Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  ‘It is why we came to the chapel, the abattoir. People prayed to what they could not understand. Their minds were too small and already too full. But they had faith. People had prayed and begged for mercy in there, where so many animals were killed. Thousands. All of them together. Crowded, frightened, for years. They lived in fear, like we do. Their heads were smashed, their throats cut. Chaos was there, the great unreason, the beginning of the opening, and the place was made special. The walls were worn thinner in a place of such horrid light. Thin enough for Simmy’s magic. Thin walls between places, between here and there, the other place that is coming closer, to swallow us.’

  Oleg grinned, as if recounting some great accomplishment. ‘We evoked a glimpse, with our intensity, the force in us. We made such magic, you cannot know, you cannot believe it. We made such drugs to unbind us. We made sacrifices and we prepared ourselves. We went far, me and my Simmy, deep. Little holes we made for our dreams to fall through. Dreams that were eyes. And only in them did I see you burn your way towards me with a message, because of something we had done. Something me and Simmy had done in our fury. The great mistake, we called it, which meant we had to go before we wished to, before we were ready. In our time, we have been responsible for so much’ – he paused to smile – ‘suffering. So I only came back from time to time. Awoke, now and again, because I could not find him out there. I still cannot find him . . . but maybe you, the Red Father, could tell me why he had to go, so soon. Could tell me who initiated the hour of his death. And when he is avenged, maybe he will come close to me again. Maybe he will see the fire of my vengeance. This is how the confinement of a ritual works.’

  Oleg turned his head so quickly, the father flinched. Chorny’s yellowing eyes widened, and his head slid from side to side as if it were mounted upon the trunk of a serpent. ‘So I waited to speak with you, and it was all because of a girl. The little girl! After all that we did, that is the reason that a great seer was lost . . .’ He shrugged as if astounded that such a trifle should have been his undoing. ‘But I have come to know that I am dealing with a man who is burned by such rage, strangled by such guilt, that he makes powerful signs between our own signs. You, the hour of my death, I have seen you coming towards me for two years, and so has another . . . You have joined the ritual.’

  The father stiffened, reminded of the expressionist image of himself on the black wall outside the vestry, and of what had billowed upon the ceiling: the possibility of its existence took his breath away. ‘You were dead. Yonah’s men found you. You were dead. Under that church. They wouldn’t have made a mistake.’

  Oleg nodded. ‘Without my eyes I saw a dead man die. After his death he was not dead. Still he lives and yet he is dead. All this after death I see.’

  ‘You want me to believe that you were dead?’

  ‘There are places between here and there that do not observe such distinctions. Has this not always been so? I am a simple reader of the dark, Red Father.’

  ‘Shut up!’ The man was an illusionist who’d somehow faked his own death. Faith healers, prophets, evangelists, the world was strewn with tricksters, now that hope was dying. ‘Your junkie disciples put you underneath that place, and you played dead.’

  ‘The office of the dead. I asked to be laid down, for sure, facing east, beneath the altar. I told those who were around me that I wanted no lamentation. If I sank away, I would lie upon the ground like a beast, like a pauper. I was untouchable, as it should be. At the end we are all the same, we are nihil, we are nemo. I asked those who followed me for one last act of devotion, that they wrap me in a shroud and leave me in the crypt. These preparations always achieved results. Is the grave not closer to hell? And under that place I have journeyed far to find Simmy, that is all.’ Oleg paused to wince. ‘I saw things you cannot imagine. But what little I could remember when I returned, I painted . . . including the patron, our guide, who has followed the trail of our signs. My signs and Simmy’s, and yours too, Red Father. Your offerings were delicious to it, and you have become its servant also, blind though you are. And so, here we are.’

  ‘You’re full of shit.’

  Oleg humoured him with a smile. ‘You too, I think? Mmm, you’ve seen the things that wait for us, what we stirred up. Maybe you have glimpsed it too. Bad dreams, Red Father? It clings because you have been noticed, through me. Our journeys are visible in another place. Do not fool yourself about this a moment longer, Red Father. And your daughter’s sign burned so brightly. Simmy knew the energy around her would be strong if we took her. It dragged you in, and you are so close to her now.’

  The father was on his feet. Yonah Abergil’s handgun was in his fist. The sights wavered over the skull before him.

  ‘I am very sorry to get you mixed up in this, Red Father, but at least you can get your daughter back, for a while, I think, if it means so much to you . . . but only if you don’t squeeze the trigger.’

  The father thought he said ‘What?’ but wasn’t sure he had even spoken.

  ‘You want to know who has your daughter? I will tell you. A woman has her. A woman paid Yonah to take her. And Yonah paid Simmy to make the snatch. Simmy asked me to drive. We did everything together.’

  For a few seconds the father did not understand what the man had just said, could not interpret it, but then the final part echoed between his ears. He comprehended that there had been the words: A woman has her. ‘Who?’ He had to swallow to repeat the question. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘Through the fat larva that was Abergil, it seems the same bitch who has your girl had my Simmy killed too. This is of great concern to me.’

  The father became frantic. ‘What woman?’ He moved towards Oleg.

  ‘She had no children. And she wanted yours. She wanted a child, but she wanted to make you suffer too. You and your wife. Oh, she was bitter. In this work there was revenge, and madness. I think maybe that also made the ritual so much more than we could control.’ Again, the nonchalant shrug. ‘I will tell you her name, and then you will give me my drugs. I am not feeling well. To go between there and here so much, it takes a toll. And the boot? There will be no more of that.’

  ‘Tell me.’ The father could barely speak. ‘You know where she was taken. Tell me where she was taken.’

  Oleg nodded, and smiled wistfully as if recalling good times.

  ‘Tell me!’

  Oleg raised his claws and spread his talons to appeal for calm. ‘In a place by Swindon, there was a car waiting for us and our little passenger. We tagged her clothes.’

  ‘The girl, she was put in a second car?’

  The skull nodded, its lungs rasped. The father turned away to escape the spray teeming with bacteria that erupted from the grey-stubbed mouth.

  ‘The second car. Where did it go?’

  Oleg recovered. ‘We use our navigation and we followed the next car until it stopped for a security check in . . . some place . . . in, in Wroughton, yes, Wroughton. By the forest, the New Forest. The car was not searched. The security waved it through. So we knew this car belonged to someone. Someone important.’

  The figure swallowed, wheezed and took in more air. He spat blood onto the cement. ‘This car finally stops and we have the location, so we went in on foot, through all of the lovely trees. And we found a most magnificent house, big. Then we found out who lived there. This was a woman’s house. A very rich woman, so Simmy thought we might visit her again one day.’

  It made sense, horrible sense, like everything else these dreadful creatures did. They would steal a child to order, but they would want to know where the captive was taken; they would want to know everything about a person with whom they did their foul business, like a woman who had enough money to pay for the abduction of a child; the child of a nobody. Because such a paymaster could also pay them more at a later date, or she could be beheaded and shuffled deep beneath the cold earth.

  The father barely heard himself speak above the pressure pulsing between his ears, behind his eyes, a
nd bass-thumping his chest. The anticipation of the final details was near-erotic. ‘Her name. Who? Who is she? What is her name?’

  ‘My drugs first.’ Oleg snapped two long fingers in the air. ‘I want them now.’

  The father moved, but felt as if he was wading through water to retrieve the man’s stash.

  ‘And the bitch you seek belongs to me. I will kill this woman. Those are my terms.’ The bony wreckage spoke matter-of-factly, smiling all the while, as if the grief he had experienced on learning of his lover’s betrayers had vanished.

  The father stuffed the bag of paraphernalia into Oleg’s clawing fingers. ‘Her name? The name!’

  ‘You give me your word first that I can kill the bitch who paid for Simmy to die?’

  ‘I give you my word.’ For this last piece of information, he knew he would do whatever was necessary, to anyone, anywhere. He’d make a pact with any devil. And according to this criminal, his daughter was alive. If a woman had paid for his daughter, then his daughter may not have been taken for human horrors from which there could be no recovery. His little girl may not have been abducted for the worst act a human being could commit: the rape and murder of a child. A concept forbidden from the father’s thoughts, which appeared only in the nightmares that had always made him want to die.

  If Oleg Chorny was telling the truth, then she might well have been stolen from her parents to live another life. He and his wife had once prayed together that this was so. For many months after his daughter had been taken, he would imagine this very scenario so that he could fall asleep with tears of joy in his eyes. To know that she was alive somewhere, and not hurt, had been the greatest mercy imaginable for the last two years.

  Oleg closed his eyes. ‘The woman’s name is Karen Perucchi.’

  Disbelief was followed by sickening jolts of acceptance, and the father sagged to his knees.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Oleg slumped upon the back seat, his head back and eyelids trembling, mouth agape and his ridged throat exposed. The father stared through the windscreen, without seeing much. Just as preoccupied as the intoxicated figure in the rear, he swept his memory backwards, and into a minor episode of his past; a regrettable experience that had suddenly, and traumatically, devoured the present.

  When the father first met Karen Perucchi, a few years after the final collapse of global food exports, she had been the CEO of the Open Arms charity. And long before then, there were water-cooler rumours about her organization.

  They discovered each other at a conference held during a lengthy period of looping discussions about agricultural capacity in the United Kingdom. Talks in which it was impossible to discuss the matter of food self-sufficiency without finally acknowledging the end of food aid to Africa, Asia and the Middle East; a common dilemma in a Europe swelling with refugees.

  Word on the logistics vine implicated Open Arms in embezzling billions of euros in food aid. As the prices in international food markets last-gasped at stratospheric highs, Perucchi’s Open Arms was one of many organizations suspected of an enterprising repackaging and selling of foodstuffs, and medicines, at inflated prices, to countries fatally stricken by drought and famine.

  Even on a transparent legal basis, no more than a fraction of her organization’s revenue had ever reached the starving. Plenty of NGOs and charities were caught with their snouts in a diminishing trough, as public sympathy peaked during successive Chinese, African and Central American famines. But what little had been reaching the needy had clearly been too much for Perucchi and her corporate peers. As had been the case with many of the crisis enterprises, as soon as large sums of money became involved in addressing the catastrophic effects of runaway climate change twinned with overpopulation that had followed centuries of environmental vandalism, the unscrupulous in the higher latitudes initiated one last freeboot, before the world they knew vanished forever.

  As shortages became critical in territories stricken by drought, and governments collapsed, black markets empowered organized criminal franchises, armed militias, and even legitimate armed forces, who took control of all aid and relief operations, from warehousing to distribution. Eventually, as most financial donations and every case of food aid were seized by criminals or political rebels, first-world contributions to the beleaguered masses carpeting the planet were consigned to the past. A dismal end to global interaction.

  During their affair, he’d learned that she’d also siphoned off a cut of her organization’s considerable funds into an eye-watering salary for Open Arms’s senior executives. And had done so for years. So high had she soared into the troposphere of the highest earners across successive years that she had, in effect, become untouchable in the eyes of the law. In his lifetime, the father had never met anyone else as privately wealthy as Karen Perucchi.

  Even though his association with her was relatively brief, he’d quickly identified an equivalence in the fear and sycophancy that she inspired in those around her; the two key human responses that orbit affluence. After five months of inconsistent and difficult relations, he’d wanted Karen to leave him alone forever, going to great lengths to extract any trace of himself from her determined radar.

  But despite repressing Karen Perucchi in his memory, he now had to accept the incredible: this former lover had subsequently ruined the lives of his family.

  Way back then, his abstinence, self-control and caution had always been compromised when he was on the road, and when he first caught Karen’s lacquered eye at the conference, he’d held her fixed, unsmiling stare, and transmitted that near-imperceptible flicker of desire back to her, then looked away. And that was the moment, the very first moment that had delivered him here: a ruined man, a killer, sat in a stolen car with a rucksack full of guns, while a drug addict and kidnapper shot up in the rear seats.

  An old girlfriend. Her. Impossibly, it was her.

  In the conference hall, his eyes had returned to Karen’s face a few seconds later and she had noticed him too. The come hither exchange in the auditorium had not been planned. When her attention fell upon the third row of the conference hall, in which he sat, all of his instincts had screamed for him to lower his face. But unsuitability charged with danger had often made women attractive to him, until he met his wife. He’d eventually figured out that a reciprocation of risky sensual possibilities was a kind of mirror that served to confirm his own desirability to women. It had not taken a therapist to make him acknowledge this. An insatiate narcissism had trapped him as an adolescent gazer into reflections, following him out of youth, and had demanded that he test himself with a giantess of the business world that day; a woman elevated by an intimidating reputation far beyond his own rung of the career ladder.

  At the time he was a single and recklessly promiscuous man; in one of his phases, usually followed by a retreat into monogamy. But during his predatory periods, his desire to seduce, to encounter novelty, to perpetually rediscover anticipation and satisfaction, would consume him after a few drinks. The same compulsion had driven him through his twenties. Back then, he’d been popular, but commitment cautious; a bad bet, but illogically irresistible to some women, and often the naive or damaged. He’d been frightened by the need of several women to possess him entirely, but unable to change his habits. When half cut, he hummed with an erotic electricity before he was fully aware of what he was doing.

  Through the long working hours and the miles travelled, he’d even seduced colleagues, at least five, including an ill-advised digression with his last boss, Diane Brown. An entanglement that Diane had possessed the sense to kill quickly. Sleeping with her a few times, whilst knowing that passion might flare between them in the future, had been sufficient. Ideal, in fact. That was how he’d rolled.

  He had met his wife just over a year after Karen: ending an anxious time that seemed to cure him of his incautious fixations. Coming together and then settling down with Miranda had been motivated, in part, by the shock of Ms Perucchi. He’d never denied it, and he had su
bsequently buried the memory of Karen.

  Back at the conference, he’d spoken well in his keynote speech and Karen’s attentions had grown by the second day. She appeared to circle him, incrementally drawing nearer, and he’d toyed with what he assumed was her yearning for flattery. On the final day of the conference, he arranged to be near where she would be talking to the Swiss trade consulate. Nothing more had been required of him: exchanged glances and a physical placement beside her. She’d taken it from there.

  The suddenness of her vast presence all about him had led to a vertigo that was both unpleasant and perversely narcotic. And he’d engaged in something he wasn’t sure about, with someone despicable, and even more so than himself, though in a different way. He’d still pursued ideas of social justice, fairness, of egalitarian systems, during the greatest perils ever visited upon civilization. He’d opposed the final disastrous stages of economic inequality and the tax arrangements of the wealthy, though to no end. Karen more or less stood for everything he hated and blamed for worsening the crisis, so he’d known all along that he was seducing a devil. But there was no place for reason in his love life, and his curiosity about Karen was never going to be anything but self-destructive; he’d even recognized this at the time, but had never fathomed just how devastating the consequences of his compulsion would be, until now, and she’d comprehensively destroyed his world.

  Making Karen laugh had been too easy, and he’d not been able to restrain himself as they’d flirted. Nor could he cap his brazen and superficial charm. His superficial charisma had resonated and gleamed brighter than ever before. He’d felt guided. Messages were sent within the hotel, mostly from her to him. Blinded by the attention, the possible professional advantages from the connection, and the sudden dysfunctional urge to bed a powerful woman, he’d accepted an invitation to drinks after her final engagements, during the dying hours of the conference.