Altar of Bones (67 page)

New York City

M
ILES TAYLOR
couldn’t stop himself from screaming every time someone came near him, even though it didn’t do any good because nobody could hear.

The screams were all inside his head.

They thought he was a vegetable. He heard the doctor tell his daughter that, the one and only time she had been to see him since the stroke. “Persistent vegetative state,” the asshole had said, and Miles had done lot of screaming then, oh, yeah. Inside his head.
You fucking ignorant bastard, where’d you get your degree, Podunk U? If I understand every fucking word you’re saying, how can I be in a state where there’s no cognitive function? Hunh? Answer me that, asshole. Answer me that
.

Miles slept a lot; there was nothing else to do. Every time he woke, it would take one sweet, exquisite instant for his mind to catch up to the hell he lived in now. And then he would remember and he would scream and scream and scream.

He wanted to die. He prayed that he would die.

Lately, when his doctor or one of the nurses would come into his room, that’s what he would scream at them.
Let me die, please. For the love of God, pull the plug and let me die
.

But they never heard him because he couldn’t open his mouth or move his tongue or work his throat.
If a man screams and no one hears him, does it even happen?

He had round-the-clock care, four nurses who bathed him and did
other things too humiliating to even think about. He loved them, and he hated their guts.

The new girl—her name was Christie—had a whore’s mouth and long, wine-red hair. A few days ago, he began to dream about her. Exhausting, erotic dreams.
Doctor, Doctor, can a man still shoot his wad even if he can’t get it up anymore?

Today, Christie was on the afternoon shift, and he found himself waiting for her with such excitement it almost hurt. His eyeballs—the only part of him that he could still move—were riveted on the open door. He’d heard her voice earlier, out in the corridor, so he knew she was here, but the hours crawled by and she wouldn’t come, wouldn’t even pass by his door so that he could see her. It was as if she sensed in some way how desperate he was, and she wanted him to wait. To suffer.

He was beginning to wonder if there was more to her than her mouth and that red hair that reminded him of Yasmine Poole.

A little meanness, maybe?

He fell asleep waiting for her and awoke with a start. She was leaning over him, her face only inches from his, and he felt a strange tingle on his left cheek. What had she done to him? Pinched him, poked him? Kissed him?

“Are you in there, Mr. Taylor? I think you are. No one else does, but I do.”

Yes, yes
, he screamed, so ecstatic with joy he was nearly delirious.
I’m here, I’m here. Oh, God …

The girl leaned closer to him, lowered her voice. “You thought you were such hot shit, didn’t you? Mr. Hot Shit Billionaire. I read all about you in
Vanity Fair
and the stuff you did to other people to make all that money. How people lost everything because of you, and all you could say was ‘Fuck ‘em.’ “

No, you don’t understand. It’s all just a game, and if you want to be somebody, if you want to matter, you’ve got to play the game. The money isn’t even real, just numbers in computers. Just ones and zeros. Not even real
…

“But now it’s your turn to experience hell on earth, Mr. Taylor.” The girl oh so gently caressed his cheek. “And you know what I say to that?

I say, fuck you, Mr. Taylor. Fuck you. And I want you to know that I’m going to be taking extraspecial care of you from here on out, because I want that hell to go on and on, for a long, long time.”

She straightened and glanced over her shoulder, checking out the doorway. Then she turned back around and slapped him hard across the cheek, where a moment ago she had touched him so sweetly.

Tears filled Miles Taylor’s eyes and the girl smiled, a smile that was pure mean, but he didn’t care. She couldn’t know his tears were ones of joy.

Hit me again
, he screamed, over and over inside his head.
Hit me again
.

Because you wouldn’t hit a vegetable, would you? Vegetables couldn’t feel, they couldn’t think, so why would you bother to hit a vegetable?

Hit me again, hit me again, hit me again
.

Norilsk, Siberia

One week later

H
OE WATCHED
the giant red digital clock on top of the Norilsk Nickel headquarters building click over another minute: 12:19. “Our mystery woman’s late, Ry. Are you sure this is the place? ‘Cause right now there ain’t nobody out here but us freezing chickens.”

Ry just looked at her and waved a Polartec-mittened hand at the bas-relief sculpture built into the corner of the building above their heads—a big bronze guy, shirtless, muscled, his square-jawed face set hard with purpose, wielding some sort of shovel. Chiseled into the base were the words
THE BUILDERS OF NORILSK.

“I know, I know,” Zoe said. “There can’t be two builders’ monuments in the city. It’s just …” She hunched her shoulders as a blast of frigid wind sent ice crystals dancing in waves down the wide, nearly deserted street. She wanted to give up and go back to the hotel. She wanted to be warm.

The mystery woman was a mystery because they didn’t know a thing about her, not even her name. She’d telephoned their room late last night, said two sentences: “I can take you to the lake you search for. Be at the builders’ monument on Leninskiy Prospekt tomorrow at noon,” then hung up before Zoe had a chance to so much as draw a breath.

The whole thing was surreal, but then surreal was what Zoe had come to expect of this strange frozen place almost two hundred miles north of the arctic circle. Norilsk was a closed city, and the policy was strictly enforced. No one, not even Russians, let alone foreigners, could
come here without an official invitation and special authorization from the FSB intelligence service.

It took some time and a lot of money, and even Ry wasn’t sure how Sasha managed it, but he finally got them the documents they needed. There’d been a scary half hour upon their arrival, though, when the police boarded the plane, confiscated their passports, and led them off for questioning. They were posing as potential investors from a Montana nickel-mining company, and Zoe let Ry do all the talking since the only thing she knew about nickel was that it was a coin worth five cents.

Then there was the two-hour bus ride into the city in the dusky gloom of a polar night, the sun barely above the horizon even in the middle of the day. They rode past ghosts of trees with blackened, barren trunks, and factories and smelters that spewed black, smelly smoke into the air. Past oily pools of stagnant water so toxic they couldn’t freeze even in the subzero temperatures. It was amazing to think this sprawling, polluted city of two hundred thousand souls and blocks of massive Soviet-style buildings began life as a prison camp cut out of the icy steppes, and that her great-grandmother Lena came from here.

These are my roots
, Zoe thought with a shiver that only partly came from the cold. It was such a hard, frozen, ugly place.

After they checked into the one decent hotel, they’d spent a day studying topographical maps and satellite photographs at Norilsk’s city hall. There were hundreds of lakes all over the Taimyr Peninsula, but not one shaped remotely like a boot. For four more days they’d walked the ice-encrusted streets, going into shops, restaurants, nightclubs, even a couple of bowling alleys, asking of anyone who would listen how to get to the lake with the waterfall.

Nothing, zilch, nada, zip. Until last night’s phone call.

Zoe thought of how Boris, the griffin shop man, had spotted her great-grandmother Lena in a noodle shop in Hong Kong and knew right off that she was a Keeper because she had the face of the Lady in the icon. Had that happened again, with herself and the mystery woman? Surely some magic people were still left in the area. Was the mystery woman one of them?

Zoe stamped her feet to keep them from turning into frozen stubs.

This street, Leninskiy Prospekt, was the main drag and was well-lit enough for her to see there wasn’t a soul around now for blocks. At least the buildings here were painted a cheerful, if rather gaudy, orange and yellow, unlike the rest of the city, which was all washed-out shades of gray and brown.

She checked the time on the Norilsk Nickel building again: 12:24. Almost a half an hour late. The woman wasn’t coming.

Zoe stamped her feet again and clapped her mittened hands together for good measure. She looked up and read the inscription on the base of the sculpture for the umpteenth time, and she must have sighed out loud, because Ry said, “Be patient. She’ll come.”

“I was just thinking, whoever this particular ‘builder’ person was, he couldn’t have built anything in Norilsk. Even with pecs like his, you’re not gonna sashay around this place without a shirt. You’d be a Popsicle in five seconds. And I’ve got purses back home bigger than that itty-bitty shovel—Hey, look, Ry, that car’s slowing down. Please, God, let it be her.”

A silver sedan with a broken right-turn signal pulled up to the curb halfway down the block from them, but the figure that got out was so bundled up against the cold, Zoe couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman. Whoever it was reached back into the car and came out with an oversize and obviously heavy attaché case, then carried it into a nearby bank.

Zoe sighed again and looked back up at the digital readout on the Norilsk Nickel building, but the time had flipped over to the temperature. Minus thirty-nine degrees.
Somebody made that up
, she thought.
If it were a real number, we’d be dead, and—

“Here she is,” Ry said.

Zoe followed his pointing mitten to a small, slender woman wearing a black fur hat and an ankle-length black coat getting off an ice-crusted city bus. She made a beeline for them, her stride purposeful, confident.

The long, white wool scarf she’d wrapped around her neck obscured part of her face, but as she got closer, Zoe was surprised to see she was young, barely out of her teens.

She stopped in front of Zoe and stared at her as she loosened the
thick scarf. Zoe saw a pale face with translucent skin and delicate features. Her eyes were gray and full of curiosity.

She said in fast-flowing Russian, “Sorry I’m late. The buses are always breaking down in this weather. Great-uncle Fodor saw you two days ago. He said he overheard you chatting up Ilia the baker in her shop, and that you’ve come from America and were asking about the lake with the waterfall. And that you’re the very image of the old photograph we have of Lena Orlova, who was the last Keeper. At least we thought she was the last …” Her voice trailed off as she studied Zoe some more.

“Lena Orlova was my great-grandmother.”

The girl nodded, her eyes sparkling. “Most think Lena was the last Keeper because she was killed before she could pass on her knowledge and anoint a new one. She was a nurse at the prison camp here, and she was killed by the guards when she tried to help the poor
zek
who was her lover to escape. But there’ve always been a stubborn few who wanted to believe in the rumors that she got away, for it was too good a story not to be true, was it not? And here you are, living proof. Are you the Keeper now?”

“Yes. My grandmother Katya, Lena’s daughter, she … anointed me.”

“Good. That is how it should be.” The girl turned abruptly and looked up at the builders’ monument. “I hope you don’t think this Soviet poster boy is anything at all like the men who built Norilsk.”

Zoe would have blinked at this abrupt change of subject, but she was afraid her eyelids would freeze shut. “Not hardly. I mean, who would go to work in this place without even a shirt?”

“It’s not so much the scarcity of clothing as the abundance of robust flesh. The men who built Norilsk were prisoners, who were fed just enough so they could stay alive and work, and they worked until all that was left of them was bones. When they died, they were buried together in mass graves, and every year to this day their bones come back to haunt us. In June, when the winter breaks, the melting snows churn them up from out of the ground, only everyone pretends not to see them.”

“But you don’t pretend,” Zoe said.

The girl smiled at her. “No. Because that would be denying them
all, wouldn’t it?” She pulled her wool scarf across her face again. “Come with me now, out of this cold, and we will talk.”