The House Next Door Trilogy (Books 1-3)

by Jule Owen

  The river widens and deepens again, and he hangs on harder still as the force of the water gathers, but he feels more vulnerable and wonders how he might turn the trunk so he’s behind it again. He slips off and gradually edges it around in the water, pushing against the current.

  Staring ahead to where the river narrows, he spots a large stony beach on the right-hand side. The water becomes shallower, his feet bang and drag on the riverbed, and he lifts his legs. Near the beach, the water gets shallower still, the tree gets stuck, and he wades around to push it free.

  Something large and powerful hits him from the side, throwing him onto the shore.

  He’s so dazed, it takes him a moment to realise it’s the cat. He scrambles to his feet – there’s a searing pain in his shoulder, but no time to think. The cat is between him and the river. He tries to move further along the beach nearer the water, but the cat has him covered and cuts him off. Slowly, he backs towards the forest, all the time expecting the creature to pounce. He somehow scrambles over a bank, gripping roots, grass, plant stems – anything. There’s a vine hanging by his face – he grips it and pulls, testing it, and quickly gets a foothold and swings towards the trunk of a tree, throwing his leg and catching it on a branch, levering himself with his arms and his wounded foot. The cat comes bounding up the bank. Mathew gets clear just as the cat launches itself at the tree, leaving a great gash mark in the bark. Struggling crazily, Mathew kicks and scrambles and climbs desperately, until he’s sitting on a sturdy branch. The cat makes one more attempt to get at him, leaping and falling with a crash.

  For a long time it sits at the base of the tree, roaring at him whenever he peers down.

  It starts to rain. The branch becomes slippy, and he retreats slowly to the heart of the tree. His shoulder is numb with pain. Touching it with his hand, he finds that it’s wet and sticky. When he looks at his fingers, they’re covered in blood.

  Thunder shakes the tree, and then rain is beating down all around him, bouncing off the shiny leaves. He notices a bank of moss growing on the side of a thick branch, scrapes off a handful and holds it in the rain until it’s sodden, then presses it against his shoulder.

  He finds a way to lie down securely without danger of falling from the tree and rests there miserably, the rain pounding down, relentless. When it finally stops, he cranes his neck over the side of his refuge. The cat has gone, but night is closing in, and he’s too tired to go down and gather things to make a decent bed. He sleeps fitfully where he is, his shoulder throbbing.

  Sunday, 19 June 2472, Siberia

  In the morning, there’s no sign of the cat. He lets himself down and goes to the river to drink. His arm aches. At the water’s edge he takes off his shirt and examines his shoulder. There’s a large gash, red and gaping. He cleans it in the river, then gathers some more moss, and tears a strip off his shirt to bind the wet moss to his wound. His shirt is now in tatters. He considers putting it back on and then ties it around his head to keep off the sun and catch the sweat that constantly drips down his face.

  He spends a long time searching for food in the forest, distracted by the wound inflicted by the cat. The day before, he left his walking pole on the bank of the river and moving in the undergrowth is harder without it. Hunting around, he finds another buried in a tangle of sticky clinging vines and low broad-leafed growth. As he pulls it carefully from the leaves, he thinks about snakes and spiders. This new stick is a better one. He sizes it, balancing it in his good hand. His other arm is throbbing, and his skin is stained with his own blood, but he tries to put that from his mind.

  Heading to the river, he hears an animal noise, a growl, coming from across the water, but it isn’t close enough for him to be sure it’s the cat. He scans around for a tree to climb, but he is in amongst small shrubs and banana trees. Taking another route, he walks deeper in the forest for a while, until finally he turns again towards the river and hears the cat, distinctly this time. He’s forced to retreat, trying to stay parallel to the river from a distance.

  The river is his compass, and he doesn’t want to lose it.

  As the day goes on and he gets thirsty, he wonders how he can find clean, fresh water. Searching amongst the low-growing plants, he finds one whose centre is full of rainwater. Cautious, he tastes a small amount first, worried the plant might have poisoned it, but the water is sweet and clean, better than the river water. When he’s finished drinking, he examines his bandage and thinks about washing the wound in the water, but when he touches the moss, the pain is so bad he decides to leave it alone.

  The ground is becoming stony, and he realises he’s climbing and getting further away from the river. Straining his ears, he can no longer hear the rushing sound of the water. He clambers across a rocky outcrop on the side of the hill, bare of plants, and, standing on a boulder, takes a breather and surveys his whereabouts. Down below the treetops the river gleams silver in the sunlight. He sighs with relief. It looks like if he walks down at a diagonal, he’ll meet the river, so he slides off the boulder and sets off again.

  There are a few taller trees to use as landmarks and a rocky peak on the other side of the valley atop a flat-sided cliff next to the river. It’s hot. The sun burns without the shade of the forest. He arranges the hat he’s made with his shirt to cover his neck and shoulders. The large moon in the blue sky hangs over him.

  He moves on quickly, starting off with purpose, but he hasn’t gone far when he hears a snapping of branches. The sound is close. The cat is walking through the undergrowth directly ahead.

  Once again he searches frantically for somewhere to hide. He’s surrounded by tall trees, but they have straight, smooth trunks with no low branches to grip hold of. Striking a slightly different path, to his right, along the contour of the hillside rather than directly down, he glimpses a flash of the cat between the trunks of trees. It does not come directly at him but crosses his path, through the dense foliage ahead. It’s gone and then appears again, some way down the hillside.

  It’s sitting. Waiting. It yawns.

  He climbs slightly higher and tries to walk forward along the hillside again, but the cat is there.

  Is it playing with me? he wonders. Cats do that with their food before they make a kill.

  His pulse hammers away, but he doesn’t experience the rising panic he’s felt before in encounters with the cat, even though, this time, he seems to have nowhere to go. They continue. The cat, he realises, is pushing him higher up the mountain. It’s herding him. They climb. There are more and more rocks, fewer trees and shrubs. A high stone cliff rises above him, penning him in on the cliff side.

  Is it taking me to the place it wants to kill me?

  This is a game, he reminds himself. A highly realistic, rather horrifying game.

  Then the mantra: This is not real. I cannot die.

  He is at the base of the cliff. The cat has come from the forest. It’s standing in front of him. As he moves to go the other way, fluidly, free of the least effort, it moves into his path. In every physical way this animal is superior.

  Carved into the cliff, there’s a cave. Its black mouth gapes at the daylight. The cat is weaving backwards and forwards now, pushing Mathew into the cave. This is where it brings its prey to die, he thinks.

  The gunshot rings pure and clear, the sound bouncing off the cliff side and echoing down the canyon. The bullet was aimed at the cat. It misses and takes down a tree instead, which cracks and breaks and falls. The cat is gone in the blink of an eye. Air shudders in Mathew’s lungs. He breathes out.

  He is saved.

  There are men coming towards him.

  19 Dragomirov

  “Стой!”

  A human voice. A foreign language but a human voice. Mathew doesn’t understand the words, but they have the international sound of a command. The game clearly doesn’t allow ordinary Nexus simultaneous translation. The sound of people approaching. Rocks disturbed, branches broken. Conversation. There’s an urgency and aggr
ession to the exchanges that make Mathew think these people are not out on a Sunday stroll. The language is familiar, though. It sounds like Eva. It sounds like Russian.

  They break through the trees and start climbing the rocky slope towards him. Four soldiers in jungle camouflage carrying strange-looking guns. Two of the soldiers have their crosshairs trained on him as they approach. Slowly, Mathew puts down his walking stick and puts his hands in the air.

  “Как тебя зовут? Oткуда вы? Вы понимаете меня?”

  The man who has spoken to him, and who appears to be in charge, indicates to the others to lower their weapons. Mathew feels only marginally safer when they do.

  “Говорить!” snaps the man in charge. He has a blond crew cut, a two-day beard and the distinctive deep-set eyes of Russian people; he’s glistening with sweat, dark patches under his arms and across his chest.

  “I don’t understand,” Mathew says. “I don’t speak Russian.”

  The man smiles, clearly pleased, like he has found something he was searching for, like he has struck gold. He looks around at the other soldiers, who grin back at him, and then says to Mathew in heavily accented English, “You come with us.”

  They walk for an hour at a military clip Mathew barely keeps pace with, down to the river and along the bank until they reach a broad rocky shore, like the one where the cat pounced on him. At the edge, on the river-smoothed stones, is a camp in a cleared area. There are shelters, tarpaulins stretched between posts, hammocks, equipment and supplies hanging from the beams of the shelters, a fire tended by another soldier, the smell of food.

  Mathew thirstily drinks clean, fresh water from a beaker offered to him by the crew-cut Russian who refills it for him from a hanging barrel fed from a water filter. He indicates to a makeshift bench made from forest wood. Mathew sits down. Crew-cut shouts at the man tending the fire. The man is fat, with curly greying black hair, the bulbous nose of a heavy drinker, a red face, and smiling dark eyes. He brings something to Mathew – a metal bowl, a spoon, food, some kind of stew. It smells amazing. Mathew delves in ravenously, unquestioning. It is food. It is hot. Crew-cut smiles at him indulgently, is patient, lets him eat.

  The fat man watches him eat, too. “I am Evgeny, Evgeny Shukshin,” he says, touching his fingers to his chest. “Who are you?”

  “Mathew,” he says between mouthfuls, spooning the last bits of gravy into his mouth. “You speak English?”

  “Little bit,” the cook says, grinning. “I wish more.” The cook notices his shoulder. “You are hurting.”

  Trying to escape the cat, meeting the Russians, Mathew has forgotten his shoulder, which has started to bleed again. The shirt and moss bandage are hanging off him.

  “I hurt my arm. And my feet.” He puts the bowl on the floor, bends down and loosens the laces of his boots, slowly drawing out his feet, removing his filthy, sodden, blood-stained socks and picking off the wad of moss covering his weeping skin.

  The cooks says something to crew-cut, who calls to another soldier who’s hanging water carriers on one of the tent poles. A young man with a shaven head and a missing front tooth comes and takes hold of Mathew’s arm. He flinches. Gap-tooth says something to Evgeny.

  Evgeny says, “It’s okay. He will help you.”

  Mathew nods and turns to the soldier, who’s looking at him expectantly.

  “Okay.”

  Gap-tooth unwinds the remains of the makeshift bandage and picks away the moss. Mathew turns away and grits his teeth. The soldier whistles, goes to one of the hanging bags and comes back with a medical kit. Rummaging inside, he pulls out a tube, removes the top, and squeezes a transparent cream directly onto the wound. Then he sets to work pulling the wound together and binding the skin with adhesive strips. He wraps the whole thing in a clean bandage and then a waterproof dressing; he then turns his attention to Mathew’s damaged feet.

  “Thank you,” Mathew says.

  “Cпасибо,” Evgeny says to Mathew. “It’s thank you in Russian. Spaz iba.”

  “Spaziba,” he repeats back to Evgeny.

  The soldier grins and says something. Evgeny translates. “He says you’re welcome.”

  Another, older man holding a telephone receiver attached to a box speaks to crew-cut, who gets up, takes the receiver, and starts speaking into the receiver in Russian, looking at Mathew.

  The cook stays with him, offering him more food and water. No one points a gun at him now.

  After he has eaten, Evgeny gives him soap and nods at the river. “You smell bad. Get clean.” He mimes scrubbing himself and washing his face.

  Mathew gratefully goes down to the water’s edge, strips down to his underwear, then looks around, shrugs and takes them off as well. Wading thigh-deep, he scrubs himself with the soap and a cloth, scouring off days of grime and sweat. The soap pools around him and forms a line as it’s slowly taken down the river. When he comes into shore, Evgeny offers him a towel and fresh, dry clothes, jungle camouflage like theirs, too big for him. He rolls up the legs of the trousers and his sleeves and ties the waist with some rope Evgeny gives him. Evgeny also finds him fresh clean, dry socks, and Mathew is more grateful than he has felt in a long time.

  Evgeny puts out his shoes to dry. Mathew expects them to throw his old clothes on the fire, but crew-cut washes them, dries them in the sun, and then puts them in a bag like they are evidence.

  In the afternoon, in his fresh-smelling, clean clothes, no longer hungry or thirsty, he watches the soldiers fish in the river. They score a fine dinner, which they slowly smoke above the fire on greenwood sticks. The light starts to fade.

  As they sit around the fire, waiting for the fish to cook, Evgeny teaches Mathew all the soldiers’ names in turn. The gap-toothed man, cleaner and fixer of his wounds, is Abram Salko. There’s a grim-faced man with a well-bushed low brow and a half-day beard, hunched by the fire carving wood with a survival knife. His name is Vladimir Klokov. The soldier who handed crew-cut the phone is older, small, wiry, with greying hair and a lined, sad face, but he smiles at Mathew. His name is Yakov Zarubin. There’s a good-looking blond boy, trying to grow a moustache, called Pavel Folkin, who stands and tests one of the cooking fish.

  “Andrei . . .” Evgeny says, pointing to crew-cut.

  Crew-cut says something sharply to Evgeny. “His name is Kapral Churkin. Churkin, not Andrei.”

  “He wants to be known by his last name?”

  “Yes. Only rank and last names here, he says. But I am Evgeny. I have son. Your age. Far away. You understand?”

  Mathew nods.

  Later, as the fire crackles, some alcoholic liquid is passed around. Mathew takes a sip. It is strong and makes him cough. The soldiers laugh, but not unkindly. He’s a boy, after all.

  They string a hammock for him under a mosquito net.

  His eyes grow heavy watching the embers glow in the fire.

  Monday, 20 June 2472, Siberia

  In the morning, there is more fresh water and food: a kind of porridge with something sweet in it. Churkin the crew-cut is on the strange old phone again. The soldiers get busy packing camp. The camp is put away in bags and boxes with military efficiency. It’s all stacked neatly on the stony shore. Then they sit and wait. Salko gap-tooth and Folkin the boy wrestle to pass the time. Others sit around and yell abuse or encouragement; it’s difficult for Mathew to tell which.

  Then Zarubin shouts and points. A boat is coming along the river. It’s a military vehicle, wide and flat-bottomed, big enough to carry Churkin’s small outfit and all their stuff, pushed along by a powerful engine. It is also sheltered, with a canvas canopy, a necessity in the climate.

  Once they’ve loaded and pushed off, Mathew sits at the front watching Evgeny preparing lunch for the others while they travel. Evgeny hands him some cans and a can opener.

  “Here,” he starts one off.

  Mathew nods, “I know.” He has done this in an old game loosely based on a twentieth-century wa
r. As he opens the cans, he passes them to Evgeny, who’s spreading paste onto biscuits, which he puts in metal bowls and hands round the men. Klokov takes a bite and spits his mouthful over the side of the boat, complaining loudly at Evgeny. Evgeny says something back to the man, who takes offence and stands. Churkin yells at him, and he sits down, reluctantly.

  Evgeny glances at Mathew and grunts. “Hard ass,” he says, meaning Klokov.

  Mathew grins, eating his biscuits happily, still grateful for anything not banana.

  “Where are we going?” Mathew asks.

  “Home,” Evgeny says. Then he thinks. “No. Not home. Base camp.”

  “Where are we?”

  “You don’t know?”

  Mathew shakes his head.

  “How did you get here?”

  Mathew shrugs. How to explain?

  “You better have story when get to base camp. You better have good story.”

  “Why?”

  “Dragomirov.”

  Churkin bawls something at Evgeny, who replies deferentially and turns to deal with the empty tins.

  “But how do I compose a good story if I don’t know where I am?” Mathew says to Evgeny.

  Evgeny puts his finger to his lips and indicates Churkin watching them.

  For the rest of the journey, Evgeny won’t do more than grunt at Mathew, passing him water and food, but speaking loudly only in Russian, glancing all the time at Churkin like a dog waiting to be kicked by its master.