Daughter from the Dark

by Sergey

  “Would you collapse and fall asleep?”

  “Sit down,” Alyona said, hugging the bear to her chest. “Do you think this hurt him?”

  “Who?”

  “Mishutka.”

  “I don’t think he came to any harm from this. He’s made of plush. Also, I am sure they had calculated the dosage for a little girl, not a . . . bear.”

  “Calculated the dosage.” Alyona smiled coldly. “I have very little time, Alexey. Less than I thought.”

  Aspirin glanced at the saucer. The needle had melted without a trace. The cloudy water on the white porcelain formed an almost perfect ellipse.

  “We could send this to a lab.”

  Alyona screwed up her face. “Are you really that naive?”

  “But to kidnap children like this, in broad daylight—”

  “Alexey,” the girl said, planting her fists on the table. “If they wanted to kidnap me, they would have done so a long time ago. No. They want me dead.”

  Aspirin was silent.

  “Each side is worried the other side will get me. And that I will be used against . . . against one of those who developed me in the first place.”

  “What sides?” Aspirin asked blankly. “Who’s on each side?”

  Alyona shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you call people like them. They took a long time, waiting, considering the possibilities. But I am too dangerous, don’t you see? This kind of weapon should not exist. It should not be in anyone’s hands.”

  Aspirin looked at the bear; Mishutka sat on the kitchen table by Alyona’s side, staring coldly at Aspirin, as if saying: Yes, I shielded her with my own body. And what have you done?

  “It’s poison,” Alyona said. “And there would be no traces, just a scratch, and who knows where a child could get a scratch.”

  “I don’t believe in things like that,” Aspirin said.

  “And yet new songs are composed,” she smiled. “Words are folded into lyrics. New walls rise, new cities are built. What a terrible world. There is no harmony. That means there is a way. And it does lead somewhere. I am so tired . . .” She suddenly yawned. “I went downtown today, found this one spot. From there I can play everything, up to the last note, no one will be able to stop me and everyone will hear me. I have so little time. I am going to do it tomorrow. No, the day after tomorrow. No. I will let you know later when I am going to do it.”

  Two days had passed since then.

  “And now it’s time for our traditional contest—it’s Guessing Time! The winner will get two tickets to the underground club Digger!”

  He felt like a concrete mixer, inside which concrete thickened to an inexcusable degree thanks to the criminal neglect by the workers. For the first time in his life, the words didn’t flow out of him; instead, he had to push them out like thick clots.

  “What is your name? Irina? What a stroke of luck. How old are you? Sixteen. Irina dear. Of course you are about to ask if it’s animate or inanimate.”

  He glanced at the clock.

  Two more hours on the air. Two hours was more than enough time for Alyona to disappear forever.

  “Did you see it? Alexey, you should have seen what happened here! So much had happened . . .”

  Aspirin’s knees buckled.

  “What?”

  Almost immediately he saw Alyona standing by the garage, leaning against the metal wall, violin stuck under her arms, the bow in her hand by her side. The courtyard was filled with people, some wearing coats over their bathrobes, others barely dressed at all—as if a powerful and sudden fire had chased them outside.

  Aspirin looked at the building in alarm. There was no smoke. He looked back at Alyona, who casually waved to him.

  A janitor rushed around armed with a broom, trying to gather moist, brownish trash into piles.

  “Need to call environmental services . . .”

  “No, emergency services! The building must have cracks in it, it might collapse!”

  “Rats always desert a sinking ship . . .”

  “But that’s rats!”

  “Has someone exterminated them that effectively?”

  “All of them at the same time?”

  Aspirin turned to Sveta the concierge. “What happened here?”

  “Cockroaches,” the concierge said with widened eyes. “It was quite a spectacle, Alexey dear. Out of the blue, all these cockroaches started coming out of every apartment. Every single one. And most of them from Paulina’s place—I saw it! She never cleans, and she keeps her trash in the kitchen for weeks!”

  “All of them at the same time?”

  “Yes. Just like a river of roaches. They left the building, and marched together across the courtyard, only to stop when they got to the road. We all came out, and no one knew what to do. It was a lucky thing that a contractor was paving the road nearby, so he turned around and drove right over them with his paving truck. And now no one in the building has any cockroaches. It’s a good thing, of course, but what kind of a natural phenomenon was this?”

  Across the courtyard Aspirin looked at Alyona. The girl smiled.

  “I asked you not to leave the apartment!”

  Alyona stood by the window. It was raining, and tiny drops stuck to the glass, watching them from outside like clear fish eyes.

  The violin lay on the clean kitchen table. Mishutka sat nearby, leaning back on the chair and watching Aspirin with his benevolent (malevolent?) plastic peepers.

  “Didn’t I ask you—”

  “Here is what I think,” Alyona said, as if continuing a previous business discussion. “What if it is his right? If a person decides to make a sacrifice for something he considers important, it is his choice, isn’t it? And here I show up and tell him, no, let’s go home, let’s do it all differently . . . I came to save him, but he never asked to be saved, did he?”

  She turned her head to him, expecting an answer. Aspirin hesitated.

  “You know he’s in pain,” he said, the first thing that came to mind.

  “I don’t know. When my fingers hurt and bleed, I am also in pain, but I am happy when I can play the variations in the right tempo. If I do save him, that means he’s lost. And there will be no new music.”

  “Then we will make do without new music,” Aspirin said.

  Alyona looked at him from beneath her eyelashes, and, petrified, he saw himself as a cockroach. A tiny brown critter crawling out of a crack in the garbage chute.

  “Yes!” he said, doubling down. “Because there are more important things than new songs. Human lives, for instance! Including yours!”

  “My life is worth nothing,” she said haughtily. “I cannot be killed.”

  “You shed blood just like everyone else.”

  “Yes . . . And I feel pain like everyone else. But pain is not death. Death is when the music stops.”

  Passing Aspirin, she went to the cupboard and stood on tiptoes reaching for a half-empty jar of jam on the bottom shelf. She placed the jar on the table and put the bear in front of it, tying a clean towel under his chin.

  “Eat, Mishutka. Eat, sweetheart. It’s almost time to go.”

  Aspirin glanced out of the window; paying no attention to the rain, the neighbors continued their animated discussion of today’s incident. In the epicenter Sveta the concierge waved her umbrella and he could imagine her saying to anyone who would listen, “What kind of a natural phenomenon was that?”

  They don’t understand, Aspirin thought. Instead of cockroaches, the girl could have chased the residents themselves out of their homes. She could have played joy, then lechery, then—for dessert—terror. And they would dance, then copulate in the sandbox, then soil their pants and run away in fear. And no one would have escaped, not even Aspirin himself.

  That she hadn’t done that didn’t make it any less terrifying, and for a tiny moment, he wondered if the people who had tried to kill her were right.

  He hated himself—more than usual—in that moment.

&nb
sp; “Good job, Mishutka. You had such a good dinner.”

  Alyona put away the now empty jam jar and used a napkin to wipe the bear’s already clean face. She inspected her own hands, licked a spot of jam off her finger, and reached for the violin.

  With his back to the window, Aspirin watched her pinch a few strings, tighten up the peg, and pick up the bow.

  “What are you staring at?” Alyona asked.

  He grimaced.

  “Are you really afraid?” She frowned. “I thought you were teasing me.”

  “Yes, it was a nice topic for jokes.” He had forced the words out, avoiding her eyes.

  Alyona glanced at him above the bow.

  “Every now and then I feel sorry for you, Aspirin. And every now and then I don’t.”

  He felt the same way about himself. “Why did you exterminate the cockroaches?” he asked, curious at her altruism.

  “What if I wanted to leave a good memory of myself in this world? Do a good deed?”

  “A good deed.” Aspirin shuddered. “That guy probably threw up all over his truck.”

  “Do you think exterminating rats is a more pleasant activity?”

  “I never said a single word about rats.”

  “Then just shut up.”

  She played. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking somewhere in the distance, she began a sweet, gentle melody. Aspirin thought he’d already heard it once before. He sat down, propped his head on his elbow, and recalled camping with his parents, making fish soup in a huge cauldron in the fire pit, right on the riverbank, and how the fire crackled, and how stars were reflected in the half-submerged old boat . . .

  The melody stopped abruptly.

  Aspirin raised his misty eyes and shook his head. Alyona gazed at him with a strange expression on her face.

  “What?” he muttered, suddenly drenched in cold sweat.

  “I am so sorry, Alexey,” Alyona said softly. “Maybe you do need help, but I cannot help you. I don’t know what to play for you, and even if I knew, I couldn’t do it. I think it must be a very difficult song.”

  The rain came down harder. The dusk thickened. Aspirin sauntered around the room, then pulled his laptop out of the bag, sat down, and wrote down the title: “Cockroaches Have Left the Building. What to Expect?”

  He immediately felt better, like after a sip of good brandy. He made himself more comfortable and started writing, dropping cigarette ashes on the floor.

  As the file grew in size, Aspirin felt better and better. “It is well known that animals leave buildings just before the occurrence of natural disasters. But a mass exodus of cockroaches has never been described before. What had terrified our normally fearless hexapod neighbors? What forced them to leave their warm cracks in the wall, simultaneously, as if on command? Cockroaches are tenacious, undemanding, and yet quite sensitive to minute fluctuations of the neurobehavioral field . . .”

  Inspired, he wrote quickly, with minimal fact checking. He offered and debunked hypotheses and esoteric conspiracy theories, from the basic and trite, such as alien invasion, to the elegant and elaborate, such as “Momi, the Vietnamese ceremonial pastry in the shape of female genitalia, are used in the fertility rituals. However, the recipe is so complex that an average housewife who wants to try to make this exotic dish in her average kitchen risks lowering her apartment into the depths of negative energy . . .”

  He finished at eleven o’clock. He put a period at the end of the last sentence and took a deep breath.

  Behind a thin wall, Alyona was practicing—always practicing—and her violin moaned as if it had a toothache.

  “She’s completely brainwashed you,” Whiskas said. “Delirium is contagious.”

  Whiskas and Aspirin sat in the Kuklabuck office. Half an hour prior to their conversation a scandal took place: the administration was deeply disturbed by Aspirin’s sudden request for time off, and the only person who supported Aspirin in that difficult moment was Victor Somov.

  “Go visit your parents. Enjoy London sights. If she tries to stop you . . . we’ll have to take decisive measures.”

  “Decisive is a nice way to put it,” Aspirin mumbled, and, almost against his will, told Whiskas about the needle made out of ice.

  Whiskas listened attentively, a malodorous cigarette in his fingers twitching slightly.

  “This is utter nonsense, Alexey,” he said gently when Aspirin stopped talking. “It’s an awesome story for Forbidden Truth, or some other glossy tabloid that has you on the payroll. In real life there are no terrible secret service organizations that shoot little children with icicles. This is nothing but the twisted imagination of a sick little girl, and, unfortunately, she’s managed to pass these fantasies on to you.”

  Aspirin said nothing.

  “Should I reserve your tickets?” Whiskas asked gently.

  “I am not leaving her. She might be crazy, but she’s my daughter.”

  Whiskas sighed and crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

  “Your daughter . . . For months you’ve been walking on tiptoes around her. And we still don’t know who’s behind her. You should think about it.”

  Aspirin said nothing.

  “So the deal is off,” Vasya the concierge informed him in a whisper. “The buyer asked for his deposit back, and she agreed, would you believe it?”

  “Who?” Aspirin asked, perfectly aware of the answer.

  “Irina, of course. The buyer read your article about the cockroaches and goes, I don’t want to buy an apartment in this building! Watch out, Alexey, people are going to complain about you. You even mentioned the address! People from other buildings are asking questions. One of the residents took her kids and went to live with her parents. Her husband is an alcoholic, so it may not have anything to do with the cockroaches, but still.”

  “Nothing to do with the cockroaches,” Aspirin confirmed through gritted teeth, pushing 5 as hard as he could until the doors closed.

  “Irina called,” Alyona informed him as soon as he stepped through the door.

  The key got stuck in the lock. Aspirin jerked it once, then again, almost breaking it.

  “She wanted me to tell you that you are acting like an asshole,” Alyona continued evenly. “You should not have written that nonsense about cockroaches.”

  “Thanks,” Aspirin hissed.

  “In other words, Irina—”

  “I got it!”

  He slammed the door behind him. Almost immediately the doorbell began to rattle. Aspirin realized the key was still in the lock on the outside.

  The now-familiar-to-Aspirin local cop and a perfectly unfamiliar woman stood at the door.

  For a few seconds the visitors and Aspirin stared at each other in silence. Then Aspirin reached for the treacherous key and jerked it out of the lock.

  “Alexey Igorevich,” the cop began officially, but at that moment the woman sniffled, looking past Aspirin into the depths of his apartment.

  “My baby!” she shrieked and, pushing Aspirin out of the way, threw herself at Alyona, taking the girl into her arms. “My sweetheart!”

  Alyona neither resisted nor welcomed the embrace. She stood like a statue, slightly recoiling when the crisp black curls touched her face.

  Luba Kalchenko had returned from her business trip abroad and discovered that her daughter, Alyona Alexeyevna, had disappeared from her school for an undisclosed location.

  The school’s administration had followed the required process, including informing the girl’s guardians and police, and that was when the searching efforts stalled temporarily: the institution where Alyona was registered as a student was not a detective agency, and looking for missing children was not in its line of business.

  Very quickly it became known that Alyona Grimalsky left Pervomaysk and now lived with her father, a well-known, wealthy businessman. The school officials secretly rejoiced on the girl’s behalf, but did not call off their missing person report. In any case, neither the police, nor the sch
ool had enough money to deport Alyona back to the institute.

  Horrified, Luba postponed all her business and personal plans, bought a train ticket, and rushed to rescue her daughter. And now she sat at the table set by Alyona, and there was no end in sight to this unnatural, disturbingly false tea party.

  Because none of it was—could be—true.

  Right?

  The cop had a lot of trouble deciphering the genre of what was happening in front of him: a melodrama? A crime thriller? A bit of science fiction?

  Luba dyed her hair the deepest black one could have imagined. Large ringlets adorned her big head, falling to her shoulders. She wore a tight bright red sweater; matching lipstick accentuated her full lips, and her lashes, weighted by a thick layer of mascara, sharply curled up and down so that each eye resembled a Venus flytrap. Aspirin stared at her across the table trying to remember . . . It wasn’t that long ago after all! What was that woman like when they met? He couldn’t have slept with a woman and then forgotten her forever, as if his memory had been erased?

  Or could he?

  He drank heavily back then . . . but he never drank himself into oblivion. He was easygoing, cheerful, girls followed him around, and he remembered Lena, Vita, Katya . . . But he did not remember Luba. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember her.

  Alyona sliced a store-bought cake that happened to be in the bread box. Her face expressed neither joy nor disappointment nor surprise nor fear before her suddenly changing fate. Only concentration like during her violin practice.

  How was it even remotely possible, Aspirin thought. The arrival of that Luba put everything in its place. No one fell from the sky in search of one’s errant brother. No one came from a perfect world only to long to return. But what about the bear? The violin? The people he’d seen mesmerized in the underground?

  What about the special agents who had come to abduct him?

  What about the cockroaches?

  He glanced at Mishutka, forgotten on the windowsill. The bear stared up at the ceiling with senseless button eyes. Aspirin rose, intending to call Whiskas.