by Mark Edwards
I looked back at the unconscious woman. Was her baby in there? A small part of me wanted to look, to confirm the horror. But I tore my gaze away from the coffin, catching a glimpse of something else. It was a mind-snapping moment.
We both walked slowly to the wall, aware that we had to go, knowing the person or people responsible for all this could come in at any moment. Pinned to the wall were about two dozen Polaroid photos. Some of the photos were of women, staring at the camera lens with terror or surrender. One photo showed a woman on her back, naked, her mouth open in a scream. Beside her crouched a man, holding some kind of metal instrument which he held between her thighs.
The other photographs were of babies. Newborn babies. All of them lay on their backs. Some wore blue, but most were dressed in white. Some were crying, others placid. Some with eyes shut, some looking towards the photographer.
Each of the photos had a date inked on its white edge. The baby’s date of birth, I wondered? And then I noticed: a few of the pictures had a second date added, with a large X beside it. The Polaroid in the bottom right corner had two dates. The first was 2.7.13. The second of July 2013. The second date read 13.8.13. The thirteenth of August. Just a few days ago.
I turned my head back towards the women on the beds. The blonde woman was weeping, the other still passed out. The baby in the coffin must be hers. It had been born here. And died here, in this squalid, stinking room.
From downstairs, the scream sounded again, a scream of pain that chilled my blood.
Breathing hard, I once again spoke to the blonde woman. ‘We’ll be back. OK? We’ll make sure your baby’s safe.’
She looked at me, then at the baby.
I realised I might need a weapon when we got downstairs, looked around for one. I blew out one of the candles and wrenched it free of its black metal candlestick. I weighed the candlestick in my hand. It was heavy, solid.
Laura was already opening the door, hesitating and peering down the stairs. I followed after her, passing the first bed.
A hand shot out and grabbed my leg.
I cried out, pulled away. The skeletal woman in the bed stared up at me with huge eyes, opening her mouth to reveal that most of her teeth were gone. The remaining teeth were white, healthy, suggesting that the missing teeth had been punched or pulled out. I accidentally kicked over a bedpan that sat by the bed, the foul-smelling, brownish urine slopping over the side and onto my shoe.
The woman smiled at me, insanity in her eyes, and I ran, pushing Laura through the door, letting it slam shut behind us.
Beneath us, the screaming had stopped. Instead, I could hear thumping. Someone coming up the stairs, very slowly.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Let me go first,’ I said.
I began to descend the stairs, slowly. I stumbled on a loose stair and almost tripped, falling against the wall and managing to stay upright.
We turned the corner onto the lower section of the stairwell, Laura one step behind me.
The man stood at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at us. He had a gun in his hand, a black pistol, the kind that would be used by a policeman or soldier, not a farmer or hunter. He had thinning dirty blond hair and looked to be in his thirties, short but powerful. Wiry.
Behind him, at the bottom of the staircase, a woman lay face down. Black jacket and jeans, black hair streaked with red.
Alina.
He lifted the gun towards us, made a beckoning motion with his free hand.
I didn’t move, desperately trying to work out what to do. Go back up, look for another way out? He could shoot me as soon as I turned, and even if he didn’t, what were the chances of finding another exit? And the thought of him hunting us through his own, dark house was even worse than facing him here.
I walked down the last few steps, aware that he was eyeing the candlestick. He took a couple of steps back, past the prone Alina, gesturing for us to come down into the entrance hall.
We stood before him, all three of us breathing heavily. It struck me: he was nervous too. Not as scared as Laura and me, of course. But there was definitely fear in his eyes.
He turned the gun on Laura and pointed his other hand at the baby. Behind her, I could see Alina’s back rising and falling. She was alive.
‘Mine,’ the man said, his words jerking my attention away from Alina. I was surprised to find that he spoke any English. He gestured for Laura to hand the boy to him.
Laura didn’t move. I stared at the gun, feeling the candlestick in my hand, trying to work out if I could strike him with it. At this moment, it wasn’t worth the risk.
‘Laura . . .’ I began.
‘No,’ she said, moving towards the door.
The man gestured angrily at her, at the baby—then pointed the gun towards me.
‘Give the baby to me,’ he said.
Laura looked at the gun, then at me.
‘Laura,’ I said. ‘Give it to him.’
It was her turn to look angry.
‘Give me,’ the man said again, his voice a little louder, his anger growing.
Laura took a step towards him, holding out the baby, and the man lowered the gun so he could take the boy. The baby started to scream, as if it knew, could sense, who, what, he was being handed over to. The man flinched and Laura thrust the baby towards me, yanked the candlestick from my grasp as I took hold of the boy, and swung it at the man. He backed away—but held on to the gun, pointing it at Laura, who stood panting, clutching the candlestick tightly. I held the screaming baby, juggling it instinctively, its cries drilling into my skull.
‘Put him down,’ the man shouted above the noise. ‘The baby. On the floor.’
Laura shouted, ‘No!’
But what choice did I have? I stooped and laid the still-screaming infant on the floor at my feet. Laura started to cry, her whole body shaking.
As the man moved towards the baby, I ran for the door, grabbing Laura’s arm and pulling her after me. She dropped the candlestick and I yanked open the door, convinced a bullet would fell me at any moment. But as I risked a glance back I saw why the shot hadn’t come. Alina had got onto her hands and knees and crawled nearly to the candlestick. He was distracted by this, needed to stop her from reaching it.
I pulled Laura through the door and down onto the path.
She tried to struggle out of my grip. ‘Let me go!’ she shouted.
‘No! Laura! For fuck’s sake—let’s go.’
‘But the baby.’ She was shaking and crying and desperate to get back to the tiny boy, but I couldn’t let her.
‘We have to get out of here. We’ll get help. He’ll be out here in a second!’
‘No—’
A gunshot.
The baby stopped crying.
I could hear screaming and thought it was me or Laura—my senses were fucked up, muddled—but then I realised the screaming was coming from inside the house. It was Alina.
‘Come on, please, please. Let’s go.’
Another gunshot. And this time, Alina fell silent.
We ran down the path towards the edge of the clearing. There was no time to find the road that I’d seen through the window. My heart was pounding. He was about to appear, he would shoot us both, bury us out here and we’d never be found. Two more travellers who go missing in a foreign land and are never seen again.
I looked back over my shoulder and saw the door of the house opening, the dark figure of the man appearing, and holding Laura’s hand I ran faster than I’d ever run before, down the path, through the forest, back to the tracks. Out we came, bursting out of the trees, back onto the path, stumbling over the rail track, almost falling, one of us catching the other, stopping only to scoop up our backpacks from the edge of the forest.
We ran all the way into town.
We didn’t talk.
We d
idn’t look back.
Part Four
London
November 2013
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I finished my drink, immediately wishing I had another. I felt weak, drained. Telling the story, reliving it again . . .
‘Daniel? Hello? Are you OK?’
I closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was still there, waiting.
‘There’s one more thing. As we reached the trees, we heard another shot, then another a few seconds later.’
Edward thought about it, then nodded. ‘He went upstairs and shot the two women.’
‘That’s what I think. We’d seen them; he must have assumed we were going to tell the police. He wanted to remove the . . . the living evidence. Although the whole place would have been full of their blood and DNA. I don’t know.’
‘Maybe he decided he didn’t have any use for them anymore.’
‘Like I said, I don’t know.’
‘So why didn’t you go to the police?’ he asked, frowning deeply.
‘We did. Well, we tried. We went to the local police station in Breva, after running into town.’ I explained what had happened at the station, how we had ended up running from there, too.
Edward looked pale, even a little sick. He hadn’t touched his pint since I’d started telling the story.
He got up from the table. ‘I’m going to start by making some calls, doing a bit of research. I’ll call you tomorrow morning, OK?’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘You coming?’ he asked.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to leave the pub. I was going to stay here and get thoroughly fucking drunk.
I watched him go out through the double doors. He knew all of the story he needed to know to help me. I had done the right thing.
I don’t remember getting home or going to bed. The next thing I knew it was light outside and my mobile was ringing. The display told me it was Edward. I realised I was fully dressed and the room smelled like a distillery. It was just after eleven in the morning and my head was throbbing. My throat felt like I’d chain-smoked forty cigarettes and as I moved, a horrible, wobbling nausea overcame me. The phone kept ringing and that’s when it all came back to me. The Molotov cocktail. Telling Edward my story. Staying in the pub and getting blind drunk.
Oh Jesus.
Ignoring the phone, I went into the bathroom and threw up in the toilet. After that, I felt a little better. I called Edward back.
‘I tried to ring you last night,’ he said. ‘Where were you?’
I groped for a reply, and he said, ‘Never mind. I’ve got some stuff to tell you. I’ll come to yours.’
I took a shower, drank two cups of strong coffee and checked my emails while I waited for Edward. There was a message from Rob.
Mate,
I know you’re having a tough time at the moment but I’d really appreciate you not coming round here at midnight, banging on the door, chucking stones at Laura’s window and waking Oscar up. It took two hours to get him back to sleep. Laura made it clear she doesn’t want to see you. Personally, I think the two of you need your heads banging together, but if she says she doesn’t want to be with you anymore and doesn’t want any contact, you need to respect that. Next time, Erin will probably call the police.
And you might want to send Erin a note of grovelling apology if you want her to ever talk to you again.
I really think you need to lay off the booze for a while too.
Rob
I was mortified. What had I done when I left the pub? And why was Laura refusing to talk to me again, saying she didn’t want me to contact her? I had a flash of memory that made my whole body cringe: me, standing in Erin and Rob’s back garden, lobbing pebbles at the window and shouting Laura’s name like some drunken, rejected Romeo.
I picked up my phone and checked my texts. Fuck, I’d sent Laura over twenty messages after midnight, telling her I loved her, that I wanted to see her, asking her to marry me. She had sent a single response:
Leave us alone.
I went into the kitchen and took every bottle of alcohol out of the fridge and the cupboards, uncorked the wine, the smell making me gag, popping the tops from the beer bottles, and poured everything down the sink. I dropped the empties into a bin bag and carried it outside, slung it into the recycling. When I looked up, Edward was walking towards me, hands in pockets, head down.
‘Everything all right?’ he asked when he saw me.
‘I’m never drinking again,’ I said.
‘Get rat-arsed, did you, after I left?’
I nodded, leading him inside.
‘I have to admit, I felt like getting pissed too after that story you told me. But instead, I spent the evening working. After dealing with the bloody insurance company, that is. Somebody needs to send them into a house of horror in the woods.’
Seeing my expression he said, ‘Sorry. Shouldn’t even joke about it. I had a nightmare last night, the first I’ve had in years. Firebombs and women chained to beds and babies crawling through the flames.’ He shuddered. ‘Then I had the police round first thing, asking lots of questions about who might want me dead.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘I told them I have no idea. But they are going to want to talk to you.’ He handed me a card. ‘Here. This is the investigating officer’s number.’
A great wave of exhaustion washed over me as I took the card. I was going to have to talk to the police. It was all going to come out, everything that had happened.
I set the card aside. ‘I’ll talk to them later. First, I need to know what you found out.’
‘Make me a very strong coffee and I’ll tell you.’
As I waited for the kettle to boil, Edward paced the room, running a finger along the spines of books, peeking through the curtains at the street, like he was looking out for someone.
I carried two coffees over and he sat on the sofa while I pulled up a chair.
‘I have to say, Daniel, the story you told me sounded like just that—a story.’
‘But it’s the truth!’
He held up a palm. ‘All right. I’m not saying I don’t believe you. The thing is, from what I found out last night, it gets even weirder.’
I waited for him to continue, dreading what I was going to hear.
‘So, after talking to you last night I went to see this guy who recently did some work for me. A translator. He speaks all the Eastern European languages, including Romanian. He’s a bit of paranoid nutcase but he’s useful. I got him to call the police in Breva, to act as an interpreter.’
I was horrified. ‘You told this interpreter what had happened?’
‘Daniel, please listen. If you keep interrupting . . .’ He gave me a smile that was intended to be reassuring. ‘I asked to speak to the policeman you told me you saw. Constantin. I wanted to check out what you told me.’
‘What? But I was sure he was involved . . .’
‘Daniel, for fuck’s sake. I needed to check it out, that’s all. It’s standard practice. I’d be a pretty shit investigator if I took everything I heard as gospel. Because we need to find out if this Camelia person is connected to what you saw.’
‘OK. Makes sense.’ A fist clenched and unclenched in my stomach.
‘So . . . I asked to speak to Constantin. Or rather, my interpreter did. The Breva police were really evasive at first. Wanted to know why we were calling them, where we were ringing from, etcetera. So I told them I was following up on a crime that had been reported back in August, and they eventually put me through—but not to Constantin, to another officer. He looked on the system, told me they had no record of an English couple coming in and reporting a crime.’
Edward’s phone began to vibrate. He glanced at the screen and dismissed the call.
‘Where was I? Oh yeah. Th
is police officer told me they had no record of any such report, that they get very few English people coming to Breva, apart from the occasional loser looking for vampires or werewolves. Did you know Breva is famous for werewolf sightings? I looked it up on Google.’
I shook my head.
‘Anyway, I asked again if I could speak directly to Constantin.’
‘And? Did you get to talk to him?’
Edward looked at me over the rim of his coffee cup. ‘No. Constantin has gone missing. Nobody has seen him for two weeks.’
‘Have they got any idea what’s happened to him?’
‘They wouldn’t tell me. But it didn’t seem like it.’
‘What else did you tell them?’
‘I told them what you told me about the house and what you’d seen. An abbreviated version of it, anyway.’
I had no idea how to feel about this. ‘What did they say?’
‘To say they were sceptical would be an understatement. I mean, I was talking through an interpreter, and he was looking at me like I’d lost my mind.’
‘So the interpreter does know . . .’
He tutted. ‘But I eventually got them to promise to go and take a look in the forest. To find the house. I tried to put the idea in their heads that they might find Constantin there. Which, who knows, might actually be true.’
I stood up, strode across the room and back again. My legs were trembling.
‘I haven’t heard back yet,’ he continued. ‘I assume they were waiting till today, so they could go when it was light. I’m waiting for the Breva police to ring me back.’
Anxiety was coming off me in waves. Edward said, ‘Listen, don’t worry about the police in Romania. They’ll find the house . . . Maybe there are women being held prisoner there right now. At the very least, there must be evidence of the crimes that took place. The guy who did this will finally be stopped.’
‘You have a lot of faith in the police.’