The man-said 'Outside!' and the brief tableau dissolved.

Jenny reached for her blouse which she had thrown on the bed, but the man stepped forward and pointed the gun at her face. 'I said outside. There's no time for that. Move!'

The next moment they were herded along the corridor to the landing, where the man handed them over to a woman with-a shotgun, who stood guard over the half-dozen staff who had already been driven from their rooms. It was obvious that none of them had been allowed any time, though only one – a middle-aged woman doctor in a wet bathrobe, with bare feet – was in anything like Jenny's state of deshabille. The Angels were ignoring the babble of protests and clearing the corridor with speed and efficiency. Jenny had not uttered a word since the door burst open but the glint of excitement was still there in her eyes and she seemed indifferent to the fact that she was naked to the waist. The detached scientist in Friell observed her reactions curiously.

He was still wondering about it when the entire roll-call of the Unit – twenty-nine staff and twenty-six strait-jacketed patients – had been herded into the staff dining-room. Of the Angels of Lucifer, ten men and four women were in evidence, all armed. Friell could not see John and Karen. Again, the same swift efficiency; the Unit had once been a school and this room the gymnasium – and all fourteen patients had been tied to the wall-bars which lined one end of the room. The male nurses had been ordered, at gun-point, to tie them there as they were brought in, and in fact had obeyed quickly, since all twenty-six were never taken out of their rooms at once and would have been too much for the staff to control, even in strait-jackets.

Some of the patients were quiet for the moment, glancing around with bright ferrety eyes; several rolled and swayed as far as the ropes allowed, making a high keening noise. Two, just out of reach of each other's teeth, were straining and snapping – and at any moment at least three or four of them would be uttering a stream of words, at anything from a croak to a shout, without coherence but somehow conjuring up wild and terrible images.

At either end of the line, the staff were bunched under guard, some still protesting, some pale and terrified. With everyone in place, four of the guards cleared the room in front of the patients, sliding chairs and tables quickly out of the way. In the middle, about three metres apart, they stood two squat butane cylinders with open-ended burners on them, which they lit. Two roaring tongues of flame, each a metre or more high, shot up from the burners and illumined the room with an infernal brightness, made more eerie when the Angels turned the electric lights off.

Almost quicker than the bewildered prisoners could take it in, the stage was set; a two-metre-high head-and- shoulders caricature of Ben Stoddart hung from the bars on the opposite wall; a table slid below it as an altar on which a skull grinned beside a live and terrified hare in a wire-fronted cat-basket; one of the Angels squatting over a bongo drum and building up an insistent, inescapable rhythm Then Karen and John dancing.

They seemed to appear from nowhere, weaving in and out around the roaring flames and each other, their glistening skin naked except for barbaric ornaments – slowly at first, but rapidly building their tempo in time with the drum. Also in time with the drum, the rest of the Angels had begun to chant: 'Kill Ben Stoddart! Kill Ben Stoddart! Kill Ben Stoddart!', directing their chanting at the patients who, entranced by the flames and the drum and the erotic dance, were already beginning to pick it up, to join in. 'Kill Ben Stoddart! Kill Ben Stoddart!' – twenty-six people, incurably insane, suddenly becoming a choir of united purpose, simple and terrible: 'Kill Ben Stoddart! Kill Ben Stoddart!'

Most of the staff stood appalled and speechless but one or two of the nurses were weeping uncontrollably. Stanley Friell observed, feeling the avalanche of psychic power building and building. Suddenly, beside him, her bare arms and shoulders and breasts dripping with sweat, Nurse Jenny Parker began to shake like a dervish; then she, too, was crying out 'Kill Ben Stoddart! Kill Ben Stoddart!'

Even Stanley Friell gasped.

For a moment, such was the intensity of the shouting and the dance, Friell thought John and Karen would couple in wild ritual orgasm before their eyes. But at the moment when no other outcome seemed possible they leaped together at the altar and John dragged the struggling hare out of its basket and Karen seized a knife. They both screamed in unison: 'Kill Ben Stoddart!' as Karen slashed the hare's throat and John flung the blood direct from the pulsing, severed neck across Ben Stoddart's picture.

The screaming seemed to reach an unbearable pitch; Friell could no longer tell if his own voice was a part of it. The detached observer was swept away and he saw in a flame-lit dream the picture of Stoddart being ripped to pieces by the talons of two demonic figures, a dancing man and a dancing woman whom he barely knew.

A blow came down on the back of his skull, and the split second of awareness that remained to him was filled with the thought, 'Oblivion will be a relief!'

'Hey, love – what's the matter?' The man put his beer down on the wall, the better to attend to the dishevelled and breathless young nurse who had cannoned into him. 'Take it easy, now…'

The girl gasped 'Police, police', clinging to him for support. One of the half dozen people who had been drinking outside the pub called urgently through the saloon-bar door: (Mike, ring the cops, quick' – which of course brought everybody out to see what was happening. The nurse, exhausted anyway by her two-kilometre run from the Unit, was pouring out her story in near-hysteria to a growing crowd. If she had not been so obviously and genuinely terrified, it would have been an incredible tale; the commando raid, the cut telephone lines, the staff herded at gunpoint, the roped mad patients, the wild flame-lit dance, the crescendo of murderous chanting, the blood sacrifice… 'They said they were the Angels of Lucifer,' she sobbed, 'and they've gone, you'll never catch them now, half an hour ago – they kidnapped Dr Friell and Nurse Parker, took them with 'em – and the mess they left, and getting the patients back, it was awful – couldn't get help, no phone, and they'd done something to all the cars – I ran…

She broke down at last into wordless tears, just as a police car arrived and whisked her away. But by then the bare bones of the story, and the loaded words 'Angels of Lucifer', had been heard not only by thirty or forty villagers but also by eight London-bound and five Bristol-bound motorists.

Moira had been on edge since early evening; that something was brewing – something evil and specific – she was certain. She had a feeling that it had to do with John and Karen, but she could not be sure whether this feeling was clairvoyance or guesswork. Putting Diana to bed kept her attention off it for a while because the child was particularly lively and talkative tonight, but as soon as she had settled down Moira found herself brooding again. Dan was not there to talk to about it; he had an evening appointment with one of the few clients who had become more, not less, friendly towards him since the discrimination against witches had begun to be felt, and he would not be back till about nine. She knew Rosemary and Greg were eating, and that Sally probably was, so she did not like to disturb them.

She turned on the television for company. BBC i offered a Western, and BBC 2 a discussion on schizophrenia, neither of which tempted her at the moment. ITV had a series comedy, undemanding and cheerful; she left it on, giving it half her attention while she prepared a meal for Dan.

At about half past eight, without warning, she felt a brief wave of vertigo and gasped to herself, automatically throwing up her psychic defences. She knew she had picked up something which had the flavour of malignancy, of black magic – not directed at her, but sensed by her be-' cause of its intensity and because she had some personal link with its source. It's got to be John and Karen, she told herself, sombrely. She sat down, closed her eyes, and cast deliberate mental circles around Diana and Dan. She relaxed a little – the peak of whatever-it-was seemed to have passed – but she was still uneasy.