Rasputin's Bastards (38 page)

Richard gulped down the rest of his tea, and nodded. “G-g-g-got bus tickets up to H-H-Halifax,” he said. “The b-bus was pretty crowded.”

Miles nodded. “A lot of people. But we got there early, hey bud? Found ourselves some seats near the back.”

“Near the b-b-back.”

“See, before — before I came here, I used to work in security. At the Emissary. So if I’m on a bus, or a plane, or whatever, I like to see what everybody’s doing. I like to have my back to a wall.”

“T-t-t-t-tell about the others.”

“I’m getting there. So we get on the bus. Sit down. We didn’t pack too much to bring with us.”

“W-w-w-e knew we-we would be provided for.”

“Right. Anyway — the bus is pretty empty at first. But after we stop in a few towns up the east coast, the bus starts to fill up. And it’s like a family reunion.

“But you probably know all this. You probably got on a bus too — saw all these people you recognized, or thought you recognized.”

It wasn’t a bus. It was a boat. And yeah — that’s what I
thought.

Heather’s hand twitched, as dreaming fingers reached around her momentarily forgotten mantra, tugged on the tendons in her wrist.
Good girl
, said the voice of Holden Gibson in her head.
That’s how it goes . . . Now give it up, and rela —

“
Mi!
”

Heads turned and the tearoom went quiet for a moment. Heather blinked, flexed her fingers, and smiled weakly at the fishermen who stared at her from their table by the window.
Mi mi mi mi mi
, she thought.

Miles gave her a funny look. “You’re like Richard here, aren’t you? All fucked up inside because of what those bastards did to you?”

Heather found herself nodding quickly — this time of her own accord, but not, still, because she completely agreed with Miles. She didn’t want to go too deep on the question. Formulating a more complete answer would take thought. And thought would let Gibson back inside her, and then before you knew it, she’d be gone and Gibson . . .

Mi mi mi mi
. The mantra —
mi
— was her only —
mi
— shield.

“It’s amazing all the people they got over the years, isn’t it?” said Miles. “Remember when we stopped in Boston? That’s where Richard used to teach,” he said in an aside to Heather, then turned back to Richard. “There were people who got on that bus that you hadn’t seen in what — twenty years?”

“M-Mike B-Berry,” said Richard.

“Right. He was one of your grad students.”

Richard shook his head sadly and looked down again. “N-n-no,” he said. “H-he o-only p-p-pretended to be.”

Miles’ face fell a bit. “True,” he said. “We were all just pretending — weren’t we?”

Heather started to get up. The last —
mi
— thing —
mi mi
— she needed was another —
mi mi mi mi
— morose conversation with another of the growing crowd of fucked-up freaks that were dropping into this town like mayflies.

Miles put his hand on her arm. His eyes held a sad desperation.

“Wait!” he said. “Don’t leave us alone!”

Ah, fuck it
, she thought.
How long can a girl keep this up?

“Don’t worry,” she said, feeling herself slipping back into her own memories, the world fading in front of her, “you’re never alone for long, here in the fuckin’ village.”

“Fuck,” said Heather, sitting on the long porch outside the old Arts and Crafts building of the Transcendental Meditation camp. “Fuck!”

Hippie Pete crouched down beside her. “Swearing,” he said, “can cause stress, and stress can take us further from the centre. Seek the centre, Heather.”

Heather turned around and glared at him. “I’m pretty much
in
the fucking centre right now, aren’t I Pete?”

The big man shrugged. “The centre is not an ‘in,’” he said.

“Oh fuck — off,” she said, and stood up. “I’m going for a walk.”

Hippie Pete let her go. The first few times Heather had found herself back in this recollection since coming to the village, he’d been just about impossible to shake. Now, she could get rid of him any time she wanted. It seemed like mental holograms made of a boatload of false memories were no different than other men: given enough time and patience, you could train them one the same as the other.

Train them just like Holden had trained her and everyone else on the yacht. Maybe, the way someone had trained everyone else in this evil little village. Heather stomped down the crude stairway and along a green roadway between rows of man-planted cedars high enough to scratch cloud.

Now who the fuck
, wondered Heather,
had trained Miles and Richard?

She put that question at the end of the growing list she’d been making since she’d first seen the weird fairy tale fleet of boats, chugging and sailing and humming and rowing down on them through the sunrise, over the bow of the yacht.

Heather’s head was swimming — that bastard Alexei had just brained her after all — and she thought she might have been hallucinating.

It wasn’t just the weird colours they painted their boats, or the Halloween costumes they wore. Heather picked it up immediately, as the canoes bumped up against the side of the yacht and those strange brothers climbed on board to guide them into the harbour: the people here were strange — and not
Star Trek
fan strange, but really different-planet strange. They never quite looked at her when they were looking at her. They seemed to look through her and past her, and when they talked they talked to that space, and not Heather.

It freaked her out pretty significantly at first. When she came to on the bridge of Gibson’s yacht, and looked out the windscreens, the first things she’d seen had been those strange banners, all red and green and orange. . . .

It was as though they were doing the Santa Claus Parade in boats.

Of course, the children caught her before she could make a fool out of herself. “Don’t worry lady,” said one. “They’re just celebrating — because we are home and united at last.”

When she went out onto the aft deck, little Vladimir beamed at her from that bastard Alexei’s arms. “We are delivered from our shackles,” he said. “Ha! This is a great day, lady.”

“Put him down,” she’d hissed at Alexei. “You fucking monster.”

Alexei didn’t appear to hear her, but Vladimir giggled. “Alexei,” he said, “is not here right now. He will join us later.”

Heather nodded. It made the most sense of anything she’d seen or heard in the past few minutes. Maybe Alexei had gone to someplace like her Transcendental Meditation camp, and this guy who’d whacked her on the head was somebody completely different. Somebody else calling the shots.

“Good,” said Vladimir. “You’re not as stupid as you pretend to be.”

Heather told him to fuck off and had gone back inside — where the rest of the crew were shaking their heads groggily amid fallen down chairs, and babbling to one another. James, for instance, was going on about kindergarten and some kind of tricycle. Sheri couldn’t stop talking about a cabin her family had in Wisconsin — which didn’t make any sense, because Heather remembered they’d picked up Sheri in Florida and her parents were dirt poor drunks who lived in a trailer park. Even stranger, Leonard was going on about elves and hobbits like he’d grown up in the freaking Shire.

Heather finally had to clap her hands and shout: “Hey! Reality check!”

Everyone stopped and stared at her.

“Where’s Holden?” she said.

The crew parted, and looked down as if for the first time, to see Holden Gibson lying splayed on the floor, eyes open and staring sightlessly at the ceiling. Heather had to suppress a monstrously inappropriate laugh.

He appeared to be dead.

“Holy fuck,” she whispered, wrestling back a smile.

“Shit,” said James. “How’d I miss
that
?”

“Someone fucking killed him,” said Sheri. She looked at Heather accusingly. Heather put her hands out in front of her, shook her head and widened her eyes in innocent denial.

“He’s not dead,” said Leonard, kneeling down and touching his throat. “Pulse.”

“No,” said a commanding voice from behind them. “He is not dead at all. Step away from him, sleepers.”

Heather turned. Standing in the doorway was a tall man, fit, with a greying beard and long hair tied behind in a ponytail. He wore a long oilskin raincoat, and he was old enough to be Heather’s grandfather. But that didn’t seem to matter: he made her weak in the knees like he was a high school jock. And when he spoke, she obeyed the same as everyone else and stepped back.

“Well if it isn’t old John Kaye,” he said, looking down at her sleeping boss. “This might be the first time we meet in person, and still you can’t see me. Well. What would she be bringing you here for?”

Gibson snorted in his sleep.

“Can’t talk now, hmm? That’s fine. But soon enough we’ll meet again. And then we can speak a great deal.”

John Kaye? Who the fuck is John Kaye
? Heather wondered.

She would have asked the question — maybe even pointed out helpfully that this wasn’t John Kaye but Holden Gibson and he was such an evil bastard that they’d do best to toss him into the ocean and have done with him before he came to. But she couldn’t seem to make her mouth work.

“Until then,” said the tall man, “we’re going to have to find a better place for you to rest.” He clapped his hands. “Sleepers! Take care of your dream-walker!”

Dream-walker?

And along with the rest of them, Heather had lurched to work. They hefted Holden onto one of the tables, and lifted it like a litter between six of them, to carry him out onto the deck. The children were gone when they got there. Heather thought she could see them out of the corner of her eye, crowded onto the deck of a fishing boat that was motoring away.

Alexei hadn’t gone, though. He stood beside the old man — staring ahead with those creepy unseeing eyes of his. Heather wondered if he was in the same kind of thrall as the rest of them. And if he was, why wasn’t he fucking well helping? The table weighed a ton.

But there were no answers that day — not from Alexei, who boarded the sailboat with Holden and the children and the old man — and not from any of the other crew, who all worked together, to steer the yacht alongside the flotilla of boats, first toward the coast and then through the rocky teeth of an inlet, and finally into a fantastical village’s harbour.

Heather hadn’t seen Alexei since. Indeed, it was only when she remembered to use the mantra that she was able to see much of anything. Once they came close to the docks, Heather had felt the world growing grey, her breathing slowing down — and there she was, back in the Transcendental Meditation camp, being stalked by that terrible giant Hippie Pete and completely oblivious to what was going on with her body.

And try as she might, she couldn’t find another way out of the camp than drowning herself once more in the lake. Since she’d come to this creepy place, Heather figured she’d killed herself some nine times. Every time she forgot to say her mantra, it wouldn’t take more than a few seconds — somebody would be there to come in and take over her mind.

Lately, that somebody appeared to be Holden Gibson. Or John Kaye, or whoever the fuck he really was.

That was something that Heather would have dearly loved to have been able to figure out: just who was Holden Gibson; and how, even though he hadn’t woken up once from his little coma, so powerful and all of a sudden?

As she emerged at the top of that old familiar cliff overlooking the same old fucking lake, and readied herself to take another Goddamn plunge to yet another fucking watery death, Heather hoped she’d be able to find at least some small clue about what it all meant this time through.

She had almost made it to the end of the cliff, when she pulled herself up short. Looked at the thing that was floating in the water, like a fat white jellyfish. A jellyfish with rounded shoulders and grey hair that washed out in tendrils around its wrinkled head. A jellyfish that floated face-down in the lake.

“Now who the fuck,” she said out loud, “is that?”

Suicide could wait, Heather thought as she plunged headfirst into the water. This time, rather than diving down and sucking all the lake her lungs could hold, Heather did a fast crawl across the water towards the body. From a distance, she couldn’t tell who it was — but she had a faint and irrational hope that it might be Holden Gibson, finally sucked into his own little Transcendental Meditation hell.

If that was the case, there was no way she was going to let him drown and escape this place.
What’s good for the goose is good for the fuckin’ gander
, she thought as she came up to the floater and hooked an arm to him. She paddled back to shore, and gasping for breath herself now, dragged the body onto the beach.

She crawled further up, shook out her hair and flipped over onto her haunches. She swore. It wasn’t Holden Gibson at all. It was some old guy — older than Holden by about a decade, she figured. What hair he had left was long and almost as grey as his flesh. He was completely naked, and he looked like he’d been dead about a day.

“Fine.” Obviously, someone had figured out Heather’s escape route and was planting distractions to keep her inside. “
Mi mi mi,”
she said, tromping back up the steps to her original launch point and preparing herself for a proper death once more.

She’d almost made it to the top when a voice stopped her.

“
Hey! Leetle gorl!
”

A part of her told her not to look, to just go through with the death scene and get back to the village where she could actually do something. But Heather stopped all the same, and looked back down the stairs to the beach.

The corpse was sitting up — like a big German tourist, vainly trying to sun away the pallor at a Club Med beach.

Except he didn’t sound German.

He sounded Russian.

And while there were plenty of Russians in the village, and Heather figured she must have seen them all by now — she didn’t ever recall seeing this one.