Rasputin's Bastards

THE INSULTED AND THE INJURED

It was almost a day before the doors to the children’s brig opened again. The little room stank of sweat and blood and shit and the stink seemed to leave too little room for oxygen. It all reminded Heather of a 60 Minutes segment she’d seen on life in Russian prisons — which, she supposed, was not far from the truth. The Russians were running the show here, and sure as day turns to night, they’d turned Holden Gibson’s yacht into a prison after the old Soviet ways.

And shit — but didn’t those Soviets stick together when it came to the crunch? Alexei the KGB agent stood in the open door. He was carrying Holden’s Glock in one hand, aiming it in the general direction of the crowd. His mouth was cast firm, and his eyes had a cool, empty determination to them that Heather barely recognized.

Christ, she thought. Where was he yesterday, when I needed him? “Get up,” he snarled.

“Jesus fuck,” said Gibson, who had been snoring contentedly on the bottom bunk for about an hour. “I am going to tear you another asshole, you fuckin’ traitorous mutinous Russkie.”

Heather smiled in spite of herself. It so often amazed her how Holden Gibson managed to stay alive at all, the way he behaved with the most dangerous of people. Alexei, for instance. He pointed the gun at Holden now — lined him up in its sights. “Get up,” he repeated.

“Je-sus.” Holden squinted at Alexei — and evidently saw the same thing Heather had in his eyes: an absence. Alexei would shoot him if he didn’t get up. Heather felt a quickening of her pulse, a faint hope that Holden would defy her KGB killer.

But Holden saved himself, and stood up with the rest of them. Seeing everyone on their feet, Alexei backed out of the door. “Come,” he said. “All of you. Follow me to the deck.”

“Who died and made him Captain?” muttered James as he passed close by Heather. She gave his ass a tweak and followed close behind as they pushed into the corridor.

“No one yet,” she whispered in his ear, and he smiled a little back.

The two of them had been planning a move on Holden since Dallas. He had been behaving more and more strangely since then — following this “dream” of his; pulling his kids off the routes, and finally, piecing together this bizarre operation. Heather had confided in James from early on, and at the best of times they agreed their boss was abusive, incompetent, self-destructive, had poor communications skills. And sooner or later, needed killing. The Russian Alexei Kilodovich, with his little ballpoint pen brain-smacker and his shady secret agent background had seemed like a godsend. Until, that is, Alexei turned out to be a chickenshit when it came to killing evil old men who had it coming.

It was true that the freak show kids Holden had managed to pick up here on the ocean were a complication. But shit — it wasn’t like she and James weren’t giving him opportunities. Heather could count at least four missed opportunities since Alexei arrived, and a couple more since they got back with the kids. Hell, for one of them she even got James to pick a fight with Simon in here, to give Alexei a distraction. How hard could it be to kill a smelly old bastard like Holden Gibson? Heather’d do it herself — if she thought for a second she could get away with it around this crew. Too many of them still paid lip service to Holden’s insistence on absolute loyalty to hand over the reins of power to an obvious assassin. Heather knew that — and as she’d found out early on in their association, when she approached him to do the deed for her, James had worked it out as well. James was a bright boy, all right.

And looking over his shoulder at Alexei, who was now beckoning them all forward with one hand while he levelled the Glock at them with the other, Heather was beginning to worry that her Russian stooge was a bright one too.

Alexei led them upstairs to the lounge. It was four in the morning, so the sky and sea were still dark beyond the windows. And it wasn’t much brighter inside. In the dimness, Heather could see that the chairs had been arranged facing aft, as for a seminar. Normally, Holden Gibson would hold court from behind the table they faced. Now, three of the children sat behind it. Their faces and forms were in shadow, and they were still as statues. Heather shivered. Even outnumbered, they were scary little fuckers.

“Take seats,” commanded Alexei. “Keep silent.”

The crew did as they were told. Gibson motioned for Heather to join him, but she pretended not to see and sat by James at the back.

“All right.” It was the baby’s voice, preposterously deep and serious. “We are nearly at our destination. I must apologize for your incarceration. It was a necessary thing until we completed the journey. We didn’t want to risk — a premature awakening until we were near the safe harbour. I hope that we can put that behind us and become friends in the days and months ahead of us — for there will be much reason to, I think.”

“What the fuck are you talking about, ‘friends’?” demanded Holden, standing up. “And what’s this ‘days and months ahead of us’ bullshit? And—”

Holden yelled and grabbed his head, and the baby continued. “You are all a part of something — the same thing, in a way, as we children. As Alexei. It will become clearer to you in the next few hours, as we make our way to land, and finally meet the Koldun face to face.”

Gibson rubbed his eyes, and gasped: “What the fuck is a Koldun, kid? Why the fuck are we even up here, anyway?”

This time, to Heather’s disappointment, Gibson didn’t double over in pain. “To prepare ourselves,” said the baby. “We children have been doing so for years — but you Americans… you’ve forgotten the ways. So in the hours before we make landfall, I have decided that we shall meditate together. Close your eyes now. It is time to begin.”

“Fuck this,” said Gibson, and turned on a heel. No one stopped him as he stepped out onto the deck.

“Close your eyes,” said the baby again.

You can’t be serious, thought Heather.

But she shut her eyes like everyone else. She wasn’t about to fuck with this kid — if he could talk in her mind like that, who knew what else he could do? If he wanted her to sit and meditate, that was fine with her. It wasn’t like she hadn’t done weirder shit at Holden’s behest.

In fact, there was a time when they’d done stuff just as weird. It was the late ’80s, maybe three months since she’d joined up with his little team. She’d run away from the stuffy-assed upstate New York boarding school her parents had shoved her into six months earlier because she didn’t like the structure.

And before she knew it, there she was, at a Transcendental Meditation retreat at a rundown summer camp in Northern California, learning her mantra from an old hippie named Pete and watching Holden and Shara, his girlfriend at the time, try their hands at yogic flying. Or more accurately, try their asses at it. Even though she was just eleven years old and fairly gullible, it seemed to Heather that yogic flying was basically jumping with your ass. Which struck her as bullshit. So Heather took her personal secret mantra, which as she told anyone who asked was mi, watched the old videotapes of the Maharishi and meditated for ten minutes twice a day for two weeks — until Holden got tired of Shara and jumping with his ass, and hauled them all off to New Mexico for three years of much more lucrative magazine subscription scamming.

What was the camp like? asked a quiet voice.

It was pretty low-rent, compared with the sort of thing that Heather had been used to growing up. There were a couple of big clapboard buildings in the middle that smelled of flypaper and mould, and surrounding that a dozen little cabins. There was a lake a five minute hike down a trail, but Heather wasn’t allowed there and so she’d never been.

Hippie Pete said—

“Sometimes there are snakes that come from the lake and meeting them can cause stress and discord.”

He was smiling down at her as he spoke, his eyes taking that faraway slightly stoned look that came from spending your days and nights meditating with incense sticks burning at your feet. His breath smelled of oatmeal and herb tea, which was not surprising; that was all they ate and drank there, three times a day.

“We eliminate stress with meditation. Playing with snakes does not aid us in eliminating stress. So we do not go to the lake, where sometimes the snakes come from. This will cause stress, which we eliminate through meditation.”

Heather’s eyes shot open. “Fuck a duck!” she exclaimed. She had forgotten how creepy and irritating Hippie Pete had been. That sing-song voice; that take-you-around-in-a-circle-until-you’re-so-dizzy-it-makes-sense approach to selling things that fundamentally made no sense; that vacant smile that Heather assumed came from not having enough stress or too much meditating or both.

And there he’d been — right in front of her. A guy she hadn’t seen for fifteen years. Clear as day. She shut her eyes again, and took another look.

Yup — there he was. Smiling and nodding, holding his fingers and thumbs together with hands upturned in way that would make him look like a Buddha — if he were sitting cross-legged in a monastery and not standing out in front of the old Arts and Crafts Lodge giving her gentle, meditative shit for wanting to go down to the lake and take a swim.

And shit, but he towered over her. At first, she thought he was some kind of giant — it seemed like he was eight feet tall. But she quickly realized that it wasn’t him that was big — she was small. As small as an eleven-year-old girl from New York would be. She looked at her hands — they were soft and tiny. From the look of things, Holden hadn’t gotten around to starting the aversion therapy that would eventually stop her from biting her nails, because they were gnawed down to nubs and a couple of fingertips were pretty scabby. She was wearing a My Pretty Pony T-shirt, cheap stonewashed jeans and a pair of even cheaper rubber sandals.

“Fuck a duck,” she said again.

“Consider the rose,” said Hippie Pete. “How it has many petals which grow from a stem. Though the petals grow from the stem, it is the stem which also grows, and the petals which grow from—”

“Oh no,” she said. “We’re not getting into the rose thing.”

The Maharishi used to talk about roses all the time. There was a whole EP video about roses, in fact, six hours of the Maharishi sitting on a cushion in a studio in Calcutta or somewhere, dishing the dirt on roses and consciousness and how one was like the petals of the other. The last thing she needed now was to hear Hippie Pete recite the director’s cut.

“—and the stem,” said Hippie Pete, as oblivious as ever to Heather’s blossoming boredom, “constitute the consciousness which we—”

Fuck it, she thought. It’s now or never.

“I am out of here!” Heather yelled, and with that, she spun around on her little sandaled feet and took off along the path to the lake.

“—seek to expand!” hollered Hippie Pete behind her. “Hey! We do not go to the lake, where sometimes snakes come from! Stress, Heather! Stress!”

She ignored him and ran faster. This was too weird, and she needed the space to work out what it meant.

Heather spread out the sequence in her head: she closes her eyes for a couple of seconds in the lounge of the yacht, and suddenly here she is — back fifteen years ago, at a Transcendental Meditation camp where she spent two lousy, boring weeks before embarking on her more engaging career as a junior subscription scammer. It’s not just remembering — it’s reliving. Like she’d been transported back into her memories to relive that tedious, repetitive and ultimately short-lived phase of her life. The baby had said they needed to be prepared for something. What exactly did he mean by preparation?

Was it preparation for action? For this partnership and life-long friendship the baby had been prattling on about? Or just a neat way to keep her out of the way?

If that was the plan, it seemed to be working. As Heather ran she tried to will her eyes open. But all that happened was her eyes opened wider here, in the past. She saw the old growth cedar and pine trees more clearly, the sunlight as it sent shafts down between their branches, the bed of brown needles on the forest floor. This world was getting more and more real every step she took. Even though it wasn’t real — except in memory, and maybe the odd post-pizza dream.

That’s what they were doing — putting her people into these dream worlds, locking them up safe and sound, so the little bastards could do God only knew what when they got to God only knew where.

Heather slowed down. As an adult, she could make the run — Holden made sure they were all in fighting trim once he got going on the magazine biz — but she was using her untrained little kid legs. And when she was a little kid, she wasn’t much of a runner. Or an athlete at all. In fact, she couldn’t do much of anything well — not even —

“S-swim,” she said aloud. Heather thought about this. She couldn’t swim at that age.

She remembered bad dreams — of falling; of drowning; of being chased by the man with a hook for a hand. You didn’t always win in those dreams. Sometimes the water would get in your lungs, or the ground would come up to meet you — or the hook would catch you through a rib.

But you didn’t die. You thought you were going to die — but exactly the opposite happened. Your heart sped up — your breath caught — your eyelids twitched…

You woke up.

She put a hand on her side, where she was developing a stitch, and took off again. For the lake, with all the snakes. The stressful, stressful snakes.

But in spite of what Hippie Pete said, Heather didn’t think that the snakes would cause nearly as much stress as would death by drowning.

Heather came out of the forest at the top of a low cliff, which she could scale via a rickety wooden staircase that led down to a dock, on the edge of a smallish lake that was rimmed by rock and evergreen. Heather ignored the stairs, figuring she’d chicken out if she had to slow down to climb down twenty-five steps to a dock. She set her jaw, took a deep breath and ran full tilt over the edge of the cliff.

What followed was a brief moment of transcendent joy as Heather became airborne. Just as briefly, she worried that this weird dream-memory might turn into a flying dream — which would be bad, because she’d probably enjoy that too much to go down into the lake and drown herself properly.

But the moment passed quickly, and Heather’s feet struck the ice cold surface of the lake. The rest of her followed shortly, and before she knew it her head was underwater.

The stress was unbelievable. Every nerve in her body screamed at her to get out of the water: Get back on shore! Don’t let the air out of your lungs! Find the bottom! Put your feet down! Get Your Head Out Of The Water!

Heather felt herself struggling, heard her heart thundering in her ears. She concentrated and force d herself to open her mouth, and watched as the quicksilver bubbles of lung-air fled past her eyes. The lake water poured into her mouth, her sinuses, and filled her lungs and chest in an instant.

She struggled to cough, push it out, as her limbs flailed and her nerves shrieked:

GET OUT! GET OUT! FOR CHRIST’S SAKE YOU SUICIDAL FUCKWIT, GET OUT!

Heather blinked. She was back in the lounge on board Holden’s yacht. The sky outside the portholes was a deep azure streaked by deep red clouds.

Inside, everyone was where they had been, straight and still in their chairs. The yacht’s engines thrummed beneath them, but there was another noise — softer, more insistent — that it took Heather a moment to recognize as breathing. Slow, synchronized breathing. Heather looked to the front of the room. The three children and the baby were sitting there now. Or rather, they were slumping there. The baby was on the table, back propped against the arm of one of the older children. His head lolled. The four of them seemed to be asleep.

Gingerly, Heather stood up. She braced herself — half-expecting the baby to send one of his punishing ice cream headaches her way. But nothing came. They were too busy, probably, keeping the rest of the people in a dream state. Heather sidestepped around the edge of the chair in front of her, bent to pull off her deck shoes. She laid them neatly on the floor underneath Holden Gibson’s chair. Barefoot now, she padded her way behind the table and then to the hatch that led to the aft deck and the bridge. Just in case anyone was listening in, Heather recalled her top secret personal mantra — which they would have probably expected her to be saying in her dream retreat about now. It would block them, maybe.

Mi, she thought as she crept along the narrow corridor to the stairs, mi, mi, mi, mi, mi.

Alexei the KGB agent was alone on the bridge. He was manning the helm of the boat. There was no end to this guy’s skills.

Heather squinted. Alexei was the only person she’d seen so far that wasn’t a) a kid, or b) stuck in meditation.

Mimimimimimimimimimimimi, thought Heather, and summoned a picture of the Maharishi from her memory. It wasn’t, unfortunately, from TM camp. It was the one with John Lennon and Paul McCartney from when The Beatles went all mystical the ’60s. It would have to do.

The yacht lurched then, as Kilodovich throttled back on the engine. He turned the wheel, and as he did so Heather felt another lurch, as the boat started to come about. Where in hell were they going?

As stealthily as she could, Heather climbed the rest of the way out of the hatch and crept to edge of the bridge. She poked her head up, and looked out over Alexei’s shoulder.

She suppressed a gasp. There was a coastline ahead of them — a wall of high black rock caught fire in the sunrise, waves breaking in a golden froth over the shallows. Nearer, she could see a great swarm of large birds, circling over their path like a funnel cloud. Further, thin lines of smoke rose from beyond the jagged edge of the rock-face. And approaching them was the oddest collection of boats that Heather had ever seen.

“Mimimimimimi,” she whispered, trying to drive the wonder from her mind. Alexei turned then, and for an instant their eyes met.

“Hey,” she said softly, and made a little smile. “KGB.”

Alexei’s eyes were still and lifeless for but an instant. Then they seemed to come alive — with a kind of light, borne from the back of his skull. Heather tried to look away — but she couldn’t now.

“Mi,” she said. “Mi mi mi mi.”

But it was too late. She felt herself slipping, falling toward the light in his eyes — smelled the scent of pine and tar and lake breeze that told her TM camp was not far away. She felt a falling sensation in the middle of her gut — and for an instant, she thought she heard a voice:

“What the fuck are they?” it said.

“What the fuck are they?”

Holden Gibson counted ten boats coming to greet his yacht and bring it back to the Koldun’s home. Two of those boats were narrow wooden sailboats painted red and green, big enough to hold a cabin but only just. They belonged to Nikolay Trolynka, and were piloted by his sons Oleg and Makar. Three of them were long canoes, fitted with outboard motors and run by the Stol sisters. There was a cabin cruiser — less than half the size of Holden Gibson’s yacht — painted red and green, same as Trolynka’s boats but belonging to his second cousin Orlovsky — the most dangerous man in New Pokrovskoye.

Darya Orlovsky, his daughter, stood at the bow, holding an unlit storm lantern ahead of her as though lighting the flotilla’s way as it headed into the sunrise, her long purple gown trailing her narrow shoulders and hips in the onrushing ocean breeze. The remaining three boats were licensed fishing boats owned by the Koldun himself, their nets gathered high at their sterns and set out like strands of gold in peacocks’ plumage, in the light of the rising sun.

There were more boats in the Koldun’s harbour that might have come to greet the children for the rejoining, but these ten were deemed to be the finest and fastest — and only the finest would be appropriate for so historic an occasion as this.

The boats slowed as they approached the yacht, and for a moment, it seemed as though sound was swept from the sea. The motors died, and the wind slowed, and even the cries of the birds overhead stilled.

Holden Gibson gasped deeply as he suddenly found his feet firm on the deck of his yacht. He clutched the lapels of his untucked shirt as though he were trying to tear them away, or maybe reassure himself of their reality. He drew a breath in quiet wonder at the sight.

He stood like that for an instant more — until the silence was broken, by a man’s shout: “No! Not again! I’m sorry! Oh — thank God it’s you.” It was followed again by the scampering of feet across deck, another shout, and a woman’s surprised yelp. This last was followed by a muffled thump.

Gibson blinked, and turned away from the flotilla — this crowd of boats whose pilots and passengers he seemed to know by name. Holden Gibson was a large man, but he moved with a child’s lightness as he turned to see about the noise.

Words and ideas and memories cascaded through him as he stepped back inside, and climbed the steps to the bridge. He blinked slowly, as he stood before the tableau. He was on the bridge of his boat. His pilot was nowhere to be seen. The girl — Heather! Yes, dear little Heather — was sprawled face-down, her Rasta locks fanning across the deck like the head of a discarded mop.

Standing over her was a tall, black-haired monster; a faceless thing that would kill without remorse.

“Nah,” said Holden, as he put the new memory in its place with more recent recollections. “You’re not a thing. You’re the fuckin’ Russkie.”

Holden let go of his shirttails, leaving sweaty handprints on them. The Russian, Alexei, was looking at him — or if not exactly at him, then in his general direction.

Holden knew he should know what was going on here with the thousand-yard stare — there was a kind of familiarity to it — but he couldn’t quite put it together. He was thinking about some time in a farmhouse — a long time ago, when he was very, very young and very bad things had happened to him. It was very far away.

He had lost part of himself back then, and for some reason… For some reason, it made him think about this Russian.

The murderous sense of déjà vu slipped away again before he could put it all in order.

The Russian stepped toward him now — and for an instant, Holden thought he was coming for him; there was a faraway look in his eye that Holden had seen in men bent on killing. That, Holden was sure, was what the Russian meant to do right now. Kill Holden Gibson. He’d never been more certain of anything in his life. Desperately, Holden balled his fist, raised it, and as the Russian got into range—

—Holden swung at the air.

He was looking forward now: at Heather, who moaned and stirred on the deck; and the slate grey sky, over a dark sea that was suddenly quiet with the approach of the Koldun.

Holden whirled around. The Russian was climbing down the steps that led to the lounge. He seemed unperturbed. As though he had walked through Holden.

Fascinated, Holden followed the Russian.

The Russian ducked under the top of the doorway and stepped into the lounge. Holden followed, and peered around. It looked like nobody had moved — nobody but Heather, who’d had the misfortune to make her way to the bridge — since he’d come there. The kids were even there. Including that talking baby that they all worshipped like their fucking father.

Someone had propped him upright on his pillow like a little Buddha statue. He was the only one with his eyes open, and he looked back over his shoulder as the Russian came up behind him. The baby grinned as the Russian picked him up. Together, the two hustled back through a narrow path between the chairs.

The other kids stood, and filed along behind them. Nobody seemed to take any note of Holden Gibson, and that was fine by him. He waited until they’d all stepped out the back. He cleared his throat.

“All right, crew,” he said, in his most commanding voice. “Now’s our chance!” And all at once, the entire crew’s eyes snapped open, and each stood.

“Now’s our chance!” Holden reeled back. The crew reeled back. “What the fuck?”

“What the fuck?”

He stared at them. They were repeating his every word — in a creepy kind of unison. He lifted his hand.

Two dozen hands raised.

He raised his middle finger.

The crew returned the gesture. Holden suppressed a chuckle.

Well fuck, Holden thought, looking out the glass door at the assembly of children, watching the flotilla arrive to collect them. I’m the same as you little freaks!

Holden moved forward, among his crew — or not his crew, but his sleepers — careful not to manipulate them this time. He had to go — talk to Vladimir — see the flotilla for himself—

Rejoin his family.

He hurried now, stepping through his crew like they were ghosts, his feet slipping in the substance of the deck. Through Neil and Jude and Allan —

Until finally, he came upon one he’d nearly forgotten.

Holden.

Holden Gibson stood face to face with himself. He studied the minute lines on his face, the dark sag of skin beneath his eyes, the spots that were starting to grow on his forehead. He looked embalmed. Like a corpse. A walking corpse. Holden Gibson.

Holden Gibson took a sharp breath. Holden Gibson sucked air too, but more violently. He must have looked that way last year, when they’d had to take the defibrillator to him. Maybe they’d have to again. Holden Gibson felt his heart racing — he could feel his breath on his cheek — and a sharp tugging, like the line was going taut on fish-hooks embedded in his stomach, his thighs.

The room shifted then, as those hooks yanked him around so he was facing backwards. The fishhooks were gone, and he couldn’t see himself anymore. Weight returned to him. And with it, a terrible weakness.

But he knew it wasn’t a heart attack. Not this time. It was… there was a word for it.

The Returning. That’s what they’d called it at Kiwichiching. The Returning.

Sometimes, they warned, it could be very traumatic indeed.

By the time Holden Gibson hit the floor, the trauma was coming at him full tilt. The world grew dark. He barely heard the tumbling clatter of his crew falling to the floor beside him, their strings cut as consciousness fled from Holden Gibson’s re-inhabited skull.