by Lee McGeorge
A tall slim figure came down the stairs towards him, oblivious for a few seconds before halting when it realised he was there.
Time passed in slow motion. Two men had stumbled into one another on a blacked out staircase.
Paul turned on the flashlight.
There was a man. A skinny, spotty, beanpole of a kid with lank hair down to his shoulders. “Who the fuck are you!” Paul growled.
The kid panicked, turned and ran back up the stairs, he shouted something that sounded like, “I’m sorry.” For a few seconds Paul stood incredulous. There was an intruder in his home. In his home.
“Get back here you fucker!” Paul yelled whilst pounding up the stairs behind the trespasser. The flashlight beam swung. The kid was tall, lanky. He had a height advantage to escape and Paul saw his legs disappearing into the loft space that opened to the sky. Getting into the building this way had been easy for Paul, he’d dropped down. Getting out would be harder, he would need... a foot on the wall, part of the sprint... he bounced up, grabbed the lip of the loft entrance and pulled himself through like he was defying gravity... easy.
Darkness. Stars above. The sound of the city in the distance. The hollow metal sound of feet clattering down the scaffolding ladders of the gutted house next door. Paul picked across the ceiling beams and swung the torch low.
The kid looked up. He looked into the light. A pasty face with a look of shock and horror as he tried to scramble back down the ladder of the scaffold.
Paul was in the air. Instinctive. A dangerous leap into the void. His boots aimed square on the face of the kid.
The force made a sickening sound as his boots smashed into the face of the boy on the ladder. It knocked him backwards. Paul felt one of his legs go through a rung and he stabbed his arm through the ladder to hook on. This was crazy. It was pitch black, sixty feet in the air, a dark void below and he’d jumped, fucking jumped.
The flashlight spun one way, the boy flailed the other, falling through thin air, rotating backwards to fall head first as he dissolved into darkness. He fell for two or three seconds before the crashing sound of wood and rubble being struck signalled the end of his dive onto concrete. Then there was no sound at all.
Paul unhooked his leg from the ladder and listened carefully. He could hear city sounds of traffic in the distance. He could smell the wet charred timbers and masonry dust of the derelict building. Below him was pure blackness save a small wedge of illumination from the flashlight. The boy was down there amongst the blackness too, but there was no sound or movement.
Paul descended and carefully found his way across the remains of the fire to retrieve his torch.
The boy was lost in the dark.
It took a minute to find him as he hadn’t landed were Paul imagined. He was on his back at the foot of the stairs to the cellar. He was alive but in bad condition, conscious but unable to move.
“Who are you?” Paul asked with the flashlight square on his face.
He held up his hands weakly and spoke in a crying whisper, “I’m sorry, Mister. I just wanted a place to sleep.”
“A place to sleep? Are you homeless?”
“Yes, Mister. I’m sorry. Please, I need an ambulance.”
Paul scanned the light across his body to look for injury but nothing stood out. There were no protruding bones or bleeding wounds. Paul shone the flashlight into the cellar. He hadn’t explored this cellar but it seemed to follow the same layout as the one in his building. He grabbed the kid’s clothing and dragged him down the stairs.
“Please, Mister. Help me. I need... arrrgh.” His whispered pleas became painful as his broken body hit every step on the way down. The flashlight led the way. The kid cried but the volume was low. He was in serious pain but too weak to inhale enough breath to cry out. Paul dropped him and swept the beam around the cellar. There were two orange moulded plastic chairs, the type of thing one would see in a café from the 70’s. This cellar had a sink and draining-board on which Paul rested the flashlight. He grabbed the boy by his clothing and lifted him. It was easy. His strength was surprising; the adrenalin perhaps... it was really easy. He dropped the boy into a chair and saw his chest collapse in on itself.
“Who are you?” Paul snapped.
The boy cried without answering. Paul slowly withdrew one of his knives. The boy’s eyes widened. Panic spreading. “Please. Mister!” he managed with more muster.
“Who are you?” Paul growled with more ferocity.
“I’m nobody... I’m...” jagged little breaths of air.
“Your name?”
“Joseph, my name is Joseph Frady. Please Mister, I won't tell anybody.”
“You won't tell anybody what?”
The kid tried to shake his head but nothing really happened. He looked as though he was slipping away, heading to unconsciousness. Paul sheathed the knife and began searching through Joseph Frady’s clothing. He was too weak to resist.
A wallet. Bank cards, lots of receipts, a cardboard drinks coaster, a ‘Care in the Community’ health worker’s card... a National Insurance card.
Fortune.
“Your name is Joseph, right?”
“That’s right, Mister.”
“And you’re homeless?”
“I just wanted somewhere to sleep.”
“Where were you born?”
“Croydon.” His eyes closed.
“Do you have family there?”
“I don’t have any family,” he whispered opening his eyes again.
Paul looked at the National Insurance card for a moment then dropped it and the wallet into his pocket. His eyes adjusted a little more to the gloom. Joseph Frady was in a bad way. His ribcage was misshapen and his torso had taken the general shape of the chair he was sitting in.
Paul took hold of the knife handles on the yoke, flicked the press-stud catch away and withdrew both knives.
Frady watched the action, then breathed out and let his head droop low. There was a resignation to the action that had come far too soon. What a fucking loser. Paul couldn’t imagine behaving so weakly himself. The kid just gave up and accepted it. If that had been him he would have fought and fought and fought with every last ounce of strength to stay alive. This kid had just given up. This was unhelpful. One thing the knife combat book stressed was mental conditioning to prepare for when facing a real opponent.
This kid didn’t want to fight back.
The first blade jabbed into the left side of Joseph Frady’s chest an inch or two below the collarbone. The second blade jabbed in and out of Frady’s stomach. All Frady did was wince mildly.
Paul scrutinised the scene. Something wrong with it. Not artistic enough. For an act as powerful as ending a man’s life it deserved a sense of theatre or occasion that Frady wasn’t bringing to the event. He just sat there, slumped in a plastic orange chair with blood spreading across his clothes.
Blood.
Paul made a quick slash with his right hand knife to slice through clothing and skin of Frady’s chest. Blood came faster, skin was exposed. Frady looked at the wound with confusion. He could see it but he hadn’t felt it.
Paul leaned in to the boy, eye to eye, only inches apart. He wiped some of Frady’s blood on the tip of his index finger and brought it to his lips, still clutching the knife blade. This is when Frady reacted; he moaned, as loudly as he could. His broken body began shuddering, collapsed in a chair as the man with two knives before him tasted blood. Poor Joseph Frady, he didn’t even have the strength to raise his arms, but this is what Paul wanted to see, he wanted to see the desperate realisation, not the resignation of...
He was pissing himself.
Oh...
Suddenly the blood didn’t look quite so appetising. The bastard. This fucking imbecile was sullying everything, ruining the moment.
Paul sheathed one knife as he walked behind Frady. Just end it. He grabbed Frady’s greasy hair and fiercely yanked his head back whilst squeezing the blade with as much pressure as h
e could across his throat.
Blood spurted in hard pumps as Frady’s hands jerked into life, grabbing at the injury, shaking, livid, trying to stem the flow. Paul walked around the room to watch his handiwork. Over the course of a minute the pressure of the pumping blood dropped and the spurting didn’t reach quite so far and the grasping hands lost their intensity. Then the blood flowed and the hands fell to the side. Then the blood trickled. Then it stopped.
Paul collected his flashlight and left. He paused for a few seconds on the stairs of the cellar to look back at the former Joseph Frady, slumped in the chair with his head tilted back to extend the neck wound. He was Inanimate. A homeless bum vagrant, dead in the cellar of a burnt out shell. Behind him was the vampire. Stealthily, without being seen, the vampire had followed and guided Paul’s movements.
“We did that well, didn’t we!” Paul said to the vampire.
The vampire said nothing.
“Yeah,” Paul continued as he left the cellar. “We did that really well.”
As he stood in the moonlight he felt calm and could see the world with clarity. This was the same peaceful calm he felt after killing Nealla and Raul. It was strange that such violent action would lead to inner peace and satisfaction.
Perhaps killing was best.
Perhaps he should kill Nisha, instead of torturing himself saying he wouldn’t.
Fuck Nisha.
Kill the bitch.
Right there, at that moment, that was exactly what he decided to do. No more play acting. No more internal debate. He would take Nisha Khumari, he would make her suffer and he would end her.
PART III
ONE MONTH LATER
Corneliu Latis was finding the driving tiresome. Spring brought rain showers which were freezing into black ice. He would have to be careful. This deep onto the back roads he hadn’t seen another car for at least an hour and if he had an accident he could be stranded for some time.
He wanted a drink, a real drink. Romania has zero tolerance drink-drive laws, but he still wanted a big shot of serious alcohol and of late he’d been taking the risk. He’d been pulled over one time, but once he’d shown his police credentials was allowed on his way without a breath-test. He shouldn’t be drink driving, he’d been pushing his luck… to hell with the law, nothing mattered anyway.
Ahead of him were the ruins of old homes that sporadically littered the countryside. It looked like it had been a farming community at some point. Broken windows, huge gaping holes in the roofs, peeled paint. The village was dead. Iron skeletons of ploughs and farming equipment remained as the final tombstones to lost endeavour.
After a few hundred yards the buildings became piles of rubble and Corneliu had the strange sensation that he’d crossed a border of some kind. From this invisible line there was at least a mile before the buildings began again. This time they were low apartment blocks, four stories tall at the most. Again, none of them had glass in the windows; they were broken derelict blocks of concrete surrounded by patches of snow. This was a town that, for some unknown reason, was now deserted and had been left for nature to reclaim. Everything was gone. Except the road. The road was pristine and beside it were telegraph poles carrying cables, communication lines and possibly power judging by the thickness. Like the road these poles were maintained. In a ghost town of dereliction, someone was spending an awful lot of money to keep something connected.
As he rounded a ridge at the foot of the mountain he saw a building. A huge building. The sort of thing that would have been considered modern architecture back in the 1970’s; a brutalist concrete shell that on first glance looked like a prison. Only the narrow and tall blacked out windows gave away any personality.
There was a small car park with a dozen or so other vehicles and Corneliu parked amongst them. He noticed CCTV cameras overlooking the area. The entrance had the same blacked out windows as the rest of the building. It was lifeless.
Corneliu got out and stretched, he ran his fingers through his short black hair and rubbed his eyes. He was thin, he’d always been thin but over the last few months he’d lost more weight at an alarming rate. Too much alcohol, not enough food. He hadn’t had an appetite for a year and his loose fitting clothes showed it was getting the better of him.
Was somebody watching on the cameras? They should come out and greet him. Somebody should say ‘hello’, but as he looked back towards the deserted town he felt like the last man on Earth.
It was deathly quiet.
There was a sign by the front door, a small brass plaque with the title, Institutul de Cercetare Psihopatologice. A woman’s voice came through a loudspeaker. “Pot să te ajut?” she asked. “Can I help you?”
“Yes. My name is Detective Corneliu Latis, I have an appointment with Dr. Lucian Noica.”
“One minute please, Detective.”
He waited. He waited more than a minute before the door opened to a frosty looking middle-aged woman in a tight black skirt and white blouse.
“Detective Latis?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Can I see some credentials, please.”
It was the middle of nowhere, he was expected. Why the security?
Dutifully he showed his police I.D. and the woman stepped aside to allow him entry into a bizarre lobby. It was huge but there was nothing there. A wide space perhaps thirty feet across and forty deep but with a ceiling so low he could reach up and touch it if he tried. At the far end was a glass wall looking into a courtyard and by this window were a dozen or so reception chairs. The lady led him there, her heels clicking against the polished stone floor.
“You can wait here, Detective Latis. Dr. Noica will be with you as soon as he’s free,” she said.
“Thank you.”
Latis took a seat and watched her heels clicking away and through a door. Once the door swung closed all sound was gone.
Latis looked through the huge plate window. There was a church, a really old church. But it wasn’t the church that was the surprise, it was that this building was wrapped around it. The church was in the courtyard and surrounded on all sides by this huge structure. A deserted town, a well maintained road into the middle of nowhere and finally a prison like building with an ancient church at the centre. The architecture was remarkable, but more remarkable still was this place clearly cost a fortune to operate and maintain. Somebody was spending serious money to make this happen.
From behind him a door opened. Footsteps. Latis turned to see a man dressed finer than he’d ever seen in his life. “Detective Latis.” The voice was warm, honeyed, kind. A hand was stretched out to shake. “Hello. I’m Lucian Noica, I’m the director of this facility.”
They shook hands.
Noica motioned the way and talked pleasantries as they went through an empty corridor. How had he found the drive, had he found the place without trouble, the usual small talk. Latis followed the script and answered the questions politely whilst holding back a thousand questions on who this guy was and what the hell did he do here? The private questions stacked up further when they took an elevator to a private lobby that only led to his office. Jesus Christ, this guy had a private elevator.
“Please, have a seat. Would you like a drink, some coffee or water? I’m having a coffee if you would like to join me.”
“Coffee would be fine, Dr. Noica,” he answered wishing it could be laced with alcohol.
“Please call me Lucian.” Noica used the telephone to ask for his coffee. Rather than sitting behind the desk he sat in the chair beside Latis. “Can I ask what Chief Lupsecu told you about why you’re here?”
“Nothing,” Latis growled. It came out more venomous than he’d wanted. His heart worn on his sleeve.
“He told you nothing at all?”
Latis shook his head. “Nothing at all and I’m quite thrown by the cloak and dagger nature of coming here?” He paused for a moment before adding dejectedly, “I’m sure when I know the reasons, it won’t be so mysterious.”
Latis nodded. “I am... So far as I know there were two murders. They don’t tell me much about crimes like that.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
Latis looked uneasy and shuffled in the seat. “Dr. Noica...”
“Lucian, please.”
“Lucian... I… err, call me Cornel. I don’t know why you need to see me or what it is you think or have been told.”
Noica raised his hand slightly. “Let me start at the beginning. Just over a month ago two men were murdered in Noua. The prime suspect is a young man with dual British and American citizenship. The investigation here in Romania has stalled because all the evidence points to this man and he has left the country. His name is Paul McGovern. He flew into Britain immediately after the murders then vanished, although we have reasons to believe he has moved on to America where he was born.”
“I know nothing of that.” Latis responded.
“The British authorities picked up the trail on McGovern. He crossed the border, took out a bank loan and disappeared. Completely. And I do mean completely. We’ve had people watching his email accounts to see if he logs on, but nothing. Never checks his emails, no cell-phone use, never uses his bank cards for purchases, if he has gone to America, as we believe, he didn’t do so on his own passport. He has pulled off the perfect disappearing act.”
“He took out loans?”
“Yes. On the first day he was there; and then he withdrew all of the money as cash. The first payments on the loans were due this week and needless to say the debts weren’t honoured.”
Latis nodded. “Not the behaviour of an innocent man. It’s the behaviour of someone taking steps not to leave any electronic trail.”
“That’s what the British police say. No banking, no cell-phone, no email or social media. He is completely unseen.”