“If it comes to that,” she replied, “I will protect you. You have great value to us, and to our families. But we could not be seen as favouring your household. A sacrifice had to be made.”
I nodded, for what was there to say. “Why have you come?” I asked.
She reached up, unfastened her necklace, placed it on the table between us. “What can I do to live through this war? I don’t care about my husband.”
Just then, I heard Antoniu as I always had, a whisper high in the back of my head. “She will not live. She will be dead within the week, whatever she does.”
“It is good you don’t care about your husband,” I told her. “For he has found a younger woman and is planning to desert you. If you want to live, you must kill him. Tonight.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “You see this? This is true?”
Antoniu fell silent within me. “Yes,” I said, “it’s all so clear. A knife in the neck from behind—be swift and silent.” I took her hand in mine. “It is just as you said: a sacrifice has to be made.”
She nodded, withdrew her hand, walked out the door and up the stairs. I never saw her again.
Bogdan
I was the first to be killed when they came onto the factory floor. Normally, when I am at my station, I am farthest from the door, but at this time I was closest because someone had fallen in the change room, or so I was told, and I was the first aid attendant for the morning shift. I have wondered since if someone inside the factory assisted the attack, as I could not see anyone injured when I approached the change room, and then the outside door pulled open abruptly and the gunshots began.
I was struck in the chest and face and fell quickly. Within moments, I felt myself lift up and out of my body, held only by a thin thread of light, and then I was high up near the ceiling, looking down at my bloodied remains and then at the carnage unfolding in the rest of the room.
There were, I think, seven of them in our building, all in dark grey trench coats with black fur collars and black leather caps that were not of the police nor of the military, but from something worse. Two of them sprayed the room with machine guns. The others had semi-automatic pistols that they used to finish anyone still breathing after the hail of bullets.
After just two minutes, thirty of us lay dying, and after six minutes, we were dead. As the machine guns swept one room, then entered and swept another, mechanically, from room to room to room, you could hear the gunfire echo everywhere. And after the shots, the fires were set. In the brief silences in our building, you could hear the tra-ta-ta in the other buildings, the rush and roar of hungry flames.
Fifteen minutes, and all were dead. Two hundred and twenty of us. Four escaped, including the girl, and perhaps also the collaborator.
After a time, I felt the thread of light between myself and my body fade and I rose up higher through the floors until I was well above the factory buildings. They were consumed in an immense and terrifying conflagration which could only leave ruins and ash. Every building was burning, even animals and birds were dead. So much was lost that day.
I found in time that I could move of my own accord and that I was undisturbed by wind and smoke, and so I returned to earth and glided to the small cemetery outside the factory gates. I had always found it peaceful and contemplative, and had sometimes wished that I would die during my requirement so that I could be buried there. I settled under a tree, much as I would have if I had been alive, and turned my attention away from the factory buildings towards the three villages and the land beyond.
After what felt like an hour or two—for time was already behaving strangely—a young woman drifted along the road and up over the hillock and came to rest next to me. She said nothing, so I spoke first.
“I thought I was all alone,” I told her. “I thought I missed my chance. Hundreds died, in the factory, but I’m the only one I’ve seen. Except for now, for you. Have the others moved on, to another place? Is that what was meant for us?”
She paused for a moment. “I’m new myself but—I think what happens is you float up and up and, if you don’t stop yourself, then you disperse like a mist. You just cease to be. But if you will yourself down, back down to the ground, then this is where you’ll stay. I don’t know if it’s true for everyone, but I’m here and I think that’s why.”
“What happened to you?” I asked.
She shifted uncomfortably. I almost said that she didn’t have to tell me. And then she knelt down beside me, and stared at the ground between us. “I was at home, waiting for my brother to come in from the pasture, when I heard the shots. I looked out, I saw him die, I saw his face. And then the men, two men, they were coming to the house. I had no escape. They grabbed me, held me down, they—violated me, slashed me open. I died. And when I pulled away from my body, I left the house, I looked for my brother. I found his body, but he wasn’t there. I looked back at the house and then thought I should go, but didn’t know where. I saw the smoke from the factory, so I followed it here, and then I found you.”
“Were you angry?” I asked. “Or sad?”
“I was sad,” she admitted, “but as I left the farm and started on the road, my sadness began to fade. I knew the thing I feared the most had happened, so I was no longer afraid. It’s not peace, exactly, it’s more like a stillness.” She turned and for the first time met my eyes. “Is it like that for you?”
“I think so,” I answered. “I thought I would be lonely. I was always lonely before. But I sat and watched the grass wave in the wind, the sunlight stream through the leaves on the trees. I remembered songs my father played on accordion and violin, I sang them to myself. Yet those things that happened just a few hours ago feel as distant as my grandfather’s schoolyard stories. I wonder if we will stay like this, or if something more will happen.”
We sat in silence, and then she stood. “I should go,” she said. “To my mother’s house. My brother might have gone there, it’s where we always felt safest.” She leaned down, lightly kissed my forehead. “Remember me, if you can.”
“I will try,” I replied. I watched as she drifted back over the hillock and down alongside the road, and when I looked again she had vanished.
And suddenly it was dusk, and the shadows cast by the setting sun crept past me and up onto the factory wall. My thoughts turned once more to my father, and I began to sing.
Horia
Less than a week after my birth, just hours after my mother died, I was adopted by the Grazyns: Maxim, owner of the Grazyn Porcelain Factory and benefactor of the three nearby villages, and his devoted wife Anychka. I never knew who my mother was or where she came from. The Grazyns felt this was best, as my mother had no living relatives and my birth father was unknown. They could not have children themselves, so my early life in many ways was like a fairy story—filled with love and riches and luxury, and loneliness. A feeling that nothing I had belonged to me, and that I in turn belonged to nothing and to no one.
From a young age, I had a tutor, Miss Irina, who was from our region but had been raised in Prague and had travelled through Europe with her family. Twenty years older than me, she was beautiful, if somewhat severe in appearance, and I adored her. She taught me all of the conventional subjects—mathematics, science, history, geography—as well as reading and writing in Russian, German, French, and English. And also embroidery. Mother believed that I should be seen on occasion with a silver needle, a lock of thread, a square of white cotton and a Grazyn thimble on my finger. As it turned out, I had an aptitude for needlework and by adolescence was creating my own elaborate, intricate designs that decorated my bedroom, the family sitting room, the factory chapel, the bereavement suite, and the altars of the churches in the three villages.
In private, I more often used a goat leather thimble, as they were inexpensive and easy to replace, but I appreciated the beauty and the practicality of the porcelain thimble. Smooth and resilient, the Grazyn thimble was unique among porcelain thimbles as the surface was three-qua
rters painted with delicate motifs, and one-quarter plain. The plain surface, which protected the pad of the finger, was lightly pocked with small indentations to keep the needle from sliding off. As I grew older, these indentations proved delightfully practical for other, less girlish activities—sparking countless fantasies of Miss Irina lifting her bedcovers and welcoming me into her embrace, warming me with her moist red mouth.
I was rarely allowed to interact with other children, and seldom with adults, so for many years Miss Irina was my only friend. She had never married, and never would, but was mindful of the possibility that her caregiving duties might end once a suitable husband was found for me. To their credit, the Grazyns did not impose their will upon me. They concentrated instead on preparing me to run the factory when the inevitable moment came.
It was then, as I turned nineteen, that my father revealed the factory’s many secrets, those of the Grazyns and of the villages around us. His trust in me was implicit, and his calm persistence in the face of my disbelief was itself a powerful demonstration of his faith in me. Yet my image of him, of our family, of our world together was deeply shaken. I wanted to be the good daughter, the capable heir, but I also wanted to run, to escape the ghoulish prison that my fairy-tale palace had suddenly become. And the tiniest part of me, like a shard of ice in my heart, wanted to kill him.
He was a vivisectionist, performing horrific experiments on the living. He was a murderer, a killer even of children. He was a resurrectionist, a body-snatcher. Our wealth, our renown, were founded on decades of his unspeakable acts, and on two hundred years of unspeakable acts by Grazyns before.
And yet, he was my father.
And then a thought, a fine thin blade of dread, ran from the crown of my head down the back of my skull and all the way down my spine. “What of my mother?” I asked. “Was she one of your victims?”
“You are in fact my child,” he said softly, “and I am your father. Your mother is Miss Irina.”
He leaned closer. “And you are my greatest gift. For while I am human, Irina has the Drevniye blood, a sister to the Naystarsha. This is why we have kept you from other children, from other people. You are not like them.” He reached behind me, under my capelet, unbuckled the leather flap that concealed my other mouths, that held my myriad knife-sharp tongues all snug against my back. He caressed them gently. “You are the last great hope of Irina’s kind, and the crowning achievement of mine. You are the one that lived.”
Just then, from below, on the factory floor: shouts and shots and screams, and silence. And then more cries, the smell of smoke, the stink of burning flesh. I turned to him. “What is this? What do we do?”
“The Nichni Politsiyi,” he said, hushing his voice to a whisper. “Run to the back of the building, to the library, and out through the window. And then to the trees.” It was true, the factory backed onto a dense dark forest. Its floor was knotted with roots and vines and nettles but its trees stretched out serenely above the tangle with branches supple and strong. I took his hand to pull him with me but he shook it away. “You cannot lift me, and I cannot climb. I will face them here. Now go.” Already footsteps were rushing towards the doors. I turned and ran.
Our rooms were a maze of doors and passages which had been a boon for childhood games of hide-and-seek with Miss Irina, and here I was again, ducking and dodging and peering and scuttling, my heart in my throat as—tra-ta-ta!—the gunfire rang out behind me. Father was dead, I knew this, but it was all that I knew. From study to bedroom to hallway to gallery to library I ran, and then stopped. At the window leading out to the forest was Miss Irina. Bleeding. She had been shot, very possibly with silver.
“There is no time,” she said. She held her arms out weakly.
I raced to her, enfolded her, pulled her up to the sill and into the lush leaves above. “You have carried me, and have always carried me, and without a word,” I told her. “Now it is my turn.”
The doors behind us burst open—but we were already gone.
Ivan
“What I don’t get is, why aren’t there more ghosts?”
“Don’t turn here, it’s a one-way going north,” I said. “You have to go down to the end of this block, take a right, and then go up the next street.”
“I mean,” he continued, “thousands of people die every day. Terrible deaths, some of them, murders and worse. So what I want to know is,” and with this he turned and looked at me, “why aren’t we overrun with ghosts? And why are they all from the last few hundred years?”
“There’s a ghost in the Bible, in the first book of Samuel. England has a Roman soldier haunting the Essex coast. And Pausanius wrote about one in Ancient Greece, at the site of the Battle of Marathon. I’m sure there’s a phantom caveman somewhere.”
“What’s that, three? Four?” he said, glancing over at me again. “Where are all the others?”
Just keep your eyes on the road,” I replied. “I don’t care if there are dozens or millions, I’d rather we didn’t join them.”
He took a pair of flat-fold dust masks out of his pocket, handed one to me, slipped the other one on himself over his mouth and nose. I tucked mine inside my jacket. He shrugged, pulled out a key on a blue plastic tab, slid it into the lock, wrestled with it until the bolt slid free. He grabbed the knob, pushed the door open. A musty grey cloud floated out to greet us. He gestured for me to enter first. I fanned at the air with my hand, peered into the darkness, stepped inside.
“Just a reminder, I don’t clear houses,” I said. “It’s not my skill set.”
“Yes, I know,” he answered. “I just want to know what’s in here, whether we should even try to reopen it.”
Edward House, a brooding pile of crimson brick down in the entertainment district, had been a speakeasy in the ’20s, a men’s shelter in the ’30s, and a mob-connected steakhouse in the ’50s. It achieved its true notoriety in the early 1970s as a gay men’s bathhouse, with a trend-setting nightclub and lounge that hosted rising disco stars and fading Broadway divas. Grace Jones had played one of her first shows here, and Ethel Merman one of her last. The Edward Baths thrived through Charlie’s Angels, Dallas and Dynasty, and then struggled through the early years of AIDS as the illness tore through the city’s gay community.
Then, in 1997, there was first a suspicious death, and a few months later a fire that trapped a dozen men on the top floor. Some of them burned to death, some suffocated, and one broke his neck when he leapt from the third-floor window to the pavement below. Police, fire, and ambulance took a leisurely twenty-seven minutes to arrive. Much of the back half of the house was destroyed but the front remained largely intact.
Edward House sat empty for the better part of a decade before Stefan inherited it and began to explore turning it into an event space, suitable for weddings, parties, conferences, and recitals. In the meantime, the building was declared a heritage property, so he spent another five years carefully dismantling the ruined section of the house and developing a plan to rebuild and expand the space within the rigorous and convoluted heritage guidelines. However, something had recently happened with his contractor—one of his crew had ended up in the hospital and the rest had flat-out quit. And that’s when Stefan called me.
He reached over to the left of the front door and flicked a switch. A trio of worklights on yellow stands burst on, flooding the area with cool clean whiteness. We were in a large open entryway with a wooden cash desk built into the corner at our immediate left, a pair of solid red oak doors just beyond, and an open archway to the right with another stand of lights just inside waiting to be powered up. A large red oak staircase rose up ahead of us, with a tin sign nailed on the wall at the first step: No Alcohol Beyond This Point. On the floor in front of us were some scuffs and gouges where a pair of turnstiles should have been—torn out by the renovator, I supposed, to make it easier to bring large or heavy items in and out the front door. The floors were surprisingly clean, swept maybe two or three days before.
I heard, then felt, a very faint hum that seemed to emanate from within the walls: residual spirits—the most common kind. Remnants of souls, frozen in time, gradually fading over the passing decades. In a warm inviting home they loved in life, their gentle presence can help to create an atmosphere of quiet contentment. Here, there was an edge of despair, confusion, even fear. A chord struck from clashing notes. Not dire enough to cause Stefan any trouble, though, or alarm his future customers. It might even be helpful, encouraging patrons to eat quickly, drink more and leave sooner. I tuned in to the dissonance, filtering out the noise and focusing on the essence. I reached out, touched the wall to my immediate right. A little ripple, like a droplet of ice water, ran from my fingertips up my arm and through my shoulders and chest. Again, not enough to be concerned about, but startling all the same.
Stefan saw my face and frowned. I tried to pull my features back into a more neutral expression. “There are a few things going on here. It will take me a while to sort them out. Are all the doors unlocked?”
“Everything but the basement,” he answered. “I can let you in there now if you like.”
“No no, it’s fine. I think most of what I’m looking for is on the upper floors.”
I looked through the arch on the right into the large empty room, the bordello red paint on the walls cracking and peeling to reveal the old white calcimine underneath. More must, more damp, with an edge of smoke and rot. Risers in front of the bay window suggested a platform for a DJ booth or a tiny stage, aptly placed in front of the modest wooden dance floor in the centre of the room. In the darkness at the back I could make out the generous curve of a bar with rows of empty liquor shelves behind. Plastic sheeting and some yellow caution tape sealed the room off from those at the back of the house. The hum was stronger here, richer, more resonant. A throb, a pulse. Eyes watching, bodies swaying, hands reaching.
The Bone Mother Page 8
