Smog - Baggage of Enternal Night (20 page)

I set the suitcase next to the
gramophone and opened it wide. The record seemed to spin faster on the
turntable as if frantically trying to hypnotize me before I confined it. If the
gramophone had legs, it would have scrambled away like a spider about to get
squashed. I picked it up, and the sides of the wooden base scalded my hands. I
cried out and heaved it into the empty suitcase. Normally, when a record player
is jostled, the arm slides and scratches the record all to hell. Not this one.
It still played fine as a dancehall juke. Steam sizzled from my burned flesh,
but I ignored the pain and slammed the suitcase closed. The limestone edges
lined up at the seams, and for the first time I noticed that they formed a
pattern leading away from each side of the handle in a series of abstract
crosses. I didn’t have time to examine it.

I ran.

I ran, the way a man might run
who wore clown shoes, twenty sizes too large. Retreating through the woods was
no easier than advancing forward only minutes earlier. One might think the way
back would be less arduous, the path having been broken in. But, instead, the
tree branches now seemed sturdier, less pliable to bend out of the way, yet too
tough to be broken. Indeed, they seemed almost as living creatures reaching to
ensnare me with contorted fingers. I dropped the baseball bat and held the
suitcase with both hands, using it as a shield in front of me to push through
the forest.

Stoy! Stoy!

The voice screamed in my mind,
ordering me to stop, and I slowed, feeling compelled to obey. Fortunately
another part of me took over. It was a part that I—like most rational
people—normally kept shackled deep down in the recesses of my persona. The part
that, when you’re at a bar and someone spills their drink on you, wants to leap
out and throttle the drunken slob. The part that, when you’re handed the bill
from an auto mechanic and see you’re grossly overcharged, wants to slap the
deceitful swindler and stuff the bill down his throat. It was the part of me
that was wild with inconsequence and once outraced a cop car and another time
taunted a rabid dog.

That part of me told Rasputin
to kick a turd. That part of me said to keep running.

I then felt that nothing would
stop me. Rasputin’s voice in my brain grew louder, but I ignored it. It
repeated in severity, but I knew not to stop. It got closer, so that I felt a
tingle creeping up the back of my neck, like the breath of his words tickling
my skin. I knew it was only in my head, but I still turned expecting the Mad
Monk to be alongside, shouting right into my ears. Though I saw pursuing
figures, there was nobody immediately near. I turned back, and a branch cracked
into my forehead…It wasn’t me
running into
a branch; the tree limb swung
across the path like pulling a car antenna sideways all the way and letting go.
I clunked backwards, and my feet went over my head. Flashing stars exploded,
brighter than the lights twinkling in the night.

Shouts and curses and strange
squeals sounded through the air. I realized I could hear again, and the ear
plugs were knocked loose. But the music wasn’t playing; being locked up in the
suitcase was apparently enough to keep it turned off. I was comforted it
wouldn’t brainwash me, but maybe it didn’t matter…Rasputin’s voice was still in
my head.

Stoy!
Predatel!

I staggered back to my feet and
knew Rasputin and his followers were closing in. How much further had I to go?
I lifted the suitcase back up and pushed on through the trees, wary of their
limbs swaying back-and-forth the way a cobra warns before it strikes. A couple
more times they took a swing, but I dodged away. My legs were heavy, and my
breath erupted in irregular gasps. The pulsating orbs in the sky grew larger
like frightened eyes, and the snow fell harder. It became difficult to see more
than five feet in front of me, but I pushed forward, head down, concentrating
on following my tracks back to the door.

I strained and labored and
fought my way back up the path and through the trees until, with an exhausted
roar, I broke through, falling into the clearing. The campfire was nothing but
smoldering gray ash, and most of the suitcases looked like ice sculptures. The
door was still cracked open as I left it, though slowly vanishing under the
snow flurries.

To my right, the trees parted
easily as fluttering curtains, almost as if they bowed to passing royalty.
Rasputin emerged, calmly striding with long steps to come between me and the
apartment door.

But it wasn’t just Rasputin. It
was Ray,
within
Rasputin, looking at me through Ray’s eyes that looked
at me through Rasputin’s eyes.

I was a goddamned
war hero
,
those eyes seemed to say.
Look at me now.

Then he spoke, and the voice
was unmistakably that from the records.

“
Vkhodite.
”

Rasputin snapped his fingers. I
shuddered. A beat passed, and he snapped again. The corners of his lips pulled
tight and the tips of his white teeth showed through. He snapped his fingers
again in rhythm, as if there were a secret beat only he could hear.

“
Yapobedit
,” he said. He
snapped his fingers as Ray snapped his fingers, and I figured that Rasputin
took on more than just the physical characteristics of those he absorbed.

I held the suitcase up, so its
handle and limestone crosses pointed at him, like a talisman. Rasputin wavered,
and he screwed up his face like something stunk real bad. The limestone was
said to be antithetical to him, but I didn’t know to what extent that meant.
Did he simply dislike it, the way I detested cauliflower, or did limestone
actually injure him? Rasputin grimaced and more of his teeth showed, then he
closed his eyes and, with a shout, brought both hands down on the suitcase,
knocking it from my hands. A bit of steam floated from his skin where it
touched the case, but it was no more than how the record player had burned me.
Touché.

Of course the suitcase fell
closer to him than to me, and when Rasputin opened his eyes, I saw how much
that pleased him. I wouldn’t be able to grab it before he took hold of me. I
wanted to slice off the smile that grew on his face, so I drew the
conquistador’s sword from my belt.

I swung at him the way Errol
Flynn might have done, in a wide, swashbuckling arc. Being as I’ve never struck
a sword at someone before, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I missed
completely. Instead of advancing, my confidence waned, and I stepped back to
reappraise the situation.

Rasputin’s features melted,
swirling, like colors of different wax running upon each other. The mask of
Ray’s face was gone, and Rasputin’s own showed clearly, solidly, before that
too melted and then reappeared as before, a face within a face. The new face
was of a woman, and I recognized her as the gorgeous wife of the Scandinavian,
Martin. She wasn’t so gorgeous now, but it was her, a photograph of life
existing in a false vessel.

I didn’t know if he was showing
off or trying to intimidate me, or some law in his world required he change
form every so often. Maybe he thought I wouldn’t strike a woman. I wouldn’t let
niceties stop me now.

I pointed the sword at him,
ready to charge again. “This is for Joey.”

I expected him to reply with
his usual
‘Vkhodite,’
but he only glared at me. What he did next
tormented me more than anything else he might have said, anyway. Rasputin’s face
melted again, and Joey’s appeared. His lips pursed together and his cheeks
rose, the way they would when Joey acted mischievous. I shouldn’t have voiced
Joey’s name; all that did was give Rasputin new ideas of what to use against
me.

“
Vkhodite
,” he said.
There it was, the word I expected, only this time it was Joey speaking to me,
and I imagined:
Come in, Charlie. It’s time to come in.

“You’re nothin’ but a broken
record,” I said. I thrust the sword forward in a straight line—no fancy arc—and
it sunk dead-center into Rasputin’s chest.

After all that, the sword ended
up not doing a thing to help, and I got the sense Rasputin was toying with me.
He shrugged the attack off and stood there with it sticking out of him like a
third arm. I thought back to the stories I’d read of him: Rasputin had been
stabbed, shot, poisoned, and none of that affected him. Why would it be any
different now? Joey’s face looked down at me and his head shook, like I was the
one to be pitied and not him.

The trees began to open up, and
I saw glimpses of people about to pass through into the clearing. I had to act
now. Rasputin reached his right hand across the hilt of the sword and began to
pull it out of his chest. I leapt forward and grabbed at the suitcase near his
feet. Rasputin reached for me with his other hand, as I thought he would.

He couldn’t grab me. Rasputin
fumbled and looked at his hand as if it betrayed him, but I knew otherwise. He
wore people like a layer of clothes, and part of him took on their physical characteristics.
While he maintained Joey’s form, his left hand was useless as a shoe full of
mud. Those broken fingers couldn’t do a thing but poke at me. It was a good
thing, too, because when they brushed against my neck, his fingers were colder
than anything I could have imagined, as if the deepest reaches of the Arctic
Ocean drained into that hand. I shudder to imagine what would have happened if
it could have wrapped around my throat.

I stepped away from him,
triumphant, holding the suitcase once again, though Rasputin still stood before
the door, and now he brandished the sword against me. On the flipside of our
circumstances, I knew a sword strike would harm me plenty. I still felt the icy
touch of Rasputin’s hand on my neck, and it seemed the skin where he touched
turned dead from frostbite. The first of the Misbegottens pushed through the
trees at the clearing, tromping high through the deep snow.

I dug my hand into the
mountaineer’s bag of powdered chalk I carried on my belt and came out with a
handful. I didn’t have any wisecracking final words to add, so I just flung the
dust into Rasputin’s face, aiming for his eyes.

He shook his head once, about
annoyed as if a horsefly meandered past. Then something changed. His mouth
unhinged, and his eyes turned even bigger than they usually appeared. Rasputin
screwed up his face and shrieked like a nest of hornets had been let loose in
his pants. His eyes closed tight and little wisps of smoke plumed up. He
whipped the sword at me quick but, blinded, his aim was even more lopsided than
my Errol Flynn swing.

Limestone
did
hurt
Rasputin. Maybe not permanently, but enough to slow him down. I don’t know how
I remembered such a thing but chalk, after all, is simply ground-up calcium
carbonate.
Powdered limestone.

I dodged to one side and ran
around him and squeezed through the apartment door. I hit that hallway running,
but after two steps tripped over the snowshoes and went sprawling. The carpet
burn was almost as bad as the shame. I heard crashing and shouts coming from
the other side of Joey’s room. I frantically worked at the straps holding the snowshoes
onto my feet, but my fingers were numb from the cold and everything I tried
took twice as long as it should with half the result.

“
Stoy! Predatel!
”

The voices were muffled, but
they were close. Worse, I couldn’t tell if they were from Joey’s room or in my
head or a little of both. My sight was fading from my peripheral vision, and
something felt to be pushing against my guts, and I imagined Rasputin trying to
force his way inside my body.

Finally the snowshoes fell off,
and I ran in a staggering bounce-off-the-wall pace until I got in the elevator.
I kicked the chrome ashtray aside and, as the doors closed, I saw figures
stumbling out of Joey’s apartment.

That elevator ride down four
floors was the longest of my life. I considered how vulnerable I’d be if caught
in that narrow metal box. Already the walls seemed to close in, and snow
somehow followed me inside.

Stoy! Stoy!

That was definitely in my head.
I cried out for the inner strength that had rescued me before to come back, but
it must have been on coffee break.

Ne
zaderzhivat’sya v kholodnyy i temnyy…

I shook my head back-and-forth
like a lunatic, talking to myself. “No, no, go away, you’re not real.”

Finally the elevator reached
bottom, and I tottered out into the lobby. It appeared as an ice castle, the
floor shimmering blue-and-white and the broken couches arranged as a series of
thrones. I heard echoes of voices chasing me from all directions. Shadows
watched and grew from the corners like a pack of uneasy dogs, gathering courage
to attack in number. I walked through it all, letting memory guide me along;
I’d strolled through the lobby of Les Deux Oies every day for over a decade. My
vision was filled with falling snow, and I felt something crackling in my
brain, something else strangling my throat. I gasped and staggered and forced
each leg to take a step forward. I don’t know how I made it out the front
entrance, but soon enough I pushed through the lobby doors into Detroit’s early
dawning sky.

Gail was there, waiting. A tiny
part of my mind—that clock-watching sense of guilt—screamed at how late I was.
Hadn’t I told her twenty minutes, give or take? How had I been in Rasputin’s
world for so long? The sun was beginning to rise, and I knew I was hours behind
what I said, but she had stayed. I could only imagine the worry and indecision
gnawing away as she sat parked by the curb, watching the front door as each
second ticked away. I knew, too, that if she hadn’t waited—if she wasn’t there
that exact moment—I would have surrendered. I would have cried out in defeat
and collapsed on the sidewalk that appeared so pale and empty like a sheet of
ice.