Poe (31 page)

“Okay, Dimitri,” says Lisa, trying to pull me away from the fire. “We’ve gone from catharsis to borderline insanity. Come back from the edge.”

I hear her faintly but grab the last of the pages and stuff them in roughly while black smoke starts to drift from the hearth, too much for the chimney to handle. Now Lisa forcefully pulls me back.

“My father,” I whisper and start laughing. I’m not sure why, but I can’t stop.

Lisa grabs my face and turns it to hers. She looks so serious, and that strikes me as hysterically funny. Even the tears in my eyes are funny to me. I wipe them away with the back of my sleeve.

“You know it was the first time they were coming to see me? Almost four years in college, and they’d never visited.” My chest shakes with laughter, and the room starts to tilt.

She wipes my forehead, like I’m a fevered child. “You do love me, right?” Lisa asks. “You said that last night, that you loved me.”

Oh Christ, she heard that?
It’s like someone just dumped a bucket of cold water over my head—I’m instantly serious. “You were supposed to be asleep.”

“I wasn’t
that
asleep,” she says.

“And?” I ask quietly. An owl hoots in the distance.

She rubs the back of my neck with her calming hand. “And I can honestly say that if your father wasn’t proud of you, then fuck him.”

I close my eyes. It feels good just to hear the words “fuck him” in the same sentence with the word “father.” I lean in, let my forehead touch hers. “And?”

She knows what I mean. “And I guess love you too.”

I lightly kiss her lips, reach my hands behind her back, and stroke the skin that’s warm from the fire. “And?”

“What, are you deaf?” says Lisa breathlessly. “I just said I love you.”

I pull her to me, jubilant, and explore the soft arc of her neck with my lips. “I know,” I say. She tastes like a lovely addiction. “Say it again.” I pull her sweater up over her head. Outside the wind rattles the panes.

“I love you,” whispers Lisa, running her hands through my hair.

Together we fall to floor and let everything that needs to burn, burn.

CHAPTER TWENTY: THE CABIN

I
t’s night. I’m in a thicket of enormous trees. There’s a small log cabin in front of me, and a warm glow shines from its sole window. A large brown horse snuffles under the shadow of an eave; it’s tied to a pole, and its head hangs low, somber. Beside it is a sleigh, and I see something that chills my heart—a small body covered with a red cape. A tiny bluish hand dangles from the sleigh’s edge, miniature icicles hanging from its fingers.

“No,” I whisper to myself. “Not here, not now.”

I’m alone. Or not. By the sleigh, partially hidden in the shadow, is a familiar figure.

Poe.

I close my eyes. Christ, she’s followed me. Why can’t she leave me the fuck alone? I will myself to wake up—I try to find the thread that will lead me back to consciousness, to the sleeping bag on the floor, to Lisa—but when I open my eyes the cabin is still there. The wind blows a sprinkling of snow off the roof. From inside the cabin come the soft, repetitive tones of voices chanting.
Russian
voices.

Now she’s got me hooked. And even though I know that on a certain dangerous level I’m being manipulated for reasons I still don’t understand, I quietly approach the front door.

The chanting instantaneously stops. Suddenly the door swings open, and a boy who looks about ten stands in the doorway. His clothes—gray handwoven pants and a thick, roughly sewn white shirt—are drenched with water. He doesn’t see me—instead he
looks through me out into the dark wood, like he’s scanning for an intruder.

“No one is there,” he says to someone inside. There’s something strange about his speech. The lilt is unmistakably familiar, just like my father’s, but the words themselves are completely foreign, although I understood him perfectly well.

In my dream I can understand Russian?

“Good,” says an old and weary voice in the same thick Russian. “Then shut the door before more trouble comes.”

Guess that’s my cue.

The boy reaches out to shut the door, and I nimbly step past him into the small one-room cabin. A bit of scattered snow follows.

The planks of the cabin look hand-hewn, and from the beams hang a variety of dried flowers, plants, and leaves neatly tied with coarse string. On top of a narrow, rustic table is a flickering candle, a wooden bowl and pestle, a few odd-looking roots, and glass jars filled with ground herbs.

And in the center of the room is a taller boy tied to a bed with thick straps of leather that bind his hands and feet. He appears to be unconscious. His fevered flesh is pale and sweaty, and his eyes are closed. A weary-eyed man sits next to him on a simple wooden stool. He wears the same woolen pants, a roughly woven white shirt, and his brown hair and beard are flecked with gray. The smaller boy walks over to the crackling fireplace, which snaps an occasional spark as the logs gently burn. Water from his clothes drips onto the floor, and a small pool gathers near his feet. He holds out his hands to warm them.

The man coughs, and something on his hand catches a glint of firelight. The ring. My
father’s
ring. For a moment I can’t breathe.

The man turns and beckons for the small boy to approach. The boy swallows but does as he’s told.

“Rasputin, this isn’t your fault. It is
mine
,” says the man gravely.

Rasputin’s eyes fill with tears.

“It was not Dmitri who drowned your sister. It was the demon inside him, a demon he called because he read the books. I should have taught him years ago. If I had, he would have known then how dangerous they can be. I will not make that mistake with you. Do you understand?”

The boy nods his head mutely.

“Bring them to me.”

The boy crosses over to a wooden trunk. He lifts out two battered books, both bound in rough calfskin, and reverently hands them to the old man.

“These are old books, Rasputin, very old. So old we don’t even know where they came from. But my father gave them to me to safeguard.”

He gently opens one of them. “I want you to promise me something. That you too will safeguard them when it’s your time. That you will never share their knowledge with anyone but your
own
children.”

“I promise,” whispers Rasputin.

“We use our knowledge of spirits to help people, to heal them, and I will teach you how to be a healer like me. We can do
wondrous
things, my son. But there are good
and
bad spirits that haunt this world. Remember the man who saved you?”

The boy nods solemnly.

“He looked like a man, but really he was a good spirit in the man’s body. The man died of a fever. And when I couldn’t save his body, I called a good spirit, Nachiel, to come help protect our family.”

“He didn’t protect Maria!” blurts the boy.

“He tried. But he was too far away when Dmitri said the words that conjured another spirit, a bad one. Too late for your sister, but he was able to save
you
from being drowned.”

“And Dmitri,” whispers the boy.

The old man drops his head then, a wave of grief obviously overcoming him. Dmitri moans softly and turns his fevered head to the other side of the pillow.

“And Dmitri,” says the boy more firmly. “It wasn’t him that tried to drown me. It was a bad spirit from the bad book.”

“Yes,” says the old man quietly. He raises his head and looks at Rasputin closely. “The bad one called Sorath. He hates our family. Do you know why?”

The boy shakes his head.

The old man raises his hand, holding out the finger with the ring. “
This
is why. I’m going to tell you something now, something that’s hard to believe. When my father gave this ring to me, he told me he was
two hundred years old
.”

The boy sucks in his breath.

“And I know he was telling the truth, because
I
have walked this earth now for one hundred and fifty years.”

“How?” the boy whispers.

The man slowly runs a hand through his beard, as if he’s looking for how to begin. “A long time ago, before my father was born, or his father’s father, a healer in our family conjured a demon, Sorath, and made a trade. If Sorath stole into the Garden of Eden and brought back a bit of apple from the Tree of Knowledge and a twig from the Tree of Eternal Life, he would be given the body and soul of the healer’s daughter, who was very beautiful and very good.”

Rasputin edges closer, his eyes wide.

“But after Sorath returned and handed over the twig and piece of apple, he discovered that the daughter had died during the night and her soul had passed on—she’d been very ill, but the healer had hidden it from Sorath. The man had known when he’d made the pact that she wouldn’t live much longer than a day. Sorath was enraged, but the man had the twig and the apple, so he couldn’t be killed and he couldn’t be tricked—he now possessed powers that made him the equal of any spirit, good or bad. The man forged a special ring, preserving the twig within the band, and he took an ordinary red stone, carved out its center, and placed the small piece of apple inside. So the ring has two special qualities. The twig from the Tree of Eternal
Life makes the wearer immortal as long as he wears it. The apple from the Tree of Knowledge gives the wearer the ability to communicate with the spirit world, a world where he can see the past and sometimes the future. He can even slow the effect of time for the ones he loves so that they don’t age as other people do. That’s why Sorath hates us.”

The boy hesitantly holds his own finger over the stone.

“
But
!”

The boy instantly draws his hand back like he’s been burned.

“Immortality is not always a gift. Sometimes it feels like a curse. Especially when death comes for the people you love. And the spirit world is dangerous for humans. You can’t see them, but they can see
you
. And sometimes bad ones want to do you harm.”

“But you can get rid of the bad spirits?” asks the boy softly. “Make them go away. Right?”

“Yes. With the books and the help of a good spirit, I can almost always get rid of the bad one. But when you have to touch the dark soul of a demon, it leaves its mark on you. And that’s what Sorath really wants, in the end. For one of us to turn… to become
like
him.”

“I’ll
never
be like him.”

The man smiles grimly. “That’s good, Rasputin. I know you won’t. But there’s something else, too. Something that will be hard for you to hear. Usually, when a bad spirit possesses someone so close to our family, someone we love…” He takes a deep breath, and his own eyes tear up. “Usually when I make the bad spirit go away, it kills the body as it leaves.”

“
No
!”

The man grips Rasputin firmly by the shoulders. “I
could
do nothing,” he says, his own voice cracking, “but it wouldn’t be Dmitri. It would never be your brother. It would be a monster, and it would kill and kill again to gain more strength, more power. Maria was just the first. If we don’t perform the exorcism, it will say anything—
do
anything—to claim five more souls. And then I wouldn’t be
able
to make it leave. A demon that murders six within the cycle of one moon is invincible.”

The boy wrests himself from his father’s arms and backs away, sobbing. “No! I don’t want the books! I don’t want the ring! They’re Dmitri’s; he’s the oldest!”

“Son,” says the old man.

“
They’re Dmitri’s
!” the boy screams. He bolts out of the house into the dark woods, sobbing. I watch the shadows gather behind him, until he’s disappeared entirely.

Then I hear footsteps behind me. I turn and find a thin, reedy man, also wearing wet, roughly sewn clothes, solemnly standing in the doorway, a knitted cap in his hands.

“Should I find him?” he asks softly.

“Let him go, Nachiel. He needs time,” says the old man with a quavering voice. “And we have a long, hard night ahead of us.”

He reaches for one of the jars, slowly pinches out what looks like a bit of black ash, and bends over Dmitri, using his thumb to spread a thick line across the boy’s forehead.

Suddenly Dmitri awakens with a howling scream. His eyes bulge, and his body begins to seize wildly, straining against the straps that bind him. Nachiel quietly shuts the door behind him.

The man opens one of the calfskin books. “Let us begin.”

A hand reaches out for my arm, startling me, and I turn to see Poe behind me, her eyes fierce with a burning, luminous intensity. She leans in toward me and softly whispers in my ear.

“
Say my name
.”

The words hang like vapor, then burst into flakes of snow, creating a whirlwind—a blinding white arctic storm that stings my face and my eyes. Poe grips my arm so tightly that it feels like she could break the bone.

But I pull hard against her. “No,” I want to say. “I need to know what happens next. If the boy survives.”

But then I remember what I learned from the book
Rasputin: Mad Monk or Mystic Prophet?

He doesn’t.