Truth and Fear

by Peter Higgins

  I see what you’re doing, darling, the angel whispered, and its voice in her head was Chazia’s own voice, Chazia speaking to Chazia, intimately, the lover speaking to the one it loves. I see that thing you’re bringing, and I see what you want to do with it. You’re so brave, my beautiful, so brilliant and so brave. It really is remarkable. But you will not do this. It will not be done.

  ‘No,’ said Chazia. ‘No. I want it.’

  I am so sorry, Lavrentina. I left you alone for so long. Too much time has passed. It was wrong of me, I made a mistake, I see that now, and I’ve come back. Can you forgive me, Lavrentina?

  Her name! It was using her name. It knew her, it had always known her! Chazia had been right: it had been there watching all along, but silent, so cruelly silent.

  I understand you so much better now, darling. You felt abandoned and alone and you turned to this other thing to comfort you. I understand that. But I’m back now. You don’t need the other thing, not any more.

  The angel went everywhere inside her, turning everything over, Chazia’s angel-enhanced senses flared incandescently. It was overwhelming. She felt the strength of her body and the force of her will magnified a hundred, a thousand times. Nothing was impossible.

  Is this not what you want, Lavrentina? Am I not enough and more than enough? Am I not all that you would ever need?

  ‘Yes.’

  We just need to destroy that thing you’re bringing. You don’t understand it, Lavrentina. It has deceived you. It’s a terrible, repellent thing. We have to get rid of it and then, together, just you and me, we can do… anything!

  ‘I don’t want to destroy it. We can use it. Once I have learned—’

  I know what you want, darling, and I will give it to you. I will give you everything. The whole world will see what you are. Just do this for me. The thing must be destroyed. Destroy the disgusting repellent thing. Let it burn.

  ‘I don’t want to do that,’ whispered Chazia.

  But we need to destroy it, my love.

  75

  Lom woke to grey daylight and Antoninu Florian looking down on him, his hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Vissarion?’ Florian was saying. He looked concerned.

  ‘What?’ said Lom, warm and reluctant. He was comfortable. There was a pillow. Sheets. Florian’s head was framed in a wide square of leaden sky.

  It was a window. There were thin lemon-yellow curtains, pulled open.

  Lom hauled himself upright in the narrow steel cot. Springs protested under his weight. The walls of the room were corrugated tin on a timber frame. There was a table under the window. A desk. Empty.

  ‘Where are we?’ said Lom. He had been dreaming of water and trees. The encounter with the dead angel was a distant and receding darkness, a stain of metallic fear on the horizon. He didn’t want to think about that.

  ‘The aerodrome at Terrimarkh,’ said Florian. ‘How do you feel?’

  Lom thought about it.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Hungry. And I could do with coffee. A lot of coffee. And a piss.’

  ‘OK,’ said Florian. ‘Good. And then we leave.’ He hesitated. ‘Can you do that? Are you well?’

  ‘Of course. Why?’

  Florian handed him a razor.

  ‘You might want to shave while you’re in the bathroom.’

  Lom ran his hand across his chin and felt a thick rough growth of beard.

  ‘Shit. How long—’

  ‘We have lost much time. You were delirious, confused, and then you slept very deeply. We couldn’t wake you at all. Gretskaya is fretting to be away.’

  ‘How long has it been?’

  ‘We have lost three days.’

  ‘Three days!’

  Lom pushed back the covers, hauled himself out of the bed and walked unsteadily across to the window. Standing was a shock. The bare linoleum chilled his feet. His legs felt feeble. Shaky under his weight. He looked out on bleak expanses of concrete and asphalt under a threadbare dusting of snow. Hangars and huts, low and widely separated. Fuel tanks. A water tower. And beyond the aerodrome, nothing: no house, no hill, no road, no fence, no tree, only the weight of the sky, draining the world of colour. The single runway, swept clear of snow, stretched black into the distance. The Kotik stood ready. There were no other aircraft visible. No sign of life at all.

  Three days! Maroussia! Shit!

  ‘How soon can we leave?’ he said.

  ‘Get dressed. I’ll find you something to eat. Then we’ll go.’

  Two hours later they were airborne and on their way north to Novaya Zima. Gretskaya stayed below the cloud bank. The altimeter showed a steady 2,000 feet. She found the railway and followed it north. The track cut straight across monochrome tundra, mile after mile, hour after hour, parallel with the low hills on the starboard horizon, misted grey with distance. Drifts of leafless birch trees rolled away behind them, and white expanses of snow pitted with circular lakes. The lakes, not yet entirely frozen, were fringed grey with ice at the shore. The dilated coal-black waters stared sightlessly back at the sky.

  At last the coast fell suddenly away behind them and they were over the sea, but the railway plunged on, carried on concrete piers. The track stretched ahead of them, cutting low and arrow-straight across the dark waters to the distant vanishing point. Squadrons of seabirds swept low over the waves, floated in speckled rafts, and lined the concrete parapets of the endless viaduct, roosting.

  ‘That is the Dead Bridge,’ said Gretskaya. ‘It was built by penal labour. Men, women, even children worked on it. There are hundreds of bodies under the water, thousands maybe, all drowned, frozen, starved, dead of exhaustion. The eels and the fishes get fat on the bodies and the birds get fat on the fish.’

  Ahead of them there was no horizon. The sea merged with the sky, diffuse and indeterminate and in the deep distance the Dead Bridge narrowed and faded as if into the air. The Kotik roared on.

  After half an hour or so, above the place where the railway viaduct still disappeared into the distance, a paler colourless wash came slowly forward, separated itself from the sky and resolved into a distant mountain, its peak buried in cloud, its base lost in mist.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Gretskaya. ‘That’s where we’re going. Novaya Zima.’ She swung the Kotik away to the north-east, climbing until the railway was out of sight, then turned round, dropped down to a hundred feet and cut the throttle.

  And then they were gliding, the wind hissing through the struts, the rotor blades turning slowly. Lom could see small scattered rafts of ice floating on the water below them, rising and falling with the swell.

  ‘I’ll come in low and quiet,’ Gretskaya said. ‘No one will know we’re there.’

  The island of Novaya Zima was a spine of dark hills ridged with snow, rising higher to the north, towards the still-distant mountain. The lower slopes were covered with trees: a dark monotonous woodland that rolled away from the hills until it met the shore. The seaplane skimmed onwards. The black wall of trees widened and rose to meet them. Gretskaya dropped the tail and they came down, bouncing a couple of times off the swell and settling in a long subsiding skid across the water. She opened the throttle slightly and motored towards the narrow shoreline, a ten-yard strip between the water and the edge of the woods. The seaplane’s nose beached gently a couple of yards out.

  Gretskaya slid the cockpit open. She kept the engine running.

  ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Quickly. Go.’

  Lom climbed out, dropped to his waist in freezing pine-green water and waded ashore. It was a steep climb, soft mud sucking at his feet. He almost lost his shoes. The beach was an unstable mass of twigs and mouldering needles and leaves, thickly matted with rotting seaweed. His feet broke the surface with every step, dislodging an appalling stench and clouds of tiny black flies that buzzed angrily at his face and neck. He stumbled and fell forward, plunging his hands elbow-deep into the high tideline.

  ‘Fuck,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Fuck. Fuck.’ It was bitter
ly cold.

  He turned when he reached the trees. Florian was coming up the beach behind him, a small canvas knapsack slung from one shoulder by a narrow leather strap. Gretskaya had already pulled the Kotik back and was swinging it round to face out to sea. The roar of the engine rolled along the shore as she raced away, leaving a widening wake, and lifted into the sky.

  76

  The woodland was a dim, perspectiveless, muted labyrinth of widely spaced birch and pine. Resinous. Twilit. Snow-carpeted. Directionless. Florian seemed to know where he was going: he set off quickly, moving in as straight a line as was possible, away from the sea.

  Lom followed.

  ‘We must get clear of the landing place,’ said Florian. The moss and the snow and the trees drained all echo, making his voice sound drab and flat. ‘We cannot light a fire until it is dark.’ He fished a twist of paper out of his pocket. It was filled with solid dark pieces of sugar. ‘Here,’ he said, holding one out. ‘Eat this. We go west until we strike the railway. Then we follow it north wherever it goes. OK?’

  ‘How far?’ said Lom.

  ‘To the railway? Ten or twenty miles. Not more. After that, who knows? We follow the track to its end, wherever that is. The south island is a hundred and twenty miles long and fifty wide at the waist, but I doubt we will have to go so far.’

  ‘What we’re looking for is on the south island? Why not the north?’

  ‘I think not the north. This island sits across a current of warmer water that flows from the west; the north island does not. It is under permanent ice, glaciers come down from the mountains.’

  Florian, in his sombre suit, dark overcoat and astrakhan hat, the knapsack on his back, moved with fast and sure-footed noiseless grace. Lom jogged and stumbled behind him. The Blok 15 was a solid weight in his pocket. He carried nothing else. Shallow streams crossed their path, ice-fringed water running fast over mud and gravel, turning aside and deepening into moss- and root-edged pools. They drank and washed the stinking smears of the shoreline from their clothes. Lom plunged his face into the freezing water and sluiced his matted hair, then sat on a fallen trunk to wipe his eyes with his sleeve. When he looked up he saw the wolves. They were moving under the tree-shadow, silent and indistinct as moths. One turned its face towards him. Wolf eyes. Unhurried, considering.

  ‘Wolf,’ he called to Florian in a low voice.

  He would fight, if he had to. Wolf mouth on his face, his arm in a wolf mouth, fingers in a wolf throat, digging. Dragging his revolver from his pocket, firing it into wolf belly. Firing again. Blood and blood. Without hope, he would turn and fight.

  ‘I see them,’ said Florian. ‘There are others behind us. They are following.’

  Lom jerked round but there was nothing to see.

  ‘Why didn’t you say before?’

  ‘They will not trouble us while I am here,’ said Florian. ‘They are not hunting, they are curious, that’s all. But do not go far alone. Not without me.’

  All afternoon and into the evening they pushed on through the trees, Florian moving fast and confidently, Lom struggling to keep up. From time to time he looked for wolves but did not see them again.

  They broke out onto the edge of the railway track suddenly, without warning. It stretched away to right and left, twin parallel rails. The massive sleepers and ten-foot gauge of a major freight line. On either side of the track the trees had been cut down and cleared five yards back from the line. It was freshly done work, the toppled trees stacked neatly, the ground scattered with raw yellow axe chippings, the scent of fresh-cut timber in the air. An inch-deep covering of snow. It made the going easier. They turned right and began to jog along beside the rails.

  They had been going steadily for about an hour when Florian stopped suddenly.

  ‘Train,’ he said. ‘Do you hear? A train is coming.’

  ‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Lom. He was breathing hard. Heart pounding in his chest.

  ‘Get out of sight,’ said Florian urgently.

  Lom followed him into the dimness under the trees and they hunched down low to wait. Eventually he heard the rumbling in the rails, rising in pitch to a squeal as the train got closer. It was approaching from behind them. He could hear it now, a locomotive under full steam. The train roared into view and thundered past, close enough to see the moustache glistening on the engineer’s face in the firebox glow and catch the smell of hot iron and burning coal. Iron wheels high as a man is tall. Truck after truck followed the engine, ten, twenty, thirty of them, wooden-sided, windowless, each as long as a barn. Lom recognised them. The long trains. He had seen such trains, hundreds of them, waiting in rows in the Wieland marshalling yards. They looked like cattle trucks but they weren’t for carrying cattle.

  They walked on, following the railway track. There were no landmarks. No horizon except the vanishing point of the track. Walking brought them no nearer to anything and no further away. Motion without movement. The birch trees receded in all directions, endlessly repeating mirrors of trees, misting into brown and grey, dimness and snow. Numberless, featureless and utterly bleak.

  ‘We’ll camp here,’ said Florian when the light began to fail. They had reached nowhere in particular.

  They left the railway and pushed three or four hundred yards in under the trees, to a place where a heavy spruce had fallen, tearing its root mass from the earth, making a small clearing where scrub and thorn had taken root. Florian fished a small bag from his pocket and gave it to Lom. It held a fire steel and a clump of dry tinder: moss and leaves and small twigs, all dry and sweet.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Keep the fire small. We should be far enough from the track, but we should take no risks.’

  Lom gathered a bundle of branches and set them by. He scraped a patch of earth clear with his foot and checked the ground for shallow-buried roots that could catch and smoulder underground. There were no stones to make a hearth. He took a handful of tinder from the pouch and laid it ready: a tight clump in the middle, outside pieces pulled looser to let the air in. When the tinder was set he held the fire steel close above it and struck a shower of sparks. He got it first time, sweet, like he always did, and bent low to breathe on the faint smoulder. Gentle. Gentle. Encouraging the little flicks of flame to come alive. Breathing in the faint smell of woodsmoke.

  The wood he had gathered was all damp. He chose a few of the smallest, driest pieces and set them round the smouldering tinder one by one, carefully, to shelter the frail young flame, to barely touch it and take it into themselves. He fed it with a little extra tinder when it started to fail and felt the first brush of heat against his face. A little cup of life in the gathering dark. When he was sure of the small fire, he picked out some of the larger branches from the pile and set them in a careful pyramid around the tiny fire, closing it in like a tent frame. The heat and smoke would dry them out.

  Lom sat back for a moment and watched. A bitter breeze had risen as the light faded. The legs of his trousers were still soaked, and now he had stopped moving the cold of it chilled him. But the fire had steadied. It was breathing. He watched the lick of small quick colours, the sparks in the smoke, the heart of it growing stronger.

  While Lom made the fire, Florian took a small hand axe from his knapsack and hacked an armful of larger branches from the fallen spruce. He propped them against the side of the tree and wove thinner stem-lengths through them to bind a strong, shallow-sloping wall, on which he piled deep armfuls of brush and damp earth, until he had made a low, dark tunnel closed at one end, with a mouth at the other. He took some branches still heavy with needles and cut them to size, to make a door for the entrance which could be pulled shut once you were inside.

  When he had finished, he came across to the fire. Considered it with approval.

  ‘It’s good,’ he said.

  He pulled a little pan from his knapsack and set it on the fire. Used the axe to cut a fist-sized chunk of pork into slices and dropped them in. ‘I raided the kitchen at Terrima
rkh,’ he said. ‘The shelter is for you. You should spread more leaves inside on the floor.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I have no need. I will not sleep.’

  When they had eaten, Florian set some water to boil in the pan and scattered it with coffee grounds. Dropped in a small pebble of sugar. He set the pan aside to cool and then they drank from it in silence, alternating sips. The drink was dark and bitter and sweet and good. Night thickened between the darkness and the trees.

  Lom sat quietly and stared out into the darkness, taut as wire.

  77

  Hundreds of miles to the south Eligiya Kamilova lay on her back on a narrow shelf in a crowded stinking cattle wagon. The train had been stopped for hours. There was the noise of other trains outside, shunting and moving slowly past. Shouted orders. Men talking. Narrow shafts of bright arc light beamed in through the gap near the top of the wall and splashed across her face. She did not know where they were. She was no longer hungry or thirsty. That had passed. She was not waiting. The time would come when it was ready to come. There was nothing to wait for.

  The freight car door rolled open with a crash and light spilled in. Electric light and cold night air which smelled of bitumen and naphtha and trees. More people were being shoved inside, though there was no room. VKBD men swore at them as they hesitated. A woman started to shout and scream. Eligiya Kamilova couldn’t understand what she was saying. A young boy in uniform smashed her in the face with the butt of his rifle. That quieted her. Kamilova turned away, staring at the pitch-soaked wooden ceiling close above her face. It would be bad if she were seen looking.

  When the door was rolled shut and locked again, she took another look at the new arrivals. They brought with them nothing. No bags. No coats. No food or water. They stood or crouched in the shadows. Some of the men on the lower shelves were jostled. They swore at the newcomers in low vicious voices and pushed them away.