by David Mark
‘We have friends in the police. There have been more disappearances than we thought. You remember I tell you about the girl in the lay-by? She is not alone. Many girls have been reported missing. Such reports have made the police poke their nose in to things they should not know. So money has been paid. Mothers have told the police their children have returned. But they have not returned.’
Molly realizes she is biting the flesh of her index finger. She suddenly hates the world and her place inside it. Finds herself damning her species as poison.
‘What sort of mother …?’
‘One with more children,’ says Karol. ‘One who is willing to think of her family rather than an individual. I am sorry, Molly. This world must seem so strange to you.’
Molly realizes she has pulled Karol close to herself and is pressing against him as if searching for warmth.
‘Do you think she is alive?’ asks Molly, looking into his eyes. ‘Truly?’
Karol holds her gaze. ‘If she is not, I wish she were. The man who has her is so much worse than me. The man who has her is worse than anybody. He seeks her flesh, Molly. He wants her skin and bones.’
Molly shudders, and pulls herself closer to Karol. She presses her cheek to his and feels bizarrely grateful for the hand that climbs up her coat and presses against her bare skin.
‘What do we do?’ she asks. ‘How do we make this better?’
Karol tips her head back and kisses her softly. ‘We thank God. And pray we are forgiven for the revenge we take.’
‘You’re religious?’ asks Molly, surprised.
He gives a quick flash of smile. ‘No. I’m a blasphemy.’
‘I don’t understand …’
‘In my country, they call me the Angel of Vengeance.’
LOTTIE
Lottie is too excited to keep her thoughts to herself. She pulls her phone from her pocket and flips the camera function so she is looking at her own image. She checks her teeth for lipstick and smooths down her feline eyebrows before flicking up her quiff. There isn’t much light in the back of the cab so she engages the flash and coughs, hard, to clear her throat. She licks her lips and grins into the camera.
‘News flash for the Coffin Club. I don’t want to spoil the surprise but I’ve got a treat lined up for you if I can pull it off. Maybe it will make up for tonight’s shambles, eh? If you were watching you’ll be pleased to know my glamorous assistant is feeling much better. Note to self – never hand an arse-in-a-jar to anybody under the age of thirteen until you have checked their gag reflex. And that sounds a lot grubbier than I meant it to. Anyways, I’m wittering on now because I’m on my way to try and sniff out an exhibit I’ve been fascinated by for years! Takes me right back to my university days when I was just a weird little odd-bod with a morbid thirst for blood and bones. Not much has changed! Check out a piece I wrote on the blog a year or so back if you’re looking for clues. Jean Denys, Richard Lower and the Blood of the Lamb. If it doesn’t give you goose pimples then check your pulse and I’ll see you on my slab. Take care, you weirdoes.’
Lottie stops recording and glances up. The cab driver is looking at her with an expression of mild interest. ‘You on the telly?’ he asks, his accent East London.
‘Now and again,’ says Lottie, and tries to sound like a self-deprecating big deal. ‘Internet mostly. Irons in the fire.’
‘What was that about an arse-in-a-jar?’
Lottie grins and shifts her position to better see the driver. He’s middle-aged and plump and there’s a smell of cigarettes and spicy food coming off him. She finds herself picturing his arteries and the thickness of the subcutaneous fat around his belly. ‘I’m a pathologist,’ she says. ‘I run a web show and blog for people interested in death.’
‘Blimey,’ says the cabbie. ‘You and my missus would get on. Obsessed with it, she is. Always wanting to tell me about somebody she went to school with who’s got this or that wrong with them. Wants me to get my things in order. Buried or cremated, buried or cremated. Always on at me. I’ve told her she can have me fly-tipped for all I care. Dump me down a lane. Put me out with the recycling if you like, couldn’t give a shit. I’m only fifty-seven.’
‘What does she fancy?’ asks Lottie.
‘She’s read that you can have your ashes mixed in with paint and be used in a portrait. Reckons you can have yourself turned into a diamond ring if you want. Why would you want it? I wouldn’t mind being put in a cannon and fired, I suppose, but when you’re dead you’re dead so it’s not as though I’ll know anything about it.’
Lottie rubs her chin and considers his perspective. She spends most of her time with the dead and those fascinated by mortality and occasionally it does her good to speak to relatively normal people about their views on the great beyond. ‘You’ve got no hope of an afterlife, have you? Nothing at all?’
The cab driver shrugs. ‘I reckon after you die you go to the same place you were before you were born. No-bloody-where. I hope that’s the case, any road. Sounds nice to me. Nothing at all. You think Heaven would be any kind of a place for a man like me? I get bored ten minutes into Midnight Mass. Wings and hymns and praise for all eternity? Do me a favour.’
Lottie laughs, enjoying his perspective. She glances down at her phone. The video has not yet uploaded and she is almost at the address that Brendan would give an arm and a leg to acquire. She puts her phone away. She’ll try again later, when the signal improves.
‘This is about right,’ says Lottie, and the cab slows to a halt at the kerb.
‘You want me to wait?’ asks the cabbie, and Lottie opens the door and steps into the darkness and rain. ‘Dropped a fella off this way earlier on. Done up like a dog’s dinner he was. Cape and a hat and skin hanging off him like he’d just been dug up. Makes you wonder how people afford it, doesn’t it?’
‘I’ll hopefully be more than a few minutes,’ says Lottie, shaking her head and handing over a £10 note. ‘Keep the change. And if you want my advice, burial is the way to go. But do something interesting. Have your head cut off and put between your legs so you can confuse the archaeologists of the future.’
‘What you got planned?’ asks the cabbie, lighting a cigarette.
‘I want to be a rug,’ she says, raising an arm to protect herself from the rain that blows in sideways. ‘Just leave my head and my backside on and use the rest of me as a decorative throw.’
‘You’re mental,’ laughs the cabbie. ‘Love the hair, by the way. Best of luck with your arsehole collector or whatever he is.’
Lottie gives a nod of thanks and turns away as the cab moves off. She stands for a moment on the sodden kerb and checks the address she has written down on a Jolly Bonnet bar mat. She looks up at the dilapidated property before her and feels a shiver of excitement. For all of her bravado and desire to stand out, Lottie still feels like the same awkward teenager who spent most of her school life being picked on for wearing Doc Martens instead of trainers and preferring The Cure to Westlife. She knows that if she were to see her old schoolmates again, they would recall her as the weirdo who used to keep dead butterflies in a jar and who stole a frozen rat from the biology lab freezer and opened its skull with a rock hammer so she could look at the wrinkles in its brain.
The house is a towering five-storey affair, clinging to the edge of a terrace of better-kept but similarly ancient homes. All have the same shuttered windows and wooden front doors and none of these Georgian townhouses looks particularly British. To Lottie’s eye they have a Dutch look about them. She can imagine such properties looking down on the canal in Amsterdam. But they sit at the heart of Spitalfields and sell for millions on the rare occasions they become available. She had assumed that the address she had unearthed for the man she seeks would be a more humble apartment, but when she peers closer at the number hanging lopsided on the soaking pinkish brick, she realizes her quarry owns the entire house. She wonders how many years she will have to work before she could even afford a bed in the basemen
t and stops the thought before she gets upset.
There is something unsettling about the property. Lottie is only a couple of minutes from the bustle and laughter of the Ten Bells and she can see the outline of Christchurch at the end of the road. But there is something sinister about this old street. These houses have looked down upon violence. The pavements on which she stands have been replaced countless times since the homes were built but she finds herself wondering how much blood has soaked into the ground beneath. She feels oddly vulnerable, as if she might turn around to find the street filled with horses and carts and mud-soaked drunken men. She keeps glancing at the Fiat 500 parked to her right but it seems like an anachronism – a futuristic visitor.
Lottie breathes out and gives three sharp raps on the wet door. Unlike the neighbouring properties, this one shows no signs of habitation. Others on the street have been converted into offices by accountancy and architectural firms but there remain some private residences and in each, at least one light is burning. She can see the yellow outline around the shutters. At the house where the collector is listed as residing, there is no sign of life.
‘Come on, come on …’
The man inside is rumoured to possess the actual journals of the surgeon whose experiments in blood transfusion altered humanity’s perceptions of itself forever. In the same year that the Great Fire was devouring the streets upon which she stands, physician Jean Denys was transfusing the blood of animals into human beings, having successfully completed the practice with animals. The collector’s specimens would make for a fascinating episode, but for purely personal reasons, she is eager to look upon the equipment which the maverick physician had crafted and honed.
Lottie gives an exasperated sigh, banging again upon the wood. She crouches down and lifts the letterbox, peering into the darkness beyond. A breeze tickles her eye lashes as she stares into the darkened space and then she catches the whiff of something rotten; a pungent tang that is as familiar to her as warm loaves to a baker. She smells decay. Corruption. Blood.
Lottie stands up straight. The rain is still coming down hard and the only sound she can hear over the endless patter of water on stone is the distant swish of car tyres on the damp road. She wonders if she imagined the smell. Worse, whether she has carried it with her from the morgue. She does not know whether there is a protocol for such a situation. Should she knock on a neighbour’s door and alert them to the smell of death wafting out of their neighbour’s letterbox? Perhaps the collector is away and a pet has perished. Perhaps one of his specimens has been improperly packaged and has leaked its contents on the hallway carpet. She finds herself torn. She is only standing on this step because she wants something from the man inside. She turns around, hoping somebody will be passing that she might be able to ask for counsel, then grows cross with herself for requiring it. You’re a grown woman, she tells herself. Make a decision.
After a moment, Lottie reaches into her bag and pulls out a notebook embossed with a poison bottle and a raven. She scribbles a note, her address and phone number, and pushes it through the letterbox. She keeps her head back in case the smell should do something to her conscience.
Cursing, Lottie stomps down the steps and back on to the road. Her pace quickens as she heads up the street towards Christchurch. With every step she has the strange feeling that she is heading back to her own time and putting something dark and unpleasant behind her. By the time she passes the lights of the Ten Bells and raises her arm to hail a cab, it is all she can do not to break into a run.
MR FARKAS
Mr Farkas sits in the dark. He is resting in a high-backed chair and his lower half is wrapped in a red blanket. He has an old laptop computer upon his knee. His thumbs are leaving semi-circular grooves in his cheekbones as he rhythmically pushes his head back and forth along the sharp surface of his fingernails. He has scored eight trenches into his wrinkled forehead. There is a little blood upon the index finger of his left hand and three hairs have adhered themselves to one slender knuckle. He does not remember taking this position. He cannot remember drinking the acrid liquid that he can taste upon his tongue. He is unsure which room within his great house he has deposited himself within. He thinks he may be able to hear a knocking on the door but the sound could just as easily be the creak of the settling timbers or the rattle of the casters on the wooden floor. He can smell blood. A soft whisper of metal and earth. He knows there should be a stinging sensation upon his grazed skin and yet he feels no pain. He has taken his medicine. Nothing hurts him when it is in his system. He does not truly feel as though he has any form of physical presence. He sees himself as somebody else’s vision; an apparition drifting upon the cold and murky air of his big and drafty home.
There was a time when such a thought would have provoked a burst of philosophical study. How would it feel to be the object of another person’s imagination? Would a person be aware if they had been called into being by the creative whimsy of another? Are we all the unwitting fiction of something greater? He would have written long into the night. Querying. Questing. Seeking after truth. Would humanity even know if it were just God’s daydream? Perhaps the whole of man’s history could be reduced to a bizarre and orderless reverie within the cerebral cortex of some greater force. He does not write down such thoughts any longer. He finds that he tires too quickly. There is a noticeable shake in his right hand and he struggles to read back his own barely legible scribbles. He is little better on the occasions he brings himself to use a computer. It took him a Herculean effort of concentration to tell the blue-haired girl that there had been a terrible misunderstanding. She had his child. Somehow, she had his child.
Mr Farkas is only an occasional viewer of the little shows that the pathologist has been broadcasting over the last few months. He does not recall the first time he stumbled upon the programme or quite what he had been seeking at the time, but he does recall being transfixed by the attractive presenter and mesmerized by the samples which she held up to the camera and explained in explicit and grisly detail. In another time, in another life, Mr Farkas had been an expert in specimens of mortality and morbidity. He wrote academic papers and provided guidance and advice for auction houses, museums and private collectors. He ran a website for collectors of medical antiques, detailing the finest and rarest artefacts from the world of medical, surgical, apothecary and quack collectibles. Such work paid well. He had been fortunate to purchase his home while still a young man and paid off his mortgage around the same time Beatrix fell ill. That was a blessing. Her care has been extraordinarily expensive and he doubts he would have found the funds without resorting to murder had he still been paying for the house. As it is, he does not know how much money he has left. There are great gaps in his memory. At times he sees his mind as a complex lace; a web with more holes than fabric. He feels constantly as though he is in some garish hinterland between sleep and wakefulness. As a young man he would laugh when he would enter a room then forget why he had gone in there. But he feels as though he lives in such a sensation all the time. He forgets to wear a watch so is never sure whether the darkness precedes sunrise or follows sunset. In such moments of uncertainty he knows only that he is being a poor nurse. His daughter relies upon routine. She needs her own medicine at precise times. Sometimes he fears that he has forgotten to feed her or to hold the water glass to her lips. There are times he nearly forgets she is there. He wonders why he moved her to the basement in the first place. He must have had his reasons. Perhaps it was to spare his knees. There are four flights of stairs between the parlour and her room on the top floor. He must have decided the air in the basement was more beneficial to her lungs. If so, he has yet to see the benefits. If anything, she is getting worse. There is a clamminess to her skin that makes him think of rotting pork and a low, pitiful sobbing keeps erupting from her mouth. She did not enjoy the story book he had chosen for her. She had hurt his feelings. He had not raised her to be so ungrateful. He made allowances for her illness but had been
harsh with her in his chastisements. Beatrix sometimes acts as though she has a right to her luxuries. There is an air of entitlement about her that sometimes makes Mr Farkas angry. His own father would have discouraged such behaviour with physical remonstration. There are still welts upon Mr Farkas’s back from the studded belt with which his father would beat his shoulders, thighs and buttocks whenever he had misbehaved. Mr Farkas’s wife, God rest her soul, used to run her fingertips along the wounds and press her damp cheeks to each of the places he had been hurt. He misses that closeness. He does not believe he will know it again. Within his confusion, the pain of her passing remains a constant. He has to keep reminding himself that she is gone. Too dead to save.
There is a sudden blast of colour and light as Mr Farkas leans upon the computer in his lap. He almost pushes it away from himself. He cannot recall placing it here. Cannot understand what forced him here, into this cold and creaking room. He should be with her. With his daughter. Why had he left her? He feels panic flare inside him and then just as suddenly he is shrinking back inside himself as the screen fills with the image of the pathologist.
He remembers. He had needed to see it again. Needed to confirm his fears. Though his fingers shake he manages to operate the pad on the computer and then he is recoiling like a vampire shying from the light as the woman gives way to the young girl with the plump face and unkempt hair and the bright but baleful eyes of a pure and beautiful soul.
Her child.
His child.
The recollection floods him. How could his child be both there and in her bed? How could his perfect cica be out so late with this strange and colourful woman? Through the fog he had typed out a demand for answers and a desperate plea for help. He had begged. Please. My blood. My blood! And the child had heard him. She had glanced at the screen and she had walked off camera. She was coming home. Back to her bed, where she would be safe and protected and under the umbrella of her father’s perfect love …