Rasputin's Bastards (64 page)

The squid brain went silent for a moment. Stephen turned his attention outside — watched as the sea reeled past — guided the kraken down, to the tangle of metal and glass that sprawled across the shelf — the submarine that suckled at its belly. He let the tentacles flutter out, scraping along the bulkhead of the thing, tapping on it.

“I flew,” said Alexei finally. “I flew across time, and then through the sky. For a long time, I flew over land — I saw Rome, you know, from high — it looks beautiful in the dawn light — then past Gibraltar. Like a bird, but far faster. And not with the cold that would come.”

“Dream-walking,” said Stephen. “Fine.” Kolyokov did that kind of thing all the time.

“And all the time, I am getting nearer to the ocean. I am thinking: fuck New Pokrovskoye.”

“Where?”

“New Pokrovskoye. Where I am — I think, fuck Vladimir and his plans for me. He wanted me to figure things out — fine.”

“Vladimir?”

“Little kid. Brain like a forty-year-old.”

“Vladimir.” Stephen caught his breath, and thought about Chenko and Pitovovich’s incredible story. “
The
Vladimir.”

“Are you listening? I am telling you a story. So I fly along the water, and just for fun I stick my finger in it. Felt okay, so what the hell, I stick my head in. Before you know it, I hear a beautiful song. And then — I’m like an oil slick on that ocean. Everywhere. Including here.”

“You didn’t use the bathyscaphe, did you?”

“The what?”

Stephen sighed. Kolyokov didn’t tell him much about dream-walking. But he had made clear to Stephen for many years about his anxiety coming from deep water — the compelling song of the ocean. The bathyscaphe was Kolyokov’s safety metaphor.

“That’s what Fyodor Kolyokov used to use, any time he had to dream-walk underwater. A bathyscaphe — a diving bell.”

“What are you, crazy? I told you I was flying by myself. No bathyscaphe.”

Stephen shook his head. “You have a lot to learn,” he said.

“That is what everyone keeps telling me.”

“You may not know it, but you’re in a lot of trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“You’re spreading.” That was one of the things that Kolyokov had warned Stephen about when it came to dream-walkers playing in the water. The medium was so huge — the salt water so perfect a conductor — that the ocean itself took on a kind of diffuse sentience. It was easy to simply dissolve in it. “Alexei,” said Stephen carefully, “stop spreading.”

“Ah. What is the point?”

“Imagine a bathyscaphe,” said Stephen.

Alexei started humming, some Russian song. Stephen swore. He was dissolving. And he didn’t have even sense enough to imagine any kind of protection, let alone a bathyscaphe. Stephen thought hard about what to do.

“Manka,” he said, “Vasilissa. Baba Yaga.”

Alexei continued humming, and Stephen wasn’t really surprised. The mnemonic was designed to wake up sleepers. And if Alexei had been a sleeper at a time in his life, that time was long-past. Alexei was a dream-walker. He was a true psychic.

“Shit shit shit shit,” said Stephen.
What the fuck do you do for a real psychic
? Then he said, “Oh,” and thought:
New Jersey
.

Just a few weeks ago, he’d snuck away from the Emissary to go to this little psychic fair in Jersey, where he’d in addition to getting his aura red and his chakras reset, he’d picked up the tapes: Lorelei Jones’ Ten Steps to Psychic Oneness.

Stephen had listened to them just the once — and he wasn’t sure if he could remember any more than eight of them. But what the hell, he thought. Better than nothing.

“Alexei,” said Stephen, “I want you to visualize the colour red.”

Alexei kept humming, but the cadence slowed a little. So Stephen went on. “Red red red red red. Is that good? Now feel your breathing — ” he cut that part short. Alexei after all wasn’t necessarily breathing right now. “Okay. Imagine orange. Orange orange orange orange. Got it? Now yellow.”

Stephen kept that up until he’d made it down the spectrum to violet, and then he said: “Now look ahead of you and you’ll see a door.”

On Lorelei Jones’ tape, that door led to a green field with butterflies and a perfect clear sky and the scent of flowers wafting through the comfortable spring air. Stephen substituted: “The door is very thick and when you open it, you step into a cramped room where you’ve got to duck your head. The room has all kinds of controls flashing here and there. The controls say how deep you can go and they flash on and off if you’re detected by anyone. And the walls of this room are very thick. They’re steel and ceramic and insulation material like asbestos but not so toxic. There are air tanks underneath your seat. And from the top of it, there’s a line of woven steel that will pull you up to the surface in a second. And — ”

“All right.” The humming stopped. “Shut up. I get the idea. A bathyscaphe.”

Stephen breathed a long sigh. “So you’re back now?”

“Yes. Maybe I shouldn’t have told Vladimir to fuck off.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have gone swimming without a buddy.”

“Well. Thank you for pulling me back. Is this one of Fyodor Kolyokov’s tricks?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well however you came about it — thank you. This looks to be a very useful vessel.”

“Metaphor.”

“Right. Well, it’s got all kinds of instruments. This scope here — it looks like some kind of a radar. It goes round and round — how does it work?”

“Um,” said Stephen, “I think you have to decide.”

“Ah. Very good. It — let’s see. It tells me where I am. Detects others. There — hah! There you are! Little tiny blip.”

“Is there anything else?” he said.

“Let me look. Hah. Yes. There are some others — not so far off in the water.

Maybe they are inside squids too? They are a ways away now so it is impossible to tell.”

“The Mystics?” said Stephen.

“Could be the Mystics. Who are they?” Alexei paused. “Ah! The ones who fled City 512!”

“That’s them.”

“Well okay good. I have to say I prefer this method to Vladimir’s.”

“What is Vladimir’s method?”

“It’s like psychiatry. You spend all your time reliving things and come out for the most part ashamed of yourself. It does have its uses, but this is cleaner. Where did you learn of it?”

Stephen was quiet for a moment. He had imagined all kinds of meetings with Kilodovich — but they all involved talking to an unimaginative thug that he had understood to be nothing more than muscle to protect Mrs. Kontos-Wu on an off-shore outing. Not some green dream-walker who he could swap ten-steps-to-power techniques with inside a giant squid.

“What,” said Stephen, “are you doing here?”

The squid went silent again. Tentacles rat-a-tat-ted across a ganglia of conduits, then extended momentarily into a deep fissure in Petroska Station’s superstructure.

“I am unravelling,” said Alexei finally.

“Do you want to do the bathyscaphe thing again?”

“No. Not unravelling that way. It is my life.”

“What?”

“I have been on a mission to unravel the lie that is my life. Understand it. Know myself.”

“Ah.” Stephen knew a lot of people who were on that sort of a mission. The psychic fair in Jersey was filled with them. They drifted from booth to booth — checking out their Kirlian auras, sitting down with psychic gypsy mind-readers; buying crystals and listening to tapes and crouching underneath pyramids — on an inwardly spiralling mission of self-discovery. Stephen had found these people maddening, incomprehensible. Here they were, on the cusp of utter transformation — grasping at a tool that could lead them literally to omnipotence — and all they could think to do with it was try and figure out why their marriage went wrong or their father was mean to them when they were six, or whether they were ever going to finally get laid.

“I feel this way too,” said Alexei. “It seems like a lot of bullshit.”

Stephen whipped a tentacle across a line of rivets. “What are you, reading my mind?”

“No, no,” said Alexei. “I can tell from your tone. You think I am some full of shit neurotic. But this thing — this unravelling thing. It has been useful.”

“That so?”

“Da. I have been doing much thinking and remembering. I’ve worked a few things out. I think I understand what my place in things is.”

“Okay,” said Stephen, “I’ll bite. What is your place in things?”

“Well, before this bathyscaphe trick,” said Kilodovich, “I have to admit that I was not sure. But here — look! It is a scope for self-understanding. And I can see it! Right here in front of me!”

“And what does it say?”

“I am the destroyer,” read Alexei, “of worlds.”

“Ow!”

Stephen felt as though he had been lashed — flung at great speed out of the brain of the squid. And at the same time, he felt as if he had been kicked.

He didn’t know about the lashing. But the kicking sensation was obvious. A Romanian was looking down at him, pulling his boot back from Stephen’s kidney. The Romanian kicked him again.

“You little fucking traitor,” he snarled — in a different voice. “What have you done with the Mystics?”

Stephen swore as he gasped breath into his lungs. “Z-Zhanna,” was all he could manage before he blacked out.

After a moment, the hag coughed and spat and rolled over, looking up at Mrs. Kontos-Wu as she climbed the ladder to the gantry. Mishka and Vanya looked down at her, then at Mrs. Kontos-Wu. Then at the old woman again.

“Why did you do that?”

“You asked for my help,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “You wanted to get the Babushka out of here — am I not correct?”

They looked at her. Vanya ran a rubbery finger across his chin. Mishka started down the ladder, not saying anything.

“Babushka,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu, “is out of her. She thinks the body is dead. I’m willing to bet she won’t be back again for a while.”

From below, the hag let out a pitiable wail. Vanya looked away, his shoulders shaking.

“You’re welcome.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu spun on her heel and headed back out the door. They would thank her later, she thought, as she stepped through the portal — and into a room that was sickeningly familiar. It was filled with tall book-cases, lit by golden sunlight admitted through tall leaded-glass windows.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked at her hands. They were young and soft — a girl’s hands. They were also shaking.

She was back in the library. Over by the window, she spied a comfortable chair with the tented cover of a novel on its seat. The chair beckoned her. She could at last find out what happened at the end of
Becky Barker and the Mystery of the Scarlet Arrow
.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu balled her young hands into fists and stepped deliberately backwards. She set her mouth in a line and narrowed her eyes — giving the outward impression, she hoped, of determination — but in fact, just fighting back the tears of despair that were battling their way to the surface.

“Bitch,” she said under her breath. For it was clear to her what had happened. She’d just given Lena — Babushka — Lois — whoever, the finger. Stood up to her. And now, the bitch was making it clear that
that kind of talk wouldn’t do
.

“Well fuck you,” said Mrs. Kontos Wu. She backed away from the chair. “I’m not reading the book.”

Something rustled, and there was the dull thudding sound of old books falling on older carpet. Something grunted, and Mrs. Kontos-Wu saw a flash of movement at the edge of the K-L aisle. She backed into the X-Z aisle.

“I’ll burn the place down again,” she said in a voice that sounded firm. Like arson was easy here.

It was a different matter in the real world. In Physick. All you had to do was pinch the nostrils, cover the mouth — and if it gets too bad, retreat. Retreat to Bishop’s Hall.

Here, though, in Bishop’s Hall . . .

There was, really, no retreat.

You could close the book — but the book was always there — tented on the plush seat by the windowsill, tempting you into it with questions. What happens to Jim now that he’s down to one hand? Football’s out of the question. And Bunny? Poor, poor Bunny. . . What’s to become of her?

Mrs. Kontos-Wu shut her eyes — felt the tears come. And then she heard a voice:

“At the end of the book, Becky calls in
Les Gendarmes
, and they break up the order of the Scarlet Arrow once and for all. Antoine’s father — or
père
as the French put it — is sent to prison, and Antoine goes to live with Bunny and her family back in America. Jim is fitted for a hook which in the last line he pretends is a pirate hook and everyone laughs.”

“That’s a lie,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. But she opened her eyes and gasped.

In front of her, a tall black-haired man stepped out of the sunlight and shut the book. He bent down and peered at her.

“Mrs. Kontos-Wu?” He looked relieved as he extended a huge hand to shake her small one. “You are well. I am relieved — I thought for certain I had lost you when the children torpedoed your boat.”

“What have you done with the Mystics?”

Stephen blinked and coughed. He didn’t have to look around to know he was back on the submarine — the old-socks stink and the endless tick-ticking of the lights were enough to tell him that he was here, in the old engine room, handcuffed to a chair. He didn’t need to look around to see that.

But look around he did. Three Romanians were surrounding him — one, the little guy with glasses he’d pummelled a day ago outside the sleeping chambers.

It was he who was talking. But Stephen knew it wasn’t him.

“Zhanna,” said Stephen, “I’ve — I’ve been in contact with someone you need to talk to.”

The little Romanian sneered. “Answer the question,” Zhanna said through him. “Where are the Mystics?”

“I don’t know about the Mystics,” said Stephen. “They’re gone. You need to talk to this guy. Alexei Kilodovich.”

“Alexei Kilodovich.” This time it was the tall bearded Romanian who brought him here. “A trick. The Mystics are dead and you have killed them. Somehow, through you, Fyodor Kolyokov has destroyed the Mystics. Tell me how and it will be quick.”