Red Winter (3 page)

On this side of the road, there was a line of nine
izbas
, built with enough space between each to prevent the spread of fire. I checked every yard and outbuilding before moving on to the road that ran between the houses.

I listened for a while, shivering as the temperature dropped and my breath misted around me, then moved from home to home, summoning the courage to enter each one but finding them all empty. I headed across the road and searched the windmill, the church, and the houses that backed onto the river, but found nothing other than what I had found in my own home. There were plates on tables, a few bits and pieces of food in cupboards, and all the signs that people had been going about their business, but the people themselves were missing. It was as if they had been plucked from their homes by invisible hands, or left in a hurry without time to do much more than pick up their coats. Except it was only the
children’s
coats; wherever they had gone, the adults had not taken their winter coats with them.

As the night matured, the cold bit harder and the wind played among the highest branches in the forest, teasing the sails of the windmill so the air was filled with the creak and groan of old wood.

I returned to check on Kashtan one last time and took my supplies back to the house, but even when I closed the door and pushed the bolt across, it felt as if the forest demons had slipped inside with me. After jamming a chair under the door handle, I went to the windows and considered drawing the curtains but decided against it. If anyone came in the night, they would bring lights, and I wanted to be able to see them.

Eventually I went to my brother and slumped beside him as before.

‘There’s no one here,’ I whispered, staring at the door, feeling more alone than ever. ‘They’ve all gone.
Everyone
. Where the hell are they? What’s happened to them?’ I couldn’t bring myself to look at him, to remind myself that he had gone too.

I placed the revolver in my lap and concentrated on the significance of the winter coats. It bothered me that the children’s were missing but not the adults’, and I couldn’t think of a good reason why it would be so. I went over it again and again, but I was worn out and my thoughts began to blur and swim. I told myself I would look again tomorrow, try to find an explanation.

Somewhere in the night, exhaustion overcame me and I slept a while beside my dead brother. I woke when I thought I heard my wife’s gentle laughter and I sat up, forgetting where I was.

‘Marianna?’

But then there was the emptiness of remembering she wasn’t there, and I leaned back and rubbed my eyes.

The wind had strengthened further and it probed the house, searching for a way in, plucking at the windows, shaking the door and rattling the bolt. I wondered if it might be safe to light a fire. No one would see the smoke in the dark, and I could keep the oven door shut, pull the curtains across the windows. The warmth would be a welcome relief.

I stood and rubbed the stiffness from my neck before going to the range, breaking kindling and arranging it in the oven. Reaching for the bundle of matches and taking one from the roll, though, something stopped me from striking it. A voice whispering in my head. Whatever had taken the people of Belev might come for me too, and how would I ever help them then? What use would I be to my wife and children if I were to disappear the way they had?

I replaced the match in the roll of cloth and put it on the table, my fingers reluctant to let it go. I wanted that fire so much my heart sank at how close I had been to having it; how close I had come to that one small comfort. A huge sadness welled inside me – for the loss of my brother, for Marianna and the boys, for everything I had done and seen. It surged in a great wave and I squeezed my eyes shut, pressing my fingers against them.

Standing like that, I prayed for my family. Prayed for some sign of them.

But my prayer was disturbed by a scraping and shuffling from deeper in the room. At first, I thought I was imagining the noise, but when it came again, I opened my eyes and turned back to my brother. My vision was impaired, blurred because I had been rubbing my eyes, and I thought it was playing tricks on me when I saw a dark shadow rising in the room. The spectre was taking shape, emerging from the ground in the murky darkness, as if Alek had woken from the dead and was standing to greet me. I tried to tell myself it was my imagination. It was nothing more than an eerie mix of light and dark. As my sight cleared, however, I knew it was no trick. Someone or something was there.

I was not alone in the house.

A blinding white light of panic and fear exploded in my mind. A quick flash, a fraction of a second and then it was gone. After that, everything was instinct. The revolver lay on the floor beside my brother and was of no use to me now, so I launched myself at the figure, thinking to protect myself by attacking first. I had no idea who had come into my home, but in the fragment of time it took to make my first movement, I remembered that I had bolted the door. The windows were closed, and the door was locked, so it was impossible that anyone could have come in while I was asleep. The only way anybody could be inside the house was if they had already been here when I returned from searching the village. They had waited for me to fall asleep and they had emerged from their hiding place to do whatever it was they had done to the other villagers.

Three steps were all it took for me to cross the distance between us.

Three wide, quick steps.

My boots clicked on the wooden floor and the figure remained as it was. It made no attempt to move or defend itself and I barrelled into it with all my strength. My natural impulse was to use as much force as I could, to destroy this threat without delay. I had seen and suffered things that gave a man the inclination to destroy and kill before waiting for horrors to be committed upon himself. I had extinguished life before, and tonight I would do the same.

There was no resistance.

As soon as I put my arms round it and forced it to the ground, I knew the figure was thin and weak. It was well padded with clothing, but beneath the materials, bones protruded hard against flesh. Skin was old and dry. Muscle was weak. It made hardly a sound when it hit the floor and took my full weight as I came down on top of it. There was just an escape of air and a muffled grunt, and then I was astride the shape, pinning it to the floor. I put my hands out, finding the narrow throat and circling my fingers round it, pressing my thumbs into the soft hollow, squeezing the life out of it, crushing the cartilage.

The smell that issued from the bag of bones beneath me was hellish. The odour of damp earth and human waste filled my nostrils and clotted my throat. The stink of decay washed over this awful creature like a disease, making me gag, but I knew it was human. It had to be. I could feel its neck crushing in my grip.

It raised its hands to my face, touching me with bony fingers, long nails raking at my cheeks. Then, as life began to leave it and its body began to relax, it managed a word. It opened its mouth and spoke a single word, which came out in a long, hot breath.

‘Alek.’

And with that word, my senses returned to me. I was killing something I could not see. I might have been strangling my own wife on the floor of our home.

I released my grip and jumped back from the creature, crawling to where my brother lay. I ran my hands around the floorboards, searching for the revolver, and when my fingers stumbled on its cold metal, I snatched it up and pointed it at the shape that lay coughing in a heap. It had turned onto its front and was spluttering and hacking like an old hag.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, but the creature didn’t reply. It stayed as it was, fighting for life, drawing air into its lungs in short, wheezing gasps.

I waited, trying to keep the revolver steady in my shaking hands, the stink of the creature thick around me. And when its breathing eventually settled to a rhythmic rasp and whistle, it spoke again.

‘Alek?’ the creature said. ‘Is that you, Alek?’

‘Who
are
you?’ I asked for a second time, but I was almost too afraid to hear the answer. I knew this was no witch or spectre; this was a person who was looking for shelter and safety, just as I was. I also knew it was a woman – the voice told me that much – but I was afraid to know which woman. The thought that my wife might have become this creature was almost too much to bear.

When she didn’t answer, I raised my voice and asked once more, ‘Who are you? Speak now or I’ll shoot.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, Alek.’ She shifted on the floor and turned towards me. All I could make out in the darkness was the shape of her, but I saw she was holding a hand out to me. Whether she wanted me to take it or she was just trying to reach out to me, I didn’t know, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch her even if it was what she wanted. The way she smelled and the way she had felt in my fingers made my skin crawl.

‘Tell me your name,’ I said.

‘Is that you, Alek?’

‘No. It’s Kolya. Nikolai. Alek’s brother. Who are
you
?’

There was a moment of silence as if she were trying to remember.

‘Galina,’ she said. ‘Galina, Galina, Galina.’

Galina Ivanovna Petrova was a friend of my mother. At least, she had been until Mama died, the summer before the revolution. Mama went to the river to wash clothes one morning and didn’t return. When Alek and I went looking for her, we found the clothes but no sign of Mama, so we searched up and down the bank, finding nothing until we came to the lake where the water washed from the river. We swam there when the weather was warm. The lake was a good size, with a small, marshy island close to the far shore where my brother and I played as children. We had an old rowing boat with a tin for baling out the water that leaked through the joins in the wood. At its deepest point, the lake was deeper than any of us ever cared to find out. As children, we would dare each other to swim down and touch the bottom, but the darkness closed around you quickly in the murky water, and the weeds reached up to tangle your hands and feet. Nobody I knew had ever touched the bottom.

Mama was in the lake when we found her. She was floating face up, as if the river’s current had turned her to face the sky. Her skirt billowed around her, rippling with the surface water, and her headscarf had come loose so her hair was spread out in tendrils. A deep gash marred her forehead, cleaned by the current and the fish so that it was an empty, ragged scar.

We could only guess that she had slipped from the riverbank and hit her head on one of the many rocks. If the blow hadn’t killed her, it was the cold water that had taken her life, swirling about her, drowning her as she lay unconscious.

We never found Mama’s headscarf.

We buried her the next day, in the patch of land behind the small church. Papa had been there a long time already, and tomorrow morning, I would bury my brother beside them.

‘Galina Ivanovna?’ I said, pushing to my knees. I could hardly believe the creature that had risen from the darkness was the old woman I had known all my life. She was the woman who used to give Alek and me
pampushki
, still warm from the oven and laced with enough garlic to burn your tongue.

She was one of the women who had mourned at my mother’s funeral.

‘Alek. Thank God. Please. Help me.’

‘It’s Kolya,’ I said without thinking. I got to my feet and took a tentative step towards her. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Help me,’ she said again, and this time I went right to her, reeling at the stink as if coming against a barrier that I had to force myself through. I knelt beside her, feeling the loosened floorboards as I did so.

‘You were under the floor?’ I asked.

‘Always under,’ she said. ‘Hiding. It’s not safe when someone comes.’

I shivered when she touched my wrist. Her grip was stronger than I expected and she squeezed tight as she pulled herself up. Her skin was cold and damp.

‘When who comes, Galina Ivanovna?’

‘
Anyone
. So I hide and watch and I see everything.’

‘From under the floor?’

‘From under it and above it. From outside and in. From the forest. I saw you coming, riding your horse, and I knew you had come to help me.’

‘Help you how?’

‘Help me with the others, of course. You can take care of them now.’

‘The others? Where are they? I’ve been looking—’

‘Gone,’ she said. ‘All gone.’

With that single word, an icy fist punched through me and clawed its fingers round my heart. ‘Gone where?’

Galina Ivanovna kept her grip tight on my wrist, and her breathing wheezed in and out, in and out. ‘Is it over now?’ she asked. ‘The war? Is that why you came home?’

‘Where have they gone?’ I pulled my hand away, loath to feel her touch. ‘When?’

‘Hmm? Oh. A long time,’ she said. ‘Days, weeks. I don’t know.’

Judging by the way she smelled, I guessed it was weeks rather than days.

‘Can you remember what happened here, Galina Ivanovna? I can’t find anyone and it’s important that you tell me where everyone is. I want to help you.’ I wished I could tear the truth out of her, but she was confused and hardly seemed to know what she was saying.

Galina put her hand to her head and tapped it with the gnarled knuckle of one finger. ‘Remember,’ she said. ‘Remember, remember, remember. Oh.’ Her movement was sudden and she reached out to grab me once more. This time she grasped my forearm with one hand and reached up with the other to touch my cheek. She brought her face close to mine. ‘Don’t let him take me too.’

‘Who?’

She spoke with urgency, lowering her voice and putting her lips to my ear. ‘Don’t let him make me go with the others.’

‘Where did they go?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice calm despite the questions spinning in my head. ‘Who are you talking about?’

She loosened her grip on me and put a hand to her mouth. ‘Don’t let him take me.’