Smog - Baggage of Enternal Night (15 page)

Yefim nodded gravely.

“You’ve got records by the Russian seer,
Rasputin?”

“Mr. Stewart’s friend has them. He is
the
doorway
.”

Ray smiled for all the wrong reasons. “Then what
are we doing up here?”

Staying safe
, I wanted to respond. But I
knew I had to move; it was time to go to Joey’s.

“What are you going to do with the records?” I
asked Yefim.

“The same as anyone would do. Listen to them.”

Suddenly my plan seemed foolish, the strategy of a
child who breaks a cookie jar and tries to hide it in the nearest cupboard
drawer. I would never be able to contain the mess just by passing it along for
someone else to use.

“I hear it playing now,” Yefim added. “Below us…”

I thought of the three records that Vic passed to
Yefim. Vic had said:
“My friend says these records are cursed. They’re like
reading a demon’s diary; they make you sick if you listen. They don’t play like
normal records. You noticed that already. And Yefim…he says they don’t end.”

I wondered how long Yefim had listened to those
records while they were in his possession. Did he play them for hours before
realizing they never ended? Was he more
infected
with it than any of us?
The music seemed like a germ. Once it contaminated you, you might not feel its
effects for some time…but when the germ incubates, it infects the listener and
spreads into madness. Yefim must have understood after listening that they were
cursed and returned them to Vic, but since then the voices grew in his head,
calling to him to listen again.

“Below us…” Yefim repeated. He cocked his head,
listening to a song I could not hear. He walked out the door.

What should I do? Stop him by force? The records
would still play, and Joey would still listen. I decided my original child’s
strategy would have to do for now. If Yefim took them, at least that would buy
me some time. At least the records would be out of the building and, hopefully,
their effect diminished on us.

I followed Yefim down the hall to the elevator,
and Ray trailed after us, writing in his clipboard.

“I’ll help you get the records,” I told Yefim.
“But you take them far, far away from here.”

He didn’t respond, and the elevator doors opened
to take us inside.

I heard that cursed music as soon as we reached
Joey’s floor. I imagined a rider on a horse galloping to me from the distance.
Every time I heard the records playing, the rider drew closer and closer, great
puffs of dust filling the sky behind. Only that rider wasn’t coming to greet
me—he was coming to run me down.

Yefim seemed almost to be shaking, like he was
overjoyed to hear the music. Ray made a face like someone farted in his ear and
told him it was a lullaby.

I had sensed those records were bad news ever
since I first listened to them, but now I began to feel genuinely scared. It
was harder each time I heard it not to just settle down and let it carry me off
to whatever dream world it sang about. I fought the temptation and led the
others to Joey’s door, thinking:
let Yefim take the records away; please
just let him take them all right now.
That was followed by the thought that
if Yefim didn’t buy every one of the records, I would snatch them with me on
the way out. Just grab-and-dash, break them over my knee, and apologize later.

We walked down the hall, and I saw the building’s
superintendent, Horace Wetzel, standing in a daze outside Joey’s apartment. His
craggy face hung slack and tilted toward the door as if listening to what
occurred on the other side.

“Wetzel, what’re you doing?” I asked.

He looked at me confused, the expression of
someone waking from a deep slumber.

“I got a complaint,” he said. “A complaint…but
someone called me…someone I couldn’t see…”

“So you settled for eavesdropping?”

His mind seemed to clear a bit, and his face
flushed. “I run this building. I can go where I damn well please.”

“I don’t think nosing around is in your job
description—”

“You got a problem, pay your rent on time. Then
we’ll talk,” he interrupted.

He turned about-face and marched up the hall
toward the elevators. His head kept twitching to the side, though, as he
passed, spasms like the aftershock of a particularly violent sneeze.

I knocked at Joey’s door, knowing he wouldn’t
answer. I turned the knob and the door opened, so I entered, followed by Yefim
and Ray.

The first thing I saw was that Joey wasn’t alone.
There were several other men and women sitting with him in a circle on the
floor. The Scandinavian, Martin, sat hunched over, arms extended palms-up, as
if offering worship to Joey. Next to him, Martin’s wife tilted her face to the
ceiling, eyes rolled back. The woman across the hall with blue hair was there,
swaying back-and-forth, as were a couple other people who looked familiar, but
I didn’t know by name.

The man with the beard was there, too…
Rasputin
.
This time he did not vanish when I looked upon him.

He stood behind Joey, and a strange effect caused
me to rub at my eyes. The room seemed blurry, as if a fine mist hung in the
air. I looked again and saw Rasputin was also
within
Joey, like a spirit
rising from its mortal body or, perhaps, like a form within a form, like those
little Russian nesting dolls, in which a wooden figure is stacked inside another
wooden figure.

The chanting was louder than ever before. The
record player must have been at full volume and everyone in the room sang with
it. That sound was hideous: squealing, crashing, scratching instruments that
just played over and over, overlaid by the recorded voices. Yefim pushed past
me to kneel with the others and began to repeat the words I now knew so well.

Vkhodite. Vkhodite. Vkhodite.

Ne zaderzhivat’sya v kholodnyy
i temnyy, ho prisoyedinit’sya ko mne v svet navsegda.

“Christ almighty, it’s cold in here,” Ray said
softly. Then he gasped. “Is that…snow?”

And then I realized why the room seemed blurry.
There was a fine veil of snowflakes floating in the air. The baggage stacked
against the walls had thin lines of frost hanging off the edges. On top of the
nearest stack lay the empty leather suitcase with ivory handle that Joey had
won, the case that had contained the record player. Everything in the room
seemed paler than it should have been.

Yefim turned to us. “Come in,” he said. A puff of
fog exhaled with his breath. “Do not linger in the cold.”

He returned to chanting, and I felt shammed. Yefim
was never planning on buying the records; he just feigned interest in order to
find out where they were. He wanted to hear them again, to join with the
others.

“Charlie,” Ray said and tugged at my elbow.
“What’s going on?”

“It’s those records.”

I looked again at Joey and stepped closer to him.
I was wrong in thinking Rasputin was “within” him. It was the other way around;
Joey was within Rasputin and fading away. I saw Joey only as if he were an
afterimage. Rasputin’s eyes glowed like burning coal briquettes, and they shone
through the veil of snow. Steam lifted off his shoulders. If we were in a snowy
forest, it was Rasputin who would be the campfire that we circled for warmth.

“Joey,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

The group chanted louder.

I needed to turn the music off, to set them free.
I pushed past Joey’s neighbors and reached for the gramophone playing in their
midst. Rasputin watched me and made no effort to interfere. I should have been
leery when a thin smile crossed his face, but I moved forward in my charge with
the adrenaline-fueled fortitude of the sanctimonious.

I took hold of the record player’s arm and lifted.
It took no more than a second, and it was
easy
. The music stopped and,
by proxy, so did the chanters. It was as if the spell were broken immediately,
and the room turned dead-silent. I was already imagining squeezing my hands
around that bearded lunatic’s throat.

Of course there had to be a reason he was known as
the ‘Mad Monk’; I should have realized he kept some sort of hoodoo up his
sleeves in order to skip across time and materialize out of a record player.

The player’s brass arm turned fluid in my fingers
and moved like a wet snake, lashing out with its needle, slicing the palm of my
hand. A bright red line opened across my skin, and I released it with a cry.
The arm became solid again and dropped back exactly into the position from
where I had lifted it. The music—and the chanting—resumed.

Rasputin now spoke, and licks of flame shot from
his mouth. “Come in. Do not linger in the cold.”

An icy wind blew over me, and Rasputin’s robes
billowed with a
poof
. I felt light-headed listening as the chanting
continued, but it sounded distant, the volume turned down. The air became
fuzzier, and I wrapped my arms across my chest, shivering under the thin
pinstriped suit.

Why had I come into the snow
dressed like this?

Pine trees bristled thick in all directions, and I
knew I would be lost if I tried to make my way amongst them by myself. In the
distance, on mountaintops, were fairy-tale castles with pink and turquoise
spires. The moonlight caused them to glow. Snowflakes settled on my nose, and I
felt myself grow numb. It was an effort of great magnitude to lift my legs and
move, though there was nowhere I could go. I stood in a clearing with a
campfire at its center. The fire was wrapped in robes and a beard.

Vkhodite.

Rasputin rose into the air and held his hands up
parallel to each other, about a foot apart, as if supporting an invisible rod
at each end. Between his hands, the universe shifted. I saw flames roll across
the cosmos, consuming worlds and stars and gods. The infinitesimality of
existence consumed my thoughts, much as the flames consumed eternity. I knew
not if this were a reflection of the past, or of things to come, or how I fit
in; only that I was as insubstantial in its effect as a shadow is in a
lightless cave. If I held poison in my hand, I would have drunk it; had I a gun,
I would have put it to my head. The despair was a blanket wrapped over my
senses, so that I suffocated in its many folds.

Vkhodite.

Then I knew. He showed me these things so I would
join him. He offered an escape, a freedom from suffering, a chance to find new
purpose as one of his Misbegottens. I would never again be alone, never shiver
in the snow of life.
I would never die.
It was only my soul he would
take, a pittance for his gift of immortality, and I would play on and on
through him. If only I would stop fighting and chant along to the music…

I woke to Ray slapping my face. He wore a silver
pinky ring in the shape of a horseshoe, and the edge of its band cut my cheek.

“Snap out of it,” he said and shook me like a
ragdoll.

The temperature seemed to jump a hundred degrees.
I went from standing in drifts of snow to leaning against Ray in the muggy
early evening of Detroit summer.

“I gotta slap you again?” he asked.

Ray seemed blurry at first but soon drifted into
focus. I spoke, and heard my voice sounded drugged. “No.”

“Thought you went loopy on me.”

“What happened?”

He let go of me. We stood on the sidewalk outside Les
Deux Oies.

“You were talking to someone,” he said. “And then
your voice just dropped off. You looked like you were sleepwalking, the way you
moved, real sluggish and stiff. You sat on the floor with your friends and
mumbled some weird words over and over.”

“Didn’t you feel it?” I asked.

“Yeah, I felt it. That’s why I left. I’ve been
drunk enough to know when my senses are slipping away. I picked you up and
carried you out.”

“They didn’t stop you?”

“The man with the beard said something, and the
others looked like they might intervene, but you and I were closest to the
door. I was quick and, once out, nobody followed.”

“Joey needs help.”

“He sure does. I don’t know what he’s gotten
himself into. What were they doing up there? Looked like a group of commies
praying to the devil. That’s some sick stuff.” Ray snapped his fingers.

“We’ve got to stop them.”

“You have a plan? I hope it don’t involve the
police, ’cause they wouldn’t care. As long as it stays in the room, that’s a
solid case of religious freedom. Maybe McCarthy was right all along. We’re
being subverted by the
pinkos
. Ever since his censure, the liberals have
been running the country.”

Vkhodite.

It sounded in my head, from far away, calling to
me. Was the voice growing stronger the longer it went on? Or did its reach
expand as more people sang along?

“But you saw it,” I said. “It’s like being
brainwashed. And for God’s sake, it was snowing in there! Police or not, we
have to go back, pull Joey out of the room, the same as you pulled me out. Then
the others...”