Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

‘Letting the weather clear,’ said Gretskaya.

‘So where are we?’

Gretskaya shrugged.

‘The Gulf of Burmahnsk. At a guess, somewhere between twenty and fifty miles offshore. At a guess.’

Florian grunted again in disgust and disappeared back into the cabin. Lom wondered what he was doing in there. Most likely strapped in a cot trying to sleep. Travelling evidently wasn’t his thing. Gretskaya settled back into her seat and closed her eyes and Lom stared out of the window, watching the sea. The Kotik lifted and fell with the swell, dipping one float then the other in the water. In the cockpit it was bitterly cold. Lom’s heart sank. Fifty miles of deep dark fogbound icy ocean.

Elena Cornelius, crouching knee-deep in an anti-tank ditch, hacked at the solid black earth with a gardening trowel. The wooden handle had split and fallen away, but she gripped the tang in her blistered palm. She was lucky: many women of the conscript artel scrabbled at the ground with their fingers, numbed and bleeding, tearing their fingernails and the skin off their hands. Fresh snow had fallen in the night and the churned mud bottom of the tank trap was frozen iron-hard, sharp-ridged and treacherous, but her cotton gabardine kept out the worst of the wind and the digging was warm work.

Black earth rolled away from her in all directions, level to the distant horizon, skimmed with a thin scraping of snow. In front of her the rim of grey sky was broken only by sparse hedges and clumps of hazel, a line of telegraph poles, the chimneys of the brickworks where they slept. Between her and the sky rolled a wide slow river, crossed by a bridge: steel girders laid across pillars of brick, a surface of gravel and tar. The bridge was why they were there. The retreating defenders would cross it and then it would be blown. But for a while the bridge would have to be held.

At her back the sound of distant explosions rumbled. Every so often she straightened and turned to watch the flickering detonations and the thick columns of oily smoke rolling into the air. The bombers were over Mirgorod again.

The ground they were working was potato fields, harvested months before, but from time to time the diggers turned up an overlooked potato. Most were soft and black with rot, but some were good. Elena stuffed what she found into her pockets and underclothes for later, for Yeva and Galina and Aunt Lyudmila. She ate handfuls of snow against the thirst. It was OK. Survivable.

‘Here they come again!’ Valeriya shouted.

Elena looked up. Three aircraft rose out of the horizon in a line and swept towards her, engine-clatter echoing. They were fat-nosed, like flying brown thumbs suspended between short, stubby wings.

Bullets spattered the earth and snow in front of her, and three yards to her left the top of a woman’s head came off. Elena had known her slightly. She had been a teacher of music at the Marinsky Girls Academy.

While the planes circled low to make another pass, Elena and the others ran for the river. Breaking the thin ice at the water’s edge they waded waist-high into the current, feet slipping and sinking in the silt, and waited, bent forward under the low bridge, for the planes to drift away elsewhere. Oilskin-wrapped packages of explosives clustered under the bridge, strung together on twisted cables that wrapped and hung like bindweed.

Elena saw something in the water out near the middle of the river: a sudden smooth coil of movement against the direction of the current. It came again, and again, slicker and more sure than the wavelets chopping and jostling. She glimpsed a solid steely-grey oil-sleeked gun barrel of flesh. Blackish flukes broke the surface without a splash. A face rose out of the water and looked at her A human face. Almost human. A soft chalky white, the white of flesh too long in the water, with hollow eye sockets and deep dark eyes. The nose was set higher and sharper than a human nose, the mouth a straight lipless gash. The creature raised its torso higher and higher out of the water. An underbelly the same subaqueous white as the face. Heavy white breasts, nipples large and bruise-coloured, bluish black. Below the torso, a dark tube of fluke-tailed muscle was working away.

While she rested upright on her tail, the rusalka was using her arms to scoop water up onto her body. She rubbed herself down constantly, smoothing her sides and front and breasts as if she were washing them, except it was more like lubrication. She smoothed her hair also, though it wasn’t hair but flat wet ribbons of green-black stuff hanging from the top of her head across her back and shoulders. While she washed herself, the creature’s face watched Elena continuously. There was no expression on her face at all. None whatsoever. Elena gripped the arm of the woman next to her.

‘Valeriya!’ she whispered urgently. ‘Do you see it? Out there! A rusalka!’ But when she looked again there was nothing but a swirl on the surface of the water.

After the planes had gone the women waded out from under the bridge and slipped and scrabbled up the bank. A thin bitter wind was coming up from the south. They stood shivering and shedding greenish river water from their skirts. There was a flash on the horizon, the dull thump of an explosion, and one of the brickworks chimneys collapsed in a cloud of dust. Two more explosions followed and the whole building crumpled.

Seven heavy tanks were rolling towards them across the potato fields.

‘Our boys,’ said Valeriya. ‘Running home to mother.’

More muzzle flashes, rapid fire. The chatter of machine guns sounded dry and quiet, like twigs crunching. In the distance behind the tanks long lines of men were coming towards them, making slow progress across the levels of frozen mud.

‘No,’ said Elena. ‘Those aren’t us. The enemy is here. We have to run.’

When she got back to Aunt Lyudmila’s apartment it wasn’t there. The building wasn’t there. The whole of the street was gone. Sticking out from the rubble among the smouldering beams and spars was a leg, pointing its heel at the sky. Small enough to be a child’s. A girl’s. It was black like burned meat. A charred flap of shoe hung from the foot.

The rain in the Gulf of Burmahnsk was definitely beginning to ease. Slowly the area of visible sea around the aircraft widened until it was possible to see a mile or more in every direction. Lyuba Gretskaya stirred and opened her eyes. Lom wasn’t sure she had ever really been asleep. She slid back the canopy, letting in a blast of freezing spray and the smell of the ocean, stood up precariously in her seat and reached up to jolt the engine into life.

She took off and climbed steeply to a thousand feet, swung round and headed east. After about fifteen minutes they crossed the coastline: a wide shallow lagoon behind a long sandspit. Drab dunes and brown scrub grass dusted with snow. The Kotik swung north to follow the shore. Bays and lagoons. Small scattered settlements tucked a mile or so back from the sea. The fuel gauge lapsing closer and closer to empty.

They came up on Slensk from the south where it hid from the weather in the lee of a low headland. As Gretskaya swung a loop to port, Lom found himself looking down on a tumble of bleached grey rooftops divided by a broad river. Wharfs and piers edged the river, fronting an extensive patchwork of timber yards. Beyond the docks the river frayed, splitting into a threadwork of rivers and streams across a widening triangle of tawny brown mud streaked with veins of livid orange. The Northern Kholomora reaching the sea.

The Kotik swung out over the delta, descending gently, and turned back to touch down neatly in the middle of the river. Gretskaya taxied across to the nearest jetty and found a berth between a rusting hulk and two big pitch-caulked barges roped together side by side. She eased the plane nose first against a solid wall of pine trunks blackened and streaked with lichenous green, and cut the engine.