David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

Lois shrugged and pointed. “Look — down there. I think we have found our little friend Jim.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu squinted.

Sure enough, where the stairs entered the water someone had constructed a broad wooden platform. It was tied to the side of the cistern with chains that certainly didn’t look as old as the lumber.

And sitting in the middle of it, tied with mere ropes to a metal chair, was a small, trembling figure with a bag over his head. If Becky had been here, she would have gasped in recognition.

It was Jim!

A tall, blond man that Mrs. Kontos-Wu thought she recognized, stood there with a sickle-shaped knife held at poor Jim’s throat.

“That,” said Lois, “in case you didn’t recognize him from Chapter Two, is kindly Monsieur DuBois.”

“Antoine’s papa?” Mrs. Kontos-Wu admitted she hadn’t seen that coming.

“It’s true,” said Lois. “Turns out that the Famille DuBois have been members of the Society of the Scarlet Arrow since the Crusade against the Cathars. It’s all tied up with the Holy Grail and the Templars and the highest levels of the Vatican, but don’t ask me how. The important thing is, Monsieur DuBois is going to slash Jim’s throat and drain his blood into a ceremonial chalice unless you do something immediately. Ordinarily, this would be where Becky would step in but—”

“—you killed her.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu took a step back into the corridor.

“That’s right,” said Lois. “Now follow the plot.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu pressed herself against the stone. She was inclined now to creep down the stairs — snap the neck of the villain carrying the axe and behead the villain with the torch — make her way onto the platform, cutting her way through the five others who stood between Monsieur DuBois and her — then finally deliver the coup de grâce to the mild-mannered Parisian civil servant that had, in Chapter Two, met Becky, Bunny and Jim at the Aéroport Paris-Charles de Gaulle and shown them the Tour Eiffel on their way back to the townhouse.

But if Mrs. Kontos-Wu had learned anything, it was that following her inclinations in these kinds of places wasn’t what was best.

So instead, Mrs. Kontos-Wu spun around, and took hold of Lois by the hair.

Her former best friend shrieked in spite of herself.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu yanked on Lois’ hair and pulled her face around to meet her eye.

“Not finishing the book,” she said, and — as the army of fez-sporting cultists looked up — Mrs. Kontos-Wu spun around and flung Lois off the precipice, and into the Cistern of Blood.

Lois looked up at her — with tears of horror and rage in her eyes — and a moment before the impact of death came upon her —

She vanished.

“Manka. Vasilissa. Baba Yaga.”

And just like that — under nobody’s direction but her own — Jean Kontos-Wu closed the book.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu blinked. She was standing in another large room — not as tall as the Cistern of Blood, with no afternoon light coming down from the ceiling. There was a pool — this one like a swimming pool, a sad old movie star’s swimming pool, filled with water green with algae. The light came from long banks of fluorescents, hanging from a ceiling that was barely twelve feet from the surface of the water.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked down at her hands. She was carrying an axe. She lifted it, and examined the blade. Good. No blood. Wherever she was now, with any luck she’d managed to get there without fulfilling Lois’ instructions — of destroying Petroska Station, and killing the children.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu lowered herself to her haunches, and held the axe close to her chest. She would have to be very careful. As irritating as they had been, Ilyich and Konstantine and Tanya had obviously been on to something. She was addicted to this thing, this metaphor. That was fine as long as Kolyokov was around to mind her. But now that he was gone? The addiction left her open — open to suggestion. And that made her a danger to everyone around her.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu sat like that, stewing, until a sense at the back of her head tightened, a drawn thread.

There had been a noise. A wet slosh; a slap; a bleating sound, like a goat.

Echoing across the chamber. She squinted toward its source — and saw a lone figure, horribly pale, with long hair and rags for clothing, standing on the far side of the pool — shuffling tentatively, grasping its hands and tugging at stray locks of hair like a nervous child.

“Help,” it croaked.

“Why should I?” demanded Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

“We are being invaded,” it said.

“We held off Comrade General Rodionov,” said Fyodor Kolyokov, “for years with all sorts of tricks.”

“That so?” said Heather. She was sitting in a small kitchen that reminded her of her parents’ kitchen back when she had parents and wasn’t a runaway slave in Holden Gibson’s magazine subscription crew. It was small and simple. Along one wall, there was a stove and a refrigerator and a little bit of counter space. The cabinets above and below were dark wood laminate; to the right of the sink, there was a lousy little under-the-counter dishwasher. Comrade Zombie Kolyokov positively glowed under the light, propped up as he was at the little kitchen table in a tattered grey bathrobe with a tiny cup of tea.

“That is so,” said Kolyokov. “Rodionov had us in his sights for seven years before he was able to take any action. At first, his problem was that he did not truly apprehend the nature of City 512. He thought we were simply managing sleepers. He made the fatal error that so many of his Comrades had also made — in assuming that the research we conducted there was but a fraud.”

“The fool,” said Heather.

“He was a fool. But not so complete a fool as some of my comrades. They deluded themselves — believing that in time, Rodionov would be replaced by a more sympathetic administration. When Gorbachev moved into the Kremlin, they were certain Rodionov would be held in better check.”

“You knew better of course.”

“I took steps,” he said.

“Like Babushka did?”

Kolyokov winced, and sipped at his tea. “No,” he said. “Babushka, as you call her, was smarter than us all.”

They fell quiet for the moment. Heather smoothed over her skirt and leaned on the Formica of the kitchen table. They’d been here for hours now; since seeing that cloud over New Pokrovskoye. Heather had felt her vision fade and before she could think to do the mantra trick again, here she was in her childhood home. Sitting next to Fyodor Kolyokov while the T.V. played a hockey game in the living room.

At first she was angry:

“You fucking lying piece of shit zombie!” she’d yelled, lunging at Kolyokov with a steak knife she’d pulled from a wooden block beside the coffee maker. The old man had moved quickly and the knife embedded itself in the kitchen chair behind him. By the time she could yank it out, he was able to explain:

“You are not trapped. You are hiding here. If you had stayed near the top of your mind — the thing that Lena — that Babushka had made of herself — would have found us instantly. She is living within minds — many minds. And she has the key to yours.”

Heather was still pissed. She stalked off to the living room and kicked in the tube of the television. Kolyokov followed patiently.

“We have to make it through the night,” he said. “That is all. By morning — we should be able to venture out again. Learn some things and maybe start to undo this.”