“A metropolis or a provincial city?”
“A small village. Don't be surprised, sometimes I miss the silence and loneliness.”
(from Rina’s interview to “Zen With Celebrities” channel)
There was a cool breeze from the river, the wind blew through the hoodie, causing the skin to be covered with goosebumps. Hugging herself with her arms, Rina remained standing on the narrow bridge, where village boys had recently been fishing: a piece of scaffolding with a sinker caught on a blackened support, and a broken fishing rod lying on a trampled earthen bank spoke about this. And now there was nothing to fish in the river: the fish had gone, and the one that remained was floating belly up in the muddy water.
Rina was woken up at dawn by a call from a single number crammed into a simple mobile phone.
“Have you noticed what's going on?” the interlocutor asked, bypassing the greeting.
She noticed. And even combined oddities into one picture: a crack in the ground, a half-dried tree and scary entities.
“It's not me!” Rina exclaimed childishly, half asleep, deciding that she was being blamed for what was happening.
“Of course not you! It all started before your arrival,” the interlocutor replied and gave the following instructions. At first, he said to come to the river and wait… for what exactly, he did not explain. “You'll understand,”the man said vaguely, and then ordered to find an overturned boat with a blue stripe on its side and take the package hidden under it.
And now Rina has been standing on the bridge for half an hour, waiting for something. She had wanted to leave for a long time, but something held her in place. She stared at the dead fish and the blackened, as if charred, water lilies for so long that at some point everything merged into a solid mass before her eyes. The mass swayed, moved, as if alive, and then began to take the shape of a silhouette and slowly moved towards the bridge. Rina screamed in fright, realizing that this was not really a dead fish, but an unknown something stretching out its hands from the water column. Before reaching the bridge, the monster suddenly disappeared in a sudden whirlpool, in which Rina noticed several more similar creatures. Whether they were being dragged into the abyss or, on the contrary, thrown to the surface, she didn’t consider running away from the river that frightened her.
It didn't take long to find the right boat. Rina noticed her from a distance next to a fishing shack. The boat has not been used for a long time: the boards have cracked and a finger easily passed between them, the blue paint on the side has peeled off, turning a solid line into a dotted line. Rina put her hand into a small depression in the ground and felt for a cellophane bag. Carefully brushing it off from the stuck blades of grass, she looked inside and found a thick paper envelope. At the same moment, the mobile phone rang.
“Did you find it?” the man asked.
“Yes. Just.”
“When you've seen everything, call me.”
“Okay. I saw a whirlpool on the river, and there were some creatures in it.”
“Has the funnel disappeared?”
“I don't know. I ran away,” Rina confessed.
The silence that hung in the receiver made it clear more eloquently than words that she had screwed up. And when the phone rang, Rina got angry. These calls broke her life, but the caller still didn’t give an explanation! Rina squeezed her eyes shut tightly, holding back tears, and then with a cry released some of the pain and slammed the phone against the edge of the boat.
“Go to hell! All!”
Tears still sprang from her eyes, but from annoyance when she saw that the phone was not damaged by the blow. These aren’t modern fragile smartphones, but unkillable ‘classics’! And how nice it would be to crack this damn phone! Then she would really disappear from everyone, absolutely from everyone!
“Heh!” It was so unexpected that Rina jumped up and turned around sharply.
Behind her, Stas shuffled from one foot to the other in embarrassment and wrinkled his tanned face. Meaningful sympathy suddenly flashed in the old man's faded eyes, and Rina was ashamed that he had unwittingly witnessed her hysteria.
“Heh,” Stas sighed ruefully and ran his finger along his sagging cheek.
“I'm not crying anymore, Stas,” Rina whispered and hastily wiped away her tears. “So… A speck got into my eyes. Where's Blob?”
She wasn't sure that the old man would understand everything from her speech, but Stas smiled a familiar crooked smile and waved somewhere behind her back. Rina turned around and saw a piglet running like a puppy across the meadow.
From pleasure, Blob loudly grunted and snored, and from a distance it could really be mistaken for a bulldog. Rina smiled and held out her hand to the piglet who ran up. Blob poked her palm with a wet piglet and grunted.
“Huh,” Stas approved and, stretching his lips into a tube, whistled softly.
The piglet spun on the spot, as if trying to keep up with the tail. And when the owner whistled with different intonations, it fell on its back and lifted up its hooves, as if it had executed the command ‘die’.
“Wow!” Rina admired.
Stas laughed contentedly and tapped his cheekbone with his finger.
“I'm not crying anymore, Stas. I'm telling you, a speck… What are you doing here? Walking? Are you lost?”
Whether the old man understood her or coincidentally, but he nodded aside. Only then did Rina notice a knapsack thrown a little further away on the grass, an unfolded chair and… an easel. An easel!
“Did you draw? Will you show me?” she exclaimed.
Maybe Stas can somehow explain why he gave her a portrait of a man so similar to Dima?
“Please!” Rina asked and folded her palms in front of her chest, because Stas didn’t budge, continuing to look at her with an unexpectedly wise look, brightened and, at the same time, sad.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Rina felt uneasy at the thought that the old man seemed to look into her soul and ‘see’ what she wanted to hide from everyone.
“Heh,” finally said Stas and wandered towards the easel.
Blob trotted after him, and Rina picked up the package from the ground and went after the old man.
“Fish,” Stas said sadly, pointing to the easel. “No. Small fish.”
His face contorted with suffering again. Even before she saw the drawing, Rina guessed what was depicted on it. However, she didn’t expect that the picture would be so realistic.
Stas depicted a river, a whirlpool funnel and disproportionate whitish silhouettes in it. The old man was definitely a talented artist: he not only faithfully depicted what Rina saw, but also made it clear that the whirlpool did not pull the creatures, but pushed them out.
Stas also drew Rina. In his painting, a dark-haired girl in wide trousers and a hoodie stood on the bridge and watched the funnel. She held one hand slightly behind her back, and with the open palm of the other pointed to the whirlpool. The old man drew Rina with her shoulders squared and her head held high, as if she was not at all afraid of what was happening in the river - unlike the man on the opposite bank. Instead of his face, there was still a white spot, so it was impossible to understand who the old man was going to draw. The man ran along the shore and pulled his right hand towards Rina, as if wanting to warn about something.
Most likely, if the old man had had time to finish painting his face, he would have portrayed this man screaming.
“Stas, why… Why did you draw this?! What did you see? Stas?!”
From the place where the old man put the easel, the river was poorly visible, and the bridge was completely hidden by a willow. Stas could not draw Rina unless he saw her when he passed by. But it is unlikely that he would have managed to almost finish the painting in such a short time. Stas definitely knows something!
Her loud exclamation frightened the old man, he backed away and often ‘snorted’. Something gurgled and gurgled in Stas' throat, and he choked on another ‘hiccup’, froze in place and covered his face with his hands.
“Stas, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you,” Rina murmured affectionately, taking a cautious step towards him, and then another one until she got close enough to the old man to lightly touch his hand.
“Stas, please don't be afraid. I won't hurt you! Truth. I'm scared too, and I just want to know what you saw. What do you know, Stas?”
The old man either did not understand her, or didn’t hear her anymore, because, without taking his hands from his face, he shook his head. Rina sighed heavily and looked for the piglet. Blob, with a contented grunt, poked into the roots of the long willow branches bent over the river, apparently found something interesting - a worm or an apple core. That's really who fully enjoys such simple things as something delicious.
“Heh,” Rina involuntarily copied Stas but suddenly succeeded, because the old man cautiously looked out of his palms, and then completely lowered his hands.
Only he looked at Rina not with that meaningful and penetrating look, but with a clouded one. It seems that the old man, like his piglet, was again occupied with simple things, and he didn’t understand complex issues.
“You draw very beautifully,” Rina praised, restraining a sigh. “Very beautiful! I'll buy you pencils and paints. Do you want to?”
The old man smiled with the happy smile of a naive child, but not in response to the promise of a gift, but a funny Blob trotting across the clearing.
Rina lingered a little longer, deciding whether to take the old man home or leave him alone? Stas resolved her doubts himself: he grunted and trotted to the easel, then resolutely crumpled up the drawing and put it in his pocket, and extracted a folder from his knapsack. Rina watched for another minute as the old man attached a blank sheet to the easel. And when she was convinced that Stas was passionate about work, she went home with a package in her hands.
The endless night turned into pain, nausea and dizziness. Yura was so bad only once – after one student party, at which he had too much alcohol.
At times Yura fell into fragmentary dreams, in which he circled on a carousel and could not get off the ground in any way. Strange faces flashed before my eyes, then merged into one – the face of that ‘malvina’ from the park. The stranger closely watched Yura's attempts to get off the carousel, but didn’t try to stop the infernal attraction.
Thoughts of a stranger obsessively haunted him even when Yura emerged from nightmares into reality. And it wasn't the extravagant appearance of the girl, but the fear that flashed in her eyes. It was as if she recognized Yura and immediately pulled away from what was happening, withdrew into herself, even though she had tried to help before. Suffering without sleep on the bed floating away from under him, Yura tried to figure out where he could have crossed paths with this girl before? Maybe she was a quickly lit up and just as quickly extinguished celebrity, whom he once interviewed? Or did the girl work for celebrities as an administrator? Of course, then she obviously looked different, because Yura would definitely remember such a bright bird. Then he went over his random and non-random girlfriends in his memory, but he didn't remember anyone like that. At the moment when associations began to appear in his mind, like an iceberg floating out of the fog, an attack of nausea rolled over him. And, despite the treacherously slipping floor from under his feet, Yura rushed to the toilet.
“I need to call an ambulance,” he thought when he got to bed. And he fell asleep.
In the morning Yura woke up healthy, except for a bump that hurt from touching. He cleaned himself up and called his sister to see if she had any news. Yura kept silent about his adventures. Manya reported that there was no news, because Vsevolod had left for two days, and Gennadiy Sergeevich and his greyhound weren’t at the last lesson.
Yura brewed coffee and connected the camera to the computer. Only almost all the pictures and videos turned out to be spoiled. He cursed with annoyance, although it was not his ‘crookedness’, but an abnormal zone in which gadgets were out of order. But he was comforted by the fact that a video with a moving ‘devil’ ferris wheel was preserved. Yura spent another hour and a half writing the first article, uploading it along with the video to the channel and monitoring the news about Rina. To attract attention to his blog, he uploaded a bunch of his interviews with the singer and threw in a few hooks. He was already turning off the computer when he received a call from an unknown number. An informant called, who did not make himself felt after Yura's dismissal. He was intrigued by the promise to tell something interesting and unusual about Rina, but he asked so much for information that Yura mentally howled. He had the right amount, but if he paid, then in the future he would have to tighten his belt.
Yura arrived at the meeting early, found a bench with a view of the fountain, near which he and the informant agreed to meet, and went to his channel via a smartphone. Only three comments were left, but Yura didn’t expect that his newborn blog would immediately gain popularity. The main thing is that his article is being read. One of the commentators immediately accused the author of the video of using filters. Yura grinned, but did not delete the comment, as well as enter into an argument: others will do it for him and thereby develop a controversy
Much more interest was aroused by an old interview with Rina, someone even wrote in a personal account, asking if he knew where the singer had disappeared. Yura smiled contentedly and opened the next message. This user was interested in the amusement park, and so much so that the message ended with a phone number. Yura clicked on the profile, but it turned out to be empty. Then he dialed the number, but as soon as the beeps started, he dropped the call because he saw an informant near the fountain.
The news really turned out to be interesting, but Yura didn't know what to do with it. It was as if he had been given a disassembled puzzle and offered to put it together himself. He went down to the subway, almost confused, thinking, the direction of the trains, and stood all the way looking out the dark window. The longer he thought about what he had heard, the more he saw the connection between the different topics of his channel – Rina and the anomalous zone.
Approaching the house, Yura checked his blog and suddenly found that it was blocked.
“What the hell?!” he barked when everything remained the same after updating the page. Now, instead of resting, he will have to write to tech support and find out the reason for blocking! Yura inserted the key into the lock and suddenly heard the barking of a dog. Judging by the hysterical subtle notes in his voice, it was not a bass Pencil that greeted the owner of the apartment at all.
Yura opened the door and was amazed to see greyhound in a vest in the corridor.
“Well, hello,” he muttered confusedly, crossing the threshold.
Greyhound cut off its hysterical barking with a frightened squeal, stared at its dark eyes and peed itself.