David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

In fact, there was a time when they’d done stuff just as weird. It was the late ’80s, maybe three months since she’d joined up with his little team. She’d run away from the stuffy-assed upstate New York boarding school her parents had shoved her into six months earlier because she didn’t like the structure.

And before she knew it, there she was, at a Transcendental Meditation retreat at a rundown summer camp in Northern California, learning her mantra from an old hippie named Pete and watching Holden and Shara, his girlfriend at the time, try their hands at yogic flying. Or more accurately, try their asses at it. Even though she was just eleven years old and fairly gullible, it seemed to Heather that yogic flying was basically jumping with your ass. Which struck her as bullshit. So Heather took her personal secret mantra, which as she told anyone who asked was mi , watched the old videotapes of the Maharishi and meditated for ten minutes twice a day for two weeks — until Holden got tired of Shara and jumping with his ass, and hauled them all off to New Mexico for three years of much more lucrative magazine subscription scamming.

What was the camp like ? asked a quiet voice.

It was pretty low-rent, compared with the sort of thing that Heather had been used to growing up. There were a couple of big clapboard buildings in the middle that smelled of flypaper and mould, and surrounding that a dozen little cabins. There was a lake a five minute hike down a trail, but Heather wasn’t allowed there and so she’d never been.

Hippie Pete said—

“Sometimes there are snakes that come from the lake and meeting them can cause stress and discord.”

He was smiling down at her as he spoke, his eyes taking that faraway slightly stoned look that came from spending your days and nights meditating with incense sticks burning at your feet. His breath smelled of oatmeal and herb tea, which was not surprising; that was all they ate and drank there, three times a day.

“We eliminate stress with meditation. Playing with snakes does not aid us in eliminating stress. So we do not go to the lake, where sometimes the snakes come from. This will cause stress, which we eliminate through meditation.”

Heather’s eyes shot open. “Fuck a duck!” she exclaimed. She had forgotten how creepy and irritating Hippie Pete had been. That sing-song voice; that take-you-around-in-a-circle-until-you’re-so-dizzy-it-makes-sense approach to selling things that fundamentally made no sense; that vacant smile that Heather assumed came from not having enough stress or too much meditating or both.

And there he’d been — right in front of her. A guy she hadn’t seen for fifteen years. Clear as day. She shut her eyes again, and took another look.

Yup — there he was. Smiling and nodding, holding his fingers and thumbs together with hands upturned in way that would make him look like a Buddha — if he were sitting cross-legged in a monastery and not standing out in front of the old Arts and Crafts Lodge giving her gentle, meditative shit for wanting to go down to the lake and take a swim.

And shit, but he towered over her. At first, she thought he was some kind of giant — it seemed like he was eight feet tall. But she quickly realized that it wasn’t him that was big — she was small. As small as an eleven-year-old girl from New York would be. She looked at her hands — they were soft and tiny. From the look of things, Holden hadn’t gotten around to starting the aversion therapy that would eventually stop her from biting her nails, because they were gnawed down to nubs and a couple of fingertips were pretty scabby. She was wearing a My Pretty Pony T-shirt, cheap stonewashed jeans and a pair of even cheaper rubber sandals.

“Fuck a duck,” she said again.

“Consider the rose,” said Hippie Pete. “How it has many petals which grow from a stem. Though the petals grow from the stem, it is the stem which also grows, and the petals which grow from—”

“Oh no,” she said. “We’re not getting into the rose thing.”

The Maharishi used to talk about roses all the time. There was a whole EP video about roses, in fact, six hours of the Maharishi sitting on a cushion in a studio in Calcutta or somewhere, dishing the dirt on roses and consciousness and how one was like the petals of the other. The last thing she needed now was to hear Hippie Pete recite the director’s cut.

“—and the stem,” said Hippie Pete, as oblivious as ever to Heather’s blossoming boredom, “constitute the consciousness which we—”

Fuck it , she thought. It’s now or never .

“I am out of here!” Heather yelled, and with that, she spun around on her little sandaled feet and took off along the path to the lake.

“—seek to expand!” hollered Hippie Pete behind her. “Hey! We do not go to the lake, where sometimes snakes come from! Stress, Heather! Stress! ”

She ignored him and ran faster. This was too weird, and she needed the space to work out what it meant.

Heather spread out the sequence in her head: she closes her eyes for a couple of seconds in the lounge of the yacht, and suddenly here she is — back fifteen years ago, at a Transcendental Meditation camp where she spent two lousy, boring weeks before embarking on her more engaging career as a junior subscription scammer. It’s not just remembering — it’s reliving. Like she’d been transported back into her memories to relive that tedious, repetitive and ultimately short-lived phase of her life. The baby had said they needed to be prepared for something. What exactly did he mean by preparation?

Was it preparation for action? For this partnership and life-long friendship the baby had been prattling on about? Or just a neat way to keep her out of the way?

If that was the plan, it seemed to be working. As Heather ran she tried to will her eyes open. But all that happened was her eyes opened wider here, in the past. She saw the old growth cedar and pine trees more clearly, the sunlight as it sent shafts down between their branches, the bed of brown needles on the forest floor. This world was getting more and more real every step she took. Even though it wasn’t real — except in memory, and maybe the odd post-pizza dream.

That’s what they were doing — putting her people into these dream worlds, locking them up safe and sound, so the little bastards could do God only knew what when they got to God only knew where.

Heather slowed down. As an adult, she could make the run — Holden made sure they were all in fighting trim once he got going on the magazine biz — but she was using her untrained little kid legs. And when she was a little kid, she wasn’t much of a runner. Or an athlete at all. In fact, she couldn’t do much of anything well — not even —

“S-swim,” she said aloud. Heather thought about this. She couldn’t swim at that age.

She remembered bad dreams — of falling; of drowning; of being chased by the man with a hook for a hand. You didn’t always win in those dreams. Sometimes the water would get in your lungs, or the ground would come up to meet you — or the hook would catch you through a rib.

But you didn’t die. You thought you were going to die — but exactly the opposite happened. Your heart sped up — your breath caught — your eyelids twitched…

You woke up.

She put a hand on her side, where she was developing a stitch, and took off again. For the lake, with all the snakes. The stressful, stressful snakes.

But in spite of what Hippie Pete said, Heather didn’t think that the snakes would cause nearly as much stress as would death by drowning.

Heather came out of the forest at the top of a low cliff, which she could scale via a rickety wooden staircase that led down to a dock, on the edge of a smallish lake that was rimmed by rock and evergreen. Heather ignored the stairs, figuring she’d chicken out if she had to slow down to climb down twenty-five steps to a dock. She set her jaw, took a deep breath and ran full tilt over the edge of the cliff.