by Brad Ashlock
“Take her,” a voice echoed from the darkness. Meeko’s shackles popped open. She sat up and brought her knees to her chest, cradling her hand.
Take her,” the voice urged again. “I’ve been watching you pass through my doors, Little Bear,” it intoned from everywhere and nowhere. “I can’t stop you. I can only…take you to a place.”
The dark chamber broke with daylight. Naumkin shielded his eyes with his arms, still clutching the chocolate-dipped bone. Squinting, he looked around. He was in a forest of pines. The sky was gray; the wind picked up and the firs swayed. There was snow on the ground and the trees. A young boy now stood where Meeko had been, his back to Naumkin. The boy aimed a rifle at a bearded man who was squatting across from him in needles and snow. As the child raised the gun, Naumkin raised a hand to stop the scene he suddenly recognized, but it was too late. The boy pulled the trigger. Naumkin’s father shuddered when the bullet struck him in the heart. He fell down into the snow, twitched, and then moved no more. The boy, smoking rifle still in his clutches, turned and faced Naumkin.
“I could make you forget,” the disembodied voice of The Presence groaned.
Naumkin dropped the sacred bone and fell to his knees. He buried his face in his hands and wept. “My father was dying! He didn’t have much time anyway!” Naumkin cried.
“I know,” The Presence said. Naumkin thought he could feel icy fingers playing down his spine. “Your family was starving.
“Yes!” Naumkin blubbered.
“Your father asked you to do it.”
“Yes. He believed,” Naumkin began to chuckle, “that suicides burn in hell.”
“So you had to kill him for food?”
“Yes, I had to do it. My older brothers were already dead!”
Naumkin suddenly remembered the dog he and his comrades had eaten in the garden of glass.
“You killed your own father and you had to eat him?”
“Yes!”
“Listen to me, Tigran Naumkin. I can make that all go away. It would be like it never happened. You will forget the pain. You will forget all your pain. And I can let you see Jenny again.”
Naumkin removed his hands from his face.
“She’s just like she was when you knew her, behind one of my doors. You will forget what you had to do during Stalin’s reign; you will forget Jenny’s death. You will hold her in your arms again.”
“No! The girl. You want to kill her.”
“Lusker, not me,” The Presence cooed. The voice seemed to be right in Naumkin’s ear.
“You’ll let her go?”
“If you enter my employ. I need a new collector. Someone to fetch me things. Entertainments. It is tedious here. I fell in long ago.”
Naumkin stood and looked to the tableau in the pines before him: his dead father in the reddening snow, in the orange needles, him as a boy hypnotized by the smoke wafting from the long dark barrel, belly quaking in hunger. He picked up the sacred bone.
“Life is pain,” Naumkin said.
The woods went black. Naumkin was in the chamber of shadows again. The spotlight still shone down on Meeko Russell. Naumkin approached her, picked her up and carried her to the closed mausoleum door. He kicked it open, and as he stepped into the hallway where Cal and Jacob awaited, The Presence, its smooth voice now curdled, whispered, “Don’t leave—” Naumkin shut the door behind him.
“We couldn’t open it,” Cal said.
“That was my door,” Naumkin replied.
Jacob asked, “Are you all right?”
Naumkin nodded and handed the girl over to him. Jacob wrapper her in his overcoat and they went to the door where Naumkin had pulled the Indian bone artifact from the hinge. Without a word, Cal and Naumkin picked up Solomon’s corpse. Jacob pushed the unhinged door in and the darkness sucked it up, devoured it. They stepped through the portal and then through the door down in the bowels of the abandoned chocolate factory, Rogue, 2003. They had returned to their former visages: Naumkin the old man, Cal the gangly klutz in a faded Bruce Lee shirt, Jacob the muscular boy in the rags of a slave. They looked how they had before, but were not the same. They had seen the secret world unfold. Naumkin and Cal gently set Solomon’s body onto the cool ground.
“I can’t believe he’s gone,” Jacob said, looking at it.
“He was a good man,” Naumkin said.
Jacob set Meeko Russell down.
“I knew someone was coming for me,” she said. “The medicine man told me in a dream.”
They walked back in the dark through the pines where the river dies to Naumkin’s house. The house was cold; the window the dogs had escaped through had never been repaired. The icy wind cut through the rooms like a specter. Naumkin turned on the lights and closed the bedroom door on the howling wind. He went to the kitchen and made them all hot cider and cinnamon.
“The police are going to have a lot of questions,” Cal said between slurps. “When we tell them we found Meeko in the factory, they’ll find Solomon’s body.” (He had been too heavy to carry up the rickety floating staircase.)
“And what will happen to me?” Jacob asked.
“He doesn’t even have a birth certificate,” Cal said.
“I want to go home,” Meeko whispered.
Naumkin set his mug down and said, “We have to call the police. She needs to go to a hospital. I’m sure your parents will meet you there, Meeko.”
“What are you going to tell them?” Cal asked.
“They won’t believe us,” Meeko said.
“Meeko,” Naumkin said, looking directly into her eyes, “It’s usually not good to lie, but in this case it might be easier on everyone involved if we, well, stuck to the basic facts. We did find you in the factory, right?”
“Sort of,” she shrugged.
“Why don’t you just say you got lost for a while, and we found you in that old building. You don’t know anything about the man we left down there. For all the police know, he has nothing to do with this. They’ll think he fell down those steps and broke his back.”
Jacob began to sob.
Meeko, looking down into her cider, nodded. She looked up to Naumkin, then to Jacob, and put her arm around him. “Thank you for getting me,” she said.
“Meeko, stay here with Jacob,” Naumkin said. “That was his friend, Solomon, we left behind. Solomon helped save you, too. Wait here. There’s one more thing me and Cal have to do.”
Naumkin and Cal drove down to the Indian mounds of the Rogue River near the Book Kaboose. Shovel and bone in hand they climbed up one of the mounds, dug a deep hole, and buried the sacred artifact.
“Do you think burying this will really close the door?”
Naumkin nodded. “If it doesn’t, the police will make quite a discovery. I guess we’ll know then.”
“We can’t just leave Solomon’s body down there in the factory. It doesn’t feel right.”
“It’s just a body, it’s not him anymore.”
“I know, but he was our friend. We didn’t get a chance to know him well, but he really helped us. It just feels wrong, is all.”
Naumkin anc Cal returned to the house. Naumkin wrapped Meeko’s hand in bandages and tape, and asked her if she could wait just a little longer before being reunited with her parents. Sniffling, she agreed and fell asleep on the divan. Naumkin pulled Jacob aside and said, “How do you feel about going with Cal to bury Solomon?”
“Do you have a bible?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll bury him. I’ll say a prayer for him.”
“Let Cal go with you. I’ll stay with Meeko and when you get back, I’ll take you and Cal to a motel. No sense in having you boys around when the police get here.”
Jacob found a heavy coat and some boots that almost fit, and, shovels in hands, he and Cal departed to recover Solomon’s corpse. It had been Naumkin’s idea they use the pulley in the back compartment of the ATV. It took them a long time to find the four-wheeler in the dark. Jacob touched the plast
ic mudguards and ran his finger along the chunky rubber tire tread. Cal pulled out the ropes, winch, and pulley, and they continued through the pines, Jacob holding a flashlight and leading the way, following their old footprints.
They came upon the factory. It loomed before them, the details of its surface lost to the shadows, making it into one hulking shape. They crossed to the backdoor, ignored the blasted frozen dogs, and entered. The yellow beam of the flashlight seemed like a thin slit in the dark. They cautiously crossed the brittle tiles to the metal spiral staircase that led to the sub-basement where they had left the body of their friend. They descended into the crypt.
The magic door was gone now; all that remained was a rectangular stain. Jacob put his hand on Solomon’s cold face and wept. Cal let him finish, and then they coiled the ropes under the corpse’s arms and waist. Cal brought the winch back up to the ground-level, secured it to a piece of the Nazi chocolate grinder, and called to see if Jacob was ready to help guide the corpse up the staircase. It took them nearly an hour to pull it up. Jacob had to crawl over the body at the top of the stairs to get out and help Cal. Exhausted, they lay back on the broken tiles, panting, Solomon between them.
“Thanks for this,” Jacob said.
Together, they carried the body into the pines. The corpse seemed light now, a hollow shell. They decided on a spot just between two large trees. The digging was low until they reached sand. They took turns shoveling. By the time the grave was deep enough, the moon had passed from one end of the sky to the other. Jacob hooked his arms under Solomon’s, and Cal took the ankles. They lowered the body into the pit. Jacob stood at the edge of the grave and asked Cal to hold the flashlight for him as he read from the Gospel of John, Solomon’s favorite book. Cal didn’t listen to the reading, he was too exhausted, but words popped out at him through Jacob’s thick drawl: beast, angels, dragon, key.
Jacob finished with a prayer and said, “He taught me how to read, Cal. He was like my father.”
“Yeah.” Cal knew what that meant.
They lingered at the grave until the cold soaked into their bones and the stars disappeared in dark morning purple. They filled in the hole and made their way through the pines.
“You’re gonna love this,” Cal said as they approached the ATV, trying to be cheerful. “Just hold tight.”
When Naumkin heard the four-wheeler approach, he woke Meeko. The boys, spent and muddy, staggered into the kitchen. As the sun began to peek over the horizon, Naumkin drove them all to a motel in Grand Rapids, the Super-8 he and Cal had stayed before, where he checked the boys into a room. Things were complicated enough without having to involve them. He and Meeko returned to his house where he called the police. He fixed another mug of hot cider.
“How’s your hand?”
“It doesn’t hurt if I don’t move it.”
“Good.”
“Why did you do it? Why did you come after me? No one else did.”
“Your parents would have if they could. They love you very much. I met them once when they were searching for you. I don’t know why I was chosen to help you. I guess I just couldn’t bear to lose another child,” Naumkin said, remembering himself as a boy.
Before Meeko could finish her cider, detectives arrived in gleaming government cars leading a parade of flashing police cruisers.
“I found her in the old Dudley factory in the pine forest,” Naumkin said. “Take her to a hospital—she’s broken her hand.”
Before they could whisk her away, Meeko leaned over Naumkin in his chair and kissed him on the forehead. Then she was gone. The detectives interrogated Naumkin for hours. Two FBI agents arrived late, but asked nothing. Naumkin stuck to his story. He had been out on his ATV as he was known to do, stopped on a whim near the abandoned chocolate factory, and had heard someone crying. Why had he been out on a four-wheeler before the crack of dawn? Why, that was the best time to spot deer. Meeko, in the following days, corroborated this story. The police eventually went over the factory with a fine-toothed comb. They found nothing unusual.
Naumkin, through the old newspapers that had collected under his mailbox, soon learned how Gordon Dudley and his bodyguard had been slaughtered by a pack of wild dogs. He had no comment about it for the police or journalists, but offered his half-hearted condolences to the Russells.
Meeko’s parents had reconciled once their daughter had been returned to them. They met Tigran Naumkin for the second time in front of an ocean of reporters and television cameras on the steps of City Hall. The story was international news. Because of Gordon Dudley’s demise, Mrs. Russell became the sole heir to the Dudley Chocolate fortune.
Cal told his mother he had run away from home because of his father. Nothing much changed in his household, but his father never again laid hands on the boy—something burned now in Cal’s eyes, something frightening and full of power. His father never mentioned hunting camp again.
Jacob had become a ward of the State. It only took a few months for Naumkin, American Hero, Medvedkin, Master of Defense, and Chess Champion of Moscow, to become his guardian. The boy went to school with Cal (Naumkin had built upon Solomon’s foundation and taught him to be a phenomenal reader, but math was a weak spot). Cal and Jacob both took chess lessons from the master, still best friends a year after their adventure—what they now called “The Incident”. They eventually stopped referring to it altogether.
* * *
The man on the four-wheeler rode between the sandy hills into the field. It was summer now: the white and brown had been replaced by a thousand shades of green. It had been seven months since The Incident. Jacob and Cal had gone camping together near Lake Michigan on the dunes with Jeffrey Hore and his parents, giving Naumkin a chance to return to the woods, to walk alone in the green. The trees swayed in the light breeze. The sky was a rich blue, unmarred by cloud or jet trail. He rode up and over the pile of boulders into what had been Dudley’s woods. The county owned the land now. Ahead was the fallen maple, wedged between two birches. He drove under it, through the imaginary gate, and parked where he always parked, just off the jagged-edged stream that somewhere must have met up with the Rogue River. Maybe it was a remnant of Rogue Creek, the river that died in the pines. If Naumkin so desired, he could walk through those old pines again and go to where the abandoned chocolate factory had once loomed. It had been torn down as a hazard two weeks after Meeko Russell’s return. He still hated that pine smell.
He got off the All-Terrain Vehicle. The dry leaves crunched under his feet. He felt a fluttering deep in his chest, but ignored it. Coughing, he trudged up the nearby hill, then across the woods to the valley of dead trees and telephone wire vines where he had once dreamed of Joost Lusker, the promiser of destruction. There, of course, was no snow and dirt here, no white and brown, no hellhounds, no Joost Lusker; there was only the trees and the cool air. Naumkin sat down on the log he liked to meditate upon, and let his mind drift away. He heard a stick snap behind him, opened his eyes, and whirled around.
“Hello, Tigran”, the medicine man said. There was a dim aura around him. He stepped from the shade into the sunlight; he almost seemed to become part of the sun.
Naumkin, ignoring the ached in his chest, smiled.
“I wanted to thank you. We all do,” the Indian said.
Naumkin slowly stood up and said, “I should thank you, too. It stopped chasing me. No more white and brown. No more beautiful monotony.”
“Good. I’m glad you’ve had a few months to enjoy it, but I’m here to take you, Tigran.”
“Take me?”
“Your spirit is young, but your body… you’ve got to go over the last threshold now. Jenny’s there, waiting.”
“I’ve waited so long to see her again.”
“Yes. I trust Jacob will be taken care of.”
“I have things in place.”
“Of course—safety first. Jacob and Cal will both be fine, Tigran. They’ll take care of each other. Meeko won’t forget her rescuers. O
ne day she’ll inherit all that wealth. She’ll do good things with it. She’ll never forget you, Tigran, or the boys.”
He nodded.
“We need to get going now, my friend.”
Naumkin, with joyously suicidal ambivalence, stepped away from his corpse that had fallen over the log, hand clutched at the chest, face in the leaves, and followed the other ghost up through the levels, toward the darkness, toward the sound of rushing wind and fleeting passages of purple outer space, higher and higher above the pines where the river dies to the final layer, black like smoked glass, perfectly smooth and gleaming beyond the shimmering thresholds of the Everywhere Doors.
THE END
Copyright © 2017 Brad Ashlock
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