Marc Zicree - Ghostlands

Colleen found herself on the other side, not Bangkok or New York but rather an undifferentiated area, murky and dim. The floor under her feet was substantial, however, and as she moved forward she noted that the matter in the air-not fog, precisely, denser and more still-avoided touching her, shrank away as she pressed through. Keeping an eye on the path behind her, just in case Agnes Wu or whatever it was took a notion to come after her (which thankfully, she did not), Colleen slowly advanced.

She discovered that by waving her arms in a broad arc, she could clear a bit of space around her, actually get a look at where she was. She saw now that she was in a vast corridor hewn from solid stone, blasted out of the rock itself. Not like a cavern, nor a mine, either, it was puzzling. She noted there were porcelain panels set in the walls, with writing on them. But in the dim illumination from the fog, she couldn’t make out the words.

She reached out and touched the rock wall, found to her relief it stayed solid and silent. It was real, or as real as anything could presume to be nowadays, which was about as far as you could throw it.

But no, she corrected herself, what she felt for Viktor was more real than that. He had made her wear this freaking armor against all her protestations, her contrariness. He had saved her.

She longed to see his gray, forgiving eyes, his knowing, sad smile, feel the tentative sureness of that touch that unmanned her, that made her small again and opened her heart like a surgeon’s scalpel that would only heal and not harm.

And unlike the fraudulent tissue structure overlaying some twisted armature that would have been the likeness of her father had she reached the end of Soi Cowboy, she knew that when she found Viktor (and she would find him, and the others, too, get them the hell out of here, if it could be humanly done), he would be alive and present and no mocking ghost.

Her arms waving like some crazed Leopold Stokowski on speed, Colleen Brooks made her way down the vast corridor of stone, the murky thick air around her-that had once been fragile young women and pale, delicate boys-clearing a path before her.

“Wake up, Viktor,” the sweet, soft voice said, and he felt a caress on his cheek. “You’ve been dreaming.”

It was only as he opened his eyes that Doc Lysenko realized she had been speaking Russian.

She filled his field of vision, she was that close, peering down at him lovingly, with him all the world to her.

That tangle of auburn hair was unmistakable, the long, long lashes, those incredible, unforgettable eyes, darkest green with flecks of gold in them, like sunlight casting through dense leaf cover onto a forest floor.

It was Yelena.

“This is not real,” Doc said in alarm, sitting up, throwing back the covers. He, too, was speaking Russian.

“Sh, sh, my love,” Yelena said, kissing his cheeks and brow, touching him with light fingers like a whisper. Oh God, it was familiar, so precisely right. He realized with a shock how much he had forgotten, and now remembered.

“Nurya…?” he whispered in a croak, the pain like an icicle from a Moscow winter thrust into his heart.

“In the other room, of course, asleep. It’s early.” She drew him out of the bed, enfolded him in the thick sable robe she had bought him in Odessa on their third anniversary. He saw that she was wearing the pale shift he so loved. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail-which only made her features all the more elegant and refined-and secured it with a band.

“Come,” she said, taking his hand. “Let’s step outside, to the beach.”

“No…” he protested weakly, and felt his own consciousness dimly, or rather as if everything that had come before was growing dim, retreating from him despite all his efforts to hold on to it.

He pulled away from her languorous grasp, stepped out of the bedroom into the common room, with its fireplace of the twelve massive stones quarried from near the Sea of Azov. He knew this place well, felt overwhelmed by the sensation of returning home, of nostalgia like a consuming wave.

This is what it is like to die, he thought, to be lost in an embrace.

Ignoring her whispered entreaties, he strode to the opposite bedroom and eased open the door. In the darkness within, a small figure lay bunched under the covers. Hesitantly, his breath held like a treasure within him, he approached the bedside and peered at the tiny form. Her face was pressed into the down pillows, and she wore a frown line between her brows as though concentrating on life’s deepest dilemma. But she still looked every bit an angel.

Yelena was behind him now, her gentling hands on his shoulders. “She’s fine, she’s perfectly well,” she assured him, her breath soft as memory in his ear. “Don’t you dare wake her.”

He turned to his wife, and she shimmered through the wetness of his eyes. “Goodness, Viktor, you act as if we’d been gone an eternity. Come, let’s see the dawn.”

He let her lead him then, to dress him in his summer clothes of linen, his soft hide sandals. The two of them emerged out onto the fine white sand, he and the woman who was his bride. The sun was warm even though it was the break of day, the wind mild and salt fragrant. They were alone on the beach, all the other gingerbread cottages closed up tight, the world at peace. He looked out at the sea that stretched forever, the gentle waves lapping like God welcoming a road-worn pilgrim, a prodigal son.

They were at the dacha on the shores of the Black Sea, their summer idyll when Yelena had persuaded him reluctantly to go on vacation, to set aside his crushing workload at the hospital in Kiev, to fob it off on other, equally competent (although not quite so gifted) doctors.

It was an impossible luxury for most physicians, he knew, but then Yelena’s father was high up in the Party, and it was the family retreat, had been since the days of Stalin and Molotov, before the Great Patriotic War and the frozen dead of Stalingrad.

A seabird called from on high, and he looked into the rosy, lightening sky to see the gull hovering overhead, could make out the perfection of its outstretched wings, the ordered rows of its feathers. It floated bobbing on the currents of air, then folded its wings and plunged like a spike driving down, crashing into the water, sending a spray flying upward as it speared a fish and gobbled it down.

I have seen that movement before, Doc thought, but it had been no bird and its prey no fish, but something of considerably more weight and moment.

He tried to call up the image of those dark forms and found them elusive, could not summon them in his mind’s eye. It filled him with dread closing on panic. But even as the feeling speared up within him, he felt it damped down and muffled, as if from some will outside his own.

Vague forms and structures moved within his mind, the towers of foreign buildings, faces he felt should be familiar but were alien and born of far lands.

Not now, but belonging to another time, one that was paradoxically both future and past, in a time beyond the horror that was to come. It was all receding from him, misting away. He felt a sense of desperate unreality, and suddenly did not know whether it was the present moment or the insistent call of memory that was unreal.

Yelena was studying him, the ocean breeze playing with her hair, and her smile was sympathetic and sad. “You look so weary, my love. It’s good you’ll be able to rest here.”

And, dear God, he felt that, too. So good to be here, to release the grief, the demand of duty, of obligation to others. To relax into ease and comfort and belonging, like floating on the warm, forgiving sea.