Reign of Evil

CHAPTER 32

The trip from Warwick to Somerset would normally take two and a half hours, but because of their constant concern for surveillance they took five. It was decided that Walker, YaYa, and Trevor would go while the others remained with Sassy and the Tuatha to see how they could best leverage the creature.

Preeti was busy trying to find the radio beacon they’d placed in the golem’s head, but with no luck at all. She also pointed out to them something they’d completely forgotten. Tomorrow was Christmas. Not only was it one of the pinnacle Christian holidays, but it was also a well-known pagan holiday, predating the determination that the twenty-fifth of December was the birthday of Jesus Christ.

Holmes made it clear that this was not a time to celebrate. They were neck deep in pagan mythology and needed to be aware of its dangers.

Laws, ever the encyclopedic mind, shared that more than four hundred years before the birth of Christ early Romans celebrated the birth date of the deity Saturnus. It originally began as a simple banquet on December 17 but then grew to a five-day affair, highlighted by gambling, gift giving, and a general bacchanal celebration. It eventually became something different as Saturnus’s darker aspects were celebrated. In addition to everything they’d done previously, Romans introduced the Lord of Misrule as part of the holiday. Every Roman community selected a man or woman to become the Lord of Misrule, who would represent the enemy of their people. Beginning on the seventeenth of December, they’d feed and treat this person as if he or she were an actual lord, denying him or her nothing. But then on December 25 they’d come together and kill the Lord of Misrule. Ancient Greek poet, Lucian, mentioned in his texts that revelers would also travel from home to home naked, singing the songs of the day; performing deviant sexual public acts, including rape; and eating human-shaped biscuits to symbolize the eating of your enemy.

Walker found the information creepy, especially when he thought of the similarities to the Christmas he and every other American kid normally celebrated. To think that the gingerbread man had a violent and terrible past was stunning.

Holly, ivy, the giving of gifts, the use of an evergreen tree, and many more symbols of modern Christmas were derived from ancient Roman pagan customs. Laws and Preeti weren’t sure how December 25 would affect the power of the Red Grove or other neo-pagan groups but had to be aware that it might have an incongruous effect on the success or failure of any mission they might be conducting. Just as the Winter Solstice was a special day for the Red Grove, Triple Six had to consider that Christmas might be as well.

The house they needed to surveil was a two-story Tudor with four chimneys and seven dormers. Records showed it to belong to Jason Belair, who ran an import-export business specializing in North European antiques and collectibles. He’d been referred to in a Financial Times of London article as being the kitschy king of secondhand Ikea. Although the description was unflattering, his net worth was upwards of 100 million pounds.

The home was less than two hundred meters from Glastonbury Tor, which held an interesting place in British history and mythology. No one exactly knew how it was formed, but because the hill rises 150 meters above the surrounding plain it had been used since at least 400 BC as a place to defend from.

“Tor” was an English word referring to a high rock or hill. But the name used by the Celts for the hill was Yns yr Afalon, which translated meant “The Isle of Avalon,” linking it directly to King Arthur.

When this piece of information had been discovered, it had set off a murmur of excitement among them in the chapel basement. But what they found next was even more intriguing. According to the twelfth-century poet Gerald of Wales, monks from the nearby Glastonbury Abbey discovered a coffin buried in the side of the Tor. It bore an inscription identifying it as Queen Guinevere’s. Although this presented an exciting prospect, experts now believe that the monks, who’d recently lost their abbey to a fire, might have had a more commercial reason for finding and selling the artifact. Gerald of Wales also indicates that Glastonbury Tor was one of the possible locations of the Holy Grail, especially because of the discovery of the Nanteos Cup at the same abbey. The cup was allegedly brought to Briton by Joseph of Arimathea, who was believed to have founded the Christian settlement at Glastonbury Tor.

Finally, what was arguably most interesting was the connection of the Tor in Celtic mythology to Gwyn ap Nudd, also known as Annwn, and later called King of the Faeries. The hill became known as the entrance to Avalon, the land of the faeries. Yet even with all that history, the Tor usually wasn’t considered a mound but rather a fortification. Those gathered in the basement were coming to believe something a little bit different.

“I always wanted the legend of King Arthur to be real,” Walker said when they were still twenty minutes out. “The whole Knights of the Round Table and the quest for the Holy Grail seemed so spiritual.”

Trevor, who was driving, scoffed and couldn’t help but reply, “Your romanticism is amazing. Kings are just like anyone else. They are fallible, sometimes mean, most often greedy, and rarely considerate of the common man.”

YaYa was sitting in the backseat and leaned forward. “Is that the way you feel about your queen?”

Trevor kept his gaze straight ahead, but he replied quickly. “Not at all. Queen Elizabeth, God bless her soul, is completely different.”

Walker laughed. “Now who’s being a romantic? I heard she’s a billionaire many times over. I’ve also heard the theories about her and Princess Diana.”

“Rubbish. Pure bloody rubbish. It’s in no way the same as your Americans’ reverence for a king you know nothing about.”

Walker couldn’t help himself. He crossed his arms. “Explain?”

“It’s because of your movies and books. No, it goes back further. It goes back to Washington. Sure, you had a general for a president, but you lost your king. Americans have always had a love affair with the idea of a monarchy. It’s why you put so many of your cultural icons on pedestals.”

“Like LeBron James and Brad Pitt,” YaYa said.

Trevor pressed harder. “What do you know about King Arthur? Have you as Americans read any of the actual historic texts or the academic dissertations or are you a victim of American pop culture? Your movies have become encyclopedias to your young. Look at Arthur. You have one movie where he wears chrome armor and another in which he is a Roman wearing leather armor. In one movie Camelot is a ten-story gleaming castle with pinnacles and in another it’s an old fort made from stone and mortar. Your love affair with the myth makes reality unreachable.”

Walker sat back for a few moments, then said, “Wow. Where’d that come from?”

YaYa nodded. “Probably some pent-up anti-American sentiment.”

Walker’s brow creased. “So what you’re telling me is that Arthur doesn’t look like Richard Gere and doesn’t wear chrome armor? I drop the bullshit flag on that.”

YaYa shook his head. “Lancelot. Richard Gere played Sir Lancelot. It was Sean Connery who played King Arthur.”

“Sean Connery. Yeah. That fits with me. He even talks like he’s from around here.”

Trevor turned to Walker and gave him a deadpan look, then shook his head and turned forward. “All I’m saying is that when we meet King Arthur I think he’s going to scare the shit out of us.”

Walker uncrossed his arms. “That I believe.”

They parked a mile away from their target. They were dressed for recon, not for battle, although they did wear body armor. Instead of helmets they wore baseball caps. Their night-vision goggles were in pouches hidden under their jackets. They carried Sig Sauer P229s with silencers and knives. They had their intersquad radio system but wanted to keep it silent until they knew what they were up against.

There were no CCTV cameras in this area near Glastonbury Tor, so they didn’t have to concern themselves with their actions being seen by police. Three men dressed in black approaching a home on Christmas Eve would have been odd.

They made their way down the lane with Trevor on one side and the SEALs on the other. They’d traveled halfway to their objective when they passed a house that was under construction. They checked for security, but there wasn’t any. In fact, the front door was unlocked. The serendipitous find would serve as their forward observation post.

Walker and YaYa each carried a small plastic case containing a PD-100 Black Hornet Personal Reconnaissance System. Comprised of two micro-unmanned aerial vehicles called Hornets, a base station, a recharging station, a remote-control unit, and a seven-inch screen by which to watch the footage.

The Black Hornet was little more than a camera molded into a tiny helicopter, weighing less than sixteen grams. It was invisible at ten meters, almost completely soundless, but lacked the ability to film in night vision. The smallest FLIR camera weighed twice as much as the entire Hornet. Even without night vision, what the three-inch UAV would do was allow them to get up close to the house and surrounding compound and see what was going on without being seen.

At least that was the plan.

Trevor placed infrared trip wires at both the front and back doors downstairs and on the stairwell. If one was tripped, a signal would travel to the receiver in his pocket, which would then vibrate in series, with the number of repetitions corresponding to whether it was from number one, two, or three.

It was about ten at night and snow just had begun to fall when YaYa and Walker were ready. They’d chosen a second-floor bedroom to use as their launch bay. The glass in the window had yet to be put into place, so the space was open to the elements. Walker could already feel the cold seeping into his fingers as he prepared the tiny UAVs.

He launched his first Black Hornet by sitting it on the ground and remotely controlling the minute helicopter blades, enabling it to rise. It was hard not to control the UAV while looking at it. Instead, he forced himself to use the small monitor, forcing himself to become the Black Hornet and shrinking his universe to what could be viewed by the nose-cone camera.

Tunnel-visioning in, he found himself rising, then moving forward. White snowflakes fell like down feathers. He could feel a slight crosswind and had to adjust by turning into it. The result of this was that in order to travel in a straight line, he’d have to aim the camera slightly left of his target. He found it tremendously difficult to do that and stay online. Thankfully, the wind subsided and he was able to point his nose at his goal. The downside of having a MUAV was that wind was its kryptonite.

He negotiated the Black Hornet through tree branches, which were already beginning to be covered in the Christmas Eve snow. He passed over a backyard occupied by a dog staring woefully into a warm-lit living room where a family was huddled around a cozy television. Then an empty lot. Then the compound.

He rose to an elevation of fifty meters so he could see the whole area. The backyard was enclosed by a wall. People were outside around several bonfires. Judging by the people, the wall was ten or twelve feet high—high enough to hide activity from outside view, especially since there were empty lots on either side. It seemed as if every light was on inside the home, creating a nimbus of warm orange light. In addition to the bonfires, four floodlights mounted on poles in the four corners of the wall shone inward.

He counted twenty-seven persons in the backyard. Walker moved the Black Hornet closer to resolve the images of the people. The wind began to pick up and he found his ability to focus severely constrained. He fought to keep the MUAV still for several minutes, but to no avail. He cursed and heard YaYa swearing beside him too as he tried to control his own MUAV.

“I’m going to find a place to put it down,” Walker said.

“What about the corners?” YaYa asked. “We can put them in the protective lee of the poles supporting the floodlights.”

“Good call.”

Walker manipulated the MUAV until it settled on the northwest corner post on the side of the light pole opposite the wind. He adjusted the aim of the camera, then turned off the blades. To anyone looking, the MUAV would just look like a black blob the size of a dragonfly sitting on top of a pole.

“Take the northeast corner.”

YaYa rogered and soon after landing the other MUAV they were looking at a complete feed of the entire backyard. The area was so well lit, their lack of night vision wasn’t going to be an issue.

Now that they were close enough to see the images of the people, what they saw made their eyes go wide.

Trevor leaned in to look. “Are they—”

“Naked. Absolutely.”

“And what the hell is wrong with their faces?”

“I have no… idea.” Walker couldn’t help but bring his hand to his own face and touch his lips with his cold fingers. Where his lips were warm and smooth, the lips of the seven naked women they counted in the backyard were scarred and sewn shut by an inexpert and vicious hand. Other than their lips, their faces were free from any mark and would have been beautiful, had they not been so gaunt. The women’s hollowed-out faces, prominent cheekbones, and bulging eyes made them look like victims of a famine. But once Walker was able to take in the totality of their appearance, he understood what was going on; he just didn’t know why.

“See their rib cages? I bet they don’t weigh even a hundred pounds.”

Trevor’s voice was low and reverential. “They’re being starved.”

Each woman stood beside an outdoor heating element that rose half again as tall as they were. On occasion, a man dressed in a suit would walk by and place his hand on a woman’s crotch or lean down to kiss her breast. The women remained unfazed, their faces blank as if they were in another place.

“They’re stoned. Someone drugged them… thankfully.” YaYa made a fist with his prosthetic hand. “I suddenly want to kill every one of the fuckers who did this.”

“Something tells me we’ll get the chance.” Walker tore his gaze away from the women and regarded the yard. He counted twelve men dressed in expensive suits and cloaks. Servants circulated among them with trays. Three figures were clothed completely in red robes, their faces hidden behind masks, and a conical matching red hat that rose several feet. They looked like scarlet KKK robes. These three were treated with clear deference.

“Wish I could get close enough to hear what they’re saying.” YaYa stared at the scene for a moment, then shook his head. “I still can’t get over the women. I get they’re starving, but how can they survive without water? They have to drink.”

Walker shrugged. “I’m sure they’ve figured it out. They’ve been starving for a while. Let’s get back on mission. Trev, you still watching our six?”

Trev replied from his sentry position in the hall, “And seven and eight. Roger.”

“I don’t see the woman who took the photos.” Walker prepared a second Black Hornet. “I’m going to check out the windows on the second floor.”

It took him a few moments, but he was soon controlling a second MUAV, flying it well above the trees and bringing it in over the top of the Tudor house. He could see the party in full swing down below. He decided to check the front of the house first.

If he thought he’d seen it all in the backyard, he was terribly mistaken. The view into each room was a different study in debauchery. Men on men. Men on women. Some were tied. Some were being taken violently. In all cases, their faces were covered by brightly colored carnival masks.

He moved around the eastern side of the home and found a room where several men and women were putting their clothes on. Walker figured this for a dressing room and was rewarded with the sight of two men dressed in masks and nothing else entering into the room. They removed their masks and could have been the most normal people one would encounter. They glanced at each other, their gazes lingering for a moment, then went about putting on their clothes.

That’s when Walker noticed that one of the women was staring directly into the camera.

She couldn’t possibly have seen the Black Hornet, but just in case, Walker backed it away from the window. But she came closer and began to point.

He swung the camera north just in time to catch a flash of light from high up on Glastonbury Tor, as if there’d been an explosion. He glanced out the window, to where he could see it in real time, but the light was gone.

The feeds on all the cameras began to static.

It dawned on him what was happening about the time the camera on the northwest pole winked out.

He directed the Black Hornet to pull up and head south of the area, hopefully getting far enough away to be out of the disturbance zone.

YaYa took a knee and stared out the window, now that the feed on his screen had gone blank as well. “Do you think it’s the Hunt?”

“What else could it be?” He let the craft hover and put in a call to Holmes, using his MBITR Bluetoothed to his cell.

Holmes answered on the first ring. “We’ve been watching.”

Walker peered into the night but couldn’t see anything. He focused on the view from his remaining Black Hornet, but the Tor was too far away for him to see much of anything except blobs. “Then you can tell us what the hell is going on.”

“Sassy says it’s the Carnival of Fools. They’re using sex magic to pool power.”

“You can get magic like that?” YaYa asked.

Sassy got online. “Jack, it’s the collocation and derivation of energy. Magic is all about gathering and transmitting energy. By the looks of it, they’re creating enough energy that were I on the astral plane, I’d be able to see it from here. Think beacon.”

“Well, I think the beacon is working. Looks like the Wild Hunt is coming.” Walker strained to see, but the images were too grainy.

Laws joined in. “They’ve been busy. We have seven more reports of missing persons, including an entire population of Basques who’d established a sheep farm in Wales. MI5 is keeping everything quiet, but the Prime Minister is raging.”

Holmes returned, “Stay put. Looks like we may have found their headquarters.”

Walker rogered out. If they were going to stay put, he could at least see how close he could get. He began to ease the Black Hornet forward. He was at about two hundred feet and the wind was buffeting him pretty badly. As soon as the camera found the yard below, it would turn away. The view was akin to looking through a porthole on a small boat on high seas.

YaYa wondered aloud, “I wonder which one of them it is.”

“Which one of who is what?” Walker realized his sentence was an egregious violation of the rules of grammar, but in context it made sense.

“Which one of them is the Lord of Misrule,” YaYa said. “If this is the Carnival of Fools and they’re celebrating Saturnus, then someone has to be the Lord of Misrule.”

Walker was finally able to get low enough on his bucking MUAV to get a glimpse of the backyard. Several hounds from the Wild Hunt were climbing over the wall. No one seemed disturbed by them. He saw one of the hounds approach a naked woman, leap at her, only to disappear inside of her. The woman arched her back—

Then the feed blacked out.

Walker felt a moment of panic. The last thing he wanted was for the MUAV to fall into the yard where it could be found. So he turned the MUAV south, or at least he was hoping he had, and he powered it out of the area. Only the feed never came back on. He continued powering it away, praying every second that he’d get it back. He really had no way of knowing if he was powering anything.

Finally, he gave up and slapped the remote control into his lap.

“We have entry from the front door.” Trevor moved to the doorway of the room. Then he whispered, “We have entry on the stairs. Prepare yourselves.”