Ash (38 page)

Gloria smiled grimly.

‘Because Unity’s child wasn’t a son, as Hitler had been informed, but a daughter. And even at such an early age it was obvious from the baby’s over-large head and other physical attributes that Unity and Hitler’s daughter was, and would always be, an imbecile.’

As the lunatics shuffled towards him, with hands dangling uselessly by their sides, Ash looked around for a means of escape. Behind him, at the end of a corridor, was a large, strong-looking wooden door, while opposite the lift was a cell door blown open by the huge pressure wave created by the antique contraption’s accelerated arrival.

Still unsteady and finding it difficult to breathe, he staggered down the corridor to the wooden door. He fumbled with the large rusty doorknob above the empty keyhole, finally managing to turn it. Ash pushed hard but the door wouldn’t budge. Praying it was merely jammed by age-old dirt, he used his shoulder to try to force it open. It refused his efforts. As the howling and wailing from behind him drew closer, he bent down to look through the keyhole to see if there was a key on the other side.

The lock was empty. Yet air was blowing through the keyhole, a draught with a hint of the sea. He pushed and banged at the door in desperation but failed to move it by even a fraction.

He turned in resignation to face the approaching horde.

There were more than fifty patients crowded together in the long corridor, the dust cloud still settling like stage fog around their feet. He could see their crazed faces. They looked like the walking dead.

One of the pack came forward, his hands raised towards Ash. Then another followed, hands and arms similarly outstretched, fingers bent like grabbing claws. A strange mewling sound came from the first man’s mouth, drool dripping from his dusty-white, cracked lips.

Ash decided bravado was his only option.

Straightening up to his full height, he said in a commanding voice, ‘Stop right there. I want you all to return to your rooms until I can get help.’ He deliberately didn’t use the word ‘cells’ in case it roused their undisguised resentment even more.

One or two halted and looked around, confused, but the rest continued to shuffle towards him. The nearest three were approaching in a loose triangular formation, taking up the full width of the corridor.

Ash did the only thing he could: he marched directly towards the trio, sternly warning them, ‘Stand aside, make way, this instant!’

His logic was that these institutionalized individuals were more likely than not simply to do as they were told, and for a moment it seemed the ploy had worked. The leader came to a halt, dropping his arms and looking around as if bewildered. The second man did the same, although he was breathing heavily, taking huge gasps of dust-filled air so that his ample stomach constantly pulsed in and out.

But the third one was apparently even more aggressively insane than his two companions. He stood directly in Ash’s path and, growling somewhere deep in his throat, pulled one bunched fist back behind his shoulder and aimed a punch at the stranger in their midst.

Ash blocked the wild-eyed man’s fist with his forearm and then pushed him away hard, using both hands. The man fell heavily against the grimy, damp brick wall and Ash took advantage by plunging into the crowd jammed along the corridor. But he got barely three yards before they began to overwhelm him.

They yowled and keened, whined and shrieked, striking him, slapping him as he tried to protect himself from the worst of their hostility by covering his head and face with his arms. He fought hard, but there were just too many of them.

He felt himself going down and, half-panicked, he kicked out, only to be kicked back at, this time a woman’s bare toes thumping into his groin.

He yelped with the pain, then smashed her with his fist, only adrenaline helping him endure the agony, turning it into numbing discomfort rather than unbearable pain. The adrenaline also enhanced both his strength and clarity of mind. He pushed, hit and kicked out, fighting with all his might, not caring if he struck man, woman or child, conscious only of the fact that if he didn’t get away soon, he would probably be trampled or beaten to death.

With a superhuman effort he reared up, sending those trying to pull him back down into the clamouring mass. Brief images sped before his eyes – a woman with grey, matted hair spitting at him through long yellow teeth; a man whose wild beard and head of untamed hair hid virtually all his features save for the small, threatening bestial eyes; another man whose limbs were so thin it was a wonder he could even stand; a young girl, no more than nineteen, with black, deadened eyes, who might have been pretty had her mouth not been full of rotten teeth that snapped at him and tried to bite a lump from his cheek while her hand snatched at his crotch, whether with lust or loathing he’d no idea.

He was almost back at the lift now, but his attackers had the upper hand. Soon, he knew he would be dragged to the stone floor. Then he noticed the open cell door opposite the lift. If he could get inside, he might be able to barricade himself in until the security staff arrived.

But just as he’d made the decision and was pushing towards the open doorway, trying to ignore the punches and kicks and scratches he was taking, the hemmed-in crowd made a sudden surge forward which threatened to carry him with the flow back towards the big locked door at the end of the corridor.

Powdered concrete clogged his nostrils, yet the smell of mangled iron and twisted and broken cables from the crashed lift overlay even the rancid stink of the frenzied inmates. Ash knew that if he became trapped once more against that solid wooden door, he’d be done for.

He turned and smacked the nearest man’s face, knocking him away. A restraining hand that had been holding Ash firmly was immediately gone. Next Ash drove his elbow into another crazy’s chest; he fell away, but instantly an arm snaked around the investigator’s throat from behind. Ash was at a loss to understand the inmates’ hostility towards him. Maybe these people simply blamed him in some way for their own miserable torment and captivity. Judging by what he’d seen, their treatment was hardly humane.

But the unusual aggression was within him, too, and it drove him on. He kicked and lashed out at anyone who came within range. He would reach that empty cell at any price!

Broken teeth cut into his knuckles when he drove his fist straight into the open mouth of his nearest attacker, but he had no time to register his own pain as he swung at another who presented himself when the first collapsed onto the hard floor. This one was big though, towering over Ash and the others around them. But as the brute lunged, the investigator pulled a raving woman in between them, so hindering the giant just enough for Ash to take rapid steps towards the room he hoped might offer him refuge for a short time at least. The big man, whose head was completely bald and strangely pointed, his seething eyes staring out over bags of bloated skin below and under bushy eyebrows, tossed the woman aside; but as he did so, his grip on the material of her thin cotton garment ripped, and he suddenly became interested in her firm breasts. His smile was manic, matching his glaring eyes. He quickly lost interest in the fleeing investigator.

Ash watched in horror as the big man reached down for the half-naked woman, who must have been somewhere in her early fifties, yet still had the unblemished and puppy-plump body of a much younger person. She was lifted to her bare feet as the big man twisted her so that he was behind her. He gripped her with one broad arm around her shoulders and neck, while the big-knuckled fingers of his other hand reached between her legs. Other eyes had taken an interest and for a moment they forgot all about their quarry.

They dragged the poor struggling woman to the floor again, while the big man took swipes at those who wanted to join in. Shocked, Ash glimpsed soft writhing thighs among the scrum.

There was a time, no matter what the danger to him, when Ash would have tried to help the woman, but he knew he’d be no match for all these lunatics. This new, darker, more cynical side of his mind saw that this could work to his advantage, as it distracted those who were still trying to get him. He pushed, shoved, and heaved at the people in front of him, not really caring if anyone was injured in the process.

Then, suddenly, he was there at the open door, beyond which an inviting darkness seemed to beckon. One more thrust at a smock-wearing little man who staunchly stood in his way, and then he was inside. The first thing to assault him was an awful, nauseating stench, a mixture of body odour, dirt and the dulled scent of dried faeces. Nevertheless, gasping for breath, he slammed the door behind him, leaning his back against it, one hand searching for a doorknob that wasn’t there. Of course, all the cells would be electronically locked, with no means of opening them from the inside. The crashing lift must somehow have triggered an automatic door-release system.

That was fine by Ash, whose main preoccupation right then was to keep the door shut. He imagined the banging and shoving at the door would start as soon as the crazies realized he’d got away from them, but for the moment he could only hear a confused clamouring. Was it too much to hope they’d forgotten about him altogether?

The cell was almost completely dark, the only source of light the faint glow emanating from a caged ceiling bulb. It was an awful place, a single room approximately twelve feet by twelve. It was little wonder the patients had been so anxious to get out. As his eyes accustomed themselves to the dismal gloom, he could just make out a cot-bed against the right-hand wall, a tiny table and chair and . . . and that was it. There was no other furniture; not even a rug for the concrete floor. No windows, no lamps, no other light source except from the grimy, low-wattage bulb in the ceiling. The smell was overwhelming and he almost gagged.

Ash reached into one of the long pockets of his field jacket and found the slim Maglite torch. He opened up its beam with a twist of its black barrel and slowly shone it around the walls. He expected to see something horrible, and he wasn’t disappointed, for the grey-stone walls were daubed with hideous, noxious graffiti written in faded excrement and blood. What made the smeared daubings all the more sickening were their clumsy emblematic representations of Nazi swastikas and crude SS insignia.

He couldn’t imagine who, or what, would make a person do this, or why the symbols hadn’t been washed off. It made no sense, unless these inmates were left to live out their lives below ground with little supervision or observation, and no regard to their personal hygiene. It was cruel; wicked. Perverse. An extraordinary way to treat a fellow human, no matter how mentally unbalanced they might be.

Keeping his back firmly against the door, he slowly moved the light beam around the cell, suppressing the urge to gag from the stench that swept over him like heat from an opened oven. The unsteady beam of light – his hand was still shaking – picked out an open latrine in one corner from where the stink was fresh and even more atrocious. Rivers of excrement ran down its overflowing sides, while clumps of dark matter lay around its base.

There was something more that he’d almost missed. Ash jerkily swung the beam back to the spot.

Floating in the air above the ordure was a small, perfectly round orb. Obsidian, yet non-reflective, its absence of colour so deep it felt like a black hole capable of sucking in anything that came too close, never to release it again. Maseby had described the invasion of Comraich’s main office by these things, and Ash had seen similar phenomena himself. Many researchers and sensitives claimed they were the souls of people who had passed over; but then the orbs, usually gold in colour or yellow, even orange, were generally assumed to be benign. He had witnessed them several times in his career as a psychic investigator. But this one seemed to give off a pernicious enticement, a subversive, ungodly lure. Even from where he stood he could feel its draw as it hovered two feet above the ground. He moved the light onwards and discovered at least a dozen more of the floating, pitch-black spheres. No wonder the very atmosphere down here exuded evil, and the room’s stench was not just a physical manifestation but part of the corruptive foulness of the things themselves. He’d no doubt that Douglas Hoyle had occupied the room directly above this one.

Other orbs he’d seen had a tendency to shoot around the room excitedly, but none of these was moving an inch. It was as if they were aware of his presence. And waiting for him to make his move.

The brightness from the fully charged Maglite began to dim and he realized the threatening balls of darkness were somehow absorbing the very light itself. Just before the light disappeared entirely, he saw something –
someone
– shift in a far corner, and he heard a low sniffling sound.

Close to panic in the near-blackness, he slipped the torch back into his jacket and took out another gadget, a Minox night sight. Monocular and lightweight, its scope gathered and amplified the smallest amount of light to make objects clearly visible in the dark. And if there was no light whatsoever, an infrared light could be used instead.

The room was now pitch black, so Ash switched the sight to infrared. Through it, he saw in the corner of the room a figure standing with its back to him like a naughty schoolchild ordered there as a punishment. The black orbs were nowhere to be seen in this peculiar light, although Ash was sure they were still present and even multiplying, for the feeling of oppression in the cell had become almost numbing and his head hurt so much it was difficult to peer through the lens.

Ash blinked a few times to moisten his eyes, then looked through the lens again.

The figure stood, its smock open-backed, the drawstrings untied to reveal skinny buttocks and stick-like legs. The small figure shifted again, although its head remained bowed into the room’s corner. It had been more like a twitch than a controlled movement, almost skittish, as if the person were afraid of him.

The mephitic odour that made the air seem so toxic, the childish daubings, the fascist ciphers and swastikas marking the walls, a still-moist pile of faeces in the middle of the floor, the cot-like bed with its stale, stiffened and torn blanket (even as he looked through the lens, a large black bug with too many legs crawled from beneath a tattered sheet) – all these nauseating elements combined to make Ash almost terrified. And those malign jet-black orbs, which he knew still lingered in the room with him. Somehow watching, somehow waiting.