The room was full of bodies.
Newbury rushed to her side. “Veronica!” he whispered urgently. “Are you unwell? What’s the mat…” He trailed off as he glanced up and saw, through the open door, the same harrowing vision of Hell that had sent her running from the room.
Naked human bodies hung from the ceiling on row after row of meat hooks, like carcasses in a butcher’s shop, a forest of white, damaged hides. The bodies were once men, but they had been so brutalised, so mutilated, that they no longer resembled anything but hunks of pale, bloody flesh.
The stink emanating from the room caused her to retch again, and this time she couldn’t hold back her vomit, a thin, watery stream that splashed on the maroon carpet by her feet. She wiped her mouth and looked apologetically at Newbury, but he was still staring in shock at the contents of the dimly lit room. Mustering her strength, she moved to stand beside him.
“I recognise some of them,” Newbury said, his voice tremulous. He approached the door, hovered on the threshold for a second, and then went inside. Frowning, Veronica followed.
Newbury walked amongst the hanging dead, his expression switching from repulsion to fascination as he examined the corpses in more detail. Flies buzzed around the victims’ heads in thick black swarms.
“These are ritual killings,” Newbury said, his voice echoing. Veronica realised for the first time how big the room really was. There were probably a hundred flayed bodies in there, each of them hanging from the ceiling like fleshy stalactites. The windows had been blacked out with thick drapes, and the only light came from a bright electric strip that arced across the ceiling, humming with power. There was no furniture in the room, other than a small table bearing various implements of torture: a hammer, a saw, a whip, some tongs. The sight of them threatened to turn Veronica’s stomach again.
She glanced up at the pale face of one of the corpses. The sallow, sunken eyes and the manner in which the jaw hung loosely open, clearly broken, suggested many, many hours of torture had been enacted upon the victim before he was finally killed. She noticed that the man’s torso had runes and magical symbols carved on it. She examined another. This one had been tattooed with similar markings. Yet another had a large pentagram branded into his back, just below the shoulders. She could see what Newbury was getting at. Ritual killings. It seemed the Bastion Society was a lot more sinister and dangerous than either of them had imagined.
“Why?” She turned to Newbury, who was still wandering amongst the hanging bodies. “What are they hoping to gain from all this? Surely if they were only interested in murdering their enemies, they’d dispose of the bodies somewhere, rather than stringing them up like this for everyone to see?”
“I rather think that’s the point of all this,” Newbury replied cryptically. He swung one of the corpses around on its hook, stooping low to examine the feet. Veronica blanched at the sight of the metal hook, which had pierced the dead man’s shoulder, rending his flesh around the exit wound. The blood had long ago dried and been cleared away.
Newbury was prising apart the toes of the dead man’s left foot as if this were all quite normal, something he might do every day. Veronica didn’t want to brush against one of them by accident, let alone touch them deliberately. The last time she’d seen death on such a scale was in the wreck of the Lady Armitage, the airship that had crashed in Finsbury Park last year. But it later transpired that those bodies had been victims of the Revenant plague, so in many ways they had already been dead before the crash. But this? Something monstrous was going on here.
“It’s just as I thought,” Newbury said as he let the body swing free again. The hook creaked on its chain, and the cadaver knocked against another with a dull slap, setting that one swinging in turn, so that its head lolled in a semblance of nodding. Veronica turned away.
“In what sense?” she managed to ask, still fighting the urge to gag. Everywhere she looked there was a putrefying eyeball, or a disembowelled belly, or worse. She settled for focusing on Newbury’s face.
“Haven’t you noticed? All the victims are men. There are no women in here. What does that tell you?”
Veronica sighed. Now really wasn’t the time for one of his deductive games. “No. I didn’t notice,” she replied hotly. I’m too busy finding this whole situation rather too appalling for words, she thought, but didn’t add that to her response.
“They’re like Sykes. All of them. Clean. Unused. As if their flesh has never been worn.” He paused, letting his words sink in. “They’re copies.”
“More duplicates? But the scale of it…” She trailed off, thinking once again of Amelia. Somehow, this whole thing was linked, but she hoped beyond hope that this wasn’t what would become of those duplicates she had encountered at the Grayling Institute. That would simply be too much to bear. “You said you recognised some of them?”
Newbury nodded. “The men from downstairs. That’s why there are no women. All of these corpses are members of the Bastion Society. Look here.” He beckoned her over and pointed to a dangling corpse, about three feet away from where he was standing. She recognised the face immediately.
“Oh God! It’s Enoch Graves!” She swallowed, but her mouth was dry. The corpse had been neutered and its chest cavity wrenched open, its heart torn out. “What on Earth are they doing here?” She was utterly appalled, uncomprehending.
Newbury put his arm around her shoulders and she fell against him, burying her face in the crook of his neck. She didn’t want to look anymore.
“The occult symbolism suggests this is some sort of transference ritual,” he said, lapsing into his lecturing voice. Veronica realised his only way of staying unaffected by the horrors they were facing was to turn off his emotional reaction and approach them like a scholar, without passion, like a puzzle that needed to be solved.
“Transference?”
“Yes. It’s all about establishing a balance. You see, some religions and philosophies believe that every act a person commits has consequences, and that the universe finds a means to pay that person back in kind. So if you hurt someone, the likelihood is that you, in turn, would get hurt. Similarly, if you demonstrate kindness, you will be shown kindness in return. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘treat people as you’d ask to be treated’?”
Veronica nodded. “Yes. But where does the transference come into it?”
Newbury clacked his tongue against his teeth. “Dr. Fabian mentioned karmic debt for how he’d helped to provide Graves with the means to carry out bizarre rituals. Perhaps those rituals involve inflicting pain on their doppelgangers in an effort to avoid that karmic settlement? They might think that if their duplicates suffer horribly, they won’t have to.” He paused, and she could feel him sighing sadly as she held on to him, still refusing to look at the dangling bodies all around her. “And if I’m right, that means they’ve committed some terrible atrocities indeed, if this is the result of their efforts to avoid the redressing of the balance. Either that or they’re rather overcompensating.”
“Or putting credit in the bank, so to speak.” The voice rang out, echoing around the large room. It was a voice she recognised immediately, dripping with arrogance and affected refinement. Enoch Graves. His footsteps rang out against the tiled floor as he approached, making no effort to conceal himself from them. “You almost have it, Newbury, and I must admit I’m terribly impressed! Good show! There’s just one thing you’ve got wrong…” He paused as he finally found them, brushing aside one of his dead, mutilated colleagues to clear his path. “They were never alive. We’re not monsters. The machine makes copies, yes, but it never instills the spark of life. They’re just dead husks that look and smell and feel like us, but they’re never conscious. They never feel pain.”