No Way Out at the Entrance

Chapter 3

Three Wishes

It is very difficult to love one who is near. It is simple to love one who is far. Let us assume I love the writer Chekhov but we live together in one place; how he laughs, gurgles with tea, or drops a wet spoon on a polished surface would irritate me. That is, until I learn to tolerate someone near, there is no point in saying that I love someone.

The chubby middle-aged person waiting for Guy on board the Gomorrah was so cheerful and efficient that Guy, dressed in a stretched sweater and canvas pants, momentarily wanted to confine himself in a pinstriped suit and be shaved. “Oh, Guy!” he said, leaping up. “No, no! I know that you’re monstrously busy! Several minutes for me will be enough!”

Guy, not looking, sat down. He knew that Nekalaev would manage to move a chair. Moreover, not only for him but also for the stout Till. Thirty paces from the elevator, five steps, and Till was already gasping for breath.

“Your call surprised me,” said Guy. “And the foolish mysteriousness irritates me. Why did you decide that I’m sure to buy from you what you’re offering? And, by the way, what is it exactly?”

The cheerful person started to smile soothingly and lifted his hands, showing that all the answers would be given in their time. Then he took out a hard rectangular business card and tapped the table with it.

“I’m… hmm… a little of everything. Broker? Antique dealer? Bibliophile? Now and then the most interesting people die. Writers, artists, academicians. The heirs remain. Quite often not particularly competent.”

“I find this hard to believe,” Guy remarked absent-mindedly. “They cannot but know what their ancestor killed his whole life for.”

Chubby began to nod hurriedly. “Goes without saying! It’s well known to them that there’s quite a lot in grandpa’s and father’s library. But that’s all they know! Almost no one suspects that 95 percent of collected works in luxurious bindings have very little value, but some tiny unpretentious little book is priceless. The first limited edition Akhmatova8 collection with her autograph, or a well-preserved bundle of Satyricon,9 or something similar. I politely buy dozens of beautiful books, paying three times their value for them, and out of courtesy I take the tiny booklet in an overall pile of all sorts of unnecessary things.”

“In other words, your task is to find this five percent and get it for nothing, after leaving the rest to the fool of an heir?” Till, wheezing, spelt it out. The round face of his collocutor strayed somewhere between the sun and a pancake.

“Each business has its special quirks. Can’t teach them. Can only learn them. In the spring, a decrepit old lady on Ostozhenka passed away, the widow of an artist of battle scenes. Her niece couldn’t wait to get rid of the junk. She was simply happy when I bought from her two trunks of all sorts of old stuff.”

“Soiled palettes? Drying tubes of paint?” Guy asked.

The cheerful person started to laugh with exaggerated energy. He had a habit of overstating the worth of mediocre jokes like that of book collections. “Not quite. The artist drew historical paintings, and for that, reliable historical things were necessary. Weapons, cloth, goblets. The entire second trunk turned out to be crammed with ancient horse harness. Bridles, belts, stirrups, adornment.”

“Do you want a bridle?” Guy asked Till.

Till shook his head and started to crumble bread with his thick fingers. “I now rarely sit behind the wheel. Gotten old, clumsy,” he complained.

These jokes did not fool the cheerful person. Once such people have heard you out up to this point, they will listen some more. Then they will pay, there is no getting away from it.

“The lid of the trunk interested me most of all. It was suspiciously heavy. I tapped it and found a secret compartment, which even the owners themselves clearly didn’t know about. An hourglass in a copper case lay there.” After mentioning the hourglass, the antique dealer stopped talking and quickly looked at Guy. “A very interesting hourglass. That and something else belonged to some first-hdiver Mityai Zheltoglazyi,” he sweetly added.

Guy stopped cleaning his nails with a corner of the business card and looked attentively for the first time at his collocutor. “What do you know about hdivers, Sergey Ilich?” he asked sharply.

Pancake-face grinned and stroked the napkin lying in front of him as if stroking a dead rabbit. “A little. You see, the hourglass was wrapped with a scrap of skin. On the skin was text. Very brief, but I examined it… For example, I understood that hdivers would hardly pay me. But you here are a different story.”

“What, me personally?” Guy doubted.

Sergey Ilich lowered his eyes so shyly that one wanted to give him some money. “No, of course not. I spent three months in order to come to you. Several times the thought flickered in me that there exist neither hdivers nor warlocks. So many centuries have gone by. I despaired, and here’s a piece of luck! I discovered on the Net the description of a strange anomaly – an enormous column of water on the Moscow River. Someone shot it with his cell phone. Immense! Such could only be done by a hdiver marker, the description of which was on the reverse side of the skin. And you yourself know only who could drop it… hee-hee… So I came to Gomorrah. The rest is a technical matter.”

“Not bad!” Guy showed approval. “I see you’ve done some good work. Can I have a look at the hourglass and the skin?”

The antique dealer looked cautiously at Till. Till was calmly chewing a piece of dill, which was hanging from the right corner of his mouth as from a horse’s mouth. “They’re at my place. No, no, it goes without saying, not with me! First we agree on a price!”

“What will the price be?” asked Guy.

“High. Transactions of this grade happen once in a lifetime,” the antique dealer said firmly. “I’ll ask three things, quite normal.”

“What are these three things?”

“Money. Health. And I want to know always what threatens me!”

Guy drew a circle with a wet finger on the polishing. “Why the last one? With money and health?” he asked.

The cheerful person looked tritely downcast. “I don’t like to move blindly! You can see that my work is also tricky. I’m always meeting people I don’t know. All or nothing. That’s my motto.”

“Great,” Guy approved. “Are you sure that I’m capable of supplying you all this?”

“Sure, I could demand even more. Three wishes is quite modest, taking into account that the sand in the hourglass has almost trickled through.”

Guy stopped examining the chin of his collocutor and looked him in the eyes for the first time. “Sand? Do you mean to say it has been flowing all this time? All these decades?”

“Yes,” touching the napkin, Sergey Ilyich confirmed. “It’s a strange hourglass. The sand runs only in one direction. And very slowly. One grain of sand a day at dawn. Must admit, I tried to cheat. Turned the hourglass over. And then the grain of sand – I swear! – fell from the bottom to the top!” Sergey Ilyich looked sharply at Guy, checking what impression his words would make.

“You’re observant. Difficult to notice one grain of sand a day. You probably have a lot of free time,” Guy acknowledged.

“I used a web cam and examined slowly at high magnification.”

Guy stretched, getting up. Overtaking the waiter, Nekalaev dashed to move aside the chair. The antique dealer also jumped. “Well, fine, my dear!” said Guy after a long pause. “We’ll fulfil your wishes if the hourglass actually belongs to… what did you call him?”

“Mityai Zheltoglazyi,” smiling with understanding, the antique dealer prompted. “When will you be ready?”

“I’m always ready,” said Guy, listening to something going on inside him. “At least health and the knowledge of the future I’m ready to give you now. As for the money… possibly we’ll have to make a couple of calls!” He looked at Till.

Looking sombrely, Till promised that he would find the money even without Dolbushin. From his small personal reserve. “And we still haven’t settled our misunderstanding with Albert,” he acknowledged.

“Soon?”

“Yes, perhaps I’ll manage in an hour. You need so much,” Till said complacently. “Bring the hourglass!”

Sergey Ilyich anxiously turned pink. He thought for several seconds, knitted his brows, and made a decision. “I’m quick! I had the feeling that everything would be decided today.”

“So the thing is with you?” Guy was surprised.

“No, no, not at all! A friend is waiting for me not far from here,” he acknowledged.

Guy smiled. “Ingvar! The money!” Guy reminded Till, who got up reluctantly and began to get down tottering. He returned quickly. The berserkers accompanying him unloaded from the trunk an enormous TV box glued together with Scotch tape.

Their recent guest emerged from the parking lot simultaneously with Till. Apparently, he had been watching from the bushes. His boots were wet. He was holding in his hands a briefcase stained with soil.

“Saw your friend?” Guy asked with irony. “Let’s have a look!”

The antique dealer nervously looked sideways at the box. “This is ridiculous! You’re a serious person. Of course you won’t cheat me!” he said, having convinced himself, and handed the briefcase to Guy.

Guy wiped with his sleeve the soil from the lock. He took out a bulky, thick hourglass with a copper stand. The sand inside the hourglass was bluish. “No doubt. The work is truly his,” Guy acknowledged in an undertone. “Look, Ingvar! What do the numbers 300 and 1 mean?”

Till took the hourglass from Guy, looked at it, and poked at the stand with a rigid finger. “I don’t know about the numbers. Doesn’t this clay idol remind you of anyone?” he asked, wheezing.

Sergey Ilyich gave a cough, drawing attention to himself. Guy turned to him. “It seems you said something about some skin!” he reminded him. The antique dealer hurriedly shoved a hand into the briefcase and with readiness handed Guy a ripped leather rag covered with writing. The other half was missing.

“This is all? I hope you don’t have the other half? And then it’ll surface in a month for an additional three wishes,” Guy asked severely. The antique dealer hastily shook his head. He held before himself the briefcase, clutching it with both hands.

“Ah yes! The wishes!” Guy recalled and with disgust nudged the box with his foot to the antique dealer. Then he stretched out his hands and simultaneously touched the right and left temple of his guest. Sergey Ilyich took a sip of air. For a moment, it even seemed to him that Guy’s hands met inside his head. At the same time, the fingers of one hand were icy while those of the other were almost white hot.

“Well, that’s it!” Guy said tiredly, taking away his hands. “Ingvar! As usual!”

With great care Nekalaev and Till took the trader by the arms and led him onto the gangway for Gomorrah. A well-fed berserker solemnly carried the enormous box behind them. His wide face like a samovar panted with importance.

Sergey Ilyich took a dozen steps and, coming to his senses, stopped. “Why there? Perhaps I came from there?” he asked suspiciously. Nekalaev let go of his arm and courteously moved aside, yielding his place to the sturdy fellow with the neck of a bull.

The water babbled. Sergey Ilyich sat and laughed hysterically. Guy did not cheat. He actually obtained all that he wanted. The open box stood by his feet. Occasionally he took out a bundle, took off the seal, and tossed it up. Money flew away like a fan. They fell into the water and floated on it. The cough torturing him since winter had disappeared somewhere. He felt in himself such health as he had never felt for twenty years. And, most importantly, with his new gift, the antique dealer knew what would happen to him. He knew so precisely and unmistakably that he even did not jump up to beat on the thick door tightly pressed into the partition.

It was useless even to shout. No one would hear. He was in a ship’s hold lower than the Moscow River. Above it were two more empty decks. The pump outside hummed monotonically. The tight cabin deprived of windows in the hold of Gomorrah slowly filled up with water…

In the same minute two decks above, foreheads touching, Till and Guy were examining the parchment cut slantwise:

Guy again picked up the hourglass. He began to look closely. Earlier it seemed to him that all the sand had trickled through. Now he made out bluish grains of sand sticking to the upper flask. How much? Two dozens? Less? It was not simple to count them.

“Mityai Zheltoglazyi disappeared three centuries ago. He didn’t return from a dive. Before the dive, he wrote a little poem, made the hourglass, and drew Gorshenya on them. Purpose?” he asked. Till, starting to snuffle, tugged at his wild boar head on a short choker chain. “A real watchdog!” thought Guy.

Chapter 4

At Volokolamskaya Station

Between Shchukinskaya and Tushinskaya stations, passengers following the Krasnopresnenskii radius can see Volokolamskaya Station in the window of the subway car.

This station was intended for the residents of a housing estate on the Tushino airfield site but was never constructed. Exit to the surface and any external decorations are absent at the station, only several lamps illuminate the deserted platform and two rows of pillars.

It is a station of standard design, with pillars, shallow placement. 10

Only subconscious suicides, tunnel explorers, and hdivers risk riding between subway cars. A young person belonging at once to all three groups jumped at the last second between the last and next-to-last subway car of a train starting at Tushinskaya Station. He was twenty percent suicide, sixty percent tunnel explorer, and hundred percent hdiver. Although today he had replaced the hdiver jacket with a hoodie.

The train caterpillar slowly pushed its way into the tunnel. It crawled lazily at first, but after getting excited, began to twitch its sides, desiring to scratch them against the thick wires sheathed in rubber. Each jerk could turn out to be the last for the person in the sweatshirt. The foothold was poor and there was even nothing really for the hands to hold onto properly. Soon he would have to touch his clms, and how to hang on then was incomprehensible.

Light cut through the windows of the subway car. He saw how the yellow quadrangle, shaking, slid along the sheathing. All of a metre separated him from the people in the car, daydreaming, reading, listening to music, texting. Interesting, will someone hear his scream if he flies under the wheels? He began to feel sorry that he had gotten involved in all this when the caterpillar slowed down. The rumble of the train spread and ceased to deafen. The light from the windows no longer reflected off the walls but stumbled against vertical white pillars appearing out of nowhere.

A light flickered for a second between the third or fourth pillar. Someone switched on and immediately switched off a lamp. This served as the signal for the young person in the sweatshirt. He pulled up his sleeve using his teeth, gauged the distance, and, after seizing the lion on the blazing clms, pushed off with a foot from the unreliable foothold. He was flying a second later into the darkness and only at the moment before landing recalled that today he did not have the jacket to cushion the shocks. Protecting his head, he fell flat as a rag. No rolling across, no somersault. No sense in ending up with a piece of railing in his back for the sake of a beautiful landing. Better to wipe the flagstones with his belly. Let the dear city become somewhat cleaner.

Lying on his stomach, the hdiver turned his head. The caterpillar wagged farewell and, after giving an electrical buzz, was hidden in the tunnel. The youth leaned on scraped palms and got up. He was standing in a preserved unfinished underground station without escalators and exits to the outside. Iron flakes of a large city were lying all around.

“Hey! I’m here!” he hailed hesitantly. “And we’re here!” the answer was quite near. The young person turned around, stretching his lips into a smile without any eagerness like stretching wet socks. A ray of someone’s flashlight struck him in the face. He tried to screen himself but he was not allowed to bring his hand to his face. In the next second, he was pinned in such a way that it seemed to him as if he was pressed in a vise. The light continued to hit him in the face. He more guessed than saw the three large figures.

Rough hands thoroughly felt his jacket pockets, underarms, and back, and slapped around the pant legs to his shin. After cutting the laces, they quickly and expertly unfastened the clms. They removed keys, cell phone, and a penknife, the existence of which even he himself hardly remembered, with a blade the length of a little finger. “It’s dull,” the young person said timidly. They advised him to keep his mouth shut.

One of those holding him was moustached, nervous, and rough. The other was round-faced, with thick eyebrows, and outwardly good-natured. Simply a shaven Grandfather Frost11 who had decided to take a break from the beard till winter.

“A schnepper? An attack marker?” asked Grandfather Frost.

“Yep, a hundred,” the youth answered carelessly and got the back of a hand on his lips. Strangely enough, precisely from Grandfather Frost. His face was compassionate at the same time, like a man who was forced to carry out his task.

“Of course he has nothing,” the one going through his pant legs answered.

“Good boy! Move!” The powerful figures closed in and half-led half-carried him somewhere. Stepping, the young person in the sweatshirt thought that if he tucked in his feet, no one would notice.

Unexpectedly the berserker walking behind issued a short exclamation and directed the ray of the flashlight near his feet. A heavy bee got out of the hdiver’s pant leg and crawled in a businesslike manner along the floor of the platform. The bee crawled and shone like a newly forged nail.

The berserker struck it with a heel. The bee was flattened under the heel but immediately straightened itself. The berserker struck it a second time, a third. In the end, he was already turning his heel screwing the obstinate insect into the concrete. When the bee should have become one moist pulp, he lifted his boot from the floor. The bee, alive and unharmed, was sitting and cleaning itself, moving its antennae and bending its wings with its legs. It displayed no hostility to the person who had jumped on it recently.

The berserker squatted down and started to singe the bee’s antennae with a cigarette lighter. “Tenacious trash! Look, jerks away!” he said triumphantly.

“Don’t touch it!” the youth in the sweatshirt rushed and again got the back of a hand. It hurt more this time because the hit came with the signet ring.

“Leave the insect alone!” moustached said, frowning. “You won’t do anything to it this way! It’ll perish by itself as mine once did.” The youth in the sweatshirt quickly looked at him and lowered his eyes. The bee took off and, after landing on his hood, trustingly crawled under the collar. He with melancholy felt how heavy it was, as if cast.

They started to come across lamps more often in the centre of the platform. The berserker who had trampled on the bee switched off his flashlight. A chair with the back to them was already very visible even without the light. Antique, with decadent curved legs. It would look much more appropriate in the out-of-town palace of a palm-tree dictator but not here in a deserted Moscow subway station. Guy was sitting in the chair, elbows on the back. His security did not form the usual chain but a spacious quadrangle.

Occasionally someone with a flashlight gave a sign into the depths of the station and he was answered in the same way, with the brief winking of a flashlight. Moreover, each time the flash was from a new place. “Eight teams of four here!” the youth in the sweatshirt estimated.

They led him to the chair. The cloth of the back was brighter than Guy’s face and the youth continually shifted his gaze involuntarily to it. Of Guy, he saw only sharp elbows and a soft face lowered a little. Guy waited.

“The bees became agitated. They’re swarming, flying everywhere. Sometimes you’re simply wrapped in a cloud – they’re everywhere,” the youth said indecisively.

“It means, already soon,” Guy commented indifferently.

“Within the next few days,” the youth began to nod in a hurry.

Guy, gnawing his fingers, listened to him. “If that’s all, you’ve wasted my time! The bees always fly for novices in September. It wasn’t worthwhile to drag me to Volokolamskaya for this.”

One of the guards, dark-complexioned with a fresh pink scar on the cheekbone, raised his arbalest. The berserkers holding the fellow in the sweatshirt moved aside. They did not want to be splattered.

The youth began to fret. “DON’T! I forgot! Four bees departed!”

Guy stopped the arbalesters with a look. “To whom? Managed to trace?” he asked quickly.

“Seems so to me,” the youth began.

“I need names, not hallucinations!” Guy cut him off.

The youth froze. To betray straight away was difficult. He wanted to do it piece by piece, choosing the least disloyal of them. But there was no turning back. After lingering, the youth squatted down, unlaced a boot, and took out from the top of the boot a folded sheet of notepaper.