Trickster

© Ilya Skad, 2026

ISBN 978-5-0071-4393-6

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Chapter 1. The Last Chord of the Barrel Organ

There was no corner in the sublunary world more poisoned by the stinking breath of worthlessness and vice than that wretched puppet booth which had nestled on the outskirts of the city, where the street lamps seemed to exude a thick, almost palpable darkness. The air within was heavy and motionless, saturated with the fumes of cheap tobacco, stale liquor, and the sweat of that pitiful crowd which had gathered on this evening beneath its decrepit canopy, which let through the rainwater. Like specters detained in the world of the living by an unspoken curse, they sat in the gloom — vague and faceless figures, whose only manifestations of life consisted in hoarse laughter interrupted by fits of coughing, and in dull, expressionless eyes turned toward the stage lit by oil lamps. And that stage, so insignificant and wretched, was for Kazimir the last circle of the hell described by Dante, but deprived of even a hint of the sublimity of suffering; it was a hell woven from vulgarity and indifference.

And he, Kazimir, was its eternal and sole inhabitant, a demon-warder chained to the pillory of his own humiliation. Standing behind a decrepit baroque screen, once fashioned by his teacher’s hands but now blackened by time and covered with a thick layer of dust, he ran his long, pale, almost transparent fingers over the rough surface of the wooden slats to which were attached unrefined strings — those reins that governed his small, pitiful world. These strings, woven from hemp of the coarsest manufacture, cut into his skin, leaving red, inflamed marks, for any contact with this palpable vulgarity provoked in him a fit of physical revulsion as acute as a sudden taste of bile on the tongue. Every creak, every rustle of these ropes, every trembling bend of them echoed in his soul with a sound akin to the grinding of rusty hinges on the door of a tomb.

And on the stage, in the spectral glow of the smoking lamps, his puppets danced — the last thing left to him by his teacher, the last legacy of a past wrapped, in his memory, in the haze of a melancholic grandeur. There, obedient to the trembling movements of his hands, Pierrot, his face forever frozen in a mask of inconsolable grief, attempted to court Columbine, whose empty eye sockets of blue glass reflected the dim light of the lamps like blind lakes in the kingdom of the dead. But their dance was devoid of all grace; it was a parody of love, of passion, of movement itself, for it proceeded not from an animated soul but from the desperate, convulsive efforts of a puppeteer whose spirit had been torn and defiled. The movements of the dolls were sharp, angular, lacking that magical smoothness which makes the spectator forget the existence of the strings; they were a spectacle blatant, pitiful, exposing the entire mechanical underpinning of this pretense, and therefore — inexpressibly tragic.

And the audience, that cohesive organism in whose veins flowed not blood but thick, murky beer, sensed this falsity, this agonizing artificiality. It did not believe in the performance; it regarded it with the same indifference with which it would regard the death throes of an insect caught in a spider’s web. From the darkness came abrupt, senseless shouts, interspersed with heavy, drunken laughter. Some hoarse voice proclaimed something obscene, addressed to Columbine, and a host of other voices picked up this bawdy joke, bursting into guffaws that sounded like a death rattle. Kazimir heard every sound, every note of this humiliation; they pierced his hearing like sharpened blades, and with each such prick his fingers gripped the slats more fiercely, and the strings tautened, threatening to snap, plunging his fragile actors into a final, silent fall.

Oh, how in those moments he hated them! Hated these dolls with their forever-frozen masks, their soulless grace, their mute obedience. They were the eternal witnesses of his downfall, a living — no, a dead! — reproach to his unfulfilled ambitions. And through the fog of despair and rage swirling in his consciousness, like a specter from another, beautiful world, memories emerged. He saw himself not here, not in this stinking den, but on the boards of a real theater, where the air was suffused with the aroma of wax and expensive perfume, where crystal chandeliers descended from a ceiling painted with frescoes, their light refracting in a thousand pendants like tears of rapture. He saw himself not as a puppeteer but as a director, a creator, a ruler of human souls, whose word was law for the living, not for wooden blocks. He cherished in his soul the dream of a theater where the actors would be as obedient to his will as these marionettes, but as inspired as the gods themselves; a theater where life itself, with all its chaotic inconsistency, would be reduced to an ideal, geometrically precise order by his genius design.

But how pernicious, how corrosive his nature proved to be! His pride, his irrepressible desire for total control, his maniacal conviction of his superiority over the crowd of mortals — all this was interpreted as «unseemly behavior,» as something monstrous and intolerable. He did not merely strive to rule; he thirsted to possess, to subjugate, to penetrate the very essence of another’s will and reshape it according to his own fancy, just as he reshaped the fates of his dolls. And they, those insignificant little actors with their inflated vanity, sensed in him a threat, something alien and frightening. Whispers behind his back, frightened glances, the sudden coldness of those who only yesterday had lavished compliments on his talent — and then, after some insignificant but deliberately orchestrated scandal, came expulsion. He was cast out of the temple of art like a leper, shown the road to those very booths he had formerly despised with all his soul.

And now, standing behind this grotesque semblance of a theatrical screen, he felt the poison of memory corroding him from within. Bitterness rose to his throat, bitter and salty as a tear he had long since forgotten how to shed. The performance at last came to its inglorious end. Pierrot, abandoned to the mocking attention of the crowd, froze in his final, absurd pose, and the curtain, which was a piece of dirty matting, descended with a creak, meeting not the slightest approval. The silence that reigned in the hall was more eloquent than any whistles; it was an indifference absolute, all-consuming, testifying that the spectators had already forgotten what they had just seen, their minds once again submerged in the swamp of their own intoxication.

Kazimir slowly, like a sleepwalker, lowered his controls. A tremor, fine and irrepressible, ran through his hands. He turned away from the stage and, staggering like a wounded beast, made his way among piles of crates and scenery toward a kind of «backstage» — a narrow, dark space behind the decrepit drapery, where chaos reigned and it smelled of mold and dust. Here, on a fragment of a column left over from some forgotten performance, stood a clay mug half-filled with wine of such low quality that even in the scant light of a single candle it shimmered with a murky, swampy hue. He seized the mug with trembling fingers and drained its contents in one gulp. The liquid burned his throat but brought no desired oblivion; it was like serpent’s venom spreading through his veins, not lulling him but only sharpening his already painfully acute perception of everything around him.

His gaze, wandering and restless, fell upon a large chest of dark wood standing in the corner. It was his ark, his sanctuary, his tomb. Approaching, he threw back the massive lid bound with iron. Inside, on velvet cushions — once scarlet, now faded to a dirty brown — rested his marionettes. They lay in a row like corpses in a family tomb after a terrible epidemic. Their carved faces, so expressive and delicate, now seemed merely death masks; their glass eyes, staring into nowhere, reflected the flickering flame of the candle, and for a moment it seemed to him that in their depths something glimmered — not life, but a semblance of it, mocking and sinister. Their exquisite, though dust-covered, garments whispered of times long past, of days when his teacher, the great and unsurpassed Balthazar, breathed into them, as he claimed, a particle of his own soul. Kazimir ran his hand over Pierrot’s face, feeling beneath his fingers the cold, smooth stone that had replaced the precious sandalwood. A legacy… Oh, what a bitter, what a barren legacy! He had inherited not art, not glory, not recognition, but only these mute, accusing visages, these eternal companions of his shame. And in the silence of the abandoned booth, broken only by the howling of the wind in the cracks and distant drunken laughter, he felt a seed of a dark, mad thought, long dormant in the depths of his mind, begin to sprout, reaching toward the light of his consciousness with its poisonous shoots.

To leave the booth was for Kazimir equivalent to being expelled from one grave into another, still more cramped and airless. He stepped from the kingdom of coarse noise and vulgar merriment into the embrace of a silence so deep and absolute that it seemed to possess its own density and pressed upon the ears like water at great depth. The streets through which he made his way to his dwelling were deserted and plunged into that gloomy hour when night, having reached its culmination, begins slowly and reluctantly to yield place to dawn — but to a dawn gray, sickly, bringing no relief. The street lamps, sparse and dim, cast pale, trembling halos upon the cobblestones, in which swirled the mist rising from the nearest swamp — that miasmatic breath of the earth itself, saturated with decay. He walked without feeling the cobblestones beneath his feet, without feeling the piercing damp cold that crept with tenacious fingers beneath his worn frock coat. His entire being was turned inward, into that infernal hell that blazed within his soul, fed by the fuel of humiliations, of furious, unquenched vanity.

His abode, or rather his refuge, his final haven, was situated at the very top of an old, creaking house, whose walls, warped by time, seemed about to collapse under the burden of their own years and the sorrow accumulated within them. The attic. What a fitting name for this receptacle of rejected hopes and shattered dreams! The house stood apart, on the edge of the city, where urban life gradually dwindled, giving way to dismal wastelands overgrown with stunted shrubs, which abutted upon that very swamp whose stinking breath hung perpetually in the air. He climbed the staircase, whose steps, devoured by woodworm, groaned and sagged beneath his feet, as if warning him that each return here was an act of burial, slow and inexorable.

And so he entered. The air in the workshop was cold, stagnant, and heavy, with a distinct tang of dust, old wood, linseed oil, and something else — something elusive, which might be called the smell of time gone stale. Moonlight barely pierced the single dust-covered dormer window, spilling through the room in a spectral, silver-ashy glow. In this faint illumination, the contours of objects lost their clarity; they seemed vague recollections of themselves. Chaos reigned everywhere — dead, frozen, like the ruins of a forgotten civilization. In the corners were piled crates of tools, spools of thread, fragments of scenery, pieces of fabric that had once served as costumes for his marionettes. And in the center of all this, on roughly knocked-together shelves and on the floor, they stood, sat, and lay — his wooden army. Their empty eye sockets were turned toward the door, toward him, and in this there was no greeting; it was expectation. Silent, patient, inexorable expectation.

He flung his cloak upon the table, and this movement raised a small cloud of dust that swirled in the beam of moonlight. The desire to get drunk, to drown the inner trembling in wine, was still strong, but the mug with its revolting swill had remained there, in the booth. Here there was nothing that could dull the sharpness of his perception. He was alone with himself and with them. With them… His gaze slid over the motionless figures. There was Harlequin, frozen in an unnatural, leaping contortion; there was Columbine with her eternally naive tilt of the head; there was Pierrot, melancholy incarnate, his face seamed with cracks like the wrinkles on an old man’s face. They were beautiful in their dead perfection, and therefore — unbearable. Every curl of the carving, every stitch on their garments was a reproach to his own imperfection, to his perishable, suffering flesh.

Despair, dark and bottomless as that night beyond the window, rose to his throat, constricting it in a steel vise. He staggered and lowered himself onto the edge of the only chair, which was heaped with scraps of velvet and silk brocade. What remained? What was left to him? Neither glory, nor money, nor respect, nor even a ghost of hope. Only this attic, only these soulless dolls, and eternal, humiliating slavery in the booth, for the amusement of the drunken rabble. The thought of self-destruction, always dormant somewhere in the back alleys of his consciousness, suddenly appeared before him in all its seductive, terrible clarity. But no — even this was beyond his power. His nature lacked the heroic impulse capable of a decisive, final act; he was doomed to smolder, slowly and agonizingly, as damp wood smolders, yielding neither flame nor warmth.

And then his gaze, wandering in despair over the clutter-filled corner, fell upon an old, massive chest. This chest, knocked together from thick oak planks and bound at the corners with iron blackened by time, had once belonged to his teacher, Balthazar. In it the old man had kept his most precious, most cherished tools and materials. After his death the chest passed to Kazimir, and he, having sorted through its contents in the first days of his apprenticeship, had dragged most of the things off to the shelves of his workshop. At the bottom, beneath a layer of faded sketches and drawings, there remained only one single thing, which Kazimir had then deemed useless and therefore left lying in oblivion. A book.

He had never attached much importance to it. Balthazar, a strange man prone to mysticism, had called it the «Book of Forgotten Whispers,» saying that within it were contained secrets inaccessible to the understanding of mere mortals. Kazimir, then still young and full of skepticism, had looked through it, but saw only strange, convoluted metaphors, allegorical descriptions of certain psychic states, poetic exercises on the theme of solitude and creativity. He had deemed it a collection of philosophical essays clothed in lush but empty form, the fruit of his mentor’s senile imagination. And now, in the abyss of his despair, the memory of it surfaced in his consciousness with obsessive, almost painful vividness.

As if moved by some external force, he rose from his place and, stepping over piles of rubbish, approached the chest. Its lid yielded with a creak, exhaling a stale, sepulchral breath. He flung aside folders of drawings, rolls of parchment, and his fingers encountered the rough, cold surface of leather. He drew it out. It was a volume of no great size, but incredibly heavy, as if stuffed with lead. Its binding was fashioned of dark, almost black leather, devoid of any embossing or ornament; it was smooth and surprisingly pleasant to the touch. The clasps, evidently once silver, had now blackened and become covered with the patina of time. He carried the book to the table, swept a pile of rags onto the floor, and sat down, setting it before him.

The candle, which he had lit with a trembling hand, cast a flickering, uneven light upon the pages. He opened the book. The pages were of thick, yellowish parchment, covered with the dense, fanciful handwriting of Balthazar. The ink, once black, had browned with time. He began to read, and at first all proceeded as before: he saw the same vague phrases, the same enigmatic assertions. «True power,» the book said, «lies not in the subjugation of the flesh, for the flesh is weak and perishable; but in the subjugation of the very shadow that the soul casts, in the mastery of the silent echo of the will.» Kazimir was already prepared to slam the folio shut in vexation, deeming this mere gibberish, but his gaze fell upon a page entitled «On the Summoning of Silence.»

And then something strange occurred. The despair that reigned in his soul seemed to sharpen his perception, lending it a supernatural acuity. What he had formerly read as poetic metaphor now presented itself to him as an instruction, clear and unambiguous. The description of the ritual contained neither circles of candles, nor incantations in forgotten tongues, nor sacrifices. Instead it spoke of the necessity of absolute inner concentration, of directing the will toward a certain point beyond the bounds of the visible world, of «rending the veil of the habitual,» of «hearkening to the silence between heartbeats.» It asserted that he who could attain a state of «inner emptiness equal in magnitude to the outer universe» would be able to summon… summon what? The text named neither a name nor an entity. It spoke only of «the awakening of the Shadow,» of «endowing Silence with a voice,» of «the creation of life from the substance of non-being.»

Madness? Without doubt. But Kazimir’s despair was stronger than the voice of reason. What had he to lose? If this were a deception — he would lose nothing, for he possessed already only nothingness. If it were the truth… Oh, if it were the truth! The thought of power, of the ability to create something truly alive, something that would be wholly subject to him — this thought blazed within him with a blinding, infernal flame. He would be not a puppeteer but a demiurge! He would create for himself servants, spectators, a whole world that would worship him, Kazimir, the rejected genius!

And he, hesitating no longer, set about the deed. He did not seek out special ingredients; all that was required was within himself. He pushed the candle aside, so that its light might not distract him, and plunged into a deep, almost trance-like state, following the instructions gleaned from the book. He tried to halt the rush of thoughts, to expel from his consciousness all images, all memories, all pain. He concentrated on the silence that surrounded him, listened intently to it, tried to penetrate its essence. At first this was difficult; the echoes of humiliation endured, the malicious faces of the spectators, the mockery — all this swirled in his head like a whirlwind. But gradually, by an effort of will, he succeeded in subduing this chaos. He sank deeper and deeper into the abyss of his own «I,» and this abyss began to seem boundless to him.

He uttered no words. He made no gestures. He simply sat in his hunched pose, staring into the darkness before him, all his will, all his hatred, all his despair concentrated in a single point — in the desire to rend the veil of reality. He did not know how much time passed — a minute, an hour, an eternity. Suddenly he felt something. Not a sound and not a light. Rather, a change in the very quality of the world around him. The silence, hitherto absolute, became deeper still, denser. It ceased to be an absence of sound and became a kind of substance filling space. The air froze; the motes of dust suspended in the beam of moonlight halted as if rooted to the spot. The faint breeze that came from the cracks and had hitherto rustled old paper fell silent. The city itself beyond the window, which usually gave at least some signs of life — the distant bark of a dog, the creak of a cart, someone’s footsteps — was plunged into a muteness so complete that it seemed unnatural, sinister. It seemed to Kazimir that Time itself, that great tyrant, had for a moment halted its course and turned to look upon him from the abyss of eternity. And in that gaze there was neither wrath nor mercy — only cold, indifferent curiosity.

The ritual, if it could be called that, was completed. Kazimir exhaled slowly, and his body, hitherto taut as a bowstring, went limp with terrible exhaustion. He waited. He waited for the appearance of an angel or a demon, a flash of light, a voice from the heavens, anything that would become a visible confirmation of his success. But nothing happened. Nothing! The silence remained impenetrable, the dust hung motionless in the air, the moonlight still poured from the window in a deadened stream. No miracles. No power. Only he, his dusty attic, and his silent, wooden companions.

And then his patience snapped. All the despair accumulated within him over these long years of humiliation burst forth in a blind, impotent fury. With an angry cry, in which mingled all shades of hatred — for himself, for the world, for the teacher who had deceived him — he seized the book and hurled it with all his might into the darkest corner of the workshop. The heavy volume struck the floor with a dull thud and slid beneath some cabinet, vanishing from sight.

«Madness! The madness of a senile old man!» he rasped, shuddering with sobs and laughing at the same time. He had been fooled. Fooled by his own hope, the last, paltry straw at which he had clutched. Now he remained absolutely alone, face to face with the cold, merciless fact of his final and hopeless defeat.

His fury, as violent and barren as a summer storm over a parched wasteland, ebbed as suddenly as it had surged, leaving behind only a chilling, all-consuming emptiness. He sat hunched over the table, staring into the darkness of the corner where the book had flown, straining to discern its outlines, but seeing only solid, impenetrable gloom. Shame — burning and acrid — mingled in his soul with a feeling of the deepest, almost infantile disappointment. He, an intellectual, a man who fancied himself above superstitions and prejudices, had allowed himself to be carried away by the ravings of a half-mad old man! This realization was perhaps bitterer than the humiliation in the booth itself, for it was a blow to the last thing he had left — to his pride, to his intellect.Shame — burning and acrid — mingled in his soul with a feeling of the deepest, almost infantile disappointment. He, an intellectual, a man who fancied himself above superstitions and prejudices, had allowed himself to be carried away by the ravings of a half-mad old man! This realization was perhaps bitterer than the humiliation in the booth itself, for it was a blow to the last thing he had left — to his pride, to his intellect.

He passed his palm over his face, feeling beneath his fingers the damp coolness of his own skin, and tried to bring order to his disordered feelings. The silence, which had seemed to him so sinister before, was now simply silence — empty, senseless, devoid of any supernatural tinge whatsoever. The air once again acquired its customary viscosity, dust slowly circled in the moonlight, beyond the window came a distant, drunken shout, and then the creak of a solitary cart’s wheel. The world, with its coarse and immutable materiality, returned to its place. All was as before. All, except himself. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of his being something had broken, some last thin partition separating him from utter despair, and now he felt gutted, emptied to the very dregs. drunken shout, and then the creak of a solitary cart’s wheel. The world, with its coarse and immutable materiality, returned to its place. All was as before. All, except himself. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of his being something had broken, some last thin partition separating him from utter despair, and now he felt gutted, emptied to the very dregs.

He raised his head, and his gaze, wandering and weary, mechanically fell upon the marionettes. They stood and sat in their customary poses, frozen in eternal, silent expectation. Pierrot, nearest of all to him, inclined his head with its face white as a corpse’s and a painted blue tear upon his cheek. His long, ungainly limbs were folded in such a way that he seemed melancholy incarnate. Kazimir looked at him with his customary mixture of pity and revulsion. This clown, this eternal sufferer… was his continuation, a grotesque reflection of his own soul, doomed to eternal suffering without catharsis and without an audience’s compassion.painted blue tear upon his cheek. His long, ungainly limbs were folded in such a way that he seemed melancholy incarnate. Kazimir looked at him with his customary mixture of pity and revulsion. This clown, this eternal sufferer… was his continuation, a grotesque reflection of his own soul, doomed to eternal suffering without catharsis and without an audience’s compassion.