In his system, the soother reached the zenith of its effect. The tranquilising bulk of the pill had dissolved, putting a potentially dangerous dosage into him, and the emetic core spread in his gut. If he wanted to drug any more, he would have to empty his stomach. He wasn’t soothed right now. Fear played his buttons, icy fingertips keyed his vertebrae. He would have to empty his stomach.
His bathroom was mirrored and luxurious, richly carpeted and hung with turquoise and scarlet silks. The design was copied from a Cecil B. DeMille spectacular of the 1920s he had rejected as too outmoded to be worth even a thorough remix. Jewel-encrusted gold taps shone against lime-green, veined marble sunken tubs. This was the focus, far more than his austere bedroom, of his fantasies and fulfilments.
Monte bent double over a puce and ginger toilet bowl, fashioned like a triton’s horn, and vomited tidily. He slammed down the oyster-shaped lid and sat on it. The emetic had a calming side-effect. He felt bad, but was instantly better. He got up and walked to the sink—a mustard replica of the font in Salisbury Cathedral—and washed his face.
Behind him, a door silently opened.
Monte peered minutely at his face in the mirror. It was possible to be flabby and haggard at the same time. He bared his teeth. They were filmed yellow. Then, the thing took him. He saw the hand that gripped his jaw and felt the one in his hair, but neither showed in the mirror. He was held fast by emptiness. Arms like metal bands gripped him. Angling his eyes down, he could see the dark sleeve of a dinner jacket and the black folds of a cloak; but in the mirror (on-screen?) he was struggling only with himself. His Paisley collar was yanked away from his neck. Cold lips clamped to his throat, ice-chip teeth sank in . . .
The turquoise and scarlet faded first, turned dead and grey. Then, his shirt calmed down and resolved itself into a dingy, indeterminate smear. His vision slowly bled, the technicolor twitch passing from left to right before his eyes . . .
He felt himself emptying out. Feebly, he raised a hand to push away the unseen face pressed to his throat. He had no more feeling. His hand flapped, chilly and wet, in his field of vision.
The last things he saw were his fingers, stained forever with the black of his own blood.
GREGORY FROST
Lizaveta
GREGORY FROST is the author of three odd-titled fantasy novels (Lyrec, Tain and Remscela) and dozens of short stories, most of which qualify as horror, fantasy, or science fiction. He has been published in such magazines as Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Twilight Zone and Night Cry, and the anthologies Ripper!, Tropical Chills, Liavek and Invitation to Camelot.
He reveals that “Lizaveta”, a story of historical haunting first published in a science fiction magazine, came about as a result of reading Harrison E. Salisbury’s study of the Russian revolutions of 1905–17, Black Night, White Snow.
Frost presently lives in Philadelphia with close companion Barbara and a cat the size of Staten Island. His favourite city, however, is Edinburgh, Scotland, where he holed up for a week once in a cold-water flat and read Kingsley Amis’ The Green Man and Olaf Stapledon’s Starmaker. He says he’d like to go back.
AS HE STROLLED WITH his comrades along the fogbound filthy walk, Sergei Zarubkin wondered if the war with the Japanese were to blame for the eruptions of violence spreading through Moscow. The war had become a travesty in the failure of so vast a nation as Russia to devastate the upstart Orientals. Added to that, the hot August temperatures this year had inflamed tempers, fueled fights, even murders . . . as for instance last night in the Yama.
The Yama: the Pit, Moscow’s Red Light District. Three blocks of ornate houses, with windows trimmed in carved scrollwork and lace curtains; where a woman cost three rubles for one hour of her time, ten rubles for a night; where boys of high-standing became men. But that quiet tradition had been suspended—because this night the Yama lay in darkness, in absolute stillness, with the houses all looted, their bright scrollwork smashed, lace curtains charred and hanging in tatters. All the whores had been beaten, killed, or driven out. And that was why four soldiers had to come here to the cesspool called Khitrovka Market in search of women for the night.
Zarubkin took a swig from the bottle of Smirnov’s he carried, then passed it to Gladykin on his right, who lifted it, hailed it as a national treasure, and drank his fill before passing it on to Getz. From Zarubkin’s left, Vanya handed him another bottle—he must have had it hidden inside his greatcoat. Zarubkin smiled to him, but recalled for an instant Vanya’s despairing face, lit by the fires all around, last night in the Yama. Dragoons not unlike him had initiated the destruction: Two fools who decided they had been cheated out of three rubles by some madam; two men who had, because of tension and heat, impotency and drink, managed to stir a civilian army into looting and killing. Tonight those same civilians ran amok somewhere in Moscow, violence begetting violence. The disease of the mob had turned away from the whores, reshaping into something with a more sinister purpose: Zhidov, the new target. Jews.
Zarubkin, a captain in the Czar’s guards, looked past his friends and into the fog. Why, he wondered, hadn’t the zealots burned this pestilential place instead of the Yama? Even the police tended to avoid Khitrovka Market. The thick blanket of fog tonight hid much of the district’s rot, but it carried the intense stench of the place, so that Zarubkin felt smeared with rheum. He took a hard pull from Vanya’s bottle, then snarled, “To hell with the righteous citizens.” It was they, after all, who had forced him and his friends to come here. Anywhere but where the mob was on this night off. Let those on duty look into the face of Hell. Not him, not two nights in a row.
Gladykin laughed and slapped his shoulder. “To hell with the righteous,” he agreed, then added, “May they all burn for every one of us who carries crabs out of here tonight.” And “Crabs!” cried Vanya, “To the crabs!”
They all drank to the health of lice and strode on. Their boots clopped like horses’ hooves on the cobblestones in the dark.
Whatever evil had really dwelled in “The Pit,” it hardly compared with Khitrovka. Here, as Zarubkin had learned from the heartfelt writings of Gilyarovski, the young girls were called tyetki when they advanced, at the age of ten or eleven, from begging to prostitution. Many had become alcoholics by that point, although their pimps—their “cats” — generally watered down the vodka. Few survived past their fourteenth year. Gilyarovski had found none in his search through the rubble. Because of two uniformed idiots, those hapless children would now have to match their indecent skills against professional prostitutes—the desperate survivors of last night’s conflagration. How many of each, Zarubkin wondered, lurked in the fog ahead?
As the four men neared the heart of Khitrovka, beggars began to emerge from the darkness. The beggars choked the houses round about—thousands of soiled bodies wedged into a few blocks of space. Some were mutilated or deformed, unable to work. Some carried the corpses of babies in their arms as an appeal for sympathy in the form of coins even though with the child dead they had one less problem in their lives. Often the dead babies weren’t even their own.
The sight of four large, well-fed guards in uniform sent most of the beggars scurrying back into shadow, the fog swirling after them. The four men walked on toward the building called Peresylny where the prostitutes had most likely found a haven. As he passed a curbstone fire, Zarubkin sensed someone watching him. The watcher turned out to be a scrawny creature warming its hands over the fire where another wretch, oblivious of him, cooked up a “dog’s mess” of sausage and onions in a rusty iron pot. The creature staring so boldly was by appearances an ancient dwarf. The fire between his fingers revealed skin like parchment and a nearly hairless head that looked to have been smashed in on one side. The dwarf sneered at him, revealing brown and broken stubs, and gaps in the gums, like a child in the process of losing his baby teeth. His nose looked like a rotting carrot. By a trick of sound, the sizzle of the “dog’s mess” seemed to emanate from the dw
arf. Zarubkin looked away. He made himself relax, and discovered that his hand had closed over the butt of his revolver.
At that moment Gladykin announced, “I think it’s time we separated, gentlemen. Together, we’re going to scare off our nightingales. After last night the tyetki, I’m sure, expect us to burn their little world to the ground.” He gestured at the fog, laughing as if to say that no sane man would waste his energy on such a task.
“All right,” Getz agreed, “see you all inside Peresylny.” Abruptly, he broke away from them and went up another street. They heard him walking long after he was lost to sight. Gladykin gave Zarubkin a wink, the turned and followed Getz like a bird in formation. “Later, my friend,” his voice carried back. Zarubkin was going to share a humorous reply with Vanya, but he found that Vanya had quietly taken his leave, too. Zarubkin slowed and glanced around. Of the four of them, he had least wanted to venture on his own in this place, though soldiers would be quite safe. Especially, as Gladykin had said, after last night.
Pinpoints of light here and there revealed clusters of people, but the fog drank their voices and turned them into primeval lumps. The dwarf at curbside had vanished. Maybe the fog had swallowed him, too.
Zarubkin turned toward Peresylny, and a tall figure rushed toward him from a doorway on his left. He leaned away, his bottle held at the ready to smash down. Hands in fingerless lace gloves reached out for him. Delicate fingers closed on his wrist, over the neck of the bottle, pulling with the weight of a single body. The darkness swished. To his surprise, a woman pushed herself up against him. She stared into his face for a moment, her terror quite naked; then she glanced past him, all around, nervously.
Zarubkin guessed her age to be twenty-five. Vodka had puffed the skin beneath her eyes, adding some premature years there, but had not yet swelled her body or burst the capillaries in her nose. She was lean, her cheeks prominent and proud, her body like a whip in the dark décolleté dress that had blended with the fog. Her hair—it looked perhaps auburn—hung in disarray at her throat but also bore the signs of a coiffure not many days old.
When her attention returned to him he saw again the unrestrained terror in her dark eyes. What was after her in the fog? He could not help glancing around himself. Whoever wanted her, they would doubtless be less inclined to trouble one of the Czar’s guard. Had she recognized that as he passed by? Was that why she had scurried to him? He smiled reassuringly, said, “Would you care for some vodka? It’s not watered down—it’s good Smirnov.”
A smile trembled desperately on her lips, made little creases in her cheeks and revealed good white teeth. Of course, he realized then, this girl was from the Yama. No wonder she was terrified: in this place she played the part of the lamb in a field packed with wolves.
She drew nearer, like an intimate companion. “You’re very kind, thank you.” She took his bottle and drank deeply. He saw her looking over it into the fog once more, eyes searching, always moving.
Vodka glistened on her lips as she returned the bottle to him. Then she asked, “Would you stay the night with me, soldier?”
This nonplussed him: It was supposed to be his question to her, after all. As a Yama whore, she ought to have recognized the proprieties of their encounter. He politely took back his vodka.
She seemed to sense his withdrawal from the proposal. “Look,” she said and dug fervidly into a small purse. “I have a ticket.” She held up a yellow card. “Government approval.”
He hesitated, but there was something about her, about her predicament, that he wanted to know. “Yes, all right,” he said, found her staring out into the night again. She had made enemies here—probably, he thought, by trying to push her polished manners on the denizens. In Khitrovka she could disappear and no one might ever look for her. What was one whore more or less afloat in the stinking Yauza? She had to be scared to be so forward as to express her wants. The problem, as he saw it, lay in the fact that he had only enough money for an hour of her time if he was going to rejoin his friends for more drinking. In some embarrassment, he explained this. The woman started to laugh, very near hysteria. “Three rubles?” she said and pressed tightly against him. “My darling captain, with three rubles you can have me for life.”
Zarubkin merely gaped. He had paid for a woman twice before, and he knew enough to know that this was not the way it was supposed to go. Then she buried her face against his collar and whispered, “Please stay with me this night, fair captain. Don’t leave me to this . . . this horror.”
She smelled of soap, and perfumed French soap at that. He wondered how so delicate a scent had survived a day amidst the ordure of the Market. The whore’s breast rubbed against the back of his hand where he held the bottle to his chest. Her scent, her looks, her mystery aroused him. “Of course,” he lied. “Of course I’ll stay. Where do you live?”
The small room contained three beds wedged in around a scarred and warped washstand displaying a cracked ceramic pitcher and a brass oil lamp. Two of the beds had been stripped, and the whore assured him the other occupants would not be returning. “They fled the city this morning, Neva and Olenka. The landlords don’t know that yet. I would have gone with them . . . they didn’t wait.” She hid her face where she could regain her composure. “I’m sorry. You delight that we’re alone of course.” She drew back the covers. Blotches and smears the color of rust stained the sheets but she swore that no vermin hid in the bedding. The business side of her came out as she undressed, her manner mechanical, any hints of nervous tension coming only at the end, as she removed the last of her shiny underclothes. Next she helped him remove his own clothing, her fingers quick but twitchy.
They lay down together. Her thin body shivered, but she smiled bravely, prepared to endure anything to have him. He found her peculiar forlornness arousing, and he pulled her to him. She stopped him briefly.
“My name is Lizaveta Ostrov,” she said.
“I’m Zarubkin.”
She looked questioningly into his eyes.
“Sergei,” he added in compliance.
“Sergei,” she replied flatly, and opened to him at last.
The warmth of the vodka seemed to shoot through him. Her love-making had urgency, as if she must race to the end before the whole world burst apart. It defied Zarubkin’s knowledge of whores: usually, they feigned vague interest in their partner, and some not even that. He had always seen through the shallow façade and not cared. This woman treated him like a drink of water in the desert, or a last meal before execution. They made love three times in as many hours and polished off Vanya’s bottle of vodka as well. She retrieved a bottle of her own from a small cupboard beneath the crooked window, crawling across the two other beds to get it. As she climbed back into bed and handed it to him, she apologized, “It’s not as strong as yours. In the house in the Yama, the madam didn’t wish for us to get so drunk as to forget to collect our fees.”
“You’d prefer I paid you now, I understand.”
The fright reappeared in her eyes. “Don’t—don’t pay until you leave. Not before day.”
“What is it, is your ‘cat’ looking for you?”
She shook her head. “I represent myself here. Now that so many others have come, it’s become more difficult. . . .”
He had to ponder that before the astonishing meaning became clear. “You came here before the Yama burned? Dear God, why? A beautiful woman like you, with your manners, your grace—”
“Oh, I did well. I learned very quickly, even though I’d arrived upon it so late, as a trade. You enjoy me?”
“Very much—I mean, three times is . . .” He looked around to cover his embarrassment. Her boldness in asking—that was like the whores he had known. “You became a prostitute recently then. Why did you choose—I mean, of all things to do with your life?”
“You’re beside your whore this very minute—don’t make it sound so foul, captain.”
“I didn’t mean—all right, yes, I suppose I did.” He studi
ed the creases in the sheet between his elbows.
Softly, Lizaveta said, “I was a teacher,” and he glanced up. Her gaze had become distant. She drank long from the bottle of weak Smirnov’s. “I loved children. I did.” Slowly, she lay back beside him with her head against his shoulder. Her toes rested on the tops of his feet. She was nearly his height.
Zarubkin had intended to leave shortly, certain that his friends would tire of waiting and go off without him. Now he realized he would not be with them. He had asked his other whores to tell him about their lives, mildly curious. But the woman Lizaveta Ostrov did not act like any whore he had known. Her pose—if it was a pose—had him desiring the explication of her life as much as he had desired the union with her body. He really did want to know what had driven her here. What lay in the fog.
At first, when he asked, he thought she would not say anything. Then she sighed, leaned up and kissed him. “You’ll stay with me, then?” There was, implicit in the question, the revelation that she had known his earlier lie for what it was.
“I’ll stay. This time I swear I will, till light.”
She covered her eyes with one hand, beneath which her lips trembled. The glistening of a tear crawled out into sight.
Unwilling to commit himself to her further, Zarubkin waited and drank, drank and waited. When she began to speak, it was so soft that she caught him completely off guard. She was telling him her story, and he had to ask her to begin again.
“When I graduated from the University,” she said, “I was equipped to teach but could find no jobs in Moscow, so I returned to the University in the hope of inquiring after a job there. I should have done that at first, right away, because by then I think I must have been the last person in all the city to ask. What they gave me instead of a job was a list of places that needed teachers, and it wasn’t a large list. A handful of jobs, all in distant places, too. Only one of them lay in the south, near the Kazakh border, in the foothills of the Urals. It sounded very lovely—warm and inviting—compared to the chill of Moscow, or of such places as Zhigansk and Obdorosk, which were among the remaining choices. I have always desired warmth, probably from having lived a cold childhood. We always want the other thing, the thing we don’t have—don’t you find people to be very polar in this way? I wrote a letter to the people petitioning, saying that I would take the job of teacher in their village, called Devashgorod. Next I waited—almost a month before the village replied. They sent back a letter of acceptance with directions on how to reach there.
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