Thirty-Three Kilometers from Kiev

Lina’s grandmother had warned her against marrying a spirit hunter. “The dukh myslyvtsya walks between the world and the world,” she’d said. “And sometimes they do not come back whole to us, no matter how much we wish it, yes? Find a good man, vnuchka. One who will live his whole life beside you.”

As she watched Dmytro from the back of the truck, she missed her grandmother more keenly than usual. She didn’t regret her marriage, and he’d been essential in saving their little town. It was true, though; her husband had changed.

She had not wanted to believe it. But the men and women of the village, people with whom he’d grown, looked at him with a certain frenetic nervousness. His smile felt too plastic—when he remembered to smile at all. Even now, as the town packed its meager belongings and prepared for the long journey to Kiev, they looked to her and asked, “Lina, is he still himself?”

Lina could not bring herself to answer. Speaking it would make it real.

It looked like him, this flesh and blood with her husband’s face. Dmytro might be in there somewhere, but she suspected whatever lived inside him now wore his skin like an over-sized flannel shirt. His voice sounded too small for his own body. At night, she’d found his chest scalding to the touch, and when she’d turned away, he’d not pursued her.

She could swear his eyes glowed in green and gold after the fire had gone out. She called him her sonechko, her sun—and now he glowed. Her grandmother, God keep her, had told stories of golems with eyes like that. If only she were still here…

— # —

Moye Kotyk,

I do not know how to write this letter. I do not know if I have strength enough to finish it. But you deserve to hear the truth, while I am still here to speak of it. So, Lina, kitten, the truth is what I bring here. I shall give this letter to Uli, so that he can give it to you when you are far from here.

I came here to escape the life of the dukh myslyvtsya. You know this. The spirits were dangerous. Too many died beside me. It was better for me to leave the work behind. Let the spirits sort themselves, yes? Besides: I was happy in honest work. A warm fire, a beautiful wife, a glass of vodka now and again. What could be better?

But when we were sent home from the factory, with scant wages in our pockets, I began to hear things. Whispers on wind. The sort of cold mutter my tato taught me to hear: ghosts with ill in their revenant hearts.

I prayed they would not stay. But the village children began to lose their hair. Some went missing. The engineers fell ill. So did many of us. A dukh myslyvtsya was needed—and I was the only such in our village. I abandoned my duty once. With the factory now possessed, I knew I could not do so again.

— # —

Lina heard his boots on the gravel before she saw him. That was also not uncommon now: his body stepped sideways around normal light. She squinted a bit to take in his eyes. “Yes?”

He smiled like a battered puppet, his face moving at odd times and in odd directions. “Are you ready to go?”

“We are,” she answered. “We’ll take the main road to the city. Oleks assured us we’d have rooms waiting when we arrived, if we were ready to work hard.”

“Good. Please leave soon. For your safety…Lina.”

At the sound of her name, she tilted her head and searched his face. He hadn’t used it much since he’d…well, since. She’d been worried he’d forgotten it; or worse, that this person had never known it. “Please,” she said, “let me stay with you. Dymtr. I can help, I—”

She knew from his face that the argument was already lost. The time to help was weeks ago, when the first villagers fell ill. There was a poison, he’d said, in the reactor at the old factory. He’d insisted evil spirits had come from there. She’d pleaded with him to stay, or to flee.

Neither would have been Dmytro, and she’d known it as she’d asked. Instead, he’d said, They’ll need you, Lina, if we don’t come back. Help them get away. Take them south to Kiev. Lead them as fast as the trucks will take you. Please, Lina!

And she let herself be convinced.

— # —

…you pleaded with me not to go. I do not blame you, moye kotyk. How could you not? The forest and the factory, the spirits there, were killing us. “Radiation,” the bosses said, but we knew better than to believe them, didn’t we? Ghosts were causing hair to fall out and the crops to wilt. Children spoke in strange tongues as they burned from the inside out.

I knew it was long past time the day your babusya fell ill.

I took what men and women would come, even if they came out of desperation. Apostol had the foreman’s key to the factory gate. Pavel knew the codes on the doors. Maryska helped carry Volod halfway there. Nataliya brought her rifle and pistol both, in case a stray wolf found us. One by one they were eaten by spirits: gasping green light pouring out of their throats and their eyes sizzling in their skulls.

Every hallway had that feeling of ghosts: the chill along the spine. But the reactor? It was alive with the dead, Lina. More ghosts than perhaps all my fathers’ fathers had ever seen. Ghosts! And all here, in one place, trapped inside the control rods. They told me themselves, later, but even then I could see it clear: we had poisoned their world first. And they, in fleeing us, had poisoned ours.

The control rods were jammed. If I did this wrong, I would destroy half the valley. And the ghosts, if let free, would tear apart the countryside from here to St. Petersburg. I was a worker, not a technician—what did I know of reactors? I was not meant to hunt neutrinos.

I would have to barter with the ghost of a scientist for help. And I knew the ghosts would only want one thing in return.

— # —

His body ambled into town, covered in burns and welts. He came home alone, but he’d saved their town. Already the sickness was passing. He had earned peace for them—was this not a salvation?

It was a polite fiction. The ground would never be farmed again. Industry would not touch the region. They would all have to leave to find jobs in Kiev. But the village was its people, not the land; they could carry the stories of their mothers and fathers with them.

Dmyt, though, could barely speak. The ghosts had come home with him, and she dared not speak of it. How would her neighbors, those who’d lost family or friends, feel to know he carried the enemy in his heart?

No. She must pretend everything was fine…when her old husband, the best version of her husband, was now a fortnight gone.

“Help them,” Dmytro answered. She came back to her senses at the sound of his voice, flat as puddle water. If he’d any emotions left, he would have pleaded, cajoled, commanded. Instead, it sounded like little more than a sigh. “And go. Before the ghosts…”

Something inside her snapped. “The ghosts,” she growled. “Before they what? What did they want? Where are they now? They’re not dead—” When he tilted his head and parted his lips, she snapped, “Yes, I know, they’re dead-not-alive. But they’re not at rest, and they’re not gone. What happened? Why, Dmytro?? Why…”

He’d steadied her before she realized she’d started to wobble. His hand was far too hot, though, even through the clothes, and she whimpered in pain at his touch. Whatever he held inside of him would not stay there for much longer; his skin looked like a bread crust ready to crack.

“They meant well,” he said. “The reactor caught them, is all. It poisoned their world. Now, all other doors are shut to them. They helped me with the reactor…Kotyk.” The word sounded tentative in his mouth. “This was good. This is safest.”

“For whom?” she asked bitterly.

“When I close the door, they will all be at rest. It’s safest for all of them. And for you, the living; and for the town and country.” He paused. “She…she says…Perhaps you were okay to marry this one, yes?”

Her eyes widened; it hadn’t been his voice at all. “Babusya?”

Dmytro’s eyes flared green and gold, but his mouth clamped shut and his body twisted like a leaf on a winter wind. He wanted to say more, she could see it. They all did. But the body was too weak to handle the strain.

She clamped her teeth together, nodded, then raised her arm.

— # —

I did not expect to meet your babusya there. She’d given me that glare, when she was alive. You remember, moye Kotyk? How she would shake her head and spit? Not so as a ghost. Not long dead, so she looked much as she did before. I think they sent her in hope I would talk. They need not have worried.

She passed her hand through my head and—Lina, I understood. That they fled nuclear poison in their world. The dead of our village were caught like fish by the reactor. The more they fought, the more they hurt us all. They did not mean harm—and nor did we. They understood that, too, when her hand left my head.

“There is only one way out for us,” your Babusya told me.

I knew what it was. It would not be easy. I would have to watch you all leave—including you, dearest heart. But it was the only way to save you all. Living and dead.

It has taken me two weeks to write these words. They hurt. It hurts to move the pen. It hurts to think them at all. They burn me, as tato said they would. But not much longer.

Go. Be happy. For the both of us. Ty naikrashcha v sviti.

Always,

Your Sonechko

— # —

The truck started forward, the jolt of the engine nearly knocking her out of the bed, so she missed the start of the wave he gave. She tried to respond in kind, but he was already turning away as she started to lift her fist. She found solace in the thought that she’d already said goodbye, weeks before; he’d been little more than a spent shell afterwards, and the love she’d have given only fueled those that had stolen him from her.

They were thirty-three kilometers from Kiev, well past the sights and smells of their farms and the village, when she registered the pistol on Dmytro’s hip. He never carried a gun. That had always been Nataliya’s work.

She knocked on the cab and opened her mouth, determined to turn around…when the ground shook the truck right off the road. She saw Uli jerking the wheel back and forth in a desperate attempt to find the path again. The ground itself had cracked, the earth spent like a used bullet. An unholy light rose in the north, bleeding green and gold into a broken horizon. The way they’d come was lit, and then it was dark, and she knew the village in which she’d spent her life, and the man she’d loved in it, were gone.

But so too were the ghosts—their honored dead, their parents and their children. Trapped unwittingly by technology, now departed for good through the only door Dmytro had to offer.

How many ghosts had her dukh myslyvtsya brought home with him? Other than the ones she cared for most, she had no way to know. The falling sickness had claimed dozens—her grandmother among them. He may have carried them all across the threshold to whatever might come next.

Had her Babusya known this day would come? Was this why she warned? If so…Lina still would not have listened. A good man was worth the risk. Even a dukh myslyvtsya.

The caravan started forth again once the trucks were set aright on the road. Lina sat in the back, arm draped over the side, and watched the sky. A widow might find a new life in Kiev, she thought; but she could not live her whole life beside another. How could she? Part of her had crossed that boundary, between the world and the world, and she could not follow. Not yet. She had many kilometers to go before she could see Dmytro smile as himself again.

© 2021 Brian Hugenbruch

From: Issue 6

About the Author

Brian Hugenbruch is a speculative fiction writer and poet living in Upstate New York with his family and their pets. By day, he writes information security programs to protect your data on (and from) the internet. His work has been featured (or is forthcoming) in Departure Mirror, Apparition Lit, Diabolical Plots, and the ZNB anthology MY BATTERY IS LOW AND IT IS GETTING DARK. You can find him online on Twitter @Bwhugen, on IG @the_lettersea, and at the-lettersea.com. No, he’s not sure how to say his last name, either.