I am Alexi Petrovich. I am Brian Favors. I believe that both of these things are true; that I am somehow both men.
But I don’t believe that is the entire truth.
I think the whole truth is that I am both less and more than these men. As they travel this strange path that has led them to a creaking train ride across the Ukraine in a passenger compartment that smells of cigarette smoke and too many years of use, I feel a phantom third trailing them, us. Sometimes behind, sometimes ahead, but always there as a terrible constant—the discordant beat of a corrupted heart.
I can’t see that third face yet, but I can sense it. It’s pushing up from some darker depth, carrying the weight of truth and the inertia of inevitability.
It terrifies me for many reasons. Most of all, because I’m beginning to fear it may be my truest face.
It took me nine hours to fly from New York to Kiev. Before that, the longest flight I had ever taken had been to Arizona to visit my cousin when I was nineteen. This was a wholly different experience. The plane was larger, but also older, and while the passenger compartment was only half-full, the seats seemed cramped for such a long flight. The blessing was that the trip was relatively quiet, and after a few minutes of listening to the low rumbling hum of the engines, I found myself drifting off to sleep.
I had gotten used to the strange dreams by that point, but the dream I had on that flight was different somehow. In it, I was in a town square, though I couldn’t have said where. People were all around me, hurrying to and fro, ordering food from a local stand, clustering up to have conversations here and there before moving on. I was looking around, trying to find some point of reference that might trigger some sense of familiarity in either Brian or Alexi’s memories, but there was nothing.
The architecture of the place was strange, and I saw no signs or engravings that gave any indication of a particular language or nationality. Just a large stone square bordered on all sides by buildings that towered over everything like the upreaching ornate fingers of some subterranean stone god. This was set against a sky that was a deep blue I would normally associate with twilight, but everything seemed too bright and well-defined for that. I could see far too much. And as the people crowding the square began to turn toward me, I could see the burn scars and keloids that traced fine lines of lightning across everyone’s flesh.
And they were turning to me now, all of them. First with curiosity, and then with joyful recognition. A few of them came towards me—men and women reaching out to touch me as they echoed out greetings to a long-lost friend. At my sides I felt my coat being tugged as children turned their twisted and charred faces up to me with gap-toothed smiles and shining eyes wild with excitement.
I tried to back away, but there was no where to go. The crush of people was growing now, and as they pressed closer, the babble of their greetings grew into an undulating wave of sound that I somehow understood even as I felt it tightening my throat and hammering down into the center of my brain.
They were welcoming me home.
I saw several of the people further back struggling to reach me, rubbing and scratching at their heads in frustration that they were so far back in the swelling biomass that was closing in on me. A needle of new horror pushed through as I saw their hair was coming away in tufts, floating away like dandelion fluff as they went back to pawing their heads with one hand as they reached for me with the other.
There was a man in front of me now, grabbing my lapels and grinning at me as he babbled that same flood of words that were neither English or Russian. He was saying how good it was to have me back at last. I had trouble understanding some of it—but not because I couldn’t comprehend the words, whatever language it might be.
It was because he was trying to talk as his teeth were falling out.
I was awoken from a deep sleep by a concerned-looking stewardess. I had somehow slept the rest of the way to Kiev and was the last passenger left on the plane. As I pushed my way further up into consciousness, I realized I was also soaking wet. It was sweat for the most part, though I couldn’t say for sure I hadn’t peed on myself a little as well.
Feeling a flush of confusion, fear and embarrassment, I apologized to the stewardess and fumbled my way off the plane. I made the apology in Russian, but I was well past being troubled by such things now. Making my way through the airport, I found a taxi stand and got a ride to the hotel I had booked prior to my flight.
My train for Pripyat did not leave until six the next morning, but between jet lag and worry I got little rest during my stay in the hotel. By three a.m., I was already heading to the station in the cold rain that had settled over the city during the night. The train arrived a few minutes early, and so by the time the sun was rising, I was already on my way to Pripyat.
I woke with a start. My watch told me I had been asleep for just over two hours—a dreamless sleep that was a blessing after so many bad nights. I still had several more hours to go before I would be in Pripyat, so I started looking around with thoughts of exploring the train for a food cart or dining car.
That’s when I saw the faded yellow envelope laying in the seat next to me.
I froze like I had just woken up next to a rattlesnake. I knew what it was without opening it. The similarity of the envelope was part of it—that same old, dried-out looking paper that looked like it had been sitting somewhere for decades before being delivered to me. But it was more than that. It was like I could sense or somehow dimly recall that there were more writings inside.
Forcing myself to pick up the envelope, I felt the shift of paper inside as I looked around the car for any sign of who might have left this while I slept. The only other passengers were a teenaged couple that were looking at something on the girl’s cell phone. Grasping the envelope tightly, I walked back to them, shifting my weight with the subtle sway of the rails as I went. They looked up at the same time, their expressions slightly frightened and wary as I asked them if they had seen anyone leave me the envelope.
The boy shook his head while the girl muttered no, they had not seen anything, and then they both went back to studying her phone. I wanted to ask more, but I could tell they were ignoring me out of some sort of anxiety, not rudeness, and I didn’t want to worry them more by being the strange man that kept bugging them with odd questions. So I reluctantly went back to my seat and opened up the envelope.
I recognized our handwriting right away. The tone, however was much different this time. It was describing events that took place several days after the last entry from Alexi, and this time the writer identified himself as Brian. Much like me, he had mixed memories of both men, and much like me, he found himself increasingly unable to distinguish one from the other as his nightmares grew more real and vivid.
Unlike me, he’d had to watch as some of our friends were killed.
Shortly after Alexi’s last entry, military came into the town and began dividing people into groups. The first divide was between people that worked at the plant and those that didn’t. Brian, still appearing to be Alexi to everyone else, was placed in the plant worker group. This group was then divided into those that had participated in hunting parties for the monster or otherwise made official reports of seeing strange things, and those that hadn’t. This wasn’t said, of course, but Brian remembered enough of Alexi’s life to figure it out quickly.
Alexi and the rest of his group were interviewed extensively about what they had done, seen and heard. The interviews were conducted in what had been the mayor’s house, but it had now been turned into a military post of some sort since the supposed meltdown had begun. Alexi, sensing the direction this was all going, minimized his knowledge and participation in the hunting parties and denied ever seeing or hearing anything strange himself.
He was allowed to return home and see Alena. He described the strange love he felt for this girl that he had just met and the desperate fear growing in him that she needed to get away as soon as she could, even if it meant sneaking past the quarantine. She refused to leave him behind, however, and he worried that if he went with her it would just guarantee that they would get caught, as he had every idea they weren’t done with him yet.
He was right. The next morning they loaded him along with two dozen others into a bus and began heading toward the plant. When some of his coworkers asked about the radiation, one of the guards just chuckled, telling them there was nothing to worry about. Brian wanted to ask more questions—how could radiation not be a problem? how could it be safe to go up there at all if the plant was still burning?—but they had assault rifles and he didn’t want to test their good humor. Besides, he had realized something as they were slowing to a stop at the gate of the plant.
None of the guards were wearing radiation protection either.
The bus parked underground in Staff Lot B. We were all taken out of the bus and made to line up as a severe-looking officer approached. He said that we had been chosen for a very important task. That all of the details of the reactor accident had not been made public, and in fact, large portions of the plant were still operational. People had been brought in to maintain the plant temporarily, but it was a short-term solution to a longer-term problem. They now needed us to go back to work for the next few weeks until a more permanent resolution was found.
There were many confused looks and fearful murmurs at this. What the man was saying made little sense. If there truly had been a meltdown at Reactor 4, the proper protocols were to evacuate, stop any outlying fires or electrical issues from spreading to the core cooling systems of the other reactors, and then look at further containing and extinguishing the fire in Reactor 4. There would be no talk of running the other reactors normally at this point, or having more than the handful of crew needed to keep the emergency systems running so there was no further problems during the full shutdown.
But I recognized many of the men they had brought because they were not only my friends and neighbors, but workers that I supervised on Reactor 4. At first I thought they were just going to have them help on one of the other reactors, but as we began dividing up, I saw they were being told to report to their normal stations. Without any special instructions or suits, not even respirators or potassium iodide tablets.
Then they gathered the few of us left, the supervisors, together. Told us that they knew we had questions, but now was the time was for action and loyalty, not questions or fear. We all nodded and held our tongues as we made our way into the plant, and as we went deeper, I kept waiting for the smell of smoke, the heat of fire, or worse yet, the metallic tang on my tongue that I’ve heard comes from radiation poisoning.
But there was nothing. No signs of destruction or even disarray. I went through my rounds like I normally would, checking with every station, and everything seemed to be in order. Not only in order, but still running. There had been no shutdown of Reactor 4. As far as I could tell, the control rods were still in their normal position and there were no signs of a meltdown or any other incident. After a couple of hours I snuck away long enough to look at some of the readings for the past few days, but the logs for the past week were all gone. Aside from confirming my suspicions that none of this was what it seemed, it also troubled me for another reason.
If they were going to all this trouble for secrecy, would they ever actually let us go?
The answer seemed dreadfully apparent, and over the next few days, it only became more so. We weren’t allowed to go back to Pripyat or leave the plant at all. It was justified as “safety measures” and “security precautions”, but by the third day several of the men had had enough. Many of us gathered in the dining hall and three of the most vocal dissenters demanded we all be released at once. After a brief consultation of who they were and how critical they were to the running of the plant, two of the three were shot dead in front of us. The third, a nuclear engineer named Dusan, was taken away in handcuffs and I never saw him again.
It was that evening, as I lay in my cot during my three-hour shift break, that I realized what I must do.
When I heard tales of the tunnels between the plant and Pripyat, I always wondered where they might be hidden. When Luka told me of the Bowl of Pripyat, my mind had turned to it again, but this time backed by years of experience working at the plant and familiarizing myself with much of its layout. I never had access to all areas, but I knew of only a few places that were likely spots for such a tunnel to exist.
I felt a rumble of nervous fear at the idea of trying to escape and being caught, but it was far outweighed by my terror at what might be happening to Alena every hour I was trapped there. I had found a forgotten letter opener the day before and taken to carrying it in my pocket just in case I needed a makeshift weapon. Tapping my leg to insure it was still there, I crept out into the hall and began making my way down to the lower levels.
I had assumed that I would encounter guards or some kind of resistance on those lower floors, particularly if there were a tunnel that needed to be kept secure. But oddly there were none. Normally this would have cemented my fears that I was on a fool’s errand, but I had been gripped by this strange certainty that the tunnel existed and I was on the path to it.
It was in one of the sub-basements that I found a heavy metal door standing ajar. I saw no one, but there were splashes of fresh blood on the concrete floor nearby, which might have explained the lack of any guards. My breaths came in burning gasps as I approached the door, terrified by what might be waiting for me beyond it. But what choice did I have? I had to at least try.
Pulling the door open further, I saw it led to a well-lit concrete tunnel that moved at a slight downward slope for several hundred feet before its path curved out of view. I saw no signs of guards or the monstrous thing I had encountered in the woods. In fact, other than a few more splatters of blood inside the tunnel itself, it looked relatively benign. Glancing behind me a final time, I stepped into the tunnel and started making my way down.
I walked for ten minutes before the tunnel started to change. I was deeper now, to be sure, but the rock was different here too. Darker and with an oily sheen that I didn’t like. There were still lights strung along as I went, but I found myself trying to avoid looking around any more than I had to. That’s why when I rounded the next corner, I almost ran into another massive steel door.
Like the last, this one was open. Pushing it further, I gazed into a large massive chamber that was lit by large fire braziers rather than the electric lights from the tunnel. In fact, it almost felt as though the light from the tunnel barely reached the chamber at all. Pools of shadow lay across much of the large cave, with jagged rock formations stabbing down from the darkness like the closing maw of a wolf. Aside from the braziers, the only real source of light came from what lay in the middle of them.
The Bowl of Pripyat was much as Luka had described, or at least as I had pictured it. Despite my desperate need to get home, I found myself drawn to it and the silvery light that seemed to be pulsing from inside like the beating of a heart. It looked to be made of some kind of metal, but…
It was then that the guard attacked me. He was already dying, but whatever had gotten his comrades hadn’t finished him off completely. Whether he thought I was his attacker or he was just determined to do his duty to the end, he managed to drive a knife deep into my side. He was talking nonsense as he pushed his weight against me, saying “держись подальше от зеркала”—“Stay away from the Mirror.”
I fell against the side of the Bowl, rolling my body away from him with enough force that he let go of the knife. Trying to fight off the cold shock I felt filling the right side of my body, I dug for the letter opener. Once out, I held it up to fend off any further attack, but it wasn’t necessary. The guard was already on the ground, his body contorting unnaturally as his bones snapped.
The monster was here.
I gripped the letter opener tighter, peering into the darkness as I felt my vision beginning to dim. My thoughts were growing stranger and more desperate as I felt my life leaving my body. I knew better than to remove the knife, but I had no way to stem the flow of blood from around the blade. I would never make it to Pripyat, never be able to help my sweet Alena. I would die here, alone in the dark with this dead man and the terrible monster that had caused all of this calamity.
Except had it? And even if it had, hadn’t it just helped me at least inadvertantly? Knowing how pointless it would likely be, I found myself calling out into the darkness, asking the monster to help me. To help me get home to my Alena. There was no response, though I felt as though I could sense it out in the dark, watching me as I clung to the Bowl for support. In another moment I would be too weak to even stand, and then it would be over.
Turning away from the unhelpful darkness, I found myself staring into the glowing silvery liquid in the bottom of the Bowl. I had the distant thought that either the Bowl wasn’t quite as tall as Luka had said, or I had gotten taller. I almost laughed at the idea. Then I saw my reflection in the liquid.
I looked strange. Something…wasn’t right. In my addled state, I found myself suddenly obsessed with seeing my reflection closer, trying to figure out what exactly had changed about me. Using strength I shouldn’t have had, I pulled myself up on the lip of the Bowl. The next moment I was overbalanced and plunging face-first into the shining depths that lay at its center.
But I didn’t hit the bottom or die from whatever that liquid might be. I may have gone mad, however, for I suddenly found myself lying on thick carpet in a darkened room. I barely had time to sit up when the lights of twin crystal chandeliers blazed to life overhead and I saw there was a painfully thin woman wearing a business suit and a serious expression walking toward me from the edge of the room.
She came within a few feet before stopping and giving what I supposed was her version of a warm smile. Looking down at me, she spoke English with a strange accent I didn’t recognize. I understood the words well-enough, though they made little sense to me at the time.
"Welcome to the Imago Hotel, Alexi. I hope you enjoy your stay."
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Credits
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