“You hear it too?” Menshov said. “I mean, don’t hear it.”
“Where’s everyone? Everything?”
There was no answer, and one wasn’t needed—or even possible. The house stood small and still, its whitewashed walls clear and bright against the cornflower-blue of the sky, the straw thatched roof golden in the sunlight. Kovalevsky knew it was cool and dry inside, dark and quiet like a secret forest pool, and yet it took Menshov’s pleading stare to persuade him to step over the threshold into the quiet deep darkness, the dirt floor soft under his boots.
He followed Menshov to the small bedroom, vertiginously like Kovalevsky’s own—square window, clean narrow bed covered with a multicolored quilt—his heart hammering at his throat. He felt his blood flow away from his face, leaving it cold and numb, even before he saw the grotesque paw, a few drops and smudges of blood around it like torn carnations. But the paw itself pulled his attention—it was black and already shriveling, its toes an inky splash around the rosette of curving, sharp talons, translucent like mother-of-pearl. If it was a cat’s paw, it used to belong to one very large and misshapen cat.
“My God,” Kovalevsky managed, even as he thought that with matters like these, faith, despite being the only protection, was no protection at all. His mind raced, as he imagined over and over—despite willing himself to stop with such foolish speculation—he imagined Olesya leaving his house that morning, the stump of her human arm dripping with red through cheesecloth wrapped around it, cradled against her lolling breast.
“Unclean forces are at work,” Menshov said. “And we are lost, lost.”
Kovalevsky couldn’t bring himself to disagree. He fought the Red and the Black armies, and he wasn’t particularly afraid of them—but with a single glance at the terrible paw, curling on the floor in all its unnatural plainness, resignation took hold, and he was ready to embrace whatever was coming, as long as it was quick and granted him oblivion.
He tried to look away, but the thing pulled at his glance as if it was a string caught in its monstrous talons, and the more he looked, the more he imagined the battle that took place here: in his mind’s eye, he saw the old man, the hilt of the saber clutched in both hands as if he became momentarily a child instead of a seasoned warrior, his naked chest hairless and hollow, backing into the corner. And he saw the beast—the paw expanded in his mind, giving flesh and image to the creature to which it was attached. It was a catlike thing, but with a long muzzle, and tufted ears and chin. It stood on its stiff hind legs, unnaturally straight, without the awkward slumping and crouching usually exhibited by the four-legged beasts, its long paws hanging limply by its sides for just a second, before snatching up and swiping at Menshov.
Kovalevsky always had vivid imagination, but this seemed more than mere fancy—it was as if the detached paw had the power to reach inside his eyeballs somehow and turn them to hidden places, making him see—see as Menshov staggered back, the saber now swinging blindly. He propped his left hand against the bedpost, gaining a semblance of control, just as the monster reached its deformed paw and swept across Menshov’s bare shoulder, drawing a string of blood beads across it.
The old man hissed in pain and parried, just as the creature stepped away, hissing back in its low throbbing manner. With every passing second, Kovalevsky’s mind imagined the creature with greater and greater clarity, just as the still-sane part of him realized that the longer he stared at the accursed paw, the closer he moved to summoning the creature itself.
He clapped his hand over his eyes, twisting away blindly. Whatever strange power had hold of him deserved the name Menshov gave it—it was unclean and ancient, too old for remembering and cursed long before the days of Cain.
Menshov’s mind was apparently on a similar track. “If we die here,” he said, quietly, “there’s no way for us but the hellfire.”
“Would there be another way for us otherwise?”
Menshov stared, perturbed. “We’ve kept our oath to the Emperor. We fought for the crown, and we fought with honor.”
“That’s what I mean.” Kovalevsky forced his gaze away from the paw and turned around, as little as he liked having it behind his back. “Come now, let’s see who else can we find. And as soon as we do, we best leave—if they let us, if we can.”
They searched for hours—but no matter how many doors they knocked on, only empty shaded coolness greeted them, as if every house in the village had been gutted, hollowed of all human presence, and left as an empty decoration to await a new set of actors. And the more they saw of it, the more convinced Kovalevsky grew that the buildings must’ve been like that—empty, flat—before they’d moved in. Where were the villagers? And, most importantly, where was Olesya? Was she just a vision, a sweet nightmare created from his loneliness and fear, aided by the soothing latex of the poppies in the yard and Patsjuk’s dark green tea?
“Was it always like this?” Menshov said when the two of them finally stopped, silent and sweating. “Do you remember what this place was like when we first got here?”
Kovalevsky shook his head, then nodded. “I think it was . . . normal. A normal village.”
He remembered the bustling in the streets, the peasants and the noisy geese, bleating of goats, the clouds of dust under the hooves of the White Army’s horses when they rode in. Did they ride in or did they walk? If they rode, where were the horses—gone, swept away with everything else?
And then he remembered—a memory opened in his mind like a fissure—he remembered the view of the village and how quiet it was, and how he said to a man walking next to him (they must’ve been on foot, not horseback) that it was strange that there was no smoke coming from the chimneys. And then they walked into the village, and there was bustle and voices and chimneys spewed fat white smoke, and he’d forgotten all about it. “Maybe not so normal,” he said. “I remember not seeing any smoke when we first approached.”
Menshov nodded, his gray mustache shaking. “I remember that too! See, it was like an illusion, a night terror.”
“The whole town?” Kovalevsky stopped in his tracks, his mind struggling to embrace the enormity of the deception—this whole time, this whole village . . . It couldn’t be. “What about Patsjuk and his tavern? We were just there. Is it still . . . ?”
“Let’s find out.”
As they walked back, the dusty street under their feet growing more insubstantial with every passing moment, Kovalevsky thought that perhaps this all was the result of this running out of land—running out of the world. After all, if there was no place left for the White Army, wouldn’t it be possible that some of them simply ran and tripped into some nightmare limbo? It seemed likely, even.
The tavern stood flat and still, and it seemed more like a painting than an actual building—it thinned about the edges, and wavered, like hot air over a heated steppe. Illusion, unclean forces.
Patsjuk sat on the steps, and seemed real enough—made fatter, more substantial by the fact that Olesya perched next to him, her round shoulder, warm and solid under her linen shirt, resting comfortably against the tavern’s owner’s. Both her hands were intact, and Kovalevsky breathed a sigh of relief, even if he wasn’t sure why.
She grinned when she saw Kovalevsky. “There you are,” she said. “See, you took my medicine, took my poison, and now you’re lost. The loving goat-mother will absorb you, make you whole again.”
Menshov grasped Kovalevsky’s shoulder, leaned into him with all his weight. “Why?” he said.
A pointless question, of course, Kovalevsky thought. There were never any whys or explanations—there was only the shortage of land. By then, the ground around them heaved, and the dead rose, upright, the nails of their hands still rooting them to the opened graves, their eyes closed and lips tortured. The streets and the houses twisted, and the whole world became a vortex of jerking movement, everything in it writhing and groaning—and only the tavern remained still in the center of it.
Kovalevsky’s hand, led by
a memory of the time when he cared enough to keep himself alive, moved of its own volition, like a severed lizard’s tail, and slid down his leg and into his boot, grasping for the horn handle of the knife he always had on him. He hadn’t remembered it, but his body had, and jerked the knife out, assuming a defensive, ridiculous posture. He swiped at the air in front of him, not even trying for Patsjuk’s belly, then turned around and ran.
His boots sunk into the road as if it were molasses, but he struggled on, as the air buzzed around him and soon resolved into bleating of what seemed like a thousand goats. Transparent dead hands grasped at him, and the black thing, more goat than a cat now, tried to claw its away out of his skull. Kovalevsky screamed and struggled against the wave of ancient voices, but inhuman force turned him back, back, to face the horrors he tried to run from.
So this is how it is, Kovalevsky thought, just as Olesya’s face stretched into a muzzle, and her lower jaw hinged open, unnaturally wide. Without standing up, she extended her neck at Menshov. The old man grasped at his belt, uselessly, looking for his saber, even as Olesya’s mouth wrapped around his head.
On the edge of his hearing, Kovalevsky heard whinnying of the horses off in the distance, and the uncertain, false tinny voice of a bugle. The Red Armies were entering the town of N.; he wondered briefly if the same fate awaited them—but probably not, since they were not the ones rejected by the world itself.
Kovalevsky closed his eyes then, not to see, and resigned himself to the fact that his run was over, and at the very least there would be relief from the sickening crunch that resonated deep in his spine, from the corpses and their long fingernails that dragged on the ground with barely audible whisper, and from the tinny bugle that was closing on him from every direction.
Born and raised in Moscow, Ekaterina Sedia now resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. She is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams, and Heart of Iron. Her short stories have been published in periodicals such as Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean, Fantasy, and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. Her first collection of short fiction, Moscow But Dreaming, was published last year. She is also the editor of Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner), Running with the Pack and Bewere the Night, Willful Impropriety, Circus: Fantasy Under the Big Top, and Bloody Fabulous.
Miss Sycorax has been making some very strange calls . . .
WHO IS ARVID PEKON?
Karin Tidbeck
Despite the well-known fact that it’s the worst time possible, everyone who needs to speak to a governmental agency calls on Monday morning. This Monday was no exception. The tiny office was buzzing with activity, the three operators on the day shift bent over their consoles in front of the ancient switchboard.
On Arvid Pekon’s console, subject 1297’s light was blinking. He adjusted his headset, plugged the end of the cord into the jack by the lamp and said in a mild voice:
“Operator.”
“Eva Idegård, please,” said subject 1297 at the other end.
“One moment.” Arvid flicked the mute switch and fed the name into the little computer terminal under the wall of lamps and jacks. Subject 1297 was named Samuelsson, Per. Idegård, Eva was Samuelsson’s case worker at the unemployment insurance office. He read the basic information (1297 unemployed for seven months), listened to the voice sample, and flicked the mute switch again.
“Gothenburg unemployment insurance office, Eva Idegård,” Arvid said in a slightly hoarse alto voice.
“Hi, this is Per Samuelsson,” said Per. “I wanted to check what’s happening with my fee.” He rattled off his personal registration number.
“Of course,” said Arvid in Eva Idegård’s voice.
He glanced at the information in the registry: last conversation at 1.43 PM, February 26: Subject’s unemployment benefits were lowered and insurance fee raised because of reported illness but no doctor’s certificate. (Subject did send a doctor’s certificate—processed according to randomized destruction routine §2.4.a.)
“You’ll have to pay the maximum insurance fee since we haven’t received a doctor’s certificate,” said Arvid.
“I sent two of them in the original,” said Per. “This isn’t right.”
“I suppose one could think that,” said Arvid, “but fact remains that we haven’t received them.”
“What the hell do you people do all day?” Per’s voice was noticeably raised.
“You have a responsibility to keep informed and send the right information to the unemployment benefit fund, Per,” Arvid said, in a soft voice.
“Bitch. Hag,” said Per and hung up.
Arvid removed his headset, massaged the sore spot it left above his right ear. He wrote in the log: 2.07 PM, March 15: Have explained the raised fee.
“Coffee break?” said Cornelia from the terminal to his right.
The light by subject 3426 was blinking when Arvid sat down again.
“Operator,” said Arvid, calling the details up on his screen. There was no information except for a surname: Sycorax, Miss. He hadn’t seen this subject before.
“Hello?” said a voice. It was thin and flat.
“Yes, hello.”
“I would like to be put through to my dead mother,” said Miss Sycorax.
“Just a moment.” Arvid muted the call. “Dead mother? How am I supposed to imitate her dead mother?” he said to his terminal. He peeked for the guidelines that should be popping up next to Miss Sycorax’s name. There was nothing. Then he saw his hand rise up and flick the mute switch, and a sonorous voice burst out of his mouth. “Hello?”
“Mother, is that you?” said Miss Sycorax.
“Darling! Hello there. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Finding a good connection to Hell isn’t easy, Mother.”
Arvid fought to press his lips together. Instead they parted, and his mouth said: “It’s lonely down here.”
“Not much I can do about that, Mother,” Miss Sycorax replied.
“Can’t you come visit, just for once?” said Arvid, his voice dolorous. He desperately wanted to rip his headset off, but his hands lay like limp flippers in his lap.
“Well, if you’re only going to be whiny about it I think we can end this conversation,” Miss Sycorax said, tartly.
Arvid called her just that—tart—in her dead mother’s voice. His ear clicked. Miss Sycorax had hung up. Arvid’s hands were his own again. He took his headset off with shaky hands and looked around. At the next terminal, Cornelia was talking to subject 2536 (Persson, Mr., talking to an old friend from school in Vilhelmina), twirling a lock of dark hair around her pencil as she spoke to the subject in an old man’s voice. When she ended her call, Arvid stood up from his chair.
“I’ll be leaving early,” he said.
“Oh. Are you all right?” Cornelia asked, reverting to her melodic Finno-Swedish.
Arvid looked for any sign that she had overheard him talking in a dead person’s voice, but thought he saw nothing but concern in her liquid brown eyes.
“Migraine, I think.” Arvid took his coat from the back of the chair. “Migraine, I have a migraine.”
“Go home and rest,” said Cornelia. “It happened to me a lot when I was new. It’ll get better, I promise.” She turned back to her terminal to take a new call.
Arvid punched out and left the office. Outside, yellow afternoon light slanted through the street. As Arvid unlocked his bicycle, a woman in a phone booth next to the bicycle stand was arguing with some- one. Arvid caught the words “unemployment” and “fee.” He wondered briefly if that was Cornelia’s call; she was unyielding in her case worker personas.
Arvid did feel better the next day. By nine-o’-clock coffee, he felt more or less normal. As he entered the break room, he saw that Konrad, the senior operator, was carefully laying out pale cakes on a plate. Cornelia was stirring an
enormous mug of coffee.
“Kubbar!” said Konrad. “I made them last night.”
Arvid picked a cake from the plate and bit into it. It was dry and tasted of ammonia and bitter almonds. Cornelia was sniffing at hers. “How are they?” Konrad asked. He was watching Arvid eagerly. “I haven’t made these for years. I was wondering if I got the proportions right.”
“It’s different,” Arvid managed. He washed the cake down with some coffee.
“It tastes like cyanide shortbread,” stated Cornelia. “Very Agatha Christie.”
“Heh,” said Konrad. He took a cake for himself and tasted it. “Your generation isn’t used to ammonia cakes, I suppose.”
Arvid had another cake. The ammonia taste was strangely addictive.
“I have a question for you,” Arvid said after a moment. “You’ve been here the longest. How are the subjects picked, really?”
Konrad shrugged and bit into his third kubbe. “No idea,” he said. “I signed an NQ-NDA, just like you.”
Arvid looked at Cornelia, who was chewing. She jerked a thumb at Konrad and nodded.
“So nobody knows?” said Arvid.
“The manager does, I expect,” Konrad replied. “But don’t you ever wonder?”
“No Questions, No Disclosure, son. I’m not about to bite the hand that feeds me. Besides, all you need to know is in the work description. We take calls to governmental agencies . . . ”
“ . . . and calls to persons the subjects don’t know very well,” Arvid filled in. “But—”
“And follow instructions. That’s all there is to it. That’s all you need to know. The manager relies on our discretion, Arvid. NQ-NDA.”
Arvid sighed. “All right. What did you do before you got this job, anyway?”
“Stage actor,” said Konrad. He picked a fourth kubbe from the plate. “Mhm?” he said, pointing at Arvid with the cake.
“Ventriloquist.” Arvid nodded at Cornelia. “You?”
“Book audiotapes,” said Cornelia.
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