A Lonely and Curious Country (18 page)

“He wants to meet you.” The priest’s dark eyes found Solovkin’s and held them. “The Dark One who dwells in the forest. He sees something in you. Something more than just dead meat waiting to be devoured. They are old, these woods, and the Dark One is older still.”

“I don’t believe in the Devil.” Solovkin followed the kneeling man’s gaze past the killing ground, past the burning huts. A tall, thin figure stood at the edge of the thick forest, slipping in and out of shadow before the eye could fix upon it.

“He believes in you,” said the priest and laughed. The dirt beneath his knees slowly turned to red mud. “Besides, you got it all wrong -- God and Devil, good and evil. The truth lies well beyond such tired scriptural platitudes.”

“What is He, then?”

“What you see around yourself is not a place, not a location.” The priest closed his eyes. A look of ecstasy crossed his thin face. “It is a process. Think of Him as a bridge, as the instrument by which Creation perfects itself. Oh, He’ll show you wondrous sights, and whisper forbidden knowledge in your ear. You will pass through the terminus and be changed. Reshaped in His image. Living the life everlasting.”

Solovkin pressed the muzzle of his gun to the priest’s temple and pulled the trigger. The body slumped into the mud, the dark eyes never leaving Solovkin’s. He found his reflection in them, saw it melt and become something else, turned away.

The soldiers worked quickly, without hesitation; there was no need for orders. Later they would convince themselves the village had been razed by the enemy, and the Army Command would not question their account. By the end of the war, Solovkin had almost managed to forget all about it. He had shot a religious agitator, burned a bundle of reactionary pamphlets. He’d done far worse things in the years that followed; regret was not something Solovkin entertained often.

But the priest had not forgotten, and neither had the black man of the woods. They could afford to wait; time ceased to matter in the living, pulsing dark.

Solovkin grunted and came to. He was on the floor of a prison cell, the stub of a pencil in his right hand. For a moment he didn’t know where he was, his heart beating a frantic tattoo in his chest. Then it came back to him: the arrest, the interrogation, the cruel faces of the men of the Commissariat. Sooner or later they would come back for him.

He stared at the broken pencil as if expecting it to move on its own. A recollection lit up the recesses of his mind, bringing a smile to his lips. He had committed the priest’s manuscript to the flames, but not before reading it, the peculiar symbols burning themselves into his mind. Twenty years had passed, but he would remember.

The lead heart of the pencil traced a line across the concrete floor, haltingly at first, then bolder. The secret sign, hidden in the tangle of lines and curves, burned in his mind’s eye. Solovkin hummed as the image took shape, lost to the world around him. When the pencil was used up he tore his skin open and dipped the shards in the dark ink welling from beneath.

***

The guards were caught unprepared.

Several times they had escorted the quiet elderly prisoner from cell 336 to the interrogation room, and he’d never tried to resist in any way. When they came for him that morning, he seemed even more subdued and distracted than usual. He shuffled along between them, his eyes glassy and unfocused, until they reached the staircase that connected the iron galleries. Then he spun round and shoved the guard behind him with all his strength.

The unexpected attack nearly sent the guard over the railing; he flailed his arms as he fell back, clutching at the metal bars. The man in front was too slow. By the time he turned, the prisoner was already halfway up to the upper gallery, bounding up the steps with desperate speed.

Shouts exploded in the staircase, footsteps thundering from below, the noise immense in the dead silence of the prison. Other guards joined the pursuit, but the fleeing man evaded them with ease. Yet there was nowhere to run: he was almost at the top of the staircase, two guards waiting for him on the uppermost gallery, truncheons at the ready. The prisoner scrambled over the railing and perched above the drop for a moment, arms thrown out like a grotesque bird of prey. Before the nearest of the guards could reach him, he stepped off into the emptiness.

They found him in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs, crumpled and twisted like a broken doll. He drew in a ragged breath, then another. His finger smeared a dark scarlet curve on the concrete, the start of a drawing or a strange symbol. His dying eyes gazed around the circle of faces; blood bubbled on his lips as if he were trying to speak. By the time the doctor arrived, the prisoner was long gone.

***

“Are you all right, comrade?”

“Yes,” Malenkov said through clenched teeth. “Leave me now. I have to go through the prisoner’s personal effects.”

The guard moved away, his steps noiseless on the carpeting of the corridor. Malenkov waited until the man was out of sight, exhaled a whistle of breath. The interior of the cell spun round him, mad designs and patterns inscribed into the floor and walls robbing him of all sense of dimension. He stepped in and closed the door behind him. The cell had to be cleaned up by someone reliable, someone who’d keep his mouth shut. There would be enough unpleasant questions to answer: not only had he failed to secure a confession, but the prisoner was dead. In the paranoid atmosphere of the Commissariat, even the smallest mistake could easily place one on the wrong side of the interrogator’s table. No one could know about this.

He crossed the room and peered at a shape that resembled an eight-armed star, surrounded by small, twisting symbols. Devil-worship of some sort, occultism. There had been nothing in the old man’s file to suggest anything of the sort. It only went to show no one could be trusted. He made a mental note to find out who had compiled Solovkin’s surveillance file and punish them for the oversight.

In the meantime, he had this mess to contend with.

Drawings covered every centimeter of the bare walls and floor like a hideous, tightly woven tapestry. Some had been drawn in pencil, others in the prisoner’s own blood, the strokes crude but precise, measured. A central piece above the cot featured a tall, slender form emerging from a crack in the wall: a huge, predatory grin cleft the face in two. In spite of himself, Malenkov shuddered. Something about this gruesome icon made his skin crawl, turned his mind to deep, sunless places in which screams could echo forever without being heard.

The silence was oppressive, the roar of blood in his ears deafening. Suddenly he no longer wanted to know what had happened, only to be as far from the call as possible; some long-dormant fragment of his consciousness screamed in alarm. The walls faltered, lost solidity. He turned round. The door had disappeared under the obscene scrawl. He clawed at the stone until his fingertips split and bled, distantly aware of the animal whimper coming from his throat. From behind him came a crumbling noise, the crevice in the wall widening, something pushing through. Fetid air rushed at him, the sickly sweetness of corruption. An irresistible force grasped his head, turned it against the resistance of his neck muscles and vertebrae. Malenkov heard the crack, saw the grinning maw yawn open, a razor-lined tunnel glowing with infernal light.

Radical Division

Jonathan Titchenal

              In my dreams, a bell tolls.

***

              Boone sets down the papers and fixes me with his good eye. “In your own words,” he says. “Explain to me what happened.”

              “Pennington’s report should-”

              “I’ve read Pennington’s report. I’m asking you.”

              He’s fixed me a gin and tonic. I sip it. It tastes like rubbing alcohol in my mouth. I set it aside. “Blakely was first through the door,” I say. “Then Harkaway, Robertson, me, and Pennington. We came in with weapons drawn, but they caught Blakely with a scatter gun all the same. They were expecting trouble.”

              “They usually are, now.” Boone takes a sip of his own drink, sits back in his chair. “How many?”

              “Four, maybe five Batrachians, including the priest. Eight or ten people who looked more or less normal, best as I could tell. It was smoky. They doused the candles as they ran.”

              “And this nonsense in Pennington’s report, about some kind of giant or something...”

              “A statue,” I say. “A giant fish statue, in the back of the temple.”

              “Pennington claims it was moving.”

              “It was very smoky. We were all of us nerved up.” I shrug. I keep my eyes on Boone. “The air was full of smoke. All those people were howling and dancing. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more than incense in the air.”

              Boone nods, as if he’s thought of that already. He takes a cigarette from the pack at his elbow, lights it, breathes out smoke. It hangs in the stifling air. Behind him, two windows look out on Kingsport from their third-floor vantage point. From here, all I can see is a forest of buildings, but I know that somewhere beyond them lies the harbour. I can feel it.

              “Well,” Boone says. “You’ve come through for us again, Guilford. Any of those creatures get a good look at you?”

              “No, sir. We came in masked.”

              “Good man. Shame we didn’t bring one back. Bastards get more slippery all the time.” He barks a laugh, startled by his own play on words. “What we need us is a proper witness.”

              “What about the man we brought back? The wounded one?”

              “Ah. Yes. Your man.” Boone tamps ash into a cut-glass dish. The light from above highlights every crease of his jowls. He looks up, one eye staring through milky film into the middle distance. The other eye is fixed on me. “Your man,” he says. “Broke a chair leg into a stake, put it to his eye, and fell down on top of it.” Boone’s bad eye seems to water, as if in sympathy. “Old Dave Gilman’s in there right now, cleaning up the mess.”

***

              I am very young. There is little in my head but sky and water. I sit on a rotten stump of dock that juts out from below the overhanging eaves of an abandoned building. My legs dangle over the edge, into the salty swill. My sister cuts the webbing between each of my toes with a pair of medical shears. It hurts. My blood dyes the water red. She packs gauze into the wounds, then swathes each foot in a dirty, oversized sock. She stands hip-deep in the water, her tools on the dock beside me. The tide washes in and out, in and out, around her. The sun comes out like a pale eye from behind a filmy scrim of cloud, and she turns her unblinking gaze up to it, eyes full of wet, pearlescent colors.

***

              Royal Pennington stares into a mug of beer, his face set and hard, as if expecting something unpleasant to emerge from the foam. The bar is empty on this dreary afternoon, and the air hangs still and stale, sour with the ghosts of spilled pints.

              "Christ," Pennington says. "This whole county's wrong. You know that?"

              Jim Robertson, half obscured by the smoke of his own cigar, cocks an eyebrow but says nothing.

              "I mean it," Pennington says. "It's like being dosed with something. I can't hardly stand it. He turns on his barstool to face me. "You were born here?"

              "In Kingsport, yes."

              "Well I'm from Boston, and I'm telling you this whole goddamn part of the world ought to just sink into the mud. Christ." He grimaces. "We should have had back-up. Where was the goddamn back-up?"

              "We ain't all that important," Robertson says. "Rad Div has got teams all around here, up in Arkham, down in Vermont. If you're saying we're understaffed-"

              "I am."

              "I agree with you. What do you want to do about it?"

              "I'm like to quit and go drive a bus, at this rate."

              The door opens and Robert Harkaway steps inside, doffing his hat and shaking the rain from his coat. He joins us at the bar, but does not sit. His height, and the light in the room, combine to make him loom. "I've just come from Boone's office," he says. "Eamon Blakely is dead."

              Nobody says anything.

              Harkaway orders whiskey. He holds it up to the light, as if examining it. "You gents think maybe Washington hasn't got our backs anymore?"

              Pennington turns to him. "What're you saying?"

              Harkaway's eyes flick from his glass to Pennington. "What do you think I'm saying?"