The Unnamed Violin

The guitar was already on my shoulder, I nodded. The next day I came to Good Room, I was met by a man named Baphomet, he, like Kaftz, talked to me as if he knew me – in a folksy and friendly way.

For the first time, I didn’t have to prove anything, I didn’t try to seem better – to be liked. They simply said that I was the one they had been looking for, for a long time.

I had an easy time with them, all six of them were jackasses – especially Kaftzefoni and Baphomet. They enthusiastically learned my musical compositions, they gave me the idea for the mask – noticing that I was overreacting to the attention directed at me.

They said, with a mask everything would be different – because in a mask I could be someone else … And that the feeling that I was selling myself would go away.

It didn’t go away – but the demons never heard from me about it.

I threw the towel on the floor and lay down on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I needed to get up and eat something, but apathy again entangled me with the tentacles of helplessness.

I still felt like something was wrong. They hadn’t heard from me in so long, and yet Met was talking to me like we’d just seen each other yesterday …

I coughed and rolled over, pulling the crumpled blanket up. The phone was stuck somewhere under my ribs, I pulled it out, threw it aside without looking, and closed my eyes, dreaming of falling asleep. Let it be excruciatingly sweet, like those same dreams; let it be terrible, and let all the monsters of the universe attack me …

I don’t care.

I’m so tired of all of it. So tired.

26. I Lied

Someone had punctured all four of my tires and I had to get on the subway to make it to the club. I didn’t go to work again, I had given myself another day off without regret, knowing full well Mrs. Thompson wouldn’t tolerate it. I looked gloomily at my feet, making my way through the stream of people entering the New York subway at the 30th Avenue station.

First, I had to go back home from the parking lot to get my coat. The rumble of the trains was so loud that it laid my ears, it seemed like I had been in the subway for a long time, like in a past life. An uncompromising monster train, air currents circulating through the tunnels, outstripping the machine, a predictable change of scenery …

The subway was as dirty as before. Household garbage was white on the line, and rats often ran from corner to corner along the passageway, even at daytime, completely unfazed by the flow of people.

The subterranean is both chaotic and indifferent. At the same time every day, passengers wait for the train on the platform, get in the car, take the same seat, show no interest in anything around them, stare at their phone, tablet, or computer, and meeting a stranger’s gaze is like death to them.

I would prefer that no one stared at me.

I admitted to myself that I was uncomfortable – and I was constantly expecting a trick, every passing glance made me want to fall through the ground, I wanted to jump out of the car, never to return to a crowd of people. In the reflection in the glass of the subway car – as if an unfamiliar face; every transition between stations – a flow in the herd, a feeling of being an imposter, who is visible from afar, and at any moment someone will scream and start pointing a finger at me.

I haven’t been stealing wallets for a long time, I haven’t been a shaggy teen in a worn-out sweatshirt and holey sneakers who snuck into the subway to warm up for a long time.

I rode the escalator up and wondered what was wrong with me. I spent the wait at the Nassau Avenue light, as well as the walk to Good Room, in existential thoughts. A few minutes later, I was already entering the club, greeting everyone I met along the way.

Once I was in my place, I forgot about my troubles. It was time to quit working for Mrs. Thompson – offices are not my thing.

The demons were already rehearsing in the hall, the lighting designer was randomly starting up the equipment, testing the spotlights and strobes, Kaftzefoni and Belial nodded to me from the stage. I asked Mephistopheles what the plan was for today.

“It’s good you came earlier for this once. At least we’ll have time to warn you—” he began.

But Kaftsefoni interrupted him, “Don’t listen to him. Changes in the track list shouldn’t scare you, should they? Today, we need to burn this place to hell!”

I cringed.

“Fix your face! A figure of speech.”

The festival was non-commercial, phantasmagoric, and underground; demons playing metalcore were supposed to open it. In all the organizational talk, I never managed to find a moment to tell Baphomet about the strange events forced me to give the violin to a black, yellow-eyed monster.

“Victor, haven’t you forgotten anything? We’re waiting for an explanation.”

Do they know?!

“What are you talking about?”

I blinked innocently, all determination and intention disappeared in an instant. We were standing near the stage in the main hall, the demons were looking at me attentively, I crossed my arms on my chest.

“When I saw you, you just waved me off and said you would tell me everything later. Well, ‘later’ has come. Tell me.”

He’s not talking about the violin … When did I see him? What did I promise to tell him?

“When?”

I shrugged. How odd … Let them tell me themselves.

“Are you messing with me?”

Wincing with feigned insult, Baphomet leaned his cello against the chair and took a step toward me.

I remained silent.

“Come on, the day before yesterday, Victor, the day before yesterday – you passed me by on your way to the dressing room, and I wanted to scare you, I jumped out of the darkness, but you noticed me and turned around. Remember?”

Not like that. The day before yesterday I was at home, I didn’t go anywhere after the grocery store.

“I get it: this is some kind of joke, right? I bought it, you won,” I tried to smile, but their puzzled faces contradicted the guess. “No, that didn’t happen! I wasn’t here the day before yesterday, Kaftz, you remember, the day before yesterday we met in the store, and I said that—”

“Yes, I remember. But it was after, late at night—”

“What happened? Met, I don’t understand what you’re talking about!”

Kaftz frowned in disbelief, scratched his chin and said, “Victor, why are you acting up, Met saw you, I saw you …”

“Yeah, man, you just told me to go fuck myself, aggressively, like something had gotten into you. Why do you deny the obvious?”

“Who – me? That’s bullshit!”

I jumped up to Baphomet, but Belial, who had been standing to the side, pulled me away.

“Enough, everyone, calm down!” he barked.

Even if I assume that I got drunk, went to a club and for some reason didn’t remember it, the picture seemed implausible.

“Can you just explain?!” I exclaimed, freeing myself from Belial’s hands. “Go on!”

The six demons looked at each other. Finally, Asmodeus turned to Kaftz and Baphomet, “Are you sure it was him?”

Indeed! I couldn’t have been here the day before yesterday, there was no way!

“Of course,” Met chuckled, “I talked to him, and he said, ‘Get lost, Hedman, I don’t have time for your demonic nonsense,’ and ran off.”

He waved his hand in my direction, I gasped for air.

“No, it’s—” I began.

“Yeah, and I saw you,” confirmed Beelzebub, “you were standing by the utility room, Victor was out of sorts!”

“No, that didn’t happen …”

“Yeah, the bastard didn’t even want to hear me out: I told him about the festival, and he turned around and left!”

“Lord …”

“And he waved his cloak so showily,” Kaftzefoni continued discontentedly. “Like a fucking magician! Victor, where did you get such a cloak?”

“What cloak?! What the hell kind of cloak?!”

“You mean you weren’t there?” Baphomet narrowed his eyes. “And your mask – what do you think, who else wears your white mask besides you, Victor?”

There could only be one person in that damn mask … I couldn’t answer – I couldn’t breathe.

He was here, he was walking along the corridors, and they mistook him … They mistook him for me!

How dare he show up here, and even pretend to be me?! I’ll kill him, I’ll make a new mask out of him if I run into him again – and I’ll burn his violin! Why did he come back, what does he want from me? I gave him back his violin, I did everything as he asked …

“I remembered,” I muttered in a low voice. “I wasn’t myself, guys, my bad.”

Everyone stared at me – but after a few moments the tension eased, as if I had cast a magic spell. A minute later we were back to the interrupted rehearsal. No one asked about the violin even once.

They were just waiting for me to agree with them.

I felt uneasy. I lied to them. Why did I hide the truth that I was being stalked by a psychopath in a black cloak, why did I continue to pretend that everything was okay?

The rehearsal distracted me from my obsessive thoughts. It doesn’t matter now, everything is as usual now …

I reassured myself that while I was with the demons, the black shadow would not come near me – but deep down I longed to meet him.

27. Three Kinds of Shadows

“Back in the late 17th century, Filippo Baldinucci in his ‘Tuscan Vocabulary of Drawing Art’ drew attention to shadows – as a special narrative tool in fine art,” the lecturer spoke from the podium. “A shadow is an unlit part of the surface of a solid object, located on the other side from the illuminated one. In the language of painters, a shadow means a dark-colored area that gradually turns into a light area, giving the object volume.”

I looked at the ceiling of the Hall of the Five Hundred – a room on the ground floor of the Palazzo Vecchio, the largest civil assembly hall in the world – one hundred and seventy feet long, seventy feet wide, and fifty-nine feet high … I remembered the numbers unintentionally, I was just curious to know which palace Sir Leigh would visit next during his trip to Florence.

I was seventeen, he tried to give me everything and even more. He always took me with him on business trips, I absorbed knowledge like a sponge, I tried to catch up, everything was new to me.

Renaissance architecture evoked mixed feelings in me, including an inexplicable dread, even more existential than Gothic and Gothic Revival. I couldn’t wrap my head around how many decades of human lives and tireless labor each painted stone had absorbed. Every object that caught my eye was a work of art.

Frescoes and marble statues – recounting the history of the Florentines and the Medici family – surrounded the three hundred-plus spectators in the Old Palace on an August evening who had come to hear some kind of doctor and art historian, the curator of the Capponi Library5. His speech – a fascinating journey into the plots of Renaissance paintings – was about shadows – which the average viewer usually doesn’t pay attention to.

“There are three kinds of shadow – body shadow, half-shadow, and cast shadow,” the speaker switched the slide with an imperceptible movement. “Body shadow is a shadow on an object itself. Let’s look at a sphere: on one side it will have light, and this light will gradually become darker as the shape bends and will move into an unlit area, which is called the shadow.”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «Литрес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на Литрес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

Примечания

1

Rex Gray is a character from the novel ‘Cats Don’t Drink Wine’ by Stella Fracta.

2

Ned Everglade is a character from the novels ‘The Knight, the Beauty, the Beast, the Fool’ and ‘Murder Gene’ by Stella Fracta; also mentioned in the novel ‘Albedo Castle.’

3

Peter Riedel and Erwin Frei are characters from the novel ‘Albedo Castle’ (Stella Fracta).

4

Sir Leigh McKellen and his assistant Remy Adan are characters from the novel ‘Incredible Spy Detective’ (Stella Fracta); also appear in the novels ‘Wild and Violent’ and ‘Cats Don’t Drink Wine.’

5

Dr. Lukas Gasztold is a character from the novels ‘The Knight, the Beauty, the Beast, the Fool,’ ‘Albedo Castle,’ ‘Storyteller from Whitechapel,’ and the novella ‘Shadows of Florence’ by Stella Fracta.