David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“Hey!” she ran across the room to where the boy was working. “What do you think you’re doing! This is a library! You can’t burn down a library!”

The boy turned and glared at her. “Shhh!” he said.

“I will not!” Mrs. Kontos-Wu took a deep breath and let out a scream. It was a good scream — better than the one she’d imagined hearing a few moments ago — all high-pitched spooky-movie shrill. She took a breath and screamed again — louder this time.

“Ah, shit, Kontos-Wu,” said the boy, reaching into his pocket. “Do we have to go through this?” He pulled out a book of matches, and before Mrs. Kontos-Wu could recover herself, lit one and dropped it to the floor.

The flame spread fast as sunlight along the trail of gasoline, only at first it was a line of blue, not gold. The gold came an instant later, in an explosion of flame and smoke that engulfed the boy all at once. Mrs. Kontos-Wu felt the ground fall from beneath her feet as the force of the fire threw her back. Roaring flame and the crackling combustion of wood and paper filled her ears as her back hit the floor and the air heaved from her chest. Mrs. Kontos-Wu gasped a lungful of black, evil-tasting smoke, and coughed it back out again. She felt as though she were suffocating — she couldn’t get a breath past her throat.

She felt a hand on her back, and another on her arm. The hands were large, and their grips firm. She looked up through the thickening smoke, and felt a moment of comforting reassurance.

It was Mr. Bishop! Her schoolmaster! He was wearing one of his familiar tweed jackets, the wire-rimmed glasses perched on the end of his nose. And behind them, his eyes —

Mrs. Kontos-Wu gasped — and took in a little air this time. She blinked the stinging smoke away and looked more closely. She’d been right.

His eyes were the same as the boy’s. Older, stuck into a different face. But they were the same.

“Come on,” said Mr. Bishop. “We must leave this place — before they get back.”

With Mr. Bishop’s help, Mrs. Kontos-Wu got to her feet. The fire was spreading quickly. Flames licked across the shelves at the far side of the library in little blue streaks. The wall by the entrance where the fire had started was consumed in a terrible mix of roiling flame and black smoke. The tall windows had shattered, and now the oxygen-rich night air blew in past the billowing, flaming curtains to feed the conflagration.

Mr. Bishop dragged her toward the flaming wall. Mrs. Kontos-Wu pulled against him. She was not going anywhere near that fire.

“Quickly!” he shouted. “We’ve got to get out of here — before they come back!”

“We’ll die if we go there, Mr. Bishop!” shouted Mrs. Kontos-Wu. She squirmed free of Mr. Bishop’s grip and ran toward the far end of the library.

“We won’t!” shouted Mr. Bishop. He started to run after her — and might have caught her all other things being equal.

But at that moment, an immense gust of wind knocked both of them to the floor. The curtains flew nearly straight out from their rods and the flames blew back an instant before returning, brighter and hotter in the fresh outside air.

Lois stood at the window. Her arms were folded across her chest and she appeared very cross indeed. Strange light flickered behind her — green like the reading lamp, but moving across her shoulders like a thick liquid.

“You,” she said. “You bastard.”

“I’m a—” Mrs. Kontos-Wu stopped herself. Lois wasn’t calling her a big bastard — she was looking straight at Mr. Bishop, who had climbed to his feet. He towered over them both — his head seemed to reach as high as the ceiling.

“We are all bastards,” he said. “Rasputin’s bastards, they used to call us? That is our common bond.”

“Vladimir wanted to destroy you outright,” said Lois. The flames behind her diminished as she spoke — out and out vanishing in spots. And where they vanished, the wallpaper and bookshelves and hangings reappeared unblemished. The liquid green light grew brighter. “Maybe he was right.”

“Vladimir is merciful, then. I presume it wasn’t he who devised my reunion with old Krieghoff.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu gaped. As Mr. Bishop spoke, the flames started up again — consuming the fresh wallpaper and bookshelves and hanging as fast as they’d been made. Becky Barker and the Adventure of the Scarlet Arrow was forgotten in the face of this new mystery.

“That was me,” said Lois. “You had it coming.”

“I see. I have been very wicked — of course. And who are you, little girl, who judges an old man so harshly for a lifetime of sin?”

There was a series of loud pops then, as a row of lights on the far side of the library blew out. New flames climbed up the rails of the staircase to the library’s second level in brilliant lines of blue and yellow.

And as that happened, another thing occurred, which gave Mrs. Kontos-Wu even more pause. Mr. Bishop — a tall, fit man of about fifty-five, with sandy grey hair and a tweed single-breasted sports jacket — began to melt and change. He grew shorter and his hair receded; his sports jacket melded and extended down to near his ankles, and transformed into a thick, terrycloth bathrobe that had once been a deep, luxurious purple but had faded with washings to a threadbare pink. His belly swelled and his feet grew, and his chin darkened with late morning stubble.

“Fyodor Kolyokov,” she said, nodding. This wasn’t Mr. Bishop. She was not a schoolgirl at Bishop’s Hall. She was Mrs. Kontos-Wu, who worked for Wolfe-Jordan, where she managed offshore mutual funds. Except that there really was no Wolfe-Jordan — Wolfe-Jordan was a cover, a money laundering front, and her real master was Fyodor Kolyokov, who ran his own kind of financial empire out of a hotel at Broadway and 95th, which was called…

“The Emissary,” she said aloud, looking down at her hands. The fingers, which had been small and pink and a little pudgy, narrowed and lengthened and dried out into what seemed by comparison a mummy’s claw but in fact was only the more weather-worn hand of a thirty-six-year-old woman who had not been at Bishop’s Hall for a quarter century.

She looked at Kolyokov, and he nodded to her: Good , he mouthed — and then he spoke some other words to her — not with his mouth, but in her head. They flashed across her mind like quicksilver. And then he mouthed again: Now .

Lois screamed at her to stop, but it was too late. Mrs. Kontos-Wu flung herself into the flames — felt them lick and tear at her clothes and her flesh — felt the illusion of the metaphor burn and bubble away like the skin on her arms and face and thighs — felt the pain of burning nerves and searing flesh — and then felt its absence, as death came to her sure and final, in the crumbling metaphor that was Bishop’s Hall.

It was dark enough, but that was it as far as sensory deprivation went in Fyodor Kolyokov’s tank. In spite of the buckets of cleaning products that had been flushed through the thing over the past several hours, the air inside was filled with old man stink. If anything, the antiseptic made it worse: it made it smell like a geriatric ward. And it wasn’t completely silent, either. Stephen heard the scream from the living room with both hatches closed.

“Piece of shit Soviet junk.”

Stephen muttered it under his breath, but in the tomb of Fyodor Kolyokov’s isolation tank it echoed like the voice of God. He sighed — which sounded to his sense-starved ears like a hurricane hitting a Florida beach — and opened the two hatches. The scream had come three more times before he was out.

“Shut the fuck up!” he yelled. “I’m fucking trying to fucking concentrate!” He kicked his feet into his slippers. “Fuckwad!”