Lost Girl (31 page)

From the pocket of his jacket, the father fished out the photograph he had taken from Oleg’s shrine. Presented it to the skull-face that blinked in the rain. ‘Tell me where she
is.’

Oleg looked at it for a few seconds, intensely, and finally nodded. ‘That one.’ He nodded some more, appearing wistful, as if acknowledging a long-held but unconfirmed suspicion.
‘There were so many in those days. But I can see now that it was her that brought you to me. The father. A Red Father, yes. That would explain the rage, the grief, and the guilt.’ He
looked away, his face a committed grimace. ‘The death wish of mankind is the strangest urge, but the strongest, just as death is greater than life and love. It is a path you and I have both
followed, and so we are together now. But we have some way still to go, Red Father, to finish this.’

‘What did you call me?’

Towelling the rain from his scrawny torso, Oleg didn’t answer but said, ‘It is raining. Soon I will be wet again. Please.’ He pointed at his ankles then held up the
underwear.

‘You can die in the rain with a bare arse. You can lie in your own shit for all I care.’

Oleg looked at the gun pointed at his face. Jagged contours and thin skin refashioned themselves into a wistful sadness. ‘Before we begin, you must understand something: we are
nihil
. You and I. We are
nemo
.’

The father thought of the painting on the wall of a dead ogre’s cavern. ‘What?’

‘We are nothing. We are nobody. Only in death do we transcend. And it is better to know where it is that we will go. To the terrible passage. I have known this for a very long time. And I
am ready. ’Tis a good time for me. I am in contact with a patron, over there. But you? I don’t think so. You kill me and you are closer than you have ever been to the hour of your death
too. Without me, I think the part that you have played will end for you unsatisfactorily. Alas, and you are so close.’

‘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.

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 had 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
.