What if Anya is still there?

Staying in the kitchen, Iryna kept asking herself this question, but she never dared to go to Anya’s bedroom to make sure. The thought of seeing her daughter’s empty bed was paralyzing.

Unable to take any action, Iryna gazed at the tabletop where the wizard’s cards kept falling on top of each other.

Over the grinning dog, Valery whispered for a moment before passing her the deck. When Iryna shuffled it once again, he turned another card, revealing a crimson serpent spreading its wings and craning its neck over a tight pack of red dogs. The serpent looked familiar. So huge.

“Is that Asp?” she asked, barely moving her lips.

“Yes, that’s our boy,” Valery confirmed.

The next card was nothing special: a sun-flooded beach, the sandhills crowned by a forest, and the sparkling silhouette of a predatory bird in the sky. However, Valery spent a long while contemplating this nondescript landscape, squinting at the bird. An eagle? Or maybe a falcon? Iryna could not tell for sure.

At last, his fingers touched the deck again, laying on the table a card with a pitch-black gorilla. Glancing at the ape, Iryna was surprised by the spear in its hand; it reminded her of the riders from Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. Not until she shifted her gaze to the wizard was she struck by something not quite right about the image. Looking back at the card, she discovered that the creature depicted was not actually a mounted gorilla, rather, it was some kind of a centaur with the upper-body half of an ape and the lower half of a horse. As she cast an inquiring look at Valery, he just shrugged and took another card.

Watching the cards portraying weird creatures flash before her eyes, Iryna remembered a half-forgotten word: Vulpinah. It was the name of a tailed woman from a scary story she used to listen to as a child.

The summer camp…yes, it was there. Every night, once lights were out, a bunch of early teens would come together to tell scary stories. The one about Vulpinah was Iryna’s favorite.

“A girl got a magic deck of cards as her birthday gift. One of those cards showed a woman with a tail, her whole body as hairy as a dog’s. The guest who made this gift told the girl that the woman’s name was Vulpinah.”

Saying these words, the storyteller would lower their voice to an eerie whisper. The other children held their breath and stopped moving.

“The girl and her friends went over all the cards, but they liked Vulpinah the best. So much so that they decided to summon her for real. At the birthday girl’s home, they called her dog over, dressed it in the girl’s skirt, sweater, and necklace, and they tied it to the chair.”

The storyteller’s voice grew more and more excited as they got carried away and started to believe their own story.

“Then they put the Vulpinah card in the dog’s hand,—yes, in the dog’s hand!— turned the light off, and started to say all at once, ‘Vuplinah, come! Vulpinah, come!’”

Everyone froze, petrified with fear.

The flags by the camp’s main building rocked in the wind, flapping and bending as if trying to escape the invisible Vulpinah gnawing at them. Burning through the clouds, the moon’s single yellow eye peered into the large, curtainless windows. Propping themselves on their elbows in their beds, the kids listened, glancing at the pitch-dark cypresses swaying outside in the night. No one was bothered by the dog suddenly having a hand and not a paw; their imaginations were fueled by adrenaline which smoothed out all the choppy prose, making their hearts race. Their eight-person bedroom lapsed into such complete silence, as though it were empty, that the sound of an approaching mosquito resounded through the air as loud as a fire alarm.

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Growing larger than life and monstrously hungry, the scary story devoured the storyteller and then the listeners. They felt like they were rocking in a large boat along the mysterious river inside the monster’s belly. At the stern of the boat stood a tall, stooping figure in a dark hood. It was Fear. As he used his long oar to push off the river bottom, the passengers realized the boat was still; it was the dark water and the dark walls that were drawing closer.

Then Fear applied his oar to another stone ledge, making the passage wall turn and reveal the dooming regal presence of Culmination around the corner.

“When for the third time they said it—“Vulpinah, come!’”— they saw the tailed woman sitting in the chair where the dressed-up dog had just been! She laughed like crazy, tossed the card aside, and her chair started to come towards the girls, shifting its legs! Vulpinah opened her mouth and howled. But the girl’s parents were watching TV in the living room with the volume so loud that they heard nothing.”

Mercilessly, the boat approached the finale. Every passenger believed that the hooded figure stood right behind their back, but they never glanced over their shoulder to make sure; they just prayed that the helmsman would bring them to the end of the journey as soon as possible.

The concentration of terror in the dormitory’s air was near-critical. It felt as though adding just a tiny bit more would cause the mosquitos to drop like heavy stones, breaking the floorboards.

“Coming to the birthday girl, Vulpinah gnawed at her face. The other girls wanted to escape, but the door was locked. And Vulpinah killed all of them.”

The lasting echo of the mosquito’s flight resounded through the summer camp dormitory for ages, barely heard by the bunch of teens freezing like wax figures with their mouths open.

Waking up from her memories, Iryna glanced at the tabletop that now had a new card: a smoking glassy bird, pecking at Asp in his side.

She stole a glance at the wizard. His lips were clenched tight, his jaw muscles flexed beneath the parchment scar, an evil gleam in his browless eye.

Another shuffling delegated to her. Receiving the deck back, Valery took a deep breath and mouthed some words.

He whispered for a long time. A very long time.

The kitchen was nearly dark. How long have we been doing this? An hour? Two?

Iryna glanced at the blue digits on the oven clock. A bit past one in the morning. She shifted her gaze higher, to the stovetop. The clay figurine was still on the burner.

Another card on the table.

A large bird again, its head covered with some rag; a shaggy boy was sitting on the bird’s long neck and striking it with a dagger.

The wizard gave an approving murmur. Iryna was itching to ask him a ton of questions, but she remembered that she wasn’t supposed to.

More cards lying down on the table, one after another.

A twilight forest. A long kayak by the riverbank…and something odd about it. Iryna peered closely at the boat, trying to figure out what was wrong with it. Oh. Of course. What she had mistaken for the kayak’s nose was the flat head of a half-submerged animal! The strange creature had four short legs and an opening along its back.

Turning this card over, Valery put the deck down. “Time for them to get some rest. Please make us some tea, Iryna. We could use a short break.”

Putting the kettle on the stove, Iryna turned on the gas, her gaze slipping to the clay figurine on the next burner. Who are “them?” The cards? Asp? Anya?

“What do your cards show?” she asked without looking back.

“The world where Anya is,” the wizard answered. “Your shuffling changes the course of events she encounters there. And I whisper to the cards to negotiate a good outcome from a critical situation.”

“Negotiate with whom? With the cards?” She struggled to believe that.

“Yes. These cards are alive, Iryna.”

They finished their tea in silence. Feeling like she was stuck in a troubling dream, Iryna stared at the deck. She wanted nothing more than to wake from this nightmare that had already seemed to last for ages. It was impossible to believe that less than twenty-four hours had actually passed since she’d first met Valery.

At last, he took the deck again.

The next card confused Iryna, but the wizard smiled when he saw it: the shaggy boy jumping on Asp from the tree. Each of the boy’s hands was full of sharp, spiky twigs, his face showing an urge to kill. And Asp…he was soaring to meet the attacker, spreading his wings and opening his jaws.

“Wow. A mentor indeed.” Smirking, the wizard turned another card: an abandoned hut on a grassy mountain slope with smashed, gaping windows, slanting roof, and shabby walls.

Nothing weird about this place. Nothing outright scary. Then why was there fear mounting inside of her, clutching at her throat?

Iryna peered at the house, trying to find some oddity, some deviation like those she’d discovered in the other pictures, but it was absolutely normal. That made her heart race even faster.

“Here they’ll have a rough time,” Valery said softly, handing her the deck. “Shuffle it well, Iryna.”

Feeling ice-cold in her chest, she took the deck warily. It was burning hot.