharmaceutical but his researches into the strange world of the men and women who had once used these substances had brought him into contact with some of their modern counterparts, both reputable and disreputable, and he had been fascinated. He had toyed (though with him even 'toying' was an energetic and methodical process) with ritual magic of the Golden
Dawn variety, rapidly attaining the grade of
(3) = [8]
Practicus in an easily overawed lodge. But although he was impressed by the system he found the ritual practice somewhat anaemic and transferred to one of the wholeheartedly sexual splinter groups of the Ordo Templi Orientis, where he had progressed to 7
0
Mystic Templar by the time he was summoned to Banwell. At the same time, out of curiosity, he had got himself initiated into an ex-Gardnerian coven of witches who had 'gone black'; privately he considered them ignorant dabblers but he maintained friendly contact with them as potentially useful. At least two of them he knew to be psychotic and he was very interested in the psychic power of insanity. He was a natural sensitive and had worked to develop the gift, and he could hardly help being aware of the psychic dynamite which lurked in the Banwell incurables.

As one of the top researchers at the Unit, Dr Friell belonged to the handful of staff who were necessarily permitted to come and go while the ordinary doctors, nurses, and domestics were confined to the premises (a restriction which had been even more rigorously enforced since the disappearance of Nurse Eileen Roberts). Early in August he had to drive to London for consultation with a particular specialist, and having an evening to spare after his meeting he spent it, discreetly covering his tracks, with the High Priestess and High Priest of the 'black' coven. It was from them that he learned a very interesting piece of information and was armed with a map reference and a password.

He lay awake in his hotel that night thinking carefully, re-examining and developing the seed of an idea which had been with him for the past two or three weeks. Next morning he started back to Banwell - by way of Savernake Forest. In the end he reached the Unit a day later than he had originally intended, tingling with well-concealed excitement. He was too senior for anyone to ask him why he was late.

Ben Stoddart was, yet again, a guest on BBC's 'Paul Grant Hour'. The producer, high in his gallery, flicked his eye morosely back and forth across the bank of monitor-screens which faced him, remembering the morning's conference where he had suggested that Stoddart was being overexposed. His chief had answered smoothly: "We all know you have the interests of your programme at heart but don't rock the boat, there's a good chap,' - and the matter had been closed.

The producer disliked everything Stoddart stood for, and hated the man himself even more because he could not deny he made for very gripping television.

'Jack - a bit tighter on that profile,' he ordered into his microphone and saw Stoddart's head grow larger in No 2 camera's monitor. Fascinated, he watched the handsome lips moving.

When the unthinkable happened it took the producer no more than a couple of seconds to realize that although Stoddart was still speaking, the sound had gone silent. He .turned his head quickly to the soundproof window on his right beyond which the sound booth lay and saw that Bernie had already reacted, so he issued no order, knowing that Bemie would trace and correct the fault all the quicker without interruption. Then, suddenly, over the visual of Stoddart still mouthing unaware,' a strange voice broke out:
'The Angels
of
Lucifer have condemned Ben Stoddart to death! The Angels
of
Lucifer...'

The producer and Bcrnie had pounced on their buttons in the same instant and that was as far as the voice got, but it Was done, it was said, the pirate voice had already given its message to God knew how many millions from Land's
End to John o'Groats. On the floor, of course, Ben Stoddart and Paul Grant still talked and smiled, having heard nothing; and the cameramen, though they must have picked it up on their gallery-fed earphones, did not waver. The producer handed over to his assistant, phoned the security men, and ran through to Bernie's booth.

They soon found the loop of tape, still running on a machine in an empty sound-editing cubicle, and the ingenious re-wiring which had made the interruption possible. They also found the time-switch which had triggered the device and which could have been set minutes or hours earlier. None of this highly professional sabotage bore any fingerprints, and although everybody who could possibly have committed it was grilled for hours, the culprit was never identified.

Although the pirate broadcast was made in the middle of a BBC programme - at 9.43 pm, to be exact - ITN had a beat on its news coverage, to the BBC's chagrin. Seventeen minutes were quite enough for ITN to be able to lead 'News at Ten' with the story, whereas BBC
i's
main news had already gone out at 9.00, and BBC 2's was not due till 10.40. BBC, of course, was able to hold on to Ben Stoddart for interview, but ITN smartly grabbed Quentin White and had him in their House of Commons interviewing studio by 10.03.

'How seriously do you think this threat should be taken, Mr White?' the ITN man asked.

'Very seriously indeed. The so-called Angels of Lucifer...'

Had you ever heard of them before?'

'Nobody has, to my knowledge. But the very name proclaims their allegiance - and who else but witches would threaten the life of Ben Stoddart, their staunchest opponent?

The rats are at bay and they are showing their true colours. Rats always do when they are cornered. They have been cornered by the vigilance and courage of the Anti-Pagan Crusade, by the aroused conscience of the British public and by the prompt measures of the Government.'

'If they are, as you say,' cornered - may they not be bluffing?'

'It would be most dangerous to assume that. These people are ruthless, and they have secret supporters in key positions. The very way they issued their threat proves that. You're a television man; am I not right in saying the interruption must have been an inside job - and a technically difficult one at that?'

'Yes to both questions,' the ITN man said, resisting the temptation to rub salt in the BBC's wounds, and went on: 'If the threat is serious, what is its nature? A physical one or a black magic one?' He felt a little foolish asking it, but White had asked him to during their brief preparation and he had to admit it was attention-grabbing.

White, who had had no television experience before his election campaign but had quickly absorbed Stoddart's coaching, turned from facing the interviewer to gaze dramatically into the camera lens which had the red light over it.

'Let no one be in any
doubt
about the nature of the threat,' he declared, separating the syllables as though he were handing out gold coin by coin. 'No
physical
assassin can reach Ben Stoddart
- he is too well protected by h
is friends who know that since Midsummer he has incurred the vicious enmity of evil men and women. But these men and women have their own chosen weapons. For two or three centuries now, it has been fashionable to dismiss as a fairy-tale the old belief that one could sell one's soul to the devil in exchange for power in this world. I am not so sure that it can any longer be so dismissed. In the last decades, science itself has come to realize that the human mind has unsuspected latent abilities, to which it has attached modern-sounding labels such as telekinesis, ESP, the psi-factor and so on. I believe that the witches have been laughing behind the scientists' backs - for these new labels merely hide timeless
facts,
which the witches have known about, and used, since before written history. They have trained and developed these abilities in themselves as an athlete trains his muscles - and just like the athlete,
because
of that deliberate training they can, in their chosen field, achieve results which ordinary people cannot. And as for selling their souls to the devil - the phrase may be outdated, but the thing which it expresses is
not.
By deliberately abandoning all restraints of morality, humanity and compassion, these men and women avail themselves of the incalculable powers of darkness - the evil powers which those God-given restraints, in all decent humans, keep in check. And if
that
is not selling your soul to the devil in exchange for power - what
is?
I ask you, my friends - what
is? . . .
The Angels of Lucifer - and what a revealing name they have chosen
1
- the Angels of Lucifer are not threatening Ben Stoddart with the bullet or the knife. They are threatening him with those very powers for which they
have
sold their souls to Satan. . . . Whether each of you, listening to me in the security of your own homes, can believe they
are
capable of carrying out that threa
t, is up to you to decide. But I
believe that Ben Stoddart
is
in grave danger because here on earth he stands in the front rank of the hosts of God, and he is the declared target of God's enemies. So I ask you - all of you, whatever your beliefs - to fortify this great and saintly man with your prayers.'

The Angels of Lucifer were the splash in every single morning paper (and a few hours later were big news in America, too, for Gene Macallister and Tonia Lynd had been busy all night). The pirate broadcast was news that could not be censored, because millions had heard it, so almost in relief the media went to town on the story. Quentin White's statement was quoted in full and set up the tone of editorial debate; he had shifted the emphasis, within minutes of the pirate broadcast, away from the threat of physical assassination to that of 'the powers of darkness' and there it stayed. It made much more dramatic reading and listening anyway, and the big question - 'Can they do it?' - could be expanded to fill as many column inches, or minutes of air time, as any editor or producer could wish. Everybody from the Archbishops of Canterbury ('yes'), Westminster ('yes' qualified) and York ('no') to the Professor of Parapsychological Studies at King's College, London ('five decades of clinical experiment have established beyond reasonable doubt . . .') and the Astronomer Royal ('telekinesis does not exist') was willing and eager to be quoted at length. Jungian psychologists clashed with Freudian, vicars with their own curates, and Mods with Rockers (the 1960s idiom was enjoying a mushroom revival among the trendier young this summer; it had begun to peter out, b
ut Mods' 'no' and Rockers' 'yes’
gave it a new lease of life). Fleet Street astrologers contradicted each other as usual.