The Dormant (The Sublime Electricity Book #4)

by Pavel Kornev

  My old friend Charles Malacarre was sitting on a folding chair near the statue of Michelangelo. Now, he was busy with another client; I glanced at my watch and decided to wait for the artist to finish up.

  I was in no rush. I still had to decide what I could reveal to Liliana before going back to the hotel, and also think up a believable excuse for such an abrupt change in plans. It wasn't nearly as simple as it might have seemed on first glance.

  With a fated sigh, I tossed my gaze on the palaces and towers of the Old City. I leaned my elbows on a fence and looked down into the fast-flowing cloudy water. Not far away, I heard a dull clap, and the bridge was instantly clouded over with thick orange smoke. Figuring it was street comedians fooling around, I straightened up and swore unkindly, pulling my glasses off my face but, immediately thereafter, another clap popped out, somewhat quieter than the first.

  My body reacted all on its own. I crouched down on my left foot, lurching, and something hummed past my right cheek.

  And right then, another clap!

  Instinct threw me aside again but, this time, the covert gunman was anticipating my moves, not just shooting where I was. It felt like my thigh had been pierced with a red-hot poker. I fell down on one knee and only that saved me from a second wound. The bullet hit the bridge railing. Fragments of stone flew.

  With a sharp burst, I got to my feet and drew the Cerberus from my pocket but, due to the stagnant air over the bridge, the orange haze was clinging to the air, and I couldn’t see the gunman. But he could see me just fine.

  The next clap caught me at half step and, again, only a supernatural knack allowed me to avoid certain death. I stumbled aside, and something hit my right arm. It immediately hung down limp as a lash. The shock of the wound forced me to freeze in place, and the following bullet hit me in the stomach.

  My mind went hazy, all my thoughts dissolved into stunning flares of pain. All that remained was a desire to live. Clinging to the stone railing of the bridge, I stood up straight and leaned my chest on it. I took another bullet in the back. I froze for a moment like that, then fell over the granite, polished by the hands of passers-by, and fell down into the water rushing under the bridge.

  Right into the darkness.

  Part Two

  Patient

  Hereditary Pathology and Electroshock therapy

  1

  BELLS. When I woke up, bells were ringing.

  Ringing ceaselessly. The sound would get stronger, totally filling my head, then quiet down as if it were coming from somewhere far away, just barely at the edge of audibility.

  But the sound never dissipated entirely, even for a second, or an instant, just rang and rang and rang.

  Bing! Bing! Bo-o-ong!

  Sometimes the sound drifted, sometimes it was drowned out by ambient noise, but I heard only the ringing as if there was a bell slaving away inside my head. Perhaps that was what called me back to life? I didn't know. I was drifting in a boundless blackness, not feeling my own body, not able to move my arms, or my legs. All I could do was listen. All my life was one constant ringing.

  Bing! Bing! Bo-o-ong!

  Then my sense of smell returned. Through the delirium of nothingness, there came the sharp odor of smelling salts, and then all the other aromas rolled back in as well. It smelled of medicines and antiseptics. Stacked on that was the stink of human excrement and rotting flesh.

  A hospital?!

  The smells awoke my memory; I was reminded of what had happened on the Roman Bridge. Someone had sunk bullet after bullet into me. Immediately, I was filled with vertigo. Vertigo? Oh no! My whole being was spinning! Spinning and being pulled into silence and darkness.

  For a moment, even the unchanging bell sound disappeared, but then I realized that my sense of smell had not left me in full measure. The sharp smacks on my face came through, even with the numbness of unconsciousness.

  "No! No! No!" I heard from somewhere in the limitless distance. "Don't you leave us! This frail world is not yet ready to bid you farewell!"

  And again, I was struck in the nose by an acrid stink of smelling salts. I inhaled shortly, then started coughing and breathing.

  Oh devil! I was under anesthesia!

  Morphine? Looked like it...

  And the bells immediately stopped ringing. Instead, I smelled cheap tobacco and booze breath.

  "Hey, they finally shut up!" someone nearby said in an unsatisfied tone. "That lousy peal was making my head split!"

  I still couldn't feel my own body. My consciousness was lightly swaying in the limitless black, and I didn't even want to think about what would happen to me when the anesthesia passed.

  How many times had I been shot? Three, four? After all, I also fell off the bridge...

  "The main thing is why they were ringing!" the invisible complainer broke the silence once again.

  "Easy!" a rude and unkind voice rebuffed him. "It isn't every day that Empresses die."

  "The devils in hell have been waiting a long time for that old bat."

  "Easy, I said!"

  I seemed to feel a light rocking then a landing, as if I was being transferred from a gurney to a hospital bed. The orderlies left, and I was left in silence and darkness, all alone. But not for long.

  My hearing had almost totally returned, and I heard the creak of the door, and the tapping of shoe soles on a stone floor.

  "Well, what do we have here?" someone asked a few seconds later, drawing out their words at a sloth-like pace.

  "An illustrious man," came back the quick answer with light notes of ingratiation. "Delivered without documents, hasn't yet come to. The gunshot wounds in his forearm, and thigh are perforating. We removed one bullet from his innards, and another is still lodged in his spine."

  The man I took to be a professor snorted and asked with incomprehension:

  "Why did you think this case would interest me?"

  And again, the attending doctor answered without the slightest hesitation:

  "He's illustrious and a Christian. You'll like this, professor."

  "How do you know that, if he hasn't yet come to? Was he talking while anesthetized?"

  "See for yourself, Dr. Berliger."

  I seemed to feel a gust of air, as if the blanket was jerked off me, then the professor drew out his words in confusion:

  "Yes, that explains a lot."

  "As soon as I saw these tattoos I thought of you, Dr. Berliger."

  "But this illustrious man is half dead, even if he is a Christian..."

  "The patient's condition is stable," the doctor assured him.

  "And the bullet in his spine?"

  The question caught the doctor off guard, and he faltered.

  "I won't hide it–the wound is serious. I suspect the bullet is stuck in his spine. I cannot do such a complicated operation, but you and your assistant can work real miracles!"

  "No need for all the praise," Berliger replied with slight notes of disgust. "Totally unnecessary."

  "Your assistant is the best surgeon I know!"

  I got an unbearable desire to have such an experienced physician working on me but, no matter how I tried, I couldn't squeeze a single word out.

  Curses! Ahh, what bad luck!

  The professor, meanwhile, was clearly in doubt about whether he should take my case.

  "I don't even know," he drew out his words in thought. "Even if we have operated on difficult patients before, there's no guarantee that we'll be able to get him to the clinic alive."

  "But this is a unique case!"

  "And how is it unique? Illustrious Christians are not such a rarity."

  "Well, look!" the doctor said mysteriously, and I heard a strange ringing as if a piece of metal was clinking on the sides of a glass jar. "This is the bullet I removed from the patient's stomach cavity."

  "Silver?" The professor was dumbstruck. "They tried to shoot him with a silver bullet?!"

  "See, I knew this would interest you!"

  "Now there y
ou were clearly right!" Mr. Berliger admitted. "So, you say he didn't have any documents with him?"

  "None."

  "And relatives?"

  "What does that have to do with it?" the doctor snorted. "Look at what is on his palms."

  "What is that?"

  "Traces of fingerprinting ink. This man must be an inveterate criminal. No one will come looking for him."

  "And again, your logic is flawless, colleague," the professor agreed with the medic and swished through some bank notes. Meanwhile, a wave of horror swept through the cottony apathy of my anesthesia.

  What was happening?! Why wouldn't anyone be looking for me?!

  Who was this Professor Berliger?!

  "But first, a little check," the professor declared. Then, my eyelid was raised, and the blinding beam of a pocket torch struck my vision. "Excellent! His pupil reacts to light. I'll take him."

  "Shall we make an additional injection of morphine?"

  "If you'd be so kind. We have quite a long way to go..."

  2

  THE BAD PART about being treated with morphine is the lack of choice.

  At first, you have that junk injected to stop the pain, but very soon pain becomes an excuse for another injection. And no self-control can help. The addiction is too strong. Physiology and psychology join forces into a slipknot, which a normal person cannot easily remove.

  The illustrious cannot either. Especially me.

  The morphine affected my talent directly, forcing me to see things that weren't really there, and confuse reality with narcotic lunqdy. And it wasn't as if I was dreaming of the pastures of heaven! My visions were coming one worse than the last, as if on purpose. Under the effects of morphine, strange and frightening episodes from my past were sparking up in my memory. I had lived through those ghastly moments many times before, only now they were one hundred times more real and vivid than reality.

  I would have ignored the pain and demanded they stop injecting me with narcotics, but I couldn't get a single word out. My body no longer obeyed me.

  BASICALLY, first thing's first. First, there was darkness, nothing, emptiness.

  For how long I do not know, because there was also no time. At the very least, not for me.

  And did I even exist? I wasn't sure. Not at all...

  Too vague? Well, how else can one be after first being dosed with morphine, then returning to consciousness in a room with white walls and a garland of bulbs under the ceiling. Naked, I was lying on my back and trying to remember where I was and how I'd gotten here. I tried and couldn't.

  "Operation room!" I suddenly realized.

  But then, where were the doctors? Why had I been thrown on the operating table alone?

  Then I heard the clanging of a little box of tools and the cold scraping of metal on a metal scalpel. The surgeon leaned over me, and I recognized him. I recognized the doctor and immediately remembered the operation room. I gave a jerk, but it was in vain. My arms and legs were tied down to the table with tough leather straps.

  "No!" I shouted. "You're dead! I killed you!"

  "Codswallop!" Maestro Marlini answered with a cold smile, sticking the scalpel's sharp edge into my chest. As soon as he split my skin, the cut filled with a burning liquid flame!

  "Just like the blood of a fallen one..." flickered a frightening thought, then the wound exploded in unbearable pain, and I was thrown out of the nightmare into impenetrable blackness.

  I WAS AWOKEN again but not as quickly and much more painfully.

  I was lying on an ironclad bed in a little room I couldn't even get a good view of. Before my eyes, everything was floating. My body was being gnawed at by pain. I was nauseous. And although I was lying totally motionless, I was being rocked as if I was on a ship at sea.

  On a chair pushed up to the bed, someone was sitting in a white robe. I licked my lips and exhaled hoarsely:

  "What's wrong with me, doctor?"

  "Everything is just fine with you, Leopold. Just great. For now."

  The doctor leaned over me, and I could see dark-blue hand marks on his neck. The marks of my very own hands!

  Maestro Marlini jerked the pillow out from under my head, covered my face with it and leaned into me with his whole weight. It was torturously painful to start breathing again.

  MY CONSCIOUSNESS returned to total darkness. And I wasn't lying down. I was standing and afraid to move. Because there was someone with me in the dark. Someone big and scary. And he was looking for me.

  Someone? Oh no! I knew perfectly well who. And so, I was standing motionless, not daring to even sigh. My legs were buried up to my knees in ice, which was crumbling and rustling, giving away my presence. Then, the flame of a lighter flickered in the darkness. The uneven reflection lit up the basement of my family manor and a dark figure with a carving knife in hand. But it was not the right figure, not at all the person I was afraid to see.

  "Very interesting..." Maestro Marlini drew out his words in thought, and the nightmare, deprived of the last traces of logic, started to dissolve like a house of cards brought down by a slight breeze.

  I was pulled under the ice, which peeled back my flesh to the bones.

  Just another death.

  Abominable.

  HAVE YOU EVER thirsted to kill someone?

  Striven just to take and strangle a person with your own hands, not for any tangible benefit but, simply because the wind blew the wrong direction?

  If you have, without a doubt, you know how wrong it is. Passion leaves a gap in the soul, changes you and makes you a different person. It pulls you to the bottom of that gap and never lets you go.

  I knew that for certain, because I hadn’t merely wanted to kill, I had done so. And I was about to kill again! My hands clenched the neck of Maestro Marlini, and my fingers were shivering in desire to squeeze and strangle the hypnotist, who didn't leave me in peace even after death. His own death, naturally. Not mine.

  The hypnotist, tied down to the middle of a wide queen-sized bed, had no fear in his eyes. Before, he didn't believe I had the determination to send him to the other side but now he knew it all in advance, so he wasn't even remotely afraid of the conclusion. The dead are fearless bastards. Worse has happened to them. Or so they think.

  "You're dead!" I growled.

  "Am I?" the hypnotist asked in surprise and would have laughed, but I clenched my fingers, not allowing him to do so.

  "You're dead! I killed you! Dead!"

  And I did it again, this time entirely crushing his unyielding throat to make sure. I was out of practice, so it was rough going, but I had plenty of experience in such matters.

  The bones cracked, and the summer day was immediately filled with heat. The air from outside heaved with the fire of the underworld, unbearably reeking of brimstone. I turned to the window and hurriedly covered my face with my hand. A flame-enshrouded figure, indistinct and blindingly white, stepped into the room and, after it, a fiery rain tore into the dream. A raging flame devoured my nightmare in an instant and, scorched to the bone, I plummeted like a fiery comet into the bottomless abyss, a circle of darkness spreading out around me.

  Probably, the pain from the burns tore me from unconsciousness.

  Yes, I woke up. And I cannot say that the nightmares were so totally bad compared to reality...

  IT WAS UNPLEASANT to admit, but our reality could be incomparably worse than any nightmare, even the ghastliest. Dreams usually expand on one of the edges of existence, lead it to the absurd and thus bring their victim to a catatonic state. Reality, meanwhile, is frightening by its very wide grasp on all manner of nasty things.

  The sound of heavy breathing and distant shouts, fearful and doomed.

  An acrid reek of piss and the suffocating smell of chlorine.

  An aching pain in the whole body then serenity, brought on by an injection of morphine.

  Gradually, it all came together into a unified whole, and I performed a conscious action for the first time in a long while: I
opened my eyes.

  The soft gloom of the hospital room initially blinded me with unbearable luster and, although I hurried to squint, fragments of details of my circumstances were burned dead into my mind: the white silhouette of a closed door, gray walls, the hook of an unmounted gas bulb. Dim beams of autumn sun made a checkered rectangle on the floor, but the window itself was outside my field of vision.

  I wanted to turn my head toward it, but I couldn't. I couldn't do anything. All I could do was lick my dried-out lips and blink.

  What was happening?!

  A barely audible croak tore itself from my mouth, but no one heard me. And no one could hear me: the bed at the opposite wall was unoccupied.

  In an attempt to suppress a panic attack, I took a few deep breaths. My head immediately started spinning and my ears started ringing. For some time, I managed to balance on the very edge of consciousness, but not too long. Another wave of stupor swept over me...

  THE NEXT TIME I awoke, there was a breeze of fresh air.

  Having left the door wide open, a muscular orderly in an unbuttoned white smock changed the bedpan under my bed and started for the exit.

  "Wait!" I rasped out after him.

  "Woah!" the boy was surprised, his muscular hairy forearms sticking out of his rolled-back smock sleeves. "He snapped out of it!"

  "Wait!" I demanded, but the orderly had already gone out into the corridor and slammed the door behind him, then I heard the scraping of a key turning in an obtuse hole.

  I cursed soundlessly and tried to get up but couldn't even move. And the problem wasn't even that my wrists were held to the bed with cloth straps –even a child could get out of such frivolous tethers – my body simply refused to obey me. I couldn't force myself to sit up or bend my legs. I couldn't even give my fingers an elementary wiggle.

  The only thing holding me back from panic was the morphine-induced tranquility. I was lying, looking dully at the ceiling and waiting indifferently for things to develop further.