Methodius Buslaev. Third Horseman Of Gloom

She was ready for new questions, but her keeper had already satisfied his curiosity and only thoughtfully drawled, “Ahhh!” The subject had been exhausted.

A group of about fifteen fanatics rushed past them, jumping over the bench in panic. Another group of about fifty raced after them at some distance.

“How wonderful!” Essiorh said approvingly. “Instead of sitting in front of the TV, these youngsters are busy with sports.”

“Are you sure it’s sports?” Daph doubted.

“What else? Do you have another hypothesis? Well done, friends, good luck to you in your group race with obstacles!”

The first group of fanatics reached the alley, and the other group, more numerous, rushed to Daph and her keeper. Not analysing the way, the group burst right onto the small park, jumping on automobiles. The bench on which Daphne and Essiorh sat was overturned. Both were forced to leap up quickly.

“Hey, hey, friends! Don’t knock over my motorcycle!” Essiorh was alarmed, clinging to the handlebar of his iron horse.

One of the pursuers tried, in passing, to grab Depressiac from Daphne’s shoulder, but jerked his hand back with a howl. Blood slowly appeared from five fresh scratches. Depressiac thoughtfully licked its claws, determining the level of hemoglobin.

The first group of fanatics had reached the alley, where they suddenly received a solid reinforcement of about a hundred people. After locking together for a minute, the groups’ roles were reversed. Now the first group was pursuing and the second group was fleeing. And both groups again rushed past the astonished guards. This time, however, Daph and Essiorh had enough sense to press against the wall of a house.

“Perhaps I’ll go and see where they’re running to! What fervor, what expression! I’m sure this will be informative for me. See you later, Daph!” Essiorh said. He took the motorcycle from the stand and ran, pushing it. Then, after hopping nimbly onto the seat, shifted gear and dashed away, gunning the engine, enveloped in bluish fume.

“I’ll rent a brain. They aren’t offered second-hand!” Daph said after him. She imagined to herself advertising in the newspaper. Her guard-keeper was an impervious idealist. However, Daph liked this. Each gets the keeper he deserves.

* * *

After taking leave of Essiorh, Daph, having more or less satisfied her hunger, decided not to search for Eddy Khavron anymore, but simply stroll. However, Depressiac suddenly started hissing, broke away from Daph’s shoulder, and, on the run trying to free its wings from under the overalls, dived into a gateway. Daphne’s first thought was that it had seen a dog. The second one was that it had met a great and innocent love, the seventy-fifth according to count, which directly preceded the fleeting seventy-sixth and the incomparable seventy-seventh.

She rushed after Depressiac, but just into the gateway on one side was a house, and on the other side was the red brick fence of an unknown factory. Without attempting to climb over the wall, the cat slid into a manhole and disappeared, leaving its mistress in confusion.

“The escape of overheated cats! When you dispatch the brain for repair, write a return receipt!” Daphne thought.

She was about to follow the cat, using the magic of passing through objects, but recalled in time what this would be fraught with. The entire lunch eaten recently, which was pleasant, would remain on the wall outside, as it was ordinary, non-magical by nature of its substance, and it had no ability to pass through objects.

Daph was not seriously worried. Depressiac had run away from her so many times that this already gravitated towards bad infinity. One time it had disappeared for twelve years. True, this happened in Eden and not in the moronoid world. However, there was also nothing to fret about here. Daphne did not envy the car which would hit it, or the dog that would attempt to smother it, or the kamikaze, working for the city, who would try to shove Depressiac into a cat cage.

Still, she did not like parting with the cat. Winged cats, even with a nasty disposition, do not lie around on the road. Daphne wanted to fly over the fence and had already grabbed her backpack so that the materialized wings would not be entangled, when she suddenly experienced an acute unease of unknown origin. The unease was much stronger than in the case with the succubus. If it had only been a vague unease then, now Daph was simply beside herself with worry. Her heart leaped twice as if on an elastic, and then, after growing bolder, skipped two beats.

“Run! Hide! Do something! Ahh, mama, make this sleepyhead think quicker! They’ll finish her off and me together with her!” her inner voice howled in panic.

Daphne obeyed. She pulled the flute out of her backpack and, focusing in order not to slip, blew the maglody of invisibility. Her body became invisible first and slightly later also her clothing. Only the backpack dangled in the air as an eternal monument to obstinacy.

But Daph’s inner voice was not calmed down by this, demanding something more. After dashing to the kiddie sandbox, Daphne climbed in it and lay down, taking refuge behind the freshly-planed wooden border. She did not wonder whether this was a foolish act, trusting what was leading her.

“I don’t understand why intuition isn’t included in the list of basic feelings. A guard of Light without intuition is a corpse standing in line for burial! Mark my words, my nestlings, and let the scar remain in your memory!” Elsa Kerkinitida Flora Zaches loved to repeat.

She pronounced the word “scar-r-r-r-r-r” so menacingly and meanwhile rumbled in such a way that unripe fruits poured down from the pear of decency. Sniffka was probably difficult, but she taught her subject well. A good teacher, as is known, is an enthusiastic bore, not even permitting the thought of her tediousness.

And here Daph, one of the victims of the mentioned training, had already been lying for almost a minute with her stomach on the green sand, which smelled of cats. Judging by some tactile signs, non-magic cats. A crushed nicotine-smudged filter stuck out from the sand in front of her nose. Daph grimaced with disgust. She wanted to crawl away, but she did not dare. Her inner voice demanded full immobility. Moreover, it even wanted her to bury her face in the sand and almost burrow in it, but Daph could not go through with this. Not a chance! No need to steal bread from ostriches.

From where she was hiding, Daphne saw perfectly the gateway through which she had recently ran, following the cat. Danger radiated precisely from there; it stretched out to her just like a draft. No one entered the gateway. By the dumpster, on the spot, pigeons were feeding, cooing, and coupling. The wind was flapping a duvet drying on the balcony of the third floor. On the duvet were stout blue hippopotami with bulging eyes. When the wind blew the fabric, it seemed that the hippopotami were about to scatter from the balcony like a hailstorm.

“How is it possible to nestle with such a duvet? How gross! They would even decorate it with hanging squirrels! Ahhhhh! I’m done! I’ll now grow roots if I lie here any longer!” Daph thought towards the middle of the third minute.

Her present position smacked of idiocy. Three minutes in a row she was hiding in a sandbox, contemplating the artistically lightly-buried cigarette butts. And all this was guided by an unconscious unease. It felt ridiculous to Daph. She wanted to get up and leave. “I’ll count to a hundred and, if nothing happens, I’ll move away to mourn my stupidity!” she thought and turned her gaze, intending on looking up at the sky, checking whether golden wings shone there. Precisely at that moment a terrible elastic force pressed her into the sand. What was that? It was something combining an explosion, a flash, fire, and light. A terrible, panicky thought flickered in Daph that her eyes were scorched. Pain, fear, emptiness… Daph understood that she was being attacked by the magic of destruction. Darkness with a white whirl of flares sucked her in. It seemed to the girl that she had broken up into hundreds of little screaming Daphnes, and that she no longer existed at all.

“Told you, wimp, face in the sand! Squeamish about cats! Ooh, how delicate we are! Got it?” Perhaps the inner voice should be more polite, but Daphne was not so gentle with herself. The number one rule of life says: if one is gentle with oneself, others are not so gentle.

Several tormenting seconds later her sight began to return. Daph felt relief. She had not been blinded! She was saved by looking up, shifting her gaze. Nevertheless, for now she saw only outlines, silhouettes, and shadows, nothing more. In the strange dance of shadows and flares, it seemed to her as if the stones in the gateway opened up, and a man stepped out of the reddish brick onto the road. Daph lay low, fearing to breathe, to stir, not daring to change the position of her body. She no longer trusted the maglody of invisibility. After all, it had not helped her before the explosion.

She felt rather than saw the unknown person stopped and looked around.

“If anyone from Light was here, he no longer exists. Only the one who hid in a pine coffin would survive,” the man uttered in an undertone and, after turning his back to Daph, walked out of the gateway. Under his arm he was carrying a long object wrapped in burlap.

The voice was distorted: it jumped, sounding sometimes like a falsetto, sometimes like a bass, and Daph would not risk assuming whether it belonged to a man, a girl, or an adolescent. “Look at how he protected himself! The spell of voice change. Plus the magic of distraction, attached to the rune of falsity of the second level. You see an old lady or a packed donkey, but in reality it’s a massive Cyclops, to whom the doctor prescribed cannibalism to boost hemoglobin, or a combat unicorn!” she thought. “Eh! Moscow is becoming a boring, weird place. A little longer, and it’ll breed so many wizards that moronoids will become an attraction. But why did I survive?”

After deciding that it was time to leave her hideout, Daphne started to get up, but the back of her head struck painfully against something. She twitched and pricked her shoulder with a carelessly driven nail. She rolled away fearfully, imagining heaven knows what, with her hair sliding along the wet sand, leaped up quickly and… her gaze was captured by the recently planed side of the sandbox – two boards below and one horizontally for the comfort of resting mommies.

Do not throw sand in mommy’s eyes! You will get your hands dirty!

“Indeed, the sandbox is pine! A board on the side and a board overhead!” Daph thought. She suddenly wanted to burst out laughing, fall down and, rolling on the sand, repeat, “Well, have you eaten?” Realizing that she had started to become hysterical, she bit her hand painfully. The pain brought her to her senses.

Daph approached the arch, examined and even felt it. Her returned sight informed her that in front of her was plaster with a cheerful pattern of mould, and brick under the plaster. The arch was like an arch. Fully moronoid in every respect. There was no confirmed presence of a permanent magic teleport. So, the passageway was temporary.

So, here was the fatal danger Essiorh had imagined! A temporal shift had befallen the hapless keeper, and he had seen a threat that had not yet happened at that moment. If not for the appearance of the succubus confusing them, Essiorh’s help would have come opportunely.

Daph already wanted to leave the arch when she suddenly saw a dark spot on the asphalt. She squatted and ran her finger along it. She lifted her finger to her eyes and suddenly felt sick, nauseous, and horrible. To a guard of Light, even inexperienced, it was enough to see blood once in order to understand whose and under what circumstances the blow was inflicted. There was only one thing Daph could not say: who had inflicted it.

Chapter 2

AH YOU @ AND THE OTHER BEASTS

On noticing that the edge of the blanket had slipped, Irka straightened it. She preferred to keep her legs covered, even in summer, when there was no necessity for this. This way, sometimes it was possible to forget about their existence for a while. But during a massage, changing, or when she was taking a bath, she could not manage to run away from her legs, and they persistently tormented her gaze and soul – deprived of muscles, blue-white, with protruding knees that could bend only in the hands of the masseur.

How she hated her body: hideous, useless! How she wanted to break free and exist independently, out of the flesh. How she envied apparitions and ghosts, which freely moved in space, not depending on a body. Let alone that they did not need a wheelchair. And they did not have blue ghastly legs.

Over time Irka adjusted and more and more perceived her body as a small house of little boxes, the shell of a snail, on the whole, something serving as the temporary abode of the mind. Her legs, though, were a nuisance, a huge dinosaur tail that she had to drag behind her, when she, using the handrails attached to the walls, moved from the wheelchair to the bed or settled down in the armchair by the computer.

Now and then, after staying up reading or near the monitor until the middle of the night – Granny did not insist too much on a routine, she simply did not care for it – Irka became so tired that she almost existed out of her body. In any case, she hardly thought about it.

“The computer lights burn so terribly at night. Like Vii’s eyes,” she thought, falling asleep, although, it goes without saying, she personally was not acquainted with the reputable functionary from Bald Mountain.

All day she was reading – the pyramid of books occasionally grew to the middle of a wheel of the wheelchair and even higher. Her world was fantasy – hundreds of realities, sometimes terrible, sometimes tempting, sometimes strictly Gothic, in muted tacit colours. But all of them, even the most lacklustre, were still better than reality. As a result, Irka spent a large part of her life in dreams. She knew as much about dragons, centaurs, griffins, chimeras, the sharpening of swords, and the mechanism of crossbows, as only a person not having seen or held one can know. Under the assumption, of course, that all this was the minimum amount known by the authors of the books from which she got the information.

School did not especially strain her, since Irka studied as an external student. Helping her were her grandmother (mainly serving as a morally determined baton) and two teachers, with whom she met five or six times a month. Each year, lessons took up less and less time. At times, Irka wondered whether it was worthwhile for her to glance in a textbook, as she already knew the answer in advance. Everything was simple, logical and… boring. The most depressing of all was to write in the notebook even answers clear to her: to spell out in simple terms the elementary component, all these parentheses, degrees, intermediate actions, and other crutches of thought; to reveal formulae, where her mind leapfrogged two or three steps. In the end, tired of following dreary school conventions, Irka abandoned the tedious entries and limited herself to immediately writing the answer.

The first time, the teachers were indignant, claiming that she peeked into the “answer keys” and, according to Irka’s expression, “bread crumbs”. However, this continued only until she solved one of two dozen problems in their presence. Then the teachers stopped squealing in amazement, and in their eyes appeared the bewilderment of people who do not want to relinquish profitable tutoring; but deep down they wondered what was still possible to be taught here.

Irka had already passed exams for grade nine. Two more grades, swallowed by the external student, and it would be possible to enter college. But Irka was not particularly in a hurry. Intuition suggested that seventeen- or eighteen-year-old fellow students would not take her seriously but only as an amusing little talking pet. If so, then her student life, let it even be restricted in a wheelchair, would be hopelessly shattered.

This evening, when Granny, yawning in her shop, was cutting a marshal’s uniform for the theatre, Irka was home alone. And, it goes without saying, she was sitting in front of the computer. Irka’s computers – both the desktop and laptop – were on even at night and, as often happened, they frightened Granny with the sounds of texting.

Suddenly a strange sound was heard from the kitchen. A chair had fallen. Plates clattered. The teapot stand hanging from a cord also shook, scratching the wall. And in the next instant, it seemed to Irka that she heard a moan. Completely real. Human.

As any computer person, Irka thought with her fingers and was also scared with her fingers. Now, before panicking in earnest and sounding the alarm, she reflexively typed:

Rikka: Someone has gotten into our kitchen!

Anika-voin: Aha! They want to steal your antique fridge!

Miu-miu: run for help, but stop to make a sandwich on the way.

Rikka: I’m serious! Someone is moaning in there!

Miu-miu: eat a sandwich.

Anika-voin: What if some bozo came to you with a chainsaw? I wonder, do-chainsaws work not plugged in?

Miu-miu: Nah, hardly!

Rikka: Idiots!

While she was typing “Idiots!”, the moan in the kitchen repeated itself. The reality of what was happening finally reached Irka’s consciousness. And she actually felt fear. After all, the second floor is not the ninth. Granny had warned many times that a thief could climb in from the street, and if not a thief, then some tipsy cadre, who took it into his head to drink water from a tap.

And here this happened. Irka understood that she was sitting by the computer without light, and in that case, thieves could think that there was no one in the apartment. The kitchen had been quiet for a long time, but Irka, with some real, natural intuition, sensed that this was a false silence. There, in the dark, unlit kitchen, someone was lurking, someone completely real. She started to phone her grandma on the cell phone, but Granny did not answer. Her workshop was in a semi-basement with such thick walls that a cell phone only picked up when she by chance appeared near the window.

After deciding that the most reasonable thing would be to go to the neighbours, Irka began to quickly turn the wheels of her wheelchair, but the monitor continuously flared up, spitting out new lines.

Anika-voin: Hey, what’s with you? Freaked out?

Miu-miu: Where did she go?

Anika-voin: What if they really attacked her? Call the cops?

Miu-miu: Aha! We’ll call and say, “At user Rikka’s, IP address unknown, someone is moaning in the kitchen! When we suggested that the dude had a chainsaw, she called us ‘idiots’ and slipped off somewhere.” And we’ll introduce ourselves: Anika-voin and Miu-miu.

Anika-voin: You blockhead! (takes a machine gun and shoots).

Miu-miu: blocks with a frying pan.

Anika voin: bullet will pierce frying pan.

Miu-miu: Fig. See what frying pan.

Irka hurriedly moved the levers, setting the wheels in motion. The wheelchair went in the gloom of the hallway almost noiselessly, but it seemed to Irka that her heartbeats were giving her away – resonant, chaotic, as if a leather-covered tambourine was located inside. She had already guessed the entrance door, which was darker than the walls. Open the lock, then the latch, push the door forward – by no means hard enough that it would hit the wall – and leave carefully. Insert the key outside, turn it once, and then whoever was in the kitchen would not be able to follow her. She would be out of danger and reach the neighbours.

True, the most fearful was ahead: from the kitchen to the door was a short hallway, about three or four steps, no more. And the door could be seen perfectly from the kitchen. One hope was the gloom. If the eyes of the one who had climbed into the kitchen from the brighter street had not gotten accustomed to the darkness, she would have a chance.

Let us repeat once more: lock, latch, pull out the key, leave, insert the key outside, clo…

However, before the chain was completed, the world faltered. Her palm missed the lever, only stumbling everywhere on the rubber elasticity of the tire, and in the next moment, the warm linoleum struck Irka’s cheek. Irka lay, perplexedly contemplating the overturned world. Her head was buzzing. She realized too late that she had caught the edge of the shoe rack, which she usually went around diligently. The darkness had turned from a friend into an enemy.

Understanding that the noise had hopelessly given her away, Irka hurriedly crawled and dragged the wheelchair behind her like the shell of a snail. Her useless traitorous foot – how Irka hated it at this moment! – it goes without saying, had landed between the spokes.

The shoe rack, having managed to conspire with the wheelchair, swayed. Winter boots, tucked away for the summer, bounced merrily. The material world took offence at once and rose up against Irka. This looked tragicomic, at the intersection of gothic and ordinary everyday farce.

A light suddenly blazed in the kitchen. It bore little resemblance to electric light. Bluish, persistent, much brighter, it broke out and illuminated the hallway. Irka’s eyes started to hurt and tear up. The world dazzled with the strips of the painted walls (Granny hated wallpaper) and blinked with the frivolous vases on the wooden shelves.

“Well! Really!” Irka thought, realizing that, lying, still chained to the wheelchair, she would never reach the lock.

After raising herself on her hands, she peered anxiously into the illuminated kitchen, expecting to see a stocky male figure with a crowbar, a flashlight, and a large bag. For some reason, that was how she imagined an apartment thief. But reality shook more than any naive fantasy.

A white she-wolf lay by the table among the broken crockery. The side of the beast directed to Irka was covered with blood. The wolf studied Irka without rage. Sorrow froze in the eyes of the beast.

“Hello! Ah… ah… and I’m crawling here!” Irka said for some reason.

The wolf’s upper lip lifted, baring long yellowish fangs. Blood continued to flow from the wound. It ran along the wet fur in large drops.

“Are you hurt? You poor thing!” Irka said, wondering where the wolf could have been wounded.

Had it cut itself jumping through the kitchen window? But the kitchen window appeared intact. Where could the wolf have come from at all, and even an albino, in the city, on the second floor, with the glass intact? But this was all secondary. Many things are more useful when taken for granted.

Feeling sorry for the beast, Irka tried to crawl up to it, pulling her disobedient body with her hands. She did not think about the frightened, suffering wolf charging. Too much intelligence was in the sad eyes of the beast. When, after jerking up its muzzle, the wolf howled, its howl, low and intermittent, immediately stopped and resembled human speech. As if the wolf wanted to utter something, but, not getting an answer, realized the futility of its undertaking. It tried to get up, but it was unable to. The hind legs of the beast never came off the floor, and it collapsed heavily with its chest onto the linoleum.

They lay this way on the floor for a long time. Two cripples – human and beast— equally helpless. Except that helplessness was familiar to Irka, but the wolf was apparently meeting it for the first time. Irka said some friendly, disjointed and not very coherent words, but the wolf first growled softly, then looked at her expectantly.

Finally, after twisting, Irka successfully freed her foot and escaped from the wheelchair. Without the wheelchair, Irka dragged her disobedient body along the linoleum much faster. The wolf watched her with understanding, not trying to move from the spot. Occasionally it turned its head and licked its wound. However, it was too deep, and the beast only irritated it with its tongue.

“Don’t touch it! We need to seal it up or to call the vet, if only those fools won’t induce sleep in you. Wait, I just… Darn, I won’t reach the table,” Irka muttered, hoping to calm the wolf with the sound of her voice.

Irka had almost crawled to the table when the strange bluish light dimmed, coiled with a mysterious image like a spiral, and enveloped the wolf. The wolf howled, and its howl, growing fainter every moment, was the howl of death. It placed its snout on its paws, continuing to look at Irka. The howl turned into a wheeze and died away. Its eyes became dull and glazed over.