from: …………..@mail.ru
to: ………….@gmail.com
subj: About your request
Sasha, hi. Please forgive me if you can, but this time it didn’t work out.
I’ll explain why now. You’d better not count on me now. But I think there is still hope. You can try to do everything yourself. I didn’t succeed, but you still can. I’ll tell you how. This is a bad option, very bad. And it’s not a good thing, no matter what you think. Quite the opposite.
I wouldn’t offer it to you for anything if I saw any other way out, but I don’t see it. I remember your look when we last saw each other, and, in general… Please think carefully, don’t decide anything in a hurry, don’t run anywhere. It’s me, bobyl, who has nothing to lose, but at least remember about Zinka and your parents, if any of them are still alive. Sometimes it’s really better to leave things as they are, you know?
I’ll tell you everything I know. You know my address. And delete the letter as soon as you read it.
In general, when I was ten or eleven years old, there was a popular story about our yard…
I think I’ve known this story for as long as I can remember. All the guys were aware of this legend, and many others similar. In an isolated (“experimental”, as they said at the time) microdistrict, several generations of teenagers were cooking at the same time. A road about five kilometers long led to the city from it, laid out among flooded wastelands, which were also supposed to be built up one day. Schools, kindergartens, shops, a couple of clubs: according to the architects’ idea, the cliffs of two dozen high-rise buildings standing among the fields, forming a district, were supposed to be autonomous. They were. Someone went to the city to the music room or to relatives, but most of us rarely left Zhilmash.
So the legends about the Black Man from the local park, about the mystery of the old collector or, here, about the secret passage in the corner of one of the courtyards circulated among the children constantly, passed from the elders to the younger, along the way acquiring creepy and less plausible details. Seriously, someone should write a dissertation on the folklore of separate administrative units. Well, that’s not what I’m talking about.
It was not only the environment as a whole that was closed, but also the courtyards themselves, into which our district was sliced, sitting at the kulman, by the gloomy genius of some kind of builder of communism. In the center of the square of long, nine-story buildings touching the corners, where all the entrances went out, there was necessarily some kind of polyclinic, school or other socially significant institution, and a few arches led out of this fortress, even without suspension bridges. One might think that Zhilmash was designed by a man who suspected that sooner or later its residents would have to withstand a circular siege of their homes.
In the story I’m talking about, we are talking about the corner closest to my entrance formed by neighboring buildings. There were bushes that overlooked the back, blind storefronts of the pharmacy and barber shop that occupied the first floors. At the foundation level between the houses there was a gap three palms wide and a meter and a half high, half laid with broken bricks. There was a path along the boarded-up storefronts, but no adults appeared there. The hole allowed a great shortcut, but it was not possible to squeeze into it and stay clean, so only we kids used it, playing hide-and-seek or war, and adults had to stomp to one of the arches to get to the bus stop.
Directly opposite the manhole, a square, the size of an open book, end of a stone block or pillar protruded from the ground, dug in there for some other need, apparently during construction: a small pedestal turned out. It was necessary to put some animal on it, the legend said, and then kill it. Then, in place of the manhole, a passage will open not to the concrete platform behind the bakery, as usual, but to a completely different place, to the “dead world”. Having penetrated there, it was necessary as soon as possible to find a shopping stall with closed or painted over (here the versions were confused) glasses, go to the window and ask clearly, loudly, what you want. You can ask for anything: you want — a new Sega, or even a computer. One boy, according to rumors, asked for a real jeep. And if you did everything right, then it will come true, only you will need to run away quickly before the passage closes again.
Typical, in general, a tall tale: gloomy, cruel and stupid. Just the way kids like it. As proof of its truth, they always cited an example of a friend of another friend who did this, and everything worked for him. They also pointed out concentric circles and squiggles that someone from the locals had scratched out on top of the column with a nail or a penknife - to make it more plausible, I think.
No one from our company has ever thought of torturing an animal to check a stupid story. Even for a serious offer to try, we would call the person who said this sick and twirled a finger at his temple. But Nika was not from our company. Almost an adult, as it seemed to me then, a very beautiful girl with copper hair and eternally broken knees, she came one summer to her grandmother, who lived out a long century in the neighboring entrance, and immediately seized the role of the atamansha of the yard, establishing her own rules.
We spent the whole of July wandering around together. I think each of my friends managed to fall in love with her at least a little, such is the age. On one of the last long evenings before her departure, we burned a small fire in the wasteland, chatted and baked potatoes with salt stolen somewhere in foil. This story was also heard, among others. And the next day, Nika brought her grandmother’s parrot to our “headquarters” in the wasteland.
You guessed it already, didn’t you, Sasha? Anyone else would have thought that I hurt my head or maybe I got drunk, since I’m seriously telling how a children’s horror story turned out to be true. But not you. Yes, you understand right: all these years, when the need came, I bought a creature from the pet store that is not so sorry, and went there. The manhole and the stone are still in place. But do not rush to rejoice, finish reading first. Because one dead bird in your case will not do. It’s never that easy, you know.
When, ignoring our protesting cries, Nika turned the head of a parrot beating its wings on a stone, we fell silent. Something broke along with his vertebrae, something right suddenly went wrong. Nika no longer seemed beautiful to me, not at all. Although her appearance has not changed, the girl herself and everything around her has become ugly in my eyes. A white stone with a corpse sprawled on it seemed especially disgusting. As if, say, it was made of swarming moths and woodlice, and not ordinary reinforced concrete. Then I could not understand where exactly this fracture occurred, inside myself or somewhere outside? Today I know: everywhere.
The confusion lasted only a moment, then a loud sound was heard behind us in the silence that followed. It was as if someone huge smacked his lips, opened his lips, and inhaled deeply, with pleasure. The air in the clearing among the bushes where we were standing floated, flowing around us. He rushed to where a vertical opening had formed between the foundations of two houses, now leading into the gray twilight of some completely different, alien courtyard. In ours, by the way, it just struck noon.
There were houses there too. They looked ordinary, but they looked dusty and abandoned a long time ago, even for some reason ancient, like the pyramids in the pictures in the children’s encyclopedia. In a light draft, tornadoes of dust formed and disintegrated, it was cold: not much, but as happens on a hot day near the entrance to the cave. And a faint smell. It was disgusting, somehow bitter and rancid, like from a wet overflowing ashtray or from a switched-on chandelier by Chizhevsky. A rising breeze shook the grass on our side and some colorless, straw-dry stalks on the other.
I managed (overcoming a sudden spasm of disgust) to grab the wrist of Nika, who was running past, but she pushed me away and squeezed through the gap. Into the portal. Why not call a spade a spade. She stood there for a while, turning her head. She turned to look at us, and there was fear on her face, but also delight. Delight seemed to prevail.
— Why are you frozen? Come here! Here it is!!
No one moved. On the contrary, Kostya, the youngest of us, began to back away until he ran into a wall of bushes. Nicky’s red hair in the dim light behind the aisle seemed to have faded, turned a nondescript brown. Stupid details, perhaps, but that’s how I remember her: scared and faded. Some kind of cracked.
— Nick, please come back, — Anton said quietly. — What about? What a pussy! And you are also called men. Aren’t you interested? her voice was muffled, the intonation faded at the border. — Really, don’t. This… You don’t have to go there, it’s bad, you see. And the dump stinks. Maybe there’s radiation at all. “We’ll lie to your grandmother that Kesha flew out the window,” I picked up. — If you say I let you out, it won’t hurt you. Let’s go, eh? If the passage closes, how will we get you then?
Our obvious anxiety, of course, only provoked her. We should shut up or at least offer to come back later, with a rope and a flashlight. But we were just scared. And then she left, telling us to guard the hole. She said that we were all suckers, and she would go make a wish, and disappeared around the corner of the nearest house with black openings instead of windows.
We waited a long time, maybe thirty minutes, but nothing happened. Moving slowly, as if underwater, I circled the pedestal in a wide arc and came closer to the hole to get a better look at the world behind it. There was a city there, true, but as if swollen and moth-eaten; monochrome, as dreams can be. In general, similar to ours, until you start looking at the details. Everything there seemed a little bigger than it needed to be: there were more holes in the windows, the floors were higher, and I could probably climb into the whole iron urn lying on its side. Lampposts stood at random along the roads, emphasizing the perspective, which was unpleasant to look at. The upper floors were lost in the haze, which made the strangely narrow street, squeezed from the sides by the huge buildings, seem like a cave with a high ceiling, and not an open space at all. No movement. And there was no sky, only a haze of shades of old slate instead, and behind some panels, others rose in rows: closing the horizon, forming a crushing maze, the distant parts of which swallowed all the same twilight and fog. Near the curbs, lopsided benches and a couple of rusty skeletons of cars, heaps of fine gray sand were scattered here and there.
Glancing at the right angles, the walls going up and to the sides, I tried to imagine how people walked here, lived in these entrances, and then suddenly packed up and moved to some other place… It didn’t work out. Instead, images of abandoned stage sets came to mind, designed only to imitate an Ordinary Soviet City for some long-shot and forgotten movie.
My thoughts were shattered by a scream that stunned me, coming from the other side, echoing in the void between the terrible monoliths. Nika screamed, but her scream was so strong, it lasted so long that at the end it turned into a growl, even a wheeze. You wouldn’t believe, Sasha, that a little girl could scream like that. There was silence for the time needed for a deep breath, and the scream rang out again. He approached. Nika was about to appear from around the corner, behind which she disappeared forever ago.
As the seconds ticked by, I kept my eyes on this place, trying to see at least something in the murky twilight of the dead world. Finally, I saw a swaying silhouette. Not like a human. With difficulty moving on short stumps of legs, an armless and asymmetrical figure leaned against the wall, from behind which she had just come out. The squelching bags and lumps dragging along the ground after the creature alternately inflated and fell off, like a frog’s goiter. Bending like a worm, it pushed off from the wall with its whole body and took a few more awkward steps towards us. Nicky’s voice screamed. The scream came from a disorderly pile of flesh that the creature was dragging behind it.
I screamed myself and staggered back, the edge of a stone hit me under my knees, which I had completely forgotten about. Falling, I threw the bird’s corpse into the grass. There was a slurping sound again, as if cutting off the heart-rending crying of our friend with a knife. Gradually, other, normal sounds returned: the laughter of children from the sandbox, the cooing of pigeons, the voice of a woman calling someone to have lunch from the kitchen window. It was day again in the narrow opening, rare dandelions were swinging there, a battered bus was approaching the Sports School stop. A tabby cat ran past and darted into the basement window. Nicky was nowhere to be found.
Shedding tears, we vied with each other to tell the adults what had happened: first to the parents, then to a gloomy man in an unbuttoned police tunic, while the second interviewed the neighbors. Niki’s grandmother was taken to the hospital, she became ill with her heart. No one told us that we, de, were lying or playing too much. But the testimony of the kids was not taken seriously either. They clarified over and over again whether we had seen a suspicious man, and even described his appearance. They must have had some kind of maniac in mind.
I escorted the policeman to the place where the missing woman was last seen. There he looked around, turned his head inside the manhole, walked around the house and wandered for a long time on the other side of the patch of land between the ends of the houses, looking for something in the grass. Then they left. The blue UAZ appeared in our yard several more times, but, of course, Nika disappeared without a trace.
That summer, from time to time, I remembered what she was like when she stood there, half-turned, and called us to follow her. At night I dreamed of something else. Something as if turned inside out, but still alive… However, this happened less and less often, and life set priorities. In the fall, my father left us, problems started at home, there were also problems at school. Years passed. The old company collapsed, new friends appeared, already from other yards. I didn’t remember much about the red-haired girl, only since then I have always avoided the cursed place. Until I was fifteen.
After my father left us, my mother started drinking. At first, a little, locked in the kitchen after work. Thinking that I’m sleeping in my room and I can’t hear her crying, sitting with a shot of vodka in front of the TV off. Then things got worse. Getting drunk, my mother became tearful, asked me for forgiveness, promised that she would leave me from tomorrow, but where there. A couple of times I got in the face from the men she brought with her — I tried to kick them out of the apartment. Then I skipped school for weeks to avoid showing bruises.
The head teacher enrolled our family in the dysfunctional and finally waved her hand. By the eighth grade, I had the whole household on me, I even learned how to cook. Basically, to cook soups, because it is satisfying and comes out inexpensive. I got a job at my father’s friend’s car wash as a “runner” when my mother was fired from work. She drank almost all the alimony. My father was aware, sometimes he threw off extra money, but he didn’t want to get involved in our affairs. It seems he had a new family, but I didn’t ask, and he was in no hurry to tell.
After entering the ninth grade, every morning, just opening my eyes, I sincerely hated this life. Sometimes he spent whole days in a bed spread out, indifferently listening to his mother’s new friends and girlfriends ringing in the kitchen with bottle glass. Or how she vomits in the bathroom, yells at the TV, scratches at the door of my room: “Kolya, my son, well, there’s not enough sotochki, I’ll return it at the end of the month! Do you want to go to the park later for a walk? Remember, you wanted to? I’m just going to the store and back.” After another ambulance call, while my mother was sleeping under a drip, the paramedic told me (without looking up from filling out the papers on refusal of hospitalization) that she would last another year at this pace, maybe two, and then she would need to call not an ambulance, but a funeral.
In general, every morning in the ninth grade I woke up with thoughts about the hole in the corner of the yard and the strange city lying behind it. The legend turned out to be accurate in its first part, so why the hell shouldn’t it be entirely true? I knew what wish I wanted to make. Only a miracle would help save Mom, or rather, both of us. And if not, then I didn’t want to live too much. I remembered all the horror of that summer, but you can’t escape from yourself: the idea seemed more attractive day by day, do you understand, Sasha?
One day, when I came back from school, I found my mother dead drunk on the floor by the stove, with her arm broken at the elbow. I think she was trying to cook dinner for us when she lost her footing and fell. The sharp tip of the broken bone pierced the stretched skin from the inside, and she didn’t even wake up. It’s a miracle that I didn’t have time to turn on the gas.
After sending her to the hospital, I sat up all night, and in the morning I went to a pet store and bought an exotic lizard with the last money this month. It cost much more than the funny hamsters that were bustling around in the next aviary, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at them. It was easier for me that way.
It worked just like last time. I felt again that the world had cracked, but now I was the center of the split, just as Nika had once been. Since that day, I’ve been treating myself worse, you know? As to a person to whom I would not shake hands at a meeting. I became a little unpleasant to myself, I don’t hold my gaze on the reflection in the mirror, I constantly carry this filth in myself. This awaits you, too, if you decide to follow in my footsteps. I have a theory. It consists in the fact that by opening the hole, you are doing something disgusting, and not even by personal, but by cosmic standards, or something… And it’s not about killing an innocent animal, necessary for this, but what happens next - in the very appearance of the hole.
Looking up from the stone, I wasn’t even surprised. As if all these years had not happened, the city behind the gap has not changed at all. It doesn’t change at all, except for a couple of little things. I think that time goes there differently or even froze in place. Because the “dead world” is not really an abandoned village located somewhere in the north. Rather, it’s an echo. A dream about what our reality could have become if something terrible had happened to humanity, which we miraculously managed to avoid. People have never inhabited these houses. Their inhabitants are completely different. And they’re still there.
When I crawled through the gap, the smell of decay and bitterness, spilled in the cold air, vividly revived childhood memories. I looked around for traces of the presence of that creature (Niki) that came to us four years ago out of the darkness. The sand drifts seemed to form a barely noticeable path leading along the wall and making a loop near the manhole, from where a long rectangle of light was falling now. But it could have been an illusion or the natural work of the wind, and I didn’t see anything else.
I had a flashlight with me, but I didn’t dare turn it on. There was enough light, even if its source was not clear. Soon I noticed that there was light in some windows: now in one part of the building, then in another, square pits without frames faintly opalescent in the same dirty-blue spectrum, as if televisions tuned to the same program were working behind them. From other windows protruded long black tufts of what looked like the crooked branches of a dead shrub or the legs of mushrooms
Getting cold inside at every step, I wandered, raking the stinking sand with my feet, in the direction where Nika ran away in search of a way to make a cherished wish. Pressed against the icy stone, he looked around the corner. There was still nothing moving on the street. The road continued, blocked in two places by fallen lampposts, broken into pieces, like antique columns among the ancient ruins of a lost civilization. But for some reason it always seemed to me that something was still breathing behind these walls and, perhaps, even looking at the uninvited guest from the darkness of huge apartments. Gathering my courage, I took a few steps to the center of the street, looking around intently in order to detect possible danger in time.
To the left, a little to the side, there was a gray cube of something like a boiler room or a transformer booth with the gates wide open, as if in invitation, and half-swept broken wires lying around. Behind him began a maze of squat garages, almost completely hidden behind thickets of the same bundles of sharp sticks, which broke out of the ground here and there, like frozen explosions, from round holes of wells with torn hatches. Whatever happened here, it happened quickly. I looked ahead. In the distance, one house away from me, near something resembling a crippled subway lobby, a spot of dim radiance spread across the asphalt: there was one of the lanterns burning, the only one as far as the eye could see. In the circle of light there was a row of ordinary trading stalls. You know, these kind of armored monsters with small windows for money, they used to hang out on every corner and sell everything from gum to scarce tights.
My heart was pounding even harder, if that was even possible. So the legend wasn’t lying about that either! To get there, it seemed, it was enough to walk right down the street past a series of entrances, some of which even had doors hanging on one hinge. I must have lost my vigilance from impatience… each blind doorway was three meters high. As I drew level with the first of them, I heard something rolling inside there, bouncing off the steps. A worn rubber ball with a double stripe rolled out onto the road in front of me. I had exactly the same one in my childhood, only it got lost somewhere. Perhaps he flew away from a strong kick somewhere in the bushes, and I never saw him again. Maybe even into those bushes in the corner of the yard.
I won’t bore you with the details of what kind of fear I suffered there. And for the first time, and in all subsequent ones. Anyway, you will see something of your own, personal, here my experience will not be useful to you. Just… be prepared for anything. Like in that gorge, on the first Chechen, remember? Ha, then, after the shelling, you and I decided that now we’ve seen everything, we’ve been baptized, and nothing can scare us anymore. I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen enough since: both in the dead world and in our ordinary one. Sometimes I even miss the war. Don’t get me wrong, but at that time I had friends, we swore to spend our whole lives together, if only we could survive, and we believed in our oath.
Sorry, I’m distracted. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to have a heart-to-heart conversation with someone.
I do not know for sure whether this world can harm you, whether it is playing, whether it wants to scare you, or vice versa — trying to make friends. I will only say that its inhabitants should be avoided. It’s not difficult, they are rarely intrusive and almost never leave their homes. But if you see fresh footprints in the sand or, as it were, a strip that a huge snail could leave, turn around and leave. Don’t run, there’s no need to run at all. You’ll be back the next day. Every animal killed will take away a piece of your soul, but it’s better that way than to disappear altogether.
Look at the picture in the attachment. I depicted, as best I could, the route that turned out to be the safest. Strictly follow it, even if some loop seems strange and unnecessary to you. Especially if it seems. Yes, in one place you will have to enter the house. There is a break in the apartment on the second floor, you will get out there, go down another entrance. So it is necessary, and for God’s sake, do not arrange excursions for yourself, and look only at your feet inside the house. Right under your feet and nowhere else. Ideally, close your eyes altogether. I have written down the required number of steps, learn and count.
Well, there’s just a little bit left to tell. How I got to the stall and made my first wish.
Coming out under the dead light of the lantern, I almost did not perceive anything. I was not directly harmed, but the human psyche, especially a skinny teenager like I was, is simply not adapted to endure such loads. I was shaking all over, not believing that I had made it. At first I was overcome with despair at the sight of a number of stalls: they were smashed, destroyed and in places could be seen through: just rusty frames in patches of peeling paint. In the floor of one of them, pushing apart the debris, a vile mushroom-like bush grew.
Walking slowly along the piles of metal, I reached the last kiosk in the row, and although the light inside was not on, I realized: this is it. Welded from sheet iron, like all the others, this one was intact. Even the windows behind the bars survived, so dirty that it was not possible to see any goods behind them, if there was one. On the small semicircular window, behind which the seller was supposed to be, there was a yellow card with the inscription, faded, like everything around, “OPEN.” Gathering my strength, I knocked on the window with my knuckle. A second later, it swung open.
A terrifying stench enveloped me. I already felt something similar once. When one day in autumn I took a deep breath of hot and humid steam coming from a collector in which some animal had died and decomposed for a long time.
The gloom of the iron box was not complete: something vaguely visible in the window and behind the dirty, stained glass panes stirred heavily inside, making a wet squelching sound. Huge, it occupied almost the entire volume of the kiosk. It was a Salesman.
Finally, the movement in the darkness stopped. “Even if the kiosk had a door,” I thought, “this thing wouldn’t be able to get out and chase me.” The thought calmed me down a little, but I lost all the prepared words. My voice sounded strange and hollow in the middle of an empty square of this forgotten world.
— My mom… She’s a good person, but she drinks a lot. Vodka, that is… any alcohol. She won’t be able to stop herself because she’s sick, and I can’t do anything about it. I tried!
The last “alsia” quickly fading echo disappeared into alleys and courtyards. They didn’t answer me. I don’t know to whom and what I was trying to prove, the words just flowed out of me, and they were sincere.
“She’ll die if it goes on like this, and I’ll be left alone. We didn’t deserve it. I love her anyway! That’s why I want Mom to stop getting drunk, and everything will be fine with us as before!
— Can I? I added, waiting for the mocking echo to die down again.
There was silence. A minute passed, and I let out a doomed sigh. What was I thinking about. I fell for children’s stories, got into a world where everyone either died a million years ago or became monsters, I’m trying to talk to one of them… We must save ourselves soon. Or maybe when I get back to the aisle, it will be closed? The thought that I could stay here forever made me want to lie down and cry.
—a finger,— the darkness gurgled.
— finger
My God, it couldn’t even be called a voice, but I think I understood what they wanted from me. An icy sweat broke out on me. And why did I even decide that everything would be free? Did this shit look like a good fairy tale from the very beginning? And if this thing bites off my finger, will I be able to get back out and not bleed out?
Without giving myself a chance to come to my senses, I tore off two long strips from the T-shirt with difficulty, then pulled out the trouser belt and squeezed it in my teeth, folding it in half, as I saw in the movies, until my mother sold our video to someone for a song. Clenching my left hand into a fist, I stuck out my little finger and stuck my hand right in the window of the kiosk, simultaneously closing my eyes and gritting my teeth.
Nothing happened. After a couple of minutes, I dared to open my eyes. Maybe I misunderstood, and it wasn’t about barter? As soon as I took my hand out, the window slammed shut with a bang. The inscription on the card changed, now it was “CLOSED”. Looking at my left hand made me dizzy, I started to feel sick: there was no little finger. There was no blood either, the remaining half of the phalanx looked as if I had lost a finger a long time ago, at least a year ago. Deciding to deal with this later, I set off on my way back. The gap and the clear sunny day behind it were in place.
You know, Sasha, I’ve been wondering ever since: what did Nika wish for then? And what was her actual fee?
Then, I think, everything is clear. When my mother returned to work, we patched up the two-bedroom apartment that had been destroyed by this time. I went from a simple car washer to a locksmith’s assistant in the same place, in a car service. I was assigned a simple repair, well, and paid, respectively, a little more. In general, there was enough money. I had to call my friends to discourage some over-the-top hanurik greyhounds, who did not want to understand that they were no longer welcome at home, and life went on as usual. I learned to do without a little finger in just a week, and I lied to my mother about an accident at work last year. She burst into tears again, of course. Mom died ten years ago: quietly, in bed, already retired. There was no more talk of drinking, and those were the good years. There would have been more of them if not for her undermined health.
After graduation, there was a war, and the military enlistment offices did not particularly understand who to take. Here you know everything yourself. Some have returned, some have not. We were lucky. That’s where you called me Kolka the Fingerless, but now at least you know where my finger really is.
At home, I got a job as a car mechanic in a bus park. There’s not that much difference between a tank and a groove, if you look at it. Life didn’t exactly work out, but I had girls and our meetings of old veterans. Mom bought a cottage in the suburbs to grow her tulips there — what else does a person need? Only in a terrible dream could I imagine that I would ever return to the dead world. But fate decided otherwise. You, Sasha, now know how I spent my little finger. But the last time we met, you noticed (I saw that you noticed): I’ve been spending a lot since then. Three fingers remained on the right hand and two on the left. And that’s not all. One kidney. Pancreas. And my left eye doesn’t really see. Can you guess, probably, why this is so? I think you can guess. You’ve always been the smartest among us, Student.
As you know, I haven’t worked as a mechanic for a long time. I get my allowance, I don’t leave the apartment, I almost forgot how people look, except for the girls from the social care. But I’m not offended, don’t think about it. Don’t blame yourself that we haven’t talked for a long time. And tell our guys on occasion, too, how you will meet. I wouldn’t talk to myself either if I could.
When a year had passed since returning to civilian life, and things began to get better for everyone, Igor did not want to go to another binge at first, do you remember that? And when they forced him, he sat in the corner pale, didn’t even drink. This is Igor, who cooked mutter almost from tosol. His wife, Katya, was found to have advanced breast cancer. And he loved her beyond memory. Still, “the one”, waited for him and waited after all. I probably blurted out too much then. I couldn’t watch him harass himself, I really wanted to cheer him up. Everyone’s mood was gone, they dispersed early, and on the way back I bought a canary near the house. Breast cancer cost me another finger and another lie about a case at work.
After that, there was a rumor, either in jest, or seriously: they say that we have a sorcerer with no fingers. Everything is as promised: not that remission, but as a hand removed. The doctors are in shock, Igor was lying at my feet until I didn’t know where to put my eyes.
Then they came again. Someone has a mother, an old man father, children… Especially children. Then I realized that our world is full of suffering. And anyway, I could help where nothing else would have helped. What is one of my fingers against someone’s life that has just begun? Believe me, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, looking at all the new short stumps: stumps sticking out of the palm.
I did not agree every time, and when I agreed, I did not say. Inoperable hip fracture, legs in crumbs, the guy will never walk — a finger. Sudden stroke, progressive dementia — another one. Congenital cerebral palsy, complete paralysis of the body — two fingers. Rumors were spreading. That’s about when you came to me for the first time, remember? We put your Zinka on her feet, I hope she’s doing well now.
Nine. Nine trips to the dead world, and each time a little less than me came back. And every time I looked at the opening passage, some creature was dying in my hands, and a part of my soul was dying inside. Nine is a lot, Sasha. I don’t feel anything but deep disgust for myself anymore. People can’t look at me without disgust, they don’t understand why. They feel who I have become, although they do not know the reason. Paradoxically, the more I helped people, the more alone I remained. But I was ready for it, it’s part of the price.
The only reason I haven’t killed myself yet is because I can be useful to someone else. What little is left of me.
And that’s when you called again.
I’m really sorry about your girl, really. I hope this fucking drug addict gets caught and hanged by the balls. Believe me, I was ready to give everything I have for her. I don’t know, really, if that would have been enough or not… Everyone else was alive, you know? Sometimes they are very bad, and then it cost more, but they are still alive. However, I was going to try.
But the unexpected happened. Making my way to the kiosk, I heard a quiet baby crying. It came from the windows of one of the apartments, away from my usual route. I don’t know what came over me, but I decided to check it out. I threw the “cat”, climbed into the window. It’s an insane risk, but… I must have realized something right away on a subconscious level. It was Nika.
How long has it been, more than thirty years? But that’s by our, by earthly standards. How long had she wandered through the monstrous colorless void among the dreary monoliths, from apartment to apartment, hoping to meet at least one person? I’m afraid to even imagine it. The main thing is that she is alive. And she’s still a kid, in a way. In its current form… Oh, you should have seen what her stupid desire did to her. What was it like? Maybe something like “I want to live forever”?
Imagine, she recognized me.
I never got to the kiosk. I came back to send you this email. I’m sorry if you can, but I only have one chance left, and I have to try to save Nika. To get her body back, to bring her back to our world. There is no worse fate than the one that fell to her. I don’t know what the price will be, but it doesn’t matter. Even if I have to take her place, well, I’m ready. After all, it was my fault that the portal was closed then. And, I’m afraid, I was the one who told the legend about the hole that night by the campfire.
And you have a choice, Sasha. Think it over properly. Sometimes it’s really better to leave things as they are.
I have to go, she’s been waiting too long already.
(sorry for bad english it was translated from russian)