“This is my duty,” I said. “This is my responsibility.”
“No!” Vassily threw his hands up. “You’re two days into this gig, and look at you! Two days, Alexi! Look at you!”
“They weed out the weak. You want me to look weak in front of everyone?” I asked, incredulous.
“No one believes you’re weak. They think you’re a fucking psycho, but they don’t think you’re weak.” Vassily’s face was stormy.
“You do,” I said. “You interrupted me when Petro was giving me shit. You think I’m weak.”
“Petro was stomping all over you. What was I supposed to do? Stand by? Is that what you’d do if someone was doing that to me?”
“Of course not.” The very idea was an affront. “I’d never abandon you. But I need to find Vincent.”
“No, you don’t. You need to survive. That’s what we do.” Vassily advanced on me, stabbing his finger against my chest. If I’d been stronger, I’d have caught his wrist. But I was tired, and this was too much already. “The graveyard is full of cowboys who tried to rush off into the sunset, Alexi. You think you’re any better than them?”
My eyes narrowed. “I’ll finish what I started. What kind of Vor v Zakone talks this way?”
“One who’s had to bury his mother, his father, and the rest of his whole fucking family!” Vassily shoved back from me and stalked out the open door, slamming it behind him.
In the sudden silence, Binah jumped onto the sink and arched against my arm. I stroked her as I listened to Vassily curse his way down the hallway. The cat jumped when his bedroom door slammed, and then resumed purring.
The outburst left me windless. Not angry. Anger made me stronger, not tired. I picked up Binah, draping her over my shoulder, and cast one sidelong look back at my haggard face and slumped shoulders before I limped away to the cold solace of my room.
The empty room seemed to hold the ghosts of every voice, every interaction I’d had in the past twenty-four hours. I set Binah on the bed while I found a spare set of gloves and looked down at her. She looked up at me with the same quiet wisdom I’d seen in Semyon’s apartment. That was what her name meant. Wisdom.
I saw the same depth in her eyes that I'd seen in Kutkha's... and that reminded me of him. As my attention shifted back, I could see him in my mind's eye.
“So,” I said aloud. “Kutkha. You have some explaining to do.”
The faded awareness of my Neshamah sharpened in the moment before his voice returned to me in the stillness of the room. “Do I, now? Do you think your own immortal soul is some fetch to be ordered about the place, Alexi?”
I walked to my altar and eased down to the floor in front of it. I couldn’t kneel, not with my knee the way it was, so I sort of leaned over until I could drop to my ass on the ground, legs in front. “Please, then.”
“Well, never let it be said that I did not care for my Ruachim. I will do my best to explain your circumstances, on one condition.”
"I didn’t know one’s own immortal soul set conditions for information." I reached across to beckon for the cat. "Before I make any more contracts with you, spirit, you need to prove you are what you say you are. ‘Kutkha’ is not even a real name. Kutkh was a Siberian culture hero and, I might add, a trickster.”
“That he was: I am an admirer of his. You could just as readily call me Prometheus or Lucifer—it matters not. None of them are my true name, but you don’t have a larynx capable of pronouncing the words which comprise it, Hu-Man.”
A ruffling passed through the room, a small breeze. Binah hopped down to the floor and came to sit beside me. She was watching something, her eyes tracking motion I could not see.
“What you do not see, Alexi, is that you must prove yourself to me. You feel the truth of my being here. You accepted the bargain. I am not yours: you are mine.”
“So, what is your condition, then?” I spoke cautiously. It was true that I had felt his arrival like a shattering, an epiphany, but spirits were often deceptive. I have never trusted feelings without evidence. I looked over at the collection of books around the altar table. Not a single one held the knowledge that could help me.
“You must eat eggs,” Kutkha said, after a suitably dramatic pause. “As many eggs as it takes to feel full. Then, you must shower and put yourself to bed.”
That was it? Before I could ask, the sudden desire for food overwhelmed all other thought. Fried eggs and sour cream. Ten minutes ago, I would have thrown up if I’d smelled food, but I found myself staggering up on my feet and limping to the kitchen before I really knew what I was doing, possessed of an impossibly strong desire to eat. Eggs, onions, sour cream. Greens, oh yes. Kale or spinach. How long had it been since I ate?
Aware that I’d been struck around the head, I started with two eggs. Five eggs later, I finally turned the stove off and leaned back from my plate at the kitchen table with a bulging stomach and surprisingly little nausea. I didn’t feel Kutkha’s presence again until we were back in the darkness of the bedroom and sprawled on top of the covers, stomach bulging. The rhythmic sound of the air conditioner washed over me in cool thrumming waves. I did feel better.
“So.” Kutkha seemed to speak from the ceiling over my head. “I suppose the first thing you want to know is how I come to be with you.”
“I want to know how to cast magic properly,” I replied tersely. “And why God, or this G.O.D figures into this.”
“Patience,” Kutkha replied. “To put it rationally, GOD is a living organism which spans all known realities, of which every living thing is a single particle in its many billions of strands of genetic material. It does not have a HuMan face. It heeds no religion and knows nothing except itself.”
Having it laid out so blandly, so efficiently, was oddly challenging. “I think we’re talking about different gods.”
“There are no gods as you understand,” Kutkha said. “No heaven or hell. No angels, though there are demons.”
Just as well I was an atheist. I’d never found meaning in Judaism, the religion of my mother, or entertained joining the rest of the Brighton Beach locals at their stuffy Ukrainian Eastern Orthodox church. I had a powerful sense of there being more “something” within myself, and possessed theoretical knowledge of a lot of different faiths, and that was the sum total of my spirituality.
“And is this... information that Carmine knows?” I was dubious. He hadn’t really seemed like the philosophical type.
“That depends on his Neshamah and whether or not he listens to it,” Kutkha said. “Its age and experience. Its... motives... for empowering him. He seems like a powerful Phitometrist to you, but I suspect he has little Pressure behind his Art.”
“Pressure.” And Flow, which my Neshamah had remarked on before. I frowned, thinking. “If Flow is the ability to... release or control Phi, which I assume is magical energy, then I can make an educated guess and say that Pressure has to do with how much is in reserve.”
“Yes. That is why it is important to understand the structure of a HuMan being, from GOD to Nephesh. Phi is the sap that flows through your being. It can be expressed as magic. Some branches are blocked up: the flow is stilted, and it and the fruit withers.”
I could guess at his implication. Binah hopped up beside me on the bed, folded herself into my armpit, and began to knead my shoulder. I closed my eyes, drinking in the sky-blue image-texture of her purr. “So I need a better magical framework than what I have, then?”
“You already have a framework,” Kutkha replied. Its voice was more strident now, though still sibilant and ethereal. “You merely need to free up the energy to fuel your will. To cease being static, you must submit to Awe.”
I felt the corners of my eyes crinkle as I squinted up into the dark. “I don’t know what you mean. There’s factors and complexity totally unaccounted for. Carmine has magical tools, and those... summoned dogs of his. Can you do that?”
"No. Do not envy him, my Ruach." Kutkha was suddenly very serious an
d... uncomfortable. "The hounds are his own Neshamah... he is like a deformed baby born with their organs exposed to the air. He fancies himself and his Neshamah to be powerful, but only because his exposed virgin flesh has not yet been touched by infection. His time might come... whether in this lifetime or the next."
"You need to tell me more about this," I said. "Don't hide from me, Kutkha."
"I plan to." In my mind's eye, he tucked his head under his wing. "But it is time for you to sleep."
"God, not you too. Kutkha-"
“‘Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles and the water is clear?’” Kutkha recited the half-remembered verse in a softer voice. “‘Can you remain unmoving until the right action presents itself?’”
“The Tao Te Ching.” A pang shot through my chest. It reminded me of Vassily, alone in his room down the hall. “Verse Fifteen.”
“Yes.” Kutkha formed the word strangely, like an incantation.
“In other words, you’re telling me to shut up.”
There was no reply, save for a vague sense of amusement which might have been my own.
I had a feeling that my sleep was destined to be restless. The black sucked me under like thick mud, but I was lucid. I knew I was asleep when I could no longer hear the air conditioner or Binah’s rumbling purr. The brief period of unconsciousness ended when I was ejected from nothing onto a dusty sandstone floor.
The dust in my nose felt very real as I snorted it out. The hallway was cool, and as I lifted my face, a perfumed wind danced across my skin and ruffled the downy hairs of my face.
Ahead of me was a doorway, hung with gauzy drapes that ballooned shallowly on the air. Beyond them was a darkness so deep it throbbed. A flight of stairs was behind me, and I knew without a doubt that they led up to the usual site of my lucid dreams, that childhood house with the haunted, empty rooms. I turned back to face the passage ahead. I could see nothing past the threshold, and for some reason, my throat clotted with fear.
I pushed myself to walk, pass the drapes, and enter into a blackness so thick it pressed into my nose and mouth like fingers. It sucked me into a bell-shaped chamber, a natural cavern with walls that ran with pure water. A plain silver ring was set into the polished black floor, thrumming like a dynamo core. A small woman with her wispy mousy hair up in a twist stood in the center, stripped to the waist, a proud cant to her jaw, neck, and shoulders. In one hand, she held a crescent sickle. In the other, she grasped my father’s head.
“Nikla.” My hands ached. I stepped to the edge of the circle in disbelief, my feet wooden and klutzy. “Mother... you’re dead.”
My mother was a tiny woman, tiny and thin. I looked more like her than I did my father, her prominent cheekbones and the same large, fine-bridged nose. My eyes were the same odd white-gray as my father’s. Nikla’s eyes were the blue of a summer sky, and they blazed with a radiant inner fire.
“Oleksiy.” She uttered my name thickly, stressing it in the way it was actually meant to be spelled, instead of the way I’d learned to write it at school. “It is time for you to choose.”
“I already chose.” My voice rang out, echoing. I tried to move towards her. When my toes touched the silver line, it rippled, halting my advance. “I told Kutkha that I agreed. What else is there?”
She threw the head on the floor in front of me, beyond the threshold of the circle. It landed with a dull crack on the stone.
Grigori Sokolsky was a bulldog of a man, even in death. His violet tongue lolled from behind his teeth. His eyes were missing, torn from his skull, and ichor gushed from the empty sockets. As I watched, Hebrew letters etched themselves across his brow, as if they were being drawn through the pallid flesh with the tip of a knife. אמת. Truth.
“Understanding.” My mother’s voice was as I’d always imagined it, light and dry and sweet. “It X’d me. It wants to X you, too.”
“Ex’d you?” I was rooted to the spot, staring at my father’s head. “Who?”
The black substance that leaked from Grigori’s eyes gurgled, slopping out with sudden force. The Aleph turned to an X. The remaining letters formed a wholly different word. Met. Death.
“DOG is GOD backwards,” my mother said. “They’re coming for you.”
My extremities were buzzing. I took a step backwards. “You need to stop speaking in riddles. I can’t...”
The black stuff was creeping across the floor towards me in slow motion, crawling like a twist of worms. Grigori’s mouth worked, fishlike, and then retched a great ball of the stuff, hacking it onto the marble. The stone was black, but in the presence of the creeping oil, the marble seemed colorful, nuanced and reflective. Wide-eyed, I backpedaled as it reached for me from the ground. The dead man’s skull was beginning to dissolve and wheezed a tiny sigh as it crumpled. Metallic, insectoid things moved around inside the remains, stamping and needling one another as they strove to escape the brood.
“The Hunt.” When I looked up, the woman who had been my mother no longer resembled her. This woman was tall and pale skinned, milk white, her body lean, athletic and androgynous. Her hair was the brilliant white of burning magnesium, falling in a straight liquid pour down her body to her waist. I couldn’t meet her eyes. They were a blue that had never existed in nature, impossible and terrifying. “The Hunt, Alexi, the endless question quest. They will X me. They X’d you!”
The black substance reared and lunged at me as I stumbled back and then fled the room, back through the shrouded entrance and out into the sandstone hallway. It was strung in steely cobwebs, and in them hung chittering, shrieking insects. They had flat matte bodies and gaping pincer maws with needle-thin proboscises.
Let us X you, Alexi... X you X you X you X you X YOU X YOU X YOU X YOU!
I shouted at them wordlessly, covering my head. Things with too many legs fell on me, biting and sucking and feeding. I pulled one from my arm, and it came out with a thin plume of blood. The insect had my father’s face. I crushed it with a snarl, barreling up the stairs. On my way past, I rubbed myself against the walls, the doorway, trying to scrape them off. “Fuck you both! You’re dead! You’re all dead!”
I nearly fell into the room at the apex of the stairs. It was no room I was familiar with in the house of my nightmares. It was long, like a chapel walkway, and candle-lit. At the other end was a crucifix. And I was nailed to it.
He was me, and not me. Bald, tattooed, incredibly powerful in the upper body, his legs withered, but I knew, somehow, that we were one and the same man. This other Alexi was eviscerated, shuddering around long iron spikes driven through his limbs. His mouth had been stuffed with his own intestines. He was chewing them. Slowly.
X you X you X you X you...
“You asked me to tell you everything.” From behind me, a pair of feathered obsidian arms reached around my heaving chest in a surprisingly soft, sensual embrace. Kutkha hooked his obsidian talons painlessly through my chest, all the way to my heart. It didn’t hurt. I felt it penetrate, and a thrill passed through me from nape to tailbone as I stared in fascinated disgust at the scene ahead. “This is the infection, Alexi. It X'd you before... will it X you again?”
I threw myself out of bed in the pitch darkness with a shout, skin still crawling with the sensation of biting insects. I promptly rediscovered my left knee as it buckled and sent me down hard to the floor.
Snarling in pain, I pulled myself up using the edge of the bed and stumbled to the light switch, knife in hand. I'd pulled it from the sheath without realizing what I'd done, clutching it as I recovered in the blurry light, fighting for breath. My forearms and neck were blotchy with hives. Binah was gone, hidden somewhere. “Binah? Vassily?”
There was no reply and no sound. I limped down to the second bedroom and cracked it open to look inside. “Vasya? Vassily?”
Vassily’s room was empty. The air conditioner was off, the room warm and humid. I looked over the rumpled covers and the gathering pile of dirty laundry and felt a stirring of unea
se in the pit of my gut. A growing sense of wrongness haunted me through the length of the apartment on the way back to the kitchen.
A note had been left on the kitchen table. “Gone to Mariya’s. Don't fucking kill yourself.”
A tight, unpleasant feeling washed over me, another wave of anxiety-fueled déjà vu that had nothing to do with the note. I had about a second between the kick of intuition and the sound of someone banging heavily on my front door. One, two, three.
My eyes slid across, then down. I was still holding the knife. The silence hung heavily in the house for a thick heartbeat before the pounding resumed.
I knew better than to look through the peephole or open the door on the chain. Someone had already tried to kill me once this week, and I wasn’t about to fall for one of my own tricks: knock on the door, put the muzzle to the wood, and fire two or three times. If the door was thin enough and the gun big enough, it was a cheap way to do a fast job.
I padded down the hall slowly on stocking feet and swung quietly into the doorway of the den. Ducked down. “Who is it?”
For a moment, there was no reply. Then, a thick, wet voice spoke from the other side of the wooden barrier.
“Yuri. Yuri Beretzniy.
Chapter 11
My eyes widened. I knew the man’s voice well enough, but hesitated before I went for the door.
“Hold on, Yuri. Give me... give me a moment,” I called out and backed into the den. I folded the knife back into its grip. It didn’t feel big enough. I needed shoes, a real weapon. A gun. There was a spare pistol in my desk drawer.
I went to my study. There, my gaze fell on the sledgehammer in its case. The iron gleamed dully in the light from outside, and briefly, I found myself torn between the hammer and the gun. The hammer had an intimidation factor the gun did not, but I wasn’t as confident it would protect me if something went south. I lifted up the lid, hand hovering over the haft before I changed my mind and went for the desk drawer and the .38 Special inside. I picked it up, checked the clip and the safety, and jammed it under the waistband of my pants.
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