Sam Eastland - The Beast in the Red Forest

As if the voice compelled him, Kirov slipped from consciousness, wading out into the black lake of his dreams.

*

The next time he woke, it was evening.

A nurse was tucking in the blanket, her back turned towards him.

‘Where am I?’ asked Kirov.

‘In the hospital,’ the nurse replied, ‘not far from Rovno, where you were wounded yesterday.’

‘I dreamed I hit someone,’ said Kirov.

Now the woman turned to face him. ‘Is that so?’

Kirov gasped as he caught sight of her black eye.

‘I must have had that dream as well,’ said the woman.

‘Forgive me,’ muttered Kirov.

‘In time, perhaps,’ she told him

‘There’s something else I dreamed,’ he said, ‘or thought I dreamed, at least.’

‘What was it?’

‘A man, standing right over there by the window.’

‘I was on duty all afternoon, and nobody came into the room apart from me. But don’t think you’re going crazy. They gave you morphine for the pain. That stuff can play tricks with your mind.’

‘I saw him, too,’ said a voice.

Kirov glanced towards the doorway, where a man sat in a wheelchair. He had lost both his legs halfway down the thigh and one of his arms at the bicep. With his one remaining hand, he steered the chair by gripping one of the wheels.

‘Return to your room, Captain Dombrowsky,’ commanded the nurse. ‘Leave this man alone. He needs his rest.’

Grinning but obedient, the man manoeuvred himself back into the hallway and creaked away back to his bed.

‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ said the nurse. ‘His limbs aren’t the only things he’s lost. The Captain was transferred here from another hospital right after the Germans pulled out. He made such a nuisance of himself at the other place that they passed him over to us. And now we’re stuck with him.’

‘How did I get here?’ asked Kirov.

‘Some soldiers brought you in. They found you in a bunker after the air raid. They said you had been in a gunfight, but against whom they didn’t know.’

‘I don’t know, either,’ said Kirov. ‘Someone just started shooting. How are the others?’

‘You are the only survivor,’ replied the nurse. ‘When the soldiers carried you in, you were covered in so much blood that I thought they’d wasted their time. Turns out, it wasn’t all yours. The soldiers told me that, apart from you, they found three men, all of them dead. Two were obviously partisans. The third man had a Soviet identity book, but was wearing civilian clothes. They didn’t tell me his name.’

‘That must be Colonel Andrich,’ said Kirov, ‘but there was also a Red Army officer in the bunker with us. Did they find him, too?’

The nurse shook her head. ‘Whoever he was, it sounds like that’s the man who shot you and your friends.’

‘And there was a driver. He waited outside during the meeting. How is he?’

‘No one mentioned anything about a driver. He might have been killed in the air raid.’

At that moment, the doctor walked in. It was the same man who had dosed Kirov with ether when he tried to get down off the gurney. The doctor’s apron had been cleaned, but still showed the marks of blood stains in the cloth. Without any smile or greeting, the man unclipped a chart from the foot of Kirov’s bed. Still glancing at the chart, the doctor reached into the pocket of his white hospital coat, removed something about the size of a cherry stone and tossed it on to the bed. ‘Major, you’re a lucky man,’ he said.

Kirov squinted at the object, which had landed on the blanket just above his chest. It was a bullet, or what was left of one. Kirov stared at the gnarled mushroom of lead and copper.

‘The bullet must have ricocheted,’ explained the doctor, ‘which explains its deformed shape. By the time it hit you, the force was almost spent. We removed it from under your collar bone. If the round had been going any faster, it would have torn away your shoulder blade.’

A shudder passed through Kirov as he thought of the bullet ripping through his skin.

Seeing Kirov’s discomfort, the nurse picked up the piece of lead and tucked it into the pocket of his tunic, which was now draped over a chair in the corner of the room. ‘I really don’t know why you hand those things out,’ she told the doctor.

The doctor smiled. ‘A reminder to be more careful next time.’

‘I really should be going,’ said Kirov. ‘You see, I came here from Moscow to find someone.’ As he struggled to sit up, he felt a dull, tearing sensation across his chest and slumped back with a groan.

‘Be patient,’ warned the doctor. ‘Even for a commissar, willpower alone is not a cure. You’ll be back on the street soon enough. In the meantime, allow my nurse to make your life miserable for a few days. It’s the least you can do after punching her lights out yesterday.’

‘I have already apologised.’

‘Knowing her,’ said the doctor, as he replaced the chart, ‘I think it might take more than that to earn forgiveness.’

When the doctor had gone, the nurse finished tucking in the bed. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him,’ she told Kirov. ‘He likes to stir up trouble.’

‘So you won’t be making my life miserable?’

‘When the morphine wears off,’ she assured him, ‘your life will be miserable enough without my help.’

And she was right.

In the long, sleepless night which followed, blinding flashes of colour exploded behind Kirov’s eyes and pain rose from the fading haze of morphine, shuddering through his body as if some cruel phantom was prising at his joints with screwdrivers. He listened to the Morse-code tap of the branch against the window and the whimpering of soldiers whose amputated limbs still ghosted them with agony. The more Kirov listened, the louder the noises became, until he had to press his hands against his ears or else be deafened by them.

Kirov had no sense of having slept, or for how long, but in the morning he woke bathed in sweat, to the sound of a creaking wheel as Captain Dombrowsky steered himself into the room. ‘The nurse told you I was crazy, didn’t she?’

‘More or less.’ Kirov’s throat was dry. He wished he had something to drink.

‘Do you know what those nurses call me behind my back?’ asked Dombrowsky. ‘Their name for me is Samovar, because that’s what I look like with no legs and only one arm. To them, I am nothing more than a glorified teapot. Maybe I’m insane, but I know what I’m talking about.’

Kirov fixed him with a bloodshot stare. ‘And what are you talking about, Dombrowsky?’

‘About the man you saw. He appeared out of nowhere, like a ghost, right when the nurses were changing their shifts. He went straight to your room and as he walked he made no sound. No sound at all!’

‘What did he look like, this man?’

‘He was tall.’

‘That’s all you can tell me?’

‘He wore an old-fashioned coat, of a kind I haven’t seen since before the Revolution.’

Maybe I wasn’t hallucinating after all, thought Kirov.

The nurse appeared in the doorway. ‘What did I tell you, Captain?’ she scolded. ‘Now leave Major Kirov in peace! And stay away from the stairs! I saw you this morning, and you were much too close to the edge. If you try going down in that wheelchair, you’ll kill yourself.’

‘I’m going! I’m going!’ Meekly, Dombrowsky wheeled himself away, but as he passed by Kirov’s bed, he turned his head and winked.

*

That night, Rovno was bombed again. This time, it was the outskirts that received the full force of the destruction. Above the burning houses, the sky turned pink as salmon flesh and, at the hospital on the other side of town, shockwaves caused the windows to tremble like ripples in a pond.