Werewolf the Podcast: An Angels Feather (Episode 230)

Ben Johnson is a Detective for the Supernatural Police Department. He has been asked to a murder scene. It is not just a murder scene, it's a summoning. But the Professor is in the mix. He is bringing together the crew that will fight Angel Michael, if that is who is causing all this nonsense.

Please check out Odin Apparel for amazing Viking-themed kits and our T-shirts. Preorder it now at this link.

https://odinapparel24.myshopify.com/collections/werewolf-a-serial-killer-podcast

The Old Man's Podcast:

The writing duo speak to the Old Man himself. Go check us out on his award-winning Podcast.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-old-mans-podcast/id1595940192?i=1000708626677

Grendel Press, our horror genre partner

https://grendelpress.com/

Grendel's very own cool Podcast.

https://grendelpress.com/sinister-soup. 

Buy us a coffee at this link right here:

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Werewolfwil

Buy a book about werewolves. Here it is, straight from a fang-filled mouth.

Il Lupo

Greg's first Werewolf book. Brilliantly written characters in an incredible story. 

https://books2read.com/ILLUPO

A Werewolf's Story

https://amzn.to/3BjXoZu

Werewolf the Colouring Book.

What should I do this evening? Why not sit and do some Wonderful Werewolf colouring?  Red may be a theme.

https://amzn.to/40k93l6

Facebook Group

https://www.facebook.com/groups/werewolfthepodcast/

Greg's X profile:@SempaiGreg

Werewolf the Podcast:@AWerewolfsStoryWil

Intro partnership with Grendel Press.

https://grendelpress.com/

Outro partnership with Grendel Press.

https://grendelpress.com/

The Podcast Inside Your House

Weird Horror. Created by Kevin Schrock and Annie Marie Morgan. 

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Chapters

• 14:01 [Ad] The Podcast Inside Your House
• 14:49 (Cont.) Werewolf the Podcast: An Angels Feather (Episode 230)

Transcript

Detective Ben Johnson

The rain over Walthamstow was the kind that didn't so much fall as hang in the air.

I like Walthamstow, mainly for its name. It's nice to say. 

Walthamstow. 

The area itself? Well. Walthamstow is the sort of place that gives the impression it's only just remembered it's in London and is doing its best to catch up. 

The high street stretches out like a particularly long receipt for a life you don't quite remember living — full of questionable bargains, divine samosas, and at least three barbers that all claim to be 'Original.' 

The air is thick with the scent of frying optimism, second-hand ambition, and something that might be jerk chicken but could also be the aftershave from the bloke behind you in the queue for Greggs. 

Ah, Greggs, the great British institution. 

Walthamstow doesn't sleep; it just occasionally pauses to adjust its Oyster card.

It's a neighbourhood that exists somewhere between myth and misprint. 

The local architecture is best described as 'Victorian, if the Victorians had access to cheap UPVC and no sense of proportion.'

The crows here are unionised, the foxes run protection rackets, and even the pigeons have opinions about housing policy. Yes, Wathamstow is that magical. 

Well, the Pigeons are not too chatty to be honest. They are just Pigeons, but the crows and the foxes are ver sharp.

If London were a living thing — which, according to certain Prof theories and one deeply confused detective constable, it is — then Walthamstow would be the slightly hungover heart: still beating, still beautiful in its own lopsided way, and forever muttering, 'Yeah, I'll sort it tomorrow.'

It also had its own climate. Tonight, the mighty borough had given us a damp apology for that.

A dismal, drizzle that nonetheless seeped into your bones and made its home there. 

My car, a loyal, grumbling beast of a machine.

A BMW M5 from far to long ago to be seen as dench by the youth, sighed to a halt behind a row of official vehicles, their blue lights staining the wet pavement like bruises on a sleeping face. 

Wow. After hanging with Soula and the Prof a lot, I can do that thing of waxing lyrical. 

Me sounding poetic, almost. 

I wish I had this capability of words when I was trying to woo Bianca Mitchell back at school. 

Although being able to speak in her presence would have been a start. 

Poetic me? It must be down to time spent with the educated. Or is it that my police reports are somewhat like Grim's original fairytales? Probs both. 

Wood Street Supermarket. The poorly lit plastic sign above its windows was a plea that had gone unanswered, its letters fading into the gloom of the horrific night.

I sat for a moment in the sudden silence of the dead engine. It pinked and ticked as it cooled, the ghost of the wiper blades still sweeping across my mind. 

I needed to prepare, cos it was always a bit of a mind fuck to walk into these things. 

By these things, I mean my job ain't just about people being dead and stuff. It could be anything in there, literally. 

I only get asked in by a Major Investigation Team when they have no idea what the fuck they are looking at, and they hope that I do. 

Fat chance most of the time. I just act unsurprised, which seems to mollify them. Jeez, I just used the word molify. 

I wrung the steering wheel with both hands at 10 to 2 as all not good drivers do. It gave me a sense of calm to grip as hard as I could and roll my head on my neck for a little while. 

I had to look like I knew what I was doing when in there and look like whatever it would be was just a normal day for me. 

These things never tended to be normal they was always ver not normal.

I let go of the wheel and went to get my warrant card from my inside pocket.

As me being me in this world, I still had to have proper proof of who I was at a scene. Police weren't racist no more. Well, mostly not, but they just knew their perps. 

I mean, I would have difficulty having a proper trust for me if I met me without a warrant card. 

'Hey, bruv, I am a detective in it.' Yeah, whatever, mate.

To any casual glance, it was a standard Metropolitan Police issue card. 

But if you knew where to look, if you knew how to look, you'd see the other mark, the one that isn't printed but is remembered into the paper: a blue cricled pentagram. 

It was a sigil for those of us who walk the less-trodden paths of the city. 

Members of the department that doesn't, officially, exist. Sometimes I wished it didn't. I wish I could just do simple things like murders and anti terrorism stuff. 

'Right then, I is I,' I told the quiet inside the car. I clacked my upper and lower jaw together in a teeth-chipping rhythm. 

A familiar ritual of mine, gained from my mum. A strange preparation, before stepping into the unknown. 

'You're a guest in someone else's spooky bullshit. Be polite. But don't forget to look under the bed.' I cajoled myself.

The air outside the car was cold. It was like having a wet cloth pressed against my face. 

A young constable, his face a mask of professional boredom overlaid on sheer youth, stood guarding his allotted stretch of tape. 

I remember the misery and the boredom of his job. I miss that boredom. Would it be worth the pay cut?

I showed him the card, the public side, and he lifted the tape for me, which was polite of him.

I ducked under, crossing the threshold from the world of rain and traffic and late-night kebab shops into the world of the thing that had happened here.

It dint feel right already. Maybe I had caught the Professors paranoia, but as he says, always best to think that somethings out to get you. He must like Nirvana or something. Unlikely though.

The first thing you notice about a happening like this is the silence. 

It's not a peaceful silence. It's a silence that has eaten all the other sounds that should be there. 

The air in the Supermarket was thick and still, smelling of forgotten vegetables and the sour breath of spoiled milk. And underneath it, like a bass note played in a distant room, was thee smell. 

Copper and cloying sweetness, the scent of old blood, but woven through with something else, something that crackled at the edge of perception: the ozone tang of a spent storm, and the ancient, dusty smell of opened graves.

'Oh great.' I said to the canned beans as my skin goosebumped.

My other senses, the ones the SPD trains you to listen to, were humming a low, warning tune. There was a resonance here. A stain.

A woman in a white suit, a forensic angel of death, stood by a door that led downwards. 

'DCI Marple is waiting for you,' she said, her voice muffled. 'Full kit. It's… a bad one.'

She pointed at a noddy suit and the other equipment that would be needed to be worn for such events.

I nodded. It might be bad for her. It really might, but bad is a relative term in this work, I find. 

I mean, I've seen bad. Bad is... 

I plasticked up, the rustle of the nylon a solemn dress code for the theatre of the dead. The mask over my face made the world smaller, my breath the loudest thing now in the room.

The stairs down to the cellar were old, wooden, complaining with every step. 

They didn't lead to a storage room; they led to an underworld. 

The temperature dropped with each stage of descent, the air growing heavy, the psychic stench thickening until it was a soup of misery.

And then I was there.

The cellar was a brick-lined belly, a cavern hidden beneath the mundane reality of tinned tomatoes and loo roll. The lights the forensic team had brought were too bright, too honest, carving the horror out of the shadows and refusing to look away.

In the centre of the floor was a story, written in a language of pain. A vast, intricate design was painted onto the concrete. 

I use the word 'painted' loosely. The medium was life, spilt and systematised. 

It was a map of a terrible journey, a constellation of agony. 

I felt the Mars Bar and Diet Coke I had for breakfast rise in my throat.

I didn't know what I saw's name, but I knew its grammar: it was a sentence of imprisonment and suffering.

At the four points of this compass of pain were the people, or the sculptures that had once been people. 

The reports said it was slow, over hours. Their death, no their destruction, no their defiling.

Seeing it, you understood the true meaning of time as a weapon. This was not murder; this was... unmaking.

'Look, but don't just see,' I whispered to myself, a charm against the horror. I had to look past the gratuitous gore disseminated about with what looked like a total lack of pattern. 

I had to see below that chaos to the pattern that that chaos had drawn.

'Four souls. North, South, East, West. Anchors.' They were held by cold iron, and where the iron touched, the flesh was not bruised but blighted, blackened and crystalline, as if frostbitten by a cold that burns from the inside out. 

'It's a fucking soul syphon.' I said, doing my thinking aloud.

A soul-syphon. They weren't just taking lives; they were drinking the fear, harvesting the soul, using the very sound of its dying scream as it echoed into the void as a source of power.

Human souls were magic batteries, and these poor batteries had been proper run down.

DCI Marple stood like a general on a battlefield of the grotesquely absurd, her white suit pristine, her eyes holding all the grim certainty of a headstone. 

I probably would not recognise her outside one of those suits, but in one, she was easy to spot. 

She saw me and gave a minute nod, her gaze saying,

This is your department now. Thank fuck.

But my attention was already wandering the room, picking up the details that others might miss. A small table held the instruments of the art. Yes, art, not mere knives, but ancient, purposeful things of silver and jet and bone. Who would leave such things? They were proper fine.

There were bowls, empty now of everything but the memory of herbs and bitter salts. The stubs of black candles stood sentry, their wax frozen in mid-drip, defying gravity. 

And on the walls, scratched into the brick with a nail or a blade, were faint, warding sigils. They were not to keep people out. They were to keep the attention of the thing they were calling in.

'Fuck me.' I said to the room.

Marple approached. 'Detective Johnson. Your… area, I think.'

'Sort of.' I replied. My mask hid my grim smile.

I could see her disapproving look through her mask and hood at 'Sort of.'

I think part of me did not want to say 'Yeah, it's my area,' because that would mean it would become my responsibility to sort this shit out. 

She stared and waited for the correct answer to be given so that she could pass the, whose problem it was, buck.

'Yeh Guv. It's our thing.' I agreed, my voice sounding distant even to me. Our thing shifted the emphasis away from me not being of any use.

'This is a working. A big one. The design is a focus. These people weren't victims; they were components. Batteries. Their suffering was the power.'

'What for?' she asked, the practical question in a deeply impractical situation.

I looked back at the central design, feeling its malevolent thrum in the fillings of my teeth. 

'For a door,' I said. 'Or a window. Or a shout into a place that usually doesn't listen. This much pain, this carefully caused… it leaves a mark. It pinpoints a place for certain things to find. Not nice things either.

I shuddered at the thought of what had been attracted to this sight. It was not going to be good. It was never good for a shit thing like this... happening. 

'They did something here. They called something up, or they sent something through.'

I looked at the blighted flesh around the manacles again, feeling the cold, hollow echo of the magic. 

It was done. The ritual was complete. The singers had left, but the song was still hanging in the air —a poisonous melody with a slight warping of reality still evident.

I then saw the key. It flickered at me a glorious thing in the mess. A glowing, bright feather of... oh shit. I know what that is, that... that is Angelic, that is.

But this is no way to invite... an Angel, is it?

No... What was an angel feather doing here? Part of the ritual ingredients or was one of God's best present here?

'Nah.' I said out loud.

'Nah.'

'What?' Marple was behind me. 

'I will have to ask the Prof, Guv.' I told her.

She raised her head to the ceiling and sighed. 'Really, do you have to. That's going to cost us some overtime money and manpower we don't have.'

'I'm afraid this case is no longer a whodunnit. It was a what-did-they-do? And the answer is out there, somewhere. I have not got the foggiest what it is, but something that really should not be here now is.' I told her, not knowing if what I had said made sense to me, never mind her. 

Again, I looked at the feather. She joined me to look at it.

'What is it? And if you say 'a feather,' then I personally will take great personal joy and then later shame in beating you to death with it, which would take a rather long time because it looks like it's 'a feather.' She said.

'Erm...' Should I just come out with it? 

'Erm...' Well, she did ask.

'It's a wing feather from an Angel.' I told her in all honesty.

'Bollocks, it is,' she said, snatching it from my hand. Before looking at me with just her eyes visible. 

I nodded.

'That's proper strong magic that is.' I said, nodding at the feather in her hand. 

The only part of her that was visible was her eyes, but they were wide and unbelieving. 

'That's one of them top powerful things in magic you can use.' I told her.

The eyes changed as she listened and realised that I was not making shit up. I believed what I was saying.

'Hmmm!'

She now looked at the feather as though it were an unpinned grenade. 

I decided not to tell her what it would mean if an actual Angel was part of this. Mainly because it would be proper, proper shit if one had been here and partly because I had no fucking idea what it would mean except that it would be proper shit. 

I left her holding the feather in the middle of the room and went to leave the scene to call my bossman.

As I went through the door, the forensics team filed back in to get back to doing the things that they do.

Well, there was one thing I knew. Something new and proper grim was walking the streets. 

That it had arrived here in the dark beneath a supermarket on Wood Street. Walthamstow. Not the most prodigious of places to arrive.

And it was probs going to be my job to find it, and to put it back, or to make sure it could never sing its terrible song again. Which normally meant killing it. 

Now for the phone call to the professor. 

Professor

They say evil has no weight. Whoever they are, they are wrong. It has gravity. It bends the air around it, like a planet that should not exist. And this morning, my office feels about ten degrees closer to Hell and ten degrees colder in temperature.

I had been home, partially to get the injured werewolf Wil there and safe. 

Weird if I think about it. I am putting a psychotic Werewolf of all things in my home to keep it safe. The things I do for the world are... Well.. You understand. 

I had got him to bed and left him. 

It was most worrying and strange to me. 

He usually bounced back from injuries quickly, but he didn't seem to be bouncing back at all from whatever Michael had done to him.

'Hmm'

I hadn't slept. 

Not properly. 

How could I in fair faith?

It would be impossible to sleep for any partially sane man who understood its relevance. 

Since that parcel had arrived.

It had arrived by cursed courier. 

Brown paper, string, and the faint smell of singed myrrh.

No sender, no note… well, except the note. Signed Michael, which arrived after its arrival. 

So having not slept a sleep of... Angels.

I was back in my office at ridiculous o'clock in the morning. Thinking thoughts that were terrifying to think, and thinking back to the day before.

I don't often feel the urge to pray, but I did.

Prayer is a habit for people who believe the universe is listening. 

I know it's listening, yes, yes.

The truth is, I just don't think it cares. 

But when I saw his signature — that name — I felt something like fear crawl through my chest and make itself comfortable.

And then she had arrived.

Lucifer.

Not as smoke or sulphur, but as she always chooses to appear to me— beautiful, tired, amused. The kind of beauty that makes you forget what light looks like until it's gone.

She had sat in my chair, crossing one perfect leg over the other, as though she owned the University — and me, which, technically, she did. Well, the me bit.

'I will leave this in your hands,' she had said, and then she had vanished.

No smoke. No flash. Just gone, like a thought you didn't want to lose.

That was yesterday. And now here I am again. Staring at the ghastly book. 

It's open on my desk like a wound. 

The pages whisper when I look away. 

They whisper names that don't belong in this century. Names that call back to... I don't even end the sentence in my mind. It was ended in the only way it should be, a physical shudder.

The red phone rings. It had to be a red phone for it to fit into the farce of this reality. It's an old landline. Corded. Reliable. Untraceable. 

Only certain people ever use this number. 

Only certain people have this number.

Only certain people with certain needs phone this number.

I looked at it, shocked at first. Then with suspicion.

I don't really need any other issues of that... kind right at this moment.

Should I ignore it?

Who the Hell knows I am here at this time of the bloody day? 

Why did they not phone my mobile? 

'Ah... Bollocks.' I shout, knowing there are no students here to hear.

I finally resign myself to having additional magical bollocks added to the pot and pick it up.

'Professor Simon de Montfort,' I say. 

The old formal tone hides the tremor. 

The habit I once had of lighting a cigarette as I answered the phone comes to mind as I reach for my top drawer, which always had my stock before remembering. I had quit. 

They can kill you. 

Well, it's true they can kill... you.

The voice that answers sounds like a wet London pavement and, coincidentally, cigarette smoke — tired, intelligent, edged with disbelief.

'Prof? It's Ben.'

Ah, Ben Johnson. My favourite cynic in the Supernatural Police Department. A man who's seen too much to believe in Heaven, and too little to rule it out.

'Detective Johnson. How's the weather in Hell?'

He laughs, the way people do when they're trying not to remember something they've seen.

'Wet,' he says. 'And full of blood.'

Of course it is. This is always the way in Londinium.

He tells me about Wood Street. About the Supermarket. About the cellar that shouldn't exist beneath it. About the ritual — four bodies, eight hours of their misery, a song made from suffering.

And then he tells me the part that makes my stomach turn to stone.

A feather of light.

Not a metaphor. Not a symbol. A real, physical, glowing feather.

Angelic.

The word 'Shit.' Slips out before I can collect it from my tongue.

'Oh shit... Ben,' I say, and I have to sit back in my chair. 'Are you quite certain?'

'As certain as I am that I don't want to be,' he replies.

My mobile pings and I look to open the WhatsApp message to see an image of the... bollocks... Yep, Angelic feather. 

I close my eyes and sigh. Ben, for the moment, forgotten as the room spins around me and I reel with the momentousness of this news.

It is utterly momentous and changes the world. Books slide in their shelves, whispering Latin apologies. The feather changes bloody everything.

'Prof?' Brings me back to the phone and the man at the other end.

'Listen to me carefully,' I tell him. 'If that feather was used in a ritual — any ritual — it wasn't human magic. It's... bloody celestial.'

'You mean Angelic?'

I hesitate. 'Not necessarily. It could be something worse. Something pretending to be divine.'

I heard Ben sigh. 'Why does it always have to be worse? Why can it never mean that it is all going to be okay? Why ain't it ever well, it's all going to be peachy?'

Because it always is worse, I want to say. Because when Heaven and Hell start leaving messages on our doorstep, humanity is usually the postage stamp and the damned courier.

Instead, I ask, 'What condition were the victims in?'

I have my question answered by the simple length of the pause before he responds. 

'Erm...'

More time.

Used,' he says flatly. 

'Burnt from the inside out. Crystallised. You ever seen soul rot before?'

'Yes, I taught you what to look for, did I not?' I say softly. 

The worst experience of soul rot I had seen was during the German experiments in the Black Forest in 42. 

They had tried to fuse human will with divine energy. It didn't end well for either side.

'Remember the Black Forest briefing I gave.'

Ben didn't answer. I could almost hear his brain through the phone line as it remembered and cogitated.

I continued. 'Whatever happened at the Supermarket, it wasn't a summoning. It was a transfer. They didn't call something up — they sent something through.'

Ben exhaled. 'That's what I thought. But the power that was used is etched in the air itself. It's like… something opened... something, and didn't close... something properly.'

My eyes drifted back to the book. The damned thing seemed to pulse in the corner of my vision. The Liber Malifecarum. 

It was supposedly edited and put together by a monk who tried to exorcise the Devil from his own soul by trying to destroy her. 

A monk mad enough to invite her in before trying to exile her.

The irony of that attempt to expel her, of course, being that she had not been; she had left of her own volition — but only because she wanted to. 

He had not had the power to actually banish or kill such a being. 

But he had left the recipe for such a ritual. 

It was here and waiting. 

If you had the magical ability. 

If you were an Angel or a Demon, that could be enough. 

'Fecking Michael', I said. Not really meaning to say it out loud. 

'What Prof? Michael who?' Ben asked.

'The Angel Michael wants me to use that feather to destroy the Devil...' I paused mid-sentence. '...Or, more likely, to tear open whatever fragile peace exists between Heaven and Hell.' I told him.

'Ben, listen carefully,' I said with quiet passion.

'Listen to me. Whatever you do, do not bring that feather back to HQ. That would be an utter disaster.'

'Don't log it, don't tag it, don't even tell forensics about it.'

'Lock it away in an iron box.'

'Salt the bally hinges.'

'And for God's sake, don't bleed near it.'

There's a pause. 'You think it's active?' He asks.

'Active?' A rhetorical question.

'No, Ben. I think it's awake.'

Another silence. Then, softer: 'Professor, what are we dealing with here?'

I look down at the book. Its pages moving. Turning themselves. The script seen glowed faintly gold, like veins under pale skin. 

It strangely felt like it was listening. It probably was. 

'Erm... I might have to go.' I told him hurriedly. The book relaxed. Yes, you heard that right, it relaxed.

'Erm... I don't know what we're dealing with... yet,' I said, a little perturbed.

'I need to get the Scooby gang together to discuss this thing. Wil's here at mine, but I need the others. You stay right where you are, Ben. Just be bloody aware of that thing.'

This needed to be done fast.

'But if I'm right — and I pray I'm not — then this isn't just about murder. This is about a declaration.'

'A declaration of what?' Ben asked.

'War,' I whispered. 

'Michael's tired of playing clean, I think.'

'I also don't think he's discussed it with his Boss.'

'Isn't the big boss supposed to be omniscient or whatever?' Ben asked.

I paused. He was right. God was supposed to be... 

Well, if he was... 

Then... well... erm.. 

What the fuck did that mean... 

If he was... 

Nope, unable to process that God might know what was happening. My brain hurt.

'He knows what is going on... Maybe.' I tell Ben.

There's static on the quiet line now. Or maybe it's whispering. The sound of wings, far away.

Ben clears his throat. 'So what. Do I just sit here, do I?'

I shut the book, the motion like slamming a coffin. 

'You keep that feather contained. You trust no one above your rank; no further than that, you trust no one. And you pray, Detective Johnson. Even if you don't believe.'

'I don't,' he says.

'Really?' I asked.

I was bemused by this.

He didn't believe, even with all the evidence he had seen to the contrary in his short career.

'Then believe in me. I'll find out what Michael's planning. But if I'm right… If I'm right...'

I lingered while I thought of the right words.

Even the complexity of the English language did not offer me the vocabulary to explain this situation.

Ben cut in to my thoughts, voice hard.

'If you're right, we're all fucked' 

A perfect summation of the circumstance.

'Yes, exactly,' I said, strangely excited by his erudition, then instantly saddened by its connotation.

'Fucked yes... But at least we'll know how we are fucked.' I tell him in a dead tone.

The phone line itself clicks dead, leaving the line tone.

I sit there, listening to the empty hum of that deathly tone. 

Outside, the rain starts to fall — soft at first, then harder, as if the sky itself is washing its hands.

I stare at the book as its pages rustle and ripple before they fall open and stop moving.

Where it stops, I see it. The title glows faintly, letters shifting like living things.

Caput unum

De Praelio Caelorum.

Chapter one

On the Wars of Heaven.

Some wars never end. They just change battlefields.

And this one, it seems, has chosen Wood Street, Walthamstow of all places.

Now to muster the troops.