Unlimited

Kharon stopped, took his hand out of her shorts. Victoria opened her eyes and amazingly stared at the man. She couldn’t understand why she allowed him to do what he was doing.

‘Pay you?’ she re-asked without getting what was going on in her crazy head.

‘A night costs your life’ he smiled.

‘Are you sure that it’s worth it?’ Vic spewed out with no thinking.

‘Worth it?’ Kharon fluently looked at the street and then shifted his gaze on the girl again.

Her hair was in badly messed batch, there was a frustration in her eyes, her clothes were wrinkled, and her naughty hand was smoothing out the shorts. There was fear and misunderstanding on her lips and a wild desire to be kissed by a part of hell. She had a vandalizing love to life, saying “run”. The girl was in prostration.

Kharon lowered towards her, snapped his fingers before her nose and Victoria shuddered.

‘No, no, no. Don’t do. I don’t wanna anything’

‘Lying to the demon…oh, that’s so bad. Well, you know how to find me. I’m not saying farewell. We shall see… Victoria’

The man kissed her cheek and disappeared.

Victoria was sitting like a statue for a long time trying to find out what had happened in her flat. But she couldn’t get her own feelings and emotions.

On the one hand she was scared catastrophically. She couldn’t still believe that the real mysterious creature had visited her house. Her scepticism became a silent cropper. Vic didn’t even try to get a little part of it back.

All that she had believed for twenty years now was gone. Demons? Witches? Vampires? Could it really exist? Living in secret from people, from their minds and perception… Maybe it wasn’t a secret. Maybe people were so interested in their own stormy lives that even during breaks between identical hours they didn’t see what was happening before their eyes. Perhaps, today all the supernatural creatures didn’t have to hide. Because now, living in the modern world you could stand among crowd during rush hour, plaintively crying in voice not your own because of pain, calling for help and in response you would be pushed away and someone would say: ‘why the fuck are you standing on the road, freak?’ Sliding around people, like a snake in grass, a demon, of course, in a human shape, would be unnoticed. The girl was shocked, having realized how many things were unnoticed and lost in that world.

Victoria was sitting at her table, looking at the symbols, drawn on the desk top. What was it? Was it a dream and she was about to wake up and breathe a sigh of relief? Kharon… The demon. A phone call interrupted her reflections. Her friend was going to come to Victoria.

The girls were in the room. Vasilisa was twittering about what had happened while she’d been dating her boyfriend, describing animal lust and platonic love. Vic still had been thinking of the mysterious guest, his face, which was before her eyes, his hands, smoothly sliding down her waist into the shorts… his lips, almost touching her lap and words that they were whispering… his winy, foggy and deep voice… his amber-brown gaze. Voluptuousness. Was Vasilisa able to distract her friend from those recollections?

‘What’s wrong with you, Vic?’ Vasilisa bumped on the chair, aggrievedly stared at her friend.

‘What?’ Vic came back to the reality again, having sunk next paranoid part of fantasy.

‘Are you listening to me? I’ve come to you to share my emotions and feelings, I wanted you to be happy for me… but it seems that you don’t care.’

‘No, Vasilisa, no, I do… I just…’ Vic stopped speaking.

‘You just what?’

‘I’ve had a bad dream’

‘Really? You’re worrying about something, but not looking sleepy. Will you tell me this story? Is that because of Daniel?’

‘What’s up about him?’ Vic was surprised.

‘You don’t know, do you?’ Vasilisa asked.

‘What I don’t know?’

Vasilisa looked away. She blabbed out and it was obviously.

‘I was told that he left with a girl…’

Finally, Victoria abstracted herself from recollections and surfed into the present imminently.

She didn’t love Daniel. She could speak about love when they had started dating but it was too long ago. The feeling faded away, love fell asleep, then died. Everything was trite and simple like everything else about others. However, she didn’t want to be kept in reserve: go on vacation with another but bed with Victoria? Rubbish!

Before making a scene, Victoria wanted to wait for Daniel to come back from his so-called business trip. What if someone made balls of the truth? What if someone overlooked or overviewed? Maybe someone shouldn’t poke their nose in someone else’s business. She hated all those gossips and people who were savouring them, wanting to find out who did and what that night. If you did nothing, they would always make up something.

Victoria wanted to ask Daniel face to face what was going on in very deed and see if he was brave enough to confess the truth.

‘With a girl? He’s on business trip…’ Vic said, seemed off, understanding in horror that such sensitive matter was displaced by epileptic morning recollections.

At that time the girl got she didn’t actually care whom and where her boyfriend was spending his time with. She just decided that apart from the truth they were going to break up.

Yes, they had two perfect years. There were two years of egoism, self-absorption and self-development. They had a perfect beginning. Victoria often remembered the beginning.

A long time ago they went to common parties. He opened doors for her, gave his jackets to her when she was cold, held her hand when she was walking over kerbstone imagining herself a funambulist, carried her in his arms over the puddles.

A long time ago they laughed looking at each other, holding hands, kissing in the parks… A long time ago and it had already passed.

It seemed to them it was love, that they would be together till the end of life, that no one and nothing would be able to part them. No one and nothing would be, but time did.

Having felt the other man’s touches Victoria realized that she didn’t want to feel Daniel’s anymore. Even in the very beginning she hadn’t felt with Daniel what she felt in ten-minutes communication with Kharon. He was the one who made a decisive end to her thoughts to be or not to be.

Now Vasilisa was re-telling gossips and Vic was trying to exorcise the demon out of her mind.

Olga Vladimirovna came back in the late evening and focused on her own business. Victoria was having a burr under saddle.

I gotta speak to him. No matter what will happen, but I have to…

The girl told her mum that she was going to take a spin on a bike, took it and rushed towards Serebryany Bor.

Vic was cycling through the evening park looking for a quiet corner. She didn’t need any witnesses. What would people think if they saw a girl in twilight with candles, drawing something on the ground and whispering Latin words? They would laugh at best… What would people think? What would people say? Those synonymously bloody questions made others impossible to live. Why did you need to think what people would think of you? Why couldn’t you just live without thinking of public opinion? Those people didn’t even know you personally so what’s the difference what they would think of you? Why did you need to be an object that sweetened someone’s glimpse? Was that all for five-seconds glimpse of a stranger?

Vic didn’t want to make a fool of herself. Before the incubus visited her, she would have laughed with pleasure at a person calling for rain in a forest.

A little connecting thread was nicely floating between oneself and others: we didn’t want to be treated in the same way as we treat the others. I didn’t want to be mocked in any situation but if I were to be behind these situation frames then I could afford myself to mock others.

After re-drawing signs on the ground that was getting cold after the hot day, Vic took a razor tip. The demon said there should be blood… It meant if she wanted to see him again, she needed to spill her blood. But here everything stopped. The girl couldn’t pull herself together to cut and hurt herself. She was frightened. But the desire to see Kharon overcame the fear for cutting herself.

Having closed her eyes Vic slit her finger and cried in pain at once. Dark-red blood was dropping on the ground, the faltering voice was reading the spell.

After having read the girl looked over her shoulder: nobody was there. Convulsively remembering everything that she had done before, she was looking for mistakes. She started reading the spell again. In response nobody appeared.

Something went wrong… Why didn’t he come? What was wrong? The signs, the numerals, the circles, the triangle, the blood, the spell were the same as in that morning. Why? The girl was tortured by questions which she had no answers for.

She had been in the park for an hour and a half, waiting but nobody appeared, and Victoria went home. She was slowly riding the bike, sorrowfully looking at the road, trying to get through her emotions.