Chapter Eleven: Through The Looking Glass

When the day of the expedition into the unknown came around, Amanda waited with trepidation for her father to leave the house.
The tension was unbearable. She sat in her bedroom staring at the large haversack, packed the night before with items she would need for a long journey, attempting to compose in her head the goodbye letter she wanted to write to her father. At last after what seemed like an eternity her dad shouted up the stairway, “I’m off” and a few minutes later she watched his BMW drive through the opened gates.
When her father had left the apprehension eased slightly and she found the inspiration to write, resting the note paper on a hardback book.


Dear Dad
I’m going away probably for a very long time to rescue Moonbeam, but I will be back. Can’t tell you where I am going but you wouldn’t believe me anyway. I’m sorry I lost my temper the other day but PLEASE, PLEASE don’t sell the house to The Order of the Arboreal Orb. THEY ARE DANGEROUS!’
Yours truly
Amanda

Short and too the point. She would leave the message on the kitchen table and although she knew it would not put her father’s mind to rest it would go a little way towards explaining her whereabouts. Hopefully it would encourage her dad to delay the sale of the Manor as he concentrated on searching for her. It would be a long desperate search as where she was going no one could follow, unless it was The Order of the Arboreal Orb.
Hauling the heavy haversack across the floor with both arms and then pulling the bedroom door open with her left hand, she almost stepped on Jones the cat, which darted away down the corridor, startled. She was glad about one thing she thought, as she watched the ginger tom make its cautious way back to her. With any luck they would go through to the other side without sacrificing any animals, because Amanda had found a substitute or so she hoped.
Tucked away at the bottom of a box of old video cassettes in a plain white case was a tape given to her by an acquaintance from her school in California. He claimed it was a snuff movie that he had purchased from a dealer outside an underground bookshop and when she viewed it for the first and only time it was undoubtedly realistic. For all of her liking of horror films it had sickened and appalled her-fifteen minutes of blurry atrocity footage. She had meant to dump the dreadful object but for some reason had not done so.
Now the hideous film might have some use. When the idea came to her she discussed it with Doctor Baldwin on her mobile and he said it was worth trying. Instead of killing an animal they could play the snuff movie to the mirrors, to open the way. In theory the movie would function as an immoral act activating the portal, albeit an act once removed by the medium of film.
In the kitchen she placed her letter on the table, rested the haversack against a cabinet and unplugged a portable television on the top. Cradling it in her arms she carried it through the sitting room and into the library. Placing it on the cold stone floor she manoeuvred a straight backed chair into position facing the looking glass and put the TV on it, plugging it into the nearby socket. Doctor Baldwin would bring his VCR machine with him.
Once everything was in place Amanda stood back and looked about her, her arms crossed. A hushed stillness gathered around her in the church like space and her eyes were drawn to a third alcove beneath the stained glass window picturing Adam and Eve.
This had remained empty until recently, but her father had placed the newly restored mirror, which had lain for decades in the overgrown garden, within the alcove. In deep reverie she stared at the two eyes and the twisting floral patterns on one side of the looking glass and the agonised human shapes on the other. The evilly erotic Eve with the even more sinful looking serpent was reflected back at her from the other side of the library and she wondered what awesome terrors lay ahead beyond the surfaces of the three mirrors.
These mirrors now formed a triangle, the middle aisle where she stood marking its base and she remembered what Doctor Baldwin had told her. The hall had been the focal point of George Brown’s sect and the three looking glasses had been unconsciously arranged by Amanda’s father into the triangular pattern used by the Satanists. The base of the triangle was where human sacrifices were performed five hundred years ago to gain access to the Ten Universes; bodies with their hearts torn out were strung from the oaken beams and bloody trials of gore covered the floor, taking the worshippers to the mirrors, now open gateways to other dimensions.
Back in the kitchen she sat at the table and waited. The temperature although it was mid October was extremely humid and beads of sweat had formed on her forehead, trickling slowly down the sides of her face.
Looking out of the window she saw purpled hued flowers with big funnelled petals and long stamens like proboscises, nod gently against the glass; the thick spiky stems swaying as if they moved by their own volition. These outlandish tropical plants were all over the garden and at night they glowed, attracting the strange insect life, complimenting the bright multicoloured mushrooms the size of plates arising from the fertile but sickly soil. Stranger still had been the reaction of her father who had completely ignored the weird growth, the heat and the unnatural life forms.
So many unanswered questions, Amanda thought. The most worrying concerned the actions of the Order of the Arboreal Orb. For instance why had they left Doctor Baldwin free to use George Browne’s grimoire without taking it from him by force? When the cult had intercepted them in the cemetery they could have taken it easily. But instead the mutant insect released by the man in the Golf, although unsettling, had been harmless. Maybe they were playing games, waiting for an ideal moment to pounce and what a better moment she thought with a shudder then when they where out of the ordinary world.
Hearing the beeper announce the arrival of Doctor Baldwin and Paul, she went into the hallway and stared for a few moments at the image of the scruffy middle aged academic and the young guitarist on the tiny screen connected to the CCTV camera. She pressed the button activating the gate and pulled open the front door, waiting for the man and boy to arrive.
Burdened with rucksacks similar to her own, they stood in the hall, Doctor Baldwin, clutching the VCR, gazing around in engrossed fascination especially at the floral motifs on the banisters. He was dressed in lightweight walking trousers, boots and a pale blue nylon shirt buttoned to the top, his thin uncombed hair falling to below his collar. Paul was clad in comparable style to Amanda, wearing khaki combat trousers, Doc Martins and a black Motorhead tee shirt advertising their latest tour.
Directing them to the kitchen she picked up her haversack and lead the way to the library. There was a pause as Dr Baldwin took in the ominous ambience of the large book filled room, a look of wonder on his gaunt features, no doubt pondering the evil enacted within these walls. After fixing up the video recorder, he carefully extracted from one of the pockets on his haversack, George Browne’s book, took it from its transparent folder and placed it on the small table in front of the left hand mirror, opening it to a marked page. Amanda and Paul stood to the side, merely spectators to what was about to follow.
As well as the backpack, he had brought with him a small cage containing a brown furred rat that scurried in panic from one side of its prison to the other. Where he had got the animal from, Amanda could only wonder.
“Hopefully we will not need the rat,” he said, placing the cage on the floor. “But just in case.” Ominously he withdrew a kitchen knife from his haversack and put it on the table. Amanda looked on, her stomach turning over, and she quickly grabbed the video cassette from a pocket in her rucksack and inserted it into the VCR, but before she would turn it on she waited for Doctor Baldwin’s instructions.
“Amanda, play the video and stand to the side. Once the portal is open get through as fast as you can, I don’t think it will remain open for long.”
Spreading his arms wide opposite the table and the looking-glass, Doctor Baldwin, looking directly at the grimoire, began to intone words in an unknown guttural language. His words were overlaid by the appalling screams, despairing moans and thwacks and pummelling sounds coming from the television and Amanda was glad she was not facing the screen, witnessing the atrocities committed on the helpless victims.
Paul smirked at first as he surveyed the scene but as the television set was directly in his line of sight the grin soon faded to be replaced with a look of repugnance that grow more pronounced the longer the film continued. Amanda’s heart was beating faster and faster as the time dragged on and still the mirror had not opened up.
Involuntary her sight was drawn to the rat in the cage as she grow more and more concerned that the poor thing would have to be killed and her heart leapt into her mouth when Jones the cat began to paw at the rat’s cage. Somehow Jones had crept undetected into the library and was now staring with intense curiosity at the terrified rodent.
Just as she turned her eyes back to Doctor Baldwin, whose voice had risen dramatically, drowning out the horrific sounds in the film, the looking glass went black. A moment later instead of the wild perspiring reflection of the doctor there appeared the alien and gigantic antechamber she had last seen at her fateful initiation.
“Now, everybody through,” Doctor Baldwin yelled, stuffing the book back into its transparent folder and slipping it into his haversack. Pushing the table aside he leapt through the mirror and soon afterwards Paul did the same
But Amanda hesitated staring at the towering walls awash with eerie red light, the sloping floor made of rotting slabs of stone leading to the eye mosaic at its centre and the gaping pillared archway, entrance to god knows what monstrous destinations. The tiny figures of Doctor Baldwin and Paul, dwarfed by the soaring chamber, beckoned frantically for her to join them. 
After a few seconds she acted; grasping the startled cat by the scruff of its neck with one hand, the haversack with the other, Amanda ran into her nightmares.

Chapter Ten: The Grimoire

Wearing gloves as instructed by Doctor Baldwin, Amanda carefully lifted each page of the 16^th century volume. The Doctor sitting behind the desk in his study leaned over, concerned his precious find would be damaged, but she tried to ignore him. Unfortunately the tome was written in Latin so she would be unable to read it; annoyingly she would have to rely on Doctor Baldwin’s knowledge. But there were pictures, diagrammatic woodcuttings and more, that had a disturbing effect.
As Paul, sitting next to her and staring at the book, made fake grimaces of disgust, she studied each picture carefully. Some were merely hieroglyphics, outlandish and incomprehensible, but others were pictorial: an eye in the middle of folds of flesh, gazing with evil intent, malformed insects constructed of hundreds of miniature plant like worms, humanoid figures likewise composed of organic growths, either engaged in some form of atrocious act or eating each other and scenes of ritual human sacrifice mostly involving disembowelments, eyes ripped from faces, bodies in cruciform positions strung from trees or poles, encircled by wildly dancing worshipers. Phantasmagorical landscapes were the backdrop to many of these drawings, recognisable from her nightmares of two weeks ago.
“This picture would be great for our next album cover,” Paul said, pointing to a particular nasty scene.
“It makes my skin crawl,” Amanda said after turning the last page, deliberately ignoring Paul’s comment. “But what does it all mean?”
“What I have read has confirmed my suspicions. It’s both theoretical and practical. The theoretical part turns the Cabala on its head; a description of the sefirotic tree of life totally at odds with the ancient Jewish tradition. The practical part is a guide to the rituals essential for union, not with God as in traditional Cabalism but with supreme evil.”
“That explains a lot,” Paul said, making a wry face.
“You will let me know everything about the book, won’t you Doctor Baldwin,” Amanda said trying to catch his eye but failing. Having taken the book away from her, he was absorbed in a specific page.
“Sure,” he assented but he did not look up from the tome.
Normally she would have angrily demanded more from him, extracting every piece of information he held. But for some reason her usual confidence was gone as if her twin had taken it with her into the unknown region behind the mirror.
“So what do we do next,” Paul said breaking the silence.
“First I have to study the book and then I can formulate a plan of action. Working day and night it should take about a week.”
“Leave it up to you in other words,” Amanda managed to say.
“Yes.”
She was unable to reply to that blunt affirmative. Instead she stood up and looked at her watch.
“I better get going, my dad will be getting worried.
“Yes, of course.” Doctor Baldwin still had his head lowered over the old grimoire but now was scribbling ineligible notes in a pad of paper. “I will be in touch.”
The doctor remained absorbed in his work, They let themselves out.
It was about eight in the evening, a day after the grave robbing expedition, and it was already dark. Deciding to walk to the Manor via Abbey Street and then the residential road that merged with it, rather then the unlit towpath beside the Thames, Amanda talked quietly to Paul. As they went past the entrance to the New Cemetery both lingered, staring down the long aisle of the dead at the obscured corner, where they had exhumed Sir William’s body.
“I hope they never find out that we interfered with someone’s grave,” Amanda said.
“I doubt it; we filled it in pretty good.”
Cars passed them as they continued on and they crossed the road near a small roundabout, making their way through a housing estate, then another residential street lined with terraced houses; the residents behind their cosy walls oblivious of the peculiar malevolency lurking only minutes away.
Finally they reached the gates of Ashbury Manor, Amanda and Paul pausing awhile outside and gazing at each other.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea if you come in, Paul. My dad will start asking questions.”
“I agree,” he replied, nodding his head and giving her a resigned but sweet smile. “I’ll see you then but give me a call if Doctor Strange comes up with anything.”
Amanda laughed and watched his retreating back as he walked the way they had come, starting the two mile trek to the train station.

It took two excruciatingly long weeks before Doctor Baldwin contacted Amanda.
In those two weeks, after the police enquiry drew a blank, her dad made up his mind he was going to sell the house and return to America. But friends of Moonbeam and Lucius began to get concerned. They approached the police independently and the investigation picked up again. A thorough search of the Manor and its grounds was undertaken, but they found no evidence of wrong doing.
It began to dawn on her that her father suspected her of involvement in a kidnapping or even the murder of Moonbeam. He hardly spoke and kept to himself, becoming even more withdrawn. Only when he drove her to and from school did they talk, mostly about her sessions with the counsellor, but the conversations were mostly carried out in monosyllables. None of his band mates visited and he hardly went out, spending most of the time brooding in the library or aimlessly playing the guitar in the studio annex. His demeanour became more bedraggled and unkempt, an expression of vacancy always on his unshaven faces as if he was taking hard drugs, and ominously he refused to get dressed-instead he wandered around the house in his dressing gown.
Most of the time she felt on the verge of crying in her father‘s presence, but she held back, ending up silently weeping when she was in the privacy of her room. She had never felt so lonely in her life.
She tried calling Paul but she kept getting a woman at the other end of the phone, probably his mother, who told her that he had gone out and then got angry when she tried to enquire further. Paul never rang her.
She considered phoning Doctor Baldwin or visiting him, but thinking about it she realised he was so engrossed in study he would not want to talk to her. Anyway the Doctor was too intimidating and Amanda’s depression deepened when she reflected that this obsessed old man was (except for Paul) her only real acquaintance. The two girls she had met on her first day at school had remained distant. They regarded her famous father with too much star struck deference for a strong friendship to develop.
As for the house there were no further eruptions of the supernatural but a tense hush reigned as if the Manor awaited an event that would change everything. Amanda did not know if it was her state of mind but the holes or voids of shadow in corners and at the end of corridors were getting deeper and darker. Her fear increased at the same rate that the tension rose, reaching a pitch that was almost unbearable. What made it worse was the morose spectre of her father moving purposelessly from room to room, oblivious to the rising pressure. Very soon now she knew that her self-control would snap and she would verbally attack her father, if only to get a reaction from him.
Although they were a different species from the insect released in the graveyard, the outlandish bugs in the garden scared her and she kept her window shut tightly at night; curling into a ball underneath the bed covers when she heard them rattling against the glass. She could easily imagine herself in the tropics as she sweated beneath the sheets; the sounds of bountiful life existing in the transformed garden keeping up its weird barrage of sound.
Returning to her room after a particularly depressing dinner, where her father had stared sullenly into space picking at his food, she heard through the door the faint ring tones of her mobile. Clasping the small silver object to her ear, her heart beating rapidly, she listened to the posh English voice at the other end, exited and exuberant.
Doctor Baldwin babbled almost incomprehensible about a dark side of Cabalist doctrine with Ashbury Manor at its centre. George Browne’s grimoire was a revelation, terrifying in its implications. It touched on subjects that brought him out in a cold sweat. He believed they were up against a power or force even the most courageous would shrink from, a monstrous agency that threatened existence itself.
Amanda had to admit the Doctor did not seem petrified in the slightest; rather he was over enthusiastic as if he was a scientist who had discovered a new hypothesis to explain the universe. She told him brusquely that in a couple of weeks’ time she would have left the Manor and England altogether.
“Then we are going to have to act quickly…We are going to enter Ashbury Manor” he said, a note of agitation in his voice.
“But…I already live here.” Amanda was perplexed, if it was not for the frightening experiences she had gone through she would have thought the doctor was deranged.
“I mean enter the real Ashbury Manor, not the mere façade you live in. The manor existing beyond the mirrors, an architectural masterpiece defining the topology of evil itself; a gateway to the Ten Universes, emanating from the embodiment of the counter godhead, the eternal eye.”
She restrained her urge to cut the connection and instead took a deep breath, trying to get to grips with her confusion.
“You don’t make any sense, Doctor Baldwin.”
“I thought you were desperate to know what was contained in the book. Well I have studied it and I want to go further, through the looking glass and beyond. Look, we are going to have to meet up and discuss this in some detail. If you come around to my house on Saturday I will reveal everything.”
Amanda acknowledged his suggestion with a resigned grunt, but secretly felt relieved things were moving forward.
“And bring your boyfriend; we’re going to need him.”

The worn, centuries old but surprisingly resilient pages of George Browne’s book lay open upon Doctor Baldwin’s coffee table at an inexplicable diagram depicting circles connected by straight lines. Inside the lines were words written in an unknown alphabet and inside the circles were sinister but beautiful drawings of landscapes Amanda recognised from her nightmares: deserts of crystal and jungles of exotic vegetation. Beneath these elaborate drawings were the faint outlines of what looked like the mapping of a complex labyrinth and at the base of the main diagram was an eye staring in terror and crowning the whole structure was another eye emanating malice and hatred.
They pulled the armchairs, on which they sat, close to the table in Doctor Baldwin’s sitting room. The doctor wearing plastic gloves leaned forward on the sofa, his body rigid, concerned the two teenagers would attempt to touch his precious book. His thin gaunt features were lit by the sunlight coming from the window overlooking the garden that had not been worked in for years, reflecting off his huge spectacles. A strong stench of stale sweat arose from the doctor’s skeletal body, forcing Amanda to lean backward in a futile attempt to escape the smell. But in the end she gave up, letting her horrified fascination with the old grimoire take her over instead.
“You know I could be a very rich man if I sold this book,” Doctor Baldwin was saying. “It’s probably the rarest book in the world, rarer then any other occultist manual, but not as old as the Necronomicon or The Book of Eibon. But that’s beside the point, the real riches lie within its pages.”
Amanda was aware of the ticking away of time. Only today her father announced they were leaving within three weeks and they would be gone sooner if it was not for some final preparations. He had sold the depressing pile at a very good price, incredible rapidly, to a wealthy religious group from Somerset for use as a headquarters; a representative would be visiting on Saturday afternoon to have a look around.
“This is all very interesting Doctor Baldwin, but my dad has sold the house and if we are to rescue Moonbeam and prove my innocence…”
“This goes beyond anything you could possible imagine. George Browne’s twisted genius designed and built an edifice that does not merely exist in our world but also is a springboard to other worlds, other times. His architectural masterpiece represents a map of the Ten Universes, offspring of a Prime Universe, a universe of evil, the Eternal Eye or Arboreal Orb as George Browne called it-the satanic mirror image of the divine godhead in Cabbalistic theory. Disturbingly our world which is the Base Universe is an emanation of the primary malevolency and not separate from it. The construction of Ashbury Manor was an attempt to reach the Eternal Eye, to become at one with it.”
Sighing forlornly, Amanda put her head in her hands.
Detecting her frustration, the doctor changed tack slightly. “But I have discovered in my reading a method of entering the real Ashbury Manor. We can track down this Camilla woman, Moonbeam and your doppelganger. The way of doing so involves an enactment of a ritual to open up the mirrors. There is a problem though.”
Paul who had sat silently through the proceedings with a look of mild disgust on his face spoke up for the first time.
“What sort of problem?”
“At your initiation, Amanda, you were asked to sacrifice a cat to prove you were suitable membership material for the Order of the Arboreal Orb; in other words you could act without moral scruples,” the doctor said, ignoring Paul and staring directly at Amanda in an unnerving fashion.
“But this amoral act was also the method of gaining entry to the vast hidden halls, rooms and corridors of the Manor. As it turned out your ‘evil twin’ broke away before you decided which path to follow. Whatever the mysterious cause of this split, the fact remains that the only way of entering is to enact some kind of evil or amorality.”
“First we desecrated the resting place of the dead and now you want us to mutilate animals,” Paul said, laughing nervously.
“I’ll do it, just leave it to me,” said Doctor Baldwin expressionlessly. “If we wish to confront this awesome threat and save Moonbeam, it has to be done.”
“This is sick,” Amanda said beneath her breath. She felt forces beyond her control were sweeping her away; powers she could not even make sense of, let alone confront. She relied too much on Doctor Baldwin; a man so wrapped up in his own obsessions he could dig up a corpse and now wanted to inflict suffering on an animal. But at that moment she had an idea which she clutched at desperately.
“There is another problem. We are going to have to perform the ritual without my dad knowing. This is impossible as he never departs from the house. Doing it at night is risky because he doesn’t sleep very well and wanders around the house.”
“But I thought you said your dad was meeting his band mates in London next Sunday,” Paul said.
There was a stony silence. Amanda wanted to kill him, extremely slowly.
“Yes we can enact the procedure then, it shouldn’t take too long,” Doctor Baldwin said, oblivious to the tension between the two youngsters. “A week gives me more time to prepare. I still have to do more reading to fully understand the ritual and the sort of terrain we will be moving in. This is exiting; we are entering regions very few mortals have explored. If I arrive at noon would this be convenient for you”
A resigned apathy had taken hold of her. She was unable to take any form of action removing her from Doctor Baldwin’s insane, dangerous and immoral quest. The thought of hurting an animal, causing suffering, made her shake with repugnance, but her will to say no or even protest had been sapped. With a nod she accepted.
“That’s settled then,” Doctor Baldwin said, getting up and carefully taking the book from the table and walking towards the hall. “I’ll see you Sunday week at noon.”

Later on the towpath beside the Thames, dodging the occasional speeding bicycle and getting out of the way of the Canada geese milling around, Paul made an attempt to break the barrier Amanda had retreated behind.
“I’m sorry if I put my foot in it but I thought that you were keen on rescuing Moonbeam.”
“I was, but I feel out of my depth. I hate the thought of killing animals and Doctor Baldwin just seems to take it in his stride. He’s such a weirdo!”
A light rain was splashing into the grey river from the thick cloud cover but it was not cold. They walked on in silence, feeling the rain intensify around them and they increased their pace, Paul hunched up in his leather jacket in a futile effort to keep the rain away. Amanda did not care. She was preoccupied, allowing the water from the sky to fall on her exposed head and sweat shirt without protest.
“Would you like to come out with me tonight.”
“I better not. If my dad finds out I’m seeing you it might ruin our plans for next Sunday. I’m sure he thinks we’re behind the disappearance of his girlfriend, even her murder.”
“No way! He can’t possible think that.”
“My dad is acting very strangely, he hardly talks to me.”
They had come to the turning leading to Ashbury Manor and Amanda hesitated. She wanted Paul to stay and she would have loved to have spent the evening out with him, if only to get away from the house, but she was frightened, frightened of her father. The rain was falling so heavily puddles were forming on the muddy ground and her clothes were soaked, weighty with wetness. Looking across at Paul she saw he was in a similar state. Normally she would have had an excellent excuse to invite him in.
“Staying in at night in that creepy hole doesn’t do you any good,” he said, desperately looking around for some shelter.
“I know but what else can I do,” she replied, a slight quiver in her voice. “We better separate, we’re getting very wet.” She turned her back on him and with head down walked away.
Running back to the Manor, she underwent a feeling of separation, exaggerated by the thought she had been extremely rude to Paul. She cursed herself and felt tears welling up inside as she reached the entrance of the house, vaguely noticing a black Mercedes parked outside with a dark figure of a uniformed chauffeur in the driver’s seat.
Letting her self in to the house she wiped her mud caked plimsolls on the door mat but then decided to take them off. Her hair clinging to her wet face like seaweed and her jeans heavy with the extra weight of rain water, she squelched towards the stairs, but before she reached them she heard the voices of her father and an unknown speaker coming from the kitchen. Listening intently, immobile as a statue, she caught a few words but the ones standing out as if written in blazing neon sent a shock like electricity through her body: The Order of the Arboreal Orb.
With a flash of appalling revelation she realised her father was selling the Manor to the cult. She remained still, undecided; should she confront her dad or flee to her bedroom. Suddenly she was jolted from her dilemma by a knock on the front door making her flinch. Reaching out she opened the door and stared at the chauffeur, who stood on the step, getting soaked in the downpour.
Amanda felt her insides turn to jelly as she recognised the man, the same man who had kept Doctor Baldwin’s house under surveillance and released the insect in the cemetery. He gave a humourless grin, water dripping from his cap and moved confidently into the hallway as she backed slowly towards the ornate stairway. Finally she ran defeated up the stairs, unable to face the implications of what her father was about to do.

Chapter Nine: Grave Robbing

“Hello Doctor Baldwin, it’s Amanda.”
She was using her mobile in her room after school, the TV set on and the sound turned down low, keeping her voice quiet in case her father was listening.
The voice of the doctor at the other end seemed surprised but pleased. “I thought I was never going to hear from you or your father. What can I do for you?”
“Well, I want to help you.”
“I would love some help, but you’re under age. I am going ahead with the exhuming of the body of Sir William anyway. I think I can just about do it on my own. Any information I get I will pass on.”
“You’re going to need a look-out at least, I can then give you some warning if anyone passes by,” Amanda suggested. “I might even be able to get someone else to help, you know Paul, the guy who witnessed my initiation in the library.”
“That’s an excellent idea, but I would be in serious trouble if anything went wrong.” There was a silence at the other end of the phone as if Doctor Baldwin was considering Amanda’s suggestion. “If you manage to get Paul interested” he said at last, “give me a call and I might accept your offer.”
Without any delay Amanda dialled Paul’s house-she had found the number by contacting Darkcore Records the evening before. A woman picked up the phone and it was a few minutes before Paul came on the line and when he did, to Amanda’s surprise, there was a hint of relief in his voice.
Pacing to one side of her room to the next, she attempted to explain the meeting with Doctor Baldwin and his proposal to rob the dead. She was surprised to find that it was not difficult to persuade him.
“I have been doing a lot of thinking since the party,” Paul said. “I haven’t been sleeping and I don’t think I can ignore what I saw that night, it will drive me mad. I am going to have to take some kind of action.”
“Great, my thoughts exactly,” Amanda said and then apologised for calling him a snitch. They did not talk long after that and she promised to get back to him as soon as possible.
Feeling pleased with herself she sat on the bed, allowing Jones the cat to climb onto her lap and rang the doctor back, but the line was engaged. Perspiration was falling profusely from her forehead and she wiped it off with the back of her hand. It was very warm, unusually so for this time of year. All day at school it had been cool, a thin drizzle of rain coming from grey skies, but once within the grounds of Ashbury Manor, the rise in temperature had been noticeable. The window in her bedroom was open but no cooling breezes entered to alleviate the heat.
Opening the door to allow the ginger tom to leave, she gazed around her room. It was only 7 in the evening and a whole expanse of empty time stretched ahead of her. She had no friends here to phone up or visit and the usual solitary pastimes like watching movies, listening to music or reading no longer appealed.
Looking at the garish covers of her goth and metal CD’s, her selection of horror videos and books resting in ordered piles against the walls, awaiting shelves to be put up, she was suddenly repelled by their gothic exaggeration and violent imagery. Her enthusiasm for the dark side had seemingly been taken from her, but there was an emptiness inside of her as if an important part of her psyche had been severed or a close friend had been spirited away.
The house too appeared even more constricting but at the same time the shadowed corners of her room had, if only in her imagination, expanded out to infinities of blackness. The heat was getting oppressive and Amanda decided she had to go for a long walk to escape the enclosure of the time-worn walls.
Meeting her father on the stairs she told him she was going for a walk. Jonathan was distracted and had an air of fretfulness about him, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, but he immediately focused on his daughter.
Amanda could not help but notice that he clutched a cigarette in his hand and he had not shaved this morning. At seeing her father like this she felt a wave of unhappiness overwhelm her. Her sadness was so strong she almost flung herself at her dad so she could burst into tears in his arms, but she controlled herself.
“Please tell me, Amanda if you’re hiding anything from me,” Jonathan said, abruptly and loudly.
“I’m not hiding anything. I’ve told you everything but you don’t believe me,” she said in a slightly raised voice rather taken aback by her dad’s outburst.
Calming down her father said resignedly, “Yeah I know. Bye the way I’ve booked you to see a very good counsellor, a friend of Moonbeam’s, a week from today.”
“Dad, I’ll see you later.” She moved past him towards the main entrance.
“Don’t be too long,” he said anxiously.
When she stepped onto the driveway in the gathering twilight, the gravel crunching underfoot, it was like walking out on a balmy evening in the tropics. Frogs with iridescent leathery skins of many colours hoped at her feet and she wondered at their strange markings, not having seen anything like them before except in nature programmes. The large beetle-like insects that flew in the air above her head were even more alien and reminded her of the bugs she had seen in her dreams, which swarmed in the cavernous spaces existing beyond the looking-glass.
They made her skin crawl and she quickened her pace making for the gate, but before she could reach it, one of the flying creepy-crawlies got caught in her hair. Frantically extracting it, she let it fall to the ground and fascinated despite herself with this odd life-form, she stooped low to get a closer look.
The creature moved weakly on its six legs and its transparent wings unfolded from its dazzlingly beautiful carapace; but its constantly moving mandibles and wavering antennae were repulsive and she felt the sting in her scalp where the thing had bit her. In an excess of revulsion she stamped it under her foot and ran from the grounds.
Once she had left the temperature dropped considerably. It was still warm, but this warmth was only the normal heat of an English evening at the end of summer. The drizzle that had dominated the daytime had ceased and it made for a comfortable stroll towards the river past the pub. Amanda realised she was walking aimlessly, making her way to the path beside the Thames purely as a means of escaping the Manor. She had no destination, no friends to visit, nothing. Always at the back of her mind was the beckoning presence of the old house, summoning her as if it had consciously allowed for this brief moment of freedom, knowing full well she had to return.
Now standing alone staring at the darkening river, the line of low bungalow’s on the other side and the vivid colours of the sunset staining the clouds, she had the idea of making an impromptu call on Doctor Baldwin. He was somebody she could talk to. Rapidly making her mind up, she set off in the direction of his house.
When she arrived there it was a few minutes before the doctor opened the door. He seemed a little startled if not annoyed, as if she had disturbed something, but he soon allowed her to enter, directing her to the living room. The room was surprisingly neat considering the clutter of the hall and the study upstairs, consisting of a battered old sofa, a rather plush armchair, and an old TV attached to an ancient VCR player. There was only one bookshelf, which held modern paperbacks and some hardbacks on its shelves, instead of the leather bound manuscripts dominating his study.
But on entering the living room, her eyes were drawn to a video case lying near the recorder. The kitsch image of the well muscled, naked man on the case contrasted so radically with the plain décor of the room that at first she was unable to look away. As Dr Baldwin swiftly kicked the tape under the stand the TV stood on, she was suffused with embarrassment.
There was a moment of silence you could cut with a knife but eventually it was broken by Dr Baldwin speaking in a hesitant voice, offering her a cup of tea. She accepted and propped herself on the edge of the sofa, trying to avoid gazing too intently at a box of tissues resting on the floor near the TV.
“Paul’s agreed to help us,” she said when the doctor had passed her a cup and saucer and he had sat in the armchair.
“I’m so glad,” he said, his voice less hesitant, suddenly turning all his attention to Amanda. “We will begin the digging at two in the morning next Tuesday to avoid detection. Is that alright with you?”
“Yes, although I have to go to school the next day. I suppose at the weekend there could be more people around.”
“That’s correct. I would like to do it sooner but I need to prepare. The longer you stay at Ashbury Manor the more at risk you and your father will be. But you do know what you’re getting into, don’t you,” he said, suddenly very serious and stern. “This whole thing is very dangerous, extremely dangerous and I don’t just mean the possibility of getting caught grave robbing. Maybe it would be for the best if you fled or at least moved elsewhere temporally. We are dealing with forces of evil that transcend the everyday. Your very soul might be in jeopardy.”
“I think it already is, Doctor Baldwin. I am in great danger. I am very frightened. That’s why I want to help you.”
“Sure, but you must never confide in your father. His natural inclinations will want to protect you because he considers me, well…odd. He will go to the police and have me arrested.”
“And another thing…” Getting up from his chair, resting his tea on the armrest and gesturing to Amanda, he went to the kitchen which overlooked the road.
Pointing out the window to a red Volkswagen Golf underneath a streetlight, he said, “I’m under surveillance. If you look closer you will see a man in the car. He’s been there all day.”
“Who’s watching you?”
“The Order of the Arboreal Orb. They’ve found out you have made contact with me, which makes the situation even more awkward. Our grave robbing expedition is going to be that little bit more perilous.”
Amanda did not wish to return to the Manor but it was important her dad did not become suspicious. She promised she would meet the doctor at 2am at St Mary’s church and she left for home, glancing back at the car beneath the streetlight.
At that moment the car’s engine started and the vehicle moved off in the opposite direction. She quickened her pace and shivered even though the night was warm.

Sleep was as allusive as a wisp of smoke that Monday evening and in the end the alarm clock Amanda had set for half-past one was not needed. The long tiring day at school tomorrow worried her as she arose from her disturbed bed and put on her clothes, but she was getting used to tiredness and anyway lack of sleep paled into insignificance when she thought what else could arise in the next few hours.
Since her meeting with Doctor Baldwin the previous week everything seemed to have been leading up to this moment. She had nothing to do with the preparations, so she carried on with her life as normally as she could. Her father had called the police on Thursday, but they were very perfunctory in their investigations, merely making notes while they talked to Jonathan for half an hour and then with her for fifteen minutes. They left promising to follow up the enquiry but it was obvious they considered the case a domestic problem.
After that her father had withdrawn further into himself, spending a lot of time in his studio annex. Amanda went to school and did her homework, so her dad would not get any suspicions, but she found it hard.
Shutting her bedroom door very quietly behind her she moved downstairs almost on tiptoe. Her father, suffering in the last two weeks the same insomnia as herself, had a tendency to pop up unexpectedly like a red eyed dishevelled ghost, but she reached the front door without incident.
Outside the atmosphere was as strangely sultry as ever, the night noises more akin to a rainforest then an English late summer, but she left the grounds at a fast pace, the heat and the sounds ceasing as soon as she passed through the gate, as if they had been switched off. In there place the dark stillness and the eerie quiet of early morning descended like a thick curtain and she moved almost running to the main entrance of St Mary’s churchyard.
The doctor was not there and she agitatedly glanced at her wristwatch beneath a fitfully glowing streetlight, her heart skipping a beat when she realised that she was late. The isolation of the deserted street, the darkened cavity of the church and the blunt silhouettes of the gravestones made her feel vulnerable.
A feeling of weakness, of irresolution crept up on her. Amanda began to wonder what she was doing out here, meeting a creepy middle-aged man with a dangerous obsession. Their attempt at digging up a grave in the dead of night suddenly felt insane to her.
Taking one last look around her, staring into the menacing shadows of the churchyard and glancing up and down Abbey Street, she took a step across the pavement, meaning to walk home. Tomorrow she would talk to her dad, pursued him to sell the Manor and in the meantime they would fly back to America and stay in a luxury hotel, until they bought another house. But before she could take another step she was grabbed roughly by the arm and spun around to face the surly features of Doctor Baldwin.
“You’re late,” he hissed, dragging her brusquely behind the wall.
“Get away from me, you creep,” she shouted, extracting herself from his weak grip. Trying to calm her beating heart she leant with one arm on the rough flaky brick of the wall, her right foot sinking into the damp soil of the flower beds. Shut off from the streetlights, it was very dark, the heavy foliage of a yew tree making it even darker. The smell of stale sweat told her that the doctor was standing close and she tried to escape by moving sideways, holding onto the uneven bricks as a guide.
“Where is your friend? He’s bloody late as well,” he whispered, griping her arm again and pulling her away from the wall and closer to him, his odour making Amanda heave. “This is not some teenage escapade when you can turn up when you want, you know. Now where is he? I’m going to need to dig up the grave, before sunrise.”
“I don’t know,” she stammered, trying to hold back the tears that were about to slip down her face, desperately thinking of ways to avoid this situation.
There was movement from behind and both Amanda and Doctor Baldwin turned to confront whatever it was.
She gave a sigh of relief when she saw the dim form of Paul standing in the pale illumination coming from the street. “Sorry I’m late,” he said innocently. “I was delayed.”
“Thank god you’re here anyway,” the doctor said and Amanda noticed that, when he switched on a bulky torch, he was shaking all over and perspiring heavily. “Help me with this bag will you.”
Doctor Baldwin, directing the torch into the church yard, lit up the leaning gravestones with their markings of remorse and death, as well as the large carry-all. Paul, without saying anything, came over and picked up the carry-all with both arms, the bag clanking metallically. A night-bird hooted in the distance.
“Follow me,” the doctor said. “We will go the back way into the New Cemetery. We haven’t a moment to lose.”
Amanda decided to follow Doctor Baldwin and face the hazards. Running away was an option and if Paul had not arrived she would have done so, easily out-manoeuvring the awkward doctor. She was out of her depth. Her drives, compulsions, her confidence had gone since the ceremony in the library, but she still felt responsible for the young guitarist. If it had not been for her he would not be here in a graveyard with the intention to rob the dead. With trepidation, faint with fear, she paced after the retreating torch beam wavering on the church wall and the graves.
Catching up with the struggling Paul, she took hold of one of the bag straps and both of them hauled the heavy carry-all through the gate into the Old Cemetery at the back of St Mary’s, moving onwards after the retreating arc of torch light, the sound of clattering metal disturbing the eerie early morning silence. The table tombs, broken angelic statues and moss scared markers of the dead were revealed fitfully by the beam which came to rest next to the entrance to the New Cemetery. They gratefully lowered the canvas bag to the ground and caught their breath, but Doctor Baldwin urged them on.
It was not long before they reached Sir William Barrett’s small and horizontal gravestone, tucked away in the forgotten corner of the cemetery. Immediately the doctor unzipped the carry-all now resting on the damp grass and extracted two spades, a crowbar, and an electric lamp. He passed one of the spades to Paul and kept hold of the other.
“Right, lets start digging, the quicker we do this the better,” he said and then pointed down the middle pathway that could just be discerned in the gloom. “Amanda, go to the entrance, over there. If you see anything suspicious call me on my mobile, the ring tone will warn us, now go!” After handing her a scrap of paper with the number on it, he began to dig into the resistant grassy earth.Obeying his commands she paced off down the path, holding the torch rigidly in both hands and keeping the beam still so as to light the path only. She did not want to see the looming gravestones on either side. When she reached the second entrance into the New Cemetery, fronting the road with its row of darkened terraced houses on the other side, she switched off the torch and crept into the uncertain shelter of the threadbare hedge that bordered the graveyard.

After a while she began to relax, listening to the distant sounds of digging coming from behind. A few cars went by even at this late hour, and once a police vehicle drove past, but was away before she could become concerned. But just as she was becoming bored, she was jolted out of her lethargy when she saw a Volkswagen Golf parking directly opposite. A man got out on the driver’s side and walked leisurely across the deserted road.
Acting quickly she rang Dr Baldwin’s mobile, letting it ring three times, her heart in her mouth, hoping desperately that she had not been seen by the owner of the vehicle.

Slowly and carefully he extracted from the inside pocket of his coat a matchbox. Placing it gingerly on the hard surface he carefully began to push the matchbox open with a pair of tweezers, an intense look of concentration on his face. A frantic buzzing sound emanated from the box, loud enough to be audible from where Amanda lay in the hedge. Then the object contained in the matchbox was set lose; a flying insect as big as a baby’s hand.
The man in the long coat as soon as the bug was released ran back across the road, climbed into his car and with a screech of the Golf’s tires drove off. The insect flew above Amanda’s hiding place to where Doctor Baldwin and Paul were working.
It all happened so fast that she did not have time to get a close look at the creature, but something about it made her skin crawl. Except for its transparent wings, the insect seemed to be composed of tiny interlocking filaments similar to the thing that had attacked Lucius Peake, but on a smaller scale. Again, she felt the impulse to run away, leave the doctor and Paul to their fate, but her feelings of responsibility towards the man and the boy got the better of her.
Creeping stealthily, the terror of coming across the insect making her throw the torch beam wildly around, exposing the leering faces of angels and cracked headstones, she moved gradually back to the grave.
It was open, a high mound of soil to one side, two spades lying near the lip of the six foot hole, the lamp turned off, but no sign of the doctor or the young guitarist. She agitatedly shone the torch light into dark corners, revealing the rusty railings of the fence and the unkempt undergrowth growing thickly in this part of the New Cemetery, wanting to shout out to Doctor Baldwin and Paul but too intimated to do so.
Unable to resist looking into the opened grave, Amanda directed the shaft of illumination into the black pit, immediately exposing the rotting wood of the coffin. The decayed lid had been prised up and rested against the uneven walls of the cavity and inside the man-sized box were the yellowed and dishevelled remains of Sir William Barrett. But as if seeds from the tropics had seeped into the restricted spaces of the coffin, plant growth had sprung up, wrapping the skeleton in a thin shroud of foliage.
It was as if this vegetation had grotesquely fed off the dead body, sprouting purple and blood-red tropical
fruits that pulsated with the putrefying ooze of decomposition, swimming with liquefied flesh from the corpse, beneath their exotic rinds. The skull grinned back at her through its mask of clinging greenery, the tendrils having shoot up through the empty eye sockets and covering an ancient looking book that leaned against the rib cage, clutched by the skeletal hands.
But it was not the book that had caught her eye, but the bug that crawled on its black leather surface, the same insect that had been released from the matchbox. Without warning the creature unfurled its wings and flew into the air, disturbed by the torch beam.
A few seconds went by as Amanda held her breath, hoping that the thing had flown away, but then, quickly stifling a scream, she heard the buzzing very close and then the sensation of many legs moving up her arm at the same moment the sound ceased.
Her first reaction was to violently sweep it from her arm and another split second and she would have done so, her other arm raised. But unbidden, an image of Lucius Peake and his dreadful fate came into her mind and her arm stalled. She remained frozen in complete thrall to her terror. Now she could not move even if she had wanted too.
Gradually, without any hurry, the insect perambulated upwards, clinging to the thick surface of her leather jacket, making its way to her shoulder. She had time to notice in the dim light of pre-dawn the composite nature of the animal. Made of hundreds of worm like strands that weaved in and out, they undulated constantly, except for the bony carapace that hid the enfolded wings and with a sickening lurch of her whole being, she saw a miniature version of the three tubular extensions that had wavered on the blunt head of the monster that had attacked the owner of Darkcore Records.
The creature was on her neck now, crawling stealthily and finally reached her cheek, feeling the movement of its legs on her skin. It did not stop there but continued towards her tightly closed eyes. A ghastly thought of the thing getting into her mouth and burrowing upwards into her brain made her clamp her lips together, almost making her flick the tiny beast from her face.
Inside she was silently screaming, ready to brush it off, once it got too near to her eyes. On and on it came, relentlessly, but just as she was about to swipe, it unfolded its wings and flow to the ground.
Amanda acted without thinking. Still holding the torch in her right hand she looked downwards, saw the insect in the grass and with one blow crushed the foul thing under her Doc Martin boots, making a satisfying plopping sound.
Shinning the beam at the splattered mess, she noticed that some parts of the insect were still alive. Many of the fibrous tendrils that made up its body and had not been flattened had detached themselves, wriggling away in all directions, eventually disappearing into the damp soil.
Overcome, she collapsed, not caring about the wet grass, sobbing uncontrollable, taking huge gulps of air into her lungs. Shortly she felt rather then saw two presences near her, bending over her. A young man’s voice could be heard but at first she could not make out what was being said. A hand touched her shoulder then and she looked up.
It was Paul and behind him the tall bony figure of the doctor, Paul with an anxious look on his face. It was Doctor Baldwin who spoke first, brushing the boy out of the way and gripping her shoulder roughly.
“What’s happened? Has someone taken the book!”
“Screw your book,” Paul said, pushing the doctor easily out of the way and helping Amanda to her feet.
Her distress ebbing away, she swept damp earth from her clothes and said in a wavering voice, “I almost had my brain sucked by a very big bug, but other then that not much has happened.”
Both of them heard movement coming from the pit, the sound of bones being displaced by the scrambling of feet. The doctor’s face then rose above the lip of the hole, a wide grin animating his features and his hair more of a mess then usual, a reanimated corpse arising from the grave.
“Thank Christ, it’s still here,” he shouted wildly as he held the book, now carefully wrapped in a transparent folder, above his head.Obviously she had not been detected because the man ignored the hedge and crouched low on the pavement, outside the cemetery entrance. He was so near to where she huddled in the shadows that Amanda could see him clearly. Although it was a warm night, he was wearing a woollen coat which reached to his ankles, unbuttoned and opened, revealing a pair of smart trousers and a white shirt.

Chapter Eight: Doctor Baldwin

Of all the days to begin at a new school this one was probably the most inappropriate. As Amanda filed into the modern glass building that was the assembly hall with the other kids, she could not help but notice some of them staring at her, probably having seen her alight from her father’s car at the school gates. Even a few of the teachers, sitting in their tall chairs aligned along the stage at the front, seemed to be staring at her intently.
She felt discomfited and dowdy in her uniform, consisting of a dark blue skirt, neat black shoes and a sweatshirt with the school’s logo on it, her hair scrubbed of purple dye and tied back in a neat ponytail. Everyone looked alike in their uniforms but the students she thought, quite a few of them boarders, gave off a whiff of wealthy superiority and an overbearing conventionality. She was sure she would not get on with any of them.
But as she sat next to a blonde girl, who had an inane grin on her face, and awaited the opening speech of the headmistress, these observations were swamped by an impatience to get through the day and discover the outcome of her father’s telephone call to Dr Baldwin. She decided, just at the moment the headmistress moved to the lectern, that at lunch she would call her dad using her mobile, but she still had to sit through the assembly and the classes to come with as much stoicism as she could muster. The day was going to drag on as if time itself had lead weights tied to its ankles.
Other then an excruciating moment in her tutorial class when she had to stand up and introduce herself, the morning was on the whole uneventful. The maths lesson after the tutorial seemed to last forever and her mind wandered to such an extent that it was noticed by the badly dressed runt of a teacher, who showed her up in front of everybody else.
At last the lunch break came around and before going to the canteen she went to the edge of the playing fields near the dormitory building and made her phone call. An eternity elapsed, the hum of traffic from the M25 motorway audible above the ring tones, before her father answered, but when he did he had some good news.
He had rung Dr Timothy Baldwin and the man had seemed genuinely enthusiastic about taking on their case, having a prior interest in Ashbury Manor. He had uncovered a surprising and rather unsettling piece of information concerning a former resident and would reveal it when they met.
Her feelings of tension eased by the telephone call, Amanda walked into the hubbub of the canteen. Waiting in line to get served, she surveyed the tables at which teenagers communicated with each other in loud voices and decided that she would sit at the table nearest the exit. The two girls sitting there, one of them overweight and morosely munching through an enormous crisp packet, the other thin as a rack with long brown hair, looking around her with a bored expression and picking at a meagre plate of salad, had the appearance of the school outsiders. They at least might hold hidden depths unlike the collection of rich kids all huddled together in their cliques.
The skinny girl was a fan of Blood Moon, and there was naturally an awed silence at first when she sat at their table, but after a while the ice was broken. Amanda did most of the talking describing the life of a daughter of a rock star and how it was not as glamorous or as exiting as the two girls probably thought.
Before the bell went, marking the return to the tedium of the classroom, Amanda promised to get the autograph of her father for the girls, feeling pride in her dad’s achievements.

They were going to be late for their meeting as the main road from Weybridge, were the Sir Giles Maurice School was situated, to Walton-on-Thames, had become an almost stationary line of motor cars, bumper to bumper, caused by major road works on the old Walton Bridge across the Thames. Amanda found it difficult to contain her impatience and her dad’s attempt at small talk was met with grunts of acknowledgement or one word answers, as she stared distractedly at the tree lined streets or the back of a four by four with two bored children making faces at her. When finally they reached the busy junction near Walton Bridge her dad said something which did catch her attention.
“I got a call today from an American friend of Moonbeam’s. Soon after I had an employee on the phone from Darkcore Records enquiring about the whereabouts of Lucius. I told both of them the same thing. Moonbeam and Lucius, separately mind you, had departed from the party and as yet had not returned. Moonbeam’s friend found it very strange. And so I am going to have to notify the police about their disappearance in a week’s time, otherwise people are going to get suspicious. It goes without saying I am not going to mention your account of events.”
“I see what you mean, but are we still going to use the services of Dr Baldwin?”
“Yeah, of course, but I still think what you need is a good psychiatrist,” Jonathan said, laughing.
“Dad, don’t even joke about it.”
The BMW swung into Mansion Road, off Abbey Street, a road consisting of an assortment of detached and terraced housing, a block of low rise flats, a private nursery and a pub, that made a leafy crescent shape near the river. Jonathan parked with difficulty between two expensive cars outside number sixty seven, a small terraced house at the end of the row, next to a narrow unkempt alley and opposite a small factory building that was now a garage.
Opening the rusty iron gate with a screech they walked through the tiny weed infested garden along the path to the front door and rang the bell, noticing the gloom made by the overhanging branches of an ancient, almost dead, oak tree in the grounds of the flats on the other side of the alley.
The figure that unbolted the door immediately on hearing the bell, did not at first sight seem to have the look of cool headed expertise an authority on the supernatural should have and Amanda could tell that her father felt the same, when he took a step backwards in surprise. Dr Baldwin’s dishevelled greasy hair was like strands of burnt spaghetti on top of a stretched stubbly pale face, whose eyes were covered by clunky spectacles with thick lenses. A fading chequered shirt, hanging half out of his stained baggy trousers secured with a tattered leather belt, was too large for his skeletal torso as were his cotton trousers. To compliment his dirty unkemptness, an off putting odour of stale sweat wafted from his body probably contributing to the backward step of Jonathan. But his voice when he introduced himself was low and expressive, overflowing with upper-class confidence, or affected pomposity.
They followed him down the hall, stepping over makeshift electrical equipment stacked against the walls, bristling with fan like aerials and peculiar dials. Dr Baldwin told them while they climbing a short flight of stairs to the second floor, that they where devices for the detection of mysterious phenomena in haunted houses.
His study was what Amanda had been expecting. Lined with bookcases containing the oldest books that she had ever seen, the dimly lit room had a steel filing cabinet with a spider plant trailing its sagging leaves down its sides and a bulky wooden desk containing many draws. The desk was scattered with ancient looking tomes, type written papers and scribbled notes, subsuming the computer, rather out of place amongst all the arcania. Taped to the wall, next to the window overlooking the gnarled, ivy infested oak, was a tatty poster depicting the Cabalistic Tree of Life, the only adornment on the few spaces of wall that were not covered by bookcases.
Indicating Amanda and her father should sit down on the two stiff wooden chairs aligned in front of his desk, Doctor Baldwin made himself comfortable in a swivel chair and stared at them with an uncomfortable intensity, his two hands, elbows lying on the desk, making a triangular shape.
“I am glad you approached me first,” he said at last, speaking directly to Jonathan and ignoring Amanda. “I would have found it difficult to get to know you otherwise, but as you probably realise my real interest is Ashbury Manor.”
Amanda, moving uncomfortable in her chair, felt irritated she was being ignored by Dr Baldwin; after-all it was she who had experienced the peculiar horrors of the Manor in the first place. But for now she decided to keep quite.
“I have to admit I have come to see you more on behalf of my daughter then myself,” Jonathan replied. “She thinks the disappearance of my partner, Samantha and my friend Lucius has something to do with occult forces connected with the Manor. I suppose it’s my fault really, Amanda has not had the most conventional upbringing and…”
“Mr Blake I am not a psychiatrist. If you believe your daughter is mentally ill then go elsewhere. As for myself I have spent years delving into the unknown and I can tell you this, although most instances of the supernatural are utter hokum, a tiny minority of the cases I have dealt with suggest powers that go beyond the mundane and ordinary. The little research I have managed to undertake into the matter of Ashbury Manor has made me think this particular case will prove to be extremely interesting.”
He turned to Amanda and attempted an encouraging smile but failed. “Now my young lady let me hear your story. I am all ears.”
She told Dr Baldwin everything, and noticing the nodding of his head and the focused intense look of interest on his face, was glad someone was taking her seriously. At the same time he wrote rapidly in a notepad as he listened and this heartened her even more. At the end of her tale her estimation of the Doctor had changed. There was still something creepy about his demeanour but his single-minded earnestness encouraged her.
“It must sound completely nuts to you, Dr Baldwin, but it is true. I, I mean we, are going to need your help desperately,” she said.
Now that she had finished her long story, Dr Baldwin seemed stunned, if not a little unnerved.
“It certainly is fantastic but for the time being I am going to believe you. There is too much here that coincides with my own findings for you to have made it all up. I really want to investigate this case further, but does your father believe you? I am going to need his permission before I can commence this investigation.”
“I just don’t know if I believe her or not,” Jonathan said, shrugging his shoulders. “If Amanda has done something terrible and is covering for herself by telling this absurd story, then it is a very long-winded way of going about it. On the other hand she might have hallucinated it all and rather then a so-called psychic investigator encouraging her further in her fantasies, what she really needs is a good shrink.”
“That is one explanation. It is a possibility that your daughter has imagined it, but if that is the case then I will uncover her mental instability in my on-going investigation and then you can approach a psychiatrist. But I have something that might convince you of the veracity of Amanda’s story.”
Taking a dirty brown leather journal with a faded clasp from a draw, Dr Baldwin flourished it above his head and spoke in an authoritative tone of voice.
“This is the diary of Dr Samuel Boswell, whose tragic downfall I assume you are both acquainted with. I found it only a week ago in the attic of the old asylum, now a private residential home, where the unfortunate gentleman was incarcerated long ago. It is a grisly account of obsession, and bloody suicide. According to this diary, the once respectable Victorian doctor was the father of his own daughter’s child! Driven by unholy desire, which he claimed was not only inspired by his lustful nature but by the eye on one of the mirrors, he had forced himself whilst drunk on the helpless girl, resulting in her pregnancy.”
After a pause for dramatic emphasis he continued.
“Furthermore the death of Sarah Boswell was not murder but suicide. Because of the terrible shame resulting from any discovery of his incestuous actions, he kept her locked in her bedroom, allowing her downstairs only for meals. While confined to her room, a virtual prisoner, Sarah had complained of the fearful affect the mirror in her room was having on her. The eye, the one at the top of the looking-glass, gave the impression of constantly staring at her, conferring a feeling of utmost terror. At the same time she saw things, misshapen entities crawling and slithering in the mirror, that were driving her to insanity. One night Dr Boswell noticed a surgical knife had been taken from his medical bag. Fearing the worst he raced to his daughter’s room and found her dead, her chest stabbed by her own hands. He was in time to see the body of his daughter dragged by a giant tendril that he describes in his diary as ‘as a vine or creeper’ into the looking-glass.”
“This of course could be the rantings of a guilt-ridden madman, but it corresponds to the ‘haunting’ that Amanda experienced on her first night at Ashbury Manor,” the doctor said, concluding his theatrical speech.
“So how are you going to help us, Dr Baldwin,” Amanda said.
“Well basically I am, with your help, going to attempt to solve the riddle of Ashbury Manor. The solution lies partly with the Order of the Arboreal Orb as you rightfully concluded, but you won’t find them listed in any published encyclopaedia or online. Now it is a helpful coincidence I have a little prior knowledge. It was I that helped the police in convicting the serial killer Charles Marlowe, who claimed to be connected to the cult. I had access to his unpublished writings and these revealed he was fascinated with the 16^th century occultist George Browne. At the time of the investigation I came across a small note of Marlowe’s that asserted he had discovered the lost writings of the Elizabethan mage. I took little notice of it, but since I have moved to Walton it has taken on extra significance. The key to the secret of Ashbury Manor lies in those lost writings, uncovered in the Nineteen Twenties by Sir William Barrett. But there location only adds to our problems.”
“This is totally nuts,” said Jonathan, shaking his head resignedly.
Doctor Baldwin having arisen from his chair while speaking now stood at the window, contemplatively gazing into space.
“Do you fancy a spot of grave robbing,” he then said in a calm voice.

Lying in her bed that night, unable to sleep, Amanda thought about the meeting with Doctor Baldwin. At the moment the eccentric scholar suggested desecrating the resting place of the dead, it was all too much for her father. He had angrily stood up, took hold of her hand and pulled her to the door.
Somehow the doctor had managed to persuade her father to stay a bit longer and swiftly explained that the writings of George Browne had been buried with Sir William Barrett. Using the legal channels to get the body exhumed would be a complete waste of time and so the only means of retrieving the book was to open up the grave illegally. It was an action he was reluctant to undertake but if they wished to take the investigation further it had to be done and he needed their help to dig up the coffin.
She had argued bitterly with her father in the car on the way home, pleading with him to agree with Doctor Timothy Baldwin’s plan, but he was determined not to be an accessory to a criminal act. Imagine if they were caught. He told her then that the content of horror and the occult in his lyrics and stage act was a pose and he had never taken the supernatural seriously. He was now deeply concerned what such influences where having on his daughter.
Amanda had not lost control but had instead lapsed into a sulky silence. She had her own plans; it was obvious her father could not be relied upon or persuaded to aid her, so she would have to act on her own. She was convinced Doctor Baldwin had the determination to uncover the secret and there was no reason, as long as she kept her dad from finding out, why she shouldn’t offer her help.
The chorus of frogs and abundant insect life coming from the garden had now reached the level of her bedroom, but although uncanny the sound was strangely soothing and Amanda drifted off to sleep. This time she did not have the nightmares that had plagued her the night before, as if her alter-ego had moved into a region that existed beyond her dream perceptions.

Chapter Seven: Nightmares

The glow of the dawn, permeating into the library from the stained glass windows, barely illuminated the hastily conferred conference of three figures around the alcove. The looking-glass itself had returned to its normal role of reflection and the evil eye at the top was as malicious as ever, but was now obviously artificial.
Jonathan Blake, irritable and hung-over was having difficulty believing what his daughter and Paul where telling him. Resting his back on the oaken panels of the wall, he scratched his head and rubbed his sleep deprived eyes, glowering at Amanda and the young guitarist in anger and bafflement. He went over to the alter table and picked up the palm frond shaped dish and held it in his hands, gazing at it as if it would offer up its secrets and then he throw it harshly back.
Distractedly stroking the cat that she had released from the cage, Amanda sat cross-legged on the floor, the feline purring in her lap. Tears streaked her cheeks, but now after she had told her incoherent tale her sobbing had finally ceased. Paul, deciding to remain behind after most of the guests had departed, reclined, his knees drawn up, his head lowered, against the opposite wall of the alcove from where Jonathan paced up and down. His face had not lost its paleness or its look of disorientation.
“This is crazy, absolutely crazy,” Jonathan said. He turned to Paul, his voice harsh but with a slight tremor. “As for you I am going to do everything in my power to get your band dropped from Darkcore records.”
Paul said nothing in his defence but stood up and stared at the ground.
“I will do as much as I can to help you find your girlfriend,” he muttered unconvincingly.
“You certainly will. I am going to call the police and you can discuss it with them.”
“Dad, the police won’t believe you, they’ll think she’s run off with Lucius or something.” Amanda, now some of the shock had worn of, was feeling the first pangs of guilt and although she was reluctant to admit it, she had to agree with her father that she had been very foolish. She was dealing with forces that were beyond anything she could possible imagine. They needed help all right but it was not the police they could turn to.
“Keep quiet Amanda, you are in serious trouble.”
Her head slumped despondently, continuing in her mechanical stroking of the cat.
“I know it all sounds incredible and I still can’t grasp it but what we witnessed actually happened,” Paul said, managing to look Jonathan in the face for the first time. “I’m sorry I didn’t inform you of Amanda’s plan, I suppose I didn’t take it seriously, but when Moonbeam found me I did agree straight off to help her.”
For all of the emotions of fear and guilt competing inside of her, Amanda still had room for annoyance at Paul’s attitude. She had made a mistake, a very big one, but it had been made with good intentions. Her error was underestimating the nature of the powers residing in Ashbury Manor, powers that were beyond the abilities of an adolescent girl to unravel.
“You were right about one thing, this place is evil,” Jonathan said, keeping up his agitated pacing. “I’m going to have to sell this house if I can and go back to America, but first I am going to call the cops. Moonbeam has probably been kidnapped with the aid of that scumbag Lucius.”
“Please, dad, listen to me. The cops can’t help us, they wouldn’t take you seriously. What we need is expert help, somebody who knows a lot about the occult, black magic…”
“I told you to shut up! I’m calling the police not some exorcist.” With that Jonathan almost ran from the library.
Amanda stood up, holding the cat in her arms and confronted Paul.
“Thanks for helping me out, you little grass,” she said.
He seemed on the point of saying something but then he shook his head, making a dismissive gesture with his right hand and strode out of the room.
Feeling completely alone and isolated, wishing she had not snapped out at Paul, tears once again began to well up. But with a final sob she forced them down and clutched the cat tightly to her breast, which began to struggle because of the pressure.

That night she slept, regardless of the horrors she had observed, but her rest was disturbed by weird dreams. Her dreaming was nightmarish, but when Amanda was in the grip of their unreal but solid intensity she had found them oddly pleasurable. It was only when she awoke in her shadowy room, a small lamp still on to keep the darkness at bay, that sensations of fear and disorientation suddenly overwhelmed her.
In her sleep she travelled confidently with Camilla, Lucius’ insect possessed husk and a sleepwalking Moonbeam, through an immense labyrinth of stone, brick and rusting iron, the dimensions of which were beyond imagining. They passed through pillared halls, convoluted corridors like elaborate sewers and rooms the size of cathedrals; there spaces infested with exotic but abhorrent vegetation and bizarre arachnid life, which feed greedily on inert human shapes encased in diseased but strangely beautiful foliage. Like sinners in a fecund hell, these people were trapped or suspended in coiling multi-coloured flora; their mouths clogged with pulsating vein like creepers, faces frozen into silent screams as malformed many-legged bugs, as colourful as the plant life, sucked the succulent juices from their bodies.
They came to chambers that had windows of colossal proportions, round like the window Amanda had seen through the looking-glass the night before. A few were massive skylights that opened out into unknown heavens, but most were set into the walls and looked upon startlingly gorgeous but ruined, apocalyptic landscapes. Amongst the variety there were a desert of undulating and kaleidoscopic crystal dunes, shimmering into the far distance, where mountains of obsidian towered over an alien city, deserted, crumbling and overtaken by the jewelled sands; and a jungle of chaotic fertile abundance soaked in dense moisture, with terrifyingly bizarre flowers and blossoms, of such intense colours they blinded you. Beasts and animals of extra dimensional shapes and sizes slithered and swarmed obscenely in this otherworldly rainforest.
Most disturbing of all was how she felt as she wandered naked in this realm of surreal nightmare. She gazed around her not with loathing and dread but fascination as if viewing a decadent but sumptuous painting. And above all she had the intoxicated feeling of power over another human being who once only a day ago held power over her. She could do what she liked with that moralizing new-age bitch, Moonbeam Dancer, who had taken the affections of her father away. She could prod and goad the zombie form of Lucius Peake like a mindless beast of burden. She spoke to Camilla almost on an equal footing, discussing forbidden knowledge and sinister secrets, that she forgot the moment she awoke.
After a repetition of awakening and then falling asleep, automatically plunging her back into her visions, she could not bare the thought of returning. The gothic paraphernalia and lurid horror posters moved from her previous bedroom seemed oppressive, ugly and in bad taste. There general nastiness crowded in on her as she lay supine on her bed, the duvet thrown off because of the warmth of this early September night.
She desperately wanted a shoulder to cry on, someone close that would actually believe her. But there was nobody. Her father was useless. After deciding to allow a couple of days to elapse before calling the police in case Moonbeam returned, he blamed her entirely for driving his love away. She had lost all semblance of control and for the first time a major confrontation in the true teenager and parent style had erupted. Screaming abuse at her dad she had fled to her room, slamming the door behind her, only leaving to get something to eat later in the evening.
As for Paul he was even more useless, fleeing Ashbury Manor with a purposefulness that seemed to say he was never coming back. If she had his phone number she might have rung him but she doubted he would have wanted to speak to her.
As well as feelings of dread, anger and loneliness, Amanda felt guilt gnaw at her insides. If it was not for her reckless act, Moonbeam and Lucius would still be around. She needed to work out a plan of action, a means of rescuing Moonbeam from the clutches of Camilla and whatever horrors lurked in the realm beyond the looking-glass. Lucius was beyond help she thought. This plan of attack would partly assuage her guilt and if she could convince her father of it, it might bring them back together.
Her dreams were not illusions but the direct experience of her other self that had split from her. The whole concept was mystifying, terrifying in its implications. Now there were two Amanda’s, each one representing a choice, or decision undertaken. The person she was had refused to go along with the initiation, but the other Amanda had entered into the bargain and joined Camilla in her journey to another world. Disturbingly she could not just run away from the situation, ignore it and go back with her father to America, even if she had wanted to, because a part of her would still exist inside Ashbury Manor.
It was all beyond her comprehension and she needed assistance from someone in the know, an expert in this sort of thing, if such a person existed. Hopefully he or she would be able to convince her father that there was a need for positive action, but she had to find this person very quickly.
Despair was slowly bur methodically creeping up on her, when with a lurch of the heart she heard a scratching sound coming from the direction of the door. She automatically felt relief when she realised the noise was being created by the cat that she had named Jones and had decided to keep as a pet. The animal had kept her company throughout her period of seclusion without any sign of restlessness; now it wished to leave the room.
Not wanting to remain in her bedroom any longer, Amanda put on a pair of jeans and a tee-shirt, opened the door and followed Jones down the stairs to the kitchen.
As usual the shadows thrown by the faint lighting seemed menacing, concealing hidden monstrosities ready to pounce and the creaking of the timbers suggested the mutterings of inexplicable entities. The chorus of frogs coming from the dilapidated garden, having increased in volume over the past month, now joined by the cicada of insects, drowned these threatening sounds as she entered the kitchen, but produced heightened sensations of unease.
Ashbury Manor was like a living organism claustrophobically entrapping her in its entrails, digesting her slowly. It oozed malevolence as if in its very construction the manufacture of evil was the intention.
Opening the fridge she found some tuna fish, put it in a shallow bowl and gave it to the cat. Having made a humus sandwich for herself she sat down at the table and stared unthinkingly through the window at the darkened undergrowth of the garden, overlaid by the reflection thrown by the kitchen light. She could just make out the swirl of fireflies winking on and off, swarming around the greenhouse where the third mirror lay mouldering, The cloud of gloom surrounding her thoughts thickened.
Idly she picked up a local newspaper lying on the table and flipped at random through its pages. Coming to the personnel ads she made the rather futile attempt to cheer herself up by reading the facile messages. But then something on the opposite page caught her eye.
It was a plain advertisement for an unusual private detective agency, named ‘Dr Baldwin’s Paranormal and Occult Investigation Service,’ ‘inquiring into haunted houses, apparitions, poltergeist activity, demonic possession (exorcism not included), witchcraft and occult societies and strange phenomenon.’ There was an address and telephone number underneath the heading.
Immediately on seeing this, Amanda’s spirits leapt. Here was what she was looking for. She extracted a pair of scissors from a kitchen draw and cut out the advert, staring at it for sometime, as if it would clear up all her problems.
The door behind her stealthily creaked open and she turned violently to confront whoever it was that was entering, standing up and knocking her chair to one side. She relaxed when she saw that it was her father but only slightly. Clad in his silk Chinese dragon motif dressing gown, his long hair ruffled and stubble growing on his cheeks, he seemed as startled as his daughter.
“Hi, what are you doing up so late,” he said.
Coming over to the table he sat down opposite Amanda. Leaning his elbows on the wooden service, he clasped his hands together and stared intently at her. She lowered her head feeling awkward and rather embarrassed at his scrutiny. At last after a long period of silence her father spoke up.
“I can’t sleep…I want to apologise for upsetting you. Something terrible happened at the party and I was wrong to dismiss what you saw completely.” He shook his head in puzzlement and continued. “The place is definitely disconcerting. I have looked into corners and I have thought the darkness would go on forever, if you see what I mean. And those frogs and the fireflies in the garden, I haven’t seen anything like them in England…but what you told me yesterday is just too far out. They must have drugged you, there was certainly a few drugs going down last night. You didn’t take any yourself?”
“No I didn’t dad, honestly. If I had taken drugs why did Paul see exactly the same?”
“Maybe he is in collaboration with you”
“Dad, don’t be stupid,” she said, her frustration making her shout. But she managed to control herself and lowered her voice. “Please listen to me. The police won’t be able to help us; they won’t believe a rock star who they think is a bit weird. But here is someone who might.” She passed over the clipping from the newspaper.
“I’m not sure this Dr Baldwin will be able to help us,” her father said, frowning deeply after he had read the advert. “In fact he might make matters worse; he’s probably a crank.”
“Just give him a chance, dad; he is the only person I know at the moment who could clear all this up.” Amanda felt agitation beginning to assert itself once again and she gritted her teeth, staring with beseeching eyes at her father.
“I will ring him tomorrow,” her father replied with a resigned sigh and then looked at the clock on the wall. “Or today rather; you better get yourself off to bed. As you might have forgotten you’ve got to go to school in a couple of hours.”
Amanda had not forgotten she was starting at the Sir Giles Maurice School this morning but she had pushed it to the back of her mind, what with all the other contending fears. As she walked up the murky stairs the mundane worry of school now irritated her, but she also felt some satisfaction on finding the specialist she was looking for.

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.