The Osiris Ritual

Chapter Seventeen

Veronica stirred to wakefulness.

Her eyelids were heavy and she had the bizarre notion that she was floundering underwater, her senses dimmed, her breathing thick and uncomfortable. She gasped at the air, striking out with her hands, encountering only hard, rough panels in all directions. Her heart was racing in her chest.

Probing her lips with her tongue, she found that they were dry and sore. She'd clearly been asleep for some time. She wrinkled her nose. There was a cloying scent in the air, a heady aroma of flowers.

The smell seemed somehow familiar, somehow comforting. It made her feel as if she wanted to curl up and go back to sleep, to lose herself in its floral embrace. She fought the urge, knowing, somewhere in the back of her mind, that it would be dangerous to allow herself to slip away again.

She had no idea how long she had been unconscious, or where she was, now that she had woken.

She tried to get her bearings, but her mind was slow and glacial. There was a light breeze brushing against her left cheek and she turned towards it, allowing it to play over her face. The fresh air was cool and sobering.

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!

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.