Bill Suchock just muscled in with the bricklaying, and asked few questions. It was as if he didn't want to know the madness behind the action. He certainly didn't want to hear the talk of "pathological psychism", the warning that ill health, or an untreated wound, would attract "evil" forces. He knew that Brook's Corner was a haunted place. He had felt it, after all, and claimed that he could still feel that unnerving presence, even though Brady had most effectively exorcised the rooms!

  So Bill kept his mind closed, his back in labour, and worked as hard as the rest, building Brady's wall. It was a good, defensive way to be. A mind occupied with mundanities, and a body in the full sweat of effort, were hard vehicles for psychic possession.

  When the attack was heralded, Brady and Ellen were crouched at the Line of Reflection (Ellen's second zone) creating the zona magnetica. This began four yards from the Talisman Wall, and followed a parallel course exactly. The zona magnetica was designed to snare any elemental force that might penetrate the defences embedded in both the Talisman Wall and the Line of Reflection.

  Ellen was showing Brady how to mould the modelling clay around a highly polished nugget of pure iron, creating what she called 'gargoyles'.

  'Press the clay into shapes, anything that comes to mind. Let your hand do the work of your unconscious mind, but think consciously of defensive power being impressed into the gargoyle. The iron acts as a receiver; the clay is earth, and when we bury the shape in the ground we are burying a symbol of our unconscious wish for defence.'

  Brady manipulated and kneaded the sticky clay; he made vaguely animal shapes, pressing the distorted features into the soft matrix. The shapes were weird, almost grotesque. They buried them alternately, one of Brady's then one of Ellen's, at five yard intervals along the edge of the zona magnetica.

  It was as they buried the sixth gargoyle that Ellen looked up sharply, slightly alarmed.

  'What can you hear?' she asked Brady quietly. There was a man close by, mixing cement for the wall, and she didn't want her voice to carry.

  Brady leaned back on his haunches, staring across the garden and listening. After a moment he heard a distant tinkling sound, like bells. He looked round, but could see nothing. It was early evening of a very overcast day, and the light was growing extremely poor.

  He queried the sound with Ellen. She rose to her feet and beckoned him to do the same. She was staring around her, hard and concerned. To the man working nearby she said, 'Can you hear something, like bells?'

  'Bells?' The man stopped working, straightened and listened hard. After a second he shrugged and shook his head. 'All I can hear is chatter.'

  Brady knew why. Only targeted people could hear the sounds that accompanied the approach of an attacking elemental. The sounds came in various forms, as bells, as thuds or creaks, sometimes as a distant banshee wailing. There was no way of telling, from those simple auditory manifestations, how strong the assault would be.

  'Quickly,' she said. 'It'll come through the weak point.'

  'Which weak point?'

  'Where it can draw upon local earth energy. If we can observe it, we'll know where to dig . . .'

  'Dig for what? Surely not the villa. That's supposed to be below the woods.'

  Ellen raised her hand to silence him. They were approaching the part of the garden which overlooked the dirt trackway. Brady noticed that the sound of distant bells had receded from his awareness.

  'Not a whole villa,' she said quietly. 'Part of it. Perhaps some of the living quarters, or the servants' quarters. I can't be sure, but there is definitely a fragment of psychic recorder below the soil level. And it's somewhere on this side of the house.'

  Bill Suchock was working on the wall behind the high, weatherproofed fencing that began the separation between the neighbouring gardens. He had hung his jacket on a protruding nail, and was bent busily to the task of raising bricks around a tiny linen talisman that Ellen had implaced in the wall at that point. He was increasingly distracted by the gloomy light, and would have to stop work soon.

  The fence in front of him was suddenly struck with immense violence.

  The blow had been startlingly loud, almost like a shot, and Suchock jumped out of his skin. 'What the fuck was that?' he said loudly, as he stood up straight and stared at the fence. A moment later the fencing was violently shaken, the wooden slats splitting and cracking, a sound that was exaggeratedly loud in the still evening. The savage assault lasted just seconds and then the fence stopped moving and there was an abrupt silence.

  Puzzled and slightly angry, Suchock climbed onto the low wall and peered over into the other garden to see who was causing the damage.

  There was no one there at all.

  'Get down from the wall!'

  He turned in surprise, and with some alarm saw Dan Brady standing there, face pale, arm extended, beckoning him down. 'Quickly Bill! Get down!'

  'What's going on, Dan? Who hit the fence?' He could see Ellen Bancroft standing behind Brady, her body slightly hunched. She was staring at the wall, head turning slowly as if she were watching someone move around the garden.

  Before Brady could say a word, a section of fencing, ten yards away, was explosively shattered, with a screeching and rending sound that was only part natural. Fragments of wood, and a hail of splinters, sprayed across the garden, and Ellen flung her body round, yelling with pain as her exposed flesh was struck. 'It's coming through!' she screamed, and turned back to the breach in the fence.

  Bill Suchock turned and fled, ignorant of what was going on, just aware that he wanted no part of it.

  Where the fence had been broken, the wall was now attacked and crushed, whole bricks and brick-shards being flung up into the air and across the lawns. A half-brick struck one of the workmen as he gaped at the storm of fury at the bottom of the garden, the blow sending him reeling, blood pouring from gashed flesh. Through the gap in the wall an icy wind blew, accompanied by an eerie wailing sound. Dirt, dust and cement whirled into the dusk sky before this wind, a stinging vortex that blurred the vision.

  Ellen had run to the breach, and Brady followed. 'It's not as strong as a Stalker,' she shouted against the howling gale. 'Try the pentagram . . .'

  Brady made the air sign towards the invisible energy source, and felt his hand taken and twisted, his arm yanked in an effort to stop him making the symbol. He took a step forward, closer to the wall. He felt hands on his throat, and an intense pressure on his abdomen, a stifling presence around him threatening to suffocate him. Blind fury surfaced in his mind and body: an image of the darkness, and the pain of his near murder. He retaliated in kind, reaching out to strike the elemental, filling his mind with the idea of its destruction.

  And quite suddenly there was silence. The wind dropped with impossible abruptness. The noise died away. The oppressive presence vanished from around Brady, and Ellen straightened up, breathing deeply, clearly relieved. She showed Brady her palms, soaked with blood from where she had unwittingly dug her nails into the flesh. She had five small puncture wounds on her face, and she dabbed at them with her handkerchief.

  'We beat it off,' Brady said. 'It went away.' The attack had lasted no more than a minute.

  'It was tentative,' she replied. 'There was very little of the mind of the man in it. It was more than a Watcher, but still very tenuous. Such attacks can usually be countered by a strong belief in their destruction.'

  'What about all the violence?'

  'Shedding of psychic energy. It didn't expect to find defences. It tried to get through, expending energy as it failed, and withdrew.' She glanced towards the site of its first breaching. 'There.'

  Brady looked across the garden. Three workmen had returned and were talking heatedly among themselves as they stared at the broken fencing. The man who had been hurt was up at the house, having his cut tended to.

  There would be some awkward explanations to make, Brady knew. But for the moment he said, 'What's there?'

  'Dig and find out,' said Ellen. 'A source of earth energy that attracted the Watcher. It still couldn't penetrate the lust line defence, not effectively. But it will . . .'

  As they reached the area, Brady said, 'It could have attacked in full strength and defeated us.'

  'It's not an it, it's a man. And the man is tired, and he's gathering his resources. That was part Watcher, part force that he caused to visit us. It knows about our first line, now, and almost certainly about the zona magnetica. As he reabsorbs his thought-form, so he will know about them. I think he'll attack with real fury next. It'll be his only chance . . .'

  They stared at the ground below them. Ellen said, 'Okay, we have to convert this area into a power for us. Where's Bill? I want an excavation over twenty feet square to see what lies below.'

  But Bill Suchock had fled, taking his car and driving home without further thought. When Brady spoke to him on the phone, later, he was shaken, angry and quite adamant that he would not return to help. 'I don't know what the fuck you're into, Dan, but man you can count me out. That was no kid doing that. You've got hell itself against you, and I'm not ready to be taken just yet. I must liuve been mad to have come in the first place.'

  There was little point in trying to persuade Bill any other way. Not just yet. And then again, maybe it was unreasonable to expose another member of his family to danger.

  Brady realized that it was selfishness which motivated Ins need for Bill Suchock; he liked having the man around. Suchock was solid, firm, clear-thinking; a pragmatic man who brought a certain realism to Brady's increasingly unreal life.

  The labourers stood around, disturbed and confused, lor an hour. Brady and Ellen told them nothing, merely emphasized the urgency of building the wall higher. Two nl the men were set to the task of digging down into the giound where Ellen believed there to be some fragment of an ancient building. The others returned to the wall, but worked in twos, now, and a little more hastily.

  By noon of the following day Brady and Ellen were standing at the edge of a pit, three feet deep, which had exposed a shattered, much disturbed mosaic floor. By using a degree of imagination Brady could make out the vague outline of a human figure, and an animal shape next to it. The predominant colour of the Roman flooring was blue. A great deal of mosaic had been dug up by the inexperienced excavators.

  'Fantastic,' said Brady, bending to touch the cold marble surface.

  Ellen was delighted. 'I expected a hypocaust, with a skull, or bones, someone killed and buried below the flooring. But this . . .' Abruptly she became business-like, turning to the workmen: 'I want two hundred of the central tiles taken up and wrapped in little linen bags.' The workmen looked astonished. Ellen ignored them, and said to Brady, 'You've got some linen sheets, haven't you? Somewhere? I have no linen left.'

  'Probably.'

  'It'll have to be evenly smeared with our blood, then cut into squares. Each tile wrapped in the bag will turn its influence in our favour. Place the tiles along the four foot level of the wall, spread evenly. Is that clear?'

  Dumb silence from the perplexed workmen. Again Ellen ignored them, cradling two of the mosaics in her sore hand. She shook her head. 'It's just what you said, Dan. Fantastic. Even I can feel the power in them. Whatever happened on that floor, it involved death, The mosaic has imprisoned an astonishing amount of energy.'

  'How can you feel that?'

  She passed him the tiles. They sat in his warm hand, cold and hard. He felt strangely calm. He seemed to grow, to become strong. The blue tiles vibrated, grew warm, sent a tingling charge into his skin.

  'Imagination,' he said, and smiled. Ellen reached out and patted his face affectionately, but indicating: you know better by now.

  *

  Two days later the Talisman Wall had reached a height of nearly five feet, and the bricks were finished. Suchock had badly miscalculated, or perhaps he had thought the rubble from the old wall would contain more usable brick than in fact it had. Brady called his brother-in-law, after debating within himself whether he really wanted the wall any higher, and managed to get Suchock's promise of a further delivery.

  The seven labourers went home, each clutching a substantial cash payment for their efforts. Brady walked about the wall, observing the marks which indicated the various embedded talismans and power-foci, and the line of soot-blackened metal squares attached to the brick at a height of one yard.

  They had now built the first three zones of defence, and Ellen was at work marking out the fourth. This ran between ten and fifteen yards from the line of buried clay and iron, and was something of a mystery to Brady. Ellen had prepared an alchemist's nightmare of crushed herbs, splinters of various woods, powdered elements and incense. Brady was made to beat out small sheets of industrial bronze - purloined by Ellen from the Ennean Institute - into shallow dishes. These were placed at intervals along the line of what Ellen called the zona mandragora. Mandragora was her name for mandrake, which she had gathered some months before, and which was an essential ingredient of the more powerful defence layer.

  'In the middle ages,' she had said to Brady, as he watched her preparing the herbal mix, 'mandrake was believed to scream when it was pulled from the ground, and that scream could kill. It grew wherever ejaculate fell to the earth, and that most commonly happened below the body of a hanged man. The old alchemists believed it was essential to slit the ground in a circle around the mandrake with an iron sword, then tie the plant to a black dog. Throw meat to the dog and as it ran it would yank the mandrake Irom the earth.' She smiled. 'The dog would die from the plant's screams, but the potency of the plant was still immensely high.'

  'What a lot of nonsense.'

  'Yes.'

  'How did you gather it?'

  Ellen looked slightly uncomfortable. 'Mandrake can't kill, of course. The mediaeval ritual was superstition more than anything. Almost certainly.'

  'Almost certainly?' Brady leaned closer. Ellen busied herself with the pestle and mortar. The smell of the pounded herbs couldn't mask the subtle body perfume of the woman, who, since moving to Brook's Corner, had begun to make an effort towards her personal appearance. Her hair was trimmed (the cuttings burnt), her nails likewise, and she had bought new clothes. Brady said, 'How did you gather the mandrake? You just pulled it up, of course.'

  'I didn't think there was any point in taking unnecessary risks,' the woman said, flushing slightly. She looked up at Brady, who was staring at her and shaking his head slowly. She smiled sweetly. 'But the black dog didn't die. I swear it.'

  The importance of mandrake, Ellen had explained, was that it contained an organic chemical which could effectively block psychic transmission. She knew this from elementary work at the Ennean Institute, which had studied various mediaeval "black" herbs, and discovered these potent chemical blockages to telepathic and extrasensory transmission. Others had the opposite effect, helbane, for instance. But the zona mandragora was an extremely effective psychic wall.

  'And how many of these zones are we going to need altogether?' Brady had asked.

  'Five, if I've got my research right. We also need an Earth Maze zone - a mazon. That's easy enough, but God, it's effective. We need to cut the turf into the patterns. I'll show you. Each maze must be connected. The effect is that any elemental or psychic substance that gets that far will become trapped in the maze, and eventually absorbed by the earth. I'm going to scatter trap-sites through all the zones. I'll need mirrors, mercury, sulphur and something wiili a very precise crystal lattice. Commercial salt is not good enough. Diamond we wouldn't get in sufficient bulk. Quartz would be ideal, because it's almost as hard as diamond and would be hard to break.'

  Brady had listened to all this, then shaken his head. It seemed like madness, like childish horror movie stuff. And yet here he was, days later, hands dirty from fashioning clay gargoyles and burying them in the ground, fingers blistered from smearing his own bodily exudates on a brick wall, back aching from brick laying and digging; and the cold presence on his chest of a Roman marble tile, scratched with his personal seal - devised by Ellen - and a secret name in which he had encompassed himself, and which had thus become him. That name was covered with candle wax, so that it could not be seen. He would wear it as a talisman, but if his attacker came to know the symbolic name that was Daniel Brady, then Brady would weaken against the attack. Whilst the name was secret, and attached to the ancient focus of residual earth energy - the mosaic tile - he was strongly defended against any but the most resolute and brilliant of psychic assassins.

  Outside the front of the house he heard a car's horn i epcatedly sounded; it was almost angry. Ellen looked up sharply from where she was driving a small hole into the turf of the back lawn. 'Who the hell could that be?'

  'I don't know. I'll go and look.' Brady strolled round the house and along the drive.

  Parked across the road from the front gates was Rosemary Suchock's car; Rosemary herself leaned against the driver's door, the window down, her hand resting on the horn.

  About time!' she said sourly as Brady appeared at the gate.

  Brady was puzzled. 'Rosie. . . what the hell's going on? Why don't you come in?'

  Rosemary's pallid features distorted into a grimace as In shook her head. 'In there? You must be mad. I'm not stepping inside the gates.' She was more angry than Brady had ever seen her; she was practically shaking with outrage.

  'I don't know what you've got in there, or what you've done, but you're not going to destroy me; or Bill. That's what I've come to say to you, Dan. Leave Bill alone, I mean it!'

  Brady crossed the road to her, but when he reached out his hand to take her arm she twisted away. 'Don't touch me!'

  'Rosie! For Christ's sake!'

  'Don't touch me!' she shouted. 'I mean it, Dan! Leave us alone. Leave Bill alone!' She had crossed her arms over her chest, and stood defiantly before him, the anger making her face into something ugly, almost feral. 'I'm not going to have my family destroyed like yours was. I'm not having Bill go the way of Alison. Bill's intending to come here again, even though I begged him not to. If anything happens to him, Dan, so help me God, I'll kill you! I'll fucking well kill you!'