The cortege moved along a narrow street in Alnwick. A leaden drizzle pattered on the polished stone, making small puddles that splashed as the mortuary figures of the cortege stepped over them. The hushed pace of the crowd was punctuated by the slowing speed of the hearse. A woman in the middle of her life and a young man led the entourage. Both embraced each other tightly. They wept, but refrained from breaking through the uniform sense of grief they shared with the attendants. No one uttered a word as they marched from the cathedral to the local cemetery, where the family mausoleum awaited. There, a new niche had been opened with Edward Ashford's name engraved on the epitaph.
The woman, a widow, held her composure despite the immense grief of losing her loved one. Her son, on the other hand, walked clinging to his mother's arm like a sleepwalker. His eyes, though they seemed to observe the shapes around him, focused on nothing. For those eyes had seen death. They had seen agony. They had seen sickness.
It happened three weeks ago. They travelled to Bonn, Federal Republic of Germany, where the executive headquarters of Umbrella Pharmaceuticals was located. They went because their father was to supervise an experiment with the Progenitor virus. They stayed in a hotel for a week. On the fifth day, two nights before returning to England, Alexander received a call. An accident in one of the labs. In the lab used by his father.
Alexander ran.
Once inside the facility, a bunch of human creatures in protective suits cut him off. They led him to a security room, where he remained alone until Oswell E. Spencer appeared on the scene. Spencer said your father has been infected with the Progenitor virus. Alexander froze. Spencer left him alone again. He kept crying and beating himself until an individual he did not remember escorted him to the hospital where his father had been admitted.
He was allowed into the room. His father was hidden behind an opaque translucent plastic screen. The beeping of the machines sounded spaced out and arrhythmic. Alexander peered through a transparent slit in the plastic.
His father was dying.
Blackened veins on greyish skin. Cadaverous features. Bloodshot eyes. Gasping breaths.
But it wasn't his father.
Spencer took it upon himself to tell Elizabeth and the rest of the family the fateful news. That night, listening to his mother's screams through the phone, he suddenly thought about slitting his wrists. She didn't know why. It was an instant, irrational reaction, born of a deleterious sense of guilt and, above all, fear.
He came to his senses in time to say goodbye to his father. But he knew that the man lying on the stretcher was not his father. His father was the bright, shining man who had left the hotel through the front door, promising his son that they would dine in a tavern that night. That thing was not his father, but a being pretending to be his father.
His father had left the hotel, never to return.
The thing on the stretcher expired. For safety's sake, the body was cremated. What the hearse was
carrying was an empty coffin.
Finally, it was deposited in its place. A marble slab sealed the opening.
And there, surrounded by the graves of his ancestors, the son swore on his knees to the father.