The 'Geisters Read online

  PRAISE FOR RASPUTIN’S BASTARDS

  “Bram Stoker Award winner Nickle’s (Eutopia) latest novel tells a complex story of supernatural horror and psychological suspense crafted with the somber foreboding of a Russian novel and the genre-breaking freedom of magical realism. VERDICT: This novel is supernatural eeriness at its best, with intriguing characters, no clear heroes, and a dark passion at its heart. Horror aficionados and fans of Stephen King’s larger novels should appreciate this macabre look at the aftermath of the Cold War.”

  —Library Journal

  “As always, Nickle is right on point. The prose here is thoughtful, energetic and sharp. Most importantly of all, the plot of Rasputin’s Bastards is complicated and it’s told in a complex way. Despite this, it’s stiffly compelling. Once you’re done, there’s no question: the hours spent enfolded in Nickle’s imagination are well spent. You won’t ever feel the desire to ask for them back.”

  —David Middleton, January Magazine

  “I’m almost certain the book isn’t an attempt on the part of ChiZine Publications and author David Nickle to subconsciously program an army of sleeper agents. That said, there are times when Rasputin’s Bastards feels like a twenty-first century answer to Catch-22. Both books are complex, revel in asynchronous storytelling, and left this reader eager to reread if only to mine for details, subtexts, and plot threads missed on a first read through.”

  —Adam Shaftoe, Page of Reviews

  “While recognizably ‘genre,’ whatever that may mean to the reader (and their prejudices about the same), Rasputin’s Bastards is not of a genre. Instead it’s an ambitious melange of them all. Nickle’s horror is the theft of body and will; the revelation that one’s father is ‘A cold, soul-dead killer.’ His science fiction feels like ’50s pulps, his fantasy a dark-lensed fairy tale with literary heft. Rasputin’s Bastards is a testament to the fact Nickle can write anything.”

  —Chadwick Ginther, The Winnipeg Review

  “Rasputin’s Bastards is a fever dream of a novel. It’s something you must jump into and allow to take along through the tides and currents. And sense? Don’t depend too much on that. Rather depend on your senses, and on Mr. Nickle’s ability to take you along on a journey you won’t soon forget. Highly recommended.”

  —Chaotic Compendiums

  “[Nickle’s] novel Eutopia is a gloriously original American historical horror, and his follow-up Rasputin’s Bastards is a bold and disturbing Russian epic spy thriller that takes drastically disparate elements (there are echoes of James Bond, John le Carré, China Miéville, and Simmons’ Carrion Comfort) and mashes them together in a fantastical narrative that crosses POVs and dimensions with an assurance that is staggering. Have I got your attention yet? Good. Because David Nickle is that good.”

  —Corey Redekop, author of Husk

  “Rasputin’s Bastards is an utterly unique novel; I’ve never read anything quite like it before. It’s a mind-blowing blend of science fiction, political thriller, and understated horror.”

  —Paul Goat Allen, Barnes & Noble Books Blog

  “Part Bioshock, part X-Files, part Sopranos—and 100%, uncut Nickle—Rasputin’s Bastards is a glorious, chaotic delight. I wish I’d written it; in fact, I may yet steal the domesticated giant squid.”

  —Peter Watts, author of Blindsight

  “A journey from the depths of the sea, the heart of Mother Russia, to the darkest corners of the soul, this book appeals to the reader’s intellectual curiosity, and engages the heart with surprising moments of emotionality.”

  —K.E. Bergdoll, The Crow’s Caw

  “[David Nickle] has a talent for spinning a phrase to make it much more than the sum of its parts, and surprisingly, there’s quite a lot of humor as well: clever and dry, popping up just when things start to get really serious, but never disrupting the flow. The author dives deep into his main characters and paints very complete pictures, weaving the stories together amidst a surrealistic landscape of dream walkers and mind control. This reminded me very much of Dan Simmons’ Carrion Comfort (one of my all time favorites), and it’s been quite a while since I’ve read a book with this much teeth. Lovely, rich writing only serves to make the creepy bits (of which there are plenty), well, even more creepy, and fans of subtle horror will find much to like in Rasputin’s Bastards.”

  —My Bookish Ways

  PRAISE FOR EUTOPIA

  “Nickle (Monstrous Affections) blends Little House on the Prairie with distillates of Rosemary’s Baby and The X-Files to create a chilling survival-of-the-fittest story. . . . [His] bleak debut novel mixes utopian vision, rustic Americana, and pure creepiness.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Toronto author David Nickle’s debut novel, the follow-up to his brilliantly wicked collection of horror stories Monstrous Affections, establishes him as a worthy heir to the mantle of Stephen King. And I don’t mean the King of Under the Dome or other recent flops, but the master of psychological suspense who ruled the ’80s with classics like Pet Sematary.”

  —Alex Good, The National Post

  “Try to imagine a collaboration by Mark Twain and H.P. Lovecraft, with Joe R. Lansdale supplying final editorial polish. Or if that’s too difficult to imagine, read the book and see for yourself.”

  —Joe Sanders, The New York Review of Science Fiction

  “[Eutopia] is immensely readable: a quick-paced mountain stream of a novel, cool and sharp and intense, and terrifically adept at drawing a reader in. . . . Eutopia accomplishes what the best horror fiction strives for: gives us characters we can care about and hope for, and then inflicts on them the kind of realistic, inescapable, logical sufferings that make us close our eyes a little at the unfairness of not the author, but the world—and all the while with something more to say for itself than the world is a very bad place.”

  —Leah Bobet, Ideomancer

  “Eutopia crosses genres in a world where folks from a rustic Faulkner novel might clash with H.P. Lovecraft’s monstrosities. Add a dash of Cronenbergian body horror to atmosphere worthy of Poe, and you get one of the most original horror stories

  in years.”

  —Chris Hallock, All Things Horror

  “This novel is seriously creepy. Do not read it on your own, at night, with the bedroom window open. I ended up jumpy and paranoid and then had to sleep with the window closed even though it was muggy and uncomfortable.”

  —Ellie Warren, Curiosity Killed the Bookworm

  PRAISE FOR MONSTROUS AFFECTIONS

  “David Nickle writes ’em damned weird and damned good and damned dark. He is bourbon-rough, poetic and vivid. Don’t miss this one.”

  —Cory Doctorow, author of Pirate Cinema

  “Bleak, stark and creepy, Stoker-winner Nickle’s first collection will delight the literary horror reader. . . . This ambitious collection firmly establishes Nickle as a writer to watch.”

  —Publishers Weekly (STARRED REVIEW)

  “These stories work so well in part because of Nickle’s facility with the language of the place he’s created. He is comfortable writing in different voices . . . and he knows the idiom of his semi-rural environment. . . .”

  —Quill & Quire

  “The cover is creepy. . . . The stories themselves are also very creepy, drawing you into believable, domestic worlds, then showing you the blue pulsing intestines of those worlds.”

  —Kaaron Warren, author of Slights

  “[L]ike the cover, the stories inside are not what they seem. But also, like the cover, the stories inside are brilliant. . . . You’d think that you were reading a book full of what you had always expec
ted a horror story to be, but Nickle takes a left turn and blindsides you with tales that are not of the norm, but are all the more horrific because of surprise twists, darkness and raw emotion.”

  —January Magazine’s Best Books of 2009

  THE

  ’GEISTERS

  DAVID NICKLE

  ChiZine Publications

  COPYRIGHT

  The ’Geisters © 2013 by David Nickle

  Cover artwork © 2013 by Erik Mohr

  Cover design © 2013 by Samantha Beiko

  Interior design © 2013 by Danny Evarts

  All rights reserved.

  Published by ChiZine Publications

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  EPub Edition MAY 2013 ISBN: 978-1-77148-144-1

  All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS

  Toronto, Canada

  www.chizinepub.com

  [email protected]

  Edited and copyedited by Sandra Kasturi

  Proofread by Kelsi Morris

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.

  for Madeline Ashby

  who shows me the way

  ALSO BY DAVID NICKLE

  Monstrous Affections

  Eutopia: A Novel of Terrible Optimism

  Rasputin’s Bastards

  Knife Fight and Other Struggles (2014)

  Volk (2015)

  WITH KARL SCHROEDER:

  The Claus Effect (Tesseract Books)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for Rasputin’s Bastards

  Praise for Eutopia

  Praise for Monstrous Affections

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also by David Nickle

  A Glass of Gewürztraminer

  The Voyage of the Bounty II

  The Joining of Two

  The Lodge

  The Iron Butterfly

  The Tricasta Experiment

  The Devils’ Advocate

  Mister Sleepy

  The Plains

  The Candy Robot

  The Bridge

  Empty Vessels

  The Tower of Light

  Homecoming

  A Sip of Sémillon

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  More from David Nickle

  More from ChiZine

  A GLASS OF

  GEWÜRZTRAMINER

  i

  Was it terror, or was it love? It would be a long time before Ann LeSage could decide. For most of her life, the two feelings were so similar as to be indistinguishable.

  It was easy to mix them up.

  ii

  “Family, now . . . family is far away,” said Michael Voors, and as he said it—perhaps because of the way he said it—Ann felt a pang, a prescience, that something was not right with him. That perhaps she should leave now. Until that moment, she’d thought the lawyer with the little-boy eyes was the perfect date: perfect, at least, by her particular and admittedly peculiar

  standards.

  To look at, Michael was a just-so fellow: athletic, though not ostentatiously so; taller than she, but only by a few inches; dirty blond hair, not exactly a mop of it, but thick enough in his early thirties that it would probably stay put until his forties at least. He’d listened, asked questions—the whole time regarding Ann steadily, and with confidence.

  Steadiness and confidence were first among the things Ann found attractive in Michael, from the night of the book launch. He’d approached her, holding her boss’s anthology of architectural essays, Suburban Flights, and asked her: “Is it any good?” and she’d said: “It’s any good,” and turned away.

  He hadn’t been thrown off his game.

  She had been enchanted by this easy confidence. After everything that had happened in her life—everything that had formed her—it was a quality that she discovered she craved.

  But now, that confidence crumbled, leaving a man that seemed . . .

  older. And somehow . . . not right.

  It hadn’t taken much. Just the simple act of asking: “What about you? Where’s your family from?”

  He tapped his fingers and looked away. His suddenly fidgeting hands cast about and found the saltshaker, a little crystal globe the size of a ping-pong ball. His eyes were momentarily lost too, blinking away from Ann and looking out the window of the 54th-floor view of Toronto’s financial district, a high hall of mirrors up the canyon of Bay Street. They were in Canoe, a popular spot for lunch and cocktails among the better-paid canyon dwellers. It should have been home turf for him.

  “Just my father now. In Pretoria. But—” and he twirled the near-spherical glass saltshaker, so it spun like a fat little dancer “—I don’t hear from him. We have had—you might say a falling out.”

  “A falling out?”

  “We are very different men.”

  Their waiter slowed as he passed the table, took in Michael’s low-grade agitation and met Ann’s eye just an instant before granting the tiniest, most commiserative of nods: Poor you.

  He picked up his pace toward the party of traders clustered at the next table, and Ann suppressed a smile. She was sorely tempted to stop him and order a big, boozy cocktail. But it was early—in the day, and in the relationship—for that kind of thing. Particularly because the way things were going, she didn’t think she’d stop at one.

  “He is an Afrikaner,” continued Michael. “You understand? Not just by birth. By allegiance. When the ANC won the elections in 1994 . . . He wasn’t a bigot—isn’t a bigot, I mean. But he’d seen the things that the African National Congress could do—the business with the tires . . .”

  “The tires?” Ann said, after a heartbeat.

  Now Michael made a half-wise smile, set the saltshaker aside. His hand must have been trembling: the shaker kept rocking.

  “My God,” he said, “you’d think I’d been into the wine already. I’m sorry. They would put tires around fellows they thought were traitors, and light them on fire, and watch them burn to death in the streets of Soweto. And then they became the government. You can imagine how he felt.”

  “I remember that,” said Ann. She nodded in sympathy. That was real terror, now. In the face of it, her own inexplicable instant of fear vanished. “I was small. But didn’t Nelson Mandela have something to do with that?”

  “His wife. Winnie. Maybe. Probably. Who knows?”

  Ann smiled reassuringly and they sat quiet a moment; just the chatter in the restaurant, a burst of boozy mirth from the day traders; the pool-hall swirling of the saltshaker on the glass tabletop.

  The waiter scudded near and inquired: “Need a minute?”

  “Just a minute,” she said, looking at her menu.

 
Michael studied his too, and without looking up, said: “Share an appetizer?”

  “Is there real truffle in the wild mushroom soup?”

  “You want to share soup?”

  “Is there a law says I can’t?”

  That, thought Ann as she regarded Michael, was how you kept it going on a second date: make a little joke about the appetizer. Don’t talk international politics. For that matter, don’t start asking a lot of questions about how international politics and tires kept father and son apart for so long.

  In fact, don’t start talking about family at all. Because as grim as the tale of Michael Voors’ own family turmoils might be—if Michael then started asking after the LeSages, and she was compelled to tell that horrific story . . .

  Well. He was already thrown enough to fidget—she could hear the rolling sound of the saltshaker again.

  “What about the salmon tartar?” she asked before he could answer. She allowed herself a smirk: why, Mr. Voors was actually blushing! “We don’t have to share soup.”

  “No, I—” he was frowning now, and looking down at the table. “My goodness,” he said softly.

  “What is it?”

  Ann lowered the menu, and looked down at the table. And froze.

  The saltshaker was dancing.

  It twirled in a slow loop across Michael’s place setting, rolling along the edge where the curve met its base. Then it rocked, clicking as the base touched the tabletop, and rocked the other side, turning back. Michael held his menu in his left hand—his right was splayed on the tabletop near the fork. His pale cheeks were bright red as he stared. First at the saltshaker, then up

  at Ann.

  “Isn’t that incredible?”

  Michael set the menu down, well away from the perambulating saltshaker.

  “Incredible,” said Ann quietly, not taking her eyes off the shaker as it continued to rock.