Vassa in the Night (17 page)

“My daughter,” Zinaida proclaimed, “will have the kind of life whose obstacles can't be conquered by money! I know it. She needs something much stronger. Bea, you can't really believe that a child of mine will be
ordinary.
With the traditions in my family, Vassa is certain to be pulled into—into the affairs of your sort of people eventually. And I won't be there to help her. Naturally I'm worried.”

The room was lacy, dusty, and cramped, and in her embroidered boots Zinaida dominated the upper strata. She wore a wasp-waisted, flaring frock coat of celadon brocade over caramel leather shorts, and her black hair was pinned up in complicated soft-serve coils. On a woman less striking the clothes might have seemed fussy and ostentatious, but on her they looked utterly stylish. Her beautiful face was turning gaunt and faded, but her presence remained so forceful that almost no one could have guessed how ill she was.

“You know that how?” Bea asked. “You've been looking into things you shouldn't?” Zinaida didn't answer and the old woman sighed. “What you call your worries, I can tell they're actually your wishes. You do this, you'll make them come true by your own act. You're too proud of those
family traditions
of yours, aren't you? You want your Vassa tangled up in magic so badly that you won't attend to what it might cost her. You don't have much time, Zinnie, but it's pure truth that you've got time enough to think better of this. Change your mind. Let your Vassa grow up without
persons of quality
dragging her into their business. Forget the doll, and I'll make sure of it. I'll make sure she's as ordinary a girl as you like.”

“The doll will protect her. God knows her father won't. Why wouldn't you
want
that for her, Bea? You remember, don't you, how my great-grandparents helped you escape from Russia? How you lived with them in Paris, when you had nowhere else to go? Raised my grandmother almost as if she were your own? You've been a friend to my family for generations. I know you'll be a friend now when I need you most!”

“I've been a friend to your family, and I've been other things, too. You know it. The doll will protect her, surely, but it will also bind her, and to a side of life that might be better left apart. You
know
that, Zinnie. Don't tell me you don't know what you're doing. What do you tell yourself, that your pretty Vassa can dabble about with persons of quality, waltz at our parties, and somehow avoid the dangers we bring with us? You think she can do that, when
I'm
the one you ask to do the binding? Ah, but you know full well what I've been. I don't put that past down when I take up this wood in my old hands.”

Zinaida pursed her lilac lips and paced. Bea was still sitting calmly with her teacup on her knee, but to her the idea of serenity and stillness seemed oppressive, a precursor of the unwelcome peace to come. “But that's why you can help us, Bea! You've seen so much, dreamed so much,
been
so much. You can give some of that to my little girl now, can't you?”

Bea stared down at her teacup as if she hadn't heard. The tea was cold and milky, full of obscure clouds and dangerous sediments, and with every word Zinaida spoke she grew sadder. Even after sixteen years in this dark apartment its immobility sometimes made her dizzy, a bit nauseous. She wasn't meant to be a damned barnacle.

“My past, Zinnie?” Bea finally whispered. “You want me to give her my past? What I hated then I hate now, and the wood will pick up the scent. And where the wood hunts, so will your Vassa. You might ask yourself if I have reasons of my own to make this doll for you. You might ask if reasons like mine can bring any good to anyone.”

“You mean Babs?” Zinaida asked flippantly. “To hell with that old witch.”

“Be it so,” Bea Yaggen murmured. But she didn't look up and a tear splashed on her knee.

 

CHAPTER 10

There's no impact as far as I can tell but there is a whole lot of pitch-black nothing, more than I've ever seen before, though as a Brooklyn resident I might have considered myself something of a nothingness expert. It takes me quite a while to understand that I'm moving, and at terrific speed. Stars flare in their multitudes all at once as if the night had suddenly opened a billion eyes, all of them watching me.

It's actually kind of awesome. I'm racing through this brilliant infinity, and, there in the distance, I catch sight of a star that I somehow know is our own sun. In the span of a gasp I can see Earth rolling up at me, the blue curves stretching and flattening, continents bursting with detail and mountain ranges heaving into view. Waves start to scatter sequins of light and cities lie like scabs. I'm approaching the sunlit side, but as I draw closer there's an involuntary swish and bend to my flight and I'm sailing over a dark boundary. Winging my way into night.

Cities appear now as stippled blaze on the charcoal land, and a flourish of wind wraps my face. There's a strange lull while I seem to be in movement but not in time, and then I realize I'm not alone. I'm riding on the back of a black motorcycle and my arms are wrapped around a surge of darkness, sometimes loosely humanoid and sometimes shifting into cloud forms, minotaurish or serpentine. If I look into it deeply enough, I can see wandering stars.

We're streaking along fifty yards above a harbor—yachts wander, too, lights swaying on their masts—and then a city; I don't know which one, but the redbrick row houses make me think we're on the East Coast of the United States.

I lean against the motorcyclist's broad starry back. He looks shapeless and wild but I can feel cold leather under my cheek, and there's definitely something more or less person-shaped closed in my arms. I might laugh if I wasn't breathless with beauty and velocity; I might cry if I wasn't trying to laugh.

We're heading inland over darkness carved by roofs and scripted in blinking signs, and the motorcycle curls and leaps as if we were driving along a road in the hills and not through smoke-black air. We've left what looked like a pretty fancy neighborhood and now we're sweeping over grittier districts where hunched men miss the steps as they emerge from stinking bars. Girls no older than me stand knock-kneed in tiny glittery dresses, staring at nothing. No one seems to notice us; it's like we're webbed into the wind, the roaring night.

Something tangerine and boxy jiggles ahead. It doesn't take me long to realize it's another BY's franchise, waltzing and scraping away in the silence. The heads here must not get changed quite as often because a few of them have decayed all the way to bone. Skulls bounce back light the color of setting suns. I tug on the motorcyclist, to ask him to take us anywhere else. Instead he dips lower, curving in. He looks human again, black and shining, but with obvious shoulders and head and arms. It's strange, but seeing him
look
human is what brings it home to me that he really, definitely isn't.

A second motorcyclist circles below us, endlessly rounding the parking lot. He looks smaller and lumpier than my friend, as if somebody'd done a sloppy job of putting him together out of scraps. But he's also encased in tight black leather, and his bike is black and growling, and his visor looks much too dark to peer through. I don't think he can see us but he might sense something, because unlike everybody else he cranes his head our way. A wordless, guttural cry shakes from his throat. It sounds so pitiful, like something half machine and half child calling for help.

My motorcyclist calls back to him, the same rumbling howl. We weave around the circling bike below us, dancing a smaller orbit. I wanted to run away before—
anyone but me, anywhere but here
—but now I've changed my mind.

I want to help them. I don't know
what
they are, but I do know that they're desperately unhappy and very, very alone. Even more alone than I am. I catch a glimpse of an old lady scowling from the window—probably every BY's franchise has a witch in charge—and I wonder if she's as cruel as Babs.

“Vassa,” the motorcyclist drones; his voice trembles from his whole body, even from the motorcycle's core. “Vassa.”

“You can talk again!” If he can speak, then doesn't that mean I'm dreaming? Of course, I must be. Of
course
I'm not dead.

“You can
hear
me again. I've talked to you, so many times, but you can't hear.”

I think about this. “You mean I can't hear you when I'm awake? Conscious?” I mull the problem a little more, but now the solution seems obvious. “Then does that mean you're sleeping, too? Are you
always
asleep?”

“So I don't feel.”

“So you don't feel what?”

“What I was.” The motorcycle gives a sudden lurch and we're ascending again, the rider below us straining in our direction, one lonely arm reaching our way. “What I was, was the all. The all above us.”

Right. I'd managed to forget that talking to him is one thing; understanding what the hell he's trying to communicate is something else. I'm so distracted by the thrill of flight that there's a pause before I arrive at the obvious question. “So what are you now? Because I'm getting the feeling that you're not—” I don't want to say
not human,
just in case that hurts him. “—not the same kind as me?”

That seems to stump him. He slides into silence again, our wheels whipping up a scrum of leaves from an especially tall oak. It's weird but I'm also starting to think that I can feel his emotions coming through the places where my arms wrap his body, where my torso leans against his back. Sadness seems to seep through my skin, and I know I'm making him think about things that he finds bewildering and unbearably painful.

“I know what I
was.
Now that I'm not, now that I'm separate … Can there be any word for me, Vassa?”

“Most people would say you're a man. That doesn't seem quite right, though. Does it?”

He answers me with a strange rattling growl; definitely not a sound a human could make. We skid through the fringes of black forests, curve away from fire-hooting factories, and then, although it seems impossibly soon, we're sliding above the sparkling margin of another city. I know where he's taking me, so this time when my hair whips back like a curtain pulled by the wind I'm not surprised to see the orange bobble of another BY's, this one in what looks like a shabby district of vinyl-sided houses with feeble smoke-choked gardens. We dip down, air surging up my jacket, and below us another motorcyclist cries out and flings his arms wide in appeal.

We head right for him. At first I think we're going to pull up at any moment, but as the parking lot's dark shimmer spreads like a cancer over my vision I start to have my doubts about that.

I'm dreaming, just dreaming,
I tell myself,
none of this is real.

But at this speed it's hard to have much faith in the distinction. The strange motorcyclist below is even more wind-warped and goblin-twisted than the one I saw in the last city. He's hunchbacked, his arms absurdly long and rippling like the boughs of a cypress tree. He yowls in animal terror at our approach, his grotesque arms and huge flipperlike hands winging up to ward off the blow. Beneath his black visor I see a wide-open mouth with a pallid tongue and pointy teeth. His spherical head seems to be inflating until it could burst, so huge that I can't understand how we haven't hit him already. I cringe back as a raspy scream tears from my throat.…

And then I'm still screaming, but I don't see the parking lot or the howling mouth or my own motorcyclist in front of me. I'm not perched on the leather seat or holding onto his muscular body. I'm just completely and entirely alone in star-struck darkness. What's funny is that the darkness feels so claustrophobic, so tightly confined. My panic undergoes a tonal shift, from fear of being splattered across the asphalt to fear of being imprisoned forever. The scream in my throat twitches half a note higher before I run out of breath and stop, gasping, with the miserable feeling that I'm being ridiculous. I'm dreaming, and I wonder if my dream is nested inside someone else's dream, which is maybe inside a bigger dream yet.

Sleep is larger than any night,
he told me.
It's large enough to fill the mind.

I reach out a hand; touch a surface wet and rough and concave. As if I was standing inside …

A skull. I suddenly have an awful, knee-buckling sense of where I am and why there was no crash a moment ago. My feet rebound from something spongy and I look down and see my boots darkly silhouetted against a pale morass. I know, I know beyond any rational knowing, that I'm standing on the other motorcyclist's tongue, and yes, that is just as creepy as it sounds. I suddenly miss Erg so much it twists my guts. Even in my dreams she's nearly always with me.