Lost Girl (29 page)

Flashing past the father’s face, as he moved to the doors, came again the crimson skeletal witnesses of the walls, holding childlike machetes or badly drawn, out-of-perspective firearms,
their faces weirdly beatific, white eyes gazing upwards to the black heavens. The father looked down to avoid seeing more, but beside the doors the white-robed dead knelt and prayed before a lion
with an ape’s bestial face. On the other side of the frame parodies of saints raised bone-thin arms from the ground towards their grinning executioners.

She had been taken by the criminally insane. The father bit down on the scream that wanted to shatter the rafters. Looking up within the black nave, he unintentionally glimpsed what billowed
upon the ceiling.

Transfixed, stumbling to regain balance in the darkness, he moved his light around the great central figure, perhaps winged, that had been painted upon the plasterboard ceiling. The thing was
similar to what he had seen on the walls in Torre and Paignton, as if those sightings had never been accidents. In this depiction the deity was faceless and its front was littered with redundant
paps. The preposterous accident of life, the giving, as well as untimely death, the taking, appeared to have been depicted as a female preserve.

As if prompted by a sudden opening inside this depth of the missing face, a carousal of horror swept through him, and he suffered a sense of rising out of himself and up to the rafters, towards
the very absence, arms wide, eyes wide, mouth muttering in sublimation, in hapless obeisance to what swayed up there, surveying the ruin it administered.

The terrible passage
.

The father supported himself against a wall. Gripped his head to ease the eruption. Few minds were designed to withstand such a place. But it wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t cease, and the
visions came all at once now, stacking, superimposing, reeling . . . the black air of the temple had filled him up as if the trance of a ritual had been evoked. The dead were piled against a fence
in Bangladesh . . . an American town, with not one telegraph pole standing . . . El Nino’s scythe on a satellite picture . . . the sacking of Cairo by the Islamic militias . . . the last
great crucifixion of the Christians along Salah Salem . . . the little silver dragons of the Israeli air force against a blue sky . . . a mountain range of black smoke.

The world is ending
.

He kept his eyes shuttered and clenched his jaws. It was only paint, drawings, torn pages, candles, ghastly photographs, grotesque juvenilia: the creation of men, of the men who had abducted his
daughter. Seeing her here had unhinged him, and he must focus and find where she had been taken. That is what he had come here for. He opened his eyes and saw himself upon the wall he had fallen
against.

As if he had been dreamed above the door of the room that he was now desperate to flee, there was an impressionist’s deranged sketch of a masked man, the face bone-white, death-white,
skull-white. The tired but committed form was caped in black and crowned with a scarecrow’s hat.
His
hat, the detail of the camouflaged band was crude but unmistakably his own. The
man possessed one outsized hand, carrying a handgun. The similarity was no coincidence and it portrayed him dressed to invade, torture and kill, only this figure wore a halo, painted red.

The father’s mind scrabbled for the reasons why he had been scrawled upon the wall. Someone, perhaps Chorny, must have known of the pursuit, the coming avenger. Had he been told? The image
was dust-specked and glazed dry, yet it must have been added to the wall within the last three months, when he’d been active, because only then had he been attired this way.

How do you know me?

The father moved and placed his ear an inch from the surface of the vestry doors. Heard nothing but the drumming of the rain upon the metal roof, the buffeting and distant roar of wind between
the surrounding buildings. He replaced the handgun with the stun weapon.

The doors were unlocked.

The father let himself inside.

And noisily disturbed a cluster of empty paint tins.

The skeletal figure lying upon the mattress didn’t stir.

The room was tainted by vomit, blood-ironed, excrement-infused, and so powerfully it made the father wince.

He feared he had come here too late, and that the man partially wrapped in a soiled sheet, and so motionless upon the stained mattress, was dead. He quelled the errant notion that the figure had
been laid out in a ghastly preparation, ready for his arrival.

The figure’s head and throat were completely inked by tattoos. Only the face was left clean.
Enlumineur
.

A further moment of confusion and disorientation brought the father to a standstill. Yonah Abergil had said Oleg Chorny was found dead of an overdose and a broken heart underneath this place,
two years before. Could history repeat itself so vividly, or was this coincidence and just another human junkie ruin that had crawled in here to expire? Chorny would be bones now; this thing was
still coated in flesh.

Closer, crouching, the rain still dripping from the tail of his poncho, the father thought he heard the corpse breathing, faintly, the incoming air tinged by a rasp. Yet he couldn’t be
sure, and how could anything so thin, so skull-contoured about the hairless, hollow-cheeked head, still be living? Surely no organ could still murmur within the skeletal remains of the misery
artist. He was tempted to check for a pulse.

The father shone the torch onto the vials and the coke-blackened glass tubes, the aluminium inhalers, plastic injectors, baggies scattered beside the disorderly bedding: an addict’s
detritus, the messy artefacts of a haste to depart the world. The illustrated man had been loading up by a variety of means. Sachets and plastic jars of powders, blister packs, canisters of paste,
gas burners, a pestle and mortar inside an old wooden box upon a table indicated the man had been a keen amateur chemist too, manufacturing his own catalysts and accelerants into the deeper fathoms
of consciousness.

Around the father’s feet, piles of strangled, twisted clothes, sticky kitchen utensils, food packages and empty plastic bottles covered the floor like flotsam on the surface of a fetid
canal. Pages from the Baptists’ books rested amongst the mounds of refuse. Stiff brushes, rollers, paint trays and encrusted palettes had been dropped and now stuck to what they touched. The
air itself seemed thickened and warmed by the thermals of the miasmas rising from the bedding and a blocked toilet.

A bathroom adjoined the ramshackle living quarters. The father peered inside. A good fire would be required to purify it. He looked about the yellowing ceiling, the scuffed walls, and wondered
at the dreamtime vistas, the surreal landscapes and communions with hellish delusions through which this man’s subconscious had eagerly soared.

Within his bafflement, flickers of his own image on the pitch-black walls, and of his daughter in the photograph, made his breath seize and the father stiffened with a self-generated cold that
made his hands shake. He imagined he had stepped inside a place of old magic, of unnatural laws. Faint cries from the edge of his consciousness seemed to issue warnings, and what seemed like an
acknowledgement that what he’d thought impossible was possible.

The father forced himself to return his attention to the bed and he asked himself again if this could truly be Oleg Chorny: the child taker and the man found dead two years before, according to
Yonah Abergil, and laid beneath what must have been this very building?

Abergil had lied then. Chorny, the King’s celebrated
enlumineur
, must have been allowed to live. No two men,
enlumineurs
and junkies both, could be found in the same
place by their would-be assassins. He would not believe that. So the man before the father must be his daughter’s abductor. Incredible. This man had taken her from her home and sold her, but
was just lying here, like this, laid out, as if
waiting
to be found.

His hands were in plain sight; no weapons were visible. If he so much as twitched, the father would discharge the immobilizer, though that would surely stop the heart of this figure who’d
deliberately removed himself to the edge of life, perhaps to madly depict what he saw at that border.

The father trained his weapon at the birdy chest, and peeled back the sheet. The
enlumineur
of the King Death creed had truly displayed his skilful wares upon his own flesh. To his
throat he was patterned gold and azure with sigils, signs, runes and inscriptions of black deeds mercifully coded, but borne proudly to represent a devil’s status. Was his daughter’s
name on that unwashed flesh? If it was, this father would cut it out.

Could the thing even walk? The wrists were so thin they resembled lengths of doweling. The hands at the end were cartoonish claws. They were crossed over the bony chest, to suggest repose, as if
the figure was ready to be lowered into the ground or placed upon a pyre. The angular jaw sloped to a wattled neck, ribbed with cartilage over the throat. It had no teeth, just greyish stubs behind
a lip-less maw, through which air marginally wheezed to activate a distant rattle. The skull beneath the skin. The very face of death. A painted corpse.
Aping what you serve?

Bloodied tissues were caught up in the folds of the sheet. Consumptive. Tubercular. Maybe one of the antibiotic-resistant strains. Seemingly the creature had moments to live. Would it even
survive the journey back to the car, let alone endure questioning? The father would have to carry it across his shoulders like a bundle of sticks with a lolling, oversized head.

He hovered above the figure, unsure of himself, confused by what he had seen in this place of tribute and divination. But he failed to identify the full power of his murderous hatred for Oleg
Chorny. It was mostly pity and revulsion that he felt now.

At seven a.m. the captive came round from a stupor that had lasted most of the night, only interrupted by two seizures, and suffered another fit inside the car. Arching his
back off the rear seat, he salivated, exposing a throat ringed with grime. His legs kicked out and struck the door.

The father quickly alighted from the car and stood beside it, looking through the rain-blurred windows at the figure inside, thrashing despite two sets of cuffs locked tight at the ankle and
wrist. This was the man’s third seizure since his capture, the worst yet. Eventually, he rolled off the rear seat and into the footwell.

Through the entire journey from the chapel to the car, and then through the remainder of the night and into the dawn, the captive had remained unconscious, repeatedly coughing and making
incoherent sounds, without waking fully. During the extraction through the storm, an ordeal that had near-wasted the last of the father’s strength, his prisoner had spoken once, but briefly.
In a thin, feminine voice, he had muttered into the father’s ear. It had been hard to pick out the words against the sound of the wind, until the man’s lips had flopped against his skin
and he had heard, ‘He leans over us at birth. Stands behind us in life. Sits beside us at the end.’ The sound of the sibilant hiss, as much as the contents of the utterance, had forced
the father to drop the bound figure onto the wet, wind-flayed grass, to withdraw a weapon and point it at the bony face. But the eyes had not opened; the man had only spoken from within a drugged
slumber.

The father was additionally surprised that anyone could survive the powerful seizures the man was suffering. A hospital was out of the question. He knew little about first aid, but if necessary
he would lever the man’s tongue out of his throat, with a stick or gloved fingers, because that mouth had some use. Twice he’d attempted to awaken the man, but had been unsuccessful. If
his captive died, the father would have to bury him, and his secrets, out here amongst the drenched crops.

He’d brought the drug stash from the chapel too, along with an army holdall he’d found beneath loose floor-boards. A sudden withdrawal from the concoctions the addict mainlined could
be catastrophic, he knew that much; he would have to give him something to keep him alive, for a while. The creature’s chronic addiction might even be useful during the interrogation; he
might awake eager for a fix. Most strains of recreational drugs were powerful enough to prevent any possibility of getting clean.

The father mulled over his options to force a confession. But how long would this creature linger under the duress he knew himself capable of inflicting? If his rage erupted he could not trust
himself.

Chorny’s canvas bag contained guns and enough ready cash to keep the father going until the following summer, if he lived that long. How had it not been stolen? Though the idea that the
thieves in the camps were averse to entering the chapel was not implausible. There were more drugs in the bag too, some tools and emergency rations: clear preparations for a getaway, and maybe one
that had been anticipated, if the father’s image upon the walls was an indication of what the man knew was coming for him.

There were more pressing matters to attend to now that it was light, like checking in with his wife again and driving as far from South Devon as he could manage in the stolen vehicle during the
storm. He’d hoped that he would have known, by now, where to drive to: the very place his daughter had been taken two years before. But that information remained inside a comatose mind.

A call came in.

Standing in the rain, shivering inside his poncho, he scrabbled through his pockets. As he fished out his screen, a pair of unnaturally bright eyes opened on the dirty floor of the vehicle, and
began to explore the interior. The father stepped away from the glass, as if suddenly shy before an introduction to who was probably his daughter’s kidnapper.

An unrecognized number. It had to be the police detective, Gene Hackman.

He’d driven the new vehicle a short distance from where the detective had left it, and parked at the foot of a small valley, as anywhere more exposed was still being hit by horizontal rain
and winds strong enough to knock a child over. The depression in the earth was one of the few places that attracted only agricultural traffic, and he doubted that would make an appearance
today.