David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“I’m sitting in the donut shop across from the hotel. And I’m talking a donut shop in New York City. Manhattan. Nothing smells good in that donut shop. Closest thing is the stale dough they use to make their crullers. Otherwise it’s piss and cigarettes and old coffee. But this smell—” Miles looked up at the ceiling, snapped his fingers “—what a smell — a—”

“—a-a m-mélange?”

“Yeah, Richard. A mélange . Good. You cheering up, buddy?”

In fact, Richard seemed to be doing just that. His old lips were still quivering, but they’d pulled back in a kind of a smile. He started to look up. “Pipe smoke,” he said. “Baking bread. Rosewater.”

“See? Richard smelled it too. Only not the same smells — just good smells. The stuff you smelled when you were a kid that let you know you were safe. I can’t speak for Richard here, but when I caught my whiff I was pretty much bottomed out. I’d just remembered — well, never mind what I just remembered. I was bottomed out. But I caught that whiff, I knew what I had to do.”

Richard nodded vigorously.

“I went back into the hotel lobby — isn’t that right, buddy? Walked up to Richard here — and said to him: Babushka .”

“Babushka.” Richard repeated it like a line of liturgy at a prayer meeting.

“Yeah.” Miles spared Richard a sidewise grin. “He said it back to me because he’d smelled the same smells. Or the same kind of smells. And he knew like me that it was time to go. So we went!”

Richard gulped down the rest of his tea, and nodded. “G-g-g-got bus tickets up to H-H-Halifax,” he said. “The b-bus was pretty crowded.”

Miles nodded. “A lot of people. But we got there early, hey bud? Found ourselves some seats near the back.”

“Near the b-b-back.”

“See, before — before I came here, I used to work in security. At the Emissary. So if I’m on a bus, or a plane, or whatever, I like to see what everybody’s doing. I like to have my back to a wall.”

“T-t-t-t-tell about the others.”

“I’m getting there. So we get on the bus. Sit down. We didn’t pack too much to bring with us.”

“W-w-w-e knew we-we would be provided for.”

“Right. Anyway — the bus is pretty empty at first. But after we stop in a few towns up the east coast, the bus starts to fill up. And it’s like a family reunion.

“But you probably know all this. You probably got on a bus too — saw all these people you recognized, or thought you recognized.”

It wasn’t a bus. It was a boat. And yeah — that’s what I thought.

Heather’s hand twitched, as dreaming fingers reached around her momentarily forgotten mantra, tugged on the tendons in her wrist. Good girl , said the voice of Holden Gibson in her head. That’s how it goes… Now give it up, and rela —

“ Mi! ”

Heads turned and the tearoom went quiet for a moment. Heather blinked, flexed her fingers, and smiled weakly at the fishermen who stared at her from their table by the window. Mi mi mi mi mi , she thought.

Miles gave her a funny look. “You’re like Richard here, aren’t you? All fucked up inside because of what those bastards did to you?”

Heather found herself nodding quickly — this time of her own accord, but not, still, because she completely agreed with Miles. She didn’t want to go too deep on the question. Formulating a more complete answer would take thought. And thought would let Gibson back inside her, and then before you knew it, she’d be gone and Gibson…

Mi mi mi mi . The mantra — mi — was her only — mi — shield.

“It’s amazing all the people they got over the years, isn’t it?” said Miles. “Remember when we stopped in Boston? That’s where Richard used to teach,” he said in an aside to Heather, then turned back to Richard. “There were people who got on that bus that you hadn’t seen in what — twenty years?”

“M-Mike B-Berry,” said Richard.

“Right. He was one of your grad students.”

Richard shook his head sadly and looked down again. “N-n-no,” he said. “H-he o-only p-p-pretended to be.”

Miles’ face fell a bit. “True,” he said. “We were all just pretending — weren’t we?”

Heather started to get up. The last — mi — thing — mi mi — she needed was another — mi mi mi mi — morose conversation with another of the growing crowd of fucked-up freaks that were dropping into this town like mayflies.

Miles put his hand on her arm. His eyes held a sad desperation.

“Wait!” he said. “Don’t leave us alone!”

Ah, fuck it , she thought. How long can a girl keep this up?

“Don’t worry,” she said, feeling herself slipping back into her own memories, the world fading in front of her, “you’re never alone for long, here in the fuckin’ village.”

“Fuck,” said Heather, sitting on the long porch outside the old Arts and Crafts building of the Transcendental Meditation camp. “Fuck!”

Hippie Pete crouched down beside her. “Swearing,” he said, “can cause stress, and stress can take us further from the centre. Seek the centre, Heather.”

Heather turned around and glared at him. “I’m pretty much in the fucking centre right now, aren’t I Pete?”

The big man shrugged. “The centre is not an ‘in,’” he said.

“Oh fuck — off,” she said, and stood up. “I’m going for a walk.”

Hippie Pete let her go. The first few times Heather had found herself back in this recollection since coming to the village, he’d been just about impossible to shake. Now, she could get rid of him any time she wanted. It seemed like mental holograms made of a boatload of false memories were no different than other men: given enough time and patience, you could train them one the same as the other.

Train them just like Holden had trained her and everyone else on the yacht. Maybe, the way someone had trained everyone else in this evil little village. Heather stomped down the crude stairway and along a green roadway between rows of man-planted cedars high enough to scratch cloud.

Now who the fuck , wondered Heather, had trained Miles and Richard?

She put that question at the end of the growing list she’d been making since she’d first seen the weird fairy tale fleet of boats, chugging and sailing and humming and rowing down on them through the sunrise, over the bow of the yacht.

Heather’s head was swimming — that bastard Alexei had just brained her after all — and she thought she might have been hallucinating.

It wasn’t just the weird colours they painted their boats, or the Halloween costumes they wore. Heather picked it up immediately, as the canoes bumped up against the side of the yacht and those strange brothers climbed on board to guide them into the harbour: the people here were strange — and not Star Trek fan strange, but really different-planet strange. They never quite looked at her when they were looking at her. They seemed to look through her and past her, and when they talked they talked to that space, and not Heather.

It freaked her out pretty significantly at first. When she came to on the bridge of Gibson’s yacht, and looked out the windscreens, the first things she’d seen had been those strange banners, all red and green and orange… .

It was as though they were doing the Santa Claus Parade in boats.

Of course, the children caught her before she could make a fool out of herself. “Don’t worry lady,” said one. “They’re just celebrating — because we are home and united at last.”

When she went out onto the aft deck, little Vladimir beamed at her from that bastard Alexei’s arms. “We are delivered from our shackles,” he said. “Ha! This is a great day, lady.”