So she ought to stick with what she knew. The voice inside her head, she supposed, was the creation of her subconscious mind, a reaction to the trauma of nearly dying in a fire perhaps. It was still, however, ultimately her. It didn’t know anything more than she did and she knew she had never been through the door to the left. So she should go right. For now, the nagging point that Omotoso had told her that many of the patients in Innsmouth developed multiple personalities, a common first symptom of which was hearing voices in one’s head, would have to wait. Getting out was more important. Furthermore, the door to the left was locked and controlled by an electronic lock, the code for which could be one of a billion different possibilities. The door ahead was operated by a handle and, when she clicked it down carefully, apparently unlocked.
No brainer.
She pushed it open a little and listened for signs of anyone on the other side. In the distance, she heard a low throbbing noise; a generator or a computer server perhaps, or just a large fan. But no footsteps or talking. She opened the door and padded through. Her bare feet were freezing on the concrete floor and she was shivering. An icy draft hit her on the other side of the door, her warm breath was visible in the cold air; but her only thoughts were of survival, getting out of Innsmouth as quickly as possible. She knew that Ned would come round soon but she didn’t know whether he was working alone, whether everyone in Innsmouth was on his side, whether Omotoso had deceived her. But whatever the situation, wandering the corridors with no shoes on wearing the same outfit as the patients was a bad start.
You should have gone left, said the voice, although it didn’t seem too concerned.
“Shut up,” she muttered and began to trot down the corridor, trying to stay as far to the off side as possible.
She past a door on her right. It was like all the others, with a slide at head height to see through. But there was noise on the other side. She froze, put her ear to the door to hear. Shuffling and scratching on the other side. She held her breath, pressed her ear harder against the metal. Waited, strained, tensed.
The click of the door didn’t register at first. It hadn’t occurred to her that it was being opened and for a second she didn’t move. She just watched the handle drop on her side and felt the beginnings of pressure from the other.
The door swung open as she moved away. Two men appeared, dressed like Ned: blue scrubs and surgical masks. Why did they have to wear surgical masks? Time seemed to slow as she saw the realisation cross their faces, watched their eyes narrow as they saw her. She turned awkwardly, her feet caught on something sharp, a break in the concrete, pain in her foot, a flash of blood as she fell. She felt the impact on her hands and knees and then hip.
Run, Alix. Run.
“One of the inmates has escaped!” The crackle of a radio and the sound of men moving swiftly towards her, the crack of their boots across the concrete echoing down the corridor.
She launched herself forward, pain crackling up her leg, back towards Anwick’s cell. In horror, she realised that Ned might have come round by now and she might be trapped but she had no choice about where to run. She was light and fast, even with the injury to her foot and she sensed that by the time she got to the door at the top she had created a little distance between her and men in masks.
“How the Hell she get out!” she heard one of them shout.
“Fuck knows! Base, we have breach! Shut this place down!”
She scrambled through the door, slammed it behind her and stopped dead, the blood quickly drained from her face. At the other end of the wide corridor, Ned staggered out of Anwick’s cell, rubbing his head and coughing angrily. For a moment she was paralysed, not sure what to do. He looked up and saw her, bewildered.
“Hey!” he shouted suddenly. “Wha-? You little bitch!”
With a roar, he began pelting towards her, his long legs closing the distance frighteningly quickly. Behind her, she heard the men in masks scrabbling over each other to get the door opened. There were yells and shouts, curses and anger. A siren began to whir outside, like an old war siren announcing the incoming raid. Her heart pounded, rose up her in her chest, sucked the air out of her lungs. She couldn’t move even if she wanted to.
Alix, said the voice calmly. The door to your left, which you should have taken in the first place, is now to your right. She looked over at it, at the key pad. The code is four-nine-nine-six-six-one.
Why not? She rushed over and tapped in the combination, every clank of Ned’s boots on the concrete getting louder and louder. Another noise told her the men in masks were through the door behind her. Evidently, they were closer.
“Stop her!” Ned screamed. More movement as they descended upon her. And then, as if the mechanism had deliberately waited until the very last second, the door in front of her swung open. She had no time to think. She fell through to the other side, slammed it behind her, heard the merciful sound of the bolt fire across automatically. She wasn’t in the clear but she had bought a little time, a few seconds at least.
She scanned the room she had stumbled into. An office. Large. Mauve carpet and duck-egg blue wallpaper. A large bureau in the centre of the room. Nothing on it. Books lined the right side. Five floor-to-ceiling windows behind the desk, rattling in their lead frames, looking out into the snowstorm.
A dead-end.
She moved round to the other side of the bureau. Perhaps she could push it up against...
“Well Doctor Franchot you’ve given us all the run-around for a few minutes but I’m afraid the game is up.”
The Russian accent was slightly muffled through the surgical mask. Ned was flanked by the other men. They had the door shut behind them and stood side-by-side on the other side of the bureau, the larger of the three, on the far right, puffing and wheezing.
Alix leant on the desk defiantly and glared at them. They weren’t going to take her easily.
“We’ll find out how you managed to break the coil later, doctor Franchot, but in the meantime I would be pleased if you would yield to us without further fuss.” He removed the mask, his thin lips pursed into a grin, and extended his hand towards her.
“Why aren’t I dead?” she asked, trying to catch her breath.
“You’re not dead, doctor, because I pulled you out of the fire before it caught hold of the poor professor properly. You were very lucky.”
“What happened to Anwick?”
“Spontaneous human combustion, doctor. You know the phenomenon is real.” He was mocking her.
He lowered his head dangerously but levelled his eyes on her, hand wavered a little, like he was considering retracting it.
“Why?” she said. “Why have you done this? Why have you detained me here?”
“For your safety, doctor. And ours. I’m afraid that you being in the professor’s cell at the exact time he had his hot flush was rather unfortunate. Unfortunate and unplanned. Now, as a consequence of your unexpected visit, you must remain here. Indefinitely.” His grasp of English had improved quite considerably, she noted.
“I don’t understand. Where’s Doctor Omotoso?”
Considering the apparent bleakness of her situation, Alix was surprised that she was managing to appear so confident, but the memory of Ned’s attempts to remove her nails and the anger she felt towards him, the thought of him taking her unconscious body, removing her clothes, getting his fill – or worse – and tying her to the wall. His giant hands on her body, her breasts. She felt dirty, contaminated, like she wanted to tear her own skin off just to remove any trace of him. She had never felt so much hatred towards another human being, except to the fuck who took Zara from her and ripped her life apart.
“Where is he?” she demanded again. The men in masks exchanged glances and took a small step forward. The Russian smiled.
“Doctor Omotoso has been re-assigned. Permanently.”
Alix straightened up slowly, extended her own finger, penetrated Ned as much as she could with her glare, and pointed to his face.
“You take one step toward me and I’ll tear your stinking heart out.”
“Oh, come, come,” Ned laughed, and the sound of his pleasure filled her with more rage, “Doctor, we’re three grown men and you are but such a flimsy, little thing. I was telling my comrades just how limp your body went in my arms when I had torn the clothes from it and-”
“You shut up!” she roared. “You shut the fuck up you piece of shit!”
Ned’s hand fell to his side, his grin vanished, his dark eyes were barely visible in the weak light before he said, “that’s enough talking for now, comrades. Please show the good doctor back to her cell. I will visit her later and teach her some manners.”
They advanced upon her, one either side of the bureau, and she knew it was now or never. The bottom halves of the windows behind her were fixed in place but the top halves opened outwards. She wedged her foot on to the front face of the bureau and thrust it forward. It was lighter than she had expected and the sudden propulsion caught the men in masks off-guard, the corner smashed into their midriffs with some force and they were both sent backwards to the floor. She heard shouting but it was enough time to throw the window open. The snowstorm thundered into the room, the window cracked backwards against the wall shattering the glass but Alix was up onto the ledge outside before anyone had time to react.
“This was a bloody stupid idea!” she shouted but her voice was barely audible above the roar of the storm. The blizzard swept across the face of the building as she edged away from the open window, the icy wind cut into her face and hands. It took all of her strength just to stay balanced. Below her, the snow whipped up from the ground. The top of the next window down was just visible but beyond that everything was swallowed up in a dense fog of snow and ice so it was impossible to tell exactly how high up she was.
She sensed commotion at the window and looked across. More shouting. One of the masked men was clambering out uncertainly, clasping the top of the frame as tightly as he could, trying to find a proper footing before heaving his body out onto the ledge. Finally he seemed to get himself balanced and began to creep slowly towards her. In panic, she lost her footing a little, the edge of the stone crumbled away, shards fell into the fog, she caught a sizable gap in the stonework just in time and managed to swing her leg round so she was facing the wall.
“Shit!”
Work your way around the edge, said the voice in her head, but she was so weak, battered by the storm and exhausted, her arms felt like they had seized up and for every step she took, the masked man seemed to take two. She closed her eyes, bit her lip. Every muscle in her body contracted in pain; bones felt they were made of glass, tendons of old twine. She felt defeated.
The sound of Ned’s voice carried itself on the wind. A darkness descended on her, her body began to shut down. She swayed precariously for a while. Even the voice in her head seemed distant now, like it was just a memory. The masked man was close, three, four feet away at best. He looked oddly scared, like she was. His eyes pleaded with her to give in, to submit; giving in to them was the easy option now.
She glanced down and then across at him. He shook his head, shouted something but she couldn’t hear what, her brain couldn’t cope with arranging sounds into language now. It was over. He made one final effort, skipped across the part of the ledge that had fallen away under her foot before reaching across, stretching and straining.
His hand touched her shoulder, fingers worked their way up and started to close across her collar bone.
No choice but to choose.
She looked at him one final time with tired, scared eyes; raised her hand, swept his arm away, and plunged herself into the white abyss.
Part IV
The Third Law of the Ether
The acts of men are inconsequential
Chapter 53
Ash stood quietly in the corner of George Brocken’s living room, arms folded, eyes down. The room smelt of something unpleasant. The air was stale, the stillness of everything was unnatural. He didn’t want to look again. He’d seen enough death this week.
In the opposite corner, Baron looked grimly at George’s body slumped in his chair. The room had been ransacked. Papers were scattered around everywhere, a bookshelf overturned, a table broken in two. Everything this man had owned had been destroyed or damaged.
“He was looking for something this time,” mumbled Ash, more to himself than anyone else. The pathologist, Maurice Reid, was knelt by the old man studying his arm.
“Pretty desperate to find something, detective,” he agreed. “Think I might have a hair sample though. Do you have a bag, Mia?”
A young, Chinese tech tiptoed over the parts of the carpet that were visible to hand Maurice a bag before stepping back to the side of the room to take more pictures. Maurice fished a pair of tweezers from his pocket and carefully extracted the hair from George’s arm.
“Don’t know if it’s the old boys yet but it looks different. Might be our man’s.”
“We think this is the same guy who took Megan and murdered Eph Speck,” said Baron, although whether it was a statement or a question was unclear. Ash looked up uncomfortably. It made him sick. Sometimes he wondered whether he was cut out for serious crime work. Other people like Keera seemed to understand brutality better than him. She seemed to just accept that human beings had an apparently unlimited capacity for causing suffering to other human beings. That was something that he had never accepted, although days like today tested that belief.
Nails had been driven into George’s skull. A line of them ran round his head, just above his ears and eyes, each one puncturing inflamed and bloody skin. Twenty-five in all, Maurice had said. He had probably lost consciousness after the third depending on where the hammering had started.
“Why do we think that?” asked Ash.
“Just an idea, detective. Probably a long shot,” said Maurice. “But you don’t need all these nails to kill someone. Get it right – and this guy knew what he was doing – and you only need one. So it’s a statement. As is crucifying someone, which is a pretty uncertain way to kill someone. No guarantee they’ll actually die you see. So it’s all about making statements.” As he spoke, he continued to scan the body, investigating every fold in the material of the shirt, every little scar on the arms and hands, every line, blemish and hair. “Also, what does this remind you of?”
He suddenly looked up expectantly at Ash. He wasn’t in the mood for a pop quiz but he respected Maurice too much to tell him just to get on with it.
“Looks like someone stuck a load of nails in his head,” he said.
“Yeah, but what does it look like?”
Ash sighed, pushed himself away from the wall and looked closer at the old man’s head.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “What does it look like?”
“A crown of thorns, detective Fielding. It looks like a crown of thorns.”
Ash thought about it. Eph Speck had been crucified, now this old man been made to look as though he had a thorn of crowns wedged onto his skull. It was good enough to constitute a half-decent connection, but the fact that the killer was obviously looking for something was odd. If it was him, he had Megan and maybe Katelyn’s body as well. What else did he want?
“What do we know about our victim?” asked Ash.
“Mr Bricken is a war veteran,” said Baron. “He was a major in the army. One of the toughest divisions around. His wife died three years ago and he lives alone. He has one daughter who by all accounts is an alcoholic and seemed more interested in establishing where the will was rather than showing any genuine grief. I doubt she’s involved but we ought to do some digging on her, Ash. By all accounts, he lived a modest, frugal life, voted lib dem last year, brought a lottery ticket twice a week and read the Daily Mail. Nothing extraordinary.”
“Nothing to suggest he deserved this,” muttered Ash.
Baron shook his head. Outside, they could hear children laughing and throwing snowba
lls at each other.
Chapter 54
When she finally managed to stumble into her flat, Alix went straight to the fridge. Luckily, the estate agent who dealt with the sale hadn’t handed over the spare key to the front door yet so she had dropped in with fake smiles and stories of having been to a wild fancy dress party and locking herself out before she headed back. In fact, standing in the agent’s office in an orange prison uniform, dripping wet and looking like a scarecrow had meant she received a reasonably speedy service.
In the fridge, there were five shelves, one of which was allocated to comfort food. She had a limit on trash. If she couldn’t fit it on one shelf, she binned it. Consequentially, the second shelf down swelled and bowed, packed full of high carb, salty delights. The other shelves looked embarrassingly sparse in comparison.
Dying twice in one day was tiring and it wasn’t good for a girl’s complexion. Her body felt like it belonged to someone else. It hurt in places she didn’t even know she had. Quite how she had survived the fall was unclear but she assumed the deep snow, which had drifted up against the side of the building, had broken her fall.
Alix took out a can of Doctor Pepper and drank it in six gulps. She had a craving for a coke float. There was a box of vanilla ice cream in the freezer.
I advise against the consumption of excessive caffeine.
She poured a glass of coke, letting the froth spill, crackling and fizzing, over onto the worktop. She fished out an ice cream scoop from the top drawer. Her breathing was heavy, the orange tunic was wet with perspiration despite the cold. Was this what being pregnant was like?
Are you really going to drink that?
The ice cream was solid, the freezer too efficient. The scoop stuck half way, bending under the pressure.
“Shit.”
Alix, this isn’t helping. Time is short. Will you listen now?
Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1) Page 23