Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

Chazia poured another cup.

‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty more. And food, when you’re ready.’ She took a handkerchief from her pocket and held it out to her. ‘Here. Clean yourself.’

The girl shook her head.

‘I am Commander Chazia, but you should call me Lavrentina. We are going to be friends.’

‘I know who you are. And we are not friends.’

‘No,’ said Chazia. ‘Perhaps not exactly friends. Associates, then. Colleagues. We have something in common.’

‘No. We don’t.’

‘Of course we do. Together we are going to open the Pollandore.’

Maroussia Shaumian sank back against the wall and closed her eyes.

The stars spilled across the sky like salt on the blade of an axe. The broken moons sank away, subsiding into the horizon, leaving the cloud floor dark. Erasing it. The Kotik hung suspended over nothing at all. Only the vibration of the hull suggested, despite appearances, forward motion. Silent and freezing in their dimmed red cockpit, Lom and Gretskaya might as well have been crossing interplanetary space.

And then the world began to separate. Muted discriminations of darkness and lesser darkness. A new sedimentary horizon silting out. A dark line dividing the clouds below from the sky above. The line seemed to be getting further away, as if the aircraft was going backwards. Or shrinking. The last stars swam and trembled, dissolving.

The sky grew grey like the clouds but cleaner, deeper and more still. The banks of vapour beneath the plane thickened and the sky thinned and dilated into purple then green then white then pale immensities of blue. A fingernail of misty brilliance just starboard of the Kotik’s nose became an arc of fire, burning steadily at the clouds’ rim, pulsing incandescent blazing bars of pink and gold. And then the world was blue and clean and empty and went on for ever, oceans of air above dazzling oceans of cloud. Air that was filled to the brim with an astonishing purity of bright and perfect light. Simplified, wordless, unmappable. Lom felt the coldness of it burn his face. He looked across at Gretskaya.

‘How high are we?’

She tapped the altimeter with a stubby gloved finger. The needle rested steadily at 10,000 feet. Lom did the maths.

‘That’s almost two miles ,’ he said.

Gretskaya grinned.

‘You want to go higher?’ she said. ‘We’ll go higher.’

She pulled back on the stick. Lom felt the pressure again in the small of his back. Up and up the tiny aircraft climbed–12,000–14,000–16,000–18,000–into a rarefied indigo world. Lom was aware of the air growing thinner. Sparser. It was more difficult to fill his lungs. His pulse rate quickened. He felt it fluttering in the centre of his forehead.

The air grew thinner but the light did not. Every detail of the cockpit and the wings at his shoulder burned itself on Lom’s retinas with crystal clarity. Every fold and scuff on the sleeve of his leather jacket was magnified, brilliant and intense. The jacket was translucent. Inside the sleeves, every fine hair on his arms glistened. His skin itself was translucent. The light shone through him like the sun seen through leaves. The organs of his body were sunlit pink and clear. His veins, his bones, his lungs sang with light. He wasn’t breathing air, he was breathing illumination.

More slowly now, but still the machine bored upwards. At last the altimeter registered 20,000 feet, and the nose of the machine sank a little until it was on an even keel. Gretskaya gave him the thumbs up and settled back in her seat. Urging on three tons of vibrating metal with her shoulders. Her eyes, creased almost shut against the over-brimming of the light, had seemed grey in the lamplight of her cabin but now they were the same clear clean watery blue as the sky.

Lom searched on the instrument panel for the compass and found it. The needle was pointing steadily north-east. Four miles below, at the bottom of a crevasse in the clouds, he glimpsed the glitter of creased dark water. A lake, or perhaps by now the sea of the Gulf of Burmahnsk.

Maroussia struggled into consciousness. There was a foul taste in her mouth. She felt dizzy and sick. Chazia was looking down at her, smiling, her hair backlit with the glare of the single caged bulb in the wooden ceiling. Her skin was blotched with patches of smooth darkness.

‘Good,’ said Chazia. ‘You’re awake.’

Chazia was holding the solm. She held it up for Maroussia to see. The ball of twigs and wax and stuff looked tawdry and dead in her skewbald palm.

‘I know the paluba was looking for you,’ said Chazia, ‘and it found you. It brought you the key to the Pollandore. I think this is it. This is the key. It is, isn’t it?’

Maroussia shook her head. The movement made her dizzy. Acidic bile rose up in the back of her throat. She turned her head aside to vomit.

‘I’m not going to help you,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘Not ever. Not with anything.’

‘You need to understand your position, Maroussia darling,’ said Chazia. ‘You really do. You are in my world now. There is no hope and no protection for you here; there is only me. I can turn you inside out. It’s not a metaphor, sweetness. I can dig around in you. I can pull the guts from your belly and hold them up for you to see. I can do anything I want. And afterwards I can give you to Bez Nichevoi.’ Chazia knelt in front of her and took her hand. Her gaze was warm and bright, compassionate and mad. ‘I can do this to you, Maroussia,’ she said. ‘You do believe me, darling, don’t you?’

Maroussia stared at Chazia dumbly. Her head hurt. She could find nothing to say. Whatever the foul creature that abducted her had done to her, it was still in her veins. All the energy had been flushed out of her. She felt as if she was watching herself from a distance, listening to voices at the far end of an echoing corridor. The floor beneath her was tipping sickeningly sideways.

‘You’ve imagined people doing cruel things to you, darling, haven’t you?’ said Chazia. ‘Everyone has. In dark moments. But the reality is much more terrible, and lasts much longer. It continues. Not just for hours or days but for weeks. Months. It gets messy. It’s not good to see parts of yourself being removed. It’s not good to have someone else rummaging about inside your body. Will I be brave? we ask ourselves, but of course nobody is brave, not in the end. Courage only takes you so far.’

Chazia shifted her position. Sat down beside her on the wooden floor, making herself comfortable. Shoulder to shoulder, intimate and companionable.

‘But I don’t want that to happen to you,’ she said.

‘You tried to kill me,’ said Maroussia, ‘You killed my mother.’

‘Oh. That.’ Chazia waved the memory away with a dismissive gesture. ‘That was just a favour for a friend. Before I knew you. I didn’t know then how important you were. And you escaped anyway, didn’t you. That was resourceful of you, though I think you had help. From Investigator Lom, I think. I’ve been underestimating him too. I saw the mess he made in the gendarme station at Levrovskaya Square. Who would have thought that of him?’

‘It wasn’t—’ Maroussia began, but Chazia cut her off.

‘What became of Major Safran by the way?’ she said. ‘I’ve been wondering. Just curious. Did Lom—’

‘I cut his head off. With a spade.’

Chazia giggled like a girl. Her eyes shone.

‘Did you?’ she said. ‘Well done you.’

Maroussia became aware of a prickling edginess in the air around her. A smell of ozone, like the sea. She realised that Chazia was still talking.