The War in the Dark

by Nick Setchfield

  He waved his cuffed hands at the silent entourage of soldiers. ‘And these men? They all believe in this stuff? Every one of them?’

  ‘Of course. If they didn’t they’d be dead.’

  ‘Who are you people?’ asked Winter. ‘You’re not like any KGB I’ve ever met. You seem to have imagination.’

  Karina ignored the slight. ‘We are a covert division of the agency, accountable only to a select part of the Council of Ministers. We fight the greater war, beyond the ideological squabble between our nations.’

  ‘The true Cold War,’ said Winter, remembering Malcolm’s words in the ballroom of the Fairbridge. ‘So you cut out the hearts of witches and steal runes from devil-worshipping plastics moguls. I had no idea you lot even existed.’

  ‘Perhaps you should know,’ said Karina. ‘Perhaps you need us. Or do you imagine that the things that live beyond the light care about our politics?’

  Winter smiled to himself. ‘Oh, I’m quite prepared to believe Satan’s a communist. I’m sure he only burns the bourgeoisie.’

  He fell back into silence, feeling the wheels on the road, the rhythmic jounce of tyre rubber. A thought came to him.

  ‘Tell me something. My colleague was tortured before he was killed. I saw the knife wounds on his body. It looked pretty savage. Were you party to that?’

  ‘I wasn’t responsible.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you if you were responsible. I asked if you were party to it.’

  ‘Albrecht inflicted the wounds. I could not have prevented it.’

  ‘Yes, you had a cover to maintain. I get that. But I’m not sure I could have stood there and watched a man suffer like that. I’m amazed you could.’

  ‘You denied that you knew him,’ said Karina, with a sting of reproach in her voice. ‘You clearly had your own cover to maintain. It’s what we’re taught.’

  ‘Did you find it easy?’

  Karina said nothing. Her face said nothing.

  ‘So why do they do it?’ pressed Winter. ‘Carve those marks? I assume those symbols have some significance beyond simple sadism?’

  She paused, as if debating whether to answer him.

  ‘Harzner practised ritual demonology,’ she stated. ‘Think of it as a transmission. The symbols are the message. The spell, if you will. The flesh is simply the means of communication. You cut the symbols into the skin to send the message. It’s flesh magic. Think of the body as a wireless set or a Morse transmitter. The pain clarifies the signal.’

  Winter didn’t hide his disgust. ‘It’s barbaric.’

  ‘It’s ritual.’

  Winter scrutinised the woman at his side. ‘You’re pretty deep into all this horseshit, aren’t you?’

  ‘And you’re a rational man, I take it?’

  ‘I have to be. I kill men because somebody tells me to. When that’s your job you need to trust that the world makes sense.’

  The truck had been climbing for a while, its wheels moving from pitted tarmac to a smoother surface that had to be grass. Now the vehicle lurched to a halt with a final, rattling shudder. Winter heard the thrum of the engine die, felt its vibration leave his bones. They had arrived.

  He was seized by the shoulders and pushed through the gap in the canvas. The air hit him, sharp and galvanising after the fug of sweat and diesel in the back of the truck. One of the soldiers shoved him like baggage. Karina put her hand to the man’s arm, quietly dissuading him from doing it again. The Russian obeyed, reluctantly, allowing Winter to walk forward with a modicum of dignity.

  Malykh opened the passenger door and jumped out, the soles of his boots thumping the ground. He buttoned his heavy leather coat against the night chill and gave Winter a quick, contemptuous look. And then he gave an order in Russian, summoning the rest of the squad behind him. The incognito troopers fell in. The motorbike outriders roared ahead, leaving ribbons of tyre track in the mud.

  The group climbed a grassy incline, rising to a spot that gave them a view of the great, empty plain of the Hungarian puszta. It was a profoundly desolate sprawl of marshland, treeless and bleak. Even in daylight, Winter imagined, it would be leached of colour, a landscape of dirt and scrub, broken only by pockets of rainwater.

  This was the border. If Vienna was a place where loyalties shifted like mist then this was where the division between East and West lay scored into the earth.

  An immense fence rose in the distance. It was forged from barbed wire, knitted into vicious twists, its vast, razored length dominating and defining the horizon. Winter estimated that it had to be as high as a house. As he assessed its span he saw bodies caught on snarls of wire, snagged like rag dolls. Political fugitives, no doubt, seeking escape but claimed by soldiers’ bullets on the very cusp of freedom. Or perhaps the fence was electrified and their lives had simply been lost to a lethal surge of voltage. Whatever the case, they had been left there. Warnings, he imagined. Twentieth-century voodoo totems.

  The fence was punctuated by wooden watchtowers. They squatted like crates on stilts, high above the ground. Some of them contained men with rifles. Others held a dazzle of searchlights. The guards tilted the drum-like discs into the night and Winter watched as the beams prowled the sky, cast against the stars and smudges of cloud.

  One of the lights found them. Winter raised a hand to his eyes, squinting into the brutal white glare. He saw Karina beside him, bleached chalk-pale by the beam. Her arm moved to the small canvas bag that hung on her shoulder, her hand fluttering over it, almost protectively. It seemed to be an instinctive action. Winter had noticed the bag in the truck and now he remembered how her hand had moved to it during the journey, just as automatically. He found himself wondering what the bag contained.

  Winter and the Russians followed the path that had been carved in the mud by the motorbikes. The light stayed on them, bullyingly bright. It seemed to want to pin them to the ground but they kept walking. Finally the spotlight swung away, sweeping left, illuminating another dismal stretch of marshland.

  Winter saw a cluster of vehicles parked at the border. One of them was a British car – a Jaguar Mk II sedan, its elegant curves incongruous against the functional struts of the fence. It signalled the presence of a bigwig. Faulkner himself, perhaps. Next to the Jaguar was a van, a drab Commer, as calculatedly anonymous as the Russian truck. Winter had no doubt which of the two vehicles would be returning him to Britain.

  A group of men in suits and overcoats were gathered by the Jag. To their right was a knot of border guards, kitted out in caps and greatcoats, their dogs leashed but alert. Even at a distance Winter could sense the tension between the two factions. If Vienna allowed rival ideologies to breathe the same air, swill the same coffee, then the border burned away all such ambiguities. Here East and West came together to stand and stare, daring the other to flinch.

  Yes, there was Faulkner. His silver thatch was unmistakable. He acknowledged Winter with a brisk, businesslike nod. Winter felt almost proud to have prised the old bastard out of London. If Faulkner was overseeing this handover personally then it was clearly a big deal. Winter wondered again just who he was being exchanged for. He was curious to learn his market value.

  There was an unspoken etiquette to all this. The Russian bikes had stopped some thirty feet from the British vehicles. It was a discreet, courteous distance, marking out a strip of neutral territory between the two groups. The exchange would occur in the middle of this space, the prisoners traded with precise timing.

  Winter stood behind the bikes, flanked by Malykh and Karina. He could hear the engines hum, low and restless, as if the pair of M-72s were poised to tear away at any moment. One of the riders flashed a headlight into the dark. A moment later there came an answering flash from the Commer van.

  Contact had been established.

  One of the British men broke from the others. He stepped away from the Jaguar and walked towards the waiting Russians, his pace determined but cautious. He was a slight, stooped figure, wrapped in a sheepskin coat
that seemed at least one size too big for him. The wind toyed with the unruly white hair that crowned his high, scholastic forehead. There was a thick woollen scarf at his throat.

  Winter found himself shunted a few paces forward. Malykh had his arm, the Russian’s fingers as tight as a clamp. Karina stayed close.

  The advancing figure drew nearer, his breath trailing like smoke in the cold air. Now Winter could see that the man was in his sixties, possibly older. He wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, their owlish sweep accentuating his donnish appearance. And there was a book in his hand, plump with gilt-edged pages and bound in leather. It was the King James Bible.

  The man met them at the midpoint. He announced himself with a wet, bronchial cough and tugged at his scarf, loosening the wool to reveal the white band of a dog collar at his throat.

  ‘Father Neville Katsworth,’ he declared. ‘Her Majesty’s exorcist.’

  16

  The priest regarded Winter with clear disdain.

  ‘So you’re the silly bastard we’re freeing this monster for.’ He coughed again, the edges of his glasses glinting as they caught the sweep of a searchlight. The beam momentarily haloed the clergyman’s head, revealing a mottled terrain of skin, liver spots scattered like map markings.

  Winter nodded. ‘Yes. I am. Not that I have the blindest idea who I’m being exchanged for.’

  The priest gave a bitter little chuckle. ‘Been rather kept in the dark, have we?’

  Winter smiled, bleakly. ‘Seems to be standard operational procedure in my life these days.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’re worth it. Somebody must think so, anyway. Bloody deluded though they must be.’

  ‘We have an agreement,’ interjected Malykh, clearly impatient.

  Katsworth turned to study the Russian officer. His expression held even more contempt than the look he had given Winter.

  ‘Do we indeed? My government may have agreed, Colonel. I certainly didn’t. But I’m here as a loyal servant. Their will be done. And to hell with the consequences. Quite literally, I imagine.’

  Winter saw that the priest was toying with the Bible, absently skimming its pages with his thumb. It seemed like an anxious tic. The nail of the thumb was chipped, too, the flesh around it torn and raw. This was clearly a nervous man.

  ‘So tell me,’ he said. ‘Who am I being exchanged for?’

  ‘A hero of the motherland,’ said Malykh, supplying an answer before Katsworth had a chance to speak.

  The priest snorted, triggering another phlegmy combustion in his throat. He fingered his dog collar, as if keen to loosen it.

  ‘A hero indeed. Is such a creature really a hero to you lot? A beast that tears the skulls from brave young boys? What a bloody perverted idea of heroism you people have.’

  ‘We were at war,’ said Malykh. ‘I imagine you have no stomach for such a thing.’

  Katsworth gave him a fastidiously cold look. ‘I was with the Spanish Maquis in the battle for Paris. I cast out infinitely nastier bastards than you. And may I remind you – I’m the fellow who put this vile thing away.’

  ‘I know,’ said Malykh, levelly. ‘And I’m sure that it remembers, Father.’

  Katsworth met his eyes. ‘I imagine it does.’

  Winter looked beyond Katsworth, back to the huddle of people gathered around the Jaguar. He counted three figures – Faulkner and two men he took to be fellow agents. They had the burly, anonymous look of a private security detail. There was no sign of a waiting prisoner.

  ‘So where is he, then?’ Winter asked, genuinely curious. ‘This man I’m being traded for? Have you got him in the van?’

  Katsworth gave a teacherly shake of the head, his white hair rioting in the wind. ‘Dear God,’ he said. ‘They really don’t tell you anything, do they?’

  He took the Bible in both hands and held it in front of him. There was a gilt cross embossed on the cracked leather cover. For a moment it shone with the borrowed dazzle of the searchlight.

  ‘I advise you to stand away,’ said the cleric. There was a sense of exhaustion to his words. It was the voice of an old man now, tired of the fight.

  Winter fell back with the others, though he had no idea why he was giving ground to the priest. He saw the man’s hands clamp the Bible, tighten around it, the leather binding buckling beneath his ragged fingers. Katsworth closed his eyes. He began to mutter, a low, incantatory drone of Latin, the words half heard, half lost on the wind.

  Winter caught some of the phrases. Libertas. Interminatus. Christus. He knew enough of the language to guess their meaning. This was some kind of invocation to Christ, a plea for mercy and freedom. As he watched, the clergyman’s eyelids quivered. Soon they were fluttering at speed, rippling over the whites of his eyes. The priest’s voice grew in volume.

  Libertas. Interminatus. Christus. Monstrum.

  Something shifted in the air. It was the faintest, subtlest change to the atmosphere, like the first trace of rain on your skin before the clouds broke. Winter was barely aware of it to begin with but then he felt it in the pores of his face. A sudden veil of moisture, hot and prickling, as if the air itself was beginning to boil.

  He glanced around him. The Russians were concentrating on Katsworth, their eyes fixed to the priest as he brandished the Bible like a Hyde Park preacher. High in the watchtowers the guards were equally captivated, leaning over the walls of the turrets. Some of the patrol dogs began to whine. It was a confused, distressed sound.

  Winter could hear something else, too, something barely perceptible beneath the ever-louder chant of Latin and the rising murmur of the wind. It was a noise like tiny, tinkling bells, a jangle of metal against metal. He looked for its source and saw a flash of silver in the darkness. There, tied to the wire fence, a collection of crucifixes spun and clashed, stirred by the breeze. Who had placed them there? Political protestors? No, it had to be the guards. So much for their godless ideology, thought Winter. Communism clearly only made sense in daylight. The dark demanded an older faith.

  Katsworth continued to chant. Now his voice was almost confrontational, the words hurled against the wind. He kept his left hand locked around the Bible, the book bending in his grasp. With his right hand he made what looked to be holy gestures. Winter recognised the sign of the trinity but the rest was a blur, the old man’s fingers moving like nimble spiders. Libertas. Interminatus. Christus. Monstrum. The priest’s eyes were white slits behind his spectacles.

  There was another wave of wet heat. The moisture in the air clung to their faces.

  Winter turned to Karina. ‘What the hell’s happening here?’

  The patrol dogs howled, their anxiety escalating. It was a pitiful noise, torn from deep in the animals’ throats.

  Karina stared ahead, undaunted. ‘You are getting your freedom.’

  A sudden gust of wind swept the plain, a squall that raced across the marshland and made a rattling assault on the fence. The little knot of crucifixes rang as they smashed against the wire, clanging like keys.

  And then there was a moment of impossible stillness. The wind was gone, the stars frozen. It was as if, for a second, the world had simply stopped.

  Then came a sound like the sky tearing in two.

  It roared over the puszta, as loud as a brawl of storms. Winter had read about sonic booms – modern jet fighters made them as they stabbed through the sound barrier – but this noise was beyond anything he had ever imagined. It had to be what an A-bomb sounded like in the very second of detonation.

  A cobalt-blue light filled the sky, electrically bright.

  Along the length of the watchtower every last searchlight shattered, the orbs of glass bursting as if ruptured by some intolerable internal pressure. The shards rained to earth. One struck Malykh as he raised a fist to shield himself. He gave a guttural Russian oath.

  Winter also covered his eyes, as much against the glare of the light as the volley of glass. Squinting, he saw that the unearthly gleam had a point of origin. The light forme
d a tunnel, radiating from a bright blue hole that had been punched out of the darkness.

  Something walked from the heart of the light.

  For a moment it wasn’t quite human. Winter glimpsed a flurry of shapes, blurring like photographic transparencies laid over one another. There was something subliminally insectile about them. Were those wings he could see, just for an instant? A multitude of legs? Winter had a sudden, shuddering memory of the creature he had encountered in that dark little church in Notting Hill, the one who had worn the body of a priest before all those bugs had tumbled out of him.

  The figure solidified. For a moment its movements were twitchy, fitful, as if its limbs were remembering how to respond. And then it seemed to gather itself.

  It emerged from the light as a woman.

  She wore a black dress, formal in cut, and there was a neat black hat on her head, resting on a tight black bundle of hair. Her face was obscured by a veil, the lace freckled with black dots, thick as flies. A sharp, bony jaw lay beneath it. There was nothing hesitant about her movements now. In fact she walked with an incongruous grace, her heels knifing through the sludge of mud and rainwater. She was as thinly elegant as a spider.

  ‘Who is this?’ Winter hissed, unable to take his eyes from her. The bright blue light shrank and dimmed as the woman approached. Soon it had disappeared completely, leaving only her silhouette.

  ‘The Widow of Kursk,’ said Karina, simply.

  ‘Am I supposed to know who the hell that is? What’s her real name?’

  Karina spoke quickly, obviously irritated by the question. ‘Her other names aren’t meant to be spoken. They’re meant to be carved in flesh.’

  ‘She’s some sort of demon, is she? I’ve already met one, in London. I had no idea these things even existed.’

  Karina smiled, a little smugly. ‘That’s how most people get through this life.’

  ‘I should have been told.’

  ‘British Intelligence captured this one in 1949. They’ve held her ever since.’

  Winter remembered Malcolm’s mention of a captured demon. And yes, he had said Kursk, hadn’t he? ‘Held her where?’ he asked. ‘Some kind of prison?’