Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1) (25 page)

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 snowballs 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, t
here 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?

The scoop slipped in her hand and she sent the ice cream box skidding across the floor. She threw the coke down her neck anyway, feeling the gas bloat her stomach. She needed nicotine. Desperate for something... that familiar buzz. No, not nicotine. It was caffeine she wanted. Raw caffeine.

Do you remember the caffeine warning I just issued?

Trembling, she took down a jar of coffee and spooned the black grains directly into her mouth. She chewed and the bitter granules mixed with her saliva, a gut-wrenching taste but she held it down and forced herself to swallow. She had no idea whether eating raw coffee would inject caffeine into her system faster than a liquid but it seemed like the right thing to do. Another mouthful and it was all she could do to stop herself empting her stomach contents on the counter.

I see we’re going to be learning the hard way today.

The buzz of the drug flushing through her veins satisfied her craving for a short moment.

It would make the voice go away. It would make the voice go away. It would...

What else? More coke. Directly from the bottle this time. Good, washing away the bitterness. Two litres, stopping twice to belch. The buzz intensifying, her need intensifying.

This isn’t going to end well. The caffeine affects our neurological connection, as limited as it is. You crave it because it’s a new high, something your body isn’t used to. But it wants it. It wants the power the caffeine creates.

“Be quiet. I’m not listening to you.”

Must stop the voice, must stop the voice. Must have more caffeine, feels so good. So lovely. So intense.

I really wish you would listen to me. Your body is going through a fundamental cerebral change. Flushing it with mind altering drugs is likely to create complications.

“Not listening.”

She
clasped her hands to her ears and hummed loudly. The buzz rippled through her, her vision was blurry. The world was suddenly filled with colour and movement. The intensity was almost too much to bear.

Listen to me: you have a raw control over your physical environment that your body has not previously known. If you don’t learn quickly how to control it, it will control you and you will end up like Anwick.

“GET OUT OF MY FUCKING HEAD!”

She swept her hand across the side shattering the glass of coke against the wall.
She gripped her hair with her hands and fell to her knees, the world crashing in around her, the waves of reality disintegrating against the rocky shore.

“Why is this happening to me?”

It is our unification. If you would only listen to me I will explain.

“No! No, this isn’t real. You’re not real! You’re an illusion. A figment my subconscious mind has created to cope with a sudden trauma. I know. I’m a doctor of psychology.”

I know what you are. But there is more to existence than chemical reactions.

The room span round and round. The spotlights under the kitchen units flickered and buzzed dangerously. There was a loud crack and a spark as a socket blew.  She felt the buzz overwhelm her.
It
was in control now. The voice was faint, like it was bleeding through the walls from another room. She sank lower to the floor. Wanted to be sick. Her last thought was of Zara standing in the doorway watching her fall, watching her walls come tumbling down. She was still the little girl that Alix remembered in her dreams. A small, freckled face and long red hair tied in pig tails.

A
stuffed bunny with no ears trailing by her side, saturated in crimson blood.

Chapter 55

Alix had no idea how long she had been unconscious but outside the light was already being to fade.

Everything had a slightly dull look to it, like someone had painted her kitchen a few tones darker while she had been out. She thought about Innsmouth but the fragments of memory that played through her mind made no sense.

She tried to move but her head hurt too much. She lay still for a short while.

You’re a sucker for punishment, Alix.

She smiled. The voice was like an old friend greeting her.
She was still mad. That was comforting.

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t learn well.”

Evidently.

“I’ve gone mad, I assume. Or perhaps I was always like this and I just couldn’t remember. I can’t be sure.”

In fact you’re not mad at all.

The voice was gentle, soothing. Sometimes male, sometimes female. She couldn’t decide. But not a human voice. If you hear a voice on the telephone for the first time without knowing what the person looks like, you can create an image in your head. Sometimes you can be quite accurate, sometimes not. But nonetheless it is easy to imagine.
The voice inside Alix’s head was faceless.

“I am, I’m afraid. I’m hearing voices, didn’t-you-know? It’s a classic sign of craziness. I’ve written a thesis on it. Before I went mad, I mean.”

Are you prepared to consider alternatives?

“Alternatives to what?”

Alterna
tives to the idea that you are mentally ill?

“Hell, ye
ah. I’d love not to be nuts. I don’t deal well with the thought of spending my evenings playing scrabble with people who think they are the reincarnation of Elvis, so if you’ve got an alternative idea then fire away.”

She managed to sit up but she had the mother of all hangovers. There was glass on the floor and she had managed to cut her arm. Blood had clotted over a deep gash. 

My name is Azrael and I am part of the collective known as the Necromire, a species of non-physical beings from a world that exists on a different dimensional plain to this one. For ten years I have been coupled with Professor Eugene Anwick, now deceased, but formally a brilliant quantum physicist, until his death when, in the final nanoseconds of his existence, I was able to convey myself from his mind to yours.

Alix chewed her tongue. She had a strong taste of coffee in her mouth.

“You know what, I think it would just be easier if I was nuts.”

Possibly. But in fact you are saner now than you ever have been. I could explain if you’d like. Your head hurts because you consumed enough caffeine to give a rhino a rush
before you passed out. So you might as well listen to me.

“You make a good argument,” she said, rubbing her head gingerly.
“How did I end up here? I remember being on the ledge and I remember falling. It’s all a bit blank after that.”

Pretty simple. I kept you alive, like in the fire and you walked bold as brass round to the front entrance where you retrieved your car keys and drove here. I wish it were more dramatic but it wasn’t. My guess is they’re still digging for your body in the snow. We have time but no
t much. It isn’t safe here.

“Not safe in my own flat. That’s disappointing.
The Russian chap, why is he after me?”

H
e’s not after you. He’s after me.

“I don’t understand.”
She curled herself up, arms wrapped around knees, under the sink. Everything was quiet. There was glass on the floor. She could sweep that up and replace the light bulbs and everything would be fine, wouldn’t it?

This
World that you live in, Alix. This world of humans, of cars, of pollution, of Google, of death, of war, of politics; this World is not alone. There are nine Great Worlds, all each as diverse as the next, all each strange and enigmatic in their own way. This World, which we call
the Ether
, is one of the Nine Great Worlds. I come from one of the other eight Worlds, a place that we call
the Void.
I was chosen by my kind to come to this World for a special purpose, but here the Necromire cannot exist without a human Host to sustain us.

For a time, I was coupled with Eugene Anwick but our mental states were so intimately connected that when his mind was so fundamentally damaged, I also descended into a state of mercurial. I thought I was lost. When Anwick burned I felt relief. I thought I was going to
end. But then, somehow, I conveyed into you.

“When I met Anwick for the first time, he said his name was Azrael. But you don’t speak through me. You speak
to
me. In my head, I mean.”

I had attempted to take complete control of Anwick’s mind. Something that we are forbidden from doing unless it is save the existence of either the Necromire or the human
Host. I was only partially successful. I fear by the time you met me the madness had consumed us both. Fortunately, however, your mind is quite lucid.

“I’m really not sure it is. Apparently, I’m still hearing voices in my head.”

She levered herself up and drank water straight from the tap. It felt good, refreshing. Real. Real, like she was. She examined her arm, ran her finger down the cut. It looked angry and inflamed. She thought of what the Russian had said about her and remembered he had taken her clothes. What had he done to her? She peeled off the orange tunic and threw it away, walked naked to the shower and put her head under the cool water while the voice continued to speak.

“Are there others like you? I mean,
are there other people in this World – what was it? The Ether? – that have voices in their head that claim to be from other Worlds?”

Yes, there are
some. Not many, but a few. You have met one of them.

“Good. Maybe we can start a self-help group. How do I contact them?”

As I say, you’ve already met one.

“Who?” Alix thought back to all the people she knew and wondered whether any of them were hosts to invisible aliens that lived inside their heads. There were a few candidates, she supposed.
“The Russian?”

Harker.

“Amanda Harker Q.C.? Are you kidding me? She- what? She has a –what did you say you were – a necro-something? In her head? That must be why her hair is so big and eighties.”

Yes. She is coupled with the N
ecromire named Lilith, but she does not control her. They exist symbiotically. In harmony. Like the song Anwick used to play all the time: ebony and ivory.

Fantastic. Her alien buddy was a Stevie Wonder fan. That seemed fitting though. If Alix had at some stage slipped into the paralysing grip of mental incapacitation and her subconscious mind was creating an alter-ego in order to survive then it seemed reasonable that he – it, whatever – would like Stevie Wonder.

“Well then, Azrael. Tell me about your World. I bet they have Starbucks. There’s a Starbucks everywhere.” She fumbled around for the shampoo that she reserved for when she’d been for a run and her hair was really greasy. The overly-expensive stuff. She’d need at least three washes to get rid of the smell of that bastard from her.

The Void is a world of nothingness. The entities that live there – the Necromire – like me, have n
o physical form. They exist in an entirely different way to you humans. We are like spirits, I guess. Lonely ghosts, forever wondering an endless vacuum. That’s why I need a human Host to exist in this World.

“Why are you here?”

We exist here because of Sin. We are guardians of the Ether and we protect you – mankind - against Him.

“What do you mean,
Him
? Who?”

The Void is not just inhabited by the Necromire. There is another there. A powerful entity that we call Sin. He exists in the same way that we do. In the Void he is an energy; in this world, he would require
a human Host like us but apart from that, Sin is not like the Necromire. Sin is the personification of evil. He is gluttonous and desires to take the other Great Worlds for his own. That includes the Ether.

“Okay,” said Alix. Everything seemed so surreal. This was a film. She was watching a film with her as the main star. Any minute now a curtain would drop and someone would offer her an overpriced ice cream in a plastic tub. “When you say
other Worlds
, what, like other planets or something?” An image of little green men from Mars invading her living room and eating all of her Doritos crossed her mind.

No, these W
orlds exist in different dimensions. The Great Worlds are distinct universes in the same way that, in Christian religion, Heaven and Hell are separate worlds to the realm of man. You can’t see them and, generally speaking, you can’t get to them without materially changing your form in this World.

“What do you mean? You got here?”

Actually, for as long as man has existed, so have the Necromire amongst them, although of course our true home is the Void.

“Why? Why are you here?”

To watch over you. To care for you. To ensure that Sin remains incarcerate in the Void. It is our burden to contain him. If he finds a way to escape from the Void and enter another world, such as the Ether, then he will destroy it.

“Why would he destroy it? Is he like the Devil or something?”

No, he isn’t like the Devil. The Devil is simply the Christian depiction of evil. The Devil is an idea, not a real thing. And the Devil’s mischief is purposeful; the Devil always has an agenda. Something to gain. Sin has no such purpose. He only desires the destruction of the Great Worlds, not for his gain, but simply because that is what he desires. The reasons for that have been sadly lost over time. Like two families who have feuded for generations, they no longer remember why they feud. They just do. Sin no longer remembers why he desires to destroy the Great Worlds. He just does. And eventually he will.

“What has all of this got to do with Professor Anwick? And
Innsmouth, how does that fit in to everything?”

In good time, Alix, I’ll explain all of that. The Laicey twins, Anwick,
Innsmouth, the lot. It’s all relevant. But time is not on our side. For ten thousand years the Necromire have protected all the Great Worlds, especially the Ether, from Sin. But our greatest threat is now. Anwick knew of the danger and we were working towards putting things right, until of course it all went wrong. Time is of the essence, Alix. You must understand this: whilst there are people like Lilith and I to protect humanity against Sin, there are those who work against us. And they have a head start.

“Who? Who works against us and why?”

There is a Necromire, Belial. He is the agent of Sin and he has pledged to facilitate his conveyance to the Ether. He is, like me, coupled to a human Host that we call the Harbinger: the Bringing of Sin.

“You know thinking about that doesn’t really answer my ‘who’ and ‘why’ question.”

She finished washing her hair, turned the shower off and grabbed a towel. She passed a mirror on her way to the bedroom, inspected her face. Her hair was still a mess and she had a small cut under her eye but frustratingly she still had freckles. She had half wondered whether in all the commotion they might have fallen off but evidently not. Even above the noise of the hairdryer, Azrael’s voice
was clear and pure.

Like
you homo-sapiens, there are Necromire that champion all things good and wholesome and there are those of us who seek power and profit. The Necromire coupled with the Harbinger is likely to have done a deal with Sin of some sorts. Power in return for help. Both human Host and Necromire stand to gain. But we have not yet identified who the Harbinger is.

“The Russian?” she suggested, tightening her grip on  the hairdryer as she thought of him. “Ned?”

No, he is a human partisan only. Someone enlisted by the Harbinger to do his dealing, as are others within the Innsmouth institute. I think.

“You think?”

Yes,
Azrael seemed uncertain.
I feel a bit... out of sorts, to be honest. I’m struggling to recall everything.

She put the dryer down. Her elfish features stared back at her. She ran her hand down the side of her face, remembered the intensity of the heat of the fire. There were no physical marks. No burns. Nothing. Had she imagined that part?
If it was a delusion, it seemed
very
real. Which meant her madness must be truly epic. She should hand herself in. She was probably a danger to herself and the public at large. She knew plenty of doctors that would treat her very well. She had even dated a few.

I know you must think yourself insane, Alix. But what happened to you today in
Innsmouth was real. Everything. And you snapped that cord with your bare hands. Trust in me, Alix. And get a move on. They’ll have worked out you’re gone by now and this is the first place they’ll try.

“Listen, Azrael, if some angry monster from another world is going to destroy us then I’m sure as Hell going to put a small amount of makeup on
beforehand, just around my eyes. It’s not much but it’s important to me. So shut up a sec.”