Desecration

by J. F. Penn

  “It would have been better for you to watch your daughter’s preservation than to experience Lady Neville’s particular pleasures,” Mascuria said. “But now, you have no choice.”

  He pressed the needle into her arm and within seconds, Jamie felt a heaviness in her limbs and her eyelids drooped. She forced them open again, as the winch lowered her to the floor, but she couldn’t fight the drug and she slipped into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 25

  Jamie became aware of the bonds around her as she woke and it took her a few seconds to figure out what was happening. Her body felt as if she were underwater, heavy and compliant, the sedation of the ketamine still in her system. She was lying on a chill stone floor, hands cuffed in front of her, wearing a mask with tiny slits for her eyes that obscured her facial features. As her senses slowly returned, Jamie realized she was only wearing a sheer black wrap over her own underwear. That bastard Mascuria had stripped her as he had the bodies of the dead. For a fleeting moment, Jamie wished to be next to her daughter on the slab. But then she remembered how much Polly had believed in living until it hurt and making the most out of every minute that we have the grace to be alive. Jamie grasped at a glimmer of hope, that she might make it out of this and revenge the abuses inflicted on Polly and the other innocent victims here.

  She moved slowly, trying to take in her surroundings, fighting to clear her head. Still gagged, her throat hurt from the raw material and she was desperately thirsty. She pulled against the chain that bound her cuffs to the wall and managed to lever herself up, resting back against the stone, finally able to see. She was in a twin chamber to the Inner Temple of the Hellfire Caves, but it had been transformed into a dark cave of corrupted medical history.

  The walls were hung with twisted poles wrapped with bloody used bandages, a tribute to the red and white staffs of the original barber surgeons. There were skeletons attached between them, posed in positions of torture, their limbs stretched in crucifixion. Candelabra stood around the edge, throwing an incongruous warm light into the dark space and giving off a pungent scent. Tendrils of smoke licked the walls, clouding the cave with a heady atmosphere.

  Behind an altar was a long wooden pole, an intricately carved snake curled around it, forked tongue flickering to taste the air. Jamie recognized the rod of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing and medicine, but here it resembled some kind of demonic god. Around an empty central space were rows of tiered seating facing the altar where she sat. Jamie wondered who the members would be, since the original Hellfire Club had been made up of aristocrats, businessmen and politicians. Could it still be so powerful?

  Jamie heard footsteps and slumped in her bonds, pretending to be drowsy as Mascuria came to check on her. He lifted her chin, and she groaned softly, playing the part. His fingers dug into her jaw.

  “Time to wake up. After all, you’ll want to watch the entertainment tonight and reflect on your own future.” She opened her eyes slowly to see Mascuria’s excited smile. But she realized that his enthusiasm wasn’t for her bondage, it was for something that appealed to his darker nature, and Jamie felt a heavy sense of foreboding at what was to come. He forced her to her feet, adjusting the chains so that she was held tighter, standing against the wall, shackled by her wrists and ankles. The sheer wrap barely hid her body and she shivered as the cold seeped into her exposed skin.

  “The chill is preferable to being center stage, believe me,” he said, pulling out a hip flask. “But this will warm you up.” He pulled her gag away and holding her chin firmly, poured some of the liquid into her mouth. The wine was strong and some dribbled down her chin, but Jamie gratefully swallowed it to assuage her thirst. Mascuria tipped another swig into her throat, and Jamie started to feel light-headed. Mascuria saw the question in her eyes.

  “A touch of hallucinogen. Altered reality will help you experience the heights of the ritual tonight, since I believe our guest is an acquaintance of yours.”

  Jamie’s thoughts flashed to Blake, Missinghall, the nurses at the home. Who could it be? She dared hope it wasn’t someone she cared about, but with the thought of what might come, she pitied the victim, whoever it was.

  A drum beat started, a heavy, slow thudding that echoed around the chamber. It seemed to signify the start of proceedings because silhouettes started to enter the room, emerging through the smoky haze.

  “Watch carefully, Detective, for this will soon be your fate.” Mascuria whispered, slipping away from her into a shadowy tunnel at the side of the room.

  Jamie watched as the figures walked slowly in, wearing buttoned long coats covered by hooded capes. Their faces were obscured but Jamie could tell by their stature that both women and men were present. Some glanced in her direction, some for a longer time than others, but she could see none of their features. Each wore the leather apron of the anatomist that Jamie had seen in the paintings of Hunter’s time, and they carried small wooden cases. Some had handsome canes with finely wrought handles to complete their eighteenth century costumes. They filed into the tiered seating as the drum began to speed up, a double beat like a heart pounding.

  A figure stepped from the shadowed corridor. Esther Neville, resplendent in a swirling black cape over her extravagant dress. Her hood was back and she didn’t hide her face, which was now made up with gold and metallic swirls around her eyes, matching the detail on her costume. As she strode to the front of the altar, the drum pounded harder and faster and Jamie felt her heart thumping in time, jumping to the rhythm, making her blood race. She felt heady with the noise and the smoke that made the figures weave in front of her.

  As Esther raised her hands into the air with a dramatic gesture, Mascuria wheeled in a metal gurney covered in a white cloth. Strapped on top of it, naked and struggling, was Rowan Day-Conti, his elaborately tattooed body arching in terror. Jamie gasped to see him restrained, and desperate to help him, she twisted in her chains, pulling against their hindrance. Bands round his wrists, ankles, waist and neck held Rowan to the table and, although he writhed in his bonds, Jamie could see that he would not escape them and neither could she reach him.

  Mascuria wheeled the gurney into the middle of the space as the drum reached a crescendo and then fell silent. Esther spoke into the silence, calling out in a strange language that Jamie didn’t recognize: clearly it was some ritualized welcome as the gathering responded with a chant, sipping from their goblets as they joined the words. Had the Lyceum ritualized their vivisection in this way? Was this a dark perversion of the physician’s oath?

  Jamie noticed that some of those present drank more heavily, perhaps gaining strength for the ritual to come. As they chanted, Mascuria moved forward and slipped Day-Conti’s gag off, forcing him to drink as well. Some of the wine tipped onto the white cloth beneath his neck, staining it a deep red. He couldn’t help but drink as Mascuria held his nose and tipped the stuff down his throat. Day-Conti turned his head, coughing and groaning but Jamie knew that the woozy feeling would make his limbs heavy soon enough and she was glad that something would dull the pain to come.

  “Tonight we honor our medical heritage, the curiosity that has driven physicians throughout history,” Esther said, her tone imperious. “For with every body we cut into, we slice into our own skin. For every drop of blood we shed, we are draining our own into the earth. For every heart that is silenced, our end is a beat closer. And every bone we break reveals our own inevitable decline.”

  She raised a goblet to her lips and drained it, then spun to the altar and took up the ritual knife that lay there. Holding it up to the roof of the cave, she spoke words in the strange language again and turned to the crowd. Jamie watched the proud curve of Esther’s back, feeling the resonance of her power in the space, a vibration of expectation emanating from the gathering. Day-Conti’s eyes were wide open, his head bowed back to try and see what was happening above and behind him, panic evident even through the haze of drugs. Then he saw her and in his eyes, Jamie understood his plea for help.
Did he recognize her in the depths of his pain, or did he just see another captive bound for the same fate?

  Esther stepped down to the level of the gurney and pulled a black hood over Day-Conti’s head, negating his individuality. Jamie had a flashback to the artist’s studio, where the body of the decapitated woman lay, waiting for the knife to etch into her dead flesh. Now the sculptor himself would feel her pain. Jamie watched Day-Conti’s chest rise and fall faster, his heart pounding as he awaited his fate.

  “The vivisection begins,” Esther said to the gathering, holding out the ritual knife. A tall figure stepped forward, pulling back his hood to reveal a face Jamie recognized, a prominent politician from one of the more radical right-wing parties. Esther handed the knife to him and he received it reverently with two hands. Jamie felt her own heart thumping hard against her ribs, anticipating the first cut. She twisted against her bonds, desperate to get away even as the man held the knife against Day-Conti’s right shoulder and sliced diagonally across his chest, the first stroke of the autopsy, the beginning of the Y incision. But this man wasn’t dead yet, and blood welled up under the knife.

  A hiss broke from the crowd, a forced exhalation of breath, and as one they moved forward to see better. A muffled scream came from Day-Conti as the man drew the knife across his flesh again and the drum beat began once more, muting the sounds of horror. The thudding animated the crowd and they pushed back their hoods with excitement. Smoke made their features hazy and her head spun with drugged wine and residual ketamine, but Jamie was sure she saw members of government and the upper echelons of business. The crowd parted for a second and she thought she saw Detective Superintendent Dale Cameron, his face transformed by blood lust. Jamie blinked, unable to believe it was really him, and then the robed figures swirled and he was hidden again, if it had even been him at all.

  At a sign from Esther, the members pulled out their own scalpels and crowded round the gurney. They began with tentative cuts and a semblance of scientific restraint, but soon all decorum was forgotten. Their robed bodies shielded Day-Conti’s mutilation from Jamie’s view and she could only watch their arms as they worked. As the drum beat speeded up, the rhythm turned to slashing and thrusting as vivisection turned to dismemberment. Sickened, Jamie swallowed down the bile that filled her throat, but she refused to look away. Here was evil in the bowels of the earth, committed by men and women in power, who held sway over the lives of many. Did they consider themselves as gods, with the ultimate power of life and death?

  As Jamie watched, a figure stepped from the crowd, walking towards her with a measured step. It was Christopher Neville, gore staining his robe a darker pitch and a bloody scalpel in his hand. Jamie struggled as he approached her, unnoticed by the group who were engrossed in their orgy of blood-letting. His eyes glittered in the candlelight and she sensed his dangerous arousal, remembering how compliant he liked his women as he stepped onto the altar stage and bent towards her.

  Chapter 26

  Christopher Neville loosened the chains, unhooking Jamie from them so her body sagged, pushing her to the floor out of direct sight of the crowd. As she sank down behind the altar, hands and feet still cuffed, she saw Neville place the scalpel on the edge of it, just out of her reach. Jamie felt the heaviness in her limbs, the drugs making her unresisting, but through the haze in her mind, she remembered how hard Polly had fought the deadening of her own limbs. In that moment, she surged up, trying to fight Neville’s dominance, smashing into his legs with her constricted shoulders.

  The drum beat hid the sound of his stumbling and the crack of his hand across her face in retaliation, but as he moved to right himself, Neville knocked the scalpel to the floor and it slipped beneath the folds of the material covering the altar. Jamie fell back from the heavy blow to her face but she saw where the blade had fallen, even as she lay dazed, her head ringing.

  Neville dropped to his knees and started to paw at her body, groping her breasts. Jamie struggled to get away from him, trying to wriggle across the floor, inching towards where the scalpel lay. If she could somehow roll towards it, she thought in desperation, but Neville dragged her back towards him and she knew her attempts to escape excited him further. Jamie’s breath was ragged through her nose as she tried to breathe, the gag making it hard to get enough air. She knew she couldn’t stay conscious for much longer and suddenly sagged, letting her limbs go limp. Neville smiled, the wolfish grin of a predator who knows he has won his prize. He turned her body over so she faced the floor, shifting her legs up so that they were bent under her and she lay like an offering for him to take.

  He knelt behind her, pulling his robes apart, and it was as if time slowed. Jamie saw him reach for the scalpel, perhaps to cut his way through her clothes, perhaps to hurt her further, but he averted his eyes from her in that second. She moved fast, rolling and twisting so her pinned arms could swing free, catching Neville’s hand that now grasped the scalpel, diverting it towards his own body. At the same time, she kicked out with her bent legs, thrusting them back so that they smashed into Neville’s thighs, knocking him off balance. He fell forwards, onto her, onto the blade and Jamie saw his eyes widen in shock as it pierced his neck. His eyes widened and his sharp sound of alarm was lost in the drumbeat that drove the frenzy of the room to fever pitch. Jamie could smell the metallic scent of blood mingling with the smoke and it galvanized her into action.

  She twisted further, knocking Neville sideways, so he lay gasping on his back, the scalpel sticking out of his neck as he clutched at it with weakening hands, his mouth opening and closing like a beached fish. With two hands still cuffed, Jamie yanked it from him and blood pumped from his wound. Neville started to try and rise, to attract the attention of the others and get help. Jamie rose to her knees and sat astride him, some part of her wanting to use the weapon, but at the last moment she stopped. She couldn’t stab the man, even though she wished him dead. Instead, she grabbed Neville’s head and slammed it back against the stone floor as hard as she could, then again and again until she saw his eyes roll back in his head and he went limp.

  Maneuvering the scalpel, Jamie sawed through the plastic tie cuffs that held her feet bound and then used Neville’s body to brace it so she could free her hands. The drum beat still pounded, echoing in the chamber, but Jamie couldn’t count on remaining unseen for much longer. Finally free, she crawled to the edge of the altar and peered around, shocked to see that the gathering had now descended into a depraved mass of blood stained bodies, shed of their robes. The smoke was thicker now, partially obscuring the details of what was going on beneath the vapor but Jamie could see that some were engaged in sexual acts and others still crowded around what was left of the bloody mass that had been Day-Conti, hands deep in gore and faces transfigured. No-one was looking in Jamie’s direction, engrossed as they were in their own drug-fueled depravity.

  Jamie turned back to Neville and stripped him of his robe. He groaned and she knew there wasn’t much time before someone discovered he was missing. She pulled the robe around herself and looked at the corridor where Mascuria had emerged with the gurney. That had to be the way back to the morgue area, back to Polly. She rose from behind the altar and moved swiftly to the tunnel, painfully aware of eyes on her back but hoping that somehow she would be able to escape. She had barely made it inside the corridor when she heard a shout behind her and a faltering of the drum beat. Jamie didn’t turn, but ran straight up the corridor, following the most well-lit tunnels, praying that they would lead her back to the morgue.

  Footsteps echoed in the tunnel behind her, before the drum beat resumed its frenzied beat disguising the sound. Moving faster now, Jamie turned a corner and suddenly saw the wooden door and stairs heading up to the trapdoor. She dashed to the morgue door, running in and slamming the heavy door shut behind her. She pushed the bolt home just as the men behind her reached it, banging and shouting at her with foul language. Jamie imagined them covered in blood, their eyes full of hatred, with a taste
for murder. She knew the bolt wouldn’t hold them for long.

  Turning, Jamie scanned the room. A heavy cabinet with medical instruments stood in the corner and there were oxygen cylinders placed in holding units against the wall, used in morgues when decomposition was advanced enough to require breathing apparatus. Jamie opted for the cabinet, pushing it over as glass shattered inside while she bumped it over the floor to put in front of the door.

  That would buy her a few minutes at least. Jamie turned to look at the gurney where Polly’s body lay with her own clothes discarded next to it. She tuned out the shouts of those who hunted her and went to her daughter’s side, turning her body over and gently kissing the girl’s forehead. The corpse was cold and Jamie felt the absence of life keenly as she brushed a lock of hair away from the impassive face. Finally, she could acknowledge that this wasn’t Polly anymore, that this shell had been cast aside while her true essence had become part of the stars. But Jamie still wouldn’t leave the body to be desecrated by Mascuria.

  She looked around the lab again, realizing that there was no way out. If she left the room, she would likely be taken to the slaughter of the Lyceum. The madness of that underground crypt right now meant that they would tear her limb from limb, like the madness of the Dionysians, followers of the god of all things wild. As brave as Polly had believed her to be, Jamie knew that she didn’t want to die like that, but in here, she could choose her own way. She could die in here and ensure that Polly’s body was at peace. Without her daughter, she was nothing anyway. The banging grew louder at the door and the cabinet moved. In that moment, Jamie saw a way to achieve a final end.

  Near the shelves full of monsters was a neat pile of sacking used to wrap specimens for transportation. Jamie picked up Polly’s body, cradling her little girl as she had when she was alive. She laid her down gently on the pile, using one sack to cover her nakedness and another under her head as a pillow. It wasn’t quite the pyre of the Viking princess that Polly had admired in her history class, but it would be enough to take them both onwards.