Tom Callaghan - A Spring Betrayal

“I wouldn’t expect a dumb ment like you to have a clue.”

And with that, he cuffed my hands in front of me, reached for a large hessian sack from the nearest shelf, and dropped it over my head.

“If you’re going to kill me, why bother with the bag?” I said as Graves half-pulled, half-dragged me up the stairs. I stumbled over a couple of the treads, and he tugged at my arm in irritation. I caught my thigh on what I assumed was the kitchen table, and Graves swore again, as if not being able to see where I was going was my fault, not his.

“Because I don’t trust you,” he said, as if stating the merely obvious.

Then we were outside, clean air biting into my lungs, refreshing after the damp claustrophobic cellar. My feet scuffled across gravel, and I was thrust against the side of a car.

“Get in,” Graves ordered. I fumbled with the door handle, scrambled into the passenger seat, banging my shins as I did so. If they ever found my body, it would be a mass of bruises, scars, and wounds. I realized I was in the people carrier I’d seen earlier.

“Don’t worry, Inspector, an accident en route is the least of your worries,” Graves said, hitting the ignition and the gate opener at the same time. “And besides, the air bag will save you. Which may prove not to be a good thing.”

The metal gates scraped across the driveway, then we were moving forward, turning left, picking up speed at a rate that would get us stopped if the car didn’t have diplomatic plates.

“I liked the photo of you lying dead in the snow,” Graves said. “Very imaginative, I thought. And it gave me a few ideas of my own. After all, if you’re already dead, who’s going to be looking for you now? And in a couple of years, there won’t be anything left to identify you anyway.”

I didn’t care for the way the conversation was turning, so I stayed silent.

“You know, Inspector, when I’m in my church, I often notice how my congregation changes at the end. They’ve gone through fear, then terror, to pain beyond anything they’ve ever imagined. They’ve been humiliated, shamed, helpless. For some of them, if they come, well, that’s just another way their bodies have betrayed them. Sperm first, blood later. Pleasures of the flesh, and so on. But there’s a moment, just before the end, when I see their hopes fade. Resignation takes over, maybe even a wish for a swift ending. Their eyes glaze over, ready for the final extinguishing of the light.”

Graves’s voice took on a new tone, a preacher delivering a sermon, a politician offering promises he would never intend to keep.

“You expect me to do the same, Graves?”

“Why should you be any different, Inspector? You saw your wife die, didn’t you? I’m sure she went into darkness the way we all do. In pain and afraid.”

At that moment I hated Graves with an intensity so great I wanted to grab the steering wheel, force us off the road or into the path of another car. I didn’t mind dying myself if it took him off the planet.

He must have guessed what I was thinking, from the mocking tone when he spoke.

“No heroics, Inspector. Remember, I’m the one with the seat belt, and I don’t think you’d enjoy a flight through the windshield.”

“I’ll sit still, if you’ll take the bag off my head.”

His only answer was a laugh.

“One thing I’d like to know, Graves, before you shoot me. Just to put my mind at rest. The identity bands from all those orphanages. What was that all about? I already know they didn’t match the dead bodies.”

Graves laughed.

“Do you know anything about magic, Inspector? I don’t mean spells and incantations, I’m talking about conjuring, illusions, tricks.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head, although maybe that wasn’t apparent under the hood.

“Virtually all magic relies on misdirection, making your audience look in the wrong place while you perform the trick. Deceiving their eyes while stealing their wallet, you understand.”

“So the bands were there to divert our attention, to go off on a search that wouldn’t take us anywhere?”

Graves laughed again.

“Only partly, although that was a welcome side effect. It’s really to help us in selling the films. Obviously, what we were offering wasn’t your average fuck and suck film. What you might call a specialist interest. And an expensive one. The collectors of such material are rich, able to spend big money. And for that, they want discretion, reassurance their local police force isn’t going to break down the front door of their mansion with a search warrant.”

“So?”

“So we reassure them by pointing out all our movie stars are orphans. No family to worry about them, demand an inquiry into their disappearance.”

“And your customers’ desire for this shit makes them all too happy to believe your explanation,” I said. “Little head ruling big head.”

“Exactly,” Graves said. “And the beauty of it is, quite a lot of them really were orphans. And since you stop being an orphan at sixteen, officially, the bands also provided evidence that even the older boys and girls were still underage when they made their cameo performances.”

“And the bodies up in Karakol?” I asked.

Graves paused before answering.

“A bit of a mistake, I suppose. We were offered a great deal of money to make a one-off film, one customer only, to be shot outdoors over a period of a few months, up in the Jeti-Oguz valley, with the red sandstone rocks as a backdrop. I couldn’t attend the shoot myself, I was in Moscow, but I gave very precise instructions about the disposal of the bodies. Scatter them all over, I said. Instructions that weren’t followed, which is why you found them all together. Annoying, but the client still paid.”

Seven infants slaughtered for a rich man’s whim. And all the other deaths that followed.

“I understand; you’re a pedophile, a murderer, a rapist. You’re insane. But Graves, you’re rich, why risk everything by selling this shit?”

Graves paused, and his voice was subdued when he spoke.

“Of course I could have given the films away for free to other collectors. But it’s a law of nature that we only value something if we’ve had to pay for it. And the more we pay, the greater its value. So the more extreme the material, the more it costs. Surely that’s obvious?”

I said nothing in the face of such twisted logic. I wondered why I didn’t grab the wheel, strangle him with my bare hands as the car rolled over and slid off the road. And then the answer came to me.

Fear. Of pain, of falling into dark nothingness. I could imagine a tiny part of the terror of the children led into Graves’s cellar, perhaps enticed down steep steps with the promise of food, toys, a warm place to sleep.

I reached up, managed to pull the bag over my head. Fuck it; what could Graves do that wasn’t already going to happen to me?

I blinked, saw we were traveling east out of the city, back toward Karakol. Plenty of deserted spaces, overgrown cemeteries filled with the inhabitants of villages that had long since dwindled and died, fields no longer cultivated, paths no longer trod. This was where my life had led, my body left to the mercies of rain, sun, and snow. I felt nothing, knew it meant nothing.

The car picked up speed, and I placed my hands on the dashboard to brace myself in case we braked suddenly. The road was deserted, and I wondered why Graves didn’t just pull over, drag me into a field and put a bullet in my ear.

“Don’t worry,” he said, as if he were reading my thoughts. “I’ve got just the place in mind for you—think of it like going on holiday. Quiet, no one will disturb your bones.”