Nastya only stopped talking when Pyotr pointed to his watch. She kissed me on the cheek, then picked up a small bag and cardboard box-maybe she was taking some fruit to her sick mother?
“All the best, Alisa…”
And at last I was left alone.
There was a pile of clean linen lying on the bed. The electric bulb glowed feebly under its simple glass shade.
Pyotr and Nastya’s steps and their simple conversation quickly faded away.
I was alone.
But not absolutely alone. On the other side of two thin walls, just five steps along the corridor, eighteen little girls aged ten or eleven were sleeping.
I suddenly started trembling-a rapid, nervous trembling, as if I were an apprentice again, trying for the first time to extract someone else’s Power. Nabokov’s character Humbert Humbert would probably have trembled the same way in my place.
But then, compared to what I was going to do now, his passion for nymphets was nothing but childish naughtiness…
I switched off the light and tiptoed out into the corridor. How I missed my Other powers!
I would just have to make do with the human powers I had left…
The corridor was long and the floorboards squeaked. The threadbare carpet runner was no help-my steps could easily be heard. I could only hope that at this early hour the girls were still sleeping and dreaming…
Simple, straightforward, uncomplicated children’s dreams.
I opened the door and went into the dormitory. For some reason I’d been expecting some kind of state institution, halfway between a children’s home and a hospital-iron bedsteads, the dull glow of a night lamp, depressing curtains, and children sleeping as if they were standing at attention…
But in fact it was all very nice. The only light came from the lantern on the pillar outside. The shadows swayed gently, a fresh sea breeze blew in at the open windows and I could smell the scent of wildflowers. The screen of the switched-off television glowed dully in the corner, and the walls were covered with drawings in colored pencil and watercolor paintings that looked bright and cheerful even in the semi-darkness.
The little girls were sleeping, sprawled out across their beds or tucked underneath the blankets, with all their things neatly arranged on their bedside lockers or scattered untidily on the headboards and the backs of the chairs-swimming costumes that were still wet, skirts, little pairs of jeans and socks. A good psychologist could have walked through that dormitory at night and composed a full character portrait of those girls…
But I didn’t need one.
I walked slowly between the beds, adjusting blankets that had slid off, lifting up arms and legs that had slipped down to touch the floor. The girls were sleeping soundly. Soundly and with no dreams…
I only got lucky with the seventh girl. She was about eleven years old, plump with light hair. An ordinary little girl whimpering quietly in her sleep. Because she was having a bad dream…
I knelt down beside her bed, reached out my hand, and touched her forehead. Gently, with just the tips of my fingers.
I felt Power.
As I was now, without any Other powers, I couldn’t have read an ordinary dream. But sensing the opportunity to nourish yourself is a different matter. It all takes place at the level of animal reactions, like an infant’s sucking reflex.
And I saw it…
It was a bad dream. The girl was dreaming that she was going home-their session wasn’t over yet, but she was being taken away because her mother had fallen ill and her gloomy, frowning father was dragging her toward the bus. She hadn’t even had time to say goodbye to her friends, she hadn’t had any time to take a last dip in the sea and take some little stones that were very important… and she was struggling and asking her father to wait, but he was just getting more and more angry… and saying something about disgraceful behavior, about how girls her age shouldn’t have to be beaten, but since she was behaving like this, she could forget about his promise not to punish her with his belt anymore…
It was a really bad dream. Nastya’s departure had affected the little girl very badly…
And anybody would have tried to help the child at that moment.
A human being would have stroked her hair and said something affectionate in a gentle voice, maybe sung a lullaby… anything to interrupt the dream.
A Light Other would have used his Power to turn the dream inside out, so that the father would laugh and say the little girl’s mother was well again and go running to the sea with her… He would have replaced the cruel but realistic dream with a sweet lie.
But I’m a Dark Other.
And I did what I could. I drank her Power. Sucked it into myself-the gloomy father, and the sick mother, and the little friends lost forever, and the sea stones left behind, and the shameful beating…
The little girl gave a quiet squeak, like a mouse caught under something heavy. And then she began breathing calmly and regularly. There’s not a lot of Power in children’s dreams. It’s not like the ritual killing that we had threatened the Light Ones with and which provides a truly monstrous discharge of energy. These were dreams, just dreams…
Light nourishing broth for an ailing witch…
I got up off my knees, feeling slightly dizzy. No, I hadn’t recovered my lost powers yet. It would take a dozen dreams like that to fill the yawning gap.
But those dreams would happen. And I would do my best to encourage them.
None of the other little girls were dreaming. Well, one was, but her dream was no use to me, a stupid little girl’s dream about the freckle-faced boy who had given her yet another of those stupid stones with a hole in them-what they called “chicken gods.” I suppose chickens must have their own gods.
I stood beside this girl’s bed-she was probably the most physically advanced of them all. She even had the first beginnings of breasts. I touched her forehead several times, trying to find at least something, but there was nothing. Sea, sun, and sand, water splashing, and that freckle-faced boy. Not a drop of anger, envy, or sadness.
A Light magician could have drawn Power from her by drinking in her dream and then gone away satisfied. But I was wasting my time here.
Never mind. There would be another evening and another night. And my plump donor’s dream would come back to her-I had drawn out all of her fear, but not its causes. Her nightmare would return, and I would help her again. The important thing was not to try too hard, not to push the girl into a genuine nervous breakdown-I had no right to do that. That would smack of serious magical intervention, and if the Light Ones had even a single observer in the camp, or even-who knows what tricks the Darkness might play-if there was an Other there from the Inquisition, then I would be in serious trouble.
And I wasn’t about to let Zabulon down again.
Never!
It was amazing that he had forgiven me for what had happened the previous summer. But he wouldn’t forgive me a second time.
At ten o’clock in the morning I went to breakfast with my charges.
Nastya had been right-I was managing just fine.
When the girls had woken up, they had been a bit cautious at first. How could they not have been, when the leader they had already come to love had gone away in the middle of the night to see her sick mother, and another young woman had come into the dormitory instead of her-a stranger, an unknown quantity, someone quite unlike Nastya? I had immediately felt the unfriendly wary gaze of eighteen pairs of eyes on me-they were all together and I was isolated.
The situation was saved by the fact that the girls were still little and I am beautiful.
If boys of the same age had been in their place, my appearance wouldn’t have made the slightest difference.
Ten-year-old boys are far more interested in the ugliest of puppies than the most beautiful of girls. And if my charges had been two or three years older, my appearance would have only irritated them. But for ten-year-old girls, a beautiful woman is an object of admiration. They are already beginning to develop the desire to flirt and to please, but they still don’t understand that not everybody can grow up beautiful. I know, I was the same myself, and I used to gape wide-eyed at my tutor, the witch Irina Alexandrovna…
So I soon established contact with the girls.
I sat on Olechka’s bed because the notes in the exercise book suggested that she was the most quiet and timid of them. I talked to the girls about Nastya, about how bad it is when your mother is unwell, and told them they mustn’t be offended with Nastya… she had really wanted to stay with them, but your mother is the most important person in your life!
When I finished, Olechka began sniveling and pressed herself against me. And the eyes of all the others were looking moist and weepy too.
Then I told them about my dad and his heart attack, and I said that nowadays they knew how to cure people’s hearts, and Nastya’s mother was going to be perfectly all right too. I helped the swarthy-skinned little cossack girl Gulnara to weave her braids-she had magnificent hair, but as Nastya had noted, she was a bit slow. I argued with Tanya from St. Petersburg about what was the most interesting way to come to Artek, by train or by plane, and, of course, I finally admitted that she was right-it was much more fun on the train. I promised Anya from Rostov that by the evening she would be swimming and not just floundering about in the shallow water. We discussed the solar eclipse that was expected in three days’ time and regretted that it would be just a tiny bit less than total in the Crimea.
We arrived at breakfast as a united and cheerful group. Only Olga, who was “not Olechka, but always Olga,” and her friend Ludmila were still sulky. But that was not surprising since they had obviously been Nastya’s favorites.
Never mind… in another three days’ time they would come to love me too.
Our surroundings were genuinely lovely. August in the Crimea is just fantastic. The sea was glittering at the bottom of the slope, the air was saturated with the scent of salt water and flowers. The girls squealed and ran about all over the place, bumping into each other. The marching rhymes in the old Pioneer camps were obviously invented for good reason-you can’t do much squealing if your mouth’s busy trying to sing.
But I don’t know any marching rhymes, and I don’t know how to march in line anyway.
I’m a Dark One.
In the dining hall I simply followed my little charges’ lead-they knew where we were supposed to sit. We were surrounded by five hundred children creating a huge din who somehow managed to eat at the same time. I sat there quietly with my little band of girls, trying to assess the situation. After all, I had to spend an entire month here.
There were twenty-five leaders who had come to breakfast with their brigades. My facile pride in how skillfully I was managing my charges rapidly evaporated. These young men and women were more like the boys’ and girls’
older brothers and sisters. Sometimes they were stern, sometimes they were affectionate; their word was law and they were also loved.
Where did they find people like that?
My mood began to deteriorate. I prodded feebly at the “liver pancakes” that we had been given for breakfast, with our buckwheat and cocoa, and thought wearily about the unenviable plight of a spy in enemy territory. I was surrounded by too many expressions of delight, smiles, and innocent pranks. This was a pasture for Light Ones to tend their charges and raise human children in the spirit of love and goodness, not a feeding ground for a Dark One like me.
Sheer hypocrisy on every side. As false as gilded and varnished iron!
Of course, I consoled myself, if I could have looked around with the eyes of an Other, many things might have changed, and among all these nice people I might find villains, perverts, individuals who were malicious or indifferent…
But that wasn’t definite. It could well be that I wouldn’t find any. That they were all sincere-to the extent that that is possible. That they sincerely loved the children, the camp, and each other with a love that was pure. That this place really was a reservation for idiots, the kind of place the Light Ones dreamed of turning the whole world into.
But that would mean there was at least some basis for the way the Light Ones acted.
“Hello…”
I looked around at the boy walking past. Aha, my first acquaintance in Artek.
“Good morning, Makar.” I squinted at his skinned knee. “So where’s the iodine?”
“It’s nothing. It’ll heal on its own,” the boy muttered. He gave me a slightly alarmed look-evidently he was trying to figure out if I’d found out anything about him already or not.
“Better run, or you won’t have time to eat anything…” I smiled. “Maybe you only need three hours’ sleep, but food’s a different matter. The food here’s institutional too, but it’s good.”
He strode off quickly along the line of tables. Now he knew that I was in the know-about his nocturnal wanderings and his genuine social status. If I’d been in better shape I could have drawn in a lot of Power…
“Alisa, how do you know him?” Olechka whispered loudly.
I put on a mysterious face. “I know everything about everybody…”
“Why?” Olechka asked curiously.
“Because I’m a witch!” I told her in a hollow, ghostly voice.
The little girl laughed happily.
Oh yes, it’s very funny… especially because it’s the absolute truth… I patted her on the head and called attention to her full plate with my eyes.
I still had to go through the official part of the proceedings-the introduction to the head of the Azure section. And then, the beach and the sea that my little girls were already twittering about.
And to be quite honest, I realized I was looking forward to it with just as much delight as the night ahead. I might be a Dark One but, contrary to common ignorant opinion, even vampires love the sea and the sunshine.
The year before, at the end of summer, I’d managed to get away to Jurmala. I don’t know why I went there-I must have wanted to be somewhere uncomfortable. If so, I was lucky: August turned out rainy, cold, and miserable.