Lost Girl (44 page)

‘I shoot up with something nice myself too. And then we part ways.’ The man smiled, sadly, and he swept his gaze across the building and the pool. ‘I like this place. Once, I
would have waited here for things to settle, out there.’ He nodded at the fence. ‘These people had a good plan. And I would listen and I would know what would be required next. Only
then would I open the gate.’ He touched a wall as if surveying its size and said to himself, ‘But my work is almost done.’

Mystified, the father continued to stare at the man, and infuriatingly he still awaited a straight answer. But Oleg merely pulled one of the dead Kings’ Balaclavas over his head, and
indicated that the father should do the same with the second mask. ‘Crown yourself, Red Father. They see us come to the house on camera and they will think we are Kings. Come. You
first.’

Still wearing his surgical mask and gloves, Karen’s fiancé waited in the vast living room. Fully dressed now, he quickly rose from the white leather sofa and
nodded gravely, as if he too had performed terrible and dark deeds in a garage that morning. ‘Coffee? Or something stronger?’ he said in the chummy tone, but one barely bolstered by a
superficial confidence. ‘We’ve—’

Oleg never gave the man time to finish the sentence, cutting him off by pushing the end of the assault rifle under his soft jaw. ‘We go get the vaccine for the bug. This you can
share.’

The man’s eyes widened with fear and the flesh around the surgical mask became bloodless. ‘I don’t . . . Of course. We agreed . . .’ And then he realized he was not
speaking to either of the two men who had arrived at his home the night before, with an unconscious woman in tow.

Oleg ripped away the man’s surgical mask and glasses. Kissed his mouth hard, using his tongue, then turned him around quickly. ‘Your bitch, Karen, soon you will call her out here.
But you will call her like normal, or I will fuck you in the arse with my gun and shoot out your lungs, mmm? But first you show us the drugs. Then we make a call to Karen, but not for the little
girl. She best stay in her room. All very simple. You understand me, mmm?’

Karen’s fiancé spluttered, his legs as unsteady as those of an old man on ice. He wet himself too as his legs gave way. ‘Please . . .’ His voice was nothing more than a
whispery squeal. Oleg pulled him from the floor, effortlessly, and removed a small handgun from the man’s jacket and tucked it inside his own trouser pocket. Through the eyehole of his
Balaclava he winked at the father.

The father looked around the room, holding a handgun at his side, his throat closed, his heart now walloping with relief that the vaccine was onsite, while the prospect of seeing his daughter
made him giddy. And then his skin chilled as he again tried to guess Oleg’s real intentions. The man was insane, but functioning, and at a speed and level that he could not keep pace with.
And yet his deepest and most profound instincts suggested that trying to shoot Oleg would be his and his family’s final mistake. The painted man danced through his imagination. Unwelcome
recollections of his dreams, and of the chapel, made the father quiver, while the persistent suspicion that Oleg Chorny was no longer entirely human would not abate.

Oleg began to whisper encouragement to Karen’s fiancé. The man said his name was Richard, but Richard could barely walk as they led him from the entertaining area. When he
eventually recovered his voice, the father could hear the man’s piteous attempts at negotiation. Offers of money were made, good sums too, offers of vaccines for their families, their
friends, ‘anyone really’, and claims of his innocence in the matter of the kidnap.

The father saw excitement in Oleg’s devil eyes, which rolled white and insolent in the holes of the mask, and he could not look at them for long. Oleg continued to cluck and coo horribly,
a camp skeleton, encouraging the man to talk, while obviously delighting at the prospect of the coming slaughter.

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.

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.