The Past
Valya
Moscow, Imperial Russia
Valya chose a tiny, squalid flat on Arbat Street, close to the burned-down bookshop, as their next dwelling. The physical proximity to the bloody scenes of the previous winter hurt. But they served as a reminder of her promise.
She told fortunes by night to keep a roof over her and Svetlana’s heads; she scoured Moscow by day with her for a spirit medium.
To feel closer to her lost love, Valya read Spirit Mediumship: A Guide to the Intuitive Séance.
The floorboards were cold and hard beneath her knees as she sat with a guttering stub of a candle at her side, the pages staining her fingertips with ink, as Ivan Morozov’s had once been.
She wanted to summon him not only to ask if he knew his murderer but to speak to him again, to feel their family whole, if only fleetingly.
She found the answer in the unlikeliest and likeliest of places: the theater.
That day, as every other day, Valya asked the coffee dregs to reveal to her a true spirit medium.
Finally, they obliged. In the middle of her cup, in her present, she saw images of a ballet shoe, a ghost, and a bow and arrow.
There were advertisements all over Moscow for Giselle at the Bolshoi Theatre.
Valya knew with her fortune-telling sense that she would find her medium there, as Giselle was about ghosts.
As she watched the performance, one man stood out as more ethereal than the rest. He played Giselle’s rejected woodsman lover, Hilarion, danced to an early grave by vengeful ghosts when he tried to visit her tomb.
Valya saw in the program the dancer was called Sergei. She contrived to steal backstage after the show (a few of her clients were ballerinas with the company).
As soon as she met him, Valya understood he showed the truest gift for mediumship she had ever encountered.
Sergei’s eyes had narrowed upon her entrance. “You have an aura the color of lilac, but it is blackened and spoiled by your grief,” he said, unblinking, voice as ethereal as his dancing. “That, and somebody from the beyond refuses to let go of you.”
Valya immediately invited Sergei to her flat to perform the séance to summon Ivan Morozov.
On the appointed night, she put her daughter to bed early before hiding all her coffee cups in the old cupboard. She knew what she was about to do was unnatural. She did not wish to see it confirmed in her cup.
Once Sergei arrived, they closed all the windows in the flat, removed the protective black fabric from the glass, burned herbs in the kitchen, where they sat, and prepared for the séance.
She inhaled the trapped waxy smell of candlelight, the bottle of ink that would link Ivan Morozov to the living, as she had no picture of him.
“Are you certain you wish to proceed?” Sergei watched her steadily.
The candlelight weaved shadows on the toned skin of his dancer’s arms so they looked inked.
He was young, a boy really, but there was something old and knowing in his catlike eyes and prematurely gray hair, the air of intention in his smallest, simplest gestures.
Valya ignored the rattle of her coffee cups, her history of hesitation with séances. “I know the risk.”
“That may be, but are you ready for it? Spirits tend to linger, especially the dark, twisted ones.”
Her coffee cups rattled. She knew it was wrong. But. “My Ivan isn’t like that.”
“You mean he was not like that.”
She had made her decision. “Proceed, Sergei.”
He blinked languidly and took her hand in his very small, childlike one. “Then close your eyes and think of him, your Ivan.”
Valya did as she was told, said the words she was supposed to say, waited for her love to step back into her life, suppressing her ingrained fear of spiritualism.
The kitchen darkened, the candles dipping dangerously to their wicks before extinguishing. A black cloud of cold and salty damp descended on them in one fell swoop. Suddenly, Valya could barely see Sergei or her surroundings. She could barely breathe through the heavy, porous air.
It smelled of a grave exhumed. It smelled of death.
A figure materialized by the old stove. Gray and yellow-tinged, filled with holes.
It flickered in and out, an impression of a figure more than the real thing.
The light brown hair was darkened to the black of midnight.
The sparkling green eyes poisonous. And the once-charming face was twisted into a sinister expression that left Valya thinking, Here is something other.
Here is true evil. A ghost. All she could do was cry out.
Sergei startled. “You can see him?”
Her eyes were riveted on the spirit who was her husband and not. Later, she discovered her fortune teller’s sensitivity allowed her to see spirits.
The spirit gave a gleam of a leer and vanished.
But he was not gone. And he not only lingered. He started to haunt them.
Ivan Morozov was back, but he was a dark entity, a nechistaya sila.
Valya realized she was dealing with a spiritual infestation.
She called Sergei back to her flat, but the medium stared back at her sightlessly, as though he were still onstage, dancing to his death.
“I cannot expel him, Valya. There is a way to root out the dark spirit causing an infestation, but I have never been able to do it.” He placed a cold hand on her shoulder.
“My advice? Leave this place and never return.”
But even a tiny, squalid flat can start to feel like home.
A haunted home in which nothing was ever as it should be.
Glass was constantly strewn all over the floors from mysteriously, repeatedly broken windows; Valya had to hastily cover them with canvas so they had a chance of surviving the winter.
The last of their grain disappeared. Doors slammed randomly in their faces.
Furniture appeared rearranged in the morning.
Her coffee cups and her coffee went missing.
Still, they stayed. It wasn’t until Ivan Morozov played his most disturbing prank that Valya finally conceded it was time to give in and move out.
One night, she fell into bed beside Svetlana, wrung out from the day’s usual tasks and her nocturnal clients, when she felt not her daughter’s warm, sleepy body but a cold presence that enveloped her in a dark fog.
Valya drew in a shaking breath, too horrified to move.
The buzz of swarming insects filled her ears, rot pushed into her mouth and eyes so there was nothing but that, but death, the air choking her.
Slowly, she turned her head—to Ivan Morozov’s shadow. Beyond his transparent figure, she made out her daughter, still asleep on his other side.
The ghoul’s lustrous eyes fixed on her. A wicked smile lit his corpse’s face. Then he placed his gray hands around their one-year-old daughter’s neck and squeezed.
Valya screamed herself hoarse until she finally heard the spirit’s echoing laughter as he vanished.
Half gasping, half sobbing, she lunged for her daughter, who opened her eyes in that moment, tilted her head, and said, “Mama?” It was the first time Svetlana had spoken, her first word. Then she said, “Can we go, Mama?”
Valya realized she was clutching at the illusion of home while placing her daughter’s life in danger. So she nodded, and she and Svetlana moved out the very next day.
Valya set her sights on Saint Petersburg.
It promised not only a good life for her little family but the hope of finding the murderer of her beloved Ivan Morozov.
She had seen a rider upon a horse in the coffee dregs and knew with her fortune teller’s intuition it was the famed bronze monument of Peter the Great in his great capital, and where they would go.