Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘This is not right,’ he said. ‘I just need to sit down. Sort myself out. Could you? Find me somewhere? You can leave me there.’

‘No,’ said Maroussia.

‘Yes,’ said Florian. ‘Really.’ He leaned against the wall, took off his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve and put them back on. His face was papery white, his forehead beaded with sweat. ‘I’ll be fine. In a minute.’

‘You’ve been shot ,’ said Maroussia.

‘True,’ said Florian. And for a second his face seemed to readjust itself. Looking at Maroussia, he reflected her own face back at her, mirroring her expression. Concern. Indecision. Shock. The dark bright eyes widening. He gave her a pained, sympathetic grin. ‘I am in some pain. And so for now I cannot walk. I must sit down. Or lie down. Even better. You can leave me. You need to go.’

‘He’s right,’ said Lom.

‘Vissarion—’ Maroussia began.

‘It’s true. We can’t take him with us. He can’t walk in that condition.’

‘But… we can’t just leave him here.’

‘No. So we need transport. And we need somewhere he can stay while we find it.’ Lom turned to go. ‘Wait here.’

Near the exit from the gully was a wide high wooden gate, peeling black paint, with a small wicket door set into it. Lom tested the wicket. It was unlocked, and opened into a wide linoleum-floored passageway. Bare electric bulbs hanging from the ceiling cast a bleak light on a clutter of stacked boxes and pallets. Shuttered entrances, grilles, closed doors. A porter’s trolley. A service entrance for the Apraksin market. There was no one about. Lom was thinking two minutes ahead. Maximum. Get through that. Then worry about the next. The only thing now was to get off the street.

Twenty feet into the passageway was a half-glazed door. Small panes of frosted glass. No light showing. Lom tried the handle but it was locked. He smashed a pane with his elbow, reached in past the sharp broken jags and unlatched it. Inside was a room for the porters, something like that: several tables and chairs littered with unwashed mugs and plates. In the corner was a small sink and an urn for hot water. He hustled back out into the alley.

‘I’ve found somewhere,’ he said.

Florian was drowsy, unsteady on his feet. Lom didn’t like it. A bullet in the gut was a killing wound, not immediately, but soon: bleeding out or infection, death either way.

They got him into the porters’ room somehow. Florian sat in a chair at one of the tables, his face pale, his eyes wide and dark behind their lenses. Sweat slicked his forehead. He took off his coat and unbuttoned his shirt to the waist. Blood smeared his ribs, matted the thick hair on his chest, gathered in the thin folds of his belly. The entrance wound was a dark ominous leaking hole. His face tight with pain and concentration, Florian pushed his finger inside it and poked around, hooked something out and placed it on the table. A distorted fragment of brass sticky with blood. A bullet.

‘You got it out ?’ said Maroussia.

‘Bad idea to leave it in,’ said Florian. ‘It hurt. A lot.’

He hauled himself to his feet, staggered and leaned against the table.

‘If you could just… pass me my coat.’

Maroussia hesitated.

‘You can’t…’ she said. ‘You don’t look—’

‘I am quite well.’ He shrugged the coat on painfully. ‘Thank you. I will go now.’

He took a step forward and slumped to the floor, sending the chair crashing over.

Between them Lom and Maroussia hauled Florian, a heavy dead-weight, awkwardly up into a chair and let him slump forward across the tabletop, head cradled on folded arms. To a cursory glance he would look like someone sleeping.

Working quickly, Lom went through his pockets. There was a handful of coins, a leather wallet with a few rouble notes, a fountain pen and a soft leather notebook, the kind with an elastic strap to hold it shut and a thin black ribbon to mark the page. The pen was expensive, a squat and solid turquoise Wassertrau. Nothing else. No identity papers.

‘Vissarion!’ hissed Maroussia. ‘Hurry!’

‘One second.’

The astrakhan hat had a purple silk lining and a maker’s crest, a double-headed eagle. A tag sown into the crown said, ‘ Joakim Sylwest. Superior Outfitters. 144 Ulitsa Zaramalya. Koromants. ’ Lom riffled the pages of the notebook, but there were only illegible scribbles and scrawls.

‘We need transport,’ said Lom when he had finished. ‘There must be trucks or wagons somewhere near a place like this.’

‘I know someone who works here,’ said Maroussia.

Lom looked at her doubtfully. He didn’t want to involve anyone else, just find what he needed and steal it. But that would take time, and how much did they have before the place was crawling with militia? Not enough.

‘Who?’ he said.

‘A friend. She works here on the fourth floor,’ said Maroussia. ‘I trust her.’

Lom hesitated.

Get though the next two minutes.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s find her.’

Lavrentina Chazia worked the pulleys and lifting chains that swung the heavy angel skin away from the wall and into position. Stood on a stool to reach the headpiece, unhook it and bring it down. When she put her head inside it the weight of its edge cut into her shoulders. Enclosing, suffocating darkness. The iron-and-ozone tang of angel flesh in her mouth.

She waited.

Nothing.

Chazia opened her mind, greedy and desperate, hunting for the link, the connection that didn’t come.

Nothing.

She had put her head inside a casket of stone meat. That was all.

But she could not fail. She needed not to fail.

Her legs were weak and trembling. She knelt on the ground and bent forward, resting her head against the stone to relieve the weight, stretching her arms out to the side. Closed her eyes. Focused all her attention on the dark purple surging inside her.

And waited.

And felt the barest touch of something at the back of her head, moving under her scalp. Like cool, tapered fingers brushing the surface of her mind. Tentatively feeling their way. Pausing. Teasing. Waiting.

Chazia screamed.

Hot blades stabbed deep into the core of her brain. The burning needle-bite of jaws snapped shut. Her body spasmed. Rigid. Jerking. She was on her back, staring unseeing up towards the roof, and the rock, and the earth, and the piled up floors and roofs of the Lodka, and the vaporous open sky. Her senses caught fire and burst into strange, alien life. The world poured into her.

She knew every contour and texture of the walls and the ground beneath her. Every object in the workshop. She sensed the tunnel leading away, its slight downward gradient. She was aware of Mirgorod around and above her, the weight and structure of its buildings. She felt the flow of the river as a surge of brown light. A heavy solid sound. She perceived the presence of people. Fuzzy patches of sentience. She could distinguish them from dogs or cats or birds. It was like a taste. They offered themselves up to her, all those teeming, unprotected, vulnerable points of life: they were naked before her alien angel gaze. She could have reached out and plucked one of them for herself, like a fruit from a bush. The sharp, dark, edgy points of meat scuttering away down the tunnel, those were rats. There were other things underground as well: ways and chambers unconnected to the tunnel, and lives inhabiting them. Older, stranger lives she could not identify, which felt her touch and slithered and shied away. And below her, deep and going down for ever, was the warmth and torsion and slow pressure of planetary rock. Sedimentary silt of seashell and bone. Extrusions of heart-rock: seams of granite and lava, dolerites, rhyolites, gabbros and tuffs, all buckled, faulted, shattered and upheaved under the weight of their own millennial tidal shifting.