The Moon Witch E-Book

Leslie Garber

• Herausgeber: Alfredbooks
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 125

Beschreibung

The Moon Witch Leslie Garber Uncanny novel Dark rituals between monastery walls and a cruel moon cult - a young woman sees to bring light into the darkness and gets to feel the powers of the moon-witch and has to fight for her love.

Leseprobe

The Moon Witch

Leslie Garber

Uncanny novel 

Dark rituals between monastery walls and a cruel moon cult - a young woman sees to bring light into the darkness and gets to feel the powers of the moon-witch and has to fight for her love.

Copyright

LESLIE GARBER IS A PEN-NAME OF ALFRED BEKKER

© by Alfred Bekker / Cover Tony Masero

2018 of the digital edition by AlfredBekker/CassiopeiaPress, Lengerich (Westphalia)

www.AlfredBekker.de

[email protected]

1

"Rhymeth," whispered the woman in the blue dress whose long red hair blew in the night wind. The call reverberated unheard between gloomy monastery walls. "Rhymeth!" she shouted a little louder.

Her face was finely cut and very even, but there was something in her features that made every viewer shudder involuntarily.

Uncovered cruelty.

The smile to which her full-lipped mouth twisted was as cold as death...

In her dark eyes the full moon was reflected, whose pale light made bizarre shadows appear on the grey sandstone walls.

"Rhymeth! Your obedient servant calls you!"

She spread her arms out and stretched them towards the moon.

"Rhymeth! Give me strength," she whispered, her face contorted in a way that gave her something inhuman. One last time she called out this gloomy name and despair had crept into her tone.

She finally lowered her arms and swallowed.

Then she breathed deeply and closed her eyes, as if she had made a great effort. She swallowed and clenched her hands in fists.

The next moment, the tinny sound of a church bell opened her eyes wide. It was a deafening noise.

The woman in red stroked her hair out of her face with an erratic gesture.

From the bizarre shadows that the moonlight conjured onto the grey stone walls of the nearby chapel, dark figures now emerged.

At first it was just dark outlines, like blurry shadows, but the closer they came, the more they changed.

At first glance, they looked like monks. However, they wore strange oval wooden amulets around their necks instead of crosses.

Under the hoods of her ankle-length frocks there seemed to be nothing but nameless blackness, although the moonlight would have been bright enough to show some of their faces...

Silently they approached the woman in red and then formed a kind of semicircle around her.

"Rhymeth," said the woman with red hair in a brittle voice. "They..."

"She's still silent?" it came out dully from under one of the hoods.

"Yes."

"Then there is only one way..."

"I know," she muttered, and the sound of her voice got something predatory.

"A sacrifice!" it came from the cowl wearer.

In the woman's dark eyes it flickered. Then they began to glow strangely, like little lamps. There was more of her pupils now. Her orbits were filled with a garish white...

She exposed her teeth.

"Yes, a victim," she confirmed whispering, and the night wind took her words with it and carried them across the land like a threat...

2

It was the clapping of raindrops that released me from my dream.

I opened my eyes and a moment later I was just as straight as a die. Rhymeth - this mysterious name, which had played a role in my dream, was still on my tongue...

It was not the first time that I dreamed of that red-haired woman who, in the presence of a group of mysterious figures dressed in monk's robes, kept pronouncing this name in an old monastery wall...

Rhymeth ...

I got up and looked out the window. With my left hand I drove through my medium-length brunette hair and sighed. It was raining outside. The weather had been miserable even by London standards for days and the garden of Aunt Bell's villa looked like that. Aunt Bell was actually called Beverly Maddock and was my great-aunt. I lived with her since the early death of my parents and lived on the upper floor of her spacious villa.

I crossed my arms in front of my chest and rubbed my elbow. It had become cold - much too cold for the season.

I was horrified to think that a strenuous day awaited me tomorrow in the editorial office of the London City Observer, a London tabloid newspaper for which I worked as a reporter. I did my work gladly and with full commitment, only one could hardly use sleepless nights in this sometimes exhausting job. And that was even more true when something like that became more frequent, which was the case with me...

In the last days the dream about the mysterious redhead had haunted me several times and every time I was struck by a strange restlessness, so that I had fallen asleep again only in the early morning.

A noise from the lower floor made me listen. It had drowned out the splashing of the raindrops for a moment. It was probably Aunt Bell, who sometimes sat in her large library for nights and browsed through old folios.

I thought for a moment and then decided to keep her company. At the moment it didn't make sense anyway when I went back to bed.

Rhymeth ...

The name echoed inside me like an echo from another world, another time...

Barefoot and in my nightgown I went down the stairs that connected my part of the villa with Aunt Bell's rooms.

Aunt Bell was the wife of the once quite famous and controversial archaeologist Franklin Maddock, who had not returned from his last expedition and had disappeared under mysterious circumstances. He was the source of countless archaeological finds and artefacts of exotic cults, which turned Aunt Bell's villa into a kind of museum. Beverly's personal interest in anything somehow related to unexplained phenomena, occultism and psychic perception was added. She had compiled a considerable private archive in this field, which contained thousands of press articles as well as valuable copies of remote writings. In painstaking and years of detailed work she had collected this treasure and so in the meantime her villa certainly contained one of the largest collections on this subject which existed in England.

It was a grotesque hodgepodge that meanwhile filled almost all rooms of the villa - with the exception of my floor, which I sometimes jokingly called the occult-free zone.

Already on the first landing the face of an African god of the dead Benin grinned at me, who would have fitted into every ghost train with his devilish snarl.

I actually found Aunt Bell in the library. She sat in a large wing chair and, with a serious, slightly tense face, was absorbed in the reading of an already half-decayed and rather dusty tome.

At first she didn't even notice me.

It wasn't until a parquet plank creaked that they were startled.

"Oh, it's you, child..."

Child - that's what she still called me many times, although I was certainly already an adult at the age of 26.

But she had raised me like her own child after the death of my parents and never really got used to the idea that I was an adult.

I said, "Am I interrupting?"

"No, of course not." I sat down with her and she closed her book. "What is it? Can't you sleep?"

"No."

She looked at me and then nodded knowing. She could hardly hide anything from her, she just knew me too well.

"Did you dream?" she asked me.

"Yes."

"Again by the red-haired woman in these monastery walls..."

"...and this name. Rhymeth ... You think it's one of those dreams, don't you?" In the meantime I had accepted it as a fact that I had a slight supernatural ability, which mainly showed itself in dreams or daydream-like visions, in which fragments of the future revealed themselves to me.

Fragments - that's usually all it was. Sometimes little more than a subliminal hunch or mysterious pictures that I first had to interpret.

As a teenager, I had foreseen the fire of a house in this way. Since then Aunt Bell was rock solidly convinced of my gift, while I had remained very skeptical for a long time.

Aunt Bell sighed, "I have already begun to research in my archives what this name - Rhymeth - could mean..."

"Well?"

"So far I haven't found anything. But that doesn't mean anything yet... I need a little more time!"

"Yeah, sure."

I knew that one could hide in Aunt Bell's occult archive for days to research a particular matter. Sometimes I had the impression that my great-aunt herself had already lost track of the size of her collection.

She looked at me and tried to cheer me up a little with her smile. "I'll figure it out, my child. You can count on it!"

I shrugged my shoulders. "I guess this dream doesn't have the meaning I attach to it," I explained.

But Aunt Bell shook her head decisively. "Don't even try to tell yourself such nonsense, Jenni! It's important and you know it..."

3

When I entered the open-plan office of the London City Observer editorial office the next morning, I had difficulty suppressing a yawn. I walked straight to my desk and sat down on the familiar swivel chair, and my eyes fell on the note that someone had put there for me.

There were only two words on it.

TO THE CHIEF!

I took a deep breath.

That's all I needed! So I got up again and walked straight to the office of editor-in-chief Martin T. Stone. When I entered, I saw Stone sitting behind his desk looking up at me.

"Good morning, Jennifer. Glad you're finally here, then we can get started!"

Stone was notorious for his sometimes choleric manner.

For him, managing the London City Observer was more than just a job. Stone lived for this task. He made every effort to ensure that the Observer held its own in the market and demanded the same from each of his employees.

At first he had been very sceptical about me, but in the meantime I had earned his respect. And that was something to be proud of.

"Hello, Jenni!", it came from another direction.

I turned halfway around and saw a man my age, blond and in tattered jeans. He had planted himself in one of the thick leather chairs standing around Stone's office. The hair was a bit too long and had certainly not seen a hairdresser for some time. And the lapel of his jacket had suffered greatly from the straps of the cameras he used to wear around his neck.

"Jim!", I greeted him and he winked at me mischievously.

Jim Shelby was a photographer at the Observer and it happened quite often that we both worked together on a story.

"I beg your pardon," Stone grumbled a little annoyed. "Let's get down to brass tacks!"

One of the many things he hated was wasting time.

I didn't wait until Stone offered me a place, because I was sure he wouldn't do it.

"I suppose there is work," I said, trying to put on a reasonably cheerful face and hide my fatigue as effectively as possible.

Stone nodded.

"Do you know the name Hal Morgan?"

I thought briefly, and then I said, "Do you mean the Hal Morgan?" Celebrities were part of our business and therefore I was familiar with the name. There was a former TV presenter who had been running several game shows under this name. A few years ago it had been very popular. Now his name was hardly known to the general public. Only now and then there were a few lines about him in the gossip columns of the tabloid press. Morgan had retired from show business at the height of his success and had turned to esotericism. Rumors had it that he had either joined an obscure sect or enjoyed his life in seclusion somewhere in Spain or North Africa.

Martin T. Stone nodded slowly.

"Yes, the Hal Morgan," he then confirmed. "It's sad. Three years ago, you probably wouldn't have asked me that. He was even more popular than some members of the royal family. This is how fast it can go..."

"What about Morgan? Does he want to go back to the stage?" I asked.

"No. He was murdered last night in Birmingham."

"What?"

"The crime scene is near St. Philip's Cathedral. The news came in a quarter of an hour ago via the tickers. More detailed information is not yet known... I'd like to ask you and Jim to go to Birmingham immediately to find out more about this..."

I nodded thoughtfully.

It was a sad thing. Hal Morgan would return to the public eye once more - through his death.

4

With my red, somewhat old-fashioned Mercedes, which was a gift from Aunt Bell, it took us about two and a half hours to Birmingham.

"What's wrong with you, Jenni?" Jim asked me on the way.

"What's the matter?"

"You're so quiet."

"It's nothing. Nothing, except maybe the fact that I'm pretty tired!"

"The rings under your eyes are conspicuous," he flattened, which of course was not meant seriously.

"And I thought I made them up good!", I gave back.

"Seriously, Jennifer!", he said. "You know you can talk to me about it if something's bothering you, right?"

"Yes," I said, but with the thing going around in my head I couldn't come to him, Jim might as well be such a nice guy. We were good colleagues. A well-rehearsed team as far as the job was concerned and otherwise no more than friends.

Jim wouldn't have minded if more had developed out of it, but privately Jim with his unconventional way just wasn't the man I wanted to be by my side in lonely hours.

I was still occupied with the dream I had. The face of the red-haired woman was as clear to me as the face of a real human being. For me that alone was an indication that this dream had something to do with my gift. Often enough I had experienced that these visions actually showed me something about the future - or about events taking place in distant places. Things no one could normally know anything about when you walked within the narrow limits of school science. But by now I had long accepted that there were enough phenomena that could not be explained in a way most people say is "natural".

The question of what my dream could mean gnawed at me. I knew it had to mean something.

"You can't fool me," I heard Jim say.

"Let's drop it, Jim. Okay?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Whatever you say."

We reached the centre of Birmingham. At a fast-food restaurant we stopped briefly to eat something. Then we continued through the narrow, confusing street labyrinth. From New Street we turned off and drove along Temple Street, at the end of which we could already see the green spaces surrounding St. Philip's Cathedral.

This was the crime scene.

I left the Mercedes on the side of the road and then we got out.