“You filthy harlot, I’m going to fuck you till you bleed, and if you ever tell anyone about what I’ve done I’m going to come back and slice your nose off, and then your eyelids and then your lips.” His voice was quivering with excitement, and she suddenly felt him enter her. No! Wait! She wanted to cry out. You’re not even wearing a condom! But he was too far gone to care. “And then I’m going to slit your worthless throat from ear to ear,” he panted, his eyes bulging with excitement as he approached climax, “and watch you bleed out as I fuck the hole in your neck.”
Unable to breath, Willow lashed out in terror, at first clawing at his face and then trying to gouge his eyes out, but he was far too strong and he simply swatted her feeble efforts aside.
She could feel the life being squeezed out of her. As she vainly fought to pull his hands away from her throat, tiny yellow spots flickered before her eyes and the world began to swim. Within moments, her hands fell to her sides and her legs buckled underneath her.
And then he had finished, and she was lying on the floor gasping for breath as he stood over her, trousers around his ankles, wiping his manhood with a handkerchief.
“Now thank me,” he told her, breathing heavily from his exertions.
Willow struggled into a sitting position on the cold floor, rubbing her bruised and bloody neck. As she gulped down air, the world slowly came back into focus.
She was still alive!
When she didn’t immediately comply with his instruction, the punter reached down and grabbed her hair savagely. Using both hands, he dragged her to her feet, ignoring her cries of pain. “I told you to thank me,” he snarled.
“Thank you?” Willow sobbed uncontrollably. “What for, raping and half-killing me? You sick fuck, just get out of my sight before I call the police.” As she spoke, Willow tried to back away from him, but the punter had no intention of allowing that. He yanked her hair upwards, forcing her onto the tips of her toes. Despite the searing pain in her scalp, Willow shoved him hard in the chest with both hands, sending him tottering backward in a series of penguin-like steps.
She kicked off her shoes and tried to run past him, but the punter rugby tackled her to the ground, landing on top of her chest with a heavy thud.
His brain was on fire as he pinned her writhing form to the floor. As she struggled to break free, something inside his mind snapped and he lunged for her throat, hands outstretched like grotesque claws.
The punter continued to wring Willow’s scrawny neck long after she was dead. At some point during the attack, he couldn’t remember when exactly, he battered the back of her skull against the dirty cobbled floor, cracking her head open like an eggshell.
Afterwards, as he sat astride her body, perspiring and gulping air down hungrily, the seriousness of the situation began to sink in. Staggering to his feet, Willow’s killer wiped his bloodstained, shaking hands down the sides of his coat and hurriedly pulled his trousers up.
“My God, what have I done?” he asked himself, hardly recognising the sound of his own voice. In a moment of pure madness, he had done something utterly reprehensible.
Taking a last look at the unmoving form on the cobbled floor, the man who had ended Willow’s life so prematurely turned and ran down the alley.
CHAPTER 1
Saturday 30th October 1999
Although the pale-yellow glow from the brass table lamp illuminated his lap and most of his torso, it was nowhere near strong enough to reach his face, which remained firmly ensconced in shadow.
Beyond the small pool of light, the darkness that filled the rest of the room was cold and foreboding. From deep within it came the steady tick-tock of a large clock, providing the heartbeat of an otherwise silent house.
The man sitting motionless in the red Chesterfield opened the thick, leather-bound tome in his hands and began reading.
…As it is written in the heavens above, so it is reflected on the mortal plain below. This is a fundamental truth that lies at the heart of all occult teachings...
“As above, so below…” He voiced the magician’s motto with reverence. The maxim comes from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus (meaning Hermes the Thrice Greatest). Also known as the Smaragdine Table, the Tablet’s cryptic message is considered one of the bedrocks of Hermeticism.
The Tablet was purportedly discovered by Alexander the Great in a cave at Hebron, which contained the tomb of Hermes. The short work contained thirteen sentences in Phoenician characters, and these are considered to be the basic principles of alchemy.
In essence, ‘As above, so below,’ is an esoteric proclamation that the Microcosm – oneself – and the Macrocosm – the universe – are fundamentally one and the same, and an understanding of one leads to a greater understanding of the other. According to Hermetic doctrine, there are no autonomous strands in our existence; all things on heaven and earth originate from a single source and they remain forever dynamically interconnected. From the individual quarks, protons, neutrons, and electrons that populate an atom to the largest galaxies that make up the limitless universe, all things are joined.
The reader, a self-taught disciple of the Left-Hand-Path, was obsessed with all things occult and esoteric. Having studied books on arcane practices for many years, he knew that it is precisely because all things physical and spiritual are so intimately bound that the sorcerer is able to cause a transformation in or of a thing without any physical contact simply by possessing the will and the imagination to make it happen.
Sinking into the soft leather contours of the armchair,
