A woman had come to Nikolai’s house early one autumn morning, her cheeks were pinched from the cold and she held her shawl tightly against the wind. He asked her in without having to ask why she wanted to speak to him, there was only ever one reason. Even the people of the nearby village of Milyukovo who he counted his neighbors and friends avoided his house whenever they could except when they needed him. He gave her a seat at his table and poured her a cup of tea, which she took gratefully. She looked like she was used to more southerly climes and visibly suffered under the chill. He did wonder momentarily why she would have come so far to visit him, but didn’t think to press the subject.
“Who is it that you have lost?” He asked, once she had taken her first bracing sip.
“My husband, he died in the revolution. On the Tsarist side, I’m sorry to say.” She said, bitterly.
“I see, I’m sorry for your loss.” He said, giving the usual platitudes almost like a ritual intonation. “I heard it was a very bloody war, though we don’t get much news out here.”
“Really?” She put down her tea. “The war never came here?”
“It’s a big country.” Nikolai shrugged. “And we tend to get cut off up here once the bad snows start. What with the war starting in the winter we didn’t even know the revolutionaries won until the tax collector came last spring wearing a different uniform. But you’re not here to deliver news.”
“Ah, no... I was told that you are a chernyy mag? That you can speak to the dead?”
“By whom?”
She looked taken aback for a moment before replying. “A man, Grigori Utkin, he said you helped him talk to his son, who caught a bad fever when he was seven and didn’t leave his bed.”
“Ah, yes, a sad one that. Sadder than usual, I mean.” Nikolai said. “How is Grigori?”
“I didn’t speak with him long, but he seemed convinced of your abilities.”
“And what about you?”
“Well, I suppose I’ll have to wait and see. But I’ve come a long way to find a magician who can do what you supposedly can. I admit I am sceptical, but I mean to find out if it’s true.”
Nikolai nodded thoughtfully. “Good enough. Alright, I will speak for your husband, but before we begin there is the matter of my fee. I apologise for bringing it up at such a sensitive time but it is how I make my living.”
She put down her tea and put her bag on her lap, rifling through it for a moment before pulling out a purse. From it she withdrew five antique silver coins and placed them on the table in a little stack.
“This is how much, right?” She asked.
“Yes, five coins, a ‘palm of silver’. Grigori told you?”
“He did, he said it was important.”
“It makes things easier. The dead are slow to change, tradition and rote pleases them and a palm of silver is the traditional payment for what I do.” Nikolai said, taking the coins and pacing over to a small mahogany coffer that sat on the mantle above his hearth. He unlocked it with the silver key he kept chained around his neck and touched each coin first to his forehead and then his lips before placing it in the coffer where they chinked against the small pile of others that came before them. He then relocked the box and turned to his client.
“I will need to know your name, and your husband’s.” He said.
“I always thought that you should never give your name to a magician?”
“True enough, but it’s necessary for this kind of work. If you know not to give a magician your true name then you should also know that I cannot break a sworn oath without consequence. I’ll swear on my power not to use it against you, if you like.” Nikolai replied. The woman clutched her bag a little tighter and nodded in reply.
“Then I swear on my mother’s tutelage and my grandfather’s spirit that I shall not use your true name against you in any of my practice.” He said, hand on heart.
The woman nodded thoughtfully, seemingly relieved by this little act for all her apparent scepticism.
“Marina Glazkova, my husband’s name was Moisey.”
“Thank you. There’s nearly an hour until dusk. We’ll begin then, if that is alright?”
“Yes, please.” She replied, weakly.
Nikolai paced from window to window, closing the curtains against what little light the setting sun still cast. Marina sat mutely as he made his preparations. His kitchen table was cleared and a ladder-shaped skalagram drawn upon it in charcoal and chalk, symbols describing the world of the dead at his end and the world of the living on Marina’s, each rung on the ladder given the name of one of the underworld’s rivers in the language of old Kypros. From his workroom he brought a box of dark wood lined with velvet, from which he produced a perfect cube of polished black stone that he placed carefully beneath the table’s center. He also placed a bottle of vodka and three small glasses on one side. Lastly he went to his bedroom and changed. He put on a threadbare and long out-of-fashion suit of black linen, mourning clothes worn at many a funeral by his grandfather. By the time he had returned to his seat it was twilight outside, perfect for this kind of practice.
“I’m about to start the rite, once I have begun you must not speak until addressed by the spirit.”
Marina nodded her understanding. Nikolai closed his eyes a moment and cleared his throat.
“Grandfather, I need your guidance and aid.” He whispered, almost inaudibly. Immediately he felt the presence of his spirit guide fill the room. From the way Marina suddenly shifted in her seat and started looking around, particularly into the dark corners of the room, she felt it too. It felt like a warm hand on his shoulder, the beginning of a laugh, the taste of kvass and the smell of dark, rich tobacco.
“Thank you for coming, grandfather. I need you to find someone, Moisey Glazkov is his name, his wife Marina wants to speak to him.” Nikolai poured a shot of vodka into one of the glasses and drank it. He filled the other two glasses and nudged one over to Marina, who took the hint and downed it.
“A little poison, to bring us closer to the dead.” He said with a smile.
The other glass he upended on the floor. He felt a brief sensation of satisfaction, a sign of his grandfather’s pleasure with the sacrifice. “Tell him there’s another shot of that waiting for him if he needs any coaxing.” He added, refilling the glass.
His grandfather’s presence vanished abruptly, to break the silence he said aloud “It won’t be long now.” Marina nodded but remembered not to speak.
He closed his eyes and let his mind drift, the vodka helped with that now that a dull alcoholic haze was beginning to settle. Just when he was beginning to wonder if the spirit would ever arrive he felt it, another change in the room - a presence different to his grandfather. He felt earnestness, sadness, the tang of gunsmoke, the dull scratch of rough wool washed too many times and a too-tight collar against his skin - a soldier, he guessed.
“Moisey Glazkov?” He said in a whisper. A wordless feeling of acknowledgement was his reply.
“Marina, who you called wife, would speak with you again and has paid the proper price. Speak through me, let this sacrifice give you the strength to cross the veil.” With that Nikolai upended the glass on the floor a second time. The presence of the spirit of Moisey Glazkov suddenly grew more intense, until it became almost a physical thing. The muscles down his neck and back seized and shuddered as he felt it take residence in his body.
Sympathetic pain burst through his chest, right in the heart, making him momentarily choke and gasp - Moisey Glazkov had died by gunshot. He gripped the edge of the table tight and waited for it to pass, but it didn’t, something was keeping it fresh in the present. Surely Marina hadn’t brought Moisey’s murder weapon with her? He could scarcely imagine a recent widow carrying around so grisly a reminder in her handbag. Nikolai readied to place his foot upon the black stone cube that would align him to the physical world and expel the spirit as soon as his piece was said and not a moment sooner - five pieces of silver or not, nothing was worth putting up with this for longer than necessary.
“Marina?” He said aloud in a voice not his own.
She started at the voice and stammered wordlessly for a moment before replying. “Moisey? Is it you?”
“Marina, why?”
“I wanted you to know, I miss you, and that I think of you all the time-” She began.
“I loved you, Marina,” Nikolai said, sadly.
“I know you did.”
“I loved you.”
Marina didn’t reply immediately, her head hung limply, shoulders hunched. Nikolai wondered, hoped, that might be enough - for some people that was all they needed, and the pain of the gunshot in his chest had only gotten incrementally worse.
“Marina. Why did you come?”
“Oh stop, I’ve seen enough you fraud.” Marina spat with such unexpected vehemence that even in the grip of Moisey’s spirit Nikolai was surprised by it. She got to her feet and reached into her bag, drawing from it a compact snub-nosed revolver that she leveled at Nikolai’s chest, right where Moisey Glazkov’s mortal wound had been. “Nikolai Stepanovich Kozlov, I hereby charge you with crimes against the people and the state, of fraud in the second degree and propagation of counter-revolutionary superstitions of a theological nature, of-”
“Are you going to kill him too, Mara?”
Marina shuddered and took a step backwards.
“What did you say?” She said, uncomprehendingly.
“Everything I did was for you.” Nikolai said. Distantly he tasted tears on his lips, whether they came from the pain or some sympathetic connection with the spirit he could not say. “Those men, they were criminals, murderers, was I not worth more than them?” The last word he spat like an accusation.
“Stop this.” Marina said, firmly.
“I can’t sleep, Mara,” Nikolai felt his face twist into a grimace of misery. “I rage and I bleed and I grope in darkness and I cannot sleep.”
“Stop it now.” She cocked the hammer on the pistol and levelled at Nikolai’s head, trapped inside his own body he struggled for control over his spirit-gripped muscles but it was no use - the spirit’s own murderer was in his presence, the strength it gave them was overwhelming.
“Not until you’re dead.”
“I will splatter your brains on the fucking wall if you do not stop this right now!” Marina was wild now, her eyes wide like a spooked horse.
“There’s no peace waiting for you, murderess. But I will wait for you.” The spirit, having apparently said its piece, loosened its grip on Nikolai. In that instant he stepped on the black cube and felt the spirit leave his body as quick as the snuffing of a candle flame. His head swam with nausea brought on by the pain and synesthesia.
A piercing noise rang through the room, he opened his eyes with a start and saw that Marina had blown a whistle, the kind that officers in the military used to signal their troops. The sound of splintering wood soon followed as his door was smashed down. Half a dozen men in unfamiliar uniforms burst in and tackled him off his chair, pressing him to the ground with the weight of their bodies, shouting incoherent and contradictory commands. One grabbed a handful of his hair and smashed his head into the stone floor, as if he could be more dazed than he already was. He cried out in shock and the room, already dark, went black as the candlelight and hearth extinguished themselves. Despite the darkness he could see the figure of his grandfather standing over him as clear as day, a figure of shaded-in white, like a pencil sketch of a man - bearded and clad in the heavy clothes of a woodsman - no less solid-seeming for his colourlessness.
The men apparently saw him too, as they recoiled in shock and the weight pressing down on Nikolai’s back abated. His grandfather’s spectre opened its mouth wide in a silent roar, his face twisted and monstrous with rage. A buzzing, flickering, black nothing in the back of the spectre’s throat emitted a wail like no living thing could and three of the men who had been closest fell screaming and clutching their ears, thrashing wildly on the floor as blood streamed from their eyes and under their hands.
Those who remained turned their attention entirely to the phantom, drawing blunt-nosed pistols and firing, filling the room with deafening cracks and flashes that briefly cut through the unnatural darkness. The shots may as well have been aimed at moonlight for all they did to his grandfather’s wailing spirit. The spectre moved with a stuttering insectile speed like a character on a zoetrope. It gripped the pistol-hand of one man and he screamed in agony, his fingers blackened by frostbite, the pistol that dropped from his hand hit the floor and shattered into flash-frozen shards as if it had been made of glass. Another of the soldiers had the spectre’s hand pass through his chest and immediately fell to the floor in convulsions, sucking air desperately like a winded horse in between blood-flecked coughs.
Marina, meanwhile, withdrew a huge golden key from her bag and barked a stern command in a language Nikolai didn’t recognise as she held it aloft whilst gesturing to the ground with her offhand. The oppressive supernatural darkness was suddenly cut by the arrival of a second spirit, which announced itself with a pillar of golden flame from which stepped a superficially manlike-figure, lion-headed, winged, a masculine body of almost inhuman perfection nude besides for a serpent that coiled around it like a robe, holding a key in one hand and a scepter in the other. With a thunderous sound of splintering wood and broken glass every door and window in the house forcefully blew itself open the moment the entity arrived.
The lion-headed being gestured grandly with its scepter and in a single instant Nikolai felt the presence of his grandfather vanish, gone as if he had never been summoned, as the spectre winked out of existence.
After the storm of chaos in the last few seconds the silence that followed was paralysing. It was Marina who eventually broke it.
“Well? Grab him, idiot.” She hissed at the one man who were still up.
To his credit, the soldier’s only hesitation was a brief shaky nod before he stepped over the bodies of his fallen comrades and roughly pulled Nikolai’s hands behind his back and slapped manacles on his wrists.
“Wait, I’m sorry, I didn’t do that on purpose! He was just trying to protect me.” Nikolai protested weakly.
“You, shut up.” Marina spat, pointing the golden key in her hand at him like a sergeant’s baton. “In fact, if he says a single word more - shoot him. Make sure he has no writing implements, jewellery, objects of silver, jet or bone, anything that looks too old or antique to be of common use, any otherwise normal object that’s inscribed or scrawled on or smells of incense. Anything suspicious.”
“Yes, Commissar-Magus.” The soldier shakily replied.
Nikolai grit his teeth, sure that Marina’s threat had not been an idle one, though his veins froze and questions span through his head like leaves caught in a gale.
The soldier pawed through his pockets, finding nothing but his watch, a simple affair if a silver-plated one. The man held it up to his nose for a moment.
“Incense or perfume on this, Commissar-Magus.” He announced, holding it out to Marina who took it and turned it over in her free hand.
“What does it do?” She said, glaring at Nikolai.
“Tells the time.” He replied, giddily, half aware he had just made a mistake.
“Hurt him.”
The soldier jabbed his thumb into the flesh of Nikolai’s shoulder and pressed down just so in a way that sent shooting, spasming pain down his side. He screamed, dazed and paralysed, until the woman Marina gestured and the soldier finally relented.
“You’ve think I wouldn’t recognise the combination of myrrh, cassia, cinnamon and calamus? A classic recipe for anointing oil. You’ve put a spell on this, what does it do?” Marina said, dropping to one knee beside Nikolai and waving the watch in his face.
“It’s a fetter, it belonged to my grandfather, it helps me contact his spirit.”
“That entity that attacked my men?”
“You attacked me, in my own home! He was a guardian spirit protecting his blood, he couldn’t have done otherwise.”
“Stop your drivel, that was no more the spirit of a dead man than this-” she waved offhandedly at the lion-headed being that stood, impassively overlooking the scene with an air of detached boredom “-is an archon of the King of Heaven.”
“I don’t know what that is, but it was my grandfather’s shade that struck down your men. I apologise but you brought it on yourself. Look, I’m sorry, I’ll forget everything that your husband said, I won’t breathe a word-” Nikolai pleaded, but before he could finish his sentence Marina nodded at the soldier holding him down, and the man wrapped his arm around Nikolai’s neck and held his brutalised arm out at full extension for another soldier to stick with a hypodermic needle and any other words that came after were just choked sobs before his vision began to tunnel and darken.
“Yes you will,” Marina said, before he slipped into unconsciousness. “You’ll tell everything.”