I pushed myself to walk, pass the drapes, and enter into a blackness so thick it pressed into my nose and mouth like fingers. It sucked me into a bell-shaped chamber, a natural cavern with walls that ran with pure water. A plain silver ring was set into the polished black floor, thrumming like a dynamo core. A small woman with her wispy mousy hair up in a twist stood in the center, stripped to the waist, a proud cant to her jaw, neck, and shoulders. In one hand, she held a crescent sickle. In the other, she grasped my father’s head.
“Nikla.” My hands ached. I stepped to the edge of the circle in disbelief, my feet wooden and klutzy. “Mother… you’re dead.”
My mother was a tiny woman, tiny and thin. I looked more like her than I did my father, her prominent cheekbones and the same large, fine-bridged nose. My eyes were the same odd white-gray as my father’s. Nikla’s eyes were the blue of a summer sky, and they blazed with a radiant inner fire.
“Oleksiy.” She uttered my name thickly, stressing it in the way it was actually meant to be spelled, instead of the way I’d learned to write it at school. “It is time for you to choose.”
“I already chose.” My voice rang out, echoing. I tried to move towards her. When my toes touched the silver line, it rippled, halting my advance. “I told Kutkha that I agreed. What else is there?”
She threw the head on the floor in front of me, beyond the threshold of the circle. It landed with a dull crack on the stone.
Grigori Sokolsky was a bulldog of a man, even in death. His violet tongue lolled from behind his teeth. His eyes were missing, torn from his skull, and ichor gushed from the empty sockets. As I watched, Hebrew letters etched themselves across his brow, as if they were being drawn through the pallid flesh with the tip of a knife. אמת. Truth.
“Understanding.” My mother’s voice was as I’d always imagined it, light and dry and sweet. “It X’d me. It wants to X you, too.”
“Ex’d you?” I was rooted to the spot, staring at my father’s head. “Who?”
The black substance that leaked from Grigori’s eyes gurgled, slopping out with sudden force. The Aleph turned to an X. The remaining letters formed a wholly different word. Met. Death.
“DOG is GOD backwards,” my mother said. “They’re coming for you.”
My extremities were buzzing. I took a step backwards. “You need to stop speaking in riddles. I can’t…”
The black stuff was creeping across the floor towards me in slow motion, crawling like a twist of worms. Grigori’s mouth worked, fishlike, and then retched a great ball of the stuff, hacking it onto the marble. The stone was black, but in the presence of the creeping oil, the marble seemed colorful, nuanced and reflective. Wide-eyed, I backpedaled as it reached for me from the ground. The dead man’s skull was beginning to dissolve and wheezed a tiny sigh as it crumpled. Metallic, insectoid things moved around inside the remains, stamping and needling one another as they strove to escape the brood.
“The Hunt.” When I looked up, the woman who had been my mother no longer resembled her. This woman was tall and pale skinned, milk white, her body lean, athletic and androgynous. Her hair was the brilliant white of burning magnesium, falling in a straight liquid pour down her body to her waist. I couldn’t meet her eyes. They were a blue that had never existed in nature, impossible and terrifying. “The Hunt, Alexi, the endless question quest. They will X me. They X’d you!”
The black substance reared and lunged at me as I stumbled back and then fled the room, back through the shrouded entrance and out into the sandstone hallway. It was strung in steely cobwebs, and in them hung chittering, shrieking insects. They had flat matte bodies and gaping pincer maws with needle-thin proboscises.
Let us X you, Alexi… X you X you X you X you X YOU X YOU X YOU X YOU!
I shouted at them wordlessly, covering my head. Things with too many legs fell on me, biting and sucking and feeding. I pulled one from my arm, and it came out with a thin plume of blood. The insect had my father’s face. I crushed it with a snarl, barreling up the stairs. On my way past, I rubbed myself against the walls, the doorway, trying to scrape them off. “Fuck you both! You’re dead! You’re all dead!”
I nearly fell into the room at the apex of the stairs. It was no room I was familiar with in the house of my nightmares. It was long, like a chapel walkway, and candle-lit. At the other end was a crucifix. And I was nailed to it.
He was me, and not me. Bald, tattooed, incredibly powerful in the upper body, his legs withered, but I knew, somehow, that we were one and the same man. This other Alexi was eviscerated, shuddering around long iron spikes driven through his limbs. His mouth had been stuffed with his own intestines. He was chewing them. Slowly.
X you X you X you X you…
“You asked me to tell you everything.” From behind me, a pair of feathered obsidian arms reached around my heaving chest in a surprisingly soft, sensual embrace. Kutkha hooked his obsidian talons painlessly through my chest, all the way to my heart. It didn’t hurt. I felt it penetrate, and a thrill passed through me from nape to tailbone as I stared in fascinated disgust at the scene ahead. “This is the infection, Alexi. It X’d you before… will it X you again?”
I threw myself out of bed in the pitch darkness with a shout, skin still crawling with the sensation of biting insects. I promptly rediscovered my left knee as it buckled and sent me down hard to the floor.
Snarling in pain, I pulled myself up using the edge of the bed and stumbled to the light switch, knife in hand. I’d pulled it from the sheath without realizing what I’d done, clutching it as I recovered in the blurry light, fighting for breath. My forearms and neck were blotchy with hives. Binah was gone, hidden somewhere. “Binah? Vassily?”
There was no reply and no sound. I limped down to the second bedroom and cracked it open to look inside. “Vasya? Vassily?”
Vassily’s room was empty. The air conditioner was off, the room warm and humid. I looked over the rumpled covers and the gathering pile of dirty laundry and felt a stirring of unease in the pit of my gut. A growing sense of wrongness haunted me through the length of the apartment on the way back to the kitchen.
A note had been left on the kitchen table. “Gone to Mariya’s. Don’t fucking kill yourself.”
A tight, unpleasant feeling washed over me, another wave of anxiety-fueled déjà vu that had nothing to do with the note. I had about a second between the kick of intuition and the sound of someone banging heavily on my front door. One, two, three.
My eyes slid across, then down. I was still holding the knife. The silence hung heavily in the house for a thick heartbeat before the pounding resumed.
I knew better than to look through the peephole or open the door on the chain. Someone had already tried to kill me once this week, and I wasn’t about to fall for one of my own tricks: knock on the door, put the muzzle to the wood, and fire two or three times. If the door was thin enough and the gun big enough, it was a cheap way to do a fast job.
I padded down the hall slowly on stocking feet and swung quietly into the doorway of the den. Ducked down. “Who is it?”
For a moment, there was no reply. Then, a thick, wet voice spoke from the other side of the wooden barrier.
“Yuri. Yuri Beretzniy.
Chapter 11
My eyes widened. I knew the man’s voice well enough, but hesitated before I went for the door.
“Hold on, Yuri. Give me… give me a moment,” I called out and backed into the den. I folded the knife back into its grip. It didn’t feel big enough. I needed shoes, a real weapon. A gun. There was a spare pistol in my desk drawer.