In the Devil's Name Read online

  In the Devil’s name.

  Later that night, Lachlan Griffiths carries out the King’s command.

  Labhrainne is visiting the dungeons to satisfy his bloodlust on some poor unfortunate. Lachlan comes to him under the pretence of joining him in the ritual sacrifice of a young girl. When James’ mad bastard, naked and splattered with gore, passes the sacrificial dagger to Griffiths so he may take his turn rending the flesh of their victim, the head of the Questioners instead plunges the bone dagger into Labhrainne’s throat.

  As the life bubbles in a bloody torrent from Densmore’s twitching body, Lachlan Griffiths takes on all that was his. His titles, his riches, his royal protection.

  His curse.

  Unseen to human eyes, the shadowy wraith that had stood by Labhrainne Densmore's shoulder since that afternoon immediately moves to stand behind Griffiths, merging and becoming one with the other of its kind who already haunts the new Earl of Ayrshire's footsteps.

  In that same night, Griffiths, accompanied by his personal guards, goes to the homes of Anderson and Cairns. Both men are dragged from their hovels, presented with a signed royal decree and accused of treason before being executed on the spot with a single musket ball to the heart. Their bodies are left in the street for their screaming families to deal with. The wraiths that had accompanied these men since that afternoon feed briefly on the grief and horror of the men's wives and children before returning to their own plane of existence, their purpose unfulfilled.

  An hour later, Griffiths and an entire company of his men force their way into the barracks of Cairns' soldiers. They are also briefly shown the royal command, then quickly and efficiently executed on charges of treason.

  Lachlan Griffiths rides south the following day accompanied by his followers, and promptly summons the acolytes of the Southern Coven to the newly named Griffiths Hall. On arrival, each one is put to the sword and then burned. As the last of Densmore’s Satanists dies, so does the truth. The only ones left alive who know that the people of Bennane Head were innocent are the King and his new Earl of Ayrshire, the high priest of the New Southern Coven; Lachlan Griffiths.

  And so it is that the deal made between the creature Ozay and Alexander Beane is broken for the first time.

  Although broken, the hex festers like an infected wound through the ages; unfulfilled for centuries through a twist of fate.

  For ever after, the Earl of Ayrshire is a marked man, each generation visited and haunted by the daemon Ozay. Many of the Earls through the centuries die in strange, unnatural ways. Heart attacks are rife in the Griffiths blood it seems, as is madness, as more than a few discover. The family believe that the manifestation of the spirit that plagues them is a dark blessing; proof of their connection and servitude to their King and to their lord Satan, and so they bear this terrible burden, in their twisted reasoning seeing it as the price they must pay for their privileged position both on Earth and in the beyond.

  The house of Griffiths continues to carry out its task as charged by King James, and each year, a single innocent quietly falls under the exquisitely carved bone dagger, murdered in the Devil’s name. That they are never brought to justice for the annual killings is seen as further evidence of the esteem in which they are surely held by their dark master.

  The family likewise continues in its other sworn duty; to maintain the legend of the terrible clan of cannibals who once dwelt beneath Bennane Head, snatching unwary travellers from the road above and feasting on their flesh. For years the myth is repeated, embellished and twisted until it passes into the very realms of folklore and becomes a story to scare children with, part of the country's sub culture.

  And so it goes through the passing of uncounted summers until almost four hundred years after it all began, when everything changes.

  Desdemona Griffiths, son and heir of Alexander Griffiths, has been haunted all his life by the malignant presence he calls the bogey rogey. Keeping with the age old family tradition, his father has drilled into him since childhood their sworn duty; to continue to make sacrifice annually in the Devil’s name, and to keep the legend of Sawney Beane alive.

  At the age of nine Desdemona makes his first kill, when under the supervision of his father he cuts the throat of a girl his own age while kneeling in a shallow grave deep in the dark heart of the forest outside Ballantrae. For the next nine years, he assists his father in the yearly sacrifice, personally performing the blood letting ritual himself every second year.

  Although he develops a taste for the kill and keeps up the pretence of being a loyal follower of his father’s religion and the family tradition, Desdemona secretly cares nothing for either, and seeks only an end to his torment.

  As he has grown, the manifestations have become worse and more frequent, but such frequency does nothing to dilute the terror that seizes him when the bogey rogey comes calling. Instead, the nightmare that plagues him night and day becomes more terrifying, more real. He fears that his mind is starting to unravel, and is afraid that he will go the way of his grandfather who was committed to an asylum before he saw fifty years, raving and insane.

  His father’s blind reasoning that the haunting is some sort of unholy blessing and a due they must pay is lunacy, and Desdemona decides that he must take control of his fate and finally bring the madness to an end.

  He reads anything and everything he can find relating to demonology. The library in Griffiths Hall has a vast collection of literature dealing with this subject, amassed by his ancestors over hundreds of years. Most of what he reads is superstitious hokum, full of half baked Christian and Satanic beliefs and dogma, but one book, which bears no title and cites no author is different. Two hundred years old and written in German which he is fluent in, it deals with the subject from a non religious perspective. It instead describes daemons as highly intelligent trans-dimensional entities that exist only to feed on negative energy and to trade in the life force that men know as souls. He reads the fascinating book over and over, until he is able to quote it from memory. Despite his new knowledge, the visitations continue and lose none of their power to terrify him. He knows that he must end it soon or he will surely lose his mind.

  In the year of our lord nineteen eighty two, his father is brought in for police questioning regarding the murder of the seventeen year old girl whose remains have been found in the woods. A girl that Desdemona had in fact killed. It had been his turn that year. Her name had been Lisa, he recalls.

  Money changes hands, pressure is applied where it needs to be applied, a few threats and promises are made and before long a man is arrested for the crime, freeing his father from suspicion. It had been close however, Desdemona frets. The family have been carrying out the annual killing for centuries and never once had suspicion fallen upon them. He knows the family can no longer continue on this bloody path, heedless of the prospect of incarceration. Sooner or later their luck would run out, and he is aware they are being watched closely by a certain policeman going by the name of Grace.

  For the past couple of years, Desdemona has been forming an idea in his mind, and believes he may finally be able to bring his torment, which has by now reached near unbearable levels, to an end. He will not be able to carry out his plan however, should he find himself in a jail cell.

  On the eve of his eighteenth birthday, the Earldom of Ayrshire and all its obligations pass to him, and his father presents him with the sacrificial dagger that has spilled the lifeblood of scores of victims through the ages. Desdemona swears a blood oath to continue the family traditions, the lie falling easily from his lips. His father, in a rare show of affection embraces him tightly and tells him he is proud of him.

  He retires to his bedroom and waits, scared almost witless about what he must do.

  It begins with a familiar scratching in the wall behind the bed where Desdemona sleeps. He feels the drop in temperature in the room that always heralds the arrival of the entity. And the smell; a noxious, rotten aroma as of something dead left i
n the sun for too long. Absolute terror grips him. Although he has prepared himself as well as he can for this moment, he is helpless in the face of the horror that these manifestations conjure in his breast.

  He watches the wall above his bed bulge and distort, much in the same way that Phillip Densmore would witness in a strange dream many years later. The bedroom wall takes on the elasticity of soft rubber, and long bony fingers, hooked at the tips, push through and reach for him, stretching the plaster impossibly. The nausea inducing smell grows stronger, cloying in Desdemona’s tightened throat. The frigid air plummets further in temperature and he can see his rapid, fearful breath crystallise before his eyes.

  Control, he tells himself through his fear. You must have control.

  “I… I wish to make a deal,” he stammers.

  The daemon laughs. A liquid cackling sound that has no place on Earth.

  “Please,” Desdemona begs. “I am the Earl of Ayrshire, but a worm before you, and I seek an accord.”

  The terrible laughter intensifies. The wall over his bed bulges further, showing the outline of some grotesque alien form. Cracks begin to appear in the plaster. It is breaking through.

  Desdemona prostrates himself in supplication, face down on the floor. He is by this point a trembling, panicked wreck, but he manages to croak out a further entreaty.

  “Master, I beseech you. I will do anything, whatever you command. I will give anything. I only wish an end to my torment. I know not why you haunt my family, but I seek to bargain with you. An insect in your magnificence I may be, yet I know something about the workings of your terrible kind. I know you trade in souls…”

  There is a loud crack and crumbling sound as the plaster finally gives way. The very oxygen seems to be sucked out of the room as the entity manifests itself physically. Desdemona struggles to breathe, yet keeps his face pressed into the carpet, unable to raise his gaze to the monster he knows now stands over him.

  You know nothing, human.

  The voice, the sound of a wailing multitude heard from a great distance, echoes in his head. Unable to control his body, his bladder and bowels void themselves at the sound of the daemon’s words.

  My kind are beyond the limits of human imagination, it says.

  “Yes, yes. Forgive me my lord,” Desdemona whimpers. “Your glory is not for such as I to comprehend. I only wish to serve you. To give you all that I have in worship…”

  The thing known as Ozay senses opportunity here; a chance to put right a debt centuries old and unsettled. The boy has now taken on the mantle of his father, and as such has ancient and natural rights over the souls of others. He could prove to be profitable.

  It makes a decision, and with a thought, rearranges its atoms into another form. Something that will not drive the boy instantly insane to behold.

  Rise, Desdemona, it says.

  Desdemona forces himself shakily to his feet, raises his eyes slowly, and finds a man standing before him. He is unremarkable. Just a normal looking male of average height and weight wearing non descript clothing. He has plain brown hair of average length, and a thoroughly forgettable face neither handsome nor ugly. He has the appearance of someone you would barely notice, such is their ordinariness.

  Until he looks closer and sees the faint shimmer outlining the body that speaks of the glammer which is the plain looking man’s form. And the eyes. Desdemona realises the eyes are dead black orbs. As the eyes gaze back at him out of that astoundingly normal face, Desdemona experiences a peculiar draining feeling, as of something being leached from his body. He quickly drops his gaze again and the sickening feeling fades.

  My kind do not favour unpaid debts, Desdemona Griffiths, it says, still speaking in his mind. You are haunted because of a hex placed on your family when it should have been the burden of another. If you wish to be free of my attentions, the original debt must be paid in full.

  “How can I do this, Master?” Desdemona asks in stupefied awe, still averting his eyes. “If you will but name your bounty, it will be done.”

  And so Ozay and Desdemona Griffiths make a deal.

  In return for an end to his haunting, the heir to the Earl of Ayrshire swears to use his family’s wealth and influence to once again bring together the four bloodlines of Cairns, Anderson, Densmore and Griffiths. Only then can the curse be carried out as was originally intended and the debt can be finally paid. Desdemona agrees to then officially renounce his title as the Earl of Ayrshire, and the haunting of the generations will pass back to any remaining Densmore males.

  Desdemona Griffiths is well aware that lifting this hex from his head will mean sacrificing his own child in the future, but he coldly reckons it is a price worth paying.

  And so it is that he devotes his life, time and money to tracking down the far scattered remnants of the four families and bringing them together again. Months are spent in libraries and public records offices, poring over archives and genealogy records, and an immodest fortune is invested in private investigators, bribes and a thousand other expenses borne of his enterprise.

  He locates the descendant of Labhrainne Densmore first; a man going by the name of Kyle Densmore, a sales rep for IBM who lives in Aberdeen. Through one of his many investigators, Desdemona learns that the man is recently married to a woman named Rebecca and they have a child on the way. Within weeks, man and pregnant wife have relocated to Ballantrae after Rebecca receives out of the blue the offer of an unusually well paid job as librarian at the local high school. Their first son James is born later that year.

  The Anderson line is next to be found. Alan Anderson, a twenty three year old engineer works for a firm in Greenock, and has recently become engaged to his long time girlfriend Maria. The Griffiths family own an engineering business in Ballantrae, and soon, Alan Anderson is the new manager. Desdemona makes a generous contribution to their wedding fund and sets them up with a nice house, one of many he owns and which he sells them for a very reasonable price.

  The Cairns family seems to fall into Desdemona’s lap. While on a business trip to Glasgow, his car hits a deep pothole and he finds himself in a grotty mechanics workshop in want of a replacement tyre.

  While angrily leafing though a tattered magazine in the waiting room, fuming about the inconvenience, he hears one of the troglodytes who works in the stinking garage refer to another by the name ‘Cairnsey’. The recognition of the name grabs Desdemona’s attention.

  An hour later and he is buying a pint of lager in a dingy smoke filled bar for Anthony Cairns, a weasel faced man with a sour disposition and an obviously addictive thirst for alcohol. Desdemona asks many questions of the man, who is at first suspicious of the well dressed businessman’s interest, accusing Desdemona of being a ‘fuckin’ queerhawk’. A few more lagers and whiskies loosen the man’s tongue though, and Desdemona is furnished with answers to his questions about where his family is from and what he knows about his ancestors. It turns out that Cairns is not the type to be interested in family trees and ‘all that pish’, but Desdemona has a strange feeling about this bipedal rat of a man. He excuses himself and makes a quick phone call to a government employee who owes him a favour and who has access to more genealogical information than Cairns is able to supply. He is amazed when it is confirmed that the borderline alcoholic is the direct descendant of Captain Hugh Cairns.

  Returning to the table, Desdemona buys a few more drinks, then offers Cairns a job in a garage he owns down the coast. The job offer comes with a lucrative salary well above what he is currently earning and Cairns immediately accepts, drunkenly toasting their arrangement and proclaiming that Desdemona is ‘a good cunt after all’.

  Cairns, who is inconveniently single, is in Ballantrae days later, where it is soon seen to that he meets a dim witted local girl named Karen Smart, who ironically is anything but. A few thousand pounds in her cheaply made purse is enough to convince the dim witted girl that she would look just great on the arm of the new mechanic in the village, a young man from t
he big city no less. They are pregnant less than a month later and their son Grant comes along later that year.

  In the year of our Lord nineteen ninety three, it all comes together, and Desdemona Griffiths’ masterplan bears fruit.

  His wife Sheena, whom he has already been married to for seven years, finally gets her act together and fulfils her only task by bearing him a brat whom she names Dean. Desdemona doesn’t give a shit what the kid is called, as its only purpose is to die eighteen years later.

  That same year, the Cairns and Densmore families each welcome a second son to their home, and the Andersons, who Desdemona had been starting to worry about, are also blessed with the child they have been trying to conceive for so long.

  It’s so perfect it seems like it’s meant to be, and Desdemona Griffiths rejoices.

  Chapter 55

  19th September 2011

  My earliest childhood memory is of a family holiday to America when I was about three years old. Me, my mum, dad and James, who would only have been about eight at the time, spent three weeks in a rented log cabin in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York, miles from anywhere. We spent the days wandering in the deep woods, fishing and canoeing on the nearby lake and having picnics. It’s the only time I can recall when our whole family had been completely happy. James had begun having 'problems' when he’d turned nine, unsurprisingly. Same age I now knew Desdemona Griffiths was when he made his first kill. Three is a powerful number, and three squared…

  When I came to after grabbing that dagger, the first thing I became aware of was the scent of the forest and the sound of birdsong.

  I opened my eyes and found myself sitting on a rough bench made of cut logs, gazing across a large lake surrounded by tall pine trees. The sun was high in the azure blue sky, and there was just the faintest of breezes on the pleasantly warm and incredibly fresh air. There was a dirt path leading down to the water from the bench where I sat, a small jetty jutting into the lake’s mirrored surface and the wooden boathouse where the canoes were stored. I turned my head to the left, and there was the log cabin. Just as I remembered it from some fourteen years previously. The great spread of moose antlers above the door which I remembered had fascinated me as a child was still there, as was the chopping block and woodpile where my dad had enjoyed hewing great chunks of pine for the massive open fireplace I remembered was inside. The only thing different from my memory of the place was a subtle air of abandonment. The bench on which I sat was weathered and rotting in a few spots and in need of replacement. Likewise, the jetty, boathouse and cabin itself had a dilapidated look to them. A few planks of wood were missing from the jetty’s walkway and the paint was peeling on the boathouse walls. I knew that no one had been here in a long time.