She had lost count of how many nights like this there had been. When the heat was impossible. It was so hot that she couldn’t sleep. The night was as dark as in winter but as hot as in summer somewhere far South. All the windows were open on the possibly only inhabited house of the whole cottage district, but it was still hot. No wind, not the slightest draft. It would have been better if the windows had been closed, then the inside would have been cooler than the outside.
Kadri could not sleep. She was the only one who could not sleep. The past several nights had made it abundantly clear. She had gone with the other to look for the Lake of Forgetfulness. But in the end, all of them had made it here. To the Nameless Town, to Tontla, Valgepalõ. Without themselves knowing how. On the road. On a dark night. They had visited some pond. It seemed to be the thing they had been looking for. But it was not possible to make a truthful and honest claim. And Mariann, that mysterious girl in black was certain that it wasn’t the Lake of Forgetfulness. That she knew where the Lake of Forgetfulness was, that it lied right behind her window. But she was never willing to open up on neither where the lake was nor where she lived.
Kadri and her friend who had come here. Siim, Tiina and the others, they had met Mariann several times. And every time, it was weird. The meeting itself was noting strange but, it wasn’t exactly a meeting, it was more like running into one another, bumping into one another. Usually this was preceded by a lot of unexplainable and personal. Strange sounds in the night. Smells that some found pleasant and others nauseating. Strange restlessness and a need to go on a drive with no particular reason. And of course strange recognitions and synchronicities, be they about books being currently read or even thoughts being thought.
Each and every time all that directed them back at Mariann who had some new tale to tell. A tale which at first turned everything on it’s head and then after giving it some thought, seemed perfectly reasonable and even correct. Unexplainably, intuitively. It all felt intuitive, by gut feeling and also strange because this gut feeling did not lead them into the bog or a dead end. It led them to an understanding. How they had initially gone to find the Lake of Forgetfulness, how they had reached here, how they always met with Mariann. How they never needed to be want of lodging, food or fuel. Intuition and synchronicity.
And uncountable amount of literature which found it’s way to them either by chance or by suddenly falling off the shelf. Or via Mariann, by some indirect means, which perfectly explained what they needed to know or understand. One could almost think this was some ritual or initiation, it mattered little whether they were performing this ritual for the their own good, or for the good of somebody else. Or maybe they were just the travel partners of Mariann, trying to understand and give meaning to everything going on in this world.
Kadri sighed. It was still night. It was still damnably hot. She could no more. She had to get up. Get dressed. Go for a walk. Might as well do it on the streets of the cottage district, on those with just enough working streetlights to not let one’s eyes grow used to the darkness. Despite the chance of meeting wild animals being greater than meeting people. Despite the chance of meeting ghosts was greater than meeting the living. Despite the fact that there weren’t many things the locals feared more than walking in the cottage district at night.
At the same time there was nothing special, nothing scary about it. The cottage district was abandoned. Derelict.
Some say the cottage district was left empty after the Death Fields incident. Only few lone inhabitants remained. And all of them lived by the major road. A local villager and some strange young man who acted weird when about the village and in search of his loved one. And he was not the only one like that. The was another one, a bit older who kept writing one name again and again on walls yet uncovered. Wilhelmina. There were also a man and a woman, acting like quaint locals, which was the weirdest sting of all. Because who would live in the middle of the abandoned cottage district like there was nothing wrong?
The cottage district was mostly abandoned. But there was still life going on. Way back when, the cottage district was abandoned suddenly and in a hurry. People had fled leaving their laundry on the lines in their yards, and their food steaming on plates. Chernobyl. Nobody had come stealing, nobody had come raiding. Doors were unlocked, the fabric on beds still ready for use. Closets and wardrobes full of clothes.
These people had escaped not only from the cottage district but also this region. They would never return for their property and other items. At first this gave all sorts of crooks a chance to steal everything with any value, leaving behind only that which could not be sold quick and for any significant sum of money. This usually meant clothes, dishware, old furniture and other similar items. Which were coincidentally also items most required for one’s daily life. Although the crooks had also removed most of the wiring, it wasn’t really necessary to have much electricity for basic living. Only enough for a few lamps and radios.
And should the tenants ever start arguing with each other, there were many other houses to move into. But this night heat! There was no place to move into to escape that. Maybe only to some subterranean cellar. But a subterranean cellar had it’s own issues.
Although the cottage district was abandoned and yet partially inhabited, mostly by people like her and her friends who had nowhere else to go to, it also felt chilling to be here. Lots of old summer cottages and houses fallen into unusable ruins. Some simply collapsed. Some had burned to the ground. Of some, only the chimney and a few walls remained. And at all times, one could hear something crawling in the tall grass by the drainage ditch.
During her walk, Kadri usually kept to the main streets. Even if the lights atop the concrete poles were not lit, it was still safer to move from pole to pole, rather than away from them. Never mind that recently, the cottage district had grown much more chilling and scary than it had been before.
It happened one cold and damp morning when the tenants of the cottage district discovered several trails of smoke rising into the air. When they took a closer look, they discovered that these rose from near the old post office in the middle of the cottage district. The post office was still okay, but surrounding it, there were a total of three large helicopter wreckages. Obviously these had fallen from the sky. The night rain had quenched the flames, but the wreckages smoked for several days. No bodies or body parts were ever found, no weapons either, just big piles of metal burnt into empty shells, that had once been helicopters.
But the strangest thing was that the night had been calm. Nobody had heard anything. Nobody had even woken up. Whatever had brought down these aircraft had done it in a such a way that not a single denizen of the cottage district had had their sleep disturbed. And some of the locals had their homes right next to the pot office, just across the street!
Kadri stopped. She knew she should not be think about at a time like this. Yes, there were things in the night, but three choppers falling out of the sky without anybody noticing was a frightening thought no matter which way she looked at it. In much the same way somebody’s house might just vanish during the night with none of the neighbors the wiser. And during one’s nighttime walk in the deathly quiet cottage district it was not good to let one’s imagination run wild with all sorts of scary things which lie hidden in the darkness. More so, the idea that all locals to the cottage district slumber in such depths to be totally oblivious to a quick war passing over, took her thoughts back to the Death Fields and to the reasons why the cottage district was abandoned in the first place.
She turned around the corner and stopped again. But this time not because of fear or some random wandering thought. In the distance, under the next function streetlight, there stood a large car, dark red in color. A car with two doors and no roof. In addition to the streetlight which cast orange high pressure sodium light at the car and everything around it, there was also a smaller light clipped to the metal edge of the windscreen. The light from that was cast onto the red leather interior of the car. As she got closer, she realized that there was not a car just standing there, there was a person inside the car as well.
With a wary step, she approached the vehicle until a realization dawned. Lying on the back seat, there was the familiar girl in black, focused on reading a thick book with dark red fabric covers. She could also hear quiet music playing from the car’s sound system.
“What are you doing here!” Kadri asked, utterly dumbfounded.
“I’m reading.” Mariann said. “You cannot sleep due to heat, correct?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because besides me, you are the only awoke person in the whole cottage district. In some ways it is a blessing as it allows you a unique perspective, compared to those still sleeping.”
“What are you reading?” Kadri asked.
“The horror tales of Ambrose Beirce.”
“Horror tales?! Whatever for?”
“Because they help to think. And this music also helps to think and to keep my thoughts on the right path.”
“Did you know that I would take walks when the heat does not let me sleep? Did you know in advance that we could meet like that?”
“That sounds like something I would know and would be able to arrange, does it not?” Mariann gave a smile and set the book aside. “The answer is no. I also could not sleep in this heat. Or rather, I generally cannot get any sleep during these summer nights. And tonight the cottage district seemed to be the place with the right aura to come to.”
Mariann lifted a small carton of wine and two glasses from between the seats.
“Wine?” She asked.
“But still.” Kadri did not stop after having some wine. “Why are you reading horror stories at night in the cottage district?”
“As I said before, to think. Horror no longer has any effect on me. Every day I am right inside it. Tales of ghosts, zombies, all sorts of terrible creatures and even cosmic horror in itself is no longer enough to arouse any chills or to direct thoughts on this topic. Coming to a place a little more special than home helps a little. To read the right thing helps a little more. And Ambrose Beirce wrote some good stories about how our world is tied into a knot, how our senses, thoughts and vision not only experience the world but also actively influence and change it.”
“And that helps?” Kadri asked.
“It gives a new perspective, how to give meaning and sense to things. And honestly, right now it is too hot to simply contemplate. There’s even no wind. Somehow, one must awaken the mind.”
“The Lake of Forgetfulness.” Kadri said.
“You are still on that topic? I thought it to be long since buried. What about it?”
“You once said that what we found and what we thought to be Lake of Forgetfulness was not the real Lake of Forgetfulness but instead something else. You also said that the real Lake of Forgetfulness lies on the other side of your window.”
“I remember.” Mariann agreed.
“Why do you not want to tell us how we could get to the Lake of Forgetfulness?”
“Because it would have no meaning. It would not help you in any way.”
“How so?”
“Let me ask you instead.” The girl in black smiled. “Do you know what the Lake of Forgetfulness even looks like?”
“No...”
“Then how will you recognize it, should you find it? Why are you so sure it in any way differs from a regular lake? That it’s waters differ from regular waters? You and the other carry a great expectation that something will definitely happen when you reach it or return from it. What is it that should happen?”
“I don’t know but...”
“But there is a feeling that something should happen, right?” Mariann stopped her. “What if that feeling itself is but an apparition? Maybe you have been to the lake a long time ago and what you are expecting to happen, happened a long time ago, without you being aware enough to notice it?”
“How could that be possible?”
“Every day, hundred and thousands of events take place which we are unable to notice at the time or give sense to at the correct time. We cannot give meaning to them. That’s why hindsight is a precision science.”
“But still. You said that the Lake of Forgetfulness lies beyond your window.”
“Yes, I did. But that is a topic much more complicated.”
Mariann took a deep sigh.
“Do you believe in winter?” She asked.
“What does that mean?” Kadri asked. “What kind of question is that anyway?”
“A simple question. Do you believe in winter? You have been here in the Lost County doing things for some time now. When was the last time you saw snow?”
“Snow, that was...”
Mariann kept staring at here expectantly.
“I think it was a few weeks ago when it fell and stayed for a few hours.”
“I am not speaking of morning sleet, I am speaking of snow. Biting cold weather, blowing snow, heavy snowfall, snowdrifts at least a meter in height. Of frozen lakes and rivers. When was the last time you saw that around these parts?”
“I cannot remember.” Kadri replied. “But I am sure I have seen...”
“Are you though?” Mariann continued. “Even if you cannot remember the year. Can you remember at least one winter you have spent here?”
“No.” She finally admitted. “No I cannot.”
“Does that not seem strange to you?” Mariann asked. “By the way, no other local can. I myself also can’t. Not even from childhood. It seems that summer turns into fall and then back into summer, with the rest of the seasons having disappeared somewhere. I cannot even tell where the summer ends and the fall begins. One day feels like early summer, the next might feel like late fall, the third one like mid-summer.”
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“I haven’t noticed that.” Kadri said. “What does that have to do with the Lake of Forgetfulness?”
“In a place I sometimes spend my nights, there is a wall. In that wall, there is a small window. Behind that window lies the Lake of Forgetfulness. In wintertime.”
“In wintertime?”
“Yes. Behind the window there is frozen and dried grass under clumps of snow. And thick snow is slowly falling from the sky on a windless day. There is a few dozen meters of grassland until the forest and on top of the grass, water has accumulated and then frozen over.”
“And how do you know that the Lake of Forgetfulness lies there?” Kadri asked.
“Because it is not a lake in the common sense. It is not a lake, just a depression on a field, the water has gathered and frozen. What I can see from the window is but a small pond nearby, further away I can see a large field and a similar lake on top of it.”
“All that is visible through the window?”
“Yes.”
“But if you go to the same place outside where the window lies?”
“It cannot be gone to.” Mariann said. “It cannot be found. There is no wall, there isn’t even a window, never mind the grassland. You will see yourself when you get there.”
“What about opening the window? Or breaking it?”
“I do not want to take that risk.” Mariann replied. “Because it may result in consequences more or less undesirable.”
“How so?”
“Option 1. It is not a window but a screen. I break it and I will no longer be able to see what it was showing me or how it was functioning. Option 2. It really is a window to a place that lies beyond the wall. This side of the window, there is plus 15 Celsius, on the other side, minus 15. Thus I would lose a cozy place of lodging until I get it repaired. Option 3. It is a window to somewhere that lies beyond the wall, but what lies beyond is not spatially connected to what lies on this side. There is a topological defect between them. What if breaking the window sets the topological defect into motion? And not towards what lies beyond the window but what lies on this side?”
“I am not getting it.” Kadri said.
“What lies on one side starts to overwrite what lies on the other. It may happen at a speed visible to one’s eye. It may happen at the speed of light. Also, it is not clear what happens if a spatial defect meets with the living. Will it destroy it or will it let it continue existing in some grotesque form? Option 4. It looks like screen but is not. Maybe it really is a captured topological defect, a fold in space-time continuum. If I break it, only a wall will remain. The fold will collapse into regular space-time.”
“Where is that window located?” Kadri finally dared to asked.
“In the Underground Base. Several levels underground.”
“In the Underground Base? This very same one that is located next to the cottage district?”
“Yes.” Mariann nodded.
“And still you recommend that nobody goes there?”
“Because it is dangerous. There are some very specific times it is accessible. Sometimes one must wait days or weeks until one can enter or exit the place.”
“But you go there?”
“Not currently. Earlier I did, yes. The Underground Base is not spatially connected to this world. It is very much like another secretive facility under the cottage district. And the deeper levels of the Underground Base are currently nearing the apoapsis of their period. Meaning the furthest distance from Earth, or rather, our world. It also means there are times when one can enter or exit, but centuries may pass between them, while in periapsis, the duration may only be hours or days.”
“Then when would be a prudent time to go there?” Kadri asked.
“Maybe in 8 months. But without me it is not a safe thing to do.”
“So at the current time, one cannot get to the Underground Base at all?”
“Yes one can. The first 8 levels are open and accessible by car.”
“And the window you mentioned?”
“The 27th secret sublevel.”
Kadri fell into thought. On the one hand, Mariann’s explanation was absurd. But it was also absurd on the other hand. A window looking at the Lake of Forgetfulness 27 floors underground.
“Wait, you said that there is another secret base under the cottage district? Are these choppers here because of that?”
“They are indeed.” Mariann said. “The secret base under the cottage district became accessible quite unexpectedly and the Russians put together a team of special forces operatives to explore it and perhaps even to retake control of it. But somebody got ahead of them. And that somebody did not want the Russians getting back their facility.”
“So a nighttime battle took place?” Kadri asked. “And nobody woke up?”
“Not a soul.” The girl in black said. “That’s the peculiarity of falling asleep in the cottage district. In here, one can fall into an especially deep slumber.”
“It that because of the Death Fields? Or because of the underground base that lies underneath?”
“Not because of the base. Under here there is only one of the reserve gates into the base, the base itself is not. As you yourself well know, the Death Fields phenomenon only lasted a single year. People were evacuated, all harvest and plants were burned away. And the next year, everything was again fine as usual. It would be hard to believe that something that disperses into the air as the night falls has remained in plants to this day. But it cannot also be ruled out, some plant may indeed have muted back then in such a way that it assimilated some part of the poison and also pollinates as darkness falls.
Nevertheless, it is a fact that for years now, those who fall asleep in the cottage district have a good but deep sleep, that is generally impossible to awaken from. That’s why it also somewhat spectacular that you are awake.”
“That’s the reason you said that I will get a unique perspective?”
“Yes. Mainly due to that. But not exclusively. There are two other reasons. As we are generally used to being active during the day and sleeping during the night, instead being awake in the night nevertheless allows for a new perspective. That is not a feature exclusive to this place.”
“And the third reason?” Kadri asked.
“The heat. Lack of wind. This fall darkness that spreads all around us, instead of the almost daytime dusk that precedes the Midsummer Eve. That you cannot hear a single bird singing. Because usually dark nights like these are cool. And the wider streets of the cottage district get buried into the fog that is flows from the lake. This to gives a unique perspective. Like looking for midsummer beetles and fern flowers during Midsummer Eve.”
“Ferns have no flowers.” Kadri said.
“Why do you think that?” Mariann asked. “Why is the Death Fields incident any more believable than flower of a fern?”
“You said spectacular.” Kadri changed the topic. “You did not expect me to be awake? Were you expecting somebody else? I still have not received a clear response on why you are here.”
“You know why I’m here.” Mariann said. “I am here to read. I am here in hope of gaining a new understanding. All else is extraneous. Even incidental. Or a bonus. For example hoping that somebody wakes from the nighttime slumber of the cottage district. Or that somebody would come for the choppers that fell all those nights ago.”
“Who do you think would come?” Kadri asked.
“The Russians of course. Their hardware. The Men in Black and those Boys from the North driving their old cars with fins have no interest in Soviet junk, no matter how ahead of its time it it. No matter how mystical it is. Those Boys from the North are after a legacy far more mysterious and aged.”
“This is not the first night you are reading here, is it?” The girl asked.
“Nope.” Mariann said.
“You know why I awoke, don’t you?” Kadri continued.
“I have an idea. For the most part, it might really be the heat. But there is something else as well. I think.”
“What?”
“It could be called a natural innate talent. Something in this talent finds nurture in this general area. Something in it allows you to stay active in this place, without being too much affected by the local peculiarities. Usually there is a distinction between locals and the foreigners. The local village folk do not find anything particularly strange or dangerous going on, while to strangers, everything is weird and the simplest of things may end up being dangerous. Your being would be some kind of third way of being. By now, you have already become a local, you are as safe as a local would be. But at the same time you are able to take a peek behind and under the surface function of things. To see what lies obscured.”
“Like you are seeing it?”
“Something along those lines. Have you seen the TV series Twin Peaks?”
“Maybe. In the house we are lodging in has stacks of video cassettes with recorded TV-shows. One of these may have been Twin Peaks.”
“Well, watch that. In the show there is a fat military officer working in some strange field. He goes to the forest with other characters and disappears. He reappears several days later, and will tell nobody what happened to him. Quite usual, right? But his superior says that the man has been bless by nature with a navigational hardware others can only dream of.”
“And where does he navigate with that?” Kadri asked.
“That is not said. But what is implied is the mythology of the series and various spirit worlds. Just like navigating visions caused by psychotropic substances, which may not necessarily be visions. Instead they might be the capacity of the mind to travel to other dimensions which are not necessarily physical.”
“And you think I have the same capacity?”
“Not the same capacity. A similar capacity. A comparable capacity. Because our world is real, at least to us. And as we have seen, despite it being real there are similar forces hidden in this world of ours, similar mysteries. Only that they follow different rules, rules much more complicated than in somebody’s work of fiction. As you woke up in the night, in a situation where most other locals and strangers would stay asleep, there is something in you that is lacking in them. Something in you reacted. Now you must figure out what it was and what it reacted to. And start training this ability.”
“And how would I do it?”
“I cannot tell you that. Follow your intuition and make sense according to that. That’s what piloting and navigating by intuition is all about, doesn’t matter if it happens in phantasmal trips caused by lysergic acid or while clearheaded. I can tell you that the door is already ajar. Maybe your yourself don’t have to make any proactive move for the door to continue opening, slowly but surely. Whether you want it or not, you will start to see and understand. And then you’ll start looking for explanations, building theories, to get answers to.”
“Like you?”
“I am doing my own thing.” Mariann smiled. “Knowingly emulating somebody may help you in the beginning. But an unknowing emulation may cause a lot of damage fast. But yes, to somebody looking at it from the sidelines in the future, it may seem that the two of us operate in much the same way.”
Kadri kept silent for several minutes, trying to not only make sense of her conversation with the girl in black in front of her but also to remember everything she had learned thus far. This allowed Mariann to peek at her book again and advance a few paragraphs.
“But still. How do you know? That the thing beyond the window on that 27th secret sublevel is truly the Lake of Forgetfulness?”
“It is not something I know. It it somewhat of an opinion I have arrived to, because it feels correct. There are many things and places which can be seen as the Lake of Forgetfulness. And who said that there is only one singular Lake of Forgetfulness? Also at the same time, who told you that there are a multitude of Lakes of Forgetfulness?”
“There’s again a theory you have about this?” Kadri asked.
“Yes. And this is a thought I just found on my mind. On an evening not as hot as this I met with you and your friends and told you how the Lake of Forgetfulness is located by the Fourth Route. Because by the Fourth Route there is the bar at the end of the world. And one can get to the Lake through the back door of the bar.”
“I remember.” Kadri said.
“But in a similar way, the lakes of Peipus, Tyoploye and Pskovskoe can be seen as a Lake of Forgetfulness when it gets cold and the lakes freeze over. It is quite possible to go on the endless frozen and foggy lake at nighttime and become lost forever. Or the opposite, to reach the port of Valgepalõ by morning, freezing and tired to death. Having started one’s journey from a place completely different, maybe some small town which does not lie on the same maps as our county. As a curious side note, if you look at the map, the Lake Peipus is about the size of a county as well.”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning, if we return to my previous thought. What if the Lake of Forgetfulness is a topological defect in space-time continuum. And not an artificial defect like the space-time here which has been twisted out of it’s proper shape and some bogs and forests are dangerous to body or spirit, but instead a natural one. And it doesn’t exist in our three-dimensional space but instead in a space with more dimensions. Maybe in that higher-dimensional space it is not a defect at all. And the Lakes of Forgetfulness we are familiar with are but surface waves both in time and space.”
“You mean to tell me that the Lake of Forgetfulness is merely an illusion?”
“Not that. Surface wave is not an illusion. Throw a stone into water and you see waves, right? In windy weather you can also see waves, but you cannot see the wind itself. Same with the Lake of Forgetfulness. It is a surface phenomenon, a consequence. The cause of which is very hard if not impossible to guess, especially because we do not have any experience based on which to make conclusions that reach back into these higher dimensions.”
“So that the place we once reached my have really been the Lake of Forgetfulness, or rather the surface waves of it.” Kadri mused.
“It may have.” Mariann agreed. “No matter how much I dislike admitting it. But also, do you see the other answer hidden within this?”
“What answer?”
“Why nothing happened. And the answer would be that you only visited the edge of it. You only looked at it. You did not interfere with it, you did not touch it in a way that would cause it to react to you and result in something noticeable or remarkable. And that’s why your thoughts are full of emptiness and regret that something should have happened, something you could assign meaning to or at least sense.”
“But maybe you are wrong.” Kadri said. “Maybe something did happen. Maybe we touched it to a sufficient degree. Because we did not start our journey to the Lake from this world. I am pretty sure we started it from a different one, the maps of which have no sign of Nameless Town on them, never mind Valgepalõ.”
“That is an interesting way to make sense of things.” Mariann said. “And brings us back to the beginning.”
“That making contact with the Lake of Forgetfulness is not necessarily something that can be experienced in the present with one’s five senses. Only to interpret and to attempt to make sense of in hindsight.”
“It would seem the night heat has had a positive effect on you.” Mariann smiled.
Suddenly Kadri heard a strange noise. At first it was barely audible but but slowly grew louder and louder, ending up as almost deafening ruckus in otherwise deathly silent cottage district. A low rotating noise of some machine.
“What the hell is that?” She asked.
“Sounds like the motor of a diesel engine doing about a 150 revolutions per minute.”
“A train? Where in here could it come to?” Kadri felt confused. “There are no rails anywhere near here. Or is it going to the Underground Base?”
“No, it is coming here.” Mariann said. “The rail line to the Underground Base runes on the other side. Maybe you haven’t noticed yet, but directly North from the cottage district lie large open fields, right?”
“Right...” Kadri agree, still unsure.
“But before the fields begin, there is a strip of forest maybe two dozen meters wide. The rail line is hidden inside this strip of forest, under dried brush and grass. That’s why the train has to arrive so slow as to not run off the rails. And before getting anywhere near the cottage district and the forest, the rail line is hidden in tall grass. For some reason they needed to hide a functional rail line that runs here, so instead of building a railway dam 4 meters high, they excavated enough earth to hide the dam on the surface level.”
As they spoke, the train came nearer and nearer until finally between the buildings they could see a glimpse of a large yet dim light set into the nose of the train engine. The light emitted by the light seemed to dissipate into the night completely, offering no illumination whatsoever.
“That’s some kind of signal light, right?” Kadri asked. “So this train is so secretive that they don’t even want to illuminate what lies ahead of the engine?”
“That’s the searchlight at full power.” Mariann replied. “The engine and the light on it are alien to this region and thus the light is not able to illuminate much. And even if the engine and the light are not alien, as there are always some ready to use engines hidden in the Train Yard, it driving here, on these otherwise disused hidden rails, is something alien to this world.”
Kadri rose her gaze at the orange yet cold Soviet era gas discharge lamp. She then looked at the small incandescent bulb on the small light clipped to the edge of the windscreen, still illuminating the red interior of the car.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Mariann said. “This is the best explanation I can give you. Wanna come see what they’re doing?”
“You know why they are here, don’t you?” Kadri asked.
“As I said in the beginning. It is a hot and windless night. And almost all inhabitants of the cottage district are slumbering in such depths that they might as well be dead. Meaning this is the best time to come and recover the chopper wreckages. You know that large empty plot opposite the post office, right? Where there is a rectangular mound which looks like a foundation for a tower for high tension lines.”
“I do.”
“In reality, this is not the foundation of a mast but instead a loading ramp hidden in plain sight to deal with one cart at a time.”
Suddenly, the train stopped and stood there for a few minutes. Then the engine pitch rose slightly and several powerful spotlights ignited.
At the same time, several pairs of yellow headlights started approaching from the opposite direction. These too did not do much to illuminate the dark night, rather they allowed the people in convoy to understand where the next vehicle was positioned ahead. At this distance the only thing Kadri could be certain about was the middle vehicle being really wide compared to the other ones. It only took a few minutes for the convoy to reach them, which allowed Kadri to see that she had been correct, more or less.
The convoy was made out of five cars. Two UAZ willy’s offroad cars, two black Volgas and a long rectangular ZIL state limo. This one stopped right next to Mariann and her red car. With the quiet hush of compressed air, the window on the rear door rolled down.
In the car there sat a man in his sixties, with a gray eyebrows and a light beard, wearing a Soviet army officer’s hat with a sharp rigid visor and edges.
“Mariann.” The man said instead of a greeting.
“Hello-hello, comrade Voronov.” Mariann replied. “I think that’s the way you prefer to be referred to?”
“General Voronov.” The man said. “But you can address me as you please. You know why I am here, right?”
“You came for your choppers.”
“Exactly. And I hope for your kind permission to do it.”
“Be my guest. Just be gone by morning.”
The general nodded, the window on the car rolled up again and the convoy continued onward.
All the while this exchange took place Kadri stood silent and dumbfounded. The whole conversation contained so much that was dreamlike in it’s incomprehensibility, that she couldn’t even start anywhere to make sense of it.
Starting with the fact that a general of the Soviet, or rather the currently Russian army speaks fluent Estonian without any accent. But what made it even more weird was the frivolity with which Mariann replied to him. As if it was no experienced army officer in charge of massive military power but instead a local drunk looking to exchange labor for some vodka. And then that last straw. How the general did not talk to Mariann like normal local nor even as an equal but a superior to oneself, Carefully and respectfully to not aggravate her. As a possessor of an unknown yet most certainly terrible power. As a… demigod. Or a witch.
“What is it?” Mariann asked.
“Nothing.” Kadri said. “I just fell into thoughts for a moment.”
She looked how many more powerful spotlight now lit up and the boom of a crane started to stretch above the roofs of the buildings. Atop of the boom there was another spotlight.
“Go ahead and see how they are lifting the helicopters onto the train.” Mariann said. “Might be interesting.”
“I think they don’t want extraneous people there.” Kadri said.
Mariann shut off the light attached to the windscreen and then threw the light onto the rear seat along with the book. Then sitting on the driver seat. With a low rumble, the engine on that massive car came alive and soon the sweet smell of partially burnt hydrocarbons surrounded the car.
“You’re leaving?” Kadri asked.
“Yes. I figured they might come tonight. At the same time they case so much nose with their activity that I’d rather go read somewhere else. Wanna come with?”
“Better not.” Kadri said. “It is late. Maybe now I can fall asleep.”
“In that case sweet dreams. I hope.” Mariann said and took off.
Kadri gave a last glance at the boom stretching above the buildings and then turned around to head back to her lodgings.