[The following is an excerpt from my new novella, Let the Devil In, now available here.]
II
The Rapist
No sooner had Brezhnev returned the Lysenko girl’s bones to her grave and refilled the hole with soil than he was met with a written summons to return to the city. He was being temporarily recalled from his post for jury duty. The trial was due to begin in nine days; jury selection would begin in eight. (Who would notarize documents or dig graves while he was gone?) He phoned in to the city court to ask what the trial was about, thinking that his status as a civil servant might grant him the privilege of some foreknowledge.
Incorrect.
The clerk who answered the call said that there were several trials set to begin that same week, and they were not yet sure which one they would need him for—and even if they were sure, it would have been a matter of the gravest impropriety to tell him.
“Very good,” Brezhnev said before terminating the call.
With nothing to notarize and no bodies to dig up and immolate before the start of jury selection, he had nothing much to do except sit in a chair outside his office/apartment on the western edge of town, rolling cigarettes and drinking vodka and watching the sky. By day, low clouds crawled slowly by. And when night fell, the heavens would mock him with glimpses of unfathomable cosmic opulence. He had no life, our Brezhnev. That is, no woman, no children—not even any pets, other than the stray cats and dogs that sometimes wandered past his door, begging for scraps. And no job worth doing. The city paid him just enough to keep him off the street; not enough to make him attractive to women—even to other lowly civil servants. Sometimes he wished he’d been born a farmer. Or an intellectual. But his father had been a lawyer, a public prosecutor for the city, which fact had somehow doomed Brezhnev to civil service. A trade for which he was not exactly cut out, as proven by his disgrace. And when his father died, the city inherited his wealth, paying the widow, Brezhnev’s mother, a pitiful stipend until she, too, returned to the Earth. The stipend, of course, did not pass on to Brezhnev. They were paying him more than he deserved already! What more did he think he was owed, the ingrate!
Lucky we didn’t throw you in prison to rot!
Yes, he was lucky to be alive and marginally free and employed and to have just enough money left over after buying eggs and bread and coffee for the week to purchase tobacco and rolling papers and bottles of the cheap rotgut vodka that was doubtless destroying his liver as he sat and watched the sky. His older brother had been an alcoholic; he’d drunk himself into the grave by seventeen. And here was Brezhnev, thirty-five?—or was he only thirty-four?—not an alcoholic in the usual sense, merely drinking away the nights of his long disgrace because there was nothing much else to do. (He had plenty of books to read, sent from the city, but nowadays reading made him sleepy, even if he drank coffee while he read.)
The villagers generally treated him like a benign tumor. He was not well-liked enough for any of the young women to make eyes at him. All the better, as these malnourished and inbred women were, without exception, quite hideous. And even if that hadn’t been the case, their minds were all backward and twisted with the abject misery of living—if you could call it that—out on the steppe. A life of raising goats and cattle, planting potatoes and carrots, and brewing vodka in the bathtub. And lying with your cousins.
There wasn’t much violence in the village outside of drunken brawling. Gunshots were reserved for putting down animals. Or for suicide: At least once every other month, one would go off in the night—usually a ruined patriarch who’d had enough—and then there would be another hole for Brezhnev to dig.
And sometimes a drone from the city would fly over, recording the village on video, to make sure that they were all still poor and miserable.
Smiles? Brezhnev hadn’t seen a smile since his exile, when the ruling court-martial had treated him to a sadistic grin while reading off the sentence. (There is true and valid pleasure in purging society of its malcontents.)
He was smart enough to know that jury duty did not likely translate into the end of his exile, but so sick of this village and every other one like it with their shit-paved streets and bedbug infestations and their wurdulaky that he dared to hope returning the correct verdict would put him back into the city’s good graces. Even if he weren’t reinstated in his old position or given a raise, it is better to be a city notary than a village one.
The regional constable came through in his shiny electric car just as Brezhnev was thinking about preparing to make the journey. His name was Crazhnetsyn. He liked Brezhnev, liked to wind him up and put him down. “Is that shit on your face, Leonovich? Jesus, how do you monkeys live out here? Where’s your sister? Have you made an honest woman out of her yet?” He would roll through once every two or three months to make a report, and to forge reports for the months he had missed. He’d park right in front of Brezhnev’s cottage and stand there, looking into the village with distaste as he combed his bushy mustache. “It’s not easy,” he’d complain. “They’ve given me too much territory. Too many monkeys. Full of too much criminality. You keep waiting for these plebs to stop fucking their mothers and join the century. But they’d rather go on raping each other’s horses. And that’s why they can’t have nice things.”
Crazhnetsyn would always bring good vodka—city vodka, made not with potatoes and carrots but with grain. And good tobacco, too, imported, not like the weak country weed Brezhnev was always smoking. This visit was no exception. Crazhnetsyn invited himself inside. Brezhnev joined him at the table, and Crazhnetsyn poured two vodkas and rolled two cigarettes. “What’s the skinny?” the constable asked. “Any murders? Thefts? Rapes? Arsons? How many? Give me the tallies.”
“This isn’t really that kind of village,” Brezhnev reminded him.
“Don’t get defensive, Brezhnev. Christ—you’ve been stuck out here too long. Starting to take a liking to horseshit, are we? Starting to feel like this is where you belong?”
“It’s quiet here. The worst we’ve had are suicides. And we haven’t had one since the last time you were here.”
“Well, you’ve got to give me something. I can’t hand in a report that just says ‘Nothing to report.’ Then they’ll start looking into my activities with real scrutiny. Check my dates against drone footage, check my logged mileage against my odometer—you know the drill. I don’t need that pain in the balls.”
Brezhnev puffed and stared out through the door for a while. “Can’t you just make something up?” he finally asked.
“That would be unethical. How dare you even suggest such a thing? I’m not that kind of constable, Leonovich. There are constables like that all over—and worse—but not me. I’m just overtaxed. Stretched thin, as they say.”
Brezhnev scratched his stubbly chin. “We had a wurdulak.”
Crazhnetsyn looked at him as one would a mentally challenged individual spouting absurdities.
“Well . . . a wurdulak scare, I should say.”
“What daft nonsense. You want me to write that in my report? They’ll put my balls in a vice!”
Brezhnev sighed helplessly. “They had me dig up a little girl to check if she was still in her grave.”
“And . . . was she?”
“Yes. But they hammered a spike through her heart and burned her body anyway, just to be sure.”
“Oh, thank heavens.”
“And I’m happy to report that all wurdulak activity has ceased.”
“These fucking plebs are hilarious,” said Crazhnetsyn. Nevertheless, he made a note of the incident for his report:
Suspected wurdulak.
Little Petra Petrevna Lysenko.
Notary Brezhnev dug up the grave. Body still there.
Townspeople put a stake through the heart and burned the body anyway. Can’t be too safe.
Wurdulak activity ceased—for now.
He was a sarcastic one, this Constable Crazhnetsyn, and he liked to see how much sarcasm he could leak into his reports before his captain would pull him in for reeducation. Brezhnev told him about all the seniors and children that the Blue Death had cut down since his last visit, and he wrote those down too. Then he got up, crossed to the light switch, flicked it up. The light came on. “Just checking whether you still have electricity,” he said. “For the report.”
“It comes and goes,” Brezhnev said. “As long as it holds for winter, no one should freeze to death.”
“That’s the key,” said Crazhnetsyn.
“The key to what?”
The constable sat back down, poured more vodka. “To clearing up all of this . . . superstition. Witches and wurdulaky, goblins and ghouls.”
“Electricity?”
“Bingo.” Crazhnetsyn twirled the ends of his mustache. “Electricity. The more of it, the better. Not enough of it out here on the steppe. When you can turn the light on your own damn self without having to wait for the sun, you can dispel the shadows. Take control of the night. It drives out the fear. And if no one’s afraid anymore, all the little goblins and wurdulaky have nothing to do.”
“You can’t get rid of all of the fear,” Brezhnev argued mildly.
“No,” the constable agreed. “The world is illuminated. Nothing left to fear but our fellow man.”
On that note, he removed his pistol from its hip holster and pointed it at Brezhnev.
Brezhnev blinked, went on smoking.
“This report’s a little on the thin side,” said Crazhnetsyn. “Do you mind if I shoot you?”
“It’d save me from jury duty,” Brezhnev joked in a cold monotone.
The constable gave a little chortle, clicked the safety back on, and set the pistol on the table.
“I don’t suppose you could give me the heads up on the trial . . .” Brezhnev ventured.
Crazhnetsyn laughed loudly. Then shook his head definitively from side to side. “Absolutely not. Wouldn’t be ethical. Not that I even know what’s what. They keep me running from one end of the steppe to the other all year. I miss all the juicy news. Fuck—I’m not even sure who’s mayor anymore.”
“Does it matter?”
“On the evidence? No.”
They drank a toast to that. Then Crazhnetsyn stuck his finger through the loop of the pistol’s trigger guard and, pressing his fingertip against the table, spun the pistol round and round. “Feel like a game of roulette?”
Brezhnev shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”
Crazhnetsyn stared at him as if he were crazy. “You really don’t care if you live or die anymore, do you?”
Another shrug.
“Can’t blame you. Hell, if I were a fuckup like you and they stuck me out here, I’d’ve blown my face off long ago.”
Yet another shrug, another puff on the cigarette.
“How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Go on?”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea.”
“You’re a mystery, Brezhnev. I can’t figure you out. Must be why I haven’t arrested you yet.”
“What for?”
It was Crazhnetsyn’s turn to shrug. “I could think of something. Desecrating a grave, for starters. Ghoul activity.”
“Wasn’t my idea.”
“I wouldn’t put that in the report.”
Brezhnev pinched out his cigarette and stowed the roach in his shirt pocket. “Prison would probably be preferable in many ways to this place.”
“Oh, Leonovich . . . That’s exactly why you’re here.”
“Hmph.”
“Want me to make it happen? Get you transferred to prison? Grave robbing is a serious offense, after all.”
“I didn’t rob the grave. Just dug it up.”
“And is the body still there?”
“I put back the ashes and bones. So, technically, yes.”
“Very good. I won’t arrest you.”
“Thank you, Constable.”
The constable had himself a hearty laugh, slapping his knee. “Shit, I’m on my way to the city, too,” he said. “Two weeks’ leave for the holiday. Two weeks with my wife and kids. What a blessing! Just thinking of it makes me want to swallow a bullet.”
“How many kids now?”
“Seven. A new one just popped out.”
“Oof.”
“Yes. And what about you? Why haven’t you knocked up one of these smooth-brained redneck hussies yet, Leonovich?”
Brezhnev stared off evasively. “It’s not in my destiny.”
“That’s for the better. The world doesn’t need any more flipper-babies.”
“For certain.”
—
When the constable was good and drunk, he left the remains of the bottle and drove off at high speed, heading west. Brezhnev would follow him in the morning. And maybe run into him again in the city; maybe not. He’d have to make the journey on horseback, because the city would not give him a car. And since they wouldn’t give him a horse either, he’d have to rent one. What holiday? he wondered as he lay down for a nap. It took him a moment to remember that October had come. Oh, that’s right. The Revolution.