by A. Sparrow
She turned and glanced around the flat. It looked no less messy in the dimness.
“Are you alone? Where are your roommates, Sturgie?”
“They’re in Aberdeen … for a match.”
“We should just stay put, then. Pretend no one’s home.”
“These people … who are they?” said Sturgie, tucking in his shirt over his slight paunch.
“They’re from my dad’s church. It is me and Izzie they are after. They think you might be harboring us.”
“They’ve been after me at school. Freaked me out, I tell you. I skipped classes the other day so I wouldn’t run into them.”
“Have you been in touch with Linval lately?”
“Tried calling him the other day. I had an angle on a gig. Student activities is looking for some bands. But he’s unreachable. His message box is full and he never picks up the phone.”
Karla bit her lip and sighed. “Maybe Papa still has him.”
“What do you mean he, ‘has him’?” said Sturgie.
A figure appeared on the walk, slight and female, her eyes wandering from building to building—Isobel!
“Oh merda! What is my sister doing out of the bloody car?”
“Is Ren not with her?” said Jessica.
Just then, a tall man in a raincoat emerged from the building across the garden. He squinted up into the rain and popped open his umbrella. Isobel passed before him like an unsuspecting fawn in the path of a wolf.
Karla tore across the room, burst out of the flat and pounded down the stairwell. She shoved open the back exit and flew around the side of the building. Izzie was gone. The garden was empty.
She ran back towards the car. As she passed between the buildings, something dark and bulky stepped out from behind a hedge.
Her heart felt like it might pop as she lurched away.
“Easy. It’s just me.” Renfrew leaned against a utility pole, puffing casually at a cigarillo. “So how did it go with Sturgie?”
“Ren? Where’s Izzie?” said Karla, in full panic.
“She’s back at the car. I just stepped out for a little smoke.”
“But I just saw her walking through the garden.”
A brief but plangent cry cut through the sizzle of the rain and traffic before it was muffled. She ran towards the source, Renfrew close behind.
An engine cranked to life. The black Vauxhall pulled out and began to execute a three point turn. Behind a bus stop enclosure, two figures struggled in the shadows. Mark had his cricket bat wedged up under Isobel’s chin, his hand clasped over her mouth.
Renfrew barreled past Karla, knocking her aside. “Take your hands off her, you bastard!”
Mark tossed Isobel down to the pavement. Renfrew went to tackle him, but he stepped aside and cracked him squarely in the back of the head. He dropped like a sack filled with rocks.
Isobel popped to her feet and started to run, but Joshua blocked her way. She collided with him and he seized her. Mark came after Karla, grinning like a ninny.
“God Bless! We’ve really hit the jackpot, Mark. Here they both are, right under our noses.”
Mark lunged and tried to grab Karla, but she slapped his arms away. He shoved her down. She rolled away and pried loose a large chunk of blacktop.
“Jess! Sturgie! Help!”
The black car hopped the curbing and squealed to a halt. The passenger door flew open. Joshua muscled Isobel into the front seat.
“No! Let her go!”
“You girls are going nowhere but home,” said Joshua. “Your Papa, he misses you dearly. Mark, be a gentleman and help Miss Karla into the car.”
“Fuck you, and to Hell with Papa!”
Joshua did the sign of the cross and shook his head. “Oh dear. Something tells me you’re due for a little intervention, perhaps even an exorcism.”
Mark lunged at Karla. She swung the chunk of paving upward and caught his solidly in the brow. Blood gushed into his eyes, blinding him.
“Gah! You little whore! We were trying to help you.”
“Karla? Where are you?” Jessica called around the corner of one of the buildings.
“Over here! On the street!” Karla grabbed Mark’s bat and pulled it free of his grip.
Renfrew, groggy, was attempting to stand, the pistol loose in his grasp.
“Mark! Get in the car! The other guy’s got a gun!”
With one hand clasped to his head, Mark stumbled over to the car and climbed into the back seat.
The car squealed away as Jessica and Sturgie came running up.
“They got her,” said Karla. “They got Izzie.” She collapsed back to the pavement, burying her head in her arms.
***
Everyone piled back into the blue Ford, sans Isobel. Sturgie kept his eyes averted from his uncle, but Renfrew was too dazed to even notice or care. Jessica had to shove Ren out from behind the wheel. He was in no condition to drive.
The black sedan was long gone. A chase was out of the question.
Karla fought a losing battle with her tears in the back seat. Sturgie patted her on the back, trying his best to console her, in his self-conscious and plodding way.
“Where do you suppose they took her?” said Jessica.
“Home, I would guess. To Papa’s house.”
“We should call the police.”
“We can’t. I’ve tried telling you people. The police are on his side.”
“Two strangers snatch your thirteen-year old sister. How would they not see that as a crime?”
“They’re returning her to her father. She’s a minor. He’s her legal guardian. The law is on his side.”
“That just ain’t right,” said Renfrew, voice still a bit slurred, his eyes bleary. He popped the magazine from his pistol, cleared the chamber, checked it and popped the magazine back in.
Jessica started up the car. “So what do we do? Where do we go?”
“I can call some friends,” said Sturgie.
Karla shook her head. “Let’s go to the house. Go down this street and take a left.”
“But they’ll be expecting us, won’t they?” said Jessica.
“Let them,” said Renfrew, his voice restored, his eyes clear and hard.
***
They parked opposite Ardconnel Terrace, separated from the terraced houses by the private sunken garden they all shared. Karla still retained her keys so she let everyone in the wrought iron gate and led them down the stone steps to the ravine-like park below.
The plantings were thick with shadow. It had always been a minimally lighted place. The residents who shared the space were not expected to frequent it in the middle of cold, rainy nights.
Renfrew and Sturgis had still barely spoken a word to each other. They walked meters apart, as if separated by magnetically repellent bubbles of personal space.
They reached the bottom, thick with holly and yew. Karla led them across and up the steep stairway on the other side.
“Stay back,” said Karla. “Let me check things out.”
She went up to the black iron fence and gazed across at the terraced townhouse where she had spent the three worst years of her life.
Every window was completely dark. She glanced up and down the street. Papa’s white Peugeot was nowhere to be seen, nor did there seem to be any black sedans of the model that had whisked Isobel away.
Jessica inched forward behind her and laid her palm on Karla’s shoulder.
“They don’t seem to have come here,” said Karla. “The house is all dark.”
“Where else would they have taken her?”
“Joshua and Mark’s, perhaps. They live on the other side of Inverness, near the Lock. Or maybe the rectory, or even the church.”
She reached for the latch on the gate.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
***
The group formed a protective gaggle on the stoop behind Karla, everyone uneasy and glancing around guiltily. Renfrew had
his pistol out and pointed straight up. Sturgie carried a leafy branch he had torn from a mulberry tree. They must have looked like a gang of incompetent cat burglars.
“Are you sure you want to go inside?” said Jessica. “What if your dad’s home?”
“I doubt he is here. I do not see his car.” She slid her key into the chamber. It turned freely. At least he hadn’t changed the locks.
She pushed open the door and stuck her head inside, listening carefully for any signs that the house was occupied. Besides the hum of a refrigerator and the muffled jabbering of a neighbor’s television, all was silent.
“Alright, everyone come inside. But keep the lights off and your voices down. Someone might be watching. And I don’t want the neighbors to tattle.”
She walked to the center of the front room, illuminated only by the oblique wash of a street lamp. The curtains had been stripped off the windows. Cardboard moving boxes were heaped along one wall.
But Papa’s shrine remained in place along the wall beside the hearth, the spot where a normal family might opt to place their television. Racks of votive candles had all burnt down to nubs and smears of paraffin in the bottoms of their colored glass receptacles. Papa would never have let a single flame go out. It was obvious that he had not visited the townhouse in at least a day.
She bustled across the hardwood floor, down a short hall illuminated by a feeble nightlight to her and Isobel’s old room. Just being in this space again was enough to cause her heart to be gripped by a thudding dread.
She found their bedstead gone, a bare mattress on the floor. All of their old clothes and the few dolls and puzzles the girls had ever owned had been crammed in a heavy duty polythene sack, the kind usually used to dispose of construction debris.
She crossed into the kitchen, where there was a door leading to the basement. It was a long shot, but it worth checking for James down below, for due diligence if nothing else.
Papa had not hesitated to confine her and Isobel there for disciplinary reasons and there were spaces down there that matched James’ description. It had two casement windows in front, but none in the twin storerooms to the rear. It was not unusual for Papa to host services and rituals in his little chapel area. There were times that the house might sound like a church to someone locked in the dark.
Luckily, Papa had neglected to pack the torch they had always kept on the top step. She flicked it on and started down the stairs.
“For God’s sake, don’t go down there by yourself lass,” said Renfrew. “Let me go with you.”
But this basement could not frighten her. She knew it too well, having lived down there for days on end at Papa’s discretion, whenever he sensed anything unholy in her demeanor that required immediate expulsion.
She knew exactly where the spiders liked to spin their webs, and where the millipedes gathered under a rotting timber beneath the sill. She had never identified the mystery creatures that scratched through the spaces in the walls. She liked to imagine they were pixies, only because it made for a more pleasant image than rodents with naked tails and yellow teeth.
Once, she had found the skeleton of a rat tucked behind a bin in the corner, the forgotten victim of some grain baited with warfarin. At the time, the only thought that came to her was: how lucky, this beast.
She went straight for the storeroom, which was locked by key, as usual, and rapped on the door.
“James? Are you in there? James?”
“Do you think he’s actually here?” said Renfrew, still wielding his pistol.
“No,” said Karla. “I am just being thorough.”
Renfrew grabbed the knob and jiggled it. “I don’t suppose you have the key?”
“No.”
There was a work bench along the wall, covered with ancient tools gathering dust. Renfrew found an antique slater’s roofing hammer, the kind with one long straight claw—like the fang of a saber-toothed tiger—and slammed it between the door and the jamb. Two massive tugs and the center of the jamb splayed outward, popping the door open.
And there it was, just as she remembered, the dusty room with the long wooden crate that had served as chair and bed and pretend coffin. During her confinements, Papa would send down a motley array of men to reprogram her, ranging from young seminary rebels to elderly secular mystics, some kindly, some lecherous, all empowered to berate the devil out of her and cast the demons that had made her such insolent and ungodly daughter.
Jars of preserves predating her family’s occupation of the townhouse still filled the shelves. Pickled crabapples and quince, overgrown with globs of fungus, floated in the cloudy, viscous medium like the mutant fetuses in a pathology museum. Lids were rusted through and erupting with ooze. Some jars had cracked, their contents leaking and drying into a sticky and adherent mass.
This place was where she had first met Root. The visitations began when she started to contemplate how much more pleasant her existence would be if she took advantage of the glass at her disposal and take a shard to her wrist. Those thoughts provided the summons the Liminality had been waiting for.
When the sheer stone walls had transformed into a rounded fibrous tunnel, she thought for sure that she must have been hallucinating, delirious from lack of food or something. She convinced herself that the pod was actually her own undersized sleeping bag that somehow she had become entangled with, and hooked on a nail, suspended from the ceiling. Somehow. However unlikely.
But the Reaper made it for real for her when it had come snorting up from the depths on only her second visitation. That could have been the end right there if it Bern and Lille hadn’t been patrolling the tunnels. Only their timely appearance and swift unraveling of her pod had spared her soul from the Reaper’s gullet.
“Guys? Is everything okay?” said Jessica, calling down the stairs, her voice quavering.
“They’re not here,” said Karla.
“Where to now?” said Renfrew, returning from the far end of the basement. “We can’t stay in this house.”
“Why not?” said Karla. “It’s probably the last place they expect us. Rest up. Make yourself at home. We can go to the church the first thing in the morning.”
“The church? You think that’s where they took her?”
“Almost certainly. Joshua’s wife never cared for our family. She would never stand for having us. We frighten her. She probably thinks we might contaminate her home or rub off on her perfect children.
“Why wait? Why not go now?” said Renfrew.
“Because I bet it’s sealed up tight,” said Karla. “That place is like a fortress at night. But it will open at dawn, as it always does. For morning vespers.”
“Alright then,” said Renfrew. “We’ll have ourselves a nap. Get up maybe, what say, four?” He started back up the stairs, but Karla stepped back into the storeroom. “Uh … where are you going, love? Don’t you want to come upstairs?”
“No. I’m sleeping here,” said Karla, reclining atop the crate.
Chapter 34: The Procession
As Renfrew retired upstairs, respecting her wish for solitude, Karla reclined atop the long, dusty crate. Splinters caught in her cardigan. Sprung nails poked her hip. She flicked off the torch so she wouldn’t have to stare at the filthy, old beams and their cargoes of lint ready to fall on her face.
It was just like old times.
She sorted the lobes of her mind, situating them comfortably into the neutral nooks and crannies she had learned to carve and cultivate through trial and error, lopping off or tucking away any wish or longing that resembled hope or desire in favor of the null and void.
She was there, on the box and then she wasn’t. She found herself on the floor of the rickety hovel between the walls of Frelsi, the place that Lille now called home. The shack was empty, but there was a commotion outside—multiple strains of singing and chanting almost clashing at counter purposes.
She rolled off a mat, annoyed to find herself naked yet again, but at least here in Lill
e’s little hut, there was no shortage of pre-made wraps and shifts and dresses. Lille was obsessive and excessive when it came to her wardrobe, even at these heights, where Weaving could be a challenge.
She threw on something simple and shapeless that Lille had left draped over a stool and wandered outside. Lille had probably used it as a night gown, but Karla didn’t care about fashion, only that she had something to cover herself with.
She stepped out the broken-hinged door and was taken aback to find a huge Reaper sprawled across the parade ground, it’s decking painted with gaudy flowers and curlicues, its posts adorned with brightly colored flags and streamers.
A handful of men and women dressed in billowy pastel clothing stood at the railing and waved to the surrounding crowd as if they were about to embark on a pleasure cruise.
Karla spotted Lille standing with Bern on the backmost segment of the decking. She pushed through the spectators and ran alongside the Reaper.
Bern, wearing his usual frumpy attire, spotted her first, his eyes popping wide as he tugged on Lille’s sleeve. Lille, rapt in conversation, ignored him at first, but when she finally turned and saw Karla, she screamed.
“That’s my girl down there! Someone, please get her on board.”
One of the crew hopped the rail and extended his hand to Karla. She took it and was helped up onto the decking. Lille, swathed in a gown of light blue silk and tulle, swept her up in her arms, sprinkling joyful tears. “Oh, I’m so glad you made it back for this! And you’re just in time. We’re just about to set out for the glaciers.”
And before Lille could even take a breath, the Reaper lurched forward, rising up on a hundred appendages that advanced and rippled in waves. A few of the bystanders cheered and waved, while most just stood around and stared.
“These buggers hope it will be them making this ride next time around,” said Bern.
“Bern, why aren’t you dressed up?” said Karla.
“Oh, that’s because I’m a guest like you. Only candidates get to wear their Sunday best.”
“So it’s actually happening? Lille’s getting murdered?”
Lille puckered her lips. “Oh dear. It sounds so harsh when you put it like that. How about we say my soul is about to be liberated?”
The Reaper picked up speed, dashing up the lane like a runaway bus, as Hemis struggled under their loads to dodge out of its way. It hugged the inner wall bounding the Sanctuary, making a wide circuit around the core of the city.