by Max Hardy
‘Hands behind your back.’ he demanded, giving her left bum cheek a sharp slap. Eve jolted, a pleasurable whelp escaping her lips as she willingly placed both hands behind her back, crossing them at the base of her spine. Ettrick spun the pillowcase a few times to make a length tight enough to use as a binding, then started to tie it around her wrists.
‘Interesting that you should be called Madame Evangeline, when that name has been in the news so much recently. Is that just a coincidence?’ Ettrick asked as he yanked the binding tight, Eve’s hands jerking under the force.
Eve moaned again, drinking in the pain. ‘She was such a powerful woman, don’t you think? How she stood up for women, how she showed those men for the sexist, mental madmen they really are. How she became a martyr to misogyny. Every woman should take her name.’
Ettrick slid his hands under her hips and raised her backside into the air, allowing his throbbing member to slide back down her bum cleavage, letting it tickle her arsehole before resting next to her moist, slightly gaping labia lips. He prodded the purple tip of his penis into the willing, wanton warmth of her vagina, then raised both hands quickly into the air, bringing them down hard and fast in a flat slap on both butt cheeks. Eve squirmed and screamed, forcing her hips backwards, straight onto his length, taking every inch of him inside her.
An evil glint entered Ettrick’s eyes as his torso towered above her, his pupils becoming dilated and his lips tight, exposing gritted teeth. He dug his fingers hard into the base of Eve’s back, still deep inside her, and started scratching up her skin, breaking it and drawing blood. Eve moaned and writhed in blissful agony.
‘Not anywhere near the sides yet!’ she moaned longingly.
‘That doesn’t answer my question. Nor the question as to why you were in the club tonight and why you were playing me.’ Ettrick responded with a tinge of aggression ringing through the words.
Eve giggled, thrusting her hips backwards, filling herself with all of him, revelling in the feeling. ‘For that beast of yours, deep inside me and to see just how much you could touch the sides.’
Ettrick’s hands were up by her neck now and he slowly started to circle her beautiful, blonde curly locks through his open fingers, getting every last strand around them, before clenching his fingers tightly into furious, shaking fists.
‘Oh, your sides are going to be ripped apart: literally.’ Ettrick snarled as a crazed glaze contorted his face and he yanked his hands back with all his might, with every sinew and muscle in his body tensed and focused on not just pulling, but riving her hair.
A look of absolute shock overwhelmed the crazed glaze in his eyes as the wig Eve was wearing came loose quickly. The force of the effort he put into the pull made him topple backwards and at the same time, Eve forced the weight of her whole body through her backside, pushing him over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. She nimbly spun around onto her haunches, her eyes darting to Ettrick’s lumbering form trying to turn from where he had landed. Eve leapt into the air, gaining four feet of height, straightening her body, bringing both feet together in one movement. She started to descend, both stiletto’s angled for Ettrick’s shin, her eyes focused on that spot. Ettrick was still trying to gain purchase on the floor to help him rise, and wasn’t looking as the whole force of Eve’s body followed her feet straight into his leg, instantly breaking the shin, the broken bone ripping the skin.
Ettrick screamed in agony, his head spinning around to look down at the source of the pain, seeing the jagged white bone poking out of the twisted leg, watching as blood started to pour over the carpet, ogling as Eve slid off the shin, pirouetted on one leg and let the other come flying around to smack straight into his face, knocking him unconscious.
She quickly kicked off the stilettos and rolled backwards on the bed, crunching her legs in tight and pushing the arms bound behind her back over her bottom and her legs, until they were in front of her. Using her mouth, she hurriedly bit loose the knot in the pillowcase, freeing her hands. With surprising strength, she dragged Ettrick’s inert, heavy body onto the bed and used the pillowcase to tie both of his hands to the bedstead. She grabbed two more pillows and de-cased them, tying first his good leg to the foot of the bed, then his broken leg. Ettrick started to stir as she moved the broken leg.
Eve stood up and took a deep lingering breath, closing her eyes on the exhale for a few seconds to compose herself, before opening them again and bringing her fist hard down on Ettrick’s broken bone.
Ettrick squealed, his eyes shooting open, his body writhing, his mind trying to comprehend the pain and his position, head darting frantically, looking at his bound hands and feet, looking forward to Eve standing naked in front of him at the foot of the bed. Watching Eve, through eyes slowly opening in astonishment allying with the agony, as she reached inside her mouth as removed a few plastic fillers, her cheeks sinking in as she did. Watching her peel small pieces of rubber from her cheekbones and chin. Watching her wipe heavily applied makeup from her eyes and brow. Watching as she pulled a tight hairnet from her head, freeing auburn hair in a short bob. Watching as her facial features transformed physically into Madame Evangeline.
‘That’s not possible. I saw you kill yourself on TV. It’s not possible!’ Ettrick repeated, still groggy, shaking his head, opening and closing his eyes to double check if what he was seeing was indeed real.
‘And yet here I stand, in all my naked glory, lauding it over you, in all your naked ignominy.’ Eve responded, circling around the side of the bed and moving up closer to his head, closer to his hands tied to the bedstead.’
‘I don’t think you realise who it is you are messing with little girl. I don’t think you understand what is going to happen to you when I get out of these ties.’ Ettrick rumbled, anger spilling out of the words as his eyes followed hers.
Eve shrugged her shoulders and grabbed the small finger on his left hand and quickly bent it all the way back, breaking it instantly. Ettrick’s eyes bulged and he let out a low grunt, stifling the scream he wanted to unleash. ‘I know exactly who you are and exactly what you are capable of. You should know that you are going to die tonight. You should know that ultimately, there may only be five of your bodily organs remaining intact before I kill you.’ Eve replied calmly, her emerald eyes staring at Ettrick with a piercing certainty.
The heady rouge of pain suddenly drained from Ettrick’s features as he heard the words, a look of panic rising from a quivering lip, through flaring nostrils to frightened wide eyes. ‘Gabriel sent you!’ he stated, his body sagging into the bed.
‘Gabriel is not happy. Gabriel wants to know how you possibly thought he wouldn’t find out about your little demi-faith, the cult of Unas. He wanted me to remind you of your pact, a bone at a time. He wants me to find out who else you have co-opted into your tin pot religion. You have a choice. Tell me what I want to know now, and I will kill you instantly. If you don’t, I will break ever single bone in your body, strip every last piece of flesh from your bones, remove every unnecessary organ you have, one at a time and quite frankly, torture you to within an inch of your death until you do. The choice is yours.’
Chapter 12
A simple fact can totally change your outlook on the world. It can fundamentally reshape your life. It doesn’t have to be a huge fact. It can be something as mundane as knowing the little dimple between your top lip and your nose has a name: a philtrum. I couldn’t believe that there was a name for it. As a species, we have to give order to everything. When I found that fact out out it sent me on an obsessive week of research into finding out if every part of the body has a name. Every part of the body does, indeed, have a name. Even that dry, liny bit of skin on your elbow. Darrie told me about that, in his own inimitably seedy way, and about all the dodgy websites setup to worship the word. It’s called a wenis. Sometimes they are huge facts, and they are staring you right in the eyes, literally. I have green eyes, Eve had green eyes, Rebecca has green eyes, Adam has green eyes and Jacob h
as green eyes. Coincidence? Not if you are from the same bloodline. Not if your mother is potentially also your auntie and your father is also your grandfather. Not if your family has been inbreeding for years. I have always thought of myself as an orphan, with no one to call family. Now I probably have a twin brother and Rebecca could very likely be my sister, as well as the mother of our son. Try weaving morality around that. It doesn’t fit, in any way, shape or form. Now at the minute, the fact is, we all have green eyes. The implication from Adam is that we are all inbred, deliberately. We have to find out if that is a simple fact, and once we do, we have to find out why.
The early morning sun is casting some spectacularly meandering reflections off the river running outside our apartment, the reflections laconically weaving between the moss covered stepping stones stretching away to the grassy embankment on the far side. It is a beautiful early morning vista and is making me long for my canvas and brushes, to take my mind away from this mad world it currently resides in. I turn back from the window and back to the job at hand: setting up a row of monitors on a long writing desk in the study and hooking them all up to a laptop. I plug the last monitor into a USB repeater and power the laptop up.
An omniscience stick is what Adam called it, as I plug the memory stick into the last spare USB port on the repeater and watch as a folder opens up on the laptop screen. So, the stick that knows all there is to know, what are you going to show me? There are a number of subfolders, the first called ‘Cameras’. I click on it, to open up a list of files, with locations as file names. I click on one called ‘Edinburgh Police HQ Incident Room’ and a web browser opens and starts to stream live footage from that very location, although this early in the morning, the room is empty. I drag the window and drop it onto the farthest monitor. There’s also one called ‘Ennis Office’. There’s an original Cezanne on the wall in that office. I click on that link and another window opens, showing the paisley papered walls and mahogany furniture of the room. It all looked as precise and meticulous as the last time I was in there, barely three weeks ago. Surprising considering the police have been and must have checked over it for evidence. I flip the window onto a second screen.
I hear a stretching moan behind me and swivel in my chair to see Rebecca standing at the door, arms high above her head and standing on tiptoes to get the sleepiness out of her joints. She is totally naked and isn’t wearing one of her wigs, so every scar, scab, cut, weal and gouge that she inflicted on herself during her time incarcerated in the Fielding Institute is visible. It’s a fact that the first time I saw her on the video looking like that, it turned my stomach and made me question the mentality of someone who could self-harm so much. But as I watched the videos I totally understood why. It absolutely amazes me how different she is now and when I look at her, I don’t see scars caused by weakness, I see scars of strength. I now see beyond them, to the beauty shining from her sleepy emerald eyes, totally unabashed by her nakedness as she saunters over and sits down on a seat next to me.
‘Sleep well?’ I asked, leaning over and pecking her on the cheek.
‘Surprisingly, yes. I managed to stop thinking about thrusting a knife into Dessie Bentley’s back and killing her long enough to drop off. I guess you didn’t, seeing that you’ve managed to set all this up.’
‘No, I went off for a few hours, then went and sat watching over Jacob for a while. Just wanted to see if that medicine did anything other than supress his fits. He was sleeping, and didn’t move at all.’ I answer, hopefully not displaying my disappointment too much, that he hadn’t moved.
‘Did you find Ian Bear at all?’ she asks. I haven’t told her I left the bear for Jerry to find.
‘No, we must have dropped in somewhere in the rush leaving the apartment.’ I lie, far too naturally for my own liking, looking at her fleetingly sad eyes to see if she can tell, noticing them taking in the bare calf on my left leg. She leans over and runs a finger down the half a dozen visible raised mounds of scar tissue, and looks up to me, eyes full of questions.
‘The remnants of my childhood spent in the white room in Italy. It’s where they injected the needles and tubes into me when I was a child. It seems we both wear the memories of our incarceration.’ I whisper, my words simmering with emotion as I consciously shore up the walls of my rickety rooms.
She smiles at me with a sad, knowing, haunted look on her face, then changes the subject completely, deliberately. ‘So what are you doing now?’
‘Seeing what omniscience looks like. We have a feed from the police station Incident room: empty at the moment. We have Dr Ennis’s office, again empty, which is good. I’m just about to see if there are any other feeds from the Institute on here and if there’s anything to help us find a way in there.’
‘Okay. Do you fancy a coffee? I need a coffee. I’ve got birdcage mouth and don’t have a tongue to get rid of it.’ Rebecca teases, wiggling the stunted stump at me through open lips as she stands, kissing me on the head and saunters out of the room.
‘Yes please.’ I answer after her. Rebecca is good for me, she has a knack of taking me out of my own moribund reverie and not letting me be consumed by my own darkness. Her naked body is a beautiful distraction as well! I turn back to the laptop and check out a few more of the folders. I click on one called ‘Systems’. Another list of files appears, this one with titles such as ‘Police’, ‘HMRC’, ‘PNC’, ‘DVLA’, ‘GCHQ’, ‘Group 4’. Jesus, they have links to all of those! Hold on, the security firm who look after The Fielding Institute are Group 4. I click on it and a Word document opens. In it are instructions on how to log in to the Group 4 scheduling system and a link to that system. I click on the link and a web page opens. A proxy redirect message appears on the screen, quickly followed by another, stating that I am now accessing ‘Hop Off Server 8’, before a login page appears, with a Group 4 logo in the corner. That’s two different servers I am bouncing off before getting to the login page, so I’m not directly connected. If anyone were to be spying on my internet usage, they would never know what I was doing. So this is how the Angels manage to get into systems undetected. I enter the username and password from the Word document and am straight into the Group 4 scheduling system, with administrative access.
‘One coffee, black with no sugar, consistency of tar, just how you like it.’ I hear Rebecca say behind me as she appears at my side, my eyes distracted from the screen temporarily by her swaying breasts, which she notices. She smiles, while adding ‘Pervert’, before sitting down beside me again, both mugs of coffee resting on top of a book.
‘How are you getting on?’ she asks, passing over my coffee, which I take willingly, supping the thick liquid down almost immediately, savouring the caffeine rush. She slurps her own, warming her hands around the mug.
‘Well, I am just about to schedule a visit to the institute today, at 11am for a Dr Marsha Evans. She is part of the team carrying out the investigation into alleged molestation of patients at the Institute by the late Dr Gordon Ennis.’ Fuck, what callous bastard. I pause after the flippancy of the first sentence and look over to Rebecca’s features, suddenly overtly conscious that she was one of the patients molested by him. ‘Sorry, that was insensitive of me. Are you sure you want to do this? It may bring back some memories you would rather forget?’
‘John, please don’t ever feel like you have to pussyfoot around my feelings. I am made of stronger stuff than that. You are made of stronger stuff than that. I appreciate the sincerity and the concern, but I am more than ready to do this. We have to find out if there’s anything in Ennis’s files that can help us and I know that place better than anyone. I think I had at least one finger of fun in every single cell, holding room, cupboard, office, toilet and bathroom in that building, so I am also more than qualified to be investigating the alleged molestations.’ she answers, starting with stern authority and ending in sexual joviality.
‘Okay, but it was only a few weeks ago that you were trying to kill yourself in there, so b
e careful. We both know where emotions can take you, and ours have been all over the place in the past few days. What’s the book?’ I ask, trying to change the conversation as I see her starting to get frustrated at my mollycoddling. She looks down and picks it up.
‘It was on side in the kitchen, it’s a history of this charming town. You know, I lived in Northumberland most of my childhood life and Morpeth was always the posh town around here, but I never knew what that name meant or where it came from. Now I’m thinking, is it really as posh as I thought? It also confirms why there is a mental hospital on the outskirts of town.’
‘Why, what does it mean?’ I ask curiously as she picks up the book, flicking through the first few pages.
‘Well, back in the 12th century, Morpeth as it is today didn’t exist, and this was a crossing point on the river on the route from Newcastle up to Edinburgh. Probably across those stepping stones out there. So many muggings, molestations and murders took place along the route through the area, that it gained a reputation, and a name. Morpeth, in old English means morð-pæð, or ‘murder-path’.
‘Murder Path? Curious. Why the link with the mental hospital?’
‘Morpeth has always had more than its fair share of fruitcakes and nutters. There are quite a few called out in the book. It’s one of the reasons the old lunatic asylum was built here. I’m just wondering if that has anything to do with the Seymour family history. It could have been caused by the early stages of inbreeding perhaps?’
‘It is always possible. Ennis talked about a patient who was a brilliant painter, had a sense of Munch about his work. He painted the Angel picture in the reception to the Institute. He was a psychopath partial to eating the genitals of his victims. He was also an ancestor of the Seymour family. It would be good to find any of his notes, see how far this alleged inbreeding goes.’
