Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1) (2 page)

Chapter 3

Two things became very apparent to Alix a short while after Ned had disappeared back through the door h
e had taken her through: first, the glass wall didn’t, as she suspected, expand the entire breadth of the room but stopped a few feet short either end at which point it turned sharply to run parallel with the wall and then again at the back. This meant she was standing in a room inside another room. Second, she was not the only occupant of the room within the room.

The man who shared her space was short (they were roughly the same height)
and plump. He was blessed with a blotchy red face with features all scrunched up in the middle like his head had, at one point, imploded in on itself. He wore a pinstripe suit and carried an expensive looking pilot’s bag. His shoes were especially shiny. The product, Alix suspected, of very many hours of labour.

Her heart sank as he waddled over to her with
a look that suggested he might be heavily constipated. She hoped this wasn’t the house doctor she was supposed to be meeting.

“Are you with the CPS?” h
e demanded.

Shit, she thought.
Far worse. He was a lawyer.

“No,” she replied. “
Alix Franchot. I’m a psychologist here to see Professor Anwick.”

“So you’re with the CPS then.”

“No. As I say, I’m a psychologist. Freelance, actually. Or at least I was until recently. Sorry, not making much sense. I just can’t get over this...”

“What? Oh, yes. The fact that we are standing in a glass prison inside a government sponsored, top secret loony bin for nutters so dangerous that they have to be hidden from the world at large. Yes. Odd, isn’t it.”

Alix sensed the conversation wasn’t going to be the start of a long term friendship. Better hold off giving him your Twitter username for a while, kid. See how things pan out first. There was a musty smell in the air and she wasn’t sure whether it was the old stone walls or the lawyer.

“Well,” he said, “I’m Anwick’s brief. I’ll be present while you do your thing. Which is what exactly?”

“A simple preliminary evaluation. I’m surprised your client even needs representation,” she said, knowing full well that a legal aid defence lawyer wouldn’t pass up on the opportunity of a visit to this place.

“Just making sure my client isn’t distressed by being unlawfully detained here in this
God-forsaken place. There are Human Rights issues here, you know. Human Rights.” Perhaps saying the words again gave them more legitimacy. “Anyway, I was expecting someone-” He broke off, obviously feigning not finding the right words and wanting her to fill in the gaps. Asshole.

“What? Older? More senior? A man, perhaps? Receding hairline and homoerotic moustache?”

“Now look here,” his face seemed to get redder, which was quite an achievement. “There’s no need for that. I was expecting someone from the CPS. That’s all. But since you’re not, I’ll just wait until they arrive.”

He took his pilot bag and sat down on a bench on the other side of the room.
Evidently, their conversation was at an end. Alix stood blinking a few times before a door on the far side of the room opened. A man with a white lab coat flung over a suit walked in and unlocked a door to the glass room opposite to the way they had come in. Professor Anwick’s lawyer was on his feet immediately, making up as best he could for his lack of height by dancing around in front of the visitor like a child queuing for an ice cream.

“Ah,” he said. “
At last. Sir, I wish to register my utter disgust with the conditions my client is being kept under. This is barbaric.”

The man in the white coat barely looked at Anwick’s lawyer but instead made his way over to Alix. He was from the Ivory Coast, bald head and glasses, a pleasant smile, and talked
in soft African tones.

“Doctor Franchot?” He extended his hand, which Alix took.

“Yes,” she said. “You must be Doctor Omotoso.”

“Call me Edwin.”

“And, yes,” piped in the lawyer getting in front of Alix and squaring up to the doctor as best he could. “I want to see the duty manager. There is a duty manager, I assume?”

“This ain’t no hotel, buddy. You’r
e here to see Anwick, follow me. You’re here to complain about the view from your room, there’s a suggestion box out d’back.”

Alix allowed herself a polite chuckle. This was her kind of guy. And the look on the lawyer’s face was worth putting up with his crap earlier.
Realising he wasn’t going to get very far, the lawyer rummaged around in his bag and pulled out a blue notepad on which he started scribbling notes, presumably to make a point of it all. Edwin raised an eyebrow at her and winked.

“This way,
then,” he said and they followed him out together.

Chapter 4

As the others filed in to the Church of Saint Mary Our Virgin Jacob felt the change in the air. It wasn’t just the absence of the cold
breeze on his face; it was the absence of everything. Like entering a vacuum, a space in which everything was temporarily suspended. He felt something stir within him, a feeling he had, like other feelings, forgotten. He felt the quickening of his heart and the sensation of blood pumping furiously through his veins. Blood charged with something ancient and cruel.

Like the others
, he shuffled along the stone floor and down the central aisle. Took a pew to the left at the back. They sat in unison. A sad procession of puppets pulled and manipulated by invisible strings.

At the altar stood a man whose face was obscured by shadow. He wore a black robe that flowed around him like a
demon’s wings, tied with a blood red cord around the waist. He stood motionless as Jacob and the others silently took their seats. Their eyes down. All of their eyes down on the floor.

Jacob’s head was spinning. There was a horrible
churning in the pit of his stomach. He touched his face and ran his tongue carefully over his fingers. They tasted of salt. He studied them closely, looked at the contours on his skin that ran across his knuckles and the small mole on his thumb.

He didn’t recognise
them.

He was there, standing over him. The man in the black robe. Hadn’t noticed him move from the altar. He couldn’t breathe. The fear was choking him.
He looked up and into his eyes but there was nothing but black holes there. He thought his heart might burst from his rib cage.

“I know you feel it more than the others, Jacob,” he said. “You feel, yet you don’
t feel. You are caught between worlds, Jacob. One foot in a real world and one in a dream world. They -” he swept his hand across towards the others – “they are already dead. You can’t save them. Empty cells waiting to be reused. That’s all. Nothing more.”

He moved his hand over the boy’s scruffy hair
and down the back of his neck, across underneath his chin and over his face.

“It will be over soon,” he told him before striding to the front of
the congregation and turning. The blade in his hand, long and curved, glinted in the sunlight shining through the stained glass windows. The sun was rising quickly. The night had all but retreated.

Jacob watched as he extended a hand and, although he couldn’t see the robed man’s eyes, he
knew he was looking straight at him. And slowly, one by one, the heads of the others turned, their expressionless faces burning into him.

“In th
e name of Cronos, the Original Maker,” said the figure, “I choose you, Jacob, to make this Portal.”

Chapter 5

Alix had stayed up until the early hours of the morning absorbing everything she could about the
Innsmouth Institute but nothing she had read had come close to suggesting that the hospital, or at least this part of it, remained in operation. She stayed close to Omotoso as he led them down seemingly endless, dimly lit corridors. Anwick’s lawyer followed a few paces behind, not wanting to make it appear as though he was actually with them, as if by doing so he somehow legitimized this place, but also making sure he could hear the conversation.

“How many patient
s do you have here?” she asked him as they rounded another corner.

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen? That’s it?”

“Yep. Just one wing.”

“Why? Why just keep one wing open? And why keep this place secret?”

Omotoso glanced nervously over his shoulder. The lawyer had pricked up his ears and Alix, despite her desperation to understand, didn’t want
him
to know the truth either, whatever it was. She exchanged a look with Omotoso and decided not to push it.

There was a faint smell of disinfectant in the air but other than that nothing to suggest this was a working hospital. The wa
lls were stained with some putrid yellow substance. The floor hadn’t been swept in years. There were no light fittings, just naked bulbs hanging perilously from the high ceiling, which was cluttered with uncovered pipes and wires and ventilation shafts. In places, the plaster had come away from the walls to reveal the flaking brickwork underneath.

Hardly an atmosphere that promoted healing
, if indeed that was the idea.

Here,
the boundary between hospital and prison was somewhat blurred.

She thought back to the blog entries she had read.

             
Innsmouth
, lunatic asylum. Built in the early part of the nineteenth century, the complex expands over a four acre site. The Victorian utilitarianists constructed the Innsmouth Institute with the new belief that insanity could be cured. They had no concept or understanding of the complexity of mental illness and its different and varying forms. Abnormalities of the brain were there to be isolated and extracted using crude and often brutal techniques. In any event, incarcerating lunatics was expensive. Curing them was cheap. That paradigm had been all but extinguished by the end of the 70s. Asylums like Innsmouth are relics of a forgotten and dark age. The rise of institutional psychiatry has spawned a new era for the treatment of mental illness. Hospitals have replaced institutions. Drugs and therapy have replaced brutality and restraint. White walls and disinfectant have replaced stone and leather padded cells.

This place was a relic of a forgotten age. Why bother to fund it in secret?

“What sort of patients do you have?” Alix asked, trying to find a way to ask questions without putting Omotoso in a difficult position, although, frankly, she wasn’t convinced about the ethics of even working in a place like this. She was only really being tactful to spite the lawyer.

“The kind that don’t fit in with
the normal system,” he replied.

“So you just go right ahead and take these folk outside the system and hide them from the world,” said the lawyer. He whistled as if to emphasise the
absurdity of everything. “That makes you part of a serious violation to human rights, my friend.”

“It makes me a guy doing a job,” he replied.

Alix didn’t like it, but she had to admit to herself that the lawyer might have a point.

“So what happens when these guys’ families come to visit?
Do they have to sign the Official Secrets Act too?” The lawyer again.

Omotoso stopped at another heavy door and fumbled around for his keys.

“The kind of patients we have here, mister, they don’t have people who want to come and visit them.” Alix nodded. She liked the way he talked. Everything he said was numbed with a mixture of sincerity and sadness.

The door creaked open and they followed him through to another corridor. Alix had lost track of how far they had come. She looked back anxiously but there was no way of telling how to get back to the entrance if she needed to. No friendly signs pointing to reception, or brightly coloured vending machines dispensing cans of coke, or
little green bottles of disinfectant. Nothing.

“How are you funded?” asked the lawyer. “I will be pissed to the max if my tax money pays for this illegal joint.”

“We manage our own budget,” said Omotoso curtly.

“I mean look at this place! It’s a shit hole. I’ve seen
cleaner public toilets in Soho.”

Alix wondered how many public toilets the lawyer had seen in Soho. Quite a few she imagined.

“I wish I’d never signed that damned paper.”

Alix looked at the lawyer sideways. He was out of his depth. If he knew anything about what he was into
he would know that signing the Official Secrets Act was irrelevant. The Act was law. People given access to government secrets were bound by the terms of the Act whether they signed it or not. Signing was just to bring to their attention the penal consequences of failing to adhere to its terms. Alix felt a little better knowing that she wasn’t, perhaps, the most naive out of the three of them.

The corridor had widened and for the first time Alix could see out of the windows into a snow covered yard about the size of a football pitch surrounded by a twelve foot high fence crowned with barbed wire. Behind that, the looming wall she assumed to be outer perimeter complete with unmanned watch towers.
The yard was deserted, except that there were tracks across the snow from the one end to the other. Freshly made from what she could see.

In
this corridor, there was a faint noise bleeding through the walls on the opposite side to the windows. She wasn’t sure initially what it was. At first it sounded mechanical but, after a while, she recognised it. The unmistakable noise of a man in pain; the sorrowful moaning suppressed them all into silence, even the lawyer. Alix shivered.

“Tell me about Anwick,” she said to Omotoso,
breaking the silence.

Omotoso sighed before saying, “complex, like the rest of ‘em. I need a lot more time to get to the bottom of
him. He communicates intermittently through what I think is an alternative personality who calls himself Azrael.”

“Dissociative identity disorder,” Alix suggested.

“The definition of DID requires there to be two or more personality states that recurrently assume control of the mind. But I’ve only met Azrael. So technically that only makes one. Just not the right one.”

“Could be that the alternative personality is dominating in the early stages shortly after the trigger event.”

“Could be. Not enough time to do a proper screening yet. Have you ever read DSM-5?”

Alix shook her head, although she knew he was referring to the criteria for the diagnosis of DID set out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders but what the Manual said was well beyond her expertise.

“Just what are you two eggheads babbling about?” said the lawyer impatiently. His stumpy legs meant he had to sort of skip on every third or fourth step to keep up with Omotoso’s long strides.

“Your client’s been through
considerable trauma,” Alix explained. “But the mind is an incredible survivor. In rare cases, the mind recognises that it can’t deal directly with the trauma it’s experienced and so an alternative personality is created to take control and to shield the real personality from further deterioration. Childhood sexual abuse is a typical trigger for the emergence of an alternative personality in adulthood but extreme psychological stress, such as that which your client has endured, could also produce the same effect.”

“I guess that would help an insanity plea,” said the lawyer slyly.

“Not really. If there is an alternative personality then it came
after
what happened to your client,” said Omotoso.

They turned a final corridor which opened out into a larger room with cell doors (there was no better way to describe them) on the right and glass looking out onto the snowy yard on the left. Omotoso led them to the end
door next to which was hung a chalk board.

Prof. Eu
gene Anwick

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