Ex Nihilo

“I need help!” Mathis is half-shouting into the phone, his frustration both real and acted out in equal parts. He didn’t mean—fuck. Fuck. “You don’t understand. She’s gone, you moron. Gone.”

Mathis has been in crime business for a long time, that is true enough. Crime came before his career in the band did, so it was understandable that he stuck to the old contrast, the checked one that brought results. He just never... He has never actually killed somebody. Fuck. Fuck it all to the hell and back.

“Gone where?” His bandmate asks, although he hardly sounds interested. Mathis knows what the idiots wanted from Anya – he’s seen them look at it. It didn’t make them smart, or special, or observant or anything. Anybody who had eyes barely working could tell that his fiancé was drop dead gorgeous. All the crazy ones are.

“Like fuck if I know, Dan! She vanished into thin air!” What a lie. What a nasty, well-placed lie that will save him later, oh yes. She didn’t vanish into thin air – she certainly isn’t made of that kind of matter. She’s all flesh and bone, like he’s checked himself, sickly pale with blood gushing out of her. She went to the bottom of the ocean, that’s where she vanished.

Not before he ruined her entirely, though—he didn’t want to, oh no. It was gruesome and his hands were shaking, regret forming already, but if he was already doing it, he was going to go through to the very end. Finish it the way he started, not leave anything half-done, because there was no going back from what he’s done.

And he dropped her off in the deepest pit he could drive to. Who knows how long it’ll take for them to find her, just if he keeps reminding everybody gently and yet not too frequently. Don’t raise panic about it.

“Dude, you know how she tends to disappear for days. Calm the fuck down, I’m sure she’ll be back by Friday.” Like hell she will. She’s dead. Fucking dead. Mathis smiles just by thinking of it – he’s not sure why, really. He’s never really thought of murder before, not really, but killing Anya has freed him in more ways than one.

“You’re probably right.” He concludes. “Thanks, Dan.” There, done.

He slumps on the couch a little bit. It’s barely a little over noon, and Anya is normally asleep at this time of the day. If he’s being honest, Anya is asleep most of the day, confined in her room. He’s tried getting inside while she was sleeping, and she’s gone all crazy on him – shrieking and hysterics were not something he would have to endure anymore.

Realistically speaking, the only time he ever got inside Anya’s room was when they were getting it on, and he’s paid more attention to Anya than to their surroundings.

Well... it’s not like she’s here to stop him from entering.

He gets up, bones popping, and stretches first. He’s moving leisurely and, on his way to his fiancé’s room, Mathis picks up her phone from the low fridge in the corner of their living room, right by the hallway door. Then, he moves towards her room.

It’s strange, really, being here without her. He’s connected it to her, to something private. His room was their room, but Anya’s room was just that, Anya’s. Something that he didn’t get to intrude on, no matter the circumstances. When Mathis flickers the light on, it’s yellow, so different than their normal light within the rest of the apartment. There is only one window, but the curtain covering it is thick enough to block all and any light coming in. It’s always been like that with her.

There’s nothing unusual here. It’s pretty messy, but it doesn’t strike him as unusual because that’s how the rest of their apartment was, too. He sits on the bed instead and it dips below his weight. There’s clothes strewn about it, jumpers and jackets and skinny jeans, but the cover is perfectly drawn around it, stretching beneath his weight. Her laptop is there, too, but it died three weeks ago, so Mathis isn’t even going to bother.

He unlocks the phone first and sees a notice – four new voice messages. He lets the first one play, and looks around the room while it does. He doesn’t understand a word of it, but he knows the voice. It’s Anya’s, speaking in her European language – Polish, he knows, because he asked about the last name as soon as he could. He’s not surprised, because she would sometimes leave the reminders like this for herself. He wouldn’t be surprised if all four of them were like this. He notices, then, that the message came from his own phone. Definitely a reminder.

There are sticky notes pasted to her drawers – most are with dark rectangles filled to half with red marker. There’s four of those sticky notes in total and each of them has three rectangle on them. The first two ones are crossed out. The fifth sticky note holds an address that is vaguely familiar to Mathis, then something written in Cyrillic – У попа была собака first and Ночь пришла right below it. It’s unusual because... Because Anya wasn’t Russian, or whatever this lettering is. She was Polish. She said so.

He plays the next message.

Male voice filters in, speaking in the same language Anya used. Mathis cannot put the voice to the face or, least of all, the name, but he doesn’t bother. He’s heard enough to recognize the similarity in words with Anya, but he’s also heard enough to know that he won’t understand a thing anyway, so he skips over to the next one.

“I know you’re not incredibly fond of me.” Female voice says. She sounds to be in her late teens, at most, but Mathis isn’t so sure. “But I’m telling you, something is wrong. I know that you—I know that you spoke to your brother, I know because... because he’s always been the first one you turn to and because you’re looking for your sister so that only... I’m rambling okay, okay, but I’m scared. I’m so, so scared. I’m—I’m sorry. I need help. I really need your help.”

She sounds terrified, too. Anya has never appeared to be the kind of person to be helping others, saving them. Mathis has always only seen her as hedonistic, self-serving and destructive, so similar to himself that sometimes the resemblance was eerie.

He plays the last voice message, unsure of what to think of the unknown female voice. He doesn’t give it too much thought.

At first, there’s just a lot of white noise – he’s pretty sure that nothing is coming out of the phone so he checks the caller ID. It’s a certain Moroccan hotstuff, which doesn’t really help him much. He’s nearly forgotten that there isn’t a person in Anya’s phone who has a normal name. So the voicemails are as follows – from Shitstain, Ghost Boy and twice from Moroccan Hotstuff. He really ignores the fact that he’s the shittain. Fuck her.

Just as he’s about to return to the message and shut it off, there’s a sharp intake of breath, then the female voice speaking again.

“It’s Aceline, Anya. I don’t know what she wants, but it’s her. Please.” A pause, then—“We need your help.”

And isn’t that just the most interesting thing in the world?