Heretical Edge

From Bystanders’ point of view, Bethlem Royal Hospital was a four-story brick building. Looking up the public details later and comparing it to my own experience revealed that there was an entire fifth floor, parts of the other levels, and a full underground basement area that simply did not register to Bystander senses. Those parts of the building were entirely magically cut off. I wasn’t sure if people were simply made to not notice those areas, or saw walls where there weren’t any, or what. All I knew was that whoever had set this up had gone through a lot of trouble, probably with the help of energy from the Rift itself, to give themselves some privacy.

All of which meant that when our little group descended through that hatch, we were actually coming down into one of the areas that was magically hidden. Which wasn’t exactly surprising, considering the very first thing we saw after jumping down and landing in a large, wide-open room, was a dozen operating tables with various half-dissected bodies of various species laid out on them. Some of whom were twitching, trying to move against the straps that were holding them down. Yeah, that was the worst of it. There were a few of these bodies that were either alive or sort of half-alive. They were either actually trying to escape, or their limbs were just doing some reflexive motions. Either way, it made me shudder. As did the weak, quiet moans that served as background noise. I couldn’t help but feel like the beings here, however alive they might have been, were afraid. They were very scared of what was going to happen to them.

Miranda swallowed audibly as we all looked around at these bodies. It was obvious that Lechmere had been experimenting up here, working to put his creations together. It looked like this room had been some sort of hospital ward at one point before he commandeered it. Her voice was a whisper that nonetheless seemed very loud. “What the hell was he doing here?”

“Building his creatures,” Aylen replied just as quiet-loudly, her whisper practically echoing. “He took patients from below, the ones who wouldn’t be missed, and he worked on them here. The other lab we saw, that was where he took the people from the streets. This is his lab for the mentally ill. I think…” She trailed off, looking disturbed. “I think the areas in the lower floors that are magically blocked--I don’t think he did that part. I think those rooms are where the disturbed Alters were being kept. There must be--or have been--some doctors here who helped them. But now? Now I think he’s been bringing them up here and cutting them open, sewing them together, doing…” She trailed off, giving a visible shudder before gesturing around us. “Doing all of this.”

I started to say something, but before I could, movement caught my eye. It was Bezique. She was walking past me, her feathery wings shaking out a bit and shuddering in what looked like a nervous gesture. She walked to one of the empty surgery tables, one covered in bloodstains. Her trembling hand, made from several very different bodies with varying finger sizes, rose before resting against one of those stains. We all watched as those mismatched fingers brushed over the stain. Her voice came a second later. “Was here. Was laying here. Why was here? Why?”

Biting my lip, I glanced at the other two before hesitantly stepping that way and extended my own hand to rest against her shoulder. In that moment, I felt bad that Tabbris was busy with the rest of the Flique. She probably could’ve helped right then. “Maybe we should get out of here and find--”

“Laying here,” Bezique interrupted. She turned and leaned over, pressing her head against the padded, stained cushion where it would have been if she was laying on the bed. Her hand rose to point at a crack in the ceiling. “Laid here, saw crack. Watched crack. Pretended crack was in head. Wanted crack in head. Would’ve killed. Would’ve been dead. Wanted crack in head to be dead. Dead better. Better dead than… than…” Her words had started coming quickly by that point, voice trembling audibly through it.

I had no idea what to say to that, no clue what sort of words could make her feel better or help her cope with the things she was remembering and feeling right then. So, I didn’t try. Instead, I waited a moment for her to feel that bed a bit more, then gently but firmly tugged her around to face me. Going down on one knee, I wrapped both arms around the so-called Batty-Fang and hugged her tightly. Nothing else mattered in that moment. Not Lechmere, the rift, or Invidia. We would deal with all of it soon enough. Right then, in that second, I simply held Bezique close.

That lasted for just a few seconds, even if it felt like longer. I held onto the smaller figure while she hesitantly, slowly lifted her own arms to return the gesture. It was like she barely understood what a hug even was right then, but knew that it felt good so she wanted to return that. Which was a thought that made me squeeze her just a little tighter. I wasn’t sure exactly what she had been through while she was being… sewn together from different pieces, or what exactly had been entailed in giving her the mind she had now. But what I did know, what I could guess based on the evidence, made me want to skin Lechmere alive and take his organs apart bit by bit. And he had done this not just for Bezique alone, but for dozens of these creatures. Which meant he had done it to hundreds of separate beings to put them together like that. What the living hell?

Living hell. Yeah, that was probably a good term for it. Both this place itself and what Lechmere was doing in it. I couldn’t put a stop to the first bit, not without screwing up the timeline. And probably doing more harm than good, to be honest. But I could stop the latter. I could put an end to Lechmere, to the so-called Jack the Ripper. I could make sure he never hurt anyone else.

Finally straightening up once it felt like Bezique was ready to move on, I put both hands on either side of her face so she would look up at me. My voice was quiet, but I knew she could hear me. “Whatever happens, you are welcome with us. You are wanted. We want you to stay with us.”

I didn’t push any further than that. I just let her absorb those words, then turned to the others. My voice cracked a bit. “Okay, we need to move on. I--we don’t have time to deal with all this.” I couldn’t bear to look around the room any more, couldn’t bear to listen to these beings. I felt like we should put them out of their misery, yet another part of me wanted to try to help them. After all, Bezique had come out of that alive and--well might have been a matter of opinion, but still. She was okay enough. She was a living, breathing, conscious being who could think for herself.

But there wasn’t time. We had too many problems piling up, too many very dangerous beings who could show up at any moment, and another dangerous one probably already here. And we had to deal with the rift. I had to go through it before anyone else did so and managed to lead the Fomorians here. Or worse. I wasn’t sure what could be worse than that, but it was possible.

“I’ll come back here, when you’re done,” Aylen assured me, interpreting the meaning behind my hesitant tone. “When you go through the rift and the others disappear, I’ll come back and make sure these--I’ll make certain all of this is taken care of. They won’t be left like this, I promise.”

“Disappear?” Miranda put in, looking over at her after giving me a quick, curious glance. “Is that what’s going to happen after Flick goes into that thing? We’re just gonna vanish into thin air?”

Aylen offered her a faint, reassuring smile. “I’m pretty sure it just means you’re sent back to the present, where you belong. But yeah, that’s what happened before, at other rifts I’ve seen.”

Yeah, I still really wanted to get more details about all that, about all the stuff that had happened at these ‘other rifts.’ Instead, I turned to the nearest door (there were three separate ones along the same wall at varying points, probably all leading to the same area) and started moving. We could have stayed in here for the next few hours, talking about everything I wanted to get into, helping these poor moaning, whimpering creatures, and planning out what to do next. But we had to keep moving while we still had a chance, before the Seosten or Katarin’s people showed up and made this whole situation even more difficult than it already was. Honestly, I wasn’t sure which would have been worse in that particular case, but I didn’t want to test it either.

On our way through that door, I checked in with Extra to see what was going on in the Archive. She assured me that Tabbris had made it there just fine and she and the others were going through the books that Story had been able to find, looking for something we could actually use to separate Invidia-Charmeine from Joseph Bell. She was a big enough problem as it was without also being attached to him and all the Crossroads-related authority that came with him.

The door (all the doors, actually) led from that horrifying lab to a narrow corridor with dark, grimy windows looking out into the garden area where I could see some of those patients still wandering around and occasionally screaming. That was enough to send another shiver through me, but I pushed it aside and looked both ways. It was darker out here than it had been in the lab, with only the light from the dirty, possibly intentionally obscured windows giving any illumination. The corridor itself was only about half as wide as it probably should’ve been, forcing anyone who moved through it to do so in a single-file line. I was pretty sure the only person who came up here of their own volition at this point was Lechmere himself. It was a thought that made me grimace. “I’m gonna guess the rift we’re looking for is in one of those basement rooms. That just feels like the way this is gonna go, if the other hidden areas were already established places for Alters to be treated. It sounds like the basement being hidden from everyone else is… new.”

Miranda and Aylen agreed. Bezique didn’t seem to have an opinion on the subject, though she did stand very close to me, making very soft squawking sounds now and then as she looked around with obvious nervousness. She really didn’t like being in this place, and who could blame her? I wasn’t sure exactly what memories were playing through her mind, but they weren’t good.

I was kind of surprised that Lechmere hadn’t sent anything up to delay or interrupt us yet. Maybe he didn’t want to deal with the sort of attention that would draw to this place? Or he was busy preparing a suitable trap downstairs. I absolutely did not believe that he didn’t know we were here. We weren’t that lucky. Besides, there was basically no way that Invidia wouldn’t have warned him. I still wasn’t sure what her game was with all this or what she was hoping to accomplish by convincing this monster to do all these experiments and shit (or even how much of a hand she actually had in that), but I knew she wouldn’t let us make it all the way here in secret. She would’ve known we could finally track down the rift, and let Lechmere know about us.

So, needless to say, our guards were up. Together, the four of us crept through that corridor, looking for stairs to get down. We had to find that basement area, preferably without running into any Bystanders, whether they were patients or staff. I didn’t even want to think about how we would talk our way past those people. Honestly, we’d probably just knock them out and move on. But still, it was better to just avoid them entirely. The situation was complicated enough as it was.

On the way, I noticed Aylen repeatedly grimacing. When I glanced at her, she hesitated before whispering, “Death, I can sense a lot of death around here. Too much. This is a very bad place.”

“That must be what I’m feeling too,” I murmured, touching my stomach as another wave of queasiness ran through me.

It was Bezique who replied, in a halting, hesitant voice, “It is misery place. Should be gone. Should be fire. Made fire. Put down and broken. Should be broken forever place. Make gone.”

This was very different than she probably would’ve been if we’d asked her about the place before actually coming here. Something told me that if we had been out on the streets and asked her about the place of her…creation, she probably would have waxed poetic about what a wonderful man her creator was, and about the sort of paradise he was putting together. Or something like that. But in this case, now that she had actually physically come back here and had clearly had some of those old memories reawakened, that tone had changed. She thought this place was bad with a capital b. Had that changed how she felt about Lechmere himself? Part of me wanted to ask about that, but I also didn’t want to push her. It was obvious that the girl was going through an awful lot right now.

Reaching down, I took her hand and squeezed it. “We’ll take care of it, I promise. We’ll make sure no one else gets--goes through what you did. Whatever else happens in this place, we’re gonna deal with it and stop these experiments.” I paused briefly then, unsure if I should push any further. In the end, I decided to add, “We might need your help to finish this before it’s all over.”

By that point, with the reactions she had shown so far after coming into this place, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the patched-together girl. But she straightened up, wings giving a short, decisive flap (or at least as much of a flap as they could in this narrow corridor) before her voice came about as firmly as I had ever heard it. “Help. We help. Make place better. Make all better. Stop hurt. Make hurting go away. No more hurting. No more screaming. No more pain. Make all scared better.” Her gaze found mine, as I stared into those two different eyes. “We make better.”

Miranda was already nodding. “That’s right, we’ll all make this place better. Whatever it takes.” She gave me a quick look, adding in a way that made it clear she was talking both to me and Bezique. “You’re not alone. We’re right here with you, and we’re going to help make it better.”

“We are not alone even when we are alone,” Bezique informed us. “We are alive. We were killed and we were put together.”

“As one who is many to another,” I replied, “it’s been nice to meet all of you.”

Walking down that corridor, finding the stairs (which were suitably creaky and spooky-sounding), and descending through the building didn’t exactly make me feel any better about this place. The occasional tortured scream could still be heard, and the worst of it was that we had no way of knowing if it was the scream from some poor creature that Lechmere was working on, or one of the ‘normal’ screams from a patient who was supposed to be here. I hated this place so much.

The stairs we took from that first corridor didn’t go all the way down to the basement, of course. That would’ve been entirely too simple. We had to go through one of the public, Bystander areas. This was one of what they called the female patient galleries, the area where their rooms were. It was almost like walking through a fancy old hotel, if I didn’t let myself think too much about it. The corridor was wide and spacious, with old paintings, vases full of flowers, tables with various decorations, and tall wooden doors spaced evenly along one wall. They weren’t metal doors with little viewing slits or anything. Only the fact that they looked so heavy, and had what looked like expensive, fancy locks on them gave any indication about what this place was. And even that was subtle. Visually, basically nothing about the hallway stood out as having anything off about it.

But I knew. Whether it was just because I was already aware of what the place was, something related to my Necromancy-type sense, something to do with being an Ankou-Fae and thus my connection to death that way, or all three, I knew in the pit of my stomach that this was a bad place. The stink of suffering and fear and death was all over the place, coating every surface. Aylen and I both sensed all of that, her probably even more than me. Neither of us liked being there. Then again, you probably didn’t even need to have any of our abilities to be incredibly creeped out by this place and want to leave as quickly as possible.

But there wasn’t time to focus on how bad the corridor, or the rest of the hospital was. We had to keep moving, heading through that corridor and past all those doors (the actual patients were apparently elsewhere at the moment) until we found the next set of stairs hidden behind a door that was apparently invisible to Bystanders. Even in our case, it was a little hard to find. It felt like something was trying to stop us from looking directly at that door. But it was weak enough that we were able to push past it. We checked the door for other spells, found nothing, and hauled the thing open. Even doing that took both Miranda and me pulling it together, while the other two kept watch just in case something tried to ambush us while we were so distracted with that.

Fortunately, nothing did. We were able to get the door open and descend further. Which led us to the next level down, an almost identical corridor to this one. And we just had to do the same thing again. We did that for the fourth floor, third, second, and first. Each time we had to move the opposite way back along it and find another semi-hidden door leading to another set of stairs. It might’ve been faster to smash our way through the floors, but Aylen was pretty sure that would set off all sorts of magical traps. To say nothing of the attention it would draw. We had to take it easy. If there was any chance to do this without disturbing the regular patients, I wanted to try.

Finally, after spending entirely too fucking long working our way through this place, we found the last set of stairs leading into the basement. As we descended what turned out to be cold, stone steps, Aylen glanced back up the way we had come. Her voice was soft. “I have a few spells set up around the city. They went off. The Seosten are here. I don’t know how many, or what they brought with them, but they have a ship close enough to drop off troops. We need to finish this.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect when we reached the bottom of those stairs, found a set of tall metal doors, and pushed them open (after checking for traps or other spells, of course), but it definitely wasn’t a fancy throne room. Yet that was exactly what we found ourselves standing in. The room was at least a hundred feet long and half that wide, with a floor that appeared to be made out of gleaming white marble, several fancy pillars extending up to the ceiling about twenty feet above, and a literal red carpet leading to an actual physical throne. Lining both sides of the carpet were dozens of those mismatched creatures, of all shapes and sizes. And perched on the throne itself was Charles Lechmere. He just looked like some British white guy with a neatly trimmed brown mustache, short hair, and eyes that seemed cold and distant. He was wearing the ratty old clothes and patched jacket that he probably wore while out doing his meat delivering job.

Oh yeah, and the hole in space, the rift itself, was just behind that throne. Both the rift and his throne were surrounded by a glowing forcefield whose power I could feel even from here.

Seeing the man, Bezique went very still. Not so long ago, she would have thrown herself to the floor and praised him. Now, she sort of slipped behind me, half-hiding.

He paid no attention to her. I wasn’t even sure he noticed her at all. No, his gaze was locked on me. “Oh,” he murmured, “the other child of Jacob. My rival has finally arrived. The instructor said you were coming.”

Instructor? Right, Invidia, obviously. I took a step that way, even as all those patched-together creatures turned to look at us. “This stops now, all of it.”

“Stops?” He rose from his throne, standing there imperiously while holding up a large key made out of gold with sapphires along it. Those sapphires glowed as he stepped forward, passing through the forcefield. So the key let him pass in and out of it. “No, I think it’s just beginning.” With that, he turned. Before we could move, something opened up in the air next to him. It was a different portal, leading to what looked like some sort of trainyard. Just like that, he jumped through. But the portal remained open. His words carried back through the portal. “Have fun, children!”

That was when the creatures he had made started to move. But they didn’t attack us. No, they started lunging at the walls and ceiling. They were trying to escape, trying to get outside to attack the people there.

“Flick!” That was Aylen. “That thing, it’s a portal into an Archive. His Archive! He left it open for you. I think he wants you to follow him.”

Miranda started to say something, but I shook my head. “He’s got the key to the forcefield, I need that to get through to the rift! You guys deal with these things, stop them from hurting anyone. I’ve got Lechmere! Don’t let them draw the Seosten or Boschers here, that’s what he’s hoping for! Invidia probably told him to make a scene!”

With that, I ran through the crowd, producing my staff and pointing it backward to use its concussive blast. As I was sent rocketing toward the portal, I felt something--someone right on my heels. But it wasn’t until I reached the portal and threw myself right into it that I realized it was Bezique. And she wasn’t alone. One of Miranda’s duplicates was right there too. Both of them were following me into Lechmere’s Archive.

Now it was time for the three of us to put an end to Jack the Ripper.