The entire street below lay buried beneath thick fog. Diffused light, falling from the overcast autumn sky together with barely perceptible droplets of drizzle, pierced straight through it, making the weightless shaggy mass seem as though it glowed from within. Here and there, through the blurred air, trees stretched upward past the damp terracotta facades of buildings. Their bony claws looked eager to grab hold of the clouds.
Thump… Thump… Thump… Thump… Fading like an echo. That isn’t my heart beating. Of course, I have one too, and I must say, it has been handling its job perfectly well for more than a hundred years now.
Thump… Thump… Thump… Thump… In the tiny speakers of my in-ear headphones, chords from a synthesizer shamelessly imitating strings join the solitary sound of a bass drum hit run through a delay effect.
Thump… Thump… Thump… Thump… Now a woman’s voice comes in, unbelievably strong and deep — enough to raise goosebumps, despite the fact that my body went cold a very long time ago.
Thump… Thump… Thump… Thump… Annie finishes the line: “The rhythm of this trembling heart beats like a drum.” And on the words: “It beats for you…” — I emerge from a cloud of steam endlessly pouring from an open manhole a little way off from the pedestrian path.
“Love Song for a Vampire.” It doesn’t exactly fit the moment, but I like it far too much. I could listen to it forever. Ha! Coming from me, that sounds rather ironic, doesn’t it? After all, not everyone in this world can afford such a thing.
I wonder if she’s a vampire too. Probably not. Though anything is possible. Celebrities of our kind, for fairly obvious reasons, prefer to disappear into the shadows while still young — or at least before their mortal поклонники start asking questions about the unfading appearance of their idol.
The prehistoric—even by human standards—MP3 player had already reached the climax: “Let me be the only one to keep you from the cold…” Against the backdrop of the music, the world around me faded away… “…The floor of heaven is strewn with stars of the brightest gold.” And my heart was on the verge of bursting out of my chest. “They shine for you, they shine for you. They burn for all to see.” If I were human, I probably would have died. “Return to these arms again and set this soul free.”
And at the exact moment the final chords faded, I found myself standing on the cracked and buckled asphalt of a tram stop, separated from the roadway by a pair of tram tracks. From the pocket of my oversized gray coat I pulled out a tiny box with a gleaming корпус and pressed the crescent-shaped button beneath the control wheel. After songs that good, you have to pause, because compared to them, all the others—often completely undeservedly—can seem pale and lifeless.
Gradually, the sound of cars rustling past over the wet asphalt and the conversations of pedestrians behind me drowned out the beating of my unholy heart—my thoughts slowly returned to earth. I looked down at the toes of my outrageously bright sneakers splattered with fresh mud, then shifted my gaze to the rusted rails lying at my feet, showing through the overgrowth of dead grass that had swallowed the space between the nearly rotted sleepers. Autumn had carelessly strewn the whole decaying mass with leaves of every shade imaginable, from pale green to orange. A vivid prelude to pale, icy death.
Across from me, at the edge of the road, people crowded around the bus stop: old women with wheeled shopping bags roaming the city all day in search of discounts, students freshly escaped from the confines of the local college. Every last one of them bent over six-inch portals into the endlessly updating universe of informational compost. The real world, it seemed, no longer interested anyone.
And there I stood, gazing at food with the indifferent eyes of someone long overfed. The Internet age, by making us like them, had turned me into a consumer. Back in the day, satisfying hunger required ingenuity and cunning. And the selection wasn’t exactly great either: a creature trapped in the body of a fourteen-year-old human boy could only lure in teenagers around the same age. Young blood is wonderful, of course, but sometimes you crave something special.
Now, through social media, you can “work on” practically anyone, almost with home delivery. And honestly, considering the current quality of feed given to the human herd, it’s much easier to find delicacies among health-obsessed lifestyle devotees and lovers of organic products through niche online groups. This so-called modern age has turned us into quite the gourmets.
Somewhere deep inside, from the pit that had once apparently been occupied by an immortal soul, boredom began to crawl its way out. So familiar, predictably repetitive, and unbearably dear. And that alone would have been manageable, if not for the fact that right behind it would come its inseparable little friend — melancholy. And after that, depression would inevitably arrive dragging along an entire heap of recreational substances. In the end, of course, everything would conclude joyfully and with great pomp, but my plans for the evening would definitely be ruined by then.
Before it was too late, I pulled out the cassette-sized player once more and, spinning the mechanical wheel, selected shuffle mode on the tiny monochrome screen. A chord played simultaneously on guitar and piano rang out — the dreary mumbling of the city shattered into tiny fragments. Then came the rhythm: the grumbling roar of a powerful motorcycle engine looping over three measures at idle speed. Here we go.
Come with me
Into the trees
We lay on the grass
And let hours pass…
They definitely aren’t human, those ageless guys from Basildon: creating music untouched by time out of scraps of everyday life and dead synthesized sounds. And their lyrics? It’s as if they observe life from somewhere outside it. Vampires, obviously! I said it and grimaced to myself. The names they give us never end: ghouls, revenants, undead, strigoi, restless dead. Though I do wonder what cows, pigs, and all the other creatures humans devour would say about humanity if they could speak? And the things these careless descendants of Adam do to the planet? Humans can invent as many insulting nicknames for us as they like in order to make themselves seem pure and innocent. It changes nothing about what they are. Then again, why be offended? No one gets angry at cattle for fouling the place where they feed. Besides, unlike them, we vampires often leave the source of our nourishment alive.
From a philosophical perspective, vampirism is more about a second chance. For some reason, we became unnecessary to God here, and the other one took us in. And many of us, it must be said, made good use of that opportunity. Among the children of the night are not only stars of the music world, but also individuals who achieved remarkable success in science and art, engineering, information technology — and simply beings of extraordinary intellect. It was we who gifted humanity many of its discoveries and inventions, who created masterpieces whose beauty people attribute to a divine spark.
While I stood there lost in thought, what felt like an eternity passed. By then, the incredibly addictive instrumental break in my headphones had ended, and the final words faded away, leaving me once again alone with the dying rumble of a two-cylinder engine.
Shining with freshly washed sides, a blue city bus crawled up to the stop by the edge of the roadway and spread open its glass doors, inviting passengers into its plastic belly. The player selected another track from the hard drive: “A New Dawn Fades” — not a shred of hope or joy in it, but the music was impossibly good. A primitive rhythm beaten out on the simplest drum kit was joined by an equally raw bassline, and a moment later a rattling guitar entered the intensely pulsing duet. Meanwhile, the ordinary people migrated into the vehicle’s interior.
Snapping back to awareness a split second before the bus doors closed, and risking exposing my true nature, I crossed the two half-decayed tram tracks in a single leap and landed on the step. There was no point waiting any longer. The last tram had passed through here an eternity ago.
“Faaag!” some voice barked out, crashing through Ian Curtis’s monotonous, indifference-soaked vocals — apparently my sudden appearance had startled some old woman. As if anyone needs you, I thought, making my way toward the front of the bus.
After paying the driver with a few grimy brass-coated coins, I settled by the window in the middle of the aisle.
I’ve walked on water, run through fire
Can’t seem to feel it anymore
It was me, waiting for me
Hoping for something more
On the smeared glass, over the filthy facades of the private houses stretched along the opposite side of the road, a translucent, almost slipping-away reflection drifted through the city beside me: a young man with a gaunt pale face framed by provocatively long chestnut hair. We stared at one another with the same empty, soulless gray eyes.
Me, seeing me this time
Hoping for something else
Hoping… But am I even allowed to? Hope is the privilege of mortals. Though perhaps it all depends on what exactly one hopes for. Certainly nothing good, I answered myself with a conspiratorial grin.
For a moment, surfacing from thoughts wandering somewhere between the final notes of the song’s gloomy coda, I opened my black leather backpack and carefully checked its contents. Once again I mentally ticked through the invisible list: everything in place? Everything. Satisfied that I hadn’t forgotten anything, I tightened the drawstrings and closed the bag. My hand slid over the matte tanned surface. I wonder if things made of leather have souls. Or at least fragments of one. If they do, then my backpack’s soul is human.
Meanwhile, the player scratched frantically with its reading head somewhere in the depths of its ten-gigabyte magnetized closet, digging out another track. And after a brief inside-out wail of a choir, over a slow rhythm and sparse piano keystrokes, a pale ectomorph began his mournful and terrifying song in a raspy, subdued voice. “Man That You Fear” — a story as old as the world itself: fear everything you do not understand.
The bus quietly crawled up to the next stop and, after vomiting out several passengers who had already reached their destination, swallowed a new and considerably heavier portion of humanity. Instantly the enclosed space of the cabin filled with the unbearable concentrated stench of modern people fattened on imitation food flavored with palm oil. Though perhaps that’s simply what their souls smell like. I’d never noticed it before. Then again, I somehow also missed the moment when the locals declared themselves the most spiritual people on earth and began purging every trace of “uncleanliness” from their ranks. They had been told all their misfortunes came from evil spirits and various creatures of the night. And, as mortals usually do, they took it at face value, turning their anger against anyone who stood out from the faceless worthless mass — or anyone pointed at once again by the sausage-like finger of some local representative of supreme power.
Not that any of this frightened us much. Hiding is hardly new to our kind. Still, many preferred to leave this rotting sanctuary of spirituality behind. It’s worth noting that humans also did a fine job ruining life for their own species — driving out or persecuting the brightest and most progressive among them. And now, I suppose, they sit around waiting for life to somehow improve.
That final thought coincided with the climax of the song. The androgynous creature’s voice in my headphones practically convulsed: “I am so tangled in my sins that I cannot escape…” I took a deep breath. His voice scraped the words out one by one, assembling phrases filled with meaning known only to him. Then, little by little, the music slipped back into its former course: the anguish once again gave way to a slow sinister melody. Exhale.
Here the route turned right, revealing through the window a once-picturesque meadow along the riverbank, now mutilated by the massive three-meter brick wall of some monastery or other. What are they expecting in the twenty-first century — a pagan raid? Or maybe… maybe they received a revelation about the coming zombie apocalypse, since holy men are supposedly always in direct contact with the mastermind behind every catastrophe that befalls humanity? Though seriously, why do preachers of humility and renunciation, who claim to have chosen the path of seclusion, need so much land almost in the very center of a crowded city? Especially considering that originally, before the nihilists who seized power a century ago began eradicating every manifestation of religion, including its real estate, the territory of this branch office of the Christian-Orthodox kingdom occupied a far smaller slice of worldly space. Naturally, every sect aims to possess the souls of the proletariat. Still, if I had to choose, I’d probably take the barbarians with red party cards. Though what could a soulless creature possibly understand about such matters?
Outside the window, the wall stretching along the roadway abruptly veered away from the busy street, giving way to a narrow strip of riverbank with a footpath. Swaying over a seam in the pavement, the bus rolled onto a bridge spanning the small river that cut across the city. Twenty years ago, the raging current carried the stinking waste of the local cotton mill through the rapids toward downtown, and farther on, making its invaluable contribution to the ecology of central Russia, fed itself into the great Russian river. Now the hastily renovated buildings of the textile giant had become places where ordinary people indulged in gluttony and idleness, while the waste products of their highly spiritual lives disappeared neatly into the sewer system.
The blue brute nodded once more, this time at the end of the bridge, and after dragging itself another fifty meters, settled at an intersection beside a cluster of equally motionless cars, waiting for the traffic light to grant permission to move. While the three-eyed god of crossroads sorted the streams of vehicles flowing through the five converging roads, the ancient iPod began another song. Through the impossibly thin twisted copper wires, a blot-like man with disheveled hair and smeared eyeliner crawled into my head. The chords of a complicated polyrhythmic intro rang out. Exactly eight measures later, the drums kicked in with a lively beat. After another eight, Robert James Smith’s depressive tenor entered. The carriage — sorry, the bus — moved on.
Yes, we are all prisoners of a hungry ghost. Only each of us has our own version of it — this guardian of insatiable emptiness. I found myself thinking about mine: abandoned, radiating with a negative glow. But is a soul truly necessary at all? By all appearances, possessing this intangible substance grants its owners no real advantages. Lately it even seems to me that spirituality itself has somehow detached from humanity and galloped off on its own. And if you ignore the fact that I can exist for a thousand years and that my dietary requirements differ slightly, then what exactly is the difference between us ghouls and mortals? That they can go to church?
At that exact moment, as though someone had overheard my thoughts, the Coriolis force produced by the massive vehicle entering a left turn at the intersection slammed me against the window, adding a couple of surprisingly well-preserved grandmothers on top of me for good measure.
No, seriously. Contrary to all the superstitions and legends, our vampire hearts beat too, pumping blood through the body — unholy blood, perhaps, but blood nonetheless. And daylight doesn’t frighten us all that much either. Maybe the difference lies in the fact that, unlike humans, who were supposedly designed as manifestations of good, our vessels of darkness beat in the name of something just as abstract: evil. As if without fallen angels, God would have long ago become a tyrant. Though apparently not. Because despite all the endless proclamations that humans are His beloved creations, He still treats them like livestock. Testing them? A convenient excuse. In truth, humanity has simply grown cruel, transforming into a species of selfish ordinary people forever taking out their hidden resentment on one another.
Of course, thanks in no small part to the deeds of the dark forces, mortals do get a few things in return — free will, for example. Though for the most part they really do behave like obedient sheep. And freedom, as everyone knows, is granted only to those willing to fight for it.
So, as you’ve probably gathered by now, I’m perpetually dissatisfied with something.
The bus jerked forward, accelerating sharply, only to slam on the brakes a second later to avoid colliding with the protruding rear end of a tiny ladies’ hatchback that had cut in front of it. Obeying the relentless laws of physics, the contents of the cabin swayed backward and immediately rolled toward the driver’s compartment. At that moment, I found myself missing trams terribly.
As if apologizing—or perhaps frightened by the mutiny brewing on board—the driver of the diesel hippopotamus abandoned his rally-driver ambitions, and the bus resumed its smooth drift through the turbulent flow of traffic.
Buildings from nearly ninety years ago crawled past outside, forming a corridor of massive facades. These four-story giants with their tall windows seemed doomed to spend eternity absorbing tons of dust and soot rising from the road into their plastered walls. Everyone has their curse.
Having finished droning in my ears about how people are forced to spend their lives consuming things in pursuit of happiness, the legend of gothic rock teleported back into the ten-gigabyte backstage of the hard drive. Immediately he was replaced by a pair of arrogant Englishmen pretending to be native North Americans. Great music, but for forty years now I still haven’t figured out what sort of refuge that pale-skinned Indian from the British Isles was trying to tell us about. It’s probably some mystical place connected with totems and shamanism. Or perhaps Ian spent the mid-eighties in a permanent altered state of consciousness.
Oh, the heads that turn
Make my back burn
And those heads that turn
Make my back, make my back burn
Somewhere around the first quarter of the song, the bus stumbled to a halt, once again shifting the centers of gravity of the poor souls fate had placed on this route. Another stop—the boulevard named after a Party official who died of a stomach hemorrhage. The doors slapped open sharply. The cabin rocked slightly as passengers disembarked.
And then something seemed to prick the back of my head.
Not like a migraine, and not painful in the slightest. I just call it a prick whenever my—let’s call it sixth sense—warns me that something unpleasant is approaching.
Or in this case, someone.
I turned around to see whether my intuition had failed me.
It hadn’t.
The music in my headphones had already faded into the background, becoming little more than a muffled echo.
The world
And the world turns around
The world and the world, yeah
The world drags me down
Directly across from me, a massive goth woman—or whatever they’re called these days—was lumbering into the bus accompanied by two emaciated gentlemen dressed in her image.
A recent convert, no more than three to five years ago, she shot me a haughty look, as if she were the cleverest creature in existence, hesitated for a moment, then led her pair of anemic lunchboxes dressed in black toward the rear of the bus.
Youth always mocks old age, I grumbled to myself.
I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhere beneath their mourning clothes, catheters had been inserted into the bodies of her familiars so that the gelatinous Lady Bathory could enjoy a snack whenever she pleased through thin silicone tubes connected directly to their veins.
The front doors closed, and one of the corpulent vampiress’s companions shuffled past me like a pale shadow, his heavy boots scraping the floor.
Possibly a young man, with greasy black hair that revealed roots the color of river sand, he pulled a smartphone from the depths of his cloak and began scanning the barcode stuck to the window. Having paid for the journey for his mistress, himself, and their other fellow sufferer, he returned to the back.
Maybe it was my imagination, but he seemed to have already begun decomposing.
Then again, it’s entirely possible he simply neglected personal hygiene.
I just can’t understand this new generation. They walk around the city openly parading their food. At this rate they’ll become just like mortals: first domestication. And then what? Human farms? Though I suspect pioneers of such agriculture would be the first ones raised on pikes—or stakes, aspen ones for example.
“I’d like to see you twenty or thirty years from now,” I grumble under my breath like some old fart. Though no—hopefully I won’t. Still, the retrograde mood refuses to leave me: “No torn throats, no disemboweled bodies, no entryways with walls and floors splashed with arterial spray or streaked with venous blood—nothing but boredom.”
The ever-shifting space beyond the bus windows filled with the façade of a former textile factory, once producing cotton and staple fabrics, now transformed into a shopping and entertainment center with a parking lot packed solid with cars. Then another stop. Another exchange of wandering souls, and onward to the next one.
The autumn day steadily approached evening. The lazy sun, already anticipating its winter slumber, had drifted southwest and sagged a little toward the horizon. The fading daylight snagged on a thick blanket of clouds, and their translucent shadow sprawled lazily along the street, stealing yet another little piece of light from the townspeople.
Another track ended, and with the song’s final ringing notes, the image of that woman—my tongue refuses to call her a vampire—evaporated from my head. She still sat in the back of the bus as though upon a throne, occupying two seats at once. As for the near-drained weaklings settled beside her, even I felt sorry for them. But there was nothing to be done. Children of the night prefer not to quarrel among themselves, allowing time to put everything in its proper place. We can afford that luxury.
The bus slipped beneath the enclosed fuel conveyor gallery spanning the road between the reserve storage tanks and the main building of one of the local power plants.
A heavy female contralto began to wail a cappella in my ears. After allowing the dark-skinned singer a couple of lines about her wretched fate, the bald genius of the techno age brought in his drum machine. Truth be told, I never cared much for this kind of music before, but back at the end of the twentieth century I had a friend—you won’t believe it, a human—and he got me hooked on this stuff. Not only this, of course, but a few other things as well.
I don’t know whether he’s still alive, but I can say for certain that the discoveries of that era greatly enriched my godless existence. In moments of weakness I wonder: Should I have turned him back then? Perhaps today I wouldn’t be riding this bus but making noise with my best friend somewhere very, very far from here. Strange, perhaps, for a vampire to think such things, but I remain convinced that turning someone who’s barely more than a child into a bloodsucker—even to save oneself from depression and loneliness—isn’t exactly ethical.
The city drifted by. The rubberized floor swayed gently beneath my feet in time with the uneven asphalt.
Meanwhile, the player announced a new song in Cyrillic letters on its monochrome display. A simple guitar intro played, followed by the deep voice of a dead man. To this day I don’t understand how such a fairly mediocre band managed to come up with something like this. This music makes me want to spread my black wings and soar above the rooftops at night. Dive into ventilation shafts and howl at the top of my lungs, frightening the townsfolk. Then circle above the streets, almost brushing the weary asphalt, before climbing skyward again—and again—and again, forever.
To those who go to sleep, peaceful dreams,
Good night…
The music seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. It pulled my consciousness—and with it the entire bus—into some indeterminate moment in the past. There my whole life lay tangled together, and the city outside now peered in through the window of a tram slowly measuring out its route along rails that no longer existed. Cars and pedestrians, lost in the endless stream of events, hurried about their ephemeral business like clockwork toys, obeying the schedules of disposable lives. The bustle unfolded against glowing storefronts and cafés that had once been different shops, photo studios, laundries.
Although night had not yet fallen, lights were already coming on here and there in the ancient four- and five-story buildings looming along the narrow thoroughfare. And my gaze, like that of a desperate moth, flitted from dead windows to those where hope appeared. Though even that feeling was merely a product of my overactive imagination—a made-up symbol of a home where someone dear is waiting for you. A phantom lighthouse for the Flying Dutchman.
The stops came and went. Meaningless people got on and off, some not even fit for food. No matter how many generations pass, nothing changes for them: endless squabbling around the feeding trough. For the few who try to change something, there is a lifetime of spit in the face and a couple of bad habits thrown in as a bonus.
For two more songs I simply let my eyes drift across the passing façades. I peered into windows glowing with warm light, slipping through them into other people’s lives. Then a vast neoclassical façade of a printing plant appeared before me.
Damn it—that’s my stop!
My final stop…
Barely snapping out of my nostalgic journey, I squeezed between several large-bodied figures and fluttered out of the bus.
Green light for pedestrians.
A lucky day today.
Quickly crossing the road, I glanced back at the bus that had brought me here. My seat by the window had been taken by a desperately unkempt man. Our eyes met. The fellow grinned broadly, exposing almost bare gums, and waved.
Perhaps the pathetic little human meant nothing by it, but the sight of that grin made me uneasy. As though the mortal understood everything and was mocking me:
“Look, I’m leaving, and you’re staying.”
As though I had lost, and they, in all their seething mass, had somehow prevailed. As though the toothless herd were bidding farewell to a predator no longer capable of tearing them to pieces.
“Still can,” I reassured myself and, dismissing the lunatic from my thoughts, headed with a light step toward the archway in the wall to the right, between the massive façade of the printing factory and a four-story apartment building erected in the same period of the twentieth century.
I slipped beneath the semicircular arch and, as though crossing an immense distance in a single instant, found myself in another dimension. Left behind, together with the dust and exhaust soot, was the entire burden of human concerns—every restless thought, worry, sin, guilt, and regret carried from place to place.
Synthesized bells chimed out a melody in my ears. Then a short fellow pretending to be a vampire rasped in his thorny voice over razor-sharp guitars and blast beats:
Black candles dance to an overture
But I am drawn past their flickering lure
To the breathing forest that surrounds the room
Where the vigilant trees push out of the womb
A lawn churned into a parking lot. Rusted playground installations mangled by infantile blockheads. Stunted, ugly little trees. Beyond them, the courtyard of a Stalin-era apartment block with battered cladding gradually merged into narrow streets dotted with private houses.
I remember that long, long ago, before human dwellings spread across this place, there was an open field here, swept by every wind. Back then, even from here, it was easy to see the final destination of today’s journey.
But, let’s be honest, walking in a straight line is terribly boring—especially if you’re not a bore.
I could have turned myself into a flock of crows or a swarm of bats and, within minutes, carried myself on the rustle of taut leathery wings from the terracotta-brick dormitories to the grove perched on the picturesque steep bank at the edge of the city.
But tricks like that stopped amusing me a long time ago.
Accompanied by the vicious rasping and grinding in my little earbuds, I gradually emerged from the labyrinth of private housing. Harassed by car horns, I fluttered across a busy two-lane road and found myself at the edge of the woods.
To my left, among the trees, stood the squat two-story building of a kindergarten. A little farther on, also running parallel to the narrow road leading toward the city center, stretched the buildings of the municipal hospital.
A strange neighborhood, I must say.
I set off along the asphalt access road beside the kindergarten fence. Behind the thin metal bars, the little building radiated with hundreds of pure souls, illuminating the surroundings through its enormous windows.
There was the main gate, equipped with an intercom and a magnetic lock. One might think innocent souls are threatened exclusively by disabled people incapable of climbing a fence, or by individuals whose minds are insufficiently developed to connect an electric lock with its power supply.
Not to mention us, the unholy. The law of invitation doesn’t apply to public buildings.
The security measures were purely symbolic—just enough to reassure naïve parents.
I walked on.
Ten meters farther stood a pair of swing gates bearing a red prohibition sign.
“Well, now the children are definitely safe,” I remarked to myself with irony.
A little farther on, the kindergarten boundary ran into a tall concrete wall. The sort usually built around military bases and other facilities where either the inhabitants must be protected from the outside world, or the outside world from the inhabitants.
After several monolithic sections, a metal gate emerged in the orange glow of a solitary streetlamp. The asphalt road led directly to it.
A blue plastic sign bore silver letters:
Gerontology Center.
Apparently something to do with old people.
And although, as you may have noticed, I’m quite a grouch myself, the subject doesn’t interest me in the slightest. Expired food products aren’t exactly my preference, either.
So I walked past.
Trading the firm asphalt surface for the soft carpet of one of the many footpaths threading through the grove, decorated with a scattering of colorful leaves, I entered the twilight kingdom of towering pines, bushy maples, and aspens.
The grove greeted me with its cold breath, seasoned with the stench of a summer that had died several months ago.
There would be frost tonight.
And to the ghostly song of Portuguese performers imagining themselves wolves, snow began to fall from the dark gray sky.
Outside the mythic rains
Let us know we are not insane
Blood debts still to be paid
Instead we celebrate the stranger
An anomaly, much like myself: leaves swirled together with white flakes of snow.
Not much farther now.
I moved deeper into the grove at an unhurried pace, occasionally nudging the dead children of the trees with my feet.
Inside, the mythic pains are played
Blood doubts are asked again
Beware the answers you cannot tame
Might take you too far away
Almost weightless snowflakes were in no hurry to reach the ground. They drifted and glittered in the remnants of daylight that barely filtered through the palisade of trees propping up the heavy autumn sky, like the persistent ghosts of mosquitoes.
Beyond the bare rosehip bushes, a low iron fence and the shadows of weathered gravestones came into view. One of the side gates had to be somewhere nearby. For some reason, I felt too self-conscious to enter through the main entrance.
The snow began falling harder still, trying to blanket the rotting leaves, but the decaying remains melted the delicate crystals, turning everything into filthy slush. Where was that entrance? I peered impatiently into the ghostly outline of the old cemetery. No longer caring much about the state of my shoes, I splashed through puddles and slick mud, desperately quickening my pace.
The sense of a goal, sharpened almost to the point of becoming tangible, the knowledge that there was so little left to go, had completely bewitched my mind. The music faded into the background. Tree trunks flashed past. Bare, bristling branches swept by. Snow streaked across the edges of my vision as I searched for a way in. My heart, driven by impatient anticipation, hammered like an engine running at the limit of its power, straining against a drivetrain unable to keep up, ready at any moment to burst free and outrun the sluggish body carrying it. Just a little farther and—
There! Found it.
Slowing only slightly, I hurried toward a gap in the fence near a grave inexplicably located outside the cemetery grounds. Casting a glance at the heavily rusted metal obelisk, stripped of any identifying marks, I finally crossed the boundary of the ancient necropolis.
Dead silence instantly swallowed the rustle of leaves and the crack of branches beneath my feet. Gravestones, having assumed the role of ghosts, loomed above frail iron fences and peered out from behind thick tree trunks. After a brief pause, the electronic device in the pocket of my mothball-scented coat sent a modulated low-voltage signal to the tiny membranes of my earbuds.
A ringing acoustic guitar, accompanied by a bass, began weaving a tale of loss worthy of Edgar Allan Poe himself. Without realizing it, I started humming along, imitating the introduction.
Why is it that the old-school metalheads always write the most beautiful ballads?
Reverend, Reverend,
Is this some conspiracy?
Crucified for no sins
Put an image beneath me
I wander along the narrow paths, searching for the center of this domain of sorrow. I remember the days when you could stroll freely among the trees here, without submitting to the will of this mournful labyrinth of iron fences. The cemetery where, under different circumstances, your humble servant might have been laid to rest, grew old, withered, and died. I, on the other hand, did not.
Without any particular intention, my gaze drifts across the occasional dates on gravestones and the plaques attached to tin-framed monuments—dates not yet completely erased by time’s merciless hand. Statistics may proclaim all they like about legendary long-lived laborers of ages past. Yet the simple arithmetic between birth and death dates ruthlessly topples the neat towers of their summary tables: forty-five, fifty-six, thirty-seven, twelve, twenty-three, seventeen, eight… months.
The insatiable cemetery earth swallowed them all without discrimination: still-capable adults, teenagers who had only just begun to taste life, and very small children. Yes, well, it is difficult to “live out one’s days” when most never even make it halfway.
Why am I so preoccupied with mortals? Just distracting myself to calm my nerves.
No, I’m not frightened in the slightest. Apparently, after more than a century of immortal existence, my survival instinct has been washed away completely. I’d call it anticipation instead—the kind you feel before an important performance, or when you’re about to do something new and unexplored, or on the eve of a long journey.
And now I’ve arrived.
The sun, having finally surrendered, opened the way for the gloomy shadows sprawled lazily across the earth to emerge from nowhere. Half-glimpsed movements linger between the scarred trunks of tree-idols. Suspicious flashes wink from the impenetrable darkness. The rest belongs to a fearful imagination.
Neither the past, nor the present, nor certainly the future matters anymore.
The energetic guitar riffs merge with the beating of my heart, and the music becomes a soundtrack to a thriller that actually happened.
With a small effort, I pull open the heavily rusted gate of a fence decorated with an elaborate pattern. The disturbed hinges, awakened from decades of lethargic sleep, probably released an ominous creak into the frozen autumn darkness.
Inside the nearly square little necropolis enclosure, beside a granite stele leaning so far that it looks ready to collapse at any moment, it is almost cozy.
Slipping my gothic backpack from my shoulders, I begin laying out its contents one by one on a tiny rotting bench: a collection of items that seem far more suited to a vampire hunter than to such a wretched embodiment of superstition and folklore as myself.
I hesitate for a moment.
After running through the sequence of actions in my head one last time, I take a deep breath and begin arranging the scene for a script my depressive mind has been rehearsing for years.
From the outside, it must look very strange.
Although someone wandering through the darkness of an old cemetery and spotting a teenager frozen in an odd pose over a leaning gravestone, clutching a mysterious brown vial in his left hand and a gleaming knife-like object in his right, might very well be frightened. They might even scream, ruining the entire performance.
But fortunately for me, no one seems inclined to take an evening stroll through this part of the grove.
Only the barely discernible faces gazing out from the faded porcelain portraits on the surrounding monuments will witness what happens next: how I drink a solution of colloidal silver, slit my throat with a silver knife, and lose consciousness.
And then collapse forward with the full weight of my unfeeling body onto a half-meter wooden stake—presumably aspen—braced beneath my sternum, slightly left of center.
I probably wouldn’t even leave a body behind. At least, that is if films and books are to be believed.
And if I didn’t turn to ash after all, whoever found me would most likely decide that a teenager had chosen to end his life because of unrequited love, or perhaps that participation in yet another social media challenge had ended in tragedy.
Of course, the police would have their work cut out for them, trying to identify me and track down relatives. But I doubt anyone would grieve too much when my unholy remains were buried alongside other unclaimed dead. As for me, I certainly wouldn’t care.
Well then, here’s to your poor health.
I drained the vile concoction from the jar in a single gulp.
It felt no different than drinking water.
Except that instead of an aftertaste, there was a faint burning sensation in my throat and a little farther down in my esophagus.
And then nothing happened.
Damn it.
So, gripping the slippery metal handle of the object sharpened to surgical keenness—a piece from someone’s family silver set—with all the strength I could muster, I drew the edge of the silver blade sharply across my throat.
Quickly. Coldly.
Yet contrary to my expectations, blood did not erupt in a fountain. Instead, it flowed with what I could only describe as laziness, unpleasant cold streams trickling straight beneath the collar of my sweater.
Though, to be fair, a few miserly drops did splatter against the polished granite face of the monument.
What the hell was this?
And just as I was beginning to despair that nothing would come of it, as ugly thoughts involving the word “worthlessness” started circulating through my mind, my head spun slightly.
My legs trembled.
Buckled.
And the thin wooden spike pierced skin and a shallow layer of fat before slipping gently into my chest cavity.
The knife and the jar fell one after the other from my slackening hands.
The first probably clanged loudly several times against the stone.
The second shattered, scattering ringing shards across the granite surface.
A sharp pain burst outward from the pointed tip of the stake into every cell of my body.
It seemed to reach even those places where nerve endings did not exist—into every scale, every strand of hair.
Then all my flesh appeared to crack and crumble away like a windowpane shattered by a thrown brick.
As though some unseen author, enraged by a failed draft of a story that had stubbornly stalled at its most crucial moment, had torn his creation to pieces.
And then everything fell silent.
It no longer mattered what was playing through the tiny speakers in my ears.
There were no thoughts now.
No doubts or regrets racing after them.
Only silence.
And snow, tirelessly falling from the sky.
No one would cry for creatures like me.
Not even nature itself.
Though perhaps that was simply because winter was coming.
Without me, deep inside the patched-up coat pocket stuffed with scraps of paper and candy wrappers, the little screen flickered once and went dark.
The orphaned player had died as well.
“Hey, kid, what are you doing? Of all places to take a nap!” a voice echoes, as if from the far end of an impossibly long tunnel.
Someone shakes me by the shoulder.
Firm hands roll my scrawny, utterly limp body onto its back. Light cuts into my glazed-over eyes even through my bluish eyelids. Better keep them closed, I think.
“Well, would you look at that! Now that was quite an idea you had there,” mutters the same elderly but remarkably booming voice, much clearer now.
I don’t even have the strength to open my eyes. I mumble something completely incoherent in response.
“Let’s start by getting rid of this thing.”
Rough, warm fingers fumble beneath my sweater. I respond with irritated, unintelligible noises and twitch my uncooperative limbs. Ignoring my protests entirely, the old man continues digging around in the wound beneath my solar plexus with his stubborn, knotty stumps of fingers.
I picture him trying to hook a splinter of broken wood with century-old hardened fingernails, and the thought makes me profoundly uncomfortable.
I grumble again.
“Easy there, little falcon. Just a bit longer and you’ll be right as rain.”
I don’t want to be right as rain. Not at all, I protest internally, since my tongue, lips, and facial muscles still refuse to obey me.
Meanwhile, the old man carries on with his infuriatingly noble work, and I finally surrender to the helpless role of the rescued.
Eventually the stubborn splinter gives up. Defeated by the relentless persistence of my elderly benefactor, it finally leaves my sternum.
Afterward my savior—or rather, rescuer—presses a hot palm across the wound.
Warmth spreads outward from the hole.
Then everything inside me begins to burn.
Far worse than the stake ever did.
You’d think the old man’s hand was less a hand than an iron with a built-in lava injection function.
My inhuman scream tears through the surrounding woods, racing between the pines before returning again in fading echoes.
The treatment has other effects as well.
My eyes fly open.
Strength floods back into my limbs.
With all my might, I sink my claws into the hand healing me.
“Ow!” the elderly voice yelps, and its owner jerks his hand away. “Sorry! Completely forgot that you’re, well… you know… from a different diocese, so to speak…”
Once my pupils adjust, I try to focus on the rather large old fellow before me.
He has a ruddy, pancake-like face framed by curly gray locks and an equally curly, sheep-like beard.
Behind him, still forcing me to squint, the rising sun blazes.
If you turned his head upside down, it wouldn’t look any different, I find myself thinking. A pancake is a pancake no matter which side you look at it from.
Then another thought follows.
The universe really couldn’t have positioned the sun in a worse place.
Remembering the events of the previous evening, I run a hand across my throat.
Smooth skin.
Not a single scratch.
Silky, as though nothing had happened.
Just to make sure I’m not hallucinating, I struggle upright—my chest still aches—and peer behind me.
Good grief.
That’s a lot of blood.
And my coat is ruined too, thanks to the well-meaning disaster of a paramedic who rolled me over.
There are stains all across the back.
And my ass.
The old man squats beside me, studying my clothing with equal fascination.
“Nothing to worry about,” he says. “Take it to a dry cleaner. They’ll sort it out in no time. Besides, you got the front dirty before that happened too.”
He nods toward the blood smeared across my chest and knees.
I examine what was once light-gray wool fabric.
Now it is burgundy-black with gray blotches.
Dry cleaning?
To hell with that.
It would be easier to dye the whole thing.
“Yeah,” the old man says, as though confirming my thoughts.
He grins broadly, shining like a freshly polished coin, while behind him the sun beams just as smugly through his cotton-candy-colored curls.
I squint, still trying to make out the old fellow’s face, though there’s little hope against direct sunlight.
I sit up and brush myself off.
Then realize I’ve merely smeared my own unclotted blood across my palms.
Yet instead of launching into an angry tirade against my “rescuer,” I simply ask:
“And what exactly are you doing in a cemetery this early in the morning?”
“What do you mean, what am I doing?” the glowing old man exclaims indignantly.
I actually lean back a little from the unexpected outburst.
“I’m visiting my children, of course. It’s my job. No one should be left without attention—the healthy, the sick, or the departed.”
Trying not to look directly at the blinding face, I say in as indifferent a voice as possible:
“Oh, well, that explains it. Work is work.”
That is enough for me, otherwise I might accidentally say too much—he could attack me or, even worse, start telling me about his affairs.
Then, quite suddenly, as if he had not been expecting any answer at all, the old man rises with a crack of his knees and declares:
“All right then, up you get! Enough sitting on that cold stone! Before you know it, you’ll catch a chill in your youthful parts.”
And he shines even brighter with his pancake-like face, revealing perfect pearly teeth in a broad smile.
Groaning and grunting, I somehow get to my feet. I grab my little backpack from the bench. I decide to leave the knife lying in the fresh snow together with the shards—it’s no use anyway. Then I follow the pensioner, who leaves the burial plot with surprising grace. The sun continues to drift obediently behind him.
Besides his youthful gait and that strange atmospheric-optical effect, I notice that the old man is dressed in an implausibly decent coat of a noble pale pistachio color. As I walk, not without annoyance, I once again examine my own coat, stained and old-fashioned. Usually old people, even wealthy ones, dress rather terribly, but this one is a proper dandy.
Honestly, I would very much like to get rid of my unsolicited benefactor and head home. I need to think about what to do next. However, in the daylight I become a little lost among the graves. After watching my futile attempts to escape the labyrinth of overgrown paths for a while, the old man offers to show me the way out—or rather, to the main entrance. With his help we find a well-trodden and fairly wide path without much difficulty, and together, side by side, we set off toward the main gate at an unhurried pace.
All the way there, my guide talks about all sorts of tedious things: hard work, a busy schedule, and something else connected with responsibility. In turn, I listen obediently and nod or mumble agreement in the appropriate places, all the while especially regretting that my chosen method of leaving this world ended in complete failure.
And just when it begins to seem as though the old man is deliberately leading me in circles, intending to destroy me with his unimaginably bo-o-o-oring method, the battery in my player suddenly comes back to life. And, rescuing me from the dull stories of the bearded pensioner, Annie once again settles into my ears. This time she sings about how one should not cling to unrequited love.
To be honest, I had not been paying much attention to the ramblings of the gray-haired eccentric even before that. Old people do love to make themselves seem important. Still, I would prefer solitude in the unseen presence of the Scottish diva.
For some time longer we walk on, pressing the first snow beneath our soles. In turn, it sparkles with its doomed little crystals in the rays of the shining golden circle shamelessly perched behind the old man’s head. Me on the left in silence; him on the right, opening his mouth in accompaniment to an English-language song. Thoughts completely unrelated to the present moment begin gathering in my head.
About silver that does not kill.
And could it really be that aspen did not work either?
Or perhaps both the metal and the wood were fake—some kind of nickel alloy and a birch board?
Or did the old man simply arrive in time and ruin everything?
I look at my companion. He smiles back and continues explaining something energetically. A strange one. And, besides, not much like food at all. On the other hand, not a vampire either.
Could he be?
No. My instincts have simply been dulled by the injuries, that’s all.
Or perhaps I do not believe strongly enough that I am the embodiment of evil.
Or maybe this whole endless story is nothing but a performance, and there is no eternal struggle at all, while our creators merely amuse themselves watching the antics and eccentricities of their charges playing at the age-old conflict between good and evil.
And my resurrection?
What was that?
Mercy or desperate cynicism?
Sometimes it is completely impossible to tell one from the other.
And if everything depends on the point of view of the one being “saved,” then I choose cynicism.
And so the three of us—the unheard one, the invisible one, and… the undead—eventually made our way to the modest main entrance of the abandoned cemetery, overgrown with bushes and litter.
As we part, the elegant old man continues explaining something for a while, gesturing actively, probably about yet another important matter he needs to attend to. Squinting, and risking permanent blindness, I look at his open, wrinkled face. Then I offer a polite smile in return and shake the scorching-hot hand extended by the old man. I wish him success in all his endeavors and walk away without looking back, toward another sun, equally unstoppable in its brightness and glare, eastward along the dirt road that runs through the grove beside the cemetery.
Barely giving Annie time to finish singing, the player launches something completely outrageous, ultra-new and modern. It seems this twenty-year-old piece of technology lives a life of its own. Accompanied by guitar and a drum machine, some young fellow bombards my brain with his youthful problems.
Although, you know, if you actually listen to it, it sounds quite good—or whatever the young people say these days.
I should look it up on the Internet, seeing as I have to stick around here again.
But first I ought to have something to eat.
Like those morning people hurrying to work clutching disposable paper cups of invigorating coffee, I should pour a portion of warm red liquid into myself.
So, what do we have nearby?
The hospital is out immediately.
Maybe the kindergarten or a school?
No!
A fitness club would be better!
Well, I saw you with a new boу
I’m lookin’ for somethin’ that I could destroy
You know I hate it when you tease me
After first making sure there were no accidental witnesses nearby, I theatrically swept the tail of my filthy old coat and, in an instant, transformed into a flock of crows black as night. Yes, it was pathetic, but effective. I soared into the frosty cloudless sky and sped away, dissolving into the distance against the backdrop of the inexplicably cheerful autumn sun.
I see you every night when I am dreaming
Yeah, every time I see you right there
You turn a dream into a fuckin’ nightmare, yeah
During the retrograde bus ride and the walk that followed, the unnamed protagonist listened to the following tracks on his player:
Annie Lennox – ‘Love Song for Vampire’
Depeche Mode – ‘Stripped’
Joy Division – ‘New Dawn Fades’
Marilyn Manson – ‘Man That You Fear’
The Cure – ‘Hungry Ghost’
The Cult – ‘She Sells Sanctuary’
Moby – ‘Natural Blues’
Кино – ‘Спокойная ночь’ (Live ЦСКА Арена 2021)
Two songs not mentioned in the narrative: Two songs not mentioned in the narrative: Portishead – ‘Roads’ и Sisters of Mercy – ‘No Time to Cry’
Cradle of Filth – ‘The Forest Whispers My Name’
Moonspell – ‘Ghostsong’
Pantera – ‘Cemetery Gates’
Annie Lennox – ‘No More I Love You’s’
nothing.nowhere – ‘Nightmare’
And somewhere on the hard drive, never making it onto the pages of this story, among others, no less “cool,” were lying around:
Ozzy Osbourne – ‘My Little Man’
Type O Negative – ‘Everything Dies’
The Smashing Pumpkins – ‘Disarm’ (live at MTV)
Husker Du – ‘Diane’