by Nick Mamatas
“She says you know why.”
The interrogation went on for some time. Was she a Tatar? That depends on what you mean. Did she attack the soldier Gribov, sabotage the engine, then storm through the cars of this magnificent train, killing and injuring Soviet soldiers? Certainly she did, and she would be pleased to continue. How did she manage such a feat? The soldier had his head in the clouds; her husband, murdered by Reds, had been a machinist, so she knew something of engines; Russian men are weak and easy to kill, even for a simple girl like her. Could she turn into an owl? Yes, of course. That was the fault of the Bolsheviks as well.
“How is that?” Trotsky said, clearly amused.
“Girls who are married when they die turn into owls,” it was explained by the translator before the young girl even spoke. The older woman added, “It is an old story.” Trotsky took a moment to flip through one of the children’s books his soldiers had liberated, and grunted once when he alighted upon a certain illustrated page.
“Are there mice in your home?” The old woman turned again to ask the girl, but Trotsky raised the hand. “In your home, ma’am.”
“There were mice in my home,” she snapped, “when there was food in my home. Another achievement for the Bolsheviks!”
“Then how likely is it that Polish girls transform into owls upon their death?” Trotsky asked, ignoring the last bit of editorializing. “The moon would be eclipsed every night by masses of owl wings, and there wouldn’t be a mouse left in Poland.”
The girl said something testy-sounding, and the old woman translated at length, even pantomiming a mouse nibbling at some food. Trotsky turned to Nechayev. “Summon more witnesses,” he said. “If they are not wounded or tending the wounded, if they are not on watch, if they are not repairing the engine, have them gather on either side of the car and peer inside.” Nechayev ran to comply.
Finally the girl said something and the old woman translated it. “Her explanation is that she is only a Pole on her mother’s side of the family. Her father’s side are Tatars.” There was a bit more discussion, then the old woman turned to Trotsky with a smile on her face. “She says her grandfather’s grandfather was a . . . primitive.”
“A shaman,” Trotsky said. Behind him, a crowd was forming, four or five rows deep. With military discipline the shortest gathered immediately behind Trotksy’s desk and took to their knees to not block the vision of their comrades behind them. “I presume it was the hybridity of superstitions that allows you your special ability to transform into an owl.” The old woman didn’t bother to translate that.
Lanterns shifted and danced on either side of the train car as comrades who couldn’t fit on either end of the train car tried to squeeze in. Trotsky was clearly pontificating at length in order to allow everyone to get into position.
“So, why attack us? Why not be free as the proverbial bird, always, without the burdens of consciousness or the need to labor? Why not join us, allow us to better understand your ability, so that we might integrate it into the corpus of materialist science? What diseases could be cured via this form of cellular transformation? And yet, you keep it yourself.” The old woman’s translations were obviously abbreviated and simplified, Nechayev could tell, but the young girl seemed to be getting the gist of Trotsky’s comments anyway.
“Or, perhaps, you cannot turn into an owl,” Trotsky finally concluded. “Just acknowledge this, and we’ll keep you a prisoner here until our engine is repaired. We’ll leave you at the next station on our side of the front for typical justice. If you continue to insist on your nonsense story, we shall gun you down here—summary revolutionary justice on the part of the international working class, against a deranged member of the criminal element.
“Or you may turn into an owl and flee,” Trotsky said. He glanced at Nechayev, then nodded toward the closest window. It occurred to Nechayev that the window, even were he to smash it out of its frame with the butt of a borrowed rifle, would not be sufficient for the wingspan of an owl the size of the one Gribov supposedly encountered, but he obeyed anyway as the older woman translated. Then, harshly, the older woman added something else—a message directly aimed at the girl.
The girl shifted in her outfit. A shoulder, nude, almost pink despite the cold, was visible now, and her thin little collarbone, itself like a bird’s wings. Then two things happened.
The girl made a move. It wasn’t a run, or a leap, but as though she had thrown her body forward, every muscle working together.
One of the soldiers fired. The train car filled with sound and smoke. Men screamed. “No!” “Don’t!”
For a moment Nechayev thought something would happen. She wouldn’t fall. Feathers would erupt out her back, trailing the bullet.
There was still shouting. The comrades were worried, hysterical, for themselves. Why fire into a crowded train car?! Madness!
The girl fell hard to the floor. A gardening tool slipped from one sleeve of her oversized leather coat and clattered to the floor.
The other soldiers who had had their rifles trained on the woman held their fire. The old lady wasn’t crying as Nechayev thought she might be. She was terrified that she would be next, her face chiseled by horror into an unnerving rictus.
Trotsky looked contemplative. Maybe it was a flash of disappointment that crossed over his eyes as he spoke. “Retrieve the coat and have it stitched up if possible,” he said to nobody in particular, and there were no volunteers to strip the girl. He turned to the shooter. “Comrade Fedin, you are relieved of duty due to reckless fire. Put your rifle down now if you do not wish it removed from you by force.”
He sighed deeply. “Have the body brought to the infirmary car. We’re not equipped for an autopsy here, but it might be interesting to see if there are visible lesions on her brain. So much for magical owls, eh?” Trotsky readied himself against his desk and rose. With a gesture, he told Nechayev to clear it all away. “And if I see one comrade making the sign of the cross, or hear tell of it, he will be disciplined most severely. And someone pay this woman and return her to her home,” he said, indicating the old lady, who still hadn’t moved, hadn’t blinked.
Clearly, the corpse should have been stored in the refrigerated car, but Pozansky wouldn’t have it, and he threatened the medics who said they’d go to Trotsky about it with hard discipline and a negative write-up in the train’s newspaper.
“It’s cold enough on this train,” Pozansky said. “Her lesions will keep for the night, I am sure.” There were a few choice items in cold storage that Pozansky liked to keep for himself, and whenever an unauthorized comrade entered the refrigerated car they would, in a burst of revolutionary fervor, take a sample of the caviar or beefsteak or decent vodka to share with the masses—that is, their friends.
And so she ended up in sickbay, next to Gribov. He suffered, awake, from his wounds, so was conscious to hear her cough out the bullet that had entered her chest. Mostly blind, he couldn’t see that the bullet was coated in plant matter, feathers, and tiny bones. She slid off the examination table she had been left on, wrapped the blanket she had been given out of a sense of retrograde modesty around herself, and nudged Gribov.
“I have your eye,” she said to him. “Would you like it back?” She was not speaking in the pshek-pshek of Polish. It was a strange tongue, all elongated У sounds.
“I . . . that would be hard to explain to the comrade officers . . .” Gribov said.
“You may come with me,” the girl said. “Indeed, I insist upon it.”
“I cannot fly, like you.”
She smiled. “Can you drive?”
He smiled too. Not quite like a mother giving a child a kiss, she leaned down, swept her hair away from her face, and with a significant gulp, regurgitated Gribov’s eye onto his face, then roughly pushed it back into the socket with her free hand. Ten bloody minutes later, they had made it to the tsar’s Rolls-Royce in the garage car and were on their way, roaring, serpentine, into the night, machine guns blaz
ing as Gribov twisted the wheel to dodge fire from train-top sharpshooters.
Fire that soon tilted up into the slate-dark sky as a thousand great gray owls descended in swarms onto the train.
____________________
Dark Discoveries, now defunct, was an interesting magazine. Founded by James Beach, the magazine was an ersatz Cemetery Dance, with an emphasis on showcasing and reviewing small press horror titles to be discovered, as well as publishing short fiction. Then came 2008 and the global economic crisis that popped the bubble of limited edition/collectable horror publishers, and also happened to take out a significant fraction of bookstores and newsstands. Beach then brought in a fellow named Jason V. Brock, who brought new energy to the magazine, and some new ideas. Many of the ideas, such as using every possible font, filter, color, and background image available in order to discover the sensory limits of the reader, were terrible. Others, such as having theme issues, weren’t so bad at all. When Dark Discoveries was purchased by small press horror publisher Journalstone, the design innovations were rolled back and silly pin-up covers introduced. How many strange situations can a woman with enormous breasts be put into? Let’s discover the answer! The theme issues continued, which was nice.
Toward the end of the magazine’s run, when the pin-ups were finally replaced with photos of famous authors, I was solicited to write something for their “military horror” theme. I have no military experience, and if I had to boil down my leftist politics to a single position, it would be “anti-war.” But editor Aaron French wanted to shake things up, though I knew that merely writing a story about the horrors of war wouldn’t be very interesting. Everyone, horror writers included, tends to romanticize and even eroticize that which they hate and fear. A story featuring lovely gore and miserable weeping survivors wouldn’t mean anything.
For some time a couple of decades ago, I was part of a neo-Trotskyist organization. Breathless summaries of the October Revolution often included tales of Trotsky’s great armored train zipping around the country, smashing Mensheviks and invaders from sixteen different countries. The train itself is endlessly fascinating—it was a true technological marvel on steel wheels. One of the classic tropes of a dark fantasy or horror tale is modernity slamming up against the pre-modern, so a little digging found me some peculiar legends to test Trotsky’s materialist philosophy with. Once that clash was set, the story was easy to write.
As Jacob Weisman, the publisher of this book, noted, “The Great Armored Train” takes a sudden turn into a love story. Of course it does. I hate war.
THE PHYLACTERY
TONY HAD NO IDEA HOW TO EXPLAIN IT, so decided that he wouldn’t even try. Instead, he squeezed his palm around the filakto and loitered in the doorway to the bedroom as Cheryl changed the baby. As she bent down to goo-goo at him, Tony sidled over to the crib and under the guise of fussing with the mattress pad and sleep sack, slipped it under the mattress.
Of course, Cheryl would find it eventually, and of course the little thing—a tiny pouch of crumbled flower petals from Tony’s mother’s church—meant nothing at all, but still.
But still what. . . .
“Are you familiar with Pascal’s wager?” Tony asked Cheryl. They were tucking in to dinner as best they could. The baby was in the high chair, dribbling onto his bib, his hands and face stained with mashed avocado, quiet only for a second.
“What?” Cheryl was annoyed. Always annoyed with Tony now. She could hiss words that didn’t contain sibilants. Love was a precious and dwindling resource. The national reserves deep in the Arctic of her breast were being drilled for the exclusive consumption of the baby. Annoyed enough that Tony knew the conversation wouldn’t go well, but yet another muttered “Nothing, honey” would work even less well.
So he decided to be the jerk: “That fancy liberal arts education sure was wasted, eh? Pascal’s wager is the idea that it is better to believe in God than not to. If there’s a God, good, it all worked out. You get to heaven. If not, so what? At least you lived a good life.” The baby spit just then, a punctuation mark. The baby was living the good life. When was the last time someone so carefully scooped spilled food back into your mouth, and congratulated you for finally swallowing some of it?
“I didn’t study theology in school,” Cheryl said after she looked up from the baby, the smile she’d had for him gone. “Liberal arts college isn’t bar trivia. It’s not as though I am just bursting with facts of no use to anyone, Tony. And anyway, it’s a dumb wager. Which God do you pick? I presume Pascal was a Christian then, and didn’t even stop to consider other religions.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Tony said. “You’d have to pick the religion that promised either the greatest rewards or harshest punishments.”
“Or easiest version of ‘good life’ to comply with, I suppose,” Cheryl said.
“Zeus and his thunderbolts,” Tony said. He looked at the baby. The baby looked back, making real eye contact for once, recognizing his daddy. Tony waggled his fingers at the baby and made a psshrr-krraakooo thunderbolt noise. It almost suited the steady downpour outside. For a terrifying nanosecond, the baby looked like he might cry. Tony prayed that the baby would laugh. Instead, the baby just stared. Cheryl turned him around in his high chair and fed him another green blob of avocado.
“So, the gods of my ancestors? What do you think, baby?” Tony said.
“I have to pump,” Cheryl said. “I don’t have the energy to think anymore.”
Does this baby not have a name? Of course he has a name, don’t be ridiculous. Ask Cheryl, and the baby’s name is Charlie. Ask Tony, and the baby’s name is Kyriakos—“We call him Charlie.” According to Tony, Cheryl was a slave to the whims of imaginary, if cruel, eight-year-old boys in a schoolyard positioned seven years and three months into the future. According to Cheryl, she just wanted to be able to call her own child by a name that she could pronounce without being corrected by her annoying husband.
“The ability to roll one’s r’s is genetic,” she’d said.
“No it’s not,” Tony had said. He was right, incidentally, but Cheryl had better things to do than to train herself to affect a Greek accent. Like cleaning the house for once, and a million other things that Tony only thought about after being reminded of old promises and new strategies, and getting confirmation from “dad blogs” on the right things to do.
Just go along with it, the dad blogs always seemed to be saying. You’re a hostage in an unfamiliar land. Look at the camera and recite the lines; do as you’re told. Denounce the imperialist running dogs!
It said Charles Kyriakos on the birth certificate.
Charles Kyriakos didn’t always sleep through the night, and Tony and Cheryl, who slept back to back, asses lightly touching, didn’t always follow the guideline to let the baby self-soothe. Tony was usually the softie, the one who was damning the child to a lifetime of insomnia, selfishness, entitlement, and reduced income potential, but that night Cheryl was the one who slithered out the bed first, then sang, “Charlie! I’m coming!” as she walked across the room, to the crib, in two long strides.
Tony kept his eyes shut. He had a gift, an inheritance from his father—also named Kyriakos and occasionally called Charlie by the non-Greek regulars at his diner—the ability to sleep under any conditions. The elder Kyriakos had developed the ability while in the Greek Navy, during the junta, when everything was bad. But now life was good, and falling asleep was easy. Tony, the perfect self-soother, drifted off before his son did. Not that Tony’s parents had let him cry himself back to sleep as an infant, mind you.
Cheryl woke him up at dawn, almost like she used to, straddling him. But her top was still on, and in her hand she held the filakto.
“What’s this?” she asked, curious. Not annoyed, for once. The whole room smelled of breast milk. Hormones were at work in the smile on Cheryl’s face, in the light squeeze of her thighs that she used to punctuate her question. Tony knew better to reach up and touch her breast though.
>
“It’s a filakto,” he said. Dad blog instructions: name, rank, serial number.
She put it on his forehead. “Go on. You’re dying to tell me.”
“You know, like a phylactery. For protection.”
“It’s a Greek thing,” she said, before he could.
“A good luck charm.”
“Like that?” Cheryl asked, pointing with her chin to the wall over the crib, where a blue and white swirl of amber reminiscent of an eye hung, incongruous and bizarre, from a nail left by a previous tenant. A decal of a pink and otherwise featureless sheep jumped over it.
“The mati,” Tony said. “The eye. That’s a little different. A filakto is a sanctioned Greek Orthodox Church thing. The mati is more of a folk expression.”
“Isn’t it enough?” Cheryl asked. Her fingers worried the hem of the pouch. “What’s in this?”
“Maybe flower petals, maybe ashes. All from the church. They’re a buck.”
Cheryl smiled like she used to, all perfect teeth hard won from awkward years of orthodontia. Tony warmed under her. It had been a while since he had seen that smile. He liked her hair today. It was short and messy, like a boy’s, or a girl too wild to care what boys thought.
But what was she thinking? And would the baby stir? Well, both questions are easy enough to answer, really.
Cheryl was thinking a few different things. Her husband was clearly secretly religious after all, on some level. He had insisted on a church wedding, citing the demands of his mother. He made faces when she brought home that Christopher Hitchens book. But didn’t Tony consider himself to be practically a Marxist? Wasn’t his email ID, chat login, and Twitter handle “Gramsci76?” When Occupy was happening, he had come home one night blind and smelling of chemicals, his black Old Navy sweatshirt toxic from the pepper spray. He’d just opened the window and flung it into their little shared backyard. Even the rain couldn’t get rid of the smell.
