A Lonely and Curious Country

by Matthew Carpenter

  “Who are you?” The notion that the dark man might be the devil crossed Solovkin’s mind, but deep down he knew that the truth was far more complex than that. His eyes had adapted; he could now see into the crawling darkness, where blind, ravenous shapes lurked. The thin veneer of reality had cracked and he looked upon the truth beneath it, chaos and madness spinning in the absolute nothingness beyond the rim of the universe. “What do you want from me?”

  “I dwell in the cracks, in the small, hidden spaces,” came the cryptic answer. “I need to do nothing but watch and wait. Speaking of which, I fear our time together has come to an end.”

  Solovkin glanced down and his heart sank: the white king was checkmated. Bit by bit, the robed figure faded into the blur until all that was left was the voracious grin, triangular, razor-sharp teeth gleaming in the darkness.

  “Wait,” Solovkin said. The darkness grew thicker; something moved inside it, vast and unformed and older than time. “What do you want from me? What do they want?”

  “You are being forgetful, Comrade.” The face of the First Secretary stared out of the dark man’s cowl, the broad, stern peasant features stamped with malignant glee. Solovkin screamed and sprang backward, the chair beneath him tumbling to the floor. The robed figure shrieked in awful hilarity. “Some doors close, others open. You shouldn’t have taken what wasn’t yours.”

  An image came to Solovkin: the inside of a filthy peasant hut, a symbol drawn across the rotting floorboards, a crude many-pointed star. Black candles burning at the intersections of the lines. Crude wooden shelves along the far wall, lined with musty, yellowing manuscripts. In the corner, something small and bloody, wrapped in a tattered potato sack. He had seen the hut before – but where?

  “The faithful are eaten first,” the mouth said. There was torment in its voice, a crooning hunger that the mocking tone couldn’t quite conceal. “Open the doorway, Vitaly Dmitrovich. You don’t want to be left behind by the Rapture.”

  The slavering shapes circled closer. Solovkin raised his arms to ward them off, flailed wildly. He blinked at the darkness surrounding him: the cell was empty and he lay on the cold concrete floor, a dull pain in his elbow and side. A gruff, disembodied voice from the other side of the door shouted at him to be silent. He climbed back under the thin blanket and tried to fall asleep, but the white, featureless face floated behind his closed eyelids, the pestilent grin like a raw, suppurating wound.

  ***

  The prisoners shuffled round the courtyard in a rough circle, their footsteps the only sound breaking the silence. Solovkin kept his head down and stared at the tips of his scuffed shoes. If he didn’t let his eyes stray far, he could pretend he was strolling down the city’s main promenade, far from the immense stone walls and iron-grated windows, from the scowling, uniformed guards at the center of the yard. He forced himself not to look at the other men; he was afraid he would recognize someone he knew among the blank, hollow faces. The Old Guard devoured by the monstrosity of their own creation.

  A shadow fell across the flagstones. Solovkin lifted his gaze. A man was standing in the shadow of a doorway, dressed in a long robe, like a priest’s. Long, greasy dark hair framed his bony face, eyes like hot coals in the darkness. He nodded at Solovkin and his lips parted in a leer. His teeth were black, rotten stumps.

  Solovkin glanced toward the guards. Communication was forbidden, as was stepping out of line. Yet neither of them seemed to have noticed the man in the doorway. The stranger raised his hands and beckoned to Solovkin. His palms were red with blood. The burning eyes seemed to pull Solovkin toward the shadows. He lost his step, stumbled, nearly fell. The guards laughed and cursed at him. The prisoner next to Solovkin shot him a wary look, but kept his silence.

  The whistle sounded, signaling the end of the exercise hour. Solovkin stood in line, waiting to be conducted back into the building. He didn’t have to look over his shoulder to know that the doorway was empty, that the robed man was no longer there. He remembered the pale, ascetic face, the burning eyes. He remembered the village, the smell in the peasant hut: dirt and dried blood, and tallow from the dripping candles. The chatter of the guns, the smoke and ashes rising from the conflagration. Almost twenty years had elapsed, but the priest had not changed, had never grown old.

  Heavy concrete doors scraped open. Solovkin stepped inside, the dark, vaulted corridors closing around him like a fist.

  ***

  At some point he’d fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes the cell swam in pale light and a guard was shaking him awake.

  He was taken back to the interrogation room and seated in front of the two sullen, unshaven Commissars. The covered metal cart had been wheeled closer. Laid out neatly on the table were the typed confession, a cigarette, a match and a pen. Solovkin pushed the paper away. Malenkov gave him a look of weary hatred, but Kazanov seemed almost cheerful, his dark, beady eyes shiny and malicious.

  They made him stand in a corner of the room and kept him awake with a continuous stream of questions. Hours went by; at some point the two interrogators were replaced by others, and those by others again, shouting at him, waving the fabricated confession. Solovkin suffered in silence, his legs and back riven with cramps, the world around him a blur of angry faces and loud, echoing voices. Memory came to him in disparate fragments. In his delirium he saw a crack in the wall grow into a wide fissure, the pale sickle of the dark man’s grin rise up from its depths.

  What is the name of your contact?

  Where did you meet?

  What did you carry from Helsinki?

  The questions ran together, numbing his sleep-deprived mind. The answers had already been entered into the statement Solovkin refused to sign. The name of the men he was expected to denounce were vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t put a face to them. From what Solovkin could gather, he was being accused of plotting to assassinate the First Secretary and a number of Party officials. Two men arrested as participants in this alleged conspiracy had already denounced him as a collaborator. All the Commissariat needed now was a confession from the disgraced official to close the circle.

  Several times he nearly broke down with exhaustion, but fear and desperation gave him strength. He knew that a signed deposition would spell certain death. A bullet to the back of the head, or, worse yet, whatever lay covered on the metal cart. He knew he was only delaying the inevitable, but for the moment that didn’t matter.

  Hallucinations set in. There was a hole in the center of the concrete floor, a black pit that dilated like a great sightless eye. The room was collapsing into it: he could feel the irresistible pull, see the objects around him stretch and distort. The hole blotted out everything; an abyss opened under his feet and he was falling, into the bottomless, viscid dark, into the maw of the thing that slithered below.

  An eternity passed. Rough hands lifted him to his feet, shook him awake. Kazanov’s heavy, expressionless face hovered over him. Malenkov stood in the background, smoking a cigarette and leafing through his file, flicking ash carelessly across the pages. Behind the table sat the priest from the dead village, grinning at the two Commissars who appeared to be oblivious to his presence.

  “I trust you’ve come to your senses,” said Malenkov. He closed the file with a snap and sat down in the chair. Solovkin blinked once, twice. His eyes had played a trick on him: there was no robed, leering figure behind the table, only a shadow. “The sooner you sign, the sooner you’ll be released.”

  “I can’t confess to a crime I haven’t committed,” Solovkin said. Fragments of half-formed memory leapt to the front of his mind. The beaten, bloodied priest dragged out of the darkness of the hut, babbling about unseen spheres and hidden realms, about forces beyond human comprehension. The sparks dancing in his dead eyes, fading into the darkness. Solovkin in his olive-green Commissar’s uniform, feeding crumbling old pages into the fire, watching them blacken and curl. The symbol on the hut floor falling away, opening on swirling galaxies. A vast cosmic cloud
dimming the cold radiance of the stars.

  “Don’t be a fool.” Malenkov’s face twisted in a sneer of disgust. “Whom are you trying to protect? We’ve arrested many of your accomplices, and it’s simply a matter of time before we find the rest. There is nowhere for them to hide. You can still save yourself.”

  Solovkin was silent. He was staring at a crack in the wall, from which a cancerous blackness seemed to emanate. “Too late for that,” he finally said.

  ***

  They had rounded up the peasants in the center of the village and executed them one by one, even the children. The last light of day faded and died, the evening air filling with the crack of rifle-fire. The priest knelt and watched the killings, his visage blank and impassive. Only when the hut with the altar was set ablaze and thick black smoke began to curl up from under the wooden roof did his expression change. Solovkin peered down at him. The man was smiling. His face, lit red by the spreading flames, shone in the gloaming.

  A soldier appeared at Solovkin’s side, a bundle of yellow manuscript pages in his arms. “What should we do with these, Comrade Commissar?”

  The paper was ancient, covered in strange symbols. Solovkin’s skin crawled at the sight. “Enemy dispatches, in some sort of code.” He dismissed the soldier with an impatient gesture. The priest was looking up at him and grinning.

  “Who are you?” The question slipped from Solovkin’s mouth before he could stop himself. “What’s happening here?”

  “He wants to meet you.” The priest’s dark eyes found Solovkin’s and held them. “The Dark One who dwells in the forest. He sees something in you. Something more than just dead meat waiting to be devoured. They are old, these woods, and the Dark One is older still.”

  “I don’t believe in the Devil.” Solovkin followed the kneeling man’s gaze past the killing ground, past the burning huts. A tall, thin figure stood at the edge of the thick forest, slipping in and out of shadow before the eye could fix upon it.

  “He believes in you,” said the priest and laughed. The dirt beneath his knees slowly turned to red mud. “Besides, you got it all wrong -- God and Devil, good and evil. The truth lies well beyond such tired scriptural platitudes.”

  “What is He, then?”

  “What you see around yourself is not a place, not a location.” The priest closed his eyes. A look of ecstasy crossed his thin face. “It is a process. Think of Him as a bridge, as the instrument by which Creation perfects itself. Oh, He’ll show you wondrous sights, and whisper forbidden knowledge in your ear. You will pass through the terminus and be changed. Reshaped in His image. Living the life everlasting.”

  Solovkin pressed the muzzle of his gun to the priest’s temple and pulled the trigger. The body slumped into the mud, the dark eyes never leaving Solovkin’s. He found his reflection in them, saw it melt and become something else, turned away.

  The soldiers worked quickly, without hesitation; there was no need for orders. Later they would convince themselves the village had been razed by the enemy, and the Army Command would not question their account. By the end of the war, Solovkin had almost managed to forget all about it. He had shot a religious agitator, burned a bundle of reactionary pamphlets. He’d done far worse things in the years that followed; regret was not something Solovkin entertained often.

  But the priest had not forgotten, and neither had the black man of the woods. They could afford to wait; time ceased to matter in the living, pulsing dark.

  Solovkin grunted and came to. He was on the floor of a prison cell, the stub of a pencil in his right hand. For a moment he didn’t know where he was, his heart beating a frantic tattoo in his chest. Then it came back to him: the arrest, the interrogation, the cruel faces of the men of the Commissariat. Sooner or later they would come back for him.

  He stared at the broken pencil as if expecting it to move on its own. A recollection lit up the recesses of his mind, bringing a smile to his lips. He had committed the priest’s manuscript to the flames, but not before reading it, the peculiar symbols burning themselves into his mind. Twenty years had passed, but he would remember.

  The lead heart of the pencil traced a line across the concrete floor, haltingly at first, then bolder. The secret sign, hidden in the tangle of lines and curves, burned in his mind’s eye. Solovkin hummed as the image took shape, lost to the world around him. When the pencil was used up he tore his skin open and dipped the shards in the dark ink welling from beneath.

  ***

  The guards were caught unprepared.

  Several times they had escorted the quiet elderly prisoner from cell 336 to the interrogation room, and he’d never tried to resist in any way. When they came for him that morning, he seemed even more subdued and distracted than usual. He shuffled along between them, his eyes glassy and unfocused, until they reached the staircase that connected the iron galleries. Then he spun round and shoved the guard behind him with all his strength.

  The unexpected attack nearly sent the guard over the railing; he flailed his arms as he fell back, clutching at the metal bars. The man in front was too slow. By the time he turned, the prisoner was already halfway up to the upper gallery, bounding up the steps with desperate speed.

  Shouts exploded in the staircase, footsteps thundering from below, the noise immense in the dead silence of the prison. Other guards joined the pursuit, but the fleeing man evaded them with ease. Yet there was nowhere to run: he was almost at the top of the staircase, two guards waiting for him on the uppermost gallery, truncheons at the ready. The prisoner scrambled over the railing and perched above the drop for a moment, arms thrown out like a grotesque bird of prey. Before the nearest of the guards could reach him, he stepped off into the emptiness.

  They found him in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs, crumpled and twisted like a broken doll. He drew in a ragged breath, then another. His finger smeared a dark scarlet curve on the concrete, the start of a drawing or a strange symbol. His dying eyes gazed around the circle of faces; blood bubbled on his lips as if he were trying to speak. By the time the doctor arrived, the prisoner was long gone.

  ***

  “Are you all right, comrade?”

  “Yes,” Malenkov said through clenched teeth. “Leave me now. I have to go through the prisoner’s personal effects.”

  The guard moved away, his steps noiseless on the carpeting of the corridor. Malenkov waited until the man was out of sight, exhaled a whistle of breath. The interior of the cell spun round him, mad designs and patterns inscribed into the floor and walls robbing him of all sense of dimension. He stepped in and closed the door behind him. The cell had to be cleaned up by someone reliable, someone who’d keep his mouth shut. There would be enough unpleasant questions to answer: not only had he failed to secure a confession, but the prisoner was dead. In the paranoid atmosphere of the Commissariat, even the smallest mistake could easily place one on the wrong side of the interrogator’s table. No one could know about this.

  He crossed the room and peered at a shape that resembled an eight-armed star, surrounded by small, twisting symbols. Devil-worship of some sort, occultism. There had been nothing in the old man’s file to suggest anything of the sort. It only went to show no one could be trusted. He made a mental note to find out who had compiled Solovkin’s surveillance file and punish them for the oversight.

  In the meantime, he had this mess to contend with.

  Drawings covered every centimeter of the bare walls and floor like a hideous, tightly woven tapestry. Some had been drawn in pencil, others in the prisoner’s own blood, the strokes crude but precise, measured. A central piece above the cot featured a tall, slender form emerging from a crack in the wall: a huge, predatory grin cleft the face in two. In spite of himself, Malenkov shuddered. Something about this gruesome icon made his skin crawl, turned his mind to deep, sunless places in which screams could echo forever without being heard.

  The silence was oppressive, the roar of blood in his ears deafening. Suddenly he no longer wan
ted to know what had happened, only to be as far from the call as possible; some long-dormant fragment of his consciousness screamed in alarm. The walls faltered, lost solidity. He turned round. The door had disappeared under the obscene scrawl. He clawed at the stone until his fingertips split and bled, distantly aware of the animal whimper coming from his throat. From behind him came a crumbling noise, the crevice in the wall widening, something pushing through. Fetid air rushed at him, the sickly sweetness of corruption. An irresistible force grasped his head, turned it against the resistance of his neck muscles and vertebrae. Malenkov heard the crack, saw the grinning maw yawn open, a razor-lined tunnel glowing with infernal light.

  Radical Division

  Jonathan Titchenal

  In my dreams, a bell tolls.

  ***

  Boone sets down the papers and fixes me with his good eye. “In your own words,” he says. “Explain to me what happened.”

  “Pennington’s report should-”

  “I’ve read Pennington’s report. I’m asking you.”

  He’s fixed me a gin and tonic. I sip it. It tastes like rubbing alcohol in my mouth. I set it aside. “Blakely was first through the door,” I say. “Then Harkaway, Robertson, me, and Pennington. We came in with weapons drawn, but they caught Blakely with a scatter gun all the same. They were expecting trouble.”

  “They usually are, now.” Boone takes a sip of his own drink, sits back in his chair. “How many?”

  “Four, maybe five Batrachians, including the priest. Eight or ten people who looked more or less normal, best as I could tell. It was smoky. They doused the candles as they ran.”

  “And this nonsense in Pennington’s report, about some kind of giant or something...”