House Haunted

by Al Sarrantonio

  Viktor sighed; turning away from his view, he once again tapped on the smoked glass partition. When it opened, he said, in a curt voice, “We have wasted enough time, Mikhail. Find the house.”

  Which they did, soon enough. The directions had been excellent, for once; apparently the driver who had been fooled into bringing the Pole up here was so contrite—or, more to the point, so frightened—that he had provided each detail, down to the tilted mailbox on the corner where they last turned and the description of the way the trees suddenly parted to give a view of the house, which was well off the road, before swallowing it up again.

  They slowed, the way the driver had told them to; and the trees parted as if drawn back by an invisible hand (the colors were breathtaking up here, the roads dusted with first fallings that only reflected and intensified the colors in the trees), and they found the narrow drive and were soon in front of the house.

  A gloomy place, Viktor thought. He allowed Mikhail to open the door of the Cadillac for him (oh, these wonderful American limousines!) and to assist his bulk out. Leaning on his cane, he looked up at the front of the place.

  Gloomy, unkempt. A big Victorian that may at one time have been very beautiful. Now it looked a little like the house in Psycho, that wonderful film of Hitchcock's American period. High attic cupola topped by a rusted weathercock. Chipped scrollwork under the eaves. Tall stained-glass windows needing a good cleaning. There was nothing as depressing as soiled stained glass. That was one thing the Church knew.

  Viktor eyed the door: large, darkly recessed under a paint-peeled porch. It looked as though it hadn't opened in a long time.

  It certainly had, at least once recently, to let in a daring, infamous, desperate Polack.

  Viktor stepped toward the porch.

  Mikhail, standing deferentially by the car, said, “Shall I come with you, sir?”

  To himself, Viktor snorted. Not to help, but to watch me, no doubt.

  “No. Stay with the car.” He smiled, grimly. “He could escape, steal the car, and get away from us—and then what?”

  The then what, meaning, and then what would happen to our asses? seemed to penetrate Mikhail's tiny mind, and he nodded sharply. Already he looked diligent, watching for wild Polacks leaping from windows or charging from the shrubbery.

  Shaking his head in wonder, Viktor Borodin walked to the door and knocked on it.

  There was no answer. But, then, he hadn't expected one. He knocked again, shouting, “Jan Pesak! We know you're in there! Please come quietly, I'm sure we can figure something out to make us all happy!”

  Meaning, of course, that Pesak, if he had any more brains than Mikhail, would be long gone, would have contacted some Western agency by now, either the State Department or the press, and, at the very least, blabbed his story if not begged asylum. Then again, he might still be here.

  He is a Polack, after all.

  “Jan Pesak!” Viktor shouted again. When he put his hand on the door, it opened halfway, on its own.

  Standing where he was, Borodin pushed the door open the rest of the way with his cane.

  A dimly lit vestibule was revealed, with no one in it. Viktor snorted, looked back at Mikhail, and stepped into the house.

  Somewhere in the long distance behind him he heard the front door close. But when he turned in the sudden darkness to look at it, there was no doorway there.

  There was sudden light.

  He was walking on snow. He felt stone beneath; he was on a snow-covered stone walkway that widened out all around him. It was early morning. The sun was low in the east, rising filtered through gray clouds thickening overhead. They promised more snow later. Someone had his arm around him; when Viktor turned to see who it was, he was met by a bearish grin in a face that seemed like that of a bear, all covered with hair. The man's teeth were bad; it looked as though his gums bled. The eyes in the grinning face were as cold and flat as small black coins.

  “So, comrade, it is so good to have you back with us.” The man hugged Viktor with his arm, using his free arm to gesture around them at what, Viktor realized with a shock, was Red Square. “Doesn't it feel wonderful to be back?”

  Dazedly—and because the man was gazing at him with such purpose—Viktor nodded.

  The man hugged him close again. “Good,” his huffing breath said; even in the cold, in the fresh air of morning, and at a discreet distance, Viktor could smell his bad breath.

  They walked on. The Kremlin grew closer. There were guards, at rigid attention. They smacked their heels together and saluted as the man and Viktor passed. The man waved lazily at them and their saluting hands lowered to their sides.

  They passed through a small courtyard, through an iron gate, into a building. Viktor, who had been to the Kremlin, didn't recognize it. Neither did he recognize the way they had come, the guard's entrance, the descending, darkly lit hall-way they now passed through.

  They walked for a long time. Viktor's companion had ceased speaking, and now he took his arm away from Viktor and began to walk in a more military fashion. Stealing a look at him, Viktor saw that his right ear was partly gone; it looked as though it had been bitten off, a ragged tooth line of healed tissue ridged above the lobe.

  Viktor was becoming short of breath; he desperately hoped they would reach their destination before he was beset by an emphysemic attack. His companion increased their pace, beginning to swing his arms at his side like a soldier, eyes straight ahead. Viktor did all that he could do to keep up. Suddenly he stopped, leaning on his cane, and said, “See here! You'll have to wait.”

  The other ignored him, marching on ahead, and soon was lost in the dim downward slope of the hall:

  After a mental count of sixty, a common technique, Viktor Borodin had regained his breath to the point where he could rise off his cane and take in his surroundings.

  The initial shock of finding himself here had worn off. He was left with more a sense of wonder than anything. Had he wandered into some secret experiment? Could the Polack Pesak be something much more than he had seemed, or that he, Viktor Borodin, had been told about? Viktor reached out to touch the walls, found them solid and real. Could this be an illusion? An induced dream? Temporal travel? Sensory deprivation? Something to do with Star Wars, SDI?

  Amazing, Viktor thought, tapping the dull green concrete wall, the ceiling, with his cane. Absolutely amazing.

  But in forty years, working for the people he worked for, he had seen things nearly as strange.

  There was nothing to do but go on.

  At his own pace, he followed the bearish soldier. He heard faint sounds up ahead, a door opening, closing. Another, familiar sound, between the opening and closing, which his mind did not solidify because of its brevity. He walked on.

  The slope in the hallway gradually diminished, disappeared. The walls changed. They were no longer dull green; there was paneling covering them now, a rich, deep cherry shade. The bare floor changed to gray shag carpeting. There were more lights, the feeling of being in an entranceway rather than an endless hall.

  He came to a door.

  Two doors. He had seen their kind before, in America. The doors and the fleeting sound he had heard linked momentarily, dissolved into failed memory. The doors were tall and wide, with a curtained round window set in each.

  He put his cane against the door on the right, pushed at it. It swung inward, and at that moment he knew the sound and the kind of doors they were.

  He pushed the door all the way open and walked forward cautiously into darkness. He heard a ratcheting sound off to his right. Suddenly, a beam of light stabbed the darkness past him and illuminated a movie screen set above a small stage. In the silvery radiance he saw rows of movie theater chairs, their seats sprung up. The theater was empty. The screen continued to show bare whiteness. Then, just as a countdown of numbers began on the screen, some in circles and some upside down, denoting the beginning of a picture, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, off in the back corner, a gray p
uff of smoke, heard a voice call him.

  “Come here—sit next to me.”

  The voice held lazy command. On the screen, a black-and-white globe of the world appeared; around it flew an airplane with a propeller on its front. Viktor walked through the beam, was blinded by it.

  “Hurry, you'll ruin the picture,” the voice in the back said.

  Viktor ducked under the low beam of the light. As he reached the darkened back corner, he felt a large hand take cold of him and press him into a seat.

  He turned to see the face that possessed the hand, but between the natural darkness of the corner and the weak glare from the distant black-and-white film, Viktor could not make out the features.

  “Watch the screen,” the voice scolded. “The film is beginning.”

  The credits, which Viktor had paid no attention to, rolled off, and the movie began.

  Viktor stared at the screen. He listened to the booming, hearty laughter of the figure in the seat next to him. He studied the screen and realized what he was watching. It was Laurel and Hardy film. Stan and Ollie had fooled their wives into thinking they were going on a cruise for Ollie's health. In fact, they were attending a convention. An actor on the screen, whom Viktor recognized as another great comic, Charley Chase, bedecked in fez and smoking a cigar, held a crowd of conventioneers enthralled with his trick of dropping a wallet and then whacking anyone who bent to pick it up with a wooden paddle. Ollie, naturally, became a victim.

  Viktor knew the sequence and the film well. Before long, he was laughing as loud as the man in the seat next to him. Later in the film, Stan and Ollie have been photographed by a newsreel camera while marching in a parade with their fellow conventioneers, known as Sons of the Desert. The film is then seen by their worried wives, who have found that the ship they were supposed to have been on for Ollie's health has gone down at sea.

  The man next to Viktor, watching Stan's innocently, naively smiling face while their wives register shock and then vengeful anger, burst into coughing paroxysms of laughter, hitting his knee with loud slapping sounds in the dark, barely able to catch his breath.

  “Are you all right?” Viktor whispered, doubtful whether the man's fit was still laughter or a fight for breath.

  “Yes, yes,” the figure laughed, smacking Viktor once on the knee before bursting into a fresh bout of uncontrollable mirth. “Oh, I tell you, these men are geniuses!”

  Viktor, again caught in the mood of the classic picture, following the subtitles with keen interest, had to agree.

  After much laughter, the film was over. Viktor watched “The End” flash. The screen then went dark. Viktor waited for lights to come up.

  Nothing happened. The figure next to him had gone silent. Viktor felt alone in the dark. For a moment his eyes saw nothing. He thought he might once again be afloat in the space continuum, to be relocated who knew where. Perhaps he was heading back to the house in New York State. Perhaps on some further bizarre adventure.

  But then his eyes adjusted. He saw the dark outline of the rows of seats in front of him, heard the man in the seat next to him shift and cough.

  A small square of light went on behind him. Viktor turned to see a bulb shining within the projection room. A figure was moving in there, eclipsing the movie projector and then moving away from it again.

  “What are we to have next?” the man beside Viktor called out, impatiently.

  The figure in the booth, backlit, once again walked in front of the projector. “I have managed to obtain Gone With the Wind.”

  “Ah.” The man beside Viktor lost his impatience. “Excellent. But let's finish with this piece of business first, shall we, Alexi?”

  “Of course,” the man in the projection booth answered. Viktor heard a door open in the back. He saw a shaft of light cut off as someone entered the theater. A flashlight went on, bobbed toward them. The man holding it stopped at their row, counting to himself, and attempting to enter, bumped on the aisle seat. He gave a low curse.

  The man next to Viktor chuckled. “Come along, Alexi.”

  “Yes.”

  The flashlight steadied on the floor. Viktor watched the figure approach. It stopped when the flashlight found his shoes in their beam. The man holding it cleared his throat.

  The man sitting next to Viktor said, “Go ahead, Alexi.” The man holding the flashlight angled it up across Viktor's Face to hold it under his own. It gave him a ghoulish appearance, lighting his face from below. But Viktor knew

  It was the hairy man who had met Viktor outside in Red square and brought him here.

  “Hello, again,” Alexi said to Viktor, tilting the flashlight beam down directly into his face.

  Viktor winced and turned toward the man sitting in the seat next to him. He saw the man's face, in faint illumination. He gasped.

  “Shall I take him now, Premier?”

  Joseph Stalin, looking boredly ahead toward the movie screen, seemingly lost in thought and slitting his eyes slightly against the beam of the flashlight, nodded.

  “Here, Premier?”

  Stalin turned his hawk's eyes on Alexi. Viktor felt the man stiffen. Suddenly Stalin's attention waned; he turned disinterestedly toward the screen again. “Yes.”

  The man with the flashlight fumbled through his clothes.

  The beam of the flashlight was raised into Viktor's face again. He felt something heavy and cold placed in his lap. “Pick it up,” Alexi said coldly.

  Viktor put his hand on the object and pulled away from it. A pistol. He had not held a gun in twenty years.

  “Put it in your hand and lift it,” Alexi ordered.

  Viktor sat frozen; suddenly he felt Stalin's large hand on his own, the same one that had slapped the premier's knee in humor during the movie. Stalin's hand patted his.

  “Pick up the pistol like Alexi told you,” the premier said quietly.

  Nearly immobile with terror, Viktor turned to look into the face that had stared out at him from history books since he was a child. He was only twenty-four when Stalin died; when Stalin was still alive, his mother had scared him to bed with threats of the ogre getting him. The ogre had gotten enough of them. Viktor's uncle had been caught dead in one of the purges; another uncle had died in Siberia twenty years after being sent there for an infraction that no one, including the men who had dragged him away one night from his home, where he had been reading his paper, had ever been able to articulate. Viktor had had nightmares involving that face until he was in his thirties; in the KGB, there were stories that constantly floated, mostly by the old-timers ready to quit and anxious for any kind of attention at all as they sat behind their desks, about the atrocities Stalin himself had privately committed—the electricity in women's vaginas, the ritual unmanning of boys he had tired of. The stories were endless. Whatever truth they held was superseded by the need these old-timers had of expressing in some way the absolute terror that had reigned during those times. It was not bureaucracy, the stodgy powerful beast that could grind you up in its machinery but do it impersonally—that came later. It was much worse—a constant, gnawing paranoia, a perpetual state of war in which no one was safe from foe, friend, even family. It was not angst and desperation that had ruled Mother Russia during those years, it was pure chemical terror, wielded by this man sitting next to him, this vicious fox, murderer of Trotsky, murderer of the Revolution itself. They had taught many versions of this man in the history books over the years; it was even said that he was as much wildly loved as feared and hated. But no one, not those old men in their fanny-worn chairs, nor the prisoners, nor the men, like Khrushchev, who had placed themselves well by managing to avoid his eye, no, no one Viktor Borodin had ever spoken to, or witnessed testimony from—even those who had professed love—had ever spoken of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, the son of a peasant from Georgia who had grown up to become Joseph Stalin, in terms that didn't contain the word fear.

  Victor Borodin felt that fear now. The man was godlike with it. He was plain eno
ugh looking, his flat face, piggish eyes, and full, florid mustache unremarkable separately; his plain dress, the drab olive coat buttoned to the neck—all of this unremarkable in part, but devastating in total. There had been similar stories, which Viktor had been more inclined to believe were folklore, of the power of Rasputin. Rasputin would have wilted like a cold rose had he ever met this man.

  “Viktor Borodin,” Stalin said, his hand still on Viktor's awn, now pressing Viktor's fingers around the handle of the gun. “I want you to lift this gun and put it in your mouth.” His slitted eyes looked somehow huge, piercing him with a light more powerful than the flashlight beam. “You have been judged, Viktor Borodin, and you have been sentenced. Believe me, there is no reprieve.”

  To Viktor's great surprise, he found himself lifting the pistol. His hand trembled. Stalin's hand steadied him.

  “Put the gun in your mouth and pull the trigger.”

  The man was like a cobra. Viktor Borodin, even as the land followed Stalin's instructions, brought the gun to his south, set it inside (it was cold, radiated cold even before it Ruched his tongue; he thought of tongue depressors, the cold breast of a spoon bringing cough medicine into his throat), thought about whether all of this was really happening. He wondered if he really could have traveled in time as well as space.

  Even as he thought these things, staring into the blank, commanding face of Joseph Stalin, he pulled the trigger and found that what he experienced was real.

  Outside the house, when Mikhail, Borodin's driver, heard the single shot, his first impulse was to find a phone and call for instructions. Then another thought penetrated his brain. If he called in to tell them he had let Comrade Borodin go into the house alone, a house where a dangerous enemy of the state was known to be, a desperate man, it would be, as Comrade Borodin might say, “his ass.”

  Mikhail opened the front passenger door to the limousine and flipped down the door on the glove compartment. He pulled on the plastic map shelf, and it popped out, revealing a lit well behind it.