Dancing With Bears - Michael Swanwick [45]
“What schedule are you talking about? And what’s in that book you’re always looking at?”
“Book? Oh, you mean this thing? Nothing of any importance. Sermons and homilies and the like.” He put a hand flat on a section of brick wall. “Does this seem particularly weak to you?”
“No, it does not.”
“The bricks are soft and crumbly, though. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to give them a try.”
“As you command.” So common had Darger’s demands for demolition become that Pepsicolova had taken to carrying a pry-bar with her, almost like a walking stick. She hoisted it level with the wall and thrust forward hard.
The bar punched straight through the brick. When she drew it back, there was a hole through to a space on the other side. “Enlarge it! Quickly!” Darger urged her. Then, when the hole was big enough, he began tugging and pulling at the bricks himself, yanking them free, until the opening was sufficient for them to clamber through and into the room beyond.
Lanterns first, they entered.
“Look there—books, by God!”
Darger darted forward, excitedly holding up his lantern so he could examine the shelves with their warped and faded contents. Pepsicolova, however, hung back. With horror, she regarded an overstuffed chair, its upholstery half-rotted, and the small, grit-covered reading table at its side. They were not… and she knew they were not… Yet still, they paralyzed her.
Forcing an equanimity she did not feel into her voice, Pepsicolova said, “We’ve broken through into somebody’s basement. One that hasn’t been used for quite some time.” She gestured with her lantern. “See there. The doorway’s been bricked over.”
She did not add, Thank heavens.
“A basement room? Just a basement room?” Darger looked around him bewilderedly. Then he collapsed into the chair. He bowed his head into his hands and was very still.
Pepsicolova waited for him to say something, but he did not. Finally, impatiently, she said, “What is wrong with you?”
Darger sighed. “Pay me no mind. ’Tis but my black dog.”
“Black dog? What on earth are you talking about?
“I am of a melancholic turn of mind, and even a small setback such as this one can strike me with a peculiar force. Do not put yourself out about me, dear heart. I shall simply sit here in the dark, pondering, until I feel better.”
Wondering mightily, Pepsicolova stepped back from the hole in the wall. Darger was a darkness at the center of his lantern’s pool of light, a slumped caricature of despondency. It was clear that he would not move for some time yet to come.
So, with reluctance, Pepsicolova squatted down on her heels just outside the breached room, smoking and remembering. Spycraft and its attendant dangers were her solace, for their perils drove away introspection. Alas, inaction always returned, and with it her thoughts, and among them the memories. Central to which was a basement room with an overstuffed chair and a small reading table.
Afterward, Chortenko was always so serene.
His people had stripped Anya Pepsicolova bare, shaved off all her hair, save only her eyelashes, and then flung her, hands tied behind her back, into a cage in the basement of Chortenko’s mansion. The cage was one of three which Chortenko called his kennels, and it was too low for her to stand up and too short for her to stretch out at full length. There was a bucket that served her as a toilet. Once a day, a dish of water and another of food were slid into the cage. Because her hands were bound, she had to drink and eat like an animal.
If Chortenko’s purpose was to make her feel miserable and helpless, then he succeeded triumphantly. But the conditions were not what made the month she spent in his kennels a living hell.
It was the things she saw him do in that basement room.
Sometimes it was a political prisoner whom he questioned far beyond the point where the man had given up everything he knew and more, forcing the wretched captive into ever greater and