Rasputin's Bastards (75 page)

“Do not be so sure,” said Zhanna. “Who knows what he might have done had things not gone better for him?”

“Things went as they went,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “The important thing is that now we all have our wits — and,” she tapped the napkin with a fingernail, “this.”

The five of them looked at the napkin. If Heather was to be believed, those numbers allowed access to bank accounts containing on the order of a half billion U.S. dollars. It was, she claimed Kolyokov had told her, an inheritance.

Divide this evenly between the sleepers and dream-walkers, who have been so ill-used
, he had told her.
This is truly theirs. I should never have taken it to begin with.

Zhanna snorted. “Deathbed repentance.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Stephen, and all looked to him. Those three words were the most he had spoken since he had detonated the psyche bomb and wiped Discourse from their minds the previous night.

Zhanna put her hand on his arm. “Stephen?” she asked. “Are you well?”

Stephen looked at her and looked away, out the window. He squinted at a point on the rocks, across the harbour. There was a figure there. He got up, pushed his chair away, and stepped outside.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu, Heather and Zhanna followed as Stephen tromped down the narrow roadway to the docks. They followed him as he clomped across the wooden boards, back up some cement steps, and onto another dock that jutted just a few feet from the rocks where the old man danced.

“Hey,” said Heather. “I know that guy.”

“From where?” said Zhanna.

“From here,” said Heather, and Mrs. Kontos-Wu blinked, recognition dawning on her.

“Here?”

Stephen smiled. He stepped closer onto the rocks, and put his hand out. “Richard,” he said. “Well fuck me.”

Richard spared Stephen a sidelong glance and a wink before returning to his reel. He danced and sang on the ridge, his arms raised up and fingers snapping over his head. His voice trembled, and occasionally he stumbled over the lyric, and he could not hold anything approaching a melody.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu found herself smiling as Stephen climbed onto the rocks to stand a little closer to Richard.
Discordance
, she thought,
has never sounded so good.

Rasputin’s Bastards
was a long haul in the writing, and many people had a hand in encouraging and guiding it along. The members of the Cecil Street Irregulars writing workshop past and present helped me chart the course of the manuscript as it developed. In particular, Peter Watts helped me bring the deep sea to life around Petroska Station and all those squid. Karl Schroeder provided me with basic training for the writing of this kind of gonzo Cold War tale, with our collaboration on our first novel,
The Claus Effect
. He and the rest of the crew at the Cecil workshop helped me know when to ground the book, and when to let it take flight.

Sandra Kasturi, Brett Savory, Erik Mohr, Sam Beiko and the rest of the team at ChiZine Publications took that last task to the final stage. During the editing process, we took to calling the book Fat Bastard — it is, as I write this, the longest book that ChiZine has acquired. Taming the Fat Bastard was a task that took patience, elbow grease and no small amount of mutual faith. I think it’s paid off. Erik Mohr’s cover art is, as always, a work of art. And as we edited, the help, love and support of Madeline Ashby proved invaluable.

There was no small amount of research involved in putting
Rasputin’s Bastards
together, but readers will not be rewarded tracing the location of City 512 or the Emissary Hotel or New Pokrovskoye. Need it be said that I made it all up?

The aesthetic of the novel and its characters is another matter. For that, the Russian side of my family proved foundational. My grandmother came to Canada with her sisters shortly after the Russian Revolution, and they formed an expat community in Canada founded on family, and a deep nostalgia for a magical pre-revolutionary Russia that may or may not have ever existed. It didn’t really matter; that Russia lived on in revisionist memories and dreams of my grandmother, who I think took comfort from them as she engaged in the formidable task of surviving as a single mother with no formal education in 1930s Toronto. She was able to convey that nostalgia, through story and song and acrylic paintings that she made later in life, of wide fields of impossible green surrounding golden onion-domed churches lit by a brilliant, pre-Soviet sun. When I thought of the dream-walkers, or at least the mechanics of the dream-walkers’ Metaphor, I thought of her.

David Nickle is a Toronto-based author and journalist whose fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies like
Cemetery Dance, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
, the
Northern Frights
series and the
Queer Fear
series. Some of it has been collected in his book of stories,
Monstrous Affections
. His first solo novel,
Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism
, led the
National Post
to call him “a worthy heir to the mantle of Stephen King.” He also works as a reporter, covering Toronto municipal politics for a chain of community newspapers.

“Toronto author David Nickle’s debut novel, the followup to his brilliantly wicked collection of horror stories
Monstrous Affections
, establishes him as a worthy heir to the mantle of Stephen King.”

“Nickle’s bleak debut novel mixes utopian vision, rustic Americana, and pure creepiness.”

“A dark, complicated and frequently harrowing read . . .
Eutopia
is a compelling exploration of the horror of good intentions.”

“[A]n Excellent Novel.”

“[
Eutopia
] is immensely readable: a quick-paced mountain stream of a novel, cool and sharp and intense, and terrifically adept at drawing a reader in . . .
Eutopia
accomplishes what the best horror fiction strives for: gives us characters we can care about and hope for, and then inflicts on them the kind of realistic, inescapable, logical sufferings that make us close our eyes a little at the unfairness of not the author, but the world — and all the while with something more to say for itself than the world is a very bad place. Thoughtful, accomplished, and recommended.”

“. . .
Eutopia
is the kind of book I’d recommend to literary snobs who badmouth the horror genre while completely ignoring the multitudes of splendid books on the shelves. Nickle comes from a different cut of cloth than a lot of current horror authors. He’s created a unique world that’s a far cry from any of the current trends in horror fiction. In fact, his style seems generations removed from all the apocalyptic zombie and vampire novels on the market. Thankfully, he understands that the most important ingredients are strong characters, originality, and a compelling story. That his novel is also dark, frightening, and beautifully written is just icing on the cake.”