Until She Rots

A gritty horror thriller where two cursed women wage war, with all of London’s soul at stake. Detective Inspector Elizabeth Wokoma has a tragic family history with a lingering malevolent presence, but with spiritual guidance from Father Douglas ole Maskonde she keeps the past and her families demons at bay. However, following a horrific double murder where the entity takes control, Elizabeth is forced to abandon her life and career, having to use hard drugs to keep the thing inside her sleeping. Three years later an even darker threat emerges in the form of Ivy; a vampiric succubus once employed by the state. Ivy can drain people dead through sexual contact, and she begins killing on an industrial scale. Father Douglas must now drag Elizabeth out of her stupor and barter with the demon to aid their cause. Their hunt will track Ivy through an netherworld of occult societies and political secrets. As the body count rises the duo face a grave predicament: is Elizabeth willing to sacrifice her soul to stop Ivy’s reign of terror? Story: We open with DI Elizabeth Wokoma investigating a domestic disturbance call at a high-rise, discovering a macabre message carved into the walls. Two words that speak of the personal tragedy which shaped Elizabeth’s life…daddy’s here. As a young girl Elizabeth’s Pastor father Robert slaughtered her mother and then took his own life, attributing his madness to demons. Robert believed he was communing with God, but instead lost his mind and destroyed his church. Unable to locate Ayesha and Jade - the high-rise flats occupants - Elizabeth’s partner DI Nina Cleeves suggests Elizabeth take the rest of the evening off, aware of her tenderness around domestic abuse cases. Elizabeth calls Father Douglas ole Maskonde, an old family friend who worked at Robert’s church, and vents her fear that the thing which destroyed her family is back. She then receives a garbled call from the demon - now calling itself ‘Daddy’ - and is given a location to drive to. Arriving at a bleak woodland spot Elizabeth finds Jade digging a grave, with a lump wrapped in binbags nearby. Jade claims Ayesha had become obsessed then possessed by the occult, and after a violent altercation between the pair Jade bludgeoned Ayesha and plans to bury her body. Ayesha then emerges, very much still alive, screaming that Jade is the one whose ‘infected’. A nerve-jangling game of cat and mouse ensues before we learn Jade has been possessed by ‘Daddy’, hoping to re-establish its hereditary connection with Elizabeth. Elizabeth takes down Ayesha but cannot overpower Jade, and in a moment of mortal combat Elizabeth is fused with the demon. The next morning Elizabeth is faced with the gruesomely disfigured remains of Ayesha and Jade - necks broken and heads turned around backwards - and realises to her horror she is responsible. She makes a call to Cleeves but hangs up as the realization of what’s happened hits home. Her and Daddy are now one, and she hurriedly flees the murder scene. Cleeves later arrives but is unable to find any trace of her partner. Despite the ensuing investigation no one is able to locate her. Elizabeth Wokoma has vanished off the face of the earth. Three years later Ivy, a bedbound pensioner, receives a letter confirming that her state pension is being cut off, and after sexually draining a young handyman dead she revisits her old employer - a seedy strip club owner - and learns her former ties to the British government are now defunct. We learn Ivy was once a sleeper agent with a covert security department, responsible for the removal of several malign threats against the UK. However GCHQ have now cut all ties with former agents, leaving them to fend for themselves. Furious at her treatment Ivy begins a killing spree; fucking to death several high profile celebrities and MPs. Nina Cleeves – now DCI – is assigned to the case and in desperation goes to see Father Douglas, aware that he and Elizabeth once pooled resources on unusual cases. After seeing one of the victim’s husk like corpse Douglas visits a dilapidated halfway house run by a tyrannical Scottish matriarch called Ma, who takes in junkies and drug addled runaways. We find Elizabeth is amongst them, using heroin to keep the demon Daddy comatose inside her. The entire halfway house is full of possessed souls, all abusing drugs to stop their demons from escaping. Father Douglas discloses Ivy’s path of carnage, begging her to help him. Elizabeth initially refuses, but Ma convinces her otherwise: only a demon could absorb Ivy’s lifeforce, potentially cancelling out both entities in the process. Following Ivy’s brutal attack on an neonatal unit Elizabeth makes a deal with Daddy: she’ll go cold turkey if he helps her stop Ivy. Daddy agrees, seemingly delighted to offer assistance. They follow Ivy’s trail of destruction through a labyrinth of secret societies and political cells, learning the macabre history of ‘inexplicable’ agents the British government has employed over the centuries. Daddy, periodically taking control, enjoys provoking everyone they encounter, whilst taking them into the underworld beneath London’s veneer. They near miss Ivy at a nightclub where she drains an huge number of revelers and as Elizabeth and Daddy bicker from within the same body Daddy brutally kills Nina, determined to dissuade Elizabeth from double-crossing him. As Douglas and Elizabeth’s relationship reaches breaking point - Daddy mocking Douglas’s past failure to save a child in his parish - Elizabeth concocts a desperate final plan. She’ll lure Ivy to Ma’s and set the possessed residents loose on her. Fascinated by Elizabeth Ivy gladly enters the trap and drains her way through all of the possessed junkies, before the two demons go headlong into battle; first in a display of violence then lustful aggression which all but kills them both. With Ivy’s bloated post coitus body at bursting point Daddy uses wax to seal her orifices shut, causing her to first decompose then putrefy. With Daddy’s supernatural energy now totally spent Elizabeth goes into cardiac arrest, Father Douglas gives her last rites and she dies in his arms. Six months later we find Father Douglas conducting a baptism. During the ceremony he sees the grinning demonic visage of Daddy in the baptismal font, and realizes to his horror the demon has now transferred to him. The war for London’s soul is far from over…