Skeletons (4 page)

Victor pulled at the cane, getting it halfway down before it was caught by kicking, falling bodies above. Another face stared down at us, pressed against the grate, shouting painfully, "Help me!"

Victor tried to work the cane free, then suddenly broke it in half.

"It will have to do," he said.

I stood looking at the face crushed against the grate above.

"Help me, help me...."

"There's nothing we can do," Victor said, drawing me away.

Reluctantly, I turned and followed him to the grate under the stage.

"Now up on my shoulders again, and push it open with this," he said, putting the broken cane in my hand. "It should be long enough."

I mounted his shoulders again and pushed at the grate, which immediately rose up. It slipped once, but the second time I was able to work it to the side, snugging the end of the cane into the middle of the grating and making an opening.

"Now's the hard part; I'll have to boost you to get you through," Victor said.

"What about you?" I asked.

He was silent for a moment. "I'll have to go back to the tomb. I'll watch you work your magic from the crowd."

I reached down to take his hand. "You're a good man, Victor
Volokovsky
. But I have to warn you, I don't think there's anything I can do."

"You will try."

"I'll try, yes, but—"

He smiled, squeezing my hand firmly then letting it go. "I know," he said. `But I'm proud you took my bus.”

“I'm proud to know you, Victor."

"Go," he said.

He boosted me up off his shoulders, holding my legs up with his strong hands while I grasped and then held the top of the grating hole. I pulled myself out. When I looked down, he had already gone. I heard his retreating footsteps down the tunnel.

I was indeed under the stage; and there, unbelievably, was Jon Roberts when I emerged, pacing in front of a shrinking cordon of soldiers, the still-clear stage behind him.

"My God, I don't believe it!" he said, hugging me. "Where—"

"There's no time," I said. "Are any of the guest speakers still here?"

"Gone," he said. "They fled when the first shooting started. They were sure the Soviets had decided to turn this into another
Tienanmen
Square. I still don't know what the hell's going on. But I decided to stick it out. There's all kinds of rumors, but the army guys look as scared as anybody." He laughed. "Some jerk even said the place was surrounded by zombies."

Before I could answer, he went on. "Look," he said, taking hold of my arm and steering me toward the steps leading up to the stage, "I think I've got the main mike working now. You're the only one who can calm them down, Peter."

Another mortar round went off, landing on the far side of the square. Jon flinched, then looked hard into my face. "Do it," he said.

Never feeling more helpless, or more false in my thirty-five years, I walked slowly to the center of the stage, watching Jon until he had checked a group of cables, finding two he wanted and connecting them, and gave me a signal.

"Please," I said. Immediately there was some reaction from the crowd in front of me. Eyes turned to the stage. Miraculously, the shelling had stopped. The wave of attention spread, and now I felt that rush of purpose I had so often felt before crowds, a Svengali-like power, sweep through me and over them. Much of the screaming stopped, and I saw people bend to help their neighbors up.

"Please help those beside you," I said.

The injured were carried toward the back of the crowd. Miraculously, there was near silence.

"Today was to be a great day—" I began. But that was as far as I ever got, for up around us on the buildings and Kremlin wall surrounding Red Square I saw a horrible sight. A line of white skeletons, shoulder to shoulder, rose as one. Now the meaning of the cessation of shelling became evident.

The army had been defeated.

Jon ran to me across the stage. "Peter—" he said, then looked up. "My God, what is it? Is this some sort of joke?" He put his hand on my shoulder, and at that moment a shot rang out. I even saw the rifle from which it came, the puff of smoke from the barrel of a gun borne by a skeleton directly across the square.

I felt a splash against my face and was sure I was hit. But in an instant of recognition I realized that it was Jon's blood that had hit me. His eyes were wide with surprise even as he collapsed, the lower part of his face torn away. He said nothing and dropped, falling from the stage.

I had seen death before, had seen it worse than this. But now I was paralyzed. The crowd had yet to react, and I knew I must say something to them, stand here even if it meant my life. But even as the words froze in my throat there was a sound from behind and above me. I, along with all the others in the square, turned my attention to the balcony of the Kremlin, from where so many Soviet leaders had reviewed their troops and spoken to their people. A loud, booming voice, a Russian voice, now came from there, commanding attention.

"Silence!"

An instant thought went through me: that this was, after all, a trick of the Soviet establishment; that all of these skeletons rising from their graves were tricks of technology, weapons to defeat the democratization we all, Jon and I and all the others who professed so highly to believe in it, thought was inevitable here and all throughout the world. Perhaps the totalitarian regimes had their own plans. Power does not pass easily, the saying goes; though it resides in the heart, its manifestations can be in the softness of blankets and pillows or in the hardness of steel. Was this, then, a trick, a weapon?

I looked up, and waited.

The balcony seemed to be empty. Around it the tops of buildings in Red Square were thick with rows of skeletons, bearing weapons. I saw a battery setting up a mortar in one spot, and other large guns being readied. In my heart I began to be sick, and knew the words I would say now when the time came.

"
Silence
!" came the commanding Russian voice again.

And then, at the edge of the balcony, leaning out over the crowd stiffly, appeared a ghost from history.

It was Lenin himself. On quick examination he was a skeleton like all the others, but the more one looked, the more that faint shroud I had noticed on the bony figure in the potato field became defined and visible. Like a ghostly etching on the air around the skeletal figure, the features of Lenin appeared: the sharp beard, the piercing stare, the hard face and clenched fist. It was a skeleton holding Lenin's body opaque as air around it.

"Listen to me, bourgeoisie!" he shouted. His voice rang out around the square with booming authority from every loudspeaker. The huge crowd was electrified by fear and shock.

The skeleton raised its clenched fist and leaned out farther over them. "A new struggle has begun! Let there be no mistake! The proletariat will triumph, the worker will triumph, the masses will triumph! The comfortable bourgeoisie will be trampled into the ground. All workers will share in the blessings! The worker is the state—the state is the worker! A new day has dawned in the world order—
let there be no mistake
!"

The skeletal fist came down hard on the balcony. Lenin turned away briefly. He motioned behind him, then turned back to face us. When he spoke again, the voice was lower, but just as hard.

"This is the price of the old—the bill has come due!"

Four human bodies appeared on the edge of the balcony, thrashing. As they were thrown over, and as the ropes attached to their necks brought them up short, kicking as they hung, I recognized them as the top Soviet leadership—among them the head of the KGB, the foreign minister, the head of the army in his uniform, and the premier, who was to speak before me today. Though I had seen its like before, it was a sickening display, four bodies kicking their life away yards below the very spot where they had held such high sway for so long.

Lenin leaned down to look at them until the bodies were still. Then his hard fist went up again.

"This, then, is the price of defiance!" The white skull's jaw split into a monstrous grin, mirrored faintly on the shroud of Lenin's ghostly features. He held up his hands to the skeletons surrounding the square.

"Destroy them all! Let them join the masses!"

Gunfire erupted. I ignored the bullets hitting the stage around me, took the microphone, and shouted, "Please!
 
Watch your neighbor! If you watch your neighbor, you will stay calm!"

Only the word "Please" got out before the microphone went dead, and I saw a skeleton holding the severed halves of the mike's cable as another aimed a rifle at my head. I was sure the shroud surrounding the skeleton who had broken the cable held Jon Roberts's features.

I dropped to my knees as the shot sounded. Now, out in the crowd were many skeletons who had moved in from the streets. Mortar rounds went off in all directions. The air was filled with smoke and screaming.

I crawled from the stage and dropped to the square. A woman lay at my feet, a bullet hole neatly over her left eye. As I stared at her the skin and features of her face began to fall away to dust, revealing the white skull beneath. All of her body melted away; I saw her ankles above her shoes become white bones. Faintly, her former features came into ghostly view around the bones, and I saw the shadow of her real eyes blink open as the polished skull turned its eye sockets on me and the jaw clacked open.

"Kill him!" she shouted, reaching her bony hands up at my throat. "Kill him!"

I jerked away as she rose. Her clothing clung to the just-glimpsed ghost of her body. In direct light, though, even this close, it looked like a movie skeleton was wearing those clothes.

"Kill him!" she screamed, leaping at me. I felt the pressing tingle of her ghostly hand, then the rub of a bony finger on my neck. I pushed back into the crowd, turned, and ran away from her. Almost immediately I ran into another skeleton, who swung a rifle butt at my head. I jerked away from it and found myself back near the stage.

"All of them!" Lenin shouted. I looked up through a clearing in mortar smoke and saw the communist leader turn away. Below the balcony the four dead human bodies had turned to writhing skeletons. As I watched, the former premier grabbed the rope with his bony hands and pulled the noose from his neck. He began to climb the rope up to the balcony, the other three behind him.

The smoke rolled in. Close by I heard the scream of a man. I reached into the smoke as an arm appeared and pulled the man toward me. It was the old man who had given Victor his cane. He seemed dazed, but unhurt.

"You ..." he said.

"Yes," I said. "Come with me."

I ducked beneath the stage, pulling the old man after me. He was hobbled, but able to move. We went to our hands and knees. In front of me a haze of smoke blew aside, revealing a prone human body, a man in a brown suit and wearing glasses with a bayonet thrust into his neck, beginning to decompose to skeleton.

"Hurry," I said.

We crawled past the body and found the open grate.

I pulled the old man to the hole and lowered him down. "It will be a few feet to jump, so be careful." I let him go, and heard him hit with an
ooof
. Quickly, I followed.

"My cane," he said, picking up the remnant of broken staff that still lay on the floor. "My uncle Mikhail gave me this cane," he said dreamily. "It was of the finest wood."

"We must go," I said.

"My uncle Mikhail—"

I took the cane from his hands. "If we don't go, we will die."

"Perhaps we should," the old man continued dreamily. "Did you know I was a schoolteacher before my pension? Twelve-year-old boys. I taught them history, about Lenin. None of us knew we would live to see Lenin, did we? Perhaps I am asleep. I wonder where my twelve-year-old boys are now." He looked at me pleadingly. "Don't you know how to stop this? Weren't you supposed to do away with Lenin and all of them, bring democracy to the world? What have you done! You've made it worse!" He grabbed at me angrily. "Give me my cane so I can beat you—look what you've done!"

He began to weep, turning away from me in the near dark, back toward the grate opening.

I took him by the shoulders gently and turned him around. "Come with me. It's possible we can escape."

"My boys. Those poor twelve-year-olds, seeing this." For a moment his eyes cleared and he seemed to find reason. "You're right," he said. "We must try to survive."

"Good."

I walked on, at a slower pace than I wished in deference to the old man, who limped behind me. He would not let me help him. I paused at the laddered grate and looked up. A body lay across it, writhing, nearly covering it. Though the screams and explosions were muffled down here, it was not hard to realize that a great battle was taking place above.

I walked on.

When I came to the next grate, I looked back, but the old man was nowhere to be seen. I called out, and heard a muffled gasp somewhere behind me.

I ran back and saw the old man just falling to the ground at the hands of a skeleton, the brown-suited figure I had seen earlier. He had shaken off most of his real clothes, but a torn arm of a shirt still clung around one skeletal arm, and almost comically, his black glasses still clung to the faintness of his features around his skull. He had thrust the bayonet from his own neck into the old man's chest, and now pulled it out as the old man collapsed lifeless to the floor.