Babayaga: A Novel (39 page)

From almost the very first, Temra was her closest friend. Elga had no idea how old she was, only that she had served Oba for eons and could sense from a glance or a footfall the old woman’s many moods. Temra cautioned when to stay out of Oba’s path and, alternatively, when it was timely to ask for favor. Over the years, she also provided wise guidance on how to master this range of new powers. “You are a different animal now, but you are not evil. Like the serpent who guides you, you can be an ally to many,” Temra told her. Elga could not think of any beast allied with the serpent, but she did not contradict her friend. She merely worked her days and lay through the nights as the years fell around them like drops of rain.

Elga stayed with Oba, Temra, and the rest of the tribe for what would have been the span of four lives, studying, listening, watching. To memorize the spells, she mimicked Temra by the firelight and then turned them backward, spinning them into riddle songs that she repeated as she followed the dusty long trains of mules and camels.

Finally, in the end, she was forced to flee, once again alone and frightened. Oba’s mind had slowly blackened with a seething paranoia that wrapped around her thoughts like a choking ivy. Obsessive, secretive, and certain that those around her were trying to hurt and betray her, she sulked and brooded and kept to her tent. Then, one by one, the other women of the tribe began taking ill, some mortally stricken with fever, others dying from bloody cramps. Plague pyres burned and suspicions grew. Finally, one night, Oba sent a message for Elga to come to her side. When Elga found her, Oba whispered that she needed help taking the conspirators down, and that the worst of the plotters was Temra. Elga begged to leave, Temra was a sister, friend, and lover to her, but Oba firmly insisted. Elga asked why she could not do it herself, why she needed her help, and that was when she learned her final lesson from Oba.

“I have never told you this but all in our camp, you and me and the rest of the women, our bonds to the darkness give us a stronger hold on life than weakling mortals possess,” Oba explained, her fingers working nervously on the edges of her shawl as she chattered on. “A man can stab or choke you to death, but if you are one of us, if you have our blood, your ghost will remain, still capable of a curse and a haunting, still able to track, still able to whisper and curse, until your will is done or the earth finally burns and vanishes. It takes more than one hand to kill a woman of our spirit, you need another with powers to help. Two sisters must act together, one blow for the body, one blow for the soul. So remember, you need a second sister to kill with you or you will never be safe, the witches’ spirits will follow you, they will haunt you, and they will kill you.” Elga did not like the look in Oba’s eye as she said these things.

Before she was allowed to leave, Oba made Elga promise to lure Temra back before the sun rose, but instead, the moment she was out of the tent, Elga ran stumbling, panicked, out through the camp, barely able to breathe, trying to find her friend to give warning. When she got to their pallet, Temra was gone and no one had seen her. Elga wandered the campsite, searching in the dim glow of the vigil fires for her friend. Temra was innocent, she knew that as clearly as she knew where to find her hands. Oba had descended into a madness, time had chewed through the spells and was now tearing apart the old woman’s reason the way a swarm of locusts went at fields of summer grain. Perhaps she was talking to Temra at that very moment, convincing her that Elga was the traitor. It might be worse, she realized, thinking it through; perhaps Temra had been the second sister who had helped Oba bring the cramps and the fever to all their fallen sisters. Perhaps Oba was now only covering her tracks. Elga stopped searching for her friend. It was not safe. She grabbed her few belongings and made her way to the edge of the camp, where she hid. Hours later, she took a horse and rode it out bareback, driving hard for four days, up creeks and off trails to confuse any pursuers, until the stallion became delirious and unsteady, almost crushing her as it collapsed from exhaustion. Elga made camp, built a fire, and smoked the horsemeat. She shaved the edges of the ribs against flat rocks until they were sharp as warrior knives and tucked the new weapons into the leather belt of her skirt. Then she continued on through the wilderness, moving steadily north and west, beneath the bleak and pallid skies.

III

“Smoke?” the bald man asked, holding out a silver cigarette case.

“No,” Will said tersely.

Smart move, thought Vidot, don’t take anything from this man. He reeks of toxins. Of all the hosts he had ridden, Will was the first Vidot felt a certain kinship with, perhaps because he sensed the two of them were equally perplexed by all that was unfolding about them. After so many hours on this scalp, Vidot was beginning to feel like Will’s affectionate sidekick, a loyal gundog, or a Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote. He would have enjoyed the camaraderie more if the chiming of his own internal clock had not been growing so increasingly loud. Vidot was feeling painfully certain that every block they drove down was leading him further away from a solution to his metamorphosis. Fleeing the old witch had most probably been an error of judgment, but he had gotten the sense that staying close to Will and Zoya might lead to a possible solution. After all, she seemed to have powers too. But now she was gone and he was in yet another stranger’s car speeding across the bumpy streets of the city. He had the feeling that it might be a long time before any potential answers appeared, while at the same time he was fairly certain that he did not have the luxury to wait.

The car slowed and turned into a narrow alley behind what Vidot recognized to be the pharmacy. Once they stopped, Bendix pushed Will out of the car, keeping his gun pressed up into Will’s neck as he unlocked the building’s door. He gestured for Will to step forward into the darkened room. “Go ahead, I will get the light, it’s—” Bendix did not finish the sentence; instead he jumped up and slammed the butt of his gun into the side of Will’s skull. Sitting high atop Will’s scalp, Vidot was safe from the gun’s blow, but not from the aftermath as he found himself reeling down as though he were atop a great falling tree as Will tumbled over, landing hard on his side.

Will lay moaning on the floor while the little man turned on the light, and whistled loudly. There was the noise of rumbling footsteps from above, and Vidot looked up to see two large men descending the stairs. Both were almost grotesquely oversized and muscular, looking like mutant stevedores or errant strongmen from some rustic circus. “Put him in the chair there. Be careful. We’ll use him for the next test,” said Bendix. They lifted their victim up and dragged him to a wooden chair by the wall, lashing him tightly to it by his arms and legs. Bendix stood to their side, smoking and watching. He seemed to be thinking through his next steps.

“You can leave us alone now, I won’t be needing your help,” he said, going to fill a tall glass at the water cooler in the corner. The two large men nodded and went upstairs. Looking down at his victim, Bendix took a sip from the glass and then threw the rest of the water into Will’s face, thoroughly dousing Vidot. Will woke up with a shock, and the little man smiled a devilish grin. “My apologies, but you must understand, it is important to set the right tone,” he said, leaning over his prisoner. “Now, where should we begin? How about we start with you telling me all you know about Mademoiselle Polyakov?”

Will shook his head. “I don’t know her.”

The little man nodded and took a drag of his cigarette. “Lies never bother me. In my profession, lies are like a wave hello, or a child jumping joyfully to greet his papa as he comes home from work, they are simply another way to begin a happy conversation.” He picked up a chair and placed it directly across from Will, sitting so close they were only millimeters apart, though Will was a full head taller. “You know how strange it is?” asked Bendix. “I have spent so much of my lifetime searching for Zoya and Elga, such a very long time, so long that I had even given up. And now, when I am working on a completely different project, I find her, without even looking. It is enough to give me goose bumps, look. See?”

He held out his arm. It was true, Vidot noticed, the man did have goose bumps. Will did not say anything. “I wonder, have you ever asked your friend Zoya her age?” Bendix asked, then smiled. “No, I suppose a true gentleman would never do such a thing. But I can tell you one thing, she is older than she looks. In fact, would you believe me if I told you she is older than me?”

Will stayed silent.

“I see.” Bendix got up and went over to the closet. “First you lie and now you don’t talk. That is fine. I don’t mind. So, how about I tell you all I know about this friend of yours while we get set up here.” From the depths of the closet he rolled out a large, odd-looking device. It was a tall, black, metal tripod composed of a padded arm that rested above a series of rubber hoses that were, in turn, wrapped in a serpentine fashion around a skeleton of steel pipes.

“This was a long time ago,” said Bendix, “when I was working as a fresh-faced research assistant in Basel. Now, when I say a long time, it was almost fifty years ago, well before you were born. Like me at the time, my industry was budding young then too, molting free of its cultish alchemical past and burgeoning by leaps and bounds toward a bright and promising future. It was an electric, exciting time of discovery. My colleagues and I sensed opportunity everywhere. Most of my work was laboratory-based; this has always been my natural milieu. But my direct superior at the time, a brilliant man named Claude Huss, believed the next great leap forward could only be made by journeying beyond the antiseptic confines of the lab, out into the field, where we could delve into the myriad mysteries of the organic world. His plan—an ambitious one—was to catalog and distill the world’s most ancient remedies.” The little man paused to correct himself. “Not distill them literally, of course, but rather to identify, classify, and then methodically strip every remedy down to its most basic chemical components. Then we would rebuild each one scientifically, dispensing with the unnecessary elements and improving upon them wherever possible. As I said, it was an ambitious goal, but what ambition.”

Bendix kept talking as he rolled the awkward, rattling contraption over to Will’s chair. “You see, Huss was an anthropological pioneer, really, and to him this field of research was of the utmost importance. My job was to accompany him on this safari, uncovering any and every source of ethnobotanical knowledge we could find. Huss and I traveled for well over a decade together, by train across Asia to see the herbal doctors of the Far East and taking passage on the White Star steamer to America to visit the indigenous reservations there. We dove into mescaline rituals, sampled fungal teas, and danced with majestic hallucinogenic lizard kings. Then up the Amazon we went, where we both almost died of malarial fever before drinking deeply of the enlightening ayahuasca. Oh, how we suffered. But it was well worth it for all we were able to sample, collect, and categorize. Wait, one second…”

The little man rose and went over to the metal cabinet on the wall. Inside was a stack of white cardboard boxes. Removing one of the boxes, he opened it and carefully emptied the powdered contents onto an aluminum tray. Next he took a tall brown bottle off a shelf and poured its liquid over the powder, mixing it into a paste as he continued his story. “Some secrets took a little prying, but most were quite easily bought—for instance a bone-crowned Polynesian medicine man traded us what amounted to two volumes’ worth of jellyfish cures for a single bottle of scotch. Bartering was often simple like that, some took gold, others whiskey. There was, however, a singular group who guarded their herbal remedies so obsessively that, in the end, extracting their coveted secrets became our greatest obsession, especially for poor Huss. It was all the more vexing since this band of ancient women, sometimes called the Babayaga, or sorceresses, or Wicca, or, more commonly, simply witches, were all situated right here in our realm, here in Europe, scattered across the east and the north: primarily in Russia, the Balkans, and Poland. I tell you, these pests were everywhere. Despite centuries of persecution, we knew they were still among us, roaming the land, leaching off our society like parasites, doling out their curses and cures wherever they went. Try as we might, though, we could never make contact with them. We hunted and searched tirelessly. More decades passed, and our new medicines began earning us prodigious profits. Huss’s patents alone made him one of the wealthiest men in Zurich, but he never enjoyed his fortune. It bought him a vast mansion, but he stayed buried, locking himself up in its bowels, myopically studying maps, charting their rumored migrations, sending out correspondence to all corners of the continent, obsessed with chasing down their cursed kind. We followed every faint trail, every wisp of scent or clue, putting out ever-increasing offers for rewards, and eventually instructing our budding trade network of small town pharmacists and entrepreneurial suppliers to keep their eyes and ears open for these strange women. It was their shriveling ancient coven versus our prospering new cabal, and I knew we would run them to ground, it was only a matter of time.”

Bendix opened a drawer and pulled out two separatory funnels. One he filled with water and attached to a hook and a tube, keeping its valve shut tight. The other he spooned a third full with the wet, gray paste from the tray and then hooked it beneath the water funnel, sealing the higher tube to the lower funnel. “Well, finally we caught one. A telegraph arrived in Bern from a Polish apothecary named Zell informing us that his brother, a local farmer, had trapped a bitch of a thief in his barn. The man was superstitious and, sensing she was trying to slip him a spell, he had gagged and bound her. Huss and I were there in twelve hours, a miracle for travel in those days.”

Bendix tightened both of the funnels into place on the contraption. The water began dripping down into the lower funnel, and the paste started dissolving. Opening a metal drawer, the little scientist removed a long hypodermic needle. He fastened it to the tube at the bottom of the device.