by Brian Lumley
“Yes, I know,” Shukshin tried not to snarl. “I hadn’t been too well, Harry, but I’m fine now. Was there something you wanted?” I could eat your heart, you unnatural little swine!
“Why, yes, I wondered if perhaps I might come to see you. Maybe we could talk a little about my mother. Also, I’ve got my skates with me. If the river’s frozen I could do some skating. I’m only up here for a few days more, you see, and I—”
“No!” Shukshin snapped, and at once checked himself. Why not get it over with? Why not get this shadow from the past out of the way once and for always? Whatever it was that Keogh knew or suspected—however he had come by Shukshin’s ring, which the Russian had believed lost in the river, and whatever the psychic link between this youth and his mother, which apparently bound them still—why not bring it to an end right here and now? Commonsense stood no chance against the bloodlust which surged in Shukshin now
“Stepfather?”
“I meant only—Harry, my nerves still aren’t up to much, I’m afraid. Living here all alone—you know, I’m not used to company. Of course I’d like to see you, and the river is perfect just now for skating, but I really couldn’t do with a houseful of young people, Harry.”
“Oh, no, Stepfather, I didn’t intend bringing anyone with me. I wouldn’t think of imposing on you to that extent. Why, my friends don’t even know I have a relative up here! No, chiefly I’d just like to visit the house again and go on the river. I’d like to skate where my mother used to skate, that’s all.”
That again! The bastard did know something—or at least suspected something—definitely! So he wanted to skate, did he? On the river, where his mother skated. Shukshin’s face twisted into a leer. “Well in that case … when can I expect you?”
“In about, oh, two hours?” came Harry’s answer.
“Very well,” said Shukshin. “About 4:30 to 5:00 P.M., then. I shall look forward to it, Harry.”
And he put the phone down before an utterly animal growl of hatred could burst from his writhing mouth and betray his true feelings: Oh, how I shall look—forward—to—it!
* * *
Harry Keogh wasn’t nearly so far away as Edinburgh. In fact he was in the foyer of the hotel where he’d been staying the past few nights in Bonnyrigg itself. After speaking to Shukshin on the phone he shrugged into his overcoat and went out to his car, a battered old Morris he’d bought on the cheap especially for this trip. He had passed his driving test the first time around—or at least an ex-driving instructor in the cemetery in Seaton Carew had passed it for him.
Now he drove on icy roads to the top of a hill some quarter of a mile from the old house and overlooking it, where he parked and got out of the car. There was no one about; the scene was bleak and bitter; shivering, Harry carried binoculars to a stand of trees rising starkly naked against the sky. From behind the bole of one of them, he trained the glasses on the house and waited—for no more than a minute or two.
Shukshin came out through the study’s patio doors and hurried through his courtyard garden, finally emerging from a door in the wall facing the river. In his hand he carried a pickaxe.…
Harry drew breath sharply, let it out slowly to plume in the frosty air. Shukshin scrambled through brittle shrubbery and brambles down to the river’s rim. He let himself down carefully on to the ice, tested it, sprang up and down at its very edge. Then he turned and looked all about. The place was quite deserted.
He walked to the centre of the grey-shining expanse of ice and bounded again, and once more seemed satisfied. And now Harry’s eyes were riveted to the scene, that monochrome tableau which he almost felt he’d watched before, and the act which he was absolutely certain Shukshin had performed before.
For the figure trapped and enlarged in the lenses of his binoculars now crouched down, took his pickaxe and swung it in a wide circle, scoring a boundary, a demarcation, in the crusty surface of the ice. And all around that etched circle he strode, hacking periodically with all the strength and passion of a madman, until spouts of water jetted up each time the point of the pick struck home; so that in a matter of minutes a great disc of ice nine or ten feet across floated free in a pool of its own. Then the final touch:
Once more pausing to peer all about, finally Shukshin walked the perimeter of the circle, using his feet to brush icy debris from his assault back into the gap. The water would freeze over again, of course, but it would not be safe for hours yet, certainly not before tomorrow morning. Shukshin had set his trap—but he didn’t know that the intended victim had watched him do it!
Harry could scarce control his shivering now, the trembling in all his limbs which had little or nothing to do with the actual temperature. No, it had more to do with the mental condition of that hunched figure down there on the ice. The binoculars were not powerful enough to bring the figure really close, but still Harry was sure that he’d seen its face working hideously through all the hacking. The face of a lunatic, who for some reason lusted after Harry’s life as once he had lusted after—and taken—his mother’s.
Harry wanted to know why, would not rest until he had the answer. And there was only one way to get it.
* * *
Feeling physically and mentally weary, and yet knowing that his work wasn’t over yet, Viktor Shukshin returned to the house. Inside the walled courtyard, he dragged his pickaxe behind him across frosted flags, letting its haft fall clattering from his fingers before he stepped through the open patio doors and into his study. Head down and arms dangling at his sides, he took two more paces into the room—and froze!
What? Was Keogh here already? The entire house felt filled with strange forces. It reeked of ESP-aura, its very atmosphere seeming to vibrate with alien energies.
Instantly inflamed, now Shukshin sensed movement: the patio doors clicking shut behind him! He whirled, saw, and his jaw fell open. “Who…? What…?” He choked.
Two men faced him, stood there in his own study where they had waited for him, and one of them held a gun pointed straight at Shukshin’s heart. He recognized the weapon as Russian service issue, recognized the coldly emotionless looks of the two men, and felt Doom closing its fist on him. But in a way it was not entirely unexpected. He had thought there might be some sort of visit one day. But that it should be now, of all ill-omened moments.
“Sit down—Comrade,” said the tall one, his voice harsh as a file on Shukshin’s ragged nerves.
Max Batu pushed a chair forward and Shukshin very nearly collapsed into it. Batu moved to stand behind him where he sat facing Dragosani. The ESP-aura washed all about Shukshin now, as if his mind swam in bile. Oh, yes, they were from the Château Bronnitsy, these two!
The blackmailer’s face was ravaged, eyes sunken deep in black sockets. Looking over his head at Dragosani, finally Batu’s round face cracked into a grin. “Comrade Dragosani,” he said, “I had always thought you looked ill—until now!”
“ESPers!” Shukshin spat the word out. “Borowitz’s men! What do you want of me?”
“He has every reason to look ill, Max.” Dragosani’s voice was deep as a pit. “A traitor, a blackmailer, a murderer.…”
Shukshin looked as if he might spring to his feet. Batu placed heavy, stubby hands on his shoulders. “I asked,” Shukshin grated, “what you want of me?”
“Your life,” said Dragosani. He took a silencer from his pocket, screwed it tightly to the muzzle of his weapon, stepped forward and placed it against Shukshin’s forehead. “Only your life.”
Shukshin felt Max Batu step carefully to one side behind him. And he knew they were going to kill him.
“Wait!” he croaked. “You’re making a mistake. Borowitz won’t thank you for it. I know a lot—about the British side. I’ve been giving it to Borowitz bit by bit. But there’s a lot he doesn’t know yet. Also, I’m still working for you—in my way. Why, I’m on a job now! Yes, right now.”
“What job?” said Dragosani. It had not been his intention to shoot Shukshin, m
erely to frighten him. Max’s getting out of the line of fire had only been a natural reaction. Shooting was messy and made for bad necromancy. The way Dragosani had planned Shukshin’s death was much more interesting:
When he had obtained all he could get this way, by simple questioning, then they would take Shukshin to the bathroom and bind him. They would put him in a bath half full of cold water and Dragosani would use one of his surgical sickles to slit his wrists. As he lay there in water rapidly turning red as his life leaked out, then Dragosani would re-question him. The promise would be that if Shukshin told all, his wounds would be bound and he’d be released. Dragosani would show him bandages, surgical tape. But of course, Shukshin would only have so much time to respond: as much time as it took the water to darken with his blood, until he lay in a cold, crimson soup. It would have been a warning, a promise that if Shukshin continued to give them trouble, then Dragosani and Batu—or others like them—would be back to finish the job. That is what they would tell Shukshin, but of course the job would be finished right there and then.
Even so, still Shukshin might hold something back. Something, perhaps, which he did not consider important, something forgotten—maybe something too damning to tell. Maybe, for instance, he was already working for the British.…
But whatever he said it would make no difference. When he was dead they would flush his drained corpse with fresh water, take him out of the bath, and then … then Dragosani would continue to question.
Now Dragosani took the gun away from Shukshin’s forehead, sat down facing him. “I’m waiting,” he said. “What job?”
Shukshin gulped, tried to force his fear of these men—and his hatred of their weird ESP talents—to the back of his mind. It was there, it wouldn’t go away, but for now he must try to ignore it. His life hung by a thread and he knew it. He must get his thoughts in order, lie as he’d never lied before. Some of it would be the truth anyway, and of that much at least he could speak with absolute conviction:
“You know I’m a spotter?”
“Of course, it’s why Borowitz sent you here: to find them and kill them. You haven’t been too successful, apparently.” Dragosani’s sarcasm was acid.
Shukshin ignored that, too. “When I came in here a moment ago—the moment I stepped into this room—I knew you were here. I could almost taste your presence. You’re powerful ESPers, both of you. Especially you,” he glared at Dragosani. “There’s a terrific, a monstrous talent in you. It … it hurts me!”
“Yes, Borowitz told me that,” Dragosani answered dryly. “But we know about spotters, Shukshin, so stop stalling and get on with it.”
“I wasn’t stalling. I was trying to explain about the man I’m going to kill—today!”
Dragosani and Batu exchanged glances. Batu looked down on the top of Shukshin’s head and said: “You were going to kill a British ESPer? Why? And who is he?”
“It was my way of getting back into Borowitz’s good books,” Shukshin lied. “The man’s name is Harry Keogh. He is my stepson. He got his talent—whatever it is—from his mother. Sixteen years ago I killed her, too.…” Shukshin continued to glare at Dragosani. “She fascinated me—and she infuriated me! Is she the one you meant when you said I was a murderer? Oh, I killed her all right. Like all ESPers, she hurt me. Her talent drove me mad!”
“Never mind her,” snapped Dragosani. “What about this Keogh?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you. With you two, powerful as you are, still I had to actually enter the house to know you were here. But with Harry Keogh—”
“Yes?”
Shukshin shook his head. “He’s different. His talent is … vast! I know it is. You see, the bigger it is, the more it hurts. So I’m not only killing him for Borowitz but also for myself.”
Dragosani was interested. He could always finish this thing with Shukshin later; but if Harry Keogh was that powerful, he would like to know more about him. And in any case, if he was a member of the British E-Branch it would be like killing two birds with one stone. As his interest expanded he forgot to ask Shukshin the important question: was Keogh a member of the British E-Branch? And that was something the other wasn’t going to volunteer.
“I think we might be able to accommodate you,” Dragosani finally said. “It’s always good when you can reach an understanding with old friends.” He put away his gun. “When, exactly, were you going to kill this man, and how?”
And Shukshin told him.
* * *
After Shukshin had gone back to the house, Harry returned to his car and drove it to the foot of the hill in the direction of Bonnyrigg. Down there he parked again, off the road, then made his way on foot across a field to the river. Frozen over, the area was unfamiliar and made more so by the first feathers of snow where they drifted down from the leaden skies. Everything began to take on the soft, misty aspect of a winter painting.
Harry began to make his way upriver. His mother’s resting place was up there somewhere, he couldn’t say where exactly. That was one of the reasons he’d come again to this place: to make sure he knew exactly where she was, that he could find her under any and all circumstances. Walking on the frozen water, he reached out his mind:
“Ma, can you hear me?”
She was there immediately. “Harry, is that you? So close!” And at once her apprehension, her agony of fear for him: “Harry! Is it … now?”
“It’s now, Ma. But don’t give me any more problems than I have already. I need your help, not arguments. I don’t need anything to trouble my mind.”
“Oh, Harry, Harry! What can I say to you? How am I supposed to stop worrying about you? I’m your mother.…”
“Then help me. Don’t say anything, just be still. I want to see if I can find you, blind.”
“Blind? I don’t—”
“Ma, please!”
She was silent, but her worry gnawed at him, in his head, like the pacing of a troubled loved one in a small room. He kept walking, closed his eyes and went to her. A hundred yards, maybe a little more, and he knew he was there. He stopped walking, opened his eyes. He stood in the curve of the overhanging bank, on the thick white ice which formed his mother’s headstone. Her marker, and his marker, too. Now he knew he could always find her.
“I’m here, Ma.” He crouched down on the ice, scuffed away a thin layer of snow, looked at the heavy jack-handle in his gloved hand. That was the second reason he had come.
As he began to batter at the ice, she said: “I see it all now, Harry. You’ve been lying to me, deceiving me,” she reproached him. “You think there will be problems after all.”
“No I don’t, Ma. I’m much stronger now, in many ways. But if there is a problem … well, I’d be a fool not to cover all the possibilities.”
Here, close to the bank, the ice was a little thicker. Harry began to perspire, but soon he’d made a hole almost three feet across. He cleared as much as he could of the broken ice fragments from the hole and straightened up. Down there, the water swirled blackly. And under the water, under the cold silt and mud.…
All done, now Harry must go, and quickly. No good to let his sweat grow cold on him. Also, it was beginning to snow a little heavier. It began to get dark as the early winter dusk came with the snow. He had time now for a brandy at the hotel, and then, then it would be time for his showdown with Viktor Shukshin.
“Harry,” his mother called after him one last time as he hurried back across the field to his car. “Harry, I love you! Good luck, son.…”
* * *
One hour later Dragosani and Batu stood behind a clump of young conifers on the river bank twenty-five or thirty yards upstream of Shukshin’s house. They had been there for a little less than half an hour but already were beginning to feel the cold biting through their clothing. Batu had commenced a rhythmic swinging of his arms across his chest and Dragosani had just lit a cigarette when at last the yellow light above the door to Shukshin’s courtyard snapped into life—his signal
to them that the scene was now set for murder—and two figures came out into the evening.
In real time it was not yet night, but the winter darkness was almost that of night and but for the stars and a rising moon, visibility would be poor. The clouds, so dense only an hour ago, had now drifted away and no more snow had fallen; but to the east the sky was black with a heavy burden and what little wind there was came from that direction. It would yet snow tonight, and heavily. But for the moment the stars lit the scene with their cold, soft light and the rising moon made a silver ribbon of the winding river of ice.
As the figures from the house picked their way down to the river Dragosani took a last drag on his cigarette behind cupped hands, threw it down and ground it out beneath his heel; Batu stopped swinging his arms; they both stood like stone and watched the play unfold.
At the river’s rim the two figures shrugged out of their overcoats and placed them on the bank, then adopted kneeling positions as they put on their skates. There was a little conversation, but it was low and the wind was in the wrong direction. Only snatches of talk drifted back to the hidden watchers. Shukshin’s voice, dark and very deep, sounded openly aggressive to Dragosani and wolfish—like the growling of a great dog—and he wondered why Keogh didn’t take fright or at least show something of suspicion; but no, the younger man’s voice was flat and even, almost carefree, as the two glided out onto the ice and began to skate.
At first they went to and fro, almost side by side, but then the slighter figure took the lead. And moving with some skill he rapidly picked up speed to come skimming upriver towards the spot where the watchers were hiding. Dragosani and Batu crouched down a little then, but at the last moment before he drew level with them Keogh turned in a wide loop which took in the entire breadth of the river and headed back the other way.
Behind him, Shukshin had almost slowed to a halt as Keogh made his run. The older man was far less certain on the ice, seemed awkward and even clumsy by comparison; but as Keogh sped back towards him he now turned to skate in the same direction, but in such a way as to impede the faster man. Keogh leaned over in a slalom at such an angle that his skates threw up a sheet of snow and ice as he missed the other by inches, then threw himself over the other way at a similar angle to bring himself back on course. And a scant twelve inches away, his skates carved ice on the very rim of the sabotaged circle where fresh-formed ice barely held the central disc in place.