Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  ‘Part? You think this is some fucking game?’ The father nearly squeezed the trigger.

  Oleg saw the subtle tightening of the sinews in his gloved hand and smiled. ‘The distance from life to death is narrow, and I do not fear death. Your threats are no good. As I say, I expect as much from you, until your eyes are fully opened. But know this: I only came back for you, from the place where I was waiting, a border. I came back for whoever was coming to me with an answer.’

  ‘You want me to think that you’re mad, is that the angle?’

  Oleg smiled, humouring him. ‘From time to time I returned, to see who could help me, to see who else was confined inside something that was started many years ago. A ritual. A great ritual. And it has not always been easy to go from there to here.’ He gazed at his naked, ruined body, as if at soiled clothing. ‘The distance between life and afterdeath is . . . monumental. The journey is tiring.’

  ‘Shut up. Where did you take the girl? Who paid for her?’

  Oleg raised his thinly papered skull to stare at the sky. He looked like a corpse arisen from a grave on Judgement Day, but one that had been lied to and still remained a ruin. ‘Red Father, I will try and make it simple for you because we do not have much time, and because you hate me more than you have ever hated anything. Hate is good, but only when properly directed.’ He sighed, as if impatient before the great task of instruction ahead of him. ‘What do you hear, Red Father? All around us.’

  ‘Don’t you call me that!’

  Oleg ignored him. ‘I hear the silence of centuries, of millennia. There is nothing left behind us. But afterdeath is a cacophony. And that is ahead of us. In there the past has gone. The past and all we seek and love is swallowed. The world is being devoured. As every moment passes, we are all one moment closer to afterdeath. Nothing here matters.’ Oleg then grimaced as if he recalled some episodes in this other place, this afterdeath, of which he spoke. ‘There is no more future. We do not need to record any more history. No one has any use for it. Signs and marks alone have power. In chaos they shine. I have made so many signs, as have you. Make another now if you wish. I have been ready for a long time to finally let go. Why delay what is inevitable? Why care so much?’

  The father wanted to discharge his weapon and keep on firing until the mad thing in the ditch was broken apart like the crockery in a dead king’s barrow. He couldn’t decide whether this show of suicidal insanity was authentic, or an act to prolong a meagre existence.

  Oleg turned his head quickly, cutting the father’s thoughts in half. ‘Do it. Here. If you lack the strength to go further, if you have lost the will to know, then go make another of your signs. Your marks. They are incandescent. They make such light in darkness. I have seen your lights coming closer and closer. I wish I could have seen you light those tapers too, but at least make this death between us a terrible art and sever our bondage in this ritual. Death is poetry, the highest sensation. You know this. So make me part of your ecstasy, and one of your signs, if you cannot carry on. If you cannot bear to know what it is you have found while you sought something else . . .’ Oleg finished with a cryptic smile.

  The father lowered the gun before the desire to use it became overwhelming. Even though it was him holding the gun, he was far more uncomfortable than he wished to be. He didn’t understand the man’s riddles, not literally, but there was meaning, a sinister subtext, that struck strange chimes at the back of his mind, and he resented the awful notion that this man in rags was trying to be a tutor, an educator in something he was now in danger of believing.

  There might be another inference in the exchange too: a confession about his daughter’s fate, or whereabouts, would only come slowly; information would be only dribbled out in prophetic-sounding gibberish, as if his captive sought a way into his mind, and out of captivity. If so, it was time for him to impart a lesson of his own, and to destroy the equivalency between them that this man was trying to create.

  Oleg looked past the father again and into the distance as if he addressed that. ‘In this world we are smudges, brief traces, smoke rings, small vanishing vapours. And when our smoke vanishes’ – Oleg clicked two dirty fingers – ‘we will see better in the darkness of afterdeath.’

  The father stepped into the ditch and engulfed Oleg’s head with a cloud of nerve gas.

  Oleg whimpered, fell forward, clutching at his face, then writhed and kicked like a dying spider at the side of the ditch.

  After a minute the father hauled him out of the turf by his upper arms and dragged him to the car. He sprung the boot latch. Raised and dumped the coughing man inside, pushing his thin legs down as if they were kindling being packed into a fireplace. He covered the twitching figure with an oil-stained blanket, then made to slam closed the lid.

  ‘That was not necessary,’ Oleg said, snivelling. ‘I am here to guide you.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Oleg cleared his sinuses and mouth. ‘You can if you wish. It has been a while for me, but you waste our time, so let us go back to the sea. Let us get closer to what you seek, Red Father. I suggest Portsmouth.’ He grinned knowingly through the tears and mucus that had formed a glistening coating across his red skull.

  Confused, but also stricken, the father hesitated. This was either a clue regarding his daughter, or a ruse leading to a trap. He withdrew the nerve gas and let Oleg’s horrible, swollen and solitary open eye see it. ‘This is nothing compared to what will happen to you, if you do not tell me where you took my daughter. A lawyer was involved. A go-between. I want his real name. And the location of the place you took her to, two years ago. I will either break this information from you, or your last moments on this earth can be painless. I’ll even let you overdose. How’s that?’

  ‘Such consideration I never expected from you, whose rage I have watched like a star in another place that has no light, and whose very fire I brought into this world . . . and into that other place too.’ Oleg tittered, like a camp puppet. ‘But who can afford unacceptable delays in such pressing times? We are going north? If you seek what you have lost, you will not find it in that direction. And I can only hope that in your efforts to find me you did not meddle with King Death. By the look in your eyes, am I to assume that you did? Well, if they catch us, my old friends will not hesitate, and they will be enthusiastic in their work. They have no soul, most of these Kings, only a banal purpose. But you have such fire, and it should be allowed to grow brighter before I leave you.’

  The father closed the boot and returned the man to darkness. As he walked away, his prisoner embarked upon a coughing fit.

  He sat in the car and thought his way through a tangle of options pickled by indecision. He thought of Birmingham and he tried calling his wife again. If the person you loved was in danger and did not answer your calls, then you would return to the place you last saw them. There you would start looking. But he considered who might now be waiting for him in Birmingham if he continued north.

  The father instructed the car to take him to Portsmouth.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  On arrival in Portsmouth, the father checked on Chorny. Inside the car boot that stank of wet carpet and urine, the man now shivered and whimpered from withdrawal. The father dropped a bottle of water inside the boot and slammed the lid.

  Outside an old municipal car park he found a public comms post on the street and tried to connect to his wife. He tried four times and gave up, held the post with both hands and dipped his head. When the spike of his dread passed, he used the terminal to access the last accounts that Gene Hackman and Scarlett had used to make contact with him. If the Kings wanted to communicate with him, to send a message, they might use his old idents that they were now familiar with. But if they had the means to identify the places in which he accessed those accounts, then they’d also know which city he was in. But they would not be able to follow a handset in transit, as he no longer had one, or the car if he only used public comms on the street.

  If Gene Hackman ha
d given this vehicle up, his end could come any time and his quest would be over. But why had they not come already, today? They were everywhere and into everything, but they had not found him. Not yet, and he could not abandon the car even if they knew of its existence and easily traceable registration. All further movement towards the truth of his daughter’s abduction depended upon the use of a private vehicle. He lacked the skills to steal another, and couldn’t waste time trying to buy one. A rental would be registered to him and would quickly give up his location. He’d been careful on the journey to Portsmouth on the available roads, looking behind constantly, two loaded handguns ready at all times, and was sure he had not been followed. His sole hope was the possibility that Gene Hackman had omitted this one crucial detail, in a confession tortured from him prior to execution. Or perhaps the vehicle’s traceable identity had even been erased? Criminals did it to their own transport. And the father had to believe the stolen car was safe.

  There were two messages waiting for the father at the account he’d used for communicating with Gene Hackman. Each communication had visuals. He also checked the last account Scarlett had used, which hadn’t been discontinued either, and that revealed the same two messages as the pair in the Hackman account. They had been recorded during the previous evening when he was snatching Oleg Chorny. Gene Hackman may have recorded the messages before he was murdered. Perhaps a frantic warning awaited him here, even pertinent advice for his continued survival.

  The father opened the first message, and gasped when a black cloth bag was whipped from a head onscreen, revealing the face of a kneeling figure: his friend, Gene Hackman. Briefly losing his balance, the father gripped the media post. Rain slapped the canopy. He looked about himself, at the wet street, the mostly unlit windows of the commercial buildings. Nothing, no one.

  We are nothing. We are nobody.

  He returned his attention to the naked figure onscreen: a purple, black, red visage, with closed-up eyes, that had once been the face of a man. The police detective began speaking. ‘It’s over . . . our time.’ The figure then shuddered as it was pushed or kicked from one side. Someone spoke a prompt, their voice muffled. Gene repeated what they had said to him. ‘They know who you are. They know everything about you. All is being settled.’

  The screen jumped to a scene a few minutes later. The officer’s head was bowed and he wept. The recording returned to him speaking the same message as before. The loop was repeated. The father prepared to close the communication, but suddenly found himself looking at a new scene, but in the same place – what looked like a grove in a dismal, wet wood. A gloved hand gripped the wet hair of the police officer’s scalp, pushed his head further down so that he was facing his navel. And before the father could make the screen go blank, to remove the sight of the pale but blood-smeared shoulders, and the tangled, damp chest hair, a voice, off-screen, said, ‘L’Homme devant la mort. Yonah Abergil.’

  The partial shot showed a hand gloved in black that held a machete. A rustle of cloth, a swish and a fleshy thump: the officer’s head dropped from his shoulders. A red-white stump slid to one side and fell from view. The scene’s crude edit kicked into repeat.

  The father closed the message and bent over to vomit at the base of the post. He clawed the metal with weak and quivering fingers as if he were tethered to a stake.

  Finding his feet after the worst of the nausea passed, he turned about and scanned the street again, raked the area with his juddering and leaping vision for a face directed at him, for vehicles with watching occupants at the kerbs. There was nothing, no one.

  We are nothing. We are nobody.

  The Kings would now know where he had activated the message, but they could not have known that he would come to Portsmouth before the communication was opened. Even so, he could not stay here for long or the monstrousness that decapitated a serving detective would be upon him, and that would be him upon his knees, waiting for the steel to scythe down, from behind, from beyond his blind, panting anticipation and terror.

  He needed to get out of here. There was no one to help any more, no more sympathy or assistance to call upon from allies. Friends and guardians had been sacrificed for him. For his cause, they had been abducted and killed. The idea was too great for his mind to withstand. He wanted to get back to the car.

  Miranda.

  ‘God, please . . .’ Thoughts of his wife intermingled with images of the detective’s gored shoulders. The father retched again onto the pavement.

  Second message. There was a second message. This one had also been sent from the police officer’s account. One hour after the first film was posted; so both would have been sent from those who were now hunting him. Perhaps the second message was a further taunt, or more to horrify, sicken and weaken him with terror. He briefly imagined watching a desecration of the policeman’s remains as he stood speechless in the wet street. His whole body tensed as if a scream was close to emerging from his throat; he wanted to fold in on himself and close down.

  Find a place to end this, to end all of this.

  At the comms post, he opened the second message. Decided to look at it quickly, and then run. Run where? Until Chorny gave him somewhere specific to go, a location, a name, he had no destination to pursue. That information would have to be extracted from the man, and fast, as soon as he returned to the car. No more clues or riddles. Chorny spoke or he died within the hour.

  A road appeared onscreen, lit dim amber at night, flanked by brick apartment buildings. The father didn’t recognize it. The scene had been filmed from street level, from inside a car. Two men came out of one of the buildings and approached the car. They wore black Balaclavas, like guerrillas, with a suggestion of lighter colours about their eyes. As he studied the men, more figures left an entrance to the apartment building in the background. Three other people had emerged. Their arms were linked, until they began walking in single file. The gait of the figure in the middle was distinctly feminine, her coat long, her face lowered. But it was not his wife because this woman wasn’t tall enough.

  The scene jumped and here was another plain room: cement walls, narrow, low-ceilinged, white. A new scene in the same room was dropped into the montage. This act featured a cast of one: a thin, naked woman, narrow-faced, her breasts small and covered by her arms, her hair tied back; someone he had never seen before. Make-up ran down her cheeks from wet eyes. Her mouth opened. ‘Every door is closing.’

  She lowered her gaze and looked at something to the left of the camera, at whoever was sat there. The woman swallowed. ‘You knew me as Scarlett. My real name is Amy. I also have a child. I am a mother and I love my son very much. My son and I are in danger because of what you and I have done.’

  ‘No. No.’ The father spoke to no one but himself in the windblown street. He slapped the side of his head as if to knock these images out before they settled. So they already had Scarlett when she called him that morning? They were listening then, and had made her call him to get a fix on his location. What choice did she have? She was a mother.

  ‘All of this must stop, now. My son and I will be reunited. We will be safe.’ She tried to smile, but her face dropped before she finished the sentence she clearly did not believe a word of. ‘Use this account to arrange a meeting. It’s very important that you make contact. This is about your daughter and your wife. Information you need is waiting for you.’

  The father wanted to terminate the message, but knew he was now incapable of doing that because his little girl and his wife had been mentioned. They knew he would listen, and while he did so his skin shrank at the idea that a vehicle was on its way right now, to finish this carnage he had brought into so many lives. The longer the messages lasted, the more time the Kings would have to reach him. His legs started to twitch, as did his hands, his face, his thoughts.

  They’re coming.

  Scarlett spoke again. ‘Your daughter is alive. She is a happy and healthy girl. She is six years old. There have been reasons why she c
ould not be with you and your wife. Your wife understands now. Everything has been explained to her. She will be in touch with you too. Soon.’

  ‘God. God.’ The father spoke to the rain and wet cement, to the rattling of a security shutter. An alarm screamed in the distance. Only seagulls answered it with sounds that seemed to swallow the father’s mind.

  ‘There is no way you will find your little girl. There never was. But she can be brought to you, both your daughter and your wife, if you cooperate. You don’t have a choice because this matter is closing. The man they wanted was the police detective. Not me, not you, not your wife. Not my son. We played no part in the murder of Yonah Abergil. Please let us know where you are. Where we can all meet, safely, in public. No one will be harmed. This can all end soon, and we can all be reunited with those we love. Please.’

  The woman swallowed and her eyes welled up. She struggled to compose herself, to straighten her face. ‘They understand you. Understand what you have done out of desperation, out of a desire to see your daughter. And you will see her . . . soon. But you must . . . you must get in touch from this account, or this will not end and the consequences of your actions will be addressed in full. For all of us, please. Please . . .’

  The screen jumped and the message restarted.

  For all of us, please. Please . . .

  The father killed the connection and staggered away from the post.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The vehicle’s navigation found another car park two miles away. On arrival, he couldn’t recall the journey, either through the streets or up inside the concrete levels to the sixth storey. Too many thoughts were clambering into his head and getting stuck in a limited space. Images from the communications appeared red and vivid in nauseating bursts; fragments he would recall for as long as he lived.