Rasputin's Bastards

THE IDIOT

Alexei gasped and blinked in eye-stinging heat. His spit felt cold on his tongue as he sucked steam over it. He coughed as the steam hit his lungs. He sniffed at a strange and familiar scent, of rising bread and boiling cabbage and pine and struggled to focus his eyes on something in the hazy darkness.

“Aie, shit,” he said. Alexei was surprised, pleased even, to hear his own deep man-voice. He ran his hand over his steam-slicked shoulders, the thick hair on his chest. “I’m back.”

In the darkness, another voice chuckled. “Back, are you?”

“Who is there?”

Alexei came more to himself each passing second. He knew he was sitting on a wooden bench; his feet dangled to touch what felt like bare stone, cold as ice in the heat of this room. He blinked again, and now he saw a shape — a lean figure of a man, lolling naked on another bench across this strange, log-hewn room.

“Hello, Alexei,” said the man. “I am Vasili Borovich. They call me the Koldun here. Welcome to the bathhouse, my cousin. And welcome home.”

Alexei squinted. “Home?”

“For all purposes — yes. You have slept a long time. Nearly two days. I know that seems a terribly long time, but there you are.”

Actually, it didn’t seem that long at all. As far as he was concerned, he’d spent literally months in the strange metaphor of his recollections. But he just nodded.

The Koldun, Vasili Borovich, smiled at him. “What did you dream?” he asked.

Alexei started to answer — to talk about the onionskins of his memories, the spy school and the psychic stuff and the sleeper school which were all lies or so he thought — and then a familiar reflex took over.

“I don’t remember,” he said.

The Koldun leaned forward and peered at him — as though trying to read something in his eye, spot the object of the truth and pull it out of him. Evidently he couldn’t find it, because he finally blinked and just shrugged.

“It will come to you,” he said. “That is fine.”

“I am sure,” said Alexei. He looked skeptically around the log-hewn room. “So this is home. Where exactly, Mister Koldun, is home?”

“You don’t remember your dream — it’s not likely you’ll remember this place.”

Alexei shrugged now. The Koldun smiled, and raised his hands, looked around.

“The village,” he said, “of New Pokrovskoye. It is home for us all.”

“If you say so,” said Alexei.

The Koldun’s smile faltered and his eyes narrowed, and Alexei found his hands going to cover his privates.

“You don’t remember it as home. But the Babushka has prepared it for you. You and your cousins. You should be very grateful.”

“The Village of New Pokrovskoye.” Alexei rolled the word around in his mouth. It did come easily — more easily, say, than City 512 — or Murmansk. “You should thank Babushka for me.”

“I will — pass it along.”

“So I have been asleep for two days?”

The Koldun nodded.

“Are you in charge of this place?”

The Koldun hesitated. “No,” he finally said. “Well, that is not true. I am — transitionally in charge. But I will not be for very long.”

“And this place is my home.”

“You are coming back to yourself. Good.”

“I’m only repeating,” said Alexei.

“You know, we are not going to accomplish anything sitting here in the bathhouse.” The Koldun slid down off the bench and drifted through the steam to the door. He turned back to Alexei and beckoned.

“Come,” he said. “It is time to go outside.”

Alexei followed the Koldun through the door, into a small antechamber. It was colder here, and small. The two had to shuffle and dodge to keep out of contact with one another. The floor was bare rock and Alexei curled his toes against the cool. He felt gooseflesh run up and down his arms, the backs of his thighs. There was a little window that was frosted with condensation. It admitted a cool, blue light to the tiny room. Beside the window was a door of wooden planks.

“Ready, Alexei?” The Koldun smiled over his shoulder as he pulled on a wrought iron handle and pushed the door open.

The sky held the consistency of fine marble — little lines of white transgressing a perfect blue dome that covered the world like the ceiling of a cathedral. Alexei drew a lungful of the cool, maritime air as he stepped naked out of the bathhouse. The sweat and steam cooled on him and ran down his flanks in little rivulets. If this one was a trick, he thought to himself, it was a good one.

“Name the smells,” said the Koldun.

Alexei frowned — crinkled his nose.

“Pine needles,” he said. “Mushrooms. A lady’s perfume.”

“Interesting,” said the Koldun. “Myself, I smell the city. Engine oil. Exhaust fumes. You, I think, are more in the Babushka’s favour than I today.”

“Babushka?” Alexei squinted down the hill. There was supposed to be a village there, but all he could see was the tops of thin scrub, and farther off, the ocean. “You mentioned her inside. Who is she?”

The Koldun laughed. “You wouldn’t know her by name — but you will have felt her in your dreams. You might have even dreamed of her. If you did, you smelled her, most likely. One day when you smelled a peculiar smell, a short time ago perhaps — did it not change your destiny?”

“My destiny?” Alexei frowned. “Burnt sugar,” he said. “I smelled it on a man’s breath, who pulled me from the ocean. It caused me to lie to him.”

The Koldun nodded. “The Babushka favours you,” he said. “As to who she is? She is the one who made this place — her and some others whose names and bones are lost.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. She was one of the first to come here — one of a small group of agents like yourself. Sent here to establish a base of operations for the dreaming army.”

“And where,” said Alexei, “is here? Don’t say New Pokrovskoye.”

The Koldun laughed. “We’re in Labrador, which is a part of Canada no one much goes to. We established it to keep a close eye on the NATO base at Goose Bay. We keep it now — well, let me just say that it suits our purposes, past and present.”

Alexei stomped his bare feet on the rock. He took another breath. This time, the smells were gone.

“We are in New Pokrovskoye, and Labrador. And you call yourself a Koldun.”

Borovich smiled and nodded.

“That’s an old name,” said Alexei. “It means that you are a village wizard.” He waggled his fingers. “Casting charms on people and such.”

The Koldun shrugged. He gestured to the log building behind them. “There is my sauna,” he said. A village Koldun, Alexei knew, spent a lot of time in saunas. “A good place to meditate. I do not cast many charms, though.”

“Except metaphorically,” said Alexei. “Tell me — did you preside over the awakening of all the newcomers to—” he snapped his fingers.

“New Pokrovskoye.”

“Right.”

“No.”

“Another question, and I won’t trouble you. You talked about a ‘dreaming army.’”

“I did,” said the Koldun.

“Am I dreaming now?” said Alexei.

The Koldun laughed. “Truly,” he said, “that is a question I cannot reliably answer. Come over here—” he gestured around the side of the structure. “We should put some clothes on you. Your balls are as small as pebbles in the cold.”

A few minutes later, Alexei was dressed in a pair of cotton trousers and a thick woollen sweater — clothing he’d never seen before but which nevertheless fit him perfectly — and walking down the hill with the Koldun.

He regarded the smaller man. The Koldun was old. Maybe he was old as Kolyokov was these days. But he was in much better shape. His hair was all there, and still mostly black, combed back into a thick ponytail. His beard had borne the years more vividly — it was streaked with grey and white where it drooped below his chin. Alexei felt as though he ought to like this Koldun character, and in many ways he did. A Koldun, at least as far as Alexei remembered from his mother’s stories, was a wizard true enough — but force of good in a community. And this one seemed to be that. He had, after all, pulled Alexei from the pits of dream; helped him back into himself; answered his questions as best he could; and given Alexei clothes and a bath.

But Alexei could have said the same things about Holden Gibson — and he didn’t like or trust that old bastard at all.

And on the subject of Gibson…

“I came here with some people,” said Alexei. “In a big boat. A yacht. I don’t see them here.”

The Koldun put up his hand to hush him.

“In time,” he said, “you’ll see them all.”

Alexei frowned. Something was in the Koldun’s tone he didn’t like.

“What about the children?”

The Koldun looked at Alexei sidelong, and smiled.

“In time, Kilodovich,” he said. “In time.”

They had been walking down a broad, rocky pathway between planted rows of small conifer trees. The path was ending now, intersecting another at a wooden platform from which a long, precarious stair descended down a cliffside. For the first time, Alexei got a proper view of the village.

He made an appreciative noise.

The village spread below them to the left and right, hugging the crescent of a wide and stony harbour like lichen. It seemed to Alexei that it was snatched not out of time, but memory. The houses were all of dark log, neatly cut with bright window trims and great red and green beams along the spines of their wood-shingled roofs. Did a village such as this ever truly exist a century ago? Probably not. But its sight filled Alexei with an almost painful nostalgia — far from his just-relived memories of City 512, this was the place he wished to have come from.

Past the water’s edge, it seemed as though another village began — this one stretching up long docks and out to the harbour’s middle. It was a village of boats — and a strange, incongruous collection of boats. There were fishing boats, with netting gathered at their sterns like dark peacock plumage; narrow wooden sailboats, painted outrageously in brilliant primary colours; long canoes with outboard motors dangling off their backs; a little cabin cruiser, painted like the sailboats; and at the end of the longest pier, a plainer motor yacht that dwarfed the rest. Alexei recognized it immediately as Holden Gibson’s.

“This is a forward base?” Alexei frowned. “Pretty conspicuous, I’d think, for that kind of work.”

The Koldun laughed. “Not at all. No one knows about it who doesn’t live here.”

“Of course not.”

It occurred to Alexei then that the Koldun’s words might have meant something else — that the place didn’t exist but for those who lived here — that it was nothing more than a dream. Nothing is real. Alexei was beginning to think this was a more and more reasonable proposition.

The Koldun leaned on the railing of the strange staircase. He spared Alexei a brief but penetrating glance.

“Tonight,” he said, “there will be a dance in the town. You should come to that; we’ll maybe talk some more. But I don’t think a lot of talking is what you need now. You don’t remember anything. So what you need is a lot of thinking — yes?”

“If you say so,” said Alexei.

“Don’t come down to the town straight away,” said the Koldun. “No point in seeing too much at once. Go to the lighthouse for now. When more people come, they’ll be billeted there. But for now, no one but you.”

“You have a lighthouse here? Is there shipping?”

The Koldun laughed. “No shipping. Just what you see here. The lighthouse was here when I came. There’s a story behind that. But for later.”

Alexei was puzzled — he had half a mind to protest, to go down the stairs to the town. But he had to admit, the idea of food and rest was tempting.

“All right,” said Alexei. “Which way?”

The Koldun waved a hand to his right. “That path,” he said, “takes you straight there. I’ve got some business to attend to in town — more new arrivals to greet, I’m afraid. So if it’s all right, you just go off on your own — take it easy for a couple of hours? Yes?”

“Sure,” said Alexei. He waited until the Koldun had disappeared over the edge of the staircase — listened as the older man’s footfalls diminished down the rock side — before he set off down his own path.

The path led Alexei along a high ridge of sea-weathered rock, over the town and toward the lighthouse. The path was lined with brilliant yellow wildflowers here, their shoots encroaching on Alexei’s stride. The nearer he came to the lighthouse, the narrower the ridge became. Alexei could barely maintain his footing. How the hell did they get the trucks and machinery out here they’d need to build the thing?

It was the least of the mysteries that this strange hamlet presented. Quite aside from the peculiar tug on memory that the place presented to him — the discomforting aura of comfort — it was difficult to imagine how the people here had managed to keep it hidden; particularly given the Koldun’s explanation that this village was nothing less than a forward base for old Soviet espionage activities.

No, Alexei decided. This Koldun character was lying — or at the very least, not telling the whole of the truth.

Alexei stepped up to the door of the lighthouse, and paused to examine the stonework. This building was no Cold War relic — even to Alexei’s untrained eye, it was clear it was no younger than a century. It looked like it was made out of hand-cut limestone, in the fashion of a fortification. What had been in this isolated harbour before the Koldun and his crew had come here?

He shrugged, and smiled to himself. The Koldun had been right about one thing: Alexei needed some time to think things through more than he needed to ask questions. He pulled the heavy wooden door open and stepped into the cool dimness of the lighthouse’s base.

Alexei let the door swing shut behind him as he stepped into the middle of the lighthouse’s deep silo. Planks creaked as he shifted his weight. The floor here was dark, but the glow of the afternoon leaked past the wooden stairs that crawled up the inside of the tower to the light room. And the Koldun wasn’t lying about other things: there were cots lined against the curving walls, with clean white linen and yellow wool blankets folded at their feet. A card table was set up in the middle, and atop that a cloth-covered dish bulging in ways suggestive of bread and meats. A metal jug held water, and Alexei poured some of it into one of the cups beside it. Under the table, Alexei spotted a bottle of Smirnoff vodka — but he felt it best to leave it alone for now.

So was this a dream then? The water was cold on Alexei’s lips and it made a very convincing line of coolness down his middle as he swallowed it. But the water he’d dreamed drinking the past two months was just as convincing — less sweet, more brackish, but very realistic nonetheless. So sure — he could be dreaming. He could be a sleeping child now in the depths of City 512, recasting his future into the life of a former secret agent who’d somehow wound up in this lighthouse drinking a cup of nice sweet water. That might have been the dream. He might have another dream ahead of him… .

Alexei pulled the cloth off the food. The bread was thick and white and looked as though it had been freshly baked. Beside it were slices of a dark sausage, infused with garlic and thick clots of fat. Alexei took some meat and some bread and made himself an open-faced sandwich. He bit into it. Tasted good.

“Not a bad dream, if that’s what it is,” he said to no one. “No point in spoiling it by sleeping.”

Sandwich in hand, Alexei made his way past the cots with their convincingly fresh linen, to the base of the stairs. He wanted to see what the view was like from the top — before the daylight spent itself back to darkness.

Alexei could see a fair distance from the aerie. He found one road leading inland, but it ended at the gleaming roofs of what Alexei took to be a long, low set of greenhouses, maybe a kilometre off. They formed a cruciform around a tin-roofed structure that climbed two storeys more. Just beyond that, Alexei could make out what looked like concrete pads — and some long, low buildings with flat roofs and low chimneys. Thin gravel roads crawled between them. But beyond that, the land was barren. Alexei shook his head. What kind of a village these days doesn’t even have a concession road coming in to service it?

Someplace like City 512, perhaps? Alexei settled back into the canvas chair next to the lamp assembly. It could follow. If that was real — if this was real — if the things that Alexei had learned about himself were anything approaching the truth.

The Koldun may have been lying about everything else — but one thing he had gotten right. Alexei needed some time to think this through.

First point. It was clear to him that the Russians — his masters — were operating a sleeper agent program. Alexei had gone through a raft of programming to become one of these sleeper agents — men and women who were operated remotely by psychics who could, at the drop of a hat, fly through the air or pass through walls like ghosts. He had gone to a training school called City 512 to learn how to be a sleeper. And the memories he carried could not be trusted.

“Fine,” said Alexei aloud. The false memories included potentially several layers: one, of his education as a KGB assassin somewhere near Murmansk. Alexei was unclear as to why, however, such a false memory would be implanted in a sleeper agent who was meant to spy on the Americans. Unless he was meant to spy on someone else. Someone… nearer.

“Aha,”said Alexei aloud. That could be it.Alexei Kilodovich was a manufactured KGB assassin — made, perhaps, by one of the many factions of politicians in the Kremlin who wished to have an ace up their sleeve for this purpose. Why not have one of their assassins empowered to turn on his Comrades if necessary? He was an insurance policy for some ambitious Communist.

“But,” said Alexei as he chewed on his sandwich. What of the dream-walking? He had assuredly, at least in the early stages of his life, been vetted to become one of the puppet-masters. Fyodor Kolyokov had indicated he was a complete failure at dream-walking.

And yet, had he not prevented the old poet’s execution — based on his own sudden intuition? Had he not predicted the arrival of General Rodionov?

Why, if Alexei were enough of a psychic to do that, had Fyodor Kolyokov cast him down into the company of untalented sleeper agents?

Alexei crossed his arms and looked out the glass. There was, of course, one easy answer.

This all might have been a dream. All, nothing but shit.

Alexei had been sulking over the view for nearly an hour when he spotted the lone figure making his way along the path to the lighthouse. “Aha,” he said aloud. It was James, the shaven-headed fellow who’d pulled him from the sea on Holden Gibson’s yacht. Alexei leaned on the railing around the circumference of the light room as James approached the lighthouse — then made his way down the stairs as the door opened.

Alexei watched from the stairs as James came in. He looked to the left and the right. Alexei was about to shout hello, when a glint of metal in James’ hand caught his eye. The shout caught in his throat, and Alexei pulled back on the stairs and stilled his breath.

The glint was from the barrel of a gun.

No dream, thought Alexei.

James squinted up to where Alexei had hidden himself. James moved to the base of the stairs and raised the gun.

It looked like Holden Gibson’s Glock semiautomatic. James held it in both hands, one elbow crooked so he could sight along it. He’d aimed it along the curve of the wall — if it fired now, the bullet might hit Alexei in a ricochet. But if James saw Alexei — it would be nothing to adjust the aim a degree up and another to the left, and shoot him there.

James started up the stairs. He blinked, as his eyes adjusted — and the barrel of the gun moved up and to the left and trained on Alexei’s chest.

“Russkie,” he said — in a voice that seemed not his own. “I got you, Russkie. Don’t fuckin’ move.”

“I am not moving,” said Alexei.

“Good.” James wasn’t moving either. He stood in what seemed an impossibly uncomfortable position, aiming the gun at Alexei’s chest, while he spoke in that strange, incongruous voice.

“Now, I want you to tell me simple. How the fuck come you’ve been thinkin’ about nothing but killing me?”

“Ah — don’t be upset, James. But I’ve barely thought about you at all.”

James stood as a statue. “I meant Gibson. Not — not me. How the fuck come you been thinking about nothing but killing fucking Holden Gibson?”

Alexei squinted. He thought about City 512; about what he’d learned from his childhood; about the dream-walking and Fyodor Kolyokov, and the horrifying dance for General Rodionov, and everything else. He looked closely at James.

“Holden Gibson?” he said. “Is that you?”

“Hold the fuck still!” The statue of James was screaming at the top of its lungs. “Hold still or I’ll fuckin’ kill you! Now why the fuck do you want to kill me?”

Alexei was amazed. It was Holden Gibson standing there — holding his own gun on Alexei. He somehow inhabited the body of his worker James. Gibson was to James — what Fyodor Kolyokov had been to Alexei all those years: his puppet-master.

“Get out,” said Alexei. He willed it.

James/Gibson’s composure began to waver. The hands trembled — and suddenly, it was as though James’ strings had been cut. James stumbled back, the gun went down, and it slipped from his numb fingers and clattered down the stairs.

“Jesus.” James leaned against the wall staring at his empty hands, then up at the golden light now trickling down from aerie. By the time he looked down the stairs to the lighthouse’s main room, Alexei had already jumped down, retrieved the gun, and trained it on James’ chest.

“He’s gone from you now, isn’t he?”

James blinked down at him. “You.” He raised his hands over his head, and flinched.

“Relax,” said Alexei. “I’m not likely to shoot you if you keep still.”

James did relax a little.

“S-so,” he said. “You look… well. You get your memory back?”

“My memory — ?” Alexei stopped himself. Of course — for him, it was months ago that he’d told that peculiar lie on the deck of Gibson’s ship: A knock on the head had knocked memory out his ear like pool water after a swim. “I think I’m doing better now, thank you.” He paused, and stepped closer to the base of the stairs. “How about you?”

“Me?”

“Yes. How’s your memory doing, James?”

“Well…” The stairs creaked as James shifted his weight. “Do you — do you mind if I sit down? I’m kind of stiff for some reason.”

Alexei nodded. “Sure.” The poor kid was probably cramping, what with the amount of time Holden Gibson had kept him standing still. “Just keep your hands in sight.”

James lowered himself to the steps. Once he was seated, he extended first one leg and then the other. His joints cracked like an old man’s.

“You didn’t answer my question,” said Alexei. “How’s your memory? Do you remember, for instance, how you got here?”

James settled his left leg back to the steps. “I do not,” he said.

“You showed up here with this gun and a mind to shoot me.”

James shook his head in bafflement. “The last thing I remember was dreaming. I was back at school — Kindergarten. In Illinois. I was so small…”

Is that how it goes? Alexei wondered. When one of the bastards comes in and takes over your body, they send you back to school? Some memory like that? Alexei recalled many dreams such as that through his career — and (here, he shuddered) hadn’t he just spent the past two months or so remembering his school days in a vivid, unending nightmare?

James was still dwelling on his own. “—and at play time, the Barker twins took my Big Wheel and—”

“That’s bullshit,” said Alexei , and James’ eyes went wide.

“Don’t shoot me!”

Alexei noticed that at some point he’d raised the gun for emphasis, training it between James’ rounded eyes. He lowered it now.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ve had enough grade school reminiscences to last me a while. Tell me the last thing you remember. Before coming here?”

“Well — I went to sleep last night. I was really tired — they’ve got us working in the scaling house most days… I just washed up and went to bed.”

“They have you scaling fish?”

“That’s my new job,” said James. “Part of my — re-education.”

“Too bad,” said Alexei. “So you went to bed. And the next thing you know—”

“Here I am.”

“Here you are.”

“Right.”

They regarded one another quietly for a moment.

“What’s Holden up to lately?”

James shrugged. “Don’t know, really. He seems to sleep a lot.”

“Of course he does.”

James must have read something into Alexei’s expression, because he squirmed uncomfortably. “Hey — you’re — you’re not going to beat me up again, are you?”

“Beat you up again?”

James gave him a worried look.

“I have no recollection of ever beating you up,” said Alexei. “Just,” he added, thinking it through, “as you have no recollection of coming here with a gun belonging to Holden Gibson to shoot me.” Alexei lowered the gun to his side. There really was no need — the puppet masters were gone for now. It was just Alexei and James. Alexei felt a tugging in his chest. He flipped on the safety and stuffed the gun barrel-first into the back of his pants.

“No, James. I’m not going to beat you up. Come on down. There’s some food here. Let’s eat and talk.”

James looked relieved. “Thanks,” he said. He winced as his cramping muscles pulled him to his feet.

When one has suffered a very bad trauma — a rape, a beating, a terrible childhood spent with cruel and demanding parents — there always comes a point at which it is good to talk about it. And not just with a psychotherapist, who can at best understand the trauma intellectually. The point comes where one must speak with someone who has gone through the same thing — or one so similar as to be indistinguishable. Even among men who are otherwise complete strangers. Such a conversation can lead all sorts of places — not the least of which is simple insight.

So it went with Alexei and James as they tore through the rest of the cold cuts, and got into the vodka. The talk they had ranged on for hours, until the light from the top of the tower dimmed and diminished into a cool blue, and the base became dark and cold.

James did most of the talking. The mind control stuff was new to him — or so he claimed. But the abuse he underwent at Holden Gibson’s hand was a lifetime’s worth. He’d been with Gibson since he was eight or so — he at this point only had vague memories of his life before that, and most of those memories centred on school, not his parents. Gibson, he said bitterly, had no doubt done a thorough job of erasing those memories, so he could use James for his own purposes.

“Did he—”

“Feel me up? What do you think?” James swallowed his vodka too quickly and coughed.

“Since you brought it up…”

“No. At least — I can’t remember.”

“So what did he do?”

“Used us.”

Gibson had a succession of houses and ranches — or at least the use of them — dotted across the U.S. and Canada. Some of the places were quite nice — big estate homes on the edges of nice little college towns, or near defence contractors. There were a couple of farms — and boats. Gibson would move his “family” around for weeks at a time. Once there, he’d set up shop and start the business. The magazine sales racket that Alexei had stumbled across on board the yacht was just one enterprise of many, and they covered the whole range. One month, they’d be selling chocolates for fictitious school fundraisers; the next, running dope for one of Holden’s contacts in Seattle; three months later, picking pockets in train stations.

“There has to be an easier way for someone like Gibson to make a buck,” said Alexei.

“What do you mean?”

Alexei poured himself another mug of vodka. “I’m just saying — he can… get into your head, make you do what he wants… . Why make you pick pockets?”

“No no no,” said James, his voice slurring with the vodka. “I like pickin’ pockets. I don’ think he did that mind stuff too much — until lately.”

Alexei patted James’ arm. “Sure he didn’t.”

“But he was always a prick,” said James. “I remember he locked me in the trunk of his car — well, not his car — this stockbroker guy whose house we were using… .”

“That’s terrible,” said Alexei.

At length, Alexei began to talk about his own pain.

“The worst,” he said, “is not being able to remember anything.”

“Oh yeah — the amn-amen — amnesia.” James tapped his forehead.

“No. That was bullshit. I’m talking about not being able to remember anything at all… reliably. I have memories — but they’re not full. For instance — I can recall being in Moscow in 1986 — I remember that: Alexei was in Moscow. But do you know what comes to mind when I think of it?”

James shook his head.

“Nothing! That’s what. Just words: Alexei worked for a guy in Belarus until last year. If I think hard I can remember an address where I lived; a part of a telephone number, maybe some street names. But nothing — nothing of the senses. I don’t think I was ever in Belarus — do you know that?”

“That’s fucked up,” said James.

“Yes,” said Alexei, “it is. But,” he added, not wanting to make James feel badly having been outdone, “your story is fucked up too.”

“Thank you.”

They clinked their mugs together.

Fyodor Kolyokov’s afterlife had become like the ocean he feared so much as a dream-walker — a great, chattering place where the language of the mind became a drowning medium; a metaphoric sea all its own.

A sea of Discourse.

It was useful to think of it in such a way, at any rate; metaphor had always been Kolyokov’s lifeline in life — and here in death, it helped.

It helped a great deal in fact: for although a state might in some forms be inescapable, a metaphor sometimes pointed to an otherwise invisible exit.

And this sea — well, no matter how deep their bottoms, didn’t all seas also have a surface?

Kolyokov apprehended that surface now — by pinpricks of light, wavering down through the tumult.

So Fyodor Kolyokov swam up to them. His metaphorical lungs strained, and the sea bottom called to him, but Kolyokov strove upwards. As he drew closer, he saw what those pinpricks were — they resolved into binocular pairs looking out upon a thousand vistas. They were, Kolyokov realized, the eyes of sleepers. A thousand sleepers, maybe more.

Many of the vistas were meaningless to Kolyokov; the back of a bus seat; a magazine article; a highway ahead, white dotted line strobing beneath the hood of a car.

But one — one caught Kolyokov’s eye.

Kilodovich.

Kolyokov’s penultimate hope.

With his last strength, Kolyokov swam towards the vision of Alexei Kilodovich — closer and closer, until the sleeper’s vision became his own.

As he emerged into the young man’s vodka-soaked consciousness, Kolyokov felt like a man who’d traded one drowning for another. Alcohol was one thing that made dream-walking difficult — if he had it himself, it would send him straight to a dreamless stupor; and in another… well, it was like trying to make sense to a drunk at a party. An exercise in frustration.

Nonetheless, this time he had to try. The young man was talking to Kilodovich — and before it was too late… before he had diminished too much to even make a peep — he had to take over that conversation himself.

But first — he listened, and watched. This was the first time he’d seen Kilodovich in weeks. The man looked good — healthy. He had a discolouration on his forehead, some kind of a bruise, but that looked to be healing now. If Kolyokov had still had lips, they would have pulled into a smile. The boy looks good, he thought.

The phantom smile vanished, however, as Kolyokov listened to what Kilodovich was saying.

“The old bastard jerked me around like a puppet from the time I was a boy — just like you, James. He made me do God knows what — replaced my memories. Worked me like a Goddamn marionette. It would have been better” — Kilodovich paused to sip his drink — “it would have been better, you know, if he’d just sent me to a work camp. That, at least… That might have left me my soul.”

“Hear hear!” said Kolyokov’s host.

“Fuck Fyodor Kolyokov,” said Alexei, raising his glass. “Fuck him, wherever he is!”

Kolyokov reached out, to take hold of his host’s drunken lips and tongue and larynx. He grasped at them, but they slipped from his fingers again and again. Finally, Kolyokov let them be.

I wouldn’t know what to say with them anyway, he thought miserably, as he sank back into the murk. He opened his throat, and let the metaphor of water, the spreading Discourse, flood into his lungs. Drown me, willed Kolyokov. I’m done here. I am past done.