Russian Horror Book

My friend laughed.

“Now tell me they disappeared at the full moon!”

He laughed even harder when he saw my face had changed. No, I didn’t check those things about the moon. But I was ready to test and believe anything, and it seemed to me that it was noticeable.

“Playing detective?” my friend concluded, having stopped laughing.

“I was just thinking…”

“Look, what do you want from me, huh?” the district police officer spoke quietly, but so sharply and roughly that it seemed to me as if he was yelling. “Why did you call me? I’m like a dog at work, you know. And here you are! and your uncertain affairs! That’s not the case for district police officers, but for the Criminal division.”

At some point, my friend stopped noticing me and started talking as if to himself.

“I have a friend transferred to the Criminal division, so now he hasn’t any problems. At least he’s getting enough sleep. Sometimes. And the salary is good – he bought his own aparts…”

He looked absently. He was overwhelmed with fatigue and self-pity, and I couldn’t blame him.

“I just want to get into that house, to see what kind of people lived there. And maybe to find there someone suspicious.”

“Our guys would have gotten all suspicious persons by now. But you – you’re kind of a hero. All suspicious people out there now, huh?”

He looked at me with a sad grin.

After all, I got him persuaded.

***

By the time we got to that house, it was getting dark. The officer sipped coffee from his thermos.

“So what? What’s the plan, hero?”

I didn’t have any.

It all came down to the fact we went around a few apartments for a stupid reason: to check whether everything was OK. Hey, they say that recently some people were missing here about. Sir, ma’am, did you notice anything strange?

My friend looked unhappy and gloomy.

I was dressed as a civilian, and people, who smiled politely to the district police officer, looked at me with distrust. Naturally, we looked suspicious.

“All this is some kind of a farce,” he said to me when we went to the second entrance. No-one answered the knock. When we reached the third floor, we were knocking the doors of three apartments there and were about to go down, as one of the doors opened.

There was an old woman, so decrepit, skinny, gray-haired – seemed about to depart to the other world. She was wearing a plain calico dress, old and fade, probably being washed a thousand times.

“Yes, luv?” she said, staring with her colorless eyes at the officer.

The old generation is responsible, unlike young people.

In spite of the fact that I am young, I can honestly speak about it.

In the rest of the apartments in that building, nobody opened their doors, although we could definitely notice lights in their windows from the outside; so someone was there in those apartments. But the tenants could see a police officer in their peepholes and decided to pretend that they had not heard anything, and to lay low.

But that old lady, though could hardly move her legs, considered it her duty to open the door for the police. However, maybe she just needed someone to talk to?

In general, she was so friendly, she invited us in so persistently, and we decided to have respect for the granny[1 - in Russia, you may address with this word to any old woman] and stay with her for fifteen minutes.

***

The apartment was old-fashioned, clean and sparsely furnished; an old polished wall-unit of the Soviet age, and an old sofa in the only room.

The kitchen was just as simple and clean, with lace window curtains. The walls were covered with faded (and turned yellow in some places) millefleur wallpapers, that had been there for probably twenty years or more. Everything there seemed faded and yellow, within the light of cheap yellow bulbs. The whole apartment smelled damp rags and mothballs. The smell of old age.

We went into a tiny kitchen: a table, a couple of stools, a blackened gas stove. On the door of the old-type ‘Sviyazhsk’ fridge there was a huge number of magnets and square stickers that people collected in the nineties.

I noticed that my friend habitually, ‘professionally’ was glancing around the old woman’s apartment. She, meanwhile, warmed some tea and muttered something about the hard work of police officers.

“The Granny is a God’s dandelion[2 - an idiom used for harmless, old people],” smiled the officer behind her.

She even named us ‘luv’, in a grannies’ manner, addressing to one, to another in turn.

“Whatcha looking for, luv? Walking, wand’ring… What’s the matter with us? This district is quiet as a swamp.”

She had a terrible lisp, because of many teeth missing.

“Yes, that’s my friend worries for his friends. No idea where could be…”

He looked at me, as if saying that it’s my turn to mess around.

And I began to talk, while the old woman was listening to me and pouring mugs with blackest tea and the boiling water.

“A meat pie, luv?” she asked, waving that pie in front of my face. She had pulled a whole pan of those pies out of her old gas stove.

The pie smelled bad, like it hadn’t meat in it – but God knows what, and we both said no. Everything in this apartment smelled strange, even tea and food.

“My friends worked in this district, in this house, too. They visited people, offered…”

“What offer?” the granny leaned closer to hear me.

“Their work was offering contracts for pension. Before they disappeared!” I almost shouted the last words in her ear.

“Oh, I remember one of them, I do.”

“Really?”

“Yep. There was a young girl. Curly hair.”

“That was Marina. And the guy, d’ye remember the guy? Tall, short-haired.”

The old woman didn’t seem to hear me.