Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  He near-fell from the car and pressed his face into the cold metal of the roof.

  His wife had been mentioned. The Kings had his wife? It was why Miranda wasn’t answering. She was unavailable. And will be forever now. They had moved so swiftly, so decisively, once his identity had been established. They had killed a police officer. Surely another one by now, the woman he knew as Scarlett. Maybe her son too. God, no. Please God, no. They would kill his wife. A cull: this was their message. If he opened another mail at the account Scarlett had given him, he might see his wife on her bare knees and he would hear her pleading . . . ‘Oh Jesus Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ.’ He buried his face in his hands and groaned. He sounded monstrous, bovine.

  They said his daughter was alive. The enormity and impact of that thought was too sudden for him to process. Instead, he went limp to the soles of his feet. If they weren’t lying and they knew where she was, where she had been taken two years ago, they could also go and collect her. They could . . . The beheading: their signature. ‘Bastards!’ He struck the roof of the car. ‘Bastards!’

  Inside the boot, Oleg Chorny coughed and made the noise of a dog. The skeletal figure began to bump about.

  Did they even have his wife? A ruse. Maybe. They could be lying about everything. There had been no film of his wife. But why didn’t she answer his calls?

  Everyone you know, they cease to exist. In one week they all in hell.

  Root and branch.

  No more sleep, no more resting for the scarecrow. No more disinformation from an addled consciousness. Chorny confessed now or he died. The father yanked open the boot. Seized Chorny by his ankles and hauled his legs out of the car. Grabbed his shoulders and positioned him on the cement. The figure was dazed and the light smarted against those big yellowy eyes. He covered his skull-face with his long, bloodless, crab-leg fingers.

  The father carried him like a roll of carpet to the side of the car park and to the waist-high wall. Understanding the intention, Chorny pushed back, weakly, into the father’s side.

  ‘Time . . . You’re going over. You’re done. You shite. This ends!’

  Oleg’s face mooned with terror. ‘No! Your daughter, think. Think. I am helping you. Together we do this. We get her back.’

  ‘Liar. You’re all liars.’ The father pressed his face into the veiny skull as he held the man’s hollow cage of a torso, gritted his teeth and whispered. ‘I’ve just heard from your old friends. They removed the head of someone who helped me. They filmed it and showed me. They’re onto me and they are coming. No more delays. You love death. You all love death.’ But maybe not this one. ‘This is the hour of your death. I’ll see you on the other side. And I will come for you there too.’

  ‘You don’t listen. Please . . . this, no.’

  The father manoeuvred the man to the cement wall and pushed his head over and into the rain-specked air beyond. ‘Down there. You’ll break apart on the street . . . I’m done. I’m done with you all!’ The father gripped Oleg’s body in a bear hug around the top of his thighs, and raised him up as if to bundle him over.

  Oleg attempted to fold himself in half, his pale face discovering a new shade beyond white, his spindly arms grasping for the wall. Spittle flecked his mouth, his nostrils flared horribly. And as his bony head hung in empty space his eyes became even vaster, expanding as he looked at the sky. He then glanced over his shoulder at the immensity of air below that a man could plummet through like a brick.

  ‘Time to go to your afterdeath.’ As if placing a sacrifice onto a plinth to await a god, the father rested Oleg’s pointy hips upon the ledge. Witless before the drop, the man’s mouth fell open, but he appeared too frightened to speak. Two-thirds of his near-fleshless bones were draped over the ledge, the sky above, death below. The father didn’t like heights either, but had never before seen fear so vividly erase everything but itself upon a human face. Today, they were all traders in fear. Merchants who negotiated inside the deepest aquifers of each other’s nightmares: a stolen child, the prospect of a beheaded spouse, the terrible thinness of the air and the cool breeze preceding a fall to one’s death on concrete. The father had drilled deep into the only thing that mattered to all of them who bargained in such places as this: life and death, how you and those you loved died. There was nothing else, not really, not any more. Every man, woman and child would know this too, in time. Destiny. Maybe this afterdeath was nothing more than acceptance.

  The father pushed the jabbering skull another inch into the void, then turned it over so the big-eyed face could fully see the smashing floor below. Whoosh, scream, cement. He wanted to let the figure go and knew he could do it. If Oleg did not speak now and reveal where his daughter had been taken, the father would let the body drop.

  The figure found its last breath, its final cry, and . . . began to laugh, and the mad laughter ascended the scale into something raucous, queenish. His entire body shook with mirth as if another drug-deprived seizure was imminent. ‘Death is larger than life!’ He reached his bound arms into the air as if preparing for a high dive. ‘Always it has been this way. So let me return to the terrible passage, Red Father. You disappoint me, but at least the fire of your rage will give me a fitting re-entry.’

  A gun pointed into his face, the withdrawal of narcotics: nothing had made Chorny do anything but act out, lie, resist. Here was more evidence. This man was truly unafraid of death. His recalcitrance and doublespeak had merely prolonged his time. This lover of death had played him. It was as if he was privy to greater opportunities that not even death could spoil.

  The father felt his body heave towards a sob of frustration at the utter futility of the tasks he had been set. Despair soon encased him like lead. His wife, Scarlett, Gene, had died for nothing and he was just wasting time in a public car park with a junkie. ‘You have no idea! No idea . . . what you did to us!’ The father screamed to rouse himself from torpor, from shock, from the dread that this man would never tell him what he wanted, what he needed. ‘She was everything! She was ours. We loved her. You have no idea what you did . . . to me . . . to her mother . . . You don’t know . . . You don’t know what you did . . . What you all do . . .’ He sobbed and let the man’s thighs loosen under his arm. He clenched his jaw, swallowed. ‘I wished . . . I wished I’d had the chance to kill your lover too. You bitch! But I’ll finish what that fat prick Yonah started. He got to your lover first, but I’ll finish all of you who touched her, who paid for her—’

  Oleg turned his head to fix his serpent eyes upon the father. His legs tensed and he hooked his calves behind the father’s waist. The mad eyes narrowed, confused but searching at this mention of his old boss. ‘Yonah? Yonah Abergil?’ The man paled again, but from not from a threat of death this time. The features withered under a sudden and terrible comprehension. The mad intensity in his eyes went out. ‘Simmy. He . . . Abergil had him killed?’ The man’s shock was not fake, but then the father had been certain that his terror was no act either. ‘Tell me!’ Oleg shrieked so loudly that the father nearly let go of the bundle of cuffed bones. He finally had the man’s full attention; had accidentally learned how to hurt him, and deeply.

  The father spat and began to laugh. ‘You didn’t know! Your messages from the other side didn’t tell you? Yes, Yonah murdered your lover. He had him killed. Your own boss had your lover killed, you skinny fuck. My daughter was his last job. And you didn’t know. The devil that paid for her paid for your deaths. It was part of the contract. You can’t even trust each other. There are no words. No words for people like you. There is no death to fit your crimes.’

  ‘Simmy,’ the skull whispered again, his body now entirely limp and hanging upside down, a hanged man, crucified by the remembrance of his own loss.

  ‘Yonah lied. He said you were dead. But you’ve limped on for two years. For two years that made me wish that I was dead!’

  Oleg placed his hands over his wet face.

  ‘You’re not going to tell me about my girl.
And there is no one who you love that I can kill. There’s only you to punish.’

  Oleg dropped his hands and looked at the father, transfixing him with a gaze of near-inhuman rage. The collection of bones within the father’s arms seemed to expand with a strength that pushed him backwards. Even with his ankles cuffed, Oleg curled his lower legs around the father’s waist as one tight vice, near-crushing the breath from his body as they pulled the father against the waist-high wall. His body became an anchor. Oleg then seemed to twist his upper body around and sit up in mid-air solely using the strength in his stomach muscles. Using his bound legs behind the father’s back as one belt of bone, he pulled himself forward and out of the wet, grey abyss. Long, sinewy arms whipped the air and knocked the father away from the wall, the metal cuffs splitting his lips.

  As the father’s vision settled, he found himself staring at the concrete ceiling. A yellow light flickered as if trying to revive his blunted consciousness. A tone hummed deep inside his ears. Dripping from the bottom lip, he tried to speak, but only gargled. He needed to convince himself that what now sat before him, with its back against the wall, was even human. He had never been struck so hard before. And Oleg Chorny had managed to swivel his thighs between the father’s arms, wrap his lower legs around the father’s waist, and pull himself back to the wall that he’d been draped over. He’d struck the father, before dropping to a crouch in one quick, fluid motion. A man who had seemed close to death had done this as if he were some acrobat or escapologist; a man reported dead two years gone, and a man whose ankles and wrists were still secured with steel cuffs.

  The father made to stand, fumbling for the handgun in his pocket. Oleg stood too, poised like a perfectly balanced corpse-dancer, and looked out, distractedly, into the town. ‘We go to Yonah. Enough of this bullshit. We go to Yonah, or you never see your daughter again.’

  ‘Yonah is dead.’

  Oleg’s attention returned to him. The red eyes narrowed.

  ‘I killed him.’

  ‘You?’ This was said with contemptuous disbelief.

  The father nodded. ‘After he gave me you, I killed him.’

  ‘He gave you . . . Yonah would not speak, unless . . .’

  ‘I shot him. His knee caps. But I believe it was my threat to kill his father that broke him.’

  Oleg’s long fingers traced the contours of his inked skull. ‘The mad old bastard? He is still alive? Maybe that would have done it. Not the knees.’ He raised his chin and blinked at the tears filming his big eyes. ‘Yonah, Yonah, Yonah. It was you?’

  ‘You knew I was coming for you. You knew that I was killing to find you. You painted me onto that bloody wall. You say I have made . . . these signs. But you did not know that you, and your partner, were betrayed by your own boss? You’re not much of a seer.’

  Oleg’s thoughts drifted for a while and his eyes became near-vacant. ‘I looked for Simmy. I went to hellmouth. You can’t imagine . . . But the pit has no specific answers. It’s not like that. And who could ever take Simmy down on their own? Such a man you have never known.’ Oleg slapped his own head. ‘I once considered Yonah as the culprit, but I decided this is not possible for Yonah. Simmy would have been warned first, by friends. He had more friends than Yonah ever did.’

  The father dabbed his numb mouth with his sleeve. ‘You want me to believe that you have some special relationship . . . with some thing, this afterdeath, just like all the nut-job evangelists and prophets? You think you’re special? You bore me rigid. A demon, was it, that made you abduct a child? So you tell me now. You tell me everything right now, or you die. I swear that you will die here.’

  Oleg shrugged. ‘You confuse what I have told you about with . . . with an intelligence you would recognize. There is no negotiation with afterdeath. No favours. I have spent many years looking to find this out. There are only visions in the great chaos that are similar to what is upon my walls. Pictures of what has gone and will come. But eventually it is possible to find a patron out there.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  Oleg ignored him as if he were tired of the father. ‘Simmy looked for this place first, afterdeath. He was the artist who tutored me. He was the seer. He knew there were guides for us, patrons over there, that we could . . . follow. He knew that we could always be together, and over there too, after this life. And something he found . . . that we found, we offered to and it came closer to us. It came to us as we made more and more of our own chaos. It found us through our signs, the ones we made in the ritual. You would not understand . . .’ Oleg shrugged. ‘How could you? Only we, and those seers before us, will ever know about what is so near and what can be beckoned closer. You think this is something that can speak, or be understood, or controlled by something as pitiful as us? We are dust. Dust that seeped through a crack, dust that soon gets swept back to what we all came out of.’

  ‘Enough, enough of the bullshit. I’m warning you! My daughter . . .’

  ‘Her? You ask me for only a tiny piece of the great truth, because you have no interest in the whole picture. You lack the mind, even now. You can’t understand that what gave life to us, here, that tears itself into blood and flesh, only waits, impatient, for us to return to the terrible passage. We are of it. We are small parts of something that spread into a multitude, here. There is no time over there, no space. And we are all nobody here. Here, is nothing.’ Oleg seemed to believe his own delusions. And, as was customary when faced with insanity, the father felt uncomfortable, tired, and strangely solemn.

  Chorny was not reading his signals and was again ignoring the gun pointed at his face. ‘We made our patterns in blood, can you not see, Simmy and me? We made our signs in a ritual that could truly be seen in another place, bright enough to be seen by a patron. It was all part of Simmy’s bait, the ritual. And between the signs we became stuck. Every time we slept, we saw how badly. We saw his end. Yes, and we tried to alter it. But what was seen was inevitable once it all began. I saw my own nemesis in the dark too, you. All I knew was that my final hour was tied to Simmy, and to something we had done to someone. To your daughter, it now seems.’

  Oleg leaned forward, his eyes bulging, the most excited the father had ever seen him. ‘And when you have acquired the vision, of what came before and what comes after, you see the other things in afterdeath, traces . . . bloodless shadows, those already over there, the long-returned. Patrons. Who knows their origins? They are so old. But they see and they can leak between the right signs if they are made in the right sequence. We glimpsed them many times, and we learned that death is the only thing that gives life meaning. This!’ He looked up and around himself as if to encompass the entire world. ‘This life will soon be only a culture of death, all that we can expect or will ever see again. Soon. Our reign is brief and we must go back to what we came out of.

  ‘For the next part, for the return to afterdeath, we decided it was best to be aware over there, to frequent the court of a patron, and to remain together, while all others find blindness and oblivion.’

  ‘There is nothing else but this world. And you were the cause of this world, and the consequence.’

  Oleg shrugged. ‘You have no idea, father. If only you could see. La mort, the finality, the endless distance. This world is one spark in darkness forever. It has only ever been this way. But we found something . . . in this dark. Truly. Something too great for us to know, to understand. Something that does not care for us, for anyone, but it felt our vibrations, our antics, at the mouth of the terrible passage that we looked inside. Simmy lured it from the darkest pit.’ Oleg paused to spit, nodding at the father. ‘And you, you stepped between the signs, our signs. The hole that we could see through, the one that we made. And the one that I have used again and again to look for Simmy over there. We pulled you in because you . . . You would be a part of our deaths. His, then mine. But we did not know who you were, or how you were connected to our destruction, or from what deed of ours you came to be linked to us.’ Oleg dropped
his head, as if his task was futile. In a quieter voice he said, ‘Don’t you see, ours was the experiment the scientist loses control of, and there were consequences. I can’t explain it to you in another way. I always prefer to paint it.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘I am contagious, Red Father. There is an awareness of me, over there. I wanted this observer to be Simmy. It was not. But it is the one, I am sure, with whom Simmy keeps company now. A patron. If this is so, my love is not lost to me yet.’ His sincerity was more unnerving than the preposterous claims the father mostly failed to grasp.

  The father spat more blood from his mouth. ‘This? This is what drives you to kill, and to take a child? This black magic bullshit?’

  Insensitive to insult, Oleg turned his hairless head to stare blankly at the lightless office building opposite the car park. He spoke wearily, and more to himself than to the disappointing presence of another unbeliever. ‘Afterdeath is eternal. It is terror sublime forever. Maybe death itself. We don’t know. Part of a god? Or just the absent dreams of something else, from another place. And it is none of these things. No one can see a face that is not there. Nemo deum vidit: nobody has seen God. It is . . . ineffable. Unlike anything. But close to here. So big, everywhere, just outside this . . . Closer, and closer now comes the great dark flow.’ Oleg looked at the father as if he were looking at a child. ‘People always sense this presence and call it lots of things. Devil. God. Instinct. Imagination. Maybe you do too. But the true source is closer than it has ever been, because never has so much been ready to travel through the terrible passage.

  ‘This place brushes our minds, but comes no further. When it is close, ordinary things start to have meanings they did not have before.’ Oleg’s reedy voice slowed, as if in some final, hopeless confessionary moment. ‘Dreams, they scrape it. Dreams that make you terrified of falling. The dreams when you sink and cannot move. You scream, you panic, but still you sink. Terror in sleep is the opening of the terrible passage. Hellmouth.