“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 put 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.