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?”