Path of the Tiger

by J M Hemmings

  ‘Thanks,’ Margaret murmured.

  All of the furniture in the room was quite modern and new, except for the bathtub, which looked like a relic from the Victorian age.

  ‘I apologise for the inconsistency of styles,’ the General said. ‘The K’Nganwa did not bathe privately, as is customary in our times, and thus there were no bathtubs in this city. They all washed communally in the river, which is what my troops and I do. I have made some concessions to our customs, however, to accommodate foreign visitors such as yourself.’

  Margaret almost said something when she heard the word ‘visitor’, but she forced herself to hold her tongue.

  ‘Thank you,’ she replied cautiously. ‘I, I appreciate this.’

  She was careful to suppress any thoughts of discontent or anger, for she remembered how, when she had first met the General, he had slipped inside her mind with such effortless ease; she had to be extremely cautious around him, which was unsettling and quite frightening to say the least. Indeed, she felt utterly naked before him, in a way that she never had with any other person. Person. She wondered if that was the correct term to use, for it had become blatantly clear that neither he nor his child soldiers could be considered entirely human. What they were, exactly, she still did not know – and this bothered her, a woman of science and medicine, immensely.

  ‘Please, lie down and relax,’ the General said, breaking Margaret’s spell of contemplation. ‘I will send one of my troops up to fill the bath and heat the water. She will also bring you a change of clothes. I am aware of how you feel about soldiers and anything to do with violence and war, but I am afraid that the only clothes that I can spare for the moment are combat fatigues and camouflage pattern tee-shirts. I hope that wearing these does not cause you too great a deal of ideological discomfort.’

  ‘Any fresh clothes would be much appreciated, sir. There’s no need to apologise for the fact that they’re army apparel.’

  ‘I appreciate your flexibility,’ he said calmly, a tight smile on his lips, and amusement – or perhaps smugness – sparkling in his eyes. ‘You will dine with me in the main hall in an hour, and there you will meet my fellow Antidote collaborators. They are grown men and women, like ourselves; this city is not only populated by what you so ignorantly think of as “child soldiers”, you see.’

  The General grinned eerily, almost savagely at Margaret after he had said this, and a wet chill crept slug-like down her spine. She shuddered as she realised that he had again probed her mind, but she was too frightened to react this time, so she merely nodded compliantly and hoped that he did not notice the crimson splash of embarrassment spreading across her cheeks.

  ‘Enjoy your bath, Doctor,’ he said as he turned and started to walk away. ‘A soldier will show you to the dining hall in a few hours, and we will speak further then.’

  PART FIVE

  17

  ADRIANA

  17th September 2020. Bangkok

  Adriana tossed and turned in her sleep, sweating in the oppressive heat of the underground room as she fought her way through a hyperreal nightmare. In the dream she found herself back on the small plot of land that her family tilled to eke out a living; a patch of earth nestled in a tiny village in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. She, the youngest child of the family, minded her siblings’ children while they worked in the fields, or, as was the case with the eldest two, in factories in distant cities during the week.

  Adriana was deeply absorbed in her book, a dog-eared and haggard copy of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in English, her second language, and she devoured the words in a semi-trance as the unruly children wrestled and raced around her feet in the cottage. From outside, however, the sound of a car rolling up the dirt track caused her to pause her reading.

  ‘Adriana, I’m going into the village to thee what thith ith about,’ her mother lisped through the gaps in her rotten teeth.

  It was a rare occurrence that a car entered their remote village, and Adriana’s mother, chief gossip among the local housewives, always had to be first in line for any news from the outside world.

  ‘Of course, mama,’ Adriana mumbled, not bothering to raise her eyes from the novel. ‘I’ll keep an eye on the little ones.’

  The portly woman wrapped a shawl around her head to combat the autumn chill that crisped the air, and then she shuffled out of the humble dwelling. To Adriana, utterly spellbound by the words on the page, her mother seemed to have only been gone for a few seconds when she rushed back into the house, abuzz with keen excitement.

  ‘Adriana! Put that thtupid book down, girl, put it down and thtand up!’

  ‘What is it, mother, what’s wrong?’ she asked, stirring with consternation at the urgency in her mother’s voice.

  ‘Nothingth wrong, girl. In fact, for a change, thingth jutht might be coming right! Let me thee how you look,’ she said, gripping Adriana’s arms and turning her around, as if she was a mannequin on a pedestal.

  ‘Mother!’ she exclaimed, aflutter with amusement, but also feeling a prickle of rising suspicion. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘No, no, thith won’t do,’ her mother muttered under her breath, her brow knitted with concern as she shook her head with disapproval. ‘Thith won’t do at all. Hurry up, into your older thithters’ room! We can uthe thome of Ana’th clotheth. And let’th put thome of Nikita’th makeup on you, yeth, that will thpruce you up a bit.’

  ‘Mother, calm down please, and stop pushing, ow! Just give me a minute to breathe, and tell me what’s going on!’

  ‘Opportunity ith knocking, girl! Opportunity, fortune, luck – all of which have been in exthremely thort supply here in rethent yearth!’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘A woman from the thitty arrived here in that car. Thee ith a job agent! Can you believe it, a job agent, coming out here, to thith plathe! Thee’s looking for pretty girlth to work abroad. Abroad, my girl, in Franth and Germany!’

  ‘Work abroad? Really? Doing what?’ Adriana asked. Her pulse began to quicken with excitement – excitement that elbowed any murmurings of fear and suspicion out of her mind.

  ‘Waitrething in high clath rethtauranth! They’re willing to pay Romanian girlth in Euroth, my dear, in Euroth! Thee thaid on a good night you could make ath much ath one hundred Euroth for a thingle thift!’

  Adriana gasped in shock.

  ‘One hundred Euros in one night?!’

  ‘Jutht imagine, Adriana, you could get uth out of here! You could thend the brat-th to thchool! You could make your own dream come true, and finally enroll in univerthity!’

  Adriana’s heart was now thumping with elation and her soul was fast becoming intoxicated on the heady wine of optimistic joy.

  ‘I could really go to university? Really?! I-, I … do you really think she’ll choose me, mother?! I mean, I, just, I’m … I can’t even think right now, I’m so excited! How will I even be able to speak to her without blabbering like an idiot?’

  ‘Just keep your mouth thut and let your beautiful eyeth do the talking; everyone knowth that you’re the prettietht girl in all the Carpathianth. That’th why your father and I haven’t let any of these local boyth near you. We knew you’d be destined for thomething better, and here it ith, finally! Quickly, let’th get thith makeup on and get you into the jeanth, and find a nice blouthe for you. The woman is over at the Petrethcu house right now, having a look at their daughterth, but thee’ll be over here nextht. Hurry!’

  Five minutes later Adriana was attired in her sister’s tight jeans, high heels, and a pretty pink blouse with a floral print. She had applied just enough eyeliner to bring out her piercing honey-coloured eyes, and she untied her mane of wavy chestnut-brown hair so that it could hang loose about her slim shoulders. She waited with nervous apprehension, and a persistently tingling flutter in her upper belly and diaphragm, in the cramped space that served as both the living room and entrance hall of her family’s tiny dwelling.

  A
slim middle-aged woman with high cheekbones and a pinched, prominent nose, wearing an excess of makeup, trotted into the house. Adriana was immediately impressed by her confident stride and the cut of the business suit she wore. The woman’s artificially whitened teeth flashed in a slash of a smile as soon as she saw Adriana, but the girl could not help but feel as if something sinister was lurking behind those large eyes that gleamed with such allure below the arches of her perfectly plucked eyebrows.

  ‘My, my, my, the rumours are true,’ the woman exclaimed as she sized Adriana up and down. ‘This is the homestead of the most beautiful girl in the Carpathians.’

  She sat down on the moth-eaten sofa and crossed her legs with elegant grace, and over the course of fifteen minutes or so she explained the details of what her employers were looking for to Adriana and her mother. With every word this woman spoke, warning bells pealed louder and louder inside her head, yet as the woman was handing her the papers to sign, it seemed as if a demonic force was guiding her hand; it fastened the pen in her fingers with a granite grip, and moved her trembling digits to forge the shape of her signature, doing so entirely against her now-panicking will. A scream was beginning to build within her lungs, but she felt as if she had been forced under water, and that she was drowning in the black depths of some deep quarry pool. Dread crashed around her, crumbling like a temple of Atlantis as the cataclysm rent its foundations asunder and the earth swallowed it up.

  Adriana tried to pull her hand away from the contract, which burst spontaneously into flames, but invisible fingers kept her pen locked on the paper with a vice-grip. She looked up at the job agent, and a tsunami of terror flooded her mind as she saw that the woman’s eyes had turned black, and blood was now gushing out of her sneering mouth.

  She turned, trying to get up and run, but her limbs seemed to be mired in wet cement, entombing her still-living body like that of a mastodon in a tar pit. Her mother’s head twisted grotesquely upon her neck, rotating until it was entirely back to front, and then a howling hurricane wind smashed out all of the windows, sucking her mother out of the house and sending her spiralling up through the vortex into dense banks of storm clouds, spinning and growing smaller and smaller until she was but a speck against the pitch of thunder and lightning.

  And then they were there, in the house with her: vile, stinking men of all shapes and sizes, their greasy hands pawing at her, tearing at her, rending her flesh and ripping skin and meat from her body, devouring her with cannibalistic relish as she somehow remained conscious throughout the unspeakable agony.

  Finally, a monstrous figure, his face hidden deep within the shadows of a massive hood, shoved the others aside, slammed his iron-wrapped fist into her chest, and tore out her heart. He held it, still beating, before her horrified eyes. The earth then opened up beneath her, and in an instant she was falling, tumbling, accelerating through the void towards a fiery pit. As she reached terminal velocity and was about to plunge into the glowing lake of magma, however, she awoke with a jarring start.

  For the first few seconds of consciousness Adriana could not even breathe, so overwhelming and real was the fear that lingered in the wake of the nightmare. Her heart was palpitating madly, and her palms were clammy with cold sweat. Yet slowly, ever so slowly, reality began to materialize through the torrid haze of fear-laden humidity. Above her a crooked ceiling fan spun, clicking with every rotation, and below her the purple satin sheets of her bed were soaked with sweat. A stub of incense smouldered with tenacious pungency in the corner of the room, and a red light bulb illuminated painted scenes from the Kama Sutra that adorned the walls in gilded frames; she had awoken from one nightmare only to find herself inextricably mired in another.

  As the cold hardness of reality materialised in all of its harsh impermeability, she saw Roxana standing at the foot of the bed, and the girl’s eyes were wide with fright.

  ‘Are you … are you all right, Adriana?’ she asked in her gentle voice. ‘It looked like you were having a bad nightmare.’

  Adriana let out a drawn-out sigh, and the omnipresent, suffocating sense of despair and hopelessness closed once more around her.

  ‘As okay as I can be in this awful place, Roxana.’

  ‘Tippawan just knocked on the door while you were asleep. He says that you need to clean yourself up. You have to go dance in five minutes.’

  The words sent a chill down Adriana’s spine, and a soup of revulsion, horror and fear began to bubble in her guts. Up to this point she had only had to strip on stage and dance in private booths in the club, but she knew that the day was coming when she would have to provide more intimate services to the perverts who patronised this hellhole. Sigurd was waiting for a high enough bid on her virginity, and after the first high-paying client finally had his way with her, she would have no more special privileges, and would be made to service countless men, dozens of per day, like the other girls had been forced to. She took the teenager’s hands in hers and locked her eyes into the girl’s, trying to bolster her gaze with conviction.

  ‘We … we will survive this, Roxana, we will survive this. I won’t let them touch you, do you understand?’

  Roxana nodded, but it was obvious that the girl saw through the hollowness of this promise. They had been here for a few weeks now, and neither Tippawan nor his masters had yet found a suitable bid for Roxana’s virginity. The time, however, was surely coming.

  Biting back tears of anger and hopelessness, Adriana hauled herself off the bed and stumbled over to the tiny en-suite bathroom, where she stripped off her flimsy slip and stepped into the shower cubicle. She hosed herself down with lukewarm water and washed herself with automaton-like detachment. When she was done, she stepped out, dried herself off and paused briefly to peer at herself in the mirror.

  Her slim body, previously lithe, sleek and glowing with youthful vigour, was beginning to look unhealthily gaunt. Tippawan had been trying to force-feed, her but Adriana just hadn’t been able to keep the food down. Her torso was mottled with bruises from Tippawan’s frequent beatings, her eyelids were permanently swollen and puffy from constant bouts of weeping, while her skin was wan from the lack of sunlight in this subterranean prison.

  She couldn’t hold back the tears at the sorry sight of herself, so once again she fell to her knees, weeping with helplessness and sorrow, and aching with a desperate longing for the life she had so rashly left behind. Roxana moved in close to her and hugged her gently as she cried; the teenager had thus far seemed to have been handling this situation with a stoicism that belied her years. Adriana had precious little time to wallow in self-pity, for a few seconds later there was a sharp rap on the door.

  ‘Storm!’ Tippawan shouted. The harsh, ruthless tone of his voice was entirely antithetical to the soft politeness he had feigned at their first meeting. ‘There are some people here who want to inspect you for a bid. You’d better be ready!’

  ‘Yes sir,’ she tittered meekly, the sudden fear in her voice palpable.

  She ran over to her bed, where she slipped into in the required white lingerie, and then she opened the door with trembling hands. With what felt like a mass of maggots writhing in her guts she swallowed her silently screaming terror, forced a smile onto her face and flashed it with hollow fear at the clients: four burly Japanese men dressed in black suits. Colourful tattoos poked out from under their sleeves and crawled up their thick necks; these men were Yakuza. Their leader was an obese middle-aged man who strode into the room ahead of his compatriots, leering lasciviously at Adriana and Roxana. She thought briefly of the Japanese woman, and wondered whether these men were the ones who she had said would be coming to help her, but the stranger’s words rang clearly in her memory: ‘look for a red dragon in a stormy sky’. Whatever that had meant, it seemed to have little to do with these salacious perverts who stood drooling with lust before her.

  Tippawan adopted his gentle tone of voice as he spoke to the gangsters, and in fluent Japanese he explained that they were welcom
e to grope the girls, but that they were not to remove their clothing or insert anything into any of the girls’ orifices. The leader nodded and grinned, his eyes feasting greedily on Adriana’s body all the while, and he grunted out an agreement to the terms, with his men nodding behind him.

  ‘Good,’ Tippawan murmured in Japanese, clasping his hands and pressing his long, feminine fingers together. ‘I’ll leave you all to it. Of course, any extras you so desire will be provided free of charge, should you place a suitable bid on either girl. And do I mean anything: alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, absolutely anything. We are here to serve you! I hope that the quality of the two products in front of you is enough to elicit a suitable bid.’

  He bowed to the men and then left them alone with the girls. The sweating oaf at the head of the party shuffled immediately over to Adriana. The rancid odour of his halitosis began to fill the room with its acrid pungency, and she gritted her teeth and swallowed the rising tears and nausea, trying to wrench her mind out of this reality and onto an imaginary plateau of oblivion, somewhere far, far, far away – anywhere but in the crushing squalor of the here and now. She needed her mind to be gone for this ordeal; it was the only way she could hang on to the last remaining shreds of her sanity.

  The man got right in her face, grinning lecherously, and he barked an order at her in Japanese, which had his comrades guffawing behind him.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand, sir,’ she murmured in English, which she had learned as a child, first by watching American TV shows, and then by devouring English novels and comic books in her teenage years. The man stared blankly at her, so she repeated herself in Thai, a language she was quickly picking up.