“All right, all right,” Bill held up his hands in submission, although with obvious displeasure. “You’ve convinced me that ‘aving to listen to the Steward moan on about the weight of his physical existence crushing down on ‘im is marginally more tolerable than listening to you babble on about the end of the World. Ergo, e’s in the frickin’ study through there.”
Bill kicked open a door to the left and shoved Harker through. He slammed it shut behind her.
Chapter
44
Omotoso had been watching the exchange between Alix and Anwick on the computer monitor on Ned’s desk with a mixture of fascination and uneasiness. The screen resolution was poor. Every now and again, the picture jumped and rolled and he had to fiddle with the wire in the back to get it back. Most of the technology in Innsmouth was twenty years out of date. Only the devices and systems designed to contain the residents within the walls were relatively modern; the rest were nothing more than relics of a different era.
The image froze and Omotoso grunted with annoyance. He couldn’t hear what was going on but not actually seeing it was intolerable. He reached behind the monitor and felt for the connection. He hadn’t known anyone really take an interest in any of his patients, especially a new admission, and he couldn’t help but want to know what agenda the mysterious Doctor Franchot had. Admittedly, from time to time, visitors came to the institute waving flashy ID cards showing that they had more letters after their names than the name itself. They wore pin-stripe suits and expensive silk ties. The routine was always the same: give them a tour, humour their obviously pre-determined questions, wipe their arses, show them the exit. He had no idea who they were, who they worked for or what the purpose of their visit was, save that they tended to be careful to ensure that all of the residents were accounted for. But this was all he could do now. Outside of Innsmouth, his career was over.
He heard something buzz and the image re-appeared.
“What going on?” Omotoso jumped, span round.
“Jesus, Ned,” he said. “Learn to knock, okay?”
Ned moved round to the computer monitor to see the picture, his lanky frame towered over Omotoso. The light from the monitor reflected off his pupils, tiny pin-pricks glinting like the faintest star in the darkest part of the night sky.
“What is this?” he asked. The image was stuck but Alix was clear enough to see.
“What’s what?” replied Omotoso indignantly. Ned might be a head taller than him but he sure as Hell wasn’t going to let the Russian simpleton push him around.
“This,” he motioned toward the screen. “On video. Who is this, please?”
“That ain’t got nothin’ to do with you, Ned. Ain’t you got toilets to clean or somthin’?”
“You know protocol, Omotoso. This lady is not authorised-”
“I authorised her and as far as I’m aware I’m still in charge of this shithole so that’s the end of it.” Omotoso gritted his teeth as he spoke whilst fighting with the cable at the back of the monitor to improve the picture. When he’d finished, he noticed Ned was still stood next to him.
“Is there anything else you need, nurse?” he asked, stressing the word to inject it with as much malice as he could find. The dumb fuck didn’t respond, just stared at the screen like he was hypnotised or something. The wheel was turning but the hamster was very much asleep, he thought. Omotoso looked at him for a short while. He wondered why his skin was so pasty and, if he touched it, would it be sticky or fall away in his hand or something weird like that? But then, realising that Ned wasn’t going to move, he turned back to the computer screen.
He stared in disbelief.
It couldn’t be.
He lurched forward, fumbling for the wire at the back of the screen, urgently twisting and pushing it but the picture stayed the same. Behind him, Ned had mumbled something but he couldn’t hear what. He looked again, rubbing his eyes to check they weren’t deceiving him.
“Shit!”
Alix was backed up against the wall of the cell, where the door was. She was slumped half way down, shielding her eyes with one arm raised whilst banging on the door behind her with the other. On the other side of the room, Omotoso could just make out the upright and motionless figure of Anwick, arms outstretched, feet together, the flames engulfing him, burning as fiercely as any fire he had seen.
“What the...?”
He turned round to Ned, panic rising inside him. He had to get the door open, put out the fire, get the Doctor out of there. A second passed, maybe two and he was still at the computer terminal, fingers white from gripping the desk. Ned was gone, to get help maybe. The adrenaline eventually tore him away from his paralysis and he darted to the door and with trembling fingers punched in the security code. The door was already hot and he could hear the flames crackling and growing, burning and breaking Anwick’s body down, and Alix’s frantic yelling above it all.
“Ned!” he screamed, cursing as he hit the wrong key, starting again to input the code. “Ned! Fire extinguisher!” No siren, no alarm, no one running to his aid. His heart lurched as he realised it might be just him. “Ned!”
He turned back to the security panel, hit the final digit and enter but the door didn’t click. Fuck! He must have put in the wrong code. He stopped for a second, gathered his thoughts. The system had a lock-down function. It was one of the few rules of house: enter a code wrong three times and the whole system locked down. Everything: doors, computers, phones, gates. The only way to reactivate it was to get to a single phone in the command hub and give over a password to the operator. In ten years, it had never happened before. Omotoso wasn’t even sure where the emergency phone was.
He swallowed hard. He knew the code. He’d put it in on automatic pilot thousands of times. No, he hadn’t forgotten it, just must have hit the wrong button the second time but this time hadn’t noticed it. One try left; no problem if he concentrated. Eight numbers. Eight numbers between him and Alix.
Four, four, eight, eight, two, five, seven...
Chapter 45
The heat was like nothing Alix had ever experienced before. The fire took hold with astonishing speed, enveloping its way around Anwick’s body, up his legs and across his chest to his outstretched arms, devouring him completely in a matter of seconds. It was not clear what the source of the combustion was but that thought did not enter Alix’s mind. Her only thought was of survival.
Instinctively, she had thrown herself up against the door, scrabbling to find a way to open it but there was nothing to grip; not even a handle. Everything was controlled from the other side. She screamed for help and banged on the door but the heavy metal didn’t so much as rattle. Behind her, the heat intensified and she began to feel her exposed skin burn. She turned back but the brightness of the flames was too intense to look at directly. A dense plume of black smoke was rising high above her. The fumes had already begun to gather at the ceiling of Anwick’s cell, like a committee of black vultures encircling a carcass. The fire was consuming the oxygen in the room faster than the ventilation could replace it and Alix knew that if she didn’t die from the heat she would die from smoke inhalation. Already she was beginning to choke. Where the Hell was Omotoso? Why wasn’t anybody seeing this on the CCTV?
The thick smoke began to descend upon her as the fire showed no signs of relenting. She was trapped inside a shrinking room. The heat was unbearable; every breath stuck in her wind pipe, burning her lungs. She clutched helplessly at her throat and lay down, trying to get as close to the floor as possible but the poison was omnipresent and her gasps for clean air futile. Anwick’s body was burnt beyond recognition. He had collapsed, his body surrendering to the flames which greedily engulfed him, feeding on his flesh and clothes and growing stronger with every mouthful. Her mind crashed. Thoughts flashed before her as she fought to stay conscious. Images of her childhood, of her father, of Zara, of black trees growing in a graveyard, of the church at White Helmsley, of home. Of the dead. Of Ash.
<
br /> Of Ash.
Nearby, the noise of Anwick’s body cooking and spitting sounded muffled now, like it was coming from behind a glass wall. She guessed that the heat or the smoke or both had affected her hearing. She scanned the bottom of the walls around Anwick’s cell but there was nothing. Just wall. Her final thought before her mind slipped into unconsciousness was of a raven. It glided gently down from some place just out of her vision to come to rest on a pole growing out of the ground. No, not a pole: a pitchfork, jutting out from the barren earth. It looked at her for a moment and she looked back before it took flight again.
In an instant, it was gone.
Chapter 46
Omotoso stared in bewilderment at the keypad. The noise of the siren rattled in his ears. The red light flashed at him, mockingly.
The system had locked down.
“But that was the fucking code!” he said in disbelief. He turned back to the computer monitor. The fire was raging. Alix was huddle in the corner. Omotoso couldn’t tell whether she was conscious or not. The image was distorted by the fumes.
“What the Hell is going on?”
He needed to focus. His brain was misfiring. What had happened? Anwick on fire. Doctor Franchot trapped in room. System locked down. The emergency line. In the office down the corridor. During a lockdown, he had access to the hub. A little like a command centre, but that would be putting it rather grandly. It was nothing more than a glorified broom cupboard with a phone and a computer server, but supposedly Innsmouth’s main systems were controlled there. Omotoso didn’t delay any further. Alix had one or two minutes at the most before she either fried or suffocated. He opened the other door with his key card – it was only the main exits and the cell doors that seized up during a lockdown – and pelted down the corridor.
It took him just over a minute to navigate his way down three passages to the hub where mercifully the door opened without difficulty. In the corner there was a desk and the computer server, a mass of wires, lights and boxes stacked upon each other. It was like looking at the back of a giant hi-fi system from the eighties.
Omotoso grabbed the phone. On the side of the wall someone had pinned a scrappy piece of paper from an old notepad. It had a few notes scribbled on it and a number written at the bottom in red ink. Someone had gone to quite a lot of effort to highlight the number by drawing several boxes of varying sizes around it. Omotoso was momentarily transported back to his med school days and the early part of his psychology training. Get the patient to draw a box with a pencil. Most people just do exactly that, draw a box. Psychopaths don’t. Psychopaths keep drawing box after box after box after box. Not a particularly effective way of diagnosing a patient with a dangerous mental disorder but nonetheless it had entertained Omotoso at parties to see which of his family were crazy. Apparently, most of them were.
He had punched in three of the seven digits when he heard Ned enter the room. There was no alarm in the hub, just a red light flashing above the door to notify the occupant that a lockdown had occurred. From outside, the wail of the siren sounded muffled and distorted. Omotoso looked up. He had to look twice to register what he saw.
“Put the phone down, Edwin,” Ned said calmly. He had the gun trained on Omotoso’s head. His hand was steady, the dark eyes giving nothing away. Ned looked in complete control, like he had been threatening people with guns his entire life.
“Ned, what’re you doin’? Put that gun down!”
“I’m sorry Edwin. I cannot. Put down the phone and we’ll talk. I promise. But I can’t let you make that call.”
“Ned, for fuck’s sake, I have to get her out of there. You saw! You were with me. The fire!”
Omotoso stared at his colleague in disbelief. He had never understood this place. He’d never really wanted to. He had no desire to unlock its secrets. He came to work. He did his best. He left. He knew none of the guards. He had no other nursing staff. Ned was about the only other man here he had really spoken to. He was straight forward, intellectually impotent. Omotoso had always thought of him as fundamentally decent, but a little slow. Not like the others. With the others, it was sometimes difficult to tell who was more dangerous: guard or prisoner. But not Ned. Ned was harmless, wasn’t he?
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, son,” Omotoso began, glancing back to see what digit to type in next. He had to help Alix not sort out Ned’s apparent schizophrenia.
“Put down the phone, Edwin,” said Ned, this time a little louder and with a step forward. “You don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t understand! I don’t fucking know where that fire came from, but that girl will die in there if we don’t get her out. What is wrong with you, man?”
Omotoso didn’t hear the sound of the gun. He didn’t see the small flash of light at the tip of the barrel. He didn’t feel the bullet shatter his skull and lodge itself deep in his brain. Didn’t notice his body fall limply to the floor, bouncing off the desk as it fell like a rag doll. Ned lowered the weapon. He walked over to where Omotoso’s body lay in a heap behind the desk, stood over it.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
He bent down and studied his kill. He noticed something on the Doctor’s coat. Some fluff maybe, or a collection of dust particles. He wasn’t sure. He removed it carefully. The coat was immaculate, except for the blood.
“May you find peace in whatever World the Creator sees fit to put you.”
He replaced the receiver and left the room.
Chapter 47
The study to the Grand Hotel stank of an unpleasant mixture of cigar smoke and old leather. The walls were covered in oil paintings, mostly of the last days of Christ, bleeding and dying, repenting and ascending. An open fire crackled on the other side of the room, the flames danced and shimmered in the fireplace. Two marble angels supported the mantle on which stood a golden cross encased in a glass box.
Harker stood hesitantly in the shadow; waiting, watching. She detested this hotel and its ridiculous collection of relics and artefacts. The religious bric-a-brac in this room: the products of a scared and ignorant race obsessed with the search for a meaning that didn’t exist. They had founded their ill-conceived faith on an event the significance of which was entirely lost on them. They knew nothing of the fragility of their existence. Their place in the big scheme of things hung in the balance, and yet the one that had the power to determine their fate dwelt in the rotting basement of a two star hotel in Soho, a place designed to hide away from the very creatures he was charged to protect.
A high back Louis XIII armchair had been placed before the fire. Its back was towards her making it impossible to tell whether it was occupied. By its side, a small table, a glass of something, a grey vapour swirling in dark liquid. A grandfather clock in the far corner ticked and tocked rhythmically, each click seemed progressively louder, the delay progressively longer. This room belonged to a different time, a different place.
In the end Harker coughed and took a step forward, ancient floorboards creaked underneath where she trod. She stopped, cringed at the noise and turned up her nose, the smell seemingly more potent the further into the room she crept. Tick, tock, tick, tock. There was something stale about the furnishings, she thought: the art, the sculptures, the rows of leather bound books, even the fireplace; something fetid and old.
“Mrs Harker.” The voice was soft, ghostly. She had to take another few steps forward to hear. “It has been so long. Too long.”
“Time is of little consequence to us, Steward. The years that have passed since last I was here are nothing but a blink of the eye.”
The speaker stifled a yawn before continuing: “still that time, as ephemeral as it was, has worn me.”
Harker pursed her lips. She felt a great weight upon her, something repressing her. The room, or maybe the smell, condensed around her. It was difficult to breath.
“We have decisions to make, Steward,” she said quietly. There was silence for a moment, save for the ever tickin
g clock, while she gathered her thoughts. The occupant of the chair waited patiently for her to find the words. “I believe it has begun,” she said finally.
“Ah. It. Tell me something, Mrs Harker, how long have we been here? In this World, I mean.”
Harker suppressed a flash of annoyance before saying, “the Necromire have existed in the Ether for over five thousand years, Steward. You know this well.”
“But you say it has begun. Begun now. After five thousand years.”
“Yes. The Harbinger is awakened. Belial has found a new Host.”
“Have you identified this Host?”
She bit her lip, hard. The Steward already knew the answer and His testing of her was intolerable. “No, Steward. But his work is evident. I suspect a Portal has already been created. One of the two Children is slain, the other possibly by now as well. Both their bodies are in the possession of Evil. We must act now.”
“Act, Mrs Harker? What is it that you actually propose, given the gravity of the events you describe?”
“The remaining Necromire must be gathered together, of course. There must be a call to arms. All who have knowledge must fight. If we do not unite, nothing stands in Belial’s way, nothing will prevent the Change and after two hundred years I am not prepared to sit back and watch this World burn.”
Harker found herself slightly out of breath and on edge. She felt as though something – a fury maybe – was festering at the pit of her stomach, waiting for its opportunity to escape. Everything about this room was oppressive: the lights were too dim, the furnishings too plush, the carpet too brassy. It sickened her. And the Steward, who had hardly moved in the last hundred years, sickened her as well. But she stopped quickly. A hand, or something that passed for a hand, appeared from the corner of the armchair, creeping and feeling its way across the fabric, slowly caressing the side of the table until crooked figures wrapped themselves around the drink and there was the clink of bone against glass.
Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1) Page 20