Russian Horror Book

Unless, of course…

It had to be found out. Definitely. I didn’t care if I would be called paranoid, I had to go back to that house.

***

On the way there I was sure of being ready for anything. But when I was finally close to her house I realized that I was afraid. It was about half past ten. Not a window in the house was lit.

I scheduled a day and lied to my mother about going on duty at night. I took with a flashlight and a knife with me, as if I’d going camping. I was ready to record everything and, among other things, I bought a small recorder, just in case.

And though I had not fear inside, the closer I was to my goal, the more I was shaking. Literally shaking, with the rush of adrenaline.

The door of the second entrance was wide open – there was no light.

I enabled the video mode of my smartphone, putting it in a special pocket. I turned on the flashlight and went up the creaking stairs.

Those stairs! When we visited the house together with the district police officer (by the way my friend is a real giant, unlike me) and the bulbs were lighted up at the entrance, I didn’t pay attention to the stairs. But that moment, with every creak giving a deafening echo from every corner, – I remembered the stairs from my childhood nightmares; I ran, choking with fear, and the stairs fell under my feet…

In was chilly inside – that made my skin crawl badly.

What nonsense, I repeated to myself, I am only going to visit a lonely old lady to learn a little more than I know now.

When I reached the third floor, I knocked her door. My heart was pounding like a tambourine. I heard a small shuffling, then a faint creaking as she looked through the peephole to see who was knocking.

I pointed the flashlight to my face and waved my hand.

“Hello!” I said, trying to do loud enough to be heard from outside.

There came a clang of keys, and finally the door opened.

“Electrician?”

***

There was no any light in the whole house, so the hag’s apartment was dark as a grave… I put on the flashlight the way it was bright enough, but without bothering eyes.

“Hello! Remember me? I was here with the district police officer, you treated us to tea!”

The old woman looked at me with her big, colorless eyes.

“So what?”

“I am… I want to thank you. And ask a few more questions.”

“Can’t you fix the light?”

“Well… I’m not a master at this, to be honest.”

The old woman looked at me and was silent, as if waiting for something else. Then she shook her head and waved her bony hand.

“Come in then, don’t let the cold in here.”

I was tempted to ask her, “Aren’t you afraid to let me in? What if I’m some kind of maniac?” but I kept my mouth shut.

There was pitch black everywhere, and if I hadn’t my flashlight, I would have tripped over something and smashed my nose. The old woman shuffled to the kitchen, and I followed her.

There she lit the candle. She struck a match, and it became even lighter, and it turned out that was the third candle she lit. Two short candles had melted right onto the table.

“Some tea, if you want,” she muttered, but I refused.

I felt uncomfortable. I felt stupid, blaming myself for coming there!

What’s going on in her old brain? She’d probably already thought of something wrong. If the tale my mother told me was true, even a part of it – that poor old woman didn’t have expect anything good from a guest like me. She knew, for sure – what kind of rumors were about her. And she might think I’d come to ask more stupid questions, pumped up with those very rumors.

I could tell by her sad sunken eyes that it was true.

“What have you got to say, luv?” she asked with some sad resignation. “Well?”

The candle on the table lit our faces.

I lowered the light of my smartphone and threw the beam on the fridge. So there it had been: on the fridge’s door. A business card of the pension fund. I carefully pulled it out from under the magnet adorned with the name of some far city.

“This card,” I sat opposite her again, “my missing friends had a lot of them.”

“That girl, a friend of yours gave me it,” the hag nodded.

“The girl? Not a guy? Are you sure none of them came to see you?”

The old woman looked at me with longing in her eyes.

“Luv, do you know how old I am?” she pointed a finger at her head, with a light white hair on it. “Imma ninety-two, luv. And I’ve seen a lot over the years. You wouldn’t believe the things I heard, the things people did to me… Different people. It happened, they could offend me, an I could, too. But what do you think of me? I’m an old woman. No need to keep being angry with me, if so… I know they say I’m old and crazy. And when you’re ninety, if you are, you’ll be the same like me.”

She sighed.

“Well, maybe I’m crazy… I don’t have anyone at all… I’d forgotten how young I was. I can’t remember my own face. And if anyone came to me – maybe I forgot who’d came to me… or not. But you’re young, do you really think that I’m able to do something bad? The old woman…”

Her lips trembled and she turned to the window.

I felt sorry for her, my heart ached. She was defenseless in her old age. For some reason she reminded me of my mother.

My mother was still young, with a rosy face, with only few wrinkles, as tiny rays, near her eyes and lips, and on the forehead. She always looked younger. She liked to joke and to laugh, but she sometimes cried. My mother was not afraid of her furture old age. But it certainly was incomprehensible and frightening for her to think that her time, too, someday could pass.

I reached out to the old woman’s hand and touched her cold dry skin. Feeling my touch, she turned to me and smiled.

And that moment I felt I was going mad.

A black shadow was rising in the corner behind her. Not a trembling shadow of candlelight, but something that had become a dense blackness, a darkness that moved on its own. I felt some chilling fear had awakened within me. The adrenaline hit my brain at the same moment and made the heart beat like mad. I was afraid to look upwards, I was terrified. That was a truly deep fear that made every hair on my body standing and made me want to get on all fours and to howl with fear like a frightened dog.

I saw that. I looked up though, and it seemed to me that something was shifting in my head, as if trying to protect me from madness.

I saw a face coming out of the blackness.

I saw a face. My friend’s face. She silently shouted to me, just with her lips: “RUN!”

I jerked my hand away a second before the hag rushed towards me across the table. I fell down from my chair with a crash. The light in front of me jumped up and went out – I dropped the flashlight. The candle, too, was out, and immediately there came the crash of the table falling. In the flickering light I saw something even more terrible than a ghost. I saw the hag’s face changed dramatically, how it becoming bestial, indescribably dreadful.

All that happened in one moment, in a second. I yelled. I didn’t remember what I had grabbed then – thought that was a broken table leg; and poked somewhere in front of me.

She prowled towards me on all fours, across the broken table. The wooden wreckage were crackling beneath her. I yelled again, and crawled back because I couldn’t get up for fear. Everything was too fast. Too scary. She followed me like an animal, I tried to hit her and at the same time to crawl away.

Finally I jumped up and ran. And there was nowhere to run in the tiny apartment.

The hallway was cramped. The front door was locked and wouldn’t budge – and I didn’t remember the moment the hag had closed it. I had a feeling that she, or it, was about to creep out of the kitchen, and I rushed into the only room.

As soon as I ran to the far corner, I realized that she was already there in the room. Slowly she got up from her haunches with broken movements, as if she had more joints than there should be… The moon was shining through the window, suddenly brightly, on a part of the room, so that I could see the hag’s face. Young, smooth, thin face. Unnaturally round eyes, bared teeth. Blackest hair.

“A meat pie, luv?” she looked me straight in the eye and laughed.

I put my hands over my ears.

Her laughter tore my eardrums apart.

A meat pie. I felt sick and about to vomit.

She rushed at me, and I saw her face turn back into an old woman’s when she came out of the moonlight.

It was like a nightmare. I ran, but I couldn’t run, I hit, but I couldn’t hurt her, like I was hitting something soft. My blows were drowning in the viscous darkness. My screams drowned in silence. My voice was gone as soon as I opened my mouth.

I fought back with the table leg. Vuver Kuva was wiry and strong, as if she felt no shock. She was reaching for me, trying to jump on me, but I kept dodging.

The smartphone popped out of my pocket and crashed to the floor. Miraculously it was not broken.

I rushed to take it, fell to the floor and grabbed the gadget, frantically trying to go into the phone book. My sweaty fingers were sliding on the glass – the touchscreen did not respond.

Finally it seemed to me that I had dialed the number of the police officer and after a couple of rings he picked up…

All of that was happening as if in one second. All eternity.

Vuver was getting up again, approaching to me.

I yelled into the phone: “I’m here! HERE! PROKHOROV!"… I didn’t scream like a human. Like a pig, or a cow probably… I couldn’t recognize my own voice.

She pounced at me, and I only had time to put the table-leg forward as a barrier. Kuva clung to it with both clawed hands and pressed me to the floor with her weight. And she weighed like a grown man. She screamed triumphantly. And she was reaching for me with her body, with her face and huge, crooked teeth, which seemed to grow towards me and became even bigger.

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Примечания

1

in Russia, you may address with this word to any old woman

2

an idiom used for harmless, old people