Church of Sin (The Ether Book 1) (7 page)

The clank of the main door opening forced Ernst to
quickly remove his hands from the rash and turn round. He was annoyed about the interruption and even more annoyed at the redness he could feel flooding his face. He was cursed with the look of the guilty irrespective of what he was doing.

“New one for ya’, Strange,” called an unenthusiastic voice.

“It’s Stranger,” Ernst muttered under his breath. His plan – as was always his plan when he came into contact with people who had a pulse – was to refrain from engaging in any small talk and get the visitor to leave as quickly as possible.

Victor wheeled in a trolley on which was laid a short, green bag which bulged and swelled with an unmistakable shape. It was more compensation than Ernst felt he deserved for having to endure a few short moments of live human contact.

“She’s prepped and ready. Just tag her and book her.”

“Thank you.”
She
, he thought.
Most satisfactory.

Victor parked the trolley in the middle of the room and looked at Ernst. He seemed harmless enough, sat gracelessly at a desk on which sat a computer monitor displaying a half completed game of solitaire. But Victor knew the rumours and knew better than to try and talk to this strange little hermit. He decided to withdraw quickly from the room and get back up to where the people were generally a little less weird.

Ernst counted to seventeen in his head the second Victor shut the door. That was the time it would take him to enter the lift. Then, with a childish squeal, he leapt from his chair and was instantly close to the new arrival. It only took him a few seconds to realise that there was something not quite right. The bag was so short. But Ernst’s puzzlement soon disappeared and was replaced with a broad grin as the realisation of just how fortunate he was today dawned on him.

It was a child.

But then there was something else different. At first, the oddity repulsed him and he was forced to take a small step back from the body. It was the smell. It was the smell of a corpse, of course, but that was not something that Ernst was used to at all. By the time bodies reached him, they were sanitized, shaved, disinfected, washed and, most importantly, the internal organs were drained of all bio-hazardous fluids using a trocar, a cylinder inserted into the abdomen. The inside of the cavity walls were then lined with an embalming gel before the anus and vagina were stuffed with cotton.

In short, by the time the bodies reached Ernst, they smelt better than
they had done whilst they were still alive.

This one didn’t. This one
stank of festering rot.

Fuck,
it stank of festering rot.

And it was intoxicating.

Something awoke within Ernst. He felt alive: a rare, exquisite moment of adrenaline flushed through his body and he found himself clumsily feeling for the zip of the bag. With trembling fingers he carefully split open the bag down the side closest to him and savoured the moment a short while before lifting the top of the bag. His mouth salivated, pupils expanded, his muscles flexed. Every inch of him burned with a mixture of trepidation, guilt, disgust and pleasure.

But it was
smothered in a heartbeat.

He pulled his hands away sha
rply, as if they had been burnt. He staggered back, covering his mouth. A feeling that he might be sick clenched at his stomach. And he looked away; he looked away with bile sticking at the back of his throat. And from that moment, Ernst Stranger knew that his life was a pathetic nothingness; an empty, unfulfilled existence of shame and deprivation. He felt a surge of terror at the thought that this moment, for reasons which he could not yet work out, could be his undoing.

What lay in this bag should
have been someone’s child, someone’s beloved child.

But it was not.

And it chilled Ernst to the bone.

Chapter 17

It was a long drive to the small village of White Helmsley but the marked Ford Kuga stuck to the road pretty well despite the ice.

Police Constable William Fenn was three months away from retirement. It was times like these, driving down the abandoned back lanes through the snow covered valleys, when a small part of him thought he would miss the force.

But then he thought about the pension and the feelings of nostalgia ebbed away.

The radio crackled and Sergeant Lister’s droning voice filled the car interior.

“Fenn, where are you?”

“Just coming up to Helmsley, Serg.”

“Where?”

“Helmsley.”

“Why?”

“You sent me. To, er -” he scrabbled around for his pad where he’d written the address – “to check on Blacksmith Cottage, Low Street. Mrs Something-Or-Other.”

“You took a Kuga.”

“I took a Kuga.”

“Bill, for Christ’s sake have you seen the weather? I need four-by-fours
here
to deal with
real
problems not the OAP’s day out to the coast.”

“Sorry, Serg, struggling to hear you. Must be the atmospherics.”

“Bill, don’t you dare-”

William Fenn clicked the radio and the line went dead. He smiled to himself. His final days would be taken up running pointless errands
, filling out crappy paperwork and checking on old ladies who hadn’t called in on their nearest and dearest recently. And if he wanted to take a Kuga to do it, he’d take a goddamn Kuga. Firing him now would just bring about a welcome beginning to life in the slow lane.

He overshot the turning to the village.

“Bugger.”

The sign was covered in snow and the B-road
hadn’t any tyre tracks so it was indistinguishable from the fields either side. Just a big, white blanket. He pulled the Kuga back and signalled to turn. There was no one there to signal to but he felt he should anyway.

The entrance to White Helmsley preceded a small humpbacked bridge over a disused railway line. The Kuga slipped a few times on the way up, the wheels clicked as the traction control kicked in but Fenn was soon over the other side and into the village.

There was only one main road and a few cul-de-sacs. Low Street wasn’t difficult to find. The housing was sparse. Some small cottages amongst the odd barn conversation and larger farm houses set back in grounds covered in snow. Everything pure white. Not a track in sight.

Mrs Such-and-such – he hadn’t recorded the name but it didn’t matter – lived at the end of a small lane which, Fenn surmised, would be nothing more than a dirt track if he could actually see it. Her bungalow was newer than some of the other houses. A local farmer probably siphoning off a bit of land for development as the recession nestled in. Diversify, thought Fenn. Farmers were good at that.
They had to pay for those brand new Merc trucks somehow.

The old
lady’s car – a Fiesta – was covered in thick heaps of snow. It hadn’t been moved in days. Fenn wondered whether she had taken a tumble and was lying on the floor somewhere.
Shit,
he thought. The last thing he needed was for this to turn into anything other than a quick knock on the door and a hi-how-are-you-perhaps-you-could-give-your-son-a-quick-ring-now-and-again sort of affair.

He peered through the dull glass and made out the sort of furnishings he expected to see.
Beige colours, everything patterned, heavy wallpaper. Doilies. Maybe those knitted things old people put over the spare toilet paper. Fenn wondered how long it would be before his own home started to look like this.

“Hello?” He called out and knocked at the same time. Nothing. A second knock, tried the bell. Still nothing.

He found the door unlocked. It creaked a little but the hinges were new. The warmth of the heating hit him. Winter fuel allowance gratefully received and spent here, thank you very much. The smell of an old people’s home. Maybe this is what
he
smelt like but everybody was too polite to tell him. The hallway led into a small kitchen and to a garden beyond. The living room was cluttered with ornaments and photographs of a young man in his thirties with an arm round a rather plump girl. Son and daughter-in-law presumably. Two bedrooms. Hers – fluffy pillows, sickly white duvet, more pictures and a pile of Ruth Rendall novels – and a spare.

All empty.

No food in the fridge apart from mouldy cheese and gone-off milk. A few things in the cupboards – tea, sugar, tinned mandarins – not much at all. The house was tidy but hadn’t been cleaned in a while. No indication that anyone had actually lived here recently.

Fenn scratched his head. He debated calling into base but he’d have to speak to that dickhead Lister again. Fenn didn’t like that idea so he decided to have a word with the neighbours. See if they knew anything, seen anything. That sort of thing. Old dear had probably gone to stay with her sisters and left the door unlocked. Or run off with a millionaire bachelor half her age. Fenn smiled at that idea.

The nearest house was probably part of the surrounding farm. Possibly even her landlord. Had she paid her rent on time, he wondered? The house was at the end of the same track as the old lady’s. Old and shabby. Four bedroom, maybe five. One of those old detached farm houses with poky wings and shutters instead of blinds. No one had gritted the path. Unusual for farmers.

H
e knocked on the door and it swung open. Like at the old lady’s, a rush of warm air hit him.

“Hello? Police! Anyone home?”

The wooden floorboards – original maybe – creaked underneath his feet. Inside, everything was spotless. A quick tour and he established that no one was home. In the fridge he found a few old beers and nothing much else. He contemplated taking one of the beers but thought better of it. Perhaps it would be missed.

Out the back, he found fresh tracks leading across a field and back to the main road. Three, four people maybe. He thought about getting back into the Kuga; be quicker over the field. Crops were dead anyway.
Best not. So he trudged his way in the crevasses left by the people before across the field. Here the tracks merged with others, following the main road for a short distance before cutting cross country again, this time over a low wall. The snow was disturbed on the top where people had obviously clambered over.

“What
on Earth?”

Not really knowing what else to do, Fenn hauled himself over the wall and followed the trail. Across another frozen field, more tracks approached to join from other angles. When Fenn was in the middle of the field he looked around.

A great uneasiness washed over him.

Tracks from all sides converging into one where he stood, turning sharply round the field boundary, past some trees and through to where the land inclined sharply. He followed it warily, one hand on his radio. He considered calling into base again but what would he say? He didn’t actually have anything to report, other than he felt that
something
wasn’t right.

At the foot of the incline, which turned out to be more of a mound, he came across another stone wall. The tracks followed the outside and eventually through a rusty iron gate creaking on its old hinges. He looked up. On the brow of the hill,
he saw the Church of St Mary Our Virgin framed by the creeping branches of the dead tree. The tracks led towards it.

Must be a service, he reasoned. They must have re-opened the church. Fenn had grown up near here. He knew the church was disused, without a pastor to tend to the flock. Knew the rumours of its dark history too. In the last hundred years, three clergymen found the church within their fold. All three died within a month of the first service. Cursed ground, the locals said. A Godless place, this.

Fenn put his hand to his chest, felt the crucifix around his neck. Never go into the White Helmsley Church alone, they said. The Devil is waiting for you within.

Stupid rumours and superstition.

The Church door was already open. A small porch led to a second set of double doors. These were ajar. The porch was covered with snow, brought in from the outside, mixed with dirt and mud. A sound was seeping through the double doors. A buzzing noise. Static, maybe. Electrical. Fenn felt his chest again, ran his fingers across the crucifix. Felt his heart thumping loudly within.

Stupid rumours and superstition.

He pushed the door enough to squeeze through.

William Fenn keeled over, put his hands to the back of his head and moaned softly to himself.

Chapter 18

“Why have you brought me here?” asked Alix.

She was squashed into a
room no bigger than a mid-terrace lounge, her legs squeezed under a table that had clearly been designed to accommodate people with very thin thighs. Or Emus, perhaps. People were packed in around her like sardines but nobody appeared to be quite as uncomfortable as she was. The smell of coffee was overpowering. There seemed to be just as much snow on the floor inside as there was out. It was freezing and Alix made a point of glaring angrily at anyone who seemed to be holding the door open for a fraction longer than was necessary to allow themselves room to manoeuvre round it.