Vin of Venus
Paul D. Brazill
David Cranmer
Garnett Elliott
PO Box 173Freeville, New York 13068
Part I
Part II
Part III
His last memories as a whole man?
Running. A strip of sun-bright sand that could've been a beach. Bullets whizzing left and right, passing within inches of his ear.
His feet splashed water. Cold. Without thought, he turned and plunged into the surf. Dove down. Hunted cover. Bullets splashed next to him.
Muffled by the water: an engine's roar.
Darkness.
* * *
Dr. Piotr Krol took the rural roads faster than either the icy conditions or his current state of exhaustion should've allowed.
He'd been up for hours. The drive from Warsaw to his country place was long, the Polish roads treacherous from lack of maintenance. Kilar's
Ninth Gate
soundtrack kept him company. He turned up the music, hoping the eerie strains could help keep him awake.
Just a little farther. Yes, he could see it now: the roof of his country house, peeking over a copse of pines. Everything was dusted white.
Everything, except for a murder of crows. He watched their black shapes slash across the sky, alighting on a snow bank alongside the road.
He gasped.
Reflex made him bury the brake pedal. A poor choice. The BMW slalomed right, threatening to jump an embankment. He fought to keep the car under control. A large pine bole loomed, but luck, and perhaps German engineering, brought the vehicle to a skidding halt, inches from the tree.
Krol threw open his door. Breath heaving, he jogged toward the crows.
A man lay atop the snow bank. Naked. Bloodied. The crows pecked at his face. Krol kicked and sent them flapping. He saw the man's hairless chest hitch with breath. The hint of mist from his nostrils. He was alive, but ...
He had no left arm. And no left leg.
* * *
The hospital's antiseptic smell, that was the first thing.
The second was the sounds. A constant
beep
, which he later realized was his own heartbeat, tracked by machines. Every now and then the old drunk in the bed next to his would shout in a language he didn't understand.
But this morning came the sound he'd learned to look forward to. The ringing of metal against porcelain as his nurse stirred black currant jam into his tea.
"Dr. Krol is here to see you again," she said in accented English.
Vin sat up and accepted the warm mug.
Krol's dress shoes clicked against the hospital tile as he entered. He stood well over six feet with a full head of silver hair. Vin gulped tea and set the cup down so he could shake the doctor's hand.
"I have some good news and some bad news, Mr. Vin," Krol said. "The authorities have given permission for you to be in my custody while we try to find out more about you. My apartment in Warsaw is at your disposal. You can check out of here tomorrow."
Vin couldn't help but smile at the prospect of leaving. "And the bad news?"
"I have to go to London for a few days, maybe a week, to visit my daughter in Kensington. So, you'll be in the care of my housekeeper, Pani Maria. She's a lovely woman but she can be a tad ... brusque. And she doesn't speak English."
"I'm sure I'll survive."
Vin's neighbor, lost in the throes of delirium tremens, babbled what sounded like a rosary. Krol glanced over at him and sat on the bed's corner.
"Have you remembered anything else?" he asked, his voice low.
Vin closed his eyes.
I see green skies and vast oceans. Stretches of emerald jungle so pristine it makes my heart ache. Whole cities carved from black basalt, and a people, both loving and warlike, with faces like mine ...
"Nothing," he said.
"Your first few days you babbled to me about being from Venus. Do you remember? I've chalked it up to post-amnesic delusions. Still, there's a real mystery here." Krol gestured toward Vin's wrist, encircled with an elaborate, ruby-studded gold bracelet. "Whoever tried to kill you left that attached. It must be worth a small fortune."
Vin regarded the jewellery. It felt like a part of him. Literally—there appeared to be no way to remove the thing, short of hacking off another limb.
Krol stood up. "In time, perhaps, answers will make themselves apparent. I'll bring you some clothes tomorrow morning and we can drive to Warsaw after lunch."
* * *
The third floor apartment in Warsaw's Praga district was minimalist enough to be Spartan. Krol had told Vin he only stayed in the place when he had to attend medical conferences. His frown suggested he didn't think much of Poland's capital city.
Vin edged his wheelchair over to the bedroom window. Three floors up afforded a view of a small shop sporting a bright green frog logo, a vodka factory that had been converted into a nightclub, and a stretch of bars, including one with a large black tarantula perched above its dark oak doors. Looking at the huge spider, Vin felt a pull at his memory. But it was gone as quickly as it had come.
The street bustled with young people wearing strange clothes and stranger hairstyles. A tall blonde in a black fur coat walked up to the bar with the spider and pressed a door bell. The door opened with a screech of escaping metal music. She slipped inside. Again, Vin felt another jerk of memory.
Krol had told him the history of the Praga district. How it had escaped the bulk of destruction during World War Two, only to later become infested with organized crime. In recent times, however, the neighborhood had been gentrified by waves of art students and trendy media types, although it still had its shadowy corners.
There was a knock at the door.
"Come in," said Vin.
The doorknob rattled. Someone cursed. Rattled the knob again. Vin wrestled his chair over to the door and opened it.
A stooped woman in a red beret and thick fur coat stood grimacing. She clutched two shopping bags in each gloved hand.
"Hello, En-lish man." She handed Vin one of the bags. "Mam na imie Pani Maria."
It took him a moment to register what she'd said. "Vin."
She nodded and wobbled past him toward the Kitchen. Vin tried to follow, alternating first the right wheel, then the left, using his leg to help pull the chair along the floorboards. It was slow going with one hand. Krol had mentioned getting a motorized chair in a couple weeks.
"En-lish man. Here."
Pani Maria's voice called from the dining room. He clunked his way into the sparsely-furnished chamber, where a large window with a balcony overlooked a deserted car park. The old housekeeper had removed her hat to reveal brightly hennaed hair. Vin noticed she had a club foot.
"You same as me." She pointed to her foot. "
Do DNA!
" she said, taking a bottle of vodka and two shot glasses from a small, wooden cabinet. "Let us ... drink."
* * *
He was dreaming.
Water closing over him. Drowning. A chopping sound. The smell of his own skin, burning ...
Vin woke with a gasp. The chopping sound continued for a moment, echoing from someplace below.
He pushed himself out of bed, up onto the nearby crutch. No point trying to fall asleep again. The nightmare would only come slipping back.
He shuffled to the dining room and pressed his face against the cold glass window. A stone wall surrounded the empty car park below. Next to the electronic gates stood a small breeze-block hut, where a uniformed security guard seemed to live. Vin waited, but no further chopping sounds were forthcoming.
He collapsed onto the leather armchair that Pani Maria had placed there for him, along with a small coffee table, a remote, and an ever-present bottle of vodka.
He turned on the TV. After flicking channels for a few minutes, he found an American series about forensic police. Good-looking people stared into test tubes while a short ginger man took his sunglasses off and put them on again. Vin couldn't concentrate on the program. A Polish man was talking over the English dialogue, translating, making it more annoying than anything else.
He turned back to the window. There were scraping sounds, now. The fat security guard had emerged from his hut, shovelling a path through the snow. It seemed to be an obsession for him.
Vin poured a shot of vodka and watched as the fat man went back to his concrete hut and pushed a large metal barrel out into the car park. The guard seemed to take forever rolling the barrel toward a black van with darkened windows.
Something about the way the barrel
clanged
when set down struck Vin as familiar. His head started to throb. Next to the vodka was a bottle of sleeping tablets Krol had given him. He dry-swallowed two and felt a pleasant drifting sensation only minutes later.
Drifting ...
His eyes snapped open. The golden bracelet burned against his wrist.
In the car park below, the fat man had opened the van's rear doors and was loading another barrel into the back. It could have been a trick of distance, or the pills, but Vin swore he glimpsed a pale arm hanging over the barrel's side, just before the doors shut.
* * *
The world outside the dining room's balcony had fallen into comfortable routine.
Every morning, just past six, a tall man with long black hair took breadcrumbs from a plastic bag and threw them in the air. Black birds darted down from the car park's wall, where they had been lined up like notes on sheet music. The birds flew toward the tall man, landing on his balcony and sometimes him. His bellowing laugh echoed around the park.
After the birds dispersed, the man waved to Vin and went back into his apartment.
"Composer," said Pani Maria, with a disapproving grin. "He—" she flicked through her battered Polish-English dictionary. "He genius. Crazy."