Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  Over the defiled pages, scores of photographs had been pasted as if the papier-mache dolmen had been collecting the images as trophies or mementos: bone fields in Cambodia, the skeletal remains of Iranian towns hit by Israeli nuclear weapons, a recent genocide in one of the Congos, a Nigerian civil war, a Chinese famine, the cannibalism of Pyongyang, the Californian dust bowl of the thirties, the ghost towns of Texas, long-exhausted and near-forgotten pandemics in Asia, the repeated failures of the Indian monsoon . . .

  Other things were represented here too, higher up, at eye level, people he did not recognize: individuals, strangers, random victims? Their expressions were unmistakably those of distress, shock and fear, or had been captured during their final, gasping respite from life.

  A message had been carefully written near the base of the mound, in an antique-looking scroll or ribbon, similar to the paintings and graffiti he’d happened across on his moves. Nemo deum vidit. Latin again, and again he had no idea what it meant.

  The father wondered if the artist had been the executioner, or gaoler, of the subjects in the photographs. These higher images seemed personal. They were amateur pictures, not culled from a news service, and had been printed on precious photographic paper. They were presented cleanly and not smeared with the reeking glue.

  Around the totem he walked, compelled but unsteady on his feet, his ears attuned to the darkness about him, the torch beam illuminating the tiered column. He would occasionally pause in front of a photograph before moving to the next: the tear-stained face of a woman, looking up through what might have been a manhole cover, or a trapdoor in a metal container; the bruised face of a Middle Eastern man, whose vacant eyes confronted oblivion; polythene stretched over a distorted face, the throat roped; a kneeling figure wearing a cape of black blood, its severed head resting beside its knees; the heavily tattooed back of a man lying face down, the colourful sigils of the skin riveted with black bullet holes; a river bank; the grey chop of the sea with no sight of land, and several patches of disturbed soil in settings that appeared quiet and yet more sinister because of the stillness.

  Psychopaths must have once exiled themselves here, amongst imagery of climate catastrophes and their myriad consequences, to reflect upon their trophies. Chorny and Semyon Sabinovic? The witches. The shrine was a mortuary roll that depicted nothing but disaster, death and decay: chaos, the great passage from civilization to barbarism. In this place, the father suspected that someone had grasped some deep, personal connection with the wider diaspora and depopulation. The whole edifice suggested the morbidly spiritual, which further convinced him that there was meaning behind the selection of this place too, as if this room ended another journey, or a hideously idiosyncratic pilgrimage. It was an installation of the King Death group for sure, but a shrine for a seer, priest, or whatever kind of witch doctor or shaman the group’s nihilistic mysticism and superstition generated. Some Damascene moment had called true believers here. The father was sure of this. An awakening had occurred inside sadistic minds, leading to a fuller connection with something the father had but glimpsed. Here it was celebrated, and that something was perceived as the black-miraculous. A thing closer to this world than it had ever been before. Afterdeath?

  Everywhere he searched for his daughter, he found this morbid sickness, continuing and expanding, signs encircling him. And had he not dreamed of this place too, and recently? He suddenly felt trapped, funnelled further into a hellish gullet he could not anticipate the end of, but did not understand.

  The father had seen enough and made to turn away and to find the fiend that had built this tribute in defiance of decency, erected beneath the sagging roof of civilization, but paused, and returned his torch to a spot three-quarters up the column, level with his own eyes. He took one step forward with his breath trapped painfully at the top of his lungs, as if everything inside his torso had just surged upwards to press on the bottom of his throat. The picture had been taken from the front path of his family’s old house.

  Upon the middle tier of the garden, amongst the sprouting leaves and white flowers of the potatoes that they had grown to fill the pantry, stood a little girl, his daughter. Keenly alert and curious and staring at whoever was taking her picture, she wore an expression that was half-amused, verging on a smile, eager to engage an adult’s attention.

  A slither of pain slipped through her father’s heart. He suffered a sudden and terrible sense of the broken world he’d walked for two years and of the broken people he had murdered. All through that time her little image had been here, surrounded by horrors too sickening to view at more than a glance. And her image had been here in the reeking darkness without him, her daddy.

  Dizzy, the father staggered sideways. Recovered his feet. A whimper and then another escaped his mouth. His scalp and the nape of his neck prickled. Nausea lapped the edges of his stomach. His head flooded and swam with too many thoughts.

  She was the only child featured on the papery skin of the effigy. With shaking hands, he reached out and tugged the picture free. Noticed what she was wearing: blue shorts, a navy t-shirt, and the red hooded top patched with cats. Not the clothes she’d worn on the day she was abducted. So this photo had been taken some time before the afternoon she was taken: the men, Oleg Chorny and Semyon Sabinovic, had crossed the line and entered their property to take a photo before they stole her. The revelation made him prickle cold.

  The father stumbled around the pillar on numb feet, shining his light again at each photograph, desperate to see more of her, but also praying that he would not. He came back to where he’d started and through a tear-blurred vision, his eyes implored the three images of disrupted soil not to be telling him some unspeakable truth. Those pictures could have been taken anywhere, maybe in the vast crop plantations of Dartmoor; places he’d long had to discipline himself not to think about. If there were no witnesses, abduction and murder were easy crimes to commit.

  Spiking from a renewal of the red energy that made him career like a drunkard, the father went for the doors behind the altar. He desperately wanted to find someone at home. Should he blast through joints, shoulders, elbows, knees and hips, or just shoot away the genitals?

  He’ll bleed to death.

  No, if there was a custodian or chaplain, then he must be taken alive. And he would impart all of the secrets of his vocation, and its sacrifices, before the father took apart the man slowly and unto a madness wherein the only cogent desire would be death. He would know why his daughter’s image was here before the sun rose again upon the broken earth.

  Flashing past the father’s face, as he moved to the doors, came again the crimson skeletal witnesses of the walls, holding childlike machetes or badly drawn, out-of-perspective firearms, their faces weirdly beatific, white eyes gazing upwards to the black heavens. The father looked down to avoid seeing more, but beside the doors the white-robed dead knelt and prayed before a lion with an ape’s bestial face. On the other side of the frame parodies of saints raised bone-thin arms from the ground towards their grinning executioners.

  She had been taken by the criminally insane. The father bit down on the scream that wanted to shatter the rafters. Looking up within the black nave, he unintentionally glimpsed what billowed upon the ceiling.

  Transfixed, stumbling to regain balance in the darkness, he moved his light around the great central figure, perhaps winged, that had been painted upon the plasterboard ceiling. The thing was similar to what he had seen on the walls in Torre and Paignton, as if those sightings had never been accidents. In this depiction the deity was faceless and its front was littered with redundant paps. The preposterous accident of life, the giving, as well as untimely death, the taking, appeared to have been depicted as a female preserve.

  As if prompted by a sudden opening inside this depth of the missing face, a carousal of horror swept through him, and he suffered a sense of rising out of himself and up to the rafters, towards the very absence, arms wide, eyes wide, mouth muttering in sublimati
on, in hapless obeisance to what swayed up there, surveying the ruin it administered.

  The terrible passage.

  The father supported himself against a wall. Gripped his head to ease the eruption. Few minds were designed to withstand such a place. But it wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t cease, and the visions came all at once now, stacking, superimposing, reeling . . . the black air of the temple had filled him up as if the trance of a ritual had been evoked. The dead were piled against a fence in Bangladesh . . . an American town, with not one telegraph pole standing . . . El Nino’s scythe on a satellite picture . . . the sacking of Cairo by the Islamic militias . . . the last great crucifixion of the Christians along Salah Salem . . . the little silver dragons of the Israeli air force against a blue sky . . . a mountain range of black smoke.

  The world is ending.

  He kept his eyes shuttered and clenched his jaws. It was only paint, drawings, torn pages, candles, ghastly photographs, grotesque juvenilia: the creation of men, of the men who had abducted his daughter. Seeing her here had unhinged him, and he must focus and find where she had been taken. That is what he had come here for. He opened his eyes and saw himself upon the wall he had fallen against.

  As if he had been dreamed above the door of the room that he was now desperate to flee, there was an impressionist’s deranged sketch of a masked man, the face bone-white, death-white, skull-white. The tired but committed form was caped in black and crowned with a scarecrow’s hat. His hat, the detail of the camouflaged band was crude but unmistakably his own. The man possessed one outsized hand, carrying a handgun. The similarity was no coincidence and it portrayed him dressed to invade, torture and kill, only this figure wore a halo, painted red.

  The father’s mind scrabbled for the reasons why he had been scrawled upon the wall. Someone, perhaps Chorny, must have known of the pursuit, the coming avenger. Had he been told? The image was dust-specked and glazed dry, yet it must have been added to the wall within the last three months, when he’d been active, because only then had he been attired this way.

  How do you know me?

  The father moved and placed his ear an inch from the surface of the vestry doors. Heard nothing but the drumming of the rain upon the metal roof, the buffeting and distant roar of wind between the surrounding buildings. He replaced the handgun with the stun weapon.

  The doors were unlocked.

  The father let himself inside.

  And noisily disturbed a cluster of empty paint tins.

  The skeletal figure lying upon the mattress didn’t stir.

  The room was tainted by vomit, blood-ironed, excrement-infused, and so powerfully it made the father wince.

  He feared he had come here too late, and that the man partially wrapped in a soiled sheet, and so motionless upon the stained mattress, was dead. He quelled the errant notion that the figure had been laid out in a ghastly preparation, ready for his arrival.

  The figure’s head and throat were completely inked by tattoos. Only the face was left clean. Enlumineur.

  A further moment of confusion and disorientation brought the father to a standstill. Yonah Abergil had said Oleg Chorny was found dead of an overdose and a broken heart underneath this place, two years before. Could history repeat itself so vividly, or was this coincidence and just another human junkie ruin that had crawled in here to expire? Chorny would be bones now; this thing was still coated in flesh.

  Closer, crouching, the rain still dripping from the tail of his poncho, the father thought he heard the corpse breathing, faintly, the incoming air tinged by a rasp. Yet he couldn’t be sure, and how could anything so thin, so skull-contoured about the hairless, hollow-cheeked head, still be living? Surely no organ could still murmur within the skeletal remains of the misery artist. He was tempted to check for a pulse.

  The father shone the torch onto the vials and the coke-blackened glass tubes, the aluminium inhalers, plastic injectors, baggies scattered beside the disorderly bedding: an addict’s detritus, the messy artefacts of a haste to depart the world. The illustrated man had been loading up by a variety of means. Sachets and plastic jars of powders, blister packs, canisters of paste, gas burners, a pestle and mortar inside an old wooden box upon a table indicated the man had been a keen amateur chemist too, manufacturing his own catalysts and accelerants into the deeper fathoms of consciousness.

  Around the father’s feet, piles of strangled, twisted clothes, sticky kitchen utensils, food packages and empty plastic bottles covered the floor like flotsam on the surface of a fetid canal. Pages from the Baptists’ books rested amongst the mounds of refuse. Stiff brushes, rollers, paint trays and encrusted palettes had been dropped and now stuck to what they touched. The air itself seemed thickened and warmed by the thermals of the miasmas rising from the bedding and a blocked toilet.

  A bathroom adjoined the ramshackle living quarters. The father peered inside. A good fire would be required to purify it. He looked about the yellowing ceiling, the scuffed walls, and wondered at the dreamtime vistas, the surreal landscapes and communions with hellish delusions through which this man’s subconscious had eagerly soared.

  Within his bafflement, flickers of his own image on the pitch-black walls, and of his daughter in the photograph, made his breath seize and the father stiffened with a self-generated cold that made his hands shake. He imagined he had stepped inside a place of old magic, of unnatural laws. Faint cries from the edge of his consciousness seemed to issue warnings, and what seemed like an acknowledgement that what he’d thought impossible was possible.

  The father forced himself to return his attention to the bed and he asked himself again if this could truly be Oleg Chorny: the child taker and the man found dead two years before, according to Yonah Abergil, and laid beneath what must have been this very building?

  Abergil had lied then. Chorny, the King’s celebrated enlumineur, must have been allowed to live. No two men, enlumineurs and junkies both, could be found in the same place by their would-be assassins. He would not believe that. So the man before the father must be his daughter’s abductor. Incredible. This man had taken her from her home and sold her, but was just lying here, like this, laid out, as if waiting to be found.

  His hands were in plain sight; no weapons were visible. If he so much as twitched, the father would discharge the immobilizer, though that would surely stop the heart of this figure who’d deliberately removed himself to the edge of life, perhaps to madly depict what he saw at that border.

  The father trained his weapon at the birdy chest, and peeled back the sheet. The enlumineur of the King Death creed had truly displayed his skilful wares upon his own flesh. To his throat he was patterned gold and azure with sigils, signs, runes and inscriptions of black deeds mercifully coded, but borne proudly to represent a devil’s status. Was his daughter’s name on that unwashed flesh? If it was, this father would cut it out.

  Could the thing even walk? The wrists were so thin they resembled lengths of doweling. The hands at the end were cartoonish claws. They were crossed over the bony chest, to suggest repose, as if the figure was ready to be lowered into the ground or placed upon a pyre. The angular jaw sloped to a wattled neck, ribbed with cartilage over the throat. It had no teeth, just greyish stubs behind a lip-less maw, through which air marginally wheezed to activate a distant rattle. The skull beneath the skin. The very face of death. A painted corpse. Aping what you serve?

  Bloodied tissues were caught up in the folds of the sheet. Consumptive. Tubercular. Maybe one of the antibiotic-resistant strains. Seemingly the creature had moments to live. Would it even survive the journey back to the car, let alone endure questioning? The father would have to carry it across his shoulders like a bundle of sticks with a lolling, oversized head.

  He hovered above the figure, unsure of himself, confused by what he had seen in this place of tribute and divination. But he failed to identify the full power of his murderous hatred for Oleg Chorny. It was mostly pity and revulsion that he felt now.

 
TWENTY-FIVE

  At seven a.m. the captive came round from a stupor that had lasted most of the night, only interrupted by two seizures, and suffered another fit inside the car. Arching his back off the rear seat, he salivated, exposing a throat ringed with grime. His legs kicked out and struck the door.

  The father quickly alighted from the car and stood beside it, looking through the rain-blurred windows at the figure inside, thrashing despite two sets of cuffs locked tight at the ankle and wrist. This was the man’s third seizure since his capture, the worst yet. Eventually, he rolled off the rear seat and into the footwell.

  Through the entire journey from the chapel to the car, and then through the remainder of the night and into the dawn, the captive had remained unconscious, repeatedly coughing and making incoherent sounds, without waking fully. During the extraction through the storm, an ordeal that had near-wasted the last of the father’s strength, his prisoner had spoken once, but briefly. In a thin, feminine voice, he had muttered into the father’s ear. It had been hard to pick out the words against the sound of the wind, until the man’s lips had flopped against his skin and he had heard, ‘He leans over us at birth. Stands behind us in life. Sits beside us at the end.’ The sound of the sibilant hiss, as much as the contents of the utterance, had forced the father to drop the bound figure onto the wet, wind-flayed grass, to withdraw a weapon and point it at the bony face. But the eyes had not opened; the man had only spoken from within a drugged slumber.

  The father was additionally surprised that anyone could survive the powerful seizures the man was suffering. A hospital was out of the question. He knew little about first aid, but if necessary he would lever the man’s tongue out of his throat, with a stick or gloved fingers, because that mouth had some use. Twice he’d attempted to awaken the man, but had been unsuccessful. If his captive died, the father would have to bury him, and his secrets, out here amongst the drenched crops.