The Gulp

by Alan Baxter

  Dace frowned, shook his head. No way. Definitely no way Carter would accept anything less than what he’d asked for. But if old man Nikolov had eleven grand stashed in the bottom of the wardrobe, he would surely have more stashed elsewhere, right? He needed to keep looking. He put the money he’d found in his backpack, slung it back on, and stood up.

  Directly across the hall was a bathroom and Dace checked in there. The medicine cabinet, a laundry basket, he even took the lid off the cistern. Nothing. He stepped back out into the hall, pausing for a moment, dizzy with fatigue.

  “Daddy?”

  Dace’s heart thumped.

  “Hello? Daddy?”

  The voice was female, plaintive and nervous. Then a light tapping from the other door on the same side as Nikolov’s bedroom. Dace saw it had a sliding bolt on it, locked closed. On the outside. Locking someone in.

  “What the fuck?” he breathed.

  Pictures hung on the wall between the two rooms. Old, faded black and whites, they showed a handsome young couple, no doubt Nikolov and Elena. Several shots, different locations, but just the two of them. There had been no photos in the lounge that he recalled. Just the two of them lived here, he had thought. Daddy?

  “Don’t be angry, Daddy, but are you there?” Tap tap tap. “Is everything okay?”

  No, Dace thought. Everything is most definitely not okay. He had eleven thousand, six hundred in his pack. Maybe he should quit while he was ahead, just leave, try somewhere else for the rest. He looked at the locked door. Nikolov and Elena wouldn’t be letting her out any time soon, that was certain. She might starve to death in there. But what the hell was he supposed to do with her? Maybe just let her out and run? But he needed more money and he was sure Nikolov had more hidden somewhere. Maybe she would know.

  He went to the door and slid the bolt open. He sensed the person on the other side still themselves. He turned the handle and gently pushed the door in. A young girl stood there, maybe fifteen or sixteen, wearing a long, white cotton nightdress, barefoot. Her hair was sandy brown and straight, long to her waist. She smiled widely, too wide, guileless. Her eyes were a little too open, shifting hectically as she looked him over with strange intensity. As Dace realised with a pulse of adrenaline that he hadn’t put his mask back on first, she said, “Hello! Are you a friend of Mummy and Daddy? What was all the noise about? I like your jumper.”

  “Who are you?” Dace asked.

  The room beyond her was less than simple. It was empty but for a single bed mattress on the floor, a ratty, stained doona piled on top of it and a thin pillow. Everything else was bare walls and floorboards. The light was off and Dace saw the fitting had no shade or bulb.

  “I’m Baby.”

  “Your name is Baby?”

  “That’s what Daddy calls me.”

  How could that ancient old relic out there – dead now, you killed him! – possibly have fathered this teenager? Even if he could, the woman was certainly decades past child-bearing age.

  “The Nikolovs are your parents?”

  “They are now. They have been for... well, for such a long time. I remember... others... a different Mummy and Daddy... sometimes... when I’m sleeping. Maybe a before family? Daddy says it’s nightmares, that’s all. I’m always so confused, but I take my medicine like Daddy asks.”

  Dace stared, horrified. Was this simple-minded child kidnapped and brainwashed? Why? Her pupils were large, he noticed, even in the brightness of the hall light he’d turned on. She was drugged, obviously. He remembered all the bottles in the fridge. “What do you do here?” he asked, and it sounded like a stupid question.

  “Do? Nothing. Try to please Daddy. Mummy sometimes sings to me. They give me the medicine, insist I sleep enough. I have to be... ready, yes. Daddy says I have to be ready.”

  “For what?”

  “I don’t know!” She giggled like a child a fraction of her age and turned a slow circle on the balls of her feet, arms out to the sides. “I like it in the between times. I feel tingly!”

  “Between times?”

  She stopped and turned to look at him, head tipped to one side. “Between my medicines. When my head tingles and my body feels... stronger.”

  “Why do you need the medicine?”

  “Daddy says it’s so I sleep properly. And sleep is how I get ready. I have to watch it every time.” Her voice turned both stern and singsong. “Don’t look away, Baby! Watch it closely, let it in!”

  “Watch what?”

  She smiled. “The fall, silly. When the sky splits, dark red like blood, and the broken things tumble down. Look into the abyss, Daddy says. Look and let it in. It prepares me, he says. Daddy’s drugs make my dreams so much clearer. I feel the... the abyss, he calls it. I feel... beyond.” She burst out a tiny bubble of giggles again and started turning circles.

  When the sky splits and the broken things tumble down. Dace had vague memories of a dream like that from time to time. What the fuck was this poor kid on about?

  “You need anything right now?” he asked.

  “Not really. Are you going to lock the door again?”

  He licked his lips, concerned. He couldn’t let her out, not yet at least. “Just for a while.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  She was so thin under the billowing nightdress. “Wait there.”

  He closed the door and slid the bolt then hurried back to the kitchen. He grabbed two of the roasted guinea pigs off the rack and took them back to her. Her eyes widened when he opened the door and she saw them. He paused, held them back a moment.

  “I have a question for you first, okay?”

  She nodded, not taking her eyes from the tiny, cooked bodies.

  “Where does your Daddy keep his money? Do you know?”

  “Daddy’s money is running out. Not much left, I heard him telling Mummy. I hear more than they realise through my door, when the medicine isn’t so new inside me.”

  “Running out?”

  “He said so. Sometime... before. I don’t know... time.” She frowned, looked down a moment, then back at the food. “But the other girls will be taken soon. The ready girls. Money!” She giggled. “It’s all so strange.”

  “The ready girls?” Fatigue pulled on Dace’s mind and, combined with the horrors of the night so far, and the bizarre situation before him, it was all becoming too much.

  “Daddy says there’s no need to worry. Money comes when the girls provide. And two are ready now!”

  “Ready for what?”

  “I don’t know!” She sighed and giggled at the same time. “But Daddy told Mummy more money soon. He said so last time he came back down.”

  “Back down?”

  Baby pointed at the ceiling of the hallway. Dace turned and saw the access hatch to the attic. The attic! He hadn’t thought of checking in there. Maybe that’s where the bigger stash of cash was.

  “Thank you!” he said and handed her the two roast rodents.

  She snatched them from him and sat directly on the floor. She dropped one into her lap and expertly pulled the metal cross wire out of the other. She dropped the little frame and bit into the animal, crunching up the tiny bones along with the meagre meat.

  Dace grimaced and slowly closed the door. As he slid the lock back into place he heard her biting and chewing, a soft noise of desperate appreciation in her throat as she ate. He turned again and looked up at the attic hatch. How to get up there? He went back into the lounge, planning to head through to the kitchen, but paused at the sight of the Nikolovs, pale and still in death. He’d killed them both!

  He dragged the coffee table off the rug, which he noticed had caught most of the blood from Nikolov’s toes. He pushed Nikolov straight and rolled him up in the rug, then half-carried, half-dragged it to the old man’s bedroom. He dumped the corpse alongside the bed, then went back and picked up Elena. She couldn’t weigh more than forty kilos, he thought, like a loose bag of bones. He didn’t look as her head flopped back off her neck. He pu
t her on the bed and quickly left, closing the door. There was a bit of blood left on the floorboards and sprayed over the surface of the coffee table, but that was all. Otherwise no evidence of the double murder. More importantly, he didn’t have to look at the victims of his crimes any more.

  He went into the kitchen and took one of the chairs from the table, carried it back to the hallway. Standing on it, he was just able to reach the high ceiling and unlatch the attic door. A folding ladder was tucked up inside, a rope swinging down as the door opened. He hopped off the chair and moved it, then pulled the ladder down. It rattled open and sat against the hallway runner rug.

  “Please keep your money up here!” he said softly as he climbed. If he could find what he needed, he’d take it and run. Leave Baby where she was. Then tomorrow he’d make an anonymous call to the cops, say he’d heard terrible noises from this address. Let them find everything once he was long gone.

  The attic was pitch dark. He felt around the edges of the hatch and sure enough his thinly gloved fingers found a plastic switch casing. He flicked it on. A bare bulb in the apex of the rafters flooded everything in harsh yellow light. Dace began to shake from head to toes.

  Along both long sides were shelves of books and papers, a desk with a reading lamp, a filing cabinet. In the centre, evenly spaced, were four long, low tables, made of dark wood. The short legs of the tables were carved into twisted and disconcerting shapes, like bodily organs piled atop one another. The tabletops had similar looping, twisting designs around their thick edges, and on two of the four tables was a body.

  Two young girls, of an age with Baby locked downstairs, similar in appearance. Naked, their skin so white it seemed made of chalk, and looked dry as paper. They were emaciated, hip bones poking up higher than their hollow stomachs, their ribs made rippled ridges on both sides. There were things written on their too-white skin.

  He climbed into the attic and cautiously approached the two girls. The designs on them were almost identical. Strange symbols, some that looked almost like writing, but no language he’d ever seen before. The positioning seemed to match the girls anatomy in some way he couldn’t quite put his finger on. If he looked too hard at any one design, nausea began to stir in his gut. The sight of desiccated, preserved corpses made him feel sick, but he realised with some dismay the effect of the things drawn on them made his nausea deeper. The designs seemed to push against his eyes, make his head swim.

  He leaned a little closer. No. Not drawn. Cut into their alabaster skin with expert strokes of what must be the finest scalpel. And then something had been pressed or rubbed into the written wounds, to blacken them. Maybe a kind of ink. Bile rose as he looked, and he turned his face away.

  “Fuck me dead,” Dace whispered, stepping away from the bodies.

  Were these two the ones Nikolov had declared ready? And Baby next in line? How were they not rotting?

  This was how the old man made his money? Money comes when the girls provide. And two are ready now! Dace swallowed. Was the eleven grand he’d found all Nikolov had left until these two were... what? Sold? Who the fuck bought bodies done like this? And why?

  But no. Maybe downstairs was just a store of ready cash. There had to be more, and this was the obvious place to keep it, Nikolov’s hideous attic study or laboratory or whatever the fuck it was. Dace started searching.

  It took more than an hour, doing all he could to ignore the bodies behind him. Two teenage girls, murdered after who knew how long trapped in that room downstairs. Another there being tortured and medicated now. How many before them? Where did he get them? They were somebody’s children.

  He stopped thinking about it, kept looking. He found a large jar of black ink, presumably what the old man used to stain the wounds in the bodies of the girls. There was a small label on the jar, a stylised design of an octopus drawn, perhaps, with the ink the jar contained. Dace glanced back at the girls, the black designs on them, imagined underwater denizens off the coast of The Gulp. He saw the sky, open and red, creatures tumbling. He rocked on his feet, staggered a little, and gasped. He put down the ink, blinked hard a few times. He was so tired.

  Keep looking.

  He found nothing. Not a single dollar.

  All the paperwork was in Macedonian, or some other language like the designs on the girls. Some of the books on the shelves were clearly very old, leatherbound, their pages thin, almost translucent parchment of some kind. In some the ink was a deep brown, almost red. He stopped looking too closely, just shook all the books out in case money was stashed inside. Some fell apart as he did so. By the time he’d finished it looked like a hurricane had blown through the attic.

  Close to tears with tiredness and need, he clambered back down. No sound came from Baby’s room. His stomach clenched. He realised he was starving. As he went back through to the kitchen, he saw the pale pink of dawn smudging the windows.

  So hungry.

  He looked at the guinea pigs, roasted and stretched out on their rack, and shuddered. He wasn’t that hungry yet. He searched the kitchen and found half a loaf of Wonder White bread. He opened it, sniffed. It seemed fresh. Then again, this stuff never seemed to go off. He grabbed several slices, forced himself to go slowly and ate them dry, one after another. He’d devoured almost the entire half-loaf before he felt as though he’d had enough. He put his head under the tap of the kitchen sink and drank water. He felt better. Still dog-tired, but clearer headed. He went into the lounge room and sat down on the couch, as far from where Nikolov had died as he could get.

  What the hell to do? He was fast running out of time. His eyes grew heavy. He began to doze off then jerked awake, adrenaline coursing through him again. There was a room he hadn’t checked. The one opposite Baby’s room, the third bedroom. Distracted by the attic, he hadn’t been in there.

  He ran to it and opened the door, images of piles of cash swimming through his mind in the worst case ever of wishful thinking. He pictured Scrooge McDuck diving into a pile of gold, doing backstrokes through it.

  Inside were piles of plywood sheeting, power tools, a toolbox and another box full of screws and nails. Leaning against one wall were two long, rectangular wooden boxes, neatly made. They looked like simple coffins. But they were more than that, of course. Delivery cases for the girls upstairs who were ready now.

  Dace sagged. “Fuck!”

  Had Baby overheard more? Would she know a way to contact whoever bought the girls once they were ready? What the hell was such a thing worth anyway? He was sure the poor girl had no idea beyond what she’d already said, but he had to ask. His options were running out. If she didn’t know, maybe he needed to take the eleven grand and go, come up with a new plan. His time was nearly a quarter gone already.

  He slid the bolt and opened Baby’s door. She lay on her back on the floor, blood all around her head, the wire from the roast guinea pig jammed deep into her eye. Her mouth was open, the other eye staring blankly at the bulbless light fitting.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Dace wailed. His knees knocked and he sank down onto them before he could fall on his face in a dead faint. He sank his head into his hands and sobbed, the dam finally bursting. Crying he fell over onto his side and gave in for a while to all his despair. After some time, he drifted into a restless, fitful sleep.

  He dreamed of the sky opening red, of thunder and roiling clouds, of things falling.

  Something drilled into his sleep, dragged him awake. Dace sat up gasping, he couldn’t sleep! He didn’t have time. He noticed the window of the room was boarded up, covered with the same plywood used to make the boxes.

  The telephone was ringing.

  He stood, staggered out into the hallway and saw sunshine streaming through the frosted glass of the front door. How long had he slept? He went through into the lounge, looked at a clock on the wall. It said 1.20pm. He’d slept for hours.

  “Shit shit shit!”

  The telephone rang on, but he couldn’t find it. Following the sound, he
finally tracked it to the kitchen wall, an old plastic landline with black rubber buttons. As he reached it, it stopped ringing.

  What was he planning to do anyway? Answer it?

  He jumped when it rang again. He stared at it for three rings, then snatched up the receiver. In his best impersonation of Nikolov’s Macedonian accent he said, “Yes, hello?”

  “Mr Nikolov?” A man’s voice, a little gravelly.

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t answer the first time.”

  “I vas... in ze garden, feeding ze animals. Sorry, old and slow.” Dace grimaced. He was hamming the accent up far too much.

  “Well, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m calling on behalf of Mrs Ingrid Blumenthal. Just checking that all is ready for the order we placed?”

  Dace licked his lips, grinned. “Yes, yes. All ready.”

  “Good. Well, we’ll come along to collect the item next Sunday as agreed. Around eleven okay?”

  Next Sunday? Dace would be dead by then. His mind raced. “I’m glad you called,” he said, trying to maintain the accent. “I was going to call you, in fact. All is ready with your order, but there is a slight problem with timing.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, we haf a family situation. Small emergency. I haf to leave very soon, can’t be here next weekend. You can come today, yes?”

  “What? Oh. I don’t think so. This isn’t much notice at all, Mr Nikolov.”

  “I know, I’m very sorry.”

  “Well, maybe we could wait one more week. When do you expect to be back?”

  “Ah, not for several weeks. Maybe months. Very bad situation.”

  The man on the other end was silent but for breathing. Dace could hear the frustration in it. “This is most irregular, Mr Nikolov. We need the item.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. I’m very sorry. So you haf to come today.”

  “I can’t get forty thousand in cash today.”

  Forty thousand? Dace’s mind raced again. He had eleven, he needed sixty. Another forty would get him close, but still nine short. So close, but close wasn’t good enough for Carter. An idea bloomed. “Sir, I am truly sorry for this irregular situation, and you are of course a valued client. I make you a special offer. Instead of forty, how about two for sixty? To make up for the inconvenience. But it must be this weekend, yes?”