Lost Girl (33 page)

‘Simmy,’ the skull whispered again, his body now entirely limp and hanging upside down, a hanged man, crucified by the remembrance of his own loss.

‘Yonah lied. He said you were dead. But you’ve limped on for two years. For two years that made me wish that I was dead!’

Oleg placed his hands over his wet face.

‘You’re not going to tell me about my girl. And there is no one who you love that I can kill. There’s only you to punish.’

Oleg dropped his hands and looked at the father, transfixing him with a gaze of near-inhuman rage. The collection of bones within the father’s arms seemed to expand with a strength that
pushed him backwards. Even with his ankles cuffed, Oleg curled his lower legs around the father’s waist as one tight vice, near-crushing the breath from his body as they pulled the father
against the waist-high wall. His body became an anchor. Oleg then seemed to twist his upper body around and sit up in mid-air solely using the strength in his stomach muscles. Using his bound legs
behind the father’s back as one belt of bone, he pulled himself forward and out of the wet, grey abyss. Long, sinewy arms whipped the air and knocked the father away from the wall, the metal
cuffs splitting his lips.

As the father’s vision settled, he found himself staring at the concrete ceiling. A yellow light flickered as if trying to revive his blunted consciousness. A tone hummed deep inside his
ears. Dripping from the bottom lip, he tried to speak, but only gargled. He needed to convince himself that what now sat before him, with its back against the wall, was even human. He had never
been struck so hard before. And Oleg Chorny had managed to swivel his thighs between the father’s arms, wrap his lower legs around the father’s waist, and pull himself back to the wall
that he’d been draped over. He’d struck the father, before dropping to a crouch in one quick, fluid motion. A man who had seemed close to death had done this as if he were some acrobat
or escapologist; a man reported dead two years gone, and a man whose ankles and wrists were still secured with steel cuffs.

The father made to stand, fumbling for the handgun in his pocket. Oleg stood too, poised like a perfectly balanced corpse-dancer, and looked out, distractedly, into the town. ‘We go to
Yonah. Enough of this bullshit. We go to Yonah, or you never see your daughter again.’

‘Yonah is dead.’

Oleg’s attention returned to him. The red eyes narrowed.

‘I killed him.’

‘You?’ This was said with contemptuous disbelief.

The father nodded. ‘After he gave me you, I killed him.’

‘He gave you . . . Yonah would not speak, unless . . .’

‘I shot him. His knee caps. But I believe it was my threat to kill his father that broke him.’

Oleg’s long fingers traced the contours of his inked skull. ‘The mad old bastard? He is still alive? Maybe that would have done it. Not the knees.’ He raised his chin and
blinked at the tears filming his big eyes. ‘Yonah, Yonah, Yonah. It was you?’

‘You knew I was coming for you. You knew that I was killing to find you. You painted me onto that bloody wall. You say I have made . . . these signs. But you did not know that you, and
your partner, were betrayed by your own boss? You’re not much of a seer.’

Oleg’s thoughts drifted for a while and his eyes became near-vacant. ‘I looked for Simmy. I went to hellmouth. You can’t imagine . . . But the pit has no specific answers.
It’s not like that. And who could ever take Simmy down on their own? Such a man you have never known.’ Oleg slapped his own head. ‘I once considered Yonah as the culprit, but I
decided this is not possible for Yonah. Simmy would have been warned first, by friends. He had more friends than Yonah ever did.’

The father dabbed his numb mouth with his sleeve. ‘You want me to believe that you have some special relationship . . . with some
thing
, this afterdeath, just like all the nut-job
evangelists and prophets? You think you’re special? You bore me rigid. A demon, was it, that made you abduct a child? So you tell me now. You tell me everything right now, or you die. I swear
that you will die here.’

Oleg shrugged. ‘You confuse what I have told you about with . . . with an intelligence you would recognize. There is no negotiation with afterdeath. No favours. I have spent many years
looking to find this out. There are only visions in the great chaos that are similar to what is upon my walls. Pictures of what has gone and will come. But eventually it is possible to find a
patron out
there
.’

‘Bullshit.’

Oleg ignored him as if he were tired of the father. ‘Simmy looked for this place first, afterdeath. He was the artist who tutored me. He was the seer. He knew there were guides for us,
patrons over
there
, that we could . . . follow. He knew that we could always be together, and over
there
too, after this life. And something he found . . . that
we
found,
we offered to and it came closer to us. It came to us as we made more and more of our own chaos. It found us through our signs, the ones we made in the ritual. You would not understand . . .’
Oleg shrugged. ‘How could you? Only we, and those seers before us, will ever know about what is so near and what can be beckoned closer. You think
this
is something that can speak,
or be understood, or controlled by something as pitiful as us? We are dust. Dust that seeped through a crack, dust that soon gets swept back to what we all came out of.’

‘Enough, enough of the bullshit. I’m warning you! My daughter . . .’

‘Her? You ask me for only a tiny piece of the great truth, because you have no interest in the whole picture. You lack the mind, even now. You can’t understand that what gave life to
us, here, that tears itself into blood and flesh, only waits, impatient, for us to return to the terrible passage. We are of it. We are small parts of something that spread into a multitude, here.
There is no time over there, no space. And we are all nobody here. Here, is nothing.’ Oleg seemed to believe his own delusions. And, as was customary when faced with insanity, the father felt
uncomfortable, tired, and strangely solemn.

Chorny was not reading his signals and was again ignoring the gun pointed at his face. ‘We made our patterns in blood, can you not see, Simmy and me? We made our signs in a ritual that
could truly be seen in another place, bright enough to be seen by a patron. It was all part of Simmy’s bait, the ritual. And between the signs we became stuck. Every time we slept, we saw how
badly. We saw his end. Yes, and we tried to alter it. But what was seen was inevitable once it all began. I saw my own nemesis in the dark too,
you
. All I knew was that my final hour was
tied to Simmy, and to something we had done to someone. To your daughter, it now seems.’

Oleg leaned forward, his eyes bulging, the most excited the father had ever seen him. ‘And when you have acquired the vision, of what came before and what comes after, you see the other
things in afterdeath, traces . . . bloodless shadows, those already over there, the long-returned.
Patrons
. Who knows their origins? They are so old. But they see and they can leak between
the right signs if they are made in the right sequence. We glimpsed them many times, and we learned that death is the only thing that gives life meaning. This!’ He looked up and around
himself as if to encompass the entire world. ‘This life will soon be only a culture of death, all that we can expect or will ever see again. Soon. Our reign is brief and we must go back to
what we came out of.

‘For the next part, for the return to afterdeath, we decided it was best to be aware over there, to frequent the court of a patron, and to remain together, while all others find blindness
and oblivion.’

‘There is nothing else but this world. And you were the cause of this world, and the consequence.’

Oleg shrugged. ‘You have no idea, father. If only you could see.
La mort
, the finality, the endless distance. This world is one spark in darkness forever. It has only ever been
this way. But we found something . . . in this dark. Truly. Something too great for us to know, to understand. Something that does not care for us, for anyone, but it felt our vibrations, our
antics, at the mouth of the terrible passage that we looked inside. Simmy lured
it
from the darkest pit.’ Oleg paused to spit, nodding at the father. ‘And
you
, you
stepped between the signs, our signs. The hole that we could see through, the one that we made. And the one that I have used again and again to look for Simmy over
there.
We pulled you in
because you . . . You would be a part of our deaths. His, then mine. But we did not know who you were, or how you were connected to our destruction, or from what deed of ours you came to be linked
to us.’ Oleg dropped his head, as if his task was futile. In a quieter voice he said, ‘Don’t you see, ours was the experiment the scientist loses control of, and there were
consequences. I can’t explain it to you in another way. I always prefer to paint it.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘I am contagious, Red Father. There is an
awareness
of me, over
there
. I wanted this observer to be Simmy. It was not. But it is
the one
, I am sure, with whom
Simmy keeps company now. A patron. If this is so, my love is not lost to me yet.’ His sincerity was more unnerving than the preposterous claims the father mostly failed to grasp.

The father spat more blood from his mouth. ‘This? This is what drives you to kill, and to take a child? This black magic bullshit?’

Insensitive to insult, Oleg turned his hairless head to stare blankly at the lightless office building opposite the car park. He spoke wearily, and more to himself than to the disappointing
presence of another unbeliever. ‘Afterdeath is eternal. It is terror sublime forever. Maybe death itself. We don’t know. Part of a god? Or just the absent dreams of something else, from
another place. And it is none of these things. No one can see a face that is not there.
Nemo deum vidit
: nobody has seen God. It is . . . ineffable. Unlike anything. But close to here. So
big, everywhere, just outside this . . . Closer, and closer now comes the great dark flow.’ Oleg looked at the father as if he were looking at a child. ‘People always sense this
presence and call it lots of things. Devil. God. Instinct. Imagination. Maybe you do too. But the true source is closer than it has ever been, because never has so much been ready to travel through
the terrible passage.

‘This place brushes our minds, but comes no further. When it is close, ordinary things start to have meanings they did not have before.’ Oleg’s reedy voice slowed, as if in
some final, hopeless confessionary moment. ‘Dreams, they scrape it. Dreams that make you terrified of falling. The dreams when you sink and cannot move. You scream, you panic, but still you
sink. Terror in sleep is the opening of the terrible passage. Hellmouth.

‘It is why we came to the chapel, the abattoir. People prayed to what they could not understand. Their minds were too small and already too full. But they had faith. People had prayed and
begged for mercy in there, where so many animals were killed. Thousands. All of them together. Crowded, frightened, for years. They lived in fear, like we do. Their heads were smashed, their
throats cut. Chaos was there, the great unreason, the beginning of the opening, and the place was made special. The walls were worn thinner in a place of such horrid light. Thin enough for
Simmy’s magic. Thin walls between places, between here and
there
, the other place that is coming closer, to swallow us.’

Oleg grinned, as if recounting some great accomplishment. ‘We evoked a glimpse, with our intensity, the force in us. We made such magic, you cannot know, you cannot believe it. We made
such drugs to unbind us. We made sacrifices and we prepared ourselves. We went far, me and my Simmy, deep. Little holes we made for our dreams to fall through. Dreams that were eyes. And only in
them did I see you burn your way towards me with a message, because of something we had done. Something me and Simmy had done in our fury. The great mistake, we called it, which meant we had to go
before we wished to, before we were ready. In our time, we have been responsible for so much’ – he paused to smile – ‘suffering. So I only came back from time to time.
Awoke, now and again, because I could not find him out there. I still cannot find him . . . but maybe you, the Red Father, could tell me why he had to go, so soon. Could tell me who initiated the
hour of his death. And when he is avenged, maybe he will come close to me again. Maybe he will see the fire of my vengeance. This is how the confinement of a ritual works.’

Oleg turned his head so quickly, the father flinched. Chorny’s yellowing eyes widened, and his head slid from side to side as if it were mounted upon the trunk of a serpent. ‘So I
waited to speak with you, and it was all because of a girl. The little girl! After all that we did, that is the reason that a great seer was lost . . .’ He shrugged as if astounded that such
a trifle should have been his undoing. ‘But I have come to know that I am dealing with a man who is burned by such rage, strangled by such guilt, that he makes powerful signs between our own
signs. You, the hour of my death, I have seen you coming towards me for two years, and so has
another
. . . You have joined the ritual.’

The father stiffened, reminded of the expressionist image of himself on the black wall outside the vestry, and of what had billowed upon the ceiling: the possibility of its existence took his
breath away. ‘You were dead. Yonah’s men found you. You were dead. Under that church. They wouldn’t have made a mistake.’

Oleg nodded. ‘Without my eyes I saw a dead man die. After his death he was not dead. Still he lives and yet he is dead. All this after death I see.’

‘You want me to believe that you were dead?’

‘There are places between here and there that do not observe such distinctions. Has this not always been so? I am a simple reader of the dark, Red Father.’