Chapter Six: Initiation

In every reference book and encyclopaedia on the shelves of her father’s library, Amanda had discovered only snippets of information concerning The Order of the Arboreal Orb. With the weighty tomes picked before hand, piled up one on top of the other on a side table, a notepad and pen beside her (she had searched on the net before hand, bringing up even less information), she had looked diligently but fruitlessly.
The name was sprinkled liberally throughout the history of Satanist cults and the black arts but no detailed facts regarding their ideas or their relation to Ashbury Manor could be found. The entries on George Browne and his peculiar sect were similarly scanty, repeating the same vague hints and surmises contained in William Barrett’s pamphlet. What did arise constantly in her research was mention of a nameless forbidden book, authored by the 16^th century occultist, containing diabolical knowledge but now lost completely or hidden from view.
After a while Amanda came to the conclusion that the only route open to her was to take up membership of the Order. She knew it was a desperate move and that it held all sorts of terrible dangers for her; maybe she would be sacrificed to their evil gods or forced to commit a dreadful act in some initiation ceremony. More prosaically it would mean getting in contact with Lucius Peake. But the urge to discover the secret was stronger then her reservations. If she was asked to do anything really bad she could always decline and she trusted herself to be level headed in dangerous situations. On the other hand she probably had nothing to worry about; The Order of the Arboreal Orb were probably posers or sad anoraks.
As Amanda stood slightly to the side of the huddle of people at her father’s house warming party, these thoughts crowded her mind. Wearing a black spider web patterned top which exposed her pierced belly button, a long nightshade coloured skirt nearly sweeping the floor but not quite hiding high laced up boots and with dark hair with purple streaks falling lose down her back, conspiring with pale white face makeup, solid mascara around the eyes and black lipstick, she did not look out of place at the party. But she felt distant from the gathering, not only because nearly all of the guests were her father’s age. She was distracted, butterflies playing in her stomach.
Amanda had arranged with Lucius to meet a woman, a member of the inner circle of The Order, who was to initiate her at this very event, in secret of course.
The dinning room had been cleared of its furniture and a small makeshift stage, which was crisscrossed with wiring and loaded with a sound system, speaker stacks, a silver and black drum kit and shining electric guitars, was erected at the back. A long fold-up table burdened with food was placed to the side next to a portable bar, which was doing brisk business. Music was just discernable above a babble of voices and the atmosphere was thick with cigarette smoke.
At the bar getting himself a drink, Amanda spotted the blonde bass guitarist from Cargo Cult. To take her mind off the meeting with the woman from the Order she decided she would approach him.
“Hi, Paul,” she said, after pushing herself through the tightly packed crowd and sidling up to him.
“Oh, hi,” he replied rather startled.
The conversation went on disjointedly as they were hardly able to hear each other over the constant jabber of voices. Both were preoccupied and nervous for different reasons and when Amanda spied Lucius with a tall bony looking woman with a stiff, superior posture, soberly dressed in a blue business suit, she made arrangements to meet Paul after his set.
The eyes of the woman fixed her with a curious but sardonic gaze as she went up to her, obviously scornful of the plump adolescent with her gothic pretensions. Amanda immediately felt intimidated and she greeted Lucius first without acknowledging the woman. Unusually he seemed ill at ease, agitatedly glancing to the left and to the right as if searching for someone. She wondered if that someone was her father.
“This is Camilla Armstrong from the Order.”
Shaking the teenager’s hand, Camilla managed to smile condescendingly. She certainly was not what Amanda had expected. Instead of billowing robes festooned in magical symbols, here was this thin bird like woman with brown hair tied in a bun, dressed as if she was attending a business conference.
“I have decided that I will initiate you in the library,” Camilla said, her smile vanishing as if it was never there, replaced with the hard flat line of her lips.
“What actually does the initiation involve?” Amanda was feeling she was plunging head first into some thing that could have grim consequences. A small voice which was getting louder by the minute, was telling her that this woman could be genuinely malevolent, not merely play acting or fantasising about evil.
“Nothing that you have to be concerned about. You will prove to me that you are worthy to join our Order, by passing a not too difficult test of your character’s capabilities”
They were interrupted by an announcement from the stage. Her father was at the microphone, dressed in a paisley shirt, his hair in a ponytail, introducing Cargo Cult, but there was only muted applause from the party guests, as many had expected Blood Moon to make an impromptu appearance. The three young men, long haired, leather and denim clad, picked up their instruments and launched themselves into a slow pulsation of guitar noise and heavy drums that built up into a wall of sound, shaking the walls and floor of the old edifice; the bass player’s gurgling, almost indecipherable vocals singing of exploding galaxies and desolate planets.
Shouting into Amanda’s ear, Camilla asked her to meet them in the library soon after the end of Cargo Cult’s set. She then disengaged herself from the audience and left the room, a look of pain on her face. Lucius folded his arms and nodded his head to the churning riffs, his features showing no expression or emotion.
The group played four ear shredding tracks from their album and then climbed down from the stage, mingling once again with the eddying party goers, the clouds of smoke thicker then ever. Paul, relieve that the performance was over revealed in his smile, made straight for Amanda, who had deliberately moved away from Lucius.
“Did you think we were good,” Paul said.
“Fantastic.”
An idea suddenly came to her. Amanda explained hesitantly her predicament and her intended solution. He stared at her as if she had gone mad, moving away from her slightly. Her heart sank as she looked at his bewildered face and she realised she had taken him by surprise with something seemingly completely irrational. The party milled around her oblivious to her embarrassment and Paul’s awkward silence.
“Sorry Paul, this sounds absolutely crazy I know,” she said at last, in an attempt to break the unbearable distance that had unexpectedly opened up between them. “But you will help me out?”
“I don’t think you should go through with it. You haven’t got any idea who these people really are. I can tell you this; anything that Lucius is involved in is dodgy. You should hear the rumours circulating.”
Irritated by his tone, she rallied herself.
“I don’t care what you say; I am going to do it. It is the only way I know of finding out the secret of the house. If you had seen what I had seen you would do the same. So as I am definitely going through with it, will you enter the library an hour after this initiation starts and get me out with some excuse?”
“I could get into serious trouble over this; you are making me into your accomplice. What I should do is tell your dad.”
“Are you going to help me or not?”
He sighed, looking at the floor. At last he stared at Amanda, a resigned grin on his face.
“I’ll help you, but I am also going to hang around outside and if I hear anything odd I am going straight in to get you.”
“Great, it’s about time I went. See you soon.”
Annoyance towards Paul’s nervous condescension fuelling her determination to go through with her plans, she strode out of the dinning room and within minutes was in the library. The soft lights were on but at first she was unable to perceive any other presence. No sound from the party penetrated the thick walls and the stillness was threatening, intruding feelers of unease into her resentment. Looking around nervously, she was startled when Lucius and Camilla entered.
They both gave her ingratiating smiles but it was the large object covered in an oriental cloth, carried by Lucius in his arms, which caught Amanda’s attention. Without saying anything they moved towards the alcove on their left containing the sinister mirror, Camilla leading the way.
The butterflies in her stomach lurching from side to side rather then fluttering, she was almost ready to turn and walk back to the safety of the dinning room. Those creepy smiles had made her think that Paul might be correct; what she was doing was insane and dangerous. She would never get into a stranger’s car if she was offered a lift. But her need to solve the riddle of Ashbury Manor was too strong, driving her on.
Steadying her nerves she followed the others.
At first she was unable to see much as it was murky within the alcove, but she did make out a low table, like an altar in the gloom, with a silver dish next to a bulky green candle, embedded in an elaborate holder. Camilla bent down, struck a match and lit the candle, exposing the threatening presence of the mirror, while wild shadows undulated ominously.
The details of the occultist paraphernalia were revealed by the guttering light and the same menacing floral artistry was predominant on there surfaces. The dish was moulded to resemble a palm frond while the candlestick’s shaft was encircled with brass tendrils as if it was being strangled. The most disturbing object of them all though, was something that Amanda had noticed only after the candle had been lit. A knife, resting next to the dish, whose sharp blade seemed to glow like a firefly in the faint illumination, threw out an undeniable aura of violence. But it was really the wooden hilt with its primitive but ornate carvings of insectile creatures, encrusted with bulging arachnid eyes and multitudes of legs, which sent a thrill of repulsion into her skin.
Like dark sentinels at a funeral, Camilla and Lucius stood as silent as the grave next to the covered object resting on the floor. Amanda did not know how to break the stifling stillness and her natural inclination was to run away, but she controlled herself, thinking that if they attacked her now she had a clear escape route out of the alcove. She could also shout or scream and Paul would be able to hear her in the next room.
Breaking the tension, Camilla spoke, calmly and without any dramatic emphasis, all the while staring intently into Amanda’s eyes.
“Let’s get this over with before anyone enters the library. What I want you to do is to prove to me that you are worthy of the Order.”
With a flourish she removed the cloth from the object, divulging a wire cage where a ginger cat slept motionlessly. She crouched, undid the catch at the top of the cage, flicked up the lid and dragged the helpless animal by the scruff of its neck from its prison. The cat was drugged because it did not struggle as it hung in Camilla’s hand over the silver dish. Douglas smirked beside her as she took hold of the dagger on the alter table, gently by the blade, and coolly handed it hilt outwards to Amanda.
“This is your initiation to verify to us your willingness to act without feeling or conscience,” she said, her features as cold as ice. “Slit this cat’s throat and you are a member of the lowest circle of the Order of the Arboreal Orb.”
Completely taken aback, Amanda stood rigid, unable and unwilling to receive the knife. For all of her wallowing in imaginary nastiness, one thing she found deeply distasteful was cruelty to animals. It was for this very reason that she had tried to become a vegetarian, slipping occasionally into meat eating but on the whole keeping to her diet. It was the only trait of hers that Moonbeam approved of, encouraging her on frequent occasions, but this actually had the opposite effect.
“Come on girl, just a slash of the knife” Lucius said sneeringly. “They’ve made it easy for you. Because it is drugged it won’t feel a thing and it won’t struggle.”
“Shut up, idiot” Camilla snapped and then offered the dagger to Amanda with more emphasis. “Take it and do the deed, otherwise you are not worthy.”
Moving a few steps back, Amanda gulped down a lump in her throat. “I’ve decided not to join you as obviously I am not evil enough,” she said with a forced smile, trying to bring some wry humour into the proceedings. “Oh well, one of those things I suppose.”
Distracted by the dilemma of the cat, she had not taken much note of the mirror, but now as she stepped further away from the alcove and her line of sight could take in the looking-glass in its entirety, she saw that the faint reflection on its surface had gone completely, replaced with nothing. The mirror as if it was a movie screen had gone dark, void of any colour.
Shaken as she was by this unexplainable phenomenon, it was the carved eye that really held her attention. It was literally alive and its white iris vibrated with a hatred that was like a lust for destruction, its pupil boring into her head and opening her mind to thoughts of malevolent passion. She saw Lucius features, for the first time, torn by real emotions; emotions of bewilderment and raw fright. He seemed to want to run but was unable to do so, caught in the blazing intensity of the eyeball’s gaze, but Camilla was watching stony faced, taking this outburst of the supernatural in her stride.
But his predicament faded from her consciousness as she was overwhelmed by sudden images of violence that buoyed her up, made her dizzy with a monstrous joy. Scenes from her favourite horror films boiled in her brain, taking motivation from the eye that stared continuously at her, scenes of bloody disembowelments, decapitations and exploding heads. She wanted now not only to cut the cat’s throat but to mutilate it, slice it up into little pieces.
But for all of these horrific sentiments, that seemed to have come from a well-spring lying not so dormant in her imagination, there was something holding her back, restraining her ferocious instincts; a voice of control. This side of her knew she was being used, manipulated by Camilla. This conflict had the strange effect of producing a feeling that there were two Amanda’s inside her brain struggling for domination and this inward fight was making her immobile. But eventually one side of her personality would win the battle and she would act; either fleeing the library or killing the cat.
There was a sound of fast moving footsteps and something within her snapped, breaking her inertia. She turned around, brutally grabbing the hilt of the knife from Camilla and stared into the deeply concerned face of Moonbeam with Paul, a look of startled disbelief on his features, not far behind.
The sight of her worst enemy allowed the grotesque distortion of her being to triumph. With a scream she flung her self at Moonbeam, the knife raised, her mind consumed in joyous loathing. But before she plunged the blade into the body of her father’s girlfriend, Paul launched him self forward, throwing Amanda aside at the bookcases, the knife falling from her hand and skittering across the floor. The impact stunned her, dislodging a couple of hardbacks, one knocking the side of her head.
A fierce pain flashed through her body and she cried out in fear as well as agony. Something was climbing from her skin, like a duplicate, a replica.
The anguish was unbearable as if she was being ripped into two pieces but it ceased as soon as it begun, vanishing in a second without leaving any traces.
Standing in front of her, Moonbeam and Paul looking on in benumbed bewilderment, was a young girl, plumb and naked, glistening with viscous glue like fluid, her head completely without hair. It was some time before Amanda recognised her and when she did she had to stifle a gasp of surprise and horror. The teenager was her in every detail except for the strong piercing eyes that bored into her soul as if this other Amanda could read her mind.
Seemingly with no embarrassment about her unclothed state this doppelganger picked up the knife and calmly walked towards the figures near the looking-glass. Camilla, having put the cat back in its cage, seemed as astonished as everyone else but it was not long before she rallied, beckoning the naked girl to her.
Amanda in the meantime had managed to get up on her shacking legs by clinging to the bookcase, more books falling loudly on the floor, and had backed slowly towards Moonbeam and Paul, her eyes transfixed by what lay ahead.
The mirror had ceased to be a blank screen but instead of a reflection of the mirror in the opposite alcove, it reflected another scene entirely. It was as if a doorway had opened into a part of the house that could not possible be contained within its meagre structure.
The hall inside the looking-glass was cyclopean, made of huge slabs of decaying stone. Malignant blotches of vegetable matter like cancerous growths clung grotesquely to the walls, taking nourishment from dripping beads of thick amber liquid that coruscated downwards from cavernous openings higher up, reached by vertiginous stairways. A pale red light from a blood coloured sun in an unknown sky, filtered down from a gargantuan round window set horizontally in the flat but heavily buttressed roof; its colossal frames constructed of iron girders, rusting and encrusted with sickly green moulds. The panes of the window were awash with the self same lichen, obscuring the strange sky but allowing the enormous space to be lit by the scarlet sunlight.
Laid out at the bottom of the sloping floor was a mosaic of a giant eye with an elongated pupil. Inside this were depicted a maze of curling and enwrapping creepers that Amanda was familiar with from the cruder carving on William Barrett’s gravestone, but on a larger scale. This representation was directly beneath the immense skylight, which bathed it in an extra effusion of the eerie red illumination like a spotlight. Beyond the gigantic eye at the far wall was a gaping archway with tree trunk sized pillars as supports, leading to impenetrable darkness.
As if this happened every day of the week, Camilla and the other Amanda stepped into the looking-glass and began to walk down the inclined floor. Lucius like a somnambulant did likewise, moving in a stiff gait behind the woman in the business suit and the adolescent. Eventually they reached the centre of the mosaic, within the pupil and they halted.
There was some kind of grate or hole beside them because something resembling a mass of fibres on a multitude of spindly legs crawled nauseatingly from the floor. Camilla seemed unconcerned but Amanda’s replica was obviously frightened and held tightly to the hand of the business woman. But it was Lucius, now awakening from his trance, the creature was aiming for, perambulating on its many legs in a swift motion like a cockroach.
He turned and ran back towards the mirror, pure terror convulsing his face, but before he reached it the thing leapt like a grasshopper on to the back of his neck. Amanda could not hear him but she knew by his open mouth that Douglas was screaming, his arms flailing blindly behind him. She also got a closer look before the insect jumped and she saw that the body of the animal was composed of a myriad of interlocking organic strands in constant movement. It did not have a visage only a blunt end with three tubular extensions that waved in the air like antennae and it had six spidery legs; the facial extensions and the legs constructed of the same filaments as the body.
Lucius hurled himself at the other side of the looking glass but came against a solid barrier. He smashed his clenched fists at the glass and looked pleadingly at Amanda but she was too traumatized to act in his defence.
The creature’s legs griped his chest tightly ripping his tee-shirt and the three fibrous extensions wavered in front of his eyes and mouth. With a fast whipping action two of the tubes covered the orbs of his eyes with their solid membranes. The other extension undulated over his gaping, yelling mouth, covering that too.
Heaving violently, Amanda fell to her knees. Her bodily frame shaking without volition, she looked back at the looking-glass.
Lucius was standing stock still, rigid as stone. The animated mass of fibres now covering the top of his head gently pulsed, creating placid waves in the organic pipes that had smoothed over his eyes and mouth. Horribly there was movement beneath the skin of his cheeks, neck and arms, like worms in a corpse.
Without warning his body lurched jerkily out of the mirror and came towards the three terrified onlookers. Amanda and Paul acted quickly, they ran without thinking, but Moonbeam was not quick enough. A blood-curdling cry of fear made Amanda turn her head as she reached the door leading into the sitting room and she had time to observe the situation.
Lucius’ body controlled by the entity nestling on his head was dragging the prone and helpless Moonbeam by the feet, through the looking-glass and back into the alien hall. Amanda gazed for a few seconds into her imploring eyes, but at the last moment her courage failed and she fled with Paul, a last despairing scream echoing in her ears.