“Here,” Madame Vyrubova said, softly, “take this.” She handed Ana some of the white roses. And then, after her mother and father and sisters had cast their own into the open grave, Ana dropped hers, too, watching the petals flutter like snowflakes onto the lid of the coffin.
“I am no longer among the living,” Rasputin had said on that Christmas night.
But even now, even here, some part of Anastasia did not believe it.
Chapter 22
Lying in his sleeping bag on the floor of the cave, Harley checked the time on his cell phone. The phone reception was for shit — what would you expect from a cave on an island in the middle of nowhere? — but the clock told him it was 8 A.M.
And that meant it was high time to get this damn show on the road.
After they’d run the Kodiak aground the night before, Harley and his two next-to-useless assistants had off-loaded their supplies onto the skiff and laboriously toted them up the side of the sloping cliff and into the first cave that looked relatively safe and dry. They had left an LED light burning atop a crate all night, and looking around now, Harley saw the ration boxes and knapsacks stacked against the craggy stone walls, along with the shovels, spades, and, leave it to Russell, three cases of beer. Judging from the sound of his snoring, Russell was still sleeping off the cold ones he’d already drunk. Harley crawled out of his sleeping bag, kicked Eddie to wake him up, then, bending to keep from banging his head on the low ceiling, went to the mouth of the cave; they’d stretched a tarp between two crates to keep out the wind. Batting the tarp aside, he looked out on the cold, dark morning and the seawater frothing in the tide pools at the foot of the cliff. The boat was still marooned on the rocks, advertising their presence on the island, but at least it was stranded as far from the old Russian colony as it could get. Harley would have liked to find a hideout farther from the boat, just in case the Coast Guard ever came along and spotted it, but he knew that if he’d asked Eddie and Russell to hump the supplies any deeper into the woods, he’d have had a mutiny on his hands.
“What the hell time is it?” Eddie said, burrowing deeper into his bag to escape the cold blast from the entrance.
“Time to get up and get going.”
“Take Russell.”
But Harley had already decided to let Russell sleep it off. After the brawl that had erupted on the boat, he was wary of having the two of them along — especially on this first reconnaissance mission. He didn’t know exactly what was out there, and a loose cannon like Russell could wind up proving a liability. Plus, he wanted to cover some serious ground.
After they’d both eaten some canned Army surplus meals that Harley had picked up at the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe, they stepped out onto the rocky ledge. Harley had strapped a twelve-gauge shotgun on his back and wedged a can of bear mace — made from concentrated red chili peppers — in his pocket. Over one shoulder he carried a spade; Eddie had a pickaxe. As they marched off, he had an unfortunate image of the seven dwarfs heading off into the woods.
Fifty feet in, and it started to feel even more like that damn fairy tale. The island itself was small, but forbidding. Densely forested with spruce and hemlock and alder, the ground was rocky and uneven and lightly dusted with snow, with a lot more to come if the weather reports were true. The prickly spines of devil’s club bushes snatched at their sleeves, and one of them even pulled Eddie’s stocking cap off his head. He had to stop and snatch it back, then, out of sheer annoyance, he broke the twig off and stomped on it.
“You sure it’s dead?” Harley said.
“Fuck you,” Eddie replied. “You have any idea where you’re going, by the way, or are we just out for a hike?”
It wasn’t a bad question. Harley had only the vaguest sense of where the colony lay ahead, and he figured the graveyard had to be part of it. “If we keep to a fairly straight course, we’re bound to hit it,” Harley said, turning around and cutting through some brush. He purposely made plenty of noise as he went since bears were partial to thickets like these, and a startled grizzly was a pissed grizzly. At this time of year, it was unlikely he’d stumble across any of them foraging for food — normally they’d be hibernating in their dens, or, if they were really lucky, the hollow core of a big old cottonwood tree — but it was better to be noisy than sorry, he figured.
Wolves, however, were another matter. Wolves were always on the move, year-round, scavenging dead carcasses, and hunting fresh prey — young caribou or unwary moose. Only on rare occasions had they been known to hunt man, and the one thing Harley had been taught was that you never ran from them. If confronted, you stood your ground, shouted, threw rocks, anything. Running was an invitation to be chased by the whole pack, though who knew how the black ones that inhabited this island — known to be a peculiar lot — would behave. There were all kinds of tales about them. Sailors told stories about seeing them lined up on the cliffs at night, looking across the strait toward Siberia, their muzzles raised, howling in unison. And a couple of hunters from Saskatchewan who had set out to bag a few never showed up again. Their kayak washed up a few weeks later, holding a bloodstained pair of gloves and a wooden paddle that looked like it had been nearly gnawed in half.
At the time, even though the two hunters were presumed dead, there had been some talk of mounting a rescue mission. But nobody had wanted to volunteer, and Nika, the newly elected mayor, had seemed perfectly okay to let things stand. It was almost like she was on the side of the damn wolves.
For another hour or so, they plowed through the forest, the evergreens towering high overhead, and just as Harley was beginning to fear he’d gone off course, he spied a clearing through the trees — and just beyond it, the timbered wall of a stockade. A wall that had fallen into considerable disrepair, its logs listing to one side or the other like misaligned teeth. To Harley’s relief, there was even a ragged gap large enough to offer easy entry to the colony grounds.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Eddie said, coming as close to a compliment as Harley was ever likely to get.
And given the ghoulish nature of the work they were planning, Harley wondered for a moment if it wasn’t true.
“Is that their church?” Eddie said, and Harley, too, lifted his eyes to the crumbling onion dome that rose on the other side of the wall.
“Guess so,” he said. “And just as long as they’re not holding any services, it’s fine with me.”
The truth was — and despite the jokes — the whole place was still giving Harley a very uneasy feeling, not that he would ever confess anything like that to Eddie. For years, he had heard stories about the old Russian colony, and that was all before he’d been washed up on the beach that night and nearly lost his left foot to that leaping wolf … or glimpsed a flash of that yellow lantern sailors used to talk about spotting. But he had never imagined himself standing in the dark, frigid morning air, with a spade in his hand, about to enter the abandoned colony itself.
“Come on, man,” Eddie said, shouldering past him with his pickaxe cradled like a musket against his shoulder. “Let’s get this over with.”