It didn't look all that promising.
The house had no furniture, no carpets, no drapes to cover the broken windows. The floorboards were warped and cracked, and fine dust hung in the cold morning air, dancing in the bright spears of sunlight. On either side of the passage, doors opened onto totally empty rooms. In fact, most of the doors were actually missing.
"Surprised the whole place hasn't been burned down," Krysty said, walking cautiously into one of the rooms.
"Look." Ryan pointed up to a corner where a small metal bracket remained. "Sec vids were there. Seen them in the corridor."
"In here," Doc called.
"What?" Ryan replied, following the sound of the old man's voice. He found him in another room, looking at a faded drawing on one of the walls. It was a sketch of some balloons, held in the white, gloved hand of a circus clown. Beneath it was a line of neat lettering: Hi, from your friend Penny wise.
All six of the group stood and looked silently at this cryptic message from the long-dead past. Ryan broke the stillness.
"Anyone understand it?"
Nobody replied.
Doc coughed. "Private joke of some sort, I guess."
"Rick?" Ryan asked.
"Pennywise the clown? Sorry, brothers and sister. No. Doesn't mean a thing."
"Let's go down," Jak suggested, leading the way out of the ravaged room, along the corridor, to the top of the main staircase that led down to the first floor of the house.
The devastation was at its worst at ground level. Every door and window had been smashed, and a cold wind blew in from every direction. Fine snow was piled softly in the corners, drifted in. The floorboards were largely rotted, making walking dangerous. Ceilings had fallen, and the walls bore the marks of sledgehammers and the dark scars of fires. It was amazing that the structure was standing.
"There's not going to be any food at all around here, lover," Krysty said quietly.
Ryan nodded. "I know it."
"So?"
"So we'll have to go out and find us some. If this is Russia, and not the Shens in a cold-out, then we have to get the gateway working."
The woman glanced behind them at the man leaning heavily on his walking cane. His face was pale, his eyes sunk cavernously dark.
"You mean Rick has to get it working?"
"Yeah. Not going to be easy. Then again, lover, nobody ever said it would be easy."
There were daubs of heavy, tarlike black paint in the largest room at the front of the house, strange signs that were like recognizable letters, yet oddly different. They partly covered another piece of graffiti, which was difficult to read in the gloom.
"Shall I open the doors?" Rick asked, moving unsteadily into the wide, echoing hall.
"Careful," Ryan warned. "When we were up on the roof anyone could've seen us from miles off."
J.B. coughed. "We have to make a fast decision, Ryan. No food here. Mebbe a ville near. But if the Russkies know we're Americans..." He allowed the sentence to drift away into the bitterly cold silence.
Ryan sniffed. "Yeah, but the gateway's well fucked. Gotta look around some. We don't find anything in a day's march, then we have a problem. Keep looking and mebbe starve. Come on back here to the gateway..."
"And mebbe starve," Krysty concluded quietly.
"My view, for what little it may be worth, is that we should hazard a trip into the great outdoors," Doc said. "Better to try and fail than not to try at all."
"Nobody this side," Jak reported from near the broken windows on the eastern flank of the large room. "Just lotta snow."
Doc was still trying to read the daubed-over lettering. "I just can't make it out. It's so fearfully faded."
"I'll open this door," Rick called, heaving at the handle. He put his frail weight against the rusted hinges, making them squeal angrily in protest. But the door opened, letting in a dazzling shaft of morning light.
"Uncle Vanya Sucks!" Krysty read.
"What's it mean?" J.B. asked. "Sounds like a Russkie name."
"My memory is not what it was, but I believe it was the nickname for the Communist leader Stalin," Doc offered.
Rick laughed. "No, it's a play. Chekhov. It's the name of..."
The bullet smashed into the door beside Rick Ginsberg, and he toppled into the hall, flat on his back.
Chapter Six
"I trust that the behavior of my manservant has not inconvenienced you unduly."
The man shook his head and whistled through his teeth. It made damnably little sense to him. He kept his thumb on the page and slowly read the phrase out again.
"I trust that the behavior of my manservant has not inconvenienced you unduly."
He closed the book and laid it on the scarred top of his desk. The cover was torn, but the title could still be read: The English Tongue for the Benefit of the Russian Gentleman Abroad.
It would have been nice if he could have found a phrase book that had been published a little nearer to the time that was called, in his country, "the long grayness." In the frontispiece was the date 1911. That was almost two hundred years ago, but it was still better than nothing.
He heard someone walking along the corridor outside his office and he quickly slid the frail book into the center drawer of his desk and locked it. Though he could probably have formulated a defense for possessing it, he preferred to keep his arcane knowledge as secret as possible.
The feet paused and there was a cautious knock on the door.
"Enter."
The blond, cropped head of Clerk Second Class Alicia Andreyinichna appeared around the wood-painted frame.
"Forgive me, Major-Commissar Zimyanin, for interrupting you."
"Come in, Alicia Andreyinichna. What is it?"
The secretary wore a plain skirt that fell just below the knee, in the dull maroon material that was the uniform color for Internal Security, Moscow.
"A message from your wife, Anya, Major-Commissar."
"Yes?"
The girl coughed nervously. It was common knowledge that all wasn't wonderfully well between Gregori Zimyanin and his tall, heavy-hipped wife. There were often angry calls on the telephone, generally ending with the receiver being slammed down and some colorful cursing from the senior officer.
"She wished to know what time you would be returning home tonight, sir."
"By the anvil and the hammer! She knows I'm going to be late. I told her this morning over first food. I told her!"
He remembered telling Anya, remembered her expression, remembered that she had mentioned something about an invitation they had for last food to an apartment in the adjoining block on Begovaya Ulitsa. He couldn't even recall the names. Some woman who worked in the offices of Pensions and Domestic Debts with Anya who had a buck-toothed, stammering husband with a secret taste for decadent music. Zimyanin had arranged to have them investigated. You couldn't be too careful who you knew.
"Can't be too careful," he said.
"What, sir?"
He smiled. "I didn't mean to speak out loud, Alicia Andreyinichna. My apologies. Tell her, as softly as you can, that it will be after eleven." An afterthought struck him. "And offer my deepest regrets that I must miss our last-food date."
"Yes, Major-Commissar."
He managed a smile, though his wife's constant harrying was becoming increasingly tedious. The girl smiled back and withdrew, closing the door carefully behind her.
Zimyanin leaned back, putting his high boots of tanned hide on his desktop. He had been married to Anya for only six weeks. It had only been ten weeks since his promotion from plain major and his arrival at the center of the government, the spiritual and historical home of Mother Russia.