Whispers From The Dark

by Bryan Hall

  He had come to Leningrad to meet up with his cousin Peter, who was to help him cross north into Finland and on to Sweden and escape from all the insanity that the Russians were not only fighting, but causing. He'd seen his share of Russian evil, to be sure. The women he'd seen held down and raped, the husbands or brothers or fathers who were shot as they protested. He'd been at Katyn, had himself pulled the trigger and cut down many of the ones they'd massacred for no good reason. And along the way, he'd grown tired of it all.

  No...not tired – afraid that he would be next. His atrocities were weighing heavy on his soul, and the carnage he'd waded through was bound to drown him soon if he didn't escape. Life was losing value, and each man or boy he'd shot weighed lighter on his soul than the last. He was, he feared, becoming a monster.

  So to Leningrad, then. To Peter, and then to Sweden.

  And then the fucking siege had begun. He'd spent days drunk and waiting in hiding for Peter to arrive. Too drunk to realize that his cousin hadn't made it into the city because of the Germans setting up their goddamn siege. Peter had either been turned back or shot, Valenchenko realized after the shelling had begun and drug him from his stupor.

  His stomach rumbled as he hurried across the street and ducked into an alleyway. He'd caught a rat here a few days before – one of the last in the city, as far as he could tell – and hoped to find another before the hunger became too much to bear.

  He glanced over his shoulder to ensure nobody was following him (you could never be too safe in Leningrad), and froze.

  The boy was there again, watching him.

  Even from across the street, he could see the pale emerald eyes dancing like tiny flames. He didn't move, and the two stood like statues studying one another as the low concussions thumped through a distant part of the city.

  The boy had been following him for almost a week now. He was emaciated, his clothes hanging from him like bed sheets on a clothesline. He was no younger than eight or nine, no older than twelve. At first, Valenchenko had spied him only once or twice a day, always too far away for him to make out all of his features. But those eyes assured him that it was the same lad.

  As he saw him more frequently, Valenchenko had begun to doubt his own sanity. Could hunger do that? Create hallucinations of malnourished, filthy boys with piercing emerald eyes?

  It was incredible that a child could survive in the city at all – there was little heat or shelter to be found that was safe and even scarcer food. And for a child to follow him? It must be a dream conjured by his hunger.

  Valenchenko turned his back on the boy and pressed on down the alley.

  A man, about the same age as Valenchenko, was ushering a young girl towards him, her eyes fixed on the ground.

  Valenchenko held up his hand for them to stop. “Food? Fire?” He asked. Gold was nothing in the city now – warmth and food were all that really mattered. The melted snow and captured frozen rain tasted like ash and sulfur but were enough to stay hydrated. But food was almost a memory, and little fuel was left to burn and few places were safe to burn it in. While many of the soldiers in the city were doing their best to save it, others had abandoned the fight and were instead using their weapons and numbers to prey on the civilians. A fire was one of the best ways to attract them.

  “Maybe fire,” the man responded. “At the church back the way you came. People gather there.”

  Valenchenko nodded. He'd seen it. And if worse came to worse, he would use it for heat. But too many people stayed in the church, and despite having shed his uniform he preferred to keep a lower profile. His rifle could be enough to give away his true nature. “No food?”

  The woman pressed past Valenchenko without slowing her pace. The man slowed a step, but still moved onward. He chuckled. “Ration day is in two days.”

  “Surely there's something.”

  “No fire you would want to stand by. No food for a sane man. Nothing but death. You still look strong. Your best bet is on the Road to Life, where we're going. This city is dying, my friend,” the man said over his shoulder as he picked up his pace. “The devil has it now.”

  Valenchenko watched them for a moment, until he realized that the boy was gone. He scanned the street and the alleys he could see into, but there was no sign of the gaunt, pale face. After a moment, he headed down the alleyway where the couple had come from.

  He rounded the corner to find the handiwork of Hitler's artillery. A huge section of each building had been torn to pieces, as if god had punched holes through the building's walls. He was surprised they were still standing.

  As he started to navigate through the rubble he glanced into the buildings through their wounds, hoping to spot a rat or – even better – a dog or cat that would make a meal.

  To his right, in the hollowed out guts of the building, a fire was burning. He could see the orange flicker of the flames on the roof, but the fire itself was hidden from his view by a trio of figures. They hadn't noticed him; their attention seemed to be fixed on the fire.

  He was hungry, but cold as well. The feeling had left his fingers hours ago, when he'd left another fire such as this. That one had been manned by an old lady and two teenage boys, and they'd shared their heat gladly. Most of the city's occupants did, Valenchenko had discovered, often passing around stories of survival and death and ghosts and terror. A few, much like the young man he'd just met, had sworn that they'd seen the devil himself crawling through the city's shadows.

  The stranger had lied to him, told him there was no fire he'd want to stand by. Any fire was warmth, and any fire was good enough for him.

  And now here was heat. It wouldn't feel his belly, but it was a comfort nonetheless.

  Valenchenko crawled through the opening in the wall and approached the fire with measured trepidation.

  One of the men turned and spotted him and within a breath all three had spun and raised their rifles towards him.

  Soldiers.

  The last goddamn thing he needed. Had he known they were shoulders, he would have passed them by. Or at least approached with his own rifle ready instead of slung over his shoulder. He raised his hands. “Just wanted to warm up for a minute.”

  “Fuck off,” the bigger of the three grunted in a thick Georgian accent. He shifted his leg to the side, and Valenchenko saw why they were so guarded.

  There was a corpse there, by the fire. He couldn't see the face, but he could see enough. The pants had been pulled from its body and thick slices of meat cut from its thighs. They were dangling over the fire from a metal rod, sizzling like bacon.

  “Fuck off,” the soldier repeated.

  “Get the fuck out of here or we'll shoot you dead,” one of his comrades said flatly.

  The scent of the flesh was starting to reach Valenchenko now, and it made his stomach rumble. He couldn't take his eyes from the meat, so tantalizing. No matter the source, it smelled and looked delicious. So much better than the gristle filled rat that had made his last meal.

  Nearby, another explosion tore through the city and was followed by a pair of smaller, more distant ones.

  He forced himself to nod. “Okay,” he said. “I'm going.”

  He backed out of the building, the trio of soldiers watching him as he did. Finally he turned from them and made his way down the alleyway, his hopes of capturing one of Leningrad's last rats out mind. There was, after all, another source of food in the city. And while heat was wonderful, food was even better.

  He wasn't a murderer, Valenchenko told himself as an icy breeze sliced through the alley. A killer, perhaps. He'd killed enough in battle, that was for sure. But he couldn't kill an innocent, even if it was for food.

  But the city was filled with plenty who weren't innocent. If he couldn't find a fresh corpse, he could certainly find someone who didn't deserve the life God had given them. Hadn't he just left three of them? He'd killed enough in the war to know that when a life or death situation was at hand, you had to kill or be killed.

 
; And starvation was no way for any man to die, even a deserter of the Red Army. No, if he could survive, he would. Even if it meant doing the unthinkable.

  There as a shuffle behind him, hard shoes dragging across the concrete, and he whirled just in time to catch a glimpse of the boy again, darting behind a pile of debris.

  “Go away, damn you! Leave me alone!” Valenchenko's screams bounced off the fractured walls and repeated themselves a dozen times, mingling with laughter from the soldiers he'd left before another thunderous explosion drowned it all out.

  He stood for a moment, peering down the alley until his body began to scream for him to move again – to find warmth, or food.

  The cold finally got the better of him and he turned and trotted into the open street, hurrying for the other side just as another explosion ripped through the street. This one was close, and he could see thick black smoke charging down the street to his left. He reached the other side and darted into an open doorway.

  The building's innards had been gutted, likely by looters. It was hard to say just what it had been before the siege began, but from the look of the furnishings it had likely been a bar or lodge. A long counter ran the length of one wall and a few tables or chairs had been smashed, pieces of them scattered through the room. The rest of the furnishings appeared to have been stolen, probably for firewood.

  Valenchenko checked the back rooms of the building to ensure they were empty, the shelter from the wind chasing away much of the cold. Once he surveyed the building and dealt with his hunger, he would consider building a fire with the remaining wood. Once he was sure he was alone downstairs and most of his chill had left him, he made his way up the stairs.

  He stopped just as the landing fell into view.

  A corpse lay slumped against the wall at the top of the stairs, a bullet hole in its forehead. The cold made it impossible to tell just how long the man had been there, but the skin had begun to take on a gray hue. The bits of bone and brain on the wall behind the body were black beneath a crusting of ice crystals. It was barely dressed, covered only by a thin undershirt and pair of underwear. The man's feet were bare.

  They'd killed him for his clothes, Valenchenko realized.

  He wondered if it was the same three soldiers he'd found across the street. They'd already proven they had little care or concern for others. Most likely they hadn't, but it made Valenchenko feel better to think that they had. Even more justified, in a way.

  Valenchenko continued up the stairs and stepped over the body. A short hallway with two doors on either side lay beyond. He peered in each as he passed, finding nothing but empty rooms stripped of most of their furnishings. A fire had been built on a sheet of metal in the middle of one, the ashes as gray as the rest of the city.

  When he reached the last room on the left, Valenchenko crossed its bare floor to the window.

  It was small, the glass shattered like nearly every other piece of glass in the city. But it looked out onto the street he'd just crossed. Across the street and to his left, he could make out the flickering of the soldiers' cooking fire he'd left moments before. Dark was still a couple of hours away, but the shadows of the city made it easy to spot fires.

  He grunted, the possibilities of the view satisfying him.

  When he'd been younger, his father had taken him hunting often for bear and wolf and deer in the woods around their farm near Novgorod. He'd learned to shoot then, waist deep in snow and shivering.

  When the war began his friends had convinced him to sign up due mainly to his marksmanship, as well as their misinformed sense of honor and country.

  So he'd joined the army of a tyrant to combat a tyrant, two leaders so vicious and drunk with power that Valenchenko could barely tell which was worse.

  But he'd made a hell of a sniper, and killed many Germans for Mother Russia. He'd killed boys and men alike, killed petty soldiers alongside Hitler's officers. He had no regret for his kills, but he'd grown too tired of it. Tired or not, however, he couldn't deny that he'd been good at his task.

  Grunting with satisfaction once more, Valenchenko unslung his Mosin-Nagant rifle and leaned against the wall at the window. The cold blowing through the broken panes stung his face, but he was used to the icy needles. He was sheltered enough to be as warm as he had been in hours, and his excitement kept him even warmer.

  He had no proof that the soldiers had killed the man at the stairs, and a part of him really didn't care. They were killers, just like him. And while the thought of killing his fellow Russian soldiers didn't quite appeal to him, he was running low on options.

  The rations the government was handing out had dwindled to almost nothing, and amounted to little more than sawdust anyway. And rats were few and far between, and the energy spent chasing them down or the ammo spent shooting them was hardly worth the nourishment they gave, even when he ate all of the organs, the intestines, and after he had crushed the tiny bones and ate them too.

  But the smell of that meat the soldiers were cooking – good God, the smell. Like wild boar cooked over an open flame. Just the memory made him salivate.

  He thought that he would feel guilt if he killed some feeble old man or a young child.

  He hoped so, at least.

  But Valenchenko knew that he could live with another soldier's death on his conscience. Three soldier's deaths, even. What were three more to join the rest of his kills, if it meant a full belly for a few days? The cold itself would likely preserve them for a week or more.

  Besides, they'd committed sins, he reasoned. Probably much worse ones that Valenchenko had. He'd have a hard time finding any more deserving.

  Movement caught Valenchenko's eye and pulled it from the flickering of the fire.

  It was the boy, standing in the doorway of the building adjacent to the one the soldiers were in. Despite the distance between them Valenchenko knew that the boy was staring right at him; he knew it as sure as he knew the hunger in his gut.

  He watched the boy a moment, the white plumes of his breath growing thicker in the air as the evening chill grew deeper. He could kill the boy. It would be over in an instant, and he could avoid dealing with the soldiers. They wouldn't likely come out to check on a single shot. Valenchenko could have his food and the boy wouldn't follow him around the city any more like a shadow. And as for the boy himself? His misery, his suffering in this city of the damned would be ended in a split second.

  It would be mercy, in fact.

  An end to a young child's suffering, in an instant.

  It was a girl that pried Valenchenko's attention from the boy. She was young, twenty or thirty – the distance and the filth of the city caked upon her face made it hard to tell. she was walking alone down the middle of the street, her arms wrapped around herself as if she could hold in her body's heat to keep herself warm. Valenchenko's stomach knotted as he realized just what would likely happen.

  She passed in front of the building the soldiers were in, hurrying to some unknown destination – the church, most likely.

  Just as Valenchenko thought she would pass by the monsters unscathed, one of the soldiers jogged from the building, calling for her to stop.

  She didn't, but slowed her steps to look over her shoulder. As she did, the soldier broke into a run, reaching her within an instant and grabbing her, dragging her back towards the building.

  The girl fought, but there was little she could do. The solider drug her past the shelled out building and into the alleyway Valenchenko had traveled to reach his perch.

  The man slapped her once, but she struggled harder, her screams echoing through the street and mingling with the explosions to form a macabre cacophony that sent a chill down Valenchenko's spine. The solider closed his fist, spun the girl around, and punched her in the face twice. The second punch dropped her to the ground and he quickly squatted over her, yanking her pants with one hand while trying to undo his own with the other.

  Valenchenko lined up his shot and fired, aiming for the heart. H
is shot went high by just a hair and punched a hole through the man's throat. The solider dropped to the ground beside the girl, clutching his neck in a vain attempt to keep his life from draining out. He was dead by the time Valenchenko had chambered his next round and turned his attention to the doorway of the bombed out building.

  It took the soldier's companions a moment to appear, and Valenchenko watched until they were both in the middle of the street, weapons swinging wildly about as they called for their friend.

  They were panicked already, after a single shot and a missing comrade. He didn't know why, but it brought a smile to Valenchenko's face.

  He drew aim on the man who had told him to 'fuck off' and squeezed the trigger.

  This time the shot was true and the man dropped like a stone and lay motionless on the gray street.

  The third soldier was faster than Valenchenko thought and he raced back into the building's doorway before another shot could be fired.

  “Fuck,” Valenchenko muttered.

  The solider fired blind, his shot striking the wall several feet below Valenchenko.

  He waited, watching the doorway where the man had taken cover. A moment passed, and the rifle appeared again. This time the shot was low and wide.

  Valenchenko knew better than to waste ammunition, and there was no chance of getting a clean shot unless the other man moved. And judging from his panicked shooting, that was unlikely to happen.

  He needed to move.

  Valenchenko backed away from the window and ran down the hallway, hurrying over the corpse and down the stairs while trying to stay quiet.

  Just as he reached the bottom of the stairs, another shot rang out.

  But an instant after it, screams tore through the air as well.

  Valenchenko crouched down beside the building's door and listened to the silence settle over the street.

  After a moment, he peered outside. The dusk was beginning to settle over the city, and for just a moment the entirety of Leningrad was still and silent.

  Dead.

  It took Valenchenko several minutes to convince himself to move, that he wasn't being baited into the open. Finally, it was the fact that his adversary had been panicked, firing blind and wasting ammo moments ago, that convinced him the other man had fled.