David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“Put him down,” she’d hissed at Alexei. “You fucking monster.”

Alexei didn’t appear to hear her, but Vladimir giggled. “Alexei,” he said, “is not here right now. He will join us later.”

Heather nodded. It made the most sense of anything she’d seen or heard in the past few minutes. Maybe Alexei had gone to someplace like her Transcendental Meditation camp, and this guy who’d whacked her on the head was somebody completely different. Somebody else calling the shots.

“Good,” said Vladimir. “You’re not as stupid as you pretend to be.”

Heather told him to fuck off and had gone back inside — where the rest of the crew were shaking their heads groggily amid fallen down chairs, and babbling to one another. James, for instance, was going on about kindergarten and some kind of tricycle. Sheri couldn’t stop talking about a cabin her family had in Wisconsin — which didn’t make any sense, because Heather remembered they’d picked up Sheri in Florida and her parents were dirt poor drunks who lived in a trailer park. Even stranger, Leonard was going on about elves and hobbits like he’d grown up in the freaking Shire.

Heather finally had to clap her hands and shout: “Hey! Reality check!”

Everyone stopped and stared at her.

“Where’s Holden?” she said.

The crew parted, and looked down as if for the first time, to see Holden Gibson lying splayed on the floor, eyes open and staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Heather had to suppress a monstrously inappropriate laugh.

He appeared to be dead.

“Holy fuck,” she whispered, wrestling back a smile.

“Shit,” said James. “How’d I miss that ?”

“Someone fucking killed him,” said Sheri. She looked at Heather accusingly. Heather put her hands out in front of her, shook her head and widened her eyes in innocent denial.

“He’s not dead,” said Leonard, kneeling down and touching his throat. “Pulse.”

“No,” said a commanding voice from behind them. “He is not dead at all. Step away from him, sleepers.”

Heather turned. Standing in the doorway was a tall man, fit, with a greying beard and long hair tied behind in a ponytail. He wore a long oilskin raincoat, and he was old enough to be Heather’s grandfather. But that didn’t seem to matter: he made her weak in the knees like he was a high school jock. And when he spoke, she obeyed the same as everyone else and stepped back.

“Well if it isn’t old John Kaye,” he said, looking down at her sleeping boss. “This might be the first time we meet in person, and still you can’t see me. Well. What would she be bringing you here for?”

Gibson snorted in his sleep.

“Can’t talk now, hmm? That’s fine. But soon enough we’ll meet again. And then we can speak a great deal.”

John Kaye? Who the fuck is John Kaye ? Heather wondered.

She would have asked the question — maybe even pointed out helpfully that this wasn’t John Kaye but Holden Gibson and he was such an evil bastard that they’d do best to toss him into the ocean and have done with him before he came to. But she couldn’t seem to make her mouth work.

“Until then,” said the tall man, “we’re going to have to find a better place for you to rest.” He clapped his hands. “Sleepers! Take care of your dream-walker!”

Dream-walker?

And along with the rest of them, Heather had lurched to work. They hefted Holden onto one of the tables, and lifted it like a litter between six of them, to carry him out onto the deck. The children were gone when they got there. Heather thought she could see them out of the corner of her eye, crowded onto the deck of a fishing boat that was motoring away.

Alexei hadn’t gone, though. He stood beside the old man — staring ahead with those creepy unseeing eyes of his. Heather wondered if he was in the same kind of thrall as the rest of them. And if he was, why wasn’t he fucking well helping? The table weighed a ton.

But there were no answers that day — not from Alexei, who boarded the sailboat with Holden and the children and the old man — and not from any of the other crew, who all worked together, to steer the yacht alongside the flotilla of boats, first toward the coast and then through the rocky teeth of an inlet, and finally into a fantastical village’s harbour.

Heather hadn’t seen Alexei since. Indeed, it was only when she remembered to use the mantra that she was able to see much of anything. Once they came close to the docks, Heather had felt the world growing grey, her breathing slowing down — and there she was, back in the Transcendental Meditation camp, being stalked by that terrible giant Hippie Pete and completely oblivious to what was going on with her body.

And try as she might, she couldn’t find another way out of the camp than drowning herself once more in the lake. Since she’d come to this creepy place, Heather figured she’d killed herself some nine times. Every time she forgot to say her mantra, it wouldn’t take more than a few seconds — somebody would be there to come in and take over her mind.

Lately, that somebody appeared to be Holden Gibson. Or John Kaye, or whoever the fuck he really was.

That was something that Heather would have dearly loved to have been able to figure out: just who was Holden Gibson; and how, even though he hadn’t woken up once from his little coma, so powerful and all of a sudden?

As she emerged at the top of that old familiar cliff overlooking the same old fucking lake, and readied herself to take another Goddamn plunge to yet another fucking watery death, Heather hoped she’d be able to find at least some small clue about what it all meant this time through.

She had almost made it to the end of the cliff, when she pulled herself up short. Looked at the thing that was floating in the water, like a fat white jellyfish. A jellyfish with rounded shoulders and grey hair that washed out in tendrils around its wrinkled head. A jellyfish that floated face-down in the lake.

“Now who the fuck,” she said out loud, “is that?”

Suicide could wait, Heather thought as she plunged headfirst into the water. This time, rather than diving down and sucking all the lake her lungs could hold, Heather did a fast crawl across the water towards the body. From a distance, she couldn’t tell who it was — but she had a faint and irrational hope that it might be Holden Gibson, finally sucked into his own little Transcendental Meditation hell.

If that was the case, there was no way she was going to let him drown and escape this place. What’s good for the goose is good for the fuckin’ gander , she thought as she came up to the floater and hooked an arm to him. She paddled back to shore, and gasping for breath herself now, dragged the body onto the beach.

She crawled further up, shook out her hair and flipped over onto her haunches. She swore. It wasn’t Holden Gibson at all. It was some old guy — older than Holden by about a decade, she figured. What hair he had left was long and almost as grey as his flesh. He was completely naked, and he looked like he’d been dead about a day.

“Fine.” Obviously, someone had figured out Heather’s escape route and was planting distractions to keep her inside. “ Mi mi mi,” she said, tromping back up the steps to her original launch point and preparing herself for a proper death once more.

She’d almost made it to the top when a voice stopped her.

“ Hey! Leetle gorl! ”

A part of her told her not to look, to just go through with the death scene and get back to the village where she could actually do something. But Heather stopped all the same, and looked back down the stairs to the beach.

The corpse was sitting up — like a big German tourist, vainly trying to sun away the pallor at a Club Med beach.