George Mann - The Osiris Ritual

Slowly, unsure what to expect, Veronica peeled open her eyes. Darkness. Nothing but black, impenetrable darkness. She tried to remember where she was, what had happened to her that she might find herself in this bizarre, uncomfortable place. The memories came to her in stuttering bursts of images and colour. Alfonso. The trapdoor. The box. She scrabbled with a start. She was still trapped in the wooden casket under the stage! Thankful y, she was stil alive. But where was the magician? Why had he left her here for so long?

Veronica felt around with her hands. She realised she was no longer standing, but lying on her back; the fibrous, untreated wood rasped against her skin, even through the substantial fabric of her clothes. The casket was resting at an angle. She tried to sit up, but there was not enough room, and she caught her head with a painful knock. Bracing herself, she lifted her arms above her head, pushing at the roughly hewn panel above her head. There was no give. Shuffling a little, she tried instead with her feet, stamping down at the floor beneath the bundled rags. To her surprise, the panel creaked slightly ajar under the pressure. Frantically, she kicked down with her heels, forcing the wooden floor to snap open on stiff metal hinges. The rags spil ed out beneath her, and the dim impression of light seeped in. She shuffled out, using her legs and hips to writhe free, her hands pressed against the sides of the casket to stop her from sliding downwards too quickly. The angle was awkward, but soon her feet struck hard, stone tiles, and a moment later she had spil ed out of the box. She sprawled on the cold floor and filled her lungs with the clean air, attempting to clear the stench of the chloroform from her nostrils. Her mind was still woozy, her reactions slow. She sat up, and the room swam. Somewhere, during the battle with Alfonso, she had lost her hat. Her long brunette hair had come unpinned, cascading down across her face. She brushed it to one side, tucking it behind her ear.

Veronica glanced around to get a measure of the room. She was deep underground, in a basement or cellar. Flickering gas jets danced in a series of glass bowls mounted at intervals around the walls. The walls themselves were bare, constructed from blocks of ancient grey stone, and the floor was composed of red clay tiles, laid down in a neat herringbone pattern. They were cold and damp beneath her, and she shifted slightly, swaying from side to side as she almost lost her balance.

The drug had affected her more than she had initially imagined.

Near to where she was sitting, a long wooden workbench had been laid out, fil ing much of the room. It was covered in a scattering of papers and other unusual ephemera. Beyond that, against the far wall, was a strange-looking chair, covered in a spidery assortment of brass arms and surgical instruments. She tried to focus on it, but her eyes betrayed her, and she closed them for a moment, almost slipping back to unconsciousness. She snapped them open again with a start. Nervously, she glanced from side to side. She appeared to be alone.

Hauling herself into a more upright position, she turned lick to examine the wooden casket she had tumbled from. This was clearly the room in which the "disappeared" girls were deposited during the show, after Alfonso had triggered the mechanism on the stage, causing them to fal into the box.

It was ingenious. The girl was carefully selected from the audience by Alfonso to ensure the correct size and shape, and when her weight was introduced to the casket it was enough to cause the device to begin rolling down an incline beneath the stage, on rails or metal castors. The girl was trapped, of course, but her cries would be muffled by the shouts of the audience, and soon the rags soaked in chloroform would be enough to sedate her, putting her to sleep for – potentially – a number of hours. Until, Veronica supposed, either Alfonso or some secret aide could collect her from the casket and rouse her, or worse. The girls who were set free would be so confused by the drug that they would never be able to accurately recal what had happened to them, and their theatre-going companions would undoubtedly coax them into forgetting the matter, with talk of their bravery and the mysterious nature of their disappearance. The woman would briefly become the talk of her social circle, and for that alone, she would make a point of dismissing any temporary discomfort she may have suffered. After all, she had come to no discernible harm.

That wasn't the case, of course, for all of the girls. Veronica still had no notion of what fate Alfonso had in store for those young women he decided not to set free. Perhaps this room would reveal the truth.

Shakily, Veronica climbed to her feet and approached the workbench, resting her palms upon it whilst she waited for a momentary spell of dizziness to pass. Clearly, because there was no show that evening, there had been no one waiting to receive Veronica upon her impromptu arrival in the room. She wondered what had become of Alfonso. The man had had every opportunity to finish her off whilst she lay there drugged and incapacitated. Perhaps he had lost his nerve, or else he had assumed the chloroform would keep her sedated for longer and was busy elsewhere in the building.

Whatever the case, she was grateful to be alive.

She glanced down at the workbench. It was littered with bizarre paraphernalia. Large sheaves of paper, covered in an elaborate scrawl she did not recognise; vials full of a thin brown fluid, stoppered with bulbous corks; medical equipment; scalpels; a pair of tan-coloured, elbow-length leather gloves; pencils, and an assortment of small, Ancient Egyptian artefacts. She gasped in surprise. Ancient Egyptian. She swept up one of a number of little statuettes. It was an effigy of a mummified Pharaoh, made of clay and impressed with three neat rows of hieratic script, of which she had no understanding. It was certainly original, of that much she was sure. She dropped it to the table. Nearby, another, similar statuette had been broken in half. She leaned closer. The two pieces lay side by side, and it was clear that the idol had once been hol ow. She supposed that whoever had broken the ancient artefact had removed something from inside.

"My goodness," she whispered under her breath, realisation dawning on her. She was certain this could be no coincidence.

This had to have something to do with Sir Maurice's investigation of the murder of Lord Winthrop. Did Alfonso have a hand in that, too?

She edged around the table, studying the other artefacts on the workbench. There were a number of similar ushabti figures, each of them broken, their hidden contents now removed.

Someone – Alfonso, she presumed – had been conducting a detailed study of the objects, for many of the papers contained scrawling that deciphered the inscriptions, as well as strange mathematical drawings: stars within circles and other pictograms that reminded her of the contents of Sir Maurice's Chelsea library. She drew a deep breath and wiped her brow. She shook her head, trying to clear the drug-induced fug. It occurred to her, then, belatedly, to check for any escape routes from the room, any means by which she could quit the theatre and get away. She needed to find Sir Maurice.

She glanced around. Her vision was still hazy. Across from her, on the other side of the room, was a door. She began edging around the table towards it, and then stopped in horror. There, in the corner, a few feet to the left of the door, was one of the most ghastly sights she had ever encountered: a pile of female corpses, cast against the wall and left to rot.

The women had been piled up haphazardly like discarded marionettes. Flies buzzed chaotical y around their slack-jawed faces. Veronica felt bile rising in her gullet. There were five, perhaps six corpses. She'd had no idea the situation was this severe. Only two women had been reported missing in the area, to date, but Alfonso had clearly been much busier down here in his secret slaughterhouse. She was appal ed by the sheer magnitude of his perversion. What had he done to the women? How could he continue to work down here with their dead, unseeing eyes fixed on his every movement? And the smell!