Black Angel

Conrad Jones

Description

When Conrad Jones helps the police identify an occultist symbol carved into the chest of a murder victim, he attracts the attention of a Satanic cult who believe themselves to be human vampires. He writes a book about them exposing how far reaching their influence is and they desperately want to silence him. Hunted by the cult and by the law, he has no choice but to become the hunter.... A gritty, violent thriller based on recent true events.

Sujets

• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 17 octobre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783333325
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Title Page
BLACK ANGEL
Conrad Jones



Publisher Information
This edition published in 2013 by
Acorn Books
www.acornbooks.co.uk
Converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2013 Conrad Jones
The right of Conrad Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.



Prologue
I’d like to say that I slept like a baby but I didn’t. My dreams were tortured by the haunting sound of an infant crying. I searched everywhere that I could in the dream but I couldn’t find her. I knew she was a girl. I don’t know how I knew it, instincts I guess. One minute her crying was close to me, the next it was miles away, just a whisper of distress on an icy wind which whistled through the derelict structure. It had been a hotel once. It was built to mimic a castle, with towers and turrets, battlements and arrow slits. Though its shape was imposing against the seascape, it was painted white, like a vision from a fairytale. Once a place full of laughter, wedding feasts and christening parties but now in my dreams, it was a burnt out shell perched on a rocky outcrop overlooking a stormy sea. The white fascia had turned to mottled green, blistered and peeling. Smoke-burns snaked from the empty windows like eyelashes above blackened sockets. They seemed to offer a view into an infinite black abyss. Nettles and thorny weeds pushed their way up through the crumbling floors. When I looked towards the ceilings, I could see an angry sky through the gaping holes in the roof. The slates and rafters had collapsed, leaving the timbers hanging dangerously. Lightning forked earthwards, momentarily illuminating the heavy black clouds like a massive camera flash. The ear-splitting thunder threatened to shake the decaying building to the ground. Echoes of the past reverberated from the crumbling walls, ghostly laughter mixed with sounds from the past; tears of joy and tears of sadness.
As I walked through the remnants of the bar, I glimpsed the ghostly hotel owner sitting alone on a stool crying into his whisky. His head lolled onto his right shoulder, his broken neck no longer capable of supporting its weight. His eyes bulged almost ready to pop and his tongue hung from the corner of his mouth like a fat black slug. He didn’t seem to notice that the wooden bar was nothing but a charcoaled frame, the optics long gone, the staff moved on to different jobs years ago. Next to him was the rope with which he eventually hung himself to escape the pain of losing his philandering wife and the insurmountable debts that she had left behind. Although it was a dream, I shouted at him nonetheless. I needed help to find the girl. No matter how loud I shouted, my pleas for help went unheard. I felt the desperation of the years gone by, dragging me down like a weight around my waist,slowing me down as I ran in search of the source of the tortured cries of the infant. I knew the child was a stranger to me and yet something told me that there was a connection somewhere. I had to find her. Every door was locked and every window barred. When a corridor opened in front of me, I ran as fast as the weight would allow me but I never made any progress. It was like running on a giant treadmill through mud. The desperate sobbing was ripping my heart out. I had to find her. My nightmare was interspersed with gravelly laughter from behind me. It was evil laughter whispering in my ear, a ghostly echo like an itch that you can’t scratch. I knew it was Jennifer Booth who plagued my dreams but every time I turned around, she was gone, the laughter replaced by the soul destroying sobbing of a baby in distress and a lingering stench of decomposition. It was the same dream every time I closed my eyes. I couldn’t stop the landlord slipping the noose around his neck and I couldn’t find the child. My frantic search left me exhausted when I awoke. It seemed that there truly was no rest for the wicked and wicked was what I had become.
***
It had been a year since I escaped the clutches of the Order of Nine Angels and I was no closer to finding Jennifer Booth, their human goddess, Baphomet. If you still don’t know who they are or are unsure if my tale is true, I have put their history at the back of the book. Or Google them if you dare. Despite everything that the police and the internet giants have tried to do, they still have websites and Facebook pages and as one closes down, another springs up to replace it. They are more prevalent now than ever. The more I searched for them, the more I got to know how they function and the more I understood her too. She is the evil which drives them. She is their tangible link to the insidious evil that they worship. Because she is real, a tangible God, they believe that their efforts are not in vain. They can touch her, hear her sermons and see her depravity with their own eyes and that gives them faith in the sinister way.
Unlike the traditional faiths, they have a tangible focus on this planet. She walks amongst them, encouraging them to live their lives with no boundaries. The laws we respect, our civilised values and moral framework are considered as ‘mundane’ to them. Most of her followers are involved primarily for the unbridled sex which their religion allows, but once they are drawn in by the promise of pleasure with no limitations, they soon realise that Satanism is not a game. She takes over their hearts and minds and there is no way out. She holds the threat of them being exposed hanging over them permanently and demands more and more until they either submit completely or break. The weak ones are deemed as a threat to the Order and tend to disappear. She is far more powerful than traditional religious icons because she is alive. Because she is alive, it is easier for them to believe. Jesus is long dead and yet Christians the world over worship him. Could you imagine the power he would hold if he walked the earth? Well, she does walk amongst us and her followers revel in her existence. They believe that she is the devil incarnate. Baphomet, the Dark Goddess.
My dilemma was that the police were searching hard for me, and the evil cult the Order of Nine Angels searching harder still. They were holding a girl alleged to be my daughter hostage; a daughter who I had never met. She was supposedly the product of a relationship that I’d almost forgotten about. Although it was serious at the time, it ended in tears and I’d shut it out of my mind. I’d met Pamela on a course at work and she blew my mind when she walked into the room. I thought she was the one but I couldn’t convince her that she felt the same. In the end, I gave up trying and we parted on reasonably good terms. Finding out that she was pregnant months after we had split up, her mother took the decision that it would be better to pretend that her new boyfriend was the father. She was obviously so heartbroken that she had fallen into bed with him a week after the split, so at first wasn’t sure if Constance was mine or not. Or that’s what she told the newspapers when she went fishing for a lucrative exclusive. My notoriety had shaken a lot of old ‘friends’ from the woodwork. Each one brought a nugget of information from my dull past, most of it bullshit but the press pay well for lies and exaggeration. With the new boyfriend out of the picture and the recession biting single mothers hard, Constance’s mother, Pamela jumped on the bandwagon with a story that in terms of impact, blew the rest out of the water.
‘Murder Spree Crime Author is the Father of My Daughter’.
The silly cow had no idea that the niners were looking for anyone related to me so that they could force me out of hiding. I had painstakingly wiped out my internet footprints so that they couldn’t target anyone that I cared about. It had been a difficult process cutting all ties with my family and friends but their safety was paramount and I knew that the police would be tapping their calls to try and track me down. Pamela had no idea how widespread this insidious religion had spread or how powerful they were. Her daughter Constance was snatched within a week of the headlines being published. I didn’t know if she was telling the truth about her being mine or not, but either way I couldn’t leave a young girl in the clutches of paedophile Satanists. I had to find her.
I had a head start on them this time around. Months before, I’d tracked some of the niners to a remote farmhouse aptly named, Brunt Boggart, old English for ‘burnt witch’. The farm was built on the site of the ancient execution of a local woman who was accused of being a witch and her legacy was documented throughout history. Every building ever built there mysteriously burned down and the families were plagued with sickness, death and misfortune. It seemed that the niners searched out such places to hold their ceremonies. To cut a long story short, I interrupted one of their gatherings and three of them were sent to meet their dark lord, despatched with my twelve gauge shotgun. The mobile phones which I had taken from the dead niners proved to be very useful tools in my search for the kidnappers. I knew that it could be weeks before they realised that their sicko frien