Ivan Sees You
A Thirteenth Friday Katyusha Flashback
The
are doing another diversion. This time it’s horror stuff for Friday Thirteenth.The theme? Eye See You. Click there for links to all the stories.
Given how much I enjoyed being a part of the Small & Scary diversion, and the wonderful responses to my contribution, I couldn’t really pass up this opportunity.
So I thought I would do a little follow-up flashback to Skinner Box. Those of you familiar with that story, and also with at least a little of my What to do about Katrina serialisation, will recognise the characters. Even if you don’t, it shouldn’t be too confusing.
So this is a very, ahem, small and scary vignette for you, in which we return to Katyusha’s childhood fragmentation.
It’s just over 1400 words, just so as you know.
For this one, I should definitely provide a trigger warning. Specifically, it is suggestive of Satanic Ritual Abuse and some aspect of the (related) child abuse Network.
I say suggestive, because I simply cannot bring myself to do any graphic descriptions of the horrors perpetrated by these real life monsters. But your mind will probably fill in the gaps.
Think of this, then, as a study-sketch of evil.
The world does need to know about that evil. And it needs to stop them.
Ivan Sees You
“PLUCK IT OUT!!!”
Katyusha screamed. She shuddered violently and screamed.
Phase One isn’t over yet.
“YOU NEED TO CHOOSE, KATYUSHA!”
She shook her head rapidly like an oscillator and clutched the kitten tighter to her little chest. The little kitten they allowed her to bond with. She could feel its little heart racing against hers.
Ivan screamed back at her again. Pointed over to the corner. “YOU SEE THAT LITTLE BOY THERE?! IN THE CAGE?! I WANT AN EYE! YOU CHOOSE! HIM, OR YOUR LITTLE KOSHKI.”
Tears stream. She shuts her eyes as if welding them shut and wishing they weren’t here and she couldn’t choose.
“OPEN YOUR EYES OR I WILL PLUCK THEM OUT!”
This time, she Obeyed.
“See this little circle here?” He points violently. The one wide enough for a boy or a girl or a kitten. The one embracing the five-pointed star etched in crimson.
“It’s you, or him, or little Koshki, Katyusha. And if you don’t choose, then I will choose both, the boy and your kitten.”
She howled and she wailed but she couldn’t move. The kitten’s heart accelerated next to hers.
And that’s when the screen went black.
Katyusha screamed and woke up and then screamed again.
Magda turned over suddenly and held her. Katyusha held on to her for her dearest life.
Magda kissed her head.
She kissed her head again and rocked her gently.
Katyusha prised her head away and glanced desperately towards the bedroom doorway. Slightly open.
“Breathe, little one. Breathe.”
Three quick ones, then stops hyperventilating. Control. She looks up into Magda’s deep brown eyes, the same as hers, and cries.
The other Koshki sleeps, still, on the soft chair in the corner.
Ivan Kamerensky moistened his right index finger, dabbed up the last of the cocaine and sucked it up. Then he lit up a black cigarette, inhaled deeply, downed the vodka and poured himself a generous fifth.
He sniffed again and reached for the phone, connected up the secure encryption cable, slid through the address list and clicked the one in Bavaria.
It rang twice before the response came.
Yeah, it’s Ivan. I have good news, and I have bad news.
Katyusha’s obedience protocol will prevent her from giving away the name of her owner for the rest of her life. Except to those who she knows, already know who he is.
There is a little get-out clause here. It’s called metadata. She can provide peripheral information which any competent intelligence officer should be able to use to narrow it down. Cross-reference with everything she says about her experiences, about who she met and when, cross-ref with known movements and associations. First and second degrees of connection.
“It was in North-Eastern Bavaria, not far from the border with Saxony.” She points out a vague area on the map, then looks up at Guy Melville with those big brown eyes of hers. “Please don’t ask me again to tell you. If all I do is scream then that’s kind of ok, isn’t it? But if you keep asking I will either kill you or my heart will burst.”
“Is this,” he asks, nervously, “is this a kind of suicide program?”
She shrugs. “Kind of, sure. Sometimes I think no, can’t work, you know? Then I think, well, we have so much control over everything that happen in the body, and the brain, such that, even if there’s no microchip in me anymore, you know, with the little explosive to sever the brainstem or burst open the pulmonary artery, there’s some, there’s someone inside that’ll hit the kill switch. And the heart stops.”
Guy from counterintelligence swallowed and kept staring at her. She looked up at him again and smiled. Faintly.
Then she stared into the distance once more. “He sees me, you know? Ivan. Intensive Care Unit. Eye. See. You.”
And guy instinctively recoiled when she suddenly switched to stare him in his own eyes.
We are ready to start Katyusha on Phase Three. I’ll give her a few more days of light sedation in the Chrysalis Cell, then I’ll put her in the sensory deprivation tank. The way she is progressing, I reckon it’ll take half the time as the others. Temperance and the Tower will be fortified and she’ll start working on building up her internal world.
He downed another vodka then another deep inhale. He has his feet up on the desk and is leaning way back.
Then he chuckles, in that harsh, guttural way of him. Man, I would love to see that world. She has such a fucking imagination she could have an entire motherfucking galaxy in that little head of hers.
Another drag and exhale.
Yeah, less than twenty-four fucking hours to get out of the maze. He bellows with laughter again. I was thinking of calling the fucking Guinness Book of fucking Records!
He pours another vodka.
What? How did she do it? It happened when she suddenly realised the spiders were an illusion. That the only limits were those of her creative imagination. So she burns the fucking swarm to a crisp with her mind! Fuck me! This little girl is special, for sure. I’m thinking you should maybe add a fucking zero on to the end of the price.
Hah! No, of course I’m joking. But she is, believe me, fucking scary. She’s gonna be fucking Wonder Woman when she grows up.
And yeah, of course I’ll be proud.
Because I’m like her fucking daddy…
The other Koshki purrs in Katyusha’s lap as she huddles over her and kisses her head for the dearest life.
She looks to the side. Clock says a few minutes to seven.
She is seven years’ old and all made up like Cinderella to go to the Castle and Magda says there will be high-ups there. Some people from the Bilderberg Group have heard all about her.
These are the ones who do terrible things. Unspeakable things.
They gorge themselves on cocaine and they will pluck your eyes out just on a whim.
She stares through the clock and through the wall and her eyes reach deep inside, through the briar rose and through the sky-high walls and deep into the Sleeping Beauty Palace and across the tiled, checkerboard parlour up the little dais and parts the translucent silk curtain and there she is, the Core, the original, Catriona.
Still sleeping. And still dreaming of the other world where everything is going to be utopian and bright.
Magda pushes through the bedroom door and brushes her hair back and smiles. “Ready?”
Katyusha shakes her head.
Magda crouches down to level with her. “It will be over, soon. Just one more year.”
She shakes her head again. “It will never be over. Don’t lie to me. It’s not just one more year.”
“It is for the kittens, milaya. One more year. Then they will fuse and become faeries. They will never even remember they were once human.”
“Can’t you tell them I’m sick?”
Magda shakes her head twice. “You always ask me that.” She reaches down and gently plucks the other Koshki from her lap and places her, gently, on the bed. Then turns back to Katyusha.
“They know they will have to return you in the condition in which you were delivered. Always remember that.”
Katyusha does not answer back.
Koshki sleeps.
With one ear open.
“We’ve narrowed it down to, maybe half a dozen possibles.”
Guy Melville, self-discharged from the hospital now, but still walking with a limp, sits across the desk from MI6’s man in Paris and watches for an answer.
“Are you sure,” Peter says, “I can’t tempt you with a wee tumbler of Ballantine’s, Guy?”
Guy rolls his eyes.
“Suit yourself.” Peter pours himself another.
“Ok. I’ll have one.”
“What?!” he stops in mid pour.
“I’ll have one. Please.”
“Wonders,” Peter says, salaciously, “will never cease.”
Ivan drags the little boy out of the cage and readies the bowie knife.
Drags the little boy to the centre of the star to the centre of the circle and holds him down, with the tip of the blade just a few little shudders away from the eyelid.
He turns his head, slowly, and stares suggestively, and demonically, at Katyusha…
The candles, flicker.
And somewhere, somewhere very deep inside her burgeoning inner world, one of her fragmented essences stares back at him, and then at the summoning glyph, and makes a decision.
And sets his future fate in the stone-black heart of her soul…
Pictures by me, in case you were wondering, of one of our feline visitors.
You can buy me a coffee if you wish, at that link.
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And I do, sincerely, hope I didn’t upset you or scare you too much with this vignette.
Fate is, trust me, going to catch up with the bad guys.
Oh, and if you would like a much, much lighter take on the Eye See You theme, then this story, An Optician’s Tale, as one of my Fairytale Sunday series, might just be what you are looking for. It’s a sort of postmodern fairytale, creepy but surreal but equally lighthearted…
True evil. Another masterful entry! I've gotta say, Evelyn, I'm really getting into this shared universe you've created. It's complex and seedy, filled with some mind-melting ideas. It's impressive how much I'm getting through your prose alone, the way it colors the world and its characters. I've already said it but I've saved your directory post so I can start at the beginning.
Evil bastard.