Poe Read online

  “My feet are too cold,” says Lisa. “Yours are like icicles, ’cause you never wear boots.”

  “Are not.”

  Lisa reaches over and grabs one of Amelia’s bare feet, tickling the bottom. “Tell the truth.”

  Amelia falls to her side in a peal of giggles, dropping her beans on the wooden floor. “Icy feet, icy feet!”

  “Tell the truth!” says Lisa, laughing and reaching for Amelia’s apparently even more ticklish waist.

  Elizabeth shakes her head ruefully. “A waste of perfectly good beans.”

  It’s astonishing how easy they are with each other, considering. Like there’s a groove they naturally fall into, a congenial warmth. Long ago I convinced myself that happy families are a myth, a construction that only exists in television sitcoms and syrupy Hallmark cards. It was easier to believe no one is happy than to think that maybe I was missing something. And even though I’m still somewhat on the outside looking in, I don’t mind. It’s enough just being this close. I once had to read a story about a man who made a pact with the devil—he gave up his soul in exchange for a clock so he could stop time at the happiest moment in his life. Of course the man couldn’t choose his happiest moment. There was always something to look forward to—falling in love, marriage, the birth of a child—so the man ended up dying before he stopped time.

  I wouldn’t make the same mistake. I’d stop it now, because the truth is I could stay here, like this, forever.

  Everyone’s gone to bed, the logs are comfortably smoldering, I’m in my sleeping bag, and at about page 595 of my novel when I hear a creak on the stairs.

  I look up. Lisa’s standing on the bottom step, holding a red Maglite. She’s wearing an oversized gray sweatshirt and pair of boy shorts. Impossibly sexy as usual.

  “You’re still up,” she says.

  “So are you.”

  She sighs. “Amelia kicks. I’m going to have bruises on my legs in the morning.”

  “I don’t kick.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re in deep shit. Surprised my mom hasn’t manacled you to the floor.”

  “Trust me, I get that.”

  Lisa crosses the room and settles on the floor next to me, hugging her knees. “What are you reading?”

  I blearily rub my eyes with my fingers. “Nothing interesting.”

  “Looks like some kind of manuscript,” says Lisa, peering at the type. “Your novel?”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “I want to read it.”

  Sound effect of screeching cars crashing into each other.

  “Umm, really,” I say as politely as possible. “You know that would actually take days. Days and days. Long, tedious, boring days. Weeks maybe.”

  “That’s completely unfair,” protests Lisa.

  “Life’s not fair.”

  She gives me a look then, a look that sets off more than a few alarm bells, but before I can react she’s grabbed the first two hundred pages. I try to get them back, but she wiggles expertly out of my grasp. I feel like a fourth grader playing keep away.

  “C’mon, give it back.”

  “No, wait,” says Lisa. “I played my drums for you, now I get to read your writing.”

  “Lisa, I’m really not—”

  She shushes me dismissively and settles closer to the warmth of the dying fire, holding her flashlight steady to read. I fall back on the floor, lift a cushion, and mock suffocate myself.

  While I wait for death to come, I wonder why I really brought my novel along—the odds of it containing any factual information about Rasputin are slim. And scanning it again has only confirmed that it’s not the Great American Novel; it’s not even an averagely acceptable novel—no, it’s a thousand-page albatross that I’ve been lugging around for years, like one of those sad patents for mobile bathtubs and gerbil shirts. Lisa reading even a bit of it is excruciating, to say the least.

  “Wow,” she finally says.

  It’s an unqualified “Wow,” the kind of “Wow” you say when a friend has just gotten an irreversible bad perm, because what else can you say when it’s horrible beyond fixing, and there’s nothing to do but wait and let it grow out?

  “I know,” I mumble from beneath the cushion.

  “It doesn’t sound like you. It feels like it was written by someone in their late fifties. ‘Rasputin gazed at the fire; oh, the weight of it, the future, here was the fate of Russia in his hands. Could he heal Alexis, and therefore the nation?’”

  “I wanted it to be serious,” I say defensively.

  “But then later he’s a zombie killing peasants.”

  I groan. “Okay, okay, it’s a thousand-page piece of rambling shit. I admit it. But if I let go, it’s like I wasted two years of my life.”

  “Letting go is part of the artistic process,” says Lisa with the optimism of someone who actually has artistic skill.

  “Well, the process sucks.”

  Suddenly the crackling starts to get louder, and I peek out from under my cushion. Lisa has just tossed a good chunk into the fire.

  “Holy crap!” I jump up and—damn!—burn my hand while trying to rescue it. Who knew cheap paper was so flammable? Snap, crackle, pop; in goes another chunk. “What are you doing?!”

  “I’m liberating you,” says Lisa calmly.

  “The way we liberated Iraq; the way China liberated Tibet? Hey, give me that!”

  Holy mother of God, she’s got about three hundred pages in her hand.

  “Let go,” says Lisa. “It’s time to let go.”

  “Jesus, Lisa,” I say, really irritated now, and I try but fail to wrestle the next chunk away from her. For a relatively small person she’s pretty strong. Or I need to work out more. Or maybe just work out.

  The flames crackle happily like they’re overdosing on speed, and the pages curl before turning to a blackened lump. It’s really kind of beautiful in a sick way. I can suddenly see the attraction of cremation and funeral pyres; there’s no going back once something is burned. It never felt real, on a certain level, the death of my parents. I tossed my scattering of dirt after their coffins were lowered into the ground, but I never saw their faces, and maybe I should have in spite of what Lucy said. She thought I should remember them the way they were—“The accident wasn’t kind” is how she put it—but a part of me never let them go. I reach my hand toward the fire and let it hover over the pages. See how close I can get before I feel the burn.

  “I wanted to make him proud of me, for once,” I say quietly.

  Lisa gently pulls my hand back. “Who?”

  “My father.” Suddenly the heat from the fire seems to jump—I can feel a burning flickering up my arm, reach into my chest, land in my stomach. I grab the next hundred pages and toss them in. It’s amazing how powerful it feels to pass anger and dip into pure, crystalline rage. “My father.” Fuck it, I grab about five hundred pages and jam them in over the rest of the burning mess. Now the flames are wild, they lick at the top of the mantel—they want to escape, these flames, take a walk, transform everything in their path to blackened soot.

  “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

  It’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 c
ouldn’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.”