The Circus of Machinations

by Chris Ward

  ‘Hey,’ he said, hearing his own voice detached from his mind as if he had stepped out of his body in anticipation of an unavoidable beating. ‘Give the key back to Mortin, would you, if you’re going in? It’s cold out and I need to get going.’

  A hand he couldn’t believe was his own flicked the key through the air towards them. The nearest of the two stuck out a hand and caught it, stared at it like an alien object, then put it into his pocket.

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  ‘Tell him I’ll bring the tank back in the morning, and say thanks again.’

  ‘Will do.’

  Before his courage gave way, Victor hefted the plastic canister, huffing as if it were three times as heavy as it really was, and walked past them without a word into the alley behind the house. He gave an exaggerated sigh, then made a point of trudging loudly through the snow until he had reached an adjoining alleyway. Then, as quick as he could, he pulled the canister into his arms to balance its weight, and took off at the best run he could manage through the snow.

  If they followed him he didn’t hear it, but his ears were filled with the crunch of his own boots on the icy layer below the freshest snow. He didn’t dare look back until he turned into the alley on which his workshop was located, but there was no sign of pursuit. Whatever happened though, sooner or later it would get back to Robert Mortin that a young man had been seen in his back yard late at night, stealing kerosene from his shed.

  Kurou was still sleeping, curled tightly in a ball like a giant, hairless mouse when Victor returned. Patricia, however was awake, her eyes wide open, her body shaking with cold. Victor pulled off his coat and laid it over her, then got to work restarting the stove heater. Within a couple of minutes, a slow heat was spreading outwards, and Patricia’s teeth had stopped chattering.

  Victor knelt down beside her and pulled off her gag. He took one of her hands in his and rubbed her cold fingers against his warm palms.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quietly, fearful that Kurou might wake and overhear. ‘I was as quick as I could. You know I would let you go if I could, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know what my sister ever saw in you,’ she said. ‘You’re nothing, a worthless nothing.’

  Victor shrugged. ‘Like I said, I’m sorry.’

  It was quite obvious that Patricia wasn’t about to forgive him, so he went over to check on Kurou, but the professor appeared to be soundly asleep.

  How long did they have before they were found? Victor had always been secretive about his workshop, with no written record that he was renting it, paying in cash every month to a man so shady that Victor didn’t even know his first name. There was nothing in his house to lead anyone here, and nothing here to link it to him. From time to time though, people had seen him come and go, and sooner or later the police would interview one of those people. Victor’s skills with computers and electronics had made him well known in Brevik.

  He felt like a noose had looped itself around his neck and was slowly closing. There was no way to know what would happen next, but Victor felt sure it was something bad.

  Almost as a reflex action, he turned and looked back towards Kurou.

  The strange professor had his one good eye open and was watching him. As Victor met his gaze, Kurou widened his mouth into a sinister little smile.

  22

  The closing of traps

  It had been unusual for Pavel to hear Lena crying on the other end of the secure line. Death is coming. It’s unstoppable. Get on the last train and get out. Everyone who stays will die.

  Driving as fast as she could, she was a week away, she told him, maybe more, depending on the state of the roads. Some were destroyed, others intact, but of those many were now deep with uncleared snow. She couldn’t guess at the speed of the approaching enemy; its advance slow and laborious as it ate up everything in its path, but relentless nonetheless. It was like a rising tide, slowly engulfing their country, and nothing short of the moon might drive it back.

  Pavel picked up the phone, dialling a secure line. He asked the voice who answered for the code, listening as always for the length of hesitation before the list of numbers was reeled off.

  ‘Is it ready? We leave for the mainline tomorrow.’

  ‘The rails have been checked as far as Novilorsk. We’re trying to assemble enough fuel to ensure we can reach the coast, but it’s a journey our trains aren’t used to making.’

  ‘It has to be ready.’

  ‘If we can get as far as Irkutsk perhaps we can find a connecting train—’

  ‘No. This is it,’ Pavel said. ‘This is our last train. There will be no others. Irkutsk will prove no better than staying here.’

  ‘As you wish, sir. I will ensure that the locomotive is as ready as possible. We depart at midday tomorrow as planned.’

  Pavel hung up. For a long time after silence had returned to his office, he sat holding the phone receiver in his hand, trying to convince himself he had made the right decision.

  For a moment she had dreamed that she had seen him, standing at the end of the garden path, waiting for her. Then the shadow had shifted and become two of her father’s goons, come to deliver information or receive orders. Nothing ever changed in her family; her father used bullying and power to get what he wanted, an attitude that Patricia and Esel excelled at. Isabella, though, remembered her kind mother, the sweet eyes and the soft, soothing voice, telling her that a man should be honest and strong, and a woman should be brave and elegant.

  Her mother was five years underground, taking her beauty and honesty with her beneath the accumulated years of her husband’s merciless goading. Isabella had compartmentalised her parents, and while she had never forgiven her father for his role in her mother’s decline into sickness and eventual death, she still loved him for what he was in a world her mother no longer inhabited.

  Isabella felt a tiny pang of resentment towards her brother and sister. As twins, they had naturally attracted the majority of her father’s attention despite causing the majority of the family’s problems. Forced by circumstances to act like a surrogate mother, Isabella was both worried about their safety while enjoying a little more of her father’s attention. Wrestling with the guilt of her thoughts had made it difficult to keep calm amidst the storm of having to prepare for leaving, and a double helping of guilt had been layered on when she realised that for a time she had forgotten all about Victor.

  Simple ideals were the engine that drove her; the thought of marriage and children and peace, a nice house, a husband coming home at six o’clock and still having the energy to praise the way her hair looked or the dress she was wearing, and to offer her a smile of thanks over the meal she had prepared. Simple dreams for a simple woman, many would say, but Isabella didn’t care.

  Victor, for all his faults, had been perfect. Hardworking and talented—despite what her father or siblings had often said—he treated her well and she loved him, even if she had never really shown it. He needed to understand that she didn’t mean it when she berated at him or told him to get lost, she was just insecure, just testing him. And now he had disappeared.

  The horrifying possibility that he might be dead was one she wouldn’t allow to muddle her thoughts. If she let it in, she would start to rely on it, make herself believe that the reason he hadn’t come to see her was because he was lying beneath a pile of rubble somewhere.

  The front door opened downstairs and her father came stomping in, slamming the door behind him. Isabella had prepared him a light dinner that was probably now cold, and she had been planning to retire soon for the night. Packing for the train had preoccupied her as usual; trying to squeeze everything she might need into a single tiny case was providing her with a headache she didn’t need. Still, if her father was tired, now might be a good time to ask him about letting Victor come.

  After all, if her brother and sister were missing, surely their spaces would be free—

  She cuffed herself around the side of the head.
Isabella, watch your thoughts. That’s heinous, thinking like that.

  She headed downstairs to talk to her father, pausing at the living room door when she heard his voice. She cracked the door and peered in. Robert stood by the window, looking out at the street, a telephone receiver pressed to his ear.

  ‘Has he come back? Are you sure? I’m not paying you to sleep.’

  He slammed the phone down and uttered a curse that made Isabella blush. She started to open the door, but her father began dialling another number, this time sitting down on an armchair that faced the window and crossing one leg over the other.

  ‘Yes? It’s me. I need to talk to you about someone. Victor Mishin.’

  Isabella put a hand over her mouth to stifle a cry and crept back out of sight, keeping the door open just enough to overhear.

  ‘I think he might have had something to do with the death of my son and the disappearance of my daughter.’

  Isabella clamped her hand tight over her mouth as tears sprang to her eyes. Her brother was dead and Patricia had disappeared? And her father thought Victor was responsible?

  ‘You want evidence? I have it. I have witnesses placing him at the scene of my son’s murder and the last place my daughter was seen alive. You get out there and you find that bastard, otherwise I’ll take matters into my own hands. And if I find him first he won’t make it to trial.’

  Isabella could take no more. She turned and stumbled for the stairs, wanting to get to her bedroom and be alone with her sorrow, but she tripped on a bag her father had left in the hall and came down hard, crying out as her knee struck the stone of the bottom step.

  ‘Isabella?’

  Robert was standing over her. As Isabella cried out again he reached out and pulled her up, taking her into his arms.

  ‘My daughter, my beautiful daughter,’ he said, smoothing her hair back from her face. ‘Did you hear that? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but I didn’t know how. That bastard has tricked you. Behind that mild mannered exterior is a cruel and evil man.’

  ‘Father, not Victor!’

  Robert half carried her into the living room and helped her down on to the couch. He sat down beside her and put an arm around her shoulders.

  ‘I know this must be hard for you,’ he said, ‘but Victor Mishin has seduced you with his charms. Clearly he has a vendetta against our family. Perhaps he wants my money? Don’t worry, Isabella, I won’t let him hurt you. I’ll have him strung up outside City Hall before our train leaves, I promise you.’

  Isabella said nothing. She listened to the thud of her father’s heart beside her ear, the thundering beat that sounded a little like the wheels of a train.

  Alek Politov pressed his face against the window, cupping his hands to view the darkness outside. He didn’t need to use binoculars anymore, the battle raging on the distant hills was played out in an endless series of muzzle flashes and explosions as his brave soldiers tried to hold off an unstoppable enemy. In different circumstances, such an avante garde and decadent fireworks display might have been beautiful.

  The room behind him was empty. He had bid his guards leave at the first sign of trouble, and despite the reluctance in their words he had heard the relief in their tone. They had left him food and water, and blankets to ward off the biting cold now that the electricity in the building had been switched off by his departing command crew. Not that he planned to use anything; it was delaying the inevitable.

  Better to be halfway dead when the killing machines came.

  He hobbled back to his chair and slumped back down again, closing his eyes, pushing his fingers up to his temples and rubbing the old skin there almost ritualistically.

  I know you can hear me. You can stop this. Please.

  The void seemed endless, his thoughts drifting off into space.

  No.

  Politov’s eyes jerked open. The voice had come like a sudden flare out of the dark. ‘So, you hear me after all,’ he said. ‘I always knew that you did.’

  23

  Treasure and knowledge

  Victor roused Patricia an hour before first light. Kurou was already up, sitting in a chilly corner tinkering with a broken radio receiver that Victor had given up as junk. Whenever Victor looked across at him working, he felt both awed and nauseous. Kurou’s fingers were literally a blur, moving so quickly over the component parts, twisting and shaping, reconnecting and discarding, soldering and fusing, that Victor couldn’t follow. It was like watching a time-lapse video of a construction process happening right in front of him.

  ‘Will you be quiet if I undo your gag?’ Victor asked Patricia, but the girl shook her head. ‘I’m sorry then, but I have to leave it on. I hope he’ll agree to let you go once we’re out of the town, but I don’t know. He’s … unpredictable.’

  The girl muttered some curse that Victor couldn’t understand. He figured it was probably just as well that he didn’t.

  ‘We have to go,’ he said to Kurou, who looked up at him with his head cocked to the side, looking for all the world like a bird that had been disturbed in the middle of a meal. ‘The town won’t be quiet for long and we have a fair distance to travel.’

  The professor picked up the contraption he was working on and put it in a canvas bag which he slung over his shoulder. ‘Lead the way, sire,’ he said.

  Victor went first, letting Kurou take charge of leading Patricia. At first the girl made a nuisance of herself, then Kurou whispered something to her that seemed to flick a switch in her personality. Instead of dragging her feet or even trying to sit down, she began to cooperate, walking calmly along between them, her head bowed, not making a sound. Victor didn’t want to ask what Kurou had said and the professor didn’t offer, but he could get the general gist. He imagined it had something to do with their lack of food and Kurou’s obvious taste for human flesh.

  Brevik was eerily silent. Victor took them on the same roundabout route he had taken a few days ago, out towards the old café and then up a thin ring-road that arced around the outside of the town before joining up with the mining access road to the north. Victor was alarmed to see the heavy drifts of snow in places; it looked like no one had used these roads for a couple of days. The recent snowfall had been slight, but when the wind got up it caused drifts of fine ice to build up anywhere there was shelter, and in some areas half of the road had drifted three feet deep. It was hard going, and soon they were all exhausted.

  Victor called a rest just after the v-shaped tree came into sight. ‘We’re about halfway there,’ he said, but from now on it gets difficult. We have to go off the road.’

  ‘And here,’ Kurou said, ‘we will let our little bird fly free.’

  Patricia looked up at him, frowning. Victor was also surprised. After all, he had assumed Kurou would keep the girl until she was of no further use.

  ‘Untie her, sire, but keep out of range. I get the feeling she bites.’

  Patricia struggled as Victor untied her hands and pulled the gag out of her mouth. ‘I’ll gut you!’ she screamed, taking a swing at him, but Kurou’s fingers closed over her wrist, turning her away.

  ‘It would be wise not to look this gift horse in its rather beautiful mouth, young princess,’ he said. ‘One is apt to change one’s mind at short notice. Run along now, it’s time to catch your train.’

  At the mention of the train Victor felt a pang of regret, knowing that he would surely have no chance now of leaving with Isabella. Whether he would see her again he didn’t know … but something told him their paths were beginning to diverge, and that from here on he had to make some tough choices. In all likelihood, once Patricia told her sister what a villain he was, he would have no chance to be with her anyway.

  ‘One day I’ll see you again and I’ll kill you,’ Patricia spat, as Kurou dropped her in the snow. She sat there for a few seconds, staring up at him with a petulant defiance in her eyes, then she pushed herself away and broke into a run back down the snowy mining road. Victor watched until she had t
urned a corner out of sight, then he turned back to Kurou.

  ‘Was that wise? She’ll have half the town looking for us.’

  Kurou gave him a grotesque smile. ‘Where’s your trust, sire? Have I disappointed you yet? One suggests you don’t have the foresight that others have. Hold your assumptions a while, won’t you?’

  ‘We should go. The faster we leave, the more time the wind has to cover our tracks before Patricia returns with a lynch mob.’

  Kurou nodded and gave a short bow. ‘After you, sire.’

  Victor led them in through the trees to the concealed road that led up to the valley to the secret place. It was hard going, the snow waist deep in places, and with the slow progress Victor was soon freezing cold, even as a pale sun rose above them to cast glittering light over the white landscape.

  Half an hour later, they reached the viewing platform. Victor stopped and pointed down into the valley.

  ‘Do you see anything down there? That’s where we’re going.’

  Kurou smiled. ‘Into that concealed cave entrance, no doubt.’

  ‘You can see that? I know it’s there because I’ve been down there, but from here….’

  Kurou turned to him. ‘When God refused me a human face, sire, he compensated me well. I guess you hear nothing but the wind and the rustling of the tree branches, don’t you?’

  ‘What else is there?’

  Kurou lifted a misshapen eyebrow. ‘Too much for you to need to know, sire, while there is still a distance for us to travel.’

  ‘Is there anything else down there? I mean, people or vehicles? The other day I saw a blinking light.’

  Kurou shook his head. ‘Nothing, sire. But, I’m an old man now. Could be that my sight isn’t what it used to be.’

  ‘It’s still better than mine.’