Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog

by Boris Akunin

  It was not Naina Georgievna at all, but a round-faced girl she did not know—her hair loose, wearing her nightshirt, with a shawl thrown over her shoulders. She could only assume that it was the maid. The girl’s eyes were closed, but her mouth, on the contrary, was slightly open. Her hair looked odd somehow—at the ends it seemed to be light-colored, but higher up, close to the forehead, it was black and shiny. Pelagia touched it and pulled her hand away with a shriek. It was wet. Her fingers had turned black, too. Blood!

  At that moment the match burned out, and Pelagia started crawling, just as she was, on all fours, back toward the windows. Her spectacles clattered as they went tumbling to the floor, but she felt no urge to go back for them.

  She had to tumble over the windowsill and run away from this terrible silent house as fast as her legs would carry her!

  But then again she heard the same sound as before—quiet, like a voice calling. Only now she could tell that it was not a call and not singing, but a weak groan. It came from somewhere in the dark depths of the house, and that meant that she simply could not run away.

  With a sinking heart the nun straightened, crossed the left half of her chest with small, rapid movements, and addressed a mental prayer to her patroness, Saint Pelagia, whom she only bothered in cases of extreme need.

  “Supplicate God for me, holy Pelagia, most pleasing to God, hear my most fervent appeal to thee, who art quick to succor, intercessor for my soul.”

  And instantly there was help from her saint, the beautiful Roman girl who was burned alive in a bull of bronze. A feeble flare of lightning dispelled the gloom for a moment and Pelagia saw a candle standing in a copper holder on the windowsill. It was a good sign, strengthening the resolve of her soul.

  Her fingers were trembling so much that the first match broke, and the second one likewise, but she lit the candle with the third, and now she could take a better look around.

  The first thing that caught her eye was the clear print of a boot on the windowsill, with the toe pointing inward, into the house. Pelagia resolutely turned her back to the window and raised the hand with the candle higher. Now she could see that a dark puddle had spread out all around the maid’s head. The spectacles that she had dropped glinted. Pelagia picked them up and saw that the left lens was cracked, but she was not upset—this was no time to worry about such things.

  The picture that emerged was as follows. When everyone in the house had already gone to bed for the night, someone had climbed in through the window, evidently making a lot of noise about it. The maid had come to see what the noise was and the intruder had struck her over the head with some heavy object.

  Pelagia squatted down and put her fingers to the temple, where the vein ought to be pulsating. The vein was not pulsating; the girl was dead. The nun murmured a prayer, but without any inspiration, because she was still listening.

  Another groan. And close by—perhaps only ten steps away.

  She took a first step, a second, a third, ready at the first sign of danger to drop the candle and dash back to the open window.

  The dark opening of a door gaped ahead of her.

  The corridor?

  Pelagia took another step and saw Naina Georgievna.

  The princess was lying on the floor in the corridor, very close to the drawing room.

  She was wearing a peignoir and a lace cap, and a single backless embroidered velvet slipper was lying to one side of her. Farther along the corridor Pelagia could see a slightly open door that obviously led to the bedroom. But Pelagia was not concerned with the arrangement of the rooms just at this moment—Naina Georgievna’s cap was completely soaked with blood, and her huge, beautiful eyes were gazing upward, absolutely motionless, with two little lights reflected in them. And the nun also spotted something black, a large stone, lying on the floor a short distance away. When she saw it, she could not help recalling Zakusai lying dead under the little tree, and she crossed herself.

  Naina Georgievna was still alive, but her life was ebbing away—the nun realized that immediately, the moment her fingers felt the sharp edge of the shattered parietal bone. When Pelagia was undergoing her probation as a novice, her first work of penance had been working in the convent hospital, so that she had ample experience in the area of medicine.

  The long eyelashes fluttered; the dying woman’s gaze focused slowly and reluctantly on the nun.

  “Ah, Sister Pelagia,” said Naina Georgievna, without the slightest surprise, even seeming pleased, but not to excess.

  Pronouncing her words clearly, but drawling very slightly (that was what happened with an injury to the skull), she declared: “I shall die now.” Having said it, she seemed slightly surprised at her own words. “I can feel it. And it’s quite all right. I’m not afraid at all. And it doesn’t hurt.”

  “I’ll run to get help,” sobbed Pelagia.

  “Don’t, it’s too late. I don’t want to be alone in the dark again.”

  “Who did this to you?”

  “I didn’t see…There was a noise. I called—Dunyasha didn’t answer. I came out to see, there was a blow. Then nothing. Then I heard a woman’s voice, far, far away. Calling: ‘Naina Georgievna.’ It was dark. I thought: Where am I, what’s happening to me…” The corners of the princess’s lips twitched—she must have been trying to smile. “I’m glad that I’m dying. It’s the best thing that could have happened. And you being here is a sign, a miracle from God. He is forgiving me. I am guilty before Him. I shan’t have time to tell you, it’s all slipping away. You just grant me absolution. It’s all right that you’re not a priest, you’re still a cleric.”

  With her teeth chattering, Pelagia began reciting the requisite words.

  “Like unto drops of rain, my evil and brief days do grow scant in the summer of life, disappearing little by little, Queen of Heaven, save me…”

  Naina Georgievna repeated: “Have mercy, have mercy”—but more and more quietly. Her strength was fading with every moment that passed. When the nun had finished reciting the canon, the princess could no longer speak and only smiled weakly.

  Pelagia leaned down over her and asked: “What was in the photograph? The one of the rainy morning?”

  She did not think there would be any answer, but a minute later the pale lips stirred.

  “An aspen…”

  “What about the aspen?”

  “A-live. And a mattock.”

  “Who’s alive? What mattock?”

  The floor squeaked behind her—not as quietly as before, but quite substantially, as if under the weight of someone’s heavy tread.

  Pelagia looked around and gasped. A black silhouette emerged from the doorway that led into the bedroom, moving slowly, as if it were not real, but part of some terrible dream.

  “Ah-ah!” The nun choked on her own cry and dropped the candle, which immediately went out.

  Clearly that was the only thing that saved her. In the ensuing pitch-black darkness she heard the sound of rapid steps and felt a draft of cold air on her forehead from something heavy that whistled past just above her head as she shrank down toward the floor.

  Without standing up, the nun spun around and darted into the drawing room. It was absolutely black in there, too, with only the vague rectangular outlines of the three windows to be seen. Behind her she could hear hoarse breathing, the scrabbling of feet on the waxed floor. Neither Pelagia nor her pursuer could see each other. Afraid of giving herself away by making a sound, she froze on the spot, staring into the darkness. Boom-boom-boom, beat her poor heart, and it seemed to Pelagia that this drumbeat filled the entire drawing room.

  Someone was moving there in the darkness, someone was coming closer down the corridor. The darkness whistled: whoosh-sh! And then again, closer now: whoosh-sh!

  He’s lashing out at random with his club or whatever he has, thought Pelagia. She could not stay where she was any longer. She swung around and dashed for the middle gray rectangle. On the way she knocked over a chair, cursing her ow
n eternal clumsiness, yet somehow managed to stay on her feet. But whoever was dogging her footsteps seemed to stumble over the chair and go crashing to the floor. A normal person would have called out or cursed, but this one did not make a sound.

  Pelagia climbed up into the window and the hem of her habit snagged on the projecting sill. She tugged as hard as she could, but the coarse material refused to yield. A hand clutched the nun tightly by the collar from behind, and at this touch the nun’s strength seemed to increase tenfold. She jerked with all her might, the habit tore at the hem and at the collar—and, thanks be to God, Pelagia went tumbling out through the window. Not even knowing if she had hurt herself, she jumped to her feet, looking to the right and to the left.

  To the right was the gate and the street. She couldn’t go that way. Before she could get the gate open he would overtake her. And even if she managed to get out into the street, she still would not be able to run away fast enough in her habit.

  This thought flashed through her mind in a fraction of a second, and in the next fraction of the same second Pelagia was already running to the left, around the corner of the house.

  Without the slightest warning or preliminary sprinkling, the rain came lashing down in such a sudden torrent that the nun almost choked. Now it was absolutely impossible for her to make out anything at all. She ran through the orchard and then through the birch grove, holding out her hands in front of her to avoid running into a tree.

  There was a flash of lightning somewhere nearby. Pelagia looked around as she ran and saw white tree trunks and a glassy wall of rain, and behind that, about twenty steps away, a black figure, moving with its arms outstretched.

  She had absolutely nowhere to go. Another ten steps and she could feel the breath of the chasm in her face. Pelagia did not see the cliff edge, she inhaled it. The deafening lashing of the rain drowned out the sound of the rushing River.

  The black chasm gaped in front of her, and footsteps splashed through puddles behind her—not too hurriedly, for her pursuer realized perfectly well that the nun had nowhere to run and he was evidently afraid that she might conceal herself under one of the bushes.

  On her left she could just make out some vague white form through the gloom. Like a finger pointing outward and slightly upward to where the first star appeared in the evening sky.

  A birch tree! The one that was dangling over the edge of the cliff!

  Pelagia ran to the doomed tree, went down on all fours, and crawled along it, trying not to think about the eighty feet of emptiness below her. She reached the crown and stopped there, putting her arms around the trunk as tightly as she could and pressing her cheek against the wet, rough bark. Could she be seen from the bank or not?

  Of course she could—black against white!

  Pelagia jerked up into a sitting position and dangled her legs into empty air. She tore off her black headscarf and dropped it. She pulled the habit up over her head, but it was heavy and swollen with water, it didn’t want to go flying down into the darkness, it caught at her elbows and her chin. When it finally yielded, it took its revenge by dragging her spectacles off with it. But what good were spectacles when she could not see anything anyway?

  Pelagia turned to face the bank and sat with her back against the thick stump of a broken branch. She was left wearing only her linen shirt and was shuddering all over now, not from the cold, but from the icy terror that was piercing to the very marrow of her bones.

  “Intercessor, Intercessor…” the nun whispered, but she simply could not remember what came next in the prayer to the Holy Virgin.

  The rain was streaming down her face, the water lashed against the crookedly protruding tree trunk, the River rumbled far below, but Pelagia’s straining ears also caught other sounds.

  The blows of wood on wood. Steps. The crunching of twigs.

  Soon this will come to an end, Pelagia told herself. It cannot go on forever. He will wander this way and that and then go away.

  But time seemed to have stopped. Perhaps this is the end of the world, the nun suddenly thought. Perhaps this is how everything will end: darkness, the gates of heaven opened, heart-stopping horror, steps in the darkness—how could anything more terrifying possibly be imagined?

  Ah, the lightning, the lightning—why did it have to choose that very moment to split the sky, just when the storm had almost moved away toward the forests beyond the River and only the rain and the wind were left!

  But the birch grove was lit by one last flash, and Pelagia saw a black figure close by, standing among the bushes, gleaming wet with rain. And even worse than that was the fact that Pelagia had also been seen.

  The steps came closer. The birch tree swayed as a foot was set on it.

  Using her hands to help her along, the nun edged backward along the trunk on her buttocks. The trunk began to creak and sag. Now it no longer hung over the chasm at an angle, but level with the ground.

  “You should leave, sir,” Pelagia shouted in a trembling voice, because she could no longer bear the silence. “I do not know who you are, I have not seen you. And so you have nothing to be afraid of. Do not take another sin on your soul; you have done enough already. And you will not get me here, or we shall both fall together.”

  The black, silent figure seemed to have realized already that the tree would not support the double burden.

  For about a minute there was silence. Then there were sounds that Pelagia could not understand at first. Squelching, champing, and knocking. The birch tree seemed to come alive; it started swaying and creaking.

  He’s digging out the root, Pelagia suddenly realized. And once she knew that, it was as if her fear had never existed. Suddenly it was clear that fear was another name for hope. And if there was absolutely no hope, there was nothing to fear.

  And then she remembered the prayer: “Zealous intercessor, beneficent Mother of God, unto you do I appeal in my sinfulness, greatest of all sinners as I am, hear the voice of my prayer and attend to my wailing and lament…”

  At the words “like unto a ship in an abysm, I do founder in the sea of my sins,” the trunk began to fall in a rapidly accelerating movement and threw the nun off into the black, echoing space.

  Throwing out her arms, Pelagia dived soundlessly and unhindered through the void toward the loud roaring and splashing.

  “…now and ever and into ages of ages. Amen.”

  The River accepted her with an unexpected, yielding softness. Pelagia did not feel any wetness, because she was already as soaked as she could possibly be, and she only guessed that she was no longer in the air but underwater because her downward movement was impeded and slowed.

  The nun flapped her arms, pushed off with her legs and went darting upward, to where it was open and airy. But the water would not let her go; it kept pulling her away somewhere, spinning her around, and now there was absolutely no air left in her lungs. I’ll count to three before I open my mouth and then come what may, the drowning woman thought. But she did not have the strength to hold out any longer. She parted her lips wide, ready to fill her lungs with the River, and her mouth drew in not water but air and flying spray, because at that very moment Pelagia’s head surfaced among the foaming waves.

  She drew in a breath greedily, and another, and another, forgetting to breathe out and making herself cough, but the underwater current was already drawing her back down, and the nun disappeared below the surface again.

  This time it proved even harder to surface—her sodden, heavy shoes kept trying to straighten Pelagia’s body out into a vertical line, to make it easier for the River to drag her to the bottom. She hunched over tight and tugged the weights off her feet, and it became easier to fight against the water. As she began floundering in the enveloping embrace of the rushing torrent, she pushed off with her feet and shot up, up, up.

  Again she began gulping in air, but the River was intent on bearing its booty on and away into the darkness, and seemed to find it amusing to spin her around, first clock
wise and then counterclockwise. Nearby, too far away for her to touch it, but close enough to be seen, there was something light-colored sticking up out of the water and trembling as it moved in the same direction and at the same speed as herself. Pelagia could not so much see as guess at the outlines of the broken branches, and she realized that it was the birch tree, her companion in misfortune.

  Crossing the gap of a mere eight feet that separated the nun from the tree proved very difficult. The River seemed to imagine that Pelagia wanted to play with it, and accepted the invitation gladly. The moment the nun came close enough to the birch tree to touch the slippery bark with her fingers, the current gently tossed the trunk aside with ease, as if it were a mere splinter of wood. Once it dragged it a long way from her and Pelagia lost sight of the outline that promised salvation. She herself could not remain afloat for very much longer—she was being tossed about too hard to the right and the left, spun around too fast, and from time to time a wave broke over her head, so that she could easily have choked on the water.

  But when Pelagia had already resigned herself to the tree’s disappearance, it swam out of the gloom unseen and hit her on the back of her head with one of its branches.

  At first the exhausted nun simply clung to the submerged trunk, delighted that she need no longer flounder and struggle. After resting for a moment, she began clambering onto the tree. She slipped off several times and scraped her shoulder, but she still managed to climb up and sit on the log, straddling it with her legs.

  Once, a long time before, in a different life, Pelagia had been a capable horsewoman, and she loved to race through the meadow early in the morning at a speed that set everything inside her quivering. She felt something of the same kind now, but she could only guess at her own movement from the wind blowing in her face, for the River had suddenly stopped moving. Pelagia had become fused with it, a single particle of it. She was simply sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench that was no longer rushing anywhere, merely rotating slowly in one place.

  Not only had time disappeared, so had space. But there was a chill cold that Pelagia had noticed before. She could feel the rain once again, beating heavily against her forehead and cheeks.