Lost Girl (28 page)

Dumbfounded by the assault upon his eyes and senses, the father operated on instinct and immediately replaced his stun weapon with the heavier resin handgun. Some inner cry demanded a greater
protection in this place, but even the unholstered weapon felt insufficient in the face of the horrors plastered upon the walls of the Baptist chapel. He feared they might move.

Disorientation further warped the dimensions of the room, suggesting that the blackness between the multitude of painted figures went on forever. It was as if he’d come into a space that
was far larger than it had seemed from the outside. If any pews or chairs had once been present on the black cement floor, they’d been removed, presenting the ground as that of an empty
warehouse, reaching into an infinity underlain by the vague taint of blood and dung: the very residues of where the livestock of the past had jostled before skull-splintering slaughters.

The air of the building also carried the smell of stale paint, dusty cement, the cold rain outside and the sharp kidney taint of human urine. The artist may have pissed where he worked. Flavours
of an ecclesiastical history had remained in vestiges too, as if to hallow the desecrated room with a sense of the apocalyptic despair that must have once been conjured by the Baptists’
shrill preaching. Instinctively, the father became momentarily convinced that something was still worshipped within the terrible room, even enshrined in the unpleasant visions on this broad canvas
transforming the interior.

More of his dumbstruck glances revealed an artist’s obsession with poorly drawn sarcophagi or crude caskets, stood upright, and filled with murky silhouettes. And bonefaced bishops,
equipped with sceptres, soiled surplices and hoods, stood upon daises, their pointed hands more like surgeons’ anatomy diagrams than those of the living. These skeletal church authorities
drew his attention to the pallid shapes lying below their unshod, bone feet: a dead congregation that barely indented or impressed their insubstantial bodies upon twisted linen, or winding sheets
open at the neck. Black-socketed, eyeless, open-mawed: many of the dead figures on the ground wore the caps of popes, the headdresses of sheiks, the crowns of kings; as if receiving last rites from
an already dead and decayed clergy.

The father hesitated, to make certain these figures all around him were not actually moving. It may have been a trick of the torch’s light that suggested motion, perhaps a vibration, even
a distant squirming at the edge of his sight.

And elsewhere, on all four walls he could see a great violence, and the resulting slaughter; suggestions of battles on grand scales amongst the other miserable components of war: the
stick-figure silhouettes hanged from rafters and leafless trees, the dead children and emaciated mothers. More of the black-eyed corpse kings sat here and there in the devastation, immobile,
enthroned, surrounded by riches but lifeless.

Sometimes the figures in the mural were depicted on all fours, their faces a mixture of the mad and the animal; beggars and kings alike had degenerated with a peculiarly apelike quality. There
was something of the chimpanzee or bonobo in the toothy grimaces, the bulbous whites of the eyes, idiotic in their rage, gleefully insane, committed to a bestial savagery everywhere, and into the
far-reaching hell on earth, if indeed it was even the earth.

The paintings seemed to represent events that were about to happen or archetypes of what had always occurred. The same thing. The eternal tragedy. A monstrous fantasy that made the viewer envy
the pale, still cadavers, now mercifully excused from the energy of the great dieback.

Across other swathes of the walls, the bones of the departed were stacked in numbers beyond the confines of any charnel house. About sickly ruins and the ragged, forsaken humanity, starved
insensible and queuing into a meaningless distance, a robed thing often stalked, either sat upon a cadaverous mare, or bent from the weight of its scythe. Death. The Reaper. King Death.

The father averted his eyes from its skeletal prancing, but between the figures the black chasm, the empty space, gaped. The chapel’s devotion to human horror was total and unflinching. It
continued inside his mind and shortened his breath. Nothing yet seen on any screen had made him so aware of the world’s deterioration, a course set in motion that could only gain a greater
momentum.

But the building’s true purpose still eluded the father. This could not be a grim depiction of the times alone. He believed it had to mean more, was perhaps a physical embodiment of a
faith, something revered. The father then feared this shrine imparted knowledge; that this was an oracle for the profoundly disturbed to ask their questions. He forced himself to suppress a new and
unwelcome suspicion that his presence might make possible the awakening of a deity within the unlit space.

Leading from the large room, two wooden doors offered a retreat from the disfigurements of the chapel. The father guessed the doors must open into what had once been a vestry or the church
offices. He moved to them, but stopped when his torch flicked across what he took to be an upright figure. He panicked, brought his weapon about and made ready to fire until the clip was empty.

Rising from the lightless floor, before the backdrop of a black wall, he saw what he’d thought was a cowled figure, the head bowed. And then realized that it was static,
solid, and not a figure at all, but a pillar. Whatever the object was, it had been built over the place where an altar or pulpit should have stood, or maybe the black installation had consumed and
superseded the holier feature.

The father moved closer to the pillar. Perhaps it had been intended to represent a long head, oval and tapering to an apex, like some primitive ancestor facing the sea on a Polynesian island,
where civilization was long-collapsed and gone to dust. To pass to the rooms at the rear he would need to encircle this column that had seemed to suddenly manifest, between the desecrated walls, as
if to prevent him going any deeper inside the building.

He washed the structure with the white beam of his torch. And it didn’t take the father long to realize that the subject matter embedded upon the column was similar to what he had seen
inside Yonah Abergil’s office, though that specimen was a fraction of this one’s size. But this was another shrine, and about this shrine must stand a temple.

Materials used in the construction of the dolmen would have been illumined by the plethora of red candles in glass holders, had they been lit, though the father found his torchlight was more
than sufficient and he illumined more than he wanted to see. The creation had more of the primary school craft room about its design and crude manufacture than the antique sophistication of the
feature in Yonah Abergil’s study; as a result, this effigy created a more grotesque impression.

Perhaps the Baptist congregation had left behind a quantity of their hymn or prayer books too, which formed a dark mortar and stucco, plastering the original frame, or actual altar, which had
been extended and built upwards, with thousands of pages and pamphlets carrying sacred words and evangelist messages. The plaster stank. In places the pale sheets of paper had dark red smears
across them, and the father suspected the paste was manufactured from blood.

Over the defiled pages, scores of photographs had been pasted as if the papier-mache dolmen had been collecting the images as trophies or mementos: bone fields in Cambodia, the skeletal remains
of Iranian towns hit by Israeli nuclear weapons, a recent genocide in one of the Congos, a Nigerian civil war, a Chinese famine, the cannibalism of Pyongyang, the Californian dust bowl of the
thirties, the ghost towns of Texas, long-exhausted and near-forgotten pandemics in Asia, the repeated failures of the Indian monsoon . . .

Other things were represented here too, higher up, at eye level, people he did not recognize: individuals, strangers, random victims? Their expressions were unmistakably those of distress, shock
and fear, or had been captured during their final, gasping respite from life.

A message had been carefully written near the base of the mound, in an antique-looking scroll or ribbon, similar to the paintings and graffiti he’d happened across on his moves.
Nemo
deum vidit
. Latin again, and again he had no idea what it meant.

The father wondered if the artist had been the executioner, or gaoler, of the subjects in the photographs. These higher images seemed personal. They were amateur pictures, not culled from a news
service, and had been printed on precious photographic paper. They were presented cleanly and not smeared with the reeking glue.

Around the totem he walked, compelled but unsteady on his feet, his ears attuned to the darkness about him, the torch beam illuminating the tiered column. He would occasionally pause in front of
a photograph before moving to the next: the tear-stained face of a woman, looking up through what might have been a manhole cover, or a trapdoor in a metal container; the bruised face of a Middle
Eastern man, whose vacant eyes confronted oblivion; polythene stretched over a distorted face, the throat roped; a kneeling figure wearing a cape of black blood, its severed head resting beside its
knees; the heavily tattooed back of a man lying face down, the colourful sigils of the skin riveted with black bullet holes; a river bank; the grey chop of the sea with no sight of land, and
several patches of disturbed soil in settings that appeared quiet and yet more sinister because of the stillness.

Psychopaths must have once exiled themselves here, amongst imagery of climate catastrophes and their myriad consequences, to reflect upon their trophies.
Chorny and Semyon Sabinovic?
The witches. The shrine was a mortuary roll that depicted nothing but disaster, death and decay: chaos, the great passage from civilization to barbarism. In this place, the father suspected that
someone
had grasped some deep, personal connection with the wider diaspora and depopulation. The whole edifice suggested the morbidly spiritual, which further convinced him that there was
meaning behind the selection of this place too, as if this room ended another journey, or a hideously idiosyncratic pilgrimage. It was an installation of the King Death group for sure, but a shrine
for a seer, priest, or whatever kind of witch doctor or shaman the group’s nihilistic mysticism and superstition generated. Some Damascene moment had called true believers here. The father
was sure of this. An awakening had occurred inside sadistic minds, leading to a fuller connection with
something
the father had but glimpsed. Here
it
was celebrated, and that
something
was perceived as the black-miraculous. A thing closer to this world than it had ever been before.
Afterdeath?

Everywhere he searched for his daughter, he found this morbid sickness, continuing and expanding, signs encircling him. And had he not dreamed of this place too, and recently? He suddenly felt
trapped, funnelled further into a hellish gullet he could not anticipate the end of, but did not understand.

The father had seen enough and made to turn away and to find the fiend that had built this tribute in defiance of decency, erected beneath the sagging roof of civilization, but paused, and
returned his torch to a spot three-quarters up the column, level with his own eyes. He took one step forward with his breath trapped painfully at the top of his lungs, as if everything inside his
torso had just surged upwards to press on the bottom of his throat. The picture had been taken from the front path of his family’s old house.

Upon the middle tier of the garden, amongst the sprouting leaves and white flowers of the potatoes that they had grown to fill the pantry, stood a little girl,
his
daughter
. Keenly alert and curious and staring at whoever was taking her picture, she wore an expression that was half-amused, verging on a smile, eager to engage an adult’s
attention.

A slither of pain slipped through her father’s heart. He suffered a sudden and terrible sense of the broken world he’d walked for two years and of the broken people he had murdered.
All through that time her little image had been here, surrounded by horrors too sickening to view at more than a glance. And her image had been here in the reeking darkness without him,
her
daddy
.

Dizzy, the father staggered sideways. Recovered his feet. A whimper and then another escaped his mouth. His scalp and the nape of his neck prickled. Nausea lapped the edges of his stomach. His
head flooded and swam with too many thoughts.

She was the only child featured on the papery skin of the effigy. With shaking hands, he reached out and tugged the picture free. Noticed what she was wearing: blue shorts, a navy t-shirt, and
the red hooded top patched with cats. Not the clothes she’d worn on the day she was abducted. So this photo had been taken some time before the afternoon she was taken: the men, Oleg Chorny
and Semyon Sabinovic, had crossed the line and entered their property to take a photo before they stole her. The revelation made him prickle cold.

The father stumbled around the pillar on numb feet, shining his light again at each photograph, desperate to see more of her, but also praying that he would not. He came back to where he’d
started and through a tear-blurred vision, his eyes implored the three images of disrupted soil not to be telling him some unspeakable truth. Those pictures could have been taken anywhere, maybe in
the vast crop plantations of Dartmoor; places he’d long had to discipline himself not to think about. If there were no witnesses, abduction and murder were easy crimes to commit.

Spiking from a renewal of the red energy that made him career like a drunkard, the father went for the doors behind the altar. He desperately wanted to find someone at home. Should he blast
through joints, shoulders, elbows, knees and hips, or just shoot away the genitals?

He’ll bleed to death
.

No, if there was a custodian or chaplain, then he must be taken alive. And he would impart all of the secrets of his vocation, and its sacrifices, before the father took apart the man slowly and
unto a madness wherein the only cogent desire would be death. He would know
why
his daughter’s image was here before the sun rose again upon the broken earth.