‘He’s in there,’ said Dmitry. Aleksei looked down and saw his son nodding towards the Beautiful Gate. There was a thud as a booted foot hit wood and the doors swung open, revealing Kyesha leaning casually against the side of the small alcove.
‘Best if you don’t come any closer, I think, Aleksei,’ he said. ‘I can’t kill you but you do seem to have a strong urge to kill me. It seems your son must be my protection.’ The threat was clear. Aleksei stood still in the doorway, opposite Kyesha.
‘This is none of his concern,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t even know what you are.’
‘Then perhaps he should learn,’ said Kyesha, stepping forward, out of the sanctuary. From somewhere deep within him Aleksei felt a sense of relief that that holiest of places was no longer sullied by the voordalak’s presence. ‘Although you yourself did not recognize my nature the first time you saw me,’ continued Kyesha.
‘I had an inkling,’ he replied. ‘It’s only taken me a few days to be certain.’
‘A few days?’ Kyesha expressed both surprise and disdain. ‘You still don’t remember me, do you, Aleksei Ivanovich?’
‘You’re not Maks’ brother, I know that. He was only a child when he died.’
‘What the hell are you two talking about?’ interjected Dmitry. He was still incapable of movement, but his weight was taken by his coat under his arms, so he was quite able to breathe and speak.
‘I think perhaps a little demonstration would assist you both,’ said Kyesha. He glanced around the chapel. Near him was a tall iron stand topped with three candles, none of them lit. Strips of flat, black-painted metal added some decoration. He took hold of one of these and tore it away. The iron was thin, and Aleksei might have been able to achieve the same with his own hands, but only after minutes of twisting and turning the metal.
The jagged, raw edge glistened clean in the candlelight. Kyesha sat down on the stone step in front of the iconostasis and placed his left hand out in front of him, splaying his fingers wide apart against the cold stone. In his right hand, he raised the iron shard above his head and paused. He glanced first at Dmitry, then at Aleksei, smiling as he brought his arm down, and not even looking where it fell.
Dmitry’s gasp was just audible above the clang of metal against stone. In front of the iconostasis, Kyesha’s little finger lay a few inches from the rest of his hand. His blood had already begun to soak into the stone. Kyesha moved his hand a little, then turned to Aleksei once again.
‘One’s not enough though, is it, Aleksei?’ Aleksei shook his head. Kyesha raised the improvised blade again.
‘He’s mad!’ whispered Dmitry.
Kyesha’s arm came down. This time there was no sound but the chime of the metal, like a hammer on an anvil. Two fingers now sat on the step, in full view of the altar through the still open doors of the Beautiful Gate, as though part of some pagan sacrifice from a thousand years before.
Kyesha held up his left hand and showed it to Aleksei, the palm facing towards him. Aleksei raised his own hand in a similar gesture, the three fingers and two stubs an almost perfect match for Kyesha’s. Aleksei saw the blood dribbling down across Kyesha’s palm, and felt the warmth of his own as if it were flowing down from the stubs of his fingers, even though they had not bled like that for fifteen years.
Kyesha’s message to Aleksei was completed, but he still had more to show Dmitry. He stood and took a step towards him. He was close enough for Dmitry to reach out and grab him, but the shock seemed to have calmed Dmitry into inaction. Kyesha held his wounded hand close up to the young man’s face, so that the blood dripped down on to his coat. Even though Aleksei knew well what he was about to witness, still he gazed in fascination at the bloody mess Kyesha had inflicted upon himself.
And even as he did so, Kyesha’s fingers began to regrow.
CHAPTER IX
DMITRY HAD LONG SINCE GIVEN UP STRUGGLING. HE HAD caught a glimpse of movement in the central chapel and had stepped inside. After that, he’d had but a moment to resist Kyesha’s attack. A heavy blow to his chest had lifted him off his feet and propelled him towards the wall. He had seen Kyesha’s face in front of him – calm, almost irritated – and seen his own sword raised in Kyesha’s right hand, poised to strike. As the blade started to fall, Dmitry had closed his eyes and begun a silent prayer he doubted he would ever finish. He felt the impact of the blow and wondered momentarily why he had experienced no pain, before opening his eyes to realize what had happened.
It was after his father’s arrival that events had taken their strangest turn. The conversation between Aleksei and Kyesha about Uncle Maks’ dead brother had been confusing enough, but it was Kyesha’s act of self-mutilation that caused a coldness to sweep through Dmitry’s body, as though his blood had frozen. He felt vomit rising in his throat and forced himself to swallow it back down. He heard a voice speak briefly and suspected it might have been his own.
As the second finger was severed, Dmitry realized what it was that Kyesha was doing – imitating the wounds Aleksei had carried for so long that Dmitry could not remember a time before them. But whatever reason Kyesha might have to mimic Dmitry’s father, how could it possibly be so important as to bring about such a deformation? Aleksei’s reaction, as far as Dmitry could tell, had been one of realization and distant recognition, as though the matching disfigurements to their hands marked a common membership of some secret society. Was this some perverse evolution of Freemasonry, in which the covert handshakes that marked one member out to another had been abandoned as unsafe – too easily copied by the uninitiated? Had they developed a handshake that could not be so easily reproduced, since it required the hand itself to be a shape no normal man could – would want to – achieve? Aleksei had always said that it was the Turks who had cut off his fingers, as part of a horrendous torture in a Bulgarian gaol, but had that been a subterfuge? Had Aleksei once inflicted those wounds upon himself as part of the same brutal initiation ceremony? It was unthinkable, and yet it was only when Aleksei had witnessed what Kyesha had just done that he seemed at last to understand him.
Kyesha had not lingered in showing Aleksei the sign of their newly created bond. He had turned and begun to approach Dmitry. Dmitry stared, fascinated, at the bloody wounds. He remembered the sensation he had experienced as a boy when examining his father’s hand, by then healed – to the extent it ever could be. In his youthful innocence he had felt no sense of revulsion, but now, as an adult, having learned to fear what is abnormal and faced with the sight of mangled bone and sinew through smeared blood, he felt nausea.
But through it, he was still alert enough to wonder why Kyesha was making such a point of showing the wounds to him. They were a message for his father surely, who understood their meaning, where Dmitry could only speculate. Then it dawned on him. Was he too to be initiated that night? Would his own two fingers be joining Kyesha’s down there on the altar steps? Pinned as he was against the wall, he would be unable to resist, but his father would protect him – he would never stand by and allow such an act to be perpetrated on his son. Or would he? Freemasons were usually more than keen that their sons should join the fraternity. Aleksei carried his scars with pride – mightn’t he want the same for his son? He had learned that the pain was something that could be endured. Didn’t the Jewish father happily watch as his baby son was physically marked out as one of the faithful, however cruel the ceremony might seem to outsiders?
But there was a difference between Dmitry and his father. Even when he had them, had Aleksei made any real use of those two fingers on his left hand? Had he spent hours a day practising trills in the bass, so that with those two fingers he had the dexterity and control most men would only dream of possessing with ten? For Aleksei, the loss was an inconvenience, but for Dmitry, it might almost be better to have his tongue cut out.