Methodius Buslaev. Third Horseman Of Gloom

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.