Stories from Lyubavino. Chronicle of an extraordinary Incident

In short, he walked and walked, and all around was just a dark abyss! The sky was covered with clouds – no moon, not a single star, not even the faintest glimmer of a streetlamp. Utter, pitch-black darkness! And then suddenly, from out of this gloom – WHAM! – someone swung and hit him right under his right eye! Out of the blue and for absolutely no reason!!!

Stunned by such an unexpected turn and literally knocked off his feet by the powerful blow, Vasily let out a loud “Oof!” and fell flat on his back.

Instantly realizing that his assailant would certainly try to hit him again, Vasily quickly rolled across the ground and, shielding himself with his hands, shouted into the darkness:

“Who’s there?.. What do you want?..”

In response – a strange silence.

Vasily strained his hearing and the remnants of his vision (in the form of his left eye) and, swaying, got back onto his shaky legs, trying unsuccessfully to make out anything at all around him. But it was dark as pitch. He assumed a fighting stance and, with his fists tightly clenched, lunged forward at the invisible enemy:

“Who are you?.. What do you want?”

WHAM! Taking a hard blow now right to the nose, Vasily mumbled something, sank down, and grabbed his face with his hands. Such insolent behavior from the invisible attacker infuriated him, and in his frustration, he began throwing punches while jumping, spinning like a top, attacking now with his feet, now with his hands.

These absurd combat gyrations were performed in pitch darkness, at random. Vasily hoped to land a blow on the bastard – to the head, the groin, the solar plexus – anywhere would do! But to his great astonishment (and horror), he didn’t manage to hit anyone at all. In the impenetrable gloom, he could hear only his own ragged breath and the scuffing of his own footsteps. Vasily fell still…

The sudden, crushing fear born of the dead silence and the unbroken murk made him take to his heels. He ran wherever his eyes led him – or, more precisely, wherever his one surviving left eye was looking.

He dashed to Vitya’s house practically blind. He only avoided getting lost because he knew the area like the back of his hand. Even in the absolute darkness, he unerringly found his way to the right street with its five-story apartment blocks. In the dark windows, candles flickered dimly here and there.

Guided by memory, Vasily walked briskly towards the right entrance. As he went, he wiped the blood, which stubbornly streamed from his broken nose, with his shirt sleeve…

Vitya opened the door immediately and, after briefly hearing out his buddy’s story about the attack, decided without a moment’s hesitation to go and punish that brazen foe before he could make his escape.

“But listen, Vitya, the guy’s some kind of lunatic with fists of steel, a real hefty one,” Vasily shared his impressions.

“Don’t sweat it, Vasily! The main thing isn’t that nutjob’s height or weight. The main thing is not to chicken out! We’ll break through!..” he replied, hurriedly pulling on his shoes.

Vitya, unlike Vasily, was of sturdy, athletic build and possessed powerful, sinewy arms with hefty fists resembling two sledgehammers; he was, as people jokingly say, big-boned.

Without a second thought, the friends set off to confront the unknown malefactor – a vile character who attacked innocent people, treacherously using the pitch darkness to his advantage.

Vasily walked almost on tiptoe, speaking in a whisper and pointing the way with a flashlight “borrowed” from Vitya. The flashlight was small, weak, and kept cutting out. Its yellow beam timidly illuminated the road at their feet, and soon they were almost at the scene of the recent assault…

When suddenly – WHAM! – this time, it was Vitya who received a powerful blow to the nose. He was knocked out cold on the spot, his powerful body collapsing to the ground. The flashlight went out along with him.

Stunned by the sudden attack on his friend, Vasily, out of sheer fright, began jumping and hopping on the spot, waving his modest, Vitya-incomparable fists in the dark, slicing through the air at random.

“Ah, you scum, you bastards! I’ll show you now!” he howled, hurling several sharp, what he believed to be lethal, punches into the darkness: “Where are you, you lowlifes?! Attacking people in the dark, from behind! Vermin!”

At that moment, he stumbled headlong over Vitya, who was lying there unconscious. Vitya, jerking upright, received a solid blow to the head, causing him to collapse once more, senseless, to the ground.

Coming to his senses a couple of minutes later, Vitya made another, more successful attempt to get up. Immediately switching into combat mode and adopting a fighting stance, he began pummeling the presumed opponent with his sledgehammer fists, but the foe deftly and silently kept evading his knockout blows. In the end, he landed a punch right on the jaw of Vasily, who was hopping about nearby like a little goat. Vasily let out a furious howl and returned blow for blow, hitting his comrade with all his might under the right eye. This time, it was Vitya who swore loudly and profanely.

“Hold on, Vasily, seems like we’re beating the crap out of each other!”

“Yeah, right, looks like it…” the other agreed after a moment’s thought.

“Hey, where are you, you fucking assholes?!” Vitya prepared to attack, but in response – only a ringing silence. “This is some seriously messed-up crap… They’re trolling us!”

“I hit you the same way just now. I kept asking, asking, and in response – silence…” whispered a perplexed Vasily.

“Let’s get the hell out of here!” proposed the freaked-out Vitya.

“Yeah, let’s go to your place…”

Edging away sideways, at first unhurriedly, then picking up speed, they bolted back to Vitya’s house.

Waking up early in the morning and seeing each other’s faces painted with bruises and their noses swollen, the young men were at first somewhat stunned. But, recalling the misadventures of the previous day, they quickly drank a cup of tea with sushki and hurried to that ill-fated spot where they had been so generously thrashed the day before.

The night before, as they were going to bed, they had racked their brains for a long time: who could it have been? The assailant had moved without a sound, struck with hard, precise blows, without uttering a single sound, and had navigated in the pitch darkness as if he were at home!

They had even sinfully thought of aliens – the circumstances seemed far too suspicious…

And so, as they approached the place where they presumed they had been attacked the day before, they saw on the ground the extinguished flashlight they had forgotten, and next to it – a pile of debarked logs. A few of these logs jutted out from the main pile in a brazen and disorderly fashion.

Vitya walked over, sized it up – and was dumbfounded: a couple of the logs were positioned right at head-level! Carefully bumping one of them with his swollen nose, he suddenly saw the light. So this was who had so brazenly “attacked” them yesterday! It was not an ambush, nor was it treacherous aliens, but merely a harmless pile of timber, carelessly dumped on the vacant lot.

They began to circle the logs with a suspicious air, constantly measuring them up, first with a black eye, then with a broken nose. And then it hit them: first a quiet chuckle, then laughter until they cried, and Vitya even got the hiccups – he was shaking so hard from laughter.

And so it was that one fine day, Vasily gained notoriety throughout the entire settlement for threatening to bury the local prosecutor – a woman who was, and still is, alive and well. For this, he was mercilessly fired before he could even properly start his job, and thanks to the same incident, he earned the fearsome and first nickname of his life: “Killer.” And as a final touch, much like the glorious Don Quixote, he had entered into an unequal battle with a pile of logs serenely resting on a vacant lot, alongside his faithful friend Vitya.