Beyond the Shadow of Night
Ray Kingfisher
Prologue
Hartmann Way, Pittsburgh, July 2001
Diane Peterson was returning home after a great night out with Brad. Well, perhaps more average than great. Enjoyable, but about as good as it ever got for a middle-aged woman who still lived with her father, and for whom the phrase “boyfriend and girlfriend” was stretched to the limit and should have snapped a long time ago. Like a lot of things.
Nevertheless, she had enjoyed the evening: bowling followed by a meal with Em’n’Dave, who for once didn’t mention their upcoming fifteenth wedding anniversary and didn’t yammer on endlessly about how well their two kids were doing. That was good. For both Diane and Brad. Kids—and probably marriage too—were ships that had long since drifted over the horizon for them.
She pulled her keys from her purse and opened the front door of number 38 before turning to wave goodnight to Brad, who returned the gesture discreetly from the cab window.
She waited until the cab’s brake lights told her it had reached the end of Hartmann Way before stepping inside the front door and shutting out the rest of the world.
“Dad?” she shouted. Not aggressively or even stridently. She’d been told off for that thirty years ago and had never forgotten. He’d said something about harsh shouting unnerving him, which had puzzled her at the time, and still did just a little. But she knew not to question.
But her call was greeted with silence, so for once perhaps a measured increase in volume was appropriate.
“Dad?”
Still nothing. Nothing but cool air.
“You upstairs?” she hollered, now fearful of both a sore reaction and no reaction at all.
A step to the side. A strange, almost metallic smell. Stickiness at the back of her throat. Three paces forward. A glance into the kitchen. And then she saw.
Her keys and purse dropped from her limp hands onto the floor. She nearly followed, summoning up just enough energy to stop her knees buckling.
There was something she should be doing.
The phone.
A call.
Her face felt hot, her breath unnaturally cold.
The number 911 flew into her head and straight out again, as she turned and staggered back to the door. She opened it, and then her knees gave out. No energy. No control. A scrabble to her feet. A stumble into the road. The rest was blurred. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
Chapter 1
Dyovsta, Ukraine, 1923
The two boys were born within days of each other on the same farm, during a warm and dusty June week.
Like any farm in the breadbasket of the burgeoning Soviet Empire, it had a big responsibility to its citizens. A crop failure some years before had caused widespread famine, so work took priority and the boys’ papas didn’t see much of them in the days and weeks that followed their births.
One of the boys, the firstborn of Mr. and Mrs. Petrenko, was given the name Mykhail, a traditional Ukrainian name. The other was the third born in his family, but the first boy. His parents had prayed for a boy—someone to manage the farm when Mr. Kogan got old—so they called him Asher, a traditional Jewish name meaning “blessed,” because they felt they were, and he should be.
Asher’s family had owned and operated the farm for decades, living through the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Polish-Ukrainian War, and even the Ukrainian Civil War. That was a lot to survive, but as the farm was nestled deep in the rural heart of the country, most of it seemed to pass them by. The only remnant of those days the boys got to know about was that Mykhail’s parents had fled the more troublesome areas three or four years before, and had been taken in by Asher’s family. In return for much-needed labor, Mykhail’s parents were given the smaller of two farmhouses on the land and a share of the produce—eggs, grain, milk, chickens, and occasionally some goat meat.
In the first seven years of their lives, Mykhail and Asher became inseparable—closer than brothers. Of course, there were chores—gathering hay for the horses, mucking them out, feeding leftovers to the chickens, fetching water from the well. But they also found time to play together, to fish in one of the many rivers threading through the terrain, and, yes, occasionally to fight each other. They played with children from the surrounding farms too, often games of hide-and-seek in the woods and long grasses, but they always remained each other’s best friend. And when the weather kept them indoors, they were also taught to read and write together.
One day, when climbing one of the few trees around the farm, Mykhail fell and was unconscious for a few seconds. Asher helped him home, but the large vertical gash and subsequent scar just below his left eye would be a lasting reminder of the dangers of climbing trees. At least, that was what Asher’s papa told them. Mykhail’s papa didn’t seem so worried, and the boys still climbed trees occasionally.
But during the 1930s many changes took place—changes that the boys weren’t old enough to understand. All they knew was that they went hungry more often, and that they were forever being encouraged to go fishing.
One typical summer’s day in 1932, the boys took a leather bottle full of fresh milk and a small bag of pumpkin seeds, and headed out for what they knew to be the best river for fishing.
The walk seemed longer than usual, and the crops sparser and unhealthier. They’d both heard their parents talking about “the situation,” but whenever they asked what this situation was they were shown a forced smile and told it was nothing for them to worry about.