With a cry, Colleen grasped her machete in both hands and brought it down hard across Agnes Wu, hacking her from shoulder to hip in a move that would have sundered her in two had she been composed of meat and bone and blood, or any material that could be so affected.
But it was like trying to cut lightning, like severing smoke. It had no effect at all, except possibly pissing off the thing that was Agnes Wu-or was composed partially of her-even more than she was previously.
The abomination gave a hideous, deafening roar that shook the ground and sky and all its stars. Its force hurled Colleen windmilling back, struggling to maintain her balance-which is what saved her ass, in the long run. For as she flailed wildly to stay on her feet as she was driven backward, her arm glanced against a wall, which shrieked and flinched away.
Now, that’s interesting, Colleen reflected.
Agnes Wu was striding toward her and she didn’t really look human anymore, unless humans were made of the molten hearts of suns, made of reactor cores in full meltdown. Colleen could feel her skin sunburning as she faced her, her eyes crisping like she was peering into the fires of hell. She turned quickly away and plunged her arm again into the wall. Her bare hand hit blunt stone, was turned aside, but where her arm glanced the wall, the brick surface rippled and screamed and irised away.
It’s the armor, Colleen realized, the armor of dragon skin that Doc, Lord bless him, had made for her and Cal and Shango. Just like the scale that had burnt Clayton Devine, that crazed, homicidal half-flare, back in Chicago when Colleen had pressed it into his flesh, the armor was doing the exact same thing here.
Because-as that bloody, horrific explosion had so clearly demonstrated just minutes before-the walls and doors and everything else here were made of flares.
With the possible-no, make that probable-exception of Dr. Agnes Wu, who was bearing down on her right about now with all the loving tenderness of a rabid Mack truck.
Not wanting to test the proposition at this juncture, not in the least, not one little bit, thank you very much, Colleen finally chose the flight side of the equation and threw herself bodily at the wall. As the armor encasing her legs and torso connected with the hard brick, the wall let out a wail of pain and opened up. She passed clean through like a knife through butter, like a B-52 through a cloudy sky, and was gone. It sealed up behind her, a fast-healing wound.
Colleen found herself on the other side, not Bangkok or New York but rather an undifferentiated area, murky and dim. The floor under her feet was substantial, however, and as she moved forward she noted that the matter in the air-not fog, precisely, denser and more still-avoided touching her, shrank away as she pressed through. Keeping an eye on the path behind her, just in case Agnes Wu or whatever it was took a notion to come after her (which thankfully, she did not), Colleen slowly advanced.
She discovered that by waving her arms in a broad arc, she could clear a bit of space around her, actually get a look at where she was. She saw now that she was in a vast corridor hewn from solid stone, blasted out of the rock itself. Not like a cavern, nor a mine, either, it was puzzling. She noted there were porcelain panels set in the walls, with writing on them. But in the dim illumination from the fog, she couldn’t make out the words.
She reached out and touched the rock wall, found to her relief it stayed solid and silent. It was real, or as real as anything could presume to be nowadays, which was about as far as you could throw it.
But no, she corrected herself, what she felt for Viktor was more real than that. He had made her wear this freaking armor against all her protestations, her contrariness. He had saved her.
She longed to see his gray, forgiving eyes, his knowing, sad smile, feel the tentative sureness of that touch that unmanned her, that made her small again and opened her heart like a surgeon’s scalpel that would only heal and not harm.
And unlike the fraudulent tissue structure overlaying some twisted armature that would have been the likeness of her father had she reached the end of Soi Cowboy, she knew that when she found Viktor (and she would find him, and the others, too, get them the hell out of here, if it could be humanly done), he would be alive and present and no mocking ghost.
Her arms waving like some crazed Leopold Stokowski on speed, Colleen Brooks made her way down the vast corridor of stone, the murky thick air around her-that had once been fragile young women and pale, delicate boys-clearing a path before her.
THIRTY-NINE
THE DACHA BY THE SEA
“Wake up, Viktor,” the sweet, soft voice said, and he felt a caress on his cheek. “You’ve been dreaming.”
It was only as he opened his eyes that Doc Lysenko realized she had been speaking Russian.
She filled his field of vision, she was that close, peering down at him lovingly, with him all the world to her.
That tangle of auburn hair was unmistakable, the long, long lashes, those incredible, unforgettable eyes, darkest green with flecks of gold in them, like sunlight casting through dense leaf cover onto a forest floor.
It was Yelena.
“This is not real,” Doc said in alarm, sitting up, throwing back the covers. He, too, was speaking Russian.
“Sh, sh, my love,” Yelena said, kissing his cheeks and brow, touching him with light fingers like a whisper. Oh God, it was familiar, so precisely right. He realized with a shock how much he had forgotten, and now remembered.
“Nurya…?” he whispered in a croak, the pain like an icicle from a Moscow winter thrust into his heart.
“In the other room, of course, asleep. It’s early.” She drew him out of the bed, enfolded him in the thick sable robe she had bought him in Odessa on their third anniversary. He saw that she was wearing the pale shift he so loved. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail-which only made her features all the more elegant and refined-and secured it with a band.
“Come,” she said, taking his hand. “Let’s step outside, to the beach.”
“No…” he protested weakly, and felt his own consciousness dimly, or rather as if everything that had come before was growing dim, retreating from him despite all his efforts to hold on to it.
He pulled away from her languorous grasp, stepped out of the bedroom into the common room, with its fireplace of the twelve massive stones quarried from near the Sea of Azov. He knew this place well, felt overwhelmed by the sensation of returning home, of nostalgia like a consuming wave.
This is what it is like to die, he thought, to be lost in an embrace.
Ignoring her whispered entreaties, he strode to the opposite bedroom and eased open the door. In the darkness within, a small figure lay bunched under the covers. Hesitantly, his breath held like a treasure within him, he approached the bedside and peered at the tiny form. Her face was pressed into the down pillows, and she wore a frown line between her brows as though concentrating on life’s deepest dilemma. But she still looked every bit an angel.
Yelena was behind him now, her gentling hands on his shoulders. “She’s fine, she’s perfectly well,” she assured him, her breath soft as memory in his ear. “Don’t you dare wake her.”
He turned to his wife, and she shimmered through the wetness of his eyes. “Goodness, Viktor, you act as if we’d been gone an eternity. Come, let’s see the dawn.”
He let her lead him then, to dress him in his summer clothes of linen, his soft hide sandals. The two of them emerged out onto the fine white sand, he and the woman who was his bride. The sun was warm even though it was the break of day, the wind mild and salt fragrant. They were alone on the beach, all the other gingerbread cottages closed up tight, the world at peace. He looked out at the sea that stretched forever, the gentle waves lapping like God welcoming a road-worn pilgrim, a prodigal son.
They were at the dacha on the shores of the Black Sea, their summer idyll when Yelena had persuaded him reluctantly to go on vacation, to set aside his crushing workload at the hospital in Kiev, to fob it off on other, equally competent (although not quite so gifted) doctors
.
It was an impossible luxury for most physicians, he knew, but then Yelena’s father was high up in the Party, and it was the family retreat, had been since the days of Stalin and Molotov, before the Great Patriotic War and the frozen dead of Stalingrad.
A seabird called from on high, and he looked into the rosy, lightening sky to see the gull hovering overhead, could make out the perfection of its outstretched wings, the ordered rows of its feathers. It floated bobbing on the currents of air, then folded its wings and plunged like a spike driving down, crashing into the water, sending a spray flying upward as it speared a fish and gobbled it down.
I have seen that movement before, Doc thought, but it had been no bird and its prey no fish, but something of considerably more weight and moment.
He tried to call up the image of those dark forms and found them elusive, could not summon them in his mind’s eye. It filled him with dread closing on panic. But even as the feeling speared up within him, he felt it damped down and muffled, as if from some will outside his own.
Vague forms and structures moved within his mind, the towers of foreign buildings, faces he felt should be familiar but were alien and born of far lands.
Not now, but belonging to another time, one that was paradoxically both future and past, in a time beyond the horror that was to come. It was all receding from him, misting away. He felt a sense of desperate unreality, and suddenly did not know whether it was the present moment or the insistent call of memory that was unreal.
Yelena was studying him, the ocean breeze playing with her hair, and her smile was sympathetic and sad. “You look so weary, my love. It’s good you’ll be able to rest here.”
And, dear God, he felt that, too. So good to be here, to release the grief, the demand of duty, of obligation to others. To relax into ease and comfort and belonging, like floating on the warm, forgiving sea.
No, something inside proclaimed to him. You get your fucking ass out of there right now, Doc Lysenko.
It was a voice that spoke in his heart, an American voice, a woman’s voice.
Boi Baba…
“I cannot remain here,” he murmured to the exquisite, serene woman beside him. He began stumbling away, along the lip of the ocean, his sandals pressing into the damp sand as the foam retreated back from him into the waves.
Yelena moved quickly to overtake him, stood blocking his way. Her eyes were no less loving, but more firm as she held him in her gaze.
“You had a dream, Viktor,” she said, not unkindly, “and in your dream we died, Nurya and I, and you were a refugee washed up onto a distant shore, and the world died, too….”
“No,” he breathed, and could not have said whether he was denying that it was a dream or that it was so.
“Is that the world you want, Viktor? A world of corpses? Or this, to be with the living?”
But it hadn’t been just a world of the dead. There had been someone, someone who had brought him back to life, when he himself had been the walking dead.
Why could he not remember her name?
Yelena drew close to him, and he let her kiss him on the lips. He felt her living breath, felt the perfume of her, the promise with no hint of the grave.
“It is no accident that we are here,” she said, and the emphasis she put on the word “accident” made him shiver and called up a distant echo of tires shrieking as they lost their grip on a rain-sheened road, the roar of a stream that was too swift, too deep, and too hungry, of two bodies he once had forced himself to identify.
Her caress banished the phantoms. “We’re safe here,” she said. “No harm can come to us.”
“And why is that?” he said, a tremor of cold running through him despite the warmth on his skin.
“Maybe there is one who provides you sanctuary, whose name we cannot speak…but who wishes you well.”
Wish…?
Wishart.
The name blossomed in his mind but meant nothing to him, although he felt it should.
But named or not, that was how power worked, how it always worked. Without that protection, that favor, all you loved could be washed away as casually, as disdainfully as skid marks off a road.
Sanctuary…
He could stay here, wrap the sea about him like a winding sheet, entomb himself in safety within this eternal moment, embrace and become like these two he loved.
But then, that was hardly a new sensation, a fresh novelty. No, if anything, it was the state that long years had made familiar to him, a decision he had chosen before the earth on two graves had grown smooth and cold.
Before a young man and woman had sought him out to help a little girl, before they and a wild-eyed mystic had called him back from his torpor, back to an existence of uncertainty and hope and pain.
Wouldn’t you rather be with the living?
Yelena stroked his cheek and smiled again. “I’ll make you breakfast. We’ll rouse Nurya. Wouldn’t you like that?”
He made to speak, to voice a question, but suddenly there was a tearing sound, and he turned from her to look outward.
There was a woman there, clothed in scaly black leather garments, a black helmet crowning her. She held a machete, and a multiplicity of other weapons draped across her back and hung from belts and bandoliers. Behind her, a ragged tear in the sky was sealing up. He supposed she had done that with the machete.
She was standing on the ocean.
And in that moment, Viktor felt a door close in him, and it was a good closing, not a forgetting but definitely an ending. He let out his breath, a release, and felt himself relax into ease and comfort and belonging, like floating on the warm, forgiving sea.
“Time for me to go,” he said to Yelena, and it surprised him only a little how easy it was to make his decision.
He found that he himself could not walk on water, so he splashed out to the ludicrously armored woman in the warm surf. He grabbed her hand, and she hauled him up to her level.
Before she led him out of there, he felt a giddy urge to turn back to Yelena (who still stood there watching him, and had not yet changed into a Gorgon or the goddess Kali or any other improbable thing that was indisputably not Yelena) and shout back, This is my American girlfriend!
But he only had so much tolerance for the absurd.
FORTY
GOLDMAN IN THE GLORY
“Save your hate for the Source,” Magritte had told Herman Goldman way back when, in Howard Russo’s dusky apartment on the outskirts of Chicago.
Her subsequent, pointless death had given him formidable reason to build that hate into an edifice more towering than the fortress deranged Primal had erected against the Source; to nurture and preserve it as a focal element that could unleash his power in all its terrible wrath.
Now at long last, he was finally where he could do something about it.
Scant moments before, the place had looked precisely like New York. But it wasn’t New York; hell, he could’ve told that with his eyes closed, could have told it Ray Charles blind, because the music of the Source, that jangly, Village-of-the-Damned, ninth-level-of-Hell swarm of voices, that white-hot electric wire that had been jabbed into his brain and reeling him in ever since before the Change, was shrieking like God Himself was Ethel Merman being tortured.
Radio Goldman was definitely on the air.
He had been saving up his pennies, putting any number of items into his portmanteau of juju, for just for this occasion.
Now he just had to zone in on the insane, beating heart of it, really put the home in homicide.
When Tina and Cal’s mock apartment did its little rumba number and sent him flying Adidas over Stetson, spinning him round and round like a Protein Berry smoothie in a Jamba Juice blender, the lights had gone out for the briefest instant, only to come up again like a curtain rising on this fresh and utterly diverting little vacation spot.
Still South Dakota, he told himself, even if it looked anything but…
Nevertheless, he did not recogn
ize the new digs. Unlike the Manhattan apartment, which he knew must’ve been derived from either Cal’s or Tina’s memory, this scenery was nothing cobbled from his database.
Postcard lovely, though, with its beachfront of faded grand hotels like a chorus line of dowagers, the bulky forties American cars plying their way down the streets, the olive-and-cocoa-skinned men and women bustling along the sidewalks, the lilt of Spanish floating from every window.
Somewhere in the Tropics? Undoubtedly…but not any time around now. This was a scene from fifty years ago, and more.
“Quaint…but I call it home,” a voice behind him said languidly.
Goldie turned, and commanded himself not to drop his jaw.
The face was familiar, and the horns, too, not to mention the tail.
Better the Devil you know…
He looked exactly as he had when first he’d appeared in Goldie’s classroom dog years back, when he’d levitated the classroom and engaged Herman Goldman in a week’s worth of frothy debate and badinage.
With one staggering difference-that particular fallen gentleman had been a projection of Goldie’s mind, he knew that, had even somewhat known it at the time, no more a distinct individual than a ventriloquist’s dummy or an American President.
But this Red Boy, well now, he might look the same, but what was under the hood was another story altogether.
For while the face was familiar, filched from the well-fertilized fields of Herman Goldman’s frontal lobes, the Foul Fiend smiling back at him was a complete and utter stranger.
Not the real Devil, certainly, any more than he’d be the real Santa Claus or Easter Bunny (though they might be arriving on the scene anytime now, no telling). And the fact that he was smoking what Goldie’s finely tuned nostrils identified as a Pall Mall and gazing at him with blind, milky-white eyes (although he seemed perfectly able to see him) only gave further proof, if that were needed.
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