A Lonely and Curious Country (17 page)

“As you wish.
”
Malenkov shrugged his shoulders. Kazanov took a menacing step forward, but his companion waved him away. A bell rang in the depths of the endless corridor beyond the door, and within minutes two prison guards appeared in the room. Solovkin was escorted down the dark passageway, through the great circular galleries, back to his cell. Thoughts roiled in his head, each one more dismal than the next. He didn’t think he’d be able to fall asleep, but exhaustion overcame him as soon as he settled on the hard, uncomfortable cot, and his sleep was full of nightmares.

***

In his dream he sat behind a chessboard in a vast, shadowy hall, its walls melding with the darkness. Across the board sat a tall figure, pale-skinned and gaunt and swathed in black robes. Its long, bony fingers flickered over the black and white squares with uncanny speed. Solovkin couldn’t make out his opponent’s face amid the shifting shadows; its contours seemed to meld and change with each shift of the flickering light. The only thing that didn’t change was its grin, huge and frightful: a hungry grin, looming in the darkness like the crescent of a diseased moon. The teeth in the grin were like a shark’s, folding back from the gums in double rows, too many to count. Bone-deep cold sank into Solovkin’s flesh; he was thankful for the shadows that hid the rest of that hideous face. Dream or no dream, he suspected the sight might drive him mad.

Frozen as his mind was with fear, his fingers danced across the chessboard with unusual confidence and cunning, seemingly playing the game on their own. The dark man played with blacks, cackling and tittering after every move, regardless of the outcome. At times his actions appeared erratic and haphazard; yet no matter how well Solovkin plotted his tactics and developed his position, his opponent remained a step or two ahead of him, weaving a tangle of moves and countermoves, the mad, glassy smile never wavering. Slowly the realization that he was going to lose dawned on Solovkin with chilling certainty. His second thought, groundless but persistent, was that there was more to the game than met the eye, that he was playing for the highest stakes imaginable.

A black knight blundered into the right file, leaving the middle exposed. Solovkin saw through the gambit and riposted deftly. The cackling ceased; Solovkin thought he could see the dark man’s eyes now, dull red embers glowing in the shadowed face. The robed figure leaned forward, grin twisted into a grimace, skeletal fingers grasping the sides of the chessboard. Sick, baking heat came off it in waves. Silence held for a moment; then the creature threw its head back and hooted with laughter.

“Excellent.” The dark man’s voice was the whistle of wind across a corpse-strewn battlefield. He shook and clapped his hands with mirth. A black piece slid across the board without making contact with the pale, thin fingers. “You’re a crafty player, Vitaly Dmitrovich. But how many moves do you have left?”

Solovkin stared at the board, a furrow of concentration etched between his brows. He launched a counteroffensive, but his opponent evaded, ever a maddening step or two out of reach.

“The game draws to a close,” the dark man said, shaking his head. For a moment the room took on the shape of Solovkin’s cell, wavered, dissolved once more into dimensionless shadow. “A pity. All for a handful of letters.”

“I already told you,” said Solovkin through clenched teeth. “There were no letters.”

“That’s of no importance.” It was Malenkov’s voice issuing from the man’s black lips. The tiny figures on the chessboard came alive, writhing in mute agony. “Your guilt has already been decided. By refusing to sign your confession, you’re preventing justice from taking its course. You’re a bourgeois parasite, a scab and a traitor to the Motherland.”

“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?”