Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1) (27 page)

Chapter 5
8

“It stinks of piss in here.”

Keera edged her way through the front door into a tiny hallway and looked around. The windows had been boarded up. A little light penetrated the gaps between the wood and illuminated a galaxy of sparkling dust particles that danced and twirled in the through-draft.

Seeing as the door was now already open and Keera’s decision to knock it down was not totally without legitimate justification, Ash had resigned himself to the inevitable
bollocking he would get from Baron for breaking in, or allowing his junior officer to break in, and followed Keera into the gloom.

He put a hand on the radiator. “This’s stone cold and it’s freezing in here. The heating hasn’t been used in days. Perhaps our man doesn’t live here.”

“Perhaps he likes the cold. The flat’s privately owned,” she said, running her hand along a stain on the wall, “a small investment company. The tenancy agreement is with someone called Grigori Yefimovich. He pays his rent on time each month in cash. Last payment was a week ago.”

“Alix said the guy at
Innsmouth was called Ned but that’s probably a nickname. But the Eastern European profile fits.”

There were three doors leading from the hallway, all shut. Ash tried
a handle. It came away in his hand. The door slowly creaked open to reveal a rotting stench and a grotty kitchen.

“Let me take that knob from you, guv,” Keera said, smiling, moving forward and taking the handle from him, making sure her fingers brushed against his hand. Ash pulled away, cleared his throat uncomfortably
. She smelt strongly of some perfume he couldn’t identify.

They moved into the
kitchen, Keera leading the way.

“What the Hell?” said Keera. They stood in the doorway. Ash brought his hand to cover his mouth
; the smell was overwhelming. Pots and pans stacked on top of each other, cemented together by crusty mould. Large black flies – big enough to be flesh eaters - infested everything, crawling over cupboards and sides. Everything was stained with a putrid yellow, the origins of which were unclear. Every surface looked sticky to touch, as if the whole kitchen had been plastered in a vile goo.

“This takes me back to my student days,” said Ash, taking a step back. “I think we should check out the rest of this place before we catch something serious.”

Keera nodded and they closed the door on the kitchen.

On the other side of the hallway, they found the door lead into what was intended to be a living room
. Ash’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the semi-darkness; the window had been boarded up especially tightly here. He flicked a switch but nothing happened. The room seemed completely bare at first: no sofa, no TV, no little coffee table stained with tea rings. Nothing. Just bare walls, horribly stained like the rest of the place; a sickly green carpet worn down with overuse and a light bulb gently swinging to and fro. He noticed something on the floor, small and shiny. He bent down and to examine it. It was a bullet. He pocketed it.

“What the Hell’s this, guv?”

He looked over to where she was standing, her figure hunched over something jutting out of the wall. He moved towards her, floor boards creaking underneath, and knelt down to study a chair propped up against the wall. It was metal, steel maybe, the edges rough and untreated. Thick leather straps hung from the arms and legs, two at the back, one smaller at the top where the neck would rest, and one larger round the middle, six in all. The one on the right side of the arm was different to the rest. It ran complete around the arm, had no buckle. One end hung a couple of feet down to the floor. The other was wrapped around a mechanism of cogs and small chains welded to the side.

“Do you think Megan was ever here?” she asked.

“I hope not.” But he was thinking of Alix, every minute that she hadn’t rung was beginning to feel longer and longer.

“This strap’s different to the rest. What do you think?”

“I think we need a full forensics team in here. I think we’ve contaminated a potential crime scene, we should never have broken in and we should cover our tracks, wait for our guy to come back and bring him in.”

“How do you know he’ll come back?”

“He’s got to do the washing up at some stage.”

Ash stood up and walked out without looking back.

*

On the rooftop of Alix’s flat, Grigori Yefimovich peered over the mass of blood and feathers and gave the bird a kick. It didn’t flinch. The other two men were picking themselves up, checking what damage they had sustained.

Nokia ringtone.

“Yes, Harbinger?”

“Is the Demon destroyed, Grigori?”

“A complication has arisen.”

“Oh?”

“The professor Anwick burne
d well, but, miraculously, the Demon Azrael managed to convey into a new Host. A woman who happened to be in the cell when your Fire-Spirit came to destroy him.”

“Yes, I know.”

The Russian faltered slightly. “Forgive me, Harbinger, but the woman’s name is Franchot. Do you think-”

“Thinking is not our task, Grigori. Our task is to facilitate the inception of Sin so the Ether may be destroyed and we may rule paradise together. I need you to courier a message.”

“No, Harbinger. Please. My dialogue with the Hollow One is surely over. I-”

“We must act decisively, Grigori,” the Harbinger raised his voice and the Russian closed his eyes tightly, clenched his fist. “You must alert the Hollow One to the failure of my attempt to destroy Azrael. This is important, Grigori. It has given me cause to reconsider the plan we follow.”

“The plan, Harbinger? But the plan-”

“Is set by Sin, yes,” seethed the Harbinger, “but I am not willing to relin
quish my physical form in this World if there is another way.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Yes, you do, Grigori. You do
follow
. That is all you do. The woman you speak of may be descended from the Ancient Travellers and if that is the case then she can act as a better Vessel than I.”

The Russian stood silently for a while, his teeth biting hard into his lip, drawing a little blood.

“Must Sin know of this?”

“Yes. And you must deliver the news. Now.”

The phone clicked and the familiar voice told him that the other person has hung up.

Grigori Yefimovich threw the phone across the rooftop in anger, shot the
two men with him dead, and descended down the stairs and out onto the street.

Chapter 59

The nine Great Worlds are connected by a tenth dimension known as the Inter-World. The Inter-World acts as a corridor between the nine Great Worlds. Travel between Worlds is generally only achievable via the Inter-World.

Even Sin and the Necromire,
explained Azrael as Alix pulled out into a stream of traffic on the M4 heading east towards London,
are bound by certain laws. For centuries the Necromire have waited for the time when Sin might grow strong enough to attempt to cross over into another World. The Necromire are one of the few species capable of crossing through the Inter-World but to do so expends great energy and is at great risk. Only a few now remain in the Ether, which appears to be the most likely World for Sin to enter.

The traffic was moving slowly. The inside lane had been cordoned off, although the reason for that was unclear.
An old couple were jammed in an implausibly small car in front of her. They seemed content to let the gap between them and the petrol tanker in front widen but Alix guessed that the lack of space they had made changing gears in a hurry quite tricky.

“Why our world?” she found herself asking out loud. She wasn’t sure whether Azrael could hear her thoughts or not, nor was she sure how deep rooted and irreversible the madness of it all really
was.

Before I answer that I suppose you must know a little more about the makeup of the nine Great Worlds and their genesis.

“Do I have a choice about that? We could be listening to some Counting Crows instead.”

Regrettably not. I assume they’re a band. Anwick used to listen to a lot of 1980’s punk era music, which I never understood.
Anyway, the story begins with the Elder Ones, a race of unfathomably advanced beings whom you might regard as God-like. They are blessed with the ability to create life from nothing. One of the Elder Gods, Cronos, created the nine Great Worlds to prove to the others that he was the most powerful and for a time his creations were honoured by the Elder Ones as near miraculous. But there were those that disliked Cronos’ boast. They sought to set him an impossible challenge in the hope he would fail and demonstrate weakness to them. They told Cronos that they bet he couldn’t make one of their own.

For eons, Cronos worked tirelessly to create an equal to the Elder Ones until, as life on the Ether, the last of the Great Worlds to be created, began to flourish, Cronos created his equal. And so was born Sin. But there were complications. Cronos had created his equal in every aspect save that Sin was not a clone; he was the negative of Cronos. A paradox. For all
the capacity Cronos had for compassion and goodness, Sin possessed evil.

Recognising that his creation was a threat to the Worlds he had created and a threat to the other Elder Ones, Cronos sought to contain Sin by imprisoning him in the Void. There was a great power struggle and for a time the two Gods fought an endless, unwinnable war against each other but, since they were equals, neither one was defeated. And so, growing wary of conflict, Cronos offered Sin a bargain: that for ten thousand years he would remain in the Void, giving the opportunity to the other Great Worlds to evolve and after that time, Sin would be free to choose one of the Great Worlds for himself to do with as he pleased. Sin agreed
and served his time. But he was deceived. At the expiry of the ten thousand years, Sin found that he was not able to escape from the Void and there he remains. Wrathful. A festering mass of furious energy coiled in a prison of nothing.

“And so what?” said Alix. “He’s trapped in another dimension with your ghost friends to look after him. Why be worried?”

Because there are those that work tirelessly to emancipate Sin for their own gain. They are known as the Witch Hunters. They are led by the Harbinger and I fear that the night Anwick went mad was the beginning of a chain of events that may bring about the coming of the Hollow One.

The old couple seemed to be having some sort of argument.

“Like Eve, spawned was Sin of sacred flesh. Like Eve, thine equal was conceived. But thou art a fool brother; an ephemeral thing, this hollow prison and time be the servant of that which broods for thine own. Soon I will awaken from ancient slumber and I will rejoice in the fire that follows me.”

It was like
that moment when we fall in love, that elusive point in time when we know that, no matter what happens next, nothing will ever quite be the same again.

How do you know those words?

“My father,” she whispered, shielding her eyes from the sun glistening off the snow. “My father used to say it to me when I was a child. I just thought it was funny words, so I memorised it.”

Yes, I understand.

“What? What does it mean? Why do I know this?”

They were clear
of Bristol now and the capital lay just over an hour ahead, maybe more if the traffic didn’t start moving soon. On the side of the road, a trailer had been parked. The words “Believe and Jesus will save you” had been painted on the side. The old couple’s argument was escalating.

When Azrael spoke his voice was nothing more than a soft whisper in her ear; it was more like the recollection of a conversation she had had years ago with an old friend.

In 1959, when the memories of war had just started to ebb away a little, a young priest named Father Ireland was dispatched from the Vatican to investigate rumours that had reached Rome about a boy in a small village in Siberia who, claimed the locals, had the gift of foresight. Word of his gift had spread across the land, no doubt disfigured with every repetition, so by the time the Church opened a cause, which is where something is deemed to be worthy of investigation, the boy had reportedly foretold when and how the rapture would occur.

That interested the Church greatly and the case was handed to the Congregation of the Causes of Saints, a Vatican office established primarily to investigate whether a servant of God should be beatified – meaning they have performed one miracle – or canonized as a Saint – meaning they have performed two miracles. Father Ireland was the youngest and newest member of the Congregation.

He arrived in Romania on the 14
th
November 1959 and spent a day travelling to a remote village in the north east. He was struck by the poverty that the villagers endured but he was welcomed as a representative of God. He asked to see the boy and was taken to a small house on the outskirts of the village. The boy’s name was Grigori
Yefimovich. He was twelve years old. Fearing that the child was possessed, the villagers had exiled the family and demanded the boy be either killed or exorcised so that the village would be cleansed of the Devil that dwelt within him. Father Ireland felt compassion for the family and managed to persuade the villages to leave him for a short while with the boy so that he could judge for himself whether an exorcism was necessary. 

Father Ireland spent
time with the boy, talking to him slowly and patiently about what the villagers said about him. He only permitted the boy’s mother, Sabina, to remain in the house whilst he interviewed her son. What he learnt was that Grigori had always been a strange child; he was quiet and serious. He didn’t like playing with other children and had mainly been kept indoors.

Father Ireland spent many days talking to Grigori. He made voluminous notes of his conversations during which the boy told him about dreams he had had in which an entity appeared
to him, sometimes in the form of man and sometimes in the form of a beast or monster. The entity was Sin, although of course Father Ireland did not know this. The dreams were different but with common features. They were always set in small areas – corridors, lakes, classrooms, village greens, fields – and always surrounded by nine gates or doors. Does this mean anything to you?

Alix had had the same dreams her entire life. Of some place that seemed so familiar yet was unrecognisable, with nine exists. Or were they entrances? The last had been while she was unconscious at
Innsmouth. She had dreamt of a nightmarish place where the buildings were alive and a giant creature – an unholy conjoining of woman and spider – stalked her. There had been nine roads leading off a centre square set around a bloody, pulsating fountain.

It is the Inter-World,
Azrael explained.
The tenth dimension intersecting and connecting the Nine Great Worlds. And the creature you see there is Sin, or at least, it is some personification of Sin
.

“Then... then what? I’m like..?”

The old couple had stopped arguing. He had lit up a cigarette. She was gazing angrily out of the window at the snow covered fields. Alix felt as though the life that she once knew was dissolving around her, like they had taken the props and backdrop away and she was left standing on a bare stage.

What you are
, Alix, is another story. But the dreams you shared with Grigori Yefimovich differ in one substantial way.

“He’s Ned, isn’t he? Grigori, I mean. He’s Ned. The guy from
Innsmouth.”

Yes.

“Okay. I share dreams with him. Great. Does that make us BFF’s?”

I have no idea what that acronym stands for but, pertinently, you do differ somewhat because, as Father Ireland discovered, in Grigori’s dreams, Sin spoke to him. In fact, he did more than that. He
instructed
him. He told him how to bring about his coming into the Ether
.

“So this Grigori chap – Ned – he’s not the Harbinger?”

No, the Harbinger is someone else. We haven’t been able to yet establish who but he is likely to be someone working closely with Grigori with the common aim of emancipating Sin
.

“So, Grigori Yef-whatever, when he was a kid some religious guy sent by the Pope found out that he was speaking to Sin – an evil God-like creature trapped in another world by a not-evil God-like creature – in his dreams and he was told how to get the evil God-like creature to get into this world so he could destroy it. Grigori Yef-whatever then grows up to be Ned, a guy who works at a secret mental institution looking after crazy people which included a mad professor who killed his wife and
, possibly, a little girl, and who was possessed by an invisible spirit from the same world that the evil God-like creature is trapped in, namely you, and who is now trying to kill me. How am I doing?”

Not bad. Save that Anwick didn’t kill his wife or Katelyn Laicey
.

“I knew it!”

In fact, if I’m right, Katelyn isn’t even actually dead.