Chapter 7
Zina
The room swam into focus a fragment at a time—the black wallpaper I had whimsically asked a poor émigré artist to paint with medallions of fruit, the purple divan with its cushions and pillows, the rugs with the half-moons and stars.
I turned over in my cot, blinking the sleep from my eyes.
I didn’t remember climbing up to my loft.
I leaped up, heart pumping beastly fast. Then how did I get here?
As my surroundings crystallized, I lunged toward the washstand and splashed some water onto my face from a pitcher that had gone frigid overnight.
Droplets of it trickled down my skin as I peered into the small oval mirror.
A smudged, hollow-eyed version of myself looked back at me.
I leaned over the basin, the cold porcelain digging into my flesh, as I went back over the previous night.
If it had been the previous night, I reminded myself, recalling my falling into that black void for days.
When the Grand Duke had said daughter, was he talking about me?
Or about Olga, who I assumed was just beyond the black bubble?
And the other things he said, about Baba Valya and Mama, about his blood in the tearoom, were they true?
Perhaps none of it had been real, and I was seeing things that weren’t there.
But how did I end up in my room? What happened to the séance, to Olga and Alec, to Katya?
By the pale, watery light sifting in through the skylights above, I could tell it was early, six or seven at most. My heart gave a different lurch. Was the consulting room still set up for the séance? Had Baba Valya seen it?
Merde! I scrambled out of the room and down the stairs, two steps at a time, nightgown and all. I stopped halfway through, listening for my grandmother’s snores. They resounded from her room, and I relaxed a little. At least she was asleep.
Still, I felt damnably strange.
Instead of the tearoom’s normally cloud-white energy in the morning, crisp yet pleasant from a night of rest, there was an unnerving, dark chill to the air.
It weighed down my chest like a massive boulder.
And instead of the low hum of expectation, of fortunes waiting to be told, a buzzing sound rushed at my ears.
As if there were a swarm of bees, frenzied, manic, a hive of noisy activity I couldn’t see.
A scream pierced the buzzing. High-pitched, female.
I froze, looking up at Baba Valya’s room. But with the next scream, I realized it was coming from the tearoom. I sprinted down the rest of the stairs.
Just as I reached the tearoom doorway, I slid, nearly falling.
I glanced down—at the puddle of dark crimson liquid.
Blood? I let out a gasp, my own scream building in my throat.
When it came, it was raw, a bare scrap of a sound.
I ground my feet into the floor stubbornly.
But it was too slick and slippery, and I crashed down.
The blood was everywhere, on my nightgown, on my legs, arms, hands…
“Baba Valya,” I whispered, feeling all the irrational horror of the moment, the wild fear that something had happened to my grandmother.
But in the next moment, the blood vanished. The screams stopped. I was lying on our spotless polished floor.
I rose shakily and stumbled past the tearoom, down the hall to the white-tiled kitchen and the sink and range there.
I grabbed the jar of dried fruit drowned in boiled water that Baba Valya kept beneath the muslin-curtained window.
I drank right from the jar, my gulps large and hungry.
The apricot, prune, and cherry concoction soothed my throat and slowed my racing heart, though it still stuttered.
I could be going mad, but I didn’t think so. I knew what I felt, knew I had seen some kind of vision. This place was born of blood. My blood, the spirit had said. But the scream had not been a man’s.
I looked out the window at our garden, dead in winter yet still usually showing signs of greenery and life.
Something about it had always drawn me in, inexplicably calming me.
It could have been the pine-scented air, or the valerian and lavender emanating from our herb beds.
Either way, it was the place that I liked bringing Mama’s cards to, shuffling and reshuffling them, studying them for the millionth time, thinking about her.
She was buried in the new Russian cemetery on the outskirts of Paris, and I didn’t visit her there as often as I wished. This was the next best place.
But today something was off. I set down the jar and, fumbling for the latch, pushed open the window.
Instead of the garden’s usual thrum, that same darkness pulsed against me.
The vines, tall grasses, and last season’s flowers stood like skeletons, pale and yellowed.
The evergreens were losing their needles, the trees their buds, dead already.
And our usually hardy and thriving herbs appeared rusted and shriveled.
Suddenly, in the back of the garden, against the fence, a glint caught my eye.
Without bothering to throw on my coat, I hurried outside.
Even with the fresh air, I sensed the tearoom’s dark chill, heard the buzz of the insect-like swarming. I followed the pebble path to the fence, where I ground to a stop.
A dagger was propped against it. A jagged silver bolt ran down the length of the handle, ending in a scarlet-red ruby. When I touched the handle, I heard the echo of that scream again, piercing and anguished. And a scraping behind me. I yanked my hand away and whipped around.
The door banged open—I must not have shut it properly—and a hazy figure materialized out of the solid wall of the tearoom building.
It flickered out of existence, then flickered back to life in the doorway, gray and yellow-tinged.
All I could definitively make out were those strangely lustrous eyes. And they were watching me.
The next moment, the apparition, or whatever it was, vanished like a trail of smoke.
I recalled that rasping voice. I live—in the walls. Could the dagger have anything to do with the spirit’s claims and what might have happened in the tearoom?
Before I could talk myself out of it, I grabbed the dagger and rushed back inside to change into my day clothes.
I had to see Katya. Especially since, when I passed by the consulting room, I saw that it was undisturbed.
As if the séance had never happened. But I caught a salty whiff—an indication that not everything was as it seemed.
If I wasn’t imagining things, and I had performed a real séance, which had summoned a real spirit, the Grand Duke hadn’t left at the end of it.
He was haunting Samovar. Me. And because of me, something disturbing was now happening to the tearoom.
An unexpected burst of sunlight and thawing air greeted me as I ran to Katya’s and my favorite café, just down the street on rue Pierre le Grand.
It was one of the few purely French cafés in the neighborhood.
I knew my friend would be there early, as she tried to avoid mornings at her flat due to her menace of a mama.
I spotted Katya at one of the tables, already moved outside due to the warmer temperatures, and I arrived there breathless and harried.
Thankfully, there were only a few patrons, all inside, several of them writers hunched over their papers with their strong coffees and freshly baked baguettes.
The bread wafted out of the open windows with its yeasty, buttery aromas, my stomach rumbling, inconveniently remembering its hunger.
“Zina!” Katya shot up, grabbing me by the elbows and guiding me to the chair opposite hers. “You shouldn’t run like that”—she lowered her voice—“not after last night.”
So it had been last night. “That is why I am here.” I snatched up her cup and took a generous swallow of the coffee, insufferably black, just the way Katya liked it.
I choked on the dark, bitter taste. It reminded me of the tearoom all over again, its darkness laced with cutting cold.
Especially as I glimpsed the symbol at the bottom of the cup: that of a whirling cyclone—an indication of some event to come. “What happened last night?”
“You don’t remember? You lost consciousness after I rapped under the table.”
“Did the candles go out, did I say anything? Did you see anything?”
“No.” Katya leaned toward me, concern deepening her eyes to charcoal. “I mean, the candles flickered, I think. We tried to wake you from your fit. But your eyes…they rolled back. We just saw the whites. I was afraid.”
I ignored the intrusive memory of the black void from my youth.
Katya had seen nothing—not the Grand Duke’s spirit, not the black bubble.
Though its violent shaking could have been her trying to wake me.
But the séance did happen, Katya likely tidying up the consulting room afterward. “And Olga and Alec?”
“I hurried them out. Then I revived you with Mother’s old smelling salts. At least, enough for you to lean on me and stumble up the stairs.”
“Did Olga say—do—anything?”
“She was as white as a sheet. It would seem she was disturbed by the experience. Either she bought into it or was surprised by it. I remember her smiling and making a joke to her brother at some point. But at the end, when I politely refused her assistance, her eyes became frenzied, suddenly all over the tearoom. She stopped at the door, and I thought she would refuse to leave. But she did leave, with an ‘I will write to Zina.’ Did you see anything, Zina?” A note of exasperation crackled through Katya’s perfect manners, the years of aristocratic upbringing.
“What about Alec?” I asked instead, remembering his reptilian skin.
“Maybe a little quieter than before. Now will you tell me what is happening?”
But how could I tell her anything when I myself didn’t know? I only hoped no harm would come to her—or Baba Valya. I stood up from the table. “I promise I will tell you everything once I know more.”