David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“You did nothing here, did you?” said Alexei.

Borovich squinted at him. Alexei was sitting on a rattan chair at the back of Borovich’s house. Behind him, the skeletal phallus of the half-finished CN Tower rose up. Borovich looked at his hands — still smooth, long fingers with nails bitten to the quick.

“You were desperate,” said Alexei, “to find Babushka.”

“That was not her name,” said Borovich, “then.”

“Yes,” said Alexei. “You are so disgusted with her — with your choice of her. Because you are such an honourable man.”

And Borovich’s eyes fluttered shut — as a great black thing pierced his middle — and he remembered finding her; finding, in addition to all those university students, the names on a list of sleepers that Lena had made, and hunting them. Getting angrier and angrier as one after another turned out to have quit their jobs and left their families and abandoned their lives, to disappear from the world. He dreamed and scoured the world looking for their signatures — seeking them out.

Finally, one night in the midst of a July heat wave, he found one. His name was Jack King. He was staying in the Royal York Hotel, just having arrived by train, with nothing but a suitcase containing a change of clothing, a small automatic pistol and a little packet of subway tokens. He was on his way to Parkdale — to murder an upstart who was getting too close.

Borovich had smiled to himself — made a note of his room number, and gotten one of the few sleepers he managed to control: Alice, her name was, an undergraduate political science student at U of T. She was small-boned and slender but for a tiny potbelly and thick, dark brows that accentuated her eyes. He sent her over to the hotel; made her knock on his room door; and when he answered, step inside and say: “Do not be hasty, Lena. I bring this gift.”

Lena accepted it graciously — he had not been with her long, but he’d been with her long enough to know her tastes. At the end of the night, her sleeper had said: “All right, Vasili. You may join us. But you must bring gifts.”

It was two and a half years before Vasili could assemble gifts rich enough for Lena’s tastes. He raided the Hermitage, the treasure vaults of the Kremlin, riding sleepers at the highest level of the party. Where necessary —

“You murdered,” said Alexei. “You murdered people who had nothing to do with this. It is fascinating.”

“How can — how can you be here?” said Borovich, manipulating a KGB Colonel named Vlochma to wrap his lips around a gun barrel.

Alexei sat beside him, crouched in the younger man’s mind.

“Was it worth it?”

Vasili looked at him, tears in his eyes. “Of course not,” he said. “What are you doing? How can you be here?”

Alexei was about to answer when another voice came up around them in a great, angry cloud.

“It is obvious, my love,” said Babushka. “He is the Destroyer.”

Heather stopped at the top of the wooden stairway that led down the cliff, to the main town of New Pokrovskoye. “ Mi mi mi mi mi, ” she said aloud. “ Mi! ”

“All right!” said Kolyokov. “Enough with your mantra! You can stop now.”

“Is it safe?”

“Maybe,” said Kolyokov. “Who knows? But I need to think and that Goddamn mantra is making it impossible.”

“Sorry.” Heather sat down on the edge of the stairs and looked out over the village. There were some lights on — and she could see shadows moving in front of those lights — but the town had an eerie quiet to it.

She took a deep breath, and felt an odd squirming in her middle. Was that Fyodor Kolyokov? Like some twisted foetus, making itself at home in her uterus? It felt creepy, but also kind of good. She was getting used to sharing her body with the old zombie. At least with Kolyokov, you knew where you stood. Holden Gibson had done the same thing with her, with the rest of them, on a whim.

Fyodor Kolyokov had enough respect for her to pay for his time.

And really, Heather had to admit that there was something oddly liberating being dream-walked by an old creature like Fyodor Kolyokov. As she sat there thinking, her hands worked in her lap — fingers counting. She heard muttered Russian coming from her lips. It faltered here and there — like a grandparent. Kolyokov was getting on — she didn’t know how long he’d be with her.

Her hands fell into her lap then, and she felt her head turning toward the lighthouse.

She blinked at the sight of it: the top surrounded by sparking blue electricity — its very tip connecting with a whirling, silent funnel cloud that drew down from the otherwise clear night sky. Then he turned her head to the port — where now could be heard the high-pitched hum of an outboard motor. A boat was coming in to the harbour.

“Start singing your mantra again,” said Kolyokov. “We must go meet that boat.”

Alexei Kilodovich and Vasili Borovich stood on the remains of a cracked riverbed. Mountains rimmed the horizon, but the land that led to them was flat and dry and monotonous. The sky was more interesting. It was filled with a great bruise of a cloud; a cloud that bled and pulsated and burned with a terrible fever. It had a kind of face to it — an alien face, that expressed unguessable emotions. Vasili tried to shrink away from it, but Alexei would have none of that. He stared up into it, unapologetically.

“You,” said the face, “have been ill-used.”

“Do not blame yourself,” said Alexei.

“I do not apologize,” said the cloud. “It is a statement of fact. I had wondered, when we first met, just what it was you are. And you know — with the potential that you carried, you might have lived a much better time on this earth.”

“Like your Vasili?”

The cloud rumbled. “Vasili? Is he here?”

Alexei gestured to his feet, where Vasili Borovich lay huddled.

“Ah,” said the cloud. “The traitor. He is of no consequence. He is barely here — thanks to you.”

Sure enough, Borovich seemed to be fading from this place. Alexei could see the ground through his insubstantial flesh.

“Of course,” said the cloud, “if you wanted to, you could return him here.”

“I see no need.”

“That is your ability, yes? To make — and break — sleepers. At will. What a thing you are, Kilodovich.”

“You are Babushka,” said Alexei.

“Had you any doubt?”

“Not truly,” he said. “I wished to confirm it. For we had defeated you.”

The cloud rumbled. “You tricked me. You drove me out of sleepers by placing them all in such peril. Now we are not in sleepers.”

“It does not matter,” said Alexei. “For I am—”

Alexei took a breath. He reminded himself: he was not a KGB agent who worked for Wolfe-Jordan and had failed to protect Mrs. Kontos-Wu from gangsters. He was not a low-level sleeper who had failed to perform even rudimentary remote viewing exercises.

“I am the Destroyer.”

So without more thought, he set his attention to the world that Babushka had created: the sick, indulgent conception of the Empire of New Pokrovskoye.

“Is that the best that you can do?” demanded Babushka. She had taken on the personification of a beautiful young woman — pale, alabaster skin underneath a dark crimson hood. “It is, I take it, designed to inspire fear of rape, yes? Or perhaps to erase your own sense of inadequacy. Did you play Dungeons and Dragons in college?”

Alexei looked down at his robes — at the twitching tentacle that came out of his middle. He could see what she meant.

“I suppose,” he said. “In truth I have not given it much thought.”

“Well,” said Babushka, “how effective you must think it to be then. It must strike fear into all the metaphorical children that you undo.”