George Mann - The Osiris Ritual

Veronica fished around in her jacket pocket for a handkerchief. Finding one, she held it over her mouth and nose, and hesitantly stepped towards the sickening heap of bodies. She could not believe the lack of respect with which the women had been treated, even in death. They remained ful y clothed, at least, although whatever had been done to them had clearly been appalling. What she could see of their faces showed the frigid signs of terror. These women had stared death directly in the face.

Veronica crouched low beside the nearest corpse. The girl was young – twenty, possibly – with pretty long curls of strawberry blonde, and ful, pink lips. Her eyes had once been blue, but were now a grotesque shade of milky grey. She was on her front, partially buried beneath the corpse of an older, brunette woman. One of her arms was dangling free. Veronica grimaced as she turned the head slowly from side to side. A line of dry, dark blood ran from the girl's forehead down the side of her nose. Veronica followed the line of this bloody trail, finding, with dismay, the origin was a small hole that had been burrowed in the girl's forehead. Flinching, she probed it with the end of her finger. It was about the size of a pen nib and was located at the very centre of the woman's forehead. Veronica frowned, checking another of the girls. The marking was exactly the same. A neat bore-hole dril ed for an unknown purpose, directly through the bone and deep into the skul cavity itself. Clearly, Alfonso had been intent on extracting something from inside the women's heads.

Veronica moved around the pile of corpses. She was glad that the heady scent of the chloroform was still affecting her sense of smell. Some of the bodies were days old – weeks, possibly – and had begun to decompose. Their waxen flesh had become bloated and saggy, their eyes putrefying in their open, staring sockets. Their terrified, bloodied faces were an alarming juxtaposition against the gaudiness of their colourful evening clothes. Veronica felt an intense burst of sadness for these young women, for how their lives had been so drastical y shortened, snuffed out in such a foul manner. She felt anger, too, anger and a need for retribution. She had to stop this.

She had to stop it before one more girl fell into the clutches of this terrible man. She knew, now, that the image of these dead girls would be forever burned into her memory, their silent mouths crying out for justice. She knew also of her own predicament, and the fact that – still dazed from the chloroform – she remained in terrible danger. Nevertheless, she felt a need to understand why: the meaning behind the shocking death of these women.

Veronica examined another of the bore-holes, this time in the skul of a brunette. What was their purpose? There was clearly nothing sexual about the deaths; the manner in which the women had been discarded, carelessly, suggested that Alfonso was in no way objectifying the girls. He didn't appear to desire their deaths, to treat them with any reverence or passion. No, it was as if he considered them as animals, there to be experimented upon in his laboratory. The bodies were purely carcasses, immaterial, and he had left them there to rot whilst he went about his business, having extracted whatever it was he needed from inside their heads. Veronica knew she risked jumping to conclusions, but she was convinced her reading of the situation was accurate. She'd learned a lot of Newbury's methods in the last few months; now, final y, she had an opportunity to apply them.

Standing, Veronica strode across the room to where the bizarre chair-like device stood against the wal. She needed to focus on something else, to blot out the horror of the dead girls. She fought another wave of dizziness, holding on to the edge of the workbench for support. The chair. She needed to concentrate.

The chair was an odd contraption. Its frame was wooden and roughly hewn, with locking iron bands where a person's wrists and ankles could be fixed. Likewise, an adjustable band was attached to the backrest, perfectly placed for clasping a person's head. At the centre of this band was a small opening, and Veronica realised with a shudder that this was the guide mark through which the holes were bored into the women's skul s. Rust-coloured stains around its edges confirmed that blood had been spil ed on the metalwork.

Above the chair, rising from the back of it, was a large, multi-jointed brass arm, which curved up and over the seat like a scorpion's tail, terminating in a fine drill bit. It gleamed in the low light of the gas jets. The mechanism had two handles: rods with rubber grips, attached part way along its length, so that a person standing before the chair could easily manipulate the direction of the drill bit, moving it back and forth and adjusting the height and alignment. The dril itself appeared to be powered pneumatical y; cables stretched from the drill housing along the length of the brass arm, disappearing around the back of the machine, where they snaked towards a large, grey cylinder of compressed air. Beside this, a glass bell sat atop a chamber containing two brass pistons, which were currently at rest. Tubing curled from two bungs at the top of this glass dome, connecting with two further, smaller mechanical arms, one holding a long-bladed scalpel, the other some bizarre kind of suction device.

It was a terrifying machine. It looked to Veronica like an engine designed solely for the torture of others, but she knew it had to have an even more sinister purpose.

Beside the chair was a low wooden trolley which held a number of metal trays. One of these was covered in a scattered array of glass syringes, another with a series of small vials, each of them filled with the same brown fluid she had seen earlier, in the vials on the workbench. She realised that this liquid – whatever it was – had to be the end product of whatever terrible process Alfonso was conducting down there beneath the theatre: the reason for the entire set up. Some chemical or substance extracted from within the skulls of the dead girls. Veronica felt sick to her stomach. She found it hard to reconcile the understanding she had developed of Alfonso's character with the concept of this monstrous laboratory. Yes, he was a thuggish brute, and egotistical too, but this? Did he real y have the gumption and the knowledge to pul off an operation such as this? And what of the links to Lord Winthrop and the Ancient Egyptian artefacts? Surely Sir Maurice would have made the connection by now if it were obvious. She glanced once again around the room. No, this was the work of a scientist, not an illusionist. For the first time she considered the fact that Alfonso may have only been part of the story. Perhaps he was working with an accomplice. Perhaps -

There was a sharp pain at the back of her skull as she was coshed, definitively, from behind.

Instantly she crumpled to the floor, the metallic taste of fear on her tongue, and once again she slipped away into darkness.

Newbury ached with every fibre of his being. He'd taken a number of serious knocks during his pursuit of Ashford, particularly when he'd driven the tricycle down the stairwell in the Underground station, and he knew he was lucky to be alive. His knuckles were bleeding and he had a painful red burn on his left forearm, where a hot coal from the tricycle wreckage had scorched his flesh during the crash. He suspected other minor injuries, too, but he wouldn't have time to examine himself in the cheval glass for some hours.

And yet, for all that, he had failed to capture Ashford once again. He lambasted himself for the fact that the chase had resulted in nothing substantial. He supposed he was able to take some solace from the fact that he now had a better understanding of the man, even if it had left him feeling more confused than ever. The certainty he had felt earlier, the sinister character of Ashford that he had constructed in his mind, all of that had now dispersed, become disassociated with reality. Now, they were playing a different game altogether, and Ashford had shown his hand. Firstly, the rogue agent had refused to strike him during their battle on the tracks; aware, perhaps, of his own incredible strength, he had refused to risk Newbury's life with a direct blow. Secondly, at great risk to himself, he had thrown Newbury out of the path of the moving train. If it were not for that, Newbury would certainly be dead. It seemed to the Crown detective that Bainbridge had been right all along; that Ashford was not the kil er that Newbury had earlier presumed him to be. He had much to consider.