Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  They passed many elegant rooms in the concourse of the wing closest to the garage. His daughter had run in the opposite direction so the bedrooms would probably be on the other side of the building. And in their beautiful home, Richard and Karen must have thought they were about to inherit the world after the ‘dieback’, after the ‘sudden depopulation’, and whatever other strategic terms Richard used to encompass the coming and incalculable horrors awaiting the condemned. The couple had thought they would wait it all out, in here, with someone else’s child. Yet this was no longer a home, but a long scaffold.

  One room in the utility and recreation wing featured a white baby grand piano. Another was filled with many colourful toys, an indoor slide, and a vast hammock that his daughter must have swung upon. The father looked through a window and into the rear of the grounds, and saw an adventure playground out there, the size of a small house, that resembled a fort, all made from hardwoods. There were two guest rooms with en-suite bathrooms that put to shame those in the best hotels he’d visited many years before. A library with real books had been installed, a vintage cinema, and a stainless-steel kitchen the size of the entire floor of his old family home, equipped with a walk-in freezer. The air throughout was filtered and kept constant by the house’s computer, which provided information via discreet screens, placed at intervals along the corridor. All of this had come from intercepting money allocated to the starving.

  When they reached the end of the curved wing, Richard unlocked a door using a keypad: a storeroom. And the father was soon staring at enough packaged food to sustain three people for years. He had never seen so much wine stored in one place either.

  ‘The drug.’ Oleg pushed the gun into the back of their prisoner’s perfectly cut hair. Richard turned and looked at the father. ‘I, I, I didn’t take her. Please . . . You know this.’

  Oleg finished the fifth injection in the father’s abdomen, his long bony fingers working gently, expertly, feather-light, upon the skin. Nearby, Richard sobbed as he packed bales of cash into two leather bags. Oleg had made him open the safe. In the father’s pocket nestled the address of Karen’s barrister, and the address of his chambers; and perhaps the final link to the abduction.

  ‘You must “do” this one,’ Oleg whispered to the father as he removed the applicator and dabbed cotton wool upon the puncture. ‘The terrible passage yawns for such a fool.’ The remark made the father suffer another chilling suspicion they were about to perform a sacrifice, so that something beyond his comprehension could open, or at least be accessed in a bewildering but terrifying manner. The very idea was incredible enough to both frighten him and make him feel ridiculous. But he nodded his agreement.

  Oleg grinned. ‘He’s getting on my nerves. He’s no more use to us. And you don’t need reminding how it works in this fucking world. Never hesitate, Red Father.’

  ‘How do we know this is the right drug?’

  Oleg glanced at Richard, so busy upon the floor giving away his hoard. ‘He’s too scared to be clever. Trust me.’

  The father eyed the two leather bags at his feet, containing more money than he could earn in two lifetimes. He watched the money because he could not bear to see Richard call Karen on the intercom. ‘Darling, in a few minutes would you be so kind as to come to the living room. We’re all . . . good. Come alone please.’

  The father overheard Karen’s voice as she spoke to his daughter in a distant room. ‘Mummy’s popping out to see Richard. Can you be a good girl and stay here?’

  His daughter’s voice was audible, though not her exact words. She sounded happy, upbeat, slightly distracted. The floor of the father’s stomach dropped away.

  The world outside was blurred by the rain upon the long windows. The father dropped to a crouch and tried to swallow. The smell of the dead man’s clothes filled his mouth and nose and throat. Richard edged closer to the father to whisper, ‘You can take her. What belongs to you. I promise you, I swear on my life, that no one will come after you. Please. I had nothing to do with your daughter or your wife. Nothing. Please tell me that you understand?’

  Oleg placed his hand on Richard’s shoulder and nodded towards the corridor that led to the living room. ‘Maybe you need a drink, my friend. Come, come, relax.’ Glancing over Richard’s head, Oleg nodded at the father. The hard unequivocal expression in his eyes alone served to awaken the father’s fragile purpose.

  Back in the vast living area, the father took over the shepherding of Richard, and in a breathless voice asked him to stop beside the vast bar. He then moved to stand behind him. ‘Penny’s mother . . . She never came to terms with our daughter going missing. It broke her.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t look at me. I don’t want to see your face.’

  ‘Please!’

  The father gripped the man’s shoulder and made him look forward. ‘What Karen first brought into our lives two years ago has come back. And those men were going to behead my wife, Penny’s mother, in your home with your blessing. She would have died without knowing that her only child was alive. And even if they’d told her Penny was here, it would only have been to make her suffering worse.’

  ‘What could I do? Please. Please.’

  On the far side of the vast lounge, Karen clattered into the room in her high-heeled mules. The father heard her gasp.

  The gun went off in the father’s hand.

  Richard slid down the bar and his head smacked upon the marble floor. Melon thump. Rivulets of blood, tributaries of matter. The father did not look away soon enough. The bullet had taken away the roof of the man’s skull, and that flapped like a clod of turf.

  Karen screamed and tried to run from the living room. Oleg didn’t need to chase her. She fell over unassisted between two vast leather sofas. ‘You . . . you can have the vaccine too!’ she cried out from the floor. ‘There’s enough . . .’ She turned her attention to the father, still standing beside the bar, and near-screamed, ‘You can have it! You! You! I’ll get it for you!’

  Oleg crouched beside Karen and commenced stroking her hair. He muttered to her for a long time while she sobbed and, strangely, clutched his tattooed arm. With his other hand, he began cutting or stroking the air above his head, as if drawing invisible signs. Upon the wall behind him, the shadows cast by his thin limbs weaved and circled. The father looked away, and found a bottle of vintage rum, all the time keeping his back to the room and the people that were in it.

  ‘God no, God no, God no,’ Karen suddenly said aloud.

  ‘Come, come,’ Oleg murmured, and in the mirror between the optics the father saw a silvery suggestion of the man holding Karen by her arm. He pulled her weak and flopping body into a kneeling position. From his rucksack Oleg withdrew the machete that had been brought here to behead the father and the mother of a stolen child.

  The father watched the skeletal figure’s reflection as it straightened to what appeared to be an unnatural and freakish height in the mirror – a hairless, tattooed bone man, unnervingly straight-backed and agile, who looked no fitter or firmer than a corpse, but transformed here as if by hidden energies evoked by blood. And for a moment he believed in the nonsense of the addict, about the signs, the confinement between them, the patron . . . For the father, all was becoming too vivid within the space about them, too bright, supernormal.

  Upon the false mother this emissary of King Death turned, this thing in rags, who held a scythe above a dethroned queen, perversely suggesting the final act of a ritual: the throttling circle a vengeful father had been drawn into, baptized by his grief, by rage, which was now closing. In the silence, the only movement came from Oleg’s arm and the shadow signs upon the great white wall. And for a moment, the father could believe that a great worm had finally swallowed its tail and that all had come full circle.

  How could he reconcile his own dreams, the coincidences, the mosaics of surreal torments that he had witnessed, with reason? And right there and then he feared he truly had been touched
, or infected, by a patron from out of Oleg Chorny’s afterdeath, a presence ineffable, imminent, and not seen beyond dreams. Maybe the distance to another place, one beyond the world, had lessened again, as the addict had claimed. He didn’t know, nor would he ever, but such a thing suddenly seemed possible.

  The father twisted the cap off the rum bottle.

  He heard Oleg speak softly, near-musically: ‘L’Homme devant la mort,’ followed by a man’s name. ‘Semyon Sabinovic.’

  There followed a sound of a spade thrust deep into wet soil.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The father’s thoughts moved rapidly, then seemingly not at all. Around his head the stark, chic interior of the living room reflected what might have been his own nervy trauma, before amplifying it. Oleg’s voice drifted in and out of his mind. ‘. . . some sheets on this mess . . . these two go outside. Old times, Red Father, old times for you and I.’

  The father stared at the open door leading to the wing that housed his daughter’s room. Shouldn’t he be running down there to seize her, to hold her? But when Oleg dragged Richard’s motionless form away from his feet and out to the rear patio, he could only close his eyes and hold his own body upright by placing two hands upon the bar.

  ‘Go now,’ Oleg said from outside, ‘before she comes in here. Better if she never sees me. As wonderful as our friendship is, let’s not risk a squabble.’

  The father only half-heard the instructions, but enough to feel confident he understood. Such had been the shock and dreadful anticipation of his impending execution, he’d been left emotionally concussed, unable to identify a shred of satisfaction during the subsequent cull. One atrocity had bled into another. But he would feel something later. And there would be a later because Oleg had saved him and his wife, helped him recover Penny, and now seemed to be releasing him from a pact he’d never agreed to and didn’t even understand. A man he had wanted to kill so desperately for two years was dismissing him. And yet, in all that now impacted and blocked his struggle for comprehension, the father was becoming even surer that he was no longer in the presence of an actual man.

  He left the living area and walked down a corridor, half-lit by natural light and the dim glow of the blue panels beside the doors. Three-quarters of the way down, he came across a door covered in stickers. A sign in the middle of the wood, at a child’s eye level, indicated ‘Yasmin’s Room!’

  Removing his mask, he crouched as the strength deserted his legs. Covered his face with his hands and thought all the way back to their grief and shock that first afternoon when Penny was taken. He filled his mouth with the Balaclava’s salty fabric to stifle a sob and screwed his eyes shut. The revelation came harder and colder: they had both nearly died mere feet away from their daughter, and it seemed they had just evaded the cruellest of all the injustices. If he let out a cry, others would follow. He could not even begin to grieve for Scarlett and Gene, his guardian angels. This wretched life moved too quickly and forbade it.

  Attempting to gather his wits, and readying himself to look upon his daughter’s face, he realized he had never truly believed that he would stand outside any door with his daughter on the other side, save one inside a police station or a hospital morgue. But slowly, his sense of being bludgeoned by futility began to ease. The pressure weighing upon his heart, a pig-iron cage fitted too tightly, loosened. Hopelessness and loathing were slipping away. He wasn’t sure whether it was elation, shock, or even terror that inhabited the new space.

  Glancing down the corridor, he also considered what he and his daughter’s kidnapper had just done. So what would he tell his daughter about those people? How did he stop being the Red Father and become again the father she had once loved? ‘Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.’ The father’s hands trembled upon the wood.

  Beyond the closed door, small feet bumped rapidly towards where he knelt. ‘Who’s there? Richard?’ the little girl called out with delight. And before he had time to stand, the bedroom door was pulled open.

  FORTY

  He retained his retreat from the house only in fragments, punch-drunken memories. Later on, these moments appeared too vividly, yet out of sequence, pulling him back to another time and place: back to the terrible sweat that coated his entire body beneath someone else’s clothes, his heavy legs heaving through air thick and slowing, the wet sandbags of his lungs, the eternity of mowed lawn he laboured across to the car, pulling a child behind him, holding leather cases of money in the other hand.

  She didn’t remember him. His appearance had changed a great deal, and she had just turned four when she last saw him. Two years had been a third of her life, her permanent memory only beginning some time just before she was lost. Karen would have done everything possible to make her forget what she knew of her parents, and her other life.

  Other details from his escape from the house in the New Forest could appear at any time too, and often words he had thought forgotten.

  Where’s Mummy?

  We need to go now, quickly.

  Where’s Mummy? The voice warbling with impending tears.

  Penny’s smooth face had whited in panic, crumpled. She had started crying when he pulled her from the house, and the pieces of his long-broken heart had split further apart. He’d realized he was abducting his own child from what she knew as home, two years after she had been taken from him. He suspected that her old terrors from an afternoon on a distant front lawn in Torquay may have awoken right then.

  We have to leave for a while. It’s not safe for us to be here. Can you carry this bag? We have to go to the car.

  As they had turned, ungainly, him panting and her whimpering, into the living area, he remembered trying to block her view of the room with his body. She had looked down and seen sheets there and the girl had clearly but wordlessly wondered why so much bed linen was spread and crumpled over the floor of the place where she had played, so safe and warm, for two years. And then the father had seen Oleg.

  Before he had left the room to find his daughter, Oleg had been walking backwards, slowly, talking to himself, or at the sky, while dragging a body by its feet into the rear grounds. When the father returned with Penny, and tried to pass through the expansive white crescent of the living area, to reach the glass doors – by then clutching more than holding the girl’s hand and shepherding her before him, this small stranger who held the little bag into which they had shoved a few articles of clothing – Oleg was sitting down.

  Upright, his eyes wide and bright, he had selected one of the large white chairs beside the media centre. The man had been grinning, though it had taken the father a while to realize that Oleg could not see them. An exhausted applicator had lain unclutched in one upturned claw.

  The father had found the long silhouette of the man’s thin shape especially unappealing as it sat propped up like a cadaver unearthed in a tomb. But once he’d understood what unnerved him about that actual corner of the room, he’d stopped looking at it and begged the frightened girl to go outside with haste.

  Don’t look back. This way. This way. To the car.

  At any time later that night, and for many nights afterwards, yet more could feature upon the screens of his mind at any time, including those memories he could not trust.

  Cloud cover had only allowed sparse light into the open-plan centre of the building, so the cause of the motion around Oleg’s death seat could have been nothing more than the reflected arrangements of rain-black clouds in the sky outside. But beyond the lounge windows, as they staggered onto the patio circling the covered pool, the father suspected that day had already surrendered and that night had fallen. That was not possible as it was still not even noon.

  Another backward glance into the darkening room revealed in the far corner, upon one wall, a seemingly impossible unfurling of lightlessness, momentarily convincing the father that shadows were moving like water, except upwards from the floor, and perhaps surging too like a visible gas.

  The dark flow.

  He’d told himsel
f this effect was caused by the storm, because further up the white walls he could see the great shadows of the tree limbs from outside. It was unfortunate, because they too appeared to his frenzied mind as long arms, or even wings. Wind that had been inaudible inside the house was now gusting through the trees along the fence, and the movement of their branches was, of course, cast upon the walls behind Oleg’s chair. Shock and trauma were the only reasons the darkness had suggested facets of that loping king in rags, the one he had seen depicted in other places. The maelstrom of emotion that interfered with his breathing, and his very heartbeat, was worsening the effects of the wind-stirred tree shadows, and it was nothing more than that, or so he told himself for hours afterwards. But then the shadows and even the gloaming air had also seemed to expand on those interior walls and move not unlike a large octopus in inky water, before the shape flitted as fast as a black spider, disturbed from behind wet wood in a garden; up and across the ceiling it seemed to go and then away.

  To the car, the car, the car.

  The walls of the main building and garage became a cover he had then longed desperately for, as if he and the girl were small creatures, like mice, electric with panic, scampering beneath something vast enough to alter the air pressure, the very density of the atmosphere. And as this sensation spread out above them, it also suggested that they were cast under a dreadful scrutiny.

  A swoop of vertigo had discouraged him from looking up. He’d been convinced they could fall upwards, together, into the black sky, and just keep on going, gathering speed, until they were unable to breathe . . . until they came apart from each other and from themselves. He’d thought himself dreaming while awake.

  Mummy. My mummy.

  I can’t tell you now . . . I’ll explain . . . do you remember your old house, before you were here? The house on the hill.

  Mummy. Her crying, her crying and then him crying because she did not know him.