Lost Girl (36 page)

He’d vowed to never repeat the experience with the powerful, the unstable, or the powerfully unstable, and eventually he stopped flinching when his screens chimed. In time, and after other
quick affairs, culminating in the courtship of his future wife, he mostly forgot about the unfortunate interlude. Within his wife’s deep-seated gentleness and grace he’d sensed a
merciful release from himself. His secret suspicion that he was condemned to forever repeat his compulsive, inebriated seductions, seemed to pass. He married and had one child, believing his
marriage and daughter had saved him.

But he’d fooled himself, and knew he’d begun to feel the destructive, libidinous demon revive inside him, around the time his daughter turned four.
It
had wanted to come out
of retirement. And he’d slipped, but only once; the affair was never consummated, but he’d been preparing the ground the afternoon his daughter was abducted. Those messages alone had
been enough for him to lose everything. They had distracted him, and his daughter had been stolen.

He no longer knew who was most to blame for her abduction: Oleg Chorny, Karen Perucchi, or himself. He didn’t know who should be shot between the legs and left to bleed out in a ditch.

The breaking news intruded into his thoughts. He stared at the screen vacuously.

Washington, Moscow, Beijing and the UN have all appealed to Islamabad and New Delhi to exercise restraint and prevent further escalation in Kashmir
.

A voice from the back seat. ‘You still watch this? Why?’

The father grimaced. ‘You’re not interested in the opportunities it presents to you? The shortages your kind can exploit, the destitute that you can run as slaves or
whores?’

‘I am retired. I have learned to pursue less worldly matters.’

‘Your visions? Graffiti daubed on walls?’

‘I think you are being facetious. I do not respond well to the facetious.’

The father ignored his captive and sank again into his wretched and morbid reverie. Karen had clearly not been able to forget him, and she must have studied his life from afar before she made
her own move. Tracked him, perhaps, his fortunes, movements, his marriage to a younger woman, and all from a safe distance. And in the intervening gap, the world had become a different one; the
people different. Rules and boundaries were always changing. Ways of enforcing the older rules were decaying. Everything was on fast-forward now.

He wondered whether memories of the distant affair, and the woman’s psychosis, should have mattered more to him after his daughter was taken. Had the spectre of Karen Perucchi appeared in
the long interrogation of his soul, when his guesses about why his daughter was abducted veered from the ludicrous to the unbearable? Once or twice, he seemed to recall, but Karen had never been a
true suspect because Karen had not been the first. He’d been through similar bad scenes with at least four other women before her. Borderline stalkings, and one fist fight that he’d
lost to a man who punished him on behalf of a very disappointed woman in France. And the father had simply been unable to suspect a woman of such a crime. He knew of no precedents.

But his rejection had been sufficient cause for Karen to abduct his child. Karen’s fury at his choice of a younger woman, and at his wife’s subsequent fertility, must have been
incandescent. And neither could Karen have expected that anyone would suspect her. She’d even paid Yonah Abergil to kill the abductors, and she’d nearly got away with it. Only a
painted, drug-addled corpse had somehow survived the purge, by playing dead under a hideous chapel. And Oleg’s presence troubled him more than he wanted to admit.

His captive smiled at him now, the azure- and gold-inked shoulders spiking out of the blanket on the rear seat, the reptilian mouth seeming to recognize the father’s acknowledgement of
such terrible truths.

The father sought an escape from the yellow eyes within his preoccupations, and they were many. Why had Karen waited for so long, until his daughter was four? She’d waited years to avenge
herself.
So long?
There must have been a continuing slippage into a bitterness and resentment so vast and black, and endured amongst the worst kind of company, a criminal fraternity, until
she’d decided to steal a former lover’s only child. He had no other theory.

Without any help from the weather, the father felt colder than he had ever done in his life. Had he truly been a victim of a long, patient campaign driven by a scarred woman’s vengeance?
Maybe Karen was infertile? But the desire to wound and disable others on this scale, because of a trivial romantic disappointment, struck him as grotesque, ludicrous, spiteful, and hateful beyond
belief. The motivation seemed too monstrous, too fantastical, to unreal for credence. But when he, in turn, considered the dying world, and how his species turned upon itself daily, and what he had
done in the private homes of those he suspected of wronging him, then he had to accept that what Oleg Chorny had told him was possible.

Ultimately, his intuition failed. A sudden crime of passion was one thing, but to actually wait years to steal a man’s child was
inhuman
, and he didn’t know who, or what, he
was dealing with. Or what such a maniac might have done to his daughter subsequently. Had she . . . would she have killed . . . or had his daughter killed?

Killed. Sold. Transported
.

Those seemed the most likely options.

Or would she have kept her? To gloat and prolong her revenge by plunging him and his wife into abject despair and desolation, since they had both wronged her by defying her? Satanic. Is that
where society was now? A place where the most affluent, using their affiliates in organized gangs, abducted the children of private citizens over slights, while the authorities would no longer
properly investigate their crimes?

Inside the car, the father bent double and spat sour saliva from a drying mouth. Straightening up, he caught Oleg’s idiotic, beatific grin as the drug continued to course through the
man’s veins. The insolent levity had gone from his eyes, as if he were now losing patience with the father. This powerless man, cuffed at wrist and ankle, who had done so much damage, had the
temerity to mock him.

As if walls of bronze inside his mind were suddenly beaten by red tongues of fire, and reflective depths flickered with the deep blood of a voracious sun, the father was consumed by rage,
charred by a loathing for himself. He produced the handgun, turned sharply, and reached into the rear of the car. He forced the weapon inside his captive’s mouth. Not pulling the trigger
might have been the hardest thing he had achieved in his life. It had come down to the gun going inside Oleg’s mouth or his own.

There has been a continuation of fierce artillery and mortar exchanges. Within the last twelve hours the British and United States governments have urged all remaining citizens to leave
India and Pakistan immediately. Diplomatic and aid agency personnel have been evacuated
.

The father withdrew the weapon from the King’s mouth. Oleg spat blood onto his blanket, then grinned anew, and the father recognized that Oleg knew a great deal more about the situation
than he had shared.

The father unlocked his door and made ready to get out, to make the call he dreaded with every vibrating atom of his being, and had postponed for hours: to the old accounts that Scarlett
Johansson and the police detective had given him. He needed to face up to what had been done to Miranda. Oleg seemed to read his intentions, even before he had them. ‘Maybe your wife is
already dead. Why confirm it now? But the girl, your daughter, I think we can save.’

The father never opened the car door. Instead, the blood leaked from his heart to leave him cold and unable to move. The very air seemed to darken around his head.

Oleg spoke quietly, reassuringly, as if to a child. ‘As you suspect, they are confident that they will catch you. There will be a message from your wife too, but I do not think you should
look at it. They wish to destroy you, even before they kill you. This is how King Death works. This is how terror works.’ Oleg nodded at the screen and the news from India. It was now being
cut again with rival stories about the pandemic. ‘We waste time. Soon there will be greater shocks that will make the world stand still, and even the Kings will take their eyes from you. Here
is a pause that you must take advantage of. Soon, even this war will be insignificant. Something worse is already here.
Again
.’

The father stared at Oleg, dumbfounded, and only half-registering the coloured skull’s prophetic assurances. ‘All that will happen next I have seen in other forms, in another place.
Many are going to afterdeath. So many, you can’t believe. You suspect this. You feel it build. If we know this now, then we are the kings in this life today.’

‘Cut the mystical crap.’

‘Quarantines and closed roads will not favour a man who flees with a child he has stolen.’

‘Let’s keep our communication right around there.’ What other news there was originated from outside hospitals within various parts of the UK. Patients and medical staff were
dying in increasing numbers, but only a few hundred so far, in the south-east, London, the Home Counties, Oxfordshire, as well as the Midlands. But a pattern of red dots was growing across the map
of a country still reeling from the devastation of the summer heatwave.

Oleg would not be curbed. ‘There is no last judgement, but there is resurrection in a new form, amongst horrors and in chaos. Simmy and I learned this. We prepared for this. And now I am
almost ready to call upon our patron again, one final time, and to embrace the mad court. I believe Simmy dances there, while waiting for me. But there is something I must do first, and you have
told me what it is.’

‘What are you fucking talking about? Save the horse-shit. I need to think.’

‘I tell you this because you need to hear it. There is a
witness
to my final trajectory, and yours too . . .’

‘What? You think I’ll buy this crap about a . . . this bullshit. A patron?’

‘
Nemo deum vidit
. Nobody has seen God. I already tell you I don’t know what it is. I am too small to know. But death is not
terminus
, it is
transitus
. And
the cosmos is full of great beasts. I have passed by dragons. I get too close and they fill my dreams with hell. You have seen this on my walls and in your sleep. And
they
are drawn to our
hell. We who are confined by signs see it first. What you see on my walls is coming. We are both trapped inside Simmy’s ritual. Unless I make a final sign, you may never be
released.’

‘There are no signs. No patrons. There are only despicable and revolting people, like you and the bastard you loved, and Karen Perucchi, who stole a child and ruined lives.’

‘Ha! It is always easier to deny than accept. But see it another way. Greed and arrogant power made us snatch your girl. That was the first sign in Simmy’s ritual. Jealousy and
revenge made a woman steal her. Pain and terror released my name from a devil’s lips and it fell upon your ears. Your rage and your guilt made you a killer. Am I right? These were the greater
parts of us. Our power. They were the brightest lights in the window that Simmy had opened to find a patron. His ritual created the chain of reaction, and this has lit so many lights in the other
place, where he is. When you crossed my path, your rage opened you to me, joined you to
it
, the patron that is so close, and it brought us to this, here. It was all inevitable. You came
within the confinement, and now we are bound to each other. How else did I see you coming?’

‘You want to die. You are ready to die. You said so. And you know I am happy to oblige you, so why would you help me, if that’s even what you are suggesting?’

‘We are pushed together, closer, the remaining players. Two of them must work together to finish this ritual, what Simmy began.
Us
. We each have business in the same place. You
seek the lost object of your desire, but you are in the crypt. I am only offering you the stairs to lead you out. I only want the head of Medusa. The one who paid the devil, Abergil, to kill Simmy.
I believe he and I can find each other again if we make this final sign. There are . . . connections that you cannot understand. But you must be my mirror, Red Father. It is all I have lingered
for, you, the messenger. You have delivered your message, so now I tell you where we go, so that we can close this circle and sever ourselves from this woman that binds us together. The one who has
destroyed us. We are both guided on this journey, make no mistake. And we too will be severed from each other, broken from our connections, when we make a great light together. Simmy wants me to
finish this way, with blood, so that he can find me. I can sense this. Her death will be like a star to him, and will draw to me the company that he now keeps.’

‘Jesus wept. If you say one more word about this bloody—’

‘So, Red Father, listen to me carefully and I will tell you where to go. To the place where you will find your daughter.’

As the sodden and blustery afternoon turned to dusk, the father found a place in the trees, just outside the security fence, offering a partial view of Karen Perucchi’s
house. And judging by how long it had taken him to find the fence, only to then be confronted by the size of the property, he knew he wasn’t supposed to see this. No one was. An essential
part of maintaining an affluent lifestyle was now dependent upon concealing it. The survival of the rich was becoming contingent on their ability to hide wealth and remove themselves from public
life. Years of riots and home invasions had given rise to permission for affluent communities to defend themselves too; conflicts had left hundreds of looters and trespassers dead. The suspected
summary executions of thieves had failed to reach a court in years. The country was way beyond all of that now. Knowledge that made the father feel sicker and weaker as he lay in the wet soil like
a tired animal.