Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1) (20 page)

Part III

The Twenty-first Law of the Ether

The destruction of an innocent shall open a Portal

Chapter 41

There had been no sign of the snow relenting around the Victorian courtyard. If anything, the white powder lay even thicker on the ground and crunched under Alix’s feet as she trudged across it towards where she thought Omotoso had emerged from last time to greet her. She looked up at the walls around her. She felt small; like a miniature doll in an enormous wooden play house.

She hadn’t slept well, the discovery she had made on her return to the station had played on her mind all night. Too many unanswered questions buzzing around her overworked mind. Suddenly, she wasn’t quite sure who to trust anym
ore. She felt hollow, a little numb. She had even thought about quitting. But it wasn’t as simple as that. For one thing, there was this place. Innsmouth. The thought that it even existed was enough to stifle her desire to walk away; she felt drawn to it, like it was her providence to be here. The thing with Ash would have to wait.

The
institute wrapped itself around the courtyard like a giant crab, its pincers curling their way around a patch of earth in front of its eyes. The windows were nothing more than tiny slits of blackness set against the red brickwork. Here and there, ivy had managed to curl half up a wall but in every case the last two or three feet of plant drooped lifelessly where the cold had defeated its ascension. It was nothing more than a ruin; an illusion, a tourist attraction. Any minute now, she’d be ambushed by a gaggle of volunteers – bright stripy sweatshirts and head bands – selling overinflated tickets and handing out insipid literature. She stopped and listened hard; something on the breeze, some distant sound above the rustling and creaking of the leafless trees.

“
Guess you just couldn’t stay away.” Alix jumped. Omotoso was stood beside her, having emerged noiselessly from the eeriness as if out of nowhere. He wore a light grey suit and a pleasant enough smile.

“Doctor,” Alix stammered, “you startled me.”

“I beg your apology, doctor Franchot, but startled or not, it is a pleasure to have you back. In fact, I’ve never known anyone to actually come back here.”

She smiled back
wanly, not really knowing what to say and for a while nothing happened. She was beginning to think he might not be as accommodating as last time, especially considering her return presumably wasn’t on his schedule, but eventually he turned away and walked back into the white haze.

“You comin
’?” he called back over his shoulder.

Much to the obvious disgust of the guard at the kiosk, Omotoso managed to persuade him that Alix didn’t need to go through the same routine as last time with as much diligence but she still had to surrender her bag along with its limited contents. This time, she had left her phone and purse in the car having found the receipts stuffed into one of the purse’s many complex compartments out of order when she had picked up her bag the last time around. In fact, her bag now contained hardly anything but it was good to have something to leave at the door
. Alix had noticed that Omotoso hadn’t addressed the guard by his name. The conversation had been curt and awkward. There was no locker-room comradeship here.

He led her in silence through the first security checkpoint and down into the labyrinth of corridors beyond until he was satisfied that no one could overhear them and it was safe to talk.

“You don’t have clearance for a second visit, doctor Franchot,” he remarked as they walked slowly through a large hall that was perhaps once a canteen.

“No,” she admitted. “But apparently you let me in anyway.”

Omotoso smiled, opened a door at the end of the room and showed her through.

“Why was that?” she asked.
He stopped, turned to her.

“I think to myself: I’ve been here
three years and I can count the number of visitors to the institute on one hand and I work in a place that’s so secret I can’t even tell my wife about it and then you show up not once but twice and I reckon that would be for a pretty good reason. So, I think what-the-Hell and here you are.”

“Where does your wife think you work?”

“She thinks that I am at the University lecturing,” he chuckled. “But who cares? We’ve been separated for years and she’s one mean bitch so lying to her comes pretty naturally.”

“I guess so,” she laughed. There was a gentleness to Omotoso that Alix was in danger of warming to. But she remembered Ash telling her he’d been struck off three years earlier. So how did he end up here? But then again, could she really trust anything Ash had told her?

“You’re here to see Professor Anwick,” he said as they continued their trek through the institute.

“Yes. And to ask you a few things, if I may.”

“Well, you can ask,” he said. “But I’m not sure I can help you much.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because you want to know about Innsmouth. You want to know why-oh-why would the state commission a psychiatric hospital on a shoestring budget to house only a few patients and keep everyone in the dark about it, right?”

“Yeah. I want to know that.”
And, if you were struck off, how come you’re still practising? But she kept that question to herself.

“Well I have absolutely no idea.”

“Oh, doctor, you can do better than that.”

“Nope, I can’t. I come here. I do my best. I leave. They pay me. It’s
that
simple. And I accept that what they pay me buys my silence and you can measure that against whatever ethical yardstick you have but it puts food on my kid’s table and I get to hide a lot of the income from my bitch ex-wife’s bitch lawyer.”

“What about everyone else that works here? That guy Ned for example?” She hoped that she hadn’t sounded his name suspiciously but she looked over her shoulder, suddenly conscious that he must be here somewhere, perhaps even watching her now, his dark eyes barely visible from the shadows. She shivered.

“Ned? I don’t even think that’s even his real name. Listen, so far as I’m aware, we all in the same boat here bobbing aimlessly on the same sea and there’s never a staff meeting, never a secret Santa and never a manager’s barbeque.”

“Then what about the patients?”

Omotoso sighed heavily, paused to look at her, hand on the key to the next room. He seemed to be measuring her up, deciding perhaps whether she was trustworthy enough to be told something, anything. She held his gaze anxiously.

“All the patients in Innsmouth exhibit the same type of symptoms,” he told her at last. “They all have complicated mental illnesses but even so their behaviour is abnormal. Their cognitive functions are limited.” Omotoso looked pained, like he wasn’t sure whether he ought to be talking about this. When he next spoke, it was in hushed tones and Alix had to lean forward to hear him properly. “You ever seen a patient have prolonged electroconvulsive therapy?” he asked. She looked at him sideways and thought about it.

“Electro-
shock therapy?” she asked, puzzled. The image of Jack Nicolson’s smiling face popped in to her head. It didn’t help ease the tension. “Sure. Electrodes placed directly on to the skull give a shock designed to stimulate a mini-seizure. They used to use it to treat schizophrenia but it’s come a long way since then.”

“It’s pretty crude, still,” whispered Omotoso. “The seizures cause gliosi. It damages the central nervous system and kills off part of the brain. Afterwards, patients are left all zombielike, unable to communicate properly. They revert back to a sort of primal state. That’s just like the patients we have here. Except the effects don’t ever wear off. A large number – a disproportionate number – go on to develop alternative egos like Anwick. Usually, the alternative personalities are spiteful and nasty but it’s the same pattern each time.”

“And you have no idea what causes it and how to treat it?”
             

“I can’t even categorise their mental illness. I’m not given any information about any of them. The stuff I know about Anwick I got from BBC News.” Omotoso looked around nervously. They heard footsteps back down the corridor. He froze. Alix could feel the anxiety emanate from him and she suddenly felt a shiver down her spine. “I’m not a physician any more, doctor Franchot,” he said with even more intimacy. “
I haven’t been for three years. I’m just a caretaker.”

The bolts shot back from their hinges with a loud clank and the door swung open.
Omotoso motioned for Alix to go through but his eyes bored into her. What was he trying to tell her? She sensed that the conversation was over but Doctor Omotoso had a lot more to say. He ushered her through, the footsteps behind them getting louder.

“Why do you do it then, doctor?” she asked him as they made their way hurriedly down the next white corridor.

“Because I don’t have a choice,” he said. The anger in his voice was unmistakeable.

Chapter
42

She couldn’t get anything more out of Omotoso and they walked the remaining two or three minutes it took to get to Anwick’s cell in silence. She wanted to know more but something that she
couldn’t quite fathom stopped her. It was something in the walls, or the air maybe. Something
festered
in this building; a dark energy gathered around her and it brought with it memories of things she had long forgotten, arguments she had had and things she had once treasured but lost, dreams filled with images of loss and abandonment. Spectres of the past that filled her with foreboding and sadness.

She felt angry at Ash and at herself for letting her imagination
run away with her. What she had done was unfair and judgmental. There may well be a perfectly good explanation for Ash having her entire history on his hard drive. She just wasn’t seeing something. All she had to do was postpone her visit here and phoned him or gone to see him and he would have laughed and told her not to be so silly. But she didn’t, she bottled it up and stored it away and it may never come out.

The sound of the door slamming against the wall as Omotoso fumbled for the handle
shook her thoughts away and it took flight like a flock of startled birds. She was left in a cold room staring at a familiar door and, thankfully, an empty desk.

“Where the Hell is
he?” said Omotoso, frustrated.

“You mean Ned?”

“Yeah, useless Eastern European bastard.”

“Do you know much about him?” she asked cautiously.

“Zilch. I don’t know anything about nobody in the Twilight Zone. Why?”

“No reason. Just – you know – a bit odd, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so. You ready?” He was standing by the security panel, poised to hit the buttons.

“Ye
ah. Yeah, I’m ready.”

He punched the pad, and the door clicked. He pushed it open and bowed slightly as she passed him.

“Remember the bloody line this time,” he said to her as she passed.

The sound of the door locking behind her sent something fluttering through her stomach and up her gullet as she realised that she was now encased in
the windowless prison yet again. Anwick sat hunched in the corner, arms pulled around his crossed legs, his lipless mouth charily forming silent words, perhaps of prayer, she thought. There was something very
reptilian
almost about the way he looked, she noticed. Tiny pin prick eyes darted around the room, skin so pale it was almost translucent. It was as if his time at Innsmouth had stripped him of those little qualities that define us as human, those small imperfections of the skin, laughter lines, crow’s feet. The things that separate us from animal.

Alix stayed close to the door uncertainly
.

“Hello, professor.”

He came for her out of the depths of the shadows; a ghost from the darkness, crossing the short distance inhumanly fast until the cord snapped taut and his progress was halted as suddenly as it had begun.  He pulled at the cord angrily but it held fast.

Alix’s heart had stopped working in that
split second and she took a moment to breathe deeply after she realised he was still attached to the wall; bound to this cell like a foetus to the womb.

She glanced down at the thin yellow line that ran the length of the room across the floor and
for a moment she closed her eyes as the image brought her back, standing at the platform of a train station with her father and her sister. A scene played out in her mind for a split second. She must have been no more than eight, Zara no more than five. A yellow line ran across the platform edge. She could hear her father’s voice shouting, panicked, desperate. She could see Zara peering over the edge of the platform to the track below and her father roughly hauling her back. How Zara had wailed and how her father had raged, and how Alix had merely wondered: what was over the platform edge that Zara had seen?

“Do you remember me?”
she asked.

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. I do. The Host, come to visit me again. How lucky I am.”
There was something
sexless
about the way Anwick spoke; a voice that was not quite high enough to be female but not low enough to be recognisable as male.

“Am I speaking to
Azrael?” she asked.

“Who else?”
As if it had been obvious.

“We didn’t get off to a very good start last time.”

“No,” he agreed. “I tried to use you to bargain my escape, for which I apologise. I hope you are not hurt.”

Not physically at least. “
No. But let’s not do that again. I’d like to speak with Professor Eugene Anwick, Azrael. Can you arrange that for me?”

“I’m afraid the professor is not taking visitors at the moment. He is unwell. In fact, were it not for me, he’d be dead.”

“Can you explain that to me? Why would the professor be dead?”

Anwick looked disappointed all of a sudden. “Oh, this is simply intolerable. You know nothing do you? I thought you were here to take me out of this rotting place and in fact you know nothing!” He folded his arms and looked at the floor
mournfully.

“You could explain it to me,” she suggested.

“What would be the point? You’d never be able to take it all in. There’s no time, doctor Franchot. There’s no time.” He looked up at her. “This place, this hospital, is nothing more than the carpet under which all of the World’s dirty secrets are swept. And whilst I grow weak in this form the Witch Hunters take their conquest ever closer to victory. All is lost Alix Franchot. All is lost.”

“What happened to Katelyn,
Azrael?”

“Katelyn?” Anwick looked up. There was a tear in his eye. “Yes, Katelyn. Is she still dead?”

“She’s dead, yes.”

“But is she
still
dead?” Anwick wasn’t mocking her, she could tell. There was genuine concern in the way he talked.

“She’s... she’s still dead.”

“And her body? Is her body safe?”

Alix swallowed hard. Anwick was staring at her intensely, staring at her in the way that a child might stare at a parent; earnestly, with complete trust and faith. But this was too much of a coincidence. Why would he ask about Katelyn’s body just after it had been taken from under the mortician’s nose?

“Is the body safe, Alix Franchot?”

Alix ran her hand across her mouth. She thought hard. He
knew
something. He knew about Katelyn’s body going missing.

“The body’s missing, Azrael.”

“Lilith didn’t keep it safe?”

“
Who’s Lilith?”

Awick’s mouth curled around like he was about to say something bu
t the movement began to distort and to Alix’s horror he began to let out a mournful low cry. It wasn’t a noise that Alix had ever heard before. It was barely human. The sound of utter devastation compressed into a whine that grew and grew in volume until it was all around her and she was drowning in it. She sank to the floor, her hands clasped over her ears trying to shut out the awful sound.

And then it was gone. As quickly as
it had come. She looked up. Anwick was still staring at her.

“What about Megan?” he asked suddenly.

She didn’t answer at first. She felt breathless, the horrible noise was still replaying in her head. But then he was looking at her, waiting for an answer. Not a hint of the mournful despair on his face that she expected. Had it even been real?

“We’re looking for her,” she said at last. There seemed little point in lying to him.

“She’s gone too?”

“Yes.”

Anwick glanced down to Alix’s feet. His expression remained unchanged but he seemed deep in thought. She shuffled her weight from one side to the other. After a few moments he looked up at her sharply.

“The key to the coming of the Hollow One is the Harbinger. He will have Megan and he will have Katelyn. There may be still time to save the Ether but I must be freed from Anwick. He is of no use to me.”

“Did you say
the Harbinger
?” Alix thought back to Jacob Lightfoot’s diary. He had referred to the man who came to White Helmsley as the Harbinger. Suddenly there appeared another connection between the Helmsley church deaths and Megan and Katelyn Laicey. When he didn’t answer she repeated the question more urgently. “Who is he, Azrael? Who is the Harbinger?”

Anwick had straightened up and was looking at her- not
through
her, to the wall on the other side. He seemed transfixed by something.

“Azrael!” she said
, trying to move her head in his eye-line to attract his attention. “The Harbinger. You mentioned something about someone called the Harbinger. Who is he?”

For the first time,
Alix saw something glimmer in Anwick’s eyes. A spark of energy: distant and faint but nonetheless something that conveyed life to her. But his lips were pursed, his arms rigid, body stock-still. Fear, she thought. Like he’d seen a ghost.

“Azrael? Professor Anwick?” She looked behind her where he was staring but there was nothing there. So why did she also feel it? That disquiet we feel
rumbling at the bottom of our chests when we are expecting something bad to happen. The early warning system kicking in.

“Professor?”

“The Harbinger.”

His murmur was barely audible.

“He’s here.”