Desecration

by J. F. Penn

  Removing his gloves, Blake stepped over the threshold into the Museum. Immediately he saw a wooden table laid out with a full dissection of the veins and arteries of the human body. Blake put his hand out to steady himself against the wall as a wave of bloody film swept across his eyes. He tasted a metallic tang and nausea made his head spin. He fell to his knees, hands clutched to his chest as he hyperventilated, shuddering, heart pounding. He had glimpsed the dissection beginning when the victim was still alive. In the vision, Blake saw the patient made anonymous by a hood, so the anatomist could focus on the pathology, eliminating the irrelevant human from the frame of the medically interesting, even as the body shuddered under the scalpel.

  "Are you okay, Blake?” Jamie bent to him, her hand shaking his shoulder. “Blake …”

  This place was a museum of abomination. There was an ancient evil here, layered over centuries, and the deaths of many lay just under the surface of its gleaming exterior, clawing for release. Blake tried to regulate his vision, limiting the amount of sensation he was taking in at once and, as his breathing returned to something resembling normal, he tried to compartmentalize the complex web of emotion.

  “I’m OK,” he whispered, getting up slowly, making sure not to touch Jamie with his bare hands. He didn’t want her energy swirling in this maelstrom as well, for she was alive and vibrant, her colors bold and bright. He needed to feel the edges of the palette of gray, where ghosts lingered, trapped by attachment to pieces of their unburied selves. “I need to establish a baseline for the energy of the place and then try to sift through that for Jenna. Her resonance should be greater because it’s so recent.” He grimaced, unable to hide his mental pain at the sensations pressing in on him. “Just give me a few minutes.”

  Jamie nodded, clearly worried about him but Blake knew she couldn’t understand what he was going through. He was sure that part of her still thought he was a charlatan, but right now it was all he could do to hold onto the reins of his sanity. He had to face the horror head on and ride the wave into the past, and he could only do that by forcing himself to delve into the darkness.

  Blake turned to a wall of glass jars exhibiting a collection of fetal deformity. Bracing himself, he placed his bare hand on the surface, deliberately exposing himself to sensation, feeling the agony of those who had suffered. In one jar was a tiny figure, with perfect arms attached to a human torso. Its head was like a lizard, taut skin pulled back over a deformed skull, slitted eyes, flat features and a gaping hole where its mouth should have been, while its legs were fused into a tail. Blake read the label, Sirenomelus, the word haunting but sweet on the tongue. He imagined the creature swimming around in the afterlife and wondered whether there was a soul out there mourning the loss of such a body.

  In another bell-jar was a baby, its hair seeming to wave in the preservative liquid, its ears perfect little shells, soft as only a newborn’s can be. But its face was a nightmare, with only a mouth and a gaping eye hole in its empty skull. The infant’s body had been hacked open, with only crude stitching holding the corpse together for the preservation jar. Blake couldn’t help but stare into the abyss of its eye, wondering at the horrors Nature could create and man could only imagine.

  How could God allow these freaks to be born, he wondered. Blake knew that a woman’s body would usually expel such damaged creatures, for Nature abhors malformation and human society keeps such things hidden. In times past, midwives would have been the bearers of such monsters and only some grew to adulthood, abused freaks. Now he could hear the screams of these drowned nightmares, their cries muffled by the thick preservative their bodies floated in.

  In another jar, twins were joined by the face and chest and Blake’s thoughts flashed to Mengele’s lab. There was a macabre beauty in their perfect bodies with no faces, just a freakish pile of limbs without movement. Next to the jars lay delivery tools, a brutal pair of spiked forceps and a cranioclast, used for cutting or crushing the skull of the baby’s head in order to wrench it from the mother. Blake shuddered and turned away from the violent images that flooded his mind, almost on the edge of what he could bear. But he knew he would soon reach the place when his brain was overwhelmed, fear spiked and then cool, calm would descend. He just needed to push his mind a little further.

  He turned to a cabinet of diseased limbs and felt the resonance of disembodied flesh, some kind of muscle memory remaining in them, a persistent electrical impulse. Just as people with amputations felt an itch in a phantom limb, so the appendages themselves emanated a kind of psychical scratching as they were divested of the body that gave them life.

  Blake walked on through the displays to a gallery of artwork. He stopped by a selection of repulsive images, sexualizing these human monsters into forbidden pleasure tinged with insanity. In one photograph a little girl, curls around her chubby shoulders, turned with an accusatory, feral glare. She crouched on deformed femurs, clutching at cloth with tight fists, as her over developed sex was exposed to the glare of the camera.

  In another, a naked young woman stood, stomach bulging, her hair done up in a complicated style, topped by a bow. Between her splayed legs emerged a third leg, angled into the air from the knee, an impossible limb. It looked as if something had been thrust up into the girl but the leg was part of a parasitic twin that had grown inside her body. All three legs wore the same boots with long white socks. Blake couldn’t help but look at it more closely, and read the label, ‘Dipygus tripus, parasitic twin. Blanche Dumas/Dupont’. The name served to humanize the girl but he wondered what kind of life she had been able to have, or whether it had been one of constant abuse from the people making money from her deformity.

  The photos were enough to push him over the edge, and his adrenalin spiked. Blake sat down heavily, pulse pounding as the visions took over his mind, whizzing through his consciousness in a cacophony of screams and flashes of grisly horror. He felt blood pulse at his ankles and wrists as if it would burst from his body, rising to a crescendo of overwhelm. His vision narrowed to a tunnel, his hearing dulled as if under a swimming pool and panic threatened to shut his body down. Then suddenly, it broke. Blake felt the cold aftershock and his heart rate began to slow as the panic subsided. This was the moment that he had waited for, and now he could regain control.

  Blake looked up at Jamie standing a little way from him, her face concerned but also intrigued by his physical reaction. He could only imagine what horrors she had seen in her job, but she only witnessed the aftermath, while he saw visions of the atrocity in progress and actually felt the victim’s pain.

  “Do you want some water?” Jamie said, pulling a bottle from her bag. Blake nodded and sipped at it gratefully while his heart rate returned to normal.

  “I’m ready now,” he said after a moment and rose slowly, his legs feeling weak and sluggish. He pushed the baseline sensations of the Museum to a separate area of his consciousness and began to sift through the eddies of energy to find a strand of Jenna Neville. His eyes were drawn to the staircase and the heavy post at the bottom. Jamie noticed his gaze.

  “That’s where she fell,” she said, walking towards it. Blake followed and then carefully laid his bare hands on the post. He felt the extinction of life, her neck broken, the grasping suffocation of asphyxia. He shuddered as he experienced her panic and fear.

  “She died soon after her neck snapped,” he said. “But the baby didn’t.” His eyes met Jamie’s and he saw a reflection of his own stricken face. “There’s something about the child that explains why it was taken, why her body was violated. It feels different somehow but I can’t get a clear vision.” Blake grasped for a truth that was tantalizingly close and he knew that he had felt whispers of it in the cabinets. There were echoes and reflections of Jenna here and the past of this museum had come to life in the present. Jamie leaned closer, waiting for his words.

  “Her baby was a miracle,” Blake finally whispered. “Jenna was like one of these specimens. She shouldn’t have been able to g
et pregnant. You need to find who created her.”

  Chapter 13

  Parking the bike a few blocks away from Neville Pharmaceuticals Head Office, Jamie went into a little coffee shop. She was early for her meeting with Esther Neville and she wanted to review her notes on the case so far. Ordering a black coffee and dumping two sugars in it, Jamie considered how Blake’s words had disturbed her. Although she still had some doubts about him, he had definitely been affected by the Museum and seemed convinced that Jenna and her baby were somehow special. Esther Neville would be the only person who could answer that but there was no evidence with which to start such a discussion and all of the records indicated Jenna Neville was her biological child. What did Blake even mean about the baby being a miracle? Was he just disturbed by the craziness of the Museum, filled with dead things that seemed about to wake at any moment?

  Jamie examined the file on the Nevilles that Missinghall had pulled together. Lord Christopher Neville was a distant descendant of the Darwin-Wedgwood-Galton family and had been raised in aristocratic circles. After Eton, he had read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford and was expected to go into Law. But at Oxford he had married Esther Galloway, a distant cousin from another branch of the same distinguished family. Esther studied medicine at Oxford and then worked in the pharmaceutical industry, increasingly specializing in genetics after DNA had been sequenced in 1977.

  Neville Pharmaceuticals was started in 1979 with an investment from the family fortune and was now one of the most highly respected private genetics companies in the world. Jenna Neville, their only daughter, was born in 1985. Jamie read a couple of the articles from various pharmaceutical magazines profiling Esther Neville as a brilliant scientist, in total command of the business and scientific side of the research. Christopher Neville seemed to play a more social role, schmoozing with potential investors and clients, leaving the serious business to his more than capable wife. There was evidence of a number of affairs between Christopher Neville and young society women, and Jamie presumed that Esther turned a blind eye to her husband’s indiscretions. It was certainly one way to keep a marriage of power together.

  Her phone buzzed with a text from Missinghall.

  Taxi dockets show Esther Neville picked up alone 10.45pm.

  Interesting, Jamie thought, since Mascuria had indicated that she had left the gala dinner around 9.30. What had she been doing in that missing time period?

  Finishing her coffee, Jamie drove down the road to the imposing company headquarters of Neville Pharmaceuticals. It was situated on the western edge of London, close enough to the City for ease of access but far enough out for the company to have a high rise building encompassing both official office suites and functional labs. The blue glass exterior reflected the cool winter sun as Jamie parked the bike in a visitor spot and headed in.

  After the usual security protocols, Jamie was led into a long boardroom on one of the upper floors, with a giant window looking out over the city. There were a couple of pictures on the walls, magnified images of cells that were monstrous in close-up. Jamie stood, gazing out at London, considering the pulsing mass of humanity that crowded together below her.

  “Detective, how can I help you?”

  Jamie turned to see Esther Neville at the doorway, a tailored white lab coat cut close to her body and stiletto heels making her thin body appear like a stork picking its way through the marshes. She looked completely different in her own domain, clearly a scientist first, rather than a society wife. Her expertly highlighted blonde hair was tied back with a black clip, and under her lab coat she wore clothes of mourning black. Yesterday, at home with her husband, she had seemed timid, submissive and even fearful, yet here, she walked with authority. Jamie reassessed her opinion of Esther Neville and her position at the company, for this was an empire that she definitely would not want threatened, especially by her own daughter.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Lady Neville.”

  Esther inclined her head and sat at the head of the boardroom table, her eyes emotionless as she spoke.

  “What exactly do you need from me? I’m keen to help find my daughter’s killer but I’m sure you understand I’m a busy woman.”

  Jamie sat down to one side and spread her files out in front of her, keeping them closed. She noticed Esther glancing sideways at them, achieving her purpose of making the woman wonder exactly what she knew.

  “Can you explain a little of what Neville Pharmaceuticals does? Just for some background.”

  Esther inclined her head, beginning a clearly well-practiced speech.

  “Our main business is genetic engineering for the agricultural and farming industry. You must know of the increasing pressure that food production has experienced with dramatic population growth. We investigate efficient ways to feed more people cheaply, researching faster growth methods for protein sources. We also have a smaller part of the company that researches genetic mutation and how to eradicate birth defects in animals caused by environmental toxins. The exact details are protected, as the work is for the Ministry of Defense, but it’s both a profitable business and an important one for the world. Do you think that the company is related to my daughter’s death?”

  Jamie shuffled her papers to detract from Esther’s piercing scrutiny.

  “What did you think of Jenna’s legal investigations and protests against the company?”

  A flicker of disturbance flashed across Esther’s face.

  “Oh, she was just going through a rebellious patch, encouraged by that man she was seeing.” Esther was haughty with a tone of dismissal. “Jenna seemed willing to do anything to undermine me and her father. Although she reaped the rewards of what we do, she was determined to bring it all down and to make victims of the - very few - bodies we use for research.”

  “Bodies?” Jamie pushed.

  Esther sighed. “The best way to learn anatomy is to dissect the human body, Detective. We all want surgeons to know what they’re doing, don’t we? But Jenna would never acknowledge that truth.” Jamie waited, counting the beats of silence until Esther continued. “You have to break humanity before you can fix it. John Hunter knew that. He was driven by the need to understand life, and he wouldn’t take accepted wisdom as truth. He would only believe the evidence of his eyes, and only by dissecting the bodies of animals and of people, could he truly understand their inner workings.”

  “So you objected to Jenna’s legal work?”

  “We argued about it, yes. But the use of the dead to benefit the living is entirely scientific. It has always been this way. It’s superstitious nonsense to think that the body has to be intact for the resurrection, or that somehow we are dishonoring the dead by using them for scientific matters. There are those who would prefer not to think of this side of things, but they are also the ones who expect medical science to cure them, for their drugs to work and for treatments to be pain free. But drugs must be tested on human subjects and the surgeon must know exactly where and how to cut. What are they to practice on, if not real flesh? Of course, these days there are computer simulations but that doesn’t give the proper sense of cutting into a body, the push of a blade through resistant skin. It doesn’t part like butter, you know, you have to cut. Surgeons sweat as they work, it can be physically draining.” Her voice was strangely wistful. “The human body is so well put together, it can be hard to pull it apart. ”

  Jamie looked down at her notebook to leave some silence between them, as she considered Esther’s vivid words. After a moment, she looked up again.

  “Can you talk me through your movements on the night of the Gala Dinner?”

  Esther froze, her face stony, then slowly answered.

  “I had a headache that night. I get migraines and one was threatening. I put up with that odious dinner for as long as I could, but I got up to leave as the dessert was being served. I felt giddy so I sat in the toilets for a while.” She looked away from Jamie. “I don’t know how long I was
there. The pain was all I could think about, and eventually I caught a taxi home.”

  “And did you argue with Jenna that night?”

  Esther laughed, a shrill sound that seemed out of place in the austere surroundings.

  “Of course. I argued with my daughter whenever we spoke, Detective. That night wasn’t any different.”

  Jamie decided to change tack and circle back on the alibi later. There should be some footage from near the bathrooms of the Royal College of Surgeons, and she could check on the migraine medication.

  “What about Jenna’s active membership of the National Anti-Vivisection Society? The marches against this office, against you and Lord Neville personally.”

  Esther rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I know she meant well, but she was misguided. Come with me and I’ll show you how humane we are. I want to give you the scientific side of the story so you’ll understand.”

  She led the way out of the lab, into a corridor and then to a lift. Esther pressed the −3 button, and Jamie noticed that there were five floors underground as well as the twenty above ground. It was an extensive facility. Esther was silent in the lift, and Jamie said nothing either. Finally, the door opened to an atrium, which smelled of disinfectant, like a vet’s surgery.

  “This floor is where we keep some of the animals and also where we perform legal vivisection.”

  Jamie noticed her emphasis on the legal basis of the research. “Can you explain to me exactly what that is?” she asked.

  “In the UK, any experiment involving vivisection, where we use a live animal for experimentation, must be granted a license from the Home Secretary. The license is only given when the benefits to society outweigh the adverse effects to the animal.”

  “What’s your definition of adverse?”