Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #20 November 2015 | Page 42

There was a ground floor flat under the
dealer’s, some poor old ex-aristo lived there, who
said he didn’t know anything about any drug dealing
but told us it’d been getting too hot in his flat lately,
and could we ask the dealer to turn the heating down?
Anyway, underneath the ex-aristo was the building’s
basement. The dealer told us that the supplier and a
couple of other guys went down there sometimes.
He said he didn’t know what for, and whatever we
threatened him with, he wouldn’t tell us anything else.
So what can you do? In the end, we went back
to the flat, and me, Sergeant Wells and PC Foulds
went to have a look down in that basement, where
that weird heat seemed to be coming from. We were
expecting... I don’t know what. A ketamine lab, or
some shit. Could be anything. But we definitely
weren’t expecting what we found.

for hands and feet.
Except, there were six of them. I mean, let’s be
straight here, this thing was obviously meant to hold
someone down. So there should have been four, right?
One for each arm, and one for each leg. But there were
six. There were the four restraints where you’d expect
them to be, but the other two were wider than the arm
and leg ones, and set further out towards each edge
of the table, coming off in a straight line from about
where the victim’s shoulders would have been...
Anyway, we got out of there pretty quick. The
table was rancid with blood, big old pools of it that
hadn’t scabbed over yet, in all the dents and rivets
on the metal surface. And some sicko, some fucking
psychopath, had poured feathers all round the room.

We got out of the building. I remember rubbing
It was a cult worship site. There were no
snow on my hands to stop my palms from sweating so
lights down there so we were scoping the place out
much. I remember looking around, looking at the way
by torchlight, and you can imagine how jumpy that
the shadow of the spires on the Abbey fell across all
makes you. The walls were white tiles, like in a
the old, white buildings, and thinking what a fucked
hospital. On the floor, though, was all this... all these
up old city this really was. After we’d had a breather
circles and writing, and some other shit like drawings. and a cigarette, we called in forensics, and they had a
The circles got smaller and smaller towards the middle look.
of the room. They were like... like two different
spirals going different directions at the same time. You
The blood threw them a bit of a curve-ball
know what I mean? The circles going one way were
when they got it back to the lab; it didn’t match any
in something black like ink, and the writing was in
blood type we know about, and under a microscope
Latin. The circles going the other way were something there were no platelets or blood cells or anything, like
brown, that looked like dried blood. The writing and
you’d expect in human blood. They decided it was
the pictures... I had no idea. Some ancient shit, that
probably an elaborate fake, which you don’t see the
looked a bit like hieroglyphs.
papers reporting too much. Truth doesn’t sell, right?
And in the middle of the circle was a table.
We all flashed our torch beams around and all lit up
the table at the same time. I remember it was hard to
focus ‘cause our hands were shaking and the lights
were jumping around. Every so often we’d catch
a glimpse of something just inside the torch beam,
something that looked like it was moving, and we’d
all fucking jump and shout, we were that scared.
This table looked medical, like what surgeons use to
operate on, and it was huge, like someone had got two
of them and slammed them together. And welded on
to the table were these manacles, like metal restraints,

And you know the rest. They translated
the Latin, it was some old Catholic prayer about
Seraphims and Cherubims and all that. That’s where
the papers got the idea about the Angel from. The
other writing, the writing in blood, was analysed, it
turned out to be old Babylonian. You