8
Time Trip
It was winter in Moscow and snow was piled up very high in the streets. I saw the old priest beckoning to me as I was swimming in the weird open-air pool near the Kremlin; he was standing on the central island of the pool, staring at me, and his face was so old, so wrinkled and so death-like that it really gave me the most awful shock.
I often went to the swimming-pool. It was in the centre of Moscow, only a short ride on the metro from our apartment, and was heated from underneath so it sent great clouds of steam up into the cold air above. My father is a journalist and he’d taken us there for six months. I went to an English school for the children of diplomats, but I always longed to meet some Russians. That’s why I went to the pool such a lot – just in the hope of striking up a friendship. Mum always came with me, but that day she’d felt cold and gone in early to change, so I was alone with the beckoning priest.
Slowly I swam towards him, knowing I shouldn’t, but somehow unable to stop myself. As I drew nearer, his face, already amazingly lined, began to change and I trod water unbelievingly as the flesh literally fell from his bones until I was looking at a bleached skull. There was a shimmering and within seconds he had gone, but where he had been standing was a great patch of icy water that definitely hadn’t been there before. It began to pour into the pool and head straight towards me like a glacier, its colour yellowy, faintly oily. Instantly, instinctively, I dived down under the water and it passed over me, gradually forming into a miniature island of ice. I opened my eyes and stared up at it from underneath the water. Cut into the ice were two words: HELP US.
I stayed down as long as I could and then surfaced, only to see the ice had disappeared. I swam back to the side, frightened and worried, but somehow, once I reached dry land and the warmth of the changing-rooms, the fear inside me trickled away and I began to convince myself that I had imagined it all. A trick of the light, the steam, the mist – it could have been anything, and nothing.
‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost, Rik,’ said Mum when we met outside the low circular pool with the steam rising up above it. We walked through a little park to the subway, our feet sliding on the impacted snow, and all the way, even when we were crossing Red Square, Mum kept going on at me.
‘What’s the matter, Rik? Are you ill? You look as if you’ve had a shock. You didn’t talk to anyone in the pool who was nasty, did you? You know I told you not to speak to strangers.’
Eventually I managed to calm her down and reassure her that nothing had happened, but it wasn’t an easy job and I realized I must have looked really awful.
Next day, when Mum suggested going for a swim again I hesitated. The school was having a few days’ holiday and I knew she was trying to keep me occupied, but I just didn’t want to go. The only problem was that if I said no, she would immediately think something had happened and start getting worried all over again.
‘That would be great – I’d love to go,’ I lied, trying to make myself feel it was all OK, just an odd experience that couldn’t happen again.
It was early on a weekday morning and the pool was almost empty. A further light covering of snow had fallen overnight, turning Moscow into a fairy-tale city once again, with sharp, freshly white outlines and a stillness that suddenly made me think it was almost as if time had stopped. The water was wonderfully warm and I imagined it must be rather like swimming in a hot spring with your head in some polar region.
As Mum and I swam slowly up and down I became more and more nervous. She often got tired, and any moment now I knew I would hear her saying, as she often did, ‘I’ll go and change now, dear, but don’t let me stop you enjoying yourself. You swim on for a bit.’ I didn’t want to be alone here on this even more magically frightening day; I didn’t want to meet an old man whose face turned into a skull and who sent out strange messages in ice-floes.
I kept looking around as we swam, but I knew in my heart of hearts that as long as Mum stayed with me he would not appear. Predictably enough, Mum suddenly said, ‘I’ll go and change now, dear, but don’t let me stop you enjoying yourself. You swim on for a bit.’
‘I’ll come in with you,’ I gabbled, but she didn’t seem to hear.
‘I’ll see you in about ten minutes – you get your exercise.’ There was a finality to her words which left me no room for argument, and she puffingly and pantingly swam away, leaving me treading water on my own, willing myself not to look at the snow-dusted island in the centre of the pool. When I unwillingly looked up, he was there, as I had known he would be, but this time the old man didn’t seem quite so old, nor so ready to decompose. In fact he looked much more substantial, and there was a quiet smile on his face as he beckoned me over.
‘Never speak to strangers.’ I heard Mum’s voice ring in my ears over and over again. Then I realized, with a jolting shock, that he wasn’t a stranger – he was my dad.
‘Dad?’ I spluttered. ‘Dad?’
The features were definitely the same, but the clothes, old and dowdy and gnome-like, were completely different. He was beckoning to me and I heard a voice in my head quietly say, ‘Rik – Rik – come over here. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Absolutely nothing at all.’
I swam over slowly, but now with much more confidence, and when I arrived I scrambled up on to the island, shivering in the arctic conditions. As I did so the cloaked man with my dad’s face raised his hand and the sun came out, and suddenly I was warm and comfortable. I looked up at the clear blue sky and then back again at my father, but now it wasn’t him; it was the old man again and his skin was literally withering away on his face as I watched him.
‘Dad!’
‘I’m not your father.’ The voice was inside me again but entirely different, with a cracked, stumbling, hollow note to it. I knew I had been trapped, but when I tried to turn and run back into the pool something stopped me and I found I was stationary, frozen to the spot. The sun and the blue sky had gone and I was shivering in the deep chill of a penetrating wind.
‘Who are you?’ I asked inside my mind, but there was no direct answer.
Instead I heard: ‘You are needed.’
‘Who by?’
‘You must come. They haven’t long.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘You have no choice.’
‘I’ve got to get back.’
‘You have no choice,’ the cracked voice repeated. ‘You were sent to help me keep my promise. Come. Now.’
Reluctantly, with leaden steps, I found myself following him through the swimming-pool mist. The island seemed to be much bigger than I had thought, and when the mist cleared slightly I found we were walking through a little wood full of frost-sprinkled pine-trees. I didn’t seem to feel the cold any longer, and when I pinched my arm I couldn’t feel anything. I was in bathing-trunks walking through subzero temperatures, maybe already suffering from severe frost-bite, but all I could feel was an awful foreboding that seemed to drive long icicles into my heart.
Eventually we came to a little wooden chapel. The old priest opened the door and we both passed inside. As we did so I heard a strange sound and I saw the priest stiffen. What on earth was it, I wondered. With a shock I realized it resembled the sound of distant gun-fire.
Inside, the chapel was hung with hundreds of different religious pictures – the icons my parents so much admired – and candles guttered everywhere. Without hesitation, the priest went to the middle of the wooden-boarded floor and pulled aside a section to reveal an iron ring. He tugged at it and a trapdoor opened. Again he beckoned to me, this time more impatiently, and when I stood by his side, I could see a flight of roughly hewn steps descending into the darkness.
‘You must come with me,’ said the cracked voice inside my head. I tried to resist but it was hopeless; an unseen force propelled me towards the shaft. I followed him down for what seemed a very long time, until we stood in an earth-sided tunnel, pitch-black except for the long tallow candle he slowly lit. Then,
holding this aloft, he began to walk away and 1 continued to follow, the fear gnawing at me, rising from my stomach to my throat so I could hardly breathe.
We eventually came to a cave in which there were other lights, and as I fearfully followed the old priest in I could make out the shadowed faces of a group of men, women and children huddled together around a fire whose thin smoke drifted up to a blackened, root-twisted ceiling.
‘Who are they?’ I asked haltingly.
‘They are the villagers of Zarlok; they are hiding from the militia.’
‘But what have they done?’
‘One of them protected an enemy of the State. For that they are all to die.’
‘And who are you?’
‘Their parish priest.’
I paused. Then I asked slowly, ‘When – when were you their priest?’
‘A long time ago.’
‘Why have you brought me here?’
‘You will see.’
‘What is this place?’
‘A cave in the woods. A tunnel was built to the church because we knew the persecution was coming; we knew that we would have to hide.’
‘Please tell me why I’m here.’ I was utterly desperate now, trapped and frantic in this dark terrifying place, but he simply gave me his slow, sad smile.
‘You will see. Now you must come with us.’
‘Where are we going?’
He didn’t reply, but momentarily I saw the flesh stretch hard on the sharp, white bones of his face until his smile became the toothless grin of death.
With raised candles, the priest and his flock began to walk down the tunnel; it was so narrow that they could only just move upright. I followed miserably, shivering with the anticipation of some terrible event that I knew instinctively was bound to come.
The shadows leapt out as we passed, and the gunshots and the smell of cordite seemed amazingly close in the confined space.
The soldiers suddenly appeared in front of us. They were shooting at random, and the people fell one by one, screaming in black confusion as the candles dropped to the ground to be replaced by firebrands held in the hands of the grinning, exultant soldiers. I threw myself down, closed my eyes and lay still while the firing continued until there was silence, broken only by the sharp rapping of steel-shod boots. I felt a stab of pain as I was kicked in the ribs and knew the soldier was standing over me, could sense that he was aiming his gun directly at me. I waited for the shot, the impact, but nothing happened and, eventually, after what seemed like hours, I could hear his footsteps slowly going away.
When I thought it was safe to open my eyes, I saw the worst sight I have ever seen – or would ever want to see. Dozens of bodies lay piled on the floor of the tunnel, dimly lit by the few candles that were still alight from where they had fallen to the floor. All were still, nothing moved, and when I got up and slowly wandered about I found the old priest lying peacefully, his arms around a little girl, his dead eyes looking up at the roof of the tunnel.
I felt a churning inside, a dissolving outside, and I watched the bodies around me change. Their outer rags dropped away, their bones gleamed; skeletons remained – and the dust. An icy wind blew down the tunnel. There was a great sighing, almost like the high notes of a choir, and the dust re-formed into bone, into flesh. The mortal remains had become recent death once more. Then someone moved and I shuddered into stillness.
It was a boy of about my own age. He stood up, looked around him – and saw me.
‘Who are you?’ he asked tremulously, somewhere inside my mind, just as a lifetime ago I had asked the old priest.
‘A friend.’
He was short, rather squat, and obviously in a state of shock. ‘What happened?’ But he knew as he looked round, knew that they were all dead, and I couldn’t ask him about his family, about his parents, about anything.
‘Soldiers came.’
He nodded. ‘At last. We had been waiting for a long time.’ He paused and shut his eyes, and when he opened them again the terror in them had faded. ‘He promised we’d be safe but I knew there wasn’t any hope,’ he said, with weary resignation.
‘We must go back,’ I said. ‘Go back to the church.’
But the boy shook his head, his long, dark hair falling across his pale, tired face. ‘They’ll be waiting there, just in case there are any survivors.’
‘Can’t we go on then?’
‘They’ll be there too.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘There’s an escape hatch,’ he said. ‘We can try that -maybe they won’t have found it yet. Father Rosco had the tunnel built so secretly. We could just be lucky.’
I had to ask him just one question – the question that had been burning inside me for so long. ‘What year are we in?’
He looked at me curiously. ‘Why – 1917 of course. 14th February, I think.’
‘Is there a war on?’
‘Of course there is. Where have you been?’ The boy looked at me in bewilderment, the fear rising again out of his numbness. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name’s Rik,’ I replied as reassuringly as I could. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Alexis.’
‘We’d better get going, in case they come back again.’
I turned as I saw Alexis’s eyes darken, but I could smell it before I could see it. Black smoke was billowing down the tunnel from the direction of the church.
‘They’ve set fire to the entrance – they must have piled up wood – it’ll catch the roots of the trees above us. They’re going to smoke out the tunnel just in case there are any survivors.’ I began to cough as the acrid smoke reached us.
‘Come on,’ said Alexis, grabbing my arm. He suddenly seemed to have taken the lead. I jumped with surprise, for this was the first time I’d been touched by one of these phantoms from the past and the touch was real – warm and dry and human.
We ran along the tunnel, the smoke billowing behind us, the way leading us relentlessly uphill. Suddenly Alexis paused. ‘I’ll have to stand on your shoulders; the hatch is just above us.’ The idea was incredible. A ghost standing on my shoulders? And yet when he did, I could feel his weight, hear him panting, knew that I was sharing in this dreadful experience which could lead to his death, and perhaps mine as well.
The hatch slid open; he struggled out and then hauled me up. I could feel the strength of his wrists as I came up into the cold, starlit night.
‘We’re in open country – we’ll have to run,’ he whispered as we set off across heathland towards the dark mass of what looked like a huge forest.
The shots cracked out just as we were about to reach the safety of the trees, and Alexis fell on to his face and lay still. I gasped with the shock as Alexis rolled over on his back and I could see the great jagged tear in his chest, through which the bullet had passed.
‘Run,’ he whispered. ‘Run for your life.’
I glanced up and saw the brigade of soldiers advancing fast, their muskets raised.
‘Run,’ he insisted.
‘I’m staying with you.’
‘No.’
‘I’m staying.’
‘Run – they’ll kill you.’
Could they? I was not of their time so how could they kill me? Yet how could I have felt the weight of Alexis’s body, the strength of his wrists? If I could feel all that, could I be shot myself?
Shots passed over my head am as I looked up again I realized that any decision I might have made was now far too late, for the soldiers were metres away. But they were fading; they were actually fading before my eyes.
They stooped over Alexis and very faintly I heard one of them say, ‘It’s a child.’
‘He’s dying.’
‘We can’t leave him – not here.’ The man was very insistent and I could hear the doubts of his comrades clamouring inside my head. Then they seemed to come to some kind of mutual decision.
‘All right,’ said someone else, ‘bring him back to base. Let’s see what the
doctors can do for him – not much, I should think.’
The voices grew fainter; everything blurred and became translucent as if I was in an underwater landscape. Then I opened my eyes wider and detail clarified. I was underwater, looking up at a small ice-floe that was travelling slowly above me. I stared up wonderingly at the words etched into it. THANK YOU, they read.
I swam to the edge of the pool, shakily hauled myself out and went to change. Slowly and muzzily I put my clothes on, and when I rejoined my mother I was feeling so exhausted that I could hardly stand up.
‘Rik –’ she said sharply, and looking at her more closely I could see that she was tense and worried.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t really know.’ She sounded vague and bewildered. ‘I met this man. He spoke English.’
‘So?’
‘He came up to me and asked me if I was your mother. At first I was frightened and I thought you’d had an accident.’ Her voice shook. ‘But he reassured me. He said that he wanted to thank you on behalf of his father. I just don’t understand it. How could you know his father? You’re always going on about not knowing any Russians. I think he must have been a little mad.’
‘What did he say?’ I asked slowly.
‘He said, “Alexis lived. He wanted you to know.”’
I felt a tremendous rush of pleasure and exultation.
‘Do you know this Alexis?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Yes – he was –’ I thought quickly. ‘He got cramp or something in the pool yesterday, and I pulled him out.’ The explanation sounded lame in my own ears but I could never tell her what really happened.
Her face lit up and she put her arm round my shoulders proudly.
‘So it’s all right,’ I added before she could say anything. ‘He wasn’t mad. Where is he?’
‘He just went away.’
I looked around hopefully, but there was no sign of him anywhere.
‘You look terrible again,’ said Mum.
Scary Tales to Tell in the Dark Page 9
