Azazel – A Fable

Chapter 1: Dramatis Personae

Father Brendan Kelly knelt in Saint Luke's Roman Catholic cemetery, staring at the excavated grave and the shattered memorial stone. Nausea almost overcame him as he took in the blood-spattered flowers strewn about the up-ended urn and the headless chicken, its feathers cemented to the stones and earth in dried red gore.

He crossed himself, ran a hand through his shiny black hair, and rose to his feet.

Detective Sergeant Derbyshire approached the broad, tall figure in black vestment and clerical collar and spoke awkwardly, nervous of the powerful frame which shook with controlled anger.

“The caretaker discovered it this morning, Father. The fingerprint lads have been, but we're waiting for the local press to take some pictures. We got Mrs O'Hagan to agree to it. Bring it to the community's attention, you know. As soon as they've gone, the caretaker can clean everything up. We contacted you as soon as we could.”

“Did they take the body?” Father Kelly's voice cracked with emotion, so that “body” was uttered in falsetto.

“They took it out of the coffin. Just bones now, of course - he's been under for nearly two years. But we've found most of them, strewn all over the cemetery. They're in a bag at the station. They’ll be re-interred eventually, of course. It’s Mrs O’Hagan I feel sorry for. What that poor woman must be going through.”

The priest's eyes were moist. “It's not possible. What I see in front of me is not possible. For human beings, created by God, even to want to do this - it’s not possible.”

A crow cawed obscenely as it flew overhead, as if mocking his pain.

“It's the fifth incident on my patch this month. They did Saint Hilda's last Monday - C of E. At least they're non-sectarian.”

Father Kelly unconsciously fingered the cross that hung on his chest. “Do you think it's the same people every time?”

“Hard to say, Father.”

“Are you a believer, Sergeant?”

“Well ... er ... I ... ”

He sensed the policeman's discomfort. “You're not. So there's no point in my asking you if you think it's organised Satanism.”

“Oh, I don't know, Father. It's drugs, isn't it? They turn their brains inside out with every chemical they can get their hands on, then they start reading the black magic books. They learn the rituals, and off they go. It's always the same pattern, but there could be dozens of them at it. Although I'm not discounting the possibility that it might be orchestrated.”

“And Mrs O'Hagan?”

“She's at home, under sedation. She was asking for you.”

“Yes, I'll go straight there.”

Two young men entered the cemetery gates, one holding a notebook, the other a camera.

“If you'll excuse me, Father, I'd better give the press a bit of info.”

Father Kelly did not hear him. His thoughts were on the inscription on the broken memorial stone:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF OUR BELOVED SON
MICHAEL SEAN O’HAGAN
DIED JANUARY 18th 2000
AGED FIVE YEARS
SAFE WITH GOD NOW


Cyril Crimp flicked the tip of his tongue at the stamp hinge he had folded in two and reverently fixed it to the back of an iridescent Romanian pictorial. Fidgeting with delight, he lovingly pressed the thin paper image of an Orthodox icon on to the grid-lined page of the album. Since his bleak, confused and lonely boyhood, a few hours with his beloved and ever growing collection had always served to calm his troubled mind.

As he closed the album marked “East European Pictorials” and pulled towards him across the kitchen table the one marked “British Commonwealth Definitives”, he reluctantly recalled the events of the night before.

Arguments between him and his wife, Tracy, were always about sex, his mother or money. On this occasion Tracy had flared up with her disturbing fury about all three. Cyril had failed to satisfy her sexually (a regular occurrence), and this had provoked her usual accusations that he was a pathetic mummy's boy who could never find a job, “not even cleaning shit-houses”.

The anguish this recollection caused him brought on his palpitations, and he began to regulate his breathing to fend off a panic attack. He sought the philatelic balm of an old Indian definitive. His trembling fingers gripped its perforated edge with the glinting tweezers.

The franked and faded image of a splendid temple beneath the disembodied head of George the Fifth, his face scarred by the postmark, mesmerised Cyril. As he thought of how India must have changed since the stamp was printed, of how neither Pakistan nor Bangla Desh existed when it was first licked and pressed onto an envelope, a transcendental peace washed over his mind, and the palpitations stopped.

The vast areas of the earth and the great tide of human history that these pieces of inked paper recalled made his fears seem less potent. He felt a rush of joy as he leafed through the album, coursing through decades and continents with the turn of a page.

Cyril took off his spectacles, hissed warm breath on to the lenses, wiped them with a piece of kitchen towel and glanced at the clock on the wall. Eleven-fifteen. Tracy would be home from her morning cleaning job in a quarter of an hour. He wondered if he would have to suffer a wall of silence, as he had over breakfast. He hated it when his wife refused to speak to him. It made him feel like a naughty boy.

His mother treated him in the same way if he missed a visit. He knew that, if he failed to turn up for one of his thrice-weekly visits to her sheltered accommodation, on the next one she would not talk to him at all. They would sit in silence on opposite sides of the room until it was time for him to leave. Sometimes he did not see the point of it all.

Although he did not need to be at the jobcentre for his fortnightly signing until twelve-thirty, he decided to leave early and take a slow stroll instead of the bus.


The Reverend Danvers Pilbeam, vicar of Saint Hilda's, thoughtfully read the immaculately word-processed letter for the fourth time. He had seen this fiery and energetic young Catholic priest on the local television news, talking frankly and passionately about the epidemic of grave-desecration in the area, and attributing it to organised Satanism among the young and disaffected. And now this letter from him had arrived in the vicar's post.

He writes as articulately and passionately as he speaks, thought Reverend Pilbeam as he scratched his bald, glistening scalp. He looked at his fingernail with a grimace. The oily sweat from his pate had collected under the nail, giving it a grey-black edge.

“This is an excellent idea!” he enthused aloud to himself. “As well as addressing our current problem, it would provide an invaluable opportunity for worshippers of all faiths to meet each other in a spirit of brotherhood.”

He took up his dripping fountain pen to dash off an enthusiastic reply but, leaning back in his swivel-chair, he decided first to read the eloquent epistle one final time:

“Dear Reverend Pilbeam,

As you are no doubt painfully aware, this area of London has suffered in recent months the most appalling incidences of vandalism and graffiti of a particular kind.

These sickening crimes, all of them directed at religious buildings and burial places, have included the daubing of “magical” symbols on church doors and walls, the theft of religious artefacts from the House of God and (even though I can scarcely believe it as I write the words) the desecration of Christian graves.

Allow me to assert my firm belief that what we are witnessing in our parishes is nothing less than organised and orchestrated Devil-worship on an unprecedented scale, which threatens not only to disrupt the lives of decent Christian people, but also to place the souls of its confused and desperate acolytes in mortal peril.

Only sustained and concerted effort by the area’s Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist and Orthodox communions will succeed in defeating this (literally) diabolical menace.

I intend to establish, with my bishop’s full support and good wishes, a Christian Anti-Satanist Alliance, and I urge you to join with me in its formation so that we may combat this evil together as brothers in Christ.

I look forward to your co-operation.

May God protect you.

Yours in Christ,

Father Brendan Kelly

Saint Luke’s RC Church”


Doctor Dolores Delarosa, consultant psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst, walked from her flat in Knightsbridge across Hyde Park to Speakers’ Corner at Marble Arch, as she had done most fine Sunday mornings since she moved to London from Madrid seven years before. Like the tourists who flocked to this renowned spectacle, she found
most of the speakers good-natured and entertaining, obviously enjoying the amicable banter with their regular hecklers. Their performances were more a celebration of democratic free speech than anything more sinister.

But she was both professionally fascinated and personally dismayed by the handful of political extremists and religious fundamentalists who gathered to bark their rival truths at the shifting crowds.

Large groups had already gathered around the more charismatic orators when she arrived, her coal-black shoulder-length hair ruffled by the light breeze. The August sun was bright and the air warm on her face, a face which was transcendently beautiful. Her full and sensual figure attracted male glances that were more awe-struck than merely lustful.

It was past eleven o’ clock, so the regulars were well under way. Two anarchists, the one a good looking, unshaven Londoner with a pony tail of dark hair, the other a pasty-faced, grey-haired Glaswegian, were taking turns to lecture their listeners on how to “screw the system” and “take power back from government”, their soapbox being a small
collapsible step ladder. They advised on everything anarchistically imaginable, from sending tobacco and alcoholic drink through the post to one’s home address from France in order to avoid excise duty, to the use of barter among friends and neighbours for everything from vegetables to video recorders.

The young American evangelist in a cowboy hat and striking red shirt, also on a step ladder, was engaged in a friendly shouting match with a man of Arab appearance in western dress whom he called “Fred”. Fred had brought his own step ladder, which he had positioned close to the American.

“Receive into your lives Jesus Christ, the Son of God!” the cowboy suggested to his audience at the top of his voice. “He even loves you, Fred!” A few spectators chuckled.

“He was not son of God,” Fred retorted in picturesquely inaccurate English, pointing his forefinger heavenwards, “he fall from the woman!”

Most of the Christian evangelists were receiving similar challenges to their deification of the prophet Jesus from Islamic hecklers, but the atmosphere remained friendly. A police van was, however, parked on the pathway in case tempers became frayed as the day wore on. Two bobbies, one of each gender, were mingling with the crowds and smiling and chatting to the tourists, many of whom were delightedly snapping cameras, since friendly police officers were something of a cultural phenomenon for them.

Dolores strolled past the regular pitches one by one. The man with a South African accent was railing against the euro, claiming it to be the first move in a conspiracy to abolish paper money. The little shaven-headed man with an Italian accent was proclaiming the superiority of men over women, giving a music hall performance in both English and German which delighted the tourists. The Nation of Islam was promulgating its peculiar brand of inverse apartheid, the speaker surrounded by young minders in emblazoned bomber jackets and sunglasses who looked more like Harlem hoods than followers of a pseudo-religious cult. The shy young man with an inane grin and a poster stuck to the front of his anorak bearing the word-processed legend “MAITREYA THE CHRIST IS LIVING IN LONDON” was waiting for passers-by to ask for details. The converted Jew with the miniature Israeli flag sprouting from the top pocket of his leather jacket was singing “He’s alive, He’s alive,” head thrown back and Christian Bible in hand.

Dolores had passed another half dozen or so of the regular performers when she noticed two new faces. Not satisfied with upturned boxes or step ladders, both the newcomers stood on neatly erected wooden platforms with solid steps at the rear and sturdy handrails at the front.

“This is the word of Allah, the one true God!” brayed an Asian man of sixty or so in a barely comprehensible accent. As he held the Holy Koran aloft, the sun gave an other-worldly glow to his billowing white robe and bulbous white turban, and sweat from his clean-shaven upper lip trickled onto his thick grey beard like a glistening cultural paradox.

Just a few yards away stood a squat and stocky middle-aged homunculus with square-cropped, dyed blond hair, holding a battered black Bible in the air just as the Asian held his Koran.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil!” he bellowed aggressively in a moronic Bronx accent. Although he wore a sleeveless white shirt and no jacket in the August heat, his puffy face bore a crimson glow and his eyes, like the veins in his neck, were bulging due to his excessively tight tie.

“This book is your only protection against the wiles of Satan and false gods. Accept the Lord Jesus Christ into your lives and into your hearts and you will find salvation. Deny Him and you will burn in the fires of Hell!”

Although neither of them addressed the other directly or heckled his theological rival, there was an almost tangible tension between these two speakers.

“God will destroy you if you do not follow the teachings of the Holy Koran!” Muhamed Ali Husain Abubaker, the Asian orator, continued. “Your western society is corrupt. You have turned your faces from God. Your women dress and act like prostitutes,” (Dolores scowled as his accusing gaze fell upon her mini-skirt and bare thighs) “and your men drink alcohol, which turns them into violent animals. Your governments support the tyrant Israel, helping that filthy state to enslave the Palestinian people. Your religion teaches the Trinity, teaches that there are three Gods. This is blasphemy! There is only one God - Allah, the merciful and compassionate. You call the prophet Jesus, revered by Muslims, ‘the Son of God’. God has no sons! You will be punished for these blasphemies!”

“I was a hoodlum in New York before Jesus Christ saved me,” Leviticus P Stuyvesant, the American evangelist, confessed to the crowd. “When I let Jesus Christ into my heart, he changed my life. Before I found Jesus Christ I used and dealt drugs. I mugged people in the street. I burglarised their homes. I associated with prostitutes. I associated with homosexuals. I associated with Communists and Jews and heathens and worshippers of false gods. The Lord Jesus Christ cleansed me!”

Doctor Dolores Delarosa wandered away sadly. She had heard enough.

Tired and sweaty from the three hours she had spent cleaning a local pub, Tracy Crimp stepped into her steaming shower and soaped herself methodically for several minutes.

She stepped over her discarded jeans and tee-shirt as she dried herself with a voluminous pink towel, padded through into her bedroom and opened her wardrobe.

She admired her lithe body in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door, especially her full, dark nipples and long, sculpted thighs. Her shoulder-length blond hair, still damp, glistened in the sunlight.

“What a waste, what a waste,” she sighed sadly as she pulled on black stockings with elasticated tops, a black leather mini and a fluffy pink blouse over a lacy black half-cup bra. She slid her feet into black high heels and teetered gingerly downstairs and into her kitchen.

A fully laden washing machine droned and rumbled. Tracy made coffee and sipped it at the table, the floor vibrating beneath her feet as the machine began its spin cycle.

She had placed her husband’s stamp albums, which he had forgotten to clear away, in a neat pile on a corner of the kitchen table. On the remaining space she had half-heartedly laid out her astrology books and tarot cards.

Having spent years trying to improve her life, particularly the financial areas of it, through the anodyne tabloid occultism which she had genuinely believed to be a source of mystical power, she was now beginning to wonder whether it was all just nonsense for the desperately gullible, as many people insisted it was.

She looked around the shoddy kitchen and sighed. She had just passed her thirtieth birthday. She was living in a council house, married to an unemployable man, and working as a cleaner for slave wages in the black economy so as not to lose out on benefits. She felt like a prisoner. And she felt that her life was ebbing away, each day a betrayal of her true destiny.

Cyril’s adoring love and support had enabled her to defeat her drug addiction and change her criminal lifestyle. But they had been married for five years now, and it felt like twenty. Her husband was utterly hopeless in bed, embarrassingly shy in company and feckless in all areas of life. And, as much as she loved him, she was beginning to harbour thoughts of leaving him. Tracy yearned to be free of poverty and drudgery for ever, and this goal seemed unattainable while she remained with Cyril Crimp.

She had spent ten minutes or so turning up tarot cards, mumbling ominously at each one, when there came an aggressive rap on the back door. She knew immediately who it was: the only visitor who never rang the front doorbell.

“Trace? You there? It’s me!”

Tracy unlocked the back door. Her elder brother and only sibling, Trevor Bruton, stood there in his street uniform of black bomber jacket, ragged blue jeans and festering trainers. His sleeked-back black hair was as greasy as ever, and he was sweating profusely and nodding involuntarily, so she knew he had indulged in a lager and amphetamine cocktail.

“What do you want this time, Iggy?” She used the name he had adopted for himself years before, in honour of his favourite singer, Iggy Pop. He loathed his real name.

“I’ve dropped round to see ya, ain’t I?” he insisted as he drew on the stubby remnant of a reefer.

“Pull the other one! You only come round here when you want something.”

“I could do wiv a bite to eat,” he admitted as he brushed past her.

Tracy watched contemptuously as her brother rifled the fridge.

“Fuck me, Trace, is this all you got? I’m fuckin’ starvin’!”

“You wanna buy some food then, instead of all them drugs, don’t ya? An ’ if you stop dealin’ draw an’ speed an’ smack an’ blaggin’ people’s houses, you won’t be in an’ outta nick, an’ you might be able to get a job!”

“Don’t be a tight-arsed cow, Trace. I’m your own bruvver!”

“I work hard for my money! There’s never much in the fridge on Tuesdays. I don’t get paid till Friday.”

“An’ that dozy little cunt you got married to ain’t bringing much in, is he, gel?”

Tracy’s face flushed with defensive anger. “You leave Cyril alone! He gives me all his giro every fortnight!” She aspirated her aitches, as she often did for emphasis.

Her brother, on the other hand, had never been known to aspirate an aitch in his entire life. Indeed, although they had both lived in central London for many years now, their native East End accents were as uncompromisingly strident as ever.

She bent forward to vent her anger on the garments she began to extract violently from the washing machine.

“He don’t give you much else though, does he?” Iggy taunted, clamping her buttocks in his broad hand, and pressing his index finger hard against her labia.

“Fuck off! Jus’ fuckin’ fuck off!” Her maniacal wail brought her brother to what remained of his senses as she swiped his hand away. Her eyes were moist with fear and anger and her whole body shook.

“You didn’t mind it when we was kids. When I was fourteen an’ you was eleven,” he whimpered.

“That’s because I thought I was supposed to do it! I thought that’s what was expected of me, you cunt! That’s what screwed me up in the first place, you an’ Dad shaggin’ me whenever you fuckin’ felt like it, an’ makin’ me suck you off!” She was breathless with anger now, the assault having brought back painful memories of a stolen childhood.

Iggy returned evasively to his exploration of her fridge. She advanced towards him, her fists clenched.

“That’s why I ended up on smack when I was fourteen, floggin’ me cunt up King’s Cross! All because of you and him! You bastard!”

“Aw right! I’m fuckin’ sorry!” The acoustics of the interior of the refrigerator distorted her brother’s voice. He had spotted the remains of a joint of beef.

Tracy grew slowly calmer as Iggy sat noisily devouring the beef sandwiches he had clumsily made. Crumbs were spattering Cyril’s albums and her books and tarot cards. He was her brother after all, she thought, and he wouldn’t have done those dirty things to her if Dad hadn’t put him up to it.

“Sorry, Trace, I was bang out of order,” Iggy said as a piece of soggy, half-chewed meat splattered on to “Aquarius: Your Year Day By Day”.

“Just you keep yer hands to yerself. Brought back nasty memories for me, that did,” she chided with a forgiving mildness in her voice as a final tear dropped from her eye.

“You into all that? Tarot cards an’ that?” he garbled as he wiped crumbs, meat and saliva off “The Wheel of Fortune”, “The Female Pope” and “The Hanged Man” with the back of his forefinger.

Tracy blew her nose and sniffled. “For all the good it’s ever done me! I’m beginnin’ to fink these clever people are right, an’ it’s all a loada bollocks.”

“What, on account of how it never got ya nowhere, like?”

“Precisely!”

Iggy pondered the three upturned cards as he munched. “Best not to throw the baby out wiv the bath water, though.”

“What exactly do you mean by that, Iggy?”

“Well, tarot an’ the stars an’ all that, it’s all a bit mild, innit? A bit softcore, know what I mean?” The inverted crucifix hanging from his right ear lobe sparkled in the sunlight as it swayed.

“Compared to what, may I ask?”

Iggy swallowed a large and inadequately chewed chunk of beef sandwich hard, so that it made his eyes water. “Compared to conjurin’ up a demon,” he croaked tearfully.

“You what?” Tracy asked incredulously as she handed him a glass of water.

Her brother took a deep draught. “A demon. Can be done, Trace, if ya know how.”

“An’ why would anybody wanna conjure up a demon, for fuck’s sake?”

“Power, Trace. Power over yer own life. You get the demon to do yer biddin’, see? He’s in your power, so he’s gotta do what you tell him.”

“An’ how would you get a demon in your power, may I ask?”

Iggy pulled a thick book, bound in scuffed and faded black leather, from his inside pocket and slapped it on the table. The draught and impact caused most of the tarot cards to scatter over the floor, as if fleeing from a greater power. Its gold inlaid title glinted in the sunlight streaming through the window: “The Grimoire of Albertus Pusillanimus”.


Although they did not yet know it, this group of very different people - a passionate young Catholic priest, an elderly and eccentric Anglican vicar, an officer in the Metropolitan Police, a visiting American evangelist, a fundamentalist Muslim imam, a beautiful Spanish psychoanalyst, a weak and ineffectual little man, his frustrated wife and her degenerate brother - would soon be involved in a series of extraordinary events which would change or end their lives.

The tenth player in the drama which was about to unfold was in the same geographical place as the other nine, but in a different dimension. Imprisoned in an immaterial void was Azazel, a metaphysical intelligence of the type that men have historically called “demon”. It was over four hundred earth years since he had last been invited to possess a human mind and body, and Cosmic Law dictated that he could not do so without the correctly followed invocation procedure. He had to be called by name.

Azazel had been following closely the recent physical and psychological developments in this part of London. It was in his interests to do so.

For he ached to become flesh once more.


© Pete J Garbett 2001

Feedback sent in by P.J.Mandell 09/Dec/01 

I don't usually read this far on the small screen but I was hooked and had to read on. It's terrific. I began to feel that my highly volatile book paled by comparison. I'll look forward to completion of this book.