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«In history,» he said, «the teacher called Ilya Igor three times.»
«People get names wrong,» said Vera.
«Yes, but today Ilya said, „I’m not Igor,“ and she said, „Really?“ and looked at him as if he’d changed identity without submitting the proper forms.»
«And the second bad bit?»
«In the canteen Auntie Zina gave me the wrong tray.»
«That’s your tragedy of the century?»
«No. The tragedy is that on the tray it said not Danya but Boy.»
«What?» Vera actually laughed. «Just Boy?»
«Just Boy,» Danya said darkly. «I happen to be a person with a name.»
He sounded funny, but his eyes were too sharp. Much too sharp for someone who ordinarily said things first and considered them afterwards.
After lessons, their band assembled behind the school near the old sports ground, where the goal net was still hanging on by the memory of better times. It was a good place for important conversations. Adults passing by assumed children there were engaged in nonsense, and children, as everyone knows, do their most serious business under cover of nonsense.
Ilya turned up silently, as usual, as if he did not so much walk as materialise in places where he had already noticed everything. Natan came charging in a few minutes later, schoolbag over one shoulder and excitement all over his face.
«It happened to me too!» he burst out before he had quite reached them. «Teacher called me… that… little.»
«You are little,» said Danya.
«But not in the register!»
This was a strong point.
They went round in a circle telling everything, interrupting each other, arguing over details, doubling back to the important parts. And gradually something nastier than the strangeness itself began to emerge.
The glitches were happening at nearly the same time.
«Mine was at ten to three,» said Vadim.
«Half past two, more or less,» said Vera.
«In the canteen at two-forty,» said Danya. «I checked on purpose. After they turned me into Boy.»
«Ours in history was about then too,» said Ilya.
Natan, who had not thought to look at the time, said honestly, «Mine was after compote.»
«Exceptionally valuable scientific data,» said Vera.
«I do my best.»
They fell silent.
A car went by on the far side of the fence. Down on the river someone shouted something heartfelt and completely useless at the gulls. On an ordinary day all this would have been background. Today every stranger’s voice seemed to remind Vera that one might lose one’s own.
«Right,» she said, because somebody had to speak, and she had developed a particular dislike of silence. «Tomorrow, between two and three, everybody watches. We write everything down. What happened, where, when, and to whom.»
«An experiment!» said Danya, delighted.
«Yes.»
«A real one?»
«Almost.»
«Then I’m bringing a notebook.»
«I’ll bring a watch,» said Vadim.
«And I’ll bring a magnifying glass,» said Natan at once.
«What for?» Vera asked.
«In case somebody’s name goes small.»
No one had an answer to that, which was perhaps the worst thing of all.
The next day, the hour between two and three stretched like chewing gum stuck to the sole of a shoe. You went on moving, but all the while it felt as if something was quietly holding you back.
By second lesson Vera was looking at the clock more than at her exercise book. By third, more than at the teacher. By fourth she had begun to feel that the hands themselves were moving more slowly than usual. Though by then that may not have been magic at all, merely ordinary nerves, which are unpleasant enough on their own.
At two twenty-seven she was sent to carry the register to the staff room.
Of course she was.
The moment anything strange enters your life, fate immediately decides that for completeness you ought to be left alone in a long school corridor.
The corridor was empty. Not absolutely empty: somewhere far off a door banged, downstairs somebody laughed, and from the craft room came the smell of glue and wood shavings. But this stretch of it was still. Even Vera’s footsteps sounded wrong – duller than they ought to, as if the floor under her feet was listening and had no wish to answer back.
She walked past the timetable board, past the photographs of prize pupils, past a list pinned up for some school event.
Then she stopped.
The list had shifted.
No – not the sheet itself.
Her name.
Her name.
There it was in the middle: Vera Kotova, ordinary and black and flat, like all names on all school lists. Then the letters seemed to ripple. They did not vanish at once. First they faded, as though she were looking at them through water. Then they flickered.
And disappeared.
For one tiny, impossible, freezing second.
Everything inside Vera dropped, the way it does in a lift when it suddenly changes its mind about being reliable.
She stepped closer.
The name came back.
But something came with it.
Something was calling her.
Not in a voice.
Not in a whisper.
Not in any sound at all.
It was as if one small piece had been cut out of the silence of the world, and the hole left behind was exactly the shape of her name. And that hollow was reaching for her.
Ve—
No. Not even that. No letters. No breath. No sound. Only the absence of everything else, and somehow it knew perfectly well who she was.
Vera stood frozen, clutching the register against her chest.
The corridor seemed to lengthen. The light on the walls grew thinner and paler. At the far end, a door handle twitched, though nobody had touched it.
«No,» said Vera out loud, without any idea whom she was answering.
The word rang far too loudly.
At once the world came back together.
A cough sounded in the classroom to her left. Somewhere downstairs children thundered past. The list hung on the board, and her name was there exactly where it belonged, looking innocent enough to have been there all day.
But Vera’s fingers were trembling as if they had only just let go of the edge of something very deep.
She walked home quickly.
Not running – that would have looked too much like panic, and Vera was not prepared to admit to panic, if only on principle. But she walked in such a way that the wind kept tugging at her sleeves and only just managed to keep up.
At home Vadim and Danya were already there. Ilya arrived five minutes later. Natan seven minutes after that, with the expression of a person very much inclined to say everything at once.
Domino was stretched along the back of the sofa pretending to have no interest whatever in human affairs. But his left ear was tilted towards the door, which gave him away completely.
Vera told them everything in order.
The register. The list. The way her name had vanished. The call that was not a sound at all, only a hole where sound ought to be.
When she had finished, the room went quiet.
Not frighteningly quiet. Simply truly quiet – the sort of quiet that happens only when several people have all understood the same thing at the same time, and none of them likes it.
Vadim spoke first.
«It’s a test,» he said.
«Whose?» Danya asked.
«I don’t know. But if first teachers make mistakes, then signatures disappear, and then a name drops off a list…» He looked at Vera. «Something is learning. It’s trying at the edges.»
«Learning to erase?» Natan asked very softly.
Vadim looked at him and, to his credit, did not lie.
«Yes.»
Danya sat down cross-legged on the floor.
«Splendid,» he said. «So what we have is something practising how to make people… without the people.»
«That is a very crooked way of putting it,» said Vera.
«But accurate.»
Ilya, who had said nothing until then, spoke up.
«If it’s learning, then it can’t do it properly yet.»
They all looked at him.
He shrugged.
«Otherwise it wouldn’t miss. It wouldn’t muddle names. It wouldn’t only work for a second.»
It was sensible. And like most sensible thoughts, it was comforting.
A little.
«So we have time,» said Vera.
«Or it wants us to think we have time,» said Vadim.
«Thank you,» she said. «Anxiety absolutely flowers in your company.»
«I try to be useful.»
«You succeed.»
Domino jumped down from the back of the sofa, came over to Vera, and pressed his forehead firmly against her knee.
Not affectionately.
Definitively.
As if he were setting his seal on her there.
Vera stroked him without thinking.
Rules
That night, sleep came softly into Vera’s room.
Streetlamp shadows lay across the ceiling and made long, uncertain shapes on the walls. Vera had just settled herself comfortably and was almost asleep when she felt a small movement beside her. Domino, dignified and fluffy, climbed on to her pillow and, after turning round twice in cross little circles, arranged himself against her head with one warm side pressed firmly to hers.
And that night Vera dreamed.
At first it was only an ordinary sort of dream. A pale yard, too bright and too empty. A house with no windows. Trees blacker than trees ought to be. Air that made you want to look over your shoulder before you even knew what might be there.
Then Domino appeared.
He was sitting on the fence with his tail wrapped tidily round his paws, looking at Vera in the exact way teachers look at a child who has finally opened the correct page after wasting most of the lesson.
«At last,» he said.
Vera stopped dead.
She had not quite had time either to be astonished or to be frightened. In dreams one is nearly always a little late with the proper feelings.
«You…» she began.
«Yes, yes, you’re dreaming and I’m talking,» said Domino, flicking this aside with his tail. «Don’t behave as if it were a national event. We have better things to do than admire your amazement.»
«Cats don’t talk.»
«First, that is hurtful. Second, they certainly do. They merely do not often stoop to it. Third, pay attention.»
He jumped down from the fence. In the dream he moved differently from the way he did by day: not just softly, but as if the air under him knew beforehand where it ought to be.
«The things that touch names are still weak,» said Domino. «But they are learning. And anything that is learning generally becomes less well-behaved, not more.»
«Who are they?»
Domino twitched one ear.
«They, he, she, it – I am not informed about the finer points. That, however, is what you are going to discover. Assuming, of course, that you have the sense not to dash headlong into the first disaster you come across.»
«Thank you for your confidence.»
«I am a cat,» said Domino. «Not a charitable foundation.»
He came nearer. His eyes were yellow and clear and not properly catlike at all – too understanding by half.
«If you want to make sense of this,» he said more quietly, «you will have to see their world.»
All around them, everything seemed to grow lighter. Or darker. In dreams of this kind one can never be entirely certain.
«What world?» Vera whispered.
Domino looked over her shoulder.
And in the empty air, where a moment ago there had been absolutely nothing, something stirred like snow.
Only this snow did not fall.
Door
It hung in the middle of the yard: neither white nor grey, but shining faintly from inside itself, as though each flake had swallowed a tiny star and was trying not to make a fuss about it. It did not whirl like ordinary snow. It did not drift down. It simply stayed there.
Which was much worse.
«Is that their world?» Vera asked in a whisper.
«Only the edge of it, so far,» said Domino. «Worlds, like respectable cats, do not fling themselves upon one all at once. One has to know how to look.»
«And if I don’t know how?»
«Then you learn. Human beings are surprisingly tenacious creatures. Especially when cornered.»
He walked forward, and Vera followed, because in dreams there is no point arguing with a talking cat any more than there is arguing with a train that has already started moving. It will always turn out to be more right than you, chiefly because it is heavier.
The yard began to stretch in a peculiar way. The fence Domino had been sitting on slid sideways. The trees drew back, making room for something larger. The air trembled, like heat above stones, and through that trembling everything familiar began to look not foreign exactly, but unfinished.
«Listen carefully,» said Domino, without turning round. «I dislike explaining things twice, and a third time I refuse on principle.»
«How comforting.»
«I am not comforting you. I am warning you. To enter the World of Meanings, there are three things you must do.»
«What things?»
Domino stopped.
He turned and looked at her with that terribly serious expression cats very seldom wear, which makes it all the more alarming when they do.
«First, you must remember your name.»
«That I can manage.»
«Do not boast too soon. Most people are perfectly sure they know how to remember themselves until they are required to do it properly.»
Vera was just going to object, but Domino went on at once.
«Second, you must find a door where there is no door.»
«How convenient.»
«Worlds are under no obligation to be convenient. They put up with people far more than people deserve already.»
«And third?»
Domino narrowed his eyes.
«You must not give yourself to fear before you step through.»
It did not sound like a riddle.
It sounded like a rule.
Which made Vera dislike it much more.
«That’s all?» she asked, in the careful tone children use at exactly the moments when they are very far from indifferent.
«For a beginning, yes,» said Domino. «Afterwards it gets worse.»
«Thank you. You have a remarkable gift for encouragement.»
«It is one of humanity’s more exhausting habits,» said Domino, «to expect compliments from the truth.»
He moved on. The snowy light was brighter now, and Vera suddenly noticed that under her feet there was no path any more, and no old paving stones from the yard either. There was something smooth and shifting, like thin ice over very deep water.
Then she heard a rustling.
Not behind her. Not to either side.
Everywhere at once.
She spun round – and her heart clenched into something cold and hard.
Figures were standing at the edge of the yard.
At first Vera thought they were people. Then she thought they were shadows. Then she decided it would be wisest not to decide anything, because the truth was almost certain to be worse.
There were three of them. Or five. Or seven. The eye slid over them the way it slides over rain on a window: you could count them, perhaps, but not quite believe in them. They were like people whose faces had been forgotten before they were finished. Smooth, blank heads. No eyes. No mouths. Tilted slightly, as if listening to something inside her.
«Domino,» Vera said very quietly. «Who are they?»
«The Faceless Ones,» said Domino so matter-of-factly that the answer was all the more dreadful. «Do not speak to them. They may not bite, but I do not believe you would care for their embraces.»
«I wasn’t going to!»
«Excellent. One sensible thought all night.»
The Faceless Ones came nearer.
Not quickly. But that is the way of dreams. Sometimes a thing does not run or leap or lunge. It is simply closer than it was a moment ago. And that makes you want not to scream, but to wake up. Unfortunately, dreams of this sort know perfectly well that you want to wake, and have no respect for the wish.
Vera stepped back.
«What do they want?»
«The same thing empty creatures always want,» said Domino, his tail puffing out. «Somebody else’s name. Somebody else’s shape. Somebody else’s life. Poor wretches. They possess nothing of their own.»
One of the figures lifted a hand.
There were no nails on the fingers. Indeed, the fingers themselves looked as if the hand had not fully decided whether it wished to be a hand or merely a bad idea.
«Vera…» said someone.
But it was not a voice.
It was the idea of a voice.
As if her name were being half-remembered in a room where nobody had called anybody for a very long time.
Cold crept under Vera’s skin.
«They know my name?»
«They are only sniffing at it so far,» said Domino sharply. «Now remember.»
«Remember what?»
«Yourself, naturally. Not Pythagoras.»
He sprang in front of her and hissed at the Faceless Ones in a way that made the air crackle. Not literally. Dreamily. Which in some circumstances is worse.
«Your name, Vera!» he flung over his shoulder. «Hold on to it! Not as a word. As yourself!»
It was a thoroughly inconvenient instruction.
When things are calm, remembering yourself is easy. You are you, thank you very much. But add faceless shadows, impossible snow, and a cat giving orders like a general with delicate nerves, and one discovers that one’s own name is not tucked tidily into a pocket on a useful little card.
«I… I’m Vera,» she said.
One of the figures shuddered.
«Louder,» snapped Domino.
«I’m Vera!»
This time all the Faceless Ones flinched, as if her words had stung them. But they did not retreat.
What did move was the snow in front of her.
In that shining stillness, something straight began to appear. Vertical. One thin bright line, then another. As if someone were carefully drawing the outline of a door on empty air.
«I can see it!» Vera breathed.
«Seeing is not enough,» said Domino, never taking his eyes off the shadows. «You must believe it is yours.»
«It is mine!»
«You are doubting.»
«I’m not!»
«You are already doubting that you are not doubting.»
«You are atrocious at being helpful!»
«Effective, though.»
The Faceless Ones came nearer again.
This time faster.
They had no need to run. Emptiness knows how to approach with perfect economy.
Vera darted for the door. The bright handle flashed as her fingers touched it – cold, smooth, solid. That was the strangest thing of all. In a dream crowded with impossible things, this one impossible thing had become more real than anything else.
She pulled.
The door did not open.
Behind her came a rustle that turned everything inside her over.
«Domino!»
«It won’t open?» the cat barked, still hissing at the Faceless Ones.
«I don’t know!»
«You do know. You’re afraid.»
And worst of all, he was right.
She was not afraid of the door. Not of the unknown. Not even of the Faceless Ones. She was afraid of stepping through and not being herself on the other side. Of leaving her name behind. Of finding a place where no one knew her, including herself.
The Faceless Ones were very close now.
She could not see their faces – because there were none – but she could feel their hungry attention as clearly as if every blank head were an outstretched hand.
Then Vera shut her eyes.
And began to remember.
Not the letters.
Not a line on the cover of an exercise book.
But the things that made her Vera.
The way Dad had once called her stubborn, and somehow made it sound like praise.
The way Mum laughed when she was so tired she no longer knew whether to scold or hug.
The way Vadim pretended not to care and was always the first to help.
The way Danya lied with enormous inspiration, but never for long, because he always ended by laughing himself.
The way Natan discussed the great secrets of the universe like a man personally responsible for creation – at least until supper.
The way Domino came to her pillow when she was frightened and always behaved as if he had only happened to be passing.
Her name grew warm.
Real.
Hers.
Vera opened her eyes and turned the handle again.
The door swung open.
There was no room behind it.
No corridor. No staircase. No sensible and respectable thing of any sort.
There was snow behind it, as if she had opened a door straight into the middle of a blizzard.
Endless.
Shining.
Alive.
And she stepped into the beautiful glowing storm.
«Domino!» Vera cried, already pitching forwards, because in dreams doors do not always open properly. Sometimes they simply vanish under one out of pure bad behaviour.
«Don’t concern yourself about me!» came Domino’s voice, already growing distant. «I’m a cat! I always land on my feet! Just don’t forget yourself!»
And she fell.
At first she thought it was flying.
Then she understood it was not flying at all, but changing.
Her hands grew lighter than air. Her hair broke into light. Her fingers came apart into thousands of tiny cold sparks.
And instead of being frightened, Vera suddenly knew that every one of those sparks was still her.
Snow
She became snow.
Not dead snow. Not winter pavement snow. Not the sort that melts on mittens into a damp grey sulk.
A different kind.
Bright.
Living.
Endlessly falling, and at the same time simply existing.
She was every snowflake at once.
And every snowflake knew her.
Below, a world was opening.
Not all at once. Slowly, the way a secret box opens when someone very clever has decided to torment you with beauty first and explanations later.
At first Vera saw only light.
There was no sun. The sky above her was deep as space, but not black. It shone instead with shifting colour, as if stars and northern lights and the coloured glass of old Christmas baubles had all been melted together and poured overhead. The light came from the snow itself. Billions of glittering particles drifted and spun and settled, each carrying its own faint colour – blue, gold, lilac, pink, green – so pure and delicate that it made her chest ache.
Then the shape of the land began to appear.
Though it was not exactly land.
Beneath her lay shining stretches where the snow gathered itself into soft, luminous dunes. Between them ran rivers of light – not water, but something clear and living, as if light had been taught how to flow. Along the banks stood trees made of the finest frost, and on every branch tiny lights chimed like bells.
Farther off there were cities.
They were nothing like her city on the embankment, and yet they were oddly familiar too, as if they were made of its dreams and memories and secret reflections. Their towers were high and slender and looked fragile, though one felt at once that they were not. They seemed not to have been built, but thought into being. Each one had a bright outline, thin and sharp as lightning. Bridges of light stretched between them, with arches and hanging galleries and terraces, all trembling and shifting and shining without ever once falling apart.
In one place the snow was coming down especially thickly, and there the city blazed as if a thousand holidays had all decided to happen together. Elsewhere the light thinned, and the streets looked quiet and thoughtful and almost transparent. Farther still were whole regions where only a little snow settled, and everything there looked older and dimmer, like a song half forgotten but still waiting to be remembered.
None of it was like the ordinary world.
And yet it was like it in a way that hurt.
Because here too there were squares and paths and gardens and towers and bridges and shadows and lamps.
Only everything was more beautiful.
As if the real world had once fallen asleep and dreamed itself as it had always meant to be.
Vera kept falling, and had not the faintest idea how long she had been doing it.
A second.
An hour.
A hundred years.
In that light, time behaved in a thoroughly improper manner. It neither moved nor stood still. It simply did not think it necessary to explain itself.
She drifted over a valley where the snow glowed with soft amber light, and it seemed to her that laughter was rising from it. Over a silver forest where tiny constellations flared and faded in the branches. Over a dark gulf where there was hardly any light at all, only a few cold sparks – and because of that she longed to get past it as fast as possible.