by Неизвестный
Onstage, the remaining members of the royal family delayed, improvising lines as they awaited the surprise arrival of the traitorous Count Gemelli and his allies, the now-missing soldiers of Calabria. They turned as one when they caught sight of an entrance. King Fiori began to stride onto stage to demand answers from his formerly-loyal court advisor. Only a few of the audience members, seated at just the right angle, witnessed the King’s just-as-sudden exit, clawing at the wood of the stage as unseen forces dragged him away by his ankles. His screams were short-lived.
The actors stood silent, waiting for direction. The audience responded, renewing their howling and shouting, many moving to depart. A few token rotten vegetables were launched towards the stage, as if testing their range before a full volley.
Richard shook the playwright by the shoulders with gore-soaked hands. “End this!”
“I have an idea,” William rasped, his throat dried by fear. He gulped loudly as the sounds of violence grew around them.
A bold voice shouted over the chaos in the theatre. A resplendently gaudy royal costume strode onto stage. It was Richard, officer of the Royal Navy, dressed as the King. The new King Fiori, with loud and efficient shouting, belted out the lines that William had pressed upon him. His words were orders, jarring the other actors and silencing, for the moment, the audience.
“My family, my kingdom, it is undone!” shouted Richard. “Undone by our lack of wit. Ignorant we were of this vile scourge, this walking of the damned dead!”
Stumbling, William entered, clad in the trademark green suit of Count Gemelli. The stains of blood from the recently-slain actor hardly showed at all through the dark color. “I beseech you sire, forgive me now ere this wretched scum taketh me!”
It was a significant leap forward in the script, but the remaining cast, two Princes and the Princess, stood their ground, waiting to see what would happen next.
“Another day shall I deal with thy traitorous nature, Count. For now, we must fight to live!” The new King Fiori began to whisper quick commands at the cast. The Princes drew their stage swords. They turned as one, backs to the audience, and waited. The silence in the theatre was such that everyone could hear them. The postvitals. Former cast and stagehands, moaning and thumping about backstage. They were coming.
“This royal throne we defend to the last!” King Fiori waved his own sword, one not fashioned for the stage, but for real combat. He handed his dagger to Princess Barbina, a slender actor, who held it nervously with both hands.
A shadow broke the entrance to stage right. “But soft! What corpse through yonder window breaks?” William, as Count Gemelli, stammered.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the postvitals!” Richard, the new King Fiori, waved his sword and attacked the shambling forms emerging from backstage. The audience shouted with enthusiasm, hoping for a blood-soaked finale to save the day. They were quieted with shock at how real the blood looked, spurting from the newly-decapitated body of the first one to emerge from backstage. Richard’s sword was a blur as the crowd screamed for more of the amazing tricks of costume and makeup that made such a graphic death possible on stage.
The battle was upon them. The actors stabbed and clubbed their weapons against the lumbering wall of corpses taking the stage, while Richard’s sword carved great gashes in their necks and gouged deeply into their eye sockets. As the horrible, gruesome battle played out on the stage, the audience that had remained was enthralled. Prince Paccheri was the first to fall, taken down by teeth clamped upon his jugular. Prince Filini joined him soon after, the pair set upon by the grotesque creatures. Richard moved quickly to disown the lot of them of the contents of their skulls.
William himself managed to club and push back one of his stagehand’s corpses, nearly tossing himself from the stage in the effort. The corpse he clubbed spun about, halting itself as it faced the unguarded back of Princess Barbina. The actor in the dress was distracted, attempting to dislodge his dagger from the neck of a fallen corpse, and was set upon without warning.
The carnage ran its course. It came down to William and Richard, as Count Gemelli and King Fiori, backed up against the edge of the stage. The last of the postvitals moved forward. It was the former Henry Darcy. The tattered, blood-soaked remains of Prince Risoni’s costume hung about him like wet feathers. The body shuffled towards the pair of survivors, slowly. Richard reached into his costume and pulled out his last surprise, a small pistol, which he moved to charge with powder and ball. The hungry moaning of the corpse grew louder, deeper, as the corpse neared, arms outstretched.
“We’re supposed to die now,” William admonished in a quiet whisper to his officer. “The script says everyone dies, the lesson of not heeding the rules about these creatures.”
Richard paused and stared at the playwright incredulously.
“This is a tragedy, it has to end this way,” William explained.
Richard nodded and smiled. “Fine. Follow my lead.”
As the arms of the corpse reached for the pair, they fell down, shouting with feigned pain. The surprised corpse halted, seemingly wondering where its prey had gone. And then it noticed the audience. It moaned loudly, hungrily.
Richard lifted his body up, on one arm, as if to gasp out a final, breathless proclamation. Instead, the silence of the theatre was broken by the sudden explosion of Richard’s pistol. The crowd screamed in shock and awe as the corpse’s skull volcanically erupted blood and brain and bone. The wrecked body of Prince Risoni fell to the stage for the last time.
The bodies, the living, the dead, and the dead-again, lay still on the stage as the audience went mad. The screams and cheers put to shame their earlier protests.
Lying prone on the stage, the playwright and the officer spoke to each other with short shouts over the noise.
“I think I’m starting to like the theatre, William.” Richard said, a gruesome smile spreading on his gore-spattered face.
“Yes. But I don’t know how we’re going to manage to top this one. Or even put it on again. We deviated from the script rather sharply.” William sighed heavily and then laughed.
“And you seem to be short a few actors.” The pair laughed uncomfortably before rising to take their bows. The audience, too stunned to wonder why the other actors remained motionless, showered them with thunderous applause.
The next day, the word was out. It was said that the play was an unconventional, uncompromising, revolutionary look at the future of theatre. The signs went up around the Globe, announcing a temporary hiatus for some necessary upgrades. This move only stoked the rumors. The next week, the advertisements went out. New actors were required for an expanded version of the hit new play. Other ads sought out new stagehands, with preference given to those with experience in animal handling. The theatre was besieged. Quietly, elsewhere in London, a new program for dealing with outbreaks was established. The disposal of postvitals went on as it had previously, but stories were told of some Royal Army squads conducting careful round-ups of the walking dead. Hushed voices explained it to be part of an experimental, more humane, less traumatic program for disposing of the problem.
The next month, the theatre reopened with a new cast and expanded costuming and makeup magic. It was said that the actors playing the postvitals in the cast were masterful in their impersonation, and the way they died on stage was simply the most realistic depiction of graphic, bloody violence the stage had ever seen.
18th Century
Deathless
Ed Kurtz
On the road to Nebolchi, Evgeny folded his hands in his lap and lowered his chin to his breast. The carriage bounced over the uneven road, the driver whipping the horses into a frenzy. Above Evgeny’s head a cage of iron rattled so relentlessly he barely noticed the clamor anymore. His orders demanded he make the village by Saturday, and he was not one to disappoint. A beardless boyar of the Tsar’s new Russia, he did only what he was told and he did it to the letter. Nebolchi would be reached in time,
and if the specimen did in fact exist as the letters to Areskin attested, Evgeny would not fail in bringing the curiosity back with him to St. Petersburg.
Robert Areskin, the Tsar’s surgeon-in-residence, had come into possession of the letters at the end of a chain of custody leading back to a prominent household in the German Suburbs of Moscow, where talk erupted like fire of a revenant terrifying the simple-minded farmers of the outlying pogost village. Accompanied by a small cadre of soldiers, Areskin arrived unannounced at the house to demand the letters be handed over forthwith, which they were without incident. In conference with the keeper of the Tsar’s Rarities and Scientific Collections, Areskin formally concluded that the revenant—named only the “specimen” in writing—be assessed immediately and confiscated for the collection should it be verified. Thus was Evgeny Tretyakov elected to the task.
A bachelor with little but his loyalty to the state, Evgeny accepted his commission with zeal, if not a spot of skepticism. His narrow house in St. Petersburg tended to grow cold and lonely in the long winter months, and though he shuddered still in the frigid confines of the carriage, even the strange and timid man assigned to him was welcome company.
His companion and secretary for the journey, Yefim Azhishchenkov, scribbled ceaselessly on leaf after leaf of paper as they trundled eastward, recording his every thought and observation for their liege’s eventual satisfaction. Though the notes he made would no doubt prove useful to posterity, particularly once Yefim had the opportunity to witness the specimen at Nebolchi, Evgeny could not help but find the fellow a poor secretary at best for recording his own notions rather than those of his immediate superior. Evgeny too had observations, although these largely concerned how futile he expected the quest would turn out to be. Revenant, indeed.
Yefim was a small man with tiny black eyes who legally retained his beard, as the tax medallion he wore around his neck testified. If Peter could not force every man in Russia to modernize and Westernize, he would at least bolster the state coffers with the stubborn’s own coin. The diminutive secretary did not often speak, though now he raised his head, stroked his wiry black beard, and made the sign of the cross—three fingers, right to left.
“Do you know of Koschei the Deathless?” he asked, his voice thin and docile.
“I knew a Koschei once,” answered Evgeny. “Koschei Dobrynin. He was Streltsy, participated in the revolt against the Tsar.” He chuckled and shook his head. “By fire and knout I assure you he is quite dead.”
“Not this Koschei,” said Yefim. “He could not die. He hides his soul—sometimes in an animal, or an egg—so that he cannot be killed. It is an old story.”
“I do not know it,” groused Evgeny, “but it seems unwise to tell tales of men who by chicanery do not die. Only through our Lord Jesus are we truly deathless.”
“Always he tricks young men into fighting him,” the secretary continued, unabated. “He steals their wives and daughters, and they come with swords and knives, but always Koschei kills them.”
Evgeny snorted. “Peasant nonsense.”
“Only a story.”
“Skirting quite close to blasphemy, Yefim. Careful, there.”
The secretary bowed his head, dropped his eyes to the papers on his lap.
“That does not sound much like our Rostislav, anyway,” Evgeny continued, tapping a finger on the sheaf of letters on the seat beside him.
“I have not read them,” said Yefim with evident disappointment.
“State secrets.”
The secretary fell silent thereafter, and before long resumed scratching out his thoughts on a fresh page. Evgeny Tretyakov touched his bald pate and glanced out at the passing farmland, lying largely fallow for the winter. In the middle distance he espied a young man and woman traipsing nude across a thin layer of snow, white steam billowing off their pale bodies, from the bathhouse they undoubtedly just exited. Country people, he mused, were decidedly different. Whatever Peter did in the cities, in St. Petersburg and Moscow, to transform Muscovy into something like the maritime nations the Tsar so loved and envied, the folk of the land never changed.
Neither, Evgeny considered, did their superstitious beliefs. The Orthodox Church and its Patriarch could exercise all the power given to them by God Almighty in the urban centers, but out here in the nation’s hinterlands things were categorically different. Out here people still believed in spirits and witches, Baba Yaga in her cabin on chicken feet and the dead come back to life. No one in St. Petersburg expected Evgeny to come back with anything apart from a shaking head and bitter laugh, a wasted journey behind him. Yet every possibility had to be investigated. The insatiable curiosity of Muscovy’s Tsar demanded it.
Whilst Yefim filled his pages, Evgeny took up the letters bound in leather from the seat beside him and untied the string that held them. Only four in total, the letters grew more urgent in chronology, begging somebody to come to Nebolchi, to bring a Father, to rid the village of the devil among them. They were not all written by the same hand. The first and third were signed by the pogost priest, darkly hinting at Peter’s Western inclinations and the evil with which they were plaguing Russia. The second was written by a village administrator who feared for the safety and souls of his family. The fourth and last letter came into Moscow’s German Suburb from the hand of a visiting scholar who claimed to be inscribing the very words of the revenant’s own mother. Certain that God had forgotten or forsaken her, she demanded someone in Moscow alert Patriarch Feofan of her distress lest the devil’s influence in Nebolchi spread to the whole of the empire.
“Rubbish,” hissed Evgeny, his mind flashing back to Koschei and his eyes rolling over the shaky, uncertain handwriting.
“We shall find out soon enough,” answered Yefim without looking up from his work. He had managed to get ink in his beard and his dark eyes squinted in the failing light.
“Yes,” Evgeny agreed. “I suppose we shall.”
Like everything built by human hands in the country, the house to which they traveled was constructed entirely of wood and clay, a simple single-story box with a stone chimney belching gray smoke at the back. Thin, piebald goats shivered in the dancing light of the carriage lanterns, hedged in a crude pen on the east side of the house, and to the west were a trio of hastily built wooden crosses jutting from the frozen earth. The carriage slowed to a halt and Evgeny reached across to touch his sleeping secretary’s knee.
“We have arrived.”
“It must be the middle of the night,” complained Yefim, pulling his coat tightly over his chest. His words were expelled in a white fume.
“Indeed it is. Come.”
Clutching one another against the cold, the two men climbed out of the carriage and stood in the shadows, facing the house. Evgeny shot a glance at the driver, who sucked at a long-stemmed pipe and nodded as one fighting off exhaustion.
“Should we have found an inn?” Yefim wondered aloud.
“I very much doubt there is one. No matter—these people called for us. We came.”
With that Evgeny advanced to the door, leaving his secretary by the carriage door, and rapped three times in rapid succession upon the hard, weathered wood. A soft murmur arose from within the house, and a moment later a faint glow illumined the cracks around the door.
Evgeny opened his mouth to speak, but found that he had forgotten the name of the family who dwelt there. Instead, he knocked once more and called out, “We have come from St. Petersburg pursuant to your request.”
For several long minutes there came no reply and the light emanating through the cracks did not waver. Evgeny shivered, hugged himself, and grunted.
“It is really quite cold out here and I suspect you have a fire indoors,” he bellowed impatiently. “I shouldn’t like to think you would keep the Tsar’s own men freezing out here in the dark.”
“You are from the Tsar?” came a timid voice.
“We are the Tsar’s men,” Evgeny answered honestly and evasively. Peter would kn
ow nothing of this expedition if it was not successful. The Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias would only become aware if the specimen was true and returned to Peter’s Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg to be studied, catalogued, and kept.
“You come for Rostislav?” squeaked the tremulous voice.
“Yes. Now for God’s sakes let us inside. It’s damnably cold out here.”
The woman fell silent and the door did not open. Evgeny sighed heavily and pulled the string to release the door from its latch. It swung in, revealing a dark, musty room with a small fire flickering in the stone hearth. A shirtless man with a thick tangle of white hair stoked the embers while the woman—small and fat, her red face framed by a heavy woolen shawl wrapped around her hair—stood before Evgeny and glowered.
“Take him,” she grunted. “Take Rostislav, but take him now. Tonight.”
“I shall have to see him first, sudárynya. See him and examine him.”
“Shut the fucking door,” barked the man at the hearth. He did not turn around, but continued poking at the fire as he swore at their visitor.
Evgeny grimaced but did as he was told. He pushed the door closed and reaffixed the string. The woman crossed her arms over her full bosom and worked her jaw, her small eyes fixed on the man from the Tsar.
“It is true, you know,” she said. “Everything you have heard. It is all true.”
“That is what I am here to determine.”
“And when you see? That our Rostislav is . . . what he is?”
“In that case he shall be taken back with us, for study in the Tsar’s Kunstkamera.”
“I do not like anything about this,” the woman groused. “But if you are to see him before you make up your mind, you had better come along.”
“Go see him,” bellowed the man at the hearth. “Go see that damned devil.”