“
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze too long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Friedrich Nietzsche
, German philosopher

Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russia

Zakhar knew that he was being followed. What he didn’t know was whether it was just another hunter trying to hunt game on his family’s land, or some lost, homeless squatter. The signs were all around him. A bent sapling here, a pile of crushed leaves where someone had been lying there. He circled the area several times as a matter of habit—this had long been his family’s land. He’d hunted it with his father, and his father had hunted it with his father, and so on for three more generations. He knew the land well, and he knew when a stranger was on it.

Having set out that morning hunting for game, Zakhar was upset that some squatter might be inadvertently running that game off. He was a bit more than mildly perturbed.
Nothing worse than having a perfectly good hunt ruined
, he mused.

Presently, Zakhar remained well within the tree line, where the thick forest canopy had protected the forest floor from
much of the snow, though not nearly all of it. The snow-dappled ground was frozen solid, even the stubborn Siberian grass crackled beneath his feet as he walked, and it crackled again under his knees when he knelt to inspect the sign a bear had left, perhaps a day prior. The droppings were frozen almost to rock.

Whoever the man was following him, poacher or squatter, he likely hadn’t killed this bear.
I would’ve heard the gunshot
. Sound carried out here, though few were around to hear it.

He looked up, pulled his balaclava up around his nose so that he could
scratch it. Zakhar’s breath came out in a great fog, like that of a dragon. He had ascended to a hilltop that put him just above some of that aforementioned forest canopy. He looked westward for a moment of peace, out over the Ural Mountains away in the distance, and then pulled the wool mask back down over his face and descended the hill, following other sign.

The forest got thicker through here. There were great, climbing vines that threatened to strangle every tr
ee in sight—stubborn and defiant vines of a strength only conceivable in Russian territories—and a host of angry briars and brambles. There were parts out here that no axe had ever cut, forests so deep and far no man could reach the center except to jump from helicopter.

He paused here and there to inspect
a few recesses in the snow where the quiet and constant snowfall had filled in someone’s footprints.
They’re still out here
, he warranted.
Maybe more than one?
If that were so, it was probably poachers, and it would be the instance of poaching in almost four years, ever since he’d ran the last bunch off and then helped to pass stricter laws against trespassing and poaching, along with his friends at the Slaviansky Trophy Hunting Society.

He checked his watched. It was almost four o’clock.

Zakhar knelt to study the latest sign. It was a sweetgum bur, extremely rare in this part of the world due to climate change, but there were still a precious few left in the Siberian wilderness.

The prickly burs were about half the size of a golf ball, and fell from the tre
es whenever the harsh winters arrived. Their usefulness in tracking was well documented by both indigenous peoples and more modern experts. Zakhar had first learned of the importance of sweetgum burs in tracking from reading the works of the great Russian hunter Leonid Pavlovich Sabaneyev. The burs remained on forest floors and did not naturally pierce any other leaves. No, someone or something had to
step
on them in order to push them through the leaves. If a hunter lifted a sweetgum bur and found one or more leaves stuck to it, it meant someone had been through the area recently.

Zakhar found just such evidence. However, he saw no other visible sign of the bear he’d been after for two days, nor did he see sign of boar or deer.
They’ve all run off
.
That’s not like them
. Had they sensed him? Or, had they sensed the others that might be out here? He put a hand on a knee and pushed himself to his feet. He took a moment to take a few turns around the forest. “
Otkuda vy?
” he hollered:
Where are you from?

His words echoed through the lonely forest. There was no answer.
Still, sullen silence. The forest kept its secrets.

Overhead, a
covey of dark-brown gannets suddenly took flight from the trees. A few heartbeats later, there was total silence again. Zakhar started walking, and then his eyes caught sight of a squirrel about ten meters ahead of him dashing across the snow-dappled earth, lunging for a tree, clinging to it, and climbing to the other side. Here was another sign straight out of Sabaneyev’s hunting chronicles: a squirrel that leaps onto a tree and immediately moves to the other side is hiding from a predator.

The birds, the squirrel, these were all signs of what hunters and trackers called the “concentric rings of Nature.” One thing alerted one group of animals, and their scattering alerted another group, and so on. A savvy hunter knew to pay attention to these signs, and not just ignore them as random fluttering
s of the forest’s creatures.

Zakhar looked in the direction whence the squirrel came.
He removed his balaclava this time, and the cold cut to the marrow of his bones. “
Vy mestnyy?
” he shouted, a bit sarcastically:
Are you from around here?
Of course the poacher wasn’t from around here. How could he be, when Zakhar Ogorodnikov and his family had owned the hundred square miles all around for hundreds of years?

Zakhar hollered again, this time informing the would-be hunter that he was poaching on private property, and that, because of the new laws passed four years ago, the penalty for that could be as much as a million rubles.

No answer.

After listening to his words finish echoing through the trees and across the white fields beyond, Zakhar pulled his balaclava back on, then
lifted the strap of the Tigr-308 over his head to remove it, and checked it. The rifle was self-loading, built to withstand all conditions, and he hadn’t even fired a shot today, but it never hurt to check and make sure everything was set and ready to go at a moment’s notice. He’d seen violence while in the military, but in all his years living on this land, he’d never even heard of an incident happening between his family and poachers.

And who else besides poachers had any reason to come this far out into the Siberian wilderness? There was no one and nothing else out here to see, not after leaving the main road, which took one far beyond the Ural Mountains.

Could be Tatars
, Zakhar surmised. He recalled reading about Tatars moving farther this way, squatting on private property. Though he had never seen any of those roving, gypsy-like groups around his land, Zakhar knew that they had recently become a problem in and around the Ural region, large clans of them pulling up stake and driving their busted up cars and pushing their load-bearing mules onto others’ private property. The cities had all gotten fed up with their transient ways, complaining of the littering and escalating violent clan disputes, and as a result the Tatar nomads were moving deeper and deeper into outlying forested lands, hoping to become lost again in the great Siberian wastelands.

Hope to God that’s not it
, he thought.
I’ll take anything over a gypsy
.

Zakhar didn’t shoulder his rifle. Rather, he kept it in a loose, low-ready position, exactly as he’d
done in the military, and started forward. About a hundred meters later, the forest abruptly ended, and he was back in the great expansive fields of his childhood.

He noticed no footprints on the way back to
his house by the frozen lake, and heard no other sounds besides the lonely, lonely Siberian winds whickering through the forest behind him. Halfway back, the snow suddenly picked up in intensity.

Atlanta, Georgia

Her alarm clock went off at exactly 7:00
AM
. The song it was playing was “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell, a favorite of one of her mother’s old boyfriends. Reflexively, her left arm shot out from the covers and snatched at the clock, her palm smashing against its top and sending it to the floor. Only, that’s not how Kaley Dupré saw it happen. Indeed, a great deal went on before she sent that clock smashing to the floor.

The
dream had been a deep, ponderous one. She was lost amid a city…a city that looks wholly unfamiliar to her and was ankle-deep in water. Everywhere, there was water. Not a flood or a rushing river moving through the streets, just standing water that everyone around her was walking through as calmly as you please. Kaley herself stood in the water, and, after having learned her lesson many times before, she did not move.

The water she was in was foamy; at least it was around all of the people and the objects around her. Wherever the people moved, wherever there was a stop sign or parking meter, there was also a thick froth in the water right around the object’s edges, almost as if the water
was acid, and corroded everything it touched. But nothing appeared to be in decay…nothing except for the buildings.

It was an otherwise normal city street,
like Atlanta only different in all the unpronounceable and textured ways of dreams, yet from the tallest peaks of each building there came clumps of stone and masonry work, all of it plopping into the water and disappearing amid a swell of foam before that foam, too, fizzled and ceased to exist.

“This city is collapsing,” she said to the man beside her, quite calmly.
It was a man in a gray business suit…or maybe it was black. Hard to say. She knew it was a dream. And so, it seemed, did everyone else around her. In fact, they all moved about like they were mostly bored, and even occasionally looked at her with
are-you-going-to-do-something-about-all-this-or-not
sort of looks.

Kaley
hadn’t moved. She had learned it wasn’t smart to move when the world was flooded like this. The scenery was sometimes different—sometimes a desert, sometimes a forest, sometimes a frozen tundra—but it was
usually
a city, and
usually
it was smart not to move. It was as if the water sensed her, grew irritated with her. Everyone else walking about could move freely and do as they pleased, but the second Kaley moved—

And then it happened. The loud, screeching noise.
She knew at once what it was.
The alarm clock
. Knowing it made it no less offensive to her ears, and startled her no less. “Sometimes I feel I’ve got to—
bump-bump!
—run away!” sang the majestic Soft Cell. “I’ve got to—
bump-bump!
—get away from the pain you drive into the heart of me!” She jumped, and when she did, the water all around her ankles felt it. A swirling eddy that began around her.
Oh god, not again
…

Now everyone
on the street backed away from her. The whirlpool gained power quickly, and the water churned and frothed all around her. Everyone on the street now paused, a look of mild curiosity on their faces, and no one attempting to lend a hand. “Help me!” she screamed.

Then, from the foam came long, tenebrous arms. They were the same as before, black, burnt things missing flesh and bits of muscle
, with sinew dangling from each. They came up through that churning well and groped at her. One snatched at her ankle, another at her hair. “
Go away! Leave me alone!
”

The alarm was still going off
somewhere. “The love we shared—
bump-bump!
—seems to go nowhere!”

Meanwhile, the hands all around her became hungrier.
It’s only a dream
, she thought.
It’s just a dream
. She had an intuition what they were searching for, like the way you know something in a dream, but don’t know it when you’re awake.
And that’s all it is
.
Just a dream
.

And that’s what frightened her. The first time she’d seen them had been
in a dream, too, something she’d conjured up out of necessity, out of a need to survive that terrible night. That was it, just a coping mechanism. Or so she’d thought. But an officer was dead, as were Dmitry and all the others, and at the hands of the terrible things she’d brought into this world. A door had been opened, and she had opened it.

Now they want me
, she thought, struggling with the indecision. Should she stand still and hope they finally lost “sight” of her, or try to run and risk attracting even more of them?

“Once I ran to you,” sang Soft Cell. “Now I
’ll run from you…This tainted love you’ve given…I give you all a boy could give you!”

The whirlpool gained in speed and intensity. Now, even the people in her head were running in fear, but now the power of the whirlpool and its angry foam pulled them in, as well. The hands climbed higher on her, groping, searching for her lips, her eyes, her ears, her everything.
The hands were slimy, bloody from the missing flesh and dangly meat. “
It’s her
,” whispered one of the familiar voices. It was familiar only in her dreams, and whenever she woke up, she usually forgot about it again. “
It’s her, it’s her, it’s her, we need her. Get her! Get her! She can bring us back! Get herrrrrrrrrr!
”

BOOK: Psycho Within Us (The Psycho Series Book 2)

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