Roachville

Once Kalaroo was gone, I packed most of the items I had bought in the morning, namely a change of clothes, face creams, toothpaste and toothbrush, Great Tales of Horror from H.P. Lovecraft, the well-sharpened knife and my laptop. I sat down on the lounge floor, cradling the cricket bat and wondering if and where I should go.

The naga was there beside me and I could have sworn he was purring like a well-fed cat, but it was all in my head. I sensed I had to do something, but I didn’t want to do the wrong thing. If I stayed there was a high chance that Tann would come and find the naga, but if I left he would start following me and deduce that I had the naga. No way did I want a life on the run like Phuong and Mei.

At 5 in the afternoon, there was a knock on the door and I jumped up like a terrorised squirrel. I grabbed the cricket bat and positioned myself behind the door.

‘Who is it?’

‘Open the door, dude, it’s just me.’ Bek, on his way home from work.

‘Jeez, I’m glad to see you, but I’m not sure you should stay too long.’

‘Why not – what’s going on? And you know, this cricket bat might not be the best weapon in such an enclosed space.’

‘Probably, but I also have this.’ I took a knife out of my back jeans pocket.

Bek sighed.

‘I think you should come and stay with us.’

‘No, I can’t run away. Otherwise I’ll be like Phuong and Mei.’

‘Are you sure this is the best decision?’

‘No, but I have a hunch,’ I said.

‘A hunch, a bloody hunch! This is just like Vi; she said just the same about this!’ He handed me a cardboard box.

‘Okay, what is it?’

‘A lampshade, I think. We met for lunch in town and she said something about having thought of you instantly. She insisted that I should give it to you on my way home.’

‘And you don’t like it when things are unexplained.’

‘No, I hate it.’ He frowned. ‘First she wants you to have this, but she’s not sure why and now you greet me with a cricket bat, but you think it’s a good idea to stay in your destroyed home, even though you’re clearly expecting Tann to pay you a visit. Just come with me, for fuck’s sake!’

‘Listen, Bek, I’m scared, really scared, but I have to stay put until Ely comes back. I’m not involving you, I’m not calling the police and there’s nothing you can say that is going to make me change my mind.’

He sighed again and shook his head. ‘This is madness,’ he grumbled, ‘but send us a text this evening to let us know what’s going on.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ I replied as he closed the front door, leaving me to open Vi’s present.

I put the silver-grey lampshade on the broken bedside table. Even though it was brand new, its finish gave it a slight worn-out look. Its shape was unusual, like a tall rounded shell, with a flat bottom and two pointed thin ends, leaving a gap at the top, all the way down to the bottom. I plugged it in and turned it on. Soft light diffused from its opening. I put the naga next to it. There was something animalistic about this object.

As the outside luminosity faded, the shadows coming from the new lamp filled the room and I studied them, mesmerised.

The loud rasping coming from downstairs jolted me into alert mode. I listened for more sound and there was a second dry knock on the front door. I tried to get up but all I could do was stare at the lampshade. All my senses reached an apex of clarity and I heard fiddling in the lock before I felt the disturbance in the air as the door opened. A violent tremor ran down my spine and I placed the naga inside the lampshade. It was a perfect fit.

I looked down into the lampshade and, unless you knew what to look for, the naga seemed to be an integral part of it. Was this why Vi had wanted me to have it – to hide the naga? There was no time to speculate. I turned the light off and made for the door. Frantic footsteps made their way up the stairs. It was too late to get my cricket bat. A dark shape crashed into the bedroom like an over-enthused pit-bull and before I had time to open my mouth, it barged into me, sending me flying backwards. I tripped on the mattress and banged my head hard against the wall. Everything was happening fast, but I managed to direct my body away from the bedside table.

Warm liquid trickled down my face. All I could think about was that I had to weather the storm, be strong, weather the storm, be strong. I couldn’t feel any pain yet. It was just very difficult to move at all. My attacker was waiting by the bed, the air filled with repressed aggression; it was there under the skin, ready to burst. I arranged my body into the most compact position. Like me, the dark shape waited for the slower, older footsteps coming up.

There was a click and the room flooded with light. Kenneth Tann’s slim silhouette was framed inside the opened door. He still wore a stylish grey suit that seemed a bit too thick for the mild night air. He put something on the floor, which I couldn’t see very well. I sneaked a furtive glance at his pit-bull: an East Asian man around thirty years old.

‘So here we are again,’ sighed Kenneth Tann in his appealing accent.

I looked at him blankly. I had just crash-landed into a wall.

‘I must say your place is looking, very... plain.’

‘I prefer to call it “minimalist”,’ I croaked.

‘Plain, minimalist, whatever you like to call it. It’s only going to make it easier to look through here.’

‘Haven’t you already done that?’

‘No comment.’ His face turned into a charming smile.

He sat on the floor near me and forced my chin up with his soft fingers, so that I had to look into his black eyes.

‘Is there anything you would like to share with me, Annika?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said in a shaky voice. He removed his fingers from under my chin and nodded towards his man, who went out of the room and brought back one of Bek’s chair from my office. Tann sat down, almost wearily. For a few minutes, we listened to rustling and banging noises coming from downstairs, making their way upstairs and getting louder all the time. Tann’s goon quickly went through the bathroom and my empty office, and now he was in the bedroom. He threw my cord jacket out of the inbuilt cupboard and scanned the room. There was only the mattress, the sleeping bag and the bedside table left. The malevolent look made me get up and I stood in the corner, in a direct diagonal to Kenneth Tann, who had been studying me all through the search. Under his scrutiny, I experienced a flashback of the tropical genocide vision and I had to do all I could not to start crying. The mattress was turned upside down, but there was nothing there, and all attention shifted towards the bedside table. The pit-bull scratched his hair and opened the small drawer; there was just a book in there and a packet of tissues. As he slammed the drawer shut in frustration, the silver lampshade vacillated with a tiny tingle and I gulped. Tann’s face twitched. He stormed towards the lampshade and swept it off the table. The lampshade landed sideways with a dull thump and I recoiled in my corner. It would be all over now.

Tann bent down, picked up the lampshade and turned it around, and then over. The naga stayed put. I was close to blacking out.

‘I suppose you haven’t had much time to refurbish your house since our last visit.’ He stretched out his arm and held the lampshade with his fingertips. ‘Still, you could have chosen something else than this horror.’ He let go of the lampshade. It landed on the floor with a crack. I kept my eyes on Tann.

‘My friends gave it to me,’ I mumbled and glanced at the lampshade. There was a long split in the middle of the lampshade, but it had stayed in one piece.

Tann turned his stare back to me.

‘So, still no sign of the naga. Interesting, don’t you think, Sommai?’

The man who had deceived Mei’s father and Gaspard van de Rivière on the banks of the Mekong was in my bedroom. He looked more butch than I had imagined. Of course he was much older now.

Tann walked to me and seized my chin again. ‘Where is it, Annika?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘Really? Maybe your boyfriend has got it?’

‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’

‘You know, sometimes I’m in the mood for little games like these before I torture somebody, but today I’m not sure that I can’t be bothered. Like foreplay, sometimes I have the patience and understanding but other times, I get what I need. Do you understand me?’

I cowered. Tann bent down and picked up the object he had placed on the floor, a small cylinder with a handle and what looked like a twisting top. Deftly, he untwisted the top and lifted it off the cylinder. White smoke spilled out and Tann looked at me with a smile. I would have given a lot to be anywhere else but here.

‘You don’t know what this is, do you?’ Tann asked with a demented glint in his eyes.

I shook my head.

‘You do look very scared. And so you should be. You see, a long time ago, I used to be a dermatologist. A position which I hated for the most part, except the removing of verrucas... Yes, Annika, verrucas. I do love freezing them with liquid nitrogen; there is something exceedingly satisfying when the skin turns white and dies.’

‘So…’ he carried on, pointing in a theatrical manner to the silver cylinder, ‘this is liquid nitrogen! And unless you give us information willingly, I will have to make you talk – do you understand me?’

‘Please, I don’t know where the naga is,’ I pleaded.

‘Annika,’ Kenneth Tann said in a soothing voice. ‘Annika, look at me.’

I raised my head.

‘Annika,’ he repeated, ‘I feel a certain unexplained kinship towards you. There’s something about you that I cannot put my finger on. Why I should feel like this, I have no idea, but there’s no denying it, there is a certain attraction between us, don’t you think?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I whispered.

‘But Annika,’ he said, straightening up, ‘don’t be in any doubt that, even though I find you cute, I won’t mind torturing you either. It’s not something that I’ve ever found difficult. It started when I was a very young child and my parents’ cat gave birth to these five little black kittens. My parents told me to leave them alone, otherwise their mother wouldn’t look after them anymore. Well, I just couldn’t help myself. I went right ahead and broke every single kitten’s tail and when nobody was looking I would kick them or throw them as hard as I could. They didn’t live very long.’ He giggled. ‘After the episode with the kittens there was no turning back for me. I wonder why?’ His face went serious. ‘I mean, could it be because I was abandoned by my biological mother and raised by idiots on an island where everybody despised me? What do you think?’

‘I don’t know.’ I looked down at my feet.

‘No, of course you don’t. And you will never know what it’s like to loathe your parents, to know that your real mother gave you away to be the laughing stock of the community; to have nobody to talk to and to hate everybody around you.’ He raised his voice and I cringed. Hatred and pain distorted his feature and he ran a shaky hand through his glossy hair, before nodding towards Sommai.

Sommai threw himself on me and grabbed my arm. I tried to pull away, wriggling like a worm, but he just slapped me hard, yanked me back on the mattress and sat on me, with all his weight on my chest. A tiny thread of air went in and out of my windpipe and the side of my face throbbed. My arms were pinned under his legs and he squeezed my shoulders tight. In the veil of terror that gripped me, I heard Tann’s voice going melodious once again.

‘Oh good, your feet are already bare.’

Soon I felt a very cold point on the ball of my right foot. Sommai held me firm. The sensation went from cold to freezing, and then from freezing to burning. The pain was like an all-consuming animal that had got hold of my foot and wouldn’t let go. I gritted my teeth and arched my body in a desperate attempt to escape.

‘Where is the naga?’ Tann asked.

I tried to catch my breath but Sommai’s full weight was on my chest. He had put his sadistic face very close to mine. Tann screwed and unscrewed his nitrogen flask and again I felt pressure on my foot, on the same spot. I screamed.

‘Shut up!’ Sommai grabbed my hair and pulled hard. I started sobbing and Tann stopped. He moved up towards the top of the bed to look into my eyes.

‘Don’t be afraid, Annika. As long as you give me information, I won’t go further than your feet. But I would be most interested to see what my little gadget could do to other parts of your body. Wouldn’t that be fun?’ He winked towards his henchman.

Despite the tears blurring my vision, I saw in the corner of my eye the silver lampshade just behind Tann.

‘Ely has it,’ I gasped.

‘What?’

‘Ely, he has the naga. He took it with him when he disappeared.’

‘So where is he now?’

‘I’ve no idea. That’s what I told you earlier on. He’s not my boyfriend.’

‘So what was he doing with you in that squat?’

‘All he wanted was to sleep with me,’ I sniffled.

‘And did he?’ He leant close to my face.

‘Yes, then he stole the naga from me.’

We stayed in this position for ages. Me lying down with my bare feet, Sommai sitting across my chest and arms, and Tann, staring at me with his face as close as mine as he could without touching me.

Tann moved back and motioned to his acolyte who got off me with a look of regret. Coughing and crying, I sat up in the furthest corner of the futon and grabbed my knees with my arms. Blood pumped fiercely in my right foot. Tann paced along the futon and his tongue flicked in and out of his mouth. I looked away from him. Outside, a door slammed and arguing voices came through the window.

‘Boss?’ Sommai said.

Tann stood up above me, making me feel smaller than I was.

‘I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt for now. Evidently the naga isn’t in your house at the moment, but I’m certain you have more to do with it. We’re going to keep watching you and if you lied to me, I will really hurt you.’ He grabbed my foot and pressed his thumb on my wound. I yelped. ‘The naga belongs to me!’ He hissed in my ear and his voice echoed inside the room, as if the words were trapped with nowhere to go.