The Sealed Floors

THE SEALED FLOORS

THEY FOUND THEMSELVES in the dirty darkness, faintly diluted by the anemic light dribbling from an unshaded electric bulb. Svetlana was momentarily surprised by the fact that there was electricity in the sealed floors but then realized it was necessary to keep whatever was breeding here in check.

The light was so dim, though. Would it even work?

She looked around. She had not been to the upper floors since she was a child and remembered little of them. Ahead of them, a flight of concrete stairs disappeared into the gloom, littered with desiccated insects and mice droppings. There was a shed to the right where the janitor’s tools used to be stored when the entire building had been occupied.

Andrei looked back at the door that shuddered but held as the fists of the eyeless hammered at it.

“Funny neighbors you have,” he remarked acidly.

“Don’t you dare.” Svetlana turned on him, her cheeks blazing with indignation. “Those are good people. Good workers. The Enemy had done something to them.”

“What?”

She shook her head mutely. She had never heard of anything like this. A whole neighborhood turned into . . . whatever. There were no words in her vocabulary to describe something like this. There were traitors, of course, occasional people seduced by the Enemy and gradually mutating into monsters, but so many and so sudden?

Then she realized what it meant, and relief washed through her, momentarily blotting out fear and confusion.

If ordinary people could be so beleaguered by the Enemy as to become crawling ghouls, then what had happened to Dad was just another unmerited affliction. He had not willingly sold himself to the shape-shifters, walking corpses, screaming fists, and wormy damagers. He was not a traitor but a victim. Surely, the Patrolmen and the officials in the Speak-House were right now working on how to reverse the plague. Svetlana could not wait to get to the House where she could talk to whoever was in charge and explain the situation, and make sure Dad was cured. And bring him home.

She turned to Andrei, glowing. He was looking up the staircase. Suddenly, she remembered the red flower on Tattie’s chest, and her exuberance faded.

“Is there an attic here?” Andrei asked. “Can we get to the roof?”

Svetlana caught his sleeve.

“Don’t go up,” she exclaimed. “The house is infested. The Enemy has taken over the apartments here. This is why they sealed the upper floors.”

Andrei shrugged.

“It’s either that or the bunch outside. There are too many to shoot our way through. You learn it a hard way, little sister: when it’s one against a thousand, the one loses. We have to try our luck on the roof.”

He started climbing. Svetlana stood still. What if she could just wait it out? Surely the eyeless would eventually go away.

The door shuddered under a new barrage of blows. Andrei rounded the corner of the staircase, disappearing into the gloom, and Svetlana could not bear parting from him. She started climbing, almost tripping and falling in her haste. As she groped her way in the murk, clinging to the slick banister, she tried to convince herself she was only doing what was right by looking out for him. He was a warrior; his life was precious.

The bulb on the next landing was on as well, and Svetlana’s spirits rose. If there was electricity here, then the Patrols must have left it on deliberately to protect the ground floor where her family lived. Light was watching over them, after all. They were not alone.

But the electric lamps were so weak that they only generated small puddles of yellowish glow. The air in the stairwell was stagnant and smelled rusty and rotten at the same time. Something crunched wetly under Svetlana’s slippers.

They reached the next floor.

There were two apartment doors on the opposite sides of the landing. Dark red with recessed panels, they looked like the door of Svetlana’s family’s apartment except for being gouged with deep scratches. Both were firmly closed.

As they stepped onto the landing, the door on the left swung open. Clotted darkness swirled inside.

Svetlana gulped and hurried on to the next flight of stairs, but Andrei peered into the apartment, and then he dived into the darkness.

“No,” Svetlana cried, poised above the landing. The stairs ahead of her were blocked by something long and thin lying across them.

At least she could hear Andrei who was blundering inside the apartment, swearing and rattling something in the gloom. Svetlana forced herself to step down.

The electric bulb on the landing exploded, showering her with slivers of glass. The dark was as palpable as a dirty hand clapped against her face. A wave of stench rose toward her—gangrenous flesh and blocked latrines.

“Andrei,” she cried.

“Here!”

She fumbled forward, hands outstretched, horribly reminded of the eyeless people’s groping fingers. She brushed her face to make sure no writhing sea-stars blocked her eyes.

She homed in on the sound of Andrei’s voice. He was swearing incessantly. Something crashed. Then another noise—an insidious rustling.

“What the . . . ?”

In their own apartment there had been electricity once, before all the production had to be diverted to the war against the Enemy and its foreign sponsors. All the apartments in this block had the same layout. If she could just keep her cool, pretend she was in her own familiar living room where she could find her way blindfolded . . .

Svetlana’s hand touched a hanging cord, furry with dust. She tugged.

The ceiling fixture turned on.

The light was weak but shed enough illumination for her to see the cluttered room, Andrei in the corner, and the thing rearing above him.

It looked like a giant pale snake, but its flesh was soft and lardy. Its head bore a tiny human face perched askew above its proboscis like a coquettish hat, and it had rudimentary arms, pudgy and useless. They were waving in the air as the thing dipped toward Andrei, its proboscis swelling and growing.

The electric light upset the krovosos and it hissed as Andrei ducked, snatched up a chair and hit the creature that writhed on the floor, its pulpy body flailing around like a giant leech. After the third blow, it exploded with a wet crunch, red blood spraying out and splattering the walls.

***

Tossing the splintered chair away, Andrei came over to her, wiping blood splatters off his face.

“I thought you did not have electricity indoors,” he said.

“We used to. I knew where the switch would be. But why did you go in?”

Instead of an answer, Andrei turned to a big oak wardrobe with elaborately carved doors. Svetlana’s family had never had anything so grand. Was this the reason the people who had lived here had been vulnerable to the Enemy? Everybody knew that hoarding was one way to let Darkness in.

Andrei rooted inside the wardrobe and pulled out a heap of musty-smelling clothes.

“It’s winter outside, little sister,” he said.

Svetlana had to admit he was right. Her flowery housedress would be useless in the biting cold, and Andrei’s greatcoat had been left behind as well.

They pawed through the clothes. Andrei took a worn overcoat patched up with random pieces of leather and fur. It had been owned long and lovingly, and Svetlana looked queasily to the corner where the smashed body of the krovosos lay like a human-sized blood sausage. Had the master of the house been masquerading as a man until exposed by a Patrol? Or worse: had he not known what he was?

“That’s for you,” Andrei said, handing her a woman’s cable-knitted jumper, so big it fell to her knees. It stunk of old sweat but she was relieved there had been no children in the apartment as all the clothes were adult size. She supplemented the jumper with several scarves.

Dressed as warmly as possible, they went back out onto the landing. The long thin thing that Svetlana had seen on the stairs was still there, as immobile as a log.

Perhaps it was a log . . . but then the thing stirred and slithered down the stairs. It looked like a slimmer version of the krovosos but Svetlana saw, just in time, that instead of a leech-like proboscis crowned with a cartoonish human face, it had a bunch of pointed serpentine heads that thrashed and squirmed in the dank air.

“Hydra,” she hissed into Andrei’s ear. “Stand still.”

She pressed into the wall, hoping the creature would overlook them. Immature hydras were notoriously stupid, but once grown to a full size, they were more dangerous than just about any other kind of the Enemy. Hydras could not be killed except by fire. Cutting off their heads only multiplied them indefinitely.

The creature flowed by them and disappeared into the open doorway. Svetlana and Andrei rushed up the stairs.

Another landing. Yet another. The building was old, as few constructions in Loadstone Rock were, and its massive stairs, substantial doors, and carved banisters exuded the air of unclean antiquity. Not for the first time, Svetlana wished they had been given one of the smaller but newer apartments in the factory blocks. Perhaps then what had happened to Dad would not have happened.

She almost collided with Andrei when he stopped abruptly, pointing at something hanging from the sloping ceiling of the stairwell. She looked up.

They were cocoons, almost ready to hatch. One of them split on top and a small pink hand was poking through the oozing slit. There had been kids in the upper floors, after all.

On the next landing, there were no apartments but only a small postern door in the corner. They went through and found a narrow staircase leading to the attic. The door was not locked but unfortunately it meant that there was no way to lock it behind them either.

The attic was huge and freezing cold. There was a hole in the roof and tiny dispirited snowflakes drifted through.

The attic was cluttered with old plywood boxes, moth-eaten rags, bundles of old clothes—detritus of interrupted and destroyed lives. Somehow these pitiful remnants of the everyday brought back the horror of the Enemy more vividly than the monstrous encounters in the sealed floors below.

Svetlana peered through a skylight in the slope of the roof. The sun was invisible, and the sky was that peculiar lemony-gray color that presages winter twilight. But the golden lights of the Speak-House shone brightly in the dusk. They must have spent longer in the sealed floors than she realized.

She pointed out Speak-House to Andrei: a massive concrete block, its multiple windows aglow, and the squat tower above lit up by spotlights.

“That’s where the Central Committee sits?” he asked.

“We call it the Council of Light, but yes.”

“And the NKVD . . . I mean, like, security organs?”

“The Patrol of Patrols. POP.”

“Do you really want to go there?” Andrei asked.

Svetlana did not deign to reply.

Andrei rubbed the dirty glass. “There is a walkway to the next building,” he said, pointing.

From below, came the bang of a door.

They climbed the ladder in the corner and exited through a hatch, finding themselves on the icy shingles of the roof, which sloped toward a dizzying drop to the pavement four stories below. Once a parapet decorated the edge, but time and neglect had taken their toll, and now only gape-toothed remnants of the low wall stuck out here and there.

Something large passed over their heads. Svetlana followed the blackbird’s passage until it disappeared behind rooftops. Blackbirds, piloted by brave Patrolmen, were a recent glorious invention of the Voice to ensure Motherland’s victory in the coming war. Seldom seen, they were a thing of wonder, and under different circumstances, Svetlana would be mesmerized by the slim tubular body and large flapping wings feathered with silver. Now, though, they had more pressing concerns, like how to escape this infested building.

Andrei walked to the very edge, balancing on the slippery surface. Svetlana swallowed as she peered down to the pavement. She reminded herself that a nurse on the battlefield was supposed to be as brave as any soldier—braver, because soldiers’ lives depended on her. She pushed down her fear and followed, clinging to fat chimney-pots for support.

Andrei looked down into the street:

“They are gone, the eyeless ones,” he said.

“But the Enemy would be out in force,” she pointed out. “We should wait till morning to go to the Speak-House.”

“Not here.”

As if to lend support to his words, a bouquet of wormy heads bloomed out of the hatch.

“Come on,” Andrei yelled and, grasping Svetlana’s hand, pulled her to the walkway that connected her building to the next one. The problem, though, was that the other building was lower, so the walkway was basically an openwork slide, without any railings and glassy with frost.

Svetlana took a tiny step. Then another.

She saw a fat pigeon flap through the air below her.

She stopped. Her knees locked.

“Move,” Andrei yelled. “Move, you fucking coward!”

The insult landed like a slap in the face. Her eyes brimming with tears, Svetlana walked on. She did not see where she stepped, and it did not matter. Who cared whether she lived or died?

Andrei caught her in his arms. They stood on a shaky fire-escape attached to the brick wall of the next building. There was a smashed glass door leading inside.

The building, too, was abandoned. Fortunately, it had never had families living in it. Consisting of dusty corridors and empty offices, it had probably served as a neighborhood distribution center. Sparse electric lights were on.

They found shelter in a small office with lots of moldy paperwork still lying around. Andrei collected old files and posters and made a fire in a potbelly stove. Normally Svetlana would object to this willful destruction of official documents, but she felt exhausted, dispirited, and empty.

They huddled by the stove. Andrei lit up a rolled cigarette.

“I’m sorry, Sveta,” he said awkwardly. “Mama would paddle my behind for using this kind of language on a girl. But you learn bad things in the trenches. I won’t do it again, I promise.”

Svetlana nodded without looking at him.

Her stomach rumbled and her eyes smarted with unshed tears. Eventually, she fell asleep.