Russian Horror Book

I felt sorry for her, my heart ached. She was defenseless in her old age. For some reason she reminded me of my mother.

My mother was still young, with a rosy face, with only few wrinkles, as tiny rays, near her eyes and lips, and on the forehead. She always looked younger. She liked to joke and to laugh, but she sometimes cried. My mother was not afraid of her furture old age. But it certainly was incomprehensible and frightening for her to think that her time, too, someday could pass.

I reached out to the old woman’s hand and touched her cold dry skin. Feeling my touch, she turned to me and smiled.

And that moment I felt I was going mad.

A black shadow was rising in the corner behind her. Not a trembling shadow of candlelight, but something that had become a dense blackness, a darkness that moved on its own. I felt some chilling fear had awakened within me. The adrenaline hit my brain at the same moment and made the heart beat like mad. I was afraid to look upwards, I was terrified. That was a truly deep fear that made every hair on my body standing and made me want to get on all fours and to howl with fear like a frightened dog.

I saw that. I looked up though, and it seemed to me that something was shifting in my head, as if trying to protect me from madness.

I saw a face coming out of the blackness.

I saw a face. My friend’s face. She silently shouted to me, just with her lips: “RUN!”

I jerked my hand away a second before the hag rushed towards me across the table. I fell down from my chair with a crash. The light in front of me jumped up and went out – I dropped the flashlight. The candle, too, was out, and immediately there came the crash of the table falling. In the flickering light I saw something even more terrible than a ghost. I saw the hag’s face changed dramatically, how it becoming bestial, indescribably dreadful.

All that happened in one moment, in a second. I yelled. I didn’t remember what I had grabbed then – thought that was a broken table leg; and poked somewhere in front of me.

She prowled towards me on all fours, across the broken table. The wooden wreckage were crackling beneath her. I yelled again, and crawled back because I couldn’t get up for fear. Everything was too fast. Too scary. She followed me like an animal, I tried to hit her and at the same time to crawl away.

Finally I jumped up and ran. And there was nowhere to run in the tiny apartment.

The hallway was cramped. The front door was locked and wouldn’t budge – and I didn’t remember the moment the hag had closed it. I had a feeling that she, or it, was about to creep out of the kitchen, and I rushed into the only room.

As soon as I ran to the far corner, I realized that she was already there in the room. Slowly she got up from her haunches with broken movements, as if she had more joints than there should be… The moon was shining through the window, suddenly brightly, on a part of the room, so that I could see the hag’s face. Young, smooth, thin face. Unnaturally round eyes, bared teeth. Blackest hair.

“A meat pie, luv?” she looked me straight in the eye and laughed.

I put my hands over my ears.

Her laughter tore my eardrums apart.

A meat pie. I felt sick and about to vomit.

She rushed at me, and I saw her face turn back into an old woman’s when she came out of the moonlight.

It was like a nightmare. I ran, but I couldn’t run, I hit, but I couldn’t hurt her, like I was hitting something soft. My blows were drowning in the viscous darkness. My screams drowned in silence. My voice was gone as soon as I opened my mouth.

I fought back with the table leg. Vuver Kuva was wiry and strong, as if she felt no shock. She was reaching for me, trying to jump on me, but I kept dodging.

The smartphone popped out of my pocket and crashed to the floor. Miraculously it was not broken.

I rushed to take it, fell to the floor and grabbed the gadget, frantically trying to go into the phone book. My sweaty fingers were sliding on the glass – the touchscreen did not respond.

Finally it seemed to me that I had dialed the number of the police officer and after a couple of rings he picked up…

All of that was happening as if in one second. All eternity.

Vuver was getting up again, approaching to me.

I yelled into the phone: “I’m here! HERE! PROKHOROV!"… I didn’t scream like a human. Like a pig, or a cow probably… I couldn’t recognize my own voice.

She pounced at me, and I only had time to put the table-leg forward as a barrier. Kuva clung to it with both clawed hands and pressed me to the floor with her weight. And she weighed like a grown man. She screamed triumphantly. And she was reaching for me with her body, with her face and huge, crooked teeth, which seemed to grow towards me and became even bigger.