Chapter Twenty:
The Spellman Mortuary was dark.
Empty.
Alexys stepped through the front doors she had exited that very morning and yet everything was different. The depth of night had fallen and with it a nothingness that permeated around her. Her insides were a quaking mess of anxiety she suddenly had a name for. Her eyes scanned the dark recesses of the home she had committed to memory. The greatest concern was for Zelda hiding in the corners. Her greatest fear was that she was too late to save Alex or the Doctor.
Slow, deliberate steps were taken up the stairs to prevent sound. The house was old though—built, then burned, then rebuilt—almost seventy years so and it had a voice. The creeks seemed to be warning Alexys with each groan that she was committing the greatest sin of all leading ladies. She was going up the stairs. She was meant to be going down them.
But she needed the fob watches that were safely hidden in the hole under her bed. She needed her cousin Alex so they could find the Doctor. While the mystery of the Tenth Doctor was still unsolved she knew the Church of Stillhet could not harm the other incarnations of him. She also committed to detail something very important about their plan. They needed the essence of the Doctor. Not the Doctor himself.
She would do anything to make sure they did not get it.
Creeeeeeeeak.
Alex jumped in the hallway at the sound but when he turned around he saw Alexys and relief flooded through him at the fact that she was unharmed. He stepped toward her, "We need to get out of here."
"Yeah, Zelda and Hilda have been compromised," she quickly shared the new information she had been given, "They want the silver watches."
He pulled them from his pocket still wrapped in the small velvet bags and she quickly crossed the space between them to the blue one, "We have to split them like the Doctor originally wanted. We can't risk one of us getting captured and them getting all four."
"Okay," Alex grabbed Alexys' arm and lead her to the stairs, "Let's get out of here before we run into—"
He stopped talking.
"Sontarans?" the word was a ghost on her lips.
His eyes were still on the space behind her and she moved to look but his hand lashed out to grab her wrist, "Don't turn around."
Fear.
Fear at its truest form beyond the glitz and glamor of horror or terror.
Alexys did not move a muscle but every muscle was alive and active and telling her to run and yet fear made her immobile. Tears sprung to her eyes as if her body thought producing liquid would help lubricate her frozen joints. It did nothing but make her vision blur. The hair on her arms stood as her tendons twitched and her back, shoulders, neck stiffened with the feeling of being watched by something centimeters away.
She moved to turn again but Alex's grip grew tighter, "Don't. Just keep looking at me."
Alexys shook with a fear she had not known since she was a child and first learned Death meant never coming back. Her eyes focused on the figure of Alex with the stairs behind him, the shadow of balcony promising only a single escape, the light of a half-moon through the windows of the foyer with a simple sentence "stay or go." There was no answer. There was only darkness reflected back to her in Alex's eyes amplified by the reflection of his glasses.
She thought she saw a spark.
"Don't," Alex pleaded.
But she was without control.
Something was inside of her. Something had crept into her body, crept into her mind, crept into her bones to take her against Alex's wishes. His hand tightened around her but it was of no use. Alexys fought, fought as hard as she could against what it was in her brain telling her to turn around.
"Look at me…"
She was crying. Alexys bit her lip as Alex continued to beg her not to move and she choked out, "I can't sto—"
Her voice was cut off by a rough sob from deep in her chest. Violently her body trembled to fight off the tendrils of control imbedded into her mind. But with each inch she lost was another memory flashing before her mind. Back to the dance with the circles her body made at the Dean's instruction and back to Father Blackwood making the same circles on the table with his long fingernail and back to ST when they walked those circles around the track. She was corrupted from the beginning. They all were. Just sleeper cells to the suggestion implanted deep inside of them until it was time to be enacted.
They were slaves to the voice inside of them that whispered, "Look at me."
Alexys' head turned but her eyes remained on Alex with strain that made her tears thick enough to cloud her vision.
There was no air in her lungs.
"Look at me."
She did.
The deep, guttural shriek that came from his cousin's mouth was enough to break the spell of the Silent. Electricity pulled from all directions into the beings mangled claw as it pointed in their direction and Alex screamed. He turned to run down the stairs but a surge of shock paralyzed him and when he looked he cried out in horror. The full beam landed straight into his cousin's chest as she stared with wide eyes of terror into the face of her greatest fear.
For Alexys there was only darkness in the face of lifeless eyes in the cavern of horror as a swelling form took aim with a mangled claw toward the center of her. Every nerve in her body surged in screaming agony. And then there was only silence.
