by Lee McGeorge
If you got close enough there was a small brass plate by the doorbell labelled as ‘Institut de Cercetare Psychopathalogical’. The institute of Psychopathological Research, the workplace of Doctor Lucian Noica. It wasn’t listed on any maps, nor did it have an address. It had coordinates and a list of instructions on how to get there. Go north of Bran. Head towards nothingness. Keep going.
Paul McGovern had followed those instructions. He’d found them on the laptop of Detective Corneliu Latis. He’d watched this place for months. Almost every day he’d looked down from atop the mountain ridge. The hospital was circular and at its centre, in the courtyard, was an old church. Paul could look at that church all day. He’d even built a small hide so he could sit and stare at it. He was drawn to it like a moth to the light.
It was mid-morning and he’d been there since dawn. Feeling the place soak into him. Empowering him.
From the high vantage he could see for miles along the single road that approached the building and this morning he saw the familiar silver Mercedes of Lucian Noica. “Good morning, Doctor,” he said to himself. He knew the car well. He’d followed it carefully many times as he’d traced out Noica’s behaviour.
Paul came away from his observation point and trekked down onto the opposite side of the ridge to check his traps and found a squirrel hanging by a wire noose. Squirrels followed the same route in and out of their tree and once their tracks were identified the route could be snared. The little creature swayed from a low branch, its eyes squeezed out of its skull by the wire lasso.
The snow was powdery, a quirk of the weather and altitude that snow here didn’t stick. He kicked along the ground to find fallen branches and snapped fine kindling twigs from the trees. He assembled his collected wood into a teepee shape in an often used fire-pit. The wood was wet and frozen but he’d learned how to make fire in almost any circumstance. Today he made it easy on himself by using a hexamine fuel brick.
“Lunch, Ildico,” he said to the empty forest. “Squirrel for lunch.”
He closed his eyes for a moment and summoned the vision.
He opened them.
Ildico stood on the other side of the fire. She wore her white puffer coat. Today her hair was untied and falling over her shoulders. She stared into the flames and Paul watched the reflections of the fire in her eyes.
She didn’t say anything. She never said anything.
Paul rested the squirrel on a log and used a folding knife to cut off the head and front feet then pulled out each back leg to trim its rear claws, tossing the amputations into the fire. The tail swished as he stretched the legs out. He flipped the knife over to squeeze the point under the skin and cut along its belly, then peeled it back. It took strong hand wringing to tear the pelt from muscle but it came away as a single piece of soft fur which he held out to show Ildico. She was nearer now, she looked at the animal pelt and leaned a little closer to smell it. Paul turned his game over and cut through the abdomen and rib cage to expose the organs. This was the messy part. He got his fingertips inside the animal to break its matchstick ribs and snapped open the chest to pull out the entrails. The heart was the size of a kidney bean, the liver slightly larger; both were edible. They were delicacies.
He skewered his meat and rested it by the base of the fire to slow cook and stared out at the near endless vista of snow fields.
Ildico had vanished and he was alone again.
His mind wandered.
He’d done things that some people would describe as terrible, but this was where he would put it back together. This was his space to organise his thoughts and his feelings and he spent most of his time reading survival guides, learning to trap and live off the land in a bid to become self-sufficient.
There was a pride to it. Satisfaction. Ordinary men his own age couldn’t do what he was doing. They couldn’t survive out here. They couldn’t cut off the head of a squirrel. They couldn’t remain unmoved as its mouth fell open and its tongue hung loose and its little eyes bulged as it was squeezed. They would balk as the blood worked its way into the creases of their fingers, or when the animal’s fats worked under their fingernails. They would look away and wretch if forced to scoop out its entrails with bare hands.
Paul took the squirrel from the fire and tentatively bit away some flesh from the edge. It tasted sweet, somewhere between duck and lamb. Food had never been fresher, but what it really tasted of was accomplishment. This was his life now; and this is how it would stay until he was better.
----- X -----
It was dark inside the little stone hovel. The sunlight was blotted by the mountain ridge and there was only one tiny window to his room, but no matter what time of day or what weather condition, the wilderness was always stunning to behold.
It was difficult to understand what purpose his home could have been built for, perhaps that was why it was abandoned. It was on the opposite side of the ridge to Lucian Noica and his institute, but the buildings here had been razed in similar fashion. Some catastrophe must have engulfed the town for it to end up abandoned and demolished, but on this side of the ridge there were a handful of hovels in fair condition. Paul’s was a small, single room made from drystone. Perhaps it was a shed for farm tools, perhaps a small barn or farmers refuge. Whatever it was it had been abandoned decades ago. The wooden roof had decayed and rotted but Paul repaired it with a tarpaulin he’d found shielding a rusted plough. It was a strange blocky stone room on the edge of a field at the foot of a mountain. Perfect for a hermit needing space.
He struck a match to a hexamine brick for his portable stove. The hexamine looked like a small bar of soap and gave off a waxy, paraffin smell.
He scooped a little snow into a cup and put it on the stove, then laid back onto his bed of hay. He rested with one hand behind his head and closed his eyes to contemplate his love. He summoned the picture of himself laying soft kisses on her stomach. He focussed his imagination to blot out the smell of the hexamine, he willed away the dried hay and earthiness of the hovel so he could flood his senses with the scent of her skin. His imagination went further. He tasted the cheap essence of her hairspray on his lips, then caught a whiff of the plain soap she used. That smell set off his imagination with more vigour and he pictured her sitting in a bathtub by candle light, her wet hair was stuck to her back and shoulders. She scooped a handful of water, lifted it to her shoulder and let it run down her back.
She was looking away.
She was always looking away.
“I love you, Ildico,” he whispered. “I do love you.”
His snow had melted to hot water. He added a teabag and spent a few minutes checking his sleeping bag and preparing his escape pack. Take nothing for granted. Get paranoid, stay paranoid and be ready to run at a moment’s notice.
He thought of Ildico again. He pictured reaching out to touch her hair, lifting it in his fingers to his face that he could bathe in her goodness. She was beautiful.
----- X -----
He had chores today that began with an inventory of food stocks and a list for replacements. He unfolded a map of the local area. There were marks on the paper, black X’s through some of the villages. The only behavioural pattern he would be guilty of creating was never visiting the same place twice. He picked a tiny burg called Sinca Veche and went through the laborious task of manually entering the coordinates onto a GPS keyring. The GPS was barely more than an orange disc hanging on a keychain but once set with location data the navigation was a breeze. It wasn’t so much for finding his way to the town, it was for finding his way home to this little patch of nowhere.
He stepped out into sunshine and went behind the hovel for the motorbike. He had a car also that was almost hidden under the drifting snow. It was junk and coming to the end of its life. He hadn’t started the engine for two months and wondered if it would even run again. He pulled off the tarp. Trusty as always, the bike started first time and he headed out onto roads that could barely be seen. He rode for forty minutes
to Sinca Veche.
The first stop was to a supermarket where he loaded as much in tinned goods and pasta as his backpack could take. He would come back before leaving town to buy a small sack of rice and tie it above the bike’s fuel tank. The town was peaceful. Sleepy. A quiet place of stucco buildings in pastel colours. It reminded him of Noua in the layout but with an obviously better economy. There were smart looking hotels and a few pedestrians in colourful ski suits.
“Are you open for food?” he asked at a hotel.
“Yes, hello, come in please. Are you English?” The woman was about forty with a comfortable layer of fat about the middle.
“I’m Canadian,” Paul lied as he stepped into a traditionally styled restaurant of white plaster walls and dark wooden tables. He was the only customer and his hostess spent her time looking after him. He ate a chicken kiev with mashed potatoes that was simply delicious. He drank freshly made coffee from a porcelain cup with real cream rather than a plastic mug and powdered milk. Compared to living in a stone shed the restaurant was pure luxury.
There was a computer in the hotel lobby. “Excuse me, is it possible to use the internet, or is there an internet cafe in town?”
“You can use this one,” the hostess said.
He sat at the PC and waited for the hostess to busy herself behind reception then used a prepaid credit card to register with a Virtual Private Network provider in Ukraine, then used their portal to access the internet through a proxy and from there typed his name into a search engine. As usual, the lurid details of his crimes appeared in a list of relevance. He filtered the search result to list from newest first. There were always a few new entries, normally from blogs copying details from other websites. The newest was a listing on a sex-killer database. “Bastards,” he whispered. The other killers were sadists and sex-criminals. He’d committed sadistic and sexual crimes but he couldn’t mentally connect himself to those perverts.
He logged into the online banking to check Ildico’s monthly payments. There was plenty of money in there and the transfers had gone through. She spent a lot less than was transferred every month. He checked Alina’s trust fund and noticed a surprise gain of almost six percent since the last time he’d looked. Burkhalter’s investment recommendations had proven sound so far. His final check was to his lockmail account to see if the Swiss lawyer had anything for him.
There was no email from Burkhalter.
There was some spam.
There was…
Paul felt his body lock rigid. There was an email with the title, ‘Paul McGovern We Need to Talk About Ildico Popescu’
Nobody knew that name. Nobody knew the name of Paul McGovern. He was Alan Jay. Yet there it was. In plain sight was an email to him, sent to Alan Jay but using his real name.
Dare he open the mail?
Ordinarily he would have walked away… but it said, Ildico.
What if they tracked him when he opened it… what if they were tracking already just from accessing lockmail?
His heart beat faster, his skin began burning, sweat forming on his face. Assume everything. Assume a police capture team were assembled and waiting for him to login. They had to break the proxy, then the VPN, then locate him in the middle of nowhere Romania… But if the police were looking why would they send an email that tipped him off?
This was different.
He opened the mail.
‘Paul McGovern. I know you are using the alias Alan Jay. I know you are giving Ildico Popescu money that you stole. If you return the money you have in Switzerland we will draw a line under this and that will be the end of it. If you do not return the money, Ildico and your daughter Alina will be harmed. We have already started harming Ildico. You can stop us harming her by returning the money you have remaining in Switzerland. Do Not Make Us Force You!!! Ildico can keep her home, but you must return the money you have stored in trust for Alina. We can be contacted in Romania on the telephone number below. Take a good look at the photographs. You can stop this. Only you can stop this.’
He scrolled down.
Pictures.
A man in a ski mask held Ildico’s arms behind her back. Her face soaked in blood, her eyes white and bright through the visage of red. Her mouth was open in a scream with rivulets of blood cascading from her lips and between her breasts.
Another picture. Ildico was against the floor, less visibly injured but more strained. Were they raping her?
Another image, a tall thin man held her arms, her body was leaning forward as she tried to pull away, her head tilted back as she screamed, her breasts exposed, her whole body covered in bright red blood.
What were they doing to her?
Who the fuck are these people?
How had they identified him?
How had they linked Alan Jay to Paul McGovern.?
Paul wrote down the telephone number then decided to copy the message verbatim. He struggled to concentrate. His hands trembled and his handwriting was like a child’s. He logged out and shut the computer off. He stood up feeling uneasy.
“Can I get you anything?” the hotel lady asked.
Paul tried to say ‘no’ but no sound came out. His hands suddenly shook until his left hand clasped into an iron locked fist. His eyes began juddering in his head, rocking left to right, pushing him into a headache.
He passed some money on to the hotel lady, more than enough and waved her off before she gave change. He almost ran out through the front door. His arms were shaking, his eyes were shaking, his teeth began chattering. He was carrying his backpack in his right hand and wanted to loop it over his shoulders but couldn’t manage the action.
As he stepped out into the street he felt his legs giving way and he stumbled forward onto his knees dropping the pack of food.
“Jesus… Jesus… Jesus…” He managed to fight back to his feet and slid his shoes through loose snow to a wall. His breathing was rapid. He leaned against the wall and focussed on his shoes. He tried again with the backpack.
Jesus Christ… Ildico… What have they done to you?
What did they do?
Oh, fuck…
He lifted his right hand to his face and pressed it over his eyes, his body collapsed further against the wall, his left hand had locked so tightly it began to throb with pain. “I need to get away,” he whispered. “I need to get away… Get on the bike. Return to the hovel. Vanish.” That was the plan, but his body wouldn’t move. Everything had to be done in deliberate steps. The first step was to remove his right hand from covering his eyes but his body didn’t want to respond. He fought it, moving his limbs slowly, trying to get onto two feet and off the wall…
And that was when he saw it.
For the first time in a long time, he saw it.
Standing in the middle of a crossroads, was a naked man with shiny marble-like skin. The moment they made eye contact Paul’s whole being shifted. The loss of control was replaced by certainty of action. The muscle spasms were replaced by controlled strength. The rapid eye movements switched to laser stillness.
There was a naked man with pure white skin standing in the middle of a road. He began walking to Paul. He was flawless, his muscle tone perfect, his face, his cheekbones, his chin, all carved from stone. With every step, Paul felt his diffidence evaporate. With closeness he saw the ruby red glass of its eyes. With extreme closeness the man raised a hand and Paul saw the tiny silver crucifix tied around his wrist. That hand came to rest on Paul’s shoulder and like a Catholic feeling the hand of God at a moment of crisis Paul felt the hand of the Strigoi on him.
“I’m going to find these people,” he said. “I don’t know how... but I will... And I’m going to slaughter them.”
He took a moment to recompose then took the note he had written and read it again. ‘If you return the money you have in Switzerland’... Burkhalter. The lawyer. That bastard was the only one who could know. He went back into the hotel.
“Is everything alright?” the lady asked.
“Yes, of course. You can use this phone. Are you calling Canada?” She pointed to a perspex bubble hanging from the wall by the edge of reception. He found Burkhalter’s card in his wallet, his hands trembling as he dialled. Don’t scare him… information, get the information.
A receptionist answered.
“This is Alan Jay,” he said in English. “I need to speak with Herr Burkhalter please. It is very urgent.”
He waited at least two minutes. “Mr. Jay?” The voice was Burkhalter, he sounded subdued. Something was wrong.
“What has happened? Are you able to talk?”
“Yes, I can talk… Mr Jay. I was attacked by people who claim you stole money from them.”
“Who are they?” Paul growled.
“I don’t know who they are. They said you stole money from them?”
“And what did you tell them?”
There was a pause. “Mr. Jay. I was kidnapped. I suffered a heart attack... I am informing you... that I am not going to represent you.”
“You were kidnapped? By who? Tell me who did this?”
“I don’t know who they are, Mr. Jay. But they are looking for you.”
Paul looked at his handwritten copy of the email. “Did you tell them about Ildico and Alina Popescu?”
“They wanted to know what financial products I had arranged for you… Mr. Jay. They put a gun in my mouth. I am not going to have any more dealings with you. Goodbye.”
The phone went dead.
Paul read and reread the email. After a few minutes he called Burkhalter again and spoke to the receptionist. “Hi, this is Alan Jay. Can I leave a message for Herr Burkhalter, please.”
