by Jeremy Bates
I yawned. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m jetlagged. This is like six in the morning for me.”
“Boil some water,” she said. “I have some really good tea you need to try. I’ll get it out when I come back.” She grabbed a flashlight and stood.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To pee, if you must know.”
“Write your name in the snow.”
“Girls can’t do that.”
“Don’t go too far.”
“Don’t listen.”
Olivia left, the swish-swish-swish made from the friction of the inner thighs of her snow pants fading as she picked her way into the trees.
I filled the billycan with snow and hung it from the tripod over the fire. I was impressed with how well the flames continued to burn, and how much their light and warmth lifted my morale. I could only imagine the elation Cro-Magnons felt when they learned how to create sparks from flint for the first time.
Beyond the fire, the flat expanse of the river glimmered icily. I replayed the drama that had unfolded out there earlier. I couldn’t believe Disco had come to within inches of losing his life. It seemed unreal, as though it didn’t happen, or happened in a dream. It hadn’t been fair to blame Fyodor earlier, I knew. Nearly the entirety of the river had been solid enough to travel on. Only a single section, an anomaly, had been unsafe. Fyodor could not have known this. Anyone could have made that mistake. And he’d been the one to save Disco. If he hadn’t returned—
Something moved on the far bank of the river.
A black shape next to a tree. I had been staring directly at it, though I hadn’t known this, not until it moved.
I got quickly to my feet and flicked on my Maglite. The beam carved a yellow tunnel through the night, illuminating the dense thicket of trees across the river, their gray trunks and snow-laden boughs. I played the flashlight back and forth.
Where was it?
What was it?
A loud crack! splintered the darkness, the singular sound of a branch snapping in two, which seemed extraordinary loud given the backdrop of crystalline silence.
I whipped the Maglite beam to the left, then up, into the crown of the trees, then down, searching the sparse vegetation around their bases.
A reindeer? A moose?
A bear?
I played the flashlight back and forth a final time before chalking up whatever I’d seen, or thought I’d seen, to my imagination.
I sat back down next to the fire.
⁂
“I think I saw something across the river,” I told Olivia when she returned.
“You saw something?” she said. “What?”
“I don’t know what it was. A dark shape.”
“Are you trying to scare me?”
“Maybe it was nothing.”
“Maybe it was the Baba Yaga.”
“The old witch in Russian folklore?”
“Who flies through the air in a mortar, using the pestle as a rudder.”
“Terrifying.”
“She likes to eat children.”
“A bit scarier.”
Olivia retrieved the billycan from the tripod and sat back down next to me. She filled two mugs with hot water and added the granular contents of a shiny, metallic sachet to each. “It’s said the she ages one year every time somone asks her a question, which explains her reluctance to help the poor folks who might have gotten lost in the forest. But” —she passed me a steaming mug— “her aging could be reversed with a special blend of tea made with blue roses.”
I sniffed the drink. “Doesn’t smell like blue roses.” I set it aside in the snow and took out my flask. I chugged a mouthful of whiskey, and the fright I’d experienced loosened its bite.
Olivia frowned at me. “I thought you’d stopped doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Alcohol doesn’t solve any problems.”
“Neither does tea.”
She touched my knee. “What’s wrong, Corey?”
I moved my leg so her hand fell to the snow. “So what is that for real?” I asked, nodding at her tea. “Smells strange.”
She studied me for a long moment, then said, “It’s from the Philippines. I bought a box the last time I was there.”
“Why were you in the Philippines?”
“To get away from this,” she said, gesturing vaguely, and I presumed she meant the cold. “Some of the best beaches in the world are there.”
“You went by yourself?”
She shook her head. “With my boyfriend.”
“The one you broke up with in September?”
“Yeah, him. His name is Sergei. And like I told you, he dumped me.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Whatever, Corey Smith, I’m not the dickish alcoholic here. Besides, everyone has a fifty percent chance of being dumped. And it wasn’t like I was heartbroken. He just dumped me before I got around to dumping him.”
“You can call me Corey.”
“I prefer Corey Smith.”
“Why?”
“You have to use both names for famous people. It’s protocol.”
“Not if you know them personally.”
She clapped. “I knew you considered me a friend!”
“You’re an acquaintance.”
“How about a nickname then? Can I use a nickname?”
“Corey doesn’t have a nickname.”
“It must. Coreo—like the cookie?”
“No.”
“Curry? Korea? Coriander? Corny?”
“I would prefer Corey—”
Abruptly a noise echoed in the distance. It sounded like someone striking the trunk of a tree with a stick in quick succession.
“What the hell’s that?” I said, the hair standing up on the back of my neck.
Olivia was staring across the river in the direction the noise had originated.
She pressed a finger to her lips.
We listened.
Twenty seconds later we heard it again.
Clack…clack…clack…
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.
“Shhhh!” she said.
Twenty more seconds passed, forty. Two minutes.
We heard nothing else.
⁂
“What the hell was that?” I said, my nerves wound as tight as catgut.
“I have no idea,” Olivia replied in a quiet hiss.
“Someone trying to spook us.”
“We’re fifty miles from Ivdel, Corey! Someone just happens to be out in the woods with us and decides to spook us for the hell of it?”
“Should we wake the others?” I asked, working saliva into my suddenly dry mouth.
“Wait…” Olivia said, holding up a hand.
We listened in silence for another two minutes, and still we heard nothing more.
“Maybe it’s gone,” she said.
“What the hell was it?” My mind had been sifting through explanations, but nothing fit, because what we heard wasn’t a noise any ordinary animal could make. It was measured, calculated, almost rhythmic.
Besides, what animal aside from humans could wield a stick?
And was that what we heard? A stick striking a tree?
Or was it something else entirely?
“It was pretty far away,” Olivia said.
“This is fucked,” I said.
“You’re scared?” she said.
“You’re not?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said quietly.
“We should wake the others.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s something fucking out there, Olivia!”
“I think it’s gone.”
“You don’t know that.”
“What can anyone do if we wake them?”
“Fyodor and Vasily have rifles.”
“What’s there to shoot?”
I clenched my jaw, because she was right. There was no reason to wake anybody. Not yet. We’d simply c
ause a panic.
“If we hear the noise again,” I said, “and it’s any closer, I’m waking Vasily.”
Olivia nodded.
We sat in silence, listening, on edge. I wasn’t sure how much time passed. Five minutes? Ten? The adrenaline that had been pumping through my veins gradually faded to a dull ache. The fear in my gut drained away. My muscles relaxed.
I withdrew the flask from my pocket and took a long sip.
“Can I have some?” Olivia asked. Her eyes remained wide and shiny with fright, her skin alabaster in the firelight, but she seemed collected enough.
I passed her the flask. She sipped, grimaced, then sipped again, a little longer.
“It wasn’t an animal,” I said.
“Huh?” she said, coming out of her thoughts.
“It wasn’t an animal that made that sound.”
“It wasn’t the wind.”
“It was something intelligent.”
“Something?”
“Someone,” I amended. “There has to be someone else out here.”
“There’s no one out here.”
“The Mansi?”
“Why would they be banging on a tree in the middle of the night?”
“Hunters?” I said, surprised I hadn’t thought of this already. I sat straighter. “Shit, it was just Mansi hunters. Maybe that’s how they communicate in the dark.”
“How do you hunt in the dark? You can’t see anything.”
“It had to be hunters. Raya Anyamov said the men in her village were away hunting. We’re not that far from the village. Twenty miles maybe. Had to be them.”
“Maybe it was a forest giant.” She was staring at the fire, her face expressionless.
“Maybe it was Santa Claus,” I said.
“We are close to the north pole.”
I took the flask back and finished what remained. Which was all right. I’d stocked up from a shop next to the army-navy store back in Yekaterinburg, and I still had another bottle in my rucksack.
Olivia held out her hand.
“What?”
“Pass me the whiskey.”
“It’s empty.” Tucking the flask away, I retrieved the billycan from the fire and poured some water into her mug. “Where’s that tea you got in the Philippines with your boyfriend?”
“He’s not my boyfriend. He dumped me, remember?”
I found a sachet near her rucksack, opened it, and dumped the contents into her now empty mug. I was feeling a bit better now. Part of this was due to the whiskey warming my gut, no doubt. But a larger part, I believed, was due to Olivia’s company. Sometimes the presence of another person was all it took to take your mind off the goblins lurking under the bed and make everything seem normal again.
“You have another too,” she said.
I poured water into my mug and added a fresh sachet.
“So why’d he dump you?” I asked, glad to move on from worrying and speculating about the stick-banging.
“Because he’s a dick,” she said.
“I should have guessed.”
“Not a dick like you. Like a real dick.” After a brief hesitation, she blurted, “He made me have a threesome.”
“He made you have a threesome?”
“More like tricked me into it.”
“A threesome seems self-explanatory to me.”
“First you have to understand Sergei,” she said. “He’s one of those guys who are addicted to sex. The male version of a nymphomaniac.”
“A satyriasis,” I said.
“A sex maniac,” she agreed. “Sex was all he thought about. He wanted it all the time. And he always wanted to do it in public places. Parks, alleyways, in the ocean, with people around.”
“And you went with it?”
“I have to admit, you get a thrill. And the ocean thing, that was in the Philippines. It’s not like anyone I knew was going to see me.”
“So this guy, he told you he wanted a threesome with your friend?”
“His name’s Sergei. And, no, not really. He was over at my place. I was making dinner for him and my roommate—”
“You have a roommate?”
Olivia nodded. “She’s ten years younger than me and works in a coffee shop and is always asking me questions about Canada. We ended up drinking a lot of wine and playing Truth or Dare. Sergei’s idea. The dares started getting more and more…you know, daring. You always have to one-up the last one.”
“So Sergei dared you to have a threesome with your roommate?”
“No, he dared my roommate to do everything to herself that he did to me. We were all standing in the living room. Sergei moves behind me and slides his hands…I can’t believe I’m telling you this…he slides his hands over my breasts. My roommate starts feeling her own breasts. Then Sergei undoes my pants and slips his hand down the front. My roommate does the same to herself. And then, you know, it starts getting pretty hot… He tells my roommate to come closer. He starts touching her with his free hand. She reaches around me, pulls down his pants. He’s already massively hard, I can feel him—”
“Yeah, all right,” I said, “why don’t we stop there?”
“I’ll tell you this,” she said. “Having a threesome is like being on drugs. It feels good at the time, but afterward you come down, and you feel like crap.”
“Did you feel awkward around your roommate the next day?”
“Not really. It wasn’t like Sergei and I were married, and she wasn’t even really my friend, just a roommate.”
“So why did you feel so bad?”
“You just do. Dirty, I guess. I don’t know. Anyway, I just pretended it never happened, and after a few days, it was like it never did happen. Until Sergei brought it up when we were out for dinner. He asked me to ask my roommate if we could do it again.”
“This guy’s a legend.”
“He’s not a legend, Corey!”
“So what did you do?”
“I walked out of the restaurant and went home. I knew I had to call it off with him. You can’t date someone who wants to have sex with your roommate on a regular basis. I decided I’d tell him the next time I saw him. But then I get a text message—he sent me a frigging text message—saying we weren’t as compatible as he thought and it was over.”
I attempted to sip my tea and realized I had finished it. “Sounds like you’re better off without him.”
“Here.” She emptied another of those silver sachets into our mugs and filled them with the now lukewarm water. “Cheers to that.”
We tapped aluminum. I glanced up at the sky overhead, at the brilliant clusters of stars spreading across the black firmament, millions of them, billions. I didn’t think I’d ever seen so many stars before in my life.
“What about you?” she asked me. “Have you ever had a threesome?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not as prurient as you.”
“Right, whatever.”
Olivia, I noticed peripherally, was sidling closer to me. I looked at her—and she kissed me on the lips. I pulled back so our noses were touching and I could see her eyes. I wasn’t sure what the hell just happened, whether I was going to get up or kiss her back, when she pressed her lips against mine again. This time I responded. We must have kissed for a full minute. I couldn’t remember when I did that with someone last, just kissed like teenagers without doing anything else except holding hands, but there was little else either of us could do bundled up in our snow gear. It was like two Michelin men making out.
As if reading my thoughts, Olivia pulled off my knit hat, tugged down the zipper of my jacket.
I heard myself say, “Maybe we should go inside the tent.”
And she replied, “Good idea.”
⁂
Lurching awake, I remained motionless in the dark, listening. I heard it again. The distant, mournful howl of a wolf. It was answered a few moments later by its brethren—and were these ones closer?
I propped myself higher on my elbow. The portable heater glowed orange in the corner. Beneath my sleeping bag I wore my tent clothes—wool socks, thermal underwear, fleece pullover—and I was cold but not freezing. Olivia lay next to me, her breathing deep and regular.
Another howl.
So what, I thought. This was Siberia. Wolves lived here. But we weren’t their prey. Besides, Fyodor’s dogs would sound an alarm if any were ballsy enough to creep up on us.
And Fyodor and Vasily had rifles.
We’re fine. Go back to sleep.
I lay back down and tried to do that.
More howls, but they weren’t getting closer. I’d imagined that.
We’re fine…
As my eyelids grew heavy, and my mind sluggish and disconnected, the discordant, lupine symphony continued to play to the night, but it had ceased to concern me…and when my unplugged mind heard a sound different to the howls, the crunch of snow underfoot, perhaps right outside my tent, it didn’t concern me either.
CHAPTER 16
NORTHERN URAL MOUNTAINS, USSR, 1959
FOUR DAYS TO LIVE
Following closely behind Igor on the Lozva River, Zina couldn’t stop thinking about Grandpa Slava, and what he’d said about Communism and the Party. She couldn’t accept they were evil. Perhaps there had been mistakes made under Stalin’s leadership, but there had been great successes too, especially in regard to the economy and women’s rights. And in the years since Stalin’s death, under Khrushchev’s rule, many positive changes had come about. She and her fellow citizens could watch foreign movies now, and read foreign books, even those written by American authors such as Ernest Hemmingway. Two years ago the Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students opened to the world in Moscow. And since last year parents could choose what language their child studied at school.
Yes, the future of the Motherland was bright. A little patience was simply required.
Setting aside thoughts of politics, Zina’s mind drifted to the woodcutter Beard. She already missed his larger-than-life company, and she wondered what he did with all his time at Sector 41. He worked a lot, of course. Every day, from dawn until dusk, and it was difficult and dangerous. But what did he do in the long, cold evenings? He was not like the other woodcutters. He was a scholar at heart. He needed meaningful conversation and other intellectual pursuits. She hoped he would enjoy the book she gave him. It was merely a fiction novel but one of her favorites, and although it had been hard to part with, she believed he would appreciate it more than she.