Trick or Treat

by Jackson Sharp

  Her and Katerina.

  ‘Hold on, Matt,’ she called. She heard the fear in her own voice. ‘Just hold on.’

  There had to be a way of getting free, getting out. Had to be.

  There was a row of stripped-back steel counters running along the wall beyond the circle of candles. This is a kitchen, Rose thought hurriedly, so there must be, what, knives, cleavers?

  No way of knowing where they were. No way of getting to them, with her ankles tied. No way of using them, with her wrists tied. No way. No use.

  Think, Lauren. Think.

  Again she heard Brask’s broken voice, thick with dread: ‘He’s coming …’

  Soft, barefooted steps sounded on the tiles behind her head. The effort of craning her neck made her want to scream.

  A silhouette. A man’s dark shape against the inferno of candles. Him. Luka.

  ‘It is almost time,’ he said.

  He sounded grave, solemn – but there was the tautness of intense emotion in his voice, too.

  Luka padded across the tiles to the edge of the circle of candlelight. He lowered himself to the floor in front of Rose and crossed his legs.

  ‘I want,’ he said, ‘to explain.’

  Rose looked at him and he met her gaze without hesitation. Her gut tightened nauseatingly. He had child’s eyes. They were the haunted eyes of a damaged boy in the worn face of a forty-year-old man. She could see the gleam of perspiration on his shaved scalp and in the pit of his throat.

  There was a smear of black on his brow. Ashes.

  He wore a robe of hessian. Sackcloth, just like the fabric that had clothed Katerina, cloaked David and now swaddled Brask’s waist.

  Luka, she saw, was a penitent – in his own eyes, at least. A miserable sinner, seeking redemption.

  This was his idea of redemption?

  Rose’s body stiffened as a fresh wave of pain ran like a harrow through her head. Holding her head up was too much; she let it fall to the hard tiles, grunted and closed her eyes. Her hands, bent under her body, ached with cramp.

  She listened to the thunder of her own heartbeat.

  Then Luka spoke again.

  ‘I want you to understand,’ he said. ‘I want – I want you to see. Because I understand you, Lauren Rose. I know that you are afraid and I know why. I want to take away your fear, and take away your pain.’

  Muscle spasms shook her shoulders. Then untie my fucking hands.

  ‘What I do,’ Luka said, like it was his job, like he was a quantity surveyor or a lab technician, ‘is enable the truest expression of God’s love.’

  Rose felt sick.

  ‘Martyrdom.’

  ‘Yes.’ She could hear the smile in his voice. ‘Professor Brask has taught you well. Through martyrdom, the elect – the deserving ones – enter into the shining glory of Christ’s kingdom.’

  Rose opened her eyes again, to look at Luka.

  ‘All you do is cause pain and hurt,’ she told him. ‘Suffering, Luka, is what you enable.’

  He nodded seriously.

  ‘That is a part of what I do, yes. The road to salvation is a hard one to travel. But I believe that – in the end – the blessed ones I lead along that road are grateful to me.’

  Rose laughed harshly.

  ‘You believe? You mean no one has ever said thank you?’

  Luka frowned, compressed his lips into a stern line.

  Then he said: ‘You should be happy. If Professor Brask is your friend, you should be glad that he is to be saved.’

  ‘I guess I’m not a very good Christian.’

  Luka shook his head.

  ‘Indeed you are not.’

  ‘Then where do I fit in, Luka?’ She struggled to sit up, to meet his eye. ‘I see what part Professor Brask plays in all this, but what’s my role here? How does kidnapping a policewoman fit into Christ’s plan?’

  Luka’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘The Devil places many obstacles in the path of the righteous,’ he said.

  ‘Then I’m an agent of the Devil?’

  Another sombre nod.

  ‘You do not even know it – I see that. It is often this way. You think you are on the side of good. Perhaps even on the side of Christ. But you do Satan’s work.’

  He rose to his feet, lithely, an athletic man in spite of his slight frame.

  ‘Now there is work to do,’ he said bluntly. ‘The last martyr must be prepared.’

  Rose watched as he moved to the ring of candles. Brask, she saw, was quite still. Luka took a tray of jars from the kitchen counter and set it with a gentle clink on the floor. He made the sign of the cross and murmured to himself – a blessing, a benediction, Rose supposed.

  She heard him say ‘pater’, ‘father’. Then ‘Cerbonius’.

  The long-dead abbot of St Quintus.

  Luka’s religion – or whatever the hell you wanted to call it – was a thing of chaos, Rose saw, a monstrous creation, a chimera pieced together from the shattered wreckage of a traumatized boy’s mind.

  She squinted at the jars. They shimmered with reflected candlelight but inside she could see dark shapes suspended in clear fluid. In one, the outline of what may have been a finger bone. In another, what looked like an incisor tooth, the long root broken off halfway.

  The relics. Body parts from Katerina, David, Caroline, the victims in France. She made a quick count. Eight of them – and a ninth left empty.

  Eight?

  Three English victims so far. Four in France. And yet eight relics?

  She narrowed her eyes, peered again at the relics. In the smallest jar, a flattish, uneven shape floated horizontally, like a dead fish. It was an ear.

  The stark black-and-white image flashed into her mind. For a moment she’d forgotten the priest: the old priest who was carved up and hung from a tree in a Croatia convulsed by war. The priest who was missing an ear. The priest, Mrs Matić had said, who raised a demon in his house, loved it, nurtured it, until it devoured him.

  Eight relics then. The ninth would be taken from Brask.

  ‘Luka.’

  The cry escaped her almost without her meaning it to.

  He turned to her, his face a shifting map of dark hollows in the candlelight.

  ‘What we do is sacred. There must be no more interruptions.’

  ‘Father Florian called the police,’ she improvised desperately. ‘A firearms team is on its way.’

  Luka shook his head slowly.

  ‘Father Florian is a most righteous man,’ he said. ‘He will do nothing to stand in the way of Christ’s work.’ He glanced briefly at Rose. ‘I am sorry he had to strike you. But the wrath of God was within him.’

  Florian! Florian, the first link in the chain. The old man knew! He’d known from the start.

  Rose tried to hide her dismay. She could have stopped it all that very first day, that first bloody day; she could have pulled Florian in, leaned on him, made him talk. By Christ, she’d have made him talk, if she’d had any idea what he knew. Then he’d have led her to Luka.

  That would have saved David Norfolk and Caroline Chaudry.

  It would have saved Matt.

  ‘The police are coming,’ she managed to say. ‘They’ll have this place shut down tight, Luka. They know you, know all about you. You won’t escape.’

  Luka went on fiddling with his jars.

  ‘Escape,’ he murmured, ‘is not a part of the plan.’

  Rose struggled for words, something to trap Luka, outwit him, confuse him, make him see the madness in what he was doing.

  She fought against saying the words that rose in her throat. Help. Please. No.

  ‘Luka, talk to me.’

  ‘There is nothing more to say. Now I speak only to God.’

  Rose wished Brask would wake up, produce a smart argument, a theological paradox or a clever moral theory to cut through Luka’s insanity. Because what hope did she have on her own? What was she, but a career copper with a copper’s education? Not much of a reader, cer
tainly no scholar and not a religious bone in her body. She’d never believed, never had much time for airy guesswork about God and the afterlife, never set much store by what people called ‘faith’. Rose had learned to stand on her own two feet, to trade in facts, to face the hard realities of every day full on and fearless. She’d never had anything to fall back on – except the truth.

  The one thing, maybe, that Luka was afraid of.

  ‘It won’t change anything,’ she said sharply.

  Luka had been on his knees, unwrapping something tied up in a sheet. She guessed what it was from the shape of its long, taut curve through the fabric. Now he paused, looked at her.

  ‘It won’t change anything,’ she repeated. ‘Whatever you do, to me, to Brask, it won’t … it won’t bring Abbot Cerbonius back.’

  A spasm of anger passed over Luka’s face.

  ‘You do not say his name.’ He stood. Rose saw that his hands were quivering.

  ‘He’s gone, Luka.’ She kept her voice level, detached, cold as concrete. As hard as the facts themselves. ‘Nothing can bring the abbot back. All the killing, all the blood and bones – it won’t help.’ She drew a deep breath. ‘The abbot is dead in the ground. Gone. Gone for good.’

  Luka’s lips curled in a grimace.

  ‘And you say you are not Satan’s thing.’

  ‘It’s the simple truth.’

  ‘So says the Father of Lies.’

  ‘I think you know what’s real and what isn’t, Luka,’ Rose insisted. ‘The abbot is dead, the monastery burned to the ground, the relics are dust – you know these things.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s why you hide. In your “religion”. Say the holy words, block out the truth. Live in the past, try to pretend what happened didn’t happen. You say escape isn’t part of the plan but that’s not true, is it? Escape is what all this is about. Escape is all you want. Escape from what happened at Niza, what happened to you.

  ‘And now you try to drown the truth in blood, the blood of innocent people. But underneath it all – you know what’s real. You know what you’re hiding from.’

  ‘No.’

  Luka turned his back to her, dropped again to his knees. He threw aside the tangled sheet.

  The fine-grained wood of the bow shone in the candlelight. Rose saw the glinting steel tips of half a dozen arrows. Luka, his hand trembling, thumbed the bowstring gently and it sang a soft bass note.

  ‘It isn’t real, Luka!’ Rose shouted, her self-control snapping. ‘None of this, it’s not true, it’s not real!’

  Luka picked up the bow and a long-shafted arrow. Turned the arrow over in his hands. Its point was barbed and savage-looking. He stood, the bow in his left hand, the arrow in his right; he handled the weapons expertly, with confidence.

  The shadows of his movements flickered across the tiles.

  ‘You will find,’ he said softly, ‘that it is real enough.’

  In a single movement, fluid and well practised, he stood, turned, nocked the arrow to the bowstring, drew with a soft grunt of effort, aimed and fired from point-blank range.

  The arrow point plunged into Matt Brask’s body.

  Brask screamed, his head jerking up.

  For a moment a fine mist of blood darkened the air over the shimmering fire of the candles.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Rose felt sure that the sound of the arrowhead puncturing her friend’s muscles and splintering his bones would stay with her for ever.

  Now the words she’d been fighting all spilled from her at once: ‘No! Stop! Please!’

  Luka might as well not have heard her. He squatted, took up another arrow, felt its balance in his hands. The first arrow, Rose saw, jutted grotesquely from Brask’s upper chest, below the shaded angle of his collarbone. Brask was groaning, a terrible noise that bubbled with blood. He stopped when he saw Luka’s right biceps flex, saw Luka again draw back the bowstring. That’s when Brask stopped groaning and began to beg.

  Luka ignored him. Now I speak only to God.

  This time the barbed steel buried itself in the thick muscle of Brask’s thigh.

  Brask cried out, his voice cracking. A gout of blood spat from the broken flesh, splashing across the tiles. Rose looked away, she couldn’t help it. When she looked back she saw that the shaft of the arrow, stuck inches deep into Brask’s leg, was quivering, quivering to the rapid beat of Brask’s heart. The professor was breathing heavily, in gulping, terrified sobs – but he was conscious. He was alive.

  There was no colour, no blood in his face. He was drenched in sweat – surely slipping into shock.

  Luka paused to murmur something to himself, a prayer, in what sounded like Latin.

  Rose hoped it was a long one.

  Between the ranked red candles she watched the blood pooling darkly at Brask’s bare feet. Christ, she felt so helpless …

  Then: Think like a copper, Rose, for God’s sake.

  Then: No – think like a Rose. She thought of her dad, her brothers. The Rose police department, people called it. Policing was in their blood, going way back. They were a type: hard-headed, good-natured, unflappable, resourceful. Proper coppers.

  Not her, though. An outsider from the off. Always loved by the family, always wanted, but a girl – a misunderstood minority in the Rose household. Her dad hadn’t wanted her to go into the service. Not until he’d seen how damn good she was anyway.

  Her brothers had been supportive, in their own way, as best they could. Even though that meant a lot of piss-taking – all the way through from college to Hendon to the Met to the Thames Valley – she’d never doubted that they cared for her, that they meant well.

  But they never understood. Not really.

  She’d had to scrap harder, work longer, think faster and be smarter than the lot of them. She’d taken twice as much bullshit for half as much reward. She’d proved herself as a copper ten times over.

  So no, she thought, correcting herself again. Don’t think like a Rose. Think like DI Lauren Rose.

  Luka was selecting another arrow from the bundle, still murmuring, still praying, as Rose rolled on to her front and began to squirm forwards across the tiles. Her cramp-ridden body shook with the effort. The hammering in her head grew more insistent, more violent. She crawled on, towards the light, towards the candles.

  She was aware of Luka turning an arrow over thoughtfully in his hands, saw the play of light on steel. Composing himself, she guessed, preparing himself for the final acts of this ‘ritual’.

  She could hear Brask’s breathing, harsh and shallow. Could anyone live through something like this and not die, whether from blood loss, shock or internal injury? She didn’t know. All she could do was keep going. Keep fighting.

  She crawled on. One inch at a time. One twisting, aching, agonizing inch at a time.

  Then she stopped and lay on her back, trying to control her breathing and slow her shuddering heartbeat. Lay bathed in the candlelight.

  Her stomach muscles burned and her scrabbling knuckles scraped on the tiles as – slowly, slowly – she bent her body into a sitting position.

  Behind her she heard Luka bring his prayers to an end.

  ‘Don’t,’ she heard Brask say. His voice was weak, a half-voice – and yet she could hear the fear in it.

  From Luka there was only silence.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Brask, ‘for Christ’s sake, Luka, my friend –’

  If she forced her arms up, twisting the muscles of her shoulders, the joints of her elbows, Rose could lift her bound hands perhaps a foot from the floor. It was beyond painful.

  But then she learned another lesson in pain. The bowstring snickered, the arrow punched into flesh and Brask screamed, a throat-tearing animal howl that reverberated nightmarishly around the tiled room.

  She didn’t, couldn’t look round at her friend. She tried not to think about him or his pain and terror. She tried not to wonder where the arrow had struck him or whether he could survive a
nother wound or more blood loss –

  Instead she concentrated. She ignored the spasming of her muscles and the protest of her twisting elbows and made herself lift her hands.

  Set her bound wrists upon the burning candle wick. Bit her lip and waited for the fire to take hold.

  She could hear Brask’s shallow, rough-edged breathing. She could hear Luka murmuring another prayer. She could smell, over the pervasive stench of balsam, her own flesh burning, charring, crisping in the candle flame.

  Over it all – over and through it all, within it all, engulfing everything in a scalding flood – was the astonishing pain.

  With every endless second that passed Rose told herself she couldn’t take it. And yet she did. The blistering of her skin, the searing of a thousand nerve endings, the soft-hissing cauterization of her exposed flesh. And that smell: it reminded her, sickeningly, of that terrible morning east of the city, the discovery of Caroline Chaudry’s body – the finding of her roasted remains.

  Tears wet her cheeks and bitter blood from her deep-bitten lower lip filled her mouth. She would not give in. She would not let Matt die. She would not let Luka kill again. She would not be beaten. She would not give in.

  Luka prayed on, an obsessive background murmur riding the rhythms of her agony.

  Then he stopped praying.

  And Rose smelled burning rope. It was giving way.

  One more second. Two more seconds. If she took her hands from the flame and the rope still held – Christ, how could she bring herself to put them back there, to plunge herself back into this hell? She wasn’t sure she could.

  Her head pounded; a grey mist began to thicken in her vision. She had never imagined such pain. It was more than anyone could take, surely, too much for anyone to bear –

  Yet she bore it.

  Make sure, make sure. The words thumped in her head like a mantra. In her mind’s eye, though, she saw Luka drawing back the bowstring, aiming the vicious arrowhead – where? Brask’s gut? His face? His heart?

  She slumped forwards, felt her hands slip – oh Jesus, the relief – from the flame. And then, with every ounce of strength left in her ruined muscle fibres, she forced her wrists apart.