by Lee McGeorge
“Look at me, Nisha... I won’t harm you, so long as you do what I say. Take a breath and look at me.”
She obeyed. Her head lifted, then cautiously her neck tightened to tilt her gaze straight ahead. When they made eye contact she groaned in reverse, the air sucking in through her nostrils. it was like she was screaming backwards, through her nose. Her body went rigid.
“Show me your palms.”
Nisha looked down at her clenched fists.
“I SAID LOOK AT ME!”
Her head jolted back up.
“...and show me your palms, Nisha.”
Her arms unfolded away from her chest with robotic spasms, her gaze locked onto his chin or his forehead, always staring ahead but desperate to avoid eye contact. She kept her hands in fists.
“Open your hands... Open them.... Open them Nisha, or I’ll open them with this knife.”
As her fingers unclasped her breathing became rapid. Huge strong breaths through her nose, her mouth clasped tightly closed. Her hands stretched forward, cupped together like a beggar, blood dripping from the wounds into pools on the floor.
“Move your hands wider apart. Out to your sides”
She complied instantly, moving her hands out like she was about to give a hug. A crying sound came from her nose. Her breaths became pants and for the first time she became sexual. Paul felt himself stiffening. He could fuck her, he could do anything to her...
Control...
No sex. Never allow her to have the moral high ground.
Her body was streaked in blood. It ran across her hips, along the lines of her groin, in streaks down her legs. It poured from her hands and it reminded him of what he’d been told about vampires in Romania. The cure was to drink blood from a child, the wounds of Christ from cuts to the feet and hands, from the spear wound to the flank. It made her desirable. A beautiful naked girl, bleeding, blood soaked, standing in a Christ-like pose with open arms ready to embrace him.
Control...
“Put your palms on your tits.”
She paused for a second then did it quickly to make up for the lost time.
“Now rub it in... Massage blood into your body...”
Her trembling grew into jerking spasms and wild shaking. She tipped her head to the ceiling again. Her crying would have been loud but she kept her mouth clamped shut to minimize the noise. Her moans and sobs came through her nose... but she did it. Chained to the ceiling, naked, with blood pouring from her palms she massaged the blood onto her breasts.
Control...
Success.
“You can stop now, Nisha.”
He unlocked the padlock from the eye-bolt allowing more chain to run through the ring on the ceiling. He took her blanket and tossed it to her but she was too frightened to catch it.
“Go and sit in your corner,” he said. Nisha went straight and sat on the mattress, her hands back in fists and clamped to her chest. Paul checked the anchor by the door again to make sure it was still as inescapable as when he’d first fit it. He stepped out onto the stairs and padlocked the door. He set the magnet against the reed switch and reset the cell-phone alarm. He padlocked the second door and collected his coat.
As he stepped out into the backyard he found it was raining terribly, the weather having worsened significantly whilst he was down in the basement. He really should have brought an umbrella.
PART IV
It was the same dream. Ildico was beside him in bed, her arm stretched out, her smile soft and sleepy. Paul opened his eyes but lay still. He was on top of the sofa bed. The window wide open. He was naked and had kicked away the cover during the night to expose his skin to cold air. He listened to the rain.
What had he done with Nisha?
Why had he done it?
He pictured her in the basement rubbing blood onto her breasts, crying, terrified. It was his fantasy made real but he hadn’t enjoyed the experience. Something wasn’t right with it. He closed his eyes and pictured it again but this time saw himself lick his tongue up over her nipple to taste blood. It was a better image but a moment later he visualised himself slicing her with the knives; they were slices, not stabs. That was what he really wanted.
In the moonlight he stretched his arms above his head, then brought his left forearm into view. Sublimation. From the crook of his elbow down to his wrist.
The sound of rain.
Ildico.
Sublimation.
For Ildico.
What had taking Nisha got to do with improving himself? He was supposed to be getting better, how was this supposed to help? How could kidnapping Nisha possibly be a source of sublimation? It did help, he supposed, in learning to control the vampire. So many times he’d fantasised the murder of Nisha, mentally rehearsed her torture, but only now did he realise that he was supposed to be finding ways to sublimate these feelings. He was supposed to focus and learn self-control so as not to kidnap, he was supposed to learn not to act on these spontaneous feelings.
“I fucked this up,” he mumbled.
The plan was, if you get feelings to hurt a girl, learn to put those feelings down. Don’t kidnap the girl, chain her up, cut her, torture her and test yourself to see if you can bring yourself not to kill her. How was that supposed to help?
He listened to the rain.
He was going to have to kill her anyway. She was a witness, she was a problem now. A liability. He would have to kill her just to get her out of the way. Kill her in the squat, leave it locked, move away. There should be nothing left to tie him to this place or to the identity of Joseph Frady... except for the real Joseph Frady whose body was rotting in the cellar next door.
“Move on, Paul,” he said to himself. “You have been brave and you have been bold. Now revert to paranoia and move on. Kill Nisha simply, quickly, cover your tracks and move on.”
----- X -----
Corneliu watched the sun rising over London from the hotel window. He’d drank heavily and fallen asleep in the chair. He’d dreamed a lot about what Noica had said, about McGovern being a vampire in the way of the old wives tales. A research institute, a hospital, all dedicated to this ‘phenomena’.
Noica had emailed the document given to nurses. He’d skimmed through and looked at the pictures. There was something quite horrible about it. Pencil sketches on how to restrain men. Sketches of men on hospital gurneys with their wrists strapped to the side of the bed, sketches that demonstrated how to approach a restrained man to put a muzzle on him, medical bondage, barbaric instruments of restraint. It wasn’t that the images were disturbing, the true horror was that this document existed. There was a secret hospital with men tied to gurneys suffering an illness that happened frequently enough they had to produce a guidebook for nurses on how to deal with it.
He’d suffered bad dreams in the drunken stupor, dreams of McGovern that had solidified the connection to what he was doing in a raw and visceral way. The whole thing had changed from rejection and loss of self-worth into a serious operation with razor sharp details that had to be assimilated quickly. There was too much to learn, too fast a speed to reach and he was unprepared for the transition.
The words of his telephone call with Ion Lupsecu went through his mind. “You are a disgrace as a detective Cornel, and you know that,” Lupescu had said. On the telephone it was part and parcel of the rejection and he hadn’t paid the words much heed. Now he thought on it, he could see only the lack of respect and diplomacy. “Cornel, you compromised your last investigations by being so strung out.” It was true. It was all true. He had compromised investigations and he was unworthy of respect.
“This is too important for an idiot like me to do,” he mumbled to himself. “I’m going to fuck this up.”
He opened the crime book to remind himself of what was at stake. The pictures of two dead men dusted in snow struck closer emotionally. McGovern, this young academic and studious young man who wouldn’t hurt a fly had sliced up two men with a kitchen knife, he’d fought against
them simultaneously. McGovern the weakling against two brutes, yet they had been defenceless against him. Their backgrounds, their histories showed they were both fighters, both brawlers, ex-convicts with criminal records that in one case involved attacking someone with a sword. Two hard men went up against a bookish young kid who wouldn’t hurt a fly... and he eviscerated them.
“I can’t fuck this up,” he said to himself. “I can’t… this guy has to be stopped.”
Corneliu poured through the nurses guide again. He scrutinised a pencil sketch of a man on a hospital gurney. The pencil sketch nurse pressed a mask over his face and showed how to hold the mask firmly with one hand whilst tightening the straps with the other. Extreme caution for an extremely dangerous man.
Sunlight streamed through the hotel window and Corneliu woke up. Really.
----- X -----
“Paul is marvellous, Mr. Latis. Simply marvellous. A true talent.”
Corneliu smiled at the overwhelming charm of Jade Conway. She was a heavy girl in a tight black dress; a corset pinched her waistline forcing an overflow of cleavage to erupt from the top. She seemed a fun person to be around. Red lipstick, dark hair in a 1950’s style and horn rimmed spectacles on a chain around her neck.
“Do you know where he could be right now?”
“Well, he is supposed to be in Romania. I was shocked when you called to say he was missing.”
“It’s more concerning than just missing,” Corneliu confessed. The approach he used in Oxford of feigning concern had paid dividends. “Paul was seen with two men who were later found murdered.”
“Oh my...”
“Yes. We think Paul was the last person to see them alive so he is crucial to the investigation. But we can’t find him in Romania and we’re not sure if anything bad has happened to him or if he’d just moved away or even returned to the UK.”
“I can’t help you with that, I’m afraid. The last time I saw him was when we discussed the project.” She raised a finger to pause the conversation then turned around to her computer. “He did send me an email before he went to Romania... here it is. Dear Jade. I am relocating to Transylvania to prep the series and will be out of contact for a few months. Please email if you need me but I don’t think I’m going to have internet connection where I’m living, so responses may be slow... that’s it, that’s all he wrote.”
“What does he mean, prep the series?”
Jade reached to the side of her desk and collected three books. “These books are our bestsellers. They’re monster stories for teenagers.” Cornel looked at the book covers. Shadowbeast, Blood for the Shadowbeast, and finally The Shadowbeast Conflict. They looked trashy but fun. “Paul was going to expand this series by writing vampire stories,” Jade continued.
“I knew he was writing one book.”
“He was due to deliver one book and outlines for a few more. I was quite excited to see what he was going to produce. She handed over another book. The Killings of a Spectacular Man by Paul McGovern, it was an anthology of horror stories, again aimed at teenagers. “This is what we have just published and it’s brilliant.”
“What’s it about?”
“Paul’s story is about a magician in Victorian London who people come to believe is a supernatural version of Jack the Ripper. He is an ordinary stage performer turned into a killer by a cult of devil worshipping policemen and judges. They use the dark arts and magic to entrance him into committing a murder for them, but after the murder he turns the tables and gets his revenge by murdering them all, one at a time. No matter what they do, no matter how they try to hide or protect themselves, the Spectacular Man can always get to them.”
“And McGovern wrote it...”
“Like I said. He’s marvellous. He is a very creative thinker. His ideas, his writing, everything about his imagination is brilliant.”
Corneliu nodded. Noica would like to know that.
----- X -----
Paul sat in the library of UCL with his laptop open. It was busy. Beside him were a number of books on conditions of the brain. He’d already skimmed blood pathogens that could cause violence and found nothing. He’d skimmed broad and deep and although he’d found physical causes of illness of the brain, they rarely led to violence. He’d learned that madness and violent ideation were not the same thing. People could go completely and quickly insane with paresis through an illness like syphilis, but these people suffered exaggerated delusions of grandeur rather than quietly obsess over plans to murder.
The closest he’d come to an actual match of his specific symptoms was a chance uncovering of the Black Dahlia, a notorious true crime from 1950’s Hollywood. The victim was sliced in two and the blood drained from her body. Her cheeks were cut with a scalpel from lips to ear, parts of her breasts were surgically removed and a tattoo was flayed off and stuffed in her vagina. It was a gruesome, horrible crime that left Paul feeling very uneasy.
He had murdered just as savagely.
He had behaved just as evil.
The Black Dahlia was carved by a master of anatomy and decades later that detail implicated Walter Bayley, a surgeon who lived only yards away from where the body was found. Bayley died shortly afterwards from crippling loss of brain function, Alzheimer’s, with rare symptoms known to provoke violent and even homicidal behaviour in usually passive people. In the medical literature these violent outbursts only occurred in the very late stages of the illness. Paul was sure he didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but by chance he discovered variations of the illness in sheep and horses that led to aggressive behaviour and confusion. In animals, the illness was fatal within a week. The human form associated with Alzheimer’s meant death was imminent.
He knew he didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but whatever he did have bore unsettling similarities to what was described in animals. Perhaps he was looking in the wrong place, perhaps he had an illness that had jumped from animal to human that was as yet unknown to medicine.
Paul rolled up his sleeve and stroked his fingers across the tattoo. Sublimation. Today he was doing it right. Taking those negative impulses and focussing them onto research. Find out what is wrong. For Ildico.
Of course, he was going to have to murder Nisha once he finished his day job, but that was just a practicality. He checked his watch and thought of her chained up in the basement. She had about six hours left.
----- X -----
James Donovan was a stylish misfit, the sort of arty, guitar playing dishevelled kid who oozed potential and delivered very little. The smell of marijuana on his clothes was probably the reason.
“I haven’t seen Paul since we visited Tate Modern together, that was... I dunno, Christmas maybe. I wanted to show him Duchamp’s Urinal. They had it there when they opened, but it’s not in the permanent collection. Anytime it comes around I gotta see it.”
Corneliu was unfolding his notebook with little understanding of what Donovan was talking about.
“Still... if Urinal isn’t there I can always spend time looking at International Kleine Blue.”
“I’m sorry... are these artworks that you’re talking about?”
“International Kleine Blue. If you don’t know it, you got to go to Tate Modern and check it out.”
“OK, I think I will, thank you for that...” Corneliu wrote it down without care. “What I really want to talk to you about is where you think Paul McGovern is? We’ve not seen him for some time and we’re getting worried about him.”
“I dunno man. We’re friends but not great friends, you know what I mean?”
“How do you know him?”
Donovan shrugged. “Not sure. Party probably. We have a lot of parties here and a lot of people come through. I remember we were talking one night and he was kind of quiet until someone mentioned the book Naked Lunch; it was like, wow, he started talking and he knew that book inside and out. I was amazed because I thought that book was only for people who... you know... people who like to use drugs.”
“Does Paul
like to use drugs?”
“Ha!” Donovan rocked his head back to laugh. “Are you kidding? I guess you’ve never met Paul?”
Corneliu shook his head. “So he doesn’t use drugs for fun.”
“No way, man. He’s straight laced... that was why it was freaky to hear him talk about Naked Lunch. It’s something from deep in the heart of drug culture. I mean, later I realised he was coming at it from a literature viewpoint, but he knew it, man, he knew that book well.”
“And you became friends from this?”
“Yeah, I suppose. He recommends books for me and has never steered me wrong. Literally, every book he ever recommended was amazing. He knows his stuff. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has read as many books as this guy. He used to live not far from here, near Askew Road in Shepherds Bush, you know Askew Road?”
Corneliu shook his head.
“Well. He had this tiny room, and I only saw it once, but he had books stacked up the walls. He had shelves made from pieces of wood with bricks between them. Every book he had was old and second hand, I don’t think he ever had something new bought from a shop. He gave me a brilliant book called The Damnation Game and told me it was the greatest thing he’d ever found in a recycling bin. He would read them and then give them away, normally to charity shops, but it was like an addiction. If he saw an old book, he had to take it home with him.”
“So he is well read.”
“And smart too,” Donovan added. “But he lacks confidence. You know, he doesn’t really believe in himself. It’s like, when he was going to Romania he called me up and said, James, I’ve been offered a publishing deal. And I said, oh that’s great. But he was like, ahhhh, I think I’m gonna turn it down because I might not be good enough. I had to put him straight and say, look, dude, they wouldn’t offer this if you weren’t good enough. But even though he went to Romania and even though people tell him he’s really talented, I still don’t think he believes that he’s good enough.”