Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1) (21 page)

Chapter 43

Harker threw her phone across the room. It shattered against the wall, three or four small components scattered across the marble floor of her apartment. She snatched her bag from the counter and slammed the front door shut behind her. The Mercedes was already waiting for her at the bottom of the path. The driver, knowing better than to question her instructions, slipped the car into drive and pulled away into the city traffic.

Her conversation with Baron had been short but she had been troubled by it. Troubled enough to break a three hundred pound phone.

“Amanda,” he had said. “I fear the killer has struck again.”

“What do you mean?”

“I attended a homicide this morning. A small terrace in Bristol. A man in his eighties was killed in his own home. I think it’s the same man who did Ephraim Speck. Maybe also the same guy that took Megan Laicey.”

“Why? Why do you say that?” Har
ker couldn’t hide her agitation.

“It’s Maurice’s idea but there are similarities.”

When he had finished telling her of what they had found, Harker had felt the blood drain from her face.

“What was his name?” she had demanded.

“Why is that important? Bricken. George. Amanda?” She hadn’t responded but stared instead at the picture on her wall. It was an ancient oil painting, faded and torn at the edges: the crucifixion of Jesus at Golgotha, the spear of destiny thrust into his side, Joseph of Arimathea kneeling penitently at the cross.

“Amanda?” Baron’s voice
had brought her back with a jolt. “Did you know this man?”

“No,” she
had said dismissively. “Was anything taken from the house?”

“
The place is ransacked but I don’t know whether anything is gone.”

The phone had been broken into pieces before
Baron could finish.

Now, as the car weaved its way through the London traffic, Harker chewed her tongue thoughtfully. Things were happening much quicker than she had thought possible
. Baron would have a reason for suspecting the same killer, and he was rarely wrong. She had never heard of George Bricken, but she knew his death was somehow significant and it was possibly connected to a secret having fallen into the enemies’ hands.

The car pulled up outside a shabby hotel in Soho, the sort of place that wasn’t apparently open but also wasn’t apparently closed. A weathered sign above
the door read G AND HOTEL SO O. Paint had peeled off rotting frames, plaster had fallen away to expose brickwork. When she got out, the Mercedes, looking in stark contrast to its surroundings, hastily pulled away.

The interior was hardly an improvement and Harker had to steady herself on the slanted floor b
efore marching to the reception which was represented by a serving hatch in the wall. She could see straight through to a messy office in which sat a small man, no more than four feet tall, wearing a tweed suit complete with waistcoat and patches. He was glued to a portable TV. He had long, wiry grey hair which sprouted irregularly from a perfectly round scalp, the centrepiece of which was a long handle-bar moustache which he played with absentmindedly between his little, stubby fingers. From the sounds coming from the TV, he appeared to be watching two French men fuck each other.

“Amanda Harker,” he said, not taking his eyes off the screen. “
Ain’t seen you in a while, miss.”

“Busy times, Bill. The key?”

Bill waited for one of the Frenchmen to climax before taking a small key from around his neck and offering it to her.

“Password?” he asked. “For old time’s sake.”

“You mock me.”

Bill raised an eyebrow, withdrew the key enough so it was out of her reach.

“No life on the Ether is sacred. All things belong to Cronos,” she said resentfully.

Satisfied, he
leaned forward. Harker took the key and headed for the lift at the back of the room. She had to prise back an iron grate to get in but the mechanism didn’t give her much difficulty. She pressed the button marked B; the old drives whirred, the lift juddered for a moment and then descended two floors down.

Once at the bottom, the grate was opened by another small man who looked identical to Bill. Same tweed suit, same wiry hair, same long, slightly greasy looking moustache.

“Hello Henry,” said Harker.

“
That’s
Henry,” said Bill irritably, pointing upwards. “I’m Bill.”

“I’m sorry,” said Harker, although
in truth she found Bill and Henry’s propensity to wear the same clothes but habitually swop roles nothing short of infuriating.

“Come to see the Steward ‘ave we?” Harker stuck her nose up at the grating sound of Bill’s feigned cockney accent.

“Must you speak in that loathsome manner?”

“Just blendin’ in, miss,” he said unpleasantly. “Steward ain’t seein’ no one today. E’s got backache.”

Harker looked at the little man indignantly; the puffiness around his eyes said he’d been smoking again, no doubt over indulging on the many mind altering drugs this World had to offer.

“You look unwell, Bill,” she observed.

“Enjoyin’ my retirement is all, miss. Now, as I say, the Steward-”

She cut him off with:
“The Steward will suffer my counsel. There’s a war about to start, Bill, and the time for sitting on our arses is at an end. The Harbinger senses our hesitancy and may well have solved his most Byzantine problem. In all likelihood, the Portal is open and all that remains is to find a suitable Vessel for Sin to plunder the Ether and
you
say the Steward - the Necromire’s ambassador here in this shithole of a world - has
backache
. Listen, when the Change comes do you think He will have space on his Canvas for fat dwarfs like you with appalling dress sense to waste their days getting high and watching French pornography? The-”

“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.

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 a
n 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.